GreenEyedTrombonist

That's awesome @Archaeodan ! I'm glad it worked out.

@TwirlingBlades I logged onto my ETS account and looked at the Contact Us info. You can also check on your account which scores were sent where.

You could always contact the school, but if you have other conferences and things on your resume, it's at most a small footnote to them. If you included a link to a website with your CV and such, update that, but this isn't something that will make or break your app.

@jltomato thanks for the response! I'm from California (Silicon Valley) so winter is definitely something that worries me (everywhere I applied save 1 school actually has a real winter). That's awesome that you have fun parties like that. I turned in my apps early so it's largely just waiting for my last rec letter to turn her stuff in and working with Boston to figure out where my GRE scores went. I've been spending my time interviewing for jobs, moderating Twitch channels, and making games.

Who had apps due Dec 1st? Did everything get turned in or was there a mad scramble at the end? When's the next app due for you? My next 2 are due Dec 15th. Both are currently missing the third rec letter (but she tends to turn those in at most a couple days before).

Teachers can report hate speech in papers. I would deal with this by grading strictly based on the req's I've laid out in the paper, reporting if necessary, and keeping a thorough record of each correspondence with the student in question. Normally, hate speech isn't backed up through credible sources, making it very easy to grade down. Back up your notes and keep everything (honestly, even the students that don't cause issues in class might still raise a ruckus about grades later). As for trying to preemptively stop this problem, include something in the green sheet explicitly stating that hate speech will not be tolerated and students need to be respectful in their discussions inside your class. You don't need to agree with each other, but you should support your disagreements with fact and never devolve into attacking the other person. That gives the professor recourse to discipline the student if necessary (discipline here could mean reminding them of the rules and making them back off to kicking them out of the class for that period if necessary). Differences of opinion can be great for a class if the discussion of those differences is respectful, but it's part of a teacher's job (imo) to keep order in the class (and keep it relatively safe for those present).

@EvelynD I definitely have a published game and had to figure out how that fits into my resume, haha.

@EvelynD Nice! I'm making a tabletop rpg because why not (and I don't think the mechanics of current rpgs on the market work well with the mechanics of pokemon).

@EvelynD I'm writing out stats for pokemon

I miss when I thought this thread was done...

This thread reminded me to check and my last rec letter (for the app due Dec 1st) is in! App complete! Now to wait for the last rec letter for all the others, get a GRE thing worked out for one of them, and then wait forever to hear back, haha.

hey @jltomato ! Thanks for reaching out! I've had pretty good conversations with some of your faculty and am just waiting on one rec letter for my app to be complete. How do you like Madison? How is the winter treating you?

Encourage him to think beyond the degree and "it's interesting." He needs to consider what job he wants to get once he's done and then research what skills are needed to get there. It's all well and good to enjoy taking a course in Ancient Maya Civilizations, but if you want to work in the tech industry, this course is pretty much worthless to your future goals. And to be clear, you can definitely work in the tech industry with an anthro degree, though he may want to pursue a master's in applied anth if that's his goal. The beauty of anthro is how many topics you can study, but it's also its curse as you can get a degree and not have enough marketable skills in one area (or know how to market your skills to that area). He should also make sure he has realistic expectations for job placement (especially how long it will take to get placed). He may end up underemployed for some time before something works out.

I'd be interested in the responses you get as well. I'm currently in a battle between one of my programs and ETS where the program says they did not receive my general scores (sent Oct 4th) and ETS says they sent them. Currently, the stand-off is the program saying they can't check the system to see if they just didn't attach to my application and that ETS will need to send them again AND ETS says the school needs to check their system and then contact them if they still can't locate the scores.

This depends on your intended field. If you're going into something quant-based (like math), yeah, you need to improve that score. However, something verbal-based (like english) would probably be perfectly fine with that score. In addition, different programs will use the GRE differently, so it ultimately depends on the programs you apply to and their admissions practices.

I agree with @fuzzylogician that this is something to discuss with the REB office. Given the nature of my project, I ended up identifying both organizations with which I worked. All participants for surveys, interviews, and some social media posts were given pseudonyms or their identities were obscured. However, there were some publically available data included where the person, usually a person in power at one of the organizations, was named. Given that this information was not given in confidence and was being pulled from public records (youtube videos, Twitch VoDs, etc), there ended up being no predicted additional harm to the person by including their name (and it helped provide context for some of the comments that could have otherwise been confusing). In short, there are some cases where this is ok and some where it isn't, so, as fuzzy said, it's important to talk it over with the proper authorities before doing something potentially harmful.

Hey @Tyler on The Road The weight of the GRE varies between programs, but most will say it's not the most important thing to them. From what I've seen, the SoP is the most important aspect of the application. As for your second question, I have a few non-peer-reviewed publications in academia (mostly co-authorships) and a few peer-reviewed submissions in the works. I also have (what probably amounts to) way too many non-academic publications (I primarily work as a writer for a few websites) and a published game (for the completely random, haha).

During my MA, I couldn't make time to do marching band, but I did join the alumni band at Homecoming and played DnD with a few groups pretty regularly. I also have my own Twitch channel and was better about streaming when I was in my MA than now, haha. Ultimately, you need to find the balance of being committed to your studies without letting it take over your life.

Do double-check that they are received, though. For instance, I had scores sent electronically to one school at the beginning of October. The school emailed me that they are missing (this week). I emailed ETS who says they were delivered, so now I need to track down what happened with them on the school's end. :/

If you don't think it's going to be a big factor and that you've done well, I don't see why you shouldn't send the new scores.

Is there some reason you need to decide this before seeing your new scores?

So one of my schools has yet to receive my GRE scores that I sent over a month ago. I double-checked and the code was right and everything. Waiting to hear from ETS what happened.

I work as a writer of pop culture content right now so I'm always switching between academic voice for school and conversational voice for work. Ultimately, I'm of the mindset that you need to know your audience and cater to them. That does not mean dumbing down your work or only saying what they want to hear. As mentioned above, it's about explaining yourself in a way that is engaging and understood. My work has definitely helped me hone my skills for identifying my audience and presenting the information in the best way for them.

Go for it @bananabear

To give a little more targeted advice based on anthropology, our departments tend to have very few people doing the exact same thing (as in, we don't usually have departments full of professors all doing African studies based around gender issues). Anthro can be tricky to match your interests because you often are matching regional interests, topic interests, theory, and methodology (this is one of the downsides of anthro being so broad). Instead, I like to make sure there are many (minimum 3) professors who have done work in my intended sub-subfield (the subfield I research within cultural anth, for instance "digital community") and professors who have similar methodological and theoretical frameworks (digital ethnography for methodology and professors who do think communities can form online for theory, though other theoretical frameworks are more succinctly titled, such as "Marxist" or "post-structuralist"). Given the typical size of an anthro department (fairly small) I think it's ok to have a smaller number of professors who exactly/closely match your interests, but it is good that you can show general interest, theory, or methodology similarities with several members in the program. Since our programs typically have an advisor and two or three committee members, I like to show very strong topic connections to at least one professor and strong methodology or theoretical connections to another two or three. There are some good posts in the anthro section that discuss US anthro SoPs and what is typically expected so that would be a good place to check regarding specific differences in how you write your SoP for these programs. I would like to note that, although my BA and MA are in anthro, my interest in digital studies has moved me to comm programs for doctoral research. I did still research anthro programs for both MA and PhD level applications though, so this advice should still be useful.