Eigen

Older thread, but I just wanted to echo: Letters are probably the most important and defining part of your application. Publications are less important than a letter stating you were integral to the research and are a capable chemist. The publication is also less important than you being able to competently talk about your chemistry. I've even seen faculty candidates stumble because they have a great CV (ton's of papers) but can't talk about the design or methodologies of those papers in sufficient detail. Research experience with papers to back it up is great, but it's the research experience that's important.

There's also the "work smarter, not harder" thing going on. Doing 10 hours of experiments a day to yield data on one or two, vs planning out your experiments better and getting useable data from all of them and spending less total time in the lab is fine, and generally healthier all around. Some PI's are looking for graduate students to be spare hands.They don't really care if you think/design your project, they want data, and they want you to gather that data. These PIs generally want you to work more in the lab, as more solid hours means they get more data. Not to generalize, but some of these PIs also don't care nearly as much about developing their graduate students as independent researchers. They just want data. Other PIs want their students, especially senior students, to come up with their own projects, design experiments, and show they are independent researchers. These PIs are likely to realize that working 80 hour weeks..... doesn't mesh very well with trying to keep up with the literature and take time to think through your projects. They're less likely to want to you to spend 80 hours a week in the lab, and more likely to want you to stay rested, sane, on top of things and work efficiently. Just some thoughts.

Pretty much echoing what Juliet said. Termination following leave usually means you have to reapply to the program, and they decide whether to let you return or not. A leave means you can return without reapplication, and frequently are guaranteed similar/same funding, depending on the terms of the leave. Since your cousin was granted an exception from the normal policy, and then didn't inform them of the need for a further exception, my guess is they'd need to reapply. I also agree that the first point of contact would be the the committee chair/advisor, and then likely the graduate school/dean's office. Chances are likely that there is no "appeal" for termination, your cousin will just need to find out what the next steps are.] I would also wonder why it is you here asking for advice, rather than your cousin?

The CO is likely to be in your office of grants & research, or the dean of the graduate school. Or they will know who to direct you to. Definitely good to know that you can get it transferring institutions- I would have throughout that was possible as long as you had the admit by the acceptance date, but wasn't sure.

No, some don't even send them all out in the same month.

Again, the CGS resolution isn't binding, so it saying that you can rescind your acceptance doesn't mean you can. Additionally, the CGS resolution doesn't apply to you, as it's only in relation to funded offers. Think of the CGS resolution as a "play nice" agreement between colleges. They signed it to stop from earlier and earlier funding decisions that were pushing deadlines, and to stop the arms race that was funded offers. It's not in any way binding, its a resolution of intent, that most signatory schools follow. But that's it. You'd have to ask the school in question how or if you'd go about rescinding the offer. It's also worth noting that most applicants, and schools, pay very little attention to the flip side- after April 15th, no school can accept an applicant who had accepted another schools offer without written approval from that school- and these forums are littered with people rescinding offers well after April 15th.

TBH, most UK programs probably don't get nearly as many applicants as most US universities, especially looking at the ones you applied to.

Also, universities don't want to reject someone until they're absolutely sure. Most admissions committees go through and look for their top picks. Then notify those people right away. Then maybe they have a few more spots open up, and look further down, or have an unofficial waiting list. Then maybe some of the top choices decline, and they have more spots open up, and go back through applicants. Admissions is rarely an absolute ranking-type process- there's rarely some numerical list of people who did and didn't make the cut, in order. Especially because of fit and field. If, say, one of our top choice organic students turns us down, we're not going to admit another physical student. We're going to want to look for another organic student. I'm sure the same is true in your field- you can't oversaturate one advisor if you end up with a cohort that all wants to work in the subspecialty.

The institution's CO has a lot of discretion in how to distribute the award, but NSF does years at a time, as a general rule. When you select active status for a year, they give the entire year of money to the school, and the school ha to pay back any if there's some leave/inactivity during that year. NSF is usually quite good when it comes to medical leave, maternity leave, or situations out of your control, and most programs are quite good at helping students work with/around them. I know mine has helped a few times with outside opportunities, and helped others with internships, and mine helped with staggering fellowships to get the best use out of them as well.

Hmm, a customer service rep down-voting complaints about their service, and then saying that feedback is important to them. Along with a lot of really recently created accounts that do nothing but advertise for that service......

Pretty sure that leaves of absence in reserve time also have to be in year increments. You can't take a partial year in reserve, unless something changed in this years rules. Also Marty- pretty sure you're wrong about the leave of absence during reserve- from the NSF Website under FAQ for the GRFP: So either yours was a medical deferral (different from the OP) or you weren't officially on leave from the University? If you're taking time off, but are still enrolled full time (not a leave of absence), you'd be fine. I'd be interested in more details, because our program officer mirrors exactly what the NSF FAQ says- leaves of absence are considered as non-enrollment, which would automatically terminate the fellowship, even on reserve. You'd also have to write a progress report on your leave of absence, showing progress towards your degree goals, which would be very difficult. That said, this is academic, since as I read the OP they're on a leave planning to leave the institution and reapply elsewhere for the Fall. In which case, they'd still have problems as they applied as a first year graduate student.

To add, if you're not familiar with the NSF administration, when you are awarded the NSF, it goes to a program officer at the institution at which you're enrolled. They handle the disbursement of money, and are for intents and purposes, the PI on the grant that funds you.

I think this sounds suspiciously like advertising spam for academic support services. I also think that going to people online for help with courses is much less effective than (a) going to the instructor, ( making friends at your school in your program and studying with them, or (c ) using the academic support services at your school.

Are you going to be enrolled by the Fall? I'm not sure how they would treat the current leave of absence- I can't remember the deadline for being "enrolled/accepted" at a school. But if you're transferring, have you already secured admission to another program? If not, you won't be able to accept the award if you get it, since you are currently on leave, and wouldn't have anther school to enroll in yet.

I'm in applied organic rather than total synthesis. My PI has gone on record as saying he doesn't care if we only work 2 hrs a week, as long as we're productive (publishing, getting data). But really, people only count hours when justifying g a lack of productivity- if your putting our papers and getting results for grants, no one (well, no reasonable PI) will look at the hours. They check the hours you're putti in when there is a lack of data.

I doubt this has anything to do with it. We can fully fund more people than we end up accepting in a year, and we still do things this year. Don't grope the grad students, don't get drunk and throw up in someone's car, don't be overtly racist, don't tell the graduate students or faculty that their research is stupid or subpar, or that you're waaaay smarter than they are and just coming to the visit weekend for a free trip to X city. These visits are generally about making sure that you are in person what you seem to be on paper.

Yeah, no distinct limit on admits by undergraduate institution.

It's not innately doomed to failure, it depends on the relationship and the career goals of the people in question. I know some academic couples that have constant long-distance relationships (NY to Brazil, in one case) and do well. I know some where one or the other or both was happy to find a lower-prestige job (full time teaching, alternate academic career, etc) and they were able to make it work. I know other cases where both were rising starts in their field, and were able to both land TT jobs at the same school. The more flexible the two of you are both on career goals and relationship, the easier it is to make it work. I do suggest googling/reading on the Chronicle about the two-body problem, as that's what you're facing. There's a lot of great advice that's been written, more than I can hope to condense here.

Our department used to do admits and funding before visits, then transitioned to admits before visits and funding decisions after, and then after a really bad year with that moved to admits and funding decisions after visits. For us, if you visit they want to admit you, pending something major going wrong during your visit.

One thing I'll add about taking the later honeymoon is that it can be nice for so many other reasons. You're going to be tired after the wedding, even if you do a small and low stress one- we also found that we wanted to spend time with family and friends that had come in from out of town immediately after the wedding. We didn't do a huge break between wedding and honeymoon, but it was nice to not immediately rush off- take the time to organize stuff, take a bit of a break, and then take the time for the honeymoon when you're ready to go have fun!

A huge part of the oil and gas industry is developing new technologies for refining. Specifically, cracking (breaking down long-chain hydrocarbons) and synthesis (building up short chain). There's a huge amount of money going into research for this, probably more than any other field at the moment, world wide. Especially the development of novel catalysts and new synthetic methodologies. You seem to be really broadly defining "manufacturing". I think you need to identify a particular area you're interested in- catalyst development, organometallic synthesis, organic synthesis, nanosystem development, etc. You've kinda switched from talking about oil & gas (hydrocarbons) to talking about polymer science, when they're not really very connected. In addition, as you mentioned, many basic polymers are well characterized- but they fall, generally, under manufacturing, rarely under oil and gas. Additionally, while some of the basic "poly's' are well characterized, the development of self-healing polymers, conductive polymers, and coatings with novel functionalities are still very cutting edge areas of industrial research.

Maybe because not all programs are the same, and you gave advice pertinent to a MSW program to someone in a BMS PhD program? One lasts ~18-24 months, the other lasts 5-7 years? One has coursework throughout, the other has a year of coursework and then full time research? One has breaks between semesters, the other one works through breaks and summers? I can see where these differences are very relevant to the advice given. Advising someone to postpone marriage 18 months until the finish is one thing, suggesting they postpone marriage 7 years so they don't take time off during a PhD program? It's such bad advice it's kinda laughable. It's like saying not to take vacation time from a job to get married. PhD programs in the bench sciences especially are like jobs- you work 40-80 hours during the week, you get a few given holidays off through the year, and you have vacation time you can use when is convenient.

Not having a graduate degree won't just make the climb slower, you will top out very, very fast. You also seem to have have some significant misconceptions about graduate school, but I'll leave that alone for now. You're swapping 5 years of harder work and less flexibility now for what will be a career of less flexibility. I guess it depends what you mean by a research position, but with a BS, you won't ever be directing research, or doing direct innovation. You'll pretty much always be doing optimization, usually under someone else's direction. I'd suggest the local ACS meetings, but if you don't want to go when topics aren't directly interesting to you, you're going to have a hard time networking. A lot of the fundamental chemical innovation in a number of non-medical fields is coming from oil/gas research, so I'm not sure why you don't think there's innovation there. Maybe you're just not working for the right companies or reading the right journals?

So ignoring the quasi-trolling by our resident relationship expert, there's lots of good advice in this thread. She doesn't seem to get that you're looking at 3rd semester in a PhD program, so there wouldn't be classes to miss, nor would you have any summer or winter break to speak of, since BMS programs you research year-round. I can't speak personally, I got married in undergrad- it was definitely interesting trying to plan a wedding in the middle of the semester, then. How much stress goes into planning a wedding also depends on what your expectations are for the wedding- we had about 300 people, and ended up spending under $2k, including feeding everyone and a live band for dancing. We didn't stress too much about all the minor details, and everything worked out fine. We also made it a habit of ignoring all of the "helpful" advice from people about what we could, couldn't and *had* to do with our wedding. As to getting married in grad school, I've had a number of friends do it. Most of their advisors were very helpful and understanding, came to the wedding, gave nice presents, etc. My boss in particular is very understanding of family obligations and taking time to make sure your relationship stays intact. I had one professor strongly recommend planning a honeymoon around, say, a conference in Hawaii that you could stretch out before and after. The specifics depend exactly on your program, but in most the expectation (written or unwritten) is that you get at least 2 weeks of vacation time in addition to the official university closures (not breaks, closures). Once you're done with coursework, you have a lot of flexibility in how to take that, from my experience. The harder part is planning out experiments that far in advance to make sure you don't have live animals, tissue cultures, etc. that need to be worked on exactly when you want to take off! And, as mentioned, even if you are taking a class or two, missing grad classes isn't usually as big of a deal, just tell your faculty well in advance, and most will probably be fine with it.

I'd look for your local section of the American Chemical Society or AiCHE. They'll likely have regular meetings, and if you've kept your professional memberships up, you're already a member. Networking is all about making the person remember you, and one of the best ways to do that is to ask questions and get them to talk about themselves- they'll come away with a very positive remembrance of you. For you, I'd suggest meeting people at these meetings in a field you're interested in, and start asking them about what they do, how they got to where they are, and if they have any suggestions for someone trying to transition. You mention you're no longer interested in "oil/gas", but that's a huge field, encompassing many, many areas of chemical research. So it might be beneficial to tell us what exactly you are interested in? You mention not going to graduate school because you don't want to have to fund your first year, but it's really rare for PhD programs to not fully fund you if you're a competitive applicant, so that shouldn't be a problem. If you were looking at MS degrees, that probably won't lead to a research position as a ChemE.