eucalyptus

I wouldn't go if I were you. Your relationship with your advisor is too important; if your advisor is evil, your chances of dropping out are going to be really high. Why put yourself through that? Five years is way too long to be miserable, and plus if this advisor makes it hard to publish, you're potentially sacrificing the rest of your career. And if this prof acts the same way towards their colleagues as to their students, their LORs won't mean as much and you won't be able to build off their network of other academics. Evil/sadistic advisors don't seem to be all that common in psych; most often, it's just personality mismatches that cause people to switch advisors, not professors who are outright impossible to work with. Applying again next year definitely gives you a good chance of avoiding a crazy advisor! Make sure to take a look at their students' CVs before you apply - they should look like they're progressing and doing exciting things. You've already shown that you can get into a great program, and with another year of experience you're only going to be more desirable. Finally, I know you said that you won't be able to switch advisors without giving up your research interests, but I've seen a number of cases where people have switched advisors without switching projects; a lot of profs are willing to accommodate a really surprisingly wide array of research projects, especially for a student who's having issues with their advisor. If you haven't already, I'd at least talk to a couple of grad students and see if there are any of those "umbrella" profs around in the department (they're usually older profs with wide interests). Good luck!

Six hours?!?! How do you do it?? Are you driving or on a train/bus that whole time? How many days per week??

I think, just speaking money-wise, that the shorter program is probably the better idea. It's true that he might not get a job right away coming out of that program, but he also might not get a job right away coming out of the longer program. Assuming his short- and long-term job prospects are about the same with a degree from either program, I think the shorter program makes more sense because he'll be earning a real salary one year sooner, which means he can start paying down debt / stop taking out loans a year earlier as well. His teacher's salary that extra year (even working part-time or supplying) will more than make up for the $6-8k, which really isn't that much money in the grand scheme of things.

Forgot to mention, I did this myself during my Masters (also in psych). I was going to school in the UK and spent 2 months in Texas doing research. It was covered by my PI's grant so I didn't have to get my own money for it, and I had my flights & living expenses covered by the grant.

You can certainly do research abroad during your PhD, but you usually need a good reason like fieldwork, collaborating with a specific lab/professor, etc. The good news is that there's a decent amount of money available for this in the form of "international collaboration" or "research travel" grants. From what I hear, these are pots of money that often go unused, so seek them out and take advantage of them!

The advice I got about choosing schools from my Masters supervisor was to look critically at each one of the top 50 or so schools and make a list based purely and entirely on research fit. Of course, to do this, you have to have a pretty specific idea of what your interests are and what project you want to do, which in my case meant critically reviewing and revising the list up until about 2 weeks before deadlines! Then pare it down based on other criteria like location, etc, until you have a reasonably-sized list of programs that are pretty spread out in terms of rank but that are all the absolute best fits for your research interests. Make sure to email people at these schools, since that's the best way to gauge fit, and can also give you some idea of how well your application will be received. I'm in developmental psych and my "profile" was reasonably similar to yours at application time: 3.6 GPA, non-notable undergrad school, 1 poster and 4-ish presentations, 1 paper under review and another in prep, a couple years of research experience (although I was also finishing up a research-intensive Masters, meaning most of my research experience was very independent and included a bit of field work). I'm pretty certain that I had 1 solid recommendation, while my other two were positive but not really substantial - I'm guessing that the letter from my tutoring job was really just a placeholder and didn't win me any points at all! I really think that the two things that stood out about my application were my research experience (which sounds fairly similar to yours) and the project that I was proposing. I came up with this project idea pretty randomly and without doing any background reading, and it quite luckily seems to really resonate with people. Where I applied and was accepted to are in my signature; I'm going to Harvard next year which was totally unexpected and really seemed like an extreme longshot to me. So, seriously, apply to Harvard and anywhere else you're an amazing fit, because you never know! Also, take a good chunk of time coming up with a really good project to propose. You probably already know what subject you want to study (mine is using dev psych to look at the evolution of language), but try to come up with some specific project ideas and pitch them to professors. You'll know you're onto something when they sound really excited about it! You can't really change many aspects of your profile at this point, but this is something you CAN do and although people on this board don't talk about it much, it really can make a difference.

He's going to be biased, but he might still have an interesting perspective on this question. I think it's fair game to ask. I was very upfront with which other schools I was considering while I was on interviews, and I got a lot of (unsolicited) interesting inside information about the other programs, some of which really helped me make my decision. You do have to take it with a grain of salt though, especially if the prof in question wants you enough to be actively recruiting you.

PhD in Developmental Psych at Harvard!

The only thing I brought with me was a notebook in which I'd listed questions I wanted to ask (so I would remember to ask them all, and some extras to fill up any awkward silences with professors totally outside my subject area). This was also useful for noting down bits of information: papers or professors people mentioned, specific numbers, quick synopses of each conversation after it happened. If you do several interviews, everything starts to mush together in your brain so it's good to have something written down afterward to jog your memory.

If that's how your parents will really feel (although you might want to ask them, hypothetically, instead of assuming - you might be surprised at the answer), and if maintaining a good relationship with your parents is important to you, then that's fine! You do have to be aware that you're limiting yourself to a select group of guys: you're looking for a Chinese-Indonesian guy from a good family, who thinks it's cool that you want to have a demanding career, and with whom you get along very well / share beliefs and aspirations / etc. So, that might take a little longer to find, and if you go away to do your Masters, you might not get married until you're 25 or 27 or 30. Is that a risk you're willing to take? And totally just out of curiosity, would a Chinese non-Indonesian have a chance at getting your parents' approval? Like Chinese from China, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Philippines, USA, etc? Or what about a Chinese-Indonesian guy who doesn't live in Indonesia? Actually, as it turns out, my parents are incredibly liberal about this (and about most stuff, actually). I think my mom has a very slight preference for my sister and I marrying Indian guys, but it's not a big deal at all, and my Dad doesn't care in the least. My sister is dating an Indian guy and I'm dating a Chinese guy, and my parents are very happy in both cases. My mom's side of the family in India doesn't know about either boyfriend, and they clearly have a preference for Indian guys (specifically, from the same state/religion as us) for their own children. However, my sister and I fall under a different category since we grew up in "America" (Canada); they know that our lives are very different from theirs, and I don't think they'll be surprised in the least when I show up with a non-Indian fiance. My boyfriend is totally supportive of my career aspirations, and in fact he would probably like me less if I wasn't driven and smart and stuff.

I did a Masters in the UK and I think you really need to consider whether the Masters programs are cash cows for the universities. I went to St Andrews, and was doing a 2-year research Masters (actually started as a PhD, switched to Masters when my supervisor moved to Austria). I had a lot of friends in taught 1-year Masters programs and they seemed to universally find the programs too easy and too little work. Many said that if you had an undergrad degree in the subject, you'd be repeating a lot of material. Obviously not all UK schools are the same (although this was true at St Andrews even for programs that were very well known, like IR), but it's something to consider - ask current students whether they feel like they're learning enough and really being pushed. Also, in terms of affordability, you can usually work up to 20 hours per week on a student visa in the UK, and many of the MA/MLitt students I knew had ample time to take advantage of this and earn some money.

I think I have some idea of what you're facing, although I'm not in the same position myself. My family is Indian, and although I grew up in Canada, most of my cousins are still in India. My mother's side of the family is quite traditional and the semi-arranged marriages you're talking about are not all uncommon in my family. Being a mother/wife and having a fulfilling career are not incompatible, but you need to be clear with yourself about what you really want and need to be happy. Try picking apart which aspects of a career in journalism and a future as a "proper taitai" you are really drawn to. Would you need to be a top-flight journalist to be happy? That would probably mean devoting a ton of your time to your career, and perhaps delaying marriage/baby-making until your career is off the ground. Would you have to be settled in Indonesia with a rich husband to be happy? That might be harder to reconcile with a career, since some traditional men might be intimidated by or turned off by your desire to work. It would also probably rule out most of the guys you'll meet at graduate school, if they don't want to move to Indonesia (although you could luck out of course!). There are lots of questions to consider, but once you figure out which things you need to be happy, you'll be able to make a decision without any regrets. And your parents are right in thinking that some guys will be intimidated by you being smarter, having more education, and/or making more money than them - possibly quite a few of them if Indonesia is anything like India in terms of progressiveness. However, if having this career is important to you, those aren't the guys you want to be married to anyhow.

Very true. Still, suprisingly to me, quite a bit smaller than the Greater Toronto area. Before I'd been there, I really thought Boston was a Chicago- or Philadelphia-sized city, which it's not. Still plenty big enough for me, though.

It's not small as such, but it is smaller than I expected... Boston itself is about half a million, Toronto (where I'm from) is about 2.5 million. Boston has such a big reputation that I was surprised it wasn't bigger than Toronto.

I don't actually know anything about IR so I'm not sure if this is relevant, but I did my Masters at St Andrews, which also has a pretty famous IR program. I'm not sure if they're considered to be in the same league with Oxford though. At St Andrews, I made friends with lots of people in the IR program and they all universally agreed that the degree is a bit of a joke. Anyone with any IR experience in undergrad found the classes really easy, and even those that didn't found them less challenging than their undergrad programs. That's not to say they weren't learning anything - they were, it just wasn't particularly rigorous and they clearly could have been learning much, much more. They seemed to have a ridiculous amount of free time, too. Anyway, many of them have now gone on to good IR-related jobs around the world, so clearly the program was good in terms of placing people and affording job opportunities. However, in terms of learning skills and content, it was pretty lame. Importantly, I found this to be a shared feature among St Andrews 1-year Masters programs: all my friends (in IR, Marketing, Psychology, etc) said it was much easier and less work than their undergrads, and that anyone with an undergraduate education in the subject would be repeating a lot of material and find it exceptionally easy. Those 1-year Masters programs that attract a lot of international students do so because the school earns tons of money off them, not because they're such amazing programs. Anyway, I have no idea if Oxford's IR program would be similar (and in fact that might seem like a ridiculous question to someone in the field), but it's worth considering, since St Andrews seemed to have quite the reputation as well.

To be honest, I hadn't thought about the tax rates at all! Good point. I would think that the crime rate is higher in Durham than in Boston. Not only did it look a lot sketchier, grad students were telling stories of seeing numerous drug deals and fights in certain areas. What they said was that Durham has bad areas like any city, but the weird thing is that they are RIGHT next to the good areas, and it's hard to tell which is which if you're not familiar with the city. So if you do decide on Durham, I would suggest getting some advice from current grads about where exactly to live!

I have! I'm going to be heading to Harvard in September. What about you??

Try craigslist of course, but also try sending an email to your department; they might be able to hook you up with another incoming student looking for a roommate.

To be honest, $80-100 is what I would expect for poster printing. See if your PI can cover the cost for you. Also, if the poster printing places are far away, bike or take a cab!

Quick question: what do you use for making figured on your Mac? I have one as well and haven't found a good program for this (although to be fair, I haven't really looked). Thanks!

I interviewed in both cities and for me the winner for location is easily, undeniably, Boston. While Carrboro and Chapel Hill are pretty cool, they're not actually particularly close to Durham - they're far enough that I wouldn't drive out there for a weeknight dinner. I found Durham itself to be way too much of a driving city. It does seem to have some nice restaurants and other cool stuff but they're all rather spread out from each other, so you really have to drive everywhere and there are few nice walkable areas. Durham's downtown looks like it's on its way up, but you can't help but notice that it used to be (and sort of still is) rundown and somewhat sketchy. I also found it to feel quite "southern" (conservative, old-fashioned), which could be a positive or a negative depending on what you're comfortable with - personally, it felt a little foreign to me. That being said, when people say the cost of living is lower in Durham, they're not kidding around - the grad students I met were regularly paying less than $500 for nice apartments, and students with children or spouses could easily afford to live in their own houses. Also, I would melt in the summer, but I can fully understand why the weather would be a plus. On the other hand, I find Boston to be a charming, awesomely compact and walkable city. Despite being fairly small, it really has the feel of a big city. Being able to use public transportation is a big plus for me, as is the abundance of student hangouts and cute areas to explore. I really like the kind of intellectual vibe that Boston has, and it also feels quite liberal and progressive. Boston is also closer to home for me, and I'm more comfortable in very cold winters than very hot summers. Keep in mind how far your stipend will go when comparing the affordability of either city - I was offered $19600 in Durham and $27800 in Boston, which probably even out.

Halberda and Feigenson, mostly the former.

I think it really depends on how much of an edge completing your Masters will honestly give you for admissions next time around. Will the MA give you the opportunity to amass a significant amount of independent research experience - enough that it will sway admissions committees? Will you publish and present your work? Will you gain experiences and skills that will make your application really stand out next round? Will the year(s) of further study give you the background to come up with a really stellar idea to pitch in your SOP? I think, depending on a combination of yourself and the MA program in question (with special consideration of the fact that it's not in your chosen field), the answers to these questions could really go either way. But if you think the MA will greatly increase your chances of getting into a great PhD program, I don't think there's anything inherently stupid about taking that chance. You might also want to think about how much and why you want to attend a "better" PhD program, as well as whether you feel any time pressure to finish your PhD and get a "real job" quickly. Those things are also likely to change from person to person. My personal data point is that I took the MA route, although accidentally. I graduated undergrad in 2007 and applied to 5 PhD programs in Dev/Cog Psych; I got rejected from the three American schools (Harvard, Yale, ... and I'm blanking on the other one) but got into one school in Canada and another in the UK. I decided to attend the British school, and spent a year and a half there doing full-time research towards my thesis (my PhD program had zero teaching or coursework components) before my supervisor got a new job in Austria. I decided not to follow him and instead handed in my work to date as a Masters thesis. When I applied again this year, my CV looked tremendously different than it had last time around: a handful of presentations, a couple papers under review, two months of fieldwork, and a stack of research experience. Looking at my SOPs from 2007 is almost embarrassing; I clearly had NO IDEA what I was talking about back then, whereas I can confidently talk about my own experience and ideas now, as well as the field at large (this also meant I picked schools and supervisors much more intelligently this time). It's really like night and day. Anyway, in my case, the Masters was clearly a good idea: I'm going to Harvard next year. This may be a reflection of just how unprepared I was for a PhD in 2007, and I don't think my Masters experience was typical, so clearly YMMV.

I've been asking a lot of questions about what it's like to work with my prospective supervisors, since I know what kind of supervision I respond best to. Another question I like to ask is "what's the worst thing about this program"; since most students have entirely good things to say, this forces them to consider the negatives too. Other questions: what conferences do they go to, are the students competitive with each other, do they hang out together outside of school (and if so, what kinds of social activities do they partake in), do the students collaborate on projects together, can you live decently off the stipend, is it at all common to take classes outside of the department, how much time do they devote to classwork vs research vs TA-ing vs other life things... That's all I can think of right now!