Vene

I've had mine for a few months now. The admin assistant sent out an email to my personal account with how to set it up.

Well, you have Ann email so I say save it for the paper trail as evidence of the landlord tries to pull something.

Sounds like something you could mention in a sentence or two in a SOP.

A 2 would be incredibly impressive, albeit in the bad way.

I will admit this is my thoughts without even reading the essay, but is this actually something worth spending time on if you're applying to neuroscience programs?

Taking care of it yourself can easily mean that you find the people to do the work you need done. For fuck's sake, that's not even at the level of technician work. This sounds like he's trying to teach you to micromanage.

I spent $0 on GRE prep. I spent my time looking for free math problems to practice on and called it good.

Did you take the GRE yet? ETS may have provided different graduate schools with your profile.

BA versus BS means approximately nothing. Your undergrad GPA shouldn't be a hinderance, it's above the typical cut offs and you have work history going for you. There's no need to apologize for it. Your GRE scores are what I think is the weakest part of your application, but if you're already done it twice short of finding a new study method for the quantitative section there's not a lot you can do. If you're currently at a pathology lab do you plan on trying to get into that university's graduate program? I imagine that your connections with the professors there will only help you.

If you do well I'm sure it'll help, if you do poorly it will hurt. I didn't take any subject tests when I applied to pharmacology programs as a biology major. Out of 5 programs I got 2 interviews, one at the University of Minnesota and one at the University of Vermont. What I decided when I applied was I was competitive enough without it (>3.5 GPA which increased as I did undergrad, senior research project, 1 year of experience as an industrial chemist) so I didn't bother. I don't think that molecular biology programs care if you do a biology GRE or a biochemistry GRE instead. Most programs don't require it anyway.

It is incredibly hard to find a program which funds you in excess of $30,000 (and those which do either are in very high cost of living cities or are programs where the grad students would otherwise get a very high salary) and I'm personally giving up at minimum $10,000/year extra income as well as promotions and such from a decent job. If I didn't think graduate school would further my career I wouldn't bother touching it. I left a job with a decent wage, benefits, coworkers I got along with, and one where I had actual authority to do graduate school. You have to factor in opportunity cost, sure I will earn enough to survive, but it's still a cut and I am fully expecting to have to devote more time and energy into school than I did into my job.

Organic chemistry is useful, but I wouldn't call it an essential class unless you decide to do biochemistry as well. I think it's more valuable to grab a course in microbiology or physiology. Because you're at a major university I'd check to see if there are any public health undergraduate degrees and there could be a couple courses they offer which can be valuable. I don't think the goal is to become an expert, but instead to show that even though you are a math major you have enough biology coursework that you won't be behind in an epidemiology program.

If your end goal is a PhD unless you have to make up for some major deficiencies in undergrad don't do a masters. As for if you want to spend a gap year working or go right out of undergrad is up to you and if you feel like you need a break. Also, a 3.5 GPA is just fine and won't hurt you in the least. Are you heading into your third year or did you just finish your third year? If you're heading into it you're not behind. If you're heading into your last year and you're just starting research you're in a little worse shape. To some extent, I could see it looking worse to have not started earlier because a university like Northwestern will have all kinds of research opportunities a math major wouldn't get at a small liberal arts college. Also, it would not be a bad idea, if you haven't already, to grad some basic biology and chemistry courses as epidemiology is a life science and even though math is highly valued in it, knowing the background basics of the biology aspects will be useful.

Serotonin would be more productive.

There are some programs out there which will use GRE as an initial screening tool, but not all of them do this and graduate programs try to take a holistic approach to candidates. Also, a good GRE score is lower than what you may think it is, in all reality getting above 75th percentile puts you in very good shape. Also, for an engineering program the primary GRE score you need to be concerned about is quantitative. Analytical writing means nothing. Verbal is something where you mostly just don't want to score low. You can also see about if the websites for the different universities have made public the GRE scores of the accepted students in the previous years. You can also check out the results search on this website and see what different schools have accepted from previous students.

What field of study is your SO? Assuming chemistry, is there a particular type of chemistry she'll be studying? Anyway, a periodic table like this would be useful for most all purposes. One like this is a bit more useful, especially if she'll be concerned about physical chemistry. This would be useful for a radiochemist. Generally, a periodic table is a useful reference and it should be available whenever one is doing chemistry, but it's not going to be the forefront of studying, at least not at the graduate level. I think you may be able to get a board like that at someplace like staples or officedepot. Lastly, if your SO is involved at all with the biological sciences giantmicrobes has some neat toys. They're not going to be good for studying, but they're cute.

Seconding this one, for a scientific field a quantitative score of 152 is very low and won't inspire much confidence, but nothing else is a red flag. You could use the results search here for the programs you're interested in attending to see what the stats are for those they admit/reject and see how you compare.

Congratulations! The struggle sounds like it was worth it.

I think that this is the answer to your question.

Those are actually my thoughts with a notepad as well. You're not attending a lecture, there's no reason to take notes in the same manner. But, if a professor says their current project is based on an idea they got after reading a paper by Smith et al, jot down the name of the paper. Or, if you have several questions you want answered write them down on a page, but don't stare at your notepad as you mechanically read it. Instead, glance down to refresh yourself on what you want to know, you should already have an idea of what questions you want to ask. Maybe you want to know what your role in the group will be and if you will be mentored by a grad student, post-doc, or the PI; so you write down a statement on your notepad so you don't forget it when under pressure.

If this was your wife, I'd lean on the side of taking the London offer. But, I can't tell you because I have no idea how serious the relationship is and how comfortable you are/aren't with doing a LDR for a year. Also, assuming everything works out afterwards with her is she going to follow you to your PhD?

I've not done interviews like that with a professor, but I have some experience with job interviews. Here's what I'd suggest. Dress nicely, for academia that doesn't mean you need the equivalent of a suit, but wear a nice shirt and slacks (or skirt) with nice shoes, if for not other reason than as a sign of respect and that you're taking it seriously. And bringing physical papers is not a bad idea. I don't know how useful the professor's published work will be though I do think it's a good idea to being a notepad of some sort where you can have your questions written down and you should bring a pen so you can scribble down any notes.

I'm all but certain it's not because he hates you. Professors, as a whole, are quite busy as well as scatterbrained, and it is currently summer so student concerns are not a top priority of theirs. Your email probably was lost in their inbox. You could try emailing again or maybe the professor is more receptive to phone calls. Otherwise, the best way to talk to a professor, in my experience, is to actually meet up face to face. Granted, this may or may not be something feasible for you (for one of my LOR writers it was easy because she works in the same city as me, another one of my writers was in a different state so I had to rely upon email). Also, it's pretty early to need to secure recommendations, September is a better time.

Not trying to dispute you, I've actually noticed that for a number of universities they seem to disproportionately hire their alumni.

I've ran into something more now that I've accepted a program. I'm heading to the University of Vermont, which is UVM, but people keep calling it UVT.