fuzzylogician

^ Re the above post, note that as an international student, some of this advice could get you in trouble, so be careful. You shouldn't work off campus without authorization, and you won't get that for tutoring or editing jobs (and yes, you can work off the books, but do that at your own peril). Same goes for health insurance, make sure you're within the legal requirements for your visa. As for food stamps or other government assistance, if you ever want to stay in the US long-term and immigrate, this will cause trouble for you later, so beware.

I generally agree with everything you said, but this statement kind of rubbed me the wrong way. A lot of how funding is decided has absolutely nothing to do with how much work you have to do as a student. It has everything to do with how much funding is available in your particular field, and what the norms are. Any good program in any field, be it in the exact sciences, the natural sciences, the social sciences, or the humanities, are going to require more than 20 hours a week of work, and very often more than 40 (and let's not get into wars about who works more, I don't think it's healthy to be proud about working 60 and 80 hour weeks anyway). Point being, humanities and social science students can be just as busy as in the natural sciences. It's true that we are often more portable and don't need to spend time in the lab (I'm writing this from a coffeeshop where I'm taking a break from working on a manuscript, for example, though I also do experimental work that does require a lab), but that doesn't mean we magically have all this free time for outside work. This doesn't even address the OP's problem of being an international student who isn't allowed to obtain outside work, even if they did have the time. But more generally, the funding you get has no correlation with how busy you are. It is simply the case that across the board, humanities students are offered lower funding packages. I would personally not accept such a package if I had to take out loans (I don't think a PhD in the humanities or social sciences is something to get into debt over), but I think that in some fields it's not all that uncommon. That said, I knew no one who took out loans in my program (or at least no one who admitted to it, but since many were international and couldn't get student loans anyway, I believe they really didn't). I lived in an expensive city, and my family didn't give me any money. As an international student, I also wasn't able to work beyond my grad school TA/RAships. I had roommates, and I was conscious of spending, though not too frugal, and I was able to save on my stipend each month. It was more about not getting myself into a situation I couldn't handle than finding ways to survive it.

Oh! yeah, in that case, I don't think this counts for very much. In general, institution-internal presentations are something you'll probably want to remove from your CV as you progress in your program. The ones to keep are invited presentations at other institutions and peer-reviewed conference presentations (of your own work, of course).

I don't understand. Why were you presenting work you weren't involved with?

Unless there is some hidden cost of working with someone insufferable or unreasonable demands on your time, I would generally tend to think the RAship is better. More money, less teaching, more time to work on actual research -- all obviously good things anyone would want. Bonus points if you get to develop new skills or get publications out of this (discuss issues authorship early!). Since you already have teaching experience, I don't think this is as much of a concern for you. Your high school teaching days will count for something if you play it right (you'll want to write research statements that integrate this past experience with some verbiage about what you learned that's applicable to college teaching; there's probably quite a lot, I would guess, to do with engaging everyone, dealing with trouble-makers, developing lesson plans, interactive teaching techniques, etc.) It would probably be useful to have just a tiny bit of TA/teaching experience in your field, if you have none, but frankly I'd rank that lower than having the extra time to produce meaningful research, because even at teaching institutions, that's eventually what will get you hired.

Pinned right above your new post:

Oh, btw, something else to factor in: if you're international and moving to a new climate, you'll have expenses for appropriate clothing which may be unavoidable and not cheap. A good winter coat, winter boots, and warm clothes might be necessary and those costs will add up, too. Something to keep in mind.

Why don't you simply write to introduce yourself? Say you just learned you're TAing for him, that it's your first semester TAing, and you're wondering if there is anything you should do now (or over the summer) to prepare. Keep in mind that professors have variable availability over the summer and you may not get a quick response, but you have nothing to lose. For what it's worth, I never contact my TAs ahead of time and I would not be able to provide a syllabus this early on (and maybe not in mid-August either, I might get to teaching prep last minute -- the summer is my time to work on my own research!). But then there's also basically nothing my TAs would need to do in advance, either.

Yeah, that is a high proportion of your salary to spend on housing. I think you need to collect a bit more information. First off, what are other predictable expenses? Does the dorm cover utilities (electricity, gas, *heating* if in a cold location, internet, phone) -- those can add up, especially heating, if not covered. Is your health insurance fully covered or will you have to pay more (vision, dental, spouse/children's insurance)? What are average prices for groceries? Will you have a car -- factor in insurance and gas; if you are using public transportation, what is the cost of a monthly pass/however many tickets you'll need? Important -- is the stipend for 9 or 12 months, and will there be additional summer funding? If not, you need to save on each month's salary so you have enough to get yourself through the summer. Then I think it'd be useful for you to get in touch with current students and get some advice from them on how they handle their budget, which I assume is similar to yours. It might be beneficial to try and find roommates in an already existing apartment situation rather than try to contact landlords directly. Current students in your department might know someone who is looking, and could put you in touch with them. If you have roommates, you should not spend nearly as much on housing as you are describing now.

You reply to the confirmation email and/or to your latest email with the person who you've been corresponding with; you apologize for the confusion but state that you are unable to make an in-person visit at the time/location indicated in the email. I don't think there is much more you need to say than that it's 6 hours away and you already have other prior commitments scheduled at that time. I don't think anyone would think this makes you lazy. You then propose some other alternative times that would work for you, and end by thanking them for considering you for the position and reiterating your interest and excitement at the possibility of getting it.

There have been multiple discussions of this question on the board. The best advice seems to be to wait and see what machine people in your department use, and get the same type of computer. If you can't wait, you might want to ask your future advisor about this, because compatibility issues might arise if e.g. you are using a Mac and everyone else uses a PC (or vice versa). You might also try to reach out to current students to see what they use. This will give you the best idea of what should work for you at your program and given your particular needs.

This reads like a homework assignment. If so, this board is no here to help with such assignments. If not, you need to clarify why you are asking this question and what you have already done to try and answer it.

How about your advisor?

You don't need to show the same level of ties to your home country in an F1 interview. It's expected that you won't be studying and any immediate family will go with you. So it should be more straightforward than the B2 interview. Some things you can keep in mind: have answers to questions about funding -- they will ask who will pay for the degree and you should know the answers; they might worry about you working illegally, so it should be clear that you'll have enough funding and there won't be a problem. If asked about post-PhD plans, make sure to say you plan to go back home and find a job there, and not to say anything about wanting to find a job in the US. You could also show that you still have a bank account in your home country and I assume your parents are there too. Those will be some ways to show ties to your home country. Good luck!

If you took the classes after you officially graduated, these new classes will not be factored into your undergrad GPA. That is settled and can't be changed. However, a school may choose to factor it into a cumulative GPA of their own creation or to simply weigh it more because these courses demonstrate your abilities when not impaired by illness, and that seems like an obvious better estimation of your potential to success in grad school than your undergrad grades, assuming the illness is now under control. I assume that when you say that schools require a 3.0 to apply that doesn't mean that they won't accept your submitted application, but it may be more difficult for you to get in. Early fall would be a good time to reach out to those schools and ask your questions: will these later courses matter? will they round up your GPA (because, of course, 2.965 rounded to the nearest whole number is precisely their minimum requirement)? will an explanation in an addendum or a LOR make a difference (you should have a LOR writer explain your low grades and your improvement since, anyway!). This is one of those unusual situations where the GPA isn't really a good indication of your future potential of success, unlike in most cases where we tend to think that past behavior is a pretty good predictor of future behavior. Best you can do is point it out clearly, have LOR writers back you up on this, and hope that the schools you're applying to can see it, too. Usually official cutoffs can be waived or worked around, though in some cases hard cutoffs are just that, which is why it's worth asking so you don't waste your time. But unless that happens, more often than not, if there is just one blemish on an otherwise attractive application, there will be ways of working it out.

The conversation would be for you, not them. You've only just begun but you've already developed some very strong feelings about what goes on in this lab. A conversation with someone in charge might help you get some perspective on the training process that they perhaps didn't do a good job sharing with you at the outset. As others have said, you've only been there what amounts to less than a week full-time, so it's not at all surprising that you haven't been assigned any interesting duties yet. But it might help you to understand what the longer-term plans are, so you understand why you're being asked to do grunt work now. (Though frankly I think it's pretty clear, and I think that your negative attitude, comparisons with another RA that you know nothing about, and general approach to things, aren't something that this lab can or should be responsible for changing. I hope you're seeing someone for that, it's not good for you or anyone around you.)

Okay, I'll voice the possibly less popular opinion. Your responsibility is to yourself. You don't have to stay with him and you are not responsible for getting him better or for educating him. You need to take care of yourself. If you do decide you want to try and stay, I think it's of utmost importance to get support from others. Can you involve his family? friends? do you have a support system around you to take care of you, if you need it? If he wasn't always like this, something must have triggered this, and maybe you can help him through it. Whatever it is, though, you shouldn't do it alone, and you shouldn't let him take it out on you. This sounds like a situation that requires professional help. I know that posting here was probably already hard enough, so maybe the next step is for you to find counseling on your own, maybe through your school, before you think about talking to him. Figure out your resources and support network, then come up with a plan to confront him. I hope that there is no fear of physical violence, but if there is, let me repeat again: your responsibility is to yourself first. Make sure that you are safe, and take care of yourself, both physically and mentally. If that means you need to leave him, I think that's totally understandable and no one from the outside can judge. And if you choose to stay and try and fix it, again I hope that no one will judge and that you can find the help you need.

Well, you should probably talk about your responsibilities and potential for future professional development with your PI or whoever is in charge of you. However, I think you are reading a whole lot more into this than it is. Grunt work, yes. Degradation and humiliation, most likely not, and certainly not simply because they ask the most junior member of the lab to do the things they don't want to. You've only just started your training, so I'm not terribly surprised that no one has put you in charge of anything too important yet. That said, you should get more out of your experience than just emptying the trash, so just have a conversation with someone about the long-term prospects of your being in the lab.

Sounds like you need to talk to your advisor explicitly about these communication issues that you are having. She sounds like she is trying to find a way to get through to you and would be open to new things, but you need to help her find ways to make the relationship work. That basically means telling her, or if it's hard to say, then writing out and emailing her (though eventually you'll have to have an in-person conversation), a version of what you said here. You could do it directly with her, or with some mediation (e.g. with the help of your DGS, or someone from the office of disabilities). It would be good if you could provide direct guidance about what works for you and what doesn't, and also some explanation of your behavior and what it means, as opposed to how you think it might be misinterpreted. It sounds like she is generally a good and dedicated advisor, so I'd stop worrying about her dropping you as an advisee, as long as you can communicate that you want the relationship to continue and to find ways of improving it, including how best to give you feedback that you can understand. Her frustration should lessen once she understands why it's been difficult, and in particular once you start actively trying to find ways of fixing it. At the same time, it would probably be a good idea to seek help through the office of disabilities at your university. Your anxiety is something that perhaps could be treated, and the communication issues are something that they might be able to help you manage better. It would be good to do this sooner rather than later; academia is a lot about social interactions, not just about pure research. This is also true in many other future careers you might want to have, so you should start thinking about developing strategies for getting yourself understood and dealing with people you have a harder time relating to.

My program provided 9 months of funding and didn't have any official requirements over the summer. Some people would be gone basically all of that time, and others would be on campus for most of the summer. Most summers someone would organize a reading group of some kind, but there weren't any classes to take. Professors likewise varied in how much time they spent on campus, but they all had at least some availability, since a lot of students would defend their dissertations in the summer. As for me, personally, I do most of my research and writing over the summer, and I slow down significantly during the semester (and end of summer) when course prep/teaching starts to take over a lot of my time. I do really appreciate being able to use my time as I see fit and work on or off campus, travel, take breaks, etc. I try not to be on campus more than once or twice a week for meetings, and otherwise I work from home or my favorite coffee shop. For fields where that doesn't really happen, maybe there are still ways of slowing down and taking more breaks, even if you can't up and go on vacation for two weeks. A stay-cation can be just as rejuvenating. I think everyone will understand if you declare a long weekend where you're unreachable and you just do whatever you want that isn't work.

Missing details: do you have other offers you're holding onto right now? Did they give you a deadline for the decision? Will you have to pay a downpayment if/when you say yes? What about funding beyond the first year, even if you do eventually have a TAship next year? If you don't have other offers, you lose nothing by saying yes now and rescinding later if you don't get funded, unless you have to pay a downpayment. But I would read the offer letter very carefully and ask around about funding past the first year, so you don't get stuck one year from now without funding in the middle of a degree. If you do have another offer, if you've accepted it, under the CGS resolution you'll need the other school's consent to accept another offer. If you have deadlines coming, let the other school know and try to work with them to get a decision in time. Not sure what more we can say here.

London, Manchester, and Liverpool are cities in England. England is not a city. May I suggest that you just take some time off to travel in Europe? Studying an entire degree in a country you know absolutely nothing about isn't exactly the best idea anyone's ever had. Moreover, living and traveling in a place are two very different things. It sounds like you might benefit more from doing some traveling and soul-searching (or, in other words, growing up), and not necessarily from committing to a multi-year intense advanced academic program, where I would be willing to bet that you don't know what your end goal is or what career you'd want to pursue. I say this because degrees from the UK or Germany will give you different career opportunities than a Canadian degree, and to know which one is right for you you need to know something about your research interests and long-term career goals. Traveling and exploring could be a good way to figure that out.

Were you required to submit a full transcript with your spring grades? Did your offer explicitly require you to maintain a certain GPA? If so and you're below the required GPA, you may have a problem. Otherwise, all you need to make sure of is that you graduate in time and have your degree in hand before you enroll in your graduate program. That will be the only actual requirement that counts.

One other thing to try is to go on the authors' webpages. Many will have preprints or links to their articles on their publications page. Another thing to do is ask a more senior student for help, if you're having trouble with the search in general and not just finding one or two of the articles. You could consult with a librarian -- they're there to help precisely with questions like this. Or you could simply ask your professor, if you rethink your hesitation and decide there is no real reason for it (I don't know the situation well enough to have an opinion).