Eigen

As soon as you have picked a school, ask for the recommendations for that school (assuming they school is ready to accept them). Always ask as early as possible, and remind the writers as time goes along.

Most schools allow "sabaticals", where your pay is suspended for the time you need off. Since you're accepted, you might fall under that category- and be allowed to defer by a semester. If they like you enough to fund you and let you in, they'll help make it work.

Even more than your research prof, the grad student saw you regularly, work ethic, research skills, etc- and that can be quite valuable in a rec writer.

Just to be clear, this is a former grad student, right? Who is now in a faculty position? If that is the case, I don't think it would be as far off as getting a current graduate student to write it. You're getting a young professor (who knew you as a graduate student) to write the letter. And having just come through the process, they are in a unique position to write a letter. If it was me, that would be my choice.

Just because they involved analytical chemistry doesn't mean they prepared you for a PhD in it. A course like Instrumental Analysis teaches you to understand how to work (read: the basics of taking apart, rebuilding, and working with) each of the major types of instruments. You should also have a very good working knowledge of circuitry and electronics, I would think. Part of the problem will likely be the unusual courses from undergrad, and the fact that you were not in a chemistry program, but rather a forensic chem program- with much more of a specific focus, and much less of a general focus. Another problem you may be running into is that analytical chemistry (as a field) is dying in large part- mostly, it's being swallowed into the other subdisciplines. Most of the bioanalytical techniques are being taken over by biochemists, the molecular techniques by organic chemists, the electrochemical techniques by inorganic chemists, and a lot of the instrumentation by physical chemists. So few Analytical chemists are going back into academia that the programs that still offer analytical PhDs are very, very competitive.

The problem you'll run into here is that Grad GPAs are weighted to a different scale than undergrad GPAs. Your 3.7 is better, but not by as much as you might think. I'll generalize to most grad schools: a B- (or thereabouts) is usually the lowest passing grade for a class, at a 3.0 GPA. A C+ is usually failing, at a 2.67 GPA. That said, for grad school you take what was essentially a 4.0 scale and break it down to a 1 point scale- 3.0 to 4.0. I'd place a 3.7 graduate GPA at around a solid "B" (3.0-3.2) average on comparison to the equivalent undergrad. That said, your MS thesis and the research therein should be a much bigger draw than your GPA throughout. Publications are always helpful- in the sciences, in general, grades and scores are secondary to publications and research experience. The only problem you may run into is schools that have "minimum" GPA requirements, but I don't think these are particularly common anymore.

I use acrobat- it's nice to be able to make, edit, and steal from PDFs really easily on the fly. I got it free through our department, but I think I'd pay for it if I had to. It and Endnote are two things I can't do without.

If my "boss" didn't have the time to actually write my letter, I'd simply ask someone else. I think most committees will be able to tell the difference, and if your boss doesn't have the time to write a few rec letters, that means he's not particularly involved in your career.

I doubt it will be that huge of a deal. If they're sending you to conferences, most won't care if you take a few extra days of non-air travel to get there. Heck, my PI even recommends that we take some time before/after conferences for a trip/vacation. If you end up having to go to a few overseas conferences, this might be more of a problem... But I'm sure you could bow out of those (and have someone else in your group present).

Wow... I know I posted a lot this month, but I didn't think it was that much!

Offhand, I'd say professor. But I'd say it varies some depending both on what the job is/was and what program you're applying to. If, say, you worked in an R&D department somewhere, and your boss is a researcher, that could be a valuable letter- or other similar situations in other fields.

You need to specify the fellowship(s) you're applying for, they can be quite different. Assuming you're referring to the NSF graduate fellowship (or similar): 1. Once you procure funding, you'll be let in, even if you were initially turned away (generally). 2. You pick one of your potential advisers, and write based on that (hypothetical) weaving in your current research if possible. You get to keep it even if that isn't the research you end up doing. All fellowships are different, however, and I can't speak for many others.

When I took it last year, my PowerPrep score was pretty close to my real score.

Health insurance isn't that expensive. I'm able to pay premiums for both myself and my wife (we opted to not go with the school plan) in addition to all my other expenses out of my stipend. Oh, and your post was definitely off topic for the thread.

Like I said, I spent only the cost of a single GRE test + one score report. But then, most departments in the sciences let you apply straight to the department, and you're only charged the application fee if the department accepts you, at which point you apply straight to the grad school. At least that was the case when I applied. And then, since the department wants you, they usually shave off the application fee. Also, you mention non-specific research interests- that's something that's going vary wildly by discipline. If you don't have fairly specific research interests, getting into a PhD program in the sciences can be quite difficult. You're expected to have already narrowed it down by that point, at least to a large degree. I have a friend that applied to 20, he took an extra job his last semester just to afford applications.

Either that, or it's also possible it's just perpetual misinformation. I know originally (8 years ago) the fellowship I'm on was *legitimately* tax free....At least to the student. It was something about either the state or the department paying the taxes on it before it was passed on to the students. It is no longer tax free (yay estimated taxes!), but it took quite a while to get that through peoples heads, especially in the overlap period when some were on the taxable version and some on the non-taxable one (It's a 4 year fellowship). I know that I got told (until I made it all the way up to the deans office) that my fellowship was non-taxable. Perhaps some of the people I hear reporting non-taxable fellowships just haven't researched it quite far enough.

Go for it. Grad school is different than undergrad... It's more like a marathon than a spring. Less frantic work, more slow wearing. I'd say the first year is probably the most challenging, although not necessarily the hardest. You might go check out the PhD comics forums, there are some great threads on imposter syndrome and such there- more current grad students (and faculty) sharing problems and solutions. It's a very good support group for graduate school as a whole, just like Gradcafe is for the application process.

That's interesting. Even those of us on fellowships get our stipends dispersed biweekly throughout the year. Ours just doesn't get taxes taken out of it. And very true on the books. But then thankfully, at least in the physical sciences, books are almost completely unnecessary at the graduate level :-D

Filing quarterly is all about how much you owe vs. how much you've paid in withholdings. It also depends on any other jobs/income throughout the year. The fastest way is to use Turbotaxes estimator online, and see what it gives you for estimated 2010 taxes based on everything else. If you owe more than $1000, and filed taxes last year, then you more than likely need to file quarterly. Unless you've had other significant income for this year, I doubt $4000 in stipend will be enough... I really only know the married filing jointly stats, and that requires around $17k to owe taxes.

I'll see if I can dig up some of the names for you, I generally don't keep track of the specific names of my friends fellowships. I do know people on non-taxable fellowships, and I have been told by my department that they exist as well. And yes, you don't have to file if you had no liability last year. As Tim said, you also need to check NY tax laws in this area, they might be different. If you did pay taxes last year, however, you will need to worry about estimated taxes this year. The IRS has a calculator that can help you with that. My point wasn't ever that you should not try to get whatever reductions you can on your income, but rather that you need to be careful what you use for those reductions. A lot of things that you would commonly think count, will not. It's interesting that you had a fellowship and were classified GSRA, everyone I've seen funded through a fellowship is classified GSRF- Graduate Student Research Fellow as opposed to a Graduate Student Research Assistant. By and large, an assistantship is distinct from a fellowship, and graduate fellows are not called graduate assistants.

Make sure that you are filing quarterly taxes if you need to (if you will owe more than $1000 by the end of the year) the penalties for not doing so if you need to can be pretty steep. As to examples of Fellowships that aren't taxed? They are usually government fellowships. I've heard of several states that give fellowships that are exempt from state taxes, for sure. They are not mentioned in the IRS handbook, no. But if you aren't sure, your department of university can very easily answer whether they are taxable or non-taxable fellowships. And my point about the education expenses is that the IRS takes a very narrow view of education expenses. More than half of my textbooks my first year were not counted as "valid" education expenses because they were not required for enrollment in a class. Similarly, university "fees", such as Student Health service fees, Fitness center fees, or any other assessed fee may or many not be considered "valid". Most of mine were not, at least according to the IRS handbook. And yes, GA is a general term for graduate assistantship, and consists of either a TA or RA position, as opposed to a fellowship.

You're not getting my point. There are some fellowships that are non-taxable no matter what you spend the money on. These are rare. At the graduate level, very little can be counted as "income deductions", because, by and large, stipends and fellowships are in addition to tuition waivers. And since a majority of school fees (your other main "income deduction" source) can't be properly counted, as well as the majority of graduate textbooks (you can only deduct books that are required for course attendance/registration), you will probably, at most, deduct 500-1000 of your fellowship stipend per semester. You also can't consider GA's fellowships or scholarships, so they don't fall under the rules you just quoted from the IRS handbook. They are considered earned wages, and as such are strictly reported under income, with no commensurate reduction in income due to qualified "expenses". This will also depend on how the school reports it. At least this was the way our school explains it to us.

Technically, the income is still taxable, you can just take a direct deduction of the items related to degree progress. Also note that only *some* textbooks are exempt, not all. Additionally, remember that tuition waivers are considered "income", and must be reported, although the tuition can then be immediately deducted. I was referring to some fellowships that are as a whole non-taxable income. These are quite rare, although they do exist.

And better this than the opposite! At our school, they take out 2-4 times what we end up paying at the end of the year on our assistantships... Like $250 on a $1200 paycheck.

This also includes any fellowships or scholarships. Our school takes taxes out of stipends, but not fellowships- so those have to be reported as "self-employed" income. Also keep in mind that if your school is not taking taxes out, or even just not taking sufficient taxes out, and you will owe more than $1000.00 by the end of the year that you MUST pay quarterly taxes. If you get a W2 form with the stipend, that's easy.... If it's a fellowship/scholarship/grant, and it does not show on a W2, you simply report it as "additional" income with SCH written off to the side. Off the top of my head, I can't think of any form of graduate financial support that is non-taxable, although I think there are a few very special cases.