fuzzylogician

This. Having a wide network of people around your own rank--both above and below--is extremely useful for bouncing ideas around and getting advice. In the long run, these fellow students will become peers, if you stay in academia. They will always be slightly ahead of you, e.g. taking quals, writing a dissertation prospectus and the dissertation itself, on the job market, on the tenure track. Having friends out there who were in your shoes just 2-3 years ago and can provide advice on their recent experiences is priceless. They understand where you are now better than your established faculty mentors. I think the relationships I have with these peers are as important as my relationships with superstars in my field. I am not afraid to ask these people for help and advice, and they always provide it to the best of their ability. It's amazing how generous people can be, if you only ask. I do try to reach out to younger students myself, simply asking once in a while how they are doing and some general questions that may reveal if they are experiencing any difficulties, but I have to admit it's much easier when they come to me with particular questions than trying to reach out to them when I'm not sure if they are interested in that.

I can't imagine turning a junior student away if they approached me for advice on something I could help with, or trying to figure out who might be able to help, in case I couldn't. But they do have to take the initiative, I can't guess what issues they might be having and it would be pretentious approach them and offer help myself, if they don't show signs of wanting/needing it.

Are you an undergrad? If so, you don't need to worry very much about the project being a dead end, as you put it. That's not really your concern, as it seems that your boss is interested in extending it, and has the funding to do so. It's great to get publications as an undergrad but what really matters is getting the experience and the reference letters at the end. I don't understand exactly what you mean by 'he had a longer answer' about your employment. That's so vague I don't know how to make sense of it. What is your boss's role in the lab? Do they have a PhD? Will they be there a year from now, when you're applying for grad school (assuming that's the goal)? Would you be able to get a letter from the PI--does s/he know you and your work at all? You describe one not great interaction with your boss but aside from that, why are you concerned about your letter? There has to be more to this than you're telling us, or you're reading more into this than there really is. Is your attitude towards the project perhaps coming across as overstepping your bounds or as insolence? I have to say that from the way you write, I could see that happening (but of course I could be totally wrong on that!). I find it hard to believe that an undergrad assistant in a lab would get a bad rec just because they didn't remember the details of their project once, or that that would cause their boss to hate them. (Bosses don't usually have such strong feelings about employees to begin with.)

That's the outcome you were hoping for. If they had started asking you questions, that would have been bad news.

I think bsharpe269 makes a good point about your options. I think there is something unfortunate about the timing of this problem. Sending your advisor a long email about how you feel in the program as part of a progress report while he is on sabbatical makes it hard for him to address the problem. (Though I don't think he did a good job handling it, sabbatical or not.) There are a few things you haven't mentioned that are probably important here. First, are you an MA or a PhD student, and how much time do you have left in your program? How experienced is your advisor? Is he a seasoned veteran or are you one of his first students? Is he tenured? How many other students does he have? Do you know if this has happened before, and if so how frequently? On the practical side, I think you need to do two things. First, you need to work on deciding for yourself what you want. If you stay (and whether I think you should would depend on the factors I asked about above), you need to seriously adjust your expectations from your advisor. He appears to be doing everything in the official job description, but not satisfying your other needs. I think his choice is fine and on the other hand your needs are legitimate, so we have an issue of fit here. His advising style will work for some, but obviously not for you. You need to figure out if you can satisfy your remaining needs some other way, unrelated to your advisor. This is important --- it is absolutely awesome if your advisor and your mentor are the same person, but that doesn't always work out. You can and should seek out multiple mentors with various expertise to support your career. Maybe someone else can fill this gap that you feel, while your advisor continues to just be your thesis advisor. Second, once you have this figured out for yourself, you need to talk to your advisor again, and plan this so that it's more than a 30 second conversation. Your advisor appears not to be good at the personal stuff, but is just fine at providing professional advice and information. Maybe that's the way to approach this with him: ask for advice in a way that he can process, and let him help you develop the resources that are missing. Either way, I think it's worth talking to him at least once more before quitting. Don't just give up and leave without making another effort to make it work. Also, along the same lines, I suggest finding someone else in your program to ask for advice about compatibility with your advisor and quitting. Is there another professor you trust? The Director of Graduate Studies, or the Chair, or simply another experienced professor?

This post has been locked because it has been cross-posted in another forum. To reply, follow the link here:

Sounds like you need to write a version of what you said here. Remind the advisor that both he and the co-advisor agreed that it wasn't a class you needed to take and supported the other class. Explain that at the time you didn't understand the process and that you needed explicit permission to change your coursework plan. Apologize for the confusion and ask what you can do to fix it. CC the other advisor, so everyone participates in the same conversation.

This is common. My program routinely gives out 12 offers with the hopes of ending up with a cohort of 8. Some (most) years, this works out perfectly, but recently we had e.g. one cohort of 6 but also one of 10 and one of 11.

This comes up often every year. This question is used to by schools to gauge their competition. It also gives them some idea of where you think the other good matches for your research interests are, which will give them an idea of how well you understand your field. It's of course possible not to answer the question at all, but I don't think there is any reason to be suspicious of it. You would have to work very hard or write something very outrageous for the information you provide here to be used against you.

It'd be better to ask for letters earlier for Dec 1 deadlines. 3-4 weeks is getting to be short notice. For Dec 15 or Jan 1 deadlines, a 6-8 week notice is sufficient. You could always ask if the prof prefers to get the application materials from you closer to the deadline, when they are more familiar with your work. You never know when the prof will actually write the letter--it'll likely be close to the deadline--but you should give them the chance to prepare and adjust their schedule as needed. A common bibliography style in linguistics is the Linguistic Inquiry format. Students often use it for their own papers and squibs, and you see it in most major journals. (There is a LaTeX .bst file for this style, in case you use latex. Google 'linquiry2.') It looks something like this: Chomsky, Noam. 2000. Minimalist inquiries: The framework. In Step by step: Essays on minimalist syntax in honor of Howard Lasnik, ed. by Roger Martin, David Michaels and Juan Uriagereka, 89-155. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

I have friends in other fields (mostly humanities) who have this sort of funding arrangement, so it's not unheard of, though I don't know how common it is. I think it's fair to try and negotiate this, since we're talking about covering tuition here, not extra income for you. Seems vey basic to me, and worth a shot. What have you got to lose by trying?

I meant to up vote this post but accidentally down voted it instead.. ugh. I agree with everything here, especially not to worry about it too much.

Answers inline below.

As far as I know academia.edu is not used as a job search website. At least, not in my field. It's used as a sort of academic profile where you can upload your work. If you'd put your thesis on your personal academic website, it could also be posted on academia.edu. You post your work online in order to make it accessible to the scientific community--not *just* to get a job. Whether or not your MA thesis is something anybody might be interested then depends on what it is about and its quality. Either way, if you're proud of it and want to make it accessible to other researchers in your field, academia.edu is a much better venue than linkedin.

A good letter from Angelika will go a long way. Good luck.

I submitted four letters everywhere (in linguistics, including to MIT). It wasn't a problem, and in fact my letters were mentioned in interviews and open house events as a strength of my application.

I'm with the others. If there is another student in your program who is doing a minor now, ask them how they got started with the process. Then ask your department's admin assistant about the procedure. They will know both the technicalities of what you have to do, and also if there is someone on the faculty you need to talk to in order to get this approved.

Your university should have subscriptions to the relevant journals in your field. As for travel, this is something you should have probably inquired about before accepting your admissions offer, but in general travel funding is completely at the discretion of the program you attend. Most programs have some kind of travel funding they assign to students but the amount and structure of the funding can vary greatly. Common structures include: (a) everything is covered by your PI always (common in rich science fields with lots of grant money); (b ) you are allotted a certain amount of money for travel that you can use at your discretion (amounts vary greatly, and you need to use it wisely so you still have money to travel in later years right before you go on the job market). (c ) you can receive at most X amount of dollars per year, sometimes at your discretion, sometimes only for a single trip so even if you don't use the whole amount on one trip, you can't use it later that year for another trip. (d) you need to apply to some university-central fund that may choose to fund you, at its discretion. You normally need to apply before traveling, or if you do it afterwards there is a chance you won't get reimbursed. (e) there is little or no funding. You need to apply for external funding for each and every trip. Grad students often need to find ways to reduce the cost of travel because, unless you're very lucky, funding is limited and you need to watch your spending. If the issue is going from NYC to DC, you're in luck. That's usually doable. You take the bus, you find a way to crash with a grad student (email the conference organizers about this, it almost always works out!) or you share a cheap room with another student, you eat frugally. It's still expensive, so there is a limit to how much you can do this, but it's much better than needing to go to the West Coast or Europe. Also -- note that I deleted the post you made in another Grad School Life subforum. There is no need to cross-post the same question multiple times.

Maybe I'm missing something but why not simply talk to your advisor and say that you are interested in doing this? It's allowed and you're in good shape, so what exactly is the problem?

I read PDFs almost exclusively. Annotations are saved to my BibDesk bibliography and it's easier to search. I don't really have issues with the highlighting function, even though the papers I read contain math symbols and diacritics. I don't use highlighting very often, though. I do make notes for myself with any thoughts or questions, so I can always go back and see what I was thinking. If I read something on paper, I try and obtain a PDF version and put my notes there electronically. It happens on occasion that I kind of vaguely remember having read something relevant to what I'm doing now some time in the past and having some thoughts about it, and going through physical copies of papers to find it is almost impossible. It's easier when everything is electronic. Also saves a ton of paper and makes life easier when moving. I do print and read my own papers in their final versions before submission, because things tend to look different on paper and it's a good way to spot formatting issues and typos.

As long as we're telling personal anecdotes, I started my PhD without finishing my MA. It's sort of a long story but the short version is I did all of the coursework but didn't finish the thesis. I asked my PhD school whether this would be a problem and they said they didn't care. I put my MA on hold and left (in case something didn't work out and I'd want to come back and finish it later, which I never did btw), and by now I've graduated with my PhD and been on the job market so I can tell you no one ever asked about this "issue" on my CV. I list it as "MA student in Linguistics" where it's clear from the way my BA and PhD are listed that I didn't actually graduate. The CV was attached to all my applications. Of course I can't know it didn't get me an immediate reject somewhere but I'd be very(!) surprised if that were so. It never came up in any interview, not mentioned ever even in the case of fellowships that required transcripts from all my schools (which never happened for actual TT job, btw, only fellowships). Once the PhD is done, that's really all anyone cares about. So I think the bottom line here is OP, you need to figure out the requirements and specifics of your case. It may be unpleasant, but without knowing all the information you can't make a decision.

A terminal degree at this stage should be a Masters. I don't see why we need a new terminal degree here. It's true that in case this degree isn't currently offered--that is, programs where you either get a PhD or you leave with nothing--maybe it should be. Even if you didn't finish the PhD dissertation, going through all of the coursework still means you earned an education and it should be recognized. At my program students who can't finish their PhD for whatever reason can get a terminal MA, if they complete a certain amount of coursework and write a thesis-length paper--which every student should already have if they are ABD (we write two such papers before the dissertation). What I'm sure many programs would hate to have happen is for students to take this as an easy route to a funded MA. That's why, at least in my program, this terminal MA option is not official but rather happens only in exceptional cases.

I can't answer most questions here, but I think based on what you say the first thing that needs to happen is for you to talk to your advisor so you can have a clearer sense of how far away you are from graduating from your MA program. Are we talking a month, or a semester, or a year? Those make a big difference. Once you know what needs to happen before you can graduate, I think the next step is to talk to someone in your PhD program -- the chair, DGS, or your advisor. Explain the situation, lay out your options, and ask for their advice. Since we're talking about a delay due to illness, I don't think this should give you a bad reputation. I'd simply tell them where things stand, what you think the options are (and what you prefer out of those options) and ask whether they can support your plans. This all probably needs to happen fairly quickly, since I assume your program will start very soon and you may need to make arrangements relating to visa, housing, funding, etc. wherever you go, and the schools need to know about your decision soon, too. Things are somewhat complicated by the visa situation, and I don't want to give advice on that since I don't know the details of the F-1 transfer and the status of MA students. This is something you need to talk about with the international students office at your school, and the sooner the better. This is too important to just ask about on the internet. Assuming you can't graduate in the few weeks remaining before the beginning of the semester and get the visa situation sorted out, my guess is that there are two viable options, given your status: one is that you take an extra semester, or year, and finish the MA, then you start the PhD program. Another is that you quit the MA program and start the PhD this year. The third option, which I would otherwise lean towards -- start the PhD, work hard during the semester and during breaks to finish the MA concurrently with your first year in your PhD program -- is probably not possible because of your immigration status (but it's certainly something to ask your ISO about!). Personally, I'd only defer and finish the MA if your admissions and some sort of funding are guaranteed. It'd be a shame to lose your spot or funding to finish a MA that's not even required for the program.

This is very true. I think it's still the case that professors at SLACs are required to do less research and more teaching than professors at R1s (and I'm sure there are exceptions to this rule and it greatly depends on how prestigious the schools are that we are comparing). What is certainly true, at least for the jobs that I was considering last year, is that SLACs demand a lot more accessibility and support for the students, whereas at R1s no one really talked about how often I should be in my office and what my office hours / open door policy was going to be. A major difference between research at R1s vs. SLACs will be in how you set up projects, how you divide them up into tasks that your students can carry, and how you train your students. Unlike R1 programs (and more generally any graduate program), undergraduates will have less background and will not stay in your lab (or on your project) as long as a graduate student will. They may more easily become uninterested and leave. If you are successful, your goal will be for them to leave you relatively soon for a good graduate program or a job in industry. You'll need to teach them everything, from the very basics, about your lab and project, and you probably won't be able to assume any prior knowledge. That makes for a slow start and limited scope for your projects. Generally, you can expect less of undergraduates than graduate students or postdocs. At a SLAC you are also likely to have less access to facilities and lab equipment than at R1s, though -- again -- this depends on the school and how much they want to spend on a spiffy lab to attract prospective students. So you'll need to set up collaborations with others who have access to better labs/equipments/grad students, if that's necessary for your work. If you think you'll be heading for a SLAC, this is something to keep in mind because connections are very important for this to happen. All this means that you will need to structure your projects very differently if you are teaching at an R1 vs. SLAC. The scope of the projects will be different, the timeline, what you can expect research assistants to do, etc. Yes, with the caveat above. SLACs really do require that you spend more time with your students, less on research. They may still have a sizable research component in their tenure requirements, but at the end of the day except for some few exceptions, they can't really expect a professor working with undergrads to produce the same amount and scope of work as someone heading a lab with graduate students and postdocs at an R1. For me, personally, the main question was whether I want to interact more with graduate students or with undergraduates. It's about the kind of work I want to do and what kind of institution is set up to facilitate it, and also what kind of teaching I want to do. Do I want to be the one to hook the students and give them a solid foundation that will allow them to start their own careers as grad students and beyond -- for which a strong background and preparation are key, in my opinion, for getting into the right schools and making the right choices -- or do I want to take such students, trained by other colleagues, and turn them into professionals? It's a personal choice and I don't think one is inherently better than the other, even though teaching positions at SLACs can sometimes be seen as not as good jobs as at R1s.

Yes. Don't over think it. If you give them work that is not representative, they will find out soon enough. Try and do as you normally would for an assignment and you'll learn soon enough whether it's what they expect or not. It's hard to guess before you've even tried, though.