Eigen

I really don't understand the critical thinking involved in the conclusions that are being drawn here. A portion of a test that is examining reading *comprehension* will be written differently than the test expects you to write for a different portion of that same test. One part tests your ability to understand complex passages, the other tests your ability to write clearly and concisely... Why exactly are you comparing the two? They're meant to test two completely different things. If the reading portion was all written as clearly and concisely as possible, it wouldn't be much of a test.... Heck, even the word choices are not those that you would use if you're trying to communicate as clearly as possible.

I would say that it's not uncommon enough to have worked/paid your way through graduate school to mention. If the work experience was not relevant, and you don't have any bad grades that you need to explain, I can't see there being any benefit to mentioning it in your application.

Since the thread is revived, I'll go back and answer this: With your stats, I can't see you being competitive for fellowships. I think TAships are your best bet, but at the level you should be looking, most of those will be competitive as well. You may end up just having to pay for your MA (shouldn't be too expensive at a lower tier state school) or at least pay part of it.

It depends, is there a particular reason you want to bring this up? Was the work experience related to your field, do you have bad grades that you want to explain?

Not the best way to go about it. Many of those aren't exactly scholarly literature, and as such might give them the wrong impression about you, or ruffle feathers. If you wanted to compile some of your best writings on a site and make an "interactive CV" of sorts, that might be OK... But you want it to be as professional as possible, imo. ::edit:: I just flipped through some of your posts that you highlighted, and I wouldn't think I'd want an Adcom to see most of those as some of their first examples of my work if it were me. The mix of primary and secondary sources, coupled with the fact that they're primarily just compiled resources with links and quotes more than an analysis or discussion of the topic makes them poor examples of what you can/will/have done in academic arenas, imo.

Don't let it get to you- everyone works differently. He may be coming in on the weekend to do work because he's not getting it all done during the week- you never know. Getting into competition with your labmates can be bad for everyones health- focus on doing what you know is a good job of your work, and try to ignore what they're doing as much as possible.

Just to point out, Oxford is also in a different country, and so probably wasn't what the university was referring to. In your field, at least in the US, interviews are standard practice, and so are face-to-face interviews. I just think you're railing a bit hard against the school for having a policy and sticking to it. I realize you personally don't like the policy, but it's not a black mark on the school that they don't want to break the policy in order to make an exception. I think your idea of going back and refining your choices by the institutions that meet your criteria for applications is a much more productive approach.

200 sounds a bit low for their cost... I was expecting more like 500-600, but it all depends on the school. I think you might be getting a bit carried away calling them a "special snowflake" university, when in fact you're the one who is asking for special exceptions to be made.

For another option, if the university pays the travel expenses for domestic students, you could ask if they would pay a portion of your travel expenses- the same amount they would pay for a domestic student. From my perspective, in-person interviews show quite a lot more about the candidate and their fit than skype/phone interviews, mostly due to the longer duration. If you come to a school for an interview, you meet more people, and interact with more people in more situations than you would in a phone interview. I think this is often especially important for international applicants, as a chance to see if the cultural differences and/or language barrier will be something that can be dealt with, or if it will cause problems.

I found my classes during my first year to be a good bit harder, but also a good bit less time consuming, if that makes any sense. The material was several degrees more challenging in most of my classes than the corresponding courses I'd had before, but we were all expected to be focusing primarily on our research, so the time requirements (readings, problem sets, homework) were all less. There was also a tendency towards fewer tests- midterm/final or a single test with other presentations throughout the semester. It was also more common for the classes to be more general, with presentations/papers etc. allowing us to choose areas that were most relevant to our research- so there were less readings that were not relevant to the rest of what we were doing. It was also a lot more common for a 50/100 to be a "good" score on the exams than in undergrad, however- and it also wasn't uncommon for some classes to have 4+ hour exams to really give you enough time to work through things.

About $2400 for First/Last months rent/pet deposit, and about $400 for the Uhaul+gas to move. We already had all of our furniture, so it was just moving it to the new city. Electricity/Gas went through the landlord, so no deposit there, and our internet required no deposit at the time. Of course, it also took them a month to get it hooked up, so.... We were pretty strapped starting off, but we had some savings we could dip into, and it was replenished pretty fast via stipends.

I was talking about this with some of my peers last night, and I think there's one other worthwhile point to consider: The rest of the group. In a larger group, there are other grad students in your specific area of research to work with, bounce ideas off of, and get help from (assuming they're people you feel like you can work with). In smaller groups, that's less likely to be the case.

For our school, it's the same has been mentioned- 500 and 600 level classes are "masters" classes, but are also cross listed with 300 and 400 level undergraduate classes, respectively. PhD students can't get credit towards their required courses from 500 or 600 classes- we can take them as electives, but not towards our core requirements. The "doctoral" level classes are 700 and 800 levels, and are never crosslisted, although occasionally an undergrad will want to take them and petition the instructor. Masters students can get credit for either the 500 and 600 level courses or the 700 and 800 level courses, and tend to take some of each.

I want to highlight something Strangelight mentioned that I think is important, and that's that your *committee* needs to have good working relationships. Lots of people think about how they're going to work with their committee, but might miss some undercurrents between faculty members when they choose. I've heard horror stories of people who had their dissertations stalled because two committee members couldn't or wouldn't work together. Ideally, your advisor should be the one to guide you when you're selecting- they're more in the know for department politics, and a lot of the responsibility for wrangling the committee is on their shoulders. I'd suggest trying to get some minor interactions with the people you're thinking about for your committee- in my program, we have several "minor" things- department seminars we have to give and invite 4 faculty to "grade", etc. It's a good time to give prospective committee members a trial run before you choose for good. On a more informal level, you could ask them to read over a paper you're working on and give you some suggestions.

Whew! I'm dropping! I guess I need to catch back up with the year.

Personally, I wouldn't go with either of your extremes: I don't think it's necessarily time to give up on it yet, but I think you should definitely sit down with your advisor and see what they think. Maybe they can help you set some concrete goals/objectives for the next 6 months to help determine whether they project should be continued or not. As for having no pubs, that really depends on the specifics of your area, as well as your project. For instance, what I'm working on, the initial results are taking longer than I'd like, but if I can get it working, I should be able to relatively easily branch out from that point for multiple publications- the first result is rate limiting, so to speak- your project might be like that, or it might not- your advisor is the best person to help you decide.

From my experience, 5 other grad students *is* a pretty small lab group in a great deal of the sciences- although CS may be a bit different in some regards. I'd certainly say that's a number that your advisor should easily be able to split his time between, however.

A lot depends on your specific situation, because whether you have to pay estimated taxes or not depends on (a) how much you will owe at the end of the year, and (b how much you payed the previous year. From what I recall (I don't have the publication in front of me), you have to owe more than $1k in taxes at the end of the year (you probably will if you've got no dependents and are single), and what your tax burden is relative to the previous year. It's the latter part that gives you a "grace year" for when your income suddenly spikes, I think. Of course, as little as you'll probably make (and owe), you could also just pay penalties (the interest on your taxes) at the end of the year and do it all together.

I still don't really see what the problem is with that sentence. It's a bit awkward, but it's not like the meaning isn't clear on the first read through. There's nothing grammatically incorrect either- and punctuation *is* correctly used. Would it be easy to clean it up a bit while still retaining the meaning? Sure. But that doesn't mean it's "poorly written", just that it's not an exemplary example of writing. The main thing it could use is an "oxford comma" in the middle of the sentence, but there's still a lot of debate on whether that would be proper usage or not. But since the test proposed earlier was that you shouldn't have to read it more than once to get its meaning, I think it passes that fine. You keep pointing it out as an obvious example, but I'd really like to hear you dissect what *exactly* is wrong with it. Not what you think you could improve, but things that are actually wrong.

Not in Psych, so I can't comment there, but in my department either path is supported by the faculty. They want you to be up front about what you see yourself doing down the road, so they can help suggest opportunities and guide your research to be more up that alley. For those of us that want to teach in the long run, there are more teaching opportunities. For people that want to go into industry, more applied research/collaborations with industry. Ours may not be the norm, however....

I honestly can't comment on your specific case, but I do have a recommendation for you: There's a poster here who's on an adcom in CS, he has a post in the NSF GRFP thread for this year- I'd suggest PMing them and asking. I also can't directly comment on CS, but I think for my field (Chemistry), a 750 wouldn't get you thrown out, and it would come down to your research experience, SoP and letters. And I thought a 90% was closer to around 770, but that's really neither here nor there.

As I mentioned in the other thread, I would strongly recommend using your co-worker only if you can find nothing else. I also second Ktel's advice of dropping into the professors offices- I know my PI gets 50-75 e-mails every day, and while he often means to get around to responding to something later, it gets buried very quickly and he forgets about it.

I can't think of any program that relies so heavily on GRE scores that you need a 770+ to be competitive, and a 750 will require a re-take. Unless the rest of your application is really weak, I doubt any adcom is going to throw out your application with a 750 quant, even in the physical sciences/engineering- most realize that the GRE quant just isn't that good of a measure of your ability relative to the rest of your application. A 700 quant might require a re-take, but you still probably won't be thrown just based on your score even then. Just for reference: MIT Computer Science doesn't even use the GRE for admissions. Berkeley CS has no minimum requirements, and only states an average of 595 Verbal and "most applicants" above the 90th percentile in Quant. That means they didn't throw out all the applicants under 90th percentile without looking, or it would be "all applicants are above the 90th percentile". When schools say no minimum score, they usually mean it, and that usually means they're looking more at the rest of your application than your standardized test scores.

For me, that was 4 years of research ~15-30 hours per week, pretty much year round. No bottle washing- small synthesis projects for the first year or so, and then a larger project that became my undergraduate thesis. It was pretty much the same for the others I mentioned. That's not counting lab courses, but time actually doing research in an academic lab. So not really either of the extremes you mention- it wasn't full time, but it was academic research, not lab/research classes. When you say 6 months full time, are you talking about 50-60 hours per week full time? If so, that's a fair bit of research experience, but I'd say rounding it out to a year would help. As much as the "time" from research experience, it's also about what defined skills you can mention/demonstrate. How many instrument systems are you intimately familiar with? How self directed was your research- can you lay out an experimental design/proposal? What enzyme assay/biomolecular extraction techniques are you familiar with? How synthetically versed are you? Laying out your skill sets can help a committee feel where you would fit into their program.

I can only give a few anecdotal examples- I had 4 years of research experience when I applied for grad school. The undergrad from my lab who went on to grad school last year had 4.5 years. Several of the students in my cohort had 3-4 years of experience as an undergrad. That said, I'd say a solid year+ of research experience would be OK, assuming you were in the lab a lot and really knew what was going on with your projects. The more experience the better, though. I think more and more programs are looking for "shovel ready" graduate students that they can take in and put working on projects right away. To have that level of readiness requires a decent amount of undergraduate research experience, so you can safely and productively start research ASAP once you get to grad school.