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In general it's not a good idea to have more in loans than you expect to make in a year in your new career. If you're going into a field where it's at all likely that you will have a lengthy job search, a move to a less desirable area with lower cost of living and lower wages, or having to accept a job outside your field, then it's wise to be even more conservative. According to the BLS, psychologists working in school settings have an annual mean wage of $71,840, and people working in the broad field of clinical, counseling, and school psychologists have a median annual wage of $67,760. More detailed information by geographic area is available in their report: http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes193031.htm#(2) but I couldn't easily find the expected pay for a new graduate. It's safe to assume that a new graduate would be making below the median wage, though, unless they also brought some other very in-demand skill. PSLF and similar programs are nice, but IMO no one should go into school planning to depend on them. Student loan debt is at crisis levels in the US, it's projected to keep accumulating, and many existing loans probably cannot be repaid. In a stable political system, it would be likely that some change would occur before a given student loan debt could be discharged-- some repayment schemes last 25 years! And the political situation in the US, including around education financing, is not stable. Some change to these programs is likely, especially if large groups of graduates make it to the end and start being able to write off much of the principal of their debt all at once. There is no way to know whether student debt will change for the benefit of student debtors in general or you in particular. Also, under the terms of PSLF your past employment may not count for discharging grad school loans: https://studentaid.ed.gov/repay-loans/forgiveness-cancellation/charts/public-service General things you can do to earn money include finding freelance/side employment (especially if you have quant or language skills), seeking a related full-time job (perhaps at your school) that would give you a tuition benefit to cover at least some of your schooling, and seeking out jobs that allow you to study while providing coverage so you can work more than you would otherwise be able to. As for spending less and borrowing less, talk to your school financial aid office and see if they will allow you to adjust your loan amount during the semester. You could try borrowing the minimum you think you'll need, and adjust your loan amount back up later only if you truly need the money. Grad students save money on housing by living with roommates or family, or sometimes by getting jobs at resident advisors in dorms. If you've never made a budget before, try using an app like Mint that will integrate your old spending information and tell you how much you've historically spent on different things.

I read on a computer for work and do more of a mix for my personal/class reading. I am a big Zotero fan, and recently got to start using it again after a 5-year break when my new job let me pick the citation software we would use. Zotero is free, can index your PDFs using an extremely easy to install add-on (i.e. you just click "install" in the settings pop-up), syncs across devices, and runs in your browser with a little non-intrusive icon that lets you know when it recognizes page metadata it can save. It can also retrieve metadata for many PDFs, and rename your files based on citation information so they're easy to browse. Zotero doesn't have a mobile app, but it does have a bookmarklet for most mobile browsers and a web version of your library. I use Zotero to tag things and put them in multiple collections, and add brief notes; and an Excel file or notebook to take more detailed notes. iPads are great as a physical object for reading PDFs-- they're the right size and resolution if you otherwise would have printed the article. PDF readers vary a lot, though-- I personally don't annotate in them. Like TakeruK, I think this can be a good thing. I highlighted way too much stuff on printed journal articles. The slight inconvenience of typing or writing separately helps me keep my notes shorter and more relevant.

Hi s_i, the answer to that is highly dependent on the age of the building and the arrangement you have with your landlord. It's very common for heat to be included in rent in Chicago apartments. It's not unusual for other utilities to be included as well, especially water. My current apartment has all the basic utilities included-- heat, electric, and water-- and only stuff like cable/phone/internet is up to me. The rule of thumb I've always heard in Chicago is that you shouldn't spend more than 30% of your income on housing, and if utilities are included you can afford to spend 33-35%. Here are recent energy prices in the Chicago area if you do choose a place where you're responsible for electric or gas: http://www.bls.gov/ro5/aepchi.htm According to the Metropolitan Tenants Organization, if your landlord won't be paying for heat then they must give you information about what the charges were in the past. http://www.tenants-rights.org/heat-other-essential-services-faq/ Radiators are extremely common in Chicago's lovely older buildings, and they can be expensive to run yourself. Chicago is served by at least three cable/internet companies: AT&T, Comcast, and RCN, plus WOW! in some areas. I currently pay RCN just under $60/month for internet and a modem rental at a medium speed that supports my partner and me both loving Netflix. It was cheaper than AT&T/Comcast were offering for the same speed outside of promotion, but not the cheapest thing we could have gone with. Watch out for aggressive cable promotions that only last a pathetic 6 months. Sales people from the bigger companies are constantly dropping off fliers and bothering us in our building.

Sure. I got a BA in history before coordinating medical research for four years. Although I eventually was responsible for very different things in my role, the two things that got me in the door were patient experience and writing ability, both of which it sounds like you have. Researchers with clinical responsibilities often don't have enough time for every project they want to do, and they may be running several projects at once because they are recruiting subjects from their patient population. They may have feckless residents and fellows halfheartedly doing the work. They need people who can write and follow directions (i.e. journal submission directions and citation styles) to make sure the data they collected actually becomes a paper, and to do the fiddly stuff like build an EndNote library and make pretty graphs. Also, recruiting patients into research studies can be really time-consuming but is hard to delegate. You have to interrupt your other work when the right patient comes into clinic and meet with them right then, but you can't have just any intern do it because they are still a patient and you need to preserve their trust in the provider. When I was helping hire research assistants it was a huge plus to me if they'd been around patients or obtained an informed consent before because it meant I could trust them to be alone with patients a lot sooner. If you are trying to get hired, those are qualifications it sounds like you have that would definitely be worth highlighting. As a bonus, if you have any reason to know the terminology of the specific research area, make sure to mention that. Health research can get esoteric quickly, where just being familiar with basic bio or anatomy terms isn't enough. If your experience overlaps with their research at all where you would already understand the medical records or articles you'd be reading, that is really nice to have in a research assistant. If you have any remaining time as an undergrad to do more research, go for it. My undergrad research assistant experiences were in cognitive function/aging and health literacy, but they still helped a lot when looking for jobs. Once you're hired, it's a good thing to get assigned to a literature review or else ask if they have a research plan or project overview you can read to understand what you are doing and why. Most people will appreciate that you want to know. Hope this helps!

I had a 600-word one, and found it incredibly difficult. I ended up using advice from here, same as for longer ones, to focus on fit. Knowing that you have three body paragraphs, tops, to talk about yourself, I would come up with a list of 5+ things you might choose to brag about, if given the chance. They could be specific, like "presented X paper at Y conference in May 2014", or broad, e.g. "worked closely with specialists in Z". I picked stuff that was related to my CV, but maybe not clear from it, e.g. what I did on a project that won an award or how I communicated with the subjects my CV says I recruited. Then use your research to choose which 2-3 points are related to each school and deserve to make it into each SOP. Finding workgroups or resources related to your interests is great IMO, because it shows you did your research but you can easily name-drop them without using up too many words explaining what they are. Then the bragging parts of those paragraphs can be reused in future essays, for a modular SOP. I think editing is much more personal. I like to write exactly what I want to write, at whatever length I feel like, then insert a couple of line breaks and re-write directly above my original. I am always able to come up with something much shorter and more pointed by doing this because it's sort of like moving: easier to throw stuff away when you're deciding whether to move it, rather than whether to hang onto it. Other people probably have other methods for getting an essay nice and short.

My degree has a very specific course sequence outside of electives, and also frontloads credit hours so there is more time for research in year 2. So I'll be taking 14 hours this coming semester (my first), which is four core courses and an elective, but only 11 hours my last semester. I will also be working 10-20 hours/week this semester, but this is an RA job I got on my own-- it's not assumed that all MS students will be working.

You should go to the SOPHAS website first so you know what to expect and can get your applications in early. This is the central application used by most CEPH-accredited public health schools. SOPHAS doesn't open until September, but all the instructions you need are available on the website before you're officially allowed to sign up and start filling things out. You should use these and information from your chosen schools to start writing a statement purpose-- it always seems to take longer and be harder than people plan for, including me. The instructions once you can log into SOPHAS won't be any more detailed than what's publicly available, so don't make the mistake I made and wait for the site to open before really beginning work on your SOP. If you want more specific guidance, contact your schools or SOPHAS directly. SOPHAS also hosts online fairs with many schools of public health, so if you register early you can get invited to one of the early ones. I found the fair really helpful. If you are just starting to choose schools, start a spreadsheet to keep track of them. If you consider a school strongly enough to spend a few minutes clicking around its website, put whatever information you find in your spreadsheet so you don't have to look it back up later. Then you can use the spreadsheet to narrow down schools, keep track of comments and deadlines, and add up the cost of applying. Mine had school name and place, degree name/topic, expected yearly cost of attendance, prerequisites and test score/GPA minimums, cost to apply, and some text fields where I pasted advice given to me at the online fair or in emails with the schools, which research interests we matched on, and my likely options for work or scholarships. Later I gave them a subjective rating of how much I wanted to go to each one, and sorted by the rating and their application deadline to decide in what order to apply. I have a friend who would also keep track of any username/password/PIN she needed to access the school's site, which is fine if you keep your spreadsheet in a secure place. This all sounds really complicated, but honestly in the spreadsheet it was very easy to understand-- I just filtered out schools I ruled out or had already applied to. It will help you to do a short literature review on some of your research interests and find out where the people whose work you like teach, then apply to those schools. If you want to go more into public health practice, look at programs and agencies that you would like to work for. Apply to schools that have internships at those agencies, definitely, and also apply to other schools that seem well-regarded in the same city or region.

Are you trying to get a job as a health science research assistant, or do you have a job like that that you want to be ready for?

There are a lot of potential people you could talk to about this (or not-- I can sympathize with not wanting to bring it up, even though you are in the right), but one of the most important things for you to do is to stop responding to the emails. Even one-sentence responses or "stop contacting me" responses reward this guy, even though they would obviously be disappointing or chastising to a normal person. I have an ex whose messages were very similar to your stalker's. He would try to keep me from talking to my friends about our breakup or really about anything related to him, email me these novella-length messages about his dumb feelings, and alternately tell me I was a horrible person or insist that I owed him continued friendship. This person would go on my Myspace (that was still a thing then) and get offended by the titles of songs I said I was listening to, as though they were veiled messages to him. That's why I say no responses, no matter how short: people like this treat even the most brief, innocuous contact or even non-contact as a reward for their behavior and an opportunity for insight into your thoughts and feelings. This person did escalate to physically hurting me (although not seriously injuring me) in a public place before I cut off contact-- that's how angry he was, or how normal he believed his behavior was. And this person still tries to contact me sometimes, 8 years after we dated for a month and a half. But the frequency is down to yearly instead of daily, because I blocked him. I believe you should take this situation very seriously. If you have to do any work with this person, I think it's a good idea to tell your PI because he is basically a coworker. Otherwise, you risk having to share this story (which unfortunately not everyone is understanding about) as an excuse for not returning your labmate's emails, trying to regain credibility instead of bringing it up on your own terms and knowing what you want to say. Just set up a filter for the emails so you don't delete them but you also don't have to see them. You can ignore them completely or just check them occasionally to keep an eye on the situation, whatever makes you feel safer. I'm sorry this is happening to you. It isn't remotely your fault. If abusers were easy to spot, no one would be abused.

Honestly, I've never had a solution I liked. I've considered bringing in my old French press to keep on my desk, or just taking the opportunity to cut down. My old office had Keurig machines all over-- expensive and terrible for the environment. I bought a reusable cup and good coffee for it which made it usable, but the machine we had would make 1/3 cup of extremely concentrated coffee and 2/3 cup liquid that looked like weak tea, which you'd then have to stir together and drink before they separated. Yum! Sometimes I'd walk to one of the hospital cafes, but I really couldn't afford it at the amounts of coffee I drink. My current office has one of those big machines you see in diners and offices, but apparently no one uses it except to get hot water. We're also on the edge of campus so I don't like to leave once I'm here. I now stop at the Dunkin' Donuts next door on my way in (I hate that they insist on adding milk themselves, and I'm sure they hate me for being the anal lady who insists on "a little milk" instead of the 1/4 cup of half and half that is apparently normal there), then drink tea for the rest of the day. On weekends, I drink two French presses of the good stuff every day.

I considered going into bioethics before choosing epi. Most people who practice as bioethicists, either by providing ethical consultation to healthcare providers or researchers, or as academics or some combination, also have an MD or JD. Indeed, because it's fairly new as a distinct professional field, many people who work as bioethicists don't have a degree in this topic. They are people who work in healthcare or research and have accumulated experience and credibility in ethical issues specifically, for example by volunteering on an IRB or ethics advisory board. Perhaps that will change as the field grows (I hope it does actually), but in the current climate you have a better chance of finding a straightforward use for a bioethics degree if you are also a legal or biomedical professional. Public health and bioethics methods have applications in some of the same fields, biomedical research most obviously. However, I don't know anyone who has done degrees both public health and bioethics and I can't tell you that being a public health professional will "count" as far as getting you into an organization where you can offer ethical guidance as well. As far as whether to do a degree in public health, probably the most common jobs for people with an MS in a public health field are epidemiologist and biostatistician: http://www.bls.gov/ooh/life-physical-and-social-science/epidemiologists.htm http://www.bls.gov/ooh/math/statisticians.htm The BLS doesn't have a page for policy analysts specifically, just this 2007 fact sheet about the field and a page for political scientists: http://www.bls.gov/opub/ooq/2007/spring/art03.pdf http://www.bls.gov/ooh/life-physical-and-social-science/political-scientists.htm It's for you to decide whether a public health degree is worth the debt-- MS funding is easier to get than MPH funding, but still competitive most places-- on top of whatever sacrifices you are making for your current program and undergrad, given the types of jobs you are likely to get. General guidance on public health programs: - Pick a CEPH-accredited one. - Many of the good ones are public. Don't limit yourself to only private schools, or big name schools you wish you'd gotten into for undergrad. Go find out who's the best in your specific area of interest. - Public health has both research- and practice-oriented wings. If you're interested in research, don't consider places with poor research fit-- you won't get it in and if you do, you'll be unhappy. If you're interested in public health practice, don't go to a school in a city or region you wouldn't be willing to stay in. These programs involve internships and contact with local and regional health departments-- they are not the time to try out living somewhere else for just a couple of years. - At least a year of relevant work experience will help you a lot. I'd recommend checking out the MPH forum at Student Doctor for a seriously long, helpful thread on people's credentials, where they applied, and where they got in.

If you're worried about it, don't use the free score sending feature and use Score Select later on. ETS allows you to choose which of your past scores to send, so you can just send them the best score yourself. You'd forego the 4 free schools and spend $25 per report, but you'd already be spending a ton of money just to take the GRE multiple times. If you're willing to spend $480 and take the GRE three times just to have a few scores to pick from, you're just undermining your efforts by sending all three scores to schools where you'll have no control over how they'll be evaluated. I agree with everyone else though, it's not a good idea to plan to take the test three times. Prepare fully, plan to take it once, and take it early enough that if your score was unexpectedly bad you have time to retake once. There is lots of other stuff to do during an application season, and much of it is harder and more time consuming than you might think. It can also get more expensive than you expect, with department-specific application fees or transcript fees that are poorly communicated until they're due. Unless you do horribly, you will find much better uses for your time and money than retaking the GRE.

GradSecretary's advice is really good. If you haven't worked in a support position, you may not realize just how many people will be rude and waste your time. I once thought that "be nice to the secretary" was cliche advice for job or student applicants and junior or visiting people of all kinds, but actually many people don't follow it and it reflects extremely poorly on them. Many trainees and even applicants take it upon themselves to behave as though they already have that PhD/MD/whatever and any support person they meet is there to serve everyone on their level, like a drop-in computer or a hallway phone. Don't be that person. Not only is it just good manners to treat everyone with respect regardless of their job, you really have no way of knowing who you are talking to when you contact a department you've never visited. Different places can have very different job titles and local hierarchies based on people's personality and reliability. You could be talking to the useless secretary in a department where it's really hard to fire people, but you could also be talking to the heart and soul of the department whose director is going to be pretty displeased that you wasted her time. A tiny part of my old job was dealing with rotating trainees, many of whom wanted to come back in the future as fellows. I always told the people above me if someone was inappropriate, high maintenance, or otherwise a problem. It wasn't out of spite-- although sometimes I was mad-- it was because a) it's normal to tell people above you when one of your job duties is taking way more time than usual; and b )the people who would have to supervise them in the future if they were accepted should know what they'd be getting into.

I used to work at Target and hated offering these to people-- they are not a good deal. Everyone thinks they will be the responsible person who always pays it off immediately, but stores don't offer these to be nice or even just to increase loyalty like a discount card. They offer them because they make a ton of money. 5% is less than sales tax in many areas, and 7 years ago when I worked there and the discount was 10%, the discount still wasn't worth that much. People would come through my line with the 10% coupon they'd saved for a major purchase like all new bedding, but the amount we knocked off their bill-- after they'd already spent $1000 at Target!-- was maybe enough to go to Applebee's if no one got an appetizer. I would recommend that people just get a normal credit card with a standard rewards program or cash back that they can use anywhere, with an interest rate that actually reflects their credit standing. More consumer credit cards are starting to report credit score on your bill for free, which is really valuable information. My Discover card does this (also 5% on categories and 1% on everything else), and I'm really happy with it. I just used my accumulated cash back as a direct payment method on Amazon, which was kind of cool too.

I've hardly ever heard anyone say they regretted working for a few years between undergrad and grad school, unless they failed to keep in touch with academic references. If your program is professional or practice-oriented, being out of school for a few years can actually help you. This goes double if your work experience while you were out is relevant to your degree.

I might for Minnesota. I did enough research deciding where to apply for MS that I know I want to go there if I do a PhD.

Thanks for sharing! I would definitely call that a major extenuating circumstance, and very cool. I have a former classmate who is interested in both neuroscience and music, and it's a very interesting intersection from the glimpses I get of his work.

This is very mood dependent for me. Even though I may be working, I take a long time to settle into full focus and enjoyment of the task at hand (I use task timers to force myself to start). Once I do that, I can enjoy most anything. Right now for work I'm doing literature reviews on some very bread and butter public health topics, like tobacco control. I spent all day today reading design guides for adding sidewalks and bike lanes to roads commissioned by various local governments. And I really liked it! As a student I used to not want to go to the library unless I could commit to spending at least 3-5 hours there. And I studied history in undergrad, so forcibly extracting meaning from jargon (anachronistic jargon!) was research, and enjoyable, to me for a long time. In public health, the "doing" part could mean many different things including literature review or analysis. I know from experience that I find meeting with patients really rewarding but also really emotionally draining, and I will start to find excuses not to do it once I've seen a maximum of three in one day. I enjoy it in the moment-- even the really tough meetings where I am thinking on my feet about how to gain or establish trust-- and feel sort of high after an informed consent. But I wouldn't say I look forward to it or would willingly do research where I had to go through that all day. Waiting for a patient meeting to start feels sort of like waiting for them to pierce the second ear, to me: kind of excited, kind of dreading it, maybe it's not too late to cancel...

I used to deal with this a lot and I couldn't call people out on it because it was work. I mostly dealt with it by making sure to never give them an excuse again by being good at my job and adopting a professional mask that didn't invite backtalk. I would make sure not to respond in the heat of the moment, and have a coworker who got the same treatment read my responses before I sent them. About a week before I left that job, I finally talked back to someone. I was filling in for my coworker and sent their PI some extra materials I knew they would need in response to a request, and this person totally flew off the handle and got personally insulted. You could tell from her signature that she was basically emailing me on her iPhone from a meeting like an infant. This person was basically implying that a very 101-level IRB task that had been one of my minor responsibilities for years was over my head and only my coworker would understand it. Finally I wrote back and said I couldn't continue to help her if she was going to be rude. My coworker was going to be back soon and I was going to be gone soon, so I made an Outlook rule to file all her future emails without reading them so I could focus on my real work. It was great! The email previews I'd still get suggest this person didn't learn her lesson (she thought she "hurt [my] feelings"), but I hope I'd do the same thing again. I don't consider that response overly harsh and not seeing her responses for a while helped me stop dwelling on the insult and focus on more deserving people.

Public health is one area you could find a home for your interests-- you probably know that there are several. Also, public health and psychology (and maybe other fields related to your work) are areas where it's common for PhDs to practice professionally and even do research without being traditional academic faculty, which I'd consider a plus. I think work environment, funding and public interest, likelihood of getting your first choice type of job, and how good your Plan B jobs are should all play into choosing a field when you think your work would fit into more than one. The need for public health practitioners is always great, and public health and biostatistical approaches are always being applied to new problems. Research institutions including hospitals like epidemiologists and biostatisticians because they can be collaborators on many studies and improve their design and analysis. But many of us are employed by governments or on projects funded by government grants, so optimism about how many of us will actually be able to be hired seems to go with the times. (This year, the BLS' estimate of the rate of epidemiologist job growth dropped down to about the same rate as all other jobs, from a projected rate nearly as fast as statisticians. It's not hard to figure out why, in the U.S., this should be so.) If you do decide to apply to public health programs, you shouldn't do MPH first. Your MS is related enough, and the MPH is a professional degree that is terminal for most of the people who earn it. It wouldn't hold you back-- it's a great program and people with the MPH do go on to doctoral programs-- but its purpose is more practice oriented. People who know they will want to go on to public health PhDs are more likely to do an MS, and you'll already have that. If you get to a public health PhD program and feel you have gaps in your knowledge, you can patch them then with research or coursework. I'm guessing the GRE score you posted is a typo or has a major extenuating circumstance you didn't mention for you to be in an MS program now, but you should retake the GRE. The weight given to quant vs verbal will depend on your specific concentration, but 50th percentile or above is a must and 70th or above is competitive, in general, for public health.

No, IKEA is not really that bad. Most of my IKEA furniture is not their cheapest stuff, but not solid wood either-- it's a mix of the bookshelf lines, the Malm bed frame, this set of drawers, and the Karlstad sofa they've had forever and ever. Except for the bookshelves, I've successfully taken every one of those things apart, moved them, and put them back together without any noticeable loss of quality. The sofa and one of the chests of drawers were actually bought used before I did this. Most of their stuff actually goes together in pretty much the same way, so if you build the easy stuff first you should be a pro by the time you get to weirder stuff like drawers. I've had my mid-range foam mattress from them for almost 5 years, usually with two people sleeping on it, and I think it has another year or two left in it. The bed slats will break, though. I would recommend accepting this and buying extras if you get an IKEA bed, or looking for a frame that will let you use other slats/a box spring. In contrast, I bought a Target sofa for my current apartment and it was a nightmare. I was excited that they offered delivery because I would have had to rent a car otherwise. The delivery people were rude and left me (a petite woman) in the lobby with this thing when I live on the third floor and our elevators are the old fashioned kind where you have to hold the door and the gate open. I emailed to complain and Target never responded, ever (and I keep my spam folder cleaned out, so I would have known if they tried). The materials were bad, the screws were greasy and made a mess, all looked the same, and attached to obscure parts of the frame under the lining of the couch, the instructions were bad, and the couch when put together was bad. We ended up getting rid of it less than a year later in favor of the used IKEA couch and there is just no comparison. By the time we got rid of the Target couch, it had already developed an un-sittable spot where the filling was stuck under the spring, unfixable without cutting the upholstery, months before. I would honestly never buy another piece of furniture from them.

I think taking time off to work before doing public health school is a good choice. It's obviously a very practice-oriented field, so professional experience will help you get in and also get a job after. It's really unlikely that you'll get funding for an MPH no matter what you do, because it is a professional degree. At the same time, you may need it or an MS to get into public health PhD programs (I looked into going straight to PhD too). If you have your heart set on going straight in, you should research places that are less strict about already having the masters, and also contact your schools of interest to see if they would encourage someone like you to still apply. Ask about the possibility of applying to the PhD program, but being admitted to the masters that cycle if they think you're not ready, rather than just rejected outright. If you do need to get the masters degree, MS/MA credits are often cheaper than MPH credits. One way many people avoid borrowing for an MPH is that some employers pay for their employees' education credits in a related discipline. For example, I worked at a hospital that would reimburse ~$5000/year for accredited courses in health or medicine-related programs. You still might have to pay for some of it yourself, and many places that do this have service commitments where you need to keep working there for a year after, but if a job is related enough to an MPH to pay for it then the experience is probably valuable anyway. You could also seek work specifically in research universities or teaching hospitals, which will often make you eligible for a significant discount in their program-- in addition to, again, likely being related to your degree. Finally, you could focus on public programs-- many of the good public health programs are at public schools anyway-- near your family and live with them, borrowing only the cost of tuition and fees rather than the full cost of living. This last option is what I'm doing, taking out only Stafford loans and then living off of my partner's real job and my part-time research assistant job.

In my experience lots of people don't bother to review their apartment building or manager. I was only able to get unreliable information on my building, too, and I love it. Especially in my experience of living near a university, you hear a lot about big property management companies if they are bad, and you rarely hear of them if they are good. Your best bet is to just go there and view the apartment, or try to get a friend in the area to go if you're not able to go there before your move. You could also see if your school has a student tenant union, or if the company has ever been written up in the student paper. The bad company at my undergrad made our paper all the time.

Just send them a polite email catching them up on your activities since you were their student, and ask if they'd still feel comfortable writing a strong letter of recommendation for you for new programs. You don't need to over share unflattering information about yourself-- unsuccessful PhD application cycles aren't that uncommon and it's reasonable to take time off to do something else after having that happen. It is of course good manners to keep in touch with people who help you out this way, but I think most people understand that if you have something very disappointing like that happen then you won't be anxious to share. Professors very quickly accumulate too many former students to keep in touch with them all, especially if those students aren't following an academic path and don't have much in common with them anymore. No one wants to keep up an email friendship with you just so it will be less awkward when you ask for a (very normal) favor in three years-- trust me. If it helps you, try to think of a way your contact can help out your former professors. If you learned something from your previous application cycle or if your research helps you be successful this time around, that is really useful information for your references to pass on to their own advisees in the future. I used to feel embarrassed at contacting a former PI at fairly long intervals (2-4 years) for a job reference, and dealt with it by telling him how my job with him had helped me and whether I would recommend my current job for future graduates of his lab. I even sent my current job to him once we were trying to hire my replacement. I realized this is actually a great interval of time for people who wish each other well and want the highlights of each other's careers, but are not close friends.

All Superchunk all the time, for some reason.