Eigen

The only successful negotiations I know have been in person. It's really hard to do over the phone/email. I've also only really seen it when one school asks what they can do to recruit you (usually at a visit weekend) which is when there's a good opening to say "I really would love to come to School A, but I've gotten Offer X at School B, and the extra money would really help with x, y and z". Emailing cold to the department and negotiating doesn't usually end well.

Even if not asked, I can assure you I will go tell the admissions committee if a visiting student is acting unprofessionally. And I usually get asked anyway. This isn't just something to keep in mind for visits, but for the rest of your career. Your behavior around colleagues will be remembered- positive and negative- and you'd be surprised at how quickly a reputation can build up, and spread through a network. As mentioned, these incoming students are colleagues we will all have to put up with for the next 1-7 years, and their actions will have direct effects on the reputation of our program and our degrees. That said, as TakeruK mentions, if you act guarded the entire time you're visiting including with grad students, this will probably set off red flags too. It's pretty easy to see when someone isn't being themselves, and that makes you wonder what their "real" attitude is going to be like once they're accepted and start in the program.

Also, is the length/source of the funding the same? Will Chicago be $37k for as long as you're in the program, or is it a set number of years of funding? $37k seems in the range of an additional supplementary fellowship on top of the base stipend. Bargaining is hard- a lot of times, there's nothing the department can do to increase stipends unless they have some extra funding laying around. For instance, my department mandates that all TAs and all RAs be paid the same, to avoid any resentment among students. This policy has it's pros and cons, but it means an incoming student would have a lot less leeway to bargain the stipend up. We do occasionally recruit people with small ($5-$10k) fellowships on top of the stipend, but that depends on there being some pool of funding available to the department to use for that purpose. I'd second Rising_Stars assertion to double check the cost of living, but also look at the benefits each school is giving you- fee reductions/charges, health insurance, etc.

Honestly. I've never seen this turn out poorly- either the school sees it as a reason to up their offer to get you on board, or at worst, nothing changes.

They all said pretty much the same thing. The other people told you that usually anyone invited for a visit is accepted. The PI told you you're one of three people he's considering for a spot. There's no real difference between those two statements. No one else in the department can know how the professor will decide. You've been told directly by the professor what your chances are. No one here can shed any more light on it then that.

I'm not sure why you're calling this a paradox. There are two positions open and three people in consideration, the professor has told you he's still considering.

In my experience, most "what does this MEAN??" interactions are due to applicants way over-reading everything. Generally, it means exactly what it says at face value. In your case, the graduate advisor wants to talk to you. She likes your application, but it isn't a formal interview. Probably gives her a chance to pique your interest in the program as well, since you say it's lower ranked. There's nothing more to it. In short, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

No, you should not. GPA will almost never be a deciding factor in admissions. Having too low of a GPA can get your application thrown out early, but you say your GPA was already good. I don't really think anyone cares about differences in the 3.6/3.7 + range. Having an overall 4.0 would be worth mentioning, but not just a single semester 4.0.

To be honest, what you should expect/how you should prepare really doesn't change between an interview, a recruitment visit, or just a visit.

Exactly! Not quite devil's advocate, but different personal experiences that lead us to have slightly different leanings. I know you also have had a lot of experiences advocating for grad student rights, but I think you've had students that are a bit easier to argue for. I'm a bit more cynical, because I spent years pushing rights with the faculty and administration, only to be consistently undermined by grad students who weren't holding up "their end" of the deal.

I'm sure this is very field specific, but in most of the fields I associate with, there's no such thing as being paid as an RA for "Project A". Maybe at some top-10 institutions in huge labs where there are multiple concurrent NSF/NIH grants that you could be paid from, but that's rare-ish. I'm more familiar with a setup where there's one major grant with many aims, and I don't think there would be any problem with assigning someone who's main work is a project under aim A to help with aim B to get a publication out so the grant can be renewed. Your field (general you) might have much more succinctly defined projects, but in mine you're hired by a group, and paid as an RA for that group. You have your own projects, but you're also expected to go where you're needed in terms of time to help the whole project proceed. As to authorship, you have a quite well defined list of possibilities. My field is much simpler: Either you wrote a chunk of the paper, or you collected data that went in the paper and has not been published elsewhere. There are actually a lot of ethical considerations, but most journals in my field have started codifying what constitutes authorship, and it's usually "you collected data that went into the manuscript and wrote up that portion of the manuscript". A lot of the "grey area" work I do that doesn't necessarily give authorship tends to be computer based. I've written the base codes for all of my research groups data analysis algorithms. Some of it is published, some I will get authorship on when used, some I probably won't. I've also built and coded a number of the instruments in my group, some of which I use, and many that other people use and I don't directly get data or authorship out of. I also swap a lot of expertise outside of my research group. I have a really strong group of colleagues (some grad students, some faculty, some post-docs) that all have a different area of expertise, and we all help each other when our research overlaps. If the help develops into a significant contribution to a specific project, it gets authorship. Many other times it gets an acknowledgement with no authorship, or even just something I did for a friend that's helped me out many other times. To your last "no-no" items, I think it really depends on how you define "specifically paying you to do this". At least in my field, labs can easily be considered small businesses, with the PI as the CEO and all grad students as employees. My employment contract doesn't specify my roles, and honestly neither does the paperwork with the granting agency- other than the work I'm getting paid to do furthers the aim of that project. Accordingly, there's a good bit of latitude in what a grad student is being paid to do, imo, and generally things that keep the lab running (scheduling meetings, IT support) fall well under this. Our lab defines group jobs, and everyone gets a list of things they maintain- it's everything from safety to IT to ordering. Once things start getting personal (i.e., your last item) then I think a line has been crossed. I do worry about graduate students getting taken advantage of, but I also see a lot of examples (in the bench sciences) where grad students think too much of themselves and loose sight of the teamwork and collegiality angle. Everything comes down to "how does this benefit me", when a large part of academic science is in spreading knowledge and teaching others.

Are you getting paid as a research assistant? I know some psychology programs are a bit different than other bench sciences, but in general if you're in a PI's lab, you will need to do work that may not directly benefit you. Some of it is in exchange for you getting paid, some of it is part of what you do to pay your way (since you're getting access to facilities, resources, etc.). If you write code that makes an experiment possible, I'd certainly think you would deserve authorship on the paper. Generally, any substantive contribution to a research project will get you authorship (again, some of this is slightly field dependent). On a completely different note, I'd think you might want to re-visit your feelings of being "taken advantage of" just because you're doing something you aren't directly benefiting from. I do work for colleagues all the time that I won't end up seeing authorship from, but is part of, well, being collegial. Those people in turn help me with things that are in their wheelhouse down the road that I don't have the skills for- it's part of building up a professional network. Do you ever ask your advisor to do things that don't directly benefit them? If so, do they do those things? If they do, I think you might use that to inform your feelings of "being taken advantage of", as it's a similar (reversed) situation to what you're describing here. All of this goes out the window if you're being paid by the advisor, as that payment is the benefit for the work they are asking you to do.

That is indeed excellent advice. Thanks! Quite a bit. I've told myself (as Rising_Star said upthread) that I'll go on the job market in academics for a set number of years (for me, 3 more application cycles). After that, I'll go the non-academic route. I'm quite lucky that my field (and my particular interests) are very employable outside of academia, and the transition is pretty easy. I really enjoy teaching, and that's my primary career goal, but I'll end up being happy if I get a non-academic research/industry position as well. At some point, to me, my career goals fall far behind having a lifestyle I enjoy, that gives me time for my family and community engagement work and hobbies in addition to the grind of the job.

You wouldn't be relocating until the Fall anyway, right? I can't imagine you'd want to relocate 6+mos before the start of the semester. Most of our new grad students move to the city sometime in August, maybe July if they really want to get familiar with things before they get here.

Is there a reason you need to know now? Is the school that admitted you pushing for a fast decision? Most schools will (should) give you until April 15 to decide. Most schools decision time-tables are based around this- some might not get back to you until the end of Feb or mid-March. Unless you *need* to know now, checking in is annoying, will be perceived as pushy, and won't do your application any favors. Letting them know you've been admitted somewhere else really isn't pertinent information to the other schools.

That's great advice. Learning how to filter has helped a lot. My department is full of helpful, well-meaning, totally unsolicited advice. Every faculty member wants to know my plans, and then they all want to tell me why those plans are good or bad or dooming my career.

That's absolutely true. You can find fantastic groups at top-10 schools, and horrible groups at lower-ranked/smaller schools. In general, higher ranked schools have more pressure on the PI to not be in the lab or dealing with graduate students, but rather traveling, getting grants, and giving talks. I just had the opportunity to talk to a faculty member who thought the ideal group set-up (~60 people) was 6 projects, each with 10 grad students managed by a post-doc. I had a friend in a very similar group, and the PI had hired him as a post-doc specifically to buffer interactions with the grad students. When you have 60+ grad students in a lab, it runs like a small business. I really like the fact that I talk to my PI daily- I have some friends that are happy with much more autonomy and only talk to their PI's once or twice a year.

As a counter to the above, I have a friend that did his PhD at Berkeley and is now happily tenured. He says if he had it to do over again, he definitely would not have gone to Berkeley (or anywhere top 10) and would have done a smaller program with a well known PI for PhD, and then post-doc'd at Berkeley (or similar). I've had the same sentiment from undergrads of mine that have gone to top-10 schools, as well as colleagues I've met at conferences. I have one friend with a PI who calls the lab at 6 am and 9 pm 7 days a week to get a list of who's in lab.

IMO, Chemical Biology is also one of the most restrictive in terms of needing to follow the PIs lead. Material costs are expensive, and publishable work often spans multiple graduate students/post-docs. That means the PI is general coordinating all of the research to join into one grant application/progress report/publication, and it restricts how much overall freedom you have. It's usually all about grants: The materials you are using are coming from a grant that had specific aims to do X, Y and Z. Each year, the PI has to justify how the money that went to you in a stipend and to the materials you used was moving forward X, Y and Z aims of the project. Else, the grant gets pulled for insufficient progress. You have more freedom if you have external funding (fellowships, scholarships, grants), but it still needs to contribute towards the grant aims and objectives, usually. Larger groups will have more grants and more possible areas to work in, but you won't get to do whatever you want, for sure.

You will always be working on your PI's projects in a Chemistry PhD program. You have some leeway, depending on the advisor, in how those projects progress. But they are all under the umbrella of funding (and direction) or the PI, which is how you can get paid off of their grants. The way you describe things is how it works in some social science/humanities fields, and some non-bench STEM sciences. But "bench" STEM fields, you work on the projects your PI gives you. Labs tend to function like a small business, really. You don't mention subfield- if you're in a computational/theoretical field, you might have a bit more flexibility, but even then projects are going to be under the direction of your PI. That said, you can do a PhD on a topic that doesn't immensely interest you, and then go on to make your career around a topic that does, so it's not like you get locked into your doctoral work.

My suggested rule of thumb is: Don't go somewhere there aren't at least 3 people you'd be happy working for. Lots of things happen- you might have competition for your favorite lab, funding might drop through, the person you want to work with may be an immense jerk, or they might leave/die/get sick/take a leave of absence. So having at least 3 leaves you some wiggle room, and chances are the other two will serve on your committee/be people you work with along the way. Some Chem programs, you don't even get a final choice- you rank your top 3 lab choices, the faculty meet and divide up students. Some are rotation based, some you know who you're working for before you even get there.

Oh, I'm sure they'll be fine. I've got several post-doctoral offers on the table, thankfully, and one lecturer position. It just sucks that half of my mentors seem to tell me every move I make will "doom my career" and the other half think my other option will. But yeah, definitely not just a humanities thing. Happens a lot in STEM too.

Seconded. If they wanted you to visit, they would have invited you. Visiting without an invitation is more likely to come across poorly than help you in any way.

I went very selectively on the market in the fall, and struck out completely. It was really hard- especially because all my letter writers keep expressing complete consternation that I didn't get multiple interviews and offers. I knew that this was likely going into the season, but I got a lot of feedback on my materials that my chances were excellent, and that "any school would be lucky to have me". I know that the market is a hard- I know you can have a great CV and good materials and not get an offer anywhere if you aren't the exact fit the department decides it wants- but that doesn't make it any easier. At the moment, I'm applying for post-doctoral fellowships and visiting positions. My faculty mentors tell me that not getting an Ivy-League post-doc will kill any hope of landing a position I'll be happy in. But they also think anything less than an R1 wouldn't be a happy place. Mentors I've cultivated at other schools (SLACs, state universities) tell me a visiting position could be a great way to break into the market. But my letter writers are significantly less convinced, which makes getting each new letter for a visiting position quite difficult. I didn't apply too broadly because I'm ABD. I'm in a field where it's very uncommon to apply straight from a PhD program, so I knew it was going to be an especially hard run on the market. That said, I'm glad I didn't apply more broadly- I had schools I was pretty sure I could have gotten a job at, but with 5/5 or 5/6 teaching loads and no support for research at all. And while I might enjoy that, it's a limiting decision. You can't publish your way out of a school with no research support, so once you're there... You're there. This year was also very hard for me because it's the first time I've had to deal with rejection. I got into all the grad schools I applied to from undergrad, I was awarded all the fellowships I applied for in grad school- I've even gotten all my papers published and grants I've co-authored funded. I know that's rare, and I've been exceptionally lucky. But that doesn't make it any easier to deal with an overwhelming sense of imposter syndrome when everyone is telling me I should be easily landing a job and I'm not. So in summary, I completely feel you!

This is in no way true, and it's really bad to spread this kind of misinformation. No school is under any legal obligation to give you until April 15th to decide. The CGS resolution is a general anti-poaching agreement among schools, but it's very much not legally binding, and there really aren't any ramifications for schools that give earlier deadlines. Additionally, it ONLY applies to financial offers, and not offers of admission.