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?

Yet to accept my admission - offer should be forthcoming in a few days - but have absolutely no idea how accommodation works. Oh and I'm an international applicant, will most likely be turning up at OSU.

Maybe, feels really light but yeah, I'll definitely list it somewhere. I'm working on something that's a lot heavier, and I feel it's much more interesting. It visualizes data too but for actual classrooms - the Canvas LMS system. QM is quantitative methods. I should be joining the Quantitative Research, Evaluation and Measurement (mouthful) program within the Ed. Studies program at Ohio State. My background is Information Systems, but don't plan to work in it. Hope to use the skills I've learned though, they're always a great plus, even if it's simply for productivity, like automating basic tasks. Here's a related xkcd joke for "programmers"

Yeah, there's this idea that programmers have: trust nothing, absolutely nothing, that comes from a user. All right, might still add it in case folks want to look over the raw numbers themselves. I built this when I kept looking through the results page. I'll probably go there once more to enter my results when my waitlist turns to a rejection at this one school.

If you were to search for "Pennsylvania", you'd get results from multiple schools. The major issue is the survey results are entered by human beings so at times, respondents simply write "Penn". I could very easily create an option to release the results (downloadable as a file) after some of the pre-processing I currently do. Is it something you'd be interested in?

I don't really know. I simply transfer the search parameters to the grad cafe site; so whatever they're using is what I'm using. But based on my experience, I'm guessing Texas A&M does not include the other schools.

lol

The search parameters are pretty much the same as grad cafe's. https://grad-cafe-visualizations.herokuapp.com/

I just might be joining you . Should know for sure in a few days.

Sorry, here's the right link - https://grad-cafe-visualizations.herokuapp.com/

I believe the minimum accepted Q score is 130, V score: 143. Median Q is 154, V is 157. Min AWA is 3.5, Median 4.5. This is based on Grad Cafe survey data (maximum 500 Masters & PhD results, but probably a lot less so could be total gibberish) but these scores are only for Masters degrees. I built this https://grad-cafe-visualizations.herokuapp.com/ app to visualize Grad Cafe data. I searched for "student affairs"; degree: Masters.