Eigen

I use Endnote for all of the above. You can store up to (45?) items tagged to each reference- so the article, an annotated copy of the article, some figures related to the article, your notes about the article, etc. In addition, they have two sections for notes within the software itself. Endnote is just my personal preference, I think other similar programs work as well (Mendeley, etc).

The number of grad students that will be around is very dependent on the discipline- for me, all of the non-first year grad students were here, so I got to know all of them. But yeah, I wouldn't work for free- maybe a reduced salary, but...

I usually reply within a few minutes to a few hours (depends if I'm at my desk or in my lab), and it almost never takes me longer than 12 hours (I check in the morning, and again when I'm done with work in the evening). I don't find it takes me that long to compose most e-mails.... I have a couple that I've sat on for half a day or so to think of, but that's mostly the first time I'm writing a new professor somewhere to make a connection.

I was able to start about a month and a half early. One of the prospective PIs I was thinking about working with offered to pay my stipend for the month before school started. It was nice to get into the lab, get things set up, get settled in the city, etc. I don't think I would have wanted to work all summer, but a little bit early is nice. As for journal articles- you might contact a current student in the department, and see if you can get them to send you the articles you need. I know I send prospective students articles related to our work on request.

I couldn't tell from your post... Is this a masters program, or undergrad? If the former, missing classes might effect your relationship with professors, which is more important in a graduate program. If the latter, I wouldn't worry about it. Either way, it's not like you've been missing them "just because", you have good reasons.

I had a friend that roomed with his PI for a semester (they were working at another school after Katrina). Not too common though, I don't believe.

GRE, sorry. As you mentioned you've been doing, you'll just have to look through the schools you're interested in and see what they want.

I've heard of schools requiring scores from within the last two years... It's quite school dependent.

You can still do a TAship... It just can't be a paid TAship. I TA a class every other semester and grade for another... But it's just for the experience. I get paid from a fellowship. I can still do that if I get an NSF, the teaching experience is still there. And departments love free TAs. The major benefit is since you're doing it free, you often have a lot more control over what classes you TA, how many, etc.

I am planning on deferring for a year to use up another year of my current funding and give myself a little longer. But then my other fellowship is not a federal fellowship. And I know part of the point of the optional "year off" in the middle of the NSF was to be able to take advantage of other funding sources (TA, RA, other non-federal fellowship).

I redesigned the university slides... Went from a huge banner to a small corner logo, with a nice color scheme. Several others in the department are using them now.

So I'm rather liking the iPad so far. PDF's look great on it.... Still working on getting them all over and figuring out easiest way to organize them, but I can acess my endnote library through dropbox, send that seems to be working best so far.

There are no other reasonable measures of work ethic, research skill/talent, the ability to come up with your own projects, the degree of self direction the student has shown....They are all very important traits.... The most important traits for a researcher, really.Your grades and GRE say very little helpful about your potential fir graduate school, and your SoP could be honest or not. Your publication record shows something, but says little about how much of the work was really yours.

It's impressions from people who have been around you for a while.... To an adcom that has nothing but some paper to judge you a by, of course the assessment of one of their colleagues is going to be important in deciding who of a very large number of people to give a spot to.

What Fuzzy said. And yes....If you don't like the whole "letters of recommendation" thing..... Theres a lot more of it through the rest if your career. From post-docs to faculty positions and even grants!

Haha, no problem. At least it means I'm not the only one who thinks this way :-D

I had the Sony PRS-600 which had a stylus... It took quite some time to write out comments and have them register. I think it's something you "could get used to", but it's certainly not like writing on a tablet PC. I'll be getting a stylus for the iPad and I'll let you guys know in a week or so how it works. I know a number of people that use it to mark up student's papers, so it should be decent.

And would fall directly upon the lines of people who did/didn't do well. The GRE is far too simplistic to be used as an overall measure of an applicants ability.... Even the subject GRE. Really all they tell you is how well someone can study for a test- they don't show you how productive the applicant can be, how well they work on projects, how creative they are, etc.... That's what you get from the SoP and the letters of rec... The full story about the applicant you're accepting. Honestly, a good GRE holds little to no correlation about how you'll do in graduate school- it just shows that you have some knowledge of very basic math and a decent vocabulary. Test scores and transcripts are nice numbers to have- they show some baseline academic performance. They say next to nothing about how you'll do in graduate school. Success in getting a PhD is more about drive and determination then it is about grades and test scores... And you can't read drive and determination off a transcript or from test scores. Adcoms want to take students who seem genuinely interested in the field, because without some deep interest it's really hard to last out the years. Interest is (of course) another characteristic you can't see from test scores and transcripts.

I'm not sure if you can take time off between your MS and PhD and use that as the "break" between your funding years. I think there's an "enrollment" clause somewhere in the NSF... It's supposed to be a break that allows you to use alternative funding sources during your PhD, not something that allows you to go work and apply to another school.

I think meeting someone on the forums to room with as opposed to meeting someone through e-mails after departmental introduction sounds nice. It doesn't even have to be someone in the same program, just someone at the same school- it might even provide a nice outlet and another group of people you'd get to know.

Yeah, I picked up a refurbished 16 gb wifi only ipad for $350... Decent price for what you get, imo.

You can take the fellowship for 3 years out of 5... You get to choose when you are funded. You can take a year break at the start, and then another cumulative year break over the next 4 years, as other funding sources allow.

You can also see if any current grads in the program are looking for a roommate. I know we have several groups of grad students that have 3-4 bedroom apartments they share. You might have similar situations in your new departments- and there may have been recent graduates, etc. who have left vacancies.

I've had them strongly recommended by a few faculty/grad students I know... Not as a laptop replacement, but a nice middle ground. I plan on using it for presentations, e-mail and an e-reader... Maybe to markup papers and such on the go as well. Should be nice in conjunction with dropbox to make sure I always have my papers with me. I'll let you guys know how it works later in the week after I've had time to play around with it.

Depends if you want your roommate to be undergrad or grad- or don't care. Most of my cohort had places rented well before the start of the semester... Not sure how it is other places. We all wanted to get a feel for the town before classes started.