Eigen

What RH said. I can take pretty much whatever I want. And I now take advantage by siting in on things I'm interested in.

I did this at one school. Two main differences, IMO. First, they aren't yet trying to court you yet. Second, they aren't as familiar with you. Other than that, my visits were pretty much the same format. What got added on in post-acceptance visits was nice meals and a bit of wining and dining, as well as a longer visit. The actual meetings during the day were almost identical for me, though.

You keep coming back to this, but I went to an unranked, non selective admission state school and got into some top 10 programs. And I know plenty of others that did the same. Rankings aren't really that big of a deal, especially UNWR rankings. Maybe NRC, but those are very vague and still have a number of flaws. GRE scores aren't as important as you make them out either, as long as they're halfway decent. They're used as cuttoffs much more than to make comparisons.

So, for what it's worth (I'm sure you've finished and turned it in by now), I pulled a dozen or so of the Nature Publishing Group articles I have laying around, and they follow the second citation style you give- all citations, listed as superscripted numbers at the end of a sentence, separated by commas. For kicks, I also checked out ACS style guide and compared it to RSC (American Chemical Society vs Royal Society (UK))- ACS keeps bracketed citations within the punctuation, but keeps superscripted citations outside of the punctuation. RSC is all superscripted, and all outside the paragraph. Of course, all ACS based journals use superscripted numbers for citation, which would then match RSC and go outside of the punctuation at the end of a paragraph.

None of your reasoning for admissions decisions fits for my field. It may for CS, but it's definitely not the broader norm. At least in the lab sciences, often coming from a smaller school comes with greater personal research experience, and often also comes with great recommendations. And as to giving priority to their own students, I don't think that is generally the case either. In fact, it's often looked at as academic inbreeding to have too many of your own students carry on to graduate programs. Similarly, I don't think that any ranking systems for graduate programs are based off of acceptance rates or number of applications. Most are based off of a combination of funding, peer reviews, and general program statistics rather than applicant statistics.

Quite true for Chicago. The OP, however, is following Nature style citations. Nature doesn't answer the question in their style guide, but instead refer authors to NPG papers to see the convention. From my recollection, most papers follow the conventions I gave above with respect to punctuation.

Huh, interesting. I'd always read application season the other way around, as in the season in which you're applying. On the subject: I'd focus on the physical aspects of general chemistry, which you should already know. As has been mentioned, that's a lot of it. From what I recall, the subject test is strongly biased towards organic and reaction mechanisms. I'm assuming you're applying to schools for which the subject test is required? If not, and you aren't thrilled with your score, I don't think it's really necessary for most applications, unless your transcript is weak in chemistry and you're trying to bolster it.

Any reason why you're taking it so early if you aren't applying until Fall of 2013?

I highly reccommend reading the CHE discussion (on the message boards) on this article. It's illuminating, especially the discussions about how the academic job market still isn't as bad in many fields as it was in the 1970s. It's worth noting that there are still fewer than 1% of people with PhDs on welfare, something the article glosses over. It can happen, yes, but the chance of it happening does significantly go down with increased education opening up more job options. It's also worth noting that in the case of the first person in the article, she hasn't even been graduated for a full year yet- average time on the market in similar fields is 2 or 3 years. She's also the only one in the article with the terminal degree in her field- the other adjuncts have masters, not PhDs, which does significantly restrict academic employment. I'm not saying the market isn't bad, or that you shouldn't have plans B through F, but the article is more of a doom and gloom piece than the reality really is.

This doesn't really sound like a graduate study or admission related question, and as such you have probably chosen the wrong message board on which to ask your question. Moreover, it sounds lime you're trying to get others to do your work for you, which sort of defeats the purpose.

Coursework is a relatively minor part of our program. We might be allowed some slack our first semester to balance teaching and courses, but are expected to be researching pretty steadily by our second semester. Homework and studying was an evening thing for me and my cohort- you put in a normal 8 or 9 hour day at school between lab work and classes and then studied and did homework in the evening. It's one of the reasons people routinely say the first year(s) are the hardest. You have research, teaching and coursework. As time goes on, you finish coursework and can often move on to non-teaching sources of funding. More research, but just one thing to focus on.

It's fairly common. My program has no funding for MS students, but generously and fully supports all PhD students.

Some styles are very particular one way or the other. I have yet to figure out if it's american/european, or just different journals. Each journal and editor in my field has a completely different standard, so I'm flipping back and forth between 8 or 9 style guides pretty consistently.

IMO, neither is correct. What you want is: Smith et al found that giant pandas dance to rap music. [1] Most of the styles I'm familiar with, if you're citing the sentence as a whole, the citation comes after the punctuation at the end. Only if you're citing one part of the sentence but not others do you put a citation in the center, like: While Smith et al found that giant pandas dance to rap music [1], Jones et al found that they preferred jazz [2]. In the latter case, the second citation goes inside the punctuation, since it's referring to the latter part of the sentence rather than the sentence as a whole.

"Hi, I'm interested in graduate school in XX, and plan on applying to your Masters/PhD program this fall. I'll be in your area for XX reason next week, and I was wondering if it would be possible for me to meet with you to discuss your research?" The main issue I see is that it's really short notice. Ideally, you'd have gotten in touch with them several weeks in advance. That said, encourage him to not put it off anymore, as the reception will be better the farther in advance it is. Definitely don't just show up. When I did this the summer before I applied, I contacted the DGS about a month ahead of time, and gave them a brief rundown of my "stats". They treated it pretty much like any other prospective grad student visit- met all day with different faculty, lunch with grad students, etc. I doubt your brother will get something similar on such short notice, but he could probably find some faculty to meet with. The other issue that I see is next week is likely smack in the middle of finals week for most schools, which means everyone will be busy, cranky and overworked.

I wouldn't ask the blunt "do you have funding for me" question, as has been mentioned. But I think it's perfectly appropriate to approach the PI you want to do your first rotation with, and say "Hey, I'm interested in doing my first rotation with you. Do you have space for me for a rotation, and would there be room for me in your lab if things went well?" Or some variant thereof. Questions about "space in lab" are pretty much all vieled "can you find funding for me" questions, just asked more politely.

There are two parts of a rotation- one is to determine how you fit into the lab/like the research, and the other is to learn skills. It's not uncommon to want to stay in the first lab you rotate through, and then do other rotations to gain specific skill sets. I would ask point-blank if the PI could take you on. Here, actually, the PIs in our Bio department won't take on students for rotations if they don't have permenant spots for them, so yours may well be the same. It also might be that if you like a lab enough, it would be worth it to you to stay on a TAship longer but work in that area.

Julliet gives great advice. There's something else I wanted to touch on that comes across in your original post- and that's being able to choose a project that interests you. While it's important to have a project that you don't hate, it's also important to remember that what you do for your PhD dissertation work isn't what you'll have to do the rest of your career. Some people seem to put way too much stress and emphasis on the project, rather than the PI and group atmosphere. Find people you enjoy working with/for and a project that you don't hate, and then slowly bring things around to your area of interest. Especially in your first few years (and sometimes your whole PhD), project selection and choice is very dependent on the funding situation. Most of my peers have next to no choice over what they work on, it's decided by the PI. A lot of that has to do with personality, but it's also a reality of funding in chemistry- once you have an area funded, you have to keep pounding on it for results. That's especially true of young PIs. As you get more experience, and have successfully completed several projects, you'll likely get (or be able to push for more) lattitude in your work. A lot of grad students in my departments have many "side projects" that we don't spend a lot of money on, that are more in line with our direct interests than our PIs. But we can only keep working on them so long as we are putting out productive reseach on our main projects and paying the bills.

At the rotation level, I wouldn't worry so much about funding. It's something that you will very quickly find out as you're in the lab doing the rotation. While the total level of funding is important, it's also important to see what the PI does with the money they have. Do they prioritize RAships for students? New equipment? Do they second-guess and penny-pinch every expenditure? You'll find people with great funding that don't act like it, and people with lesser funding that really know how to make every bit of it count.

I bought a refurbished 1st gen model about a year and a half ago, and I've found it useful. There's nothing that it does that I couldn't do on my laptop, really, but it's a nice device. I use mine to give presentations, to keep my PDF and document libraries on, and for mobile e-mail, etc. It turns on fast, and is easy to pull out and quickly access something to reference. I still find myself doing a lot of reading on hardcopies, they just feel more comfortable overall. And although I've tried, I really don't like using it for heavy annotations on papers, or taking notes, so I end up using it more as a consumption device. But it's really nice to be able to quickly access any of my hundred's of PDFs, past presentations, pre-made graphics and handouts on my research, etc. to use in a meeting, when teaching, etc. To add on to the previous post, GoodReader is a great app that will let you highlight/annotate PDFs, and then sync them back to dropbox. You can also e-mail yourself just the highlighted text and annotations, and all of the annotations are compatible with Adobe Pro. Dropbox is also pretty much essential, imo, as is Keynote for giving presentations coupled with a Dock->VGA adapter.

Prolixity summed it up quite well. Our department has a subscription to OriginPro, but those with macs just use a VM to run it. Thankfully, plotting software is not a huge resource hog and runs very well in a VM. Which, of course, brings me back to the point about being able to run Windows on a Mac, but not OSX on a PC (for all practical purposes).

I think you make a great point with "how will things change"- it's definitely something to keep in mind. And I think it's a problem with academia as a whole. If you peruse the Chronicle of Higher Education forums, you see similar issues experienced by post-docs and TT faculty hires alike, where the contracts are exceptionally open. Here, at least, salary is garunteed at a minimum amount for the time you're here. But as you mentioned, benefits can change. Luckily for us, benefits have been getting better rather than worse, but it could easily be the other way around. It's interesting you mentioned the "contractor" idea. In the US, that's basically what anyone on an external fellowship is considered for tax purposes. You're a self-employed researcher doing work for/at the school. The pay-scales you mentioned are what I'd expect for "better" tier schools in the US. However, with around 4500 universities total, there are a lot of better paying schools, and a whole lot of worse paying ones. The salaries you mention are about what I'd expect at my current RU/VH private institution, but at my previous public RU/H university, the pay scales were what I gave, for the same discipline. To put it in perspective, you mentioned per-course pay, and I think the general pay for adjuncts that I've seen ranges from $1200ish per course per semester, up to *maybe* $4500ish at some of the really good schools, in the "competitive" fields (usually business and finance). My old school payed right at around $400-500 per credit hour per semester, so about $1200-$1500 for a normal 3 credit course. So scaling down both adjunct and full time pay scales, I think the differences line up quite well.

Why in the world would you e-mail a department to ask how it would impact admissions? A paper is helpful. How helpful varies from institution to institution, paper to paper, and year to year (based on competition), as well as person to person, based on the rest of your package. No one can tell you anything more specific than that. Aside from that, what does it really matter? Do as much research and get on as many publications as you can- higher ranked pubs are better, higher authorship is better. And in case you didn't get it, Prolixity was being *very* tongue in cheek. Hilariously so, but don't actually take the advice!

Professional societies are also a good place to look. Ours pretty much exclusively offers fellowships to people in years 3+.

All of our theory groups use Macs, as do half of the other groups in my department, just as an observation. All our computations are run on a supercomputer, so all you need is a nix terminal, which interfaces great with Mac.