Eigen

http://chronicle.com/forums/index.php/topic,134907.0.html A relevant thread. I know how much my confidence and abilities as a researcher have improved in the last few years, and I still feel completely lost a great deal of the time. Talking to friends who are post docs and TT faculty, I don't think the feeling ever really goes away, because you stay acutely aware of all the stuff you don't know.

I would be strongly interested to see what you are basing this on. Not having a LoR from your advisor or second reader from your MA will be a huge, huge red flag in any application. The bolded part worries me. A PhD program, and the rest of your academic life beyond that, are likely going to be high anxiety environments. They're kind of known for being anxiety inducing. The conditions you mention (non-directive advisor, personal problems) seem to be things that are likely to exist in a PhD program. I would say more PhD advisors in the humanities are hands-off than not. Most of my friends have advisors that pretty much sound like your MA advisor. And from what I gather, you've made progress on your personal problems, but that doesn't mean you won't be working through them, or similar issues, in the next 7-10 years. To build on St. Andrew's post, what you will do in an idealized scenario isn't what matters, it's what you will be able to accomplish in amongst all the pressures and stresses of a busy and packed academic environment. It's what you can do when you have 15 hours of work that need to be done every day, and 10 hours to do them in. Succeeding in a graduate program, and then in a TT position, is about time and stress management as much as it is about the scholarship. I don't know a single person who isn't heavily overloaded.

Off topic, but your original post is still there (). I've removed several duplicates, as double or triple posting is agains the policies of this (and most) message boards.

Synthesis is usually the biggest award area in chemistry, but since it's proportional to application, the competition is roughly the same in each discipline and subdiscipline. It's worth noting that I'm relatively certain they don't divide panels by subdiscipline, however, so your proposal should be clear and straightforward to a chemist not in your field- it's one of the biggest challenges with the short format. You can't use field conventions and jargon to make a concise argument, you need to walk the line between being detailed and specific in your research proposal while making it broadly comprehensible.

You don't have one now because you haven't started yet. But will you have one in a few weeks? If so, they need to right one. If not, you really need to get a professor who is not your advisor to write one- someone you're taking classes, or working on a project with. You know you need to build relationships for this, so start off strong when your semester starts.

You'll want to push for relationships at your new school, imo. I'd say having 1-2 letters from your undergrad is fine, but you'd want to get at least 1 from your graduate program.

I'll second the idea that it's vital to have a PI who knows you and pays attention to you/your work, for the exact same reason as above: LoRs. And not just LoRs, but helping you network/find post-docs and open faculty positions. If you're just one of a mass of grad students, they won't be helping you on as personal or, likely, as dedicated of a level. If they know you personally, there's an extra push to help you find jobs and recommend you to people they know. I'd also say it's important to have a similar relationship with other faculty in the department/on your committee.

There is no "enough" was the point I was trying to make. Awards are competitive. Any area you're weak in that someone else isn't will "harm" your application. How much it harms it depends on the other strength of their applications, and your package as a whole. I would say it isn't important what your broader impacts were, but rather that you have significant broader impacts for your past work to discuss. Also, you've given no specifics on your past research experience and its broader impacts, and I'm not sure why you're setting out research in past 'research' experience, so giving much detailed feedback as to its value is difficult. Working on a team that designed a low cost prosthetic device for use in third world countries would be very different than other experiences, for example.

I think it will hurt you, the question is how much. Ideally, you want to be able to show past broader impacts as evidence that you will follow through with what you're proposing.

I don't think complicated and school specific applications are that different in any other area, and we don't do school specific sub-forums for any other part of the board. Generally, sub-forums significantly fragment the posts, and tend to make it more difficult for people to find what should go where, and/or lead to duplicated topics. School specific threads seem like they should meet the needs fine, I'm not sure what you're imagining that you'd need a whole sub-forum for one program at one school for one application season.

I guess I was assuming that most people starting a PhD program would likely know the material, and just need a refresher. Most of our incoming students have one blank area that they really struggle with, but usually not related to the classes they'll take or their research, and so a low score doesn't matter. IE, people working in BioChem who have a really weak PChem background.

The other thing I would suggest is to run it by other trusted reviewers. I applied as a second year grad student, but I had kept up with several undergraduate professors who I got to review my proposal, as well as a collaborator at another school. They were all in different sub-fields, none of them in the sub-field I was writing a proposal for, and their feedback helped a lot- mostly in how to make the proposal straightforward for people who might be reviewing the proposal that were not that familiar with my sub-field.

It's required everywhere I'm aware of, I was suggesting that just because it's required to have doesn't make it a required fee. IE, you have to have health insurance, but it's not a university fee in the same way that, say, rec center fees, technology fees, library fees, etc. are.

Please do not double post topics. Deleted the other one.

My reading of the NSF admin guide would place health insurance as a non-required fee, and all the schools I know of have treated it as such. Not really worth arguing over, different schools do it differently, and I've never pushed for mine since the school plan is a lot worse than private insurance. My school has been very helpful, but my department is completely confused by the way NSF handles the grant finances, as they are not straightforward at all.

Mine strongly suggested I not run it by him until the very end. That way he could emphasize in his letter that the proposal was entirely mine.

You do realize there's a large chance you'll be essentially starting your PhD over completely if you transfer schools, right?

It's probably the smallest part, but more importantly it has hugely diminishing returns. Getting up to a reasonable score (say, department and school minimums) is hugely important. With a score below those, you often won't be considered. Past that, it's usefulness drops off pretty steeply, imo.

On the academic job market, the norm in my field is to apply for 200-500 jobs in a season, if that gives you an idea.

Your university caved, but your statements are still not correct. Even if health insurance is required, it can be from any source, and would not be considered a required fee. It's great your university pays for it, but required health insurance /= a required fee. Similarly, NSF isn't covering your tuition. Harvard is. NSF just requires that your tuition be covered, which Harvard is doing mostly out of pocket. Is is why MIT started capping the number of NSF Fellows they admit- they couldn't afford them. The NSF gives the school $12k per year, paid to the institution in two $6k increment, for your cost of education, your school covers the other (in your case) 3/4ths of the bill. So yes, your bill was covered, but it wasn't a case of Harvard trying to keep the money from you, but more likely a case of them trying to find the money to pay for you. S yes, fight for yourself, but do be equally and properly informed. Also, I think you're quite cynical if you think the school is trying to get double paid, rather than someone just not knowing how your fellowship is supposed to work.

Common. Almost all of my first semester classes were material I had predominately covered as an undergrad. Classes are usually set up to give a central core of required coursework that would ensure someone could teach in the field, with elective courses, electives, and your research branching you out into new and more challenging work. If the course is easy and material you've already had, then it will not take much time or focus, which will free you up for research.

My school didn't hear about it, but I made sure I went and told them ahead of time. I got mine doled out over the 6 summer payments in equal quantities.

Part of the issue may also be a difference in how you're writing. I read the OP as talking about a co-author, where the co-author is re-writing as they go through the paper, rather than revising a students work. It's a subtle difference, but it completely changes the dynamic. They aren't revising a student's work, but editing a paper that they are a co-author on. I could be wrong on this, however. For most people, that strongly effects the style from the early stages- it means the co-author is going through the paper and setting up how they would phrase things, likely based on the rest of the paper. From co-writing, it's a definite challenge to write in parallel with another author when the two have very different writing styles, which is what it seems like is happening here. Both authors are focussing on stylistic differences, because I imagine the "ideas" of the paper (being as this is in Epi) are more set from the research.

I would personally take "we don't offer funding, but other programs do" to be a suggestion to apply to another related program at the same university. But it could also mean potential RA/TA positions in another department. Really, you'd need to ask the school or someone at the school for more specifics.

Are you the only two authors on the paper? If not, you should go to one of the other, hopefully more senior, authors to see if they can help you. If you're the only two on the paper, and the same will be true for future works, then you're kind of stuck. It can really suck to be in this situation, but if they are the "senior" author, then you really have to in large part go with their revisions, or back out of writing the paper. You can definitely comment on those you don't change for specific reasons, or go and sit down with her and go over the wordings and why you think yours are the better way to go. But at the end of the day, if you can't convince her, you don't have a lot you can really do about it. This isn't just a problem with a power imbalance in co-authors, I've seen collaborations stall out over writing issues. At the end of the day, everyone that's an author on the paper has to agree on the final version to submit- if you can't, the paper just doesn't get submitted. Your other option is to find someone else, another professor, to work and write with.