Eigen

I really don't think "if you write more, you get a higher score" is valid. I had 4 or 5 fairly short, well thought out paragraphs, and I got a 5.5. And honestly, there are quite a few times in grad school I've had 45 minutes (or less) to come up with a well reasoned response to something- either a short written summary/response, a presentation, or some combination of the two. And I'm not talking about class assignments here. But the GRE AW writing section is not to "reflect the strength of a persons analytical writing skill", it's to provide a benchmark of their writing skill under specific conditions (namely, short time constraints & no references).

It can. But yes, that tiny field of "humanities"... English, languages (linguistics), History, Art, Communications, Political Science, Economics, etc. It's the semi-traditional "Sciences/Humanities split". The research as well as funding structure, etc. tends to be very different on either side of that divide. If you google it, you'll find a lot more info than I can provide here. It's the general catch-all term for describing science fields by funding agencies.

Hehe- reading old posts? STEM is Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics.

Note that's also married filing jointly- until my wife got into grad school, we were both living off my stipend. It would have been quite a bit higher had I either been single, or had we had two incomes. It works out to about 25% for both of us together (~12% per person) and assumes we make about 15k each. Was1984: It is really interesting they don't take out SS/Medicare, they're supposed to (if you read the tax code). I wonder if your funding falls under some special condition. Are you fellowship? Or TA/RA?

Depends on your school and the type of stipend. At our school all TAs/RAs have payroll taxes deducted. And fellowships, you can either choose to do it all yourself (including quarterly taxes) or you have withholding taken out of it, in which case you pay into SS and medicare.

Just remember, if the school is paying for your Tuition (Tuition Waiver) the amount they're paying also has to be reported as "income"..... It just immediately is reduced by the cost of your tuition. This will show up on your 1098-T form (that you'll get from the school in the spring) showing your tuition, and the "scholarship" income applied to counter that tuition, with the fees left as payed by the student. For grad students (mostly) the only cost you can deduct for educational expenses is the fees you have to pay to the school- the only expenses considered "qualified" are expenses that are required by the school to remain enrolled. Books can be a gray area, depending on how "required" they are... The most you can deduct is a primary text for each class.

No. Simply put your Letters of Rec are probably the most important part of your application. You might find some really off the map masters programs that don't require letters, but.... What field are you in?

Very well outlined. Mine was pretty much the same. I think it's the general boilerplate personal statement format.

Just run a quick withholding calculator- the IRS site has them, as does the turbotax site.

You had the right idea to begin with on your personal statement. Other people in this thread are talking about a Statement of Purpose, which is a bit different. If you want to PM me, I can give you some more detail on how I did mine a few years back.

If it's a personal statement, then don't worry too much about cutting out the fluff. A personal statement should be, well, personal- tell them something about you. I started all of mine off with a personal bit about my childhood and developing interests, and it seemed to be well received. Some schools also have a statement of purpose that is supposed to be relatively fluff-free, and to the point about what research you want to do (stating your future purpose).

Oh yeah. Let me tell you how much fun that is.

For reference: Married filing jointly on a 30k stipend (single income), about $300 per month is the average withholding. But yeah, award letters and such are before taxes.

Granted, I don't know you that well... But the attitude I see portrayed in these posts reminds me very much of the few prospective graduate students we get each year that all the grad students either really hope won't come to our school, or start playing the "we don't want him/her in my group!" cards. Humility and interest will get you the farthest in your relationships with your prospective mentors and peers. Arrogance and sass will get you the least far. Just something to keep in mind.

I think it's definitely a good idea in a Personal Statement... But I'm not sure about the SoP. I know I used childhood development in the personal statements I sent to all my graduate schools (none of them requested a Statement of Purpose, just a Personal Statement- which is usually written a bit more about you and then drifting into your research experience and ending with your interests/proposals), and it worked for me. Most of the NSF fellowship personal statements I've seen start with childhood as well. A lot of times, showing how you've developed (and that it's been a long held interest) can be great- just don't spend too much space on it.

It's so funny (to me) reading on here the months and thousands people have spent studying for the GRE- at my undergrad, all of our professors told us it wasn't worth the time, and no one I know (either from undergrad or in my grad school cohort) studied more than maybe 2-3 hours a few days before the exam to familiarize themselves with the structure. It wasn't until I'd been in grad school a semester and change that I started realizing how much some people put into studying- and how much you can do to "brute force" the test. That said, I think (obviously depending on the student) the time spent studying for the GRE could be used to better the application in much more tangible ways- research hours, volunteer hours, advanced coursework, independent study classes, MIT/Yale open courseware graduate classes, etc.

The value of the GRE is that it is a non-subjective measure of a few specific abilities. You could look at it as providing some specific "benchmarks" to your performance. Just like computing benchmarks, they don't necessarily mimic every day situations, or even give a full breadth of data on performance- but they do provide comparable standards between different systems/applicants. Yes, the math is quite easy- that's why so many people score really well on it. But a low score on the Quant section tells the AdCom that either you don't test well, or you don't use the math covered on the quant section enough to be really familiar with it. Verbal scores show something of the breadth of your vocabulary, and in the absence of studying hours and hours in preparation, give a good benchmark for how widely read you are (generally correlated with your GRE score). Obviously, the use of these benchmarks decreases the more people take classes and study for them- the entire test is very "studyable". But it's a piece of information about your performance under specific circumstances that can be useful in the absence of any concrete information on the program you are coming from. Your grades/transcript/writing sample are the places you display more advanced knowledge of mathematics, writing, etc- either through your performance in classes or through samples that you worked more than 30 minutes on. The GRE can be very useful, when accompanied by other application materials.

PhD Comics for Every Occasion! Grades Don't Matter #1 Grades Don't Matter #2 That said, I'm sure it is somewhat field dependent. In most STEM fields, B's are "meh", B+/A- are average, and As are good. I got a B+ my second semester, and it didn't really faze me at all- and hasn't really effected how any of the prof's view me. Even the one that gave it to me thought I did fine in the course, from what I can tell. Everyone cares much more about the research, publications, etc.

There's not really any way for anyone other than the students who are making those decisions to know... None of us can really help you, nor can the department- they have to wait (probably until April 15th) to hear from those top 10 students.

No, and no. It's many of the top programs that offer to pay application fees.... I'd say more often, it's the less competitive schools that still require the application fee, if you want to generalize. And I don't think there are many programs that are much better than a 1/10 shot of getting in. Domestic students often are preferred (language issues, staying in the country, research experience), but it really comes down to what you have to offer vs. what they do- our program probably ends up with half and half (10-11 students admitted), and I know we probably get 10 times that in qualified apps, more than half of them domestic. So even if you have a bias towards domestic students, it's still quite competitive. And looking at a current composition just tells you that even with the bias, the international students have consistently been that much better than that many domestic students.

Just passing on what I got told by my advisors when I applied. Do it, just be careful, and realize that if you come off wrong they can rescind the offer.... It's just like job negotiations. You have the possibility for getting a better offer, but if you overshoot it, you may lose the offer altogether.

From what I understand, that's not true at all. Just like a company can rescind a job offer at any time before a contract is signed, a school can rescind either the offer of admission, or simply the funding at any time before you accept and sign a contract with them. An offer is just that, an offer. Unless you sign a contract with the school/employer holding them to their offer for a certain period of time, they can change or rescind that offer for whatever reason they want. Once you accept, they can't rescind the offer... But until you accept, they are under no contractual obligation. It might hurt their PR a bit if they rescind offers too often, but I don't believe there is any legal barrier to them doing so.

All of the domestic students in my program went from undergrad to a PhD directly. Most of the people I know that did a MS first weren't sure they wanted a PhD (applying to med school, etc), so did an MS and then decided to stay on for a PhD.

I can't speak for the new versions, but the old ones worked like this: they start you out at a 500 point (average) score, and give you a question. If you get it right, you go up 200 points, and get a 700 point question. If you get it wrong, you go down 200 points and get a 300 point question. The point swings slowly drop (200, to 150, to 100, to 50, etc), zeroing in on the "point range" where you can consistently answer questions. For each question you get right, you move up in difficulty, for each question you get wrong you move down in difficulty. The highest level question you can consistently answer correctly determines your score (hence the adaptive part). The earlier questions have a much larger impact on your score- if you get the first question right and the second one wrong, you would be sitting at around a 600, whereas if you get the first question wrong and the second right you'd be sitting at around a 400. You're better off spending the time on the earlier questions as opposed to the later questions. You can still end up with a high score getting the first question wrong, it just takes much longer strings of consecutive answers. The point values/question numbers here are approximate- they don't release exactly how the algorithm works, but they give you a general idea. It's not a test like the ACT or SAT where there are sliding scales for questions answered right/wrong and scores- it relates to the difficulty of questions you answer correctly- each question has a score value attached as relates to its difficulty level. It also lets you feel how your performance is going... If you're getting lots of hard questions (or the questions seem to be getting harder) that's a good thing! And usually, getting the easy questions right is more important than getting the really hard ones right.

MOE (Molecular Operating Environment) is what our group uses- it's quite robust, and does visualization as well as calculations/simulations. We use this to modify either the environment (you can solvate/desolvate, change ion concentrations, etc) and check the new structure/stability, or to mutate the protein and check new structures/stability. It's also what I use to make all of my figures for papers and such, since you can take existing pdb files and modify them (ie, take GFP and split it to show a split reporter protein). If you just want to be able to manipulate peptide chains (say, from a pdb file) the "protein workshop" software that you can download from the PDB website does that- you can turn chains on, off, and color them differently.