watson

lol, usually you are not missing anything by not attending lip gloss. The party used to be a lot more, errr, closed door, especially way back in it's lurve days. Now it's public knowledge and advertised.

Ohhh lip gloss. You aren't missing much. Just some faculty hitting on people way too young for them. It's probably best for undergrads to stay away lol.

I used to teach for The Princeton Review...I made a killer amount of money and worked only a few hours a week when I wanted, or volunteered to cover classes and worked many hours when I wanted to....for reference, 5 years ago teaching the SAT I was being paid $32/hour BASE with extra when they overloaded a class with students (I taught a class that got merged with another class because of a flub by a summer 'camp' type thing, so I was making an ungodly amount for the 9 hrs a week I taught that class). Plus online grading of essays (optional extra work) was $1/essay, and grading took like 2-3 min per essay (they are short), so you could make a ton extra if you can handle reading that much bad writing.

Uhhh YES. My department will ask if we had particularly strong feelings (good or bad) about the applicants. Faculty have never accepted someone that one of us has said was unfriendly/rude/arrogant/competitive/non-appreciative of the opportunity to interview in our department. The grad students end up seeing the applicants a lot more than the faculty, and you wouldn't believe how many applicants BLOW IT by saying something in front of a grad student that they just should NOT have. Go in with the attitude you have and you will not be admitted into my department--we really do not want to work with someone who thinks they know more and have more life experiences than us--you don't even know anything about these grad students and this is how you view them!? And even if you DO know more and have more (notice, not better) life experience, does this mean you cannot be friendly, polite, and interact with them in a professional way?? That kind of attitude would surely be communicated back to the faculty, the faculty whose loyalty is to the current students, who put their trust in the current students assessment of your character. How about you just act like a nice, happy, normal person who is appreciative of the opportunity to meet with current students at the place you might live the next 5-8 years? Also these are the people who you will see more than anyone else for those years, so how about you try just being nice to them and maybe make a friend?

Honestly, I'd see if you can just move the flight up or back by a day rather than not stay a night with the grad student. Usually this is not a problem if you get it cleared first, especially if it won't cost any extra money to the school. Here's why I suggest this: 1. Staying with the grad student actually is a time you can really learn a lot about the program "off the record" when the grad student isn't worried about what other people are hearing her/him say. You can ask questions that maybe you wouldn't feel comfortable asking in a group or with faculty in the room. You can actually see what a typical grad student can afford on the stipend and what housing options are like in the area, as well as get a feel for local neighborhoods that you might actually end up living in someday. These are things you don't get from being on campus and will remind you to ask real questions about quality of life outside the lab. 2. Admissions are a crap shoot and I'd take all the opportunities possible to get yourself an advocate. Bonding with a current student can only help. We use hotels, but if a grad student volunteered to share their apartment they probably want to talk to you and they can be useful to you! 3. Last year we invited students to visit and 2 of them took off after a dinner with the current grad students to go meet friends--everyone else hung a little to talk. They were already making the least great impression of the group, but having made the plans and run off did sour us on them even more. It's probably not terrible if you're making a great impression otherwise, but if you're borderline it won't work in your favor.

Every interview I went to paid for the entire trip, only 1 place had actually accepted us ahead of time. We tend to accept about 1/2 the people we invite out for interviews but we always fully pay for everyone's flights/meals/hotel/taxis

We usually want an incoming cohort in social of about 2-4, so we invite usually 8-12 people for interviews. 10-15 is a really big incoming class but might be more common at a large state school? My entire cohort for the department (social + cog + neuro + clinical) was 10, my cohort in social was 4.

Interview weekend usually means they are definitely inviting more people to visit than they will be extending offers to--most programs are moving to this model. Visiting weekend means that you will still be evaluated, but is usually a bit less formal--here they may be willing to offer to all the invitees but reserve the right to not offer until they've met you and determined you're not a complete mismatch (as a person) for the program. Sometimes they consider everyone at least now on the waitlist but may make staggered offers to the most wanted candidates first. Visiting weekend is really only a pure 'preview day' if you have already been told explicitly that you are accepted into the program before the visit. I remember this being the case at OSU when I applied--I got a call offering me admission and simultaneously asking me to come to visiting weekend.

Your request depends on how closely you want this based on the MBTI, considering the MBTI is copyrighted material.

LOL! I can't say either has played while I was walking to brown bag at NU, but growing up John Nash was one of my neighbors and if he walked past you in the neighborhood someone was bound to start humming that song after the movie came out (I was in high school back then). The NU faculty had originally planned to accept some new students but then it turned out that this year only a maximum of 1 student will graduate from the area (the 5th years didn't have job market luck and prefer to stay another year at NU rather than post-doc...the exception is the student who is looking for jobs outside academia). Thus the labs were full and to a certain degree morale took a hit. But rest easy, I haven't heard of any other school pulling the same thing.

I should also point out--in my program, we are constantly teasing each other and being lighthearted during talks, so there may not have been ill-will there necessarily. It's usually a group of people who are all friends, cracking jokes at each others' expense with no offense taken--to an outsider getting laughed at will probably seem like people are being really mean, but it may actually be something that they didn't intend to be taken to heart.

My guess is they were laughing at the suggestion of dropping half the sample after you ran the study just because you didn't get the results you want. It's not the best way to do science and actually a hot topic right now about research analysis ethics. Re-analyzing without the women to see if it warranted running a new study would be fine, but you'd have to then pretty much dump the first study to stay really above board. Also, as bad as this is, people do tend to get annoyed when the undergrads ask questions/make comments (especially at job talks) and this can lead to less than polite reactions to their questions.

Unfortunately they didn't make that decision until about a week and half ago. We were all shocked.

That was the second best session I have ever attended. The best one wasn't at SPSP, and sadly sharing the story will almost certainly out me here, so I'll have to laugh to myself for now.

We decided not to bring in any new students for social this year. Labs are pretty full and profs think the lackluster academic job market warrants holding back on accepting students (so they don't graduate to unemployment). We cancelled our interview weekend.