victorydance

I believe you only have to do the diversity statements at University of Minnesota if you are applying for either of these fellowships: DOVE (Diversity of Views and Experience) and ICGC (Interdisciplinary Center for Global Change Fellowship). The former of the two is only applicable for American students. So you might actually not have to do a diversity statement, I would make sure to check for sure yourself.

They are outliers. Across most fields, with some exceptions, the benchmark for average registered time to completion of doctoral programs is 7 years. http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/infbrief/nsf06312/nsf06312.pdf

There are also many dissertation fellowships that you can apply for, both external and internal. This is true especially if you need to do fieldwork. I know a few Ph.D. candidates that got more funding during this period than during their coursework period.

I cold-emailed a bunch of profs in Mexico City and eventually got a position as a research assistant. However, most of these profs were foreigners themselves working at a research institute that publishes a lot of English work. I doubt I would have had the same success emailing typical professors even though I speak Spanish. It's pretty doubtful that you are going to find a lot of professors who are publishing in English in Asia, and more so, willing to hire someone who doesn't speak the native language. Many of these academics will be doing research in their native countries using sources in that language so I would think your chances are quite slim. But by all means do some research for profs that publish in English and ask them. It can't hurt. You should also consider just volunteering, you might not get paid but it goes on your CV anyways. Professors are much more likely to hire you as a foreigner if you are not paid.

Yeah, any laptop with 1080p is going to be virtually the same.

Whiteboard for each important date for each class. To do list on a scrap piece of paper for anything else.

I would also add that I think you should tread lightly. It's hard to be in the anthropology field without doing field work, or even any field in academia without the ability to move to different geographical locations to find employment. If this is something that will continue for the future and you won't be able to move around, I would think long and hard about entering academia.

Well, it doesn't really make your application any less "competitive." But it significantly narrows down your options and chances of getting in. While you have many choices because you live in NYC, places like Columbia and NYU may not be great fits depending on what your interests are and that is the problem with significantly narrowing down your geographical location. Not only can you pick schools close to you but those schools might not be great fits either. It also depends how far you are able to go out of the area. Schools like Princeton and Yale aren't really that far from NYC.

That's really unfortunate because your quant and verbal scores improved quite a bit the second time around.

There is a lot of this type of research in political science as well (often termed political economy). For the most part, developmental research crosses quite a few lines so you have a number of options. For one, I know Columbia is fairly strong in this stream of political science (not sure about sociology) with professors like Blattman, Huber, and Humphreys.

If you have the syllabus from the same class from a previous year then I am willing to bet that it will be almost identical. Classes don't change from one year to the next very much.

Your equation would make sense if there was a limited number of cycles one could apply for, but there isn't. There is nothing stopping an applicant from applying the subsequent cycle if one is not successful. Ergo, the opportunity isn't lost, it's just transferred to the next cycle. The equation actually goes more like this A(n) = B. Adding another n when that n could be almost limitless doesn't really affect the equation at all. And perhaps they are not. It doesn't matter. Secondly, he is applying for masters programs, which aren't as tied towards advisers as Ph.D. programs. The obvious career choice? What on earth. The obvious career choice is to become the best possible applicant as possible. Applying to grad schools takes time and resources away from becoming a better applicant. Researching schools takes time, drafting statements takes time, preparing writing samples takes time, taking required tests takes time. This time could be put to getting better grades, getting additional research experience, and developing better relationships for letters. Some people can manage both, some can't; there is no "obvious choice." The extra year could also be put towards saving up money. Preparing applications that are better than if he did them during his senor year. Other variables affecting making your applications better, ect. There seems to be some kind of underlying assumption on this board, as well as other places, that taking a gap year is "wasting time." This couldn't be any further from the truth. You only need to look at attrition rates of graduate programs and high debts of students who move seamlessly from high school to undergrad to graduate school.

I have never used a planner in my life.

I'm not nervous. Think about it: whatever happens, happens. All you can do is put your best foot forward and make your application as good as it can be. You can't change some things, but you may be able to improve others. It's not the end of the world if you don't have a great cycle. Life goes on.

There really is no "opportunity loss" to foregoing an application cycle. There are always the same positions that are open every single year. All things remaining equal, the incoming cohort is 40 next year it will be 40 the year after. Furthermore, there is no "risk of pushing it down further and further." In fact, the only opportunity cost I can see in the equation is spending valuable time and resources working on applications during your senior year when you could have devoted that you doing better in your classes and gaining research experience and you feel your package isn't quite good enough at that juncture anyways. A gap year can be an extremely worthwhile endeavour, not just academically but personally as well. Personally, I think the OP wants to do a gap year and I see no reasonable argument to convince him otherwise.

What opportunities would someone miss out on exactly by waiting a year after their undergrad? That doesn't make sense at all.

Take the gap year man. Focus on your senior year and building relationships with professors. There is no rule you need to apply straight from undergrad.

The general rule is don't submit more unless all of them are very strong. No point in submitting an average LOR if you don't need to.

How I think the myth got perpetuated that you need perfect GPA scores to get into Ph.D. program is this: In all likelihood, usually the best students and most competitive applicants will have great GPAs. I mean, if you are an excellent student it's not that hard to get a 3.8-4.0 GPA. Therefore, it's not that implausible to expect many top program admits to have stellar GPAs. That being said, there are multitudes of reasons why someone could have a lower GPA. From personal reasons, to variance due to different marking standards, to being a lame-bloomer academically, to choosing the wrong major and switching. I don't think admission committees really place much emphasis on GPAs because they are so varied and not uniform, and they also know that they are a terrible predictor of success in a graduate program. If your GPA is above 3.4, it really shouldn't "hurt" you if you have a good application. At the end of the day, they are going to make decisions between the last few applicants based on more tangible parts of your application, like writing samples, SOP, and LORs.

Actually, fields like economics, psychology, and political science place more weight on the quant score.

3.4 really isn't that low man. I have a similar GPA and I am applying to top 10 programs and I don't even have a masters. I won't be mentioning it at all, it is what it is. Honestly, not sure where this myth came from where you need perfect GPAs to get into top 10 programs. Go look at the gradcafe stats, there are plenty of people who got into great schools with a 3.4 GPA.

Just do practice ones with the same time amount that they give you on the test. It's really that simple.

For classes I just stick all of my papers in pdf form into a folder on my laptop. For keeping track of papers for big projects I use Endnote. I used Endnote for my honours thesis and compiled over 200 articles, most of them I cited, with all their pdfs attached for future reference. Just make sure to use subcategories so you can organize it better and it's not just a clunky long list of papers. I don't annotate or highlight anything. If I need to use it as a source I just open up a doc on word and put down some notes or key direct quotes and page numbers for a bunch of articles for a section of a paper or something. Or I make annotated bibliographies of a bunch of articles beforehand. I think making specific notes in each paper is inefficient and pointless.

^ It is the same way for most field as well, depending on the program you enter.

There is definitely something wrong with the current attrition rates for Ph.D. students, but not sure if this is something that solves anything. Seems rather pointless actually.