Eigen

Not in the subject line, though. Unless it's changed? Subject line when I got it was "YEAR NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Competition Result". Body had a congratulatory email. Depends if your spam filters are subject line or anything else, but you can always just white-list the NSF email address (info@nsfgrfp.org).

Just going to say, coming into a thread over two months after the last post to do nothing but critique the posters in it... Seems a bit strange? The OP didn't ask for coping strategies or help, they asked what was expected of graduate students in other programs. If your program doesn't make you TA and take classes at the same time, that's great. It's also rare. It's much more common to have to take classes, TA and do research at the same time in your first semester Also, this as a blanket statement is really bad advice, especially given to someone you don't know on the internet. There are many people who get into graduate school that are not cut out for graduate school. That doesn't mean everyone who gets tells someone they aren't cut out for it is correct, but to label them all wrong? A complete lack of willingness to listen to things you don't want to hear is, among other things, what leads to people leaving PhD programs with MS degrees after 8+ years.

Your GPA isn't important enough to not take classes (and gain a new skill set) just because you might drop your GPA "a bit".

Moved to the appropriate section. You still didn't answer the other questions (field of study). Your question is too general to be answerable.

Just please, please wear something professional. It doesn't have to be fancy, but it needs to be professional. We've had people wearing things that have no business whatsoever in a professional situation to interviews recently. A polo and slacks wouldn't draw any comments in our department, but something suited for a nightclub rather than a day of interviews definitely does.

This is too general to be answerable. You need to give a field of study. Additionally, I'm not sure what this has to do with applications. Is this a proposal for a grant application or grad school applications? If this is work for a graduate course, it should go in the "coursework" section. If this is work for a graduate research project, it should go in the "research" section. If this is work for an undergraduate class, it doesn't really belong here.

You really need to find someone in your discipline, and ideally someone you know personally. The IP risks with sharing your dissertation drafts are huge, especially if you plan on going on to publish it elsewhere. Do you not have peers in your department you swap documents with? I've proofed close to a dozen dissertations for friends, and gotten some to look over my chapters as well.

Basically, if enough people that were awarded the fellowship decline to take it, you might get one. No one can really comment about the chances, since it depends on other peoples individual decision.

Probably better off to sublet/see about on campus graduate housing your first semester, and then when your fiancé comes down you can both look for a place together. This will significantly decrease your initial costs, and at the end of the first semester you should have the savings you need to put down a deposit on a place of your own.

Yeah, it definitely depends on how much you have. My wife and I were in a similar place to Shadowclaw- we moved a full mid-sized U-haul. Neither of us were willing to leave our books & bookshelves, desks, etc. But if we were in a tighter place financially, we probably would have looked at putting some of it in storage and moving with less, and coming back for the rest when we were more financially stable in the new place.

Deposits are hard to come up with, but my department will definitely help out with that (occasionally). The maxed credit cards make it much harder, for sure. As to actual moving costs, $500 seems like a lot. Have you thought about not moving a lot of that stuff? Many of my peers came to grad school with one or two bags, or a carload if they were driving. Granted, if you're driving across the country, that makes sense. Selling off furniture, etc. and using that to fund the move is highly advisable. Moving the stuff is expensive, and you can frequently get the same/similar stuff in your new city for about the same you sold your old stuff for, minus the cost of having to move it. It also gives you some bank for the initial move (and deposits), and you can get new stuff once your stipend is flowing in.

I think you'll have a hard time with masters, period. Depends a bit on the geographic area, but in my locale it's tough to get adjunct jobs with a PhD and faculty that know you.

There's a 9 or 10 page discussion on the Chronicle forums. What at it boils down to is a lot of people think she should have been fired, but not the way she was. The board fired her without any regard for dismissal process for faculty, which is an immense overstep of their power.

To the other helpful advice, I'll add this: When emailing reminders, be very clear in the subject line, and brief. To use this case as an example: You sent an email a week before the deadline to the whole lab, with an attachment, asking for comments, and also reminding your advisor. She probably didn't note that, or if she did, it was lost in the "email from someone to a group about a draft". Then you didn't remind her again until the day of. Is there any reason you didn't include a reminder in the email you sent her the day before the deadline? My suggestion for being proactive in the future would be to send her an email reminder, separate from anything else, a week out. Put in the subject line "Reminder: Letter for Travel Scholarship Due in 1 Week". Don't put other topics in the same email, just the succinct, pertinent information. Do the same thing 3 days out. Were this one of my undergrads, I'd be a bit annoyed in the situation you describe. They wouldn't have really reminded me a week out, and wouldn't have reminded me again until the day of, which might be too late to really get it done. I would have expected an email reminder (just to me, specifically reminding me) about a week out, and then another a few days ahead of time if I hadn't done it yet. That said, I'm clear to them about what I expect from them in terms of reminders. On the general introduction, when you say your advisor is hard to get time with, do you mean she's not in her office during the day? Or is she in her office, but doesn't have time to talk if you stop by? What happens when you email her or stop by her office and say "I really need your help on something, can we schedule a time this week or next week to meet"? Have you been explicit in telling her you need her help with things? I'm amazed that any department lets her get away with not being in her office a significant amount during the day. Most of my faculty, even the most MIA ones, clock a good 4-6 hours in office/around the department.

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Just tagging in, but I think people are way to quick on this forum to call "troll" when someone posts something at odd with what they've heard/been told. As a pre-emptive warning, if the thread devolves into people arguing over who is or is not a troll, I'll shut things down to give everyone a break to chill out.

I'm having a hard time being sure from your post, but are you in the situation of already having lied and trying to recover from it? Or trying to decide if you should lie? It looks to me to be the former- you applied to two schools, wait listed at one, offer at another. Then you told the wait listed school that you had "several" offers. In that case, your decision on what to do next is a bit more difficult, as you've already lied to the PI about your situation, and now need to back-track and tell them you exaggerated, and don't have "several offers", that you just have one other offer. If you weren't being exact in your post, and haven't told the school you have multiple offers (when you don't), then Fuzzy & TakeruK both have great takes on how to handle it. Offers are leverage, but they certainly aren't everything. And being constrained is quite common in applications- family ties, responsibilities, etc. I only applied to 3 schools, and it didn't hurt my odds at all.

Echoing TakeruK, having a paper "submitted" means very little. It really just means that you had a draft ready to go. It could get a desk rejection 30 minutes after you submit your application, or it could go on to review. You had it ready for submission, it was only not submitted due to a miscommunication. I can't think anyone would care.

It's all or nothing.

I think you need to consider the reasons you're getting turned down on a case by case basis. Did you ask the faculty who told you that you weren't ready why they thought you weren't ready? What about the other excuses? In my experience, faculty only make excuses when they don't feel they can write a good letter for the student. Have you sat down with any of your faculty and asked them to help you figure out your weak areas, or where you could improve?

Just to clarify, all of what Rising_Star said is perfectly valid, unless School #1 gave you an earlier deadline. There's no external body (and CGS has no teeth) that will "make" School #1 keep your offer until April 15th. If they are a signatory of the CGS resolution (have you checked?) than they probably will. If they indicated another deadline, then you need to keep to that deadline.

Have you thought about doing an MS at ULL? With no psychology background, getting into a PhD program will be quite hard. The program at ULL is pretty good, and it's a school you're familiar with. Moreover, if you're living in the area already, it's quite inexpensive for a grad program, and they're good about partial/full support for masters. It would help you refine your interests a lot too, as your current research focus seems (to me) to be very, very broad.

To add on to this, it's very rare for there to be the *option* to do something other than work in your PIs lab over the summers. The summer is when you're expected to get the bulk of your work done without semester distractions. I've seen people occasionally work out the ability to do an internship, but it took monumental amounts of work to get permission to be gone over a summer.

I may be wrong, but I've never seen an engineering stipend that wasn't 12 months, so I'd assume the offers the OP is reporting are indeed over 12 months.

I'd be careful taking the results of one (hotly debated) book and generalizing it to "commonplace". That said, it's common sense that schools don't want to waste offers on people who are obviously not going to attend. But as TakeruK says, if you want to attend, tell them your other offers and make sure they know they're one of your top (or your top) choice. Then the offer becomes leverage, rather than a risk.