fuzzylogician

Good point! In that case, it's worth taking this requirement very seriously. I'm sure there are articles about the bridge program where they explain why it's important and what audience it caters to. OP, I'd read some of them and see how what they describe applies to you.

You should be able to get a new visa, preferably in you home country or possibly in a third country. You'll basically need to show the same documents and evidence as when you applied now, including a valid I-20. http://www.ice.gov/sevis/travel/faq_f2.htm#_Toc81222012

It's both selfish (takes up someone else's spot) and abusive of the program that is holding your spot. If you get caught (which is very likely, because you'll be enrolled at another school, which will be on your CV, and you'll present your work at conferences), there will be negative repercussions for your reputation. Reputation is everything in academia.

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This kind of statement is required by schools. You can write about any way you can think of that you will contribute to or foster diversity. Tutoring, traveling, volunteering, and if relevant then being diverse. I think it's completely valid to write about yourself and how you'll contribute to diversity by bringing your own perspective, which (as a minority) is less often heard in the classroom.

It's a standard requirement and there is no reason why you can't be successful in your classes. If you want to know if this has been an issue for students in your program, it's probably easier to ask current students or faculty there about average grades and how people usually manage, or alternatively how common it is for people to have to leave the program because of grade issues, than to ask here. If you're worried about asking a professor, this is the kind of thing that the admin staff should know about and be able to share with you. (And btw, making friends with the admin staff in your program is a good idea in general!)

Yes, please. You've been doing this for a while and have been ignoring more subtle requests that you stop. This is your last warning, what you are doing is nothing short of stalking and bullying. I won't hesitate to suspend or even ban you, if necessary.

I'd try calling the admin office at the department and ask someone in person. It'd be harder to ignore you that way.

Here are the facts, as I see them. This class is outside your major and not really all that important for your overall progress in your program. You can still get an A, but that will undoubtedly cause you a lot of stress, because the margin of error is so small. That means that if you continue to take this class, it will inevitably take over a lot of your time and become a more important priority than it otherwise should be. Therefore, you'll spend less time on your other courses and your research. Maybe it won't affect your other grades, but it'll still affect your research. Even with all that, it's still not guaranteed that you'll get an A. The implications of getting a lower grade sound quite serious. Given all that, I think the answer is you should drop the class and concentrate on your more important work. Getting frowns from others will not be pleasant, but compared to the other possible consequences of your situation, it's the lesser evil. You can take another class later and maintain a high GPA. Classes won't matter for much at the end of the day when you graduate, it'll be about the research. I understand it's also not great taking a course high load again next year, but I believe it'll be easier for you next year compared to this. First year is an adjustment period, and now that you're nearing its completion, whether you know it or not, you've learned things about yourself like how to work more efficiently, how to set up a working environment, and how to manage your time effectively. And you got some research started, got to know your professors, peers and environment, and generally got settled into your program. Those things take a good few months, at least. Next year you won't need to do all that, so the higher workload won't be as bad. I wouldn't worry about someone paying for the extra course. Really. If they are letting you do it, then they can afford it, and you need to look out for your own best interests here. You are not taking money away from anyone else. They will not open an extra course just for you--you'll join a class that would have already existed anyway. Seriously, money should not be a factor in this decision. It should be about what's best for you, your research, and your status in your program.

Well, it probably depends on your program and your advisor/committee. You'd want to know if there is a residency requirement and what your teaching obligations will be like. You'd also need to know what your advisor thinks about students being away. I seriously doubt my advisors would like it if I'd moved away during my dissertation year, but in the past my program has supported people who have followed their spouse to a different location, and those people have successfully finished their dissertation and graduated. Personally I'd have a hard time getting work done if I were away from my advisor and my fellow students. Talking to them helps me make progress. However, others like to work alone and have less frequent meetings with their advisors, so it really depends on your situation.

The BA is not going to be viewed the same as the BS. If you're doing the work anyway (or most of it), it might be worth getting the BS even if it's more of an effort. However, the most important question is how potential employers will view the BA (assuming you're planning to go into industry and not continue in academia) or alternatively how grad schools view it, if that's the plan. Assuming you'll go into industry, I'd start by looking at ads for jobs you might want to have once you graduate with your degree, and see what the requirements are. There may be organizations on campus that can help you find out about job requirements and how the BA/BS distinction is viewed by employers. You also want to know how the program you'll be in will affect your chances of getting an internship while you are in school, if that's something you might be interested in. Your degree itself counts for more when you're fresh out of school and for less the more experience you have in your field, so it matters most for getting that first job or two straight out of school--so spend time learning about requirements for entry-level positions for people with qualifications like you'll have, and ask yourself if that's what you want to do.

It's a personal decision that we can't make for you. For me, I made the decision to do a PhD because I decided it was worth it even if I couldn't find a job in academia later. I've had a great time and worked with some really amazing people. I'd like to think that I've also made some contributions to my field. I've been getting paid for 5 years to study what I like, travel to talk about it, and meet some smart people who also care about the same things. Now that I'm graduating, I've been fortunate enough to get a good postdoc that I hope will pave the way for a faculty job, but if not I know I have other transferrable skills and that I can be employed in other jobs. I work mostly on collaborative projects with anywhere from 1 to 8 co-authors and that's something I really enjoy. I also like solo projects but my work allows for collaborations and personally I find that to be more productive and more fun. I don't know, maybe I'll be more disgruntled in 5 years and think this all wasn't worth it, but honestly that's just not the kind of person I usually am, so I doubt it. If I wasn't doing this, I'd be doing something else and I'm sure it'd have good sides and bad sides, just like the academic path does. For me, it's been a great experience both personally and professionally, though it's not the easiest path to take. I'm sure that there are easier ways to make a living. If you do a PhD, I think the reality is that you'll have pretty much the same amount of debt as you do now, since you say you're in a funded program and so if you budget right there shouldn't be a need to take on more debt. That's not great but I think that's just how it is, so if it's important to you to work off the debt soon then maybe a PhD isn't for you. As for starting a family, there is no reason why you couldn't do that while in grad school. Plenty of people do, and they manage just fine. As far as your research goes, I'm sure it'll take you in directions you didn't predict--it almost always does. That's part of the fun of growing as an academic. I think you need to accept that some projects will work and others will fail, and that there will be some rejections and negative feedback, but that that's how this world works and you just work through it and come out the other side. Hopefully you're in a field where you can collaborate with others, and if so then at least the working in isolation concern shouldn't be a problem. But this is a very personal decision and if you do a PhD, it's a large investment. If there are other things you can see yourself doing and being happy at, I think it's worth taking some serious time to consider whether one of them is a better choice for you right now. Starting the process with doubts will make it hard to pull through when you hit the hard times (as everybody everywhere does, at some point or other).

You say you don't want help lying, but you want us to help you come up with a reason for "bad referencing deal with an acceptable excuse why it does not correspond." Unless you just tell your story, sounds to me like you are asking for our help making up a lie. But this is not complicated, you made page numbers (and perhaps also citations) up, and got caught at it. From a professor's perspective, I would guess that one of the following is probably true (and I'm saying this as someone who has taught and done some grading, and has run into all kinds of unlikely situations and excuses for said situations): (1) The student straight up copied things from journal articles (=plagiarized) and tried to cover her tracks by incorrectly citing other work for the material she is discussing. (2) The student copied another student's work that didn't include proper citations and either made things up, or the original paper already contained the wrong citations. (3) The student just made things up/copied from wikipedia/random websites and tried to back it up with random citations. (4) If the articles are all correct but the page numbers are not, the student probably did not copy down page numbers and thought she could get away with making them up. (4) is the least offensive offense. I think that's basically what you did, or alternatively you marked page numbers somewhere but ran out of time before you could add them to your paper. Either way, you made the page numbers up, that much is clear. I'd try and explain your work process and how it led to this mess, and ask for an opportunity to re-submit the paper with the correct citations. If you indeed did the work, you should be able to add the correct citations. And in the future, use EndNote, RefWorks, Mendeley, LaTeX or whatever else so you don't need to deal with the references independently. You already know there is no good excuse for what happened here.

You want us to help you lie to your teacher to cover up for your laziness? That's not what we do here. I suggest you come clean and explain exactly what you wrote here: that you did things at the last minute and so you just added references you used to your paper without paying attention to what you cited where. You realize it was a mistake and you will fix it (by redoing all of the citations and attributing the correct citations to the correct people). You've already been caught, lying will only make it worse. Own up to your mistake, and fix it.

I suggest you contact the school and ask. Explain that you need to know because you need to make decisions on your other offers. I'd call, but you could also email if you prefer. Also, for better results here it may help if you tell us what program you applied to, since there are people applying to all kinds of degrees who read this website.

I'd choose the funded program. It's not worth getting into that much debt for a job that doesn't pay that much. I think you know this is the rational decision. As for friends, if you don't find any in your program, you'll find them elsewhere. There will be lots of students looking to make friends in that area. You'll work your way through the classes, tough as they may be, just like everybody else will. And as for safety, you should take some time to read and explore, and get advice about where are good places to live and ways to commute. It may not be the safest place but it sounds like a lot of other people are managing to live there, so there is no reason why you can't. A fully funded offer is a really big accomplishment, I think you should view it as such and appreciate that this is a great opportunity to get a quality education for free. This is something to be excited about! You know, there will be ups and down, advantages and disadvantages, to any choice you could make here. But starting your career and adult life with the least amount of debt you possibly can is the smart, mature decision. You'll deal with whatever else comes your way.

Well as it turns out most people don't keep a similar schedule to mine, so I've had to learn to adjust. Being an academic allows me a lot of freedom. I try to be in bed by 1am on weekdays and I've been fortunate to be able to have a flexible schedule so I almost never have anything before 11am. Now that I'm dissertating and not doing much else, though, my hours have shifted back a bit.

Those two things are totally unrelated. I'm a night owl and do my best work at night (I can't write before 2pm at all, and I am most prolific between, say, 10pm and 4am). That said, I need at least 8.5 hours of sleep to function well, preferably 9. I can sustain myself on less sleep for quite a while, but I know it really affects my overall health and happiness so I'll sacrifice a lot to get enough sleep.

Unfortunately our ISO is not the most competent (this is not the only mistake-in-my-documents/detained-for-further-questioning story that I can tell you), so I'm not completely sure how this will play out. Some people tell me it should be possible to extend my I20 and visa until the end of the summer. I'm still looking into that and am not sure if it's really possible for such a short extension. Something tells me that they won't even process my documents before the gap period is up. At the moment I am counting on the 60 day grace period, which luckily is exactly how long I need before my postdoc starts. It still means I can't leave the country so all my business abroad has to be done this coming month and I also won't be able to go home to visit my family, who I haven't seen in a long time and who I also won't be able to see at least until next summer--but at least I'll be legal while here. This, of course, assuming that the Canadian government stops its shenanigans and helps me get my work permit on time, so I can actually move and start my postdoc there. They have a new immigration system that's so new that even my friend who got the same kind of work permit less than 6 months ago didn't use it, and no one at the university seems to have experience with it either, so no one can answer my questions about some quirks that have been holding me back from submitting the application. And of course no one is replying to my emails. I'll try calling tomorrow. But that's a whole separate rant right there, not really relevant here.

I have to ask -- According to your signature, you applied to 9 schools and got into at least 3. But you're talking as if only two of these 9 schools are schools you're actually in attending, with a third maybe. Isn't it a waste of a lot of time and money applying to school you never intended to attend in the first place?

OP, like the others, I suggest you ask your international students office. If the date on your I20 is later than your intended graduation date, I wouldn't worry at all. If it's earlier, ask them in case it's a mistake but in some cases that's just how the school does things. Either way, I wouldn't continue filling out any forms or paying any fees until this is resolved. I don't think the SEVIS would change, but I wouldn't bet any money on it either. The DS 160 didn't even exist when I applied for my visa, so I can't help with that. My I20 will expire in a month and a bit, and turns out that's a mistake my ISO made -- all my friends have an extra year on theirs. I didn't realize I should have had another year when my I20 was issued, of course, I thought I was just supposed to get the 5 years the program was supposed to take and based on the date I figured I was required to defend and graduate by the end of the spring semester. I was wrong: most people in my program only defend in the summer and can use the extra time for OPT or for travel. I can't begin to tell you how much trouble this has generated for me. Everything in my life basically expires in a month, and there is about a 2-3 month gap between when everything expires and when my new job starts. Although most (though not all) of these things are solvable, I would have rather spend the time and energy on better things.

I didn't do any of those things and most of them were not even possible where I grew up. I'd still consider myself a geek, though. It's more in the spirit than the actions, if you ask me.

Shouldn't be long now. Days, a couple of weeks at most, for the editor to read the review and write a decision letter.

A 3.6 GPA along with a decent GRE score should get you past any cutoffs, if any exist. A 3.6 is not actually that low and if it's from early years and not the major, it's even less of a problem. Now that that's behind us, the real question will be what the other parts of your application will look like. The fact that you can articulate clear research interests will be a very big plus when it comes time to choosing schools that are a good fit, and then expressing that in a SOP, so that's good news. I assume that you could get a strong LOR from the professor whose research assistant you were, and from whomever you worked with on the material that led to your talk. I also assume that you're fairly visible and known to the faculty, since you're the president of the linguistics club (hurray!), so I imagine that you shouldn't have a problem getting a good third LOR. The final important question is what your writing sample will look like; since you have a lot of time to prepare, you can hopefully come up with something good. I know that LORs and writing samples are a very important in the process at my school, and I'm sure it's similarly important at other ones. So, if you play your cards right, I think you should have a good chance of getting into a good program next year.

I think it's a good idea to email some people who do A to ask if they would be interested in supporting work that interfaces with B in this particular way, and ALSO to write to the people who study B directly and ask them if they would be interested/able to support someone who wants to do your kind of B as it interfaces with A, where your main work and advisor would be in A. Unless you get a terribly unsupportive or negative reply, I think it'd be worth applying even if it's not a perfect fit for all of your interests. Things are rarely perfect and besides people grow and interests change. If this seems like a good place that can support most of what you want to do and will not get in your way of learning and trying to do other things, I'd say it's worth your application fees. If you get into this school, you could have very frank conversations with both the A and B faculty, as well as their students, about this question. Things will look very different once you've been accepted and are deciding between schools. You'll have a better perspective and people will be more forthcoming than when talking to an obscure prospective student who hasn't even applied yet.