juanmesh

Thanks @Beals @TakeruK. It appears two issues are important for someone in my situation: ease of withdrawal; and matching funds from the school. I will clarify these with the school and pension agency, then decide. Thanks very much.

I am a new graduate student (PhD, international), and I have the option of opting out of a pension plan. I have no intention of remaining in the US beyond my graduation (in about 5 years). Are there any benefits of paying into the plan? All thoughts/opinions welcome.

Welcome any further suggestions. Thank you.

I know what map and reduce are. I just don't know what MapReduce is in relation to anything, though I'm quite possibly the only one in my department who doesn't know what it is. R is quite easy to pick up, actually that's not true. In my opinion, if you program in other languages consistently, you don't ever pick up R, but it's just easy to use.

My background is information systems so yes. But going forward, I'm moving into education, quantitative evaluation specifically. I wouldn't say the programming is all that useful (say except R programming?) but online visualisations are useful for communication, and the ability to automate data collection, and pre-processing is useful. Automation is always a great tool and python should be able to give you what you're looking for. There's an automation joke in an earlier post on the first page.

Thanks. But your background is Mech Engineering? Is general purpose programming a useful skill?

Great suggestion - DONE! Normally, and you might be able to tell, my sense of what things should be presented as is almost non-existent. Here's a link to the github repo - https://github.com/stonegold546/gradcafe-school-admission-results The actual code is in Ruby, web framework is Sinatra. The visualisations are JavaScript but I couldn't write JS to save my life - it's actually OS code from Highcharts.

You're welcome.

Done! I think.

@AhmedMA Well, I'll try to add that this weekend, maybe tomorrow. It shouldn't be so difficult for me to do this. Maybe a summary table below the graphs.

You're welcome. I'm not sure what you mean though. You mean you might consider it as a filter for which schools/departments your GRE scores might work at?

How would this work?

Haha. Your spellings are generally easier though: -or as in color, odor; -og as in dialog, catalog in terms of how the words are pronounced. I think the differences are not your fault; it just happens that right after the different standards emerged, the British taught a particular set of spellings to everyone they colonised. And English remains relatively easy in comparison to most languages. For one, it has no tones - the same word pronounced in many different ways still has only one meaning.

@Sketchitar That's the way the rest of the world spells defense :). I believe the GRE accepts both variants.

I could but I figured they're not reported very much, maybe I'll add it this weekend(?) Subject scores are typically within the 200 - 990 range, right? Or it's not always this way?