fuzzylogician

Well in that case, honestly unless you can get serious help with the funding I would probably choose not to attend the conference. Personally I've never heard of this conference, though you should ask faculty in your field who might know better (I'm in a different subfield). For admissions purposes you could have on your CV something saying 'accepted but declined' so you can specify that you were accepted into this conference, but I wouldn't keep such an entry on my CV for any other purpose. Of course, you can also have one of your recommenders mention your acceptance and explain that you declined for funding reasons, instead of having the entry on your CV. Either way, it's not completely useless even if you don't go. Good luck with your other papers!

It definitely matters. Different fields have different conventions for interpreting first, second, last, etc. (when there is no convention that authors are listed alphabetically), but I can't see any reason why you would want to be third rather than second. Normally second is perceived to have contributed more than third, though this changes some if the third (last) author is a professor. Either way, it's better for you to be second. The best way to discuss this is to just bring it up at a joint meeting; this is something you want to clarify early on so that no one is upset and disappointed down the line.

I agree with the other posters who said that not participating will only hurt you and is unlikely to help fix the situation. My best bet would be to try and "gang up" on the talkers together with your colleague who points out when things go off course. If you are able to respond to her comments seriously and steer the discussion back on track, instead of letting her comment get drowned by the other irrelevant comments, that will be appreciated by your other colleagues and professors.

Practically speaking, you'll probably need someone else to support your progress once your advisor has her baby. I'd be very straightforward about it and involve her in the process - discuss this concern with her and try and come up with a timeline and support system that will get you through the writing stages as fast as possible. This probably means involving someone else on your committee in the day-to-day advising, or taking on a second advisor. You should weigh these options together with your advisor and choose someone who you can both work with and who not only knows your work but generally agrees with your advisor about the expectations and goals for your dissertation.

Was there no space to upload a whole SOP later so you submitted without one? If so, contact the school and ask to attach a SOP to your application. They can fix this problem.

Conferences you attended but did not present at should not be on your CV (unless norms in your field are different from mine, which is worth checking). You should list all conferences you present at. Student conferences are conferences aimed only at students who have not yet earned their PhD and that is normally stated as part of the call for papers. Those conferences count as less and are normally only good to attend in your early years in a MA/PhD program; later on you should be presenting in national and international conferences.

I'd reply to the email and sign my name the way I'd like to be called. Hopefully the student will take the hint and you won't have to say anything explicitly.

Several questions. First, will you have anything else presented at a conference/published in a proceedings by the time you apply? Second, how prestigious is this conference? Will people in the field recognize it? Third, have you tried contacting the organizers to help you with the funding? you might be able to get some reduced registration fee or a subsidy, or at the very least they might be able to find someone to host you so you don't need to spend money on a hotel.

As far as I know, as soon as you are not a student you are out of status and you need to leave the US. I'm not sure if you can use any OPT (or the J-1 equivalent if one exists) if you don't graduate--but I think you can't and you are supposed to leave the country immediately or change status to another valid status (e.g. tourist). This is a question you need to clarify with the international students office at your school.

There are two major advantages to a student conference. The first is the experience you get from presenting your work in a low-stress but still formal environment. The presentation will also go on your CV but by the time you apply for jobs you should have higher scale conferences and publications than a student conference on your CV. The other advantage is networking; this will vary by university but often local professors will attend these student conferences (at least in my field) and it can be an opportunity to present your work in front of someone famous and get some useful feedback. Getting to know other students is also helpful - remember, these will be your future peers in your future job, they'll be the people reviewing your papers for journals and conferences, and they might be someone whose house you could crash at when you need a cheap place to stay when attending a conference in their area. It's always a good idea to put your name out there, especially if you can do so with minimal effort (i.e., I would not create a brand new talk for a student conference, but as a MA student and even in the first 1-2 years of a PhD program I think students can benefit from taking an existing talk and giving it at such a conference).

I'm an introvert too, but I still attend many events like you're describing. Although it's difficult, it's crucial to develop skills for dealing with these networking events (and that's what they are and what you should be using them for!). What works for me is to ask open-ended questions about the person and their work; people love to talk about themselves. Depending on our joint interests I might ask about the person's current projects or (if relevant) about where they went to school or where they live now. More often than not, they will also ask me about myself and my research and we might end up talking either about one of my projects or about a joint interest, for example a place we both lived in or a city we like to travel to. It's good to try and find easy things we can agree on and discuss, including benign topics like travel, weather, or food.

It's not morally wrong to keep them waiting as long as you are waiting. Be honest about the situation and explain that you are still waiting on other admissions decisions and funding offers, and therefore you can't make a decision about this school's offer yet. I understand the school's concern (they might be able to nominate someone else if you withdraw in time) but you've earned this great position and you should not give it up before you're ready. If you're comparing a better school that offers insufficient funding and this one, I think you should seriously consider this offer before rejecting it, and whatever you do you should not reject an offer before you know you really don't want it. Once you do know, then you should inform the school as soon as you can so that they can make arrangements accordingly -- but don't feel like you need to do it right away. If they are decent people, the professors at this school will understand the situation and not hold it against you or others from your school; this is a common problem and as long as you handle it respectfully and inform them of a decision as soon as you can, you are behaving entirely within what is considered appropriate.

MIT offers the same funding package to everyone, with a reasoning similar to that of UCSC, and will not negotiate with you. Personally, I chose MIT over another school that offered significantly more funding (much more than a 2K difference). Once it was clear that the stipend I would get from MIT would be enough to live a comfortable (student) life in Cambridge, I chose according to fit and not according to the money. Then again, I came here without a family and could afford to have the priorities that I did; I understand that others may have reasons to prioritize differently. Unlike some other advice in this thread, I'd recommend not attending the JHU interview. We're not talking about a post-acceptance open house with a chance to make some connections here, we're talking about a place that's still making decisions. Your decision to behave as if you're still a serious candidate may influence the adcom's offers and therefore seriously impact other applicants' lives (i.e., someone might get rejected who would otherwise have gotten an offer, if you weren't in the picture). If you know you're not going to attend, the honest thing to do is to withdraw your application. I did a similar thing with Brown and it was very much appreciated by the faculty. We stayed in contact and I even received advice from some of them about the options I was seriously considering. If you know JHU is out of the running, I think the fair thing to do is to let them know.

You could always email the person back and explain that you were so excited about the offer/interview that you got confused. After you put down the phone it suddenly hit you -- and of course you know who the person is and you are interested in working with him! say you're happy to talk again and pick the conversation up where you left off (maybe mention questions, if you have any). It's not at all uncommon for students to get flustered during these interviews so don't worry over much, just do your best to correct the situation as best you can.

It's totally normal and you should feel odd about asking to arrange just one trip or about getting money issues out of the way early. I did that when I was visiting schools but unlike selecttext, I was totally up front about what reimbursement I was getting from each school. I was traveling to several schools on both coasts and was coming from Europe, so flights were my main expense. I had information from each school about how much money they would reimburse and I communicated that to the other schools, so they sort of shared the costs of all the flights. Other students I met were doing the same thing, and everyone was perfectly ok with the arrangement. Since I was getting partial reimbursement from several schools for the same flight, they also allowed me to submit copies of receipts and ticket stubs rather than originals. Everyone was very practical and not offended at all, so I wouldn't worry.

I guess maybe your field is different but in mine if you get a revise and resubmit, usually you resubmit to the same journal that has already dealt with out manuscript once you're done with your revision. You don't go through the first stage of submission, get an R&R and then take your submission elsewhere - that tends to upset editors and reviewers.

Are you consulting with your professors about this? they should know what kind of journal is likely to be interested in your submission and they can help you tweak the rhetoric to best suit the audience of whatever journal you choose.

Ask the school if they will accept a third letter. Decide based on their reply.

ok, then as suggested, concentrate on your own research and lead with it. Provide just as much background as needed to understand your research question. Talk about why the question is interesting and the motivation for your research, then introduce the specifics (methodology, design) and talk about your results and their interpretation. I'd talk about other people's results and how your results fit with them at the end, or not at all (beyond what you'd need in the intro to set up the question).

Are you an undergrad presenting your own work? Who is the audience?

How is a post asking about choosing between two very good options insulting? It's no different from asking about choosing between any other two schools, and I don't buy that we can't help with that choice. Some posters on this board may attend these top schools and know about then or else we can always help with the general questions that go into making a decision. You realize that asking for help choosing between two good options is not meant to sting those who didn't make it but to help the person with these great options to choose the best one? You are discouraging people and posting definitive answers that are no more than unfounded opinions. Unless you know something about MIT CS admissions *specifically* then you can't help here. Even Usmivka, *who currently attends grad school at MIT*, is telling you she can't necessarily interpret the way CS releases their admissions information. As a fellow MIT grad (at another department), I don't know either, and I would never presume to interpret another field's results unless I had clear relevant information.

Sure, glaring holes need addressing; but do you honestly think that pointing out that some aspects of the application are more important than others is "silly" but recommending that the OP improve "everything!!" is useful advice? I've noticed you have a tendency to apply your limited experience with applications (sample size=1) and no experience with actually attending graduate school on the board without pausing to consider that different fields might work differently. If this advice is based on personal experience then take the extra 2-3 sentences and explain how your advice is relevant - what was missing in your application before (assuming your know), what things you improved and how. Do you actually know which of the aspects you improved made a difference? That would have been much more informative than suggesting that all aspects of the application are equally important and merit equal concentration, when clearly some are more important than others. All I can hope is that people who get advice on this board consider its source before they act on just anything they read.

Some of these more than others. If you have three strong LORs, you don't need 4-5. Maintain contact with the ones you have and seek out their advice about improving your application. If your GPA and GRE are good, I wouldn't worry about them either. I also would not recommend intentionally seeking out experience in fields that you are not interested in unless you can't get any other position. You'll have a hard time working this experience into your SOP in a way that flows because it'll disrupt the flow of interests/experience/future plans that your SOP should have. (though note: any experience will go a long way so take what you can if there is nothing more relevant you can do.) Spend time reworking your SOP and writing sample. If your writing sample is good enough, consider submitting it to conferences. If you can end up with a proceedings paper based on your work, you will have done much to improve your application. Maybe you should start a new project - will you be able to get faculty support next year? An independent study project with a professor will help you produce a quality paper at the end and/or go to conferences and will help generate a stronger LOR. Most of all, for a good application season it will help if you spend time first narrowing and focusing your research interests, and then get very serious about researching schools to find the ones that best fit your interests. Fit is all important! Once you have a good idea, look at CVs of early-career grad students - first and second years at most. What is on their CV? What was there when they were accepted? That's a good indication of the level of students that this department accepts, and that's what you should aim to have too. This is something you may not be able to do right now, but as soon as you feel that you have a good idea of your interests, before you do anything else I'd recommend seriously looking at schools and learning what they expect of (successful) applicant.

As others have said, you need to find out what your options are at this point. Talk to your advisor about this, and also talk to your Director of Graduate Studies (or person in a similar position). This situation must have happened in your department in the past and someone will know what your options are for resolving it. If you can't be in your current advisor's lab anymore then the next step is to find a new advisor in a closely related lab so you can keep as much as possible of your courses and projects. But before you get ahead of yourself, sit down with these people and see what they have to say.

I don't understand why you think your advisor hates you based on this correspondence. It sounds like you may be over-interpreting a legitimate criticism of your behavior as criticism of you as a person -- but nothing in your description of your conversation made it sound like there was anywhere near the level of emotion that you are attributing to your advisor. With that said, if I am interpreting the situation correctly then your advisor was not happy with something but it is most definitely not beyond repair and has not damaged your relationship much, if at all. That aside, I think in general it's not too late to change advisors at this stage in your program. If the problem with the current advisor is simply that your personalities don't match, that problem is unlikely to fix itself or go away. You could learn to get along, but not much more than that. If there is someone else in your department who is a better match for you in that sense, I think you'll get more out of your MA experience if you work with them. Another question is why your advisor thinks that you are uncommitted. Do you think you are committed, or is it indeed the case that you are not particularly excited about the thesis topic you're currently working on? Maybe the problem is with the topic and not the advisor. It's important to clarify the situation with your current advisor. Either find out why he thinks you're uncommitted or, if you know, have a frank conversation about how you could turn things around. If it's the thesis topic, inquire about changing it. You sound excited about your field so I'm assuming it's not about courses or general content, but maybe there is something there that bothers your advisor too. Work it out with him and get his advice about correcting the problem. At the same time, you could try discreetly seeking the advice of the person who said you show exceptional promise, as a potential future advisor or mentor. The most important point I want to make is not to read too much into this unpleasant interaction. Take it as an opportunity to fix whatever is not working between you and your advisor. Treat it as a professional interaction without any personal content -- which I think is all that it was.