BlueRose

I do not drive, and I moved myself and 6 45-lb boxes across the country by plane. I used a minivan taxi on one end to get myself to the airport, and the parents-with-a-minivan service on the other end. If you're not moving furniture, this is a serviceable option - $25 a box, thank you Virgin Air. Thought about Amtrak, but though the boxes were cheaper, the ticket for me wasn't (and would require sitting on a train for days on end).

I had a bout of that as an undergrad. As it turns out, the adrenal system can only be pushed so hard - eventually it can no longer keep up, and while you might be subclinical, you'll still be sluggish and tired. Caffeine helps temporarily, but only makes it worse in the long run. You might consider doing a hard reset - take a week off, hide the coffee machine, and sleep as much as you please. [Edit: I see you're doing that. But seriously, try going off caffeine for a week or two...it might help. (I'm not off the stuff entirely, but I don't drink nearly as much.)]

Are you interested enough to switch advisors, and possibly fields, for a chance at this relationship? Because that's what it would take, assuming you'd like to have a career. (You should probably switch advisors anyway, but if you're serious, you'd need to get out of his sphere of influence altogether.) Maybe you're soul mates, or maybe he's the department bicycle (every student gets a ride...). It doesn't matter. Even if you're fantastic at what you do, nobody will believe him about it - they'll assume you're just fantastic in bed, and he'd like to keep you happy. Plus, you aren't likely to get the advising you need. Personally, I'm in grad school to get better at what I do; I want an advisor who will tell me why my work sucks and how to fix it, not a supportive boyfriend who will let me slide, or worse, a bitter ex who I'm awkwardly avoiding.

I've been doing interdisciplinary work for awhile. It's great, but the challenges are real. As surefire said, working in N disciplines means you have N literatures to learn and stay current with. At some point, if you want to get any work done, you have to enforce your own discipline - meaning you won't be an expert on the more distant corners of any of those fields. Which means you'll occasionally say something ignorant, and the single-discipline people will look at you funny. Your background sections will be much more challenging to write. No matter what you do, or what audience you're writing for, part of your work will involve something your audience hasn't thought about since high school. You have to drag them up to speed, quickly, while making them care enough to pay attention. You'll have to deal with different cultures and different expectations. If you're writing a paper with a biologist and a computer scientist, the biologist will refuse to use LaTeX and the computer person will refuse to use Word. If these same people are reviewing your CV, the biologist will ignore your conferences and the computer person will ignore your journal articles. Both may undervalue the importance and difficulty of what you're doing on the other side, not because they're snobbish, but because that's not what they know and care about. You will need to be co-advised, which can be good or bad (serving two masters), but you do want someone from each major discipline around. I've done computational work in an otherwise 100% biology lab; it was okay, but I was totally on my own, and it would have been hard to do real research that way. And when you get out, it'll be that much harder to find a job, especially if you're looking at industry. People write job descriptions for the single-discipline experts; even if your extra skills would be useful, you're probably not going to score as well on the HR checklist as the person who's been doing one discipline all along. The job that wants you, will really want you, but there may not be many to choose from. But - if you find your niche - you may end up doing things that nobody else can do. And that's worth it to me.

You're going to screw up; the important thing is learning how to screw up less. I struggle with mornings too - I'm a night owl, and 9am classes are tough. (In undergrad, I just didn't go to class...sadly I have to act like a grownup now.) The alarm-across-the-room trick helps. I've also bought blue-light blocking glasses for when I'm on the computer late at night, and they have seriously changed my life. (Blue light resets your body clock, and computers emit lots of it.) No more chronic insomnia, though I'm still more sharp at 9pm than 9am.

I think one of the reviewers (in the PowerPoint mentioned above) read the research proposal first, on the grounds that if the proposal wasn't good, the rest didn't matter. I would try to make the essays as self-contained as possible, though references to stuff in the other essays would be fine...for instance, you could remind them in your Research Proposal that you have experience with some method, though you might save the detail for your Research Experience. And spiffyonion: I read the "Graduate Department" as the umbrella program, and the "Program" as the specific track...eg. if you were in a neuroscience program with a psychology track, you could specify this. That's what I did. But programs in my field tend to have horrible recursive names - if I type up the full name of my degree program, it takes two complete lines on my CV.

I remember seeing a PowerPoint somewhere that talked about two different reviewers' approaches to the packet, and mentioned that they look at the essays (as well as grades, LORs, etc) in different orders, based on their own personal tastes (what they thought was most important, whether they wanted to see the GPA or not, etc). They will be reading the whole thing, but I wouldn't assume an order. But the "hit 'em over the head" is accurate. I've posted this before, but one of my reviewers got my gender wrong in the review...now, if you give me a fundable score, you can call me a lot worse than "he", but still. Assume nothing. ;-)

I was in that situation (see my sig). It sucks like a warehouse full of Hoovers, no way around it. I tried to think of it as training - in science, we're all going to be rejected / failing / etc more often than not. I also knew someone in one of the departments I applied to, which helped enormously in getting a straight answer for what happened. Besides that, other key factors were a liberal application of rum and a black-hearted desire to get even. I'm not going to say it was pretty, only that I made it through to the other side and am very happy with how it turned out. It sounds like you may have just missed the cut - which happens. Nothing to be done but get a bit more experience, maybe some stronger letters, and maybe apply to more schools, and go after it again.

I've been paged. Here is my reference section - in 10pt font, it was 4.5 lines of text. REFERENCES: (1) Buchler et al. 2003. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA. (2) Rodrigo G & Jaramillo A. 2007. Syst Synth Biol. (3) Cao H et al. 2010. Syst Synth Biol. (4) igem.org (5) Friedland AE et al. 2009. Science. (6) Rodrigo G et al. 2007. Bioinformatics. (7) sbml.org (8) Beielstein T et al. 2002. IEEE-CEC. (9) Shanthi AP et al. 2005. IEEE-EH. (10) Ham TS et al. 2008. PLoS ONE. (11) Haber JE. 1998. Annu Rev Genet. (12) partsregistry.org (13) biofab.org (14) Bennett MR & Hasty J. 2009. Nat Rev Genet (15) beowulf.org I don't feel like editing it in, but the et als and journal names were italicized.

I used a similar type of opening - I think it can work, as long as it's very short (1-2 sentences max) and it's clear you have matured past the "OMG the scientists in Jurassic Park had the coolest job ever" phase. E.g.: "As a high school student, thrilled by the scientific derring-do in novels such as The Andromeda Strain and The Demon in the Freezer, I decided to study biology. Many years later, I am still awed by the power of biology, but I have come to appreciate the craftsmanship and hard work that has gone into building our knowledge. As a graduate student, I hope to become part of this tradition. My research interests are..."

@gnessa: http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html

Count me in. I'm a first-year too, and I love my program. Mind you, they're kicking our butts. This is the third consecutive night I've been working at 3:30 am (I'm working, my code is running...I'll be asleep by 4 though). I'm talking to classmates on gchat. And our classes start at 9am. The fact that I'm in a good humor about it should tell you something. My classmates are smart, come from very diverse fields, and will help each other. There have been many potlucks and bar crawls. The department is super close - the upper years, and even the professors, stop by our workspace just to hang out. There are seminars all over the place. The research is great, and the resources are there to support it. The coursework is something they work really hard to make useful...maybe too hard, it's fascinating but sometimes sleep is nice. So...yay for grad school. (Though I'm looking forward to the research years...that's what I came for after all.)

Taking a bio class would show some commitment, but the class is probably not going to be ideal for a rec letter (large and easy). If I were you, I would do my best to get some experience doing bioinformatics work for a professor. At worst, biologists are always looking for someone who can do a bit of coding for them. You'll be making intern wages, if you're lucky, but it'll get you a letter and some idea of what you're in for if you do this for real.

I've seen people make a career of being a lab manager - a combination of benchwork and front-line admin/management - which is a great fit for some, and doesn't require a PhD. But if you don't want to be at the bench forever, you're probably not going to be happy with a BS. With all of the PhDs running around, it's very hard to move up without the degree (and even if you do, you'll be stuck where you are, because your promotion won't transfer). PhD is challenging - you're learning to do real research, which isn't easy even once you're good at it - but if you choose your supervisor wisely, it doesn't have to be a horror show. It depends on what you want.

The conventional wisdom that I've heard is that anyone with a specific, activism-related interest is a flight risk. The standard case is someone who lost a relative to a particular disease and comes in hell-bent to cure it...but I think it would apply here too. If you're interested in helping a particular group, science is a really round-about way to do that. You could get the MD and do sex reassignment surgeries or open a queer-friendly primary clinic. You could fundraise for charities helping people fund their surgeries, or you could lobby for better laws that would make transitioning easier. All this would benefit real people, directly. Instead you're proposing to park yourself in a lab, where you will spend your days growing the bacteria that express the protein that binds to the other protein that [blah blah, 12 steps later] may or may not have something to do with what's happening in the people you're interested in. In this case, will you get disillusioned and drop out, or are you prepared for the "just another brick in the wall" nature of basic science? I think it's OK to mention that your experiences got you interested in particular topics, but I'd be careful to situate that in the context of your own broader interests (as well as the broader interests of the faculty you'd be working with at a particular school).

Probably too late, but in my area we just mention the brand name in parentheses, usually in the methods section. E.g. "The Roadrunner entrapment device was loaded with three sticks of dynamite (Acme Co) and several pounds of nails (Economy Hardware)."

I've heard that in some programs (esp. humanities), grades are so inflated that a B is a professor's way of telling you they don't think you're grad school material. But in the sciences, cogneuroforfun's advice is what I've heard also. In my program, if it's not on quals, it's graded P/F...saves us the trouble of triaging, heh.

I'm in a male-dominated program too. Part of it is that men and women are socialized to interact differently, and the professional mode is still the male mode. Women will collaborate with friends and compete with enemies; men will compete with anybody. It's not that they don't take their pissing contests seriously - it's how they establish status, which is important - but they don't take it personally. Maybe I've been in sausage-land too long, but I don't particularly mind. If somebody wants to have a pissing contest with me, I smile and piss right back. We're still friends, and once that's out of our systems we can get down to business. Of course, not everyone wants to be friends. Some people are terminally insecure, or are jerks, or are incapable of taking a woman seriously. In those cases, I've found that cultivating an aura of don't-mess-with-me will at least get them to leave you alone. (You don't have to bite often to get a reputation, either…you can afford to be selective with your smackdowns.) I found that the "Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense" books were helpful for this sort of thing. I have the workplace one, which is showing its age, but still useful for laying out the issues and strategies in a nice logical manner. I've also encountered what I've heard referred to as "puppy scientist syndrome" - senior people who are helpful when you're young and clueless, because then you're still a subordinate female, but freak out the first time you respond with "actually that's wrong, here's why". I'm still not quite sure what to do about that one; in particular, I don't want to find out my advisor is one of those halfway through my PhD. Maybe I should pick a nerd-fight with my rotation advisors and see what happens...

Hey, I was that rolling bag student in high school - ran down a flight of stairs with a 60-lb backpack on, hurt my neck, was wheeling it for the next year-plus. It was extra-charming because I'm 6' tall and the handles were way too short. I backpacked it through college, but for work I used a handbag. For the coursework year, it'll probably depend on how much stuff needs to be lugged on any given day...I've been known to stuff my handbag in my backpack when I realize I need to bring my laptop somewhere.

I've got a webpage. I made it towards the end of undergrad, and it's pretty minimal: a paragraph about who I am and what I do, a picture, a CV, and my email address. (I haven't updated in a year or so...I'll put my papers up before grad school starts, and I also ought to figure out how to put analytics on it.) As for CV-making, I did mine in LaTeX. I tried it in Word, but I'm finicky about formatting, and trying to get everything lined up nicely in Word made me want to drop-kick a kitten. LaTeX is so much better.

I'm keeping mine. In part because it's my name, darn it; in part because it's rare and short, therefore easily searchable (apparently my clan tangled with the wrong medieval warlord, thus the rarity); in part because I've already published with it, and I'd rather not broadcast my marital history on my CV. In my families of origin (German heritage), the kids usually take the father's name as their last name, and the mother's maiden name becomes their middle name. I'm fine with that. After all, once you get divorced and remarried, you won't have the same name as the kids anyway...*ducks* As for reverting names - both my brother and I are children of first marriages, and we changed our names to match the family we're in now. (Both first marriages ended spectacularly badly; neither of us are/were on speaking terms with our other biological parent.) He changed his last name to his mother's maiden name and took an old family name as his middle...IIRC he did this in his middle school years, before our parents remarried. When I turned 18, I swapped out my middle name, changing from my birth mother's maiden name to my custodial mother's. This was slightly more annoying because I'd already applied for college and been set up in their (many many) databases, and had a publication in the works that didn't get changed in time...but no, it wasn't a great publication, and I don't care that some of my alumni emails have my old name in them. And I'm with starmaker - I've never had a problem with being a blended family. There's sometimes a bit of explanation in order...yes my brother and I look quite similar, no we're not blood relatives at all...why yes, that is us in that wedding picture...yeah, my birth mother was taller...but I've never, ever been given grief for it. My parents, though, are MUCH more awkward / embarrassed about it. I think it's a generational thing. Nuclear families with one last name just aren't the default assumption anymore.

I would be willing to do some reading, though my knowledge of neuroscience is on par with the average zombie's (mmm, brains...). Something else I forgot to mention - reading sample essays was really, really helpful. I read through everything I could get my hands on, including all of the Rachel Smith archives and around 60 pages of Google results for "NSF fellow biology". It gave me a lot of ideas for how to present information, and also gave me a good sense for what worked and what didn't.

Yes, references can eat space. I stole a ridiculously compact format from one of the proposals on Rachel Smith's site: superscripted numbers in the text, and for the citations, no carriage returns and not much more than the first author's name, journal abbreviation, and year. Nobody complained, and I managed to squeeze in 15 references. This. Remember they are speed-reading your application, and they have probably read an unholy quantity of applications before they get to yours. Spell it out. Heck, one of my reviewers thought I was a guy - that's after three reference letters with correct pronouns, the obligatory "hey look I'm a girl I mentor girls" paragraph, and a really feminine name on the review sheet. So really, don't be subtle, because it won't work.

My essay is one of those above (the last one). I was awarded a fellowship, in the undergrad / not-yet-grad category. For Broader Impacts especially, I would point out that it's not a good citizenship prize; they want to know if funding your PhD will make the world a better place. This means that your history of good behavior (and good science) is just an indicator that you will continue to behave this way in the future, and be a good scientist / teacher / communicator / role model / etc. It's a fine distinction, but you shouldn't forget to connect your past with your future. Anyway. Things I did right: * I hammered the Broader Impacts. My personal statement was at least 85% BI...there was a short anecdote about how I got interested in my field, a sentence each about my research interests and career goals, and then I went straight to BI. I actually used each of the BI criteria as headings, so I could break down exactly why I was awesome in each one. In my research proposal, I had an extra aim devoted to outreach. Seriously, BI BI BI. This is how I managed to sneak in, despite a thoroughly mediocre undergrad record. * I listed my top choice school as the one where the proposal fit best, even though I genuinely wasn't sure where I wanted to go. * I wrote about something I knew. In my research proposal, I could say that I had experience with the ideas, techniques and methods. Not that I had a whole lot of choice, because... Things I did wrong: * I decided that I was applying to grad school eleven days before the final NSF deadline. In that time, I had to pick schools, beg for letters, and oh yeah - write a proposal. And I was going out of town during that time, so I was actually on a plane at the deadline. Let's just say this earned me a few grey hairs. START EARLY. * As a result, I didn't have anyone read my stuff. I'm sure it would have been better with more editing...or less sleep deprivation. * I included my proposal with my grad school applications, even for schools where it wouldn't have been suitable. I included a disclaimer at the top saying it was just a writing sample, not something I had my heart set on, and even removed the part about the facilities at my "top choice school". Still, the school that rejected me told me during the interview that they were worried I wouldn't find a match for my ideas. Perhaps a blessing in disguise, but something to be aware of.

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