Vene

Is this a case where you accepted the offer or where you were accepted to two different schools? Either way, it's unfunded, who cares? Do what is best for you.

And I have a hard time understanding what good it does to get Student B a middle class job instead of Student A and how this relates to the duties of academics. The career development class won't give any long term benefit to the students because the exact same percentage of them are going to find professional work regardless. Take the time to teach them about their subject of interest or that there are things out there worth learning for reasons other than monetary gain.

A thought I have as to the economic value is that the US is experiencing Banana Republic levels of wealth inequality. I don't think that any sort of education reform is going to do anything more than dent it. There simply aren't enough good jobs out there. Ideas like this: these ideas are only useful for giving an individual advice, but don't work very well in aggregate. At the end of the day there are only so many jobs and there are far more qualified applicants. Making everybody a little more qualified doesn't change the dynamic one bit.

I followed the money. I'd only pay for graduate school if I was either independently wealthy (I'm not, I'm very much working class) or if the ROI was quite high. How much debt could you expect from a MS at Rutgers? Also, do you want a masters or do you want a PhD?

Do psychology programs actually care about the writing score? I ask because a 3.5 was actually my score and I didn't have any difficulty in my field, so I question how applicable different sections of the the GRE are for different programs.

As of this moment, do you want to go to Penn State more than the other programs which accepted you? If you do, there's not much point in waiting for a response. Also, are any of your current offers funded?

There's a reason I applied to 4 different universities, I could send out the GRE score for free. Granted, this meant I had to commit to such before seeing my results, but I'm okay with that kind of risk.

Sure, I expect them to only take a handful as well. But, I do imagine that there's a lot more professors to potentially work with whereas at my undergrad I had a single professor I could work under. Even then it was because it was offered as a class, the funding for the work was my tuition payment and that was practically it. I'm not trying to sound bitter or upset with where I'm going. I'm not, I am quite happy with how things are progressing. But, I really don't understand how somebody can say that getting a degree at a internationally recognized school gives you no advantage compared to a degree from a school that's a complete unknown in the adjacent state.

You don't think that the person who did their undergrad at Harvard and can get into the labs of the top researchers in the field doesn't have an advantage compared to the person who went to a small state university where maybe one or two professors even have a slot available for undergrads to do research? You don't think that the people who select potential applicants have explicit or implicit biases towards big name schools compared to some university they never heard of before? What world are you living in? And that's not going into how the graduate from a small college is far more likely to have different socioeconomic disadvantages compared to a graduate from a top 20 university.

You know something has gone wrong when majoring in education leads to a negative ROI.

It wasn't mating, but research on jellyfish bioluminesence revolutionized molecular biology and the biomedical sciences and lead to a Nobel Prize in 2008. It's the type of thing which is generally derided as trivial or useless, the project which lead to it being cloned in the first place was even defunded. The only reason we have it is because that (former) scientist was generous enough to share his data with other scientists when they called him up. You can't just say that studying x is of no value, because without studying it, you have no idea what you are going to discover. I am not as well versed on the humanities, but I am very loathe to dismiss scholarship because I don't see an immediate use for it.

Here's what I think, if anything it means you are better than them. It's easy to come from a position of prestige, it's far more difficult to come from the bottom.

This? http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/02/business/fda-bans-three-arsenic-drugs-used-in-poultry-and-pig-feeds.html?_r=0

Canada is totally south of Michigan, Detroit is the one place in the lower 48 where you can drive south into Canada.

It would be quite a risk to wait another year, how comfortable with risk are you? Or, here's another question, let's look at the worst case scenario with both options. Will you be more likely to regret going to Emory and always ask yourself what would be if you waited a year and tried again at Berkeley, or will you regret not going to Emory and then getting rejected next year?

I vote double major, it sounds more impressive.

Strange, I've never noticed a problem with chicken. Although, I do tend to buy frozen chicken and when me and my wife do buy the refridgerated chicken we end up cutting it into smaller portions and freezing it anyway. I do agree that do not eat it if it smells putrid. I am definitely a fan of frozen veggies. An aside that pops into mind from the chicken is that a meat thermometer is a wise investment. It also means you can cook things like pork to a safe temperature without cooking it dry.

For a MS degree? That seems strange to me as I do QA work with a bachelors and I haven't worked with anybody in QA/QC who has a masters degree. As for starting salary, with a bachelors you can expect about $35,000/year if they really want somebody with a MS probably add an extra $10,000. I also live in the midwest and I think cost of living is higher in the mid-Atlantic, so maybe add another 10-20% on top of that.

I don't know that I would want to attempt such a route before actually working with the professor and knowing that our personalities click.

Just send a quick, polite email thanking the program contact saying you've decided to pursue higher education elsewhere.

I formally accepted an offer a few weeks back. I knew where I was going to go, so why wait?

Do you get a six figure paycheck after graduating? If not, run away.

Just a side thought, for the stipend amount did you account for cost of living?

4 hours of travel a day? That's brutal. Have you ever done a long commute before, they get draining fast.

I imagine it's got to be difficult to determine what an enzyme's main function happens to be. I guess you could try and assay the activity of different reactions it catalyzes in a cell in order to see what it spends the most time doing, but to truly say that a certain reaction is the primary reaction you have to justify it for all cell types and during different metabolic conditions.