fuzzylogician

^ Yes, it's up to your recommender to decide if they want to update the letter. If they do, either the application IT department can help update the letter, or sometimes the department will simply ask that the recommender email the updated version to them and they can update things on their end.

I'd put such a thing under Education. As long as it's clear what it is (a short stay, not a degree), all is good.

Hi there, please don't cross-post multiple times. Your other posts have been removed.

This, too, shall pass. It's a typo, not something to be gutted about. No one is going to reject your application over a typo.

I'd contact the chair and give them a heads-up that they're going to receive this email. It's an admin thing and shouldn't be a problem, but I think the chair would still appreciate understanding why this email suddenly appeared in their inbox. It can be short: "Dear Prof. Chair, I am Stu Dent, a BSW student in Program who is currently completing my applications for an MSW degree. As part of the application, School requires that I provide the email address for the chair of my program, so they can certify that I have advanced standing in the program (<or whatever, I'm not sure I actually understood what advanced standing means here>). I just wanted to give you a heads-up that I'm about to submit the application and you should be receiving this email soon. Thank you for your help and happy thanksgiving, -Stu". This is kind of generic because I'm not exactly sure I followed what needs to happen, but just tell the chair what they need to know so they're not surprised. I assume you're not the first or only student to make this request.

Definitely. But in this particular case, I think your answer is to stay away from this person and not ask him for a letter. His impact on your career should be non-existent other than to scare you with (unacceptable!) threats. (To put it in perspective, occasionally we hear of cases like this (and worse) that involve a person's direct advisor making threats or actually harming someone's career, in which case it's much harder to get away from their negative influence. In that sense, you're pretty lucky.)

But why? You have lots of other great options for letters, it sounds. How is he relevant? Department head is an administrative position. It doesn't magically make him know you better or have a more relevant opinion of you than the people who you work with directly. Either way, you get to choose who writes letters for you. There might be a red flag raised in an application if a student doesn't have their direct supervisor/advisor write for them, but no one expects that the department head is a necessary choice for a letter. (And even the aforementioned red flag can be explained away by other letters, if needed, which isn't the case here it seems to me.)

Sounds like you'd never need to even ask this person for a letter. I wouldn't. So you just need to know that he won't actively seek to harm you by reaching out to people and bad-mouthing you behind your back. That would be an unlikely and extraordinary step for someone to take, so I don't think it's something to lose sleep over. But to be on the safe side I think it's probably best to stay the hell away from this person, so they can find someone else to get pissed at. It doesn't sound like there's any kind of long-standing grudge against you, so hopefully out of sight, out of mind. At the same time, you might take this as a lesson about how situations like this one can get out of hand. What the prof did is *not* okay, but it's a potential teachable moment: when you create a written record (email) and distribute it widely, people can use it not as you intended. Conversations are often better as a first step to solving disputes like this, especially when it's not clear to me that it's your place as a grad student to instruct undergrads on what they should or shouldn't do (unless you have some official capacity that allows you to do that). It's also unfortunately often the case that the power structure of workplaces (academia included) is such that you need to pick your battles wisely and sometimes doing a little extra work is better than engaging in a fight with a superior. When you choose to criticize how someone does their job, you can expect pushback, even if you're entirely correct, so you should always factor that into your plans. This is not criticism of what you did, just a suggestion for learning from it. You can choose to pursue this problematic culture in your department, but you should do it fully aware of your position in the pecking order and how much you opinion counts. If you aren't in an obvious position to bring about change, it's worth thinking about how you can still influence things in a positive way.

What are your post-graduation plans? Will you depend on this person once you leave your program?

Again, let's please put the "Maybe's" to rest now.

You might want to specify a location where you're looking. St. George sounds like Toronto, but there might be more than one..

NASSLLI, if you're into semantics: https://www.cmu.edu/nasslli2018/ There are many more options outside of North America. The EGG, the summer school in Crete, the one in St. Petersburg, the one in the Himalayas, ESSLLI, to name a few off the top of my head. These all make an effort to keep costs down for students, but I don't know how federal aid would work.

^ In addition, it's helpful to generate all of your LOR prompts in one sitting, if possible. This may not work for all schools because some (annoyingly) will only generate the prompt after you submit the application on your end. But for those that allow it, generate all the prompts 4-6 weeks prior to the earliest deadline (or in batches, if you have deadlines ranging from early December to late January, for example), then use this as an opportunity to send another reminder: dear profs, I just generated several LOR prompts, which you should have received over the past hour. Here is the list: <school, deadline>, <school, deadline>, etc. Please let me know if you haven't received emails from any of these schools. I'll send another reminder two weeks before each deadline. Please let me know if there is any additional information I can provide to assist you in writing a strong letter on my behalf. Thank you! -me.

This is good advice. It's unfortunate that a lot of extra work falls to women, but the reality is that it does. It's incredibly helpful to train men to be allies. That is to say, those who say that they are but still don't see wrongdoing when it happens can be trained to see it by having it continuously pointed out to them, and they can be taught to speak up to correct the situation. I've done this with male colleagues and co-authors, and after a while it becomes second nature to them too. Did only men get invited to a panel? Does a syllabus only (/disproportionately) cite men? Do only men get named as examples of leading authors in X? Do men get more than their fair share of Q&As? And more from personal experience: a male co-author and I give a joint talk; all questions are addressed to him, including on things that are explicitly within my area of expertise; only he gets invited to present our joint work; only he gets emails with questions or asking for a copy of the work; people go up to him, sometimes going as far as to physically having their back to me, after the talk, to say "good job". It's easy for men not to notice a lot of this because some of it is subtle and some just doesn't happen when they're present, but when it's pointed out to them, it's clearly there. I've helped them draft replies to bring me back in to the conversation, phrase responses that point to me as the expert on X, etc. At this point, I don't even have to do it anymore. But it did take time and effort. This is harder to do with older men, but a lot of younger men are receptive to this issue. They can be incredibly helpful allies in this fight.

Hi there, this is your third post I've had to move. Please post in the GRE forum if you're posting GRE essays.

You should read up on implicit bias. It sounds like a version of that may very well be going on. It's alarming because there is research to show that letters of recommendations for female candidates are weaker than for corresponding male candidates, even if the writer isn't aware (e.g. here, but you can google for lots more). They may also get fewer opportunities, like to do with research, as you describe. (There are lots of other consequences, small and large, but perhaps less relevant here.) It's hard to know what to do about it; the best answer I know is talk about it openly as a community and take training to combat it. It doesn't fix the problem, but it reduces it and makes it manageable. It's harder when someone denies what is plain to see, but they may still benefit from a collective conversation on the hazards of not paying attention. If done, it should be at least department-wide and not targeting any particular professor (it affects everyone, regardless of gender, unfortunately). You didn't mention your field, but some fields have become very active at raising awareness of this issue. You could seek help from your field's professional society or from a local university-run organization, if one exists. No quick solutions here, I'm afraid.

You've skipped a few bits of information here. What do your program's rules say about such cases? Do students who struggle/fail/get Cs or whatever get expelled immediately? Do they get put on probation? Who is in charge of making these decisions? Have you talked to anyone other than this professor about your concerns? Do you have an academic advisor who can help you here? How are other students doing in this class? Are you the only one struggling with these exams? How about students in previous years? I'm also confused about the papers -- that is an entirely different mode of evaluation, so why are there problems there, too? Why can't you get any feedback -- that's not okay.

I'm sorry to hear about this OP, but unfortunately it's not clear that there is anything that you can do. I don't think there's going to be an easy way for you to "transfer to another similar program" because the funding sources are going to be different, and I would assume that the other program (and I'm assuming here that you have a particular one in mind) has probably committed its funding for next semester. Spring semester start dates are rarer, which doesn't help you either. Not everyone will take a new student mid-year. In any event, while the original program may feel bad for you, they have their own administrative processes and there are limitations on what they can do. I would suggest writing one of the other programs that offered you admissions to see if there is any way to change your mind and take their offer. That would leave you 6 weeks to deal with immigration and other bureaucracies, which is tight but possible. As for your I-20, you should consult with the school's international students office, but since the program is canceled, most likely you won't be able to use the I-20 and visa for this program. (Which is to say, you may or may not technically get away with it if you try to enter the US on an I-20 for a canceled program -- I don't know -- but you could get yourself into trouble doing that if you ever want another I-20 and visa for another program.) I'd be very careful here. You may need to get some help from someone local in PA putting your things in long-term storage (where I assume they might be anyway since you're away) or selling them. This really really sucks, I'm sorry. (And moderator note: I removed your other two identical posts. Please don't cross-post the same post multiple times.)

Lesson for life: When you ask someone to write you a letter, give them all the relevant information early on. That includes what programs you're applying to (names, websites, any other non-obvious information), and deadlines. Not everyone will do your work for you. Glad it's worked out.

Moderator note: It seems that this conversation has run its course. It is perhaps best to put this thread to rest at this point.

The CV is a living beast, and can change depending on the particular goal you're submitting it for. In the case of grad school applications, if you're submitting a transcript and your courses had descriptive names ("Advanced Pixie Dust Magic" rather than "Special Topics II"), then adding this information on your CV is most likely redundant. If it's adding something new that you think is useful, or if a school explicitly asks for it, you could have a short section on relevant coursework; it can't hurt, though it probably won't help much, either. I'd put it at the very end of the CV, and include the following: title, instructor, semester/year taken, content (in one sentence), textbook (if any). Basically 2-3 lines per course, no more, and formatted in a way that makes it easy to match up with your transcript. Once you're in grad school, this section should probably be removed from the CV. Alternatively, another way to handle uninformative course names is to simply mention the relevant ones in your SOP and discuss what you learned, if that's relevant and helpful in advancing your narrative, or asking a LOR writer to discuss them. Otherwise, you got good advice above: look at CVs of students in your field for clues. I'd suggest looking at junior students' CVs in addition to more advanced ones, because they will likely have similar information to convey to yours, and more advanced students may already have other goals in mind for their CVs.

Moderator note: Hi there, this board is meant for students applying to grad school. Your post is not relevant to the board. We don't help with homework, and this is not the place for discussions like the one you might be trying to generate.

Friend, you seem to be very confused about who we are and what this board is about. First off, no one here is required to comply with any demands in order to engage in a conversation with any other poster ("first find this article, then provide that link, then we'll talk", which you seem to continuously use as a canned reply). Second, this is not a trial. We are not defense attorneys. We don't even know the person you've chosen to pick on. What we are is people with some experience, and we are sharing alternative ways of interpreting facts (and perceived facts) that you have presented. Just like you are entitled to your opinion that everyone has the worst intentions at heart without providing any proof, we are entitled to present alternative possible ways things could have happened. This here is key: you just admitted that you have absolutely no standing, and you don't intend to follow up on any of your libelous claims. You've instead assumed the role of Defender of Academia. No one appointed you, and it seems to me that the people you claim to be fighting for aren't happy with what you're doing. Think about that. To conclude, you appear to be nothing more than a keyboard warrior, and one who is trying to get others to do their work for them, at that. We've continuously replied to your made-up scenarios, and you've continuously replied with the same unaware response. It seems to me like we're just all wasting our time.

I think the relevant question at this point is whether the degree itself will be helpful in getting you the job you want. Skills aside, I'm just asking about the official piece of paper. If the jobs you might want require an MA, there's something to be said for sticking it out. If not, and you're not learning what you want, then I'm less sure I see a reason to stay, especially if you're paying out of pocket. Independently, you might want to look into a way to replace the missing credits that would keep you an extra year with something else. Maybe there's some deal to be made; usually there can be some flexibility in these requirements.

It's a bit hard to know without knowing what was required of you as part of the application, but it sounds like the letter would be considered a supporting document, so it has 7 business days to be submitted past the application deadline.