fuzzylogician

Following up on something Dal PhDer said, I think it's very healthy to think of a PhD as a means to an end -- the end being getting a job, academic or otherwise. To that end, you may need to develop certain skills or to obtain a certain formal level of education in the form of a graduate degree. So you need to ask yourself if you need a PhD in order to obtain the skills or formal education that is required for the job you hope to get after you graduate. If so, then despite it not being ideal, since you're mid-way through your third year and past the difficult course stage (and quals?) I'd say it's worth sticking it out. If you quit, you won't try this again and you're essentially blocking off the avenues that you could go down with the PhD. It sounds to me like you're doing perfectly fine in your program - you have several ongoing projects that could produce your dissertation research and you have all the necessary skills to carry a project through to fruition. Although I understand that you would like to learn new skills, I think it may be helpful to reassess why that is so; you have a strong footing in a certain area in your lab where you can be a leader, and it appears that you are given freedom by your PI to work within those areas -- why not embrace that with both arms and run with it? You could produce a good thesis, graduate and move on quickly. Why do you need to go into new areas that you're not familiar with? That's likely to set you back in your work. Maybe it's time to zero in on the project that your dissertation is likeliest to be based on, and work on getting it to an advanced stage? I guess I'm just not sure why you have this need to go outside your comfort zone to learn new techniques at this point in your career or why you think that working within what you know is "not learning anything new," as you write.

Congrats -- this means you're a finalist or have been admitted (though that's not clear from this email). Either way, they don't offer an expense-free trip to people they are not interested in admitting so if you're not admitted yet this trip will serve to confirm that you're a match with the department and you have a very good chance of getting an offer. If previously you were trying to convince the department to accept you, recruiting events are usually structured so that the department will be courting you. The assumption is that they are going to be making you an offer and they will doing their best to convince you to accept it. This is the one time students have power in the graduate school application process - once you have several offers and are choosing which one to accept. You'll probably have meetings with professors, some events with just students or students and faculty together, you may get to sit in on classes, there may be a party or a campus tour.

Is this a program where advisors directly admit and fund their advisees? Those arrangements are not unheard of but they are kind of uncommon in linguistics. That is, normally (in US and Canadian programs) you apply to the department as a whole and identify one or more potential advisors who you end up working with. If that is the case, it's not exactly necessary to ask the POI if she are accepting new students, because usually it's clear that new admits get a choice of who they want to work with out of the existing faculty. If this is more of a lab system where the POI admits students to work with more or less directly, you need to figure out when these admissions decisions happen (maybe ask current graduate students) and plan from there. Either way, though, I think your best bet is to do some more work with this professor and after you've established a working relationship with her, ask her for advice for applying to grad schools in general and to your current school (to work with her) in particular. Given that this is only your second semester in linguistics and that you don't have clearly defined research interests at the moment, I think it's too early right now for you to get good advice on graduate schools. Wait until it makes more sense, and ask then. You'll be able to ask better questions and therefore get better answers, too.

Congrats!!

Female Science Professor has some things to say about being a woman in a STEM field.

You can just say you're excited but still waiting to hear from other schools before you can make a final decision. Any reasonable professor will understand that, they all know that students apply to multiple schools so it's not unreasonable to wait and hear from them all (or at least the few top choices) before choosing where to go.

Name recognition helps if you're looking for jobs in industry. If you are interested in an academic job there are going to be many factors that matter more than ranking, as has been pointed out above. This is all assuming that by rankings you mean a program's reputation and success within your field and not e.g. US News rankings, since those do not correspond to how well a particular graduate program trains and places its students. Moreover, not one can give you a formula of the sort you are asking for (rank #5 --> 3 first-authored papers, rank #20 --> 7 first author papers; numbers are made up and to be ignored). The important factors in choosing a school include fit, relation with advisor, resources, funding -- official rankings are a low priority.

Good luck! FWIW I only submitted one sample and did just fine. Just because you can submit three doesn't mean you have to.

The email explicitly says you were accepted...so you're accepted, not just invited for a visitation day. Congrats!

The question is not about expectation but what the job description says. At my school, a TAship is considered to be a full 20-hour a week job for international students regardless of how much time we actually end up working for the position. I'd say you should contact the professor and simply say that you've recently taken on another job and immigration regulations prohibit you from having more than one position. You can say you verified this information without specifying where so there is no need to lie and also no need to contact the international students office with a question that you already know the answer to. Apologize for not being able to take the professor up on his offer and ask for a chance to do this job next year, in case you're interested in that opportunity.

I don't have any insight except to remember to get enough sleep, even if it means you study less. Your brain needs to the time to recover. Good luck!!

I don't know about editing docs, but regarding writing samples you should ask yourself whether or not you're wasting the adcom's time. Do you really need three distinct writing samples to show your writing/research skills? Assume that someone will spend time seriously reading all of these papers (because it's true, if you're a strong applicant) -- do they all represent you equally well? Are you applying to work on the syntax/phonology interface and would like to be noticed by both kinds of faculty? Or is one paper much better and the other one(s) won't really make a good impression? You want to make the strongest case possible for your acceptance.

1. Time management: block off time in your schedule for your life activities. These may include sports, meeting up with friends, hobbies, shopping/household chores, sleep -- whatever you feel like you're not getting to because grad school has taken over your life, just actively make it a priority. It's much easier to say you're too busy to do X or can't attend activity Y if your schedule says you're busy at that time. 2. Productivity: some days (weeks?) you get more done than other days. Measure your success not just by {how much time you were in the office / how much time you actively did research}. Off-time is crucial for letting ideas simmer and develop, and you shouldn't feel ashamed if some day(s) you do less. It's also very helpful (to me) to set small tangible goals for my day (=write a paragraph on X, work on subsection Y, finish analysis of Z, read up on W). I have a detailed to-do list and I like crossing things off it. If I get my goals for the day done early, I might keep going but I may also decide I've done enough to stop even if it's still early and I could do more. You can always do more. If you live by that rule, you'll always be frustrated with your performance. 3. Learn to say no!. It's a useful skill. Some things you don't have a choice but to do, but for other things make it a habit to never reply on the spot. Acknowledge the request and say "let me get back to you tomorrow" or "let me check something in my schedule and I'll have an answer for you then." Then look at your schedule; do you have time for this commitment? Do you want to do it? Is it beneficial for you? Don't take on more than you can handle. 4. Develop relationships with multiple professors and advanced students. You can use the advice and perspective they have, even if their research is not precisely in your area of expertise. The students will know all the little unwritten rules and secrets of the program. The professors, especially the more experienced ones, will be able to judge your progress compared to a broad range of people who graduated in the past. 5. Make friends with the staff. In some ways they have more power over your life than your advisor.

There are some recommendations here:

I assume it's the departments that contacted you? and presumably the delay at the graduate school admissions office? If so, ask the departments if they'll accept an emailed copy of the letter in the meanwhile so their deliberations are not stalled while they wait for the hard copies to arrive from the graduate school. It shouldn't be hard for your recommenders to email a letter they must already have completed and on file.

I think I could get travel funding from my university; it would come out of the same funding students are allocated for conference/fieldwork travel. Normally it's possible to used that money to get accommodations reimbursed, too. Mind you, I asked around two years ago but ended up not going, and I'm also not going now, so I could be mistaken.

Answering my own question, for future reference. It took another month - I finally got a "pre-award" letter last week. The letter includes the panel's reviews and its recommendation, and now I need to submit a reply to the reviews and make some small changes to my application. Once I do that I will be officially approved; the start date on my app was changed to March 1 but I can get reimbursed for any expenses incurred up to 90 days earlier. Contacting the applicant with the unofficial decision is apparently not uncommon (at least in linguistics) - I recently learned at a conference that it also happened to other people who got the DDIG in the past ~5 years or so.

Guys, I'm not trying to blame anyone of anything, and girl who wears glasses - I'm sorry there was an event of down-voting that made you feel uneasy. We don't always happen to be around when such events happen and normally we try and keep out of such incidents if the posters seem to be calming down on their own. The board went a little bit crazy over the past two days in other places as well - I don't understand why exactly - but I hope that's all behind us now. All I am saying is I hope this thread can go back to discussing the topic it was started for, instead of the quite unproductive back-and-forth of the previous couple of days that wasn't making anyone feel particularly good.

It means the department has decided to accept you. Now your acceptance has to be approved by the graduate school at the university; they almost always approve the departments' decisions. The only way you could run into trouble is if you don't meet the general university minimum requirements for acceptance (e.g. very low TOEFL or GPA), in which case the graduate school may object and your program may have to fight for you. I can think of maybe one or two such cases that ended up in an offer being rescinded since I started posting on the gradcafe. So, congrats, you're in!

Unlocking this thread. I hope yesterday's madness is over. The other thread will stay locked, for now.

This thread, too, is now temporary locked until we assess what to do with this.

Guys, I don't mean to interfere in your discussion but I think there's a little bit of a gang-up mentality going on in the up- and down-voting in some recent posts. I understand that these issues can be personal and people get quite emotional, but I think several posts have used words that are stronger than necessary. I don't mean to tell you what to write, but please remember that there are people on the other end reading what you write who take things just as seriously and personally as you do. It's easy to misconstrue tone and intentions on a written forum like this. I truly believe that everyone here is well-intentioned, and I hope that we can go back to being the supportive community that we all try to be.

My understanding is that the source for the "different schools" preference is the belief that you should be exposed to different researchers, environments, theories, etc during your training. Having all your education completed in the same department limits that exposure, and (also depending on your research profile) might lead people to think that you are uni-dimensional or limited in your knowledge as it applies to the field at large. At the end of the day, you're going to graduate from some program and will most likely be employed by some other program. People on job search committees will want to hire a colleague who's been exposed to multiple ways of thinking and doing research, and can converse with all kinds of peers. If you attended a completely different program as an undergrad than as a graduate student, even though the two programs are in the same school I would think that this worry would be diminished -- but of course some old fart on a search committee might still wrinkle their nose at your "academic insect." Not much you can do about that, except show a breadth as well as depth of knowledge, same as everyone else should.

You should just ask. Sometimes (always, in my field) you need to make your own travel arrangements and the department will reimburse you later - usually a few weeks after the trip since they want to see receipts and boarding passes for every expense you're claiming. In other cases (including yours, from the wording of the email you quoted), the department will make the travel arrangements and hotel booking itself, and in that case nothing will come out of your pocket at any point. You should contact the program advisor and ask how the arrangements are going to be made. If they describe the former method rather than the latter, explain your difficulty and ask for help solving the problem.

Please don't post the same question in multiple (unrelated) subforums. If you worry that the venue is not legitimate, remove the publication and don't put it on your CV.