Eigen

No offense, but in STEM grad school, a lot of what you get our of your research is up to you and what you put into it. I don't think my PI has "shown me" anything. I'm sure he'd come and give it a try when he had time if I asked him to, and he definitely helps me troubleshoot and find resources, but I'm better off going and reading the literature, asking other grad students, or finding someone in my department or a related department that has done the procedure I'm looking to do. And then getting it set up and giving it a try. It seems to me like you've decided you aren't going to have gotten anything out of the program, when it seems to me like you're in a position to get quite a bit- the materials have gotten in, the PI has said to collect data, so I don't really get what's to stop you from collecting the data and making things work out in a worthwhile fashion. As for not knowing how to use software... That's kind of a side-step to the issue. Load up the software, load up the data, get out the manuals and learn it. I've taught myself several data processing packages, some more and some less specific, as well as several different simulation and modeling suites. You seem to have a very "undergraduate" mentality of waiting to be told what to do, or taught how to do something, rather than looking for what to do, and either finding someone to teach you what you need or learning it yourself. And rarely does a PI directly teach their grad students techniques, etc.- you generally learn from other senior students, or in their absence, senior students in other labs. And you seem to be making it a very hard-and-fast "a 10 week internship is a 10 week internship". If putting in an extra week of work would make it a lot more worthwhile of a project, why not put in that extra week? And as for putting myself in your situation, I've been in a quite similar one. I started grad school about 2 months early, came, and got told "here's a lab, here are our grants, design a project you're interested in". And I read through the literature, designed a project, ordered the materials and started on it. And it seems like in this case, things were a lot more organized than that. Grad school (or in this case, an early admission combined with an internship) is about developing as an independent researcher.

To add to the above, it's not uncommon to pull an all nighter collecting data until you leave for a conference, and then make up the poster on the flight. So you have a final week to collect data- it may be rushed, but it's not unusual. And posters are rarely about finalized, publishable data- if it was at that stage, it would be published and not just a poster. Posters often contain preliminary or unfinished data.

This time last year I was just leaving on a nice little week vacation after an otherwise productive and quiet summer of research.

Pretty much how my summers seem to go. I wait all year for when things will slow down so I can get lots of work done, but then it seems like summer is when we have to do all of our maintenance work!

You have two options when you attach a PDF in Endnote- either it makes a copy, or it doesn't. You can change this somewhere in the options, I forget where offhand. I find it easier to keep all of my PDFs grouped in one folder (all 600 of em) with detailed names. Then I attach those files to Endnote. Since I have Endnote set to not make a copy of that PDF, it doesn't store a copy in the library folder. Previously, I was using the Endnote Library folder, but I had some significant problems when I tried migrating to a new system- about half of the internal links that Endnote uses broke. Similarly, I can use the same library of PDFs on both Mac and PC, just by changing one line in the syntax of the link, and Endnote will do that as a batch change to make it easy. For accessing on an iPad, I really didn't like the multiple folder structure that Endnote used in it's library file (although I use X2, so that may have changed in more recent versions) and preferred having all of the PDFs in a single file.And since it's a single folder, it's an easy sync to and from GoodReader, and very easy to browse. Since Endnote applies ID #s to all records, I used those in my file naming system so that my files default to the order of most recently added. And yes, if you want to keep doing it the way you have it, make sure you open up the proper file from your Library Data folder and mark it up in Goodreader, then sync it back.

For a PhD, our group tradition is that the recent graduate (who now hopefully has a job) takes the rest of the group out drinking. Some of my friends have given advisors/committees a nice bottle of some flavor of alcohol- scotch, vodka, etc. depending on the individuals preferences.

Either Physics, Material Science or most likely Inorganic Chem.

It's a ploy from ETS to get more money, which will work because lots of people who overestimate the importance of GRE scores will take it lots of times and send the best scores. And Adcom's will start to get more and more suspicious of high scores without correlation from GPA, letters, etc. But since GRE scores are already probably the least important part of your application, this shouldn't have a very significant effect. Definitely a move that de-legitimizes the test from an Adcoms perspective, though. ETS is really pushing it.

I don't think it would be possible to publish much on synthesis and design of nanomaterials if you weren't willing to do the characterization. What I see more commonly in the physical area is instrument design, rather than use. I'd also say reaction mechanisms fall under one of the defined subfields (biophysical, physical organic) which are more usually placed under the parent fields of biochem and organic chem rather than physical. Physical seems to be instrument/technique development (Spec, NMR, microscopy, lasers, etc.), computational chemistry, and theoretical chemistry from what I see at conferences. Also a big movement in molecular spectroscopy. My roommate is a physical chemist, very much on the physics end.

Also keep in mind that your NSF fellowship is managed to some degree from within your institution. Your institution will have a coordinator that will be listed as the NSF fellowship grants "PI", essentially. I know mine would not have allowed me to take the NSF in combination with any other fellowship that came through the school. I have found that while (in my case) there were no tangible benefits to getting an external fellowship (I had to give up an equal value internal fellowship to take the NSF), the intangible benefits are quite large. The obvious benefits are the prestige, but I also find that I get a lot more latitude in my research as well as more indirect support from my department being externally funded. IE, since they aren't paying for me normally, I've never had any problem getting travel funding, funding for software, or even funding for pet projects that are farther out from our main grant goals and directives. Either way, fellowships are supposed to ensure that you've got a reasonably comfortable standard of living (not having to worry about money) while freeing you up from other duties so you can focus on your research. They aren't meant to be "awards" as such, and if you look at it from that perspective there shouldn't necessarily be a financial benefit to you for getting them. The fellowship itself and the academic freedom that often comes along with it is the benefit.

Similarly, I've never heard of it being in physical! I don't personally use all of the above on my current work, but our group uses them all, and I've used most of them at some time or another, and will be using them in the near future.

I'm in Bioorganic Chemistry- I do synthesis and characterization of nanostructured materials. Looking at employment trends, however, Physics is at the top of the pile in the sciences.

I'm in nanomaterials and devices, but I wouldn't say I'm in physical chemistry, per-se. What area are you working on? Characterization?

I use Goodreader. I keep all my PDFs numbered by Endnote ID # (Most recent=largest #) First Author, (Year), note. Then I use Goodreader to sync that file of PDFs to my iPad. You'll want to make sure you're not making internal copies of the PDFs in Endnote, however- you want all the PDFs stored in a single folder that Endnote then links to. Goodreader lets me annotate the documents and sync them back to my desktop, as well as syncing up new PDFs or annotations that I add via the desktop. There *should* be an Endnote app for the iPad released sometime this late summer/fall, it's in Beta now.

While I'm still probably closer to some of my friends from childhood, high school and undergrad, I've made a lot of friends in grad school that I think I'll probably be keep up with better, especially because they're both friends and colleagues. Two of the people I'd consider my closest friends were in my cohort. Different fields, same general discipline. The rest of our department is quite a mess of people from pretty much every different background, but there's a pretty consistent group of 15-20 domestic students that are all pretty close. We hang out a lot during the day and week, and probably do something out or at someones house every month or two. The way our research facilities are set up, it's also pretty easy to get to know a lot of the grad students in other departments as well. We also have a really energetic graduate student organization that makes it easy to meet other grad students and hit it off. I think the way grad school, especially in the lab sciences works out, it's a lot more contact than the usual job, but not such close working conditions that you tend to spend so much time together professionally that you don't want to hang out personally.

There's definitely a huge difference between fields, but the guideline my PI likes to use is that the first author should have done >80% of the work on the paper. In most of the physical sciences and engineering disciplines, the corresponding author (PI) is almost always the last author on a paper, and the graduate student that did the vast majority of both the research and the writing is the first author. As such, it would look quite bad on several levels for a PI to be the first author on a paper- it indicates they aren't transitioning well to the role of PI, and sometimes can be construed as not properly overseeing their graduate students. I know the same isn't true for a lot of the social sciences and humanities, so the above comments from Sigaba may be more helpful. We just had a project where I went from second author, to second author (both contributed equally to this work) to first author (both contributed equally to this work), so there are definitely changes along the writing process, but I agree that much of it should be discussed beforehand, as well as along the way immediately if anything changes or looks like it might change.

I can't tell from your post, is this post-doc in the same program? Lab group? The closer to you professionally they are, the more "risky" it might become, in my opinion. Otherwise, I've never seen a prohibition between grad students and post-docs dating, since there aren't the official separations from grad student to undergrad and faculty to grad student. My experience with post-docs has been that they are much more like senior peers than a tier above, but that would change if they're in your lab group and have some direct advising role over you.

Again, you seem to be conflating distributing books with distributing journal articles. And as I mentioned, the EULA that I have quite explicitly allows sharing articles with collaborators *if* they are non-profit entities, which pretty much all academics are. And since the content to which this is referring (journal articles) generate no income for the author, you aren't shortchanging the author. And since according to publishers, the cost lies nearly entirely in distribution (since the authors do the editing, copyediting, and often typesetting), that has already been paid for by my institution. For areas in which it shortchanges the author or content creator, or in fields that are actually meant to turn a profit (books (academic or non, music, other forms of media), I completely agree with your argument. For research funded by tax dollars, with publication costs paid for by tax dollars, distributed to fellow researchers for non-profit use, I don't think your argument is relevant.

Questions appropriate to the graduate advisor are academic questions- what classes to take, scheduling research rotations, and (potentially) funding availability, TAships, etc. They're also usually the person who has to approve course selection/process, and who can help with issues relating to your relationship with your research advisor. As to titles, yes, Administrative Coordinator (assuming it's for the program/department) sounds like the appropriate title, but it's hard to tell without actually seeing the department directory. Not sure where you pulled the "coordinator of graduate affairs" title from, I've never heard of that one, but it sounds like it would be a school/deans office position rather than a departmental one.

Why are you basing your expectations off of grad students in other departments? Each department will do things very differently at many schools- not all of our departments even do orientations. Also, these probably aren't questions that should be directed to the graduate advisor, but rather to the departmental administrators. It might be a bit better to just send an e-mail saying you're trying to schedule out your move, etc., and were wondering when the semester started, how much earlier (if any) you would need to be there, and what paperwork would need to be filled out ahead of time. And then direct said e-mail to the departmental administrator, preferably the one in charge of graduate students, if the department has one.

So depending on how infrequently it's going to be driven, it's a good idea to drain the gas tank. Gas sitting for long periods builds up sediment, and also gives the small portion of water in the tank time to rust the interior. Also, ask for a quote. None of the things you mention should be nearly as expensive as you seem to think- I'd put them at under a hundred bucks all told. That said, none of them are really necessary if you're not driving it much either.

Sometimes I don't get the payments posted until midway through the semester, but the school always takes care of interest, etc. It's usually a good policy to e-mail and check, however.

One thing I want to point out is a slight difference here between different "long road" paths. Cajunmama didn't do so hot at first, but then took some time off and came back and did really well- one of the top in her class, with good GRE scores, great LoRs, etc. That's a lot different than a bad start, followed by a mediocre or "pretty good" finish. If you want to make up for a bad start, everything else really needs to be exceptional, imo. Generally, grad school admissions do work in a "we notify the people we accepted" fashion- many job applications work the same way. It can be frustrating, but you just have to understand it's how things are played. There's a chance that you might get a late/last minute admission somewhere, but it's starting to get really late for this year- we've already got our next year crop showing up.

I can't speak for your field, but my understanding is that if there's a stated minimum, it's likely a directive from the school rather than the department, and will more than likely have to be fairly strictly adhered to. It might be possible for a department to request an exemption, so if you've got stellar research experience and letters of recommendation, that might be possible. Also, I'd imagine you'd want your current GPA to be as high as possible to show significant improvement. You don't mention what your GPA is since you've come back, other than that it's not close to 4.0.

Joint JD PhD programs aren't at all uncommon, in fact I can't think of many law schools that don't have such an option.