FishNerd

Hi again everyone! Exciting news, I have made my decision.
I'm going to UT Austin! I'm really excited; I had great vibes when I was there visiting.
The factors that I most considered included that I knew I would get lots of support from my advisor, the department is highly ranked and moving in a good direction, the students there seem really happy and I received an enhanced support fellowship with a great stipend. 
 
@potentiallylovely It's too bad you weren't able to visit ASU in person.  Maybe you'll like the advisor more once you meet them for real.  If not, I know lots of people have had success by finding unofficial mentors who provide some of the support that other might get from a mentor.  A good fellowship is also a big plus.  

I’m sooo excited for everyone! What an adventure it has been with you all. 

Congrats to you both!

@FishNerd and I are off to University of Denver! Took us a while to get that figured out, but the visits made everything clear.
Now to look up terrifyingly expensive apartments!

On one hand I full-heartedly agree that scholars of color should have the right to study whatever they want, but I also understand where the community representatives may be coming from in wanting their group to be studied only by community members. I do not know specifically which community you are studying but many marginalized communities have been taken advantage of by White scholars, as you yourself have mentioned, which may make them feel wary of all “outsiders,” so to speak. This is particularly true of indigenous communities who are often even reluctant to let indigenous scholars conduct research. This is not to say that you have to study  the issue in your own community - distancing yourself in order to protect yourself is real and necessary.  And I agree with the above poster that it is micro aggressive to demand that all scholars of color must study only their own group. I just don’t know how to navigate this issue, unfortunately. Sadly, White scholars do not get questioned like this - mostly because they do not invite in community members to consult with as they develop their research proposals like you did, which is wrong of them. 

You absolutely should! I'm a Latino in the US who majored in French, and the number of times I've been told that I should've majored in Spanish instead is irritating. It's necessary and good to know one's community, but it also broadens one's mind to study other cultures, communities and languages. The background of a researcher should not matter as long as they are acquainted with a subject or field.
It's also sort of a microaggression that you are expected to represent just your community. Other people are never questioned when they decide to study communities other than their own, yet for some, minority students are supposed to just study their own communities? It makes no sense! We all have a right to express our intellectual curiosity in any way we like.
That specific 'criticism' is shallow, and you should not pay much attention to it.

Thank you for these great suggestions!

I have been in a long term relationship with my partner for quite a while now and we got our master's together and now in the fall we will be starting our PhDs together. Since we are both in academia our situation is a little different since we both have times when we are absolutely swamped, so it's really easy to understand that and just let the other person catch up with everything they need to do. But I'm gonna try and give some advice as best I can into how we make it all work.
I think one of the biggest things for us is us trying to make sure we are on the same wake-up and bedtime routine because then that means the times surrounding those times of the day are spent together. Also we really try to make sure we spend time not working after we wake up or before we go to bed and instead enjoy our breakfast and coffee together or enjoy winding down for the night after dinner. I really think if you have the ability to be on a similar schedule as your partner then that allows you to see each other much more frequently through the day. If you aren't on the same schedule you can easily end up just barely missing the opportunity to spend a little time with your partner. I usually wake up when he does (5:30 a.m. )for his 8 a.m. classes even though I don't absolutely need to wake up at that time and I'm totally not a morning person. But this allows us to spend all that time together before we need to leave the house. Also when we are really on top of things that wake up time allows us to work out together in the mornings/meal prep (chop veggies) for that evenings dinner.
I think one of the things that helps us a lot is even if one of us is working at home we try to be in the same room as the other person (unless we do need absolute solitude) so we can still chit chat when the person working needs a break or someone's brain to pick about something. Also while chores aren't fun we try to do them together when we can so we can have the time to catch up during that. We also almost always try to cook dinner together or at the very least eat dinner at the same time. I guess all of my advice so far is to just try and spend time together, even if it is just day-to-day stuff, but I would imagine that doesn't work for those who need a break from their partner now and then (I guess my partner and I do tend to be attached at the hip a bit...) But I do recognize that doing non day-to-day stuff also really helps keep relationships thriving.
For you to be able to do bigger things outside the day-to-day activities together during grad school I think the most important thing is time management. It took me a looooong time to figure out time management during my masters, but once I did, my partner and I were definitely better for it. It did allow us to do non-day-to-day activities more frequently (i.e. going out to eat or to the movies, going fishing or hiking or other things that we enjoy doing together). I find that the best way for us to do these fun activities together was for us to plan on X date to do whatever it was we wanted to do. This allowed me to figure out what I needed to do before that date and usually meant I was very productive in getting things done so I could feel deserved in taking the break with my partner. Basically we had to prioritize spending time together and I think that is maybe one of the most important things we learned during out master's. Of course setting aside a certain date isn't exactly spontaneous and sometimes spontaneity is great for relationships. So at times we would just shirk our responsibilities (when we knew we could get away with it for a day or weekend) and just do whatever the heck we wanted to do besides work even if it just meant a day of Netflix together.
It is absolutely OKAY to not constantly be working during grad school (take some weekends off!) and it's OKAY to take unplanned breaks to have some fun! If you want to go on a vacation with your partner then make those plans and do it! While during grad school you of course have to be productive and get things done in a timely fashion, sometimes you just need to make time for other things because that will ultimately make you a more productive student. When I realized that it was okay to not work all the time, I started to treat my grad school responsibilities as more of a 9 to 5 job (I mean more realistically I was working from ~8 to 6 or 6:30 with a lunch break) and became much more productive. It meant that I needed to make the most of those hours I set aside for work and I did. It meant that I had so much more downtime to look forward and wasn't as likely to goof off at school as I was before. It meant my partner were so much happier because we had made the point to prioritize our life in addition to prioritizing our responsibilities to grad school.
I know this went a bit long but as I was writing it I came to the realization of just how much better off my partner and I were when we better managed our time and prioritized us. I think prioritizing your partner and relationship is one of the biggest things for a relationship to remain on solid ground. It allows your bond to remain strong and by making time for your partner that shows how much you care for them. I know I went a bit stream-of-conscious-y so feel free to ask me to clarify something if its unclear.
 

So one thing I think you could easily do is try to find a volunteer research position or other entry level research positions (field technician and other temporary or seasonal positions). These are often advertised on places such as Texas A&M job board (see link below) - which is not only for jobs based out of Texas or that university, usually the ads are on the national or international level. If you do some searching you might be able to find some other list services that could list positions you might be able to apply to.
https://wfscjobs.tamu.edu/job-board/
Another thing you could do is try looking at universities in your area (which if you are in Boston area there should be plenty) and try to find a lab/professor who is doing stuff that you would like to have experience in. Then you could reach out by email to that professor and ask if there are any volunteer positions available in their lab or upcoming. If they have grad students in their lab needing field hands they may very well take you up on that and get you some opportunities volunteering. I had a volunteer in my lab during my Master's that did exactly what I suggest you do and helped volunteer with several different things in the lab.
The only thing in any case you will need to do is be up front that you do have a job and let them know how much that limits your availability/what flexibility that job allows you. This is especially true for positions that are advertised since I believe a lot of those do require you to have quite a bit of availability.

Hi! I have been applying with my partner and we are also lucky to both have offers at more than one school! We are in a bit of a different situation because we applied to completely different programs (Biology and English) but we do have some mismatch about research interest/fit between us for the schools and unfortunately I don't have a great answer to that since we are still working through the decision. But I did want to let you know that I commiserate with the difficulty of trying to make a joint decision! It's hard because you want to make the decision that is best for you but also you want your partner to be happy and thrive as well.
We both are making our last visits this week and we are really hoping this will help clear things up for us. If you all have visited I would definitely recommend taking both of your experiences into account quite a bit since that is what we are doing. Also we plan on making a pro and con list between our two schools and will probably use that as a way to solidly view the all the benefits and negatives that we have gathered from each place. Not sure how helpful it will be or not. Honestly I really hope our last visits will make it pretty clear where to go, but we shall see.
I hope you and your partner figure out a good option for you! I would also like to add that it makes sense to wait out the GRFP results and if you get the GRFP and that makes school 1 the best I think you should go for it since it does sound like you are most excited about it. If you do worry about comparing yourself with those in the group that got university funding, just remind yourself that you won a highly competitive national level fellowship! Of course you have to hear back on whether you get it or not before you can really worry about the self-comparison concern!
 

The other thing I would say is that you don't want to overpractice or go through it too many times (yes, there is such a thing). In my experience, that leads to a presentation where everyone feels like the presenter is just going through the motions.

If at all possible, practice in front of a friend or two in advance. This is something that I think is key. They'll help point out where you could improve as a presenter but also any weak spots in the slides or the content you've included. Buy them a beverage as a thank you.

I usually print my papers and get a pen and just start crossing every word that doesn't add value as well as sentences that add nothing extra (including redundancy). Somehow seeing it in print vs. on a screen helps.
If you have any sections that are especially long/big in comparison to others but in terms of content are not that different, you should also have a look at HOW you have written things down in the long paragraphs. Can you restructure something there that makes things flow easier and thus shorter?
If you need to come back to the same point at numerous times then this is usually a structure problem. I always plan my papers in terms of flow/structure (i.e., which topics I discuss first, sometimes even transitions) and then outline this more or less in headers on my doc before I start writing. I may take a little while to plan (getting faster with it) but it saves a lot of problems and time in the end.

Hello! I found this challenging when I had to learn it as well. Fortunately for me, my Masters defense was only 20 minutes long and I had other presentation opportunities (classes, other conferences) that gave me 30 minute time slots, so it was a lot easier to work my way up to 45 minutes. However it's an incredibly useful skill to have! The 45-60 min length talk is standard for the end of your PhD and beyond, and by the time I graduated I gave more than a dozen hour-long talks from visiting schools around North America. 
Here are some tips that I learned:
1. Practice really really does make perfect. And yes, the 45 minute time length does make it hard to practice. But it's not impossible. For the first few talks, I really do recommend actually practicing the entire 45 minute talk at least once, if not two or three times. The way I would approach it is to first practice the entire talk, just to run through it, identify problem areas, etc. The goal here for me is to just go through it---I don't stop to make changes. Then, break your talk into chunks and really fine tune those chunks. For each chunk (~10 minutes) I would go through it, make changes and go through it again. No stopping for each chunk. If I find some slides or places where I mess up or where I think it doesn't sound that smooth, I would practice that individual slide and make edits, practice again etc. Once that slide is good, I go back and practice the whole chunk. Then, I move on to the next chunk. Once I'm happy with every single chunk, I practice each chunk again. Then I go for at least one run through of the entire talk. Usually there are issues at transitions between chunks so I might practice those individually before moving onto the entire talk. If it's a very new talk to me and when it was one of my first talks, I would want to practice the whole thing, after fine-tuning at least once or twice. Space out your practices over a week to not burn yourself out! 
I'll be honest though: this level of practice is not sustainable in the long term. But after practicing this intensely for one or two talks, you'll improve a ton and you won't need as much practice in the future. At one point in my PhD, I was giving enough of these talks in a short period of time** that I only practice a few key slides. I choose these slides to be really important ones where I really want to make my message clear. And also the first 1-3 slides because I found that once I start strong, it stays with me through the talk but if I have a nervous talk, the whole thing is affected. In the past year though, I have given fewer of these talks and I under-prepared for a recent talk. It was still fine but I know I could have done it better. So I need to follow my own advice to practice more too!
(**There was one especially tough week where I gave 4 talks at 4 institutions in 2 cities over 4 days. Very exhausting, would not schedule that again!!).
2. Pace yourself / go slow! I limit myself to no more than 1 slide per minute. Cramming in more than 45 slides in a 45 min slot means you'll talk a lot faster. I also try to talk extra slow when practicing because I want to have the "muscle memory" of going through it slowly. A longer 45-minute seminar is much different from a short conference talk, in my opinion. Going slow helps the audience stay engaged, especially if they missed an earlier point or are still digesting it. I also like to put in planned pauses and breaks for people to ask clarification questions. Sometimes they are explicit breaks where I ask people for questions, but sometimes I just pause after a very info-dense slide to a) allow people to digest the info, b ) allow people to raise their hand for a question if it's allowed and c) to take a breather/drink of water and "reset" myself (I often start speeding up after such a slide).
3. Make your talk modular. This will apply more when you have done several of these talks, but it will really help you practice and be able to build on your past experience. I try to spend a lot of time designing slides in the first place that can be used for more than one talk. I currently have about 3 hours worth of talk material that I can construct into different 1-hour talks based on who I am talking to. Usually the motivation/intro parts of my talks are all very similar so this means I don't have to practice them as much. I can just focus my practice time etc. on the new stuff. But this isn't as helpful to you right now, other than whatever parts of your previous conference talks you can either use as modules or expand.
4. For this type of talk and especially for non-sub-field expert audiences, take your time with your introduction. Start from simple concepts that everyone understands and then build on that. It's okay that there will be some members of the audience that know some of the stuff already---they can be nodding along and feel good about themselves that they know what you are going to say next. It's always far better to explain something the audience already knows than to skip something critical and confuse them. Furthermore, I would say that you should aim about 80% of your talk to the least knowledgeable person in the room. Make sure that someone who is science educated but not necessarily experienced in your subfield can still understand ~80% of the talk and be able to leave with the same main takeaway point as the others. However, you can and should spend a little bit of time talking at a very advanced level for the few experts in the room (you want them to leave learning something too). A good strategy is to leave this part near the end---you gain your audience's trust and confidence by showing that you can explain things that they can understand. Then, you might go for 1-2 minutes very much in depth into one topic and maybe not everyone can follow you in those few minutes. However, you should then quickly go back to familiar ground again.
5. Avoid jargon for your subfield where possible. Just take the time to say what you mean or the long form of something. Even if you explain it in the beginning, it's hard for people who don't use the jargon every day to remember it.

Time away from the work also helps a lot, so you can come at it from a fresh perspective. 
I've used the Abode "Read Out Loud" feature (under View). Works alright, kind of painful for formulas, but otherwise not bad at all. 

One of my cats doesn't like to be petted for that much time but when he sees me with my laptop, he insists on being the center of attention. He'll walk over the keyboard in front of the screen. Once I close the laptop he doesn't want the attention anymore. It's adorable. 

Seconding the writing center advice.
If your problem is with the discussion, you might ask yourself if you have a plan before you start writing. You have described your project and findings, now your goal is to communicate how to situate them in a broader context, how we should interpret them, what really matters out of what you found, and what we should take away from that to inform our science more broadly. It's useful to sit down and sketch in bullet points what the main points to be discussed are. E.g., finding 1 -- teaches us that [blah], is evidence against [this thing], lead to broader conclusion that [something]. Same for other findings. Now, are there themes? Group the discussion so you stress those recurring themes instead of scattering them. Remember that your goal is to tell the most compelling story; that may not (very often, is not) your personal story of how you made the discovery, which means that you may not introduce everything in the chronological order of which experiment happened first. Work by main conclusions and themes instead. Create that sketch on a piece of paper *before* you start writing and have a plan and a skeleton for your chapter. This should help with repetitiveness and with scattered ideas that are hard to pinpoint. 

Does your university have a writing center? Often, there's one or a few folks who specialize in working with graduate students. If you can find someone there, try to meet with them regularly (e.g., once a week) to go over your writing. They may be able to help you identify specific patterns in phrasing which you could eliminate to make your writing more concise. 

You're already covered on the usual advice, which is to read things out loud. I'm not sure what your 'reading aloud' process looks like, but any sentence you stumble over in speaking is a candidate for revision. You may already know this, but I thought I'd say it just in case.
Leaving a section for 3+ days helps, too. Once you've slept on it, you'll be less habituated to what you want your writing to mean, so you'll be able to hear what you've actually written on the page more clearly.
Sometimes I print things out and re-write whole pages by hand. I am not that quick at penmanship, so that is nice incentive to reduce my writing to the essential points! Obviously this isn't workable for an entire thesis, but the trick is not so much learning general tips, as learning your general writing habits. For example, I tend to bury the lede, so my re-writing process almost always involves fishing up topic sentences from wherever they've hidden in the body of my text, and placing them on top of each paragraph instead. Writing by hand gives me a sense of what sub-optimal writing habits have been expressing themselves lately, which I can then use as a guide for going back through the entire text on the computer. It's also a good way to power through any particularly knotty passages.
For example, it looks like one of your tics is unnecessary lists. Do you really need to say "Streamline, condense, and reduce redundancy when editing your writing"? What if you just said, "Reducing redundancy in your writing"? You could start by picking out a random page—say, page 15—and seeing if you use any pairs (or triplets) of synonyms where only one would do.

An easy place to start: remove all adjectives and adverbs. Does the text change? 99% of the time, the answer is 'no' and the extra embellishment is unnecessary. A second step: remove hedges: I would like to propose that..., it would appear that [blah] might be the case --> [blah], etc.
Writing papers can be hard. When you got started, did you sit down with your advisor and discuss the overall structure and main point(s) of the thesis? If you haven't, even though it sounds like you're fairly advanced, it would be very useful to stop and do this. Existing text aside, what are you trying to convey to your reader? How do you plan to structure the argument(s)? What does the reader need to know at each step, to understand what you're telling them? If you've done this already, go back to your plans and ask yourself how you're doing with respect to your plans. Things always change along the way, but it's also good to remind yourself of where you started and where you want to go. The thing about edits is that they get into the nitty gritty details and you can easily forget the forest for the trees. Take a step back to remind yourself of the bigger picture. Then make a pass with this in mind. For each sentence/paragraph, does it need to be there or can it be cut? If it stays, what's it doing there? Is it doing its job well or can it be trimmed? Maybe it'd serve you better in another part of the essay. 
It's useful to read things out loud or have them read to you (there's software that will do that for you). It's also often helpful to print things out and read them on paper as opposed to on the screen. At the end of the day, you have to learn by doing, there is no other way. Look back at edits you've gotten: are there common themes to things that get corrected in your writing? Are there things you particularly appreciate about other people's writing that you can emulate in your own writing? I find that going back and forth between the details and the big picture helps me avoid some frustrations.  

Very happy to report that I signed my soul over to Stanford last week! 
Now to learn how to surf... 

So during my Master's my take home was pretty minimal (~$10,000 a year) but I did make it work okay. My school though is located in a smaller city in the South so cost of living was pretty low and I lucked out in getting rent that was only $545 a month (for a fairly spacious apartment). Also I did have additional financial help from my parents. My car insurance and phone bill was paid by my parents and I was and still am on my parent's health insurance. I had no car payments on my car since I paid in full for it before I started my Master's. But outside of those things I paid for everything else: car maintenance (though mine was minimal since I have a relatively new car with few miles), food, rent, utilities, streaming services, etc. I also did split a lot of these costs with my partner. He was also on a similar stipend as me. We lived in the city our master's institution was in so we had to cover our costs year round.
Overall, money was very tight and we didn't have a ton of expendable income, but we were always able to pay our big expenses. We did eat out quite a bit because we were terrible about making time for cooking, but we rarely ate out anywhere very expensive (those types of restaurants were treats/splurges to us). We have two cats and have been able to cover any costs they need, though we were lucky that we only had to pay a one time deposit on them and no monthly rent. But we paid for that deposit and vet check ups/shots yearly, and of course food. They are even on pricey food now since one of them is allergic to fillers found in pet food. We were also able to buy ourselves new clothes when we desperately needed them and also keep our book/comic reading going too (though these were purchases that didn't occur frequently). Other people in my program who lived alone or didn't manage their money super well had to sign up for food stamps though to get by on the small stipends we got. But my partner and I always tried to manage our money relatively well and we were able to get by, though having help from our parents for the costs I mention above definitely helped tremendously.

I have been in a long term relationship with my partner for quite a while now and we got our master's together and now in the fall we will be starting our PhDs together. Since we are both in academia our situation is a little different since we both have times when we are absolutely swamped, so it's really easy to understand that and just let the other person catch up with everything they need to do. But I'm gonna try and give some advice as best I can into how we make it all work.
I think one of the biggest things for us is us trying to make sure we are on the same wake-up and bedtime routine because then that means the times surrounding those times of the day are spent together. Also we really try to make sure we spend time not working after we wake up or before we go to bed and instead enjoy our breakfast and coffee together or enjoy winding down for the night after dinner. I really think if you have the ability to be on a similar schedule as your partner then that allows you to see each other much more frequently through the day. If you aren't on the same schedule you can easily end up just barely missing the opportunity to spend a little time with your partner. I usually wake up when he does (5:30 a.m. )for his 8 a.m. classes even though I don't absolutely need to wake up at that time and I'm totally not a morning person. But this allows us to spend all that time together before we need to leave the house. Also when we are really on top of things that wake up time allows us to work out together in the mornings/meal prep (chop veggies) for that evenings dinner.
I think one of the things that helps us a lot is even if one of us is working at home we try to be in the same room as the other person (unless we do need absolute solitude) so we can still chit chat when the person working needs a break or someone's brain to pick about something. Also while chores aren't fun we try to do them together when we can so we can have the time to catch up during that. We also almost always try to cook dinner together or at the very least eat dinner at the same time. I guess all of my advice so far is to just try and spend time together, even if it is just day-to-day stuff, but I would imagine that doesn't work for those who need a break from their partner now and then (I guess my partner and I do tend to be attached at the hip a bit...) But I do recognize that doing non day-to-day stuff also really helps keep relationships thriving.
For you to be able to do bigger things outside the day-to-day activities together during grad school I think the most important thing is time management. It took me a looooong time to figure out time management during my masters, but once I did, my partner and I were definitely better for it. It did allow us to do non-day-to-day activities more frequently (i.e. going out to eat or to the movies, going fishing or hiking or other things that we enjoy doing together). I find that the best way for us to do these fun activities together was for us to plan on X date to do whatever it was we wanted to do. This allowed me to figure out what I needed to do before that date and usually meant I was very productive in getting things done so I could feel deserved in taking the break with my partner. Basically we had to prioritize spending time together and I think that is maybe one of the most important things we learned during out master's. Of course setting aside a certain date isn't exactly spontaneous and sometimes spontaneity is great for relationships. So at times we would just shirk our responsibilities (when we knew we could get away with it for a day or weekend) and just do whatever the heck we wanted to do besides work even if it just meant a day of Netflix together.
It is absolutely OKAY to not constantly be working during grad school (take some weekends off!) and it's OKAY to take unplanned breaks to have some fun! If you want to go on a vacation with your partner then make those plans and do it! While during grad school you of course have to be productive and get things done in a timely fashion, sometimes you just need to make time for other things because that will ultimately make you a more productive student. When I realized that it was okay to not work all the time, I started to treat my grad school responsibilities as more of a 9 to 5 job (I mean more realistically I was working from ~8 to 6 or 6:30 with a lunch break) and became much more productive. It meant that I needed to make the most of those hours I set aside for work and I did. It meant that I had so much more downtime to look forward and wasn't as likely to goof off at school as I was before. It meant my partner were so much happier because we had made the point to prioritize our life in addition to prioritizing our responsibilities to grad school.
I know this went a bit long but as I was writing it I came to the realization of just how much better off my partner and I were when we better managed our time and prioritized us. I think prioritizing your partner and relationship is one of the biggest things for a relationship to remain on solid ground. It allows your bond to remain strong and by making time for your partner that shows how much you care for them. I know I went a bit stream-of-conscious-y so feel free to ask me to clarify something if its unclear.
 

I have to agree that it really seems like you are most excited about UNT and I think excitement about the research and environment can go a long way in making grad school enjoyable and worthwhile.
As someone who has taken 3 years to get my Master's I think their rationale of having that first year to adjust and figure out research concentration is a solid one. I knew I wanted to do grad school and that first year really was an adjustment for me. While my program wasn't built for 3 years necessarily there is flexibility in finish date and since I took a bit to figure out how to adjust to grad school I was able to do that my first year and then concentrate more on my thesis my last 2 years when I knew what I was doing better. Also having the 3 full years means that I have really done a lot to make my thesis very thorough and (hopefully) highly publishable. I also will be getting more publications than planned because of my extra year at my Master's institution. I will be graduating with my Master's at 25 and I don't really think that is old at all for that degree, especially since my program cohort had a majority of students who were older than me. I applied and have been accepted to PhD programs for this fall and I doubt I will be that much older (if older at all?) than other students who will be starting. So if you have any more questions for doing a 3 year Master's and finishing it around 25, feel free to ask me.

Just committed to Michigan :^)