Eigen

I much prefer asking in person- it's much easier to gauge responses, and busy professors can often "lose" e-mails if they don't respond to them right away. It's also much more likely that your prof will remember you more easily by face than by name, especially if you went to office hours a lot.

This is not true in many disciplines. It's also possible to be assigned a 20ish hour "RA" with someone in a completely different field than yours, where you assist them with their research to cover your pay, but in addition to your own research, which may be on a completely different topic. Some engineering programs do it this way, as well as most social sciences and humanities.

We have two: Cumulative Exams, and Prospectus... Our cumes are general exams in each major sub-discipline given once per month. Subjects are completely random, and the exam rotates between professors in each sub-discipline. You have to pass 2 within your first two years, and a total of 6 by the end of your third year, three must be from your chosen sub-discipline. They're kinda soul-crushing, just because the pass rate is so low- and the topics can be completely out of nowhere. Our Prospectus is where we have to give an overview of our work so far and our planned work to finish our dissertation to our committee, and have them pick it apart over the course of an afternoon or so.

An iPad isn't a laptop replacement, but it can do a lot of what a laptop can. It really depends whether you have a desktop to pair it with, or if it's your sole computer. I haven't turned my laptop on in the last couple of months, I've just been using my iPad and desktop- and this is without even having a keyboard for the iPad. With a keyboard, I could see myself doing a lot more on it. If I want to do anything "heavy", I'll use my desktop either way.

I think by your fourth year, you'll want some time out of the lab, something to break up the research. Once you finish classes, you pass quals/cumes, and you've done your TAing... It's hard to focus on research with nothing else to do!

I really would not teach your first year. Trying to balance research, classes and teaching all at once can be really overwhelming. Getting the teaching experience early isn't a bad idea either... I'd suggest taking the NSF your first year, and then teaching your second year.

Sounds about identical to the stipends/cost of living at my school, or any of the ones I got offers from.

This is one of the reasons I think flexibility, rather than the amount of time you work, is a better criteria for family friendliness. If one prof wants to go catch a ballgame, knowing full well he'll need to work later that night or that weekend, he's able to. If another prof wants to do the same to spend time with his family, he can as well. I think the other benefit is the general family friendliness of the college environment- it's rather easy for my boss to bring his son with him to work, set him up in his office, etc. Academics is very much more result driven than anything else. Getting enough research/publications? Getting enough grants to support you and your work? Good teaching evals, keeping your office hours? Involved in enough departmental committees? Then no one cares when or how much time you're putting in.

I think the best mix is to try to split the summer... I started 6 weeks early- it gave me a chance to relax (early summer), but still get acclimated to the school, meet people, get to know the area, and get on payroll before the semester started.

It should say who your program officer is to the right of the screen, in the little info bar when you log in. It will be a professor/administrator at your school. It's a good idea to set up an appointment with them- I e-mailed mine, and am meeting with him next Tuesday to go over the fine points of accepting/working with the award.

To me, it's not the number of hours but the flexibility of when you can put those hours in which makes a job "family friendly".

Oh, I know it has to do with not getting much sleep. I was mainly trying to lighten the end of my post :-D I think my boss usually works until 1 AM or so (at home), then gets up around 5, works for a few hours at home, and then takes his son to daycare before he comes in to work at 9ish.

So I've had my iPad a few weeks now, and I haven't taken my Laptop with me places since. The laptop is nice for, say, going home for a week and bringing a central workstation with you, but for every day... My desktop in my lab and my iPad around campus is all I need. It's much nicer to take on trips from my lab downtown to the medical school, to take to meetings around campus, seminars, etc. It's also nice to take to read on shuttle rides, bring papers home with me in the evening, or take to a coffee shop/my carrel in the library when I need a change of venue. The onscreen keyboard is easier to get used to than I thought it was, and the stylus + Notetaker HD app lets me take notes pretty fast- I can keep up in seminars, and the classes I've taken it to. I'm in the sciences, so I can make bullet pointed notes, draw quick diagrams, etc. I've started experimenting with using it as an electronic lab notebook, and it works pretty well. I've been experimenting by copying my old notebooks into digital form via the stylus- being able to have different PDF formats to use as a backdrop is great, it means I can have templates pre-layed out for different experiments I frequently run, graphs for data, etc. I can easily take the notes I need, draw structures- and better yet, easily drag my written text down a few lines if I need to go back and add more details earlier on.

I have no children, although I am married. I like to look at my PI as a template: He's in his early 30s, he and his wife are both TT. He had a son the Fall I started. He works long hours, but the PI job is flexible enough to allow him to do a lot of that from home- he can write grants on his laptop, and he just needs to come in to teach, office hours, meetings, and some time to work with us in the lab. I'd say he *works* upwards of 60 hours a week, but manages to spend a lot of that at home. He and his wife seem to manange to meet for lunch (different Universities, although in the same city) a few times a week, and he's out of here in time for dinner almost every night (although he sometimes comes back in around 9 or 10 to work a bit more before bed. I have other professors I've met that say similar things- they could go home, have dinner and spend time with their kids until the kids went to bed, and then the parents would often curl up on the couch and write grants together (dual academics). My boss says it mostly has to do with not getting much sleep, but I think he's (mainly) joking.

Not at all- I posted them a couple of pages back. Eh? I would say changing standards are exceptionally important for the proposal: you should have little to no preliminary results (and have had no time to work with the PI you're building the proposal based on) as a senior, as a first year the proposal should be much more specific, but still little preliminary results, and as a second year you should have good preliminary results on the work, and in some fields a publication based on those early results. Even if you have no preliminary results on your exact proposal, you should already have demonstrated research experience that shows your ability to carry the proposal through- results in other closely related projects, portions of other work that you either base your proposal off of, or parallel early phases of your proposal. You should also have time to develop collaborations with other research groups by your second year, and have time to directly connect how their work will relate to/support yours (and actually know that they've agreed to work with you) while that chance is much lower your first two application cycles. I couldn't have written a proposal with near the specificity last year that I was able to this year, I also had no preliminary data last year and was able to talk about how my early experiments supported my proposal this year. Maybe if you're continuing a project on from your undergraduate to graduate programs, you could have preliminary results before you start grad school... But I don't think that's the norm.

As I mentioned earlier, the same proposal with the same reviewers wouldn't garner the same ratings from one year to the next, as you're gaining more experience and are supposed to have a "better" proposal, especially from the IM standpoint. In other words, what reviewers would consider a perfect proposal from a first year student wouldn't necessarily be considered a perfect proposal from a second year student. Some of my reviews seemed kinda weird along with the scores- "I think this is a tremendous application from an outstanding applicant!" and then giving it a VG... They were very uninformative, overall.

VG/E, VG/VG and VG/E yielded me a fellowship (IM/BI). I was 4.0 with 186 hours at my undergrad (small school, though), and am 3.96 at my current school (much better ranked, although still small), 2 publications (1 first author), several state/regional presentations/posters, and an undergrad thesis. The outreach has been a lot of demos/workshops at K12 schools, the undergrad I trained at my undergrad my last year, two undergrads that are working under me now, and a 2 year program I've had working with a local minority high school to enrich their science education through demonstrations and hands on work. I also discussed the work I'm doing to bring said high school students into the lab for summer research opportunities. Definite discussion of the fact that I could be at a "better" program, one reviewer said that my undergraduate and graduate experiences didn't mesh as well as they might (I might lack some focus, in his words), but they generally liked the publications/idea, and thought I'd done a lot of work on outreach/leadership, etc. In response to the last poster, they seem a lot stingier with the Es this time around, at least in my field/level (Chemistry/2nd year). Most reviews basically just listed what I'd done and that it was good, no really helpful comments.

Keep in mind that each successive year brings much "harsher" reviews, as well as competition. You can get an HM your first year, have significant improvements on it for the next year and not "move up", because you're competing for a different pool of awards, with different expectations of the applicants. The panels expect much less of undergrad applicants than they do of first year applicants, who in turn are less severely graded than second year applicants. It's more about how much more preliminary data you have to add to your proposal (for IM) and how much you've done as far as reaching out to the community (for BI) once you get into the grad school application years, from my understanding. If you're saying you want to work with underprivileged youth in your city, but you haven't over the last year, that can bump you down from E to VG (from the reviewer sheet a few pages back) for example. That said, I think the process is quite arbitrary, and from talking to other prof's seems to distinctly favor some subfields over others.

I'm interested to see how this works too. I have a school fellowship (4 years), and I'd like to take the next year of funding on it, followed by the 3 years of NSF. I'll be going to talk to our program officer in the next couple of days, I'll see what he says.

I got the e-mail around 2:14, after I'd gone to bed. Nice thing to wake up to, since I was sure I must have dreamed getting the award last night!

From my understanding, the HM is still noteworthy on a resume. Also from my understanding, HM allows you the access to supercomputers that the fellowship allows you- more helpful for some fields than others.

Hah! I had to go through that too. Wait for forget password page.... Wait for e-mail.... Log in with temp password.... Change password... Log in with new password... I feel for you!

I was able to search the three people I knew applied- B, G and G.

I think the fastest way to check is to just log in. If you got the fellowship, you'll have the offer letter waiting for you. Not sure if it shows HM there or not, can anyone comment?

Ok, so I was able to get on and get my award letter, so now I'm sure I wasn't dreaming! I'm really excited.