themmases

I'm kind of relieved that cyberwulf's experience seems to agree with what I've read, since I'm starting in the fall! I'll just add that Northwestern's MPH program is CEPH accredited, but their larger public health program (and hence other public health degrees) appears not to be yet: http://ceph.org/accredited/ This will come off as super biased because I'm attending UIC in the fall, but if you want to remain in Chicago you should try to go there. That is easily the largest and most affordable public health program in the state, the whole school is accredited, and it's the highest ranked if you care about that sort of thing. Funding for masters degrees is rare-- and for MPH degrees it's almost nonexistent-- and I just got a sense that UIC would be more helpful with at least finding a job to offset things. I'd stay at Northwestern if you can get an employer to pay for it, or if you know there will be opportunities for you to work for or do research with the medical school. Other excellent public schools of public health happen to be in the midwest also if you have family here or don't want to go too far-- Michigan and Minnesota come to mind.

Have you looked at the application pages of the schools you're interested in? Some of them are quite specific about coursework they want incoming students to have completed. The most common desired courses I saw were biology and calculus, with a smaller group of schools specifically requesting preparation in chemistry, statistics, or programming experience. Some schools didn't mention any specific coursework, or made vague statements that they wanted "strong preparation" in math and science. If you're not sure which schools you'd fit in now, you should contact some of them and ask. Most of the PhD programs I saw in epi (and I was generally applying to top public places, like you) required or strongly preferred a masters degree or another doctoral or professional degree (e.g. MD, JD). Unlike in other fields, it's not true-- at least of the schools I applied to-- that students are encouraged to just skip the masters. I suspect this is because the public health field is so dominated by the MPH that doctoral programs generally have their pick of applicants who have this credential. In any case, the amount of math and science preparation you should do depends on the idiosyncracies of your chosen school and your plans for working in public health. If you're interested in emerging/infectious diseases or environmental health, of course prepare more-- you'll probably be required to. If you're more interested in behavioral health, policy, or health disparities, you will probably need less science. A 3.5 is not a bad GPA to get into an epidemiology program. Public health is growing, more schools are growing their programs or starting new ones, and it's just not saturated enough to be really competitive. Work experience will help you a lot, though, both in getting in and in getting a job when you're done. Get as close to public health work as you can in your job or volunteering, and always be thinking about how your experience could affect or be affected by public health problems to bridge the gap. There is a public health board here, and there's also one on Student Doctor with a very active thread on the credentials of people who got in each cycle. They also post really good information on which degree and concentration to go for.

I don't know if I'm really "meant" to go to grad school or not. I once thought I was-- in history-- and it was a huge change to my self-image when I decided to leave for work. It was exciting, and kind of a relief, to work in medicine and find that I just enjoy research methods regardless of the field. Also, my interest when I was in history was in the reactions of educated people to poverty. It bothered me a lot to think that, as a best-case scenario, I could end up working for a university that wasn't a positive part of its community or even was worsening inequality, which I believed was true of my university. Working in medicine, with underserved populations, pretty much resolved that conflict for me. I love my work right now, coordinating medical research and learning to do whatever needs to be done to make the study work. What I don't love is what i see as the gender and age discrimination that causes people to treat me (a 27-year-old woman with seven years of experience in this field) as an intern or undergrad research assistant. This isn't really a knock on the people I work with-- from what I've seen, the discrimination seems to be baked into the career track. Hospitals largely see it as OK to treat us as secretaries who happen to do IRB paperwork, and no matter what a person on this track does, it is taken as proof that a research coordinator could and should do it-- never that respect or authority should accrue to that coordinator. So I'm leaving. I chose epi because I'd like to add more quantitative skills to my largely self-taught skills in making research work. I chose grad school rather than a new job because I love the field, want to stay in non-profits and research, and want to move away from being seen as a bright young person that others are mentoring rather than as a professional whose insights are essential to the project. So I could have chosen something different, I just don't want to.

Sorry, this is a bad idea. We're talking about the same political system that makes young people mortgage their futures by taking on this kind of debt in the first place, and has made that debt non-dischargeable in bankruptcy. The only changes to student loans that have happened in the last few years, good or bad, have been fraught with unintended consequences, a lack of price controls, and a complete lack of requirements for anyone but students to pay their fair share. Grad loans became non-subsidized recently. It's insane to think that PAYE and similar programs will still exist in their current form 10+ years from now, and that the taxes on the forgiven portion-- which no one even seems to fully understand right now-- will still work out the same way. Even if they did, 10 years is a best-case scenario. Many of these programs involve more like 20 years of payments that don't even touch the loan principle, during the years that most people would be using that money to start a life. 10% of disposable income is not nothing in the economy we've inherited. No one should borrow more than they have reason to believe they could personally pay back under their own power. It's unfair, but the ability to take on unlimited educational debt is not "access". People who'd like to see real educational access return in their lifetimes should continue to call their elected representatives and give 'em hell. ...::deep breath::

I recently submitted a blog post I wrote as a writing sample for a job, and got an interview really quickly after-- the program director seemed to like it. This was for a blog I own specifically for writing about issues related to my field. The job was in public health program evaluation, and they need someone to write general audience overviews of their program, so I'm pretty sure the blog post actually helped me. I'm split on whether they're a good way to spend one's time. I really appreciate academic blogs, because I find them interesting and I got some great insight into the field from them when I was deciding whether to go to grad school. I believe academics benefit from our societies' investment in education and research, and we owe society a mainstream, accessible window into what we're doing with that. However, I thought my blog would be more of a place for me to workshop ideas and explore and it didn't turn out to be that. People are very competitive about pushing traffic to their blogs now, and I found it a distraction that put a lot of pressure on me to write A+ stuff for the blog rather than just explore. I didn't realize before how much I would care if people read it! But it did help me. I wanted to be google-able as myself (there are a handful of people my age with my same name, including a publicist and a teen with a fairly popular twitter), and have a demonstrated public interest in this field outside of my official activites or what I'm being paid to do. I wrote some great stuff for the blog that I might not have gotten around to, or polished as much, if it had been for a private journal. I would definitely recommend it for those reasons, whether it counts as a publication or not.

Maybe it is just my social circle, but I actually don't know anyone who pursued a fellowship to do post-bac research. What we all did was get research-related full time jobs in medicine. My chemistry major friend does bench work in a translational lab in a major hospital. Another friend and I who have liberal arts degrees joined a medical research program that needed manuscript writing and IRB help, then moved into data collection and study design as the program grew and people gained confidence in us. We all have publications, multiple recommendations (because we're embedded in departments not individual programs), and grown up salaries now, so I highly recommend it. I'm sure there are similar opportunities in other industries for BA/BS-holders, I'm just not as familiar with them. I would personally start with major hospitals and universities in your city that are likely to need staff in their programs, since you won't be a student.

I also applied to jobs at the same time I was applying for grad school, and I would say apply to anything that interests you. You don't know what will happen next spring. You could even find something between then and now that strengthens your candidacy. Apply to the jobs that interest you and that you'd be qualified for. When you start getting responses, then you can decide how much to tell those employers about your situation or even to withdraw your application if need be. I did this with one job that got back to me after I started getting acceptances, 8 months before I knew I would be starting school somewhere. I just told them my situation and that I understood if it didn't work for them, and they wished me the best-- no big deal. You may hear back early, or learn more about some jobs through the application process that makes you more comfortable being there a short time-- not everything is in the job posting. Also, there is a big category of non-profit work that might be OK with you being short-term: grant-funded jobs. Many of those jobs have at least a potential end date, anyway.

Wow, I use EndNote for work and I've rarely had problems-- definitely not with citations being formatted wrong. It does cause display issues in documents being shared across different versions of Word, or on computers running different versions of EndNote. We solved it by not adding citations until the version was basically finalized. I have authors use in-text citations, then I replace them with EndNote citations as a final step. I do refuse to type citations into EndNote unless there is absolutely no other way, though. I download all my citations from PubMed and import them. Zotero is just as good though. I used it happily as an undergrad and will go back to it in grad school unless the situation is similar to what I have at work now: collaborators who prefer a different program and can get me a free copy.

I don't think you should use a paper that has other authors. Even if you wrote it, it should have received significant editing from others. It should also be in your CV, so reviewers can still look it up if they want. If you don't have an appropriate writing sample, it would be better to rework a related paper of which you are sole author, or write something new. Whether unrelated or literature review papers are appropriate really depends on your programs. Some have length limits that rule out major research papers, and some don't request a writing sample at all (none of my epi programs did, for example). If you work in a field where most of your published work will have coauthors, it's worth your time to develop a couple professional writing samples of which you are the sole author. Even though my programs didn't want them, I recently applied for a job that did. I used a sample research plan and a post for a blog I update occasionally on research ethics. Not only were those directly related to the field, they enabled me to apply for that job an hour after it posted.

Juilletmercredi is right-- proving your identity should be enough for you to close the account. If you don't know the answers to any security questions your parents might have set, go in person and bring photo ID. My only worry would be that the account is overdrawn. If that's the case, you can at least cancel the debit card associated with that account or take your name off the account completely, leaving only your parents.

I agree with Eigen-- every CC instructor I know has a PhD or maybe an MS/MA. The Ed.Ds I've met have jobs like public school superintendent, or are going for higher ed. administration jobs. I would strongly suggest that you search for a job and plan on taking at least a year off from school. A years-long PhD in a field you have no research interest in, when you are already experiencing burnout, is way too high a price to pay just to teach. An Ed.D will move out out of the classroom, not into it. Based on my reading about the job market, I also think your estimate of your income as an adjunct is unrealistically high, and that you may be underestimating the amount of work-- and travel between different institutions-- it would take to earn that much as an adjunct. You may be surprised at the types of jobs you are good at and that are fulfilling to you outside of academia. In addition to well-known areas like CC teaching, adjuncting, and language teaching, many people are happy in jobs providing professional training. I would go so far as to say that if you become experienced in most professional jobs (unless you work somewhere too tiny to have anyone new), there are opportunities to train others and be a mentor if you signal that you're willing. A woman at my hospital used to be an average support staff person, until she became frustrated with the lack of professional development opportunities here for people who aren't MDs or nurses. She got permission to fix that, and was so good at it that today teaching those courses and finding new ones to offer is her full-time job. If you like helping out people beginning their careers there are lots of jobs, such as research coordinators in universities, that spend a lot of time supervising and mentoring undergraduates. Volunteer coordinators can also do a lot of this. I also have friends who work in unrelated areas and work on the side or volunteer their time teaching adults language, life, or job skills.

I think well-chosen kitchen things can really save you a lot of money. Crock Pots, something to make coffee or tea in, and containers for leftovers/bringing lunches will all definitely save you money. They don't have to be the nicest, and a lot of them can actually be thrifted. For years my favorite spatula came from a box of abandoned kitchen stuff that the previous tenants of my house left behind. When I first moved out on my own, I got an Ikea kitchen in a box and I still have most of that stuff ~7 years later. Furniture depends more on your personal preferences and how you like to spend time at home. For me, bed > couch/chairs > shelves > any other surface. My partner and I use our kitchen table as more counter space, and eat dinner sitting on the floor at a coffee table we set like we are dolls at a tea party. I study and use my computer at that table too. My partner's employer also has excellent desk chairs and cheap desks, and they all seem to like it. I've had really good luck with Ikea. Every piece of furniture I've bought from them (except maybe bed slats-- get the thick cheap flat ones, not the curved ones, if you must) has lasted me a long time even I sometimes bought the cheapest or ugliest thing. On the other hand, I got a Target sofa when I moved into my current apartment that didn't last a year.

Submission forms do suck-- they are the only thing your references would actually be doing 14 times. When you ask someone to be your reference, have your information ready for them: your resume, a statement of purpose or at least a short statement about what types of programs you're applying to and why, and a list of your schools and degrees. If your schools have cover forms that get faxed or scanned in, print those and fill as much of them out yourself as you can. If they use an online form, email those to your professors immediately after you meet with a subject line that makes it clear which school and applicant it's for. If there are both, let the professor pick. If you can't do any part of the form for them, make sure your resume or something includes all the information about you they would need to do it themselves. This is the area where you can really save people some unpleasant work.

I lived with my parents for the first couple of months of a previous program, until an opportunity to move out fell into my lap. I'd recommend it to anyone because, while I didn't like living with my parents, I did save money and find a way better living situation than I would have otherwise. Halfway through my first semester, an old classmate contacted me because she needed a roommate. It was such a good opportunity (in Chicago, on the red line, yet similar rent to what I'd paid in Urbana) my parents offered to pay for the first couple of months while I found a job in the city. I found it really obnoxious to live off campus. I like to get out of the house and do 5 hours of work in the library, but our community library was really not geared towards that-- especially in its hours. The only coffee shops were Starbucks, they closed early, and they were full of flirting teenagers and Bible study groups. I had to drive everywhere, including my 1-hour commute into the city, also for classes that got out at 9 p.m. So it was unsuitable as a long-term living arrangement. But my parents were great and it did give me a cheap place to land until I got something more appropriate. At the time I was in history, so all this was important.

I was getting eyestrain and headaches constantly about a year ago, and was able to keep using my iPad for most of my reading. (I also have a job that mostly involves looking a computer in a windowless office.) I had gotten new glasses about three months before and adjusted to them, so I was pretty sure it was the screens. I turned down the brightness and contrast on my monitor and my iPad based on advice I read a few places to make sure the display doesn't look like a light source compared to the surrounding area. I just hold up the iPad and use the brightness slider to try to make the page I'm reading look like the wall behind it. Nearly all reading apps also have a sepia setting, which I leave on all the time. I also make a point to use windows when I'm by them now, and take a mini break where I just look out at the landscape and get some natural light. My headaches went away within a couple of days. One drawback of the iPad is that you can't (at least as far as I know) adjust global color temperature on it, only brightness. So if you're leaving a sepia-toned book to return to the home screen, that can be really jarring. Choosing a soothing background and adjusting global brightness first (not just app brightness) can help a lot though.

You could tell your supervisor the truth, that you're not comfortable with being so google-able. It will probably sound better than anything else you could say. Are you sure you want that, though? When you search for jobs in the future, people will look you up. It's good for them to see something positive about you when they do, like that your supervisor wrote about your contributions on his lab page. I'd even consider this really good, because it's not just something you wrote yourself like a LinkedIn profile. If someone told me they wanted to avoid that (and didn't have a legitimate security concern like a creepy ex), I would probably sympathize with the impulse but find it a little old-fashioned and naive.

I am rarely feeling assertive enough to act on maelia8's advice (although I think it's completely correct). But I do eventually stop trying to infer what they mean by their behavior. I quit responding to implied requests and I stop altering my own behavior based on a guess about what they want. At a minimum, there's no reason you should do someone else's work of communicating for them. The person is eventually forced to be direct with you, or else let it go. What are they going to do, angrily confront you and insist that their cutesy sarcastic fridge note signed only with a smiley face was perfectly clear?

I would go with the opportunity to become an employee. Presumably you could use the money before beginning an unfunded professional degree, and it will be more useful to you as a graduate when you are job searching. Unless your internship is amazing (by which I mean, exploiting you because they're making you do real work), employment > internship to employers.

I use it, and it was really helpful when I applied for department support. I was able to give my actual average amount spent on various categories and write in my budget justification how I knew those numbers. It's less useful if you don't want to use their spending categories though, I think. For example, I hated having restaurant meals and (I think?) alcohol nested under "food"-- to me, groceries are in a whole other category than going out to eat. If I eat at a restaurant, I want it coming out of an entertainment budget, not reducing my grocery/household budget. I created all new categories, but it was time consuming and, at least at the time I did it, you couldn't delete the old categories you didn't plan to use. Every week or so I log in and correct any purchase that's defaulted to a Mint category I don't want to use. It is free though, and the longer you use it the more useful it is. For example, when I started saving an emergency fund I had 18 months of real data to figure out how much to save, rather than a budget of what I wish I spent.

I agree with TakeruK that many of those interactions are just part of research. Even if you worked in your ideal setting, with any resources you needed at your disposal, you would still probably want to leverage the resources you already own, the processes you've already developed, and the knowledge you've already gained. Other people will be needed to keep all those things going-- there are no lone professors solely responsible for researching science, and it's not necessarily a sign of dysfunction that this is so. A study design that doesn't take environment into account is just an abstraction, it can't be considered complete. In my job, I can choose from at least three piece of software to get a list of people eligible for my studies. To choose, I balance obvious things like the format I need my data to be in, sensitivity/specificity (do I care more about getting every possible patient, or about not spending time reading their medical records and weeding people out myself?), and protecting the subjects by not getting more information than I really need. However, other people own all these resources and they aren't necessarily being political by limiting my access to them-- they might need to reserve that resource for people who are paying for it, or research that is more critical than mine. They probably need to ensure that a shared resource is used responsibly on a study that will lead to meaningful results. I don't think any of that counts as political unless you feel you have to go around someone to get your work done, or someone involved (maybe you) can't or won't be transparent. That definitely goes on outside of research too, though. Sometimes I feel that things are better in research because you can often appeal to a common goal to get buy-in for your project, or at least to discourage people from being openly nasty.

Any normal person would understand that you have to take a paid position over an unpaid one-- if they didn't, you wouldn't want to work for them anyway. I say this as someone who's vetted and trained unpaid assistants: if you're working in a remotely public-spirited field we feel bad about not paying you, we want to pay you in the future if things work out, and we understand that you could need to leave for a better opportunity that includes money. People realize that volunteers are not forever, and their actual obligations come up. I don't think you should get into the details of why the new position is better for you personally, or write in a letter that you think your own decision is unethical. It's not, for one thing, and it's inappropriate for another. Employers don't need to see you rend your garments because you changed your mind about a job offer. And there is nothing dishonest about leaving an unpaid or volunteer opportunity in favor of paid work-- it's not at all like backing out of one paid position to take another. Personally I would treat this like any other volunteer opportunity you might no longer have time for. Email them and say that you recently accepted a job in your field, and although you are excited to work with them you understand if your changed availability is a problem. (Only say this second part if you really would be willing to volunteer there if the time commitment were changed.) Apologize for any inconvenience, thank them for their time say it was nice to meet them etc. End of email.

I enjoyed this, but they left off my favorite: rephrasing your request in a forward of your original email so they can see how long ago you asked.

Do you have to mention the same ones to every school? I personally think anything you planned and executed yourself is better, but if you have more than one project that shows your qualifications, maybe you should discuss different ones with different schools depending what you like about them. Then you can summarize your accomplishments on your CV. For example, I talked about one of two studies I designed for every SOP, and then just listed the resulting projects that reused my method at the end, to demonstrate that it was successful. After that, for one program with a big imaging center, I talked about explaining advanced imaging to research subjects. For another one that's very involved in the surrounding community, I talked more about my experiences and philosophy around communicating with and educating research subjects on a specific study. For another one that has a giant data center I would want to work in, I talked about the second software project and implementing a study design that was initially not workable in our hospital. Then my CV section for that time just had the bullet points so it was clear I was responsible for other stuff that didn't make the SOP, e.g. "assisted in design of x prospective studies" or "managed studies resulting in y published papers". This was more work, but it looks like you have time and it could even help you decide if one project is the clear winner or summarize your other projects in a compelling way that fits into your SOP after all. You could also talk to your advisor about which projects you'll discuss in your SOP, so he can make clear in his LOR that your work was also good on other studies.

I don't annotate my textbooks because I don't like having notes in two separate places. Most of the time I will remember what I was looking at when thinking or writing something, but not always. I don't want to have to guess whether to look in my book or my notebook for something. I use the citation for the book or article I'm reading at the header for my notes. As I take notes, I write the page I was looking at in the margin. Every time I turn the page, I write the new page in the margin at that point in my notes. If I start underlining, I tend to get underline-happy and mark up way too much so it's not helpful. Or I find that the stuff I highlight as I'm reading turns out not to be what stuck with me that I want to quote later when I'm writing, so I usually don't bother. If I later find a statement important to reference as I'm writing, I might highlight it then. Definitely color code your notes though. I use a different color for direct quotes, paraphrase, and my own reactions. In addition to preventing accidental plagiarism, this also makes my notes a lot easier to skim later.

I'm sorry I made this confusing statement and disappeared-- I did this at a City College, which is basically a Chicago community college. The salient point there is proving that you live in the city and not an adjacent suburb or something. It's not really comparable to proving state residency for grad school tuition purposes-- I just used it as a (kind of confusing) example that people here take the documentation I mentioned as proof of residency address even in situations when money is on the line.