Eigen

And I think this is especially important if you're writing a review, as opposed to just trying to get into the area. Your review article needs to address the topics either content or approach-wise in a different way than what's already out there. So reading other reviews on the same/related topics will help you pick out the current threads of discussion as well as clue you into the seminal literature, and lets you see how to place your review among the other similar works and argue for it's impact as a unique take on the subject.

It's more that you seem to be making the argument that, solely on page length, you're in a better place to judge what is or is not a legitimate contribution to the field than a panel of experts in the field. You also seem to be ignoring the fact that someone else getting passed with a crappy dissertation has no effect on you at all. This comes back around to you making too big of a deal out of the dissertation as the keystone accomplishment that grants you a PhD. A PhD is granted to someone when their committee things they have made a significant contribution to the field. The dissertation is part of that, as is the defense, and the rest of the individuals body of work. You're putting too much importance on one thing (the dissertation) and then reducing it past that to one significant factor (the length).

I've never been a huge fan of Lamy pens, despite the fact that most people love them. The Pilot Metropolitan line is my go to, with various different Noodler inks. Very smooth, work on most papers.

Everything in your application balances together. Some are more important, and some less- i.e., a good recommendation and research experience is more important than grades and GRE scores, up to a point. There are minimum GPAs and GRE scores that it's really hard to recover from. The other thing to remember is that it's a competitive process. Having 3 fantastic letters (one won't really do the trick) will help attenuate low GPA, but there are people who will be applying that have both 3 fantastic letters and good GPAs. This is also going to depend a lot on the country, I'd imagine- I'm answering mostly for US institutions, but if I remember some of your past posts, you're looking for UK masters degrees? That's an entirely different game.

My advisor told me, as I was writing up: "Remember, a short dissertation is a good dissertation. Lots of the long ones are just people trying to pad bad science with lots of extra words." Definitely going to be field specific, but I can't really say length is much of a criteria in my field. Some of the most groundbreaking dissertations have been exceptionally short- they did great, novel science that didn't take long to discuss. Mine was on the shorter side of usual for my department, and all of my committee members said it was very strong, with one requesting a copy to use as an example for future students. Including appendices, mine was about 140 pages. Good writing, good ideas, and good execution are what make a good dissertation, not the length.

I've switched from Moleskin to Leichturm notebooks recently, and am glad I did. Much better quality paper and build, and cheaper as well. For me, I use messenger bags rather than a backpack- one waterproof Chrome bag, and one nicer looking shoulder bag. The waterproof has saved me so many times over the years, it's one of the top things I look for in a new bag. I can survive if I get soaked... My laptop and papers, not so much.

Congrats to you both! I'm a year out now and about to hit my third season on the market, and would happily contribute to threads on the job market and experiences As Rising_star says, there are otherswhov been through the entire process here, but it's a relatively small group.

My (male) advisor has hugged me (male) a few times over the year, including at graduation. Seemed perfectly normal to me all of the times it happened.

Ah, ok. Thanks for the links. None of my work stuff do I really worry about security for. SpiderOak, as you mentioned, used to be great for security, and iirc Box is up to HIPPA standards.

What did you hear with respect to reasons for not using DropBox? I've used it with no problems for years, and worry less about their terms than Google Drive. Box is good, and the editing interface is fantastic, if you need another option.

This post is so all over the place I don't know what you're asking or what your goals are. Do you want to be a writer/actor? Biologist? Work in marketing/advertising? What do you want to go to grad school in?

What makes you think NIH/NSF grants don't look at these same things? The NSF-GRFP is very, very similar to an NSF grant in many aspects, and is predominately based around your research proposal. Broader Impacts are exceptionally important for non-graduate NSF and NIH grants as well, and a key component of broader impacts is convincing people that you have a track record of, well, doing things that are impactful. It's really easy to say you'll do all these great broader impacts, but they look at what you've done as a predictor for what you will do. Broader impacts is quite clearly not supposed to just be about the societal impacts of your research. It's largely about education and outreach, of which dissemination of your work can be part of it. It's the same for major NSF grants and NIH grants. The last two I was a part of both had significant outreach portions developed in tandem to the project- they're exceptionally important for securing funding. Saying "my research will revolutionize society" doesn't count. That's really under the intellectual merit of your project. In short, no funding looks at things like this. Not graduate fellowships, not postdoctoral fellowships, not research grants. Narrative and leadership and your involvement with things outside of your work are always going to be important. From discussions with respect to NDSEG and Hertz, as mentioned, they will not be what you're looking for either. I honestly don't know of anything that is.

Don't have to do an AAR until you're on fellowship. Since even if you accept the fellowship it (likely) won't start until September, you're not currently on the NSF and as such don't have to do an AAR. Not an official source, but I didn't do one the year I got it, and no one else I know did either.

The disparity of power isn't really a direct function of tenure, though. You see similar power hierarchies in institutions without tenure, it's just based on seniority. Honestly, tenure probably does more to help than hurt on the whole- without tenure, it would be nearly impossible for someone junior (lower in the power hierarchy) to do anything about confronting established senior faculty like Searles without immediate repercussions.

This is not something that will be universal. Some schools advance masters students to candidacy, some don't. Any school that does will have explicit guidelines for it, and it will (usually) show the date you advanced to candidacy on your transcripts. Unless you are absolutely sure you are a candidate, don't claim it. The risks of looking like you're claiming a title that you haven't earned far outweighs the benefits of the title. We've had this discussion here before, and I've mentioned people who use the wrong signifiers in their email signatures (i.e., candidate as a first year doctoral student) and that it makes them look pretentious and like they don't know the system.

Just posting some clarification here, and sorry for the slow responses- most of the moderation team is currently traveling, and moderating via cell phone isn't the easiest. We don't screen for veracity of claims. Nor do we penalize people for calling out bad information, or information as suspect. That said, there's a fine line between calling out information as bad, and calling out a user as a troll. Stick to the information, don't target the user. Similarly, there are lines that have been crossed in the past wherein current bad posts cause past non-objectionable posts to be down voted in multitudes. I will also mention that we take people posting from multiple accounts very seriously, and is usually results in banning of one account along with suspension of the other account. That said, it is especially difficult to tell when people are positing on multiple accounts- many people here post from universities, and have the same IP address. Basing suspensions and bans on IP address is a really bad thing, as there are several of you here who share an IP address with MSW2MD- banning that IP address would indirectly ban you. We are honestly doing our best to keep up with this, and we really appreciate how hard all of you are working to ignore and report rather than responding.

Your publications matter a lot less than (a) the letter from your advisor on what kind of researcher you are, and (b) the fact that you'll have had a lot of research experience. Generally, getting publications as an undergrad is a bonus, but not in any way required for getting into a good graduate program- much less needing to have publications in the area in which you're applying. Although not your specific question, I would also caution you strongly against being this certain of the area you want to go into this early in your career. As a sophomore, you haven't really seen much chemistry OTHER than organic, so it's quite hard to know for sure that's what you want to do and be convincing of that. The number of students who want to go into organic chemistry early in undergrad is immense, because that's the first course you encounter thats really *chemistry*. Go into the other courses with open minds, don't be so focused on what you think you want to do (organic synthesis) that you miss other interesting options.

Also, I'm not sure if this meant you sent your offers from the masters programs to the PhD program, but having a "better" offer for a masters program will do almost nothing to sway a PhD admissions committee. They're not the same type of program, and it's assumed that a really competitive applicant might be able to get a particularly well funded masters (which is a less competitive program), but not a PhD. There's also a good chance that if you sent them other offers and both were for masters rather than PhD programs, they don't view the chance of you not taking their offer as very serious, since very few people would want to take a masters over a PhD.

That's not really statistically true, depending on how you define research. Most people with a PhD will end up in a research-associated job. Not as many will end up as PIs, or at R1s- but that's not the entire research community, and to think it is is relatively narrow. Very few people with a PhD will end up being journalists, and still relatively few as consultants. The former because there aren't that many jobs, the latter because most people prefer a consultant that is also currently research active (i.e., a professor or leading a team in industry). I think you're twisting these career presentations into something they aren't. People don't talk about academia because that's the base assumption- it's expected everyone has that as a significant goal. It's to open people up to other career options that they may or may not know about. And to be inclusive of people pursuing PhDs for careers outside of academia. There's been (long term) a huge stigma against people mentioning anything other than "I want to be an academic" in graduate school, and many programs are only recently working to change that messaging to be inclusive of other career options. I tell my students they should be honest and themselves on interviews, look for a group and a PI they feel they will fit in with, and be flexible about career goals. I think almost no undergraduate, or even junior graduate students, have enough experience with either career options or the field they're in to make a fully informed and final decision about a career. Graduate school is about learning and being flexible enough that you are open to new options as you learn about them, and being willing to follow your research into new areas that you didn't know about when you started.

This isn't true. No one is hiring science consultants where an MBA and PhD would compete for the same job. Many positions will have the PhD as the base requirement. As to the "what is an MS sufficient for", I think the important distinction is what it is intended to do. Generally, an MS isn't seen as a research degree, even with a thesis. It's seen as a degree that makes you a subject matter expert. For many, many careers, the importance isn't being a subject matter expert- it's having significant experience as a researcher at the cutting edge of your field. For anything where you're talking about the practice of research and publishing (copy editor of a journal, science journalist, policy analyst), the PhD is the requirement because of the time it ensures you spend actually doing research.

Not currently, but have previously. Currently at a SLAC where almost all of my students are going to graduate school.

First off, your opinion is not truth. First off, lets talk about your example of journalism. In this day and age, do you honestly think it's a bad thing to have well educated scientists writing about science for the general public? There's a reason that's part of NIH and NSF's outreach goals (communication to the general public). Consulting? Depending on what you want to consult about, having a PhD is a valuable credential and well spent. Looking back at your original post, your arrogance is astounding. You seem to be sure that you know better who to allocate to projects (masters students vs PhD students) than people who have experience managing researchers. You seem to think that as an applicant, you're in a position to say who should or should not be allowed into a program, moreso than the people who are actually writing grants to fund those researchers. Personally, I don't look for someone who's life is dedicated to science. I think that's an attitude that leads to burnout. I also don't just pick students who want to go into academia. I pick students who I can forge a good professional relationship with, and who have a positive attitude, a good work ethic, and who have interests outside of our research. And as for your comment on picking advisors: That's the advice I give to every one of my undergraduates applying to grad school, and what I gave to every prospective graduate student I met. Attrition from people who didn't pick based on a god mesh of personalities is huge in grad school- and grad school is about training and learning, and you do that best when you have a good fit of personality with the person you're working for. I can guarantee the mentor is picking people they mesh with in return.

I use something similar to this. I use Endnote to manage references, and give a numerical label to each new reference I add (it gives a unique identifier, and lets me figure out approximately when I added the reference to my library). All my files are in a single folder in dropbox with the reference number, first and last author, year, and a handful of keywords. I can either easily search for a single entry, entries by authors, years, or keywords in dropbox, and I have them organized for more detailed searching in Endnote. Since nothing I've found is perfectly cross-platform, having my articles in dropbox lets me pull up any article on my phone/ipad when I need it, or on any computer where I have internet connection.

Just to be clear, the CGS resolution is not a binding document. It's a guideline a number of schools have agreed to for mutual benefit. It's also worth noting that the CGS resolution only effects financial offers- not admission offers. A school can ask you to accept an offer of admission before April 15th, just not an offer of a financial package. They're usually (but not always) one in the same. Some schools offer financial packages after admissions. I also suggest you be wary of thinking of this as intentionally unethical on the schools part- the honest truth is that many graduate faculty and departments have no clue what the CGS is. It's something a dean or provost signed, but not necessarily something they educated the school about. Finally, I'd remind everyone that the CGS resolution isn't directly intended to benefit students, although that's a good benefit. It's intended to put all graduate schools on an even playing field. The person "wronged" by a school jumping the gun is the other schools who are not, and might lose a good student- although this indirectly has a negative effect on the student, by limiting concurrent choices. That said, it's a harsh change of reality when after grad school the chances of ever deciding between concurrent offers is nearly non-existent, and you have to decide on what's currently available in a vacuum.

Not commenting on the rest of this, but curious... Why do you feel you can so definitively say this thread is for applicants? It was started by the person you're saying shouldn't post here, and there no forum wide restriction on who posts where. As for compromising the "integrity" of a thread, why would you post in a thread started by someone who you feel ethically compromises it? It rather seems like you're trying to tell someone they don't belong in a conversation they started, which I really don't get.