Eigen

I have yet to find a seminar I couldn't understand enough of to be worth the time. And sometimes, what was worth the time was realizing exactly how not to put a seminar together. Or how not to respond to questions. Or even just an interesting way of approaching a problem that has some vague applications to things I'm interested in. Or even "Hey, look, I can do research with that many holes in it and still get funding and tenure". But I have yet to find one that was a complete waste of time, even some of the hardcore modeling and computational seminars that make my head hurt just looking at 100 slides worth of equations and derivations. There's also something to be said for the fact that the more seminars you go to, the more you pick up, and then the easier getting more out of future seminars gets. I'd also say that there have been very few times in my program when an hour a week was so crucial to my success in the program that it wasn't worth the tradeoffs in networking and competency. There are also definitely times I take a notepad, listen intensely to the first 10-15 minutes of the talk, and then diagram schemes for my own work or write for the rest of the time. Besides, our seminars have free beer and food! That said, the students I usually have an issue with are ignoring seminars they really, really could (or should) be able to understand and go to. You'll have someone who's, say, studying Mongolian basket weaving techniques, and they refuse to go to seminars on the history of Mongolian baskets, or overviews of eastern basket weaving techniques. Because, you know, the seminar isn't titled "Mongolian basket weaving techniques", and they couldn't possibly need to know or be interested in anything not titled that.

It's a personal journey, but I also spend more time in close proximity to my lab mates than I would any coworkers. I honestly would say chemistry, and most other bench sciences are more like a job you progress through by ranks and promotions than the personal journey in less individual areas. There are certainly far more defined hierarchies of responsibility, and I would definitely say my boss would consider me partially responsible for the development of the junior grad students in the lab. I'd also say categorizing gossip as "high school" is a bit off... Most faculty I know gossip more than the grad students. People who spend a lot of time in close proximity interacting with the same other people talk. A lot.

And increasing the GPA only works if the school you're graduating from replaces your earlier grade with the new grade. At many schools, that's not the case. You just get both grades listed on the transcript, in which case doing well in another higher level course would look better for admissions. I would also say that if you retake a course, you need to be able to get a much higher grade. IE, if you can retake it and get an A, it might be worthwhile. If you don't think you're going to get that A, it's probably not worth it. I also can't speak as much for professional programs, but where some people imply it shows initiative, I would think it shows poor time management skills. I wouldn't consider retaking a course that you did "OK" on a worthwhile expenditure of time or money- you're not necessarily learning anything new. Taking initiative would be taking a higher level course than the one you did poorly on, and having that to show to balance the lower, earlier, grade.

At least in my field, scientist (or chemist) would describe anyone who works professionally in the field- and actually, probably, moreso those working in industry/government research than academics. I actually think developing outside of your dissertation area is far more important if you don't want to go into academia- you're much more likely to have to translate your work to other fields, or work on collaborative projects and know what's going on. Academia is far more forgiving of being a one-trick pony, in my experience. One common move that I see is going into consulting- either tech transfer type consulting work, or analyzing ideas for investors. In that case, the more breadth of background you have from your PhD, the better you'll be at your job. Heck, it's even good practice to take each seminar as a potential idea presentation, and take the opportunity to critically analyze the idea- what are its merits, where does it fall flat, how useful/practical would it be long term, etc. That said, I completely agree with the first part of your post- thankfully, the majority of my department, junior or senior, are not looking for traditional academic appointments, so there are a number of options depending on exactly what you want to do and where you want to go.

I read it more as tempering expectations. IE, we generally expect the bulk of our junior graduate students to have poor professional socializing skills. They're still young. Expecting them to not be that way, and being annoyed by very common behaviors is, in itself, annoying. Or I could be reading it completely wrong. I do have on more to add though: Avoiding seminars/talks by outstanding scholars in the field because they aren't the exact subfield you're most interested in. The complaints lately about mandatory attendance at department seminars (we don't do subfield specific seminars) is immense, with lots of people saying they aren't interested in anything outside of their current planned dissertation research. To me, that seems especially naive in terms of developing yourself as a scientist long term.

I think one of the side moves we're going to see more of going forward, although likely not at R1s, is the non-research Tenure Track, for exactly that reason. Links escape me at the moment, but I've seen more schools adopting the "track" method for new TT faculty- you choose whether you're going to be doing more teaching/service or more research, and the standards you're held to during TT reflect that. If you choose to focus more on teaching, your methodologies, research on teaching, and publications in that area carry more weight, and you carry a heavier teaching/service load. It allows for "security" for what are now long contract contingent faculty (professors of the practice, instructors) while allowing them to focus on teaching, and tenuring based on teaching ability. I also think that when we start talking about adjuncts, VAPs and short-term lecturer gigs, field matters a lot more. Post-doctoral appointments are common in STEM, and have been for years. You expect to graduate, and then spend 1-5 years beefing up your research and/or teaching portfolio before going on the market and successfully landing a job. In recent years, "teaching post-docs" or teaching fellowships, have gotten more prominent for those interested in focusing less on building a research portfolio and more on building a teaching portfolio. At least in my field, VAPs are either a senior faculty member on sabbatical (rarer) or synonymous with a teaching post-doc. Lecturers tend to be long term hires that teach the bulk of the department's service courses, usually on a 4/4 or 5/5 load, and manage the bulk of the graduate TAs.

You seem to be second guessing and overthinking everything he says. Why? If you don't trust him or have a decent relationship, don't work for him. Else, take him at face value.

It's very difficult for us to take volunteers in our lab, and volunteers even with the proper paperwork have no liability coverage from the university in the case of an accident. The options are to either pay the University during the summer and take the research as a course for credit, or to get paid as a researcher. Not sure why you don't want to take the cash. As for having to track this professor for months, chances are he wasn't really looking until the end of the semester, and now he's going to get you and someone else to work for him. Not sure why you would find that insulting.

1) Being sure you know more than any of the current grad students and most of the faculty. 2) Avoiding department events or senior grad students socializing. Lots of other minor things, but those are the two big ones for me. The first is just annoying, the second is both annoying and damaging to becoming part of the department.

Anyone else heard about this from their CO? Mine still hasn't heard anything from NSF, which makes me curious.

You can incur a penalty if you owe more than a certain amount, but unless you're earning an enormous amount more than the average grad student, you won't hit that cap. The so-called "underpayment penalty", if you look at the forms, is basically a percentage of the amount you would have owed each day of the year, compounded until the point at which you pay it.

Just FYI, you can also choose to just not pay quarterly taxes. I don't. My non-fellowship income is taxed, and my wife's income is taxed, so the amount I end up paying interest on at the end of the year is pretty small. On around ~3k in taxes owed in April this last year, I think the interest was going to be $30-$60 or something? Worth it to me to not have to pay that quarterly. It's just a balancing game based on what comes due at the end of the year, with the goal to be under $1k owed OR 100% of the tax you owed last year payed. So you can just make sure that your withholdings + estimated payments equal what you owed last year, and you should be fine even if you underpay for this year. First year is definitely the hardest. TBH, looking at programs/professional preparers only made it harder, as most are not set up for the very, very few people that have fellowships as opposed to TAs/RAs. One year Turbotax told me that I was going to owe around $9k, because it kept counting my tuition waiver as income, and nothing I could do would change it.

Quarterly taxes are the same as for any other self-employed individual, and there are plenty of resources to help with that. In the scheme of things, the purchase of books (and even a computer) will have a minimal impact on owed taxes, even if audited. Not paying taxes on the stipend at all, however, will have a significant effect. It doesn't really matter what your school tells you, or what a professional tells you (unless they're willing to eat the penalty in case of audit), what matters is what the official IRS rules are. And they're happy to clarify and walk you through it if you call their helpline. Bottom line, IRS makes the rules, and anyone contradicting the IRS statements is flat out wrong. The test for tax-exemption is simple: If it is required to enroll in the program, it is required. Hence, tuition and fees count. If it's not required of everyone enrolled in the program, it's not tax exempt. As I mentioned above though, this is a minor issue in the scheme of things, and filing one way or the other will probably not cause a major issue in the future. As for estimates on quarterly taxes, I'm not sure what the mystery is. You know your income for the year, you estimate taxes. If you overestimate, the IRS owes you money when you file for the year. If you underestimate, then you owe them. It's the exact same thing as the estimates you provide to an employer for paycheck withholdings- you're just responsible for mailing in the checks, rather than your employer mailing them in. As to your earlier question of why schools don't hand out W-4s: They can't, as they aren't your employer. W-4s are for estimations of withholding for the employer to send to the IRS instead of the employee. For fellowships, the school does not employ the fellow- they simply handle passing the money through from the originator (grant, etc) to the student. You, as the student, are considered self-employed with that income, and as a self-employed individual, you estimate your taxes yourself. The presence or absence of a W-4 says nothing about whether or not the income is taxable or not- it just says your school is not acting as your employer.

TBH, while it's a bit complex compared to having a W2, it's really not that complicated. There's even a whole IRS booklet devoted to scholarships and fellowships, with specific examples. I think going through professionals makes it more complicated than not, half the time- filling out a 1040A or 1040 EZ by hand is pretty quick. The only difference with a scholarship is that amounts spent on tuition, fees & books are not taxable. Other than that, you report it as income. What's so complicated about that?

Yeah, I've never heard of a contract personally. But when we start writing a paper, we do sit down and figure out authorships at the start- although things have had to change for me before. I've also had to go to my boss and tell him I feel I should be on a paper that I wasn't originally on, not the easiest conversation, but it went well.

Also worth perusing through this recent thread on the Chronicle (http://chronicle.com/forums/index.php/topic,181727.0/topicseen.html). Not in STEM, but lots of discussion of authorship and being clear about it. Some other good ones that I don't have on hand at the moment as well.

Did you write any of the paper? Generally, it is up to the corresponding author (usually the PI) who to include. Most groups are good about discussing ahead of any project what authorship will look like. You usually get authorship for being involved with the actual writing of the paper, in addition to intellectual/practical contributions. You say "your works data was included", but that's a pretty amorphous statement.

Might just be a field divide, but I (obviously) interpreted this the same way as TakeruK. Permissible is synonymous with something being "allowed", i.e., approved or OK in some external construct. It has a connotation of legality. For it to become a moral question, I would have prefaced it with that connotation: "morally permissible" would imply that the question pertains to whether or not something is allowable under some assumed moral or ethical code. In fact, a quick google of that phrase seems to imply that a number of writings specifically refer to (and define) the coupling, setting "morally permissible" as a separate conjoined phrase to be discussed. If "permissible" itself had an ethical or moral connotation, why would we have such a common used specification? Without the specification, I wouldn't assume a question about permissibility was about ethical or moral behavior- I'd have assumed it was about some over-arching construct of allowability under agreements or unspoken contracts between the students and the university.

Also be aware that the risk is getting hit with the combined back payments + interest for all the years you didn't report, as well as a tax evasion charge. About half the grad students at my institution don't file, the rest of us don't feel it's worth the risk, since our payments while not reported are in many publicly accessible databases.

I've seen it happen. My first suggestion would be to talk to your DGS. MY next suggestion would be to talk to a trusted senior professor on your committee.

How do you know you weren't wait listed? Many schools don't tell you if you are or not.

I was suggesting you post- I can think of a couple of threads discussing rape on campus (Rape Watch) being one of them, and there have been threads in the past discussing teaching students accused of rape (or other violent crimes). I know there are faculty there who have had the experience, and I'm sure they would have helpful advice for you.

I would also strongly encourage you to go to the CHE forums, and ask for additional advice there. Such topics have been an ongoing discussion, and you're more likely to encounter faculty that have been in this position before.

That's... Certainly not how our math program works, and it's quite well ranked. Granted, Math is quite a different beast from the physical sciences and engineering even here. Regardless, isn't this thread about Engineering?

Personally, I got one from BedinaBox, and my wife and I have been amazingly happy. A bit on the expensive side, but when you spend ~1/3rd of your life in something? Worth it. They ship to you, it's easy to carry up to a room/apartment, and even works really well on the floor. And they have a 60 day money back return policy. For chairs, I recommend looking at how many hours a day they're rated for... And pick one that's appropriate to the amount of time you'll spend in it.