Eigen

Wait, there are scholarships for young married couples?? I need to get in on those!

I have no idea how our wedding could have cost 20k, unless we decided to like pay for everyone's hotel rooms that came in for it. Like I said, we did a nice reception and the wedding for around $2000 for 300ish people. I'm definitely going with local cost of living.

The note on the Fastlane mainpage now says that all letters received by the 22nd will be accepted, for those who were wondering.

That must be exceptionally field specific. No one in chemistry is expected to have any papers published prior to grad school, and the papers you have published are a bonus. Perhaps they meant papers as a way to counterbalance low GRE scores? Those actually sound like higher GRE scores than I'd expect as a minimum too- 80th percentile is around a 1200. Maybe you're just applying to too high tier of schools?

PhD. And yeah, it's quite rare. Was a perfect storm of us already being in town, and them having someone drop out of the Fall 2010 spot, leaving them some available funding. She had applied to start Fall 2011, but since she was local and had her app in, they offered her the chance to start early.

I'll tag on here: My wife finished her submissions a few weeks ago, and has already been accepted for a Neuroscience program starting this spring- she had applied for next fall, but they happened to have an opening early, so she's getting to start ahead of schedule. It works out really well, since it will put her only 3 semester behind me (same university, different programs) instead of a full 2 years.

Take this with a grain of salt, but I doubt almost any program would turn down an NSF fellow. You're basically no-risk for three years: You come with full funding and some measure of prestige, and have been through a rigorous selection process. I know people that have been turned down at schools, and then accepted on receipt of an NSF fellowship.

My suggestions: See if faculty in your department are involved in any volunteer/community based projects. I worked with one faculty member every year for 5 years judging the Science Olympiad competitions in our region, and that certainly gave me a good chance to get to know her better. Similarly, I worked with another faculty member in a related department several years in a row to put together a "fair" each summer for handicapped kids. Another way is to get involved in officer positions within student organizations. Most have a faculty adviser who you'll spend a lot more time with as an officer, planning things. Personally, when I was VP then president of our SAACS (chemistry club) group, I spent a ton of time with a lot of our faculty members- whether it was getting them to come speak at a meeting, putting on socials, or organizing demonstrations. My wife was an officer in our SAACS group, and then in the psychology (Psi Chi) honors society, and she got good faculty contacts in both. The last and most common way is to go work as a researcher for a faculty member over the summer or during the semester. Basically, you need to find what your professors do outside of class, and then get involved in that. Most are advisers in some student organization or other, or oversee out of class activities in some other way. And most are involved in research, and can always use an extra pair of dedicated, skilled hands.

It's worth a try, but schools don't usually pay for travel and lodging until after you've been accepted.

Short answer: Your CV is primarily academic in nature, and lists everything you've done making it quite long. My CV is already nearly 4 pages long, many professors have CVs in excess of 10 pages. A resume is a more targeted, much shorter document that should rarely top a page in length, and be tailored to a specific program/job.

I'm working under the same assumption.

I told all my letter writers to ignore the 22nd deadline, and get them in by the 18th (my deadline in Chemistry). Better safe than sorry- be a shame to lose eligibility over a few days, imo. More than likely, they'll still be accepted, but on the off chance they aren't....

I'll also add that at a great many US schools, 3.45 would probably be in the top 15-20% (3.5 being the Cum Laude breakpoint most places), and possibly even higher than that.

Here's how I look at it: The CV portion of the education section will get much less attention than any of the three essays. The essays are a way to highlight your most important works. Papers and presentations are the culminations of your research, therefore it's only natural to use citations of them at the bottom as support of your research- it shows not only that you did it, but it was reasonable and accepted into the community via publication. I certainly am not putting all my publications and presentations, just the ones that are the most indicative/prestigious, about 3 of each.

The images I'm using are in color, but I've made sure they'll print fine in greyscale. It's tough to give up the space, but a graphic can be worth a lot of words when you're trying to describe a complex process. Mine saves me upwards of 200 words worth of description! Otherwise, trying to describe, say, high order structural shift schemes can be quite impossible. I'll also note that captions can be in 10 pt, which helps with space.

School dependent. I took my GRE when I'd finished one application, and sent it to the other schools before my application was finalized. LoRs, I'd imagine, are slightly different- and you'd want something on file with the school so they can stack stuff up for you. If you're not sure, contact whoever is in charge of the admissions process and ask.

There is the space thing, too. Luckily for me, ACS is a very compact style, so it helps.

Adding to what fuzzylogician stated, if you are the head of your institution, you should be in a better position than anyone here to know what makes a strong letter. I'm sure you receive and review them quite regularly, or have faculty colleagues who do. As you mentioned from the student you are writing for, most of us do not get to see our letters, and we certainly don't know how they are received, exactly- just the end results of our packages as a whole. I know in all of my applications I had to sign away my ability to see the letters, I'm sure many others are in similar situations. You mention that many of your previous students have written their own letters, all the faculty I know would consider that to completely defeat the point of a letter of recommendation.

I would use the appropriate style for your discipline (APA). I'm submitting mine in chemistry and using the ACS style, as it is the most prevalent for chem.

My wife and I got married while still undergrads, but we're in grad school now. We were able to put together our entire wedding for around $1800, for over 300 people. It all depends what your priorities are. That said, getting married makes your taxes lower! So it's a financial benefit

I agree wholeheartedly with the previous poster. Decide what you want to do, and then think whether a Med Chem degree would be good for it. All of the researchers/groups that actively publish in Med Chem journals have degrees either in Biochemistry or Organic Chemistry. If you're interested in the pharmcology/pharmacokinetics side, go for one of those degrees at a pharmacy school. If you're interested in designing new drugs, then you really want a traditional organic synth PhD.

From what I understand, you won't lose money going from internal to external- as you suggest, the internal funding will be reduced accordingly. Our program allows for internal+external = 125% the max internal fellowship.

Tulane as a school is nice, and the Graduate Student Studies Association (GSSA) covers College of Science and Engineering as well as Liberal Arts, and is very active. I'm in Chemistry, so I can't speak much to the research going on in Sociology, other than the few grad students I know in the department. The school as a whole is a great place to be for graduate school, imo.

I'm not exactly sure what you're looking for here... You got two good responses to your previous topic, and now you're starting another one to attract more attention to it?

I think mostly they use it to see if you're applying to them as a "low end" or "high end" school. That, and statistics. They want to see who they're competing with when it comes to making offers, in my experience. There's nothing dangerous about answering, I did it on all of my apps and it caused me no problems.