fuzzylogician

Yeah, I think it'd be fair to have a "other work experience" section at the end of your CV and list your employment there. It's probably not going to help much and also not going to hurt -- it just might answer someone's question of what you were doing with your time, though likely it wouldn't matter if you didn't specify your non-academic job either. In my field students often have their own websites and you can find links on the "people" page of different programs. If that's not the case in your field, you could use google. Find the names on the department website and then use google to find out if they have a website. If possible, try and find people who are just beginning the program and not ones who are further along to get an idea of what CVs of accepted students tend to look like, but I'd look at more advanced students' CVs for a better idea of the accepted format of the CV. It'll require some work if it's not just listed on the website, but I think it's worth it.

Back when I was applying there were both apps that only let you send a prompt after you submitted on your end and apps that wanted paper letters (but the rest of the app could be submitted online). I hear the paper recs are basically a thing of the past now, though, so good news--it could have been worse The prompt-only-sent-after-submission thing is also annoyingly common in job applications, which don't require any application fees at all. It's just how some systems are set up, for reasons best known to their designers. I try not to worry about these things which I cannot control, but I totally understand your frustration.

Well, I think it's up to you to take the initiative if your advisor doesn't. Ask for a meeting to get his advice on applying for external funding. If you have something written up, maybe you could send it to him in advance, or else just describe the project you have in mind and ask for his opinion on it. Ask where you could apply for funding, and tell him what places you were thinking of. Tell him that you are unsure about how competitive you are, and depending on his response you might then just ask if applying for a joint project would be something he would consider and if he thinks that would be a good idea. I imagine he'll have some opinions about this question and that you can begin to work out any necessary details.

Again, this is not unusual and it does not prevent your recommenders from working on the letter before you submit the app. All it does is prevent them from submitting it before you submit the app on your end. I understand it's annoying, but it's nothing to get too worked up over. I'm sure your recommenders have dealt with worse troubles in their lives.

Seems pretty standard to me. You give them an email address, they email the recommenders, the recommenders get a link to an online app where they can submit letters. Doesn't sounds particularly difficult for the recommenders, or much different from other apps. The main annoying thing is that you can't send the recommenders the letter prompt until after you submit the app, but that too is not out of the ordinary. I doubt it has anything to do with the payment, it's probably just how the system is set up. They'll start a file for you as soon as you start sending in materials (=could be before you submit the app), and the other stuff is kept online anyway.

I'd be very careful with this advice. You DON'T know that it will work out and be worth it. You could finish your first year, still be unfunded, be unable to continue any further, AND be deep in debt because of the one year of school. If you have an unfunded offer, it's important to find out how often students get funded in their second year vs. how many remain unfunded or leave. For a school with insufficient money to fund all its students, it might make more sense to use the money to attract new students than fund students who are already paying out of pocket. The students who pay out of pocket contribute to the university's overall finances, while funded ones obviously do not. For me, the uncertainty and possible financial consequences would not be worth it -- I would assume there is a significant chance that I would not be funded later, and in my field, I don't think it's worth it to get into debt for a graduate degree.

This. I just came back from such a conference If you can combine it with a conference, I'd say -- definitely go. Going in person makes a lot of the interaction go through much more easily and it will greatly improve your chance of finding a postdoc. If you couldn't combine it with a conference it'd be expensive and slightly odd, but if you have a good reason to travel overseas I think you should absolutely leverage it for some visits to potential future labs and for giving some (self-invited) talks. The connections you'll make/strengthen alone are worth it, even if nothing more comes out of it at the moment.

I'd start with just asking for an extension on the decision deadline. You don't need to explain much; you will not be the first person to need more time in order to have all the decisions before making a choice. I'd avoid accepting an offer and then withdrawing because that could burn bridges with the first program. So first just see what they say, then go from there.

I would encourage you to get counseling and any other professional help that you can get from your school, asap. You should put your health first -- that's so much more important than your teaching obligation, which I'm sure they will figure out if they really need to. Feeling trapped and depressed is no way to spend a whole semester. Find out what your options are, and make a plan for getting out. Just knowing that you have a plan for how and when this mess will end could help a great deal. Then I would also suggest going back to your departmental advisor to update her on your current state and see if she can be of any help. If you do decide to stay until the end of the semester, you need to get her help in dealing with your PI. Your advisor should be able to intervene and help you avoid starting this project. At the end of the day, it's going to be in everyone's best interest if you don't start this project, including your PI. You'll probably not be able to do much in the time you'll work on the project, and whoever will pick it up next will be a few months behind compared to where they could have been. There should be a way to have someone work on the project who will continue working on it in the coming semesters, and you should really only be concentrating on your mental health, not on this project you'll only be responsible for for a month. I could perhaps understand not sharing your feelings with your PI while you were undecided about your next move so the relationship won't be affected, but now that you've decided I don't think there is any advantage to the secrecy. I'd talk about this point and its effects on you with your advisor. Maintaining a facade and keeping secrets is certainly not contributing to your mental health, and I think you need to find a way to stop it. Please take care of yourself.

I would caution against writing a new paper just for the writing sample. You want your paper to be read by at least one professor and you'll want to integrate their comments into your paper. Submitting a raw paper that has not been seen by anyone is dangerous. The writing sample doesn't have to match your research interests. It's important that it's sufficiently relevant to your field that the adcom members can read it and evaluate it -- so that it's not so far removed from your field that the content cannot be evaluated. But, once that is covered, the topic could be disjoint from your current interests. The purpose of the writing sample is to demonstrate your ability to do high quality research and communicate it in writing to your readers. So all it needs to do is contain arguments that your readers can appreciate. Aside from that, I wouldn't worry about it matching your proposed project because that's not expected. Interests change and develop and that's fine.

It doesn't matter what an A means to a graduate student in sociology. The important question is how an A translates for an undergraduate in a graduate class, and my guess is that there it's not trivial, even if it just translates to nothing more than "satisfactory" for a grad student. I'd also not worry about it too much, because you can't change how people will think about your grade and you can't know or guarantee that everyone will interpret it one way or the other. You can just do well and earn an A. If you do well and you have an interesting project, you could have that professor write a LOR for you, and then you are guaranteed to have someone say you did well (and that's more important than what the grade actually is).

That too depends on the application. You can check and see if they let you send a prompt before you submit the app or not. Back when I applied, the only school that would not allow you to send the prompt before paying was Rutgers, and for UMass you had to send paper letters. I imagine some things are better now, but you just need to check the individual websites to see what they let you do.

Again it depends on what your CV looks like at the moment. CVs can be structured in different ways and you want to choose the one that presents your accomplishments in the best light. This means you could perhaps have this under "conferences," but I'd be careful not to give the impression that you presented your talk, when in fact you didn't. When you have a large CV, you would have conference proceedings papers (which, in my field, are distinct from full journal papers which are more prestigious) separate from journal papers and also separate from book chapters. Similarly, you separate refereed conferences from unrefereed ones and from invited talks. When you have less things under each category, it normally looks better to have all the presentations together under one headings and all the publications together under one heading. But CV structures are also field-specific, so you should follow what's customary in your field. Generally, I don't think you can keep this conference on your CV if you don't go and you also don't have an abstract or proceedings paper published. So you need to decide if this conference is worth having on your CV, and if so then pay the fees and publish the abstract. If you think that publishing the full paper independently is sufficient, that's your call. It's certainly more prestigious, but the question is first, how sure you are that the paper will be accepted for publication, and what will the timeline be - will you be able to have an accepted paper on your CV when you apply? Will you at least have a full submitted draft by that time (also quite good for an MA application)? At an early stage in my career, I would choose to have the conference on my CV if it's at all prestigious, and honestly the option you're given is a good cheap way to add a line to your CV without needing to travel, spend money, and prepare a talk. It's not a bad deal.

To make matters even more complicated, in my department your funding may be designated as a "fellowship" or as a (teaching) "assistantship" for tax purposes based solely on the funding source (=where the money comes from, a behind-the-scene issue that does not affect how much you are paid or what your responsibilities happen to be in a given year). This funding does not necessarily correlate with your teaching responsibilities for that year: you may be TAing but receive your funding from a fellowship source or you may not have any teaching obligations and be funded through assistantship money. In my department, no one is funded through research assistantships, so beside TA obligations (two semesters during our 5 years of residency) everyone -- on any kind of funding -- can work on whatever research project they want, independently of the advisor's project. These funding sources, as has already been noted, are department-internal and therefore not competitive. NSF grants (and other national grants), on the other hand, are awarded after an external committee which views applications from many students decides that your research is worthy of this external funding, and it's therefore much more prestigious.

This will allow you to put the conference on your CV in some way (the abstract could go under publications), where otherwise I think you would have no way of mentioning it. If this conference publishes full proceedings papers, this will probably also give you the right to submit a paper for the proceedings, and that will be very valuable. At the stage you are at in your career that sounds like a good thing to have, unless you already have many other presentations on your CV. Can you consult with your advisor about this issue?

So you are in stage 2. Your professors have agreed to write letters on your behalf and they are waiting to get the prompt, which will only happen after you submit the app. This is all fine and expected. Most students will not be submitting their apps this early in the season. Professors normally don't write letters this early, either. Next month or in December, you'll send them the prompts and they will upload the letters. There is no reason for them to email you at the moment, or for you to email them. After you submit your apps next month, it'll be a good time to send a reminder email to tell your recommmender that you've submitted the apps and that they should have therefore received a prompt and to let you know if they haven't. Offer again to send them any materials that might help them write a strong letter on your behalf. Also, only submitting three letters is the norm for most apps. You can contact the schools to ask if they will read a fourth letter (many will), and if that's possible you may be able to ask the fourth professor to send the letter via email to the schools (ask them how to submit the letter if you can't add the fourth professor to the website). Good luck!

Yes -- I was under the impression that you were past stage 1. You say they agreed to write you letters and even thanked you for sending the SOP and other info. So, now they are waiting for you to perform stage 2, or else you are in stage 3. If that's the case, you have no reason to expect another email from them right now. You just need to wait for them to upload their letter, which they will hopefully do soon. BUT -- many professors only do this close to the deadline or even after it, because they know that the submission deadline is really only for the students and professors can often submit letters a few days/weeks later and still be in time (=before the adcom meets to make decisions). Precisely for this eventuality, I proposed setting up a reminder system with your recommenders in my previous post, so you can know they haven't forgotten about you. If your deadlines are in December, they may not be writing and submitting letters on your behalf for several weeks to come. This is very common, and at this point I think you have nothing to worry about. I would caution against emailing too often and starting to pressure your professors too soon, they still have a long time to write the letter at this point.

You're missing my point, 4 letters is a lot. Most people don't have that many people who can write them strong letters, so you're in good shape (if the letters can talk about your research ability/potential, not just about grades from classes). LORs normally are not sent to the students at all: when you fill out the online application for the schools you're applying to, you will be asked to provide email addresses and contact information for your recommenders. They will then be sent a prompt from the school and will be able to upload a letter to the application system directly. In many cases, a LOR that has been seen by the student is given less weight because it's assumed that it's not truly confidential -- in some cases such a letter will even be discarded. I'm guessing your professors are now waiting to get the prompts from you so they can finish things on their end, but at no point will they just send the letter to you.

How many people did you ask? You had some people reply AND you have four letters? That sounds like a lot. What reply do you expect to an email with your transcript and SOP? When did you send it, how long have you waited? Maybe it's a good idea for you to establish a reminder routine with them so you can send them an email every X days (or X days before the deadline) to remind them?

Good luck to you, and I hope you come back to report how your meeting went. Overall it sounds like your current relationship with your advisor is not working for you, so I'm glad you're taking the necessary steps to fix it. Your advisor might be surprised, but if she is a good advisor she will try to learn and improve from this. If she is indeed just "being the way she is," which generally sounds like a very likely option, then it depends on her personality whether or noth she can seek to make changes in how she behaves around you and adapt her mentoring style to your needs. If she's just upset at you but nothing changes, it would be one more sign that you should be seeking another advisor.

I bet you I've worked and studied in your part of Europe, and indeed in a classroom setting everybody is addressed by a title.It's a different situation when you work with a professor as a grad student in the US, and in that case, even for professors from that part of the world (and everyone else, as I've pointed out), we all use first names. When I talk to my former professors from Europe when they visit here, we also use first names now. Again, that's how things work in my field.

Well, at least as far as I can tell, there is no difference between linguists working in one part of the US or another, or linguists working in Europe or Asia for that matter. It's just generally how our field works. I've really never heard anyone go by anything other than a first name or nickname, including Noam (Chomsky) and other faux-celebrities. This could perhaps be different for undergraduates but I did not do my undergrad in the US, so perhaps there are nuances I am missing. However, I believe that all the professors in my department go by their first name when teaching undergrad classes. The TAs certainly do.

Here is what I know, mostly for formal (theoretical) syntax/semantics. Apply to your own field at your discretion. Q. What are conferences for? A. To present ongoing work to the linguistic community. To get your name and face out there, to meet other working linguists, to get known as a person who works on X. Q. When should you start attending? A. Probably at least a couple of years before you go on the job market, to start getting your name out there. I don't think there is any harm in not applying to conferences in your first year and also having just limited experience in your second year, and saving your effort and funding for years 3-5. I would generally not recommend going to the LSA until the year before you go on the job market (to get a feel for it) or only the year you apply, because it's very different than "normal" conferences and it's not that useful of a venue in general. Generally, you should think about going to conferences in the part of the world you want to have a job/live in. So, if you want to get a job in the Asian market, you need to go to conferences there. Same for Europe. If you're planning to apply in the US you could mostly go there to save money, but you should still try and go to Europe once in a while because you'll meet different people there who do things a different way than in the US. Their questions will be different, the focus is different, it's good to be aware of. If you specialize in a certain language/language family, it's good to go to dedicated conferences to meet the other specialists. Q. What happens at a conference? A. It's always a busy 2-3 days full of talks and posters. You start early, you go until late, and then you (sometimes) go out in the evening. Some drinking might take place and (once you know the right people) it's a great place to catch up on all the latest gossip. It's a great opportunity to meet famous people and make connections with other students. Remember -- these students will become your peers, you should also have relationships with them and not only with the famous professors. Peers doing similar research are likely to review your papers in years to come, they will co-organize events with you, they might invite you to their campus, etc. Even if you are an introverted person, you should spend some time in a conference talking to new people and being outside your comfort zone -- I promise it'll pay off in the long run. Q. How do I find out about conferences, how do I know which ones to apply for? A. Consult with your advisor. Check for calls for papers on the linguist list. Remember, conferences normally come in two seasons - Fall and Spring, with abstract submission deadlines a few months earlier - some time in the summer for fall conferences, and towards the end of the year for spring conferences. Plan ahead. Q. What are some good conferences? A. Here is what I can think of (mostly for syntax/semantics): The annual large conference happening at the same time as the MLA, bringing together different kinds of linguists that don't normally meet: LSA - Linguistics Society of America (first week of January) The two large US conferences, featuring all fields but recently putting more emphasis on syntax: NELS - North East Linguistic Society (October) WCCFL - West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (April) Other general conferences BLS - Berkeley Linguistics Society (February) PLC - Penn Linguistics Conference (March) CLS - Chicago Linguistics Society (April) ESSLLI - European Summer School in Logic, Language, and Information (Summer) DGfS workshops - Deutche Gesellschaft fuer Sprachwissenschaft (multiple, different topics throughout the year) Syntax: GLOW - Generative Linguistics in the Old World (April, Europe) GLOW in Asia Semantics: SuB - Sinn und Bedeutung (October, Europe) AC - Amsterdam Colloquium (December, Europe) SALT - Semantics and Linguistic Theory (May, US) Experimental syntax/semantics: CUNY - CUNY conference on human sentence processing (March, US) Linguistic Evidence (February, Europe, every other year) Cognitive Science Society (Summer, moves around) Acquisition: BUCLD - BU Conference on Language Development GALANA - Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition-North America Numerous other workshops Phonology: MFM - Manchester Phonology Meeting (May) Language group specific: FASL - Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics FAJL - Formal Approaches to Japanese Linguistics WAFL - Workshop on Altaic Formal Linguistics FASAL - Formal Approaches to South Asian Linguistics J/K - Japanese Korean Linguistics FAMLi - Formal Approaches to Mayan Linguistics ACAL - Annual Conference on African Linguistics SULA - Semantics of Under-represented Languages in the Americas (I'm sure there are others I'm forgetting!)

In my field first names are the expected norm -- I can't think of anyone who goes by anything other than first name or nickname. So as soon as people sign their name with their name (which is always), I use that name. I only use an official salutation when it's someone I've never met before. I guess this, too, could be very field specific so OP -- you should find out how they do things in your field.

If they sign the email as "Bob," you can address them as "Bob." Make sure it's not an automated signature, and if in doubt opt for being more polite rather than less.