fuzzylogician

No one can tell you. One of several things might happen: it's possible that the application will actually only save the first 3000 characters, especially if there is a dedicated box to enter the response in. It's possible that you submit something longer and nothing happens. And it's entirely possible that you submit something that's clearly over the limit (as this will be), and your readers get pissed at you and hold onto that while they read the rest of your file, or they only read the first 80% of the statement. No way to know. What I can tell you is that word and page limits are extremely common in academia, and while they're hard to work with, anyone who wants a career in academia has to learn to deal with them.

Really, these are questions that are best addressed directly to these programs. There aren't that many of them that you're considering. Contact them, explain your situation, and ask. Best we can do is guess.

The right kinds of questions to prep for will have to do with how your research interests fit with the prof's, and how their expertise will benefit you. Along similar lines, they might tell you about some of their ongoing projects or stuff they're trying to get funded now and have a conversation with you about that. The goal is rarely to actually get you to make a research contribution during the interview; that's highly unlikely. Usually it's just about seeing whether you can hold a conversation about your research and understand what others are telling you. And just as much, it's simply about personality fit: can you have a productive conversation? Does it seem like you will fit with the group? Given that, I don't know that reading papers closely is the most useful thing, although some familiarity is useful. It's more about understanding the bigger picture: what does this prof and their group do? what kind of projects/papers do they work on? what kind of questions do they (generally) ask? how does that fit with what you want to do?

Most platforms I know won't let you rescind a pending request, nor change any recommender details once you've entered them into the system.. as long as you have three letters, you should be good. I don't think anyone's going to worry about the fourth one. As a general rule, if it'll add to your application, you might as well hope it makes it. If it's not as strong as the others, you could try and rescind, but you should also ask yourself why you asked for it in the first place!

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Canadian schools might be your best option. They actually fund their MA students, unlike US schools. It's fairly common for students to come into the MA program and apply to other PhD programs, no one is going to think twice about it. The top three programs to look at are: Toronto, UBC, McGill. Others: Simon Frasier and Concordia, maybe. Concerning France, I'm not sure how easy it would be to live and study in a country whose language you don't speak. Even if you could have meeting and write in English, as soon as you need to take classes or really do anything else (talks, reading groups, group projects), life might get hard. And that's not even mentioning the fact that living in a country/city without speaking the language can get very hard very fast. But if you are considering such things, look into Berlin and Amsterdam as well. They have very good people who do their linguistics in English, and those cities might be more tolerant of non-local-language-speakers.

Sounds odd, are you sure you're not missing the link? Does the department have a FAQ that discusses what to do? If not, you might email/call to ask. I wouldn't necessarily assume that uploading it together with the CV is what they have in mind.

Two thoughts: (a) write the school directly and ask what kind of letters they'll accept. (b) you can only do what you can do. If you don't have three professional letters (which seems reasonable and probably the case for most people), go with what you have.

It might be a good idea to calm things down a bit. One doesn't always get the advice one expects, especially from strangers with imperfect information, and especially on a discussion board where anyone can take the discussion in any way they choose. You can choose what to take and what to ignore. It's not personal. Personally I think that if you get a decent number of requests and spend a lot of time and energy doing this, motivation and passion aside, charging some fee actually makes perfect sense. This is especially so if we're talking about companies that expect to pay some fee and who would pay other speakers in similar situations. You may choose to volunteer your time when speaking to a non-profit or the like, and you can adjust your rate when you speak to a company that has a budget for these things. I would try and find out what other speakers charge. Maybe you know some other speakers who've attended the same meetings as you, who you can ask. I have a friend who does things like this and one thing she learned is that charging a fee means thinking of yourself as a professional, and it often means that the other side treats you with more respect and takes you more seriously. If they want to fly you out to speak in front of a large audience, they can afford an honorarium. In case it's at all meaningful, for colloquia and the like, the sum usually runs from a few dozen to a few (very few) hundred dollars. I give colloquia because it's good for my career and I wouldn't decline an invitation just because a school can only afford to reimburse my travel/accommodation, but I wouldn't decline an honorarium, if offered, either. It's simply part of the culture; it's not something to be ashamed of, and it doesn't change my motivation or passion one bit.

If you've been tense for a year and a half and experiencing severe symptoms, you can't expect it all to magically go away in one day or even one week, especially if you're still in the same triggering environment. The best advice I can offer you is to keep doing what you're doing: stick to a routine, and allow yourself some down-time. A holiday, some shopping, that all sounds good. Regular exercise, cooking at home, doing some leisure activity -- whatever works for you -- are other useful things to do. Whenever I accomplish something big I give myself permission to take at least the rest of the day off, more if I can afford it, to do absolutely nothing related to work. It's also nice to celebrate, to have an official recognition of your achievement among friends. I hope you have someone who you can go to happy hour with to mark the occasion. And then, you find something else to focus your energy on. If you're waiting on anything (referee reports? starting a job?) but you can't do anything about it, it's usually helpful to divert the nervous waiting-energy to something else. Work or not, find something to do to keep yourself occupied; that will also help keep you from getting over-emotional. And congrats! It was a long road, I'm glad you made it.

Is this the case: Or this: Because 1-2 months is a very long time, and it's not surprising that someone might choose to take time off after a busy semester, celebrate the holidays with family, prep for next semester, and catch up on a variety of other tasks that have deadlines much earlier than 1-2 months from now -- before submitting letters with fairly late deadlines. I don't know when you emailed, but keep in mind that this is a fairly busy time of year for most profs, as fall grades are due around now at most institutions. If you're emailing with great urgency about something that really isn't urgent now, you might get ignored in favor of actually urgent things. It's also not actually important for you to choose now and replace a strong letter with a potentially weaker one, if there's this much time left to go. At best, if you want to put your mind at ease, you could ask the student if she would be willing to act as a back-up referee just in case anything happens, so you know you're set either way. But it's entirely premature to actually swap letters this far out. (To answer your other question, it's unlikely that you can get by with just one letter. You can ask the relevant schools, but I'd be willing to bet that they'll want two letters. That's already a low number.)

A thesis is one genre of writing, a journal paper is another. It seems to me that the editor is reminding you of that. The gist: tell us about your case study and why we should care about it (how your study is situated in the context of related theories and how it informs the greater picture of the area your case-study fits in). Don't give us as much lit review as you might for a thesis. If there is anything you included because the school required it, remove that for the journal submission. Tighten the language if needed. If your thesis is long, make sure you pick out just the relevant/strongrst argument(s) and make it digestible within the journal page-limit. That kind of thing.

A lot of the time students won't even bother to read comments they get on written work. So many professors don't waste their time giving too many comments. If you want detailed comments on either the content or writing in your paper, ask for them. I can't promise that everyone will oblige, but you're more likely to get detailed comments if you express a willingness to digest them than if you don't.

I think it's fairly simple: if this were your only offer, would you take it? Remember that if you are admitted to department X, you'll get a degree from department X. Department Y owes you nothing, and your degree won't be from them. Keep in mind that it's very risky to only have one POI that you could possibly see yourself working with. If the answer is nonetheless yes, then you go. Out of prudence and politeness, you find other people who you might want to work with, or who you think at the very least it'd be useful for you to be friendly with, and you meet with them. You try to keep in mind that eventually, when you graduate, you'll need multiple letters of recommendation for practically anything you might want to do (and probably earlier too, if you want to apply for grants and the like while you're a student). So, you try and identify those people who you might take relevant classes with, who you might meet with at least on occasion, who might serve on your committee(s), etc., and you make friends with them. If there is really absolutely no one other than this one person who you find remotely interesting, then frankly I think it'd be a bad decision to attend this program, for all of the reasons above. You'll need a committee, and multiple recommendations, and you really want more than one person to learn from. If this is the situation you're in, and you feel like going and meeting people will be a waste of time, then decline. However, it's probably worth keeping in mind that this is a networking opportunity. Even if you don't attend this program, you can extend your network and make a good impression on people. You also never know if you won't change your mind (for better or worse) once you actually meet people and see the place in person. This, of course, depends on you actually having an open mind and not dismissing everyone out of hand before you even meet them. Anyway, that's my $.02.

What's your question?

Yup, email them. And if you don't hear back by a reasonable hour in the morning (or if you just want to be able to plan your day!), call them.

Just be friendly and thoughtful. A thank-you note or gift would be appreciated, but are not expected or necessary. In all the years I've hosted students, I only had one leave a card. It was nice and I still remember the student, but I also remember others. I also had very few who made up the bed before leaving, so I remember the few who did that, too. As long as they were polite and considerate, I didn't expect anything more. You definitely don't need to spend all of your time with them (they probably wouldn't want that, either). They'll probably suggest some kind of joint activity at some point (like a dinner, or they'll just join one of the organized events at the department), and that's probably enough. The one thing I'd suggest is if you don't get your own key, be mindful of the fact that they need to wait for you to go home from any late evening events; offer to leave with them whenever they get tired and want to go home, so they don't have to stay up extra late just for you.

It seems to me that we've now found the crux of the matter: getting faculty to participate is going to be the real challenge, much more than getting students to participate. The faculty who you might get to participate are probably the ones who already update their websites anyway, so students can already get all the relevant information about them by visiting their website. The rest probably won't invest in an extra website because they don't even maintain their own personal websites. So you might end up with a very skewed picture of availability and profiles of professors in any given field. Unless you can get past this problem, I don't think there's much of a point in asking students what content they'd like to see in said website/app. The real question is whether faculty see any value in your app, and I'm not entirely sure that will be the case. There's already a move to stay away from platforms like academia.edu and the like, which attempt to charge faculty for viewing their own content (and the content of others).

Definitely ask about travel and accommodations if that info wasn't provided. As far as weather-related travel difficulties, those are hard to plan for, but if it happens, usually one of two things will happen: either you get rescheduled (usually) or they offer you the option of participating in meetings/interviews via Skype, especially if rescheduling is somehow hard. I would suggest not worrying about things you can't predict. If there's weather trouble, you won't be the only one having it, and this won't be the first year this happens. Let them solve the problem if and when it arises.

Not necessary, as far as anyone I know is concerned. The SOP is about you and your interests. To the extent that you need to cite anyone (which frankly isn't clear to me), it should be fine to give just enough information for the citation to be found (e.g. Smith 2010, J of Unicorns). On the other hand, if you do include references, I doubt anyone is going to fault you for that.

Wait, doesn't this also depend on having professors allow you to have their profiles up on this website? Or are you going to data-mine without their permission? (In which case I'd find it invasive, and would think of it as a glorified RateMyProf type site..)

You've probably got nothing to lose by doing it. Usually you'd reply to whoever invited you, but you might as well write your POI and express enthusiasm at meeting them.

That's a general kind of advice that's supposed to lead to better writing, it's not specifically something that graduate schools are looking for. As a linguist, I find a great deal of this advice misguided, including a lot of things that get classified as passive that aren't even that. The active voice is said to be better because it conveys agency, brevity, or similar, which is sometimes what you want and other times not. Use your better judgment to decide where you want to keep the edits and when not.

Also sometimes called double-blind: the idea is that your paper is anonymized (so no one can tell who wrote it) and then sent to reviewers whose identity is also kept secret from the author. The journal editor chooses these people based on their expertise in the area your paper is in. The editor decided what to do with the paper (accept, ask for revisions, reject) based on the referee reports. Since the referees don’t know who wrote the paper, their reports should be objective and based solely on the content of the paper — so your name and affiliation shouldn’t matter.

You can live with roommates. It'll be more affordable, too. Depending on the COL in your target city and the stipend you'll get, it might even be necessary. You'll have cohort mates, and you can stay in touch with your family via the phone/skype.