isilya

Yes, let's do that! I'll PM you

Hi all, The social sciences NSF GRFP deadline is tomorrow (!!) and it's also been my 21st birthday weekend so of course I'm putting off submitting til the last minute does anyone want to read my Personal, Relevant Background, and Future Goals Statement and give a bit of feedback? It's pretty short, 1.5 pages single-spaced. Basically I want to show that I can do research, have experience being a teacher and mentor to undergrads (dem Broader Impacts), and will make a great professor after grad school if they give me money. My field is Psychology -- Psycholinguistics in case anyone is interested!

Is anybody having problems uploading their transcript pdfs to the website? I can upload other pdfs just fine but it doesn't want to take my transcript

I really want to go!! It'll be nice to take some challenging courses for once! A bunch of people whose work I love will be there as well, so it'll be a good excuse to introduce myself to them and get to know them

Took the GRE on the last day of August. I did the two ETS Powerprep II tests; I can't remember exactly what scores it gave me, but I want to say 163V/160Q on the first test and then 160V/156Q or something on the second one. I didn't do the writing sections on either practice test but I highly doubt they give you a score estimate, how would that even work? Anyway, real test: 161V/162Q/4.5 So the ETS practice tests really underestimated my quant score! I think part of the problem was the second time I took the practice test I was really tired and was also sitting in a loud coffee shop...

Hi all! I've been seeing this thread for the last couple months but for some reason never posted in here... I'm interested in language processing in general -- I'm working on multiword expressions at the moment which I LOVE!! Seriously, the questions of mental representation of frequent phrases, heuristics used when encountering new ones...super interesting stuff Anyway, I'm applying to some Linguistics departments, some Psych departments, some Cog Sci departments...and I would love to go to any of them, so hopefully I get into one at least!! Some stats about me: I have about 2.5 years of research experience total, and 1.5 years in my relevant subdiscipline. My majors are Cognitive Science (3.85) and Linguistics (4.0), and I have a 3.75 GPA overall. My GRE scores were okay but not amazing (161V/162Q/4.5). So yeah, that's me! I hope so!! I'm going to see if I can get funding to go!!

Hi all! It's application season and I'm obsessively editing my CV and of course I have a few questions... 1. I will be part-time lab manager for the lab I'm doing my honors thesis in. Should this just be an extra line under "[lab name]" in my "Research Experience" section, or should it be in a different section altogether? It's mostly doing admin stuff so putting it under research seems misleading... 2. I presented a poster at a biology conference back in high school (yes, an actual professional conference and not just some special high school thing). Should I list this on my CV? It's totally irrelevant to my field and I feel like it might make me look weird and desperate since I don't have any other presentations or publications in undergrad. 3. Should I include a "Skills" section on my CV? I don't elaborate on any of my research experience in that section (I just list lab name/position/duration), so there's no way to know what kind of specific research I'm capable of doing. Plus I feel like noting my programming experience might be beneficial since I have more than the average Linguistics/Cog Sci student. 4. Should I include a "Relevant Coursework" section? I know that admissions committees will have access to my transcripts, but I feel like it might be easier to give a nice list of all my Linguistics/Cog Sci coursework, especially since I can note which classes are graduate-level. Thanks everyone!! Also, if anyone wanted to directly look at/critique my CV that would be great!

I only did 2 verbal/quant practice tests and then half-heartedly looked at some writing topics the morning of the day I took the test and ended up with scores nearly the same as yours (161V/162Q/4.5). I agree, not much studying is needed! OP, if your quant is lacking, I'd suggest just doing a bunch of practice problems where you can get feedback on the ones you got wrong. I disagree with the people who say you need some sort of "strategy" for the quant section -- I did slow, tedious, inefficient calculations and still finished every quant section with a few minutes to spare. I think the best advice I can give is to just relax! I feel like most people are capable of getting great scores without too much work if they can just calm down and not psych themselves out. Also, see if you can find GRE score averages for admitted students at your prospective programs; this will help you to see where you stack up. Good luck!

Hi all! I've read the NSF GRFP FAQ page and I think I'm clear on everything but I just want to see if I'm misinterpreting anything. I'm planning to write my proposal based on the research that my dream PI does (I'm already doing something very similar, so hopefully it won't be too hard!!). So I'll mark that institution as my "proposed university" on the GRFP application. And then if I don't get in there or decide not to go there, etc., I can change my institution, right? And I can change my research if I end up doing something else, right? It seems like it won't be a problem as long as I'm still in the major field of study. My main worry is that this proposal is going to be labeled as "Psychology - Psycholinguistics", but if I want to do more neurolinguistic-y things later, it might be considered "Psychology - Cognitive Neuroscience". Will that be an issue? Also, how the $%&# am I supposed to indicate that I'm getting 2 bachelor's degrees?? There's only room for one major field of study on the online application!! Should I add a second institution that's the same as the first, but just fill out a different major? I've also had this problem with some graduate applications Thanks!

Did they say anything else? It seems odd that you would be invited to an open house if they were planning on immediately tossing your application. You've already contacted your POI, presumably if they think you're a good fit for the program they would make sure your application gets looked at. Maybe contact your POI and see what they think?

Thanks for the advice!! Luckily my longest research experience is related to what I want to do in grad school, so it'll frame my SOP nicely, and I can mention the others but not in as much detail

Thanks for the advice! I definitely am going to talk about what I want to work on in grad school, and it's very related to what I've been doing for my linguistics thesis, so that's good. Probably my main concern is the neuroscience lab because I'm looking at biological motion perception so it feels like this sort of weird outlier that I've spent tons of time on (it's my other thesis). But I'm sure I can sort of brush over it and talk about the general research skills I've gained and not focus too much on the high-level vision aspects Yeah, originally I was thinking of applying to exclusively linguistics programs, but I am not looking to get into theory. Most of the professors I wanted to work with in ling departments have joint appointments with the cog sci/psych department, so I figured it makes more sense to work with the person I want to work with while also having the resources (money, equipment, more faculty, etc.) of a cog sci/psych department. So yeah, UCLA and Penn are definitely outliers in my list of schools, but they have a couple people that I really like. My main interest is syntactic processing/language processing in general, but I'm also really into phonetic perception (hence my interest in UCLA for Megha Sundara, Bruce Hayes, etc.) Oh, and I do like Maryland a lot! I haven't decided if I'm going to apply yet -- I was sort of throwing around the idea of applying for their post-bacc.

Hi everyone! I'm a Linguistics/Cognitive Science double major in my final year at a large public research university and I'll be applying to programs in both departments + some psych departments. My main research interests are psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics. I have a good GPA (3.75 overall, 4.00 and 3.85 in my majors) and acceptable GREs (161V/162Q/will find out AW in a few days), so I'm not worried about passing cutoffs. However, I have research experience in a bunch of different labs throughout undergrad and I'm worried that it will look like I've just been bouncing around. I spent a bit over a year in an ERP sentence processing lab, have spent a year and a half so far in a psycholinguistics lab, and have spent about 9 months so far in a cognitive neuroscience lab (in a topic completely unrelated to language). I was also in a summer program this year doing computational modeling of pragmatics. Oh and I also did two summer internships in high school in addiction neurobiology labs. So my research experiences are pretty varied/all over the place, and I'm worried that it will look like I'm not devoted to any one thing, especially since I don't have any publications. Is this the case? If so, should I address it in my statement of purpose and how? Here's the list of schools I'm applying to for reference on where I'm aiming (mostly top programs). Am I aiming too high? University of Rochester Brain & Cognitive Sciences MIT Brain & Cognitive Sciences Brown Cognitive & Linguistic Sciences NYU Psychology Stanford Psychology UCLA Linguistics UC Berkeley Linguistics Penn Linguistics