fuzzylogician

Yes, it's ok to list research experiences on your CV/SOP without providing proof that they are real, and they will still count. You should be able to explain what you did in the lab with sufficient details - for example, you can talk about the problem you were working on, methods you used, any findings or outcomes, and what you learned from the experience. That should make it clear that you are not lying and it will enhance your SOP by showing exactly how you've benefited from this research experience.

At the moment I am reading articles that are related to my dissertation or that I think might give me a fresh approach to things that I am thinking about. They are either recommended by my professors, cited by other papers, or I find them through searches. It's not a huge literature so I pretty much know what I'm up against. For each paper, I... - Skim abstract, intro and conclusion. Determine how relevant the article is for what I'm doing. - Go back, skim headings and intros of sections of the paper, get familiar with what's where and decide which parts (if any) I need to read carefully. - Read text, go through proofs and data as necessary but without getting hung up on anything complicated I can't figure out. - If necessary, work through difficult parts. Throughout, if I have thoughts or comments I mark them with highlights and comments in the pdf file. I do that as the thoughts come up so I don't forget them later.

Re: length of visa, I think it's pretty standard. If your program does indeed take seven years to complete, you'll have to apply to get a new visa once your current one expires (assuming you will want to leave the US; the visa is only necessary for re-entry, not for being in good standing while inside the US). Re: multiple visas, that's perfectly fine and possible, these two visas are for two very different purposes and probably have different lengths. You have a tourist visa (to use when you enter the US as a tourist) and a student visa (to use when you enter for your studies). You just need to make sure that the immigration officer always lets you in on the correct visa every time you enter, because you are not allowed to study and stay for a long time in the US on a tourist visa. Either make sure to always give them the passport open to the student visa page or ask them about it during your short interview at border control.

If you put an idea out there, you should be aware that it's now in the public domain and anyone can pick up on it and essentially write your paper before you manage to. For that reason it may be wise to strategize about when you start presenting a new idea. If it happens to be the case that there is someone in the audience who works on the same problem as you and is familiar with the literature, you might be supplying them with precisely what they're missing to make their own theory work. In that case, they may beat you to the punch. So, someone could take your idea and run with it, but if their new paper is based on a presentation you gave and on any written materials that originated from your work, then that contribution should be cited and you be credited with coming up with the approach or proposing the idea (even if you didn't have a full theory of it at the time) or whatever else is relevant. If that is not done, you're looking at what you can call "idea stealing." If your original work was cited but then essentially someone beat you to writing the paper that would result from the idea, then that person is perfectly within their rights. It's all about how the credit to the original ideas was given. Of course it still sucks if instead of collaborating, this hypothetical audience member doesn't approach you to discuss your contribution to their work, but I suppose that's not anything out of bounds. Just kind of sneaky and someone who I would mark as a person I want to have nothing to do with. I know this is a real problem in some fields, but in mine people are happy to cite several people for coming up with basically the same idea at roughly the same time (independently). It's terrible if someone beats you to writing your own paper, so it's important to worry about this, but you also need to balance that with being out there and spreading your ideas. So it's a tough problem, but one that everyone deals with. I tend to opt to be out there and be known for saying certain things even if the papers come much later, because I believe it gives me the right image and authority so that people know to associate my ideas with my name. But yes, it is a risk that someone else will beat me to the final punch line.

I recently submitted a paper with a cover letter like the following (content anonymized):

I don't know what else you might do this summer other than teach and what this teaching position will be taking you away from, but I hardly think having teaching experience is something that will be a problem for getting jobs down the line. This will contribute to your portfolio in terms of teaching and you'll have to also make sure you have something to show for yourself in terms of research.

What information are you expecting to receive? If it makes you feel any better, I don't think our new incoming class has been contact for anything and when I was an incoming student I didn't really hear anything from my department until mid-August. There's nothing much an incoming student needs to know right now, it's early in the summer and many of the faculty are away.

I don't see why not, especially if you are looking to have connections in North America. It does make things more complicated -- you get less hands-on support from the person overseas, and having a committee member in a different time zone who needs to skype-in to your defense (assuming your university doesn't require them to be there, which complicates things even more) will make it hard to schedule a defense and have run smoothly. If you do think the advantages outweigh the disadvantages, you should consult with your advisors about who it you should invite to join your committee and you should probably also get their help approaching the person, if it's not someone you've already met.

Don't email, it's a tacky question to ask and you won't get a straight answer anyway. You have to assume that even if this professor is still actively taking on new students (unlikely), he might not be around to advise you 5-6 years from now. If he is the only reason you would be applying to this program, I'd suggest you move on. The chances that you'd able to work with him as a main advisor without any hitch or hindrance seem low and you'd be setting yourself up for all kinds of trouble if something does go wrong. Say he takes you on and you work with him, and then something happens in your first year ... do you reapply elsewhere or wait and see who is hired to replace him? Suppose there is a job search in your second year and someone is hired and starts their position in your third year but you are not a match -- then what, do you then start over? Now take this story and offset it by two years -- suppose you're already in your 3rd or 4th year when things start to go wrong. Then what? This all just sounds like a bad story I would not choose to be a part of. I would recommend for anyone to worry if there is only one person they can work with in a particular school, age or not, because things can turn bad for all kinds of reasons. In this case, however, you independently have reason to expect trouble, even if everyone has the best of intentions. My advice - don't set yourself up for trouble that way.

@aberrant: I read in that at home! We also have a couch in my office, but it's not all that comfortable.

Why not ask? Worst case scenario, you're told that there is no funding at the moment and you have to bring your own. You were going to do that anyway, so what have you got to lose? Personally, I think it's a fair request and at least in my department it's clear that it's the department's job to make sure that everyone has comfortable chairs. You only get the most comfortable ones as a more experienced student (they're left over chairs that should have only been supplied to faculty but we have some extras that get inherited by senior students as other graduate), but no one sits on plastic chairs or anything of the sort unless they choose to.

Holy mother of bad ideas, batman! The writing sample is supposed to showcase your ability to conduct meaningful research as well as your writing abilities, not to show that you can write basic code. You should submit your best paper, not some code you wrote for an intro class.

Everybody does it. It's like saying 'have a great day!' to service providers or signing your email with '(warm) regards.' It's a polite communications convention. Trust me, you wouldn't like it if everyone signed the email with what they really think about you! Don't you think you're reading too much into this?

I fail to see the problem.

1. No, don't sacrifice a good letter for a "diverse" DWIC letter. How is it diverse if the letter can't say anything particularly insightful about you? Get the best letters you can, it's fine if they're all from linguistics professors. If you got three letters from Physics professors (to pick a random field) that would be different, but we're talking about linguistics professors writing letters for (computational) linguistics grad programs -- those should be well accepted and appreciated by the adcoms. 2. No, don't mention the composition of your letters and not wanting to sacrifice quality. It's assumed that you chose your best options so anyone wondering why you didn't have a letter from a CS professor will guess that it's because it would not have been as strong as the letters you got from the ling professors.

Here are some old threads that address some of the issues you raised: and the ever-relevant advice on EVERYTHING:

- My first and second summers, I worked as a research assistant for my advisor. There was funding available and all I needed to do was be around and work on projects that are relevant for the lab. - My third summer, I worked as a research assistant for my advisor and for one other professor. Got summer funding from both. My advisor again didn't require anything out of the ordinary; the other professor had a project in Japan and I got an all-expense-paid trip to Japan to meet with collaborators. That was an awesome summer. - My fourth summer (this one), I'll be around and work on getting as much done for my dissertation research as possible. If all goes well, I'll have all of my experiments done and try and write up at least one chapter. No special funding but I'll have someone working to help me get all my work done, so I'm happy. - My fifth summer, I'll be finishing up my dissertation and hopefully moving to a new city for a job |fingers crossed|.

Re: clothing, no need to be too formal. The denim, etc. outfit sounds great, and would work better for a trip that involves walking anyway. Re: substance; First, you can definitely ask about money! Don't be shy ( now or in the future) -- it's OK to ask about money, it very directly affects your life and everybody understands that. You can ask your advisor how grad students generally feel in the program but keep in mind that as a professor he can't really tell you; instead you could ask more indirectly - e.g. has anyone recently quit without graduating (or: how many per cohort, if it's common in your field/department)? Are people generally on track for graduation as specified on the website or in the dept handbook, or are people often behind (e.g. in my program people tend to defend their papers *much* later than formally required, but they all manage to graduate on time)? If there are opportunities for research in the first year in addition to course requirements, how do people usually go about defining their first project? How long does it take people on average? Do most people continue working on these early projects in later years or do these small projects get abandoned later? When do people start attending conferences (when does your advisor recommend doing so)? How often does your advisor meet with his students? How are the teaching requirements structured? ... I'm sure you can find other questions to ask elsewhere on the forum. The best thing you can do is have a chat that flows and is comfortable, and see if your advisor provides you with relevant information and whether you need to ask leading questions. You don't need to have everything answered right now, in case you're having a good conversation but it goes off on a tangent--that's fine and even useful, so you know you two get along on a personal level. Good luck!

Both a bottle of water and flash cards or notes are perfectly natural to bring to any presentation. If the notes can help you slow down, that may be useful but hopefully as you practice more you'll also be able to pace yourself better so you won't need to actually use the notes to slow you down -- it'll be sufficient that they're there to give you confidence. If you're not doing so already, start writing down the timing for different parts of the presentation (e.g. Overview of presentation begins at 30sec mark, Part 1 at 2:30, subsection 1.2.3 at 11:00 and so on). After you get a sense of your natural pace, try and decide where in the presentation you would *like* to be at a certain point in time and then figure out how to speed up or slow down to get you there at the correct timing. Often the answer to that problem is either to decide to cover less topics, or else to cover less details within your topics. For a presentation of your thesis, it should be fine to give an overview of most of it and go into details in one specific place, or else to state up front that you're only going to discuss aspect X and Y of the thesis and that for questions Z and W the audience is referred to the paper or else they should ask you about that during the question period. A common mistake would be trying to cover *everything* because that often means you end up talking about too many details and covering too much ground, making it difficult to pick out the important contributions out of the details.

Email and ask for an extension. I've never been denied when I asked for one. Then start making changes, start with small ones so you have something to submit in four days in case you have to. Then depending on what you hear back from the organizers, try for larger changes.

Awesome, congratulations!! I'm glad this story has a happy ending

I suspect you'll have to reach out to potential schools of interest (or advisors of interest) and ask them directly. We have a student in my cohort who already has a PhD in philosophy and is now doing a second PhD in theoretical linguistics. He got in through a connection with a professor who was just starting to develop an interest in the area that this student was interested in studying. His work for his previous PhD and his current work are sufficiently distinct from each other such that there won't be any overlap in the dissertations, but I think generally this situation is quite unusual.

AW doesn't count for much in any field that has other ways of measuring an applicant's writing abilities. I bet that includes your field -- you probably have to submit a writing sample, and both that and the SOP are much better indications of your writing ability than the GRE. I wouldn't avoid retaking the GRE because your AW score might suffer. As for which grades to submit, most schools won't give you a choice -- they will either want both or the latest (normally both). Some schools will then take an average, others will take the highest score in each sections, still others will take the latest. If you're not sure, contact the schools you're applying to and ask (assuming they don't already specify on their website).

Although I think the Asher book is generally very helpful, this is one place where I disagree with his advice. By and large it's not necessary to have extraordinary backgrounds or unique life stories in order to apply and successfully get into graduate school. What should get you noticed is your interests and fit with the program, not anecdotes and stories. I would do as jmu recommends and not as Faith.Ze recommends. You can worry about finding a 'catch' phrase for your beginning once you have written the rest of the essay, or you could open with your research interests as I have often recommended in other posts. But either way, the majority of the essay should be devoted to explaining some of your background and mainly what your interests are and why you are applying to the program that you're applying to (fit). I would NOT spend too much time discussing courses, internships, challenges, relationships with anyone, etc -- UNLESS they connect to your current and future plans. You could discuss your thesis or other research experience as part of an explanation of your interests and what you hope to do in school. You really don't need to take your reader through your entire background and story of how you developed your interests (you'll be surprised how similar most "eureka" stories are). Generally, I'd say maybe 1/3 should be devoted to the past, the rest to current/future plans and discussion of fit.

I have a heading "Other Academic Experience" underneath "Education" for summer schools and language programs. I think your course could fit in a similar section. I imagine a "Skills" section should be more about what you know and less about how you came to know it, so it may not be a good choice for listing the course.