fuzzylogician

Hi there, please don't cross-post the same post multiple times. I've moved this copy to a more appropriate location (the GRE subforum) and have deleted the other copies.

People are admitted to PhD programs from all over the world. Naturally, they will come with different levels of preparation and some gaps in knowledge in some subfields. This is entirely expected. You seem to have discovered that part of your field that you have less training in, and perhaps this is one where the majority of your cohort happens to have a strength in. That is a bit unfortunate, but at the end of the day it's to be expected for someone in some subfield. First-year classes are offered precisely in order to bring everyone up to speed and make sure that they share some common terminology, set of beliefs and/or facts, and a language to talk about them. As an instructor, it can be a delicate balance if you have a class where the majority of students come with more background and are pulling ahead, but you also have some students with less background who will need to catch up quickly. Not everyone is equally good at handling that, it's actually a really hard challenge. That said, your instructor will have probably noticed that you are one of those students who came in with less background and therefore s/he should expect that it may take you longer to catch up, especially if the class has mostly students with more background. So, I wouldn't worry about how you come across just yet, it's really early in the semester. I think that one very good thing to do is to meet with the instructor, be up front about feeling like you're behind, and do two things: first, get the instructor's opinion as to whether that's actually true (students can be so so wrong about that sometimes), and second, get some extra help if you are. You might need to ask for additional readings, or meet with the TA, or work with other students, or whatever it is that works for you, and spend extra time on this particular class. Knowing to ask for help and what the resources are is half the battle. Then it's a matter of working hard. Trust me, by the end of the semester you might have worked harder than some of the others, but you will have closed the gap between you and them. It's pretty amazing what you can do in one semester of a good graduate course, compared to even several years of undergrad courses. And rest assured that there will most definitely be some other area where you are strong and they are weaker. And rest even more assured (!) that everyone is insecure, whether they admit it or not, and everyone is comparing themselves to everyone else and thinking that they are the only ones who can't keep up or shouldn't be there. There is a reason your program accepted you, and that is that they think you are a good fit and can succeed there. I would accept that as a given and not doubt it, even if you can't see it now. They are the ones with the experience and they know what they are doing.

Unless you are in a very large field and don't expect to see your advisors again, I would advise against burning bridges. You didn't say if this new opportunity is a full-time paying job, an opportunity to finish your MA somewhere else, or something more of an internship or part-time/unpaid position. If it's the latter, it's a bit more difficult to see how it's a good idea for professional reasons, though I understand that it may still be what you want for personal reasons. You also didn't say if you have just one year left or two, and that too is an important factor here. Since you say that you can do your work on your current dataset from afar, is there a way to move to the new lab location but finish the degree remotely? Or at least commit to doing whatever the lab needs to get publications out and/or train someone new to take over your responsibilities before you leave? Maybe there is a way to finish everything you need to do on-site in a few months and move for the next semester. I get the sense from your post that you really want to move, and I understand that sentiment. I would see if there is a way of doing that in a responsible way that your current advisor will appreciate. If you trust him/her, you might share some version of the personal side of the story to explain why it's important for you to get away from your current location (you don't need to give too many details). Even if not, don't just spring the decision on him/her -- give him/her time to plan and if necessary, find your replacement before you leave.

A quick look at the faculty page will tell you how seriously they take the "Canadians preferred" clause. I find that different universities take it more or less seriously. Read up on the structure of the program to avoid saying something that sounds uninformed (e.g. programs will almost always require an MA; some have such a thing as a "qualifying year"; funding for students might be very different than you are used to, perhaps tighter and/or generally only available to Canadian citizens; undergraduate degrees at least in some provinces may sometimes be only three years, not four, depending on whether they come in with some previous work, e.g. from cegep). This will influence how you want to talk about interacting with and teaching students. There is often more available government funding in Canada, so talking about applying for grants early and often might not be a bad idea. Find out which granting agency is the relevant one for you. Generally, though, it's not all that different from applying to jobs in the US. I don't think I did anything different in applications to Canadian schools than for US schools. A lot of what I just said is more relevant if and when you get an interview.

To reiterate what TakeruK says above, you can list peer-reviewed journal paper, conference proceeding papers, and (in some fields) technical reports, even if the publication venue is online-only. However, stuff that you *only* post on ResearchGate, academia.edu and similar are not publications. Anyone can post anything there, so if you have e.g. a paper or slides from a class presentation up there, those should be treated as manuscripts at best, but they can't be counted as publications.

I could spend time explaining this but I won't. It doesn't matter if I think it's right or wrong, it's a matter of a school's policy. They may accept graduate courses taken at another institution or not, it's entirely up to them. I am guessing that schools might be more likely to do so if a student actually graduated than if s/he took some classes and dropped out, but I could be wrong. It's actually very common for students to have to take courses in a PhD program even if they've taken similar ones in a previous degree. I think it's really a waste of time arguing this when you haven't even been accepted to any program at the moment. As for the deadline question, again this is too broad. There is no official deadline across all schools in the US, obviously. As a general rule, one might imagine that the longer ago you took the classes, the less likely a school might be to consider them still relevant. But we're talking about courses you took last year, so I don't think this is something to worry about for now. Again, all of these questions are moot unless you are actually admitted to a program, and at that point you'll want to ask them, not us.

It will depend on the particular school that you are admitted to, and no one here will be able to make you any promises no matter how much additional information you provide (though the above poster is correct that you aren't providing enough information in your post). You may be able to transfer anything from none of the credits to all of them; no one here can tell. If you had a school in mind, someone here might know, though in that case I would advise to ask them directly. In this particular case, since you left your previous without graduating, I would say the chances that credits will transfer are lower than they might otherwise be.

If you can find another internship, that seems to me like a good solution. I suppose you wouldn't want to switch more than once (if you can help it), but leaving a place for reasons of 'incompatibility' or some such would probably not raise too many red flags if you are successful at the next internship. I'd definitely look into that before choosing to leave the program and give up altogether.

I don't know why it would be unethical. Funding considerations are entirely legitimate when deciding where to apply and where to go for school. The answer in this case might depend on field, and as @TakeruK suggests, asking about summer funding is a good way to find out. In my field, offers are almost always for 9 months (same as faculty salary, btw), but there are exceptions.

Good. But I would really suggest concentrating less on this grade that's worth less than 1% of your final grade and more on understanding your department's culture and expectations.

Yeah, the single-authored paper seems like a much safer bet. Your LOR writer will mention the other one in her letter, so if anyone wants to find and read it, they can go ahead and do that, too, but I would leave it up to them to look it up if they choose.

One last attempt before I give up: what other letters do you have? The question is how this third letter fits in with the other two. Though if I understand correctly both letters will be from people who've only known you briefly (one summer and one semester, respectively) and will talk about one quick project. If that is the case, it seems like the person with a PhD and research background is a better choice. Although of course you also didn't tell us what the letters are for (I'm assuming a research PhD here), and that, too, matters.

Even if allowed, the only way I would even think about submitting a co-authored paper as a writing sample is if (a) you did most of the work on the paper, and (b) the professor who co-authored it with you will serve as a LOR writer and will attest to that. The main concern adcoms are going to have is that it isn't going to be clear what part of the work was done by you as opposed to the professor. If the writing isn't yours, because it was substantially edited by the professor, or if the idea and main parts of the execution were theirs, it's just not a good idea to submit this paper. A single-authored paper is a much safer bet.

I bet you this varies a lot too. In my field this will usually be stated on the conference website. For most conferences it'll be a month to a month and a half from the submission deadline but it could take longer. If you can't find the answers online, email the organizers and ask.

see the first answer here: come back and ask if there is any particular acronym that wasn't covered.

What matters at the end of the day is the work and how you talk about it, and less so the actual publications, especially given that these are mostly undergraduate/graduate journals/conferences (I assume that by "professional" you mean respectable journals/conferences in your field that recognized scholars submit to, preferably top-tier ones and not obscure ones). Frankly I would not over-emphasize having that many lower-tier papers, it speaks to a possibility that you might tend to spend your time making less than ideal choices about where to invest your time and efforts. Having dozens of lower-tier works won't do very much to advance your career at any stage beyond this point, compared to having fewer but well-placed pieces. The thing to emphasize instead is the actual project, the results, what you learned from it, and how it informed your current/future goals. If there are multiple projects, you do not need to talk about every single one in your statement. I would choose one or two (depending on word/page limits), and no more than three, and spend a paragraph on each: what were the questions/goals of the project? what methods did you use to approach the problem? what did you learn from doing this? why does it matter? do you hope to expand on this in the future, and if so how? you could very well conclude with "This project led to X conference presentations and to a publication in UG Journal. A fully spelled-out version of the proposal has been submitted for review with Fancy Journal" or some such.

Not sure I followed all of that. That said, 1. I don't know why you think that formal semantics, experimental phonetics, and computational linguistics (what an odd collection of subfields!) only study English. That aside, 2. Any argument you make has to be based on data. Your "knowledge" is insufficient; facts need to be established through argumentation. That may be based on data from your native(!) judgments (I would be less interested in your judgments on non-native languages, in most cases) and best through additional data collection for any non-obvious claim, be it judgment work involving multiple speakers, experimental evidence, corpus-based evidence, arguments from language acquisition, etc. 3. Where do you think Greenberg's universal came from, if not an argument from data? You can use such a universal as an assumption in your analysis, that's for sure. You'd need to give appropriate citations to those who've argued for it and, if necessary, cite and discuss arguments against it. Your own argument will be only as strong as the premises it relies on.

What others have said. The fact that you have actually gone to the trouble of thinking through and reading up on formal complaints and that you talk about 'escalating' the situation is very worrisome. You just got to this new school, your job is to observe and learn the norms of the place; don't make any sudden moves that you'll later regret. The thought of ruining your relationship with your advisor over a problem set grade is beyond absurd. Don't do it. As others have said, go to office hours and try to get a better idea not only of what specifically he was expecting of you for this pset, but more generally how to go about solving other psets in this class (and others as well). You have decided that the grading was absurd, arbitrary and capricious.* I would encourage you to entertain the very real possibility that that is NOT the case, and to take this as an opportunity to learn what you are missing to make sense of the grade. It sounds to me like you did not understand what the question was asking and therefore only did part of the work/only answered part of the question.** So this sounds like a norms/expectations problem, partly perhaps to do with your department's culture and partly perhaps to do with the fact that this is the first time that you are attending this kind of linguistics program, so you might just need to learn the quirks of the field. For what it's worth, I never once had a rubric for any of the assignments I did I grad school, nor will I be making one for classes that I teach now. By the time you get to grad school you should pretty much know what's expected, and if you have questions or concerns, the solution is to talk them through in office hours, not to file formal complaints. * And this would make the second time that you've suspected someone at this school of targeting you in some harmful way with no evidence or reason. That, too, is worrisome. ** A way to check this: did (many) other students get points taken off for missing the same parts of the same questions? If so, maybe there is a problem with the formulation of the question, otherwise it's more likely you. But whatever the answer, this is just one pset, and you would be well advised to just put it away.

I don't know if this will help you, but I use BibDesk for all my bibliography needs. It allows me to add tags, highlight text so it shows up in a dedicated dialog box, sort my bibliography by author, year, etc., and link documents with bib entries. My bibliography is organized in a big folder with a sub-folder for each author. File names are AuthorYear. New documents are automatically archived in the correct folder by BibDesk when I associate them with a bib entry (this is a setting you can enable, and involves simply dragging the file from wherever it is into the bib entry). Getting started for me involved importing a .bib file from a colleague who has similar research interests, moving pdfs to those entries that the file already contained and creating new entries for the other ones. Some work went into that, but I don't remember it as a particular hardship.

Hi there, this is a fine place to post. I would really suggest talking to a faculty member in your department about these questions. Someone who knows what the profiles of successful applicants tend to look like, and can understand the details of what your application will look like. I'm in a different field so I can't comments on specifics of the GPA but it'll be very important that you get strong LORs, and having any kind of research experience will be a big plus. Those are two things that you can work on to improve your chances. With a less than stellar GPA you'll also want a strong GRE score, and that too is something you can do to improve your chances of getting into a good school. For the question of whether you should just focus on your career or go to grad school, you should ask yourself what your long-term goals are and whether you need a graduate degree to get there. Maybe so, but maybe not. And maybe you'll learn that in your field some practical work experience can go a long way. Again, talk to faculty advisors or the career center at your school. They will usually have good information and they tend to be under-utilized by students.

Whether you could do better next time around depends on your application, which you told us nothing about. So I don't think we can give advice there. The question you need to ask yourself is whether you think you would be happy at this university in Winnipeg, whether you can afford it, and whether it fits your research and future career goal needs. Those are things we can't really help you with. But ask yourself if you fell like you got along with the potential advisor, and if there are other potential substitutes in case you don't get along or simply need advice from more experienced folks. Once you go on the job market, is the university you will attend good at placing students in the kinds of jobs you want? Conversely, are there other schools out there that would be a better fit and would better support your interests and goals? Do they take students with profiles that look like yours? Do some of this research, and you'll be better equipped to make an informed decision.

It sucks. It's not clear why this is happening; maybe you don't know. It might be completely outside of your control to fix; sometimes there are just very weird dynamics among such small groups of people, especially if many of them are as awkward as academics tend to be. But I would suggest giving it a bit more time and staying friendly, despite how discouraging it must feel. As others have said, if you don't give it a real chance, you won't find new friends, and you want to at least have cordial relationships with them. That said, I would also remind you that there is life outside of your cohort. You didn't mention if this was a MA program or a PhD, but in both cases there are at least some other people not in your year. Possibly many, if it's a PhD program. For what it's worth, the vast majority of my friends were from the year above mine and the year below it. Once I found them (which took about a year, mind you), I was very happy. And there are people outside of your program altogether. I am not claiming it would be fun not to have friends in your program, but a social friendly person who usually has no trouble making friends can count on themselves to do it again, if not with one group then with another.

I answered this exact same question not even a week ago. And I gave the same answer. You don't need publications to get admitted, it's the experience that counts. A review article may count for something but probably not much. Again, it's all about the experiences, how you write about them, and the LORs you get through them.

Yay, congrats!

Alright, so why don't you give us the relevant details? What can the letter from the supervisor say and what can the letter from the advisor say? Does the supervisor have a PhD-holding supervisor of her own who could co-sign the letter? What other letters do you have?