fuzzylogician

3-4 papers are more than enough for a website. Hell, I don't know if I have 4 serious papers on my website. It doesn't have to be high-tech or pretty, it just needs to have a clean interface and clickable links to your work that she can look at if she chooses[1]. I hear it's really easy to make a webpage like that nowadays, you can even open a public page on google-docs an do it in less than an hour. If you are a high-techy person like that, then you can go ahead and send the professor the link right away. I don't know about sending documents without getting permission, though. It seems a bit pushy. I know the situation sort of calls for pushiness, but still I think a better course of action is to offer to send the documents and get permission and not just smother the professor with too much information that she didn't ask for. [1] and maybe it can have a counter so you can know who visited you website and when.

Some more specific questions would help, but judging from the accepted applicants in my year and this year, it seems that the adcom members choose people who have worked on least one well thought-out project. Usually it's a paper (=the writing sample) that develops and defends an argument about a (possibly very small and focused) problem in one of the core areas of research - syntax, semantics or phonology. Areas of research members of my cohort worked on prior to getting to MIT include comparatives, NPIs, case, concealed questions, gradable adjectives, locatives. People work on different languages, including English, Japanese, Korean, French, Chinese, Hebrew. I'm simplifying because obviously the papers dealt with some small niche in a specific language in each of these areas, but the point is that it's mostly formal stuff in various areas of research. They've been working on increasing the amount of experimental work that's being done in the department. You mostly see it in phonology, but there is interaction with the brain and cognitive science department and there was a recent hire of an experimental semanticist (Martin Hackl) who is really great and I am sure will lead us in cool new ways to do research in the coming years. Mostly, though, if you want to be prepared for the 1st year coursework at MIT, you need at least some basic training in all of syntax, semantics and phonology. The way things usually go, people have deep training in one or two of those fields and less knowledge and interest in the third. Most of the work that is being done is very much formal and theoretical. The program is best suited for individuals who are self-motivated and work well independently. The program is exactly what you make of it. There is great freedom and you will get support in doing whatever you want, but you have to get interested in things yourself and in some cases deal with the bureaucracy of getting it done yourself. If you can do that, then MIT is a good place for you.

I get around 24,000 in Boston (Cambridge, to be exact) and that's more than enough for me. It partly depends on your lifestyle and what you expect to be able to afford. I don't own a car, but I made a point of finding a large room that's accessible from the T. I don't mind spending a bit more on rent. I don't go out much and I'm not a big spender, but I can afford to buy myself whatever I like when I feel like it (which happens every so often). I can afford a plane-ticket home ($1300+) at least once a year. I cook at home and bring food with me to the office -- eating out can be a large expense. A monthly public transport ticket is $30, which is not so bad. My utilities aren't that expensive either. Really the biggest expense is rent, since my health insurance and tuition are being payed by my department. I guess if you've never done this before, living an "adult life" can be hard in the beginning. It's not so much the specific budget, which at least for Boston I think is very doable, it's just the different responsibilities you'll have that you never even knew existed before. That said, people have successfully done it before, and there is no reason why you can't.

congrats!!

1) I think it's OK to suggest to send additional supporting materials. Say exactly what kind of materials you have -- I suspect that a good writing sample can be helpful, the GRE scores not so much. If you have a website, you could put everything relevant on it and send the professor a link. That's the most effortless way to allow her access to as much or as little as information she would like to have about you. 2) It's fine to ask about her work, especially as it relates to your interests. Make sure she understands how her work would enhance yours and how your interests accommodate each other. Only ask questions if they are intelligent, thoughtful ones; you want to make a good impression. 3) Be enthusiastic but respectful, and keep the email short. Thank the professor for her time. Also, I think you have nothing to lose by saying that this is your top choice.

Congrats!

Congrats! Go the simple way: write to the DGS and say something along the lines of - "Thank you very much for your offer! I am excited to let you know that I have decided to accept. What is the next step? Are there any forms I need to sign?" (=usually yes, you have to send a letter or fax formally accepting the offer). Say that you are looking forward to meeting them in the fall (or seeing them again, whatever fits). It doesn't have to be a long email. After that you're pretty much set. All you have to do is wait til the fall

You are of course entirely within your rights to say you would rather not say, and no one will be offended. Mostly professors ask because they are curious to know where else the prospective students applied (which implies the student thinks those other department is on par with the one they are visiting) and what decisions those other departments have made. Students simply ask out of curiosity, and sometimes they can offer valuable inside information (or plain gossip) that you may want to know. I understand your feeling weird about name dropping and the possible ensuing "other department bashing", but I'd suggest you look at it from another perspective and use it as a kind of test. The best way to convince prospective students to attend a department is to show them how well they fit - tell them about all the positive things that are going on and why they are awesome. Professors who engage in negative-talk about other schools instead of concentrating on the positives at their school are actually telling you something very important - maybe they are insecure or feel that the other school is strong competition, maybe they don't have good things to say. Either way, that is a negative environment which you might not want to be in. I never hid where I was accepted when someone asked. Honestly, at most schools I only heard good things about the other departments that accepted me. You can hear very interesting opinions from outside people (which you weigh accordingly, obviously), which you maybe can't see from the inside while you visit. In small fields everybody knows everybody so those opinions are usually well founded. The only place where people engaged in bashing was immediately crossed off my list. Don't need that for 5 years.

*happy to finally be off the list*.. yay!

First of all, congrats! If you have your interviewers' names and email addresses, the best thing is to send them each their own email. Thank them for taking the time to meet with you and mention something specific you talked about that was memorable. You can also go ahead and mention that you were accepted, and if it's someone in your subfield then maybe you can follow that up with questions, if you have any. Showing enthusiasm is always a good thing.

Having had a "real life job" (um, and working is academia is not?) - I can tell you that in these kinds of situations, when you encounter a student who is out of line and is trying to screw you over to get a better grade, and your superior hangs you out to dry and gives in to them -- you complain about both the student and the lecturer. The two are not mutually exclusive. Same as I would complain both about a jackass customer and my jackass boss. The situation in academia is sometimes much worse than in "real life": you often depend on the instructors you TA for to fund you, advise you (i.e. meet with you on a regular basis, read your work, suggest new directions you should take - generally look out for you and try to advance your research), ultimately approve your dissertation, help you network and write recommendations for future jobs for you. It might not be the case here, but relationships between students and faculty can be very convoluted and they are often very frustrating. People need to vent. That's what anonymous forums are for.

Fair enough. I guess your bottom line is that you can't be sure that the lecturer will back you up, in which case it is indeed best to keep contact with this student to a bare minimum.

Well. It's not spiteful or negative (which is what I imagined reading from the title of this post), so it is certainly not going to totally screw you. It might not get a reaction at all, or someone might respect your writer less because of her wording. So, at worst, this letter is going to be disregarded or not taken very seriously. At best, the readers are going to concentrate on all the good things in the rest of the letter and not even notice a bad choice of wording in one sentence. If your other two letters are solid, then you should be fine.

Everybody here gave good advice which I won't repeat. The important thing to make sure of in dealing with this kind of situation is that the lecturer has your back. Regardless of how annoying undergraduates can be (and they can!), you are only ever in trouble if the lecturer doesn't back you up and takes the student's side (which I guess is sort of what I understood you were saying, in that they raised the student's grade without consulting with you first?). Maybe you should have a chat with the lecturer and let them know what you didn't like about the way they handled the situation? You know, just say "I wish you had talked to me before you decided to do X" or whatnot. The teaching staff should really appear cohesive to the undergrads and any problems should preferably be resolved after joint consultation and not with the lecturer just overriding the TA's decisions. Since you consulted with the lecturer it would make sense to follow their suggestions, but I actually think it puts you in a better position if you don't ignore the student when they come back to class. You certainly don't have to give him any special treatment (=don't tutor him to make up for the material he missed), but you could suggest that if he comes by during your office hours then you will explain to him why you gave him the grade and comments that you did. In my experience, students who like to complain rarely follow up on that and are not genuinely interested in suggestions for improvement. So most likely he will never take you up on your offer, but in the off chance that he really does care, you should be the mature one in your relationship and give him a way to retreat and start over. I would generally suggest being very careful about what you say and write to this student, so he can't use anything you said against you and claim that you mislead him in any way.

You accept the interview invite. It's possible, as you say, that the professors you would rather work with have decided they don't want to work with you. It's also possible that the person who contacted you is simply the person on the adcom who is doing the interviews in your subfield (at least that's possible in my field). There's no reason why talking with one professor should make other professors not want to talk to you. Make a good impression on the professor you are talking with, and for god's sake don't say that they are your second choice! Discuss your shared interests, not how you're a better fit with someone else--unless the person is the adcom representative and is not interviewing you as a potential advisee. I don't know about faking enthusiasm that is not there, I guess it depends on how unexcited you are by this option. However, don't worry about being pressured to decide on the spot. That doesn't normally happen and if it does, it's perfectly fine to say that you can't decide yet because you don't have all the information you need (from that school and others). If after the interview you haven't changed you mind about working with that professor, and other professors from that school don't contact you, then you can always decline any offers you are made.

It has a 14-page limit, so it's not going to be able to cover everything. However, it's probably a bad idea not to address a problem, if I see it. Other people will surely raise it anyway. It's not definitive even if it's published in the Journal of Truth. Someone will always challenge what you say, and that's a good thing. I've been holed up in my office working on this every free minute I have for the last month, and I think it might time to take a step back and let it sit for a while before attacking the problem again and (hopefully) thinking of new ideas. The problem is not so much that I will have a "ideas for future research" section in the end of the paper as that my analysis gives a wrong prediction for the truth conditions of a certain kind of construction and it appears right now that that follows logically from what I propose so I need to completely drop that and do something else. It does give really nice predictions in other places and it's an interesting approach in general that several professors have told me that people will appreciate reading about. But yeah, I'll be publishing a "why what I say is wrong" paper.

heh I'm presenting basically the same stuff (more data, less analysis) in a workshop this Saturday. It's not prestigious at all and there's not going to be a proceedings. It's more a chance for me to practice public speaking, meet people and maybe get some new feedback on my analysis. I could in principle submit to another conference and follow up with a journal article anyway, assuming that I can actually work out something that accounts for all the data. The decision that I recently discussed with my advisor is to proceed as if I am publishing - spend the time working out the details of the failing analysis, in part in order to diagnose the problem in full and in part to see how much I can convince myself that it's a big problem and not just a bump in the road. Right now it seems to me that the analysis is crashing in a way that I can't save, so I'll need to completely change directions. If that's the case, I'm not too worried about publishing it (though I could be wrong; I haven't had enough time to really think this through). Even if I work on this nonstop for 2-3 weeks *pleads to the gods of extensions* it won't be perfect and I'll eventually have to make a decision based on less than optimal information. I'd love to hear more opinions about this situation.

It's true that it's only a proceedings, but as my advisor says, its a proceedings "that people actually read." So the paper will be out there and people will read it. So far the pros I see to publishing the paper are: [a] an even more-wrong (wronger?) analysis is out there in the form of a handout from the conference talk, so it's not like no one knows what I'm working on or what I think (well, thought) about it; it's a paper from a good conference proceedings that goes on my CV, which is nice for a first-year; [c] it's putting a new idea and new data out there, which will people will be interested in. There are also cons to publishing the paper: [a] it's incomplete; it's letting everyone know my new idea, before I had time to fully develop it. Someone could use it to publish a working solution of the problem before I get a chance to do it myself. [c] it's a huge strain on my time, and I'd have to write about my current analysis, which has problems, instead of spending the next 2-3 weeks[1] improving the analysis I have and making it work. [1] the official submission deadline is this Monday. I am hoping for an extension.. otherwise this whole discussion will remain a theoretical one.

I wonder what you think about the following situation: I presented a paper at a conference in November, and the written version for the proceedings is due next week. Since November I have discovered new data that can't be explained by the analysis I proposed back then. This new data causes a significant complication that is not predicted by any current theory that deals with the topic I am working on, and I haven't been able to fully solve it yet. Since the paper has already been accepted, my advisor suggested that a write a "progress report" of sorts, laying out the desiderata that a good theory should predict, and sketching my previous attempts to explain the data and the problems they raised. Now, I've always thought it's really wrong that researchers don't publish papers about failed attempts at solving a problem (with the explanation of why and what's missing for the analysis to work). What do you think - would you publish an analysis that only accounts for some of the facts and explain why it fails to explain the others? Or would you hold off and hope that you can produce a working analysis, and only publish that?

Glad to help Since you say the interview is with someone who doesn't know you, I assume they want the exact same thing all interviewers want - to get to know you. Is this a potential advisor? It would make sense that (s)he would want to talk to you to see that you click and that you have passion for shared interests. You will have a distinct advantage during the interview, being able to mention participating in ongoing projects in the department and having recommendations from trusted faculty members from the same department. Your chances of acceptance will probably depend on the department's general policy regarding accepting its own students (some don't like to do it, so maybe you're getting an interview because they want to make an exception for you; other departments regularly recruit their own undergrads, and then you most likely have a good chance of being admitted).

Interviews are always a good thing. Depending on the field, you've either made it past the first round, or you are in fact a finalist. Some departments only interview applicants to make sure they are not exceptionally incompatible (=if you don't make a very bad impression somehow, then you are in), in other cases departments only accept a few of those interviewed. Since you don't give any information about your field and school, it's hard to tell, but it's a good sign either way. The interview is probably is big factor in the decision. It's already been established that you meet the GRE/GPA standards and that your interests intersect with those of some faculty member(s). In the interview they will test whether you are a good fit for the department - in terms of compatibility with potential advisors (personality, as well as research interests) and in terms of compatibility with the spirit and personality of the department. There have been many threads about preparing for interviews in the forum, which you should read for excellent advice. Good luck!

I went against all my professors' advice. I don't regret it for a second. Go to the school that you feel is right for you. It's your degree and your life, not your advisors'. You'd be making a crazy decision if you chose a school to indulge your pride, at the expense of your intuition that it's not the right place for you.

I'm so sorry to hear that they did that! (but then luckily it all turned out for the best ) In my case there was one (California) department that basically said they didn't have funding for internationals, but at least they had the decency not to let the grad school play the bad guys. I was upset they took my registration fees when they clearly could not accept me, but I guess I should be thanking them for being frank about it.

...and something is useless to everyone?

heh, no need for deference. That's good to know, I've really never heard of it happening before. Must have been a very unusual story.