fuzzylogician

So it's that time of year - I have interviews coming up for assistant prof jobs, both on skype and in person at my field's large society conference (where practically all the schools that have job searches this year will be conducting their interviews). These are interviews of "medium list" applicants, I believe of around 12 people, out of which probably 3-5 will be chosen for an on-campus interview. For people in my position - ABD but no dissertation in hand - getting interviews is great but converting them to actual job offers is not easy at all. I've been reading about interviews and talking to all kinds of people but I'd also love to hear from anyone here who has had experience with similar interviews. Anything and everything that comes to mind would help - keep in mind that I've never had an interview in the US and few relevant experiences in general, so obvious (to you) things may not be obvious (to me).

It could help quite a bit. This is basically a recommendation from a person that the adcom known well and hopefully trusts. It will get you noticed and it should get you some favorable attention during discussions. It could end up making the difference between being admitted and not, but who knows.

Two things. First of all, you should be careful about how you define "independent" and "derived" projects. That a student has similar interests to their advisors is not really surprising and doesn't tell you much about their independence - choosing an advisor who can support your interests (=shares some of them, is an expert in something you care about, etc) is usually a good idea and will help you make progress on your own work. If that student ends up working on something similar to what their advisor does and (gasp) using their theory, that doesn't mean they did not develop their project independently. An important question is how the advising system works at a given program - whether it basically works with an advisor-advisee system, where a student mostly works with just one professor, or whether students are free to meet with whoever they want on different projects - I think it gives you some indication of the freedom that program allows. If it's the former, you can look at a particular professor's students (plural, multiple of them) and decide whether they as a whole work on what looks like their advisor's stuff or whether they have their own diverse projects going on. If it's the latter it's slightly more complicated but not by much. You just want to look at profiles of recent graduates and ask whether they have diverse projects that seem to reflect their own research agenda, or whether it's a mix of the professors' interests. Second, maybe we should also be more careful about how we define "fit" with a program. On the larger scale, if you e.g. applied to both Brown and UCLA to do the same exact semantics project, or UMD and OSU to work on the same syntax project (disclaimer: these are examples, other schools and topics could have been chosen here!), I'd worry you don't have a good understanding of what these programs are about. On an advisor level, a lot has to do with personal chemistry which is hard to judge but on a more objective level, you want to have at least 1-2, preferably 3-4, people at a given school who could guide different aspects of your work. That is, you want them to be experts in at least some aspect of what you want to do. However, at some point in your career you need to become the expert and they can provide guidance because of their experience in general in the field. At that point, you just want to be able to trust them and get along with them. Since that is the case, when schools are choosing applicants, they want students with a proven track record of successful research, who are smart and motivated, and those students will "fit" if it also seems that they want to study questions that the faculty could support through their own expertise and past work. If you want to study something that a school has no way of guiding you in, then having superb academic abilities is not going to get you very far. And finally on a more personal note: you want to work with the experts. Being afraid of working with them because their theory might be forced on you is unfounded - I would apply and meet them if you get accepted to see what they are really like, or at least I would verify (not assume) that indeed these people force their theories on people. For example, it's hard for me to think of anyone who would be more excited to debate a serious well thought-out challenge to her theory than Donca Steriade. So at least for her, I don't think your assumption is at all well-founded.

Everyone -- the level to which this thread has descended is inappropriate and unacceptable on the gradcafe. Please watch the language you use. If all you have to say is a put-down of someone else, save it. You are not helping the OP or other posters, you're just making the forum a less friendly place than it was before you arrived. Stop it now, before we are forced to deal with this more seriously.

Schools are interested in knowing who their competitors are. It helps them know where else their candidates are applying, and down the line they may also want to know where the people they admitted chose to go so they can learn how to improve at attracting the students that they wish to have - e.g. if there is a difference in funding or course offerings, those are things they can play with to improve the admissions offers for next year. Or if they are lacking in a certain subfield that their competitor school is strong at, they could try and think about hiring in that field for future years. The smart way to answer this question is to not seem all over the place - if you're applying to seemingly very different schools (opposing theories, strong disagreements about the important questions in the field, etc) I wouldn't mention that. A good selection would be schools with similar strengths and similar rankings, though you could indicate also trying for very good schools or slightly less well-ranked schools. As long as it seems clear why you would want to apply to these schools, there is nothing to worry about. They are just curious. I don't think this question is normally used to evaluate students, again - unless there is something obviously odd about how you replied. One caveat - if you seem "too good" schools may not want to "waste" an acceptance on you. They may assume you'll have better offers and won't accept theirs, so they will reject you based on that. This shouldn't happen if you're a good fit with a school, but if you apply to a top 100 school and indicate that all your other choices are top-10, that may cause some concern. But again, that's what I meant when I said above to have "similar" schools to the one whose application you are filling out.

Well I certainly don't mean to pressure you about applying to MIT, it's not like they pay me to recruit students for them, it just seemed like a conspicuous omission given the other schools you listed. I'm glad I asked because your answer shows something important that I would like to point out -- if you value your independence, I think it's important that you spend some time investigating the potential schools you might apply to in order to learn whether in fact students there work on independent projects or on derivatives of their professors' work. For me this point turned out to be very important and one of the key ways I decided between my top two offers - at one, students were given a lot of freedom and did not appear to be working on their professors' interests; in the other, students mostly worked on problems related to their advisor's interests. Both are valid ways of doing things, but I preferred the more unstructured program that allowed you to develop your own project. That doesn't work for everyone - you need to be able to deal with feeling lost and having less guidance than if you work more closely with an advisor on something that they are an expert in. I don't know whether MIT phonology (or any other department for that matter) is of the former or latter kind, but I think it's important not to make assumptions here. I, at least, was surprised at which schools were in which category when I was making decisions. I was not smart enough to do this before applying, but you can make your school selections based on this question. It will require some work - find out who the recent graduates are in the past, say, 5 years, who had your POIs as their advisors. Look at their dissertations/other papers/homepage and see whether the questions they are asking seem to be derivatives of their professors' work (e.g. confirming their theory's predictions, applying their theory to a new construction or language, etc) or whether they are independent (caution: they may be using a theory developed by an advisor for part of their work, especially if it's a mainstream one. That by itself doesn't mean anything, it's all about how the questions are formed.).

Some schools take time to update the system and some actually never do. I'd try contacting someone again, maybe on the phone instead of in an email. Don't forget that we just had a long weekend so there may be some lag in response to email, or they may just not be very good at that. If you have a scanned version of your transcripts, it may be a good idea to try and email them to someone in your prospective department so they have something to look at while they figure things out with your official transcripts. I'm not sure if you're talking to the grad school or the department but if you're talking to the grad school, also email the admin person at the department about this. You are not doomed, but you should stay on top of this situation.

Your choice, obviously. I'm not sure I know why (not) being a fan of generative grammar should affect your research in phonology. You'll have to do first year classes in syntax at every(?) program you might attend and many of the programs you listed will tell you quite a lot about minimalism (e.g. NYU, UChicago, UMD, Cornell, UMass, maybe one or two of the others but I'm not sure). After your first year you can put that behind you and not do any more syntax ever again (more or less, specifics depend on program). I wouldn't use that criterion to choose schools because frankly it's not all that relevant. I'm also not sure I understand what it means for some professor to "already have a pretty complete theory about relationship between phonology and phonetics." I doubt that they think their work is done and they can now retire happily ever after. Do you mean that they don't work on questions that interest you, or they study them in a way you disagree with?

You're welcome First off, hoping for *perfection* is never a good thing. In my opinion it's how people get held back because they keep doing the same thing over and over instead of moving on, despite diminishing returns at some point. Learn to do work that's "good enough," I think that's critical if you are to be successful. (Also learn what it means for different parts of your work - e.g. your coursework vs. teaching vs. thesis work). It's of course possible to have significant results in your first real study -- not necessarily in the pilot but later on -- but given your time constraints and how well your pilot works, it may be hard. Sometimes you have a great idea but for whatever reason it just doesn't work out. Sh!t happens. You need to talk to your advisor about their expectations of you and your work. That's the best way to know and therefore not spend time worrying about what-ifs. You'll have an easier time planning for actual requirements as opposed to imagined ones! If it were up to me, I think it's not reasonable to demand significant results at all costs but instead a thesis might describe an idea, experiments (design, methods, results, implications) and have some discussion of why things didn't pan out - anything from the theory was wrong to something was off with the design or implementation. If it's the latter, you may then propose a revision or follow-up experiment. To me that sounds like a perfectly respectable thesis. it wouldn't be as exciting as significant results and you obviously would go around excitedly presenting that at conferences but you should be able to defend it and move on with your life. Remember -- the thesis and defense are an internal requirement of your program, an exam that is part of your degree. It is not a normal step in research - there you would just debug your experiment, think about ways to improve whatever was problematic, and just try again! And you can still do that later on when you're in a PhD program, if you're still interested in that project. Or, it'd be totally legit to leave it behind and start something different for your PhD, and noone will think any less of you.

longforit - I'm not a phonologist so take this with a grain of salt, but I think you could have a good chance of admissions to the schools you mention, if you play your cards right. You have research experience, 2 papers and 4 conference presentations, which is a lot. Many people didn't do a BA in linguistics, so that's not a problem, especially since you are doing an MA in linguistics. It's also ok to have only discovered what you are interested in this year (it's even ok to change your concentration after you begin your PhD program.. gasp!). I wouldn't talk about your lack of lab experience as a negative, but instead talk about what you're doing this year and what you already learned, and also about what you hope to do next. Lab experience is also part of what your PhD training will be about. I'd spend some time thinking about how you present your interests. You have a good start - an overarching theme ("the relationship between categorical/invariant phonological knowledge and continuous/variant phonetic realizations") with some examples of sub-questions ("categorical/fine-grained perception, categorization (agent-level), phonologization (historical-level), phonetically-based phonology (structrual-level)") and a methodology/theory you want to use to study them ("complex system theory"). That's exactly how you want to structure your research interests in your SOP. What you are missing, I think, are examples of specific questions that you want to study within these sub-interests -- that is very important! I'm not a phonologist/phonetician so it's hard for me to know but it sounds like you listed quite a few diverse interests. That's ok, but you need to be careful that they have a common theme and that they are feasible. If it's too much, or unrelated, it'll show a lack of understanding of the field, unless you can tie them together and explain why they should be studied in tandem. I'd propose spending some time thinking about which questions best relate to your current strengths and represent things that people are worrying about now or (better yet) that you think are where people should be looking next (explain why!). This might mean that you only talk about a subset of the sub-interests you listed above, and that would be fine. Choose the topics that would be relevant for the most people and that would be considered broad and exciting. Be specific -- that is very important for showing that you are an independent thinker and that you (1) can identify questions in your field and (2) understand what is a reasonable size project. This is hard work, but once you're at the end of the process I guarantee that it will be worth it. You learn a lot from this kind of introspection. (Also, I just had to ask -- why aren't you considering MIT at all?)

I wouldn't say 4 months is particularly fast but I also don't think it's all that slow since it's your first time doing this type of work. It means you probably took longer than you otherwise would on all stages of the design of the experiments, including reading the literature and preparing the stimuli, which can be very time consuming. Those things improve with time, when you learn to be more efficient with your time, with using the software, and you learn what makes good vs. not so good stimuli. It's always been my experience though that things take longer than you think and in general they almost never work out the first time around - you do a pilot and then all kinds of unexpected things happen and then you spend more time figuring out what happened and redesigning or redoing some (or all) of your stimuli. It's an important part of the process. Personally, these kinds of "problems" have led me to some important discoveries in my research. It's a shame if your advisor isn't happy with your progress but doing things yourself is an important part of learning to be an independent researcher and it's just a fact of life that things will be slower when you're just starting out. Do you have reasons to think you are behind other students in your cohort or others in years ahead of you who do similar work? If so, you could talk to some of them to figure out how they were able to be faster. Maybe there are tricks you could pick up that would help you speed the process along. However, I think it's important to point out that in my experience experimental work does take longer than paper-and-pencil work. It's why collaborations are so important. It's also a fact of life that there's always going to be someone who is better/faster/whatever and I wouldn't worry about comparing myself to that person.

If by far your best work is a co-authored paper, then that's the paper you should submit. However, cutting out your co-author's contribution is an odd way of dealing with the co-authorship problem. Instead, leave the paper whole and add an addendum explaining your contributions to the research and to the writing. If possible, you should also have a letter writer describe the paper and your contributions to it.

Do you have the support of your Masters advisors? Will you get letters from any of them? Moreover, if they were contacted about you (which may happen even if you don't submit letters from them because people will be curious), what will they say about you and the circumstances under which you are leaving? That's the amount of information you will need to give and explain. It might not be advisable for you to go into too many details, but you need to help the adcoms see the bigger picture. If you are not successful with a MA thesis, why do you want to go on to do a PhD, and can you be successful at it? What will be different? I don't think there is any way around explaining what happened, and more importantly why you are still a strong candidate for a PhD despite it.

Yeah, generally it's better to have single-author papers and next first-author papers. Obviously, that's not possible in all fields - in some, most work is co-authored. The concern with these co-authored papers is that it's not clear what your contribution was to the paper - in some fields anyone from the PI to the person who cleans the Petri dishes gets to be co-author, but obviously not everybody contributed equally. That's why it's important to explain what you did and if possible also have a letter writer address it. If your letter writers haven't submitted their letters, ask them to address these projects so your contribution is clear. You don't need to be shy about it - remind them what you did, I guarantee that they will appreciate it. You remember your contributions much better than they can, even with the best of intentions.

I'd go with sample 2. In cases of joint authorship, it's important to explain your own contribution to each paper as opposed to the contributions of others. The adcoms will be asking themselves what exactly you did on each project if it's not clear from the paper itself. The papers should showcase your research and writing abilities, and it'd be good if you could say you extensively contributed to aspects of the research itself as well as the writing (though this is field-specific, in some it's really the PI who does the writing and everybody knows and expects that). I'd propose either having an addendum to each paper detailing your contributions, a short description in the SOP, or having a recommender talk about this.

Oh, I see. That wasn't clear to me at all. I hope this clears up any confusion, then!

This: That's some portion of people who visit this forum but you're probably missing many others who will visit the lobby but not here because they are not grad students yet.

If you don't want current grads you should post in a more appropriate forum, e.g. the lobby. I think I'll move this poll there, unless you object.

I have headings and subheadings in my job applications for documents that are 4+ pages long. I think it helps orient the reader and it's easier to read than just a big block of text. It's not necessary for shorter documents, but for anything longer than 1 page I make sure that if I don't have headings, the first sentence of every paragraph starts with a wording that clearly situates it in the broader context, e.g. "My research ...," "In my dissertation...," "In previous work, ..." "I have taught...," "As an Assistant professor at Awesome U, I hope to..." etc. Not only does it help the reader, but when I was in writing stages it also helped me structure the essay and make sure that I was covering all of my bases.

Yes, do it. It'll help the committee orient themselves and find the answers to each of their questions.

OP, this is actually a known problem in philosophy (and other fields as well). You can start by reading here: http://feministphilosophers.wordpress.com/. I think there is probably some truth to your feelings. I've had occasion to feel the same way, where I know for sure that my views are no less valid, interesting or important than what my male colleagues have to say. Yes, as others have mentioned, it's hard to know when someone's behavior is (partly) motivated by gender discrimination and when not, but I think our perception of events is important and not to be ignored or trivialized.

I don't know, it seems to me that being required to teach both a class that starts at 10am and a class that ends at 9pm is a bit much, it requires the OP to be on campus for 11 straight hours. If that happened to me, I'd make sure to talk to the coordinator next time around to ask not to be put in that situation again, if possible. Maybe I'd come off as demanding, but if it would otherwise significantly affect the quality of my life and work, I would be willing to take that chance (of course, while still doing my best not to come off as such). I've made unsolicited requests because of a medical condition in the past, and they have always been well received. I know it's not quite the same, but I think the OP has good reasons to ask for some consideration.

This varies by field, as mentioned. Here are some leads:

That's why I think it may be easier to choose something to just not mention at all, as opposed to try to cut out a little here and a little there but keep all of the same content. Not that that's easy, but I think it tends to lead to a better essay than lots of edits.

Being well-cited does not (only) imply that you are grammatically correct but also that you are interesting. I don't understand why the dichotomy. My point is that longer != better. As I said, it depends on the content of the two papers we are comparing, and neither one of us knows that -- but I just don't think the correlation is necessarily there. As for choice of appropriate content, it probably depends on the type of program the OP is applying for. PhD means research, not creative writing, doesn't it?