Catria

Can you do so within the same department? Or you have to get out of your department to do so?

For some reason, I thought that, the higher-ranked the department (or school, if it correlates with undergraduate rankings more than with graduate rankings), the greater the ability of its graduate students to substitute meals with seminar refreshments. That is not to say that it was a factor in anyone's choice of applications, but attending departmental seminars is definitely part of a PhD experience. But how easy/hard is it, really, to substitute meals with seminar refreshments at your department?

Do you have work experience in engineering? That will have to do at this point...

Thanks for clearing that up...

CS is a field without writing samples so the personal statement is the best writing measure then. A 116 is not necessarily more attractive than a 90-100...

Because I'm kind of worried about Vanderbilt but the missing letter, in my case, is the coursework-based one, so I think it's the weakest of the gang, even though it's written by someone famous in mathematical physics...

What schools (or departments even) will still review applications with 2 recs in?

I am not a humanities guy, but I can definitely feel how the "crapshootiness" (please excuse my poor choice of a word) of PhD admissions processes would compel people to apply to large numbers of PhD programs, and hoping for just one acceptance. And said processes can render people neurotic. My budget limited me to 12 applications; I would probably have submitted more if I had the money (would have applied to Case Western, Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Caltech, UCD and Arizona State as well)

If you elect not to answer any verbal question whatsoever, you will receive a NS score... I advise against it but, as others said, retake.

If you are staying in UG for another year, then try to get research experience...

Although two of the three recommenders have written recs at Columbia just fine, the third recommender claims not to have received the submission link at Columbia, even after reminding the recommender through the application portal three times in two days. Yet, I used the same institutional email address for every application so I know that it doesn't stem from an incorrect email adress, since the other 10 apps showed that recommender could submit his rec just fine using that email address. I gave my recommender my date of birth and my application number so that he could contact tech support at Columbia regarding the rec. Anyone else for whom such a situation happened?

Had too many non-reaches (I felt that, with Notre Dame in its stead, I would have enough non-reaches to have my bases covered, alongside Tufts, Dartmouth, Minnesota, WUSTL and CMU)...

There wasn't an app fee for physics either... should I just complete the application then?

Today, I received an email from Vanderbilt saying that they have received my application even though I haven't submitted it. Admittedly, it was almost completed but I chose to exclude from consideration all three recommenders (which, btw, wrote recs to all 11 I chose to actually apply to) as a sign of withdrawal, hence not submitting it. So how could Vanderbilt receive my application when I didn't actually submit it? How often do situations like these arise? If the end result is getting a free rejection letter in Vanderbilt's letterhead (if only because of missing recs), then so be it. I must admit, however, that, for Vanderbilt's physics dept to be willing to consider an incomplete application with recs missing, there must be at least one of the following at work: - Desperate to take me (and likely with an UGF to boot) and then there had to be a few elements that caught their attention - Have an otherwise incredibly shallow or poor applicant pool - Not weigh recs much

I must admit I suffered from things like these when I began prepping for the PGRE, but it actually took the result of the PGRE itself to convince me otherwise (910, 86th percentile, and my recommenders said that, once at 900 and higher, the PGRE is not a game-changer anymore, even at top-10 schools) And then came PhysicsGRE.com, where I realized that Ivies actually did admit students with the sort of files I have, and, with the suggestions given there, I felt that I have to prove that I really was the same as them (I ended up applying to five top-20s, of which two are top-10s, out of 11 schools total). My advisor says that students that are strong students, but not quite top students, are often quite difficult to advise regarding PhD applications, because unlike students at my undergrad that are merely above average (for whom staying at their undergrad is often their option with the best reputation) they can be overwhelmed by their options.

But really, my subfield (theoretical particle cosmology) usually has no special facility requirement, unlike some experimentalists (condensed matter, for example), hence why I would readily consider doing research if I ended up teaching at the CC level.

As far as college-specific grants in Canada are concerned (there could be other province-specific grants I never heard about): Canada-wide Quebec-specific (in French) I wonder whether there are similar programs in the US, either through a US-wide grant-awarding agency (NSF, NIH, DOE Office of Science, DOA, etc.) or a state-specific agency... maybe some of you here are interested in both teaching at the CC level and in maintaining a research program. But is the teaching load 5/5 in STEM too, or it is more of a humanities/social science thing?

CC faculty at home seemed to be on a lighter teaching load (vs. the US). The grant-awarding agency that supervises the grant assumes, when calculating how much funding is actually awarded on each grant (per the current Quebec-wide collective bargaining agreement), that the teaching load is 3/3. 1/3 reduction could mean 2/2, or one semester off-duty but one has to teach one course in the summer term. In fact I would say that CC profs used the PhD glut as leverage to obtain that grant system and that the ever-increasing room given to research is a reaction to the glut... they say that, as you said, many PhD holders turned to CCs, and, for this reason, there is a loss of expertise and that a few grants would allow to reduce the loss. At least overhead is not taken out of the grant at home; the school receives a separate check to cover overhead expenses. In the context of the CC grant, this means 1/3 or 1/2 the yearly salary of the awardee, depending on whether the awardee asked for a 1/3 or 1/2 reduction respectively. That one grant applicant that came to my lab on Wednesdays said that she planned to use the $12k allowance to pay for summer interns at $1,300/month for 3 months apiece...

How would profs be able to... design a project (or a component thereof) so that the undergrad assigned to it won't be put off? Research, by and large, is a highly volatile endeavor. Of course, a prof won't be able to know in advance that a project (or component) will succeed. What I dislike most of European PhDs is that, often, you have a pretty tight time limit to complete the project you choose (or you get assigned), giving you little wiggle room in the event your project goes awry, and projects are supposedly designed so that the risk of failure is fairly manageable. In fact, the importance actually granted to undergraduate research experience is highly field-dependent. Pure mathematics is a field where little emphasis is placed on it, when compared to, say, chemistry. And some admissions committees will understand that a project may have turned off a student from a subfield, or an approach in a subfield, but the student still retained a drive for the field or research in general.

You might be better off searching on the Student Doctor Network; otherwise, credentials may make you consider different schools.

The first time I've ever heard about community college faculty being able to conduct research on the job was in a graduate course, where the instructor mentioned that he worked with a community college teacher on a grant. Upon hearing about how these grants worked, I told myself, back then, if I ended up teaching at the community college level at home, maybe... maybe I could apply for one such grant so that I could continue doing research (if successful)! And another community college teacher hired in the past five years said that, at home job market trends point, on the next 5-10 years, towards more PhDs on CEGEP faculty rolls in STEM disciplines (BSc and MSc-holding retirees will likely be replaced with PhD holders) and, with them, more room granted to research with each new collective bargaining agreement, with the current one (which granted more room to research in CEGEPs than ever before) creating a grant program tailored for them. As for the grants themselves: one that is awarded a grant can have one of the following, for 3 years: 1/3 reduction in yearly teaching load + $12k allowance for research expenditures or 1/2 reduction in yearly teaching load + $4k allowance for research expenditures. However, how much room is given to research in STEM disciplines in American community colleges? Is a PhD (or a better research record) more attractive to a CC than a MSc for CCs in the US (despite the likely higher cost), if the teaching records are decent? My PI said that I shouldn't rule out community college teaching but I should keep research conditions in mind.

But I would suspect that the job market for CC teachers is so glutted that PhDs are flooding that segment, hence more PhDs in CC positions than in the past.

I seem to remember that humanities are bigger proponents of BA+MA+PhD than, say, physics, where BSc+PhD is strongly encouraged. Most en-route masters I know about are awarded conditionally to the passage of quals; a few are awarded upon completion of coursework but failure of quals (the consolation prize my PI talks about when talking about en-route masters in the US). But most people around me in school (keep in mind I am still in the Canadian system for now) say that en-route masters earned by passing quals are "fake" masters and terminal masters (usually understood as being with thesis in my field) are real. Yet, if one gets to the point where, under a direct PhD plan, one is taking quals, usually people will have earned some research skills and experience beforehand.

Undergrad + MSc? My undergrad was open-admissions (at least for physics and math) but I had no other affordable option because I wanted to go to undergrad in winter. I felt that, regardless of where I'll end up (fingers crossed for any of the Ivies I applied to, as well as UChicago) a PhD will represent a much greater accomplishment than a BSc or a MSc.