fuzzylogician

How about asking the faculty or admin staff? I'm sure someone there knows where their students are. Maybe they are just home for the weekend, you know.

In my field authorship is determined by the authors' contributions, and according to the conventions there the one who contributed the most is first, and the PI is usually last. Another convention in a different corner of my field is to list everybody alphabetically, especially if everyone contributed equally. Whether or not the submission "will be taken seriously" because of who's first is never a consideration and anyway since review is blind I don't think it should matter. Not that it's hard to know who you are reviewing (it's a small field, I normally have a good idea of whose papers I'm reviewing and also of who reviewed mine) but that doesn't affect authorship decisions.

No. The people who were admitted have until April 15 to make their decision and the school can't legally force them to decide earlier (though some schools will still ask applicants to let them know early, precisely because there are people on the waitlist). There is nothing you can do to put pressure on anyone, you unfortunately just have to wait it out. You can, if you want, inquire once in a while about your status on the list and reaffirm your interest in the program, but I would caution against doing that too often.

Thank you for coming back to update us, and congrats on your admissions!

Call them. Find out the number for the admin assistant / dept secretary and just call on Monday during business hours. Ask who can answer your questions about X, Y, and Z. If they want you to email someone who's you've already emailed but didn't get a response, say that and don't agree to be turned away without some solution that works.

Sigh. Posted and went to work, didn't look at the text again. No hints intended.

Here:

There is no one correct answer to this question, only you can attach costs to your choices. But here are some questions that might help. On the school side, what is the actual difference between the schools? Can the school near your girlfriend (let's call it A) provide you with the education you need to meet your future career goals, or can only the one that is farther away (let's call it B ) provide that? More precisely, what makes B more attractive, and can that (or at least the important parts of that) be found in A? Is it the advisor, or the placement record, or certain equipment, or other opportunities? Is there something that is just wholly lacking in A, or is it just that B is somehow better than A in something and you'll have to work harder or have some handicap, but you could still end up with the same (or equivalent) career opportunities when you graduate? If B really provides something crucial that A is lacking in, and giving that up will seriously affect your career, that's very different than if both A and B can basically provide you with the same opportunities but you just have a (academic) preference for B. Alternatively, if you choose B, do you have to be in residence the whole time? Could there be an arrangement where you spend some time at A, or could you be away after you are done with courses and teaching (while you are dissertating)? On the relationship side, do you think you can survive a very long LDR? Some people do it better than others but it seems to me that going into 5-6 years of (physical) separation will be very very hard on you and that could affect all aspects of your life. If you are unhappy in your personal life, your work will suffer too. Furthermore, if you are going into academia, there is a fairly good chance that your first jobs will also not be in the same geographic area so you may be looking at an additional 1-3 years apart. That would be more than I would personally find reasonable. Do you know what your girlfriend's opinion is on this issue? An LDR can only work if both parties agree, and it's a lot of hard work even then--you can read a recent thread about that The bottom line is that you will be compromising on something. The question is which is the bigger sacrifice, and that depends on the specifics of your situation and only you can decide. If there is a way to have it all, I'd start by looking first at how much of a sacrifice it would be to go to school A because to me a very long LDR would be very difficult to maintain even if you have the best intentions at heart. But again that's just me and this is a very personal decision.

That's what the OP says. Why not believe it?

A 1000 words is really short. I think it's be very hard to have a good self-contained excerpt from a paper that could serve as a strong writing sample. If I were you, I'd attempt to write an abstract of sorts for some section of your seminar paper. Since the goal of the writing sample is to show (1) that you are a proficient writer, and (2) that you can do meaningful research, I'd aim for a structure of a simple scientific conference abstract. Start with a clear introduction that sets up the problem and give a summary of your solution. Then give a detailed explanation of one argument for your proposal, and sketch your other arguments briefly. If there is space, discuss what others have said and why it's a problem. Or alternatively, discuss some predictions your proposal makes or some conclusions you expect to follow, and show that that is indeed the case. Detail questions that arise from your proposal or obvious problems that need to be addressed. Finish with a summary/conclusion of what you've proposed and what the main argument in favor of the proposal was. [Disclaimer: I know nothing in particular about your field, so if this sounds completely foreign to you and you've never seen this kind of thing done, please ignore this suggestion.]

Hi there, this board is not meant to help undergraduate students do their homework. This sounds like a question that should be directed to your professor or your TA.

I can't help with either program but since you're in Boston, why don't you just go visit Brandeis? There doesn't have to be an open house for you to just arrange a short 1-2 day visit for yourself, perhaps with the help of their admin person. Ask to meet with professors (not just your POI but others who work in reasonably related fields) and students, and sit in on a few classes. And yes, you need to do some of the legwork yourself to figure out where alums go and how they are doing. For Indiana this is more difficult, but you could at the very least talk to some professors on the phone and perhaps chat or email with some students. Ask for the names of some students in your subfield, perhaps students of your POI, and email them with some basic questions. Get a good range of first years and more advanced students who are close to graduation. You can learn a lot from the replies (and even more from talking to them on skype, if they are willing to do that).

I have no idea about psychology undergrads in particular, and I suspect that comparing "undergrad in X" to "grad school in X" is too monolithic to be useful because there are good ugrad programs and not-as-good ones, good and less so grad programs, some that emphasize writing and others that less so, etc. In general, part of the training you get in grad school has to do with learning to work on research projects of the kind that get published in journals and turn into dissertations. The training helps you deal with the sheer size of the project, which is larger than what students encounter as undergrads, the depth and breadth of the research, which is again more than you are expected to do as an undergrad, and the writing. The writing process of a large project is (or should be) connected to the development of the project, especially for more substantial ones. The project doesn't all just exist in your head until it's finished and then you write it all up - you do it in steps as you collect data and arrange it e.g. for presentations or to show to your advisors and co-authors. Your undergrad education prepared you for these projects in the sense that you were supposed to be exposed to academic writing and to do some of your own writing on small-scale projects. Grad school picks up on that with more reading, more researching and writing of larger projects, which eventually lead to publishable materials and a dissertation. It's a process that starts with your undergrad education but it's hardly ever the case that someone could just write a dissertation based on that alone.

If we're worried about people over-staying because they are applying for a visa renewal, we might just as well worry about people not bothering trying to renew their visa and over-staying just for the heck of it. As was already mentioned, the document you need to keep valid throughout your stay in the US is your I-20 or DS-2019, not your visa. Even if someone is denied a new visa, they could in principle stay in the US until their documents expire, and they probably would appreciate knowing that they won't be able to re-enter the US because presumably their belongings would remain behind them in the US if all they are doing is going away for a few days for a conference. The main argument I see for letting students extend (or renew) their visas from the US is the hassle that it creates if you need to renew them from abroad, especially since you're supposed to get the visa renewed in your home country and not in any other US embassy. Doing that (=trying at another embassy) sometimes works and sometimes doesn't and there is a risk involved. Needing to fly to your home country after every visit to another country is expensive and it takes much longer to then be able to get back into the US. We are talking here about people who need to leave e.g. to go to a conference and who otherwise have valid documents, so people who we otherwise expect to get their visas renewed but who have the misfortune of being citizens of countries that the US is not on the best terms with. People who aren't sure of their status or don't have all of their (other) documents in order will probably not leave the US to begin with.

This sounds like the kind of question whose answer completely depends on the school and the situation. Some departments with large undergraduate degree programs and large GER service courses might need a lot of TAs and students have a relatively high teaching load. If you volunteered to TA in such a department, I'm sure they could find something for you to do. Other departments have tiny majors and not that many service courses, so they don't need that many TAs. If that is the case, if may be more difficult to volunteer for a TA. What's more, I'm actually not even entirely sure if it's technically possible for someone to volunteer to teach -- I can imagine at least at some schools that there are laws against employing someone but not paying them. As for RAs, at least at the schools I know students don't normally work as RAs (for pay). You may be able to get something over the summer if you work in someone's lab and they have funding, but otherwise during the year I can't think of anyone I know who's been an RA. That said, this is based on partial (or no) knowledge, and for definitive answers you really need to contact the program that you are considering attending and ask them.

No. Compensation is not commensurate with how many students you advise. Advising is part of the job, as is teaching, research, etc. Similarly no one gets paid more for doing more service, or more research.

I am unable to do that myself. Please PM rising_star or bgk with this request.

A celebration dinner with friends, followed by some beers. Maybe some school memorabilia to go with me when I leave. I will be starting a new job within probably 2-3 weeks of graduating (maybe less). No trips or vacations for me. I would just hope for a little bit of time off, but I think I'll probably need to deal with packing and moving and with putting together a course that I'll be teaching in the fall, so I'm not even sure that is going to really happen.

This. Honestly, I am surprised how often people come in wanting to re-invent everything and be "original." Yes, maybe sometimes people are simply wrong about everything, but that's rarely the case. Normally, the best theories are the simplest ones. You don't want to change everything, that will make it very implausible that you're on the right track. Most of the time you work on a problem that others have already thought about. You DO NOT want to redo everything a different way; instead, you want to propose a well-motivated reasoning for thinking about things differently than before, because you can identify some problems with that way of thinking. This may involve bringing in an approach that's normally used for other kinds of questions, or bringing new data to bear on how to formulate an existing approach (or both). The fewer changes you can propose to capture all the data, the likelier your proposal is to be on the right track.

We all know that the GRE isn't really a good predictor of graduate school success. One's ability to do good research -- including reading, writing, and presenting in English -- is not exactly what is measured in the Verbal section of the GRE (nor the AWA but don't get me started on that one). A large portion of the test simply has to do with the size of your vocabulary, in particular as it pertains to rare and esoteric words and phrases. Another important factor is how fast you can read. Having native-speaker exposure increases your baseline starting point for studying vocab for the exam. So does reading and writing in the language on a regular basis. If you're a speaker of a language that does not use the Latin alphabet, and you don't speak a Romance or Germanic language that shares some vocab with English, your starting point is quite different from that of a native speaker. Ask yourself, how fast can you read in a second language in a less familiar alphabet? Is that really correlated with how good your science is? Once you're in a degree program, as an international student you will work harder than native speakers at developing the necessary communication skills so you can become a successful academic. Your peers who are native speakers will have an advantage and won't work as hard. Still, as you say, everyone will get the same degree. Should this extra work be counted for anything? Probably not, because it's required training for anyone who wants to be a researcher and communicate their science. But it's worth keeping in mind that holding non-native speakers to the same standard as native speakers for irrelevant tasks that favor one group over the other (and I think the GRE is exactly that) may not be the best way of select the best applicants, and I think it's entirely understandable that the groups that are disfavored by this test worry about it.

I wonder why you ask, WeEditTheses. Are you looking for clients who you could edit theses for? Advertisement will get you banned from this site.

Yep, this may work and you indeed have nothing to lose. I'd wait until after April 15 so (1) the grad school app season is over and everyone is freer (2) it's clear (and you should make it explicitly clear) that you're not challenging their decision or appealing it, but instead are interested in improving your application for next year. You may not get a straightforward answer out of anyone, but it's worth a shot. Another thing that may work if you had a personal relationship established with a POI at any of these schools is to talk to them in person (on the phone/skype) -- you might get feedback that they wouldn't want to put in writing.

Are they all equally good in terms of fit? Assuming that's the case, - Is there a POI who you got along with particularly well? - Is there a particularly famous/influential/well-connected/grant-mongering POI who you might work with at one school? - Is one program/school's reputation much better than the others? - Is the stipend at one school significantly better than at the others? - If the schools are in different cities, where would you like to live?

Actually I had several experiences during my grad school application process where I was interviewed by schools that I was not a great fit for, I assume because my application was quite strong and they were intrigued. I did a somewhat reasonable (I think) job of demonstrating fit with those schools in my SOP, but really I later came to realize that they were in fact pretty poor fits. The main question in those interviews, and it was asked several times in different ways in all of them, was "why did you apply here?" -- this was of course also a question asked by other schools where I was a better fit, but not something that the interviewers dwelled on once I gave a satisfactory answer. I said pretty much the same things as in my SOP, and I don't know how convincing they were. In fact, they convinced me that the schools weren't a good place for me, but I don't know if it was convincing to them. I ended up withdrawing my applications to all those schools after the interview because I realized that indeed they weren't good fits (and I already had offers from better fitting schools) so I don't know what would have happened, but I am willing to bet I would have gotten rejected from at least some of those schools. If I were on the adcom, I'd reject me.

I hate to say it but since you got 3 interviews out of 4 applications, I don't think this is about your application packet. Clearly, your application was intriguing enough for these schools to want to interview you. That would indicate (I think) that you are good enough to get your foot in the door, and that all these schools were considering admitting you despite the weaknesses that you list above. The fact that all of the rejections came post-interview make me think that perhaps you didn't handle the interviews well. It's hard to guess what the issue might have been without knowing more, though. My first guess would be that since you say you have less experience in the field you are apply to, that this was a concern for the schools; maybe you didn't do a good enough job convincing them that you know enough about the field or that you'd make a good candidate for it? Maybe they had concerns about your grades that you somehow failed to assuage? These are pure guesses, of course. Also, I would not recommend applying to schools that you don't want to go to. What's the point? Actually, this makes me wonder if the problem with your application this year was the fit, and that it became clear during the interviews. As an applicant from another field, you want to demonstrate that you understand how the new field works, that you can define a reasonable (in scope, feasibility) research question(s), and that you know what schools are good places to study that question (and why). Perhaps that didn't come through as clearly as you'd hope. The fact that you only applied to 4 schools and are already talking about applying to ill-fitting schools makes me think that perhaps you could have done a better job researching programs to find ones that really fit what you want to study. I would be willing to bet that there are more than just a handful throughout the country. So maybe the problem was in your ability to communicate why you chose the schools you did? (But, of course, this is another guess.) ETA: In addition to these guesses, it's worth noting that sometimes it's really not about you. There are more good applicants than spots in good programs, so you could have done everything right and still drawn the short stick. There is not much to do about this situation except try again, and in the meanwhile get more experience and perhaps apply more broadly next time.