Eigen

You say it doesn't have anything to do with the grade, but your reasons were that she thinks your work isn't up to her standards and that she isn't supportive- are you basing these conclusions off of something other than the grade? If you're letting a B/bad feedback on your work prevent you from moving on in your research, that's something you need to deal with now, because the feedback will just get harsher further into graduate school, and a lot of being successful is being able to take harsh criticism, see what you need to do worthwhile with it, do it, and move on.

Agree with the above. Pointing out academic performance, which they can already see, isn't very useful. It's also one of the areas that is of lower importance relative to, say research experience. Lots of people have great academic performance in undergrad and are really bad fits for grad school- your SoP is where you show you're a good fit for grad school, in particular the school you're applying to.

I've had this experience a few times in my group as people have come and gone- for a couple of years I was the only non-chinese person out of 8 in my lab. On the one hand, it meant that I was surrounded by people talking a language I didn't understand, and they had no interest in helping me learn it at all. On the other hand, I ended up spending a lot more time with my PI, and we had a much better relationship for it. I also became the defecto group editor, which gave me quite a bit of experience in working on manuscripts. As some people graduated and we got new students, it got a bit more balanced- I was still the only american student, but it wasn't just Chinese graduate students, so there wasn't a default lab language, which made it a lot more manageable. I also now have some pretty good friends spread around the world, and standing offers to visit China whenever I want, which is nice. My Mandarin still sucks though, sadly. I still can't get any of them to correct my pronunciation- they tell me whatever I say is "fine". I ended up making a lot more friends in other groups and other departments early on too, which also helped down the road- now I have people to collaborate with and learn from in a number of different related labs and disciplines, and the access to other people's instruments and such is amazing.

Very discipline specific- you'd need to give us your field. For instance, there are virtually no such sources in Chemistry, a handful in molecular biology, and a lot in ecology.

They're on often enough that my door is plastered with them. They're much more relevant for people in the physical/bench sciences as most of the characters are in those fields, but a lot of the more general ones are pretty widely accurate. A lot of them are caricatures of graduate school life, so not exact and maybe slightly exaggerated, but.... Pretty damn accurate nonetheless.

Actually, there are also adjunct faculty who are full time elsewhere and maintaining a research connection in the US- I had one such individual on my committee. They'd moved to another university, but were still on a 10 year grant at mine, so they were given an adjunct position to stay official at the previous school. Adjuncts can also be faculty who are full time in another department in the same school, and that's relatively common. Also, Assistant/Associate/Full can carry different connotations at different institutions- generalizations are good, but titles are not in any way absolute.

Personally I'd suggest looking at molecular biology programs, I think you're more likely to find what you want there. That said, there's some great work at Rice in the chemistry department- Marti and Wolynes have both done a lot of work with amyloid plaques, and Marti is a really nice guy. If you really want to stick with chemistry programs, I'd suggest doing a backwards approach- find articles in chemistry journals dealing with neurochemistry, and track those back to departments/PIs. Somewhere like JACS will mostly have chemistry groups publishing, and you should be able to browse abstracts easily without university access, but most schools will probably have online full text.

Our seminar refreshments are beer, chips & cookies- no way you can sub meals for them. That said, I probably have 2-8 meetings per month that I can easily use as meal replacements for several days.

In no case, ever, does the money collected in application fees pay for a "qualified" person (i.e., admissions committee) to review the applications. They all do that for free. It does pay for a full time person to manage graduate applications and admission at the university.

Personally, I would see if you could spin it to your PI as a collaboration. Most PIs would not be interested in having "their" graduate student working to publish with someone else, but if it's a good collaboration with the potential for more publications and grants in the future that you're building, why not? A number of my current "side projects" started this way, and many of them have spun off into full fledged projects for new group members in one group or the other that I still help direct.

As mentioned, this does happen, and I'm sorry to hear it's happened to you and put you in a bad position. I'm more used to this in relation to post-graduate positions, but the general advice is applicable here as well. Ideally, you'd want to get someone *not* the head of the program that you have a good relationship with to write you a letter- perhaps the ombudsman? Someone from the institution who can write an "untainted" reference on your behalf- even someone who has not worked with you academically but can reference the personal rift between you and the program chair that is causing you to leave. Failing that, it's something you will need to address in your personal statement, but that's a lot harder.

Go to your public library, see if they have any GRE prep books. Use those.

I think it's a fine line. We have threads devoted to venting, but this thread wasn't tagged as a vent. It was asking for advice. If the OP just needed to blow off steam, letting people know you just need to blow off steam is good. Personally, I didn't read it as venting. I read it as an inappropriate and unprofessional attack on the teacher, while asking for advice. People gave advice- it wasn't all necessarily what the OP wanted. Had the post just asked about discussing grades with the professor without the accusation of impropriety, I think the responses would have been different. It's difficult to balance this being a graduate student and admissions board with this being "a safe place". When you come to a board that is a mix of prospective graduate students, current graduate students, and faculty and seemingly accuse another (graduate student, faculty member) of being unprofessional, even if it does not directly link to that individual, lots of people are likely to read it as an attack, and I think it's worth keeping that in mind when we post. And I think if you just want to vent, it's healthy to sat that. Or use one of the already made venting threads. I also highly, highly recommend containing venting to non-permanent, offline areas. Friends and family and cohort members are likely to be a better sounding board for venting than placing it permanently on an online message board. But that's just my personal take.

Minimum qualifications aren't what get you accepted to a graduate program, they're what get you considered for a graduate program. It's not a straight up process wherein if you meet the stated requirements, you are automatically accepted. Your application, as a whole, is weighted against the other applicants, as a whole. You say you know other people who were accepted with less work experience, but maybe their work experience was more closely related to what they want to study, or perhaps they had another part of their application that was more interesting or valid to the admissions committee.

Just to add, while the forums are a public place, anyone who's been here for a while knows that information is primarily being shared with applicants. Informant didn't share anything wrong or secret, but just because something isn't wrong or secret doesn't mean it's something everyone is happy with, or that people want to share widely. Posting it here in a thread directed at 2015 Social Psych applicants is different than broadcasting it, say, at a conference. Very few advisors are reading these threads, so likely would not get information contained here unless someone brought it to them. Telling people about what's posted here isn't against your rights, and informant didn't have some ironclad expectation of privacy, but that still doesn't make it a healthy thing for encouraging them, or anyone else, to share here if they experience negative consequences for doing so. Every year during vista (and application season), lots of threads pop up with people complaining that none of the grad students told them the department was toxic when they visited, or steered them away from bad faculty members, or was honest about what grad school was like. That's because of the increasingly pervasive worry that the applicants will not be discreet with that information. If I'm having a conversation with an applicant in a bar, it's a public conversation. People can here. But I'm giving specific information to a specific audience that I hope has some discretion in how they will share it. If I don't have that hope, then I don't share information, and that hurts everyone, but mostly the incoming students. Graduate students everywhere are low on the hierarchy, and can well experience negative repercussions for being honest and helpful to prospectives, or even other graduate students. An environment in which they experience said negative repercussions is a toxic one, and I'm personally of the opinion that we should minimize that competitive, dog-eat-dog side of academia as much as possible- as TakeruK says, we're all on the same side here.

I tell my undergrads it doesn't really matter. I made a huge switch from undergrad to grad school, and it took a bit of playing catch up, but none of the schools had an issue with it. The research experience (hopefully) shows that you know how to organize a project, that you can learn things you need to know, and that you have experience with the reality of research. Those are the most important transferable skills- new technically abilities and new knowledge can pretty easily be obtained when you start in a new area.

You said in your other thread that you told your advisor. Also, I was using the general "you" to those on this thread who did just that, as evidenced by the problems informant is now facing.

A lot of people are talking about "peers" vs "faculty", but I've never seen junior grad students sit on these. It's usually senior grad students. And no matter how you cut it, the 5th and 6th year grad students are closer to being peers with the faculty than they are with the incoming first years. I also get asked to give feedback about the younger grad students progress, and the faculty discuss worries they have about junior students progress with the senior grad students. Accordingly, I'm not sure why you'd feel uncomfortable to have one reading your letter this year, but not next year as a post-doc or a junior faculty member.

There's a difference between posting stuff on this forum, pseudonymously, and you, as an applicant, bitching about information posted here to your advisor, who then calls the department in question and gets someone in trouble. It's like prospective graduate students who want honesty from current students when they visit, get told things in confidence, and then go back and gossip about what they were told. It's bad form, and will result in less available information for the next wave of prospective students to use to make decisions off of.

Just FYI, your post title seems out of context with your message. Are you talking about students sitting on admissions committees and looking over applications? This is extremely common, and accepted practice. But you chose the word "screening" that indicates that they are making the initial cut of which applications get to the rest of the admissions committee or not, and I'd be extremely surprised if that was the case. That said, while Informant worded his post poorly, your initial post was.... lets just say insulting to current senior graduate students who do hold those positions. Highly so. Especially calling us, as your letter writer put it, "little shits". If my department and faculty think I'm qualified enough to help go through applications, why are you (and, I suppose, your advisor) who don't at all know me casting aspersions on my ability to do so? ::edit:: I see the post that started this all now. Two or three schools using a student committee =/= a general poll suggesting it's common practice.

I get the frustration, but I don't get how this is unprofessional. Something happened that made the program unable to take students. They notified students of this as soon as they knew. That's a professional move, not an unprofessional move. A university can't plan in advance for a faculty member leaving unexpectedly. I suppose they could have admitted all of the prospective graduate students and then told you there was no one to work with? That would be truly unprofessional behavior.

If I recall, he got in last year. Also, going to close this as it's not going anywhere good. Calling out other users for no other reason than to poke fun at them is not in keeping with good forum etiquette.

Just to note, some (or many) US Universities may consider hiring someone to edit your SoP academic dishonesty.

Also, if it's what he did his doctoral work on, no one will ever take it seriously as *his* work. It will be forever considered his PhD advisors work. He might be able to revisit it down the road when he has more of a name made and is tenured, but doing so now would be really stupid for his career.

And in general, you want to avoid citing B instead of A whenever possible. Citing someone who cites someone else is problematic, you want to go for the original source as often as you can.