fuzzylogician

OP: I don't think there's a need to suffer through an annoying undergrad course just to prove that you can do it, and I don't understand ANDS's criticism of your question. The important question is how likely is this eventuality that you be put on academic probation. Suffering through an annoying course definitely beats risking your standing in your program.

Well, think about where the articulators would have to physically be in order to produce these sounds.

I wouldn't count on it. To get reimbursed I always had to submit proof of expenses, including original ticket stubs and receipts. That aside, it's entirely unclear to me why you would expect a school to cover the cost of your canceled flight and decision to attend another school.

Indeed you don't need to be published to present but I think risingstar has it right - it's not always that important to present in your early years in a PhD program. Ask your supervisor or more advanced students in your program. In my field I wouldn't advise anyone to get too concerned before their third year, but then it'd be a good time to start presenting some serious project at conferences.

1. JH and Brown are more cognitive science/psych leaning, the others more theoretical linguistics leaning. Personally I'd prefer one of the latter, because I think these theoretical-leaning schools have good experimental people and can better support you than going the psych route where getting support for theoretical work is more difficult. 2. You are asking the wrong question. If you want a research based academic job, you'll get hired based on your work, not based on the school you're from. I can't put myself in your shoes because I don't know what kind of work you do. You need to find a place with an advisor who you get along with and who can push you in the right directions. Whether your personalities match is a very personal question, and people who I get along with may not be people you get along with. My advice is to talk (on skype or phone) with these potential advisors and try and assess your connection. You can usually get a good idea of whether or not you get along from a short conversation.

I would not bring it up because it is not going to be relevant during the interviews. Later in, once you have an offer, you could try playing one school's offer against the other by trying to have them match each other׳s offers. That rarely works in linguistics, as far as I know, but may still be worth a shot.

Well I'm not a phonologist but if I were applying to schools with the concentrations you listed, I think I would have had a completely different list of schools and set of favorites. Your description of your interests and top choices is honestly confusing me quite a bit. There are several leading schools in the fields you mention that are not on your list, and on the other hand there are some schools on your list that probably don't need to be there. That not withstanding, the schools you listed are good and there is no clear "placement ranking" of the kind you are looking for. In addition, all schools tend to provide students with enough funding to support a single person, but a couple is more difficult. The details of the offers you have could make a big difference here. You can't (and shouldn't) make a decision until you have all the offers in hand, otherwise you are missing crucial information. I think your post is premature. You should wait until you have all the information you need -- that is, all the funding offers you can get -- or else it's hard to make a good decision. Two additional thoughts: if your wife is applying to grad school, you should look at places where she can go to a decent school, not just at places that are good for you alone. In addition, if you get a J-1 visa then your wife will get a J-2 and will be able to get a work permit. I'm not saying it'll be easy (or even possible) for her to find a job, but it's not completely out of the question the way you put it.

What are the priorities here? What are your research interests? What will your spouse be doing - working or staying at home (i.e., are you looking for a place where there are job opportunities for your spouse)? What kind of funding are you being offered? Does weather play a role in the decision? A number of the schools you list have a very good placement record but it also depends on what you do, and where you hope to end up.

Two weeks is still plenty of time; some of my recommenders submitted their letter at the last hour before the deadline. Some recommenders only submit after the deadline and it still almost always works out. The worrisome fact is that your LOR writer is not responding to your emails -- is there a chance you can corner him someplace on campus and ask for an update? As for a replacement, two weeks is enough time but you should ask sooner rather than later. I think most professors submit letters in one batch some time close to the deadline but you can't know what else this professor has going on and you want to give him as much time as possible. Personally I would tell the recommender that he's a backup; you and he probably both know that he can write you a decent but not glowing letter or you would have asked him in the first place, so I don't think he will be offended to find out that you had other better options. I think it's better to be honest about the situation than come across as a flaky student who only asks for a letter at the last moment -- unless you sense a very fragile ego, in which case I might reevaluate my steps and tread carefully.

Yeah, I didn't know about the letter thing either until someone posted some studies in that conversation, then people who sit on job search committees started talking about how/whether they adjust their reading of letters for female vs. male applicants. That too was illuminating. I should point out that the three jobs above are for very good programs; in my own department there is a clear male majority among faculty - the last 5 or 6 hires were male - but they become quite offended if you suggest gender played a role in the selection. Among the cohorts, I am the only woman in mine but another one has only one man. Overall it's about 50-50, but as you point out, if we look at race/ethnicity then things will get very skewed very fast again. On the bright side, several women who graduated from my department in the past few cohorts have done very well on the job market, so I am drawing my optimism from there.

Oh please replace the current opening paragraph. You don't need a hook or story. A much better approach is straight and to the point, as was suggested by several posters above, e.g. "I am applying to school X to study degree Y. My main interests are Z and W." You need to lead with your main interests, pick and choose the parts of your background that are relevant to these interests instead of reporting your transcript in prose form, and spend much more time talking about your current and future plans. Get rid of paragraphs 2 and 6, and the other paragraphs need a lot of work, as was also pointed out.

Although there are quite a few women in my field, female representation at the faculty level has recently become a hot topic of debate among several of my colleagues (professors) on facebook. Here is the post that initiated the debate:* This sparked a lively debate about the close to even ratio of male/female presenters at recent conferences yet uneven number of shortlisted women finalists, and a comparison of letters of recommendations written for male and female job applicants. It's been ... enlightening. Personally I don't sense any overt discrimination, despite the fact that I happen to work in a mostly male subfield and have mostly male collaborators. Yet subtle discrimination of the sort that may make it hard for me to get a job after I graduate isn't any better -- how do you even begin to fight against such a phenomenon? The professor who initiated this debate is doing so by collecting numbers and publishing them in the hopes of shaming people into acknowledging their biases, and I think it's working. At least, it's getting people's conscious attention and that may help with their unconscious behaviors. *Note: as everyone agrees, this sample size is too small to draw definitive conclusions...but it is suggestive.

I understand and I wasn't trying to blame you of anything. I was very serious when I proposed you meet with your advisor to talk about your expectations of each other (this should have been long ago, but better late than never!). Different advisors have different expectations and this one clearly knows what he wants. Find out what it is -- either by asking other grads about their day-to-day interactions with him, or better, by going to the source.

Maybe you should have a chat with some grad students and professors about the value of a good idea. You can't do all those other things you listed, nor get funded to even get started, without a good research idea. OK, now we're getting somewhere, but you're still aiming way too high and broad. What are the requirements for this course? Do you have to actually implement the study and get analyzable results before the end of the semester? If so then interviewing inmates is completely off the table, you might not even get your IRB approved before the semester ends, let alone collect enough data. For that time frame a questionnaire is much more feasible. If all you need is to propose an experiment then I go back to asking how us giving you an idea isn't doing your homework for you. If you can come up with a clearly defined idea, the design will often be dictated by the idea.

Sounds like your advisor would like to be more hands on than you are letting him be. Despite the difficulty, this big-name professor is inviting you to learn from his expertise by meeting with him (more) regularly and getting his advice. You need to learn to get over your shyness and take advantage of this, or you'll find out soon enough that your professor doesn't trust you and/or doesn't think he knows your work well enough, and that will hurt the letters you could get from him when you graduate. Going over his head to your committee also doesn't help -- you need to give him time to comment on your work and you need to start approving plans with him. This sounds like a pretty typical expectation of a new PhD student; maybe you need to have a chat with your advisor to coordinate your expectations of each other.

So you want us to do your homework for you?

You could mention attending X university next year, assuming you've officially decided to go there (you don't want someone finding out you are accepting/declining an admissions offer through your fellowship application). I doubt that you could get travel funding from the university, however, because you are not a registered student there at the moment. You might be able to apply for reimbursement in the fall, once you're officially a full-time student, but honestly it's odd to ask a school to reimburse expenses you incurred before you started attending that school; I'd ask around discreetly before making an official request.

I don't know about the former question but I think the latter is perfectly fine. If it's in your city I would actually recommend doing everything face to face - get a meeting to talk about your interests, and ask about RA possibilities then. It will help increase your chances of getting hired if the professor knows you and your work, so you may want to either give the professor a paper of yours to read or else discuss your interests with them at a meeting. Once you've established yourself as a serious student and mentioned your PhD plans, you should have an easier time getting serious attention from the professor when it comes to research opportunities.

I've never expected anything more than a thank you from the students I host, but I have occasionally gotten some small gifts like coffee, chocolates or a bookmark from a student's home country/city and that's also great. It's also nice to know what someone I hosted decided to do, just because I'm that kind of curious.

What Usmivka said, except the "not science" remark -- that kind of attitude sometimes rubs me the wrong way. If you can find a way to have colleague #1 fix what they broke, that's best. Saying that there's just not enough for Colleague #2 to do right now might be the best option, and I don't think you need to worry about finding a replacement project for Colleague #2.

To answer your other question, statistics and computational methods could be extremely useful if you ever want to do experimental work, corpus studies or simulations/modeling/learnability. I'd definitely look into that in addition to Tanner's suggestions, and once you've taken funchaku's advice and really spent the time to be sure that you want to study linguistics. From the way it sounds now, while you're enthusiastic it's premature to decide you want a graduate degree and/or a career in linguistics. Take the time to learn what modern linguistics is all about, then you can make an informed decision. Good luck!

For big departments in Europe, here is what I know: In Germany, I have worked with researchers at the Humboldt university in Berlin and at Potsdam university, as well as with researchers at ZAS in Berlin. There are great people working on syntax/semantics in all of those places (I know less about phonology). There is great work being done in Tuebingen as well. In the Netherlands: check out Amsterdam, Leiden, Utrecht. In the UK: Edinburgh, UCL. In Norway: Tromso.

*hugs* Take time to recover, but then schedule a meeting with your Director of Graduate Studies or the department chair. Try and negotiate a way to continue your Masters degree, perhaps with a different advisor. If that is an option that is on the books in your department, you have the right to try and make it work for you and hopefully there will be people in your program who will understand and agree to help you. Honestly, what your advisor did sounds completely out of order. Your reasons for wanting to switch programs are perfectly legitimate and you shouldn't have to apologize for them; a change in interests in no one's fault, and bad fit to begin with (if that was the case) is a bad decision on both sides, not just yours. I agree that getting a letter from this person now could be a problem, so you need to concentrate on finding replacements (like the DGS, dept. chair or other professors). All is not lost just because of this one bad interaction!

I think the tourist visa is perfectly fine for visiting schools. It's what I used for admissions visits and I didn't have any trouble going through border control. Just make sure you don't make it sound like you're there to work or to study - that's not what the visa is for, and maybe that's what the people you mentioned said (or how their explanations were interpreted). Traveling to different cities in order to visit graduate programs you've been admitted to for graduate school is allowed under the visa, and if you print out some acceptance/invitation letters indicating your itinerary and have a return flight back home a reasonable time after your last visit ends (which you should only show if asked!), I don't see why there should be any problems.

Indeed, a peer-reviewed publication in a respected journal is normally the holy grail (not counting fields like Computer Science, where the most prestigious publications are conference proceedings and fields like history where it's books). On the other hand, it's not necessarily the case that you have to be concerned about a conference that publishes all of the papers that were presented in it. That's the standard in linguistics, and the proceedings of the two large national conferences and most prestigious subfield ones are definitely highly regarded and well-cited, even though the papers are not peer-reviewed (only the abstracts are). So a journal publication of the same material is desired, but having a paper in these proceedings is absolutely nothing to be worried about. Bottom line: find out about the status of the conference/proceedings you are talking about, don't take the very general advice you get here. Publications are one area where different fields (and even subfields) can have widely different conventions.