Eigen

Personally, I always start the conversation about finances with new graduate students. I know a lot of them are too nervous to ask about it, so we talk about what the stipends are, and how able people are to able to live on it in the area. I feel like it's a very important consideration.

I did this for one program because I was going to be in the area. They set up the full visit/interview day for me with faculty and grad students.

Yeah, that's the fellowship. Definitely helps, a lot.

Yeah, we're at the same (different from you) school though.

Unless things have significantly changed in BMS (or there's a fellowship involved) that's not the base RA/TA package, for sure.

Definitely ask current graduate students. Our stipends aren't bad, but we pay ~$2k per year in student fees, and another ~$1800 if we chose to take the school insurance (or more if we have outside insurance). Some of it is also a difference in the administrative structure- we've talked to our administration about reducing fees, and they've said they'd rather focus on increasing stipends by a similar amount. Other schools I know find it easier to move money around in the budget to provide "benefits", and that's easier than coming up with the cash in payroll to increase stipends. On the other hand, we have a huge amount of free software available through the University, and while laptops are hard to come by, grad students can pick up University desktops for offices- not state of the art, but very serviceable. One other thing that I've found to be really interesting is the length of funding provided by the school. We have some programs that only provide funding for the first 3 years of the program on admission. I also got some offers that had amazing dollar amounts, but only for the first 1-3 years, with lower pay than some of my initially lower offers following that period.

Just to add, especially as an undergrad, I think it's more important to have defined contributions to a paper and be able to talk about those in detail than the position of authorship. Even at the post-grad level, I'm starting to see more and more papers with end-sections defining exact contributions of each author- especially in projects that are getting less and less easily divided in to "first author, last author, others". A good rule of thumb I've heard a lot (and like) is that the first author should have done about 80% of the work on the paper to be a clear first author. It's not an exact thing, but it gives a good qualitative sense of contributions. Much less, and you're approaching the territory where co-first authors (i.e., "these authors contributed equally to this work") becomes more and more appropriate. Single author papers are really highly field dependent. In most bench sciences, for example, it's almost impossible to have less than two authors and generally 3-5 is common. In social sciences and humanities, sole authorships are really common. I'm not exactly sure where CE falls on the spectrum, to be honest. That said, co-authorship in a higher ranked journal is probably going to be better (as Fuzzy mentions) than sole authorship on a really low-ranked one. I would imagine that as an undergrad in any experimental field, sole author would be really hard to achieve- you likely had access to facilities, supplies, and perhaps some funded (and maybe even guidance on the project) that would likely lead to co-authorship with the person who provided those things.

This thread has kind of gone all over the place! Very interesting. Particularly so for me, as I'm looking at taking about a $10k pay cut dropping from fellowship back to RA. One thing that I think is under-discussed in comparing funding, personally, are benefits/additional costs. Is insurance covered as part of the stipend? What about extra fees to the University? Are there (as we've been discussing in another thread) internal grants and travel funds available? Does the school cover part of your relocation costs? Give you a computer? Is there broad availability of software available cheap/free from the University, or are you gong to be paying for it all out of pocket? I've seen a lot of my undergrads trying to compare offers, and most schools heavily emphasize the dollar amount, but it takes some digging to find what the actual cost of attendance will be- a few thousand dollars in insurance, fees, travel costs, etc. can be quite a lot. One thing I've noticed sharply in my field in the last few years is the increasing magnitude of difference between low and high-paying programs. It used to be a modest increase, but not huge- now it's approaching the point where well funded schools (Stanford, Duke, etc) are paying close to twice what low-ranked R1s are paying, which is insane.

Our graduate office has some, but it's a very new office- our school got rid of the Graduate School a number of years ago, and organizationally is just restructuring to provide central support. There's a long and sordid past about why we provide student association funds for travel, but in the end once we started, it's so popular it's never going away. The best I was able to do was cap it at 40% of the funds we allocate yearly, with the rest going to things with broader impact. It's from student fees, but fees are outside of what our programs cover- we have to pay all related fees out of pocket (although that's a gripe for another time- last I checked, we had one of the highest yearly fee requirements of any grad school in the US, which is horrible). Thanks for the additional info, Fuzzy- that's a really nice idea, kind of like professional development funds for faculty. Wish more fields did that- I think grad students would learn a lot from having even a small pot of money they needed to budget from.

That's awesome. The most we can get is ~$300/year in school-based awards, and those are competitive among all graduate students that year. Our department funds exactly $0 for conference travel. We also fund a lot of travel out of our graduate student association- that's not exactly free money though, since we all pay in ~200 per year, and only some people get travel awards out of it. It's more cost-sharing than anything else. All of our grants can fund travel, but it's not an explicit line item so the choice is often between lab supplies/equipment and sending someone to a conference. And even when it's sending someone to a conference, it's about how you split the available travel funding between the 4-5 people that can go to said conference. That said, I've found there's lots of money available to apply for, and I've been quite successful finagling funds from unusual sources as well- I've just never heard of it as an allotment- it's always been something I've had to justify/argue on a case by case basis. Every time I've asked about internal research grants (for computers, travel, etc.) I've been told that's what my stipend is for! The most useful one for me that I've now passed on to some junior graduate students in my department is making use of "recruitment money"- I offer to run a graduate recruiting booth for our department at the conference, and the department/school are usually quite happy to pay my way to do so.

My point was that you're conflating your PI not wanting to pay for your trip to the conference with him not wanting you to go, when the two don't seem to be related in this case. Most of your language (ie, hijacked) seem to imply malice/improper behavior. If your PI just wanted to go to the conference, they could have gone without presenting as well. A couple of years ago I wouldn't have thought people paying out of pocket for conferences was very common.... Then I spent the last 2 years reviewing applications for some of our school's travel grants for graduate students, and was surprised at the number of students covering some or all of the costs out of pocket. Definitely less common in STEM, but still a good number. Granted, we're not a top 10 school, but funding is pretty decent overall. I also think considering how much you're willing to pay for an opportunity (like a conference) can be good. It helps weigh how much you want to do it with how important (and valuable to your career) it really is- and can help you see the perspective of your PI when they're weighing travel costs. It's also fairly common to not know all of your available funding sources until pretty close to the wire (in my experience), so knowing how much you're willing to pay in case of shortfalls/not getting grants is a great idea. Definitely look for grants, there are a huge number of grants within schools and within conferences for graduate student travel and registration. Just curious, but I've never heard of anything like a bulk sum/travel allowance in my field. Is it common in yours? All funding is either tied to grants (ie, presenting research from a specific project and at the PI's discretion) or competitive in nature (from the conference organizers, department, school, outside foundations, etc.)

I think one thing that you still seem to have conflated in your head is your PI "taking" your authorship vs your PI not paying for you to go present. The way I still read the situation is that you got presentations accepted. Yay! You don't seem willing to pay out of pocket to go present them. Your project/PI don't have funds available to you. You don't have a grant that will pay for you to go. Your PI/co-author have other funds available, and are presenting so you don't have to retract the paper. Your last post still uses the "shoved aside" descriptor, when I don't get that read on it at all. Why don't you just pay your way and go to the conference? Even in a field with good funding, most graduate students I know still foot all or a large portion of their travel to conferences and/or get grants to pay for it. I would consider it uncommon to have all or even the bulk of your conference travels throughout graduate school paid for outside of very well funded labs. Also, just to clarify... You initially said you had two first author publications accepted. Are you referring to the conference paper, or are you talking about actual publications? IE, do you have two first author publications and this is just a presentation off of them? Or is this previously unpublished data?

I can't reiterate this advice enough. In the last couple of years, I've seen a number of graduate students get told "you have x amount of time to get your act together, or X will happen". Usually getting fired/swapped to the MS track. And then the PI doesn't bring it up again- they've given a deadline, and said what they expect to happen. The students assume that since the PI isn't bringing it up again, everything is now OK. Then x amount of time passes, and the PI meets with them to assess progress, they haven't done what they were told to do, and bad things happen. Chemistry graduate school is more like a job than many other fields- you are solely employed by your PI, and labs are run like a small business. The expectation that you work normal hours is quite common, as are other industry like standards of behavior. I even know some labs that use signed employment contracts & weekly/monthly/quarterly progress reports. I also want to reiterate Fuzzy's advice: stop trying to attribute feelings/intentions to your PI. They're acting like a boss, as they are supposed to. And treating you as an employee, as is typical. You don't get to tell them how many hours they should put in- they own the lab, they have the funding to pay for everything, including your salary and expenses. On the other hand, they get to tell you what they expect from you. If you feel like their expectations are out of line with what you are OK with doing, then your option is generally to leave (as in a job) and find another employer (PI) with an approach to management that fits better with what you are looking for. Your PI having a different management style than you like or are used to doesn't make either of you wrong, at worst it makes you a bad fit for her group.

I'd suggest that the advice on Academia Stack Exchange is not necessarily the best, from reading it, and I certainly wouldn't base your decision off that. If you really want a better view, I'd ask on the Chronicle of Higher Education forums, but I doubt it will be much different than the advice I gave you earlier. What you don't seem to be addressing here, at least to me, is your willingness to pay out of pocket (or your ability to secure competitive grants for funding) to attend the conference. It doesn't seem like your PI is telling you you can't go, just that they aren't willing to pay for you. That's not particularly uncommon.

It's quite a few states, yours may not be among them: http://www.ncssfl.org/docs/States%20with%20Foreign%20Language%20Graduation%20Requirements%20-%20%20Revised%202010.pdf

At least in my state, Latin would not count to satisfy a high-school "core" language credit. And I'm pretty sure the same is true at the Federal level, although not positive. It's not that it's a useless language, but the point of the language credit being required in high school is to help develop additional means of communication- and since Latin is a dead language, it's not useful for global/cross cultural communication. Lots of our local high schools (esp. Catholic schools) teach Latin in high school, but most do it in addition to a modern language.

I actually also have a couple of presentations in my CV that I was presenting author but not first author on. I was already going to the conference, and the first author (another grad student in our group) was not able to come. I was second author on the project anyway, so I presented his poster for him.

Just to comment, you can annotate papers from within Endnote (at least in X7), and you can view the PDFs natively within the program. If you want extensive notes, there are two primary ways I'd suggest going about it: 1) Annotate the PDF. This is good, especially if you want to highlight a few specific things. 2) Write a quick summary, export said summary as a PDF, and attach both the PDF summary/notes and the paper to your reference in Endnote. Endnote (as well as most other citation managers) lets you attach multiple files to a given reference- I usually have the reference, any supplementary information, and then any extra figures I've downloaded/made based on the reference, and if I have them, notes on the reference/importance. I've only briefly used Zotero and Mendeley, but aside from base design choices (and price), I've found the feature set of EndNote, Mendeley & Zotero to be pretty similar- one will come out with a feature first, then the others fairly quickly adopt or one-up it. For instance, you can do pretty much everything TakeruK suggests in Endnote. I used Endnote X2 for a very long time before upgrading, and I'm glad I did- a lot of the bugginess of some of the earlier releases is definitely gone. From a back-end perspective, I appreciate the flexibility in being able to design your own input/output styles easily- it makes going from Endnote to BibTeX pretty easy, as well as to any other citation manager. Cite-while-you-write is nice, but I prefer using the in line unformatted citation codes, and not updating/making the bibliography until the end- it saves having the issue Rising_Star mentioned. You can also convert the bibliography to plain text when you have your final paper, and then make any small edits you want to it directly. Editing in a response to TakeruK: Endnote's cite while you write is pretty much exactly the same thing as cite keys in bibtex. The coding is even very similar. Endnote uses a ref ID (numerical) and author/year bracketed and inserted in the text, then at the end compiles and creates a bibliography from those IDs. i.e. Smith 2007 with a ref ID of 742 would be {Smith, 2007 #742}. When you get used to it, you don't need to drag/drop from endnote, you can just type them in as you go. Multiple references just get tagged together with semicolons {Smith, 2007 #742;Smith, 2008 #743} which will reference the two in one place. Especially with the recent editions, I find Endnote the closest commercial equivalent to JabRef/BibTeX, and the underpinnings of how it does citations via compile are very similar to BibTeX. Endnote also supports natively an export of a library (or subset of references) to a BibTex file, and you can script in what you would like as the cite key from each reference.

In my field it's very, very typical for the presenting author to be either the first author or last author, and also common for it to be the last author (PI) unless the first author is a senior graduate student. It would be quite rare for the presentation to be a first year graduate student rather than the PI. It's also typical for presentations (oral or poster) to have a different authorship/order than the publication that they're based on. They're indexed separately, and the presentation author/presenter should be first. It would be different if you put together the presentation, but someone else presented it. I only verge on IEEE, however- I know some things change a bit, but it's not to the CompSci extreme where conference presentations are more important than peer-reviewed publications. The work is yours, it's been published as such. Your PI or Co-PI presenting on the work will more than likely bring a greater deal of recognition to the work than you presenting on it. It's also work overseen and paid for by the PIs, and as such they have just as much of a right as you do to speak on said work.

Make sure you have the OK of your advisor. Bench sciences are a bit more territorial of time/research. Most advisors would likely think it's a cool idea, some won't- and you don't want to end up on the bad side of your PI from that. Especially if, say, this person has a bad history with your PI, or there's competition for grants. Other non-bench fields are a bit looser, but most bench fields tie the graduate student to the PI very tightly, and collaborations usually involve the PI at least in some part. Similarly, at least in Chemistry, your PI would need to be on any publications that come out of it, as a general rule. They fund you completely, and there's an implied non-compete clause in that relationship.

Unless your school is unusual, you dont "switch" fields in a PhD program. You leave the current program, and apply fresh to the new one. It's not like switching majors is in undergrad. I'd also say it's unethical to have the PolSci department fund your prerequisites for CompSci. You'd be taking the spot and funding intended for a PhD student in political science, while not intending to finish or continue in either that program or that field.

Coming from the bench sciences, there's a lot of replication. It's not direct replication of the entirety of someone else's study, but there's a lot of procedural/comparative replication. If you're building off of (or comparing to) someone else's work, you would usually do a part (or all) of what they did, and then show why yours is better/worse. Same with synthetic work- you don't get credit for designing, say, a base molecule that someone else has already made, but there's a good chance a number of other people will make it on the way to something else, or to use for something else. It's not perfect, but errors do get quite frequently caught because of it- especially things that end up being environmental and not considered as a cause. There's a famous case of a synthesis that would only work with the tap water at one particular university- they happened to have copper in the pipes, which was leeching into the water. Once that was found, copper was added everywhere else in trace amounts, and then it was replicable. Biological work is harder to replicate, but molecular biology as a field is trying really hard to standardize- typing cell lines so direct comparisons can be run between different labs around the world, requiring (or strongly suggesting) profiles of cells used as well as typing data to ensure apples to apples in those comparisons. Not all data gets replicated, and some stuff is pretty damn hard/impossible to replicate exactly, but the more "interesting" or groundbreaking work (like in LaCour's case that challenged all currently supported theories), you can be sure that dozens of groups around the world will try to duplicate your results within months of publication.

It's more shocking how blatant he was. Making up almost a million dollars in funding and no one catching it?

The reason I don't think it works well as a title, is that being a "fellow" carries a different connotation than being a graduate student with a fellowship. Generally, I only see people in post-doctoral positions (or sabbatical positions) actually referring to themselves as a fellow. It's technically correct to say that you're an NSF Graduate Fellow, but I don't think it's generally going to be received well.

Very worth reading the CHE thread on this- around 15 pages, and lots of interesting details and opinions. I'm betting UCLA's Pol Sci department will have a very hard time recovering from this as a whole, and the IRB issues are going to haunt the school as well. Also worth noting that there are allegations that at least one other of his recent papers used falsified data. http://polisci.emory.edu/faculty/gjmart2/papers/lacour_2014_comment.pdf