zipykido

Once you're out of undergrad I find that most people don't bother putting their GPA on their CV/resume. If it comes up on an interview then be honest about it but I don't believe any major company out there has a strict policy on GPAs. If you're doing a master's thesis then that body of work will be more important than your GPA. In my experience doing a biomed PhD, your GPA only matters so far as it is required for enrollment (above B average, no C's, etc). In industry it doesn't matter what your GPA is as long as you can demonstrate that you can do the work assigned.

Sounds like she's freaked out about medical school then. Even when I was an undergrad, friends of mine who wanted to go to medical school would go and ask for additional points and argue minute points. I have friend currently TAing that tell me horror stories of students demanding grades be changed even when they are blatantly wrong. I think the only thing you can do is try to assure her that a B+ is not the end of the world for medical school applications and if you want to go the extra mile, critique her on points that would help her earn higher grades in the future. Aside from that, not much you can, should, or need to do.

I've noticed that pre-med students tend to push for regrades more often than others, it essentially is a low risk-moderate reward type of situation. One thing that is useful is to have a clearly set regrade policy. I've seen policies where if one question is contested, then the entire exam is regraded, which means that the student's grade can be lowered. Also group projects are typically a mess, especially in intro classes since work ethic is different for every student at that point and personalities clash. It seems like the student was counting on the group project to lift their grade up and worked harder to achieve that. You could always check the grade averages of the other members of the group. If their averages are much lower, they may believe that their contribution was equal when it wasn't.

In engineering I find it pretty casual. I don't think too many people wear leggings/yoga pants simply because it's pretty cold here in the winter. I'm on my feet all day running around doing experiments so I dress for that: sneakers, jeans, clean t-shirt. As long as you're dressed appropriately for lab nobody really bothers you about it. If I have a interlab presentation I may dress up to business casual and all other event where I'm a representative of my lab to outside folks I'll go semi-formal to formal.

I like to use the system where I'll drop a project for a week to see if I make any progress on my other projects. Basically it's about culling projects that drain more resources in terms of time and energy than they give back. At any given time though I probably have 4-5 projects that I try to address per week though so I don't have a bunch of downtime. It keeps me busy, only problem is sometimes I cycle through things too much.

You seem very competitive with your scores, although publications would certainly help if you have any of those. My advice would be to seek out faculty who are doing research that you would be interested in first rather than looking at specific schools. Most of the time it doesn't really matter what it says your degree is in but rather the content of the research. The bigger schools will typically have better funding (research and scholarships) but don't discount the smaller schools that have people doing research in the area that you want. Most engineering schools are quite well funded.

It's quite common for people to take a year or two off to get some industry experience before going onto grad school. In my opinion it usually strengthens your application since having real life experience is always a bonus. However, I find that the longer you spend out of the academic environment, the harder it is to get back into good academic habits. Also you'll take a tremendous pay cut with it, but if you come in with some savings from working you should be fine.

You should only include publications that have already been submitted to a journal. Non-currently peer reviewed work should not make it until it has reached that point.

I have a pretty simple checklist for reading papers for assignments. This changes a bit if I'm reading a paper for review or for my own research but the steps are pretty similar. 1. Read abstract. You'll get most of the information you'll need out of here if the paper is well written. 2. Read introduction. If the topic is unfamiliar to you then make sure you understand the introduction which provides the framework for the entire paper usually includes motivation, past work, and gaps in scientific knowledge. 3. Read discussion/conclusion. Note significant claims made by the author, this will be important for the following steps. 4. Figure out the figures. This is the only step in which you can only get better with practice. Once you start recognizing data presentation, reading goes a lot faster. For instance I can skim flow charts and survival charts very quickly now without having to refer to staining antibodies or conditions. But when I started it took forever to do it, and would slow down my reading to a point where it was frustrating. Make sure that the data is convincing and supports the claims made in the discussion (statistics and presentation matter!). Conclusions should be drawn logically from the data and not randomly guessed or buried in graphs and tables. Ask yourself if you were presented with this data, would you have the same conclusion? Well laid out papers will have logical sense, figure 1 will present something, figure 2 will fill in holes from figure 1 and so on. 5. Skim text. Methods and written text are important but only so much as to understand the data presented. If the figures are confusing and not well made then you'll have to dig into the text a bit to figure out what they did and hopefully why they did it. Once you're more ingrained in your field you'll be able to spot subtleties in methods that will skew the data in one way or the other. This is important for point 4. Also note that not all papers are well written or have significant contribution to the field. Don't get bogged down by those papers. I've read papers with 8 figures while only 2 of them were necessary. Once you understand the submission process and the politics behind papers you'll realize that some papers that have been accepted are just terrible. Just read to come out with key findings and key figures to support or refute your argument.

Most (if not all) schools have a very strict plagiarism policy. Unless you're being sued by an outside entity you'll probably be fine. My guess is that the meeting will be to discuss an event that happened in which material was not properly cited. They'll go over what happened and what to do in the future to prevent it from happening again, but if the second person is internal to the school then it'll be more about protecting the school and its reputation from possible damage in the future.

I agree that you don't need to say much about whether your degree is a 3-4 year program. If you're finishing with a BS, most institutions will recognize that as a 4 year degree regardless if you finish in 3 or 4. If you're finishing with a BA in 4 years then you might have to explain why it took you so long to finish (but that doesn't seem to be the case). Also your transcript should have credit hours shown on it which any school should be able to see and calculate out since it'll include your summer credits as well.

It certainly doesn't hurt to apply to US schools, especially if that's where the funding will be. I'm not particularly familiar with the competitiveness of the history programs in general but you can always check the stats on those. Where you got your BA from doesn't really matter since you have a masters. The monetary cost is trivial in most cases since a lot of schools will fly you over to interview or conduct phone interviews. Just remember that you should really seek funded programs or else you'll be racking up a ton of debt. The only real fees are for taking the GREs and application fees. GREs are important in that they serve as a minimum requirement but some candidates have a great body of previous work that trumps the GREs to the point where they become a triviality. Just make sure you highlight your previous experience and link to any publications or presentations that your work has led to.

My impression is that most programs are looking away from standardized testing scores and looking at total package. I think you already having a medical degree already displays that you are a strong candidate.

Also peace corps provides loan forgiveness if you tough it out for the two years, it's not 100% but depending on your loans, they don't accrue interest during the period and at the end you get a portion wiped away. Also you get a small stipend when you get back if you're going straight back into grad school that's useful for down payment for an apartment or car. I used to work with anthropologist and it seemed like the best thing to is full immersion to see if you like it or not. I think the peace corps can provide a good surrogate for that. Also depending on the location it'll be a good test for whether you're prepared for grad school.

Up to 301 users right now, it'll probably explode next morning.

It's tschlich! heh

I have early lab meeting so I'll be disappointed tomorrow morning.

Finally we can get some closure.

Ha ha, actually you're probably partially correct. People may have have fallen out of eligibility since they accepted the awards so they wanted to remove those names from the list, that money probably gets put back in the pool. =

Website glitch that they fixed probably, not significant at all unless they were editing some names off of the list.

Look at recent publications/posters and mention maybe the overall topic that they do that you're interested in. Maybe include your CV/resume to show that you're a good fit. Treat it like a job interview, make yourself stand out in your email but don't stress out about it too much. I've only heard of PI's rejecting rotation requests because they're full or don't have the money to take on any more students, never on the basis of qualifications since everybody in the program should be qualified.

Up to 245 users now. I wonder if we'll break 500 tonight.

Most professors will get a few emails every semester asking for rotation. It's pretty simple, introduce yourself, comment on their work, ask for permission to meet and discuss rotating in their lab. After the meeting then put in a formal request through your program and it should be all good. You generally want to meet with them first in person after the email to make sure they have money to take on additional students and to hear from them about the research going on in their lab.

Probably grfp@nsf.gov but someone who received it last year probably needs to confirm.

Knowing that everybody is waiting, more like: