zipykido

I hope this isn't some sort of horrible horrible April fools joke.

It depends on who your loans are with. I had to send in a proof of enrollment even though my school is a part of the national clearinghouse system but for some reason they never reported it to the loan company (surprise surprise). Just remember that subsidized loans do not accrue interest during deferment but unsubsidized ones do, so you might as well start paying off the interest on those anyway. Again, it depends on who your loan is with (private or government), and what their policies are.

Your argument can't really be strong without a complete essay. You need to learn to condense down your argument to the strongest points and build around those ideas. Write the body of your paragraph first then summarize it with one topic sentence. If you have multiple ideas to put into the paragraph, make it two shorter paragraphs.

I lived in New Haven for two years I would not call it extremely safe. While I never was physically threatened you would constantly get emails about security alerts. Also it depends on where you live, most of the professors and doctors live not in New Haven since the school system sucks, but the area around the med school and immediately outside of the Yale bubble were not safe.

<!--..--> Is a comment tag used to keep track of your code so it doesn't become impossible to deal with it later when you're editing the source code. It's more for the next schmuck who has to edit your website to orient themselves and has nothing to do with status. The website doesn't use any PHP or server code so I would assume that they take the website down, then manually/automatically change the homepage for everybody with their status rather than using a table that has everybody's status separate. Which is probably why they have to take the website down for maintenance.

I had the same issue when I was applying for fellowships last year. The easiest thing to do is include a secondary adviser with more experience on your applications. It requires very little extra work on your part and a quick email on your adviser's part. I find that newer faculty are more motivated and are friendlier since they were in your position not so long ago. Just make sure you hitch your wagon to the strongest horse and you'll go a long way.

There are some foods that I tend to stay away from though. Anything that would trigger allergies is a no brainer, which includes various dyes that are in most food. Also fish in large quantities. I think people are too overly concerned about the food they eat. Very few foods will ever have long term permanent health consequences as long as you eat them in moderation. The trick is to have a balanced diet and switch things up regularly. A 2012 Stanford study showed little benefit from eating organic food: http://med.stanford.edu/ism/2012/september/organic.html. Also if you do an energy balance on locally grown foods you'll see that they aren't much better for the environment than mass grown stuff. Although I prefer locally grown meats as they tend to be more humane and local processing at a butcher's shop is much better than a factory.

I don't agree that you shouldn't be the smartest person in the room. Because if you are then you have the opportunity to teach others what you know and take a leadership position. I got my undergraduate degree from a small low ranked engineering school but I worked at an ivy for two years before accepting a graduate position at another ivy school. Honestly the trick is to have some confidence in yourself. You will not be the dumbest person in the room for very long, just learn to ask questions to build up knowledge. Also don't be afraid to look stupid, I know a lot of people who ask simple questions to help boost their knowledge and you eventually realize that these people are incredibly profound in their ability to learn. If you were chronically dumb then you probably wouldn't be accepted in the first place so don't worry.

It's not the worst idea in the world. Just set up remote desktop to your desktop when you need to use applications like word or excel. It's just a pain to use if you have to network print though.

Lower tier programs often offer money to compensate for their lack of prestige. Higher tier programs know that they can get away with not offering as much because people will pay to have that name behind them. Honestly, for a masters program I would definitely go for the funded option, since you can always apply for fully funded PhD programs after and there's no point in handicapping yourself with debt. I wouldn't say you would be less happy in a more expensive city but you'd have to spend more time doing low budget things and managing your finances. Imagine how much travelling you could do with $30,000 that you don't take out in loans.

Being accepted is a condition for accepting the reward but I don't think they consider it when basing their decision. I bet you could update your profile though, but I don't think anybody is looking at it at this point.

If you like research than go for it. Nothing worse than making yourself miserable when you could be happy doing what you want. Generally unless you're proposing unique research that your lab isn't equipped to do will you run into problems with time issues but most advisers have one or two projects in mind that they need done, maybe helping someone with an aspect of their dissertation or a quick question that needs to be answered. Worst comes to worst you could always try and transfer into the PhD program to finish off your research. Even if you decide to leave you'd write up what you'd done so far and someone else could wrap up or help you publish.

Masters programs in the US are not typically funded, that's probably where you went wrong. Even if they are funded they are typically only partially funded with TA/RA. Next time just apply to programs that offer funded masters, but those are few and far between depending on school and field.

Some people go for quality and some people go for quality of publications. As long as your writing skills are sufficient I don't see anything wrong going with either path. Just make sure you polish up your grant writing skills and then apply to strong schools for your postdoc. Make sure that you demonstrate that you have a strong capability to publish, write grants, and coordinate research to increase your value. Name is one of those things that hard to gauge in terms of importance. Some people use school name as a first pass since it tells them a lot about what type of candidate you will be, while others ignore names all together. One thing for sure is that the big names tend to lead to better connections which makes it easier to find people to vouch for you and to find positions but you can get around that by going up to people at conferences and introducing yourself. Having a big name behind you doesn't hurt but the number of people who overcome that barrier is plentiful.

My NIH committee meets on the 24th or 30th so hopefully I find out about both relatively close to each other so I don't have too long freak out especially if I don't receive one or both. It sucks that the number of acceptances isn't going up. I would rather forfeit a bit of my stipend and have more people enter the program since external funding is a great boost to both the fellow and the PI. More students in the system means more research can be conducted and also frees up money from other funding agencies (NIH, DoD, etc) since money originally geared towards tuition and stipends can be rerouted to research supplies and equipment.

Assistant professors don't even make 100k a year . I'm making 25k a year in the middle of nowhere New Hampshire which isn't that bad since I'm thrifty by nature. NSF GRFP fellows get 32k stipend a year but that seems to be the upper limit. Some fellowships do not allow for additional assistantships though. The only way you'd be making $100k as a grad student is to be independently wealthy and have a pretty large portfolio going.

I've never been able to gain weight very easily (Asian genes), but if you start cooking for yourself at least 1 meal a day I find it helps to keep a balanced diet. When I'm too lazy to shop and cook I tend to eat a lot of fatty junk foods, but even if I put out a few hours over the weekend to make something as simple as a salad for the week, I find myself eating a lot healthier. For like $10-15 a week you can easily buy enough lettuce/spinach, carrots, celery, peppers, etc to put in a salad, and anything that I don't eat usually ends up in a stir fry at end of the week.

Generally the entire building is required to disclose if even one unit has asbestos. There are procedures for dealing with asbestos like completely sealing off the renovation area and filtering all the air the enters and leaves so you'd be safe if a reputable company is doing the renovations. So even if renovations are being done you're still safe living where you are. Only issue is that asbestos work costs a lot more than normal work due to the regulations about generating dust and particulates so most people don't have it removed based on cost and not safety concerns. Just don't go banging on pipes or licking the paint.

Throw all of your acceptances into a fire, whichever one you save first is the school that you go to.

It should have been reported at the beginning of the term to protect all of the parties from possible misconduct. Grading the work of your significant other is a conflict of interest and cohabitation probably doesn't help the situation. But since they were living together before the term started there's a good chance that the college would have just taken steps to assure that no preferential treatment was given to the student and they received no help beyond what was available to the rest of the class. Given that the term is almost over, I would say that the stakes are much higher now and any report will probably result in an investigation, which will be disruptive to all parties involved. But if it's policy then you probably shouldn't turn a blind eye to it.

I've been up in grad school for almost half a year now and I've been in the market to buy a place. My current issue right now is that unless you buy it outright, you don't really save much money in the long run. I'm currently paying $650 in rent. Over 4 years that's 31.2k which seems like a lot. However if you consider that you need at least two years of income to get approved for a loan it becomes much harder, on top of the 20% down payment, the hassle and fees quickly outweigh the benefits. I know people who were able to get financed and then rent out their place which pretty much covers their mortgage and association fees so they effectively pay 0 rent, however to do that you need quite a bit of capital. If I got a 2 bedroom condo for 100k (middle of nowhere New Hampshire), my condo association fees, taxes, loan, and insurance it would probably be about $800 a month. Which is no problem if you have a roommate constantly. If I charged a reasonable $600 a month up here, I would only end up paying about $200 a month. However this assumes that I have a roommate all the time guaranteed and paying that much a month would make things very tight. Additionally closing cost for a property of that value is about 3-4k, and selling it after I moved would be 6k, and maybe 2-3k for fees. I could rent it out when I moved away and make it an income property but that has risks as well. Honestly I have the credit and down payment, but I still think renting is usually the better option for a grad student unless they have a spouse/partner with decent income.

It shows initiative if you follow up. Generally, professors are busy people so unless you're an extremely desirable candidate, you're probably only in the back of their minds. Remember that they're dealing with running a lab, writing grants, presentations, classes, and personal issues. If it is over the time frame that they quoted then send them a quick email, remind them that you spoke and ask for a brief response.

Once you're on your PI's budget it doesn't hurt to decline insurance offered by the school as it will save your PI some money. But like hj2012 said before, you won't get a stipend increase and you may create more problems for yourself in terms of finding doctors and dentists.

I guess if the research isn't published in a peer reviewed research journal it wouldn't matter too much. Generally if you have a financially vested interest in your research succeeding or failing that would be considered a conflict of research. It must be disclosed in your paper but generally doesn't affect the paper too much.

Generally a good GPU will increase image quality but you still need a strong CPU to calculate most of the physics and other calculation, it really depends on what games you intend to play. Also screen size is irrelevant to performance, a 60" 1080p television has the same number of pixels as a 5.2" 1080p cell phone display, it all comes down to the number of pixels. You can play games fine on a 13.3" display. If you have other ways to unwind then that's great.