Eigen

That's a very personal decision. I fall very strongly into the "don't do graduate school unless you're offered a fully funded position", but how much debt you're willing to go into depends on you, your family, your goals, and your field.

There's also going to be skepticism on the part of School A because you've turned them down once. If I tried really hard to recruit someone, they turned me down for a better fit, and then applied again immediately... I'd start to doubt their ability to decide how well they fit into a program. Make your decision, and then be at peace with it. You can always leave if you don't like it, but you definitely shouldn't start off thinking about going somewhere else- it won't give you the best chance at B.

Hasn't come to my institution yet, but I do show the $34k yearly stipend in Fastlane now. My CO still hasn't heard anything, so not sure when it will come through for me. I don't usually use it as a title, but have very occasionally. On business cards? Yes, I'd think it's obnoxious, and won't lead to people taking you more seriously.

I use Box- I got grandfathered in for a free "faculty" account since I was on the University's IT committee when they were trialing it. It's OK- and I like some features of it- but I don't find it is as generally useful as DropBox, personally. I went ahead and bit the bullet on a $99/year dropbox plan, and I'm glad I did. I only needed about 20-50gb, but with the 1Tb storage, I end up using it for a lot more varied copies of things than I did, like raw image data from my cell studies. Nice to have it all in one place instead of a second raw data folder to back up. I figured it would take me more time to try to find, migrate, and use another backup system (like I use dropbox), than the relatively small amount of cost relative to the other cloud options.

I learned, thankfully, from the example of a post-doc in my lab group my first year. His laptop was stolen, and he hadn't backed up his data in 6 months! That was a lot of lost data, and a lot of frustration on the part of all of us involved. A lot of the raw data could be recovered from instrument computers or lab notebooks, but none of the analysis. Taking a slight break from seriousness, in favor of PhDComics. Seriously, it has every tip you would ever need to know as a graduate student. It's like they have a camera in my office....

One other recommendation from me: Try to find a way to keep digital copies of your lab notebooks from the start. I'm assuming here that you keep physical notebooks, of course. At least in the bench sciences, it's usually policy that notebooks (a) don't leave the lab while you're in grad school, and ( stay with the lab after you graduate. Accordingly, I've found it immensely useful to have copies of all of my raw notes and data at times when I'm not in the lab, and want to take such with me when I go. Currently, I'm digitizing (either scanning or typing) several hundred pages of notes as I prepare to leave and want copies to take with me. Don't let yourself be in that situation! If you're a windows user, OneNote can work quite well. On Mac, I've found Growly Notes (and the accompanying iPad app) to be the best bet. I also strongly recommend becoming familiar with basic vector graphics (Illustrator or similar) and make yourself a website/web presence at some point (Reclaim Hosting is really, really cheap for current graduate students).

Is is also one of the reasons I decided DropBox was worth paying for- a years worth of past versions backed up remotely. That said, never trust one backup method. I back up to my home PC, several different work computers, Dropbox, and an both a personal and a work external drive. Not all are perfectly current (external drives are monthly), but hey keep my data safe.

To note- I worry a bit about using google drive due for a lot of my work, due to the terms of use. Especially with any of my work that has a large potential for a productive patent, some of google's terms could be read as giving them a license to use it by storing my data on their servers.

Yes, but there are lots of things you can do working 50-70 hours a week while getting severely underpaid!

What other than a job requires a PhD?

I actually prefer MS Publisher for posters... Cheaper, too.

If you're still in the same locale, I'd suggest taking them out for coffee or to get dinner. Some of the best moments for me have been getting to catch up with some of my former undergrads and share the excitement of starting grad school. Also, tell them what a big help they were/how much it meant. It always seems obvious, but it's always nice to know.

Also likely not the best use of your time. To quote from faculty on the CHE forums: Note the 4th line. Other than to get a job, nothing really requires a PhD. Loving a field and spending a lifetime studying it certainly don't.

Not really. There are other reasons to want to work in a field, and lots of reasons to want to learn more about an area, but you don't need a PhD for those. You get a PhD if you want a job that requires a PhD. If you just want to study a field and don't need a PhD to do so, there's really no reason to get a PhD- you'll get further and be far happier without it. If you want to learn more about an area, you can read and follow that field without being enrolled in a program or getting the degree.

The advice you're looking for is very field and personality specific. All of the stuff that worked for me hasn't really worked for any of my colleagues- we all had different approaches that worked for us. What you need to know going into grad school is yourself- how you work best, how you learn best, when you work best, etc. Then apply that to what you have to do. And then iterate from your results. I've found very few broadly useful books (i.e., Getting What You Came For). Most are quite field specific, as well as specific to institutional culture. Similarly, apps/calendars/to-do lists... I don't use any regularly. TBH, none of my peers do either. I tend to have lists all over my desk and make extensive use of sticky notes. But really, for anything, the best use of your time is to pick a couple that look good and try them. One general recommendation I have is to read Inside Higher Ed/Chronicle of Higher Education regularly. Knowing the culture, and where your institution fits is a very, very useful thing to have in your abilities. As to reading papers.... I think starting out, you'll get more mileage from skimming a bunch of papers/journals in your field than you will from in-depth readings. Sit down early in the week, and go through the table of contents in 4-6 journals, and read abstracts. Flag a handful of interesting looking papers to read. Skim those, then pick a couple that look really well done and read in detail. Then pick references from those papers, and repeat the cycle. For professional fluency, nothing will help you like having a firm grasp on what's being published and what's of interest- i.e., skimming every issue of major journals in your field (and Science and Nature, usually). But all of this is highly field specific- I'm making recommendations for chemistry/biology, but from talking to my friends in the humanities/social sciences, they would advice completely different reading methods. I think you'll find some of the specifics you're looking for here (), and there are other similar topics in that forum if you search back relating to software, etc. The only sweeping piece(s) of advice I'll give, that I think are broadly applicable: Set aside time to read every day. Set aside time to write every day. Keep track at the end of the day of what you did. This will help you looking back over your week/month/year. Pick a citation manager. Which doesn't really matter. Start using it to organize all those paper's you're reading. Learn TeX.

The exchange of money does create a business transaction, but from my view, you're framing the business transaction differently than the school sees it. From the schools side, you're paying a fee to provide for the time and effort involved in reviewing your application. From your perspective, you're paying a fee to get a status- admitted/rejected- as the result of that review. A business transaction is shaped entirely by the language you (and the school) agreed to when you payed the fee- it's not fair to tag additional expectations onto that just because you have them, especially when you're imposing a timeline onto it.

Personally, I'd also consider it a nice blinking red warning light that you dodged a bullet when the school is disorganized enough time to not be able to send out rejections at a certain point.

I do know one person with a horror story of not having IRB approval at one of two schools for a study... They ended up not being able to use any of the data for their dissertation. Was a disaster. Accordingly, I agree with the "IRB everything" standpoint.

Technically, the school isn't agreeing to give you a response in exchange for your $100. They're agreeing to review your application materials for $100. And if you're not comfortable with paying an application fee without assurance of a response, it's completely your choice whether or not to pay the money, and if you feel it's worth the cost or not. It's not theft when you're getting what you agree to. Additionally, you're always free to call the institution in question and ask what your status is. I think schools should let you know, but couching it in terms of "obligated to", or "theft not to" or "essentially stealing money" is just absurd.

There are differences from job postings, sure- namely, you're not necessary to their work as a graduate student. Accordingly, they don't have personal devoted to handling the applications full time (aka, HR). As such, your application fee goes to (usually) paying the material expenses and a small portion of the salary of the administrative coordinator that collects all the packets, puts them together etc. Also to note, rarely does the department you're applying to get the application fee. It's usually the graduate school that gets the fee, and uses it for their overhead in the process. But the graduate school isn't the one who issues the decision(s), nor do they have staff to do so.

This sounds like a question your advisor needs to answer after looking over your experimental design.

Not in the humanities, but at my school the official process is to petition the graduate faculty in the department. I had to write a petition, and give comparisons of the courses I wanted to transfer credit for, and show that they covered equivalent material in a similar fashion. IE, that the courses were comparable to what the new institution offered. Then the graduate faculty reviewed the petition, and decided whether they would accept the previous coursework or not.

I understand where you're coming from, but in my experience you're better off completely taking the responsibility for your low grades, explaining that you had mitigating personal circumstances, and moving on from there. This is a graduate program, and as such people are generally expected to be responsible adults. Accommodations can be trickier at the graduate level (there is less latitude in what can constitute reasonable accommodations), and things like guidance on grading & seeking accommodations is much less visible. You're expected to have some experience with what you need, and how to get it. It's often one of the most difficult transitions of undergraduate to graduate education. With something like alcoholism, for which there are rarely in-class accommodations (it's usually just a leave of absence), I'm not sure what guidance you expected. You keep alluding to different treatment- did you have an official disability waiver from the office of disability services? Or did you just disclose it to your professors? There's no reason that you need to tell your program, ever, what your disability is. That's what the office of disability services is for. They will certify that you have a disability, and what accommodations are appropriate. They will not reveal, and faculty won't ask, what the disability is.

It's sadly quite common for universities to never inform applicants, or inform them sometime in the summer of rejections. It's possible you're on a silent wait list, it's possible you're getting a silent rejection, or it's possible that the University will send out rejections in the next couple of months. While it does suck, it's not a bad thing to get used to. Most job's, academic or not, won't notify people they don't hire- they just contact those that they want to hire, and you don't find out where you fell until you notice that the position has been filled. It's kind of hard to term it "unprofessional", when the common professional MO is that rejections aren't noted. The priority of the school is notifying and working with the students they're interested in, and while most try to send out rejections in a timely manner, they're usually significantly understaffed and tight on time.

I agree that you should appeal, but I would be careful about how you word it. Your latest post here sounds like you're avoiding personal blame for the low GPA, and that won't win you any points on an appeal. Similarly, as Julliet mentioned, you have to actually have a disclosed and verified disability with disability services to receive accommodations. The way you word your post, it seems to me you didn't have a registered accommodation, which is on you not the school. Also, as mentioned, it's not the fact that you're 0.02 points below the GPA cutoff- it's that you're so close to the cutoff to begin with. It's also worth mentioning that some programs have both the GPA cutoff, and require no lower than certain standalone grades. Especially given that your average was 3.5 in the first semester, that would indicate some really low grades to pull you down to 2.98. At my school, and grade lower than a C+ is grounds for dismissal in addition to the overall GPA having to be above 3.0. Also, you'll want to be careful about alcohol and the ADA requirements: Just to pull from one set of University FAQs: You have to be undergoing treatment for alcoholism, and not currently be "abusing" alcohol. Also, reasonable accommodations for alcoholism are usually a leave of absence/counseling to get the problem under control, not extra test time or extended deadlines. It's worth noting the last line of the second paragraph: "An alcoholic student who does not meet the performance standards of the university is also not considered qualified."