fuzzylogician

Agreed, staying for a PhD when you are no longer interested in the degree is a bad idea. You need to do what is good for you, not your advisor. Sounds like you and your advisor have a great relationship -- if so, you could bring this question up and ask for his advice on switching to the MS in the least damaging way to his tenure process (e.g. maybe it's better if you switch at the end of the year instead of in the middle, or before the faculty meet to have a students progress meeting, or whatnot. It's possible that it makes a difference for obscure administrative reasons that you would not know about). Also, as has been pointed out, you will still likely be sought out to write a letter for your advisor some time next year, and in it you can explain the reasons to caused you to switch degrees and be very positive about your advisor. One thing you could do to make sure you are asked to provide a letter is to talk to the department head and explain that you are switching for unrelated reasons but are interested in supporting your advisor through his tenure case; that way, hopefully when the time comes for your department to assemble his case, they will think of you as someone who will write a strong letter. This is something that your advisor will not be involved with directly (this part of his case will be created by the department, not him) so you want to make the people who will be in charge aware of this.

Here are some previous discussions of this question:

I'm sorry I can't do that. I've never been to med school and I don't know anyone who has (in the US).

What about funding at the London school - has that been decided? I know that sometimes takes longer and is not necessarily guaranteed, and it's definitely something that should factor heavily into your decision. As suggested, you can contact the other schools to ask where the decision process stands and see if you can't get anything out of them. If you have to wait a while longer, ask the London school for more time; I'm sure this happens all the time and they must understand your predicament. Unless you're absolutely sure the London school is your #1 choice (and that it can fund you!), I think it's important to wait for the other decisions.

Yes, visit both. First of all, your impression might change following the visit--that has definitely been known to happen in the past. Second, you should use the opportunity to make connections at the school you will not be attending. Use the visits to get to know people at both schools and keep and open mind - even if you end up not changing your mind, what have you got to lose?

Several schools are having Open House or interviews in the next week or two; there will probably be a wave of decisions that will free up some waitlists, but you may have to wait a little bit longer before you know.

My experience, which I've also shared in other threads, is that you have time exactly and only for those things that you find important. It's easy to get sucked into the work and occasionally indeed there are pressing deadlines and you need to work crazy hours. But on a regular basis, you structure your own time and schedule your own events. If downtime with your family and friends are important to you, you'll have time for them. If you neglect them, on the other hand, you might end up not seeing them at all. Same goes for hobbies, sleep, chores, volunteer work, trips and any other activities - you often need to be active in making those things a priority, but if you do then there is no reason why you can't have a good balance between your work and other aspects of your life.

As of this morning, my grant is officially Awarded! (application submitted July 15. Beat the Sequestration by one day!)

I guess you can't know for sure but if you're asking in person (e.g. on skype/phone) there is no record of what people actually said and they shouldn't worry. Even over email I can't really see what the concern would be -- when we're talking about concrete things like whether or not the funding suffices to live relatively confortably; it may be different if you're asking about professors, there I might hesitate to say bad things about my professors to someone I've never met -- but I still think for money people will be much more upfront and, again, if you ask questions like the ones I suggested I think you'll get honest answers. You could additionally ask about the cost of living - don't ask people how much they spend but instead what they think is reasonable to spend on rent/groceries/transportation/health/other in their region. If you get a few different opinions and compare that to the funding you'll get, that again is a good indication of how people are doing. You can also look up ads to see what the rent is like in the area to see if what you've been told sounds reasonable. It's hard to imagine people ganging up to give you misinformation to make you come to their school.

There is no way to answer your questions. You really need to wait and see what the funding situation is before you can make a decision. But assuming you get no funding, whether or not a Masters from that program helps students get into good PhD programs is something that the program should be able to tell you about. The success of PhD students from that program is also something they should know about, but it's a bit trickier - success on the job market depends on a list of factors, the school's ranking being quite low on that list. Either way, though, you can do some of your own legwork to learn what recent graduates from this program are doing now (both MA and PhD graduates) and you can also ask the program itself about placement. They'll have at least some information for you, perhaps only anecdotal but probably still helpful.

Ask the school to put you in touch with current students and ask them how they get by on the stipend they receive. Students tend to be very forthcoming and I think you'll learn a lot from their replies. You could ask where they tend to live, whether or not they can save some money from their stipend, and if they are generally happy with the amount they receive. Also ask if people tend to get a job over the summer or if there are additional funding options that many grad students take advantage of (e.g. additional teaching, as was mentioned). You should do that with every school that has accepted you, and once you have all the decisions and information, you'll be in a better position to make a choice.

Is the money you'll get from school A enough to live off of? If not, it's a no brainer for me. Go with the offer that pays you enough to make ends meet. If it is enough to live a comfortable (student) life, the fit question comes into play; personally, when I was faced with a similar choice, I chose the fit over the money. However, if the two choices are very close in terms of fit, the ability to live more comfortably will make your life in the program much easier in future years, and it's worth serious consideration. Sounds to me like you need to learn more about program B; talk to potential advisors and find out whether or not you get along. To me, that should be the factor that determines your choice.

I wouldn't read too much into either email. The first one sounds like a routine email checking that all your documents are in order and was probably sent before anyone actually reviewed your file; the second one is telling you the process is still ongoing and there is no decision in your case -- perhaps there is an unofficial waitlist but it's also possible that only the first round of acceptances (to "definitely accept" applicants) went out and they're waiting with the second round of decisions (for the "maybe" pile).

You know the conventions of your field better than I do. I can think of exactly one person in my cohort who still works on something that is a direct continuation of the work he came into our department with. The others have mostly stayed within their (general) specializations but are working on completely different problems than the ones they worked on before they started their PhDs. This is not unusual. So yes, I've worked in the same general field for close to 10 years now, but I work on very different questions and use different methodologies than I did before I started my PhD program. These things develop organically and I think it's hard to plan for them before you've even applied to programs. You may think you know exactly what you want to study 5-7 years from now, and that may turn out to be true, but it's likelier that something will change (region, methodology, questions, interests), and you can't plan for that now -- certainly not at the level of thesis chapters like you were asking about.

Shouldn't you apply to school before you start sketching chapters in your thesis? Seriously, you are worrying about (non-)issues that will not even be relevant until 5 or so years from now. At the end of the PhD process, if you are successful, you'll be the expert in whatever you do; it'll probably be a small problem that you work on and solve, but you want to make it relevant to a larger audience by having the means to expand your research to some neighboring issue (tools, methodology, theory, question, whatever). So you want something focused but expandable.

Please don't cross-post so many times. I've kept the post here since it seems most relevant but let me know if you'd like me to move it to another forum. I think equating success with getting published is simplistic and wrong. I don't know if there are any statistics about your specific question but you can look around for many threads about how many graduates end up with a job in academia -- which in many senses is a better marker for success and also requires having been published.

Well, the best proactive way to solve this problem (that I can come up with) is helping them learn the English terms, and maybe in the process you can also learn some terms in the other language. If you otherwise know the language, simply start writing down terms you don't understand or that you think your colleagues don't know. Find out what they mean, tell them. Rinse, repeat. You probably want to declare that you are doing this and explain it as an effort to improve communication in the lab, and you may want to get your advisor's support in doing this. If spun in a positive light (you want to understand them better, be able to participate more, whatever) then hopefully no one will be offended by you "teaching" them English or them having to teach you basic words in the other language. With your advisor's help, they may also understand that it's important for them to know the English terms if they want to be part of the larger scientific community beyond their lab. But probably part of making this work would involve you learning some of the language they are using, because taking a step in their direction is helpful when you are asking them to take one in your direction. (ignoring discussions of what happens when some people in the lab don't speak the other language at all, and the appropriateness of using other languages in such settings -- concentrating on a low-level solution only. It's hard to stop people who share a language from using it.)

I agree with the other posters. If the goal is to get 'life experience' you could develop a project, with the clear understanding that it may not go anywhere once you start grad school. Studying up on a research question is never useless, but doing so alone before you are in school and working with an advisor is very limiting. As nicolemc correctly points out, doing any kind of study involving human subjects without an IRB approval is a bad idea - that data can never be used and/or published. The most you could probably get out of this exercise is a well-defined question and a better understanding of your research interests. That is extremely important, but it's less obvious that you'll have a written product you could use later on. I'd say a better way to get experience and hone your skills and interests is to get a research assistantship, if you have the option. It'll not only help with your research but also produce a strong letter for your application.

Technically? probably yes. Ethically and professionally? you might be shooting yourself in the foot. The professors you will have led on for no reason will remember you for all the wrong reasons. The best way to go about doing this kind of move is to let the school know you're deferring early on so you're not causing them to lose a spot in this year's cohort, and also be very careful about how and when you notify them the following year. But generally, having this plan from the get go sounds like a bad idea that is likely to backfire and have unwanted repercussions.

You'll forgive me if I don't share details. My identity is not private on this site so it'd be too easy to identify who I am talking about. However, I can tell you that these things sometimes happen for no nefarious reason, for example in my subfield experimental work is a very recent thing so there are no clear conventions. People make things up as they go along and that sometimes leads to misunderstandings. In addition sometimes people do have nefarious reasons - for example you hear of advisors who are up for tenure taking over a student's paper, or an advisor giving a paper to an older student who will soon be on the job market even though a younger student did the majority of the work (you can look up such posts on the grad cafe). Sometimes two or more people contributed enough to potentially be first and then you want to sit down and decide who takes on the rest of the work and becomes first - but it's possible that both people want it. As Dal PhDer says, it's not always clear what contribution merits authorship and also what is considered "most important" or "first author worthy."

I don't know who in my program was waitlisted and who was accepted straight away (though I know some in my cohort came off the waitlist). Who cares -- we're all colleagues. For the professor too - you need to make a choice somehow and everyone knows that good applicants get on waiting lists and are also sometimes rejected. No one will think less of you because you were on a waitlist, certainly not the professor. You prove yourself once you're there, and that's all that matters.

You live in the world I would like to live in, but for me and Dal PhDer and for others in the writing forum whose posts you can easily look up - and I suspect for the OP as well - the world is more complicated. Sometimes it's not as clear who gets first/second for all kinds of reasons, sometimes you think it's perfectly clear and someone else has their own agenda. There are politics involved with collaborations and you need to handle them in a smart way. That normally includes figuring out authorship very clearly and explicitly, and early on. It should not include making unilateral decisions which may backfire, like trying to dictate to colleagues and supervisors how you think the world should be (even if you're right!). I've personally witnessed cases where more than one person truly believed they should be first and the situation got out of hand because one person just put themselves first without asking; there should be a discussion and if indeed it's as clear cut as you say then everyone should agree, no problems. But sometimes it's not that simple, and those cases are better preempted as early as possible.

Different fields have different conventions for what merits authorship and how the order is determined but I highly doubt it's acceptable in any field to unilaterally put your name first without bringing the matter up for discussion.

I have a prepaid plan with some money loaded on my phone. I hardly ever use the phone, I'm almost always in an area where there is wifi and I can use skype, IM or email for my communication needs. But I like having the phone, just in case.

You need to decide on authorship so the work can be distributed accordingly. It's a bad idea to do a lot of work and then try and do book-keeping of sorts to see who did more - that almost guarantees that someone will get upset. Honestly if it was your idea and you're the one with the initiative on this project, I think you should be first author. Even if it's already implicitly (or explicitly?) clear that your advisor will be first, you should bring up authorship very soon and sort things out. Don't think of it as sounding greedy or whiny but rather as being assertive and taking charge of the project. You need to take care of your own CV - no one else will - and if this is something you initiated and you are a lead person on, then you want to communicate what you think is your status in this project and ask for the recognition that comes with it. Together with that comes varying amounts of responsibility - e.g. if you are first author then you will likely be expected to write the draft of the paper, with input from the others. If you are second or third you may only be contributing to one aspect of the paper, for example the design of an experiment or an analysis, or you may have come up with the original idea but not done a lot of the work developing it into a full-fledged project. It depends on many factors and you should work it out sooner rather than later, and preferably as a collaboration with everyone rather than having it decreed by the first author without the explicit agreement of other project members.