red_crayons

The university where I work has several official documents floating around that say things like, "increasing revenue-generating graduate programs [i.e. master's]" is a way to plug the gaping budget hole. I've also seen some results on this site where PhD applicants have been offered places in non-funded master's programs this year, which seems to reflect this attitude. So, yes, probably schools want more people who pay to attend this year than years past. My university actually totally phased out master's in most programs, and it's kind of a big deal that they're bringing them back. I suspect they got rid of them they could claim they fund all/most of of their graduate students to get more people to apply here. Also, they were pushing the research angle, and most federal grants require a PhD AT LEAST, and often job status as faculty, to apply. So phasing out Master's also made them look better in terms of job placement and grants received by alum. Now the economic winds are pushing them to abandon that calculus for one where they may lost face but get desperately needed money up front. Thanks for asking this question. I've been following this closely where I work, and I'm curious to hear what other people have to say about it.

I remember having time to get up, go to the bathroom, eat cookies and down half a bottle of water, at least once during the GRE. I also finished WAY before time on all but one math section, so maybe that's why...? It was so traumatic that I don't have a good memory of the whole ordeal. I ended up with 710V/660Q/5.0A, which is good enough. Verbal was 98th percentile. The GRE was definitely my least favorite part. I had to do it in secret early on a Saturday morning because I was embarrassed to tell work I was applying at that point, and between renting a car, driving an hour and a half each way, and the test fee, it was a HUGE pain in the butt.

I would've ignored my mother, followed through with a linguistics major and revised Bill Labov's atlas of American dialects, at least for the northeast, because it's so out of date and (I suspect) had such a small sample size to begin with that it's WRONG WRONG WRONG. There are parts of Maine where people still sound Scottish when they speak! Different counties have distinctly different accents! Where is that in his big precious book? Alternatively, I would have started ignoring my mother even sooner and gone to music school for the clarinet instead. My bottom teeth would've fallen out by now and I'd have a bionic mouth. It's ironic how I ended up in a town with some of the best clarinet faculty in the country but gave up playing almost as soon as I got here because of a mean faculty member...

I'm applying to science journalism-ish programs. I've realized by working an awesome extension/outreach job that there are TONS of non-obvious things you can do with a journalism degree. I'm picturing myself working in extension again, as a staff writer, or designing science museum programming, or writing for a university news service, or working as a staff writer for any of thousands of the little sustainable ag/environmental non-profits that are out there. You could do that in any field, too. It puts you somewhere in the middle of the organizational hierarchy, definitely above an admin assistant, but probably below the lawyers, and working in cooperation with the PIs and other research staff actually doing whatever research you're writing about. The PIs might look down on you, but you'll probably be at a similar part of the pay scale. You're never going to have a million dollars in the bank, but there ARE ways to find stable employment. You just need an angle in addition to "journalist", from what I've seen. Going to journalism school thinking you're going to make a living working for a newspaper is like going to graduate school thinking you'll be an Ivy League professor. I would be hugely depressed to realize this AFTER starting a journalism program - especially because a lot of them are pricy and unfunded.

Trying to contact an admissions office for 3+ weeks to find out what kind of writing samples they would like. Finally get a reply. Two, in fact. And between the two back-to-back emails, only two of my four questions get answered. And my name was spelled wrong BOTH TIMES. I already had misgivings about this school...

Speaking as someone who works with students with disabilities at a very prestigious university... Universities LOVE DIVERSITY, and disability counts as diversity. There are special offices to recruit students of disadvantaged and minority backgrounds, and more and more schools also have disability services programs and/or advocates who try to include those students, too. Faculty hate it, but even here they're starting to catch on. Everyone loves an overcoming obstacles narrative, too.

If PhD department choice #1 at one uni doesn't work out, department choice #2 MUST. This is from their website; this is what I already do: The PI of my program's grant is responsible for coordinating research on the following on this university's campus: Department choice #2 also CLEARLY prefers taking applicants from their own university (that I attended) in MY MAJOR. AAHHH! Should I have put this department as choice #1?!? Oh right, no: Department chair said my #1 choice makes more sense, and that #2 department would still consider me if #1 doesn't have enough money to take me... /stream of consciousness

I sympathize with a lot of the folks on this thread. I'm only in my mid-20s, but I've been supporting myself financially since I was 18, through pretty much all of college. I HATE Americana pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps stories, because they perpetuate an annoying American mythology, but that's kind of what I've managed to do in a really short span of time. Although I don't make THAT much, I already make more than my parents combined. They're relative poor, but our family was much, much poorer when I was growing up - the kind of rural New England poverty where everyone in town is poor and barters with their neighbors for things they need and cuts their own firewood and keeps a garden because they can't afford to buy things like food and heating oil from a store. I have a lot of anxiety about money, and it's helped immensely to feel like I'm putting distance between my current position and the financial situation of my childhood. Now I live in a nice apartment with a nice boyfriend, and in the last year I've bought some nice-ish furniture and clothes that hide the unfortunate parts of my upbringing. I'm hoping graduate school will give me a boost in terms of the kinds of work I'm qualified for, or open up new academic career paths for me, but there's a very real possibility that it won't. It's much easier to continue working and knowing that I'll move up the ladder every year, but I can't ignore the fact that I'm meant to be learning and coming up with original ideas. It's probably going to stir up a lot of old feelings to take a pay cut AND know I might not get a better job on the other end. Then again, the longer I wait, the harder it will be to take that plunge.

I'll be 25. I'm worried because I want a daughter, and I want to conceive before my 31st birthday. Former professors and my awesome supervisor say that having a first child at the end of grad school was a GREAT experience for them... However, I'm as ready as I'll ever be for the SCHOOL part of it right now. I was totally aimless when I finished undergrad and very jealous of acquaintances who knew what they wanted to do. My friends were mostly clueless alcoholics, which probably didn't help me in getting focused my senior year. Working and taking classes to follow an interest I discovered my senior year to its conclusion really did wonders for helping me make up my mind. Age doesn't have to matter if you know what you want. Still, having time to explore new interests doesn't hurt. I've taken big chunks of classes in 3 very different areas (biology, French (language and lit), linguistics), and that really gives depth to how I think about things. For example, writing an essay in a French class about the psychoanalytic family drama was helped a LOT by having taken a course on evolutionary biology where the professor drove home the idea that Hardy-Weinberg is a framework that is instructive because of why it fails, not why it works. Thinking back to that professor and approaching the family as a framework, not a rule or an absolute, and finding ways to challenge it, rather than parroting back what the professor said, helped me write an essay that I was proud of (but that really angered the professor because it didn't say what she wanted!). I guess the take home message from that ramble is that learning and doing more has made me more intellectually daring, and less afraid of what a big bad professor/admissions committee thinks of me.

If I don't get in, I'll have a great excuse to move to wherever my boyfriend does his MFA. If neither of us get in, we'll have a great excuse to move to Brooklyn. I'll sell my soul to Big Pharma or something for a year, and he'll take classes at UCB.

Heh, hence why I didn't apply to Columbia. Plus, their science journalism program would've had me living in the Palisades for a year. As cool as working at Lamont-Doherty would be, ew, Rockland county.

One of my schools doesn't even bother having this complete/incomplete indication on their application website. I know that application IS actually complete because a. I manually sent GRE scores 6 weeks ahead of time; b. my recommenders are awesome and have been telling me whenever they submit a letter; and c. I sent my supplemental stuff via certified mail, so the USPS told me when it was received by the program, which was 2 weeks before the deadline. I'm jealous of all your fancy online ways to check your applications!

I have two very professional, but part-time, office jobs. One is in grants administration. I will be REALLY REALLY good at writing grants and progress reports if someone lets me in to grad school because I've been on the other side. I totally plan to work in a similar kind of job after school, but hopefully I'll have a fancier title because of the extra letters after my name. The other is working with students with disabilities. I spend most of my time - are you ready?!? - getting paid a really respectable amount to go to class. Right now I'm reading articles about Miyazake films and the Yasukuni shrine. Oh, work.

Yo. I'm applying to various forms of "science writing" programs. I'm also applying to a Science and Technology Studies program. I've worked in a lab (doing field, lab and literature research), a science museum, a vintage store, computer lab support, student services, and cooperative extension, in only 5.5 years. How's that for indecision?

One of the programs I'm applying to has a big "come visit us!" weekend two weeks before their application is due. One program's website listed a person to contact to set up an informational interview. The others haven't mentioned anything at all about visiting or interviews. I guess it maybe depends? If I could have taken the time off work, I would definitely have gone to visit schools before applying. I can't imagine it would ever hurt for someone in the department to know your name and face. Since I applied to the school where I work (doing unrelated stuff), I met two people in the department I applied to as I was finishing my apps. One was really friendly via email, awkward to talk to, but gave me a copy of his book to read, and the other was curt via email but we hit it off right away. It gave me a better idea of how the department works, what they look for in applicants, how they'll approach my transcript ("We know how to read a xyz transcript"), grad projects that are similar to my own interests, even feedback on what to include in my statement of purpose. Plus, I did both meetings in one day, which got me SUPER PSYCHED about grad school, and I plowed through the rest of the application process really efficiently. Of course, if you're already in the waiting period, maybe you won't get ALL those benefits, but... I'd think you should go for it, if you have the chance!

To temper somewhat the edginess of my earlier post (which was not the tone I was going for at all!), I wanted to mention that I like this thought. I have also been doing more writing at work lately and can't imagine where I'd be without the chance to look at my colleagues' work - finished articles and progress reports, drafts at every stage in every genre, even old emails to different kinds of stakeholders. And really, I did poke around online to get an idea of sample statements. I just didn't consider anything to be a hard and fast RULE.

Somehow, it's harder to see the negative things in writing than the good things... - No peer-reviewed publications - No fancy internships, since I had to support myself as an undergrad - Didn't contact professors in all the departments - 3.5 GPA, but lower in major because it wasn't a good fit - What I like to think of as a broad education could easily be read as a lack of focus - Recommenders aren't in the field(s) I'm applying to at all - No extracurriculars, because of working and various health issues - Didn't know how best to address the working/health stuff in my statements, so I mostly avoided it

I'm glad I didn't read this forum much while I was working on my statements. It would have made me too paranoid to apply at all. I only applied to four programs (still debating a fifth). Each would require me to take a slightly different approach to answering my research questions, from totally professional approach (journalism, where I would be looking to publish articles/a manuscript upon graduation) to academic (PhD in the field that I would be writing about in a journalism program). I had to write very different statements. In general, I explain things to people by telling a story (hence the journalism angle...), so there was some sort of anecdote in every one. But I wrote them all separately, from scratch, approaching my topics of interest from different points of view. Some had more "I". Some had more dithering about how I'm going to change the world. Some had more or less discussion of how my work experiences intersected with and informed my research questions. But reading this thread before I wrote them would have made me scared to let them develop naturally, because I would have been trying to follow all those "rules" listed above. I learned a lot about myself in the process, about my desires, goals, reasons for graduate study, and even about how to write a good essay. Then again, I always write what I want, not what the professor wants. Intelligent professors like it, average ones don't. I'd rather write something that challenges me and expresses who I am than something that's going to please someone who arbitrarily has more power than me. Plus, doing the applications while working to support myself puts the whole thing in perspective. But I was raised by back to the earth hippie farmers, so I guess my little anti-establishment 'tude isn't that surprising.

I started contacting professors 5 business days before the submission deadline if they hadn't submitted their letters yet. They were all very gracious and sympathetic about the whole process. They got things in on time and said nice things that calmed me down. I would suggest contacting the professor ASAP.

I'm looking at a variety of programs to address the communication of science - the whole spectrum, from journalism to communications to science and technology studies! GRE: excellent verbal, pretty good writing, decent enough quantitative for the humanities GPA: 3.53 from a notoriously tough undergraduate program Work: have worked in related fields for 5+ years, starting as an undergrad and continuing until now, 2.5 years after graduating SOP: worked on SOPs for literally 5 months LOR: two of my recommenders have already landed me 2 jobs (albeit at the same uni where I was a student), and the third LOVES me and we've stayed in touch since I took his class Publications: I've had a couple news articles published for the university where I work/went to school Networking: worked with a professor in one of the departments last semester on job-related stuff Networking, continued: another professor (at the same department) knows my current supervisor, had a great conversation with me last fall where we talked about about his work, the department, and my plans/thoughts and I think we really bonded (I hope?!?), AND will be teaching the class I'm taking for work in the spring Academics: Biology major, plus French literature minor, plus the equivalent of a minor in linguistics, PLUS several post-graduation courses in literature/literary theory covers the life sciences, social sciences and humanities bases

For a few days during the silence, I'm working in the building where my application is awaiting its fate for one of the programs I applied to, across the hall from the grad student offices for the department.