Jump to content

Danger_Zone

Members
  • Posts

    336
  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    3

Posts posted by Danger_Zone

  1. How have you other international students dealt with filing taxes? There is help available from my school but their instructions are so confusing I can't even figure out what forms to bring to them for help. I haven't filed taxes before so I don't really know what the process is. But am I even eligible to go to a tax prep service? We can partly file through an online website but I am confused about if/how I would file taxes to my home country. Any advice would be appreciated.

  2. @Neist I think that's normal and professors don't expect you to automatically know what you're doing and act like a grad student who has been there for a few years. I think I'm doing alright, though I do feel like other newbies know much more than me. But maybe everyone just wants to act like they have things under control when they are just as overwhelmed as I am. 

    I felt really intimidated during one of my classes which is a mixture of older and new grad students. I feel like the students were much smarter and more prepared, but they just happen to have more experience and aren't necessarily more knowledgeable, I just have to try to remember that!

    I have to write a précis once a week for one of my classes. Are you writing one on a book? To my understanding it is just a short summary on the argument of the book, its sources, audience, strengthens and weaknesses, etc. My prof compared it to a book review and said write in enough detail so that you can reference the précis come prelims if you happen to be using that book for studying.

  3. On 8/21/2016 at 10:48 PM, Neist said:

    Wait, you expect to have time for games? I certainly don't think I will! :D 

    Edit: Classes start tomorrow! And my first obligation is my TA course. I'm nervous.

    Well maybe not much anymore, but at the end of the day it would be a nice way to wind down a little! I also need something more than a Chromebook. It's a nice little notebook but it isn't really capable of much.

     

    Classes have been going well for me so far. Nearly all of my stress so far has been from traveling to and from school. The buses don't run near my apartment at night so I'm probably going to have to take a taxi when I have night classes, because I really don't feel comfortable walking nearly an hour in the dark. I walked home today because the bus wasn't supposed to be going near my house at that time, then I see it go right past me! 

     

    Glad to hear everyone is doing well so far. :) 

     

  4. 9 hours ago, Effloresce said:

    awesome! what kind are you building?

    i'm not building anything too fancy (i say as my wallet groans)..i5-4690K, started with a 256gb ssd as I have a 1TB external, 8gb RAM to start off and a GTX 960 that a friend had given me. the real feat will be fitting all of that and having great cable management into a micro ATX mini case. :P I'll upgrade as time goes on, but I think this is a pretty nice start..my old setup had two monitors but my current desk isn't big enough, so maybe in the future I'll have my dual setup again :P 

    just wanted something to be able to play games when I wanna, and depending on the lab I join I might be doing some computational work (eek). i'm really excited for my new mechanical keyboard honestly, lol...

    thank you! :) 

    That sounds pretty nice! GTX960 is a great graphics card. A friend of mine loves to build computers and offered to build mine so I guess I'm not technically building it myself, but I've ordered a GTX1070, i7-6700, 240gb ssd, 2tb hdd, 16gb RAM, 144 hz monitor, and a mechanical keyboard of course (don't you love how loud and clicky they are :P )? 

    Hoping to play games in my free time as well. The last couple of years my desktop hasn't been able to handle much of anything that has come out, so I'm really excited to run new games properly. I'd like to get two monitors eventually but I probably wouldn't be able to fit that either.. heck, I don't know how I'm going to fit a computer desk at my new place. Though my friend has a somewhat smaller place than me and has managed to fit three monitors (why he needs three I have no idea :P), so it might be doable. 

  5. 12 hours ago, Effloresce said:

    i bought parts to build a pc! they should be here by wednesday the latest. :) 

    emailing PIs that I'm interested in was intimidating, but a lot of them are really sweet which I'm relieved about. also tomorrow I'm going to meet with my program mentor who's the year above me, and she is so sweet. i'm super excited.

    That's exciting! What kind of pc are you building? I just ordered parts to build one today as well. :)

    Good luck tomorrow as well! 

  6. 10 hours ago, pterosaur said:

    Aldi is German! So it's a place you can actually get good chocolate in the US! (My high school German teacher, who's from Germany, still does all her shopping at Aldi.)

    I'm currently obsessing over the best way to get bedding upon my arrival back in the states so I don't have to sleep on a bare mattress on my first night. I was going to order it and have it waiting for me, but it turns out the mail room isn't open on weekends, which is when I arrive. I think I have to get my friend (who is an amazing human being and agreed to pick me and all my crap up from the airport) to make a stop at Target on the way to my new place.

    You could try to see if any place around you does same day delivery. If not sleeping on a bare mattress might not be the worst thing for a few days. 

  7. Well I'm about to spend my first night in my new apartment. Was a rough 3 hour drive then had to deal with ordering furniture. One of the salesmen tried to give us a "discount" but ended up charging us more and acted like he was confused about how his computer worked. But we ended up going to another place and finding much better furniture for the same price. It won't come until Friday so I guess it's air mattress time until then. :)

     

    Hope everyone's adventures are going well!

  8. 6 minutes ago, Pink Fuzzy Bunny said:

    If you are at a 24-hour walmart, I hope yours has a self-checkout! Ithaca has a teeny Walmart but no self-checkouts so you stand in line for 30-45 minutes.... GAH

    I miss self-checkouts. A lot of places around my house got rid of them because people kept stealing items while using them. 

    Speaking of stores, I'm glad to be able to go to Target again! It went bankrupt in Canada a while ago. There's even a Super Target near my university!

  9. Just started The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut. Hoping to finish this book and maybe one or two more before I need to start reading for school. Was going to start on it early but I don't quite feel in the right mindset yet..

  10. 5 hours ago, Neist said:

    Yeah, I'm not a very fast reader either, but I can manage ~7 hours a day of reading somewhat comfortably, as long as I pace myself. At 7 days of reading, that'd be ~50 hours a week, or close to 1000 pages of somewhat intense reading; I can probably average a steady 20 page an hour pace.

    If you're not a very fast reader, you might consider either Google Books or Kindle Books and have the book read to you via headphones while you read the text. I can read a little faster that way because it's reinforced both visually and audibly. 

    I've considered it, I'm just kind of a terrible audible learner. But maybe the combination of listening and reading at the same time might do the trick. 

    Even if a book is super interesting I also need to take frequent breaks but, it's more that I get antsy from sitting and less from the reading itself. :P

  11. 5 hours ago, lovekilledinos said:

    Ahaha, I feel you. I was so smug when I saw I already owned and read 1 of 2 textbooks for a class, then I saw the 11 item list for the other one and it properly wiped the smug off my face. 

    My family and boyfriend's mom thought I was so smart since I already own 2 of the books on my required text list... My boyfriend just thinks I'm some kind of nerd. 

  12. 17 hours ago, sjoh197 said:

    If it means anything... I was in a similarly shitty place last year, and things looked pretty awful... But they got better. I really hope that things get better for you. If you work really hard, things will turn out for the better, and hopefully sooner rather than later.

    Came to say this... I will leave out details for the sake of privacy but I have had some hard enough times to make me consider whether life was really worth it. But stuff has gotten significantly better for me and I'm sure they will for you too soon enough. We all go through some tough times at different points in our life, we just have to remember that they will get better. And I know that can be annoying to hear when things aren't going well but I hope it helps anyway.

  13. 17 hours ago, Neist said:

    68b0395f3d3c05a436cc61e7608bd725.jpg

    All joking aside, I feel your pain. I can comfortably ingest, perhaps, 750-1000 pages of reading a week, but I know there might be some heavy weeks that go beyond that. I've heard that one of the faculty members like to test graduate students by assigning Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist for a single week!

    I love books, but man...

    That sounds rough! I'm a slow reader so I will have to work on speeding myself up and getting the gist of texts without reading the whole thing. Though it will suck if the book ends up being really interesting if I can't sit and read it carefully.

  14. Taking 9 hours, have a general required Historical Methods and Theory course, a course on comparative global medicine (I don't know much about medicine outside of North America so this should be interesting) and a US biomedical ethics course. The latter is a sociology course but it fits very well with my research interests. I'm excited for these topics but also have my 20+ textbook list now so I'm also very overwhelmed! 

  15. 10 hours ago, Neist said:

    Okay, so many soapbox, but...

    I'm taking foreign language classes currently so I can skip the need to take a language proficiency exam. Anyway, I'm typing this at 1:20am because my partners, most of which are undergrads, are so lazy that they can't be bothered to do the work themselves. When we claimed what we were going to do for our group project, I deliberately took the heavier selection of work in order to relieve them. Now, I get an email basically summarizing, "Uh, I don't think I can do it all, you need to help me."

    I've been doing homework for the last 10 hours, and the work they were responsible for would have taken an hour, tops. 

    I feel compelled to slap someone.

    That's awful. I hate group work too and have never had a time where everybody contributed. I would probably bring this up with the professor early on so if they slack you can show what a significant amount of work you've done. I know that doesn't always work with professors but I would absolutely not tolerate people not contributing.

    @Need Coffee in an IV sounds like a good idea to me! My boyfriend thinks the same thing about me, haha. I need to look into workshops soon but when I looked nothing was in the calendar yet. I've decided to do extra teacher's training but it sounds like I can't really work on that until I'm actually leading my own lecture. 

    @MarineBluePsy I'm sorry you have to deal with that, good luck. Definitely try to deal with it as soon as possible. :/ Unfortunately I can't really provide any advice for that..

  16. 44 minutes ago, MarineBluePsy said:

    Buses to campus rock.  After a 5 min walk I hopped a bus and was on campus in 10 minutes.

    That's great! Unfortunately I have about a 30 minute bus ride to campus but I do like that my place is quiet and on its own. 

    @Need Coffee in an IV thanks for letting me know! I should look into grant writing workshops as well but there's just so much to think about and do so maybe I'll put it off for now. :P

  17. 10 hours ago, Need Coffee in an IV said:

    @rhombusbombus Ah that sounds like the perfect nap situation but the worst at being productive! I have to have a cup of coffee with me so I don't fall asleep ha. I'm reading a book that's about grant writing/seeking. Its full of info so that's a good/bad thing :D. I feel like gaston at times "how can you read this without pictures?!"

    What book is it? I want to avoid it but I feel like I should learn about grant writing eventually, haha. 

    8 hours ago, Effloresce said:

    first day of orientation is august 16th! my roommate made a good point..there's a bus that runs to campus directly from our apartment complex which is free for students. but for me, it's a trek across campus cause the med center is all the way to the back, and since i'm uh..slow at getting ready cause I neeeed my makeup, I can foresee issues with getting to campus on time.

    but at the same time, the parking pass is $50 a month... also, driving used to make me SO anxious, but i actually love it

     

    Good luck! The mandatory TA orientation starts the 17th for me but I have some other teaching related ones plus grad student and payroll orientations (so many of them!) 

    It's nice if you can catch a bus right to campus though. :) I still need to look into bus routes..

×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website. See our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use