fuzzylogician

Personally I'd stay out of it unless she asks you to help again. You could shoot her a quick email "hey, as the deadline is approaching, I hope you are doing well with your application. Let me know if there is anything more I can do to help." But unless she invites you to take a more active part in the process, I wouldn't impose.

Well, I wouldn't assume anything about the current information you got other than that spending a year away from one's wife and kids sucks and good for them for figuring it out. I think the way I'd go about trying to figure out if/when he is coming back is to bring up your summer vacation plans and (innocently) ask if he knows already when he will be back in town, because you want to be away visiting family (or similar excuse) for part of the summer and if possible you'd like to plan it for the time when he's gone or moving so you can return to town and start working with him again once he's back. He may not know yet or may not want to tell you, but I'm not sure how direct you could be or whether or not he wants to (or can) share more with you now. He may have received another offer or he may be negotiating, but in both cases I doubt he would confide in a first-year advisee before the plans are finalized. That said, another similar kind of attempt at getting more info might be to ask him about the courses he might be teaching next year and link it to your coursework plans for the coming semester and next year, if that's possible. So, try to link his plans to something relevant that you can legitimately ask about, and see how it goes from there. Unless you know him well and know he will respond reasonably, I would not straight up ask him if he's planning to leave if there is no indication of that, but I might be on the lookout for potential places where this question could be asked if he brings something up that would create that opportunity.

I'm not an SLP but: /s/ and /θ/ are both voiceless, /z/ and /ð/ are both voiced. The process seems to be alveolar (fricative) --> dental (fricative). I don't know if you have learned a name for that in your class, but on a phonological level, that's the process. (And generally -- welcome! We are not a forum designed for help with homework problems, so please stay around and participate in our discussions!)

Moved!

Well, there are all the usual costs that are associated with moving to a new place: deposits for an apartment, phone contract, etc., however much you want to spend on new/used furniture and appliances, initial grocery shopping, winter clothing if you move to a place that's much colder than where you're from, books and other school supplies, some possible school-related fees not covered by your tuition, monthly pass for public transportation (or: a car/bike?). You also need to get where you're going to live, so you need to pay for a plane ticket. These costs all depend on where you're coming from and where you're going to live. Prices vary widely. For me, I was aware of these costs in general, since it wasn't the first time I moved apartments, but it's hard to predict exact prices in a new city in a country you've never been to. At the end of the day, my stipend was sufficient to cover my expenses, but since the expenses all come at once and the stipend is paid on a monthly basis, there is always that time right after moving when things are a little tight. You might need to be more careful about what's actually immediately necessary and what can wait another few weeks for when things start to settle down.

Not necessarily. You need to follow up on your status with the department and not assume you've been accepted until someone explicitly tells you so.

I would ask for confidentiality and explain that my current employer is not aware that I am applying for other jobs. You will not be the first person in such a situation, so they should know how to handle it. I'd offer the names of other references for them to contact. They want to talk to people who know you, which is legitimate, so you just need to make some such people available to them. It gets tricky if this is the first and only job you've ever had; in that case I guess you will have to give them academic references.

We're talking about negotiating with the granting agencies and finding ways to use these hard won funds, not about deceiving anyone. If they agree to split costs so that one grant covers time in the field and the other covers write-up time and a follow-up trip (or any other arrangement) and it's all on the up and up, I don't see anything immoral here. We are talking about honestly won grants/fellowships and an honest conversation with the granting agencies about how those funds should be used. Of course there would have to be some readjustments of the budget, since we write the budget for each grant as if it's the only one we'll get--and everyone agrees that's how it should be; we don't want to have to write multiple grants based on many what-if scenarios where we win multiple grants. If a granting agency agrees to change the allocation of some funds, then all is good. rising_star wasn't suggesting that you use the money for personal travel or other unauthorized expenses, so I don't see how this criticism is relevant.

I try to be as helpful as possible to the people who are going to be looking at my application. They will be seeing lots and lots of them, so I want to make it as easy as possible for them to go through my files. For file names, I use: LaseName-DocumentName (e.g. Logician-CV.pdf, Logician-SOP.pdf, ...) For each actual document, I use headers and footers: - top left: my full name; - top right: name of document (CV, statement of purpose, etc), identifiably related to the file name; - bottom middle: page X of Y.

Welcome! That's an interesting selection of schools you have there. What are your interests? (Actually, this conversation would perhaps be better relocated to the Linguistics forum, where it won't be pushed down by other posts as quickly and probably more linguists will see it.)

Unless someone comes by to tell me that Lit is very different from other fields which I know more about, one year is not a long time to be out of school. We're talking about one semester of your being out of school before you start applying, right? Your MA education will still be the most recent thing on your resume, your grades will be reflective of your current work and thinking, and your letters will still be from people who have current knowledge of you as a candidate. I don't think there will be any issue at all.

Selection committees won't see the grade right now, if you submit a transcript before the Fall grades are out. Schools (but perhaps not scholarships) will probably want a transcript when you graduate to prove you've been awarded your degree. Either way, this one P/F grade on your otherwise perfect 4.0 transcript won't affect your application one way or the other. You don't need to be worried about your grades.

First off, anything optional you submit should strengthen your application. If it adds nothing (or worse, if it would hurt your application) then don't submit it. Now, you need to decide if you could create a website that would be impressive and convince the adcom that you have acquired these new skills. It sounds like you're not so sure you could do that. You could try to put something together, but get a professor to look at it and only submit a link if the professor tells you it's impressive enough. Second, I think the best way to show the adcom that you're learning these new skills is to talk about it in your SOP and to ask one of your recommenders to mention it in their letter. A website could support that, but I think you'll be fine without it too.

Thanks! I guess that makes it doubtful that I would use this service, since I don't usually prepare my posters more than 2-3 days before the conference... but if I ever do get my act together, this sounds like a great experience.

Don't even get me started on how not 'easy' this solution is. I think you know yourself it's not an easy solution. To answer your original question, I think your therapist has it right. Hang out with happily married/dating people and try to have fun with them in the moment. I think it's normal to sometimes want what someone else has, but you also need to learn to move past it. Unless we are talking about someone who constantly only talks about their SO, conversations will revolve around lots of things, including loved ones, and that's just a normal part of life. You have to get used to talking with people about their lives, if you want to have any friends at all. So, just get started, and soon enough you'll get used to it and it won't be a problem anymore. It might help to just stay in the moment and not constantly compare yourself to the person you're talking to. You're different people with different backgrounds so it doesn't make sense to expect that you'll be in the exact same place in life in every respect, and the fact that someone is married is just not relevant to the situation where you're just hanging out with them and having fun. You need to learn to not think about it all the time.

VulpesZerda, how long did it take between submitting your order and receiving the finished product? Was it good quality?

In particular, *so much pain* can be avoided by just asking for clarifications as soon as something becomes unclear, and keeping some kind of a paper trail to make sure that you and your advisor are on the same page. Also, regular meetings for setting goals and checking up on progress.

A blogpost by a psychology professor on how to deal with mentorship gone awry, and how to avoid lots of potentially awkward situation.. There is a lot of good advice there. http://psycgrrrl.blogspot.ca/2014/10/on-mentormentee-awkwardness-issues.html

I don't think this explanation would add much. I don't think auditing a couple of classes is a problem that needs explaining to begin with, but if it were, "I was afraid to take them for credit" would not really be a very good explanation. I'd just let the transcript speak for itself.

My dissertation, CV, research statement, cover letters, etc. are all written in (an expanded) Palatino that contains the symbols for linguistic characters that I need for my work. I experimented with re-typesetting my entire dissertation in other fonts but liked that one the best.

It can be done and is being done by quite a few members of this community. Whether you can do it depends on your profile, which you did not share with us. As TakeruK says, applying to top private schools might be a smart move because those schools tend to have more funding, and all students cost the same. Public schools tend to have less funding and normally at least some, if not all, US students will cost less. California public schools have recently been particularly bad about funding international students, but I believe the problem is more widespread.

I understand it's hard but classes are meant to bring everyone up to a certain level, and that means they need to cover a lot of ground. For someone with less background, that means a lot more work catching up. If you have less background in all of your courses, I can understand how that can be overwhelming. You do need to spend a lot of time catching up, and that involves teaching yourself lots of things. My experience, though, is that once you're through the semester, you'll basically be up to speed with your colleagues who had a lot more background coming in. So, it's not easy but it may be worth the sacrifice. It's also worth remembering that academia always involves a lot of self-teaching, it's part of the job. If don't enjoy self-teaching and want to quit because of that, that's a legitimate concern. If you continue with the PhD, there will be lots of other corners of your work that you'll need to teach yourself out of whatever resources you can find. However, if you're enjoying the research and the only concern is the next semester or two, which is a lot of very hard work, I think it might make more sense to try and push through, because it will be worth it at the end. You only take classes for a very short time (=1-2 years) and you'll do research for the rest of your career after that. You might even come to appreciate the early classes where things were laid out for you and someone showed you what you need to learn. Later on you'll not only have to teach yourself things, but also figure out what those things are that you need to learn.

You can send them your transcripts any time. As soon as you start sending them materials (e.g. GRE scores) they will open a file for you, and they'll just add other materials (e.g. transcripts) to the same file until it is complete. I think it's better to send everything together, to minimize the possibility of things getting lost or misplaced, so if you need to submit hard copies of anything other than the transcript, I'd send it all in one envelope.