eternallyephemeral

Generally, it is not rude to ask for more money because schools understand that students are people that need to pay rent, bills, and buy food! My opinion is that you should ask for more money if you cannot accept the offer as it stands because it is not enough to live on. But even though schools understand this, many schools are not actually able to increase the stipend (but they will understand and not think poorly of you for asking).
However, I do think it will reflect poorly on you if you are just asking for more money because you want more money (everyone wants more money). I might be wrong, but I can't imagine $700 per year making a huge difference on whether or not you are going to attend the top choice. For a 5 year degree, this is $3500. I think that if you ask for more money, you are basically saying either:
1. You deserve more money than other students just because you asked for it, or
2. You value the difference between your top choice and the other school as $3500 or less over 5 years. 
Both options do not look good on your part and in my opinion, if you are able to afford cost of living at the top choice school, then you should accept their offer. 
Note: I do think that grad student offers should be more like job negotiations and that we should have more employee-like rights. However, the reality is that 1) schools don't really have as much flexibility in grad student funding as they do for actual hires and 2) trying to make a statement like this for $700/year is not worth the harm it could cause you.
Finally, be sure to compare other things like cost of living (some states are really big!) and health insurance coverage. Maybe the top choice school will cost you a lot less in health insurance. Do your research so that if you do ask for more money, you can back it up with numbers otherwise you'll also look bad.

Reapplying to the same school might not be the best choice. If they aren't going to fund you now, what will change in the future?

I don't think you should list two schools like that. I don't even think one needs to say the phrase "X fits my research interests better" but it's a common choice that works in a lot cases. I personally chose to say something like "After thinking about the best overall fit for me, I decided to attend X" or something more vague than just research interest (and the people that met me during the visits knew that I was considering things like weather, job prospects for my spouse etc. too).
If you are not yet decided between the two schools, I'd do one of two things:
1. Only send the formal email and the DGS email for now, and don't mention what school you're attending instead. When you make your final decision, send the personal emails.
2. Send all the emails now without your final choice's name. The ones that are interested may ask and when they do, wait until you make your final decision and then respond. This is time specific advice since it's only 10 days away from the final decision deadline!

I think you are overthinking this! You don't have to email every person you met with (remember, they met with tons of people too). This is what I would recommend (for the schools you visited, since it seems like you got the other schools figured out):
1. Do the formal decline thing with the school (whether it's a form or whatever). This is your official decision.
2. Email the "main person" that have been communicating these decisions to you. This is probably the DGS. This is a formal letter, so what you wrote above is good (without the last 2 sentences about meeting/working together). The point of this letter is basically professional courtesy so that the department hears about your decision from you instead of the Graduate School.
3. Now, you can write personal letters to individual people that you felt a strong connection to. You don't need to include every single person you met. You should be professional, but you don't need to be super formal like the example you gave. Write it in the way that fits the level of familiarity you have with each prof. Some guidelines on who to include would be those who you had have email conversations with before/during/after the application+visits and those you met at the visit that you really clicked with and really want to keep in touch with. Basically, if you don't have anything personal to say and it would just be like a form letter, then don't do send one. 
The purpose of this letter is not to officially inform anyone of anything, the above steps take care of that. This is just wrapping up personal correspondence that you may have had during the whole application process. I highly recommend including where you will be attending instead in this letter because again, you want these people to remember you and be able to find your work in the future if they are interested. If this is not the case, then don't send this letter.

Hi there! This sounds a LOT like what my experience getting married & having children has been like. There were most definitely friends who disappeared or squeaked when I/we couldn't or wouldn't be available to their liking. Those people tended to weed themselves out eventually and I don't feel bad about it in retrospect--but I sure did at the time. In the end, it was a blessing in disguise because it opened doors for new, very understanding and supportive friends to enter. The kind where you don't see each other for 6 months and then getting together is just like no time has passed and you pick up where you left off. And maybe you only have 3 of them, but the complete and total lack of drama is priceless. There's so much drama to regular adult life anyway, it shouldn't come from those who love you the most. 
You have clear obligations right now and a real friend will understand. (Gosh, I'm sounding really harsh today!  )Eventually, regardless if it's med school, a new job, family or ??? she will find herself in a similar spot eventually. On the off-chance that she doesn't understand what really happens when someone writes a thesis, perhaps one coffee and a hashing out of things might make sense.Then at least you will be on the same informational playing field. I have no tolerance for name calling, so if she is calling you the b-word, that's just not okay.
I'm starting graduate school this fall after many years not in school to go live life. I've got to say how nice it is to not have to worry about if my friends will understand the new time constraints. My advice: Let this one go. If her friendship was meant to be, she'll come back around. 
Best wishes!
 
 

Received email about status update and bam!! Got off the waitlist and was offered NSERC YAY!!!! 

You don't need to worry about the professor's time. Worry about making the right decision. It can easily take a week to schedule a meeting, and if you think you will seriously consider this school if you get off the waitlist, you need to act now to collect all the information you need to make your decision. If following the incident you have decided not to attend this school, that's a perfectly legitimate choice, but in that case you should let them know and maybe someone else can come off the waitlist instead of you. Otherwise, I assume your previous meeting with this POI when he was visiting your school didn't discuss issues like advising style, potential research projects, students placement records, etc. You need to have a conversation with this person as his potential student at least once before you accept an offer from his school. 

This is very important.  If I could give advice to every admitted student, it would be 1) conduct one-on-one conversations, outside of Visit Day, with multiple students and former students of your adviser/field (so as to get a sense of your committee). Ideally, these students would be advanced, because they'll be able to tell you about life after coursework, when advising, funding, etc. is most critical. 2) know placement rates for your adviser & field within the department (assuming you want a TT job. I would also advise to ask about support for alternative careers, but that's another matter).   You seem to know about 2, but 1 is equally important. If you can confirm with multiple students that a professor is very, even exceptionally, dedicated to students, and kind, I'd say you have a great and rare adviser on your hands.  It's true that the adviser isn't everything. However, it is also true that the lack of a dedicated mentor can jeopardize your training, happiness, and career. Track down more students and try to figure out if this is just about department politics. If it is, ignore it.  If its a sign of general difficulty that impacts her advising, you have another matter on your hands.
FWIW, two of the faculty at my top-ranked department have issues with departmental admissions right now. This is largely because they (understandably) think fewer PhDs should be admitted due to declining job numbers.  They have both stopped actively recruiting for this reason. But, they are hands-down the most supportive people on our faculty when it comes to grad students. Sometimes the faculty that have spats with other faculty are the ones that advocate for their students the most.

Keep in mind the placement rate / prestige of the institution won't carry much weight if you yourself can't do the work to back it up (i.e. don't have good advisor fit / support). Again, not sure about your field -- but you need to think where you can do your best work, not assuming that the better school will certainly mean better prospects for you.

I don't think you should weigh general placement rates too heavily without knowing details. I would look more closely at what your potential PI's students go on to do.
I do think refusing to meet with students is a red flag. But I want to clarify - did you request to meet with him and were denied, or did he simply not take the initiative to set up a meeting? If it is the first case, I would be wary of working with him. I would wonder about getting stuck in the middle of his squabbles with the rest of the department, or being used as a pawn or leverage somehow. 

I think a comfortable standard of living (i.e. live with roommates, eat real food not just ramen but can't just eat out all the time, save a little each year but can't afford a car, etc.) would need a stipend of something like $28,000-$30,000 pre-tax in this area. I don't live in LA but I do live in Southern California and it might be true that my area is a little more expensive than the USC area (or maybe not, I'm not sure!).
To find housing, I would use craigslist (https://losangeles.craigslist.org/). Or there are sites like PadMapper that take listings from Craigslist as well as other websites and plots them on a map for you and you can slide filters to adjust price ranges etc. It's really hard to find good housing in the LA area. I would plan to invest a an hour every day for a few weeks looking for places and making a lot of phone calls. Unfortunately, it will be pretty hard for you to see the places before you arrive if you are out of the country and a lot of online apartment listings are actually scams.
My advice would be to consider starting in University Housing. Ask your school if you can move in early because you have the early orientation date. I am sure you are not the only one in this situation. If this is not possible, consider staying at a motel for the first week until move-in date. I think it's really bad that USC puts move-in date way after international student orientation---my school tries to set everything up so that students can move in, start health insurance etc. all by Sept 1 (international orientation is mid-Sept, all-campus orientation is late Sept).
For things like food, etc. it depends on what you eat. You can probably feed yourself for $25-$40 per week (so...$100-$150 per month ish) if you cook all your meals and use cheap ingredients. Maybe $200 per month is more comfortable. Utilities (for a household) may cost something like $40-$50 per month for electricity (assuming bigger household and using more electricity than a single person), $30/month for gas, $50/month for internet and I don't know how much trash costs because it's always been included in the rent where I live. Some places include gas in the rent too (or other utilities). Remember, you would be splitting these utilities cost with everyone living there. 
Cell phones can be cheap if you get cheap pay-as-you-go plans ($20/month or so). Otherwise, plan for $40-$50 per month for a full service plan. Google just released Project Fi to everyone and they have cheap plans ($20 for basic phone functions then $10/GB of data, charged based on use), but you do need to have a new Nexus 5X ($350+ retail) or Nexus 6 ($500+ retail). 

That would stress me out so much! I was accepted on a Friday, and had a lease signed by the following Friday. I'm so excited to move! Housing in my area is pretty cheap, and my new apartment has a dog park and pool right in the complex. 

Yes, that happens all the time. I met with faculty from multiple schools that said I would be a good candidate.
That's not a bait and switch, because even if they thought it, there's a whole committee of people that admit you.
This is especially true in clinical/counselling, where there are tons and tons of applicants, and very few spaces.
The school doesn't owe you anything, even if they told you point blank that you would get it (which this person never said).

If you had applied the year they supposedly offered you admission without an application and then been rejected, I would understand you being upset. But everything changes from year to year. Maybe you fit what they needed as far as research interests, etc. last year, but not what they need this year. Maybe last year they accepted a large number of students and this year only a couple because last year's enrollment was larger than expected. The bottom line is, you have no idea. You have no clue whatsoever that they were being dishonest but assume so anyways. Maybe your statement of purpose wasn't up to snuff like they expected. Maybe one of your rec letters was lukewarm. I guarantee you that the school is trying to accept the best people for them and their program. You were not among them--that doesn't mean you're unqualified, it doesn't mean they wouldn't accept you next year. It's not some sort of personal insult as you seem to take it. You're not entitled to just go there with full funding whenever works for you. @eternallyephemeral was right--they don't owe you anything. And no matter what that one professor said, he is not the only one deciding and actually can not guarantee acceptance, no matter what you thought he was saying. I HIGHLY doubt he was being dishonest (there's just no reason to), but he's not the only one admitting students, and in that way the grad school acceptance procedure is not obscure at all--you must have been aware of that. 
Sorry to be so harsh--but you seem to have already decided that this is a sort of personal vendetta or something. 

I'm sorry to hear you have had a poor experience. I would like to highlight something though in the point above. The professor is not wrong in suggesting a field that has a few scientists in, but is anticipated to be the "next big thing" will probably be better for career prospects than one that is saturated with thousands of scientists. Of course, the smaller field may be an old one that has burnt out, but the way I read the above is that it's an up-and-coming venture that will see an explosion of growth in the next 5-10 years - which is exactly what we want to find as grad students. It might work differently in physics but that's how I interpreted that.
As for the group - bashing, and some of the horror stories outlined by @TakeruK that's not cool! I would struggle to keep quiet with overtly sexist, misogynistic comments  too.

Wow, I am disturbed to hear about the bashing of other groups! Although maybe it is also disturbing that I am not really surprised to hear this happens In my program, as far as I know, we do not do this. In fact, we often want to hear where our visiting students are also considering so we can tell them what's great about the other programs (if we have visited or know faculty there). We just want the best for the visiting students, whether it's here or not!
---
Sharing these stories could be personally risky, so I'm going to list a few stories in which some details are changed (but the gist is the same). Also, this is a mix of things that happened to me or my friends (who are in different fields) but I won't identify which stories belong to who/which fields/schools.
- The visit basically consists of flying students to the department, paying for the hotel but not planning any events, not scheduling any meetings, so the visiting students just wandered the halls with no one to talk to (and no one currently in the department approached the visitors either). Luckily, the visiting students had friends already at that school who were able to show them around a little bit.
- One of the professors noted the visiting student was a coauthor on some other paper, and then harassed that student for not citing the professor's work in that paper.
- One of the professors, when talking about one of the students they graduated, admitted that they thought they wasted 5 years of their life training this person.
- While addressing all of the visiting students, a faculty member made multiple sexist remarks, suggesting that women just aren't capable of the same research potential as men. 

Top 25 is still plenty good; I think you should attend the program that makes you happy, especially if they are offering you a financial incentive to attend.

You're absolutely right that running shoes last a long time, but I'm looking for more professional shoes and I find that the one thing that basically makes me look more like a student and less like a future professional are the kinds of shoes I'm wearing. Obviously there are other, more important things, but my program has lots of internships. Also when I'm TAing, I'm very aware of trying to come across as a more mature adult to put some distance between the undergraduates and I.

Hello!
Long time lurker but first time posting. In fact, I just signed up.
I am thinking of applying for the Vanier next year. I am curious what candidates who got forwarded by their institutions put for their leadership section.
Also, what about research potential? It says in this section that "both the prestige of the Vanier CGS and the stage and nature of the candidate's academic career should be considered." Does this mean if you're a 1st year Phd, they expect you to have fewer publications than a 2nd year and so forth? Or that different research councils have different expectations? (I will be applying to CIHR)
Thanks, and good luck for results tomorrow! I wish everyone the best!
 

I think that sounds like a really good application! Are both GRE sections above 150? I know people just put their total up, but it's hard for me to conceptualize if I don't know the percentile scores. Was your writing score alright?
If you think it's important and if it would help you, I would recommend studying a bunch for the GRE and doing some practice tests after studying to see if its possible to raise your scores. Having a really good GRE if your marks are around some cutoffs (I don't know if they are or not, the more competitive cutoffs are around 3.5) can help your application. But don't do it if you don't think it's useful.
I would focus on researching programs with people that you like and whose research is interesting to you. Contact them ahead of time (after reading some of their papers) and then use those meetings or emails to see if you still want to apply to the program. This can help you narrow down your list to places where you've made a connection. Of course, some people won't respond or they won't have time to meet, which isn't a reflection on you, and you should still apply if you really want to work with them.
To be honest, if you really want to try for some PhD programs, I would do some research on those too. You might not be super competitive for a top ten school, but if there was a place with a great research fit, where you made a connection with the PI and you wrote a great statement of purpose, I think you could have a shot. Not to give you any false hope, but my bf has similar stats as you (including the publication, but he has a few posters and maybe half a year more experience and a 302 GRE) and he wasn't competitive for super difficult PhD programs in neuroscience and psych (like UCLA, MIT, Columbia, etc), but he was super, almost over-qualified for some of the masters programs he applied to.
if you think that directly applying to a PhD is what you want at this point in your life, and you can afford to try and apply to a few, I don't see why you shouldn't. However, I don't know where you're interested in and how difficult those are.
I also came from a life science background (like pre-med, basically) and I find it helped me. But most of those courses were in my first year of undergrad.
 
Disclaimer: Other people may completely disagree. This is just my opinion, and my experience is limited. I just know that sometimes you can get consumed with what ifs, and if the PhD is your goal, you could at least try to achieve that this upcoming round.

I just graduated with my Bachelor's in math and had this exact question since about my sophomore year as well- how in the world can I use math to help people?? I've since come across a few really cool ideas. One of the best things my professors ever told me was "if you have a degree in math, you have a degree in problem solving, and everyone wants problem solver." So if there's a job you find fascinating, don't be afraid to explore ways that your analytical/problem solving skill set could contribute to that type of work.
Currently I am working for a very large NGO that does all sorts of global development, working to alleviate poverty and injustice. I've learned of the rising need for STEM people in non-profit work. Like someone suggested, finance work doesn't have to just be to make rich companies richer, NGOs that are doing a lot of good in the world also need good budget analysts to make better decisions. If you're just not interested in finance, though, that's fine too (I wasn't either). Non-profits are also finding themselves in need of statisticians to perform in depth analysis to provide evidence to donors that their programs are actually effective. This type of program/policy evaluation would have similar opportunities in the government context as well. Statistics has a lot of power to help people/organizations/governments make better, more informed decisions, which can result in helping a lot of people.
Another area I've come across is Humanitarian logistics, which essentially is operations research in the humanitarian context. It answers questions such as, in the event of a natural disaster, what is the optimal way to get supplies to where they need to go? It addresses many of the same questions as operations research would in a business context, but often with an added layer of difficulty. Not only is vehicle routing (a very mathematical problem) important, but what routes should the vehicles take if infrastructure is damaged from the disaster?
Another field to explore and see if you have any interest is economics. With a math degree, you would be very equipped to enter into an economics graduate program, whereas many econ majors are not. At the graduate level, econ is very math-heavy. You're usually required a background in multi-variate calc, linear algebra, and proof-writing courses such as real analysis. 

My husband, originally a math major, also "hated stats" the first time he took statistics and probability. He decided to give it another go and changed his major to stats after that. The major reason, according to him, is he loved the varied applications of statistics. He wasn't a huge fan of the sort of abstract nature of his math major before that; he really wanted to do more applied, practical work, and stats was the way for him.
However, there are many other areas of math that can be applied besides statistics. I think statistics is probably important for most applied mathematicians to know in some sense, but there are applied mathematicians that don't use much if any statistics on a regular basis.
Also, let's walk it back a bit. If you don't know what you want to do, why are you hoping to get a PhD in math? Math is a pretty abstract/theoretical field - there are more applied portions of it, of course, but the kind of math people study in graduate school generally isn't. Even in applied fields, a PhD is often not the degree you want if you really want to "do" something. My PhD is in public health - which sounds very applied, until I realized into the program that it mostly encourages doing research, and not the on-the-ground kind of public health work people think of when they think of public health. A PhD is a research degree; if you don't want a career as a researcher (or aren't sure that you do), then you shouldn't get a PhD in math. Most of what you want to do can probably be achieved with a BA or MA in math, applied math, statistics, or some related field.
Here are some applied areas you can enter:
Epidemiology (math + public health)
Biostatistics (statistics + health/medicine)
Bioinformatics (statistics/math + health/medicine/biomedical science + computer science)
Meteorology/atmospheric science (math + atmospheric science)
Quantitative psychology (math/statistics + psychology)
Mathematician position in the federal government (do a search for "mathematician" on USAJOBS)
Medical physics (more physics than math, but still)
Check out this website on careers in math.
Also, "making the world a better place" is a broadly interpreted statement and a lot of traditional jobs (including in big corporations in finance and accounting) involve work that makes the world a better place or at least some necessary function for humanity. For example, some finance jobs may involve helping to improve the economies of developing nations, or developing a microfinance program for low-income laborers, or providing support and financing to nonprofit organizations. Nonprofits, NGOs, governments, hospitals and clinics need people in their finance and accounting departments just like large corporations do. And pharmaceutical companies (where many biostatisticians work) create drugs that help millions; there are some non-profit pharmaceutical companies, and even many of the for-profit ones do pro bono work.
On the flip side, make sure that you avoid romanticizing nonprofit or helping professions kind of work, because a lot of it is very different from what you might expect. For example, in medicine, a lot of healthcare provision and research organizations these days are very large corporations, and their primary goal might be to make money. A lot of academic and nonprofit medical research is directed by the winds of NIH funding, which is competitive and makes the atmosphere different from what you might otherwise expect. Some non-profits are poorly run and their employees not well compensated for their work (and I don't mean "I can't buy a yacht" well-compensated; I mean "I'm struggling to pay my rent this month").

I hated stats when I studied it at school, and through my first years at University. However, when I got to my final year and realised exactly how much the stats can be applied, made sense of and brought my research to life I loved them! As ginagirl said an Applied Math PhD sounds like a good fit as you're not completely sure. In my field for example we have a lot of researchers who come from math backgrounds, who do analysis on our volunteers data, genome analysis, helping us out with our own stats, and many other applications. I know for a fact that I couldn't have completed my research on injury risk factors for athletes across a variety of sports without help from the resident departmental math genius. Most of my professors are either applied maths, statistics or mech eng backgrounds who have made the transition into sport and health research. There's a lot of applied math there.

First of all, why wouldn't school B have to be nice/welcoming? If they want people to go, they should be, don't you think?
But then again, that goes back to your main question. Personally, I think happiness and financial security is extremely important. If you aren't happy and motivated, and if you aren't, how will you be productive? As well, how will you get work done if you're constantly worried about funding?
Obviously this could differ, as I'm not well-versed in chemistry programs, but I know lots of people with mediocre cvs and graduate publication records from excellent schools. I also know lots of people with amazing cvs/publications from lesser schools (and top 25 is still pretty high up there). The school does not make your cv good; YOU make your cv good. So if you're in a welcoming environment, if you have money to live on, and if you are excited about going there, I don't see how you would lose out in going to that school.
When the only thing driving you towards school B is the name and the potential for forfeiting future job prospects (which is tenuous), then I think you have your answer.
 
Hope this helps! It's just my opinion, of course.

I took a Kaplan course (provided through the summer research program I did) and studied my butt of every. single. day. My roommates at my summer program actually used to tease me because I studied instead of going out with them, but I was able to raise my quant score from a 149 to a 159 (the first time I took the GRE, I did not study at all). I also raised my verbal score from 159ish to 163.
I had a great Kaplan instructor who gave a lot of advice and made it fun to learn the material. But, in all honesty, my improvement came from at-home study. The key for me was sitting down for at least an hour every single day to study vocab flash cards and do practice quant tests. Two weeks before the test, I increased my study time to two hours a day and took practice tests once a week. I am not good at standardized math testing, so I was pretty happy with my improvement.