fuzzylogician

Universities get lots of applications from different countries and they deal with them just fine. I wouldn't worry. I also wouldn't explain my grades in my SOP, it would be out of place there. At most you could add an explanation to the CV line about your BA saying "Average grade 6.5 (equivalent to B+)" or some such.

Most likely, yes. Often it's a university-wide requirement--but check the wording of the requirement. You could also ask the schools you are applying to for an exemption, it might help in some cases.

OK, I'll bite. I think there is confusion here about the definitions. The meaning of a question is the set of all possible (true) answers to the question. There are different theories of questions out there, but one useful way to think of a question is as a set of propositions that could be true of the world, where the task of the listener is to identify the (maximal) proposition in the set that is in fact true in the world. Syntactically, questions are CPs (or whatever is your favorite notation for full clauses, including tense, aspect, etc). For the English question in (1a), we have its denotation in (1b). (1) a. Who came? (assuming the relevant individuals in the domain are John, Fred and Bill) b. {John came, Bill came, Fred came, John and Bill came, Bill and Fred came, ..., John and Bill and Fred came} Questions can be embedded under certain types of predicates. There are predicates that can embed both declarative and interrogative clauses, e.g. remember, discover. This is important because it means that seeing an embedding headed by a wh-word (as in 1,2,4 in the OP) doesn't tell us whether or not we are in fact dealing with an embedded question. And that brings me to relative clauses. Relative clauses are essentially modified nouns. They are DPs (or NPs, if you prefer), so they are a smaller syntactic structure than questions. Here we are dealing with 'free relatives' or 'headless relatives', which you can imagine are modifying a silent head noun. I'll use a different example than in the OP because I think it helps the discussion. (2a) is a non-restrictive relative, (2b) is a restrictive relative, and (2c) is a headless relative. In all cases, there is a natural position that we can imagine the relative pronoun (which, that, what) originated from or is otherwise somehow related to (=the object position, following the noun). People write whole books about how that relation is established, so lets ignore the details for now. (2) a. The food [which you ate ___ ] b. The food [that you ate ___ ] c. [ ] [what you ate ___ ] Now, the whole structure is basically a noun that is modified by a clause. At the end of the day, we are dealing with a DP. Semantically, it's an individual or a set of individuals, so it's a different creature than a question (which, recall, is a set of propositions). DPs can occupy positions that CPs can't (and vice versa). E.g., DPs can appear on either side of a copular sentence: [note interesting English peculiarities, e.g. you can't say 'who came is John', but you can do that in other languages.] (3) X is Y. a. What we ate for dinner is a banana. b. A banana is what we ate for dinner. Finally -- for the punchline of the OP's exercise: Something like 'what you ate' can act either as a question or as a headless relative, so you need to ask yourself about the environment it appears in in order to know what kind of creature it is in each of your sentences. I think it's easier to find positive evidence for whether or not you are dealing with a headless relative, and decide you are dealing with a question if the diagnostics are not satisfied. - If unembedded, is the whole utterance a question or a statement? If it's a statement, then we are dealing with a headless relative, not a question. - If embedded, what does it denote? Does it refer to an individual (a particular thing in the world, or a collection of things), as you would expect from a headless relative? In particular, if you are dealing with a headless relative, it's just a DP and can be replaced by another one, with an overt head, with minimal changes to the content of the sentence. Use generic heads ('thing' for relatives headed by 'what', 'time' for relatives headed by 'when', 'place' for relatives headed by 'where', etc. So, 'what you ate' --> 'the thing (that) you ate'). Is the meaning of the sentence (more or less) retained? If you are dealing with a question, then the replacement will cause a more serious change to the meaning of the whole utterance, possibly making it ill-formed. I believe that doing this will result in quite different answers than provided in the post above mine. But -- you should do it yourself, I'm not going to just provide you with the solution.

It's common practice for professors to basically write one letter and then tweak it to fit different schools. No one on the adcoms will expect each of your letter writers to write a new letter from scratch just for their program. It is also quite unlikely that there will be professors who serve on the admissions committees at both programs, though it's possible that at some point the finalist shortlist (and perhaps their files) will be sent around to all the faculty at both programs, and if these professors are affiliated with the other program, they might see your name on both lists. Even so, everybody knows that applicants apply to multiple schools and there's nothing wrong with that. So -- I wouldn't worry about any of this at all.

Contact the program and ask about submitting the 8-page published work before you do anything else.

This sounds like a homework assignment, and even as such it's not at all clear what you are asking.

I don't know where your mother's friend got their information but it's completely wrong, unless something drastic has changed in the US immigration procedures in the past few years. Your I-20 is issued once you show that you have sufficient funding to pay for your degree, and the department's guarantee to fund you is all you need for that. With the I-20 you go to the embassy to get a student visa issued, and there again you just need to show that your department will fund you and you should be fine. In all likelihood no one will even ask, because it's already written in your I-20. I have no idea why you were told you need to deposit any kind of collateral in a US bank. Those are private institutions anyway, and they have nothing to do with federal immigration regulations.

He's not promising you anything. Sounds like he was very honest about the funding situation. All you can do is try and see what happens, but I'm still not seeing how he's "bluffing."

Hello, over-interpretation. Trust me, if someone doesn't like you they will say no. No one benefits from stringing people along. Why not just take the professor at his word? Sounds like he likes you but doesn't have funding to admit you at the moment, so he is pursuing several avenues that might allow you to join his lab - he is writing a grant, he is trying to make connections in industry, and he wants you to try and get independent funding as well (and he will help you prepare the application and review it). I fail to see what is making you interpret this as anything other than positive.

I think it's important to talk about your expectations with your advisor and have them help you establish a routine. Also talk to more advanced students about how they got started. My guess is that you need help establishing who to go to for questions and what kind of help you can reasonably expect from people. No one starts out knowing everything, so it's perfectly fine and even expected that you need help to get you started. However, it sounds to me like you're a bit too passive in this process. If you know what needs to happen, why don't you start doing it? You may get stuck or get things wrong, but it'll be easier to ask questions and get help *with specific problems* that you are having. If you are globally confused, you need to know who you can talk to in order to unconfused. If you know what needs to happen but are just insecure about doing it, my advice is to do it anyway. You build confidence and experience by doing things; getting things wrong sometimes is not a problem, it's how you learn. The only way you can avoid making mistakes is by doing nothing at all, but you already know that's not going to work. Just choose a corner of the project that you are relatively familiar with and start there. Ask many questions, talk to many people, find out who can help you. Simply get started on something. The longer you wait, the more expectations you'll build and the more anxiety you'll create for yourself; the best way to avoid that is not to let things build up, and instead talk them out as they come up.

I'd say the average length of my SOPs was between 700-900 words, about two pages. I've also written in the past that one of my favorite versions of the statement was created after I was forced to write a 500-word SOP--that forced me to really think about my ideas and communicate them very efficiently. After that, I added back some details I had to leave out of the short statement and ended up with something I was very happy with that was about 650 words long. I had BA and MA experience, RA experience (collaborations with 4 professors in two countries), TA experience, a thesis, and other projects to discuss, and I was able to do it in that short space, plus a significant chunk spent on current/future research interests and fit. Some details simply have to be left in your CV or up to your recommenders to discuss. I don't know your situation, but 4 full pages sounds like too much. I'd find a way to cut back.

Why don't you contact the program and ask? They will be able to give you an informed answer, and we here can only guess. If you want my guess, though, it's probably fine to submit the paper as long as the program doesn't explicitly say that they don't want a writing sample, or not to submit unsolicited materials. They can ignore it if they want.

Just do it. Search one of the ten thousand times this has been discussed on the forum for details.

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|resists urge to comment on the assumptions made here|.

That is probably going to create difficulties for you. One aspect of (most) job applications, most certainly for any R1 TT job but also for liberal arts colleges is a statement about your future research interests. Teaching is indeed very important to liberal arts colleges, but these days there are enough strong candidates that they can also require a strong research portfolio for hiring and for tenure. This research will have somewhat of a different flavor than at R1 institutions because you'll be mostly involving undergraduates, rather than graduate students, in your research and you will therefore need to be a lot more independent -- but it's still a very important component of the profile of a hirable candidate. Your future interests are supposed to grow out of your PhD work, and you'll spend some time during the application process thinking about how you might explain your dissertation (and other) research as fitting into a larger research program. If you will not be able to continue any of your current work at a certain school, that will certainly hurt your ability to publish and conduct research at a timely fashion there. You'll have to start over from scratch, and maybe even rethink your research program. Your past experiences will therefore not be a good indication of your potential to succeed in the future. That will mean, to most people, that you are not a good fit and hence a dangerous hire for that school. If you know that this is where you want to end up, I'd start thinking right now about how you might pitch your research so it can be relevant for the jobs you are interested in, and how some aspect of them can be carried on there. Then I'd get started on doing exactly that kind of research, so you can prove that you have the experience to successfully carry it out. I understand that this is very difficult to do, but if you are unable to turn yourself into someone who could fit in a liberal college environment and work with the resources you have there, I think you'll have a hard time getting hired. Sorry I don't have a better answer than that.

Yes, you definitely list the grant. I assume it was competitive and you won it, you didn't just receive it out of the blue. For small amounts, I wouldn't list the amounts. I'm not sure what you mean by listing the results -- conference presentations, publications, etc. should be listed under the appropriate headings in your CV. Actual results of your studies are never listed on a CV.

You need to know how much each option pays, and how much (if anything) you'll have to pay yourself. If all the funding options cover tuition and some reasonable amount of living expenses, then the next question is how much work is involved in each option, if any. You also need to find out if there are some funding sources you may not qualify for (e.g. diversity fellowship).

Are you done? Are you sure? Then submit. In most cases all the apps will be reviewed together some time after the deadline. Submitting earlier means that if the app goes through a centralized admissions office, it'll probably be processed somewhat faster since it'll arrive in a reasonably quiet time, or the process will just proceed as normal. Submitting a week or even three early shouldn't mean your app is any more or any less likely to get lost in the system than if you submit one or two days before the deadline, and anyway that's an unlikely problem. You should just follow up after some time to make sure you app was received, regardless of when you submitted.

If you've been out of school and working for a while, I'd consider adding it because it'll give the adcom a better sense of what you've been doing. Having it there means it's the kind of entry that's normally not looked at and will therefore not help your application at all, so for most (traditional) students it's unnecessary. But if you're non-traditional and it helps give a better picture of your life/work experience and basically what you've been doing with your life for the past X years, I'd leave it there. It might just address someone's curiosity about your past, or it might do nothing at all. I don't think it should hurt, so that's why I'd say leave it there. Can't hurt, has some (perhaps small) chance of helping.

Alright. But, if those are the days your hook is aiming towards, I think my point becomes even clearer.

Because they are conscientious workers who actually know quite a bit about all kinds of fields and are experts their jobs. Decisions are not made by "a random person who knows nothing about the boring technical aspects of what you want to research" who will then look at your SOP and go "Yes.. no.. yes.. no.. no.. no..". Anyway, the more important point is that they also know their limitations in evaluating technical issues and accordingly I think the importance of the "hook" in the SOP for those people might make a difference but I think it's past the point of diminishing returns (=I'd spend my time elsewhere). My larger point is that opening with interesting research questions should do enough to hook professors who are reading the SOP, and for them, too, you should be explaining why your questions are important. I have a professor who will quite literally ask me once in a while "why should I care?," which is actually a really difficult but very important question to answer, if you think about it. This is the question that reviewers of your future papers will ask themselves, and so will grant panels and hiring committees for your future jobs. That's also exactly what you should be talking about in your SOP -- not about nitty-gritty details (at least, not up front). If you explain why we should care about what you study and you ask interesting questions, that should "hook" professors and admissions officers alike.

When is the deadline? It's entirely possible that your recommenders just haven't sent the letter in yet. It's quite early in the application process for most schools. If it's past the deadline, you should email your recommenders to ask if they sent the letters and you can tell them the school says they were not received. If the deadline is a long time from now, I'd probably just wait, but you could also just send your recommenders a reminder and ask if they have any questions of if there is anything else you could help them with. I'd also ask them to let you know when they send the letter, so you can know when to follow up with the school about receiving it. This will give you a good excuse to send periodic follow-up emails to ask if they've submitted the letter already and remind them of upcoming deadlines.

I think your goal is to make your CV look the best that it can. If that means adding older stuff that demonstrates teaching and management skills, then that's what you should do. Picking an X number of years to go back seems arbitrary. I understand that if this advice is geared towards traditional students it just means not to put things from high school on the CV, which makes sense. But your situation is different, so I wouldn't just take that advice at face value.

A couple of things. First, this outside admissions person that makes decisions about which files to forward to the department for consideration happens at some schools and for some departments but it's not a hard and fast process that happens without exception everywhere. In linguistics, I don't think it happens anywhere, because the field is not that large. Admissions committees at top departments (and elsewhere) take the time to carefully look at all the files. At my school, the DGS will narrow down obvious 'no's but then a large portion of the files goes out to everyone to read and grade, the DGS will then tally up the scores, and then the committee meets to discuss the top candidates. There are always more good people than spots, unfortunately. My professors spend more time than you might imagine carefully reading these files, and I can tell you that what impresses them are serious applicants who can propose interesting and well-defined questions and possible avenues where you might search for answers. I've been writing job applications these days and have had conversations with 5 different faculty members in my subfield(s) in the last month about these essays and what makes them stand out. Second, in places where there is someone in some centralized office who knows nothing about your field making the first cut, this is often made based on numeric cutoffs, not based on reading essays, precisely because the person in that office has no way of knowing if your SOP is any good. That's where the GPA and GRE (and TOEFL) scores become important, because having a low score will mean your application will go no further, even if you have a brilliant hook or (more importantly) a fascinating research topic. I'm not going to tell you it doesn't ever help or make you go from the 'no' pile to the 'yes' pile, but I think this is the point of diminishing returns. You worry about an extreme fringe case instead of directing your efforts more sensibly because of the imagined clueless person in the central office, but the chance that this 'hook' will make a difference seems scant. Why wouldn't a cool research question and an explanation of why your work is interesting and important not an as good a way (if not better) to get this person's attention and have them put you in the 'yes' list? They're admitting academics, not creative writers, at the end of the day. (I also happen to know someone who works in the admissions office at my school and I think he'd be very offended by your assumptions about him and his colleagues and how they do their work.)