fuzzylogician

Even if you don't think you'll be in any further contact with the school, it's wise to write a polite letter. You want the profs there to remember you favorably, they will be your future colleagues. I wrote some version of this letter to schools whose offer I declined: ETA: Please do NOT copy this letter and use it as your own! Use it as an example and write your own letter.

So, there's a not-so-active general Boston thread on here, but who's heading to MIT? I'll be going there for a PhD in linguistics.

When I visited MIT, the DGS gave me the email address they use to write all of their grad students together. I used it to write a mass-email introducing myself and asking if anyone was looking for roommates or knew of a vacancy. It's been circulating for less than a week and I've already had someone write back to me with an offer. I hope that finding a place through reliable people from my department will increase the chances that I find something decent.

Exactly. During the time I spent in Germany I got the impression that the Germans are very sensitive about their past, much more so than some Eastern Europeans who would sometimes have antisemitic opinions that are so ingrained that they don't even notice them.

Oh my, I made it to the top 5 this month. I need to stop surfing the net in the middle of the night. Sheesh!

There's so much I'd like to tell them but refrain from saying. I keep repeating to myself: stay nice, you might want a job here one day!. Luckily, it seems my tone conveys my thoughts without my actually having to say them out loud. My school passes these end-of-semester questionnaires to all students where they tell instructors what they thought of the course. Several of my students commented to the effect that "she's a smart girl who obviously knows her stuff, but doesn't really seem to like undergrads." Ha! I'm sitting there thinking: "Umm, I don't come to class half as prepared as you think, and I only mind students who kill their grandmas* off twice a semester for an extension on their homework, not all of you". 8) * did anyone else notice that students are likelier to choose their grandmother to be the dead grandparent, not their grandfather? I've started to notice a trend among my students: 4 grandmothers this year, only one grandfather. And my friends who TA other courses tell me that these super-grandparents have died more than once this year!

Yes. I wouldn't say freaking out, but I am worried about everything you've mentioned. I've moved to another country for studies before so I have a pretty good idea of what it'll cost and what exactly I need to do, and I know I've done it successfully before, but it still could be a stressful time. The best advice I can give you against freaking out is to know exactly what needs to be done and have a clear plan of where you need to go and when in order to do it. Print out lists with addresses (possibly marked on a map), phone numbers, directions to- and opening hours of where you need to go. I went as far as printing out images of the buildings I was looking for, but that was a bit excessive . Some things are more urgent (like setting up a bank account and finding an apartment), others could wait a while longer (switching drivers license and even getting a phone). Have your priorities straight and be ready for the eventuality that not everything will be set up perfectly right at the beginning. But within a month of the program starting I guarantee you, you'll be all settled in and well into the program, that you'll forget all about stressing over the move.

No. A lot of people take time off between undergrad and grad school. It's entirely understandable that you might need time to save some money, clear your head, do things you won't be able to once you start grad school (like travel) or whatever. You won't be any less competitive if you wait an extra year, and if you manage to get a job in your area of interest, you might even be more competitive.

I can't help you with K

Are both programs unfunded? The question to ask yourself is which program will give you better chances of being accepted to PhD programs that you are interested in. Since you've already successfully applied to PhD programs before, I assume that you have at least some idea of what schools you'd like to apply to. Try to find out where their current grads came from - did they have a masters at all, what universities did they attend for their undergrad/masters? If most grad students did not come with a masters degree, and since your qualifications have already gotten you into PhD programs before, you might look into less expensive ways of staying competitive (like internships or working as an RA somewhere), and reapply next without doing a masters. For what it's worth, unless NYU is much more prestigious than GWU, I'd be wary of going into debt to attend it. The only good thing you had to say about it is that it's in NYC, but don't forget that the cost of living in NYC is much higher than it would be at GWU. If GWU has faculty that you'd be more interested in working with, then it's likely to be the place where you'd do better work - and that's what's important when you apply to PhD programs.

lol - I think of this site as therapy. I can tell people here what I want to tell the undergrads I teach - (in a nostalgic tone): when I was your age we used to at least work on the problem on our own for a while before we came to ask the teacher for the answers - without worrying about angry parents calling... Ah, youth .

Wow.. good luck! I hope you are feeling whole about your decision now.

At least part of this information is available to you online via the departmental website. You'll probably get better results if you ask specific questions and people don't feel like you want them to do very basic research about the program for you. If you don't get answers here, you could try to contact the DGS or current grad students at USC with your questions. Good luck!

No harm done, haha! I wish I had a good explanation for my bad AWA score. I actually did a double take when I first saw it but since I already had my TOEFL score I decided not to let it bother me too much. I guess I didn't spend as much time preparing for the writing section as I should have. I've always been a skillful writer - it's one of the strong points everyone always commends my papers on and I've won awards for it - so I only wrote about 4-5 practice essays and assumed it was enough. Obviously, I was wrong. I have no idea how the essays are scored, but I suspect that my score suffered because of "cosmetic" factors - maybe my indentation wasn't what they expected or I had too few/many paragraphs, maybe I should have used key words from the prompt instead of synonyms. Who knows.

Start with the department websites and look for the information there. Other suggestions are to contact the Director of Graduate Studies (DGS) at both schools and ask for any info you couldn't find online, and contact current grad students to ask about their impression of the program and any advice they can give you. Have you read the posts about your universities here on thegradcafe? there will probably be a thread for each in the city guide and meet&greet forums. You should be able to find people there who have recently looked for the same (general, maybe not program-specific) info that you are looking for, who might be willing to help. Hopefully someone will read you post here and will be able to give you some more advice, but in the meanwhile you should stay proactive. Good luck! oh, and just to clarify, I'm not a dude.

I'm sorry, I don't know about industrial engineering, but I can give you this general advice: Try to find out about factors that could influence your decision and that you can know about now. For example, is location a consideration for you? Have you looked at the cost of living at Purdue vs. VTech? If you aren't funded at either place, that could be important. Job placement might also play a role, does one place do significantly better than the other in that respect? What's the average starting salary graduates from each institution have earned in recent years? Does one better match your interests/train you in fields that are more sought after in the Indian market (assuming you want to return home after you finish your degree)? If you want to go into academia, has one been more successful than the other placing its students in good PhD programs? Do as much virtual legwork as you can right now, so that there will be as few unknown factors as possible left in your decision later. Hopefully you'll hear back about funding before you have to decide (when is that, btw) and you'll be able to make an informed decision in a short amount of time.

As an international, I knew my major issue would be the vocab, so I took about 3 months to memorize as many of them as I could. I'm one of those people who memorize best by actually writing down whatever it is I need to remember, so I made myself hundreds of these little flashcards with a word+definition on them, which I would take everywhere with me. I used to take them out in the subway, in line to the dentist or whatever, between classes - you wouldn't believe how many times a day you just waste 5-10 minutes waiting on something. I got myself the Kaplan GRE book for math/vocab problem solving strategies and was very pleased. I only thought that their writing section wasn't thorough enough. Math wasn't really a problem for me so I spent maybe a week going over tips and solving a few of the problem sets in the book just to make sure I had it right. For the other parts I crammed about 2-3 weeks and tried to solve all of the problems in the book. In the last week or so I just solved the sample tests you get from ETS when you register and the ones on the Kaplan CD. I ended up scoring V670/Q740/AW4.5, which I wasn't particularly pleased with, but did get me into everywhere I wanted so I guess it was OK. I scored 120/120 on the TOEFL so that should have helped "fix" the low writing score.

Excuse me, but your accusing tone is doing nothing to help your situation. I agree with teaganc and think he put it best: you did not give us enough information to help us help you and it doesn't really seem like you appreciate our good will and efforts. You do realize that this is not a CS specialized forum? The people who post here come from all fields and it would have been wise to give some more information, for example tell us that funding and location are not an issue, and that you want to go into the business and management end of CS. You should have given this information regardless of specialization, it's a crucial part of the decision and anyone who will try to help you has to wonder what your stand on it is. Even us lowly non-CS students sometimes have useful opinions, if you paint us a full picture with enough details in it.

Going to grad school is always contingent upon your finishing undergrad first, even if it doesn't say so in your acceptance letter. Unless there's an official requirement that you maintain some GPA average which you're not meeting, or you're doing horribly (like, all F's), you shouldn't be worried. I've never heard of a school rescinding an offer over some B's and C's.

I asked the DGS at 4 different universities if they recommended any summer preparation, all of them said to relax and take it easy, I'll have enough work to do once the semester starts. I'm going to take them at their word.

Absolutely every linguistics professor I know (about 10 or so of them in two different countries) and some potential advisers at US schools I withdrew from, but kept in touch with, thought I should go to UMass. I get very strange reactions from people when I tell them I chose to go to MIT. You can't say that MIT is ranked lower than UMass or falls behind in any other respect, but nevertheless I get a very surprised "huh!!" followed by a "I thought you'd go to a more semantic-y school". I don't think MIT semantics is all that shabby (wouldn't go there if I did) but honestly I just could not see myself being happy living in Northampton and that was enough to let go of (probably) a better character/personality match with the department as a whole. I don't think I made a mistake, because I value my private life outside academia just as much as my professional life, and I had a distinct feeling while visiting Northampton that I would not enjoy living there. But who knows, I might be back here a year from now crying about unfriendliness and not getting along with faculty. We'll see.

Thanks, eldar. Where did you get this information from? Is there some official US government site that I can read this on? I'm sorry to be a bit thick about this, but I want to make sure: I will receive my fellowship from the department, but obviously part of its income comes from NSF grants and the likes. Does that mean that I will be "indirectly funded" by the US government or does that not count? I would assume that practically every reputable department in my field has some faculty member who is/has received a NSF grant that's at least partly used to fund grad students. This. I think that if one spouse has to sit at home for several years without the possibility of doing anything, that's likely to put a strain on even the best of marriages. I have to say that in that case it would make more sense to take the J-1, and not make my SO be the only one to sacrifice, particularly not for a long, frustrating period of time. For me, though, since I don't plan on getting married any time soon, I'm not sure I can find any real advantage for the J-1 over the F-1. It's too much for me to worry about a potential future spouse right now.. Is there any other advantage to either visa over the other that I am missing?

I think it's normal to feel unsure of your decision and it's actually a very common feeling--I know I had a period of about two weeks where I seriously doubted my decision. The application process is so intense and the wait is so stressful, the decision is a little anticlimactic compared to all that. Just like that, one day it's over, and I think a lot of us were left with a lot of unresolved anxiety that built up during the process. Those feelings have to be worked out somehow, and it's probably only natural that they come out as unsure feelings about our choice. I don't know about you (well, I do, liszt85, but generally speaking ), but I had that period of deliberation where I wasn't sure what I wanted to do and made pro-con lists, but in the end I came a clear conclusion of what was best for me. And for a while there I felt like it was the best choice and I was excited. Then I became worried and unexcited. But I worked through it and now I'm back to feeling (sort of) excited. I'm still working on getting back to that point of elation after finally sending the email accepting MIT's offer and feeling the rush of "being done with it", but at least intellectually I know it's the right choice for me. In any case, if for some reason it turns out that I made a mistake, I'll resolve it then. I'm sure that there are ways to start over or transfer, it can't be that one decision gone wrong can doom my whole career!

I've received the same form and can choose between a F-1 and J-1 visa. Since I don't have a spouse, I'm going to choose the F-1 visa. As far as I know, the J-1 visa has a requirement that you return to your home country (=it's not enough that you leave the US and go to another country, you have to return to your home country) for two years. I hear that this restriction isn't always enforced, for example if you receive Fulbright funding then it is always enforced but if your school funds you then sometimes not. However, I haven't been able to find a clear definition of when this restriction is enforced, so I've decided not to take the chance. Being forced to go back home for two years after my PhD/post might damage my career, and I'd like to avoid causing myself any unneeded difficulty in the future.

I second that. School A seems like the clear winner and Ithink you made the right choice. I'd also add that it's waaaaay premature to worry about your dissertation topic not working out and your committee members fighting with each other. That's all 3-4 years in the future and who knows what'll happen before then. You might actually find you enjoy the new research topics or are interested in other topics. Faculty members may move to other places and new ones could be hired. I'd concentrate on the advantages you're sure to have now over problems you might have later. When the time comes, and if the problems arise, then I am sure that you will figure out a way to solve them.