Eigen

My advice would be to wait until March or April (when things are winding down), and then contact someone from the admissions committee and ask what you could do to make your application more competitive for next year. Sending an e-mail now probably isn't going to get the best responses, everyone is focussing on getting the admits to come to their school, and that's where all of the energy is going. And, as has been mentioned, there often isn't "a reason" why you weren't admitted. But they can probably give you some advice on what to do to make yourself a better candidate next year.

That explains why it wasn't free for me as well, my states one of the other ones. Nice to know some states can get free e-filing with turbotax.

Definitely research fit. I passed up offers at a top-10 school in my discipline to work at a smaller, lower ranked school with a lab that had just about a perfect fit for research, and I haven't regretted it. It is important if you choose the lower ranked program to make sure that your PI is reasonably well thought of/has connections, and you will be more judged on the quality of the research and publications you put out. But the alternative is spending 5-7 years working 60 hour weeks on a project you don't really like, and that's just miserable, imo.

Note, however, that most states don't allow standard deductions, and turbotax is not free for state tax filings. I've used Turbotax the last couple of years, and found it pretty painless. Or at least as painless as complicated taxes can get. It's worth it to pay for them to e-file it, and they store all of your information year-to-year as well. Past a certain earning point/age you can't be claimed as a dependent anymore, so make sure you ask that before you assume. H&R Block does free 1040-EZ tax prep, and they're a pretty reputable company to use. You probably have a branch somewhere close to you as well. Note that there's a difference between TA/RA earnings and Fellowship earnings, too- the former are "normally" taxed, while the latter are only taxed on the amount not spent on tuition, fees, books, etc.

I'm probably a bit too fast sometimes. I tend to be a bit compulsive about it. Unless it's after 9pm or before 8 am, my response time is usually 10-15 minutes.

There's no easy way to ask it. But if you're accepted, and you're thinking about working for someone that's not tenured, I would straight out ask the department chair about it when you meet. They'll (likely) be understanding about why you're asking. And holy cow, a year old thread revival

I wouldn't say ranked against each other, but it works out to be about the same. They divide up the awards each year to be given out roughly 1/3, 1/3 and 1/3 to each of the three applicant pools. I don't think the reviewers get the applications separately, but it works out pretty similarly in the end.

This is patently untrue. A lot of the top publications are quite verbose, and use a lot of the "unusual" vocabulary that you'll see on the GRE verbal. A lot of less common vocabulary words can be very precise in terms of meaning, which helps a lot when it comes to creating concise and non-repetitive writing in the sciences. I got a 96-percentile on the verbal, and I got that primarily through reading articles, a lot of them in peer reviewed science and engineering journals. Now when I write articles, or co-write them, I find a lot of that vocabulary quite useful to draw on, as well as very common. Heck, I even saw brobdingnagian used in a journal article a few weeks back. Its also worth noting that a high verbal score was mentioned by the adcom when I applied as one of the things that made my application stand out, and definitely helped with admission. And I will again re-assert, even though people don't seem to like hearing it, the verbal score does matter in the sciences and engineering.

Just to note: a lot of people have suggested more "experience", but only a subset of those have specified "research experience". The OP noted that she hasn't been involved in the field for 5 years, so she's not just lacking research experience, but practical experience as well.

LSU to Austin isn't 8 hours, it's more like 6.5 or 7. New Orleans to Austin is a pretty easy 8 hour drive. Also, don't discount the ability to fly cheaply. A direct flight from Boulder to Austin only costs about $200 round trip- and once you start building up bonus miles, it gets cheaper. I've got friends that are doing New Orleans to California, New Orleans to Ohio, New Orleans to New Jersey relationships, and they make them work pretty well. Flights between major cities are such that you can afford them once ever 3 months or so if you save around it, and if each of you do that every 3 months, you only have 6 weeks between visits. Just make the visits count, and skype, call and e-mail.

No. It's not kosher to contact PIs between when you submitted your application and when you hear results from them, unless they initiate the contact.

My advice would be to worry less about ranking, and more about how you felt about the department and the faculty when you visited. How you get along with your PI, whether you like the research and your coworkers- those are the things that will make the PhD manageable or not, imo.

One thing I'll mention to keep in mind with perks and first semester bonuses: Make sure you're not blinded by a really huge first year followed by weaker support in your latter years. That said, for students that the department really wants, there are a variety of perks and incentives. I know our department has offered people money to help with relocation, a summer salary if they want to move and start early, etc. For software, our department pays for site subscriptions for the vast majority of anything you'd want to use, so that's all covered. Our department might not offer computers, but a lot of our research groups use funds to buy computers for their members- or in the case of my group, we requisition the computers the business school no longer wants since they're a year old, and set up desktops in our labs. I found people to be really flexible with visit times when I was doing it as well- breaks worked out very well for me a couple of times.

Actually, experience would trump for chemistry too.

I think by far the most worrying thing is that your PI doesn't seem to have a good reputation. Is he tenured? It's.... unusual for a PI to only have two PhD students and no post-docs in the lab sciences, especially a young PI. It also screams of poor time management to me that he's *not* reading and writing more, but is instead spending so much time in the lab. It's something that might be passable the first year or two out of a post-doc when you're really trying to get your lab to take off, but a PI will usually spend the balance of their time reading, planning experiments, and writing grants, not at the bench. Mostly, it just seems like your work style doesn't mesh with that of your PI, which is something I try to repeat often on these boards- you need to mesh working styles with your PI. Some PIs seem to view grad students as extra appendages (as yours does) and just want them to run lots of experiments without really explaining why. Others really want to see independent researchers that they can pretty much let work on their own- it seems like you'd prefer the latter style, but are in the former's lab. As with StrangeLight, if you weren't so far along, I'd recommend that you try to switch labs- not so much because of your lab environment, but if your PI has as bad of a reputation as a scientist as you've portrayed, he's not going to be the best PI to be coming from going on the search for post-docs, etc. Strangelight: In the lab sciences, your advisor really *is* supposed to be a mentor. They have much tighter control over every aspect of your graduate education, and usually only have a few students under them to work with. It's not always the case, and you can mitigate it by finding other faculty to work with and go to with questions- but your primary mentor is supposed to be your PI.

From my experience, I'll also add how much of a killer a long commute is to really making friends with a new cohort. I did the hour commute thing in undergrad, and it really made it hard to get close to people. From seeing how it's effected people who are trying it in my graduate program, it's even worse. So much of our socializing happens spontaneously and after hours in the labs, that it would be really hard to have met and gotten to know the people I'm closest to if I lived farther away and worked a more consistent (typical) schedule. I'll also second (or third, I guess) the advice that a new class of students comes in every year. It's amazing how different the classes can be. And don't be afraid to get out and meet people outside of your classes and program- some of the people I enjoy hanging out with the most are from other programs entirely, that I've met either randomly or through our graduate student associations events.

Especially since, depending on the school, last week was probably the first week of classes. And if it's anything like here, it was an exceptionally busy week for all the faculty. Give it a week, and then send a nice, non-pushy e-mail re-affirming your availability. Just say that you wanted to make sure the e-mail got through the last time.

Outside of disciplines with a heavy fieldwork influence, my advice for guys would be to just get and wear a suit. It's the standard, it's what most visiting faculty and grad students wear. You'll be expected to have one and wear it at conferences anyway, so it's a good time to pick one up if you don't have one already. If you want to be a bit more casual, then go with a more casual cut suit- tweed or houndstooth. If you want something more generic, just wear a standard black suit. Basically, echoing what others have said, you can (almost) never be overdressed for an interview. We're having people come through for visits now, and the vast majority are wearing suits or close to it. Even a lot of the faculty dress up a bit more than usual on these days. You want to put your best foot forward, and you aren't going to come across as too proper by wearing a suit, it's standard business attire. To the OP: granted, I'm only familiar with one Immunology program (at our med school), but the majority of the faculty I've met and seen from that program dress pretty nicely most of the time. I doubt you'll feel hugely overdressed in a suit. I don't think you'd be badly off wearing slacks/dress shoes/belt/dress shirt, but as was mentioned, adding the tie and jacket won't hurt at all. And you can always take them off through the day if you feel like it.

Be careful too blatantly asking about funding. You might be able to find that out through more circumspect means. As to its importance, you're both right and wrong- it is important, but not so much for funding your stipend (you could be funded through the department as a TA), but because its what funds your research. You need the PI to have a good revenue stream to fund the projects you'll be working on. Personally, I would make sure that you got a chance to talk to the graduate students in the lab- see what their perspectives are. In my department, we're all pretty helpful when it comes to steering prospective students to good professors and away from those they might not have the best fit with. As to what to discuss with the PI- I think you primarily want to look for a personality fit with them. This is someone that's going to be mentoring you and that you will be working closely with for the next 5 or 6 years- you want them to be someone you like and get along with. I would also make sure you ask how they like to manage their graduate students- do they hand down projects from on high, or do they let/expect their graduate students to come up with their own projects, or is it a mixture of both? How is lab space? Is everyone crammed together, or is there enough room for each person to have some workspace for their own projects. How do publications work out? Do the grad students right drafts and suggest submissions, which the PI then edits and approves? Or does the PI set the publication schedule, and direct the majority of the writing? There isn't a right or wrong answer to the above questions, but you need to find answers that mesh with your personality. If you want a PI that's more involved in the research and writing process, you need to find that. If you prefer to work in a more self-directed fashion, you need to find one that supports it. From my last few years, seeing what frustrates friends in multiple disciplines, it almost always comes back to some fundamental lack of compatibility with the PI. They oversee nearly every aspect of your graduate career, so differences in ideology and outlook that might seem small at the beginning can really start to chafe after a while.

It just depends how closely the "industry" experience tracks what you would be doing in "academic" research. If you're gaining the same types of skills, then you can write it up focusing on that. If you're not gaining the same types of skills/working in a parallel fashion to what you would have been doing/will be doing in academia, then it's not as valuable.

Granted, I'm in a different field, but my experience was that it fell in the middle. I didn't run across any that frowned upon it, or required it- but most places thought it was a nice addition that I'd taught some already, it meant they could much more easily throw me into TAing my first year.

I don't think it would be considered too much- in fact, we encourage undergraduates interested in applying to our program to try to come do some summer undergraduate research so they can get a feel for the place (and the faculty for them). Inbreeding is something that people worry about more when you're applying for faculty jobs than when you're applying for grad school, imo. It's not uncommon for people to do a BS/PhD at the same school- the school won't really think it's a big deal, it's just not the best for the student later on to not have multiple different programs behind them.

College apps from high school are nothing like graduate school apps coming from college. Your test scores and GPA are of much lesser importance than the rest of your application package- they only really make a difference if they're super high, or below the programs stated cutoff. I have yet to run across a program that had some "hidden" cuttoff. If they have one, it's stated, and they review all the apps that make above that level the same. And yes, a 3.8 major GPA and 3.57 overall is a solid GPA.

There's no reason not to apply. You'll need to have officially applied either way, and it gives you some time to decide.

This is an old thread, but I thought I'd pop in my recommendation for people who might find themselves in this position in the future: Use course audits! Official or non-official, they provide a great way to get the meat of the information that you'll use from a course without the additional stress of the class. I finished up my coursework requirements two years ago, but I still ask to sit in on a class here and there. I've yet to have any professors turn me down when I ask if I can just sit in without officially auditing- they're usually happy to have someone that's just really interested in the material with no requirements. It's been especially good for those courses that are tangential and weakly related to what I'm working on- they provide a good framework and overview, but I don't really need to learn every detail like I would if it was directly in my area.