fuzzylogician

My personal favorite was the school that emailed me with two rejection letters - one from the department and one from the graduate school - about a month after I told them I was withdrawing my application. Almost felt like a "Oh no you don't, we dumped you first!"

Before you go down either of these routes, could you try and contact a few of the schools where you are considering applying for your MA and ask them what their preferences would be for letters? Your current options for academic LORs seem quite weak and I'm sure would not do you as much justice as professional LORs would. However, since you've been out of school and working as a professional for 10 years, it's possible that the schools would prefer to have more current non-academic LORs as opposed to the much older academic ones. If you are applying to research programs that insist on at least one (or two) academic LORs, you would probably be well advised to seek out one/two designated LOR writers and establish a relationship with them now, so that by next year's application season they will have known you for some time. Your two best options are either to reconnect with one of the profs from your old school, or else to seek out someone from your local uni. If you can find someone who is willing to support you through the application cycle, either through taking courses with them, doing an independent study, or just meeting them and talking to them about work that you are interested in, that would be very helpful. Either way, I would probably say you should try and apply for the MA next cycle with the best letters you can have, see what happens, and if you don't get accepted then spend a year taking courses at the local uni and then try again. Who knows, you might do better than you imagine.

Yep, once you're sure you are not going to accept their offer, I think the best course of action is to let them know so they can make an offer to someone on their waitlist. I'm sure they will appreciate knowing sooner rather than later.

You can send an email. No need to sound apologetic or tell them how great they are, how hard it was to make this decision, etc. Just thank them for the generous offer and say you have decided to accept an offer from another school. If you are emailing a POI who took some time to correspond with you in the past, thank them for their time and generosity in talking to you and say you hope to cross paths with them again some time in the future. If you are emailing a grad admin but there were also professors who you corresponded with, I would email them personally to thank them and let them know what you have decided. It's important to maintain the connections you have made during the application process.

No one ever sends paper letters for rejections. Nor for acceptances, normally. I only got paperwork from the school whose offer I accepted, I believe.

You need to ask them that. We can tell you what generally happens in our programs but that will have very little bearing on what you will be allowed to do at your program (and you haven't even told us what that is).

I worked right up until the move. I don't recommend it. If you can, do fun things that are not related to school or studying. Travel to different places, hang out with friends, relax on a warm beach, read some fiction. Things will get very busy once school starts and you'll miss all these activities. If you've gone straight from high school to college and now on to graduate school, an internship in industry could be eye-opening. I think it's important to have experiences other than school at some point, so this may be a good time (or else, the summer after your 1st/2nd year because it's also a lot of work). As for moving to the new city, there are advantages and disadvantages. It's good to get to know the city and get settled in, and it helps to go apartment hunting when you're already there and have some familiarity with the city. However, if you're going to be all alone you may end up being lonely until the semester starts and you meet new friends. It doesn't actually take that long to get settled into a new place, in my opinion. A week should be enough, and two months sound like way too much time.

I wouldn't take notes during the interview but I definitely write down everything that was said after it ends. This includes the questions asked and any information that was provided. You could also take notes about whether you got along with each person. But really, these are things you will probably remember even without taking notes. You want to spend the meeting interacting with the other people in the room, not with your face burried in your notepad. The only time I've ever used notes in these one-on-one interview meetings is during job interviews when I got asked very specific questions about equipment I'd like to buy, space I'd need, etc. Then I think having pre-prepared notes that you can whip out to show that you've done your legwork and know what you're talking about will make a good impression. But aside from that I never use notes during a meeting.

Might I suggest a search of the board? In particular, the Interviews and Visits forum? Your question has been asked and answered many times so I think you can find a lot of useful information by just searching for some keywords like "interview questions." Also check out biotechie's about interviews.

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What rising_star said. Presumably these are people who know you and who you get along with, so aside from the awkwardness of whole the situation I don't think there is any reason for you to worry. Once you invite them to join the committee and describe your shared interests, you could also ask for their advice on the process of choosing a precise topic. Talking to more people might be very beneficial and can help you have a project that everyone on the committee (and especially those who said they prefer to be hands-on) is excited about.

CorruptedInnocence, please oh please stop dumping on this thread. Everyone, PLEASE don't feed the troll. Just ignore and move on. No one needs to defend their life choices to anyone else.

I don't want to hijack this thread but YES. My job application deadlines started on October 1, the last one was on February 1. I'm still waiting to hear back from two interviews (actually this week or early next week should be pretty exciting, or pretty disappointing). Postdocs are just now starting, and temporary jobs come up randomly at all times. I have been on the alternate list for a competitive postdoc for two months now and they say that "It's been our experience that anything can happen at any time, so we will keep you posted if/when it does," but it's been radio silence for a very long time. I guess I don't mind it that much that schools take some time to decide but there is nothing I hate more than when they lie to you and say they won't decide until X date, and then you find out on the wiki that they invited other people. Also, the rejection emails, omg. One school I interviewed with actually sent me an email saying they decided to go with someone else who was better qualified than me. You can just say "there were several good candidates and we had to make some difficult choices" and I can guess by myself you thought someone else was better suited for your position. No need to be mean about it. I mean, it's just insane, the odds are just so much lower than grad school apps, the stakes are higher, and you are also supposed to be working on your dissertation in the meanwhile, despite the craziness. Honestly, I've been too distracted with job stuff to get any serious work done on my dissertation for a couple of months now. No pressure, though. It's only what they'll use to judge your success in the last 5 years of your life and will feature prominently in your apps until you get your first job. </rant>

If you already have many ideas, it may be time to stop reading. There is always more stuff to read, it just never ends unless you decide to stop. I'd see if there is a way to organize your ideas into general topics or interests. At that point, it may be interesting for you to look at job ads from this year and maybe last year, to get a feel for what kind of jobs are out there. If there is something among your ideas that is "sexy" right now, that's a good way to go. Keeping it simple would be great--it'll make it easier to sell your work and to explain it to a wide non-specialist audience (read: search committees). Also, for the record, here is some advice that one of my friends got from her advisor on how to choose a topic: Finding a good topic is like finding a husband: - there's no such thing as the one - there needs to be passion, at least in the beginning - you and only you can figure out the best fit

Thanks! The prolonged waiting period is so much worse than I remember the grad school process being. You know, first it's interviews for TT jobs, then it's campus visits, then the same thing all over again for postdocs, then for temporary jobs that come along whenever they do. Unless you're very lucky, you can't make plans for anything more than 3-5 months into the future. I can't say I'm enjoying this. I like the wait and work mantra. I should do more of that myself (the work part, that is).

Yep, reply with a quick email; thank them for the news, reiterate that you are still interested in the spot, and say that you are looking forward to hearing from them soon. (Unless you've already accepted another offer, in which case you can let them know and have them remove you from the list.)

Thank you We've talked about compromes but at the moment the plan is to just let this year play out and go on to the next stage in our careers. You can't make these plans with some many unknowns in the air. We just have to wait it out. There is always the possibility that one of us will draw the shorter stick in some sense, but there is just no way to know what that entails and so no way to talk about it concretely. I think it's better to just acknowledge that and not try to make lots of 'what-if' plans. Things never work out like you imagine anyway.

I can sympathize. My SO and I are both graduating this year and applying for jobs, but at the moment neither one of us has a concrete idea where we'll be next year. We do know that unless some miracle happens, we'll have to be apart for some time. But we don't know where we'll be and for how long; our first jobs are likely to be temporary and there is a distinct possibility that we'll be in different countries with a significant time difference for anywhere from 1 to 3 years. There is nothing I hate more than the silence and wait that this entire year has been about, and the fact that it may be a few more months before we can make any kind of plan. (Oh, and while you wait and worry about the rest of your life, there is also the dissertation to write!).

People have really already said it all. I have very little to add, and I agree with everything that was said above. The one thing I'd add is that it really helps (me) to make as many of the details of your life both together and apart concrete as possible. This includes having concrete plans for things such as when we'd meet and how long the LDR arrangement is going to last for. At some point you may want to have a conversation about potential compromises and (perhaps down the line) what happens if you can't reach an arrangement that you can both live with where you're also physically together. For me, personally, it's important to keep the bigger picture in mind and it helps to have some timeline for when/how the LD portion of it will end. I also found i's important to know lots of details about each other's lives - visit after they have settled in to see what their apartment looks like, meet any roommates, know what the commute is like, see their office, meet other important people in their life (colleagues, professors, friends, students, whatnot), see the coffee shop where they hang out, the supermarket they go to, etc, so that they can tell you about the everyday details of their life. It's a very different situation when they can say "I went out with Joe to Coffee Shop" compared to "I went out with a guy from work to a coffee shop near campus." It's all more personal and you can be more directly involved in their lives. It's not quite the same as talking about your day while having dinner together, but it's better than nothing.

Good luck, I hope it works out for you! Honestly I think it'd be better for you to attend a school where your funding is not an issue. One reason I didn't go to UCLA was that even though they did offer me admissions, there were certain kinds of funding and other opportunities that they told me I wouldn't be eligible for, and I didn't want to be excluded in that way. I also had a more similar ordeal to yours with UCSC that involved my citizenship as an important factor in my admissions decision. It really doesn't feel good, but if it's any consolation, they do think you are good enough to be admitted so it's not a flat out rejection, just a reflection of a broader suck factor that governs the whole process. Also, remember that the connections you made there will last beyond the admissions process itself--you are starting to build your professional network and even though it's a no from them, they will remember you positively as someone who they wanted to admit. These connections are just as important (if not more important) than the admissions decision, as long as at least one school leans your way!

I guess the professor has a reason for saying that -- perhaps some of their funding does come with strings attached even though it's a private school. I can imagine (though I don't actually know that this happens) that some funding agencies require students funded on certain types of grants to be US citizens. Maybe if a large amount of the department's funding is of that sort, they have will have less spots for international students. Personally I've been funded by NSF grants as an international student in the past so it's not a flat-out impossibility to get money from US funding agencies, but I think it's true that not all grants and not all funding agencies were created equal, and particular situations may vary. I'm sorry to hear you couldn't get funded because of your citizenship, that really sucks.

It really depends on the department. At MIT, for example (and some other schools where I know something about the admissions process) the admissions process is holistic and they try to admit the students who they think are the most promising in each cycle, so some cohorts can end up with no people from a certain sub-field at all (my year has no phonologists or phoneticians, for example). In other schools, you need to have a designated advisor, or at least someone who expresses interest to work with you, so there is a better chance of diversity and you are at some level competing with other students who each particular POI might want to sponsor. Then, as others have mentioned, some professors might have specific grants that they can fund students on, but at least at the schools that I have any knowledge about (which is some, but certainly not all of them) the funding structure is not such that students are directly funded by PIs but instead by the department, and that means that the money that faculty bring in through grants goes into some general departmental funding pool--so while the person who brought in the money might have some power to make choices about who they would like to fund, it's not completely up to them. Considerations such as diversity, citizenship, etc. might also come up, more so in public schools and much less so in private schools, since private schools aren't obligated to any designated guidelines and the funding of domestic vs. international students is just not an issue.

You can use a part of your allowed OPT (for F-1 visa holders) or AT (for J-1) for internships that occur during your studies. I think the time comes off of your post-graduation OPT time. You can read more about OPT on google, and/or ask your international students office.

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