TenaciousBushLeaper

Last year I received an interview invite on the 22nd of December and another on the 24th.

Not sure about LGBT question but as for the latter. One way is to fly into Newark Liberty international airport, take the airtrain at the airport to Newark airport station, buy a ticket towards Trenton and ride the train up until Princeton junction. From there take the dinky to Princeton Station.

During my recent interview at Princeton from talking to the other prospectives Stanford and Pitt have sent out and scheduled interviews. Pitt should be in 2 weeks if I remember correctly, and the Stanford Psychology is also later in the month / beginning of March I don't remember the exact date.

Just to be clear, my comment on interview day was with respect to psychology. Sorry to bring the bad news.

There have been posts on here and the results section that show Princeton sent out interview invites around December 20th, interview day is February 3rd.

I would agree if it were the case that engineers were applying to cog-neuro programs (and I honestly have no idea, though I don't doubt some were, and that the rise of interdisciplinary programs would certainly be more appealing). From my experience applicants to cog-neuro programs primarily come from psychology backgrounds, and it would be interesting to know, given that you have experience with these interdisciplinary programs if the applicants there come from psych departments or engineering or a mix, though I would tend to think that these program favor engineers / math majors over psych.

I've sorta been running an experiment on myself, where I either do my usual daily things, read, solve puzzles, write computer programs, do some math, OR go a few days w/o any of this (as much as I can manage). In the latter situation, when I then try to get back into my usual routine, I have to admit that my brain feels utterly useless for about the first day or so. Does this happen to anyone else? A part of me wonders if this has anything to do with intelligence, that is, people who are actually smart don't have to constantly bombard their brains tasks that require considerable mental effort. If they decide to go watch T.V for a few days, they'd be able to get right back into it, no problem. Now don't get me wrong, I don't mind having to constantly do what I do to retain my mental sharpness, on the contrary I enjoy it. That being said, I'm left wondering if other people also feel this way?

To the OP, I would encourage a healthy skepticism of some of the comments on this thread. Ask yourself if you enjoy the type of work you'd be doing in a quant program ? How, lets say "deep" do you enjoy going into the layers of "quantyness" ? If you decide to apply to quant programs and are accepted, maybe you can try this type of exercise, pick a well known method, try to understand it conceptually, look at the math, try working it out, and then give it a go at implementing it in a programming language. For example, start small with simple linear regression (one predictor -> one response variable), that would require basic algebra at most, then move on to multiple linear regression, for efficiency, in what's called a closed form solution you'll need to understand some matrix algebra (because you'll need to compute dot products and matrix inverses), then try other methods of estimating the coefficients (which by the way is all you really need in regression, once you have those you can easily get a lot of other things). The other methods might involve optimization methods, the "argmin" you see in methods papers at times. This type of exercise might not be helpful for everyone, but it was definitely helpful for me. EDIT: when I say implement I don't mean start up R and doing: lm(y ~ x) and also...the exercise described above in no way attempts to mimic or relate a similar idea of the complexity of the work quant phd students might have to do.

IMHO the reputation of field far outweighs the delicate egos of some researchers. Why wouldn't we want to preregister a hypotheses we are confident about? I think the answer is obvious and preregistering in no way precludes being respectful and or cordial. Pre-registering simply keeps you honest, and before anyways starts with "honesty should be assumed" we aren't talking about a relationship between two people, this is suppose to be science. Also, I'd argue that exploration isn't "bad", so long as you state it as such.

We are suppose to have this really nice computing cluster that's suppose to facilitate research, but really for more than half of 2016 it's been complete crap! How in the **** *** ******** universe does a cluster this size get back up by a mere 300 jobs scheduled !?!?! ARRRGGGGGGGGH

I may be wrong but, from your statement of everyone being person B and C at some point, this suggest that you could carry out the analysis, had that been your role in project X, where you are person A. The cases that I talk about are ones where person A would be incapable of doing it, they wouldn't be able of fulling the roles of persons B or C, if someone else was person A. It's that fact that sort of rubs me the wrong way.

Over the past year I've come to notice a trend in the lab I'm currently part of, and other well known successful labs in my field, though there are exceptions. For a bit of context, to do even remotely decent research in my field it requires a good amount of computer programing knowledge and skill amongst other things, (mathematical maturity, excellent writing, social skills ). Throughout undergrad I always thought of successful researchers as these amazing polymaths with tons of domain knowledge, a (relatively )deep understanding of mathematics and statistics, and computer science. Though what I've come to understand from my current position and experience is that this really isn't the case, at all. What seems to be common is, you have person A, who is a post doc or a graduate student, who has this great idea and has read a ton literature on the topic. Then you have person B, and maybe even person C. A, B, and C all communicate with one another in some capacity, A is usually the "leader" and B and C are the technicians. They do the math, write the code, do the analysis, replicate the results, make sure everything is square and good to go and then send the data over to A. Person A then has B and C explain all the steps, proceeds to publish and the rest is history. This is where I start to get uneasy about calling person A a scientist, for a few reasons: 1. If not for the technicians person A wouldn't have the results that he/she has, wouldn't know how to do the analysis, and not be capable of it save you stop time for(at least) a couple of years for the requisite knowledge and skill to be acquired. 2. B and C could, in theory just lie about the results with enough reasonable sounding BS talk and person A might not be able to discern solid research from...not so solid research. 3. Removing the possibility of any intentional foul play, what about the cases of innocent hiccups and mishaps that may go overlooked, how is person A ever to identify these events? Now, if I step back for a bit, this setup really does make sense, it seems ideal. Why? Because you can't possibly expect one person to know all of these things at once, and in the few cases that you do have this, it's because someone has come over from a BS/CS masters or BA/BS in math, and has along the way held an interest in the topic. If university admissions committees were to limit admissions only to those with this type of background, our graduate departments would soon cease to exist So therein lies my little internal conflict with what people do in this field that I've dedicated so much time to. Opinions on this matter? Is this common in your line of research? How am I looking at this in the wrong way?

I doubt many people if any will offer free tutoring. Here are some websites that can be useful: https://www.codecademy.com https://www.codewars.com Much like anything else in life, the more you practice the better you will be. It might take time to feel confident with the language, and, by that I don't mean knowing how to do the basics. Stick with it for years, any chance you get to put python to use, do it. I liken it very much to math, I can look up definitions for how to go about doing certain computations but that will come and go if I have no discipline, structure and purpose for it's use.

First in my family to have a BA (thanks to some great professors/mentors, a lot of luck, and a little bit of hard work), and will be the first with a PhD (hopefully, if I get there). We're immigrants and in my native country the schooling for kids, when my parents were of age was up until middle school before they were expected to get jobs to help out their respective families.

Very true, I thank you all for combating the opinions of my silly mind(upon writing this I've realized that it could be read with a sarcastic tone, it is not). Moving elsewhere, I guess I should share my "stats". 4 years of research experience, 2 while in undergrad and 2 post-grad. 170 quant score and 162 verbal score on GRE. Not entirely sure what opinions I have about how strong my LORs will be just yet. GPA of 3.6. One area that I'm pretty much terrified about is my personality / confidence for if/when I get interviews, afraid this will ward people off, but I'm working on this, I think.