fuzzylogician

I would think that getting a PhD in linguistics, even in phonology, is mostly unrelated to a degree in SLP. I guess the question is why you want the PhD? I don't think it's crazy at all, I'm just wondering why you won't be happy without it and what you want to do with it and with your other degree. Many programs are very research-oriented and may not be happy admitting an applicant who will "waste" the education and not continue on to academia. On the other hand, a language documentation specialty may be practical enough to get by that problem (if it exists).. As with all other applicants, you'll get in if you can convince the adcom that you are excited and dedicated to the field and that you are a good fit with the program you're applying to. Varied backgrounds are generally something programs like in their cohorts. I'm sorry I can't help with advice about specific schools but for one thing, six schools is really not a large number. Why not apply to all of them? The GRE is probably not the main thing to be concerned about; UCLA doesn't require it at all, to the best of my knowledge, and it's certainly not a deciding factor in admissions at top schools. The field is small enough that all applications get at least some consideration. I'm pretty sure no application gets tossed out completely unread because of cutoffs. I suppose you still need a number to aim for: the general advice on this board is to at least get to 1000, and try for 1200. Again, I think other things are much more important.

In that case, START WRITING NOW! Take as long as you can to revise your SOP, the writing process is crucial here. Any part of the SOP that discusses your current and future interests is part of establishing fit, because presumably your readers at all the programs you'll apply to will be interested in what you do. However, it's usually a good idea to additionally spell out who you think you'll be interested in working with, and why. There are other school-specific elements you may want to mention - labs, classes, special programs, collaborations, libraries, other resources - so ideally you'll have 1-2 paragraphs that you tweak for each university separately. I'd suggest starting with the main part of the essay and doing school-specific research as breaks between drafts. You'll learn a lot about how to address "fit" with a certain department from carefully reading its website and noticing what it is particularly proud of.

It's not only about the amount of time you spend on your SOP, it's also (more so, in my opinion) about the time interval you have at your disposal. I think it's a very good idea not to write the whole essay in one long session, but rather to have drafts that you repeatedly revisit and revise. It's important to have enough time to let your draft sit aside for a week or two before you look at it again because that often changes your perspective. I wrote a first draft in the summer (probably August) and finalized each SOP as I submitted each of my 8 applications in December-January. In terms of net time I spent on my SOP, I think I had a total of about 10 drafts, at which point I had a finished skeleton to which I appended the fit paragraph(s). The fit research alone would have been at least one hour per school; each draft revision is at least 1-2 hours of net work, maybe more. Overall it took much longer because I also had to wait for comments from other readers. The original draft took several days to complete. The opening paragraph and the conclusion took agonizingly long to get right, I must have had at least 5 different versions that I sent out for comments. I think an estimate of 10-20 hours for the whole thing is unrealistic.

If your options are (as I understand them): - get research experience in relevant field - get degree in not-so-relevant field then I think you should go for the research experience. Is your GPA currently low? Would a higher GPA will be a significant boost to your application, even though it's not in your major? I'd guess that unless your circumstances are very unusual, the extra degree will not be as helpful as more research experience.

I sent my GRE and TOEFL scores to all the schools I applied to before even starting the application (June of the year I applied). My transcripts and assorted other material I submitted around the same time I submitted the electronic applications (December of the year I applied), but I don't think it was necessary to wait; I just wanted to make sure I didn't forget to send anything. LORs usually arrived after everything else had already been received and logged, but that's only because my recommenders waited until THE VERY LAST MINUTE to submit their letters. In all cases, I had no problems and nothing was lost. Unless a school says otherwise you should be able to submit material any time you like -- as others have said, they will open a file for you when the first item arrives and (hopefully) add things to that file as you send more items (and therefore in order to minimize the risk of misfiled documents, it's a good idea to send everything together in one envelope). If you're worried, you can contact your schools directly and ask.

Not contacting professors and not mentioning professors in the SOP are two separate issues. In many humanities fields funding is not tied to a specific grant but rather comes directly from the department so there is no need to contact professors before hand. Mentioning professors with similar interests in the SOP is still a good way to demonstrate fit (at least for research programs) so that decision should be made separately.

<sorry, posted twice>

Reading your post, you've managed to convince me that your previous experience should not hurt your admissions chances. If your SOP presents events in a similar fashion, I think you should be OK. The reasons you give for leaving, the sequence of events following your leaving and your new interests sound very reasonable, so I don't think adcoms have a reason to think that you are not serious or that you are likely to drop out again.

Well, it is Sunday and you've only waited half a day to decide that we all are not interested.. But seriously. First of all, I had a hard time understanding from your post who you are exactly and what your question is. "LOR evaluation from Head of institution" -- are you the head of the institution? I understood you that you are maybe a TA/grad student. So what does this title mean? Aside from that, I doubt most of us who write here have experience writing LORs for students; I certainly don't think I could give advice on that. This forum is for applicants who are in need of letters; you should move your query to Officially Grads if you want input from students who are currently attending grad school. Lastly, and more generally, this question is probably best addressed to your advisor or to some other more experienced professor, not to anyone on a "applying to gradschool" website.

The writing sample is not about "how well you can write," as you put it, although that also factors into the decision what to submit. The writing sample's main purpose is to demonstrate how well you can do research. It would be awesome if your writing sample can be a scholarly work directly in the sub-field that you propose to study in your SOP, but I think it's more important to submit your best piece of academic work. If that work happens to explore some other question than your narrow interests as you define them now, that is fine. Where you should start worrying is if the paper is widely outside your field so that its readers will have a hard time assessing the merits of its arguments (but even then in some cases it's still better to submit a strong paper from another field; it depends on what the other options are like). I don't understand anything about your field but the topic of your paper does sound like something you can reasonably expect the adcom members to understand. If so, then choose your strongest work, not the one that best interfaces with your current interests.

It's really very simple: would you go to this school if it turned out to be the only one that accepted you this application cycle? If the answer is yes, then you should apply there. If not, then there's no point in investing the time and money in that application. It's the same question that you should be asking yourself about every school that you are considering, regardless of ranking. For each school you are considering, you should learn about not only current research options but also future placement options (based on the success of recent graduates). Based on the program's success in recent years, you should be able to tell if you'll get a useful education there.

Yes, I would say you should get a letter from your boss. From what you write you're not going to have any letters from professors who know you long and well so if your boss can talk about your character and knowing you for the last four years, that would be a significant contribution to your application that you're not getting from elsewhere. Do you really not have any professors who knew you well when you in college? Even though it's been a few years, you should still try to find one or two. Writing recommendation letters is part of their job, and many professors will agree to write you one even though they may not remember you too clearly. I think that's more helpful than asking someone for a letter who you hasn't known you for very long. Whoever you choose to ask, try to make their lives as easy as possible. If possible, meet with them and tell them about your research interests. Send them your writing sample or some other paper of yours to read. Show them your SOP so they get a sense of who you are and what kind of research you want to do. Give them your transcript. For one recommender who asked for it, I wrote up a list of things I would like to have included in my letter. I don't know what he actually chose to use out of what I wrote, but I made sure he was aware of everything that I hoped would be helpful in a letter. So basically offer to tell your letter writers anything and everything that could help them get to know you better, so they will be able to write you a stronger, more meaningful letter.

There are two married couples in my department right now where both the husband and the wife are students in the department. They get along just fine, we get a stipend that allows a single student to live reasonably well, so two students on two stipends is no problem.

It has happened to me .... and it's a bit disturbing.

Maybe it's field specific but I can't imagine anyone in my field thinking that an MA would be a disadvantage. The main advantage of an MA is during admissions, and maybe in the first 1-2 semesters of grad school. An MA gives you the chance to develop more focused research interests and to do actual research, which should have a major impact on your SOP--improving it compared to what you could have written straight out of undergrad. It helps you to obtain better letters of recommendation than you otherwise would have. And you'd probably also use a writing sample that you wrote during the program. So, basically, it improves your application for the PhD. I think the concern your professors are raising is about sounding too narrowly focused or having a plan that is so advanced that you'll have a hard time finding an advisor. You need to keep a balance in your SOP between having focused interests and still being open to new and different directions. Things change, and hardly anyone I know still works on the project they suggested in their SOP, MA or not.

CVs look different in different fields. Try going to the webpages of some of the universities that you are interested in and spend time reading their current grads' websites. You'll get a good idea of how a CV should look and what kind of information it should contain for someone in a similar stage as you are in your career.

Just to add to what everyone has been saying, in my department the culture is such that meeting with students is considered to be the professors' main job (which is not to say that they don't serve on assorted committees, write grants, teach, do their own research and try to have a life..). We are not assigned just one advisor, rather we are encouraged to work with whoever we want on our different projects. I currently have three weekly 1-hour meetings with 3 professors and I attend one 2-hour lab meeting where a group of us working with one professor present our current work and bounce ideas off each other. Every other week or so I meet with a 4th professor (different ones), as the need arises. All of my professors meet with about 10-20 students every week. How things are done may vary from department to department and from professor to professor, and this is something you, OP, should ask both POIs and their current students about.

Yeah, that makes sense. So that would mean that if you pitch a general project within your area of specialization, the professors from the other area would be able to understand it, right? If so, then I think that going with a detailed pitch within your area of specialization is the way to go. You'll then need to spend some space in your SOP explaining that you are interested in having your ideas implemented in different subareas of circuit design and that you're eager to learn about those new areas (I feel a bit ignorant here but I hope you understand the idea..). It makes sense that at this point in your career you only have experience in some subareas of your general research interests but not in others, you just need to make your experience appear relevant to what you are planning to do in the future--and that can be different from what you've previously done.

Why did you select these advisors if your intended research is inappropriate for them? I'm sure you must have interests in common with them, or else you wouldn't want to work with them. For those people, could you suggest a different project that is likelier to be related to their area of specialty? It's better to gear each SOP towards the particular schools and particular potential advisors there than to have a general version that you don't tweak. Of course, past projects are what they are, but for future projects you can try to aim for a better "fit".

I DEFINITELY like this opener more than the previous one. You wrote that you just started working on your SOP ... may I suggest that you put the opening paragraph aside and concentrate on the body of the essay for now? The opening and closing paragraphs are the most difficult ones to write, but they become easier to deal with once you've gone through a good 10-15 iterations of writing and re-writing the main portions of the SOP. I think you'll find that you'll need to spend a great deal of thought precisely defining your interests as they relate to the interests of potential advisors and the resources that the schools you're applying to can provide. Once you have a good sense of what you want to do, the 1-2 opening sentences describing your research will become much easier to write. In any case, I think the direction you have now is a better one and I think what you currently have is pretty good.

I agree that an additional 6K a year is a lot of money; I rejected an offer than would have payed me about 13K more than I am receiving right now, but I don't regret it for a second. The only important question here is whether or not you are payed enough to live (relatively) comfortably. If not, that is a good reason to quit a program and reapply to a new one with better funding. If you are, then it comes down to research fit, in my opinion. In any case, if summer funding was part of what was offered to you when you accepted your offer and then not delivered on, you should bring that up with the graduate advisor. Explain things the way you have here and ask him to help you find some additional funding for the summer. That's only fair. The fit question is still not completely clear to me. You wrote: " I don't know if there's anybody here whose research interests are closely aligned enough with mine that I'd want to spend the next 6 years working on their projects." Is this past tense or does it still hold? Take the time to research the opportunities you have at your current school before you decide it's not good for you. There are thread on here and elsewhere that you can read that address the question of "new, upcoming professor" vs. "hotshot, famous professor" as advisor. If you could combine the two I think that would be best. You say there is a professor who would supervise your work in an area that interests you, but you are worried about the level of guidance that he can provide? Did you consult with him about this? If it's not his area of expertise, he should not be offended by this kind of concern. Could you also collaborate with the professor from the other department that you wrote about? It sounds like he has expertise in the field that you are interested in. Meet with these two professors and ask them (or ask yourself) what other resources are available to you through your department and whether or not they will be suitable for the research you want to do. If not, again - that is a good reason to leave a program and reapply to another program. You need to take the initiative and be active about making things work. If you won't do it, certainly no one will do it for you. The reason I keep telling you to try to make the most out of your current situation is that leaving a school mid-way through a program and applying to another one may burn a lot of bridges, if not done correctly. That is why I suggest you stick it out at least until you have your MS, even if it is a waste of a year. Completing a program will look better on your CV; you should be able to secure good recommendation letters; and you should be able to better explain the change in your interests, showcase your efforts to make the most out of the situation at school A. If you jump ship after just one semester you will be far from the ideal candidate for school C. Why should they accept you when you just dropped out of school A and admit to having unrealistic ideas about graduate school? Graduate school is a process, and you have only just begun it. I think your SOP will sound much more mature, focused and convincing if you try your best and don't quit in the middle.

Listen, you need to decide if there is a chance to salvage things at your current school, or not. It sounds to me right now that you are being very negative about your situation; and though your frustrations is understandable, for practical reasons it'd be better if you could try to be a bit more objective. Not having summer funding, as others have mentioned, is very common -- and not a reason to be so wholeheartedly disappointed with a school. You knew what funding situation you were getting into when you accepted school A's offer, so why are you so upset now? As far a having freedom goes, I don't know that I understand what you expected and what your current program actually does, but have you tried talking to your advisor about changing whatever doesn't suit your personality or work-methods? There is a very good point to what you've been told--if you take too long to start coming up with a project or if you change advisors too late in the game, you will indeed have less chances of finishing your degree on time. Is that what is meant by "less freedom"? Programs which have had experience with students taking too long to complete their degree requirements will have good reason to supervise new students more closely. Maybe you just need to be clear about being aware of your responsibilities and showing that you've given them the necessary thought. In addition to all this, how do you know that there wouldn't have been things you don't like at school C, had you accepted its offer? Things always look different from the outside looking in. Details aside, I'd suggest you give this some thought and come up with a precise list of things that are not to your liking and practical suggestions on how to improve them. Then meet with the grad advisor and work with him towards finding a way that makes everyone involved happy. I support the advice you've been given here that you should at least complete your Masters and then reapply to school C for a PhD. But you should still try to make the most out of the year and a half that you have left at school A. You will need to maintain good relations there if you are to obtain LORs from your current professors, and if you could improve the situation so that you are happier, you might discover a project you enjoy working on and this whole problem will simply disappear.

Some schools do things this way. You have to submit your application (and pay the fee) before your recommenders will receive the email prompting them to upload their LOR and attach it to your application. It's different from many other systems which allow you to send the recommenders their prompt as soon as you start the application. It's annoying, but it's not unheard of. It simply means that you have to finish the application to this school before the actual deadline, or else your recommenders won't have time to submit the LORs on time. I don't think you need to finish a month in advance, though. Ask your recommenders how long they need to upload the letter -- usually a week or two should be enough to make sure the letter is submitted on time.

If the paper is still within your (sub)field it should be OK if it's not within your narrow specialization. As long as there will be professors on the admissions committee who will be able to read your writing sample and learn from it about your research skills, that's good enough. It's very common for people to change their interests or refine them between undergrad and grad school; I'm sure you'll address that in your SOP, so there shouldn't be any problem with that. I agree that it's better to submit a polished paper that has been commented on by professors, even though its topic is not exactly what you want to study in grad school, than to write a new paper that will be more closely related to your new interests.

How much the fellowship pays depends on the school. Generally, the advantages of a fellowship are: a. It sounds like the fellowship is competitive. Winning one is always good for one's record. b. Fellowships usually pay more than RA/TAships. c. (Much more importantly) you'll have less teaching requirements, which means that you'll have more free time for your research. Potential downside: Less teaching experience when you graduate. Potential fix: Teach for extra payment, if the option exists. Different fields place different emphasis on teaching skills, but in all of them having great research is more important (assuming you want to do a PhD and become a research professor). More free time = more time for your research = potentially better results.