fuzzylogician

This is somewhat of an unusual question.. where did it come from. To clarify, this board is not design for homework help, so if that's what this is about, talk to your instructor or TAs.

It's time-consuming, you lose years of potential experience and earnings at another better-paying job, the job market stinks; you are incredibly likely to have to settle for a while, maybe for your entire career, if you're even lucky enough to get a job. It's mentally exhausting, it is solitary, the feedback cycle can take years, you'll experience constant rejection, you'll be required to do things no one trained you for (like teach), there will be times when you won't know why the hell you're doing it, you'll be competing with incredibly smart and motivated people who are just as desperate as you. You may encounter bad advising, bad teaching, unfriendly cohorts, prejudice of any number of kinds, you may be forced to live on a tight budget for many years. Just off the top of my head.

This is abusive and utterly inappropriate behavior. Sadly, though, to protect yourself, you need to be very careful about what you do, depending on your graduation and post-graduation plans. Some questions to get you started: Is there someone else who can act as your advisor instead of your current advisor? I ask, because it's entirely possible, if not likely, that if you complain he will know who the source was and that he won't appreciate it and will retaliate. You may be able to graduate without his support if there's an official complaint against him, but you also need to consider your post-PhD plans. If you want to stay in academia, it'll be hard not to has a letter from him. Your life will be easier in a variety of ways if you can switch to someone who is both not abusive and whose support you can count on. I would personally choose to do this even if it meant changing directions of research somewhat (within reason). Is there a history of similar complaints being taken seriously? Or conversely of students leaving him and switching advisor? Do you expect to have your department's support? You may not immediately know. If he is famous and/or tenured, it'll be much harder. You'll leave in a few years and he may stay for decades, and politics may dictate that they'll prefer to keep the calm by sacrificing you. Are there external resources to support you? An ombudsperson? Mental health services or a support group? The Title IX office? Regardless of anything else, you should seek this kind of support, because what's happening is not okay and no one should deal with it alone. It's sad that these are the questions you have to ask yourself, but this is the reality. I am certainly not advocating for continuing to take the abuse, certainly not as a default. But you need to consider what fighting back would mean, and what prices you're willing to pay. Make informed decisions, whatever they are. I would also urge you to consider that there are other wonderful people in your field, and that you shouldn't choose to quit just because of one person, if you otherwise want to stay in your field! Good luck to you -- I hope you can find your way through this and it all works out!

I don't know what you mean by "showcase". Is there anything more to it than listing your accomplishments? There isn't really much for you to discuss (you can discuss the project, findings, its broader contribution to your field, etc. That's more important than having had a conference presentation, btw. Communicating the science and your understanding of it is what schools will be looking for.). It'd be more effective to have LOR writers contextualize these grants and their noteworthiness ("this is our more prestigious award", "only one person in Field has won this grant in the past 150 years", "other students in our department who've won this award are XYZ, and they have gone on to do awesome things ABC", etc). You can't really do that yourself. This is precisely why your application is evaluated holistically -- some things are best communicated by the authority figures that support you, not by you directly.

I was the only woman in my cohort. You are not crazy, this is an important consideration. I would say this: figure out some other factors about representation in this prospective department: how many classes will you have to take with your cohort alone? Will you share an office with them, or will you be sharing an office with other random, possible non-male, individuals? Are there women on the faculty to talk to? Being the only woman in your cohort may be an entire non-issue if you get to socialize with women in your classes and in your office, and if there are female faculty to support you, too; or you may feel isolated if some of those conditions aren't met. Find other women in the program to talk to about these things.

This is one of those cases where it depends on what you do with what you've got. Undergraduate conferences aren't in and of themselves terribly impressive; you'll probably want to remove them from your CV at some early point in your graduate career. Awards are nice, but it's hard to know how competitive they were. Likewise, it's hard to judge a paper we haven't seen. But if they lead to glowing LORs and a strong writing sample, and if they allow you write a detailed and carefully crafted SOP, and if they allow you to target the right schools with the right fit for your proposed research, then these accomplishments can get you very far.

I don't think anyone can help here, but you could follow up with whoever you interviewed with and ask if there are updates (or what the timeline to decision is, if you didn't ask that at the interview). Unfortunately, often if invites have gone out and you didn't get one, that's not a good sign. That said, if it was left up to individual POIs to email students as opposed to one person sending all the invites, there is some chance that your person is just being slow. More than that would be even more speculation, I'm afraid.

I strongly recommend that you ask to be put in touch with current students in your prospective program. Finances can vary greatly across programs and locations, and the best information will come from people who are receiving a similar stipend to yours in the same location.

I would suggest browsing the Interviews board. Most interview prep will not be school-dependent. Questions are pretty common, so you can learn a lot from others' experiences in different programs.

They may do a background check. They may contact employers and former employers. They may talk to advisors and former advisors.

My advice for any large-scale project is to invest the time in planning and laying out precisely what steps need to be accomplished and when. Talk to professors and senior students to get a sense of what needs to happen the year you graduate and by when. There will be things you might not be planning for: going on the job market involves time-consuming prep work, especially the first time you do it; if and when you go on interviews, that's extra prep work. There might be filing deadlines you'll need to meet for funding/immigration/new job purposes that are different than the normal end of the year. There might be earlier funding cycles you'll want to be aware of for any extra funding. If you need to do any research in the field that is season-dependent or even just external-funding-dependent, it's even moreso important to plan. Likewise if you need specific materials for lab experiments or if your experiments are simply lengthy in time. Plan for the unexpected by giving yourself the time to deal with things that will inevitably come up. Get a sense for the average time it takes students to write a dissertation from proposal (if you have one of those) to filing. Give yourself an extra cushion there. Now, planning backwards, are there other qualifying exams, classes, etc that you have to take? Factor those in. Write your class papers and any qualifying papers with an eye toward a larger project. Use opportunities to submit parts of what might be a dissertation project as final papers, and to do background reading that could further the same project. Ideally, you will either have parts of a project already done by the time you're getting ready to focus on your dissertation, or you will have at least educated yourself in the relevant background reading on some topic that's related to your existing work. (FWIW the latter was more or less the case for me -- none of my class projects ended up in my dissertation, but they set the stage for later work on the same topics that was the core of the dissertation.) Once you're at a stage where you have a topic, take the time to spell out as detailed a plan as you can (not: ch1 by January, ch2 by February, etc, but a much more detailed plan of what goes into ch1, with weekly attainable goals). Do some score-keeping and reflection to figure out if your timing is accurate (or more likely, how much you're off), to help you plan better as you go along. Revise your plan periodically. Finally, seek regular advice and contact with others. Do this both for professional reasons and for your mental health. The dissertation writing stage in particular can be very isolating. Having company helps. Having feedback from your advisors that your plans are on the right track and that your timeline is attainable and reasonable is crucial. Eat, sleep, exercise, take breaks, allow yourself off days and bad days, because they will happen and that's okay. Time with pets, hobbies, loved ones, nature, whatever it is that charges your batteries will often be more effective than more work.

I really don't. It was an "if possible" request, and I'm sure you won't be the only one who won't have the original assignment. To the extent that you can reconstruct ("it was the final paper, worth 50% of the grade" or whatever), I think that would be helpful. And if you can get details from the prof, that would be great too. I don't think you need to worry about it otherwise.

Hard to know. Applications are occasionally considered even if they are incomplete, but other times they may not be looked at at all. I don't think anyone here can say more than that. If the program does early and later decisions, there's still a chance. If not, that may be the end of it. You may never know why a decision went the way it did.

It says "where possible". If you don't have the prompt, then you don't have it. They never said you can't submit the paper in that case. I'd urge you to submit your strongest sample regardless of whether or not you have the original assignment description.

Have you looked at the Results survey? (Since we aren't psychic, there's no way for us to know which programs you've applied for and what their process is like... if you want more precise answers, you will need to share more information.)

It seems to me that the ethical issues aren't so much implicit as explicit. You are considering lying on your application and withholding damaging information (low grades, failure in a program, debt to school) so you can get into a new program. You didn't specify if this would be a Masters or PhD, nor whether you'd be paying out of pocket or if you'd expect to get a stipend. Either way, (for different reasons), I'm sure that schools would consider your past behavior highly relevant as a predictor of possible future behavior. Some schools may run background checks, and many jobs will, as well. Lying can get your in a lot more trouble than the original sin itself. That all said, it seems to me that if you want to lie, there's a reasonable chance you might get away with it, but you'll just have to try. Keep in mind, though, that you'll always live with the lie and the possibility of being found out, which at least for some can be hard to live with.

Seconding the advice to talk to your advisor. You actually sound like you've thought about this and you have some good reasons to want to reapply to other schools next year. If you share this with your advisor, hopefully you can get their support. A good advisor wants their students to succeed, and if that means pursuing interests at another program, that should be just fine. Of course I can't promise that your advisor won't be upset by this, but frankly, if that's the case, you probably don't want this person as your PhD advisor anyway.

You have a weakness in your application but they otherwise liked it. They wanted to give you the opportunity to put that weakness in context; if there are mitigating circumstances, that could reduce any concerns about this weakness. Depending on what you did with this opportunity, you could have helped yourself, or probably left things as they were before (and hopefully not hurt yourself!). Overall if they talked to you, that's good news. Giving you a chance to help yourself is also good news. Beyond that, it's all guess work.

Everyone should be called however they choose. I have, in the past, used a western-sounding name, but eventually decided I didn't like it. For reference, I have a name that, if you're from a different culture, you may have trouble with as far as identifying my gender and using its correct pronunciation. I have a whole part of my website dedicated to the etymology of my first and last names along with a recording of me saying them and an IPA (international phonetic alphabet) transcription (I am a linguist, after all). I expect anyone who is a long-term friend , teacher, or colleague to make the effort to say my name correctly (I do accept some distortions, though; I use a somewhat Americanized pronunciation anyway, so what the heck). I really don't think it's too much to expect this from anyone who I have a professional or personal relationship with. For short-term interactions such as coffeeshops and the like, I have a Western coffee name I quite like that baristas know me by. Short answer: call the student whatever they ask to be called. In general, ask people how they want to be called, and show a willingness to learn and use unfamiliar names.

I can't do any work when there is language in the background (music with lyrics, TV, podcast), but I do enjoy working in an environment where there is low-level noise/music such as in coffeeshops. I do most of my work in these kinds of locations, including writing and editing, emails, creating slides for teaching and presentations, stats and scripting. Things I tend to do in my office (=without any distractions) include grading, reading/commenting on student papers, close-reading of research articles, final prep for teaching or presentations, initial outlining of papers (for me, a crucial step preceding any actual writing), abstract writing. Note as per other posts on this board, I also find that I do different kinds of work better at different times of the day, so that matters too. I try not to do any work at home, to maintain the distinction between the two. I think that's really important for my health.

I was sort of relieved when I found the first typo in my dissertation. They're unavoidable, and finding that first one helped me accept that it's not going to be perfect and that's okay. My entire committee and several colleagues read my dissertation before I submitted it; so did quite a few other people after publication. Still, I found a surprising number of small mistakes as I prepared the book manuscript based on this work. I've updated some crucial mistakes in the online version of the dissertation on my website but otherwise I don't usually worry about such things. My best tip for finding typos other than having multiple people read the draft is to use some text-to-speech tool. Those can read your text back to you and that can actually be a fairly productive way of both finding typos and improving your writing more generally. It is, however, somewhat time-consuming, and not always worth it.

- Visits are usually pretty important both for you and for the school to get an impression of each other. - Most schools will pay for the cost of the flight and accommodations, otherwise I think it's fair to tell them you can't afford the cost. - If you can't make it, you can ask for a Skype conversation instead. It's not quite the same, but it's better than nothing. - You can usually ask to reschedule and/or only be there for part of the visit if you really need to. Since we're talking about an important life decision here, I'm not sure that a grade is one class is worth missing out on crucial information or opportunities. If it were me, I'd see about extra credit or some attendance exemption if possible, or I might accept a somewhat lower grade, but that's just me.

Is anyone asking you to make a presentation? Unless they are, you just show up and have a conversation with your interviewer(s). They will ask some questions (you can search the Interviews subforum for common ones), you'll answer them, you'll ask them some questions back, and that's about it.

You need to talk to your school's International Students Office. You absolutely should not rely on internet sources of any kind when it comes to issues like immigration. That said, my understanding is that you can't work on a student visa, and it's not obvious to me that you can activate your MS-related OPT if you've moved to another program (but you should check that). In case you can, there's some processing time associated with the OPT and you can't start work until that's settled. So it seems to me that if you want a job, you need to be on OPT and do some serious job-hunting; and if you want the PhD, then continue with that plan. Staying in a PhD program until you find a job sounds like it could lead to several kinds of trouble. -- And again, a disclaimer: I am not an immigration expert. Talk to your school.

EGG is in early August: http://www.eggschool.org/