fuzzylogician

I think it's worth being slightly careful here. You say "I contributed a page/chapter to an online textbook in my field" -- I'm not sure what that means; as long as you are listed as an author on this page/chapter, you're definitely good to go. If you're not credited anywhere, that's a lot less clear. Are you able to consult with your advisor about how to list it? I'm sure someone looked your contribution over before it made it into the textbook (was it peer-reviewed?).

I'm not sure about MAs but in my PhD program there were some international students who took off the last week of classes in May and returned right before the first day of classes in September. (Usually they would have a significant other in their home country, but some just wanted to be home.) Since we were only paid for 9 months of the year, there were no obligations for where we had to be over the summer. You were expected to make some progress but that didn't have to happen on campus.

It's hard to tell from this information. Maybe. You should talk to an advisor. People starting out in a PhD program tend to think it's good to work on a topic that doesn't have any literature in it. I would challenge that way of thinking. You want to engage in a conversation with others; you want to work on a topic that others care about -- if for no other reason than you want to be accepted to conferences and published, and for that you need people to think your topic is important and interesting. You also want to be relevant when it comes time to find a job. If no one is interested in what you are doing, you'll have a harder time explaining why anyone should care and hire you. So, if there is literature in general and there's a clear case to be made about why a Canadian case study is interesting, that's one thing. If no one is doing it for some other reason, then that's a different story. So bottom line, you need to talk to someone who knows more about your field. Like your advisor. (And if you're a first-year, or not even that, you need to keep an open mind and remember that your interests might -- and should -- develop while you're in the program. So this might all be premature.)

The process: 1. You choose an appropriate publication venue, write up your paper, revise/polish, submit it. 2. Your paper hits an editor's desk, who takes a look. They may choose to desk-reject the paper (common in some fields, not others), otherwise they will send the paper out to review (usually to 2-3 reviewers, but this depends on the field). How long it takes to find people who are willing to review the paper may vary (sometimes you can suggest reviewers, which can help the process along). How long it takes to get an editor to actually look at the paper also varies. 3. You wait. Maybe you bug the editor once in a while. You wait some more. This step can take anything from weeks to months, with a lot of variation across fields. 4. You get your first round of reviews back, with a decision. If it's not a reject, it's likely a Revise and Resubmit. Now it's up to you to make the changes. This can take as long as you let it. 5. Assuming it's an R&R, you resubmit and the paper along with a letter to the editor specifying the changes you've made. The paper will likely go back to the same reviewers, if they're willing to look at the paper again. 6. See step 3. 7. You get your decision back. Hopefully there has been improvement, so either it's an R&R with fewer issues that are easier to deal with, or it's an accept with minor revisions. It could be a rejection, or if there is a new reviewer, there might be new issues to deal with. A good editor should not allow new major issues at this point, but it can happen. Note that some journals only allow one round of R&R so you might at this point get a rejection just because you haven't successfully dealt with all the comments from the first round. This is another one of those things that varies by field and even journal. 8. If it's good news, you revise accordingly, repeat steps 5-7. If it's a rejection, you regroup, see what you can take from the comments you got to improve the paper, and try again. (9. Eventually, you deal with copy-editing of a final version, you wait for official publication. You post an unofficial copy on your website and your field's repository. You celebrate.) The overall timeframe: Years. You write, you revise, you submit, you get comments and revise some more, you wait for reviews for weeks or months, once accepted you might even wait months or years for the paper to appear in print, if there is a backlog of papers. Some of my papers have taken up to 5 years from submission to appearing in print. The fastest ones probably took more like 1-2 years. Other fields will have a very different timeline, so YMMV.

http://thecollegeinvestor.com/242/amazon-student/

Well, what kind of time frame are we looking at? How much time do you have to invest in this and what do you hope to get out of it? If you want to just stay plugged in but keep it low key, you could try and attend colloquia or other talks in the area. The best school in the area is UMD, and if you can become someone they know, you might be able to get a nice letter out of that eventually. There's also Georgetown, which is great for some subfields. The LSA headquarters are right there, and they also have events once in a while. You could seek some kind of part-time summer research opportunity -- those sometimes exist in that area. You could attend summer institutes, if you can take a week or two off work (e.g. this year is the LSA summer institute in Kentucky, but there are also a variety of summer schools in other parts of the world, including NASSLLI, ESSLLI, EGG, the new summer school in Crete, the school in St Petersburg, there's even one in the Himalayas). There are conferences you could show up to (UMD is hosting SALT this year in May, if you're into semantics). I don't think there are too many night classes and I don't know how those schools would feel about a visitor in their first-year classes, but it's also not clear that you could attend because they are usually offered during the day and require quite a bit of a time investment. So showing up to events and starting to make connections might be best, and from there you might after a while schedule a meeting with a faculty member you think you connect with to explicitly talk about how to stay connected and perhaps prepare for a PhD in linguistics.

Often? probably not, but I'm sure it happens on occasion. Keep in mind that any publication you put out there is going to be there forever. Don't submit anything you aren't proud of or wouldn't want out there in the future. It's better to wait and produce quality publications that will go into top journals than produce half-baked mediocre papers. You do not need publications to get into a PhD program. Whether it makes sense to submit the work depends on the particular situation. For one, doing it means that you're continuing to work on an old project instead of starting new ones. Some advisors might not like that at all. You want to connect with your new program and new advisor and pick up new skills and projects. Beyond that, it's a question of the quality of the work vs what you'd be doing instead. Also a question of whether you'll have the support of your new program in doing this, which isn't obvious. Undergraduate projects are often less mature than graduate projects. So the more time you spend doing old work, the less you have to develop new skills and potentially better projects. So, again, one would have to decide how good the work is, the potential publication venue, and how much work would have to go into it. It's a conversation to have both with your old advisor and your new one.

You might want to tell us what field you're asking about, but I'm going to go ahead and say yes.

At a basic level, you need to decide if you want (or might want) a career in academia. If so, a good place to start is to look at recent hires in sociolinguistics and figure out where they got their degrees. I would imagine that there are some top programs that produce successful candidates in this field (my field is sufficiently removed that I wouldn't presume to tell you what those are). Once you have a better sense of those programs, the next step is to figure out their admissions criteria, by looking at current students, especially beginning ones. You may discover that you need to beef up your profile, and an MA is one good way of doing that. Attending the LSA summer institute and/or taking courses as a non-degree student at a local university could be others, along with finding research opportunities to help you gain some more experience outside of the classroom and also get better LORs. I don't know how I feel about applying for a mediocre program and dropping out with an MA. First off, it'll burn a bridge and might hurt your LORs. Second, not every program has an official MA on the way to a PhD and the funding might not be great, and those are things to watch out for. @2017 has suggested some good MA programs; in Canada, you could also look at UBC, Queens, maybe Concordia or UQAM (if you speak French). In the US, U of Minnesota, and maybe U of Michigan. There are also fine programs in Europe that you might go to, before returning to the US for a PhD. Those are all good routes to go in. Your main concern should be figuring out what (if anything) needs to be strengthened in your application to make you competitive for top programs (by looking at the profiles of recent accepted students, and talking to your professors), and then figuring out what you need to do to get yourself to that level. An MA may or may not be needed; there are other ways to gain extra experience. I would, as a start, probably try to go to the LSA summer institute. That's a good place to start getting to know top faculty. Once you have some sort of relationship with them, you could ask for a meeting to specifically discuss grad school admissions and their recommendations for what to do next. Then go from there, based on what you learn from your own research and the advice you get from others.

I would advise against doing an unfunded PhD. And I would advise against assuming that anything is going to change. If they're not offering funding now, when they're trying to recruit you, what's going to change after you commit? The most likely scenario is you spend a lot of money on that first semester, don't get funding, and then have to choose to take the loss, or take on a whole lot more debt to try and justify that expense you're already made. If you are in a field where students are normally funded, take the lack of funding as a rejection.

The best approach is not to lie. If they ask about it, tell them and explain what happened just like you did here. It was freshman year, it's over, and you learned your lesson. It shouldn't stop you from getting admitted to graduate programs. If they don't ask, they don't ask. I wouldn't volunteer details of any kind that aren't necessary, certainly not negative ones. As for how much detail -- not more than a couple of sentences. Basically a version of what you said here. No excuses, just straight up facts, taking responsibility and making it clear that it's firmly in the past.

Well then it really sounds like you need to go to that meeting and hear what they have to say about why you're not being renewed. It's not a normal development, so you need to find out what went wrong. Once you have more information, then you can decide what to do next.

Is there any written documentation of the two-year promise? Or any evidence to show that not renewing you would be an exception to an unwritten rule that is accepted wisdom in your program?

You didn't describe anything that sounds like an obvious red flag. But some thoughts that are more like musings that you might answer in your application and should not by themselves lead to a rejection; but they might help you get started debriefing this season: - three B.S. degrees? That's two too many. Why are you doing so many undergraduate degrees, instead of focusing on something? - you have a lot of presentations and publications in very low impact venues. I would stop doing that; some are okay, but too many and one worries about your choices and the impact of your work. It starts to look like padding, and you don't need that. Better concentrate on one really good outcome rather than multiple mediocre ones. - I assume the publications and presentations speak to research experience, but you didn't discuss that. If you ended up discussing your publications and where you presented instead of discussing the work itself and what you learned from it, that's another potential problem. You want to discuss the motivation for the work and what it taught you; the deliverables (presentations and such) could be mentioned as an afterthought or left on your CV. What counts is being able to explain what you did and why it matters. - Similarly, is there cohesion to these past experiences? Do you know what you want to study in the future? In other words, it could very well be a 'fit' issue, from what I can tell. I would take a serious look at that. In short: there could possibly be a concern about cohesion, a vision for your future, and making good choices in your research, as well as fit, as you have already been told. Are these things that your application addresses? (Disclaimer: this is just a guess, based on what you've written here; I could be way off base.)

I'm actually one of the lucky ones. I'm already on an H1B so while not being able to travel while the extension petition is being process really(!) sucks, it's still much better than if this was a new petition and I were applying while not already working in the States. That would have basically meant I would have no chance of working a job in the States next year, because there would be no way I could get the visa in time to start teaching in the fall semester.* I'm sure that there are people in that situation, and that would be SO much worse. * And given the job application cycle in my field, that would be true every year that PP is not available!

It means exactly what he said. I don't know what you think he will gain from not telling you the truth. He could tell you he doesn't have an update yet or just ignore your email, but since you got a reply and an update, take it as it is. He think he'll have funding but he's not sure yet. He can't make you any promises until he has the funding. You don't know that the funding you saw is the one he's counting on for you, so I'd stop it with the conspiracy theories. You could reply to say thank you and does he have an idea of when he'll have more information. Otherwise, unfortunately you'll just have to wait.

I'll only address this one -- if you can get a green card, and you want to live and work in the States as an adult, do it now. With the current administration, you just don't know what will happen next with immigration. Even if you qualify now, you can't be sure that that will still be true in a year or three. So, do it now, while you can. I would personally tend to think that there is no advantage to being an international student. There are usually fewer funding sources and spots for international students than for domestic students. But regardless, I'd do it just to be sure that you have it because, again, these days things are just so unpredictable.

^ Yep. In some places, now is exactly the time to start looking, and by May many of the good places might be already taken for the fall. The bigger the city and the less dependent it is on the universities nearby, the greater the chance that you'll find apartments year-round with leases beginning at any time. But that's not guaranteed, so you need to ask around to learn what the housing market is like both in terms of timing and availability where you're moving to.

Well, unless my H1B extension petition can be submitted before the end of the week, Premium Processing is being suspended next week and that means I won't be able to travel out of the States at least until October, and most likely until December/January. I've already turned down one invitation to speak at a panel in Europe because I can't be sure I'll be able to travel then. I am not applying to any summer or fall conferences more generally, for the same reason.

Well when I first moved what I did was find out the email address for the graduate students (programs will usually have a listserv kind of thing to make it easier to send announcements to the entire student body) and email them all with a quick introduction and my questions about housing. I'd already visited so I met some of them, but this was more efficient. I got very detailed replies from a couple of them and ended up deciding to be roommates with a current student who was looking for a new apartment, so that she looked for the place (since she was there) and I trusted her judgment. We had a long Skype conversation to make sure we were on the same page; we lived together for three years, so that worked out nicely. Another way to go is to reach out to a professor you've been in touch with and ask them to put you in touch with students. There are always some who are more active and would be willing to help, the trick is to identify them; professors will tend to know who those are, so if you ask to be put in touch with someone who could answer questions about housing for you, they should know who is likely to help. Otherwise, you could just open the People page for your program and cold-email a few people who seem like they might have similar interests to yours. They will either answer or know to tell you who could help. People are usually pretty friendly and willing to help when it comes to prospectives and new students; everyone remembers when they were in that situation themselves.

Make friends with current students. You might be able to get someone to go look at apartments for you. You should never sign a lease for an apartment you haven't seen, but if you can't go yourself, at least have someone go there and take pictures for you. You'll owe them something nice, but it'll be worth it. This is something that you should be able to find someone to help you with! Also, check if there is any current student moving out of an apartment whose lease you could take over, or if any of them happen to know of an opening. That would be an excellent way to find a place that is more likely to be okay. (E.g. check if any graduating students are leaving an apartment that would be good for you.) Other than that, university listings are also a safer bet; craigslist is always a bet, but it's better if you actually have someone go to each place you're considering in person.

Depends on the field, I don't think there is a general answer. I'd think of a conference as something that has a CFP where anyone can submit, and (if accepted) present their work. A symposium would be organized and speakers might only be by invitation. It'd be much smaller than a conference (though there are also small conferences). A symposium would always be organized around a theme; a conference might, but doesn't have to, and the theme would be broader. My field doesn't have anything like a "congress" so I'm guessing here, but it sounds like it could be the largest of the three.. so maybe like a large conference with a much broader appeal. But again, I actually don't know what you mean by that.

Well some schools have an official "candidacy" status, usually for a PhD, attained once you've reached a certain milestone (defended your proposal, ABD, or similar), so you can say you're a PhD candidate. Other schools don't have that, so you'll be a PhD student throughout. Can't say I've heard of a similar distinction for a Masters, but it might be out there. I honestly don't think it matters one bit what you call yourself. But if your school doesn't have an official distinction, I'd just say Masters student.

You should find out if this school will cover your tuition or not (and if not, how much it is). Usually a stipend just means that the money can go toward your living expenses -- rent, transportation, groceries, etc. That's why they don't specify anything else, it's up to you to decide how to use it. If this school is paying your tuition, that's probably the better offer. But you should keep in mind that it's unlikely that $4000 would be sufficient for a year anywhere in the States, so you might have to take out loans. You should also find out if either school is offering health insurance, which can get expensive too.

That would not be advisable. Backing out of an acceptance could burn a bridge, since it'll lead to money being committed to you and could lead to other students being rejected off the waitlist because you've taken a spot. If you back out, that will cause an inconvenience. Not that there aren't legitimate reasons why that might happen, but it doesn't sound like you have one. Have you tried asking for an extension on the decision deadline?