Eigen

@TakeruK has some excellent advice, but I just want to reiterate for lab based people: I always tell my students not to strongly consider a department if there aren't at least 3 people they'd be happy working with. Ideally, you get the person you want to work with- but things happen. It might be a tight year, and everyone wants to work with one person and it gets competitive. They might lose a grant, and not be able to afford to take on a new student (or a current student might not graduate, leaving no opening). On the much less predictable and more severe end, they might get in an accident/get sick/die (I've seen all of the above happen to friends). You also might love the research, and find out you can't work with them personally, or have deep personal issues with someone else in the lab and need to switch. If you only have one person you want to work with, realize you're taking a heavy risk- if anything doesn't work out with that person, you're out of luck.

But why would you do this before applying, when most schools will pay for you to visit after you've been accepted? Seems like a lot of effort (and money) to spend for something when you don't even know if the school is a possibility (i.e., you getting accepted) and something you'll get for free later if it is.

Maybe I'm biased, but I don't think grad school was any harder on my marriage than any other job would have been.

Not important at all before applying. That's what interviews/accepted student visits are for.

Depends, but I wouldn't count on it. Transferring courses is hard at the graduate level- most schools want the coursework to be largely taken where you get your degree.

Especially if there are diversity requirements on the search. For instance, at my school, the search committee doesn't even see the candidates until our diversity officer has looked over the demographics. If the search isn't diverse enough, it gets re-advertised until the pool is deemed diverse- and this all happens before the committee sees any of the results. So it's also possible the search didn't meet muster, and they're hoping some people declined filling out the forms and are re-sending them to everyone in the hopes that they can continue the search.

I'm not, but I'm also no longer a grad student. I'm faculty now. I was not at in a med school setting when I was in grad school, however. And yes, there are plenty of cases where there's funding that's fine in addition to the fellowship. That said, you may run into problems with NIH and NSF funding at the same time, but I think a T32 training grant should be fine since it's to the institution and not the individual. That said, the department may not want to apply funds from other sources to you if you have a fellowship that will support you- that's funding that can be used to bring in another student.

Biochemistry. Was editing in more details as you posted, so I'll include them here: Generally, the 2016 language is similar, but the emphasis is on the fact that teaching assistantships *must* be to the benefit of the students education and development, and not in service to the institution. For instance- if teaching is required as part of a pedagogy class, an opportunity to teach a class you wouldn't otherwise get to teach, etc. But if you're performing TA duties that the department needs, that's considered a no-no. It's mostly left up to the CO of each institution, but some are more experienced than others.

IIRC, that's an old guideline (2012), that has since become much more strict. It used to be (when I first got my fellowship) that it was allowed, and up to the advisor/CO. It changed over the course of my fellowship to no longer allow TA/RA compensation as a general rule, with some rare exceptions granted.

Depends on how university funding is allocated. NSF requires that you *not* have any other direct funding source concurrent with the fellowship (i.e., no TA or RA work). Many universities don't just have "slush funds" that they can allocate a portion of to funding the surplus of a student getting a fellowship- that funding is tied to a specific job title and set of duties (TAing or RAing), and can't just be split off to be used at will. For schools that get lots of external fellowship winners (NIH, NSF, DOD, DOE) it makes sense that they have a system set up to give partial funding to fellowship winners. For schools where it's not normal, it's very unlikely that HR has a system set up to give funding (payment) to someone who isn't fulfilling a job requirement. Generally, when you get an external fellowship, you take that *instead* of a TA or RA position for the time of the fellowship. That's how NSF wants it to work- they are your funding source. Schools that "top off" funding have some mechanism in place to fund extra money from some other pool set aside for that purpose.

I think saying $12k is generous is... maybe a bit of an overstatement, especially given that it's supposed to cover all required fees (including insurance) in addition to tuition. There are very few universities in the US where graduate tuition is under $12k a year ($6k a semester), and quite a few that are significantly over. For comparison, my tuition remission for grad school was around $70k per year, and that doesn't count another $5-8k in fees and insurance.

I'm talking about actual pay cuts. When I first got the NSF it was slightly less than my current funding source. And even now, since NSF doesn't change for COL, some of the RA/TAships at high COL schools are more than the NSF fellowship, but not all of them supplement the fellowship. For my school, it was an all or none thing- you took the fellowship or declined it, but there was no supplement. This is especially true of schools with a high tuition. For RA/TAships, the tuition remission is often budgeted in with the funding from the School/University, while an NSF fellowship usually requires the department to come up with other funds to cover tuition. I think it was MIT that had the problem where they started having to limit the number of NSF fellowships they took as it was bankrupting the department- tuition was much higher than the COL payed to the school.

Pretty competitive, but a good track record and a solid proposal gives you a good chance. This forum is a poor representation of average- it tends to over-represent both extremes.

Honestly, the prestige is worth it even with a small pay cut.

The other thing is to try to negotiate a short lease. I was able to negotiate a 6 mo lease on a new place that I wasn't sure about when I first moved to my grad school city. I figured with that short of a lease, I could either eat the cost of leaving early if it was horrible, or make due for a short period of time.

I did when I moved to my first post-grad school job. It wasn't worth the cost to fly back and look at places. That said, I did have some of my department colleagues check the place out, and I was renting from someone they referred me to. Was still a bit of a leap in the dark, but I signed the lease/sent the first months rent and deposit, and it turned out to be quite nice. I think the keys are making sure the landlord is reputable, making sure the lease is good, and getting someone to go see the place for you.

I dealt with this some when I was a grad student. It mostly had to do with the fact that the same office doesn't process "normal" stipends (TA, RA) as does NSF. NSF fellowships are a grant, and processed rough the grants office- it makes another layer of people that have to sign off on it, and can slow it down. The first person I would contact is your institutions NSF program officer. They're the ones who are effectively the "PI" on your fellowship, and will likely be the most helpful person to resolve payment issues. My department had a really hard time dealing with my NSF, since I was the first and only person to get one, and they had no idea how to make it work. I would get missed months of payments, made up the next month. P NSF does not interfere at all with how you're paid- the institution can do it on whatever schedule they want. By weeks, months, semester, etc. The only time they got involved was when all of the fellows at my school (only 3 of us) were ~ 6 mos behind in a payment (cost of living boost in the summer). I had a contact at the NSF that I had to use to get that handled.

I would trust it. We just ran a search at my school that had a Fall/Spring start date. The preference was for someone who could start in the Spring, but we wanted the most qualified person irrespective of when they started. My guess is that your situation is similar- they have a preference for when they want you to start, but that's not the most important part of their hiring criteria. Either they hope there's a way they can get you there in the Fall, or if they really like you would do something for a stopgap in the Fall and hire you in the Spring.

Yeah. Honestly, my job was the same way. Sign things in the Spring, then don't hear back until I'm on campus in August.

Same. I heard nothing from when I said I'd be going until orientation. No mailed packet, no emails. Just show up and it all would work out.

That part is actually pretty clear, especially if you take a quick look at the posting history for context. They started Fall 2016 in what should be a two-year MS program in ECE. That puts this summer as the summer of their first year. Not saying either of you are right or wrong about proposal expectations, just pointing out where they are in their program to add to the discussion.

Seconding what @fuzzylogician is saying, it's generally not your advisor who will be talking to you about course selection, curriculum, etc. They're there for research, and are often only tangentially aware of the other things. In my experience, for the first year, enrolling in courses is something you do after orientation. It's not something you do over the summer before you start grad school. Unlike undergrad where courses can fill up, grad school usually just puts you in the courses you need to take, and makes room for it. It's very likely that you will discuss curriculum at orientation, and then register the first week of classes/just before the first day of class. Honestly, one semester I forgot course registration was a thing. Halfway through the semester, I had to go back and retroactively add the courses I was already taking.

For someone who has never advised students, and has never been tenure track, you seem to have an awful lot of opinions about both. We can't be sure what the advisor's contract says, but I'm assuming it's the same as the vast, vast majority of other academic contracts in the US as a starting point. And those are 9 month contracts, with the summer being "off". That doesn't mean most of us don't work the summer to push our research forward, but what it does mean is that other professional obligations (i.e., advising, teaching, committees) are supposed to be suspended, or something we do on a volunteer basis as needed. Especially for an MS student who doesn't want to work on projects that are beneficial to them, I can certainly see a pre-tenure professor pushing off responding over the summer, because it's not work that will advance their research agenda or help them professionally. It's part of their 9-month professional obligation (advising), and they're under no requirement to respond at all over the summer, and certainly not on what might be considered a "timely" basis. As to putting words in your mouth, you said this: This seems to indicate that you think the advisor should have to go along with what the students wants to study. The OP says they "agreed", but then goes on to clarify it as "they didn't object to 3 different topics I mentioned, but nixed my proposal when I sent it to them". This doesn't sound like an agreement to me. If I recall, you're in ecology, which is one of the very few STEM disciplines where the student is predominately driving the research. The OP is not in ecology, but rather in ECE, which doesn't follow the same conventions. It seems like you're pushing your experience in a single discipline onto all advisors and all graduate students, which isn't necessarily a good thing. That said, your post was unclear, which is why I said "you seem to be implying", rather than "you said", and asked you a question. That's far from "putting words in your mouth".

No one is saying they have to stay with the advisor. They're saying the advisor is totally within their rights to say "here's what I want you to work on if you want me to advise your thesis", or that it's OK for an advisor to reject a proposal even on a general topic that looked good if (a) funding streams have changed, or (b) the idea was interesting, but after reading a fleshed out proposal they no longer think it's good/feasible. Moreover, while the OP seems to not be receiving a stipend (direct funding), my guess is there's indirect funding coming in (office/lab space, computers, programs, etc), and that still dictates projects. Similarly, no advisor is "required" to supervise a thesis on a topic they don't want to. @lemondrop825 it seems like you're implying that the professor should "have" to supervise a topic just because it's what the students ants to work on? You also seem to be assuming they should be volunteering their time during the summer when they aren't paid (or contractually required) to be around.

Immensely, yes. That's one of the reasons my pleasure reading has really been taking a hit this year- lots more papers to read and provide feedback to students, on top of the normal research and teaching related reading. Getting a new puppy didn't help things either!