Adelaide9216

I can totally relate as I have gone through the same thing. My school requires students to do a departmental talk every year, but I have to talk for at least 10 min. To me, the most difficult part is the Q&A session. Like you, I always worry about getting questions that I don't know how to answer and then my supervisors get disappointed. Unfortunately, there must be times when someone raise a question that you don't know how to respond. The key is not to panic. Very often, saying something like "This is a very good question/suggestion. I have never thought about that. Perhaps I should look into that later." will get you out of the way. I tried that a few times and it worked very well!
Good luck to your talk! 

There are tons of students all over Canada and the USA who do academic work with english as a second language. So you will not be alone. One student in my cohort at my MSc program was from Quebec and that program was the first time she ever did academic work in English. After giving a presentation one semester, she admitted it was her first time ever presenting science in English! We were all shocked because she sounded very natural. Based on all of your posts in these forums, I don't think you will have any major trouble adjusting to academic work in English. 
Also, it's good that you are taking English classes now but I'm sorry to hear that they are not challenging enough. When you start your PhD program, there will also be resources available to teach English to ESL students. Depending on where you go and what classes you take, they might also be too "easy" for you. I really do think your English language ability is at the same level or better than most international students in North America.
As for funding, you should check with each school because while external awards like Vanier and Trudeau are great, many dept also provide their own funding, either as awards to top students or as compensation for assistantship work. In the US, tuition is really really high so tuition waivers are often awarded to competitive students in return for assistantship work. So, check with each program you're interested in on a case-by-case basis. If you're in doubt, I would apply first and then turn it down if their support is not enough, rather than the other way around.
Finally, you mentioned national-level sources of funding in Canada. However, we have provincial level graduate funds too. For example, in Ontario, there is the Ontario Graduate Scholarship (OGS). When I was in Ontario, the award was worth $5000 per semester (max $15,000 per year). I see that you have previously won a SSHRC, which is great. Many Tri-Council (SSHRC, NSERC, CIHR) award winners also win OGS after their Tri-Council awards run out. I know that BC (my home province) also has a similar award program that you apply through your university (so you can't really find information about it online like the Vanier etc.). My point is that there is likely a lot of other funding sources that you can't get to directly before applying---you'll be considered along with your application. Typically, when you get your acceptance letter, it will say how much funding you will get and then you can decide if that's something you can afford.

Adel you are going to rock that event at Parliament Hill, congratulations on being selected, says a lot about you.

I recommend the instructions offered here.
https://wordribbon.tips.net/T008698_Adding_Borders_to_Paragraphs.html
And then the liberal use of the format painter for additional paragraphs.
If you use text boxes, I recommend that you draw them over your paragraphs and then set the boxes to have no fill. I do not recommend pasting type into the text boxes. (I work with Microsoft Office almost exclusively for my job and text boxes can end up being an incredible headache. YMMV.)

You mean something like the attached pic? 
Simplest way I know: Create a textbox. Format "line" to black. Reshape to the right width, copy-paste your paragraph into it. Copy-paste to create a new box, drag it so it's right under your previous box, copy-paste the next paragraph into there. Rinse, repeat. Not exactly high-tech, but does the job. 
Or, much better: Latex, use package mdframed. Or \fbox{} for short texts. 

I also believe that this person is probably trying to undermine you. I don't know why, I find it strange (jealousy, who knows!) Apply anyway, you've got nothing to lose. The worst thing that can happen is that they say no. When that happens, you can always try the following year. I am irritated that someone told you something like this when you sound like a great candidate. Whenever someone tells me I can't or shouldn't do something, I still manage to accomplish it and do it. But that's just me. You sound like a strong candidate. Don't let that person mess with your confidence. Good luck!

Someone is messing with your head, and if he's a permanent fixture in your life, you need to find a way to remove him. Not only was it an unhelpful and mean thing to say, it also doesn't sound like it's rooted in any fact. You have a good GPA and some prior research experience. You have two projects that two separate professors consider publishable and will presumably praise in their LORs. That should allow you to write a strong and targeted SOP. You should have a strong writing sample based on one of these papers. You should have strong LORs, from all I gather. If you write a focused SOP and choose your schools wisely based on fit (+ get a decent GRE score), I don't see any reason why you shouldn't aim high and be successful. Cut the hurtful person out of your life and look forward with confidence. No guarantees or promises, but no reason to be overly negative, either. 

Yes, I see it. It's on the page right before you can get access to your form in progress. I don't know if I explain it well, but it's the step before you can access your form. 

I'm thoroughly enjoying grad school, but that's because I'm a non-traditional older student.  The motivation and dedication I have now didn't exist when I was an undergrad or even during my first master's program a long time ago.  My interest is at such a high level that I'm applying to PhD programs for next year.
Did you recently graduate from college?  If so, maybe it's academic burnout.  If not, I assume you must have had some interest in grad school if you applied.   What reasons are causing anxiety at the start of the semester?  Is one of them imposter syndrome?  Flip your thinking around to a glass half full.  Think that you're incredibly fortunate to be in grad school, as a part of a very small select group vis-à-vis the general population.  Motivate yourself by interacting positively with your classmates; you will learn from them as they will learn from you.  Get involve in other aspects of the school you're attending.  Every college/university has tons of activities for you to participate.  If you're working full-time and don't have much free time, then get yourself in a study or project group, or start one yourself.  There are academic support services in every program, so avail yourself of that.  There are other ways to get out of a rut, but this is a start.  Good luck!
 

If you're understanding 70%-80% of works that are theoretical or largely informed by theory, you may be doing much better than you realize. 
See if you can find introductory works geared towards general academic audiences, maybe something in Oxford's VSI series or Handbook of series, or works like these <<LINK>>. 
Consider going to your professor or maybe a graduate student further along the pipeline to have occasional (and informal and brief)  "balance check" chats.
A good chat would go like this:
Adelaide9216: It's my understanding that Book 1 is saying X=(A+B)*Y Professor One: It's saying X= (A+C)*Y  would mean that you're in the ball park and you just need to reread some stuff (or figure out why you're right and she's wrong) A complicated chat would go like this.
Adelaide9216: It's my understanding that Book 1 is saying X=(A+B)*Y Professor Two: (Pause) I think it's saying something more like  Then it's time to head back to the library. 
 
 

This depends on a lot of things. Here are two data points. During my 2 year MSc in Canada, I presented at three conferences. The first was May of the first year. The second was the beginning of my 2nd year. The last was in May of my second year (I did two full years for the MSc, defended in August of 2nd year).
During my 5 year PhD at a US school, number of presentations which I travelled for:
First year: 1 conference presentation
Second year: 2 conference presentations
Third year: 3 conference presentations, plus a couple at small meetings/conferences hosted at my school
Fourth year: 3 conference presentations, plus a couple at small meetings/conferences hosted at my school
Fifth year: 2 conferences where I travelled, 1 conference that was in the same city, and 9 presentations at different schools**
**It's common in my field for finishing grad students to set up talk tours where they visit places they might want to do postdocs. This is partly because many students apply for national fellowships in postdocs where you apply to a general fund for money (e.g. as you might apply to SSHRC for grad studies) so it's helpful to visit or get "invited" to these places and write up research proposals. I say "invited" because it's very easy to get an official invite if your advisor is paying for you to travel there (usually this means the school just has to cover local costs for you). But there were a couple in there that were actual unsolicited invitations.
The conferences I attended were usually the annual meeting for one of the national society for my field each year and then one or two focus conferences that are smaller (60-300 people) specifically focussed on the topic. My advisor and I talked at the beginning of each year on what conferences I should try to go to. Typically, my advisor had money for me to go to 1 overseas conference per year and 2 North American meetings. I also had external funding from Canada (NSERC) for my first 3 years and a NASA fellowship in my last 2 years that also provided $3000/year of research funds in addition to reducing my advisor's cost to pay my stipend, so it was easier to find money for me to travel. Finally, I was at a department that encouraged their students to travel and present research and represent our program. 
Starting in our 3rd year, we also present at the weekly department seminars once per year and there are many student presentation opportunities on campus to develop and hone our skills. We also often present in group meetings etc, so we get a ton of practice talking about our research. I also volunteer a lot of time to give presentations to local schools or other non-profits in the area.

Hello everyone, I found this for gender and women's studies. Sharing the info.
https://conferencealerts.com/topic-listing?topic=gender studies

they don't have to be. I think the best networking is when you can combine the two. 

I think this is all exactly right.
It's also worth mentioning two other things:
(1) Your topic may not be quite as novel as you think (and this is where supervisor guidance can help: both to steer you to the relevant literature, in assessing the topic's potential contributions, and determining whether it's worth the effort). As Sigaba mentioned upthread, novel dissertations can be really hard to write, let alone to sell to your peers. I know from personal experience; the sum total of pre-existing research directly on my topic was a single recent article. That makes the literature review and framing issues especially hard, although it does open up space to distance yourself from the pre-existing literature. The trouble is that that literature is your only guidepost through the topic, and that makes it more difficult (emotionally and intellectually) to open up the space you need between your work and theirs.
(2) There's a fair bit of doctoral and post-doctoral funding out there (mostly through the government of Canada) for issues that pertain directly to Canada. This is especially true for areas of research in which there's a significant Canadian lacuna. As long as your supervisor is supportive of your project, it might be an especially good bet on future funding. But start chasing that funding starting in your first year. Your supervisor should be able to help steer you towards the right grants.

If you can't figure out how you're not privileged, one thing to think about writing about is how that's helped you in your life, and tie that into an understanding of how it might have affected other minorities not to have the same advantages. You can talk about how you are (or can be) an ally to those less privileged. Allies are so incredibly important when fighting discrimination; it can't just be the affected groups themselves fighting.

ALCON--
When picking a screen name at the Grad Cafe, please consider the value of NOT using the same name that you use on social media. For some members, especially newer ones, finding out who you are is as easy as highlight ===> right click ===> search google for <username> in less time than it takes to read this sentence.
While it may be highly unlikely that a member of an admissions committee will come here looking for a specific person, the Grad Cafe is a known location, and the contents of the fora turn up in Google searches. While you may think that your personal interest in X is no big deal, you will never know if that interest is a deal breaker for departments that have been burned by aficionados of X.
 

There are some threads in this forum that address your question precisely:



The short answer is that grades matter less than your research but they are still important in some cases - for example, to stay in good standing in your program and to be competitive for certain fellowships, grants and/or jobs. The bottom line is that if you get great grades in classes but can't produce strong research, you will have a hard time getting a job. If your research is very strong but you didn't make good grades, you are in better shape. Of course the ideal is to have strong results in both areas.

expert in your area, yes--but you need concrete explanations, examples, article references, etc.
you need to show how working with the same person for several years is a strength for you/in your field...for some reviewers, this could show a lack of mobility and diversity...how is your supervisor vital in conducting your graduate research? 
the other elements are not relevant imo

.

I am really surprised that my mere suggestions are of help to you. Good luck! 

I am finishing up my Master's program.

I feel over the past two years I've mastered the monograph skim, much in the way kotov helpfully lists out. I am also all about the book review. I usually will first read the introduction and then do a search for book reviews in j-stor or similar databases, read those and then determine what the meatiest parts/chapters in the book are. It also helps cement the author's argument in my mind before parsing through the evidence.

For whatever reason, I have yet to figure out how to do a good skim of longer articles. I feel as if I do more reading during a week when a bunch of different scholarly articles are assigned. Anyone have any tips in that area?

Forget "completely original thoughts."  If your research concept doesn't overlap to some degree or another with other scholars in your area, you're either thinking too narrowly, or you're not in the area you think you are.
I've been writing the first chapter of my dissertation the last few months, and one of the most important things I've had to learn is that an intellectual discipline is a conversation.  You are entering into it to contribute, not to eviscerate your competition.
Read widely in your area, follow back footnotes, don't get defensive when you come across something that either seems to "steal" your idea, or contradict it.  Instead think about your place in the conversation.  Do not feel the need to recapitulate the secondary literature of your area in your writing sample - in fact, avoid this, using only what you need.  If you were already completely versed in your area, you wouldn't need to get a PhD.
My partner has recently been reading the book They Say, I Say: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing and says it's been very helpful in this regard.  I plan to take a look when she's done.
Looking back, my writing sample wasn't even remotely original, but it showed that I had potential.  If you were capable of busting the lid off of your discipline already - again - you wouldn't need to get a PhD.  I recently got some advice about dissertation writing, "Do not think of it as the last great thing you will write, think of it as the first good thing you will write."  If that applies to dissertations, then put the writing sample in perspective.  Your originality is far less important than your potential.

Mental health problems are very common among academics but also stigmatized. Just be cause you don't see it, doesn't mean it's not there. Don't assume that you're the only one who is encountering difficulty, that's incredibly unlikely. More likely, each person thinks they're the only one and they're ashamed and deal with it alone. 
Agreed with others that you should seek (continue to seek) mental health professionals to help you with this, what you are describing doesn't sound healthy. 
Also important: try to keep to a schedule so as not to over-work, take breaks, eat well and exercise. Recognize that there *will* be bad days, we all have them. On those days, instead of beating yourself up for not doing better and wasting time trying to work unsuccessfully, try giving yourself permission to take a break (but a real one, where you don't worry about work). It's important to recharge and these times off will end up saving you time in the long run. 
A good dissertation is a done dissertation. Seriously, this is so important.
No dissertation is perfect. It'll have mistakes, and typos, and convoluted writing -- they all(!) do. You don't need to get it to be great, just to be good enough to defend and move on. That is an attainable bar. 
 
What you're experiencing is common, but sounds like on the extreme side of that. Lots of students run up against a wall at some point in the writing process. They develop anxiety, they have a hard time showing others unfinished work and get stuck, they overwork and don't take care of themselves. It's good that you're aware that there is a problem and you're trying to fix it. 

I use JSTOR a lot in researching articles for papers on literature texts. Usually click on literature in databases because lit is my field. It may be assessable in other ways also. .

I met with my class colleagues yesterday and everyone is very friendly.