riceandbeans

Another thing you'll need to consider is whether or not you can find a house/condo in a safe neighborhood for only $60K in an area where rents are $1000/month. Rents for one bedrooms in my area are $400-600/month, and even small condos go for >$80K. Unless you're willing to buy a fixer-upper (which, who has time for in grad school?), you would likely be looking at prices upwards of $100K, if not much higher (I recall in the DC suburbs, townhomes started at $300K). So, it really depends on the housing prices of the area to which you are moving.

Graduate assistantship stipends vary by academic program and institution. In my experience, most stipends fall are between $12,000 and $25,000. It's probably fair to say that financial packages in the mid teens represent the norm outside of professional schools. You should evaluate stipends in the context of the city's living costs with a special emphasis on the real estate market. If you can't make ends meet with your stipends, consider supplementing your income with private tutoring on standardized test taking (you aced the GRE, right?), writing/editing, and specific subjects in which you possess expertise. You can also explore the fragmented world of scholarships and fellowships. With luck and perseverance, you may identify a handful of opportunities suitable for your background and research interests. Finally, if all else fails, you can apply for government and private-lender student loans. To learn more about paying for graduate school, visit GradSchoolHeaven.com.

Because laughing is good for end-of-the-semester stress:
http://ceejandem.blo...-barbie-tm.html

Because laughing is good for end-of-the-semester stress:
http://ceejandem.blo...-barbie-tm.html

This is why Bernard Madoff ripped off so many people, why there was a financial crisis, why there was Enron. It was "smart" to ignore the lies, duplicity, dishonesty, fraud, manipulation, bullying to keep your job. There is so much fraud and dishonesty in these professions because people like you think it's "sophisticated" to keep quiet when you see clear fraud and bullying.

If you don't understand the key term in this hypothetical, then why are you answering my question? Sharing your ignorance is less valuable than you think.

It is sad that students are so pre-professional that when they hear of dishonesty and bullying in academia their response is to look the other way. This is why Enron and the financial crisis happened. The people who knew something was wrong did nothing.

The purpose of the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) is to help ensure the vitality and diversity of the scientific and engineering workforce in the United States. (from the program announcement)

1. The GRFP is a prestigious fellowship. The benefit of winning it is not just getting a big stipend.

2. Having a fellowship allows you to focus just on producing outstanding research without having to worry about TA/RA duties.

3. Having students on fellowship allows a PI to stretch their grant dollars (or a department to stretch its university dollars) and take more students, eventually increasing the science workforce in the states.

4. 30k is well above any stipend you would see in some fields, outside of schools in NY/LA. Also, for many schools (ones not on the coasts), 30k is above the max stipend levels for any field.

5. Most people don't become scientists for the money... or go to grad school for the money...

The purpose of the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) is to help ensure the vitality and diversity of the scientific and engineering workforce in the United States. (from the program announcement)

1. The GRFP is a prestigious fellowship. The benefit of winning it is not just getting a big stipend.

2. Having a fellowship allows you to focus just on producing outstanding research without having to worry about TA/RA duties.

3. Having students on fellowship allows a PI to stretch their grant dollars (or a department to stretch its university dollars) and take more students, eventually increasing the science workforce in the states.

4. 30k is well above any stipend you would see in some fields, outside of schools in NY/LA. Also, for many schools (ones not on the coasts), 30k is above the max stipend levels for any field.

5. Most people don't become scientists for the money... or go to grad school for the money...

What schools are these and what is your PhD program?

But you also said you got into a Math program. Give me the program that corresponds to what schools you got accepted to. You never even gave the names of the schools you got accepted to.

What are all 3 of the schools you got into and for what program?

What school and program did you get accepted to?

An attempt to reveal the skeletons in the cupboard:

http://pi-reviews.blogspot.com/

We need to reveal the unfair (and sometimes even illegal) behavior of our advisors.

An attempt to reveal the skeletons in the cupboard: http://pi-reviews.blogspot.com/


Send your stories or PI reviews to pireviews@gmail.com to let people know about your advisor.

I lived in a coop for a year in college, and considered living in one now that I'm in grad school. My experience in undergrad was pretty good. Great people, awesome food, someone was pretty much always around if you wanted human contact (even if it was just to site in silence at 10am on a Sat with lots of coffee and scrambled eggs trying to recover from a hangover), and I really enjoyed working together with a group of people to make the house a nice place to live, both in terms of physical stuff and inter-personal relations. We did have some minor issues (dinners were vegan and but there was a dairy fridge for the vegetarians, and we had a several week debate about whether or not it was ok to add cheese to the vegan dinner if you weren't vegan), we wound up with some interesting decorations (think ~100 origami cranes hanging from the ceiling in the kitchen), and it does require a surprising time investment. You will want to be home for dinner (which take a lot longer than eating by yourself), you will have to spend time cleaning every week, there are house meetings (and any disagreements will make these run a long time, especially if you are doing things conflict resolution style or require unanimous consent to make changes to house policies), parties will occur when it's not convenient for you, and be prepared to share everything. But the payout in terms of house community totally outweighed all of the downsides, at least for me. Now that I'm in grad school, I did decide to not live in a coop, but that was mostly because at this point in my life I wanted a level of privacy that just wouldn't be possible in a coop setting.

I would say that if you are a pretty easy going person or willing to sacrifice some stuff in order live in a group setting, then seriously look into coops. But I would suggest that you look for ones with an interview process (it makes it more likely that the house gets along well), and clearly defined rules about everything from chores to inter-personal conflicts.

Once upon a time, I worked in a big lab where there was a huge multi-year experiment running. I went in as the low person on the totem poll, but, due to the lab manager leaving and not being replaced, pretty soon was doing everything (ordering, scheduling, running multiple types of testing, running interference with veterinarians, training undergrads and other techs, etc). And it was terrible. But I realized after awhile that I had kind of done it to myself. I had just sort of picked up other people's jobs that they were dropping the ball on, and they were more than happy to let me do that (not necessarily because they were lazy, but because everyone in the lab was overworked, even if the extra work was coming from teaching or coursework obligations). So, after taking a big step back and figuring out why the situation was as bad as it was, I figured out how to fix it. I did two major things:

1) I realized that our protocol (your lab must have one somewhere), while perfectly adequate at explaining the big picture of the experiment, didn't actually tell you how to do the day to day running of the experiment and all it's parts. So I wrote SOPs (standard operating procedures, not statement of purpose) for everything. And I mean everything. I wrote one on how to schedule tests, what supplies needed ordered and when, how to organize the drug closet, and on and on. It was a pain to do, but then when someone asked me a question about how to do some annoyingly small thing they should have figured out 3 months ago, I'd hand them the SOP, tell them what page to read, and then walk away. It saved a lot of time in the long run.

2) I worked on my delegating skills. Everything I felt comfortable handing off to someone else, I did. And I handed things off to people at every single level of the lab food chain. I told other techs that they were in charge of schedule certain kinds of tests. I figured out what data the grad students were analyzing, and suggested that if they were analyzing the data, they might want to run those tests so they were in control of the data quality. I asked postdocs if they would be comfortable dealing with the vets, since they were on a more even playing field with them. Everyone got their very own undergrad that they were in charge of training and supervising, and then what they did with that undergrad was not my problem (I assumed that they'd use that undergrad to help them with whatever aspect of the experiment they were focusing on). If there was a really awesome and together undergrad (it happened from time to time), I let them run experiments on their own (once I was sure they were capable, of course). And then if something wasn't getting done that I had delegated, I brought it up with my PI. (I actually talked to my PI before starting to give responsibilities away to make sure he understood that I was really overworked, and I really needed to cut down my workload, but I wanted to do it in a way he was comfortable with)

So, yes, it still felt like I was the only one in the lab who knew everything that was supposed to get done, and I was still really busy, but it was a manageable level of busy and I was able to make time (note, I'm saying make, not have) to do my own side projects. As the only paid RA, everyone else in the lab will look at you as the person who knows how to get the nuts and bolts stuff done. Also, it helps to realize that, even though you want to be good at your job and want the research to go as smoothly as possible, at the end of the day it is not your research.

Note: The above is based on my experience in a similar (but not exactly the same) situation. I wanted to share with you how I dealt with it, because I thought it might help you figure out how to make your situation better. I don't want to imply that you created your own problem like I did, because I obviously don't know all the details and because you are not likely as much of a push-over as I am. I just wanted to illustrate that it might be time for you to take a giant step back, look at the whole picture (not just the grad students), figure out why it's messed up, and then come up with ways to fix it (and you might realize it's un-fixable, and then you need to get the hell out). Because staying in a lab where you a running non-stop for 60 hours a week and have been given responsibilities that are way too big for your pay grade is not a good plan. You don't want to start grad school already burnt out.

We are a group of students, who are trying to find a better way to share knowledge among people.
To launch our test platform, we need empirical data on graduate school student's behavior data.

Please help us via participating the survey on following link.
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Thank you so much for your time and concern!

I know that Society for Conservation Biology has a searchable database of academic programs (found here: http://www.conbio.org/Resources/Programs/). You should be able to search the faculty database for genetics, which would give you a good list of active researchers doing conservation genetics (and where they are currently teaching). I'm sure other societies have similar resources.