maelia8

I just start speaking quite loudly and slowly over all of them and walk around the room slowly so that I finish in front of the last ones who don't appear to have noticed that I've started talking. They always look up ashamedly and it works very well at getting silence and all eyes on you quickly.

@SpaceCowboy I do encourage you to take a good look at going into academia in your field if it means that you would be the instructor of record and expected to design and implement courses for students, even if you only lecture and your TAs do most of the "on the ground" work. I've worked as a TA for some professors who don't care very much about teaching, and I (as a TA who loves teaching and would be happy doing that for the rest of my life, even outside of academia) found it difficult and saddening to work with them. A course taught by a professor who doesn't care can be lackluster, and the students can get a bad impression if the prof behaves like a distant god by standing up to lecture and then leaving everything else (including unpleasant or drudgery-type tasks) to the TAs. I'm not saying that you should quit the Ph.D., but I'd urge you to seriously consider other job options at the end of the process and start preparing for those eventualities now, as your choice to teach without getting something positive out of the experience would affect many people beyond yourself.

1) Rather than going out to eat, cook big-batch meals once or twice a week and make at least 6 servings, then freeze them in lunch-sized tupperware and defrost for meals. It will save you a LOT of money on eating out. Also, never, ever go out for alcohol - only buy your own and drink at home, it's much cheaper. 2) Make sure you take full advantage of any discounts that your school/area offers on public transportation for students, and make use of that. Only use your car (if you have one) when you absolutely have to. Stay on a "family" insurance plan with multiple cars in it to save money on car insurance. 3) Right when you get your paycheck, put 10% of that money in a savings account where you never see it. Quarterly, put 1/3 of the money in a retirement account (can also be done automatically), use 1/3 to make a payment towards your student loans, and save the last 1/3 for emergencies. You never know when you'll need it. 4) Don't use air conditioning or heating unless absolutely necessary, and try to use fans or space heaters if you can as they use less electricity and will lower your bill. 5) If you have gov't loans, work on getting them deferred IMMEDIATELY when you start grad school to save on rising interest. While loans are deferred, make payments only towards unsubsidized/high interest rate loans with a rate of 6% or more.

Related question, also about a difficult classmate with alcohol issues: We have a military veteran who entered our program this year, and this person suffers from extreme PTSD. They are an alcoholic, and when they get drunk, they speak in a loud, belligerent manner and invade others' personal space while they tell graphic stories about their war experiences. Several (female) members of the department have complained that this person makes them feel threatened and/or uncomfortable, and is becoming a deciding factor when they contemplate attending departmental colloquia or working group meetings (many of the latter are mandatory for members). The issue has been brought to the chair of the graduate student association, who is about to pass it on to administration, but members of the association aren't sure what sort of action to request. Any advice? This person is in denial of their alcoholism, though several of their friends in the department have talked to them about their problematic behavior. Banning them from events with alcohol service would negatively impact them academically, but their presence is making others who'd like to attend the events uncomfortable. P.S: The behavior is NOT of a sexual nature, and is not considered sexual harassment.

@juilletmercredi I bank with USAA too, and I absolutely love them! Amazing customer service, great for folks on the move, and the low 1% fee charged for international ATM withdrawal is great for someone who travels a lot, like me. I only wish they would roll out the debit chip cards faster ... it's a pain trying to get folks in Europe to take your non-chip debit card, and many machines won't even read them anymore.

@ashiepoo72 and @ProfLorax, I just wanted to say how much the two of you inspire me with your devotion to your children and your academic work, and how you face up to challenges with a fortitude that humbles me. As a grad lady with plans to reproduce at some point in the next few years, you both give me valuable perspective on the challenges I currently face as a grad student, and how those will change if I have a child someday (for the different, if not for the better). I hope that if I go down that path, I can be as awesome and eloquent and brave as the two of you.

In the grad student space of my department, each student has one shelf on which to keep their books. Since I suffered shoulder problems during undergrad from carrying around too many books, I rarely bring books home and only carry one or two at a time from the university library to my shelf. I have a Macbook Air to reduce laptop weight, and I carry it in just a sleeve rather than a proper case, also to reduce weight. Other than that, I bring my lunchbox, charger, wallet, keys, and a water bottle in my backpack. I type everything on the computer, so I don't carry notebooks or more than one or two pens. Carrying too much weight can be devastating in the long run, so make sure you aren't carrying anything around that you don't need.

My first year of the Ph.D. I was easily able to do a 10-hour extracurricular commitment, but once I started teaching in the second year (which just ended for me), it became impossible. That year I even cut out exercising aside from the 20-minute walk to campus, and I still barely made it through each 14+ hour workday. I've since adjusted to teaching and have figured out how to manage my time better, but I recommend cutting back when you start teaching (if applicable) and then gradually adding things back in as the workload becomes more manageable.

I don't notice much of a divide between grads and undergrads on campus, except where grading/power relationships requires it, but I do very much notice a divide in where graduate students and undergrads choose to live. There are certain edges of campus where grad students don't usually reside because of the overwhelming presence of undergrads (ratio is about 5:1 undergrads to grad students at this university, so there are a lot more of them than there are of us). There are whole enclaves where only undergrads live, eat, and entertain themselves, and other locales and neighborhoods where graduate students do these things.

I'm a female graduate student under 30 who has never been challenged about grades or harassed by students in my classes, and I'm starting to wonder if I'm in the minority ... most of the other women in my program report things like this and I wonder why it's never happened to me. I don't dress particularly nice (I often wear jeans and T-shirts), and I'm wondering if it has anything to do with the fact that I'm quite tall, as it's the only factor I can think of that sets me apart from those who've reported difficulties. I'm one of those people who never get carded and was thought to be my real age or older throughout my teens, so maybe the height and the saunter scare people? Any other tall ladies had this experience?

I don't think I could handle living with five roommates for no other reason than that I'm extremely tidy, and it's hard enough to keep a place clean with just one or two roommates. More people means more negotiations over space, time, light, noise, and cleanliness, but roommates can also mean that you always have company and someone to help out if you need help with something. I live in a place where living alone is too expensive to be viable (literally), and I don't mind living with two or three people. If you're worried about loud undergrads, I suggest posting through your department's graduate student listserve to find other grad students looking for roommates - if you do, it's highly likely that you won't be the oldest at 27.

My department created a "gender task force" two years ago after disgruntled female graduate students expressed disgust with their treatment by male colleagues, both graduate students and professors (women make up 35-40% of the graduate student body in my department). They created an official report stating grievances that was widely circulated, and, although I don't know how much it did to actually change mindsets, it really did a lot to change the way people talked to each other in public and interacted in seminars. Sometimes official codification of problems does a lot towards getting people to acknowledge that the problem actually exists and start trying to fix it.

I am absolutely stymied by the labyrinthine employment forms and practices created by the massive university HR department (it's centralized) regarding student appointments. I worked a summer job in one department and am now trying to get my fellowship straightened out for fee remission in the fall, but my fall TA/RA appointments in my home department can't be approved because it looks like I'm already at too high of a % time to get fee remission due to my summer job in this other department, which is ending this Friday (coincidentally, also the deadline to start paying fall tuition fees). In sum, my fee remission hasn't kicked in and I'm staring at a huge tuition bill that I don't even owe - and it can sometimes take HR weeks to straighten stuff like this out after they misfile paperwork multiple times and fail to send key emails. All I can do is send endless emails back and hope for the best. I positively abhor bureaucracy - this takes the cake for most complex experience in that realm that I've had, and I used to live in a country where bureaucracy was king.

I'd like to go against the above comments and recommend digital editions. I'm in my second year of grad school and I have yet to buy a physical book. I own a Kindle PaperWhite (useless for surfing the internet, great for reading) and use it for all books that have digital copies (I also read PDFs either on the PaperWhite or on my laptop). For books that are not offered digitally, I get the book through the university library system or ILL and, if it's a hot item and I can't keep it as long as I'd like, I scan it on my high-speed flatbed scanner and make the PDF searchable. I use Evernote to take notes (providing the first/last few words of a quote and the page number or digital location in the book so I can easily find it on my PDF or ebook if I want to mention it in class) arranging the notes by chapter and section in the book. I am able to find quotes or sections quickly and easily when I need to mention them in discussion. When I need to write a paper, all of my notes and quotes are arranged by book and topic in different Evernote files so I can easily copy and paste them into documents. I run OCR (optical character recognition) on texts where I want to do in-depth analysis word by word, which provides me with an even better search function than regular PDFs. I never want to go back to the world of scribbled notes in margins or post-its ever again - in my opinion, it is incredibly labor-intensive and much more of a pain when you have to go back and flip through 5 books to find that one special quote later. In addition, I saved thousands of dollars by not buying any books last year and was able to put the money towards my undergrad loans, retirement, and savings, so it was a win in that aspect too.

I sleep all the way through the night, but I also nap - I'm just a person who needs a lot of sleep. You may not be, but that does't mean that an afternoon nap couldn't help! Have you tried taking a nap at 2 or 3pm, when according to you you're most exhausted? Sleeping in the heat of the day can be easier than falling asleep at night for some people.

Good job, Heimat! Hope your move went smoothly. My roommates are moving out this weekend and they are taking all of the furniture with them, so I'm going to be having an exciting couple of days of cleaning and estate-sale hopping.

Yes, my Canadian friend and fellow cohort member was complaining about how he has to go to an extra day of graduate instructor training especially for international TAs so that they can learn about the trials and tribulations of the American classroom (the rest of us only have to go to one day of training). I'm interested to hear what they tell him about how to teach in the USA as opposed to anywhere else. @TakeruK did you have to go to something like this?

My university-wide grad orientation allowed you to pick four topics out of a pool of ten that interested you, then go to the corresponding panels one after the other, which were an hour each (free lunch in the middle). I chose to go to the residency one, which was super helpful since it's vital to establish residency at my state school, the one about health insurance, which provided us with useful lists of what's covered, where to go for treatment, and what the copays are. For fun, I went to the one about performance events on campus and learned about theater and music offerings, and finally, I went to one about the library's resources, including an intro to the databases they subscribe to and info about grad project consulting. I found these presentations extremely useful, especially as the websites for these things are not all that intuitive or simple and having someone break it down in front of me was much more helpful. However, you should be able to get along without going if you have other plans, so I have some advice for you if you decide not to go but still want to know what happened. If you're proactive about reading handouts, get another grad student who is going to give you all of the paper they receive at orientation so that you can take notes or copy the relevant parts - everything they talk about will also come with a handout Good luck!

I use the independently-produced August-to-August calendar/planner from Mixed Role Productions. It's US/West Coast made, recycled, and super sturdy, as well as being spiral bound, which is a must for me because I like being able to tear out pages. I've been thinking of switching entirely to Google Calendar, but for a paper edition, August-to-August is the best for me.

I just want to chime in here to offer a counterexample about making friends/getting really tight with your cohort. I'm in a cohort of nineteen, going into our second year, about fourteen of which have gelled into an awesome set of buddies. We go out to eat together, have potluck parties at each others' houses, host board game nights, go out for happy hour drinks every Wednesday, have holiday parties, eat bag lunches together on campus three or four days per week (of course, not everyone is present for everything every time, but we usually can get ten people together no problem). The other five people in the cohort also participate occasionally, and we have a private cohort Facebook group of which all are members so everyone is invited to cohort events. Most of us spend time in the library together every day and study at large tables together as well. I know we will get busier as time goes on in second and third year and we'll have less time to spend together, especially during oral exams, but we've managed to connect and form a good foundation that will serve us well in the future. OP, I know your expectations were high, but I also want you to know that they were not impossible - my cohort is living proof that a group of grad students can gel well and become great friends. I am very sad to hear that this wasn't your experience, and I hope you have much better luck if you change schools! If it makes you feel better, please know that it IS possible for that kind of thing to happen on this earth.

I've been able to save a little bit this year (about $5k, 2k of which I put in my retirement account) and I was proud of that, but your numbers blow me out of the water! My stipend isn't big enough to save much more than that (I live in an extremely expensive area where 65-70% of my monthly budget goes towards rent and utilities). I don't travel except to drive home every few months (I'm lucky that my family lives close enough for me to drive), but I freely admit that I spend a bit more on food than I should (mostly because I'm picky about high-quality groceries).

Attempting to teach in BE when you speak AE (or vice versa) is one of the hardest things ever. I taught English abroad for two years and was required to teach my high school pupils BE, and it was so hard for me to auto-correct everything I wrote on the board during lectures. I initially would mark BE word order on the kid's papers as mistakes, and it took me a long time to recognize which "mistakes" were really just BE that I wasn't familiar with. (Ex: I haven't got the book vs. I don't have the book, calling grades "marks," using "ought" etc.). I also had it drilled into me to call students "pupils" because students refers exclusively to those at university in the country I was in. Imagine my amazement when I was led into a classroom of what my BE-trained co-teacher called "sixth form" kids, expecting 12-year olds, and got a bunch of 17-year olds!

Just found out that my roommate is planning on moving out a week later than previously mentioned, which throws off plans for having the apartment cleaned and having a family member visit. I had just gotten everything coordinated for the transition ... now it's back to square one, sigh.

Usually if you don't have an academic record confirming fluency, they will take you at your word during admission and require you to take a translation or oral exam to prove your fluency after admission. I would state that you speak German and leave it at that, unless you're worried about your ability to write and read German on an exam.

Also: are there rules/conditions to making payments while in deferment? I want to make payments semi-regularly, but want to keep the loans in deferral so I don't have to pay if things get tight suddenly and I need to stop for a few months.