fuzzylogician

Both of those remarks you got are true. On the one hand, your success will be *very* important for your advisor so he'll invest more in you than other advisors would. He might also expect a high work pace and results pretty early, because his productivity will highly depend on yours, so you could end your PhD with a higher-than-usual publication rate. On the other hand, as a new advisor, he doesn't have a placement record and he may (will!) make rookie mistakes in advising occasionally. So it's more of a gamble than having a more established advisor - with greater risks and potentially greater rewards. One good way of solving at least some of the potential problems that could arise from this advisor's inexperience is to have a second advisor/mentor who would also be involved in your education. You could use this person's experience and connections to resolve conflicts and to have better chances at the job market. Is that an option for you - is there a second person at the school who could fill this role?

Look, only you know your advisor and the situation, and therefore you're the only one who can assess what will happen if you push back. He could take it well, or he could insist on his position and then you'll have a decision to make about what you do next. It's important to know what his motivation is for changing authorship (are you completely sure it's him who changed it?). Does he think he deserves it or is there another legitimate (from his point of view) reason? If there is none and he is being an a**hole, do you want to / have to continue working with him? I have experience with similar situations that I don't want to share here because I'm not really anonymous on this site but my conclusion is that yes, some people may "like" you less because you're not the quiet girl they can push around and take advantage of -- but they will respect you more. I've learned to give credit when it's due and also to demand it when it's due, too.

Honestly, I don't like this solution very much. It's one step removed from not doing anything at all, but it's not much better. The way you really want this to go is that you tell your advisor you want to be put back as first author and ask him and all your other co-authors to approve this. I understand that it requires some confrontation and that it may be difficult for you, but I think you're treading into dangerous ground by just changing authorship without asking -- it's not your place and you don't have the authority. If you do that, you may enter into a power struggle with your advisor and let me assure you - you will lose. Even if you're fully justified in that you should be first, you can't just change authorship on a paper unilaterally. It should be done with everyone's agreement - you can explain why you should be first, what was promised to you, what you did, that your advisor agreed previously, etc. But decisions are made together. If despite promises and fairness, your advisor insists on essentially not giving you due credit on your work, you need to be prepared and consider your next step. You can fully expect this problem to repeat itself, and if you can't fix it now maybe you just need to cut your losses and find someone to work with how will help you advance your career in an appropriate way. ETA: I just reread the post and realized it sounds kind of harsh. My take on this situation is that your advisor is "testing" you. You need to push back and not let him get away with this. My guess is that he'll respect you more and stop trying to mess with you (at least temporarily), if you do.

This may be more relevant for the Humanities and Social Sciences, but my best advice is that you should only get a PhD if cannot see yourself doing anything that doesn't involve getting one. If there are other occupations that you can pursue that would make you happy -- do that! A PhD is a long and grueling process, it takes about 4-6 years to complete (even more in the Humanities). These are years in which you dedicate yourself to studying one very small corner of one very small specialization instead of working and gathering actual on-the-job experience. You earn much less than you would in a normal job that you could get with just a BA or Masters, and the PhD makes you overqualified for most of the jobs that are out there on the market today. What's worse, after you graduate with your PhD, your chances of finding a job range for bad to terrible. A job in academia may require taking on a heavy teaching load in a middle-of-no-where university and takes years before you have job security (=tenure). So, you should only get a PhD if you think the experience alone is worth it - even if 5 years later you won't get a job that requires your skills (in academia or research) and you won't mind the 5 years' loss of earning potential and experience, as well as the potential difficulty of obtaining a job because of over-qualification.

lewin00 nailed it. Just to be extra clear: The project that you are on doesn't depend on your membership in it, and you should stop acting like it is. The idea was conceptualized without you, and the money to fund it (and you!) was obtained before you arrived, too. I imagine the PI was hoping that you could help design an experiment and run it within the 10 weeks of the internship, with the help of current lab members. It's a shame that the graduate student who was in charge of you had to leave and I can see how that would set things back, but I don't understand why you think the project should stop. 10 weeks are a very short time to design and fully run an experiment. It would be more beneficial for you to think of your internship as a learning experience about how labs work instead of just having the narrow view of this one portion of this one experiment in one project. You got a peek into how labs are organized and what the process of designing and running one study from an existing idea looks like. There are many remaining stages to the project - analyzing the results, possibly re-designing and re-running the experiment (because often first runs of experiments have problems that you would like to control for), fitting the results within the larger project, designing and running other experiments to help interpret the results you have, presenting, publishing, developing the next stage of the project based on given results. Clearly, that all doesn't happen in 10 weeks (not even in 10 months usually) and you have a lot to learn. Regarding your poster, what is it for? Is it for a conference (what size)? For an internal or internship-related event? You don't put a lit-review on a conference poster, and for a smaller event I don't see a reason not to put preliminary results along with a discussion of the design, the implications of what you have and plans for the next step. There could be some lit review but it'd be a shame to make it seem like that is the only thing you did and learned in 10 weeks! So, you should adjust your attitude and your expectations. Note: we are being harsh because we are trying to keep you from overestimating your role in the project. If you go to your PI and start making suggestions like you were making above, your PI may get upset at you. You shouldn't burn bridges with this PI, even if you don't want to continue working in her lab. You may need LORs from her, and besides it sounds like she was trying to give you the best learning experience for your 10 weeks that she could. Either way, you should know your place in the project and act accordingly.

Dal PhDer, maybe there is still a way you can fix this, but it depends on how much you are wiling to fight. Are you actively working on this draft now? One thing to do, next time you are looking at it with your advisor (or it comes back to you with someone's comments) is simply bring the issue up again and say something along the lines of - I think I should be first author and you said in our last meeting that you were not the one who changed the order - so I would like it to go back to the way it was. One comment I got on my fellowship app was that I needed more first-authored papers, and I was counting on this being one of them. Is that ok with you? That is, be very direct about what you want, and point out that he essentially agreed with your position in your previous conversation. I cannot stress this enough - if you don't stand up for yourself, this will happen again.

If you meet the requirements most likely your offer will not be rescinded. The average requirement you stated sounds like something the graduate school would care about more than your program, and they're probably not going to want to know why you got the grades you got. They just care that you fulfill all the official requirements for being admitted as a graduate student. If asked, however, please don't say "I was bored" or blame the professor. It's not going to reflect well on you.

Like others here, I occasionally take on RA work in addition to normal TA/fellowship requirements. These normally happen over the summer, when there are no courses, and they are otherwise very flexible. If that is something that could be an option for you, I would highly recommend it over a job with regular hours.

^ That works. I just wanted to point out that it's not out of the ordinary not to have contact with your new school before you officially begin the program there. At my school, there is hardly any communication with admin staff before mid/late August, and even later than that for professors. There is nothing for new first-years to do before the semester begins, and work slows down in general over the summer as people go on vacation and make work trips. So, contact your advisor if you're still worried, but I don't think you have anything to worry about.

Hm. I've heard that some professors don't appreciate students who choose to teach, that they feel as if they've "wasted" their time on someone who will not become a researcher. Maybe that's the problem. Or maybe, as you say, this is just a problematic person with a documented history of difficulties as an advisor. It's really important that you understand better what your advisor's attitude is all about, because some of you strategy will likely depend on it. Given your reply, I think that the next two steps for you are (1) use the summer and the support of your supervisor to get as far along with your thesis as you can. (2) start forming a committee, and invite your supporters to be on it. If you have a strong thesis and you have several supporters on your committee, it'll be hard for your advisor to find reasons to object to a defense. Once you're back at your university and have made some decent progress, start asking for advice about when to defend and how to bring the issue up with your advisor. If you're making good progress and have a solid foundation, you could try and come up with a schedule for the remaining work and ask if it makes sense to schedule a defense based on that. Once everybody else agrees that you should schedule a defense date, you could ask someone (in person!) to start an email with everybody cced on it which brings up the defense. Any pretense ("I need to book things early," "I think she can defend, what do you think, advisor?," etc) will work, and it'll be much better if it's initiated by another professor and not you. You're lucky to have strong supporters and unless your advisor is for some reason actively looking to sabotage you, she'll have no choice but to agree to a defense. If she doesn't, you'll need to decide if you want to publicly fight her or lower your head and try and find a quiet solution. You could ask (with everyone cced) what you need to do to make the thesis defendable, or if her replies are unhelpful, ask for outside intervention. Along the way, it's important that you be able to demonstrate that you've done your best to do everything your advisor asked for and that you solicited her advice frequently. At the end of the day - especially if this person is tenured - the other professors need to continue working with her after you have left. They may fight for you, but you should always remember that she is in a preferred position over you.

First of all, CONGRATS on getting married! Second of all, OH NO! I thought your troubles with your advisor were over, I'm sorry to hear that they're not. If your analysis of the situation is correct and indeed your advisor is not willing to help you, but is instead only trying to help herself, then it's time to make some decisions to help you make the best of a rotten situation. Something you need to figure out is, what do you want to get out of this degree? Is it just the title, or also publications and a lead-in to a PhD? What you should do next varies greatly based on the answer to this question. Also important to know - are there trusted individuals in your department who you could go to for support - a DGS, department head, other prof, etc? Another venue to explore is the question - what changed between May and now? Why is it that your advisor is suddenly not willing to help - did something in your relationship change? is it possible that you are misinterpreting the situation or that there is something personal going on in her life that is making her less accessible? Try and figure this out before you make any rash decisions. But assuming that your interpretation of the situation is correct - If the goal is to just get the MA and get the hell out of there, I think the best strategy is to assume no support from your advisor. Do your best to get feedback from your host at the internship and maybe from someone else at your school, and schedule a defense as soon as you can. Assuming that your advisor is not looking to sabotage you, this is a way to cut your losses with minimal loss or aggravation. The thesis won't be as good as it could be, but it'll be done. A good thesis is a done thesis. Seriously. If your goal is to go on in academia, then my advice would be more complex and possibly somewhat different (though I still think that getting the hell out of there and ruffling as few feathers as possible is best). I'd want to have answers to my questions above before I could think of possible solutions to your problem.

Though I understand the anxiety, I think it's too early to be planning failure-based contingencies. Give yourself the best chance of succeeding by assuming that you will. That said, (1) quitting (in good faith) is not cause to have your stipend retroactively revoked. It's a different matter if the school thinks you were using them by signing up for a paid PhD instead of an unpaid Masters with the *preconceived intention* of just getting the Masters and leaving. (2) whether or not you can get a (terminal) Masters if you quit in the middle of a PhD program depends largely on the program. It needs to be able to grant such degrees to begin with, and it needs to be willing to grant you that degree. This is information that you should find out through your program, somehow. I think it's a legitimate question to bring up with administrative personnel or with the DGS during orientation: what happens if you drop out at various stages of the program. You could also ask more advanced students in the program if you'd prefer - I'm sure there are precedents for people dropping out in the past.

I have to admit that this is not a problem I've ever faced, so this is just general advice that may or may not help. First of all, congrats! We should all have problems like this one Since you've recognized that you've picked up bad habits from your work with your previous advisor, I think that one very useful thing would be to explore that a bit further and see if you can come up with a list of these behaviors. When you communicate with your advisor, before you reply to an email, take 60 seconds to reread what you've written and think of the tone. Go over your list and try to recognize anything that stands out. I think that just the act of being aware will take away most of the bad habits. Beyond that, if you ever recognize that you've been behaving rudely, stop and request a meeting with your advisor. Apologize and try and correct the behavior. Don't accuse your former advisor of causing the behavior, instead just own up and move on. I'm sure you'll get accustomed to having a wonderful advisor in no time!

1. Yes, some schools require an addendum to the transcript specifying information such as (1) course, (2) instructor, (3) material covered, (4) textbook (if any) - especially if this is not clear from the transcript itself. I wrote such a document as supplemental information for schools that allowed it, and also explained what paper I wrote for each class (topic, grade) and what my final grade was - so this document contained all the information the transcript did plus additional details. This is not terribly common, but it's also not unheard of. As long as your schools allow you to submit additional documents on top of the required ones, it can't hurt to submit such a document. Just make sure you're allowed to submit supporting docs - some schools are strict about not wanting to see any not-required docs and could get upset if you submit something against the rules. 2. Revising an official document in any way is a BAD idea. You can submit an addendum or explanations as necessary, but don't mess with the document itself.

1. Watch out, this could be a problem! You should be very careful following up with schools on this issue, since it's been a problem for some people on this board in previous application cycles. Any discrepancy in information on documents that need to be matched with your application could lead to trouble, and the more such documents come from different sources, the greater the chance that something will get lost. If there is a place to specify "other names", "maiden name" or similar information on the application, be sure to do that. Even so, having a different name on a document than the one you are using now could lead to documents being misplaced or not matched with your application in time. You should stay on top of this. Follow up with schools; if documents are lost, you should be sure to tell them to look under a different name. And, of course, if this can be avoided by somehow having the same name on all documents - that will make your life easier. One way to reduce confusion is to send all the documents in yourself in one packet, instead of having them sent by the registrar and other sources (most, but not all, schools allow this). That way, you can write your full name on each document and add a list of documents that were sent, and thus decrease the chances of things getting misplaced. 2. It depends. Some schools want transcripts from every institution you attended and others are not going to care about these courses. Contact the schools you're applying to directly, and ask.

No offense but I don't see how your race or nationality has anything to do with your application. You'll get accepted (or not) based on your credentials and work.

This shouldn't be a problem. As far as I remember, you order score reports for the GRE and TOEFL separately. I think they also arrive at the schools separately. The important thing is to make sure that the reports contain your updated personal information, so the schools can match your scores with your application. You can follow up on that after you've taken the exam and received your scores. For now, stop worrying and concentrate on doing well on the exam. Good luck!

I generally like the ideas in this post, but -- from personal experience -- if you don't deal with this issue now, you're likely to run up against it again later in your career, when it does matter. I don't know how experienced your advisor is, but one of two options seem likely. If he's experienced, he must have a process for determining authorship. Find out what it is, and follow the rules for getting first authorship - on future papers, if not this one. I agree that it may not be worth it to fight over this one if you have to continue working with this person in the future, but it's good to let him know your aspirations. If your advisor is new or otherwise inexperienced, he may not have thought this question through. In that case, you should bring it up. You should have ideas of how you'd like things to go, in case you're asked (though you may not be - it depends on his style). For new advisors, it's difficult to see all the pitfalls in advance, and it's going to be partly your job to learn along with them. This will be good for your personal development as a scholar and it'll be important so you can avoid such situations in the future.

It sounds like you have a good attitude towards this situation, which is really commendable. One thing you may want to get out of your meeting, in addition to what Sigaba and other have already mentioned, is a way to avoid similar conflicts in the future. Whatever the outcome is for this paper - whether you get to be first author or not - you should agree on how authorship should be decided in the future. Ideally, this question should come up as soon as a project is started (or, as soon as it becomes clear that it's successful and there will be a paper, but honestly that way of doing things has always struck me as potentially problematic). There can, of course, be reasons to rethink authorship after the project is already underway - e.g. if the main person on the project moves away and stops being a main contributor - but that aside, it should be clear who the first author is and what responsibilities are attached to being first/second/etc.

Just thought I'd mention, you can go to MIT and take language classes over at Harvard, too.

I have a BA in linguistics. I started my MA but never finished it because I got accepted into MIT midway through.

In my program, first year classes come in a sequence of two: Intro to X in the Fall, Advanced X in the Spring (X = syntax, semantics, phonology). Usually there is also a TA who gives a recitation and/or helps with assignments. The structure and content of the course depends on the professor but generally it's designed to cover all the material that students should know as a basis for being a working linguist. In phonology, in my year they did OT in the fall (basics, features, stress, tone), cyclic derivations in the spring. In semantics they tend to do extensional semantics in the fall, intensional semantics in the spring. In syntax, a rough description is A-movement phenomena in the fall, A'-phenomena in the spring. Professors usually come with a handout with the material they want to discuss. Students have assigned reading. Topics come up based on the handout and the discussion goes where it goes. We discuss datasets that are famous examples for prominent theories of different phenomena, and often we bring up other datasets or concerns that the theory needs to deal with. So basically we learn how the theory was developed and we often learn where its limitations are. In the fall there are assignments in each class almost every week. It's a very fast pace. Usually assignments contain datasets that are derived from published papers or books and they ask you to implement an analysis you learned on the data, deal with problems and solve them; or they just ask you to develop a theory of the data - come up with generalizations, explain exceptions, etc. In the spring there are less assignments, and more time is devoted to beginning some independent research. Classes usually require a squib in addition to assignments, and students are required to present something - their squib topic or a paper - in each class.

If only life was that simple. You should choose the person who can best advise you. That is not necessarily the person with the closest interests to yours. The most important thing is to have someone who you get along with and whose work style matches yours. You may find that someone with only somewhat-related interests is a better match. Things to look at include: hands on/hands off style, ways of giving criticism/advice, support in terms of career goals, connections, placement record, help with writing/editing/submissions, funding, availability.

You cite the sources that are relevant for your arguments, and you publish in the best venue that is both relevant to your work and willing to accept it. I don't see why it would be a problem to publish in a journal that has also published some of the work you cite. More precisely: how do you choose where to send your paper? one common way is to see where other similar work has been published in the past. Publishing in a journal that has no history of being interested in papers like yours will make your paper less accessible to researchers in your field (they won't expect papers that are relevant to their work to appear in that journal) and generally increases your risk of being rejected. So: I think it would be a ridiculous requirement if a journal would only publish papers that don't cite works from that same journal! (not to mention that it would be close to impossible in small (sub)fields.)

Off the top of my head (and I could be wrong here), maybe you could look at the programs at Maryland or Rochester. At MIT you could apply to either BCS or Linguistics. If you apply to Ling you'll have access to excellent phonologists and you could do psycholing work but it'll be more difficult to do neuro since the facilities are over at BCS. If you apply to BCS, you'll get some psycholing and more access to neuroling but there is no one with interests in phonology, as far as I know. UMass has experimental work but I don't know about neuro. CUNY also has facilities for experimental work, but again I don't know if they are accessible through the traditional linguistics program. The only Ling program that I know has its own neuro facility is NYU. Most (perhaps all) of the theoretical ling programs I mentioned will require you to take courses in the traditional fields (phonology, syntax, semantics). I hardly imagine they expect you to show interest in all of those fields but if you are not interested in any of them you may find that (1) you're bored in a lot of the 1st year classes, and also not getting educated in the areas you are interested in, and (2) you have limited options for advisors and committee members down the line. Why are JHU or Brown not options that you are considering? It sounds like the more inter-disciplinary programs are exactly what you're looking for. Also, do you want to work with EEG, MEG or fMRI? EEGs are more accessible and less expensive, you can find them in many psych programs and many have some researchers with some interest in language. MEG and MRI facilities are much more expensive and so less programs have them available. Looking based on facilities could also delimit your search somewhat.