fuzzylogician

I've been in situations where I would only get feedback from someone if/when I scheduled a meeting to that end. Manuscripts I would send would get a "I will read this and get back to you" response but they would never get back to me until I scheduled a meeting. If that's the situation you are in, it is not at all uncommon. You need to figure out if you can live with it, and you probably need to learn to work this system better. That is, stop expecting to get written feedback, because this person just doesn't seem to do that. Instead, send a meeting request along with your manuscript: "Dear Prof X, here is the latest version of my manuscript. Could we meet next week to discuss it? I am free Monday at 2pm." Ask for the meeting for a time when you would expect other professors to email you back some comments. It can be very beneficial to get comments from such a person, even if they are not in writing; you just need to be able to accept that this is what this person can give you.

Good luck. Again I would suggest emailing the organizations who are giving away these scholarships directly. There should be some contact information somewhere on their websites and the people there would be able to give you the most up to date answers.

That only refers to your eligibility to work in the US. The SSN number itself does not change, you have the same one for life. The only reasons it would be replaced is if you were placed in the witness protection program or if you were the victim of identity theft. You may need to re-apply for authorization for work (I don't know, you'll want to ask the international students office at your school) but regardless your SSN number itself won't change.

Again, that would depend on the scholarship. If there are specific ones you have in mind that you might be eligible for, read the application guidelines carefully. They will have particular application deadlines and will usually specify for example when notifications will go out and what the start date of the scholarship would be. The guidelines might tell you whether you can apply with one affiliation (pre-grad school) and change mid-way, and whether you can defer. I assume these scholarships have specific terms, e.g. they fund your tuition or provide research funding to study X, etc. so they may care about your affiliation or actually knowing that you're in school. These are questions you need to ask each individual scholarship you are applying to separately, and there is no one quick answer that applies to everything. This is probably why your school has not been helpful in replying to you--there is no way they can know the answer.

Apply to what exactly? What do you mean by remain eligible? Do you mean: assuming you win the scholarship, can you have access to the funds at different schools once you are officially enrolled, more than a year from now? Different scholarships/fellowships have different guidelines in terms of when the money becomes available, what your affiliation has to be, whether you can defer the start date, etc. Your question just seems very vague, unless you are referring to a specific scholarship at your specific school and then it's just probably impossible for us to know. Guess: if you want to continue to grad school at your undergrad institution and are applying for a specific scholarship through you school, it may not be straightforward to apply that money toward your graduate school education, especially since it doesn't sound like you've been accepted yet, but if you remain affiliated with the same school throughout, there may be a way to make it work. It becomes more complicated if you want to apply for a scholarship under one affiliation but then use the money for a different purpose at another school. I would guess that doing things later rather than earlier would make it easier. But again, your question was vague so my guesses are probably even vaguer.

Yeah, my school required two copies of my thesis on what we like to refer to as 'fancy paper.' The library website had along with its list of specifications also a list of brands that were acceptable and some suggestions of where to find them. I personally inherited some fancy paper from others who had some left over; you could look into that. If you have to buy your own, I'd just pay for whatever is cheap(er) and meets the requirements. This thing is going to sit at the library and collect dust while anyone who is actually interested in reading it will just download a pdf from your website.

Well if you won a fellowship then it sounds like you're not doing too bad. People here might not know the specifics of this fellowship but if you go to the City Guide forum, there is a thread about NYC that will give you a lot of information about living in the city, and you could always ask there if a stipend of $X with Y conditions sounds doable. We might also be able to help if you have more general questions about being a graduate student or a research/teaching assistant or about CUNY. I'm sure there are other CUNY students out there (though they may not be reading this thread so if you have such general questions you might want to find a more appropriate forum to ask them in). I do think that asking to be put in touch with current students was a good idea; you could also just try and reach out to some of them yourself -- most programs list their students somewhere on their website. Students are usually very happy to help new incoming students, and they will probably have the most relevant experiences to share with you.

It's useful to bring up your work experience if it connects in a meaningful way with what you hope to do in grad school or beyond. So if the work gives you relevant research experience, that's an easy one. If it helped you somehow better define your future career goals, you can talk about how that came about. If you want to combine some things you learned there into your future research, that's also relevant. If you learned transferrable skills, you can explain that. On the other hand, if it's completely unrelated work in another field, you'd have to ask yourself if it adds to the image of yourself that you want to project through your SOP or if it's just making the reader trudge through more verbiage before they get to the main point (=what you want to do, why at Uni X, how your past prepares you for your chosen career path). If that's the case, then it's questionable whether it does you any good. Being one year out of school is not something you need to explain, and there are other places to list your post-BA employment than your SOP.

What one's RA experience could be like totally varies and depends on the discipline, school, topic, and to a large extent, the professor who will be your supervisor. The questions you ask are ones you could and should ask your prospective department. From your description I would guess it's extra work you do on someone else's project who has a grant and has work they need done, but your level of engagement and responsibility is something that's hard to guess even if I'm right about my previous guess. It could range from just technical support or carrying out a project that has already been completely worked out, so you're nothing more than a glorified assistant who might not even get a publication as a middle author, to taking complete charge of a part of someone's grant where there hasn't been much more done than laying out of a main idea, so you'll do the actual spelling out of things and you might end up with anything from a publication to a dissertation-sized project. You need to ask what's expected of you. That will give you a good idea about some of your other questions, like whether you could easily switch projects and how many hours you'll be expected to put in. These are fair questions that there is no reason not to ask the person who is offering you this position.

Hi ravyn, welcome! There is no reason why you would get kicked out of this forum, but it seems that there aren't many people around who have received the exact same fellowship that you have. It might be more useful to ask whatever it is you want to know about if there is a chance that people from other universities might be able to help. If not, you might consider writing your department or whoever gave you this fellowship and asking to be put in touch with other current recipients. That might be easier than finding one on here.

For both questions, I suggest you approach your prospective department. Things may change between department so you should really just ask how it's done at yours. These questions are something the department's secretary should be able to easily answer for you.

^This. And on top of that, depending on your post-graduation goals it's not clear that finishing more quickly is a always a good idea. If you want a career in academia and you're in a program that funds you for 5 years, it may not be advisable to leave after 4. You could of course try and go on the job market after just 4 years and you may be the lucky superstar who makes it, but if not then I think it's a smarter idea to stay for a 5th year and push more publications out than take a crappy temporary teaching job somewhere where, yes you'll be out of school, but all the course preps will mean that your research will slow down and you won't be as competitive as others who could spend an extra year on their research without any extra obligations. Faster isn't always better. Just my $.02.

Yeah, it sucks when this happens. Email again, maybe your email just got lost in the shuffle. If it doesn't help, usually my next move is to find an advisor who knows the editor in question and is willing to either email or call. Sometimes (unfortunately) it helps if the email comes from someone more recognizable than a young student.

Yes, it is permissible. Why wouldn't it be? The April 15 deadline is about when you have to decide, if you have an offer with funding. It's not about when the school has to notify you. Some universities have a process in place where at some late point in the game, after all admissions decisions have been made and acceptances have gone out, someone updates rejections in the system and a mass rejection email is sent. It's a formality on their end to ensure everyone's application was process and closed. It's nothing to get upset about, it's no different from a rejection that would have come a month earlier; if you were seriously still waiting on an answer from them, the solution would have probably been to contact the department long ago, and if you were not waiting then you can just ignore it and move on.

It depends, as already mentioned. If you do the Masters and PhD in the same school, it could probably take an extra 3 years to finish the PhD once you have the Masters. If it's at a different school, it would be up to the school to decide how they want to treat your previous degree. It could range from everything counting toward the degree and then you may be able to graduate in 3 years to nothing counting, and then it might be more like 5. Of course, it also depends on the normal times to completion at these programs, so it's really impossible to know. 4 sounds like a good reasonable number, but that doesn't really tell you much about what might happen in any specific case.

I actually know places where only MA students TA because it costs less to employ them than PhD students. So it really depends.

Alongside whatever answers you get here, I would suggest you ask other students in your department, both of your advisor and others. It's probably more relevant to know what is usually done in your department and not only what others do in other corners of your field.

Two things will (hopefully) happen: first, you'll learn to become more efficient and make better use of your time, and second, you'll learn to triage your assignments and not do everything all the time. A good example is not doing all the readings. No one can go nonstop for five years, and it's not like then you can just stop and rest, if you want to have an academic career. You have to learn to take breaks.

I got more than one from universities that accepted me, together with my acceptance letter. I actually ended up rejecting those offers and never using those I-20s. I got a new one from the school whose offer I accepted. There was never any problem with that. Schools can't "create problems" for you that way. You cannot *use* multiple I-20s so "have" them in that sense. Apparently some schools issue them together with an international student's acceptance before they even accept the offer but that's not a problem if you don't do anything with those forms.

I couldn't help but notice that all you people who don't feel like you miss the sun live in California. Coincidence? I think not. Where I am right now, it's almost May and we just had a bit of snow last week. You might appreciate the sun a bit more if the last time it was actually warm was 7 months ago

As long as they are still willing to write LORs on your behalf, there is no problem.

I wrote about half of my dissertation outside. There was a park near my house with shaded picnic tables and free wifi that I started sitting at as soon as it got warm enough to spend time outside. There was also a coffeeshop nearby for all my coffee/sandwich needs and to charge my battery or warm me up if it got too cold/windy. Direct sunlight was my savior during that period.

There is a question of how you phrased the email -- I could see someone getting upset if you said "an offer from a school I like more came along so I am withdrawing" as opposed to "a funded offer came along that I simply cannot pass up, given the financial difficulties that the offer from you would have put me in." That said, a school with an early deadline AND no funding offer really has no business being upset, in my opinion.

Well it sure looks like a copy-pasted question from a textbook. If it's not, then it would be helpful if you gave more background. Where did this question come from? What context should people put it in? What have you tried to do to solve this problem? This community can go to great lengths to help people who try to help themselves, but we will not do other people's work for them.

Here are a couple of recent threads to get you started: Try to search for "what age" or "how old" -- this question has been asked multiple times.