Taeyers

This would be my recommendation too. I know this option exists in my program, although it's not officially publicized. When a friend in my cohort was having a similar issue, she discovered that the program would be willing to cover her stipend for more than just the first year (which is our official timeframe for rotations) so she could continue to rotate to find a lab.

Sorry to hear your institutions's policies are so unfriendly... Sadly I can't offer any advice about W's and external funding, but I feel like your school wouldn't give out W's so easily if it had grave implications for their grad students' fellowship applications. Considering that the alternative would be staying in the class and possibly facing outcomes like letting your research, or grades slip, I would probably withdraw anyway and hope for the best. Getting a C or neglecting your lab work for a whole summer seems worse than a W. I'd think showing good productivity and strong grades overall would greatly outweigh something so small on an application.

Two things: 1. Really?? If you leave the course on day 1, you have to take a W? At my institution, you don't get a W on your transcript unless it's been 2 weeks since the class started, even for shorter summer courses. I have often dropped courses within the first week, and never saw anything on my transcript from that. Just make sure you've read your school's policies closely, because you might be stressing about a non-issue. 2. I have 2 W's on my transcript, but it's from my undergrad years. Nonetheless, no one has ever brought up these grades to me at all, and I have a fancy shmancy internal fellowship. I can't speak to what would happen if you applied for external funding with a W from your grad school career, but it doesn't seem like it should be a kiss of death on any applications.

This is also an important point. We recently had a visiting bigshot scientist who sat down with the students in my program point out that while 17% of students succeed at finding a TT job now, a decade or two ago it was actually the same.

eteshoe, I couldn't agree with you more. You've basically said everything I would have. I'm also in a STEM field, so while I recognize that the situation in humanities very well may be more dire than in STEM, I don't personally see an issue with how many PhD students are admitted. The majority of the students in my department, including myself, are planning to pursue a career track other than academia (thus the poor TT job market is a non-issue). We are doing very interesting science, learning how to be creative and skilled investigators, and have a variety of options for pursuing scientific careers that would be taken away from us if we were more aggressively weeded out of the admissions pool. I think the solution would be to more diligently educate graduate school hopefuls about their potential career tracks and success statistics before they make the decision to apply to attend, rather than to actually bar them from pursuing the programs if they are qualified for them.

My program rejected me the first time because I was "too green" (inexperienced in research). They didn't have the funding to take me and the more qualified students, so they encouraged me to reapply. I knew it was the program for me, so I kept adding to my experience and reapplied. The year they accepted me, they also awarded me a pretty amazing fellowship and everyone was very welcoming. Don't choose to take it personally, just apply/reapply wherever you really want to be.

Thanks for asking! We have about 2.5 weeks to go and I personally haven't hit mental breakdown phase yet, and hope to avoid it entirely. I'm feeling stronger than expected going in because I think I have a solid grasp of the material from the Spring semester that will be on the exam. That leaves me to review the Fall semester, which was extremely difficult, but is thankfully only half of the comp exam. The goal is to buckle down starting tomorrow and avoid the influence of the one member of my cohort who does seem to be approaching mental breakdown territory in spite of our best attempts to talk her down. When do you get to take your exam and finally put it behind you?

This is exactly why I posted here. Of course that's so obvious to me now, but in the chaos in my mind it never even occurred to me that I should use expressions of gratitude to cushion the overall impact. And of course I am grateful, that feeling just wasn't at the forefront of my mind when thinking about this. That's also great advice. When I talked to my previous PI about returning to his lab, he outlined what the 3 parts of my thesis would be, and one of the parts is a continuation of the work I was already doing before leaving. So not only do I know what my broad long-term plans are, but I also know that I really like that research. I will make sure to say so if the opportunity presents itself.

Thanks for the response! They're eager to take me back. The previous PI was very unhappy about me leaving and seems glad to have me return. The two labs share a large open lab space (along with a couple other labs) and the two PIs' offices are directly next to each other. So there's really no getting around him knowing where I'm going, nor having to still see him on a regular basis. That's a big part of the dilemma - I don't get to just leave this behind me and move on once I get through the conversation.

Hi all, I would like to ask the many bright and helpful people here to give me some ideas for a very unpleasant conversation I need to initiate in the near future. I have been in a rotation lab for 4.5 months that everyone thought would become my PhD lab from the start of the rotation. Although conversations haven't been had about the decision being finalized and set in stone, both I and this PI were intending for him to become my advisor assuming that nothing went wrong during the rotation. He recruited me somewhat aggressively from another lab with a project that sounded like it would be great for me, and he has been freely discussing my long-term future in the lab in front of everyone. I've been nearly entirely integrated. However, at this point I've learned that I really struggle with his arrogant "I'm smarter than everyone, including you" personality, I'm bored by his subfield (my previous subfield really fascinated me!), and his advising style is extremely overbearing (both in terms of asserting his own opinions about any random thing and about completely controlling the project that's planned for me). The bottom line is that I've found myself unhappy and dreading going to the lab every day. I want to return to the first lab I worked in, even though I originally walked away from that PI for the lab I'm currently in. Now I feel like a total ass for having to go tell the new overbearing PI that I'm flip flopping and going back to the lab I left in the first place. I obviously don't want to tell him that I can hardly deal with his personality or that he's basically a human steamroller as an advisor, but I do have to make a strong enough case for walking away without making it seem like careless flakiness. Getting to the point: does anyone have suggestions for specific things to say or general advice for talking to my almost-advisor about leaving his lab and framing it as an issue of not wanting to stay in his subfield of research? Thanks! Edit: The typo in the title was a great giveaway of how frazzled and inarticulate I feel about this whole thing. Yay me...

I don't feel like I'm bragging when I explain what I do because I never assume that someone who's on a different path in life would think my choices are better or more impressive than theirs. Just as much as I wouldn't want to be a stay-at-home mom or a kindergarten teacher, SAH moms and kindergarten teachers probably wouldn't want to be biomed PhD students. Truth is, I've noticed that our demographic values intellectual pursuits much more than most people, and frankly they might not be that impressed by just how very smart we are because their worlds don't revolve around that. They might value good interpersonal skills or responsible parenting above all else. That's one neat thing about people - everyone has their own strengths, and the world wouldn't work if everyone only wanted to do the "challenging" things and not the ones that they're best suited for. So what I do is just answer directly without trying too hard to make my work seem less impressive than it sounds. Then I realize that they might actually be feeling bad for me because making more money, having long-term job security, or raising 3 kids by my age is probably exactly what they wanted for themselves and they wouldn't take my place no matter what. Or they think I'm a deranged maniac because of things I do with mice... ETA: to clarify, by answer directly I mean that I say I'm a physiology PhD student. If probed again, I answer that I work in a lab researching [insert several-word blurb about target disease]. I may clarify that it's mouse work if it seems appropriate for the audience. I don't usually go into more detail, and I'm never really asked to. I suppose it helps that often people have no idea what "physiology" is, so the name of my field impresses no one.

I work with mice in biomedical research. And by that I mean that I've done experiments where I wean, routinely care for, make veterinary care decisions for, give drugs to, and sacrifice mice. I'm a huge animal lover and the reason I could do those experiments is because, as many have already said, extremely strict guidelines are in place to ensure that those animals are treated humanely. I have commented a few times that those mice receive better medical and end-of-life care than we do, and I was only kind of joking. Mice and rats that I see used daily by others around me are also treated very carefully and respectfully. The IACUC doesn't approve any animal use protocols unless the rewards reasonably justify the risks and pain/distress are minimized as much as possible. WRT a previous comment about becoming attached, I agree to a large degree, but not entirely. Truthfully, I talk to my mice, get to know them a little, and while I know better than to name them, I do feel sad when I have to sacrifice them. I really do not like sac day. But know what? That's ok, I allow myself to feel sad while still knowing that I'm ending the mouse's life in the kindest way that minimizes fear and eliminates pain. I've had an undergrad ask me before if I would want to die the way my mice do, and I truthfully would. So that's how I get through it - not by avoiding sadness but by doing my best to respect the mouse in a sad situation. The research has to be done and the mice have to be sacrificed, so I'm proud to say that at least everything I do is being done humanely.

Add me to the list of people dreading qualifying exams... I don't know if I've ever been less excited for anything. It's 2 days in a row, 8 hours each day, and completely handwritten. I've told my PI and lab members not to expect to see me for a couple weeks in May, just to cover any mental breakdowns before/after the test.

I'm nowhere near the defense yet, but I've thought about this for my oral prelim defense and the public talks that students in my program have to give annually starting in the second year. I would choose whatever makes you feel strong and confident. In my case, that would be nice black pants that fit exactly right (too loose/unstructured makes me feel sloppy), and a fitted cardigan or blouse that won't make me sweat or freeze (and won't show sweat stains if I decide to sweat anyway). A suit would be too hot for me because I get very warm in front of an audience, and I think I'd feel silly in one, like I'm playing dress-up. [This wouldn't apply to you if you're used to suits or your program/field culture encourages them.] I strongly recommend against buying new garments specifically for your defense without wearing them for something else first. You never truly know how something will fit and feel after it's been stretching and moving with you for a few hours until you try wearing it. Things to watch out for are pants that suddenly increase in size after you've sat in them for a while and shirts that turn out to have very itchy seams/tags or shift in strange ways on you. These are not surprises you want to discover in front of your thesis committee.

I have tattoos on both wrists (in addition to elsewhere), and my arms are very long so sleeves are always too short to cover them. It's never been an issue in the least. I hardly ever comments on them, and the few comments I have gotten were merely curious or positive. I'm in a lab science though, and we're pretty strange folk in a wide variety of ways... For what it's worth, I'm also getting a tattoo removed right now, and it's actually not that bad. Not like you shouldn't consider a tattoo a big decision and try to aim for something you'll like forever, but it isn't truly permanent. You do have options if you decide it's a hindrance later on in your career.

It's really difficult to offer detailed advice to someone in a humanities discipline from the perspective of someone in a lab science, so I won't comment much on the alternatives, but I would definitely get away from your current advisor. She sounds like a perfect example of a reason why so many PhD students fail to finish dissertations or stay in PhD programs for way too long. I'd find some way to establish a more supportive and stable working relationship with an advisor, whoever it has to be. Again, I'm not in the humanities, but faced with a heinous adviser like yours, I would sooner shift to a different but related subfield in order to work with someone else than try to stuck it out for the next who-knows-how-many years at the expense of happiness and sanity. I'm so glad that I've never experienced this type of behavior, and I always hope that people in your position know that the complete opposite is also possible. In fact, many advisors are not fire-and-sulfur-breathing dragons. Good luck to you.

I sent 2 thank you emails after interviews and didn't get a reply to either. Then I contacted both professors requesting to do a rotation, and the request was promptly approved by both. My bet is that he didn't think a reply was needed after seeing that it was a thank you email. Just try again and be direct

I agree with BeakerBreaker, except for the Antarctica part... Just wanted to chime in and say that I'm in a very "young" recently established program, and I think the mentoring here is phenomenal in part because of that. First of all, at this stage of the game, each individual student's success matters more in helping the program gain a good reputation and recruiting quality students in the future. So the faculty are very invested in setting us up for success. Secondly, by virtue of being new, our program has a lot of flexibility with respect to our individual needs because rules aren't set in stone and there's no "typical" way to do things, which I would consider to be a mentorship perk too. Just another side to consider when contemplating the newer institution

This is not uncommon at all and you don't have to be a perfect applicant to be pursued by programs if they were impressed with you and feel that you'd be a good fit. Don't overthink it, it's just their way to persuade you (you as a person, not as a minority or a notch in their belt) to attend because they want you there. It hasn't happened to me personally because I only applied to the one program I'm attending now, but I believe my program is currently taking this route with our top choice applicant this year who recently declined our offer.

It really reflects positively on you that you would consider this. I agree with TakeruK, it would be a nice touch to contact students you interacted with closely, but not necessarily all of them. Speaking as a current grad, your decisions do affect us (even more so in small tight-knit programs) and we certainly get curious about how these decisions turn out. We don't hold them against you, we just like to know. I wouldn't expect any reasonable student to be offended that you decided to go elsewhere. Grad programs are all about fit, so they really shouldn't interpret it as you saying that another program is objectively better than the one they're in. This is only somewhat similar, but I was very involved in our 2-day recruitment event along with several other current students. Our top 3 favorites were chosen to receive offers, and we were pretty excited. Lo and behold, a couple of us emailed these students to congratulate them, and heard absolutely nothing back. In fact, there was one applicant we all rallied behind who said he would accept an offer from us, then chose to go somewhere else and only decided to reply to the DGS and not the 3 current students who contacted him after he first received the offer. I'm not going to lie, that colored my opinion... I understand that applicants are considering high-pressure decisions and it can be confusing knowing what to say to current students without revealing too much or saying the wrong thing, but when people who spent 2 days hosting you send you friendly enthusiastic messages to congratulate you, for chrissake, at least reply with a "thanks!" and a brief verdict once you've made your decision. Like you wisely pointed out, we will very likely see each other again and possibly work together someday. Good manners and showing appreciation are never a bad move.

Congrats!! Must feel awesome to put it behind you and feel like you did your best on it! (While I still have 2 months of dread coming up before my written prelim, I'm really looking forward to the feeling of knowing that it's done and I probably passed.)

What are the pass/fail rates for your exam? My written prelim is two 8-hour days in a row (so 16 hrs total) in person, closed book/notes/everything. It covers the first year of coursework, and the covered material is both very dense and difficult to master. When I need something to prevent me from weeping softly under my desk while arguing with an imaginary friend at the mere thought of this exam, I just remind myself how statistically unlikely it is that I wouldn't pass. Any chance you can take the same approach?

I second wanting to know which one! Pleeeease?