Eigen

It's a very interesting issue, and this is the first time I'm aware of a University has used FERPA to access a students medical records- there's generally an imaginary wall between medical/counseling records and other parts of the University. It's not as absolute as non-University healthcare, as it's intended that the administration could get access to help with a student experiencing problems, be proactive, etc. Using it for a legal defense, however.... That's difficult. They're saying FERPA gives them the right to access medical records if they're relevant for a legal defense, which seems to be a stretch to me. There's a good discussion on this on the Chronicle forums that's more detailed, for sure. My bet is this makes it up to a circuit court, at least, and the precedent gets slapped on that this is not appropriate.

Doesn't seem high to me, considering that lower than a 3.0 is usually grounds for expulsion from most graduate programs.

Personally, I'd advice against picking a specialization too early. There's more and more overlap between subfields, and it's not really until after you've experienced multiple research areas that you have a solid idea of what you do and don't like. Advanced classes will help, as well. To be perfectly honest, I didn't even have a defined idea when i applied to grad school, and I'd taken the equivalent of an MS in coursework, and had 4 years or research experience. I knew there were things I liked, things I didn't like, and a general goal for my research- I liked biological/biologically inspired projects, and I liked working on things that had defined practical and applied outcomes. I ended up applying to different schools in different subfields- bioinorganic some places, instrumentation development others, and even some very biophysical programs. Also just some standard wet organic medicinal chemistry labs. Even when I started grad school, I'd courted several different groups in different areas, and picked the one that let me work in the most interdisciplinary area. At the professional level, there's not as much focus on "field". You're a chemist, and as such expected to be relatively fluent in all of the sub disciplines, and a lot of people transition from one to the other at various points in their career, depending on exact research interests and applications. Accordingly, my advice would be to work on developing a solid, well rounded background- and as mentioned, get research experience. It doesn't need to be exactly in the area you're most interested in long term, but it should be with a good advisor, and something that will get you some defined wet-lab skills, and see what a research environment is like.

This thread is already fast devolving, but I wanted to put in this piece of general advice: There's a difference between being able to do something capably and deciding you don't want to do it, and deciding you don't even want to learn how. Having skillsets that you are capable of using, but decide you don't want to use in your research for defined reasons can be fine- you know what you do and don't want to study, and what the utility is. If you don't have those skillets, no one will take you seriously when you say you don't want to use them or they aren't useful, because it comes across like you just don't have the right background/don't know enough to know they'd be useful.

Spring break (when we have one not tied to Easter) is an undergrad holiday at my school. Grad students and faculty and staff are still here.

I would be careful judging too much based off the recruitment weekend. Sometimes the staff organizing them don't pay a lot of attention to when in the semester they get placed, and faculty may be very busy/out of town at a conference, and the same with grad students. We got less than 2 full days notice for a recruitment poster session in the department, and there were several other major things going on that night- so I'm sure attendance was low, even though we're normally a very sociable group.

Not that you need to go drinking, but I wasn't sure from your post: are you uncomfortable being around people who are drinking? We've pretty consistently had people in our cohorts with religious backgrounds that don't drink, and there's never been an issue. They come and hang out with us earlier in the evening, and head home when they need to. At least in my program, it's very common to go out for a relaxed drink or bite to eat earlier in the evening, and then we all head our various ways- home to family, back to the lab, out with other friends, etc.

I liked Levine for PChem in undergrad, but McQuarrie has excellent books as well. Levine's QM is definitely less understandable (although probably more complete) than McQuarrie. I never really found inorganic/organic texts I liked, Smith is OK, as is Brown & Foote. Depending on your focus, I'd say pick up March's Advanced Organic, as it's a great book to keep on your shelf. I've taught out of a number of sophomore organic texts, and they all have a huge ratio of useless:useful information, formatted with pretty boxes and not a lot of meat. I feel the same way about most Gen Chem texts.

It's pretty much the truth. We'd have to have somewhere in the ballpark of 50% of our offers be declined before we'd start sending out more.

I think your peer group is extremely important, but not necessarily your cohort- and the ways in which they're important aren't easily visible from the outset. The people I rely most on for research advice, for working through projects, for mock interviews, for honest advice, and for future research collaborations are my cohort, and those a few years ahead and behind me. I spend as much time talking my research through with my peers as my PI and committee. I think I would have done fine without a strong cohort, but with the cohort I had I'm coming out with very strong collaborative research ties to a couple of other students who stand a very good chance of landing R1 jobs, and that research network already being in place has been a huge boost to my research in general. None of us work in the same area, but we're all tangentially connected that collaborations are extremely fruitful. That said, the people I'm closest to now, I would have really disliked had I met them at visiting weekends- we had no interests in common, we were all in pretty different places in life, and, to be honest, we were all pretty damn abrasive. I don't think we gelled until we'd been working together late nights/early mornings for a few months. Some of the other peers I'm close to and rely on, aren't in my department- they're scattered around the University in similar research fields, with similar areas of interest to mine. Again, I wouldn't have met them interviewing, some of them I didn't really get to know until I started to branch out with my research a bit, several years in. So your cohort matters, but how much you get along with them at this stage? I'd consider not particularly informative, sadly. You really have to trust that the faculty are hiring/admitting students with good backgrounds, solid personalities, and knowledge bases you can use. This is also, like anything else, going to be field dependent. I spent a lot of hours a week in pretty close proximity to a large bulk of my peers. We share instruments, we share space, we eat a sizeable number of meals together. If I was not in a lab science, I think the situation might very well be different.

The benefits to being at a (smaller) school that really wants you don't stop after admission, TBH. The kind of care and attention you're seeing now frequently continues through the PhD, as well as mentoring post-graduation. Exact timelines can be very school specific, and depend on the public/private divide, and how much the department has to wait on the school. For example, we still haven't done all of our campus visits for prospective students, and in fact they're just starting. The offers probably will roll out from now until late march, so we wouldn't expect someone to decide until April.

Rotate with them right away. If you don't fit as well as you're hoping to, you need time to select other rotations. If you do click, and are sure you want to work there, sit down and talk to the PI before you end the rotation, and tell them you want to continue in their lab. Then use the other rotations to pick up skills that could benefit you and the PI and your future projects. I don't think order of rotations matters a great deal if there are multiple students competing for one spot. That said, a good PI won't take on additional rotating students if you get there and seal the deal first. If they really want to leave it open to competition, it will be the person that fits best and brings the most to the lab rather than order, I think.

That's great! Feel free to PM me, I'll be there most of the week. Looking to make myself a bit more attractive to Industry as well, and it's always a fun conference. I'd be glad to grab coffee and talk about developing skill sets- LC and spectroscopy are two of my more developed areas, but I'm a horrible electrochemist. I've prepped a couple of people with weekend crash courses for applying for jobs with LC focuses, it's really not that bad to pick up enough to talk your way through a job interview.

In your case, you might strongly consider either an industry or academic post-doc. It would let you expand your skill set, and get some post-graduate experience that will make you more attractive for higher-level jobs. The other thing I'd suggest is to just start applying and circulating your CV- you might be surprised at the bites you get. PittCon in particular is a fantastic place for feeling out employers, especially in analytical fields- they have an employment bureau that is entirely based around job searches and interviews to attendees, and there are usually hundreds of jobs offered there each year. If nothing else, you might bet a better feel of what skills would best round out your current set, and make some contacts for the future.

The main reason I recommend waiting until close to the deadline is that many schools will expect you to. They may not have finalized your funding package, they may have extra university fellowships that won't be announced until a later date, etc. Part of the CGS resolution is in giving schools that extra time to put together admissions packages and schedule interviews and visits- it's mainly targeted towards allowing fair competition among schools, rather than allowing fair appraisal by students. It's there to let students wait until the middle of April to weigh the final offers from everywhere, and decide where they want to go. Similarly, I highly recommend visiting all of the schools you can that you have a significant interest in- visiting a school that might not have been your top choice can show characteristics of the school that might change your mind, as can meeting with professors and students in person. Personally, my bottom-ranked choice became my top-ranked choice, and one of my other options e-mailed me an offer for a hugely increased fellowship literally the day after I declined their offer and had accepted somewhere else. I'm of course working off of the assumption that you didn't apply to schools you would not want to attend, and accordingly, all of the schools who would accept you are valid choices. If you applied to schools that were really only there as safeties and you have no interest in attending, and no faculty you fit with, then you don't need to hold onto those, but if there was a reason you applied, or faculty you wanted to work with, I think you owe it to yourself (and them) to see if they really are the best fit. This of course goes hand-in-hand with Takeruk's very well written post, and obviously if you're 100% sure you don't want to attend somewhere, you shouldn't keep it on your list "just because".

Where is your external funding from? A prestigious grant will definitely help you- funding in general won't necessarily help. STEM programs in general have enough funding to support the students they want to accept, so they're more interested in finding students who fit with the program, and look like they will produce good work/go on to be successful than just finding people with funding.

What did the school respond when you asked for additional time? Is this a MS or PhD program, and is the offer funded or not-funded? In general, you want to avoid accepting and then later rescinding an offer- that can lead to the spot not being able to be filled at all, rather than the school being able to offer admission to someone on the waiting list. Sometimes it's the only workable option, but you want to exhaust all your others first.

It's very rare for a school to rescind an offer, and you'd have to do something like sexually harass one of the current students or faculty members to get there. Personally, I'm a fan of suggesting that people be themselves at any school visit. It's not like you're not going to be yourself for the next 5-8 years you're working with the people you'll meet at the school!

I'm assuming by revisit, you mean a second visit in the same year post- interview and post-acceptance? The tone will definitely change. You don't want to relax too much, but you should assume that they are now trying to court you, rather than you courting them.

Seems like you're claiming a that there's something deeper than me seeing a post, thinking it needed a response, and responding to it, in the fashion of message boards. More, you're implying that my involvement "using my status as a moderator" has something deeper (and implied to be wrong) behind it. Additionally, one more time, I did not call your ethics into question. I stated an opinion on the ethics of publicly posting letters that were intended for a private audience. You've said over and over that your letters were not that. Nor did I suggest they were. But since I felt your post was likely to bring in others who might post more sensitive information, I thought a suggestion against doing so was a good idea. Nor have I said anything about the funding survey being unethical. I think it's a great idea. You've already said you won't respond to this, but I feel the need to post a follow up, since you're accusing me of, at best, using my status as a moderator to do something untoward, and I take offense at that. As to you not seeing me here much this year, I'm in and out, as I have been every year since 2009. I don't have as much time to read thousands of posts and reply to them as I used to.

You're being far more analytical about this than I think is warranted. Sigaba and I have both been here through far too many seasons, and we've interacted with a number of different academics in different fields, especially surrounding admissions. No one's telling you that you can't do anything, we're just conveying that the public posting of a letter would be, in our minds, bad form. What you (or anyone else in this thread) chooses to do with that information is entirely up to you. If you don't feel like you're breaching any confidence, then by all means post. Nothing I've said here seems to be in any way against your reccomendations, which is that nothing that's not a form letter be posted. If what I'm saying isn't at odds with your position, I'm not sure why you're being so very antagonistic, or suggesting conspiracies in the fact that I'm a moderator, and happen to be posting here. You seem to be calling into question why I would post in this thread "as a moderator" when I'm not really sure what posting "as a moderator" entails. To me, if I was posting "as a moderator", I would have made it clear that my post carried some official position, rather than positing both of my posts as my opinion, and sharing what I feel are general opinions in higher education. Hence the continued use of "generally" and "I think", etc.

As an alternative PSA, I'd encourage people with multiple offers to be patient, make sure the full offer is in, and don't rush deciding where your best fit for the next 5-7 years of your life will be.

Is there any particular reason you keep addressing me as "moderator" rather than my actual user name?

You've only posted wait list/rejections so far, but I have yet to experience a school that writes bulk acceptance letters, which are what I'm talking about. Sigaba may be referring to all of the above. Many acceptance letters are quasi-form letters, with some generic bits and some specific to your offer. It's usually the finding information that's considered confidential, the same as job offer letters. It's considered confidential, as it was written to you, and different people may receive different funding amounts. Law school admissions is a completely different animal, and law admission is not synonymous with a job offer. As to posting thus while a moderator.... I'm usually quite clear when something is violating the forum rules. Else, I'm quite clear that it's my opinion or perspective, as in this case. That said, it's probably a good time for a reminder that all posts here are permanent, and once you post it, you can't just have it taken down. As to ”by whom", since the sentence started with generally, it was intended as a general statement. But I was thinking of admissions committees and other university individuals.

The point is more that no one is sure how much longer UNO as a university will exist. I'd be very leery of getting my MS from a school that might no longer be around in a few years. UNO got cut off from LSU and the LSU system a couple of years ago, and has been floundering without that funding and research support.