fuzzylogician

(a) you'll need to contact the department about this. They may agree. But it'd still be better if the prof could upload the letter, even if it's exactly the same as last year. (b) That said, there's going to be a question of what changed from last year. If nothing did, the admissions decision likely won't either. If some things have, hopefully at least the other two letters (and your SOP!) should reflect that. Maybe there's an advantage to replacing this letter with a different one, if you can.

Have you generated letter prompts yet? Do you know if any letters have been submitted? Note that letter prompts are often automatically generated when you enter your recommender information into the system, not when you submit; but this varies by application software. If no prompts have been generated, I would do the following: Contact IT to see if they can easily change the email address associated with the application. If yes, good news. If no or it's complicated, start a new application. If you've generated letter prompts and especially if some letters have been submitted (or if you're not sure!): Contact IT to see if they can change the email address associated with the application. If yes, good news. If no or it's complicated, contact your letter writers to let them know to expect new prompts, and why. Then, start a new application.

Thirding this. As a professor, I want to know about any unusual situation that my TAs are dealing with. It's a part of my job to manage these things and to guide TAs in dealing with difficult situations. It's also often the case that I'll have more resources available to me that the TA doesn't have access to, like access to the student's academic record and knowledge of prior similar behavior in other classes. Telling your professor and asking for advice on how to deal with a difficult student is not offloading anything and not shirking your responsibility. It is precisely what you are supposed to do.

Seconding @TakeruK: I didn't understand how your text related to your title. What are you asking for from us?

You can send an update for major accomplishments: a publication, an important award, a grant. A conference presentation doesn't make the cut, in my opinion, but congratulations nonetheless!

I took it to be a question about appearances, in which case having a professional meeting in a professional setting during normal work hours should take care of it. If the question is about what to do if a professor gets sketchy during a meeting, I think it'd be good to get the hell out of dodge fast (hence, it's useful to have the meeting in said professional setting, like someone's office, with the door open), and thank your lucky stars that you're early enough in the process that you can choose never to work with said person (or for that matter, be in a room alone with them) ever again. More than that has to depend on the situation, I would think.

I'm very confused about the whole coffee and date discussion. Why would you not simply ask to schedule a "normal" meeting with these people, gender aside, in their office during normal business hours while you're in town? For what it's worth, if you're doing several of these meetings back to back because there are several people you'd like to meet, and they know it, someone might ask you if you'd like a coffee. If you say yes, they'll take you to a nearby coffee stand and splurge for two drip coffees. You'll probably talk on the way there/back and waiting in line. Maybe even sitting down for a few minutes. There won't be anything romantic about it.

Unfair, and also not totally relevant to your question, as far as I can tell. (Mostly not just unfair, but probably harmful, since students won't know the genre as well as their professors and probably won't do as good a job of writing the letter.)

Self-submitted letters come with several grains of salt as far as admissions committees are concerned. It's harder to be able to trust that the letter is authentic and that it was written with full intellectual freedom (as in the case of a letter that the student never sees). It just looks very suspicious when a student writes and/or submits their own letter. It is MUCH better if you can get your LOR writers to submit their own letters. One remedy for cases when it's hard to stay in touch with older writers is to use a service like Interfolio or similar, where they only need to upload the letter once, and then you can get the service to submit the letter anywhere that's needed after that. The advantage is in maintaining confidentiality, so the writer uploads the letter to the service and the service sends the letters to where needed, and the candidate isn't involved in the process any more than they would be if the writer emailed the letter directly. As for your prof who's changed jobs, most academics don't just fall off the face of the earth even if they do switch jobs and even if they're old and don't do a great job maintaining an online presence. Contact your old program; they should have contact info for this person, if you can't find it by just googling.

Say you are a student for the actual times you will be a student, whatever they are. Sounds like you're still a student in your department, even though you're not taking courses anymore. Note that the question isn't when your degree will be officially conferred or whether you are taking courses in semester X but whether you are an enrolled student in the department at a given time. I also assume you have LOR writers who will say things like "XYZ is currently a MA student in our department, expected to graduate at Date ABC" or some such. If you're worried, you can ask someone to say that explicitly to avoid any misunderstandings, but this may be a case of over-thinking it. (I suppose that attaching your certificate can't hurt, but it sounds like it's most likely unnecessary.)

It's not terribly common but it's not unheard of. It's usually easier if your own advisor or someone in your department puts you in touch with the person from the other school to get things going. Otherwise, there are different ways to get collaborations underway; most will include making yourself known to the faculty member by attending events at their school, taking their classes, etc., and establishing that you have shared interests. You might meet with them about your current work, and you might even straight up ask if they have a project you can get involved with. The main thing before you do any of this is to have a clear sense of how your own department (and especially, your advisor) take such out-of-department collaborations. Some might frown on them, and if that's the case, you could be walking right into a mine field that is best avoided. I'd talk to knowledgeable individuals (advanced students, trusted mentors) before making any big moves.

I'd email and ask to update your email address (and explain why). You don't want to create confusion by basically appearing to have submitted two applications for no reason. You also don't want the wrong one (or both!) to be ignored.

I'm sometimes very surprised at how much my students seem to factor my workload into their plans. Trust me to make my own plans and to tell you if what you're asking isn't feasible for me given my other commitments. (And anyway, at this point, what have you got to lose?)

(BTW I say this as someone who had to get an emergency fourth letter, and mine wasn’t even from someone who already had anything written up. The original third letter eventually was submitted, but either way I don’t think that whole crisis ended up affecting my acceptance decisions very much since all that really mattered was that the application be officially considered complete. My anxiety levels were a whole other story.)

At this point I don’t think you can afford to worry about your recommender’s workload. If I were you I’d email them, apologize profusely, explain the situation, and ask if they would be willing to email the letter directly to the department basically right now. You don’t need to change anything in your application for this. Just do what you have to do to make sure your application is complete and is under consideration.

Any chance to get your other letter writer to email their letter to the department(s) in question? That way your application isn't incomplete, and I'm sure that if that's done on Monday, you'll be fine. Since this extra letter actually exists, it shouldn't be a lot of extra work for the writer to email it to a couple of other places. Good luck!

This reminds me of a recent blog post I enjoyed: https://debuk.wordpress.com/2017/11/26/mind-the-respect-gap/

This is Oh So Not the way to decide on where to obtain your graduate education. Talk to your advisors, consider fit, funding, location, placement records of your potential schools, and go from there. Rankings on this piece of paper aren't worth the electronic ink that's spilled on them as far as graduate education is concerned.

What @GreenEyedTrombonist said. Clear guidelines concerning your expectations for the class established early on, written and documented feedback pointing out problems with writing and behavior early on and throughout, and consistency. It's also often very helpful to seek advice from more senior colleagues if you encounter a student who you suspect might cause trouble. They may have dealt with said student (or similar) in the past, and may otherwise be able to tell you what policies and recourse are available to you *in your department and at your institution*. As sad as this is, sometimes you have to let them win, if you know e.g. that your institution or department won't back you up. Also, separately but not really, look up threads about dressing the part for women. Men seem to feel more able to be dismissive of young (or young-looking) female instructors. There isn't much you can do to change your age or appearance, but you can often dress up to stress the distance between you and your students. There are certain behaviors that you can justifiably not tolerate in your classroom, and that includes people who dismiss your authority or disrespect you.

Well, seeing as I am generally pretty terrible at predicting the future, I just go with the feedback I get on my actual product at the actual time I produce it. Yes, I expect my writing to mature with experience (specifically, I've definitely adopted a style of writing and presentating/teaching that I didn't have when I was just getting started), but for sure I wouldn't have been able to predict that before grad school, or even as a young grad student. At any given point in time, you do your best with what you've got. For that reason, I don't think it's wise to aim to "sound like a grad student", whatever that means. Aim to sound your best, given who you are now. And again, learn to identify that point of diminishing returns, where you might make very small improvements at very large costs that aren't obviously worth it. That's the point to accept a product that is "good enough" for this particular purpose. (For homework, that point would be much earlier for me, for example).

Oh, this reminds me. For the love of all that is holy, PLEASE, do NOT re-read old drafts of submitted statements. That's one of the best way to add useless agony to your life. Put them behind you when you're done and move on. (Caveat: unless you're back to work on new drafts for a new cycle. But even then, what's done is done.) Old statements will be embarrassing to you no matter what you do. For most people, all of their old writing is like that. It shows all their flaws and inconsistencies, or so they think. But the thing is, no one else resides in your head and knows these things, and anyway -- what's done is done.

Check the Results portion of the board for when answers came out for your target programs in previous years. It's no guarantee, but it can give you a ballpark of what to expect.

The point of diminishing returns for me: when readers uniformly say that whatever I sent them to look at is good to go, and make suggestions that are either minor or conflict with what others suggest (e.g. A says "move XYZ to the top" and B says "I think XYZ would be best at the bottom", unless one of them actually has a compelling reason for their view). Caveat: that last typo will remain there, no matter many people read your draft; you'll find it 5 seconds after you submit (or, embarrassingly, 5 years later).

Hi there, this forum isn't meant for help with homework assignments. I suggest you find a better suited venue for your question.

Actually, you know what, maybe this needs to be locked for a while.