Eigen

I would say you're probably going to need to go back and get a BS in a related field. You won't have the background courses or research experience to head to grad school coming from a really week 2 years of science and then an Art Studio degree. You might be able to get into a weaker MS program, and move up from there, but if you went back and did well with a second BS, you could probably apply straight to virology PhD programs.

You don't need to just be looking at Human Factor masters. Getting a MS/MA in psychology or cognitive science in general will help you bolster the weak points of your application, then you can look for more specific programs. I'm sure graduate classes as a non-degree seeking student will "factor into your applications", but I'm arguing that they probably won't be weighted that heavily. Coursework in grad school is a minor part of the degree- it's not something you have to "excel" at, it's just something you have to pass. Therefore, just showing that you can do the courses in the absence of the other pressures of grad school is only so useful to admissions committees. As to grad students who have graduated- they were still grad students when they knew you. They won't be writing about you from the perspective of a faculty member, and it will still not be that strong.

Oh, I've used the retina MBP. I honestly wasn't that impressed. I guess a lot depends what you're working with, and most of my PDFs aren't high enough quality to notice the difference. I've got 2 laptops and 3 desktops, and maintain several labs worth of computers (including a really nice triple 3D monitor station) but I just really don't find anything consistently that much more workable than my 11" air.

I'd really like to hear more of why a 1366x768 resolution can't show as many documents side by side as a 1920x1080 one. The resolution doesn't matter almost at all for tiling documents- the only thing that really matters is the size and dimensions of the screen. If we're talking about huge screens, it starts to matter more, but at 13" or 11", the limiting factor is how small you can read, not how many pixels across the screen is.

I'd think with 4 or even 5, there might be a bit of a raised eyebrow, but they'd toss out one of the letters and review the app. 8 would probably definitely raise some "what's going on here" flags. It either speaks to an inability to follow directions, or being completely out of touch with the norms and conventions, neither of which is a particularly good thing. Most likely, they just took the 3 first to arrive, and ignored the rest, however. Your main worry in this case is that those might not have been the strongest letters for you to have.

Not in Psych, but a few things stand out: 1) I'm not sure I would keep taking classes as a non-degree seeking student. They probably won't be that beneficial to you getting into grad school, and are taking time and money away from either volunteering for research, or working to get yourself more stable financially. 2) Don't get grad students to write you letters. You *need* to make connections to faculty who will write you strong letters, especially given your low GPA and low research experience. Grad student letters count for almost nothing, no matter how strong they are. I'm very surprised the grad students agreed to write them- I know I wouldn't agree to write a letter for anyone working for me, as I know it would do them as much harm as good. 3) Move somewhere cheaper. And find a cheaper school. Seriously, where I did my undergrad had a low cost of living, decent enough jobs, and tuition was $1600 a semester or so, even for a MA/MS in psychology. It might not be a perfect fit, but getting an MA/MS will help you a lot more down the road, and as mentioned, being full time will open you up for RA/TA positions on whatever campus, as well as let you defer paying back loans. 4) If you're on interviews/writing SoPs, don't mention that your grades suffered because you worked to put yourself through school. Grad school will require you to work a pretty full time job (RA/TA) at the same time you're taking classes and working on research. Explaining the work as the cause of low grades will just make people wonder if you can handle the workload of grad school without your work suffering again.

Definitely talk to the dean. Also note that meeting all the requirements for both programs usually means that you meet all the requirements for both programs exclusively, not combined. In other words, two MS's would require two theses, not one. And coursework wouldn't split between the programs- if each required 30 hours, then two MS's would require 60ish. Not you took 30-35 credits that would count for both degrees, and are planning on writing one thesis. Also, for the future or for others reading, please be proactive about your degree. If the person you're "supposed" to talk to isn't available, don't just let the issue drop. Push it and get someone else to talk to you or sign off on it.

My MBA screen works great to fit two documents side by side. That doesn't require a particular resolution (high or low), but rather a particular screen ratio- 16:9 or 16:10. I can put the paper I'm working on one side, and the previous version or a reference or an outline on the other. Or compare two data sets. Or code I'm writing vs. code I've written. And I'm not sure what the viewing angles are on the screen you're using, but I've got a very close to 180° angle on my MBA, both vertical and horizontal.

There's also the weight and portability side of things. Rarely do you ever "need" a 1080 monitor. But my 11" air is lighter than any of my other books and notebooks, and that makes it really easy to take everywhere. But then, I'm also fine with my old Dell IPS monitors from 2006. When 90% of what you're using it for is word processing, reading, and data analysis.... You really don't need an exceptionally high resolution. And so portability, battery life, etc. are more important for me.

That's not how it was for me, either. My advisor showed me the grants, and advised me to look up past papers the group had published, and dig into the literature to come up with a project. And this was before the semester officially started. My first few projects ran into a lot of problems, but I learned a ton from the experience. My research is pretty similar in track now to Juillet's, in that I tell my advisor what I'm going to be doing next, and why, and where I see the project going. And when it comes time to publish, I write a draft of the paper and pick a journal that I think it will fit well in.

I've gone through a number of cycles where I have problems with motivation- as have every other PhD student I know. I usually try to focus on re-organizing and redirecting my research when I go through a time like that, something that doesn't require me to be as motivated. That said, I don't know why you think autonomy is something that is only OK for post-docs. Especially coming in with a masters, I would think it's great that your advisor is letting you work primarily on your own- it lets you be the driving force developing your project, and lets you prepare for coming out of your PhD as an independent researcher, which is the end goal.

At least in my field, inviting another PI to a paper without an explicit discussion with my PI first would be crossing a huge line, and might be seen as trying to undermine my PI. And in this case, it's not even your primary paper as a grad student, so definitely out of bounds to ask someone to collaborate, or even to show the data around! Maybe it's just my field, but there's so much worry about getting scooped that if a first year on my project showed our data around to an "expert" in the field without first OKing it with me and our PI, we'd both be quite upset.

A few posts removed. Please don't feed the trolls. If you think someone is trolling, ignoring them is much, much better than continuing a protracted argument, dropping to their level, and making the whole thing a mess to clean up.

Oh, thanks for the clarification. All the TAships I'm familiar with in the US (and RAships, nominally) are 20 hours.

I'd also suggest getting some clarification from the school, because hour-wise, that looks like a half-TAship, rather than a full one (usually 20 hours). In that case, it should be much more manageable to do both.

Also wanted to mention: Don't forget to remember the importance of magnitude of effect. Most biological studies I see are looking for huge changes in effects- you aren't looking to kill a few % of cells, you're looking to kill most of them, or all of them. As the magnitude of the effect increases (to the point where a "casual observer" could see the difference") the probability of error decreases, and it counterbalances the effects of a small sample population.

So, again, I'd say you're conflating sources of error. Data is only as useful as the generalizations you draw from it: As the page you linked mentions, all cells are from the same population. It's considered to be a relatively homogenous population. But there are a lot of individuals of that population, so a lot of replication to rule out some individual variation, should it crop up. And when you write results, you're not trying to generalize to human cells as a whole- if you were, you'd need a lot more statistical rigor, if it were even possible. You're stating results from a specific cell line, or several specific cell lines. That's different than the other fields you're describing, where results are (hopefully) generalized to a much larger population- "mice", "humans", "lung cancer", etc. You seem to get what POA analysis tells you, abstractly, but I think you're placing too much importance on it. It's necessary for drawing specific conclusions, specifically it tells you how generalizable your results are to a whole population from your samples. In the examples you're citing of people not doing that, they aren't trying to generalized their results to a whole population, and so it's not really applicable. So a triplicate experiment (or duplicate, if you're short on material or space, or 4 or 5 replicates if you have room) is considered a good rule of thumb to rule out experimental errors. It doesn't worry about systematic errors as much, nor does it try to take enough replicates that the results are generalizable to a whole population. Also, to add, at least in my field, you'd never want to directly compare data taken on different days. There's too much of a chance for other factors (climate, temperature, power surges, instrumental variations) to have an effect on your result. You compare data between samples run together, so you minimize the possible variables, or such that the primary variables in your experiment are those you can control (ie, your drug).

The number. You're working on millions of samples at once, so individual variations are assumed to be minimized, which means you're primarily doing multiple runs to rule out some experimental error, rather than to separate populations. In a typical cell culture plate, your n is millions. They may be the same type of cell, but they're growing individually. Counting them together would be like considering mice housed together to be only one sample.

You're being very general here. I'm going to suggest you give some more specific examples of what you're talking about, as I'm not really sure what examples you're using of "they just did it in triplicate". Also, data is data. If it's not strong enough, that's for the reader to interpret as well. Publication by itself just means it's potentially useful, most of the time. Also worth noting that I'm from a branch of "science" that doesn't do statistical analysis of our data at all.

Think you're confusing different types of error here. Usually, you run something in triplicate not to get a large enough sample size (which would be the number of samples you run), but to rule out experimental bias or some random error. 3 is nice, because if you have an outlier, you can see that two agree and one's out in the cold. If you're talking about cell culture work, then you have to start with a huge sample size- thousands to millions of cells.

Lots of other good advice here, but I wanted to comment on this. You don't *need* a prep course to do well on the GRE. It's meant to be able to do reasonably well on with little to no prep, depending on your background. I may be in an aberrant cohort, but no one I started with studied at all, and all I did was take a practice test to see what the format was like. You may indeed need more prep than this, and that's fine- but I wouldn't generalize that "You WILL NOT be adequately prepared just by a prep book". And I wouldn't spend $100-$400 on prep materials unless you've taken a practice test and do indeed need them. Most public libraries, and a lot of school libraries, will have prep books you can borrow or use in the library as well.

Also, you don't mention if Rutger's offer included funding, or just acceptance. A lot of people overlook that the CGS resolution does not apply to acceptances, but only to offers of funding. A school can require you to accept an offer of acceptance whenever, they just can't require you to accept an offer of funding until the April 14th deadline. And even then, the CGS is more of a guideline than an enforced rule. But you definitely should obtain a release from Rutgers before accepting Tufts' offer, just so everything is clear and on the up and up.

Mine was an undergraduate thesis of similar rigor, although in the sciences. I didn't market it as such, but combined with a good deal of graduate level coursework, it was quite impressive to committees as a protracted, individually driven, stand-alone research project.

This may be true of your program, but it's definitely not universally applicable. We have a number of ChemE students try to take some graduate courses here in Chemistry, to meet elective requirements, and 90% of them drop out by the second test, as they aren't even remotely prepared for the material. At my undergrad, ChemEs only took up through sophomore chemistry classes- quantitative analytical, general organic, general inorganic. And they take even less than that at my current institution- Gen & Orgo, and then two electives in chemistry. In other words, less than a minor, usually. That's not nearly enough background to prepare you for a grad program in chemistry. That said, I do know people that have gone Chemistry -> ChemE and been successful. Usually, all you need to pick up are the more specific engineering classes- systems design, etc. And depending on the research of the lab you're interested in, the Chemistry background may be more beneficial than not. Generally, transitioning from physical sciences -> engineering or vise versa is quite difficult, owing to the fact that while there's a substantial overlap in background and material, the approach is quite different between the two, and preparation for one really doesn't suit for the other.

Projects change as funding shifts, interests shift, or things turn out to not be feasible. Your advisor is a constant. It's well possible to start off with a project you love, an advisor you aren't thrilled about, and then get pulled off the project, or have it cancelled a year or two in. Then you're in a lab with a project you may not like and an advisor you aren't thrilled about. On the other hand, you may start off with a project that isn't your dream, but with an advisor you work well with, and be able to either wrap it up and move on to something more interesting to you, or reform the project into something you're much more interested in. So yeah, advisor is way more important than the project.