fuzzylogician

Schedule a meeting with the professor to go over the paper (more than one, if necessary). Be prepared to "present" the paper to him - don't assume he'll come prepared. Once there's time in his schedule and there is someone there to walk him through the details -- he must generally know what the paper is about -- there is no reason you can't get this done in a few sittings. Try to get it submitted as soon as possible and don't worry about the deadline. In my field, at least, the original deadline is rarely met. In any event, you have nothing to lose by trying.

I applied to 8 programs. My professors were happy to help and thought it was generally a good number. It's a lot of work, but still within the manageable range. In hindsight I'd remove one or two schools from my list, but you can never know how well you'll do in an application cycle so it's good to keep as many options open as possible. There's a lot of great advice out there in the forum on how to choose schools (you can search for it); some tips are: choose places with at least two POIs you could work with; don't apply to any school whose offer you would not accept if it was your only choice; location, weather and other factors can and do play a role for some people, so think about these things when you decide. There is no such thing as a "safety" school in grad school applications. It's all about fit, not about some general rankings. fwiw, here are some more posts to compare your numbers with:

I don't understand what the problem is. Your advisor not only acknowledged your idea but decided to share it with his team, with you as a consultant. That sounds like a huge compliment to me. It's involving you in the work but not dumping it all on you, while making sure that you will get due credit for your contribution. As far as the presentation is concerned, again, your efforts were recognized. What would you gain if no one else ever used your template? It seems to me that you are being recognized for your efforts and good results and you should be very happy, not complaining.

No need to get offended, I reply to the content of a post - I don't attack the poster. Again, standards change from field to field. I'm sure your mentors give you great advice, for your field. Some of it I'm sure generalizes to other fields as well, but not necessarily all of it. That is all I was trying to say. To reply to the specific part of my post that you chose to quote, the point I was trying to make was about content, not length. I don't know what the right choice regarding these low-level entries should be; obviously I'll remove them when I'm further along in my career and either way they are not going to be what gets me hired. I keep them, for now, because they showcase work I have done that is not currently published in any higher profile venue. I don't have this type of entry for things that I've presented/published elsewhere (although I keep a list in case I learn it's also important to show that I've been keeping active in local venues too -- but it's not on my CV right now).

I replied to your post mostly because sweeping statements of the sort "no grad student should/can/is X" are almost invariably incorrect. So many things are field-dependent. Since this is not really about my own CV I have no intention of explaining how or why it's as long as it is. Maybe it'll help if I clarified that there are many different kinds of research out there that is classified under the label of 'linguistics', ranging from what should be categorized under the humanities, through the social sciences, to what I personally think should be housed under the natural sciences; what I personally do is certainly not under the humanities - it's probably at least in the social sciences. In any event, very little of my CV has to do with teaching, most of it concerns research. Following your standards I should remove three entries for local conferences that I keep mostly because they show the breadth of what I do -- I'll certainly remove them once I'm further along in my career; hopefully by then those presentations will turn into peer-reviewed talks and papers anyway. I don't see the harm in keeping them on my CV at the moment. The general point, though, is just that saying that no student should ever have a CV that's more than 2 pages is dangerous, unless you've asked around in all different fields and you know for a fact that this holds across academia as a whole.

Some of us are still around...but it has been rather slow lately.

I always use firefox on the same computer and I see both, at different times. I haven't been able to detect a pattern for when the display changes yet, though. Seems completely random. Right now it's stars and circles but this morning it was folders.

That's true of the single-authored project too, though, and it shouldn't discourage you from participating in a project if you think it's worthwhile. If you have some a-priori reason for believing you won't be able to get published, that's another matter. But otherwise I join everybody else in voting for joining the project, for all the reasons given above. I completely fail to see the down side of publishing with an admired mentor.

I would support the "one full reference, then acronym" advice. It takes up less space in the SOP (and space can be very precious, especially under word limits rather than page limits) and in many cases it also reads better. E.g. "UCSC" reads better than "the university of California - Santa Cruz" and "CUNY" reads better than "the city university of New York" when you repeat the name several times in a paragraph. Of course it depends on how the school is usually referred to, you don't want to make anything up, but if it's commonly referred to by its acronym, I don't see a reason not to use it in the SOP.

I have a Lenovo thinkpad that I really enjoy. It replaced an old IBM thinkpad -- how I wish they continued making them! I also have an iPad for travel and simple tasks; like you, I have no problems with iPads but I can't stand iMacs/macbooks so I would not get one even if I thought it was worth the price. As others have suggested, a strong laptop plus an iPad should cover all your needs, or else a light laptop and a desktop for home, in which case the iPad is probably unnecessary. Strictly speaking the iPad is not necessary for anything, but I am nonetheless very happy with mine. FWIW I hear good things about Dell, and bad things about HP.

There are several famous cases in my field in which different researchers reached the same (now widely accepted) results independently and at roughly the same time - say, within one year of each other. Usually one format of the conclusions is adopted (i.e. terms are borrowed from just one work) but everyone is cited for the idea. Nonetheless, it must be terrible to be out-published if you have worked on a topic for several years but you are still a year or so from publication - in that case I assume one must start over or at least add or change the current work, which no longer contributes anything new.

If there is space in the application for supplemental material, it certainly can't hurt. It's especially helpful if the course names are vague and the instructors are not writing you LORs, in which case the adcoms will have no other way of deducing from the transcript what you actually learned during your degree. In my opinion it's much better than wasting space in the SOP discussing your undergrad classes. One of the schools I applied to actually required applicants to submit such a document - I think it had to list the official course names, the instructors' names, a brief description of content, any textbooks used in class, and I added a one-line description of the paper(s) I wrote for each class. After I prepared the document I submitted it to every school that would accept it. I don't know that it helped--it wasn't explicitly mentioned in interviews, whereas other parts of my application were--but it also didn't hurt.

As far as I can tell, there are only two ways to deal with competitive people - join them or ignore them. People who are vocal about their accomplishments are often so because deep down they are insecure. So you can choose to feed their insecurity by telling them how great you are (while ignoring their attempts to tell you that you're not), or you can refuse to discuss accomplishments or make comparisons altogether. Someone who is trying to put you down in order to feel better about themselves can't be all that good a friend anyway, so my choice is always to walk away from these conversations. There are always going to be competitive people out there. If it bothers you this much, it may be something to consider when choosing schools to apply to. Some places are by nature more competitive than others. Like someone told me when I was choosing between offers, many departments self-select: like-minded people end up in the same places; looking at current grads is a great indication of how you'll fare in a department in the future. Make sure the schools you apply to aren't the natural habitat of people like your friend, or you may end up suffering throughout your graduate career. It's an issue that is not discussed often enough, in my opinion, but it's an important factor to consider when choosing schools: you don't work with professors in a vacuum, there a whole student body to consider. That said, some level of competitiveness is not necessarily bad -- for example, if it makes you think ahead or be more productive or make choices that will improve your chances of getting a job. It only becomes offensive when a person puts other people down instead of trying to improve themselves in order to compete.

My CV includes headings for Contact Info, Education, Publications (subheadings for journals, refereed proceedings, non-refereed papers/other), Presentations (subheadings for refereed talks, posters, other = grad students meetups, reading groups, local workshops, etc), Honors, Research Experience, Teaching Experience, Service, Languages. I've recently decided to take out all the local reading group talks and practice talks for conferences, although many students I know do have them on their CVs. Even so, it's still about 5 full pages, narrow margins, single space, with entries separated with blank lines. Even if I removed all the white space from the document, there is no way it could all fit in two pages. I guess that's another one of those field-specific things.

I created a website for myself when I entered my MA program and then changed it again when I started my PhD. It's very minimalistic, just one page; I keep a list of current and recent projects with links to papers, handouts and slides, a list of upcoming presentations with locations and dates, contact information and a CV. The CV is the only thing I update on a regular (more or less monthly) basis, the rest I change about twice a year. Teaching stuff goes on a separate site, normally on the platform offered by the university. I keep track of visitors to my site so I can tell that people visit it right before/after conferences and that in general my site does have a certain amount of presence, which is all I need at this point in my career.

This is one of those things that change from program to program. In mine, 2-3 would be normal; 4 would be a heavy work load, 5 seems almost impossible. It also depends on the teaching and research obligations you have in a particular semester. If you're wondering what workload you should take on, consult older students in your program (not professors!) - they will have recent experience to share with you.

I don't know what field you're in but isn't it enough to talk about methods and research questions for it to be clear that you are working on a certain topic and that any results should be credited to you?

That's what I use. Works great.

Well, if you get an MA before your PhD you'll have more experience; you'll be more targeted when you start your PhD because you'll know your field better than you did with just an undergrad education; will have a better idea of your interests; you'll have at least some experience doing graduate-level research; all of which mean that you should have an easier time in your PhD classes and you should be able to start developing a research program faster than inexperienced students--which means more time to deepen your research while in grad school. On the practical side, an MA training should result in your ability to write a stronger SOP, obtain better LORs and hence have a chance to apply to better fitting, higher ranked schools and be more competitive for funding. On the other hand it'll take you longer to complete your training than if you just got a PhD directly after undergrad; it'll cost you more; and you may have to repeat the courses if your new school doesn't transfer credits. Maybe you're focused enough to know already what you want to study and what schools fit your interests, and have good enough LORs right now so that you don't need the extra benefits of having an MA. Otherwise I think the main advantage of an MA is the experience you can gain from it and the potential of using it to produce a better PhD application. During the PhD program itself your inner drive and your ability to focus will be much more important than the extra two years of training, in my opinion, so if you're focused and able, my vote is to try for the PhD directly. [although I did do an MA first--which I don't regret at all, it got into my dream program. My interests haven't changed (broadly speaking) between undergrad and my PhD program but the MA gave me the opportunity to do exactly what I described - meet influential people and get good LORs, get some research experience, get some teaching experience, get published, and write a stronger and much more focused SOP than I ever could before I started the MA. I also think the experience made my life in my PhD program much easier than some of my colleagues who came with less experience, at least in the first year]

LaTeX. We get Microsoft Office for free through our department, to answer the OpenOffice vs. Microsoft Office question. I've found that my Windows 2007 version is happily compatible with the Mac 2008 and 2011 versions (same document edited by a number of authors on different versions of Word). Maybe that's a plus, but I've never really tried OpenOffice so maybe it's just as good.

On the other hand if your advisor steals all your work, you'll have a hard time getting your career started to begin with. It's possible that some of your stolen work can't be returned to you without outright accusing someone of stealing, which may be a bad political move; but at the very least you should (1) stop working with this person, and (2) learn how to lay the ground so that you can demand credit for your work, if needed. This could be in the form of choosing your colleagues and mentors correctly (talk to their colleagues, students and *former* students, learn about their reputation -- no one can steal from others for years without anyone knowing about it locally, even if no one has the courage to stand up for themselves); documenting your work; spreading the word about what you are up to, making sure that more than just your collaborator knows what you are doing, so your work can't just appear under another person's name without your being able to prove that it's yours. If your collaborator knows that others are aware that the work is yours (e.g., it's on your website, you've talked about it in seminars or with other professors, you've presented it at conferences, etc.), they will be less likely to attempt to outright steal it. Which obviously doesn't help correct the past, but could help protect you against this ever happening again in the future.

I don't know too much about applied linguistics, but maybe you can find helpful information on the Linguist List?

I think it's OK for an advisor to present their students' work e.g. in invited talks, especially when the talk covers a broad topic and doesn't go into too many details. In that case, no particular contribution should be discussed for more than a few minutes, and in any event, all contributors' names should be mentioned when their contribution is discussed. It's NOT OK to present others' work as one's own without giving due credit, and it's certainly not OK to publish someone else's work as one's own. Even if a particular contribution doesn't merit co-authorship, it should still be acknowledged! OP: what your advisor is doing is wrong!! As an aside: I once had a co-author refer to our work in the single person, e.g. "my work is blah ... I did blah ... etc" at a large conference with me standing on the podium right next to him!! And he took so long to present his part of the talk that we never got around to my part, which only made the situation worse. AND, the conference was held at my current institution, just months after I started my PhD there (which at the time I thought was awful because all my professors were there for the horrible scene, but in hindsight made it easier for me to set the record straight because of their support and first-hand experience of what happened).. Nothing I could do about it at the time - he was a senior professor and I was a lowly student, and it didn't seem like stopping the talk to say "WAIT, WHAT??" would be a good idea (although I am told that my face was practically shouting that:p). But I took pains to talk to every attendee of the talk that I could find in order to discuss my contribution, and I eventually got permission from my co-author to submit a single-authored paper to the proceedings without his name on it (but I did acknowledge him for his part--the paper mostly expanded on my part). Apparently he "didn't realize he was using the first person singular form." Ever since then I am very meticulous about both giving credit and taking credit. I think that learning to demand due credit is an important lesson to learn, although I wish I didn't have to learn it the way I did. Bottom line: don't give up on what is rightfully yours; you can set the record straight, and if you do it right you don't have to burn (m)any bridges. Eventually I think you'll be appreciated even more for standing up for yourself. At least, that has been my impression about my own situation. [sorry if this was a bit rambly, it's still a sore issue with me]

+1 to Strangefox's original post. I would urge the mods NOT to let 'Officially Grads' turn into 'What Are My Chances?' forum. It'll only drive the forum's current inhabitants away. It's the only place for us to discuss current grad students' issues, and there are plenty of other places for applicants to post their questions. Most of us surf the Applications forum and reply to threads when we have something useful to contribute. A lot of the time we don't, either because we don't know the field the OP is asking about, or the schools that are asked about, or there are not enough details in the post for us to give an informed opinion, etc. No need to 'bring those threads to our attention', which I assume would be the reason to post them in the Grads forum. We see them in their natural place too, and they annoy us (me, at least) much less when they are kept there.