fuzzylogician

See about having your direct supervisor co-write the letter with the professor. That way, you get the details from the supervisor and the signature that counts from the professor. (I am assuming here that the professor is both your and the supervisor's boss, although that wasn't entirely clear from your post.)

I would not recommend doing this unless it is absolutely clear who contributed which part of the paper, and there is a faculty member who can explicitly address that in a LOR. Unless there is complete clarity, admissions committees may not know how to look at the paper; it can't be guaranteed that you actually did any of the research and/or writing for any particular piece of the paper, so it's hard to know how to evaluate it. Is the brilliant idea yours or your friend's? Is the writing yours or theirs? What can you actually do on your own -- is this paper a reflection of your intellectual abilities, interests, and writing style? All hard questions to answer for a joint paper. So if at all possible, I would avoid this.

This is an institution, department, course-level and reading-difficulty dependent question (among other factors I'm probably forgetting). Answers are guaranteed to vary greatly. Ask a faculty member - the chair, the undergraduate program director or just someone who you know teaches similar courses. You could also take a look at other syllabi by faculty in your department to see what they do.

You should try meetups; you do need to get over the awkwardness, but remember that everyone there has the same explicit goal of making friends, so that should help. Other options might include volunteering for some cause that you care about, picking up a non-academic hobby (language exchange, yoga classes, playing some team sport, art classes, trivia nights ...), or going to church (if that's your thing).

If school is about to start next week, you can be sure that your professors are busy with a variety of other tasks right now -- everything from finalizing course materials to figuring out classroom allocations to answering student questions about teaching and advising to various beginning-of-year events and chores. This request isn't time-sensitive and doesn't need anyone's attention just now. If I were you, I'd wait until roughly the middle of the second week of the semester, then approach them about the LORs. That still leaves them something like three months to do it in, and even then I would bet at least some of them put it off and don't even think about it until a week or so before the deadline. It's also generally better to do this thing in person, if you can.

Non-Lit-specific advice here: First off, in general, if there is a page/word limit, take it seriously. There will be many times where you will be required to meet a certain limit, and going 40% over the limit, or even just 20% over, will get you immediately tossed in the "reject" pile (think grants, conference abstracts, journals with page limits, etc.). Even if someone still reads your work, you are guaranteed to piss them off by not complying with instructions. My reaction to these cases is to ask myself (1) doesn't this person respect me and my time? and (2) does this person think they are so special that rules don't apply to them? why is it that you think that everyone else can meet the limit, but you should get an extra 40% on top of that? Either way, I don't really appreciate it. I may choose to read only the text that's within the limit, or I'll skim more quickly to spend the same amount of time on this work as all others; either way, it might lead to shallower digestion of the work, with all that that entails. So, I would be for cutting the paper down. As a first step, though, I would contact the school to ask if the references count toward the page limit (if that's not already specified). I might also ask about their policy on students submitting longer works with instructions to only read pages X-Y or similar. Some might accept that, and it could be a good compromise where someone can choose to read more if they want to, but you are not assuming and/or forcing them to. As for cutting down the text, cutting out a paragraph here and there might not be the right way to go. That would inevitably lead to an unbalanced and stilted text. I would suggest finding whole sections that can be removed or greatly shrunk/summarized. I am sure that you can find some of those. Maybe there is a stronger argument and a weaker argument for the same thing and one can be summarized as "supporting evidence could also come from blah[footnote: blah shows that X by looking at Y, see Smith (2016) for discussion.]" Maybe something in the exposition could be similarly assumed without supporting evidence, with a footnote summarizing what that would be and the appropriate citations? Maybe some of the transition text can be tightened. It may be a lot of work, but I have no doubt that it is doable. Sometimes it's also easier to start from scratch and copy necessary stuff in, and writing new 'glue' text, than taking what you have and cutting stuff out.

There is a difference between being a TA, where it's entirely expected that you are a student, and being instructor of record, which is the OP's situation and where I think students' expectations are probably very different.

What really matters is the actual research experience -- your ability to talk about it in detail and explain what you did, the letters of recommendation that you'll get that will go into depth about your role in the project and how it prepared you for graduate school. Having a review article is nice, although I don't know how much impact it will have on any decisions. Likewise though having an actual paper is nice but will have limited influence, too. You were just an undergrad helping in the lab, you are not the main person on the paper, and your contribution was limited in at least some aspects (not to dismiss you at all!). This is not to say that having a paper is useless (it's obviously not), only that the way it will be evaluated will probably only assume a limited contribution on your behalf, so I wouldn't worry over much about not having it. Again, it's the actual work and experience that are most important, and the fact that you'll have strong LORs because of it.

You have definitely not committed some serious faux-pas. Ask your advisor or some other trusted professor if they have advice on this. The fact that students are telling you different things suggests that it's probably up to you to decide. So you need to ask yourself if you are more comfortable being vague or giving all the information. The way students will interpret what you tell them will also partly depend on how you conduct yourself in the classroom. As a general rule, students will simply assume that the person at the front of the classroom is a knowledgeable authority figure. You can take that and run with it. It is totally fine to say you're new to this school (and therefore you may not know fact X or procedure Y but you'll find out and get back to them, just like you would with any question where you're not sure you can answer it on the spot). That by itself should not diminish your authority. It's more about how you behave and how you project yourself to the class. You can be a new but strong and confident teacher, no contradiction there. So do a bit more to find out if there is a norm, and then either follow it if it exists or choose whatever you are most comfortable with. It's going to be a whole lot more important that you are comfortable with what you share than the particular details you choose to share.

non-rhet/comp specific advice here: submitting something over twice as long as requested is not going to be appreciated. No one is going to read that much, because it means taking away time from reading other (better behaved) students' work, and professors' time is very limited. I'd try to find a way to get much closer to what they are asking for. That said, editing down a 35 page paper into a 15 page paper is not something I would personally want to take on as a task. It can be a very difficult task, although it's also an important one. I find that a much better approach is finding a good ~12-page chunk that could be a more or less stand-alone piece that you could submit along with a short 1-page description of what preceded it and a short 1-page description of what followed (so situating it in the context of the rest of the paper). As an alternative or addition you could also submit the entire paper in case someone wants to read more, but assume that the reader will start at the beginning and put the paper down on page 16 unless you tell them to start somewhere else. If this isn't possible in this case, then I think the only other option is to submit another paper that does meet the length requirement.

I would recommend consulting with someone in your department about this. The answer will depend on the culture at your institution and I would just rely on more experienced people's insight here. My personal inclination would be that students don't need to know the particular details of their instructor's appointment, and it's not their place to understand or even worry about it. This is especially true for young female instructors who may have their authority challenged by students even before they find out that they are new and relatively junior. I think saying something along the lines of "I am a graduate student in the department of X, studying Y and Z." is a fine way to start, though again ask someone who knows what's common in your department for better tailored advice. You can always encourage students to talk to you about grad school or whatever else without talking to them specifically about when exactly you started your own program.

Or the amount/quality of work done for the money you asked for? Sounds like she didn't think you did enough to ask as much as you were asking. (I.e., ("based on my experience contracting out this kind of work over the years...") option 1: "...I would have expected this job to cost a lot less than what X charged"; option 2: "...I would have expected much better quality work for the amount of money I ended up paying, especially given how much more work I still had to do".) Not going into whether that is fair or correct, just my interpretation of the exchange.

Seconding everything @rising_star said, but this part in particular: It's always better to leave on good terms, or if that is not possible, at least on a pleasant note and not in an angry or confused place. This is true regardless of whether you'll need a letter from this person, but obviously more so if there is any chance that they might be approached and asked about you (which may happen regardless of whether you list the person as a recommender). It's also a good idea to simply understand what happened and where things went wrong, so it doesn't happen again. There are only so many times that you can allow a relationship with a supervisor go sour and be able to continue working in your field.

The first step would be to identify potential advisors, read up on their work, and then contact them to ask if they are taking on new students. In the meantime you could also start reading up on the general application processes for the relevant universities where those professors teach, and how the funding works. At the end of the day it'll come down to whether or not you can find an advisor. It's hard to give more specific advice since Europe is a large place. I do think you may be making a mistake in only looking at English-taught programs; European PhDs don't generally require any coursework, so as long as the professor speaks English and would support you in working in English (and preferably you'd probably also want other colleagues who you could interact with as well, which shouldn't be a huge problem I would think), that should be all you should care about. That said, I am in a different field, so take it with a grain of salt. The one thing I feel like I can say with confidence is that the fact that you have been out of school for three years should not by itself disqualify you from anything. You may face more hurdles than someone who just graduated in terms of getting good letters from people who remember you and perhaps in terms of getting someone experienced to read and comment on your application materials, but those aren't impossible obstacles to deal with, they just might require more proactive planning on your part.

(Assuming this is a legit post and not some weird spam:) Take the phone to the apple store or some other lab. There is no way we can help you remotely, someone needs to look at your phone.

I would use Professor for anyone who is a professor of any rank (assistant, associate, full), tenured or not, if approached for anything teaching related. Otherwise I would use Dr., including for postdocs and other folks with PhDs whose job description is not professor. But either way unless someone is incredibly picky, it shouldn't matter. A professor shouldn't get upset if you refer to them as Dr. so-and-so; they are a Dr.

Let's abstract. There are two things you want in your life, A and B. You absolutely have to have A to survive. You really really want B, but you don't have to have it. You have to choose just one. Which one do you choose? Seems pretty obvious that A. That said, the notion that you can't do both research and study for the exam seems to me wrong from the get-go. You had better learn to do both, because at *every* given point in your academic career there will be multiple things competing for your attention, and often many of them will have harder deadlines and more immediate consequences than doing research (I must be prepared to teach next Wednesday, or I won't have anything to do in class; I must submit a grant application by date X, or I won't get funded; I must read a student's paper by our next meeting, so that we can discuss it, etc.). You have to learn to combine research with these other activities and prioritize it according to your workload and needs, or you won't get any research done basically any time. Sometimes you're busy and you do less, sometimes you have more time (|cough| summer |cough|) and you do more. But stopping altogether would be a mistake.

It probably deserves its own thread. I've already received an email to the entire community from our university President and a second email from the Dean and the Vice president to the faculty on how to talk to students about unionization (mostly, what not to say/do). It's a big deal.

This just in: https://www.nlrb.gov/news-outreach/news-story/board-student-assistants-covered-nlra-0 Not that it's directly relevant to the OP's concern right now (probably).

It's reasonable to respectfully ask the professor to take this request into consideration, understanding that other constraints might make it impossible to accommodate your request. So, I wouldn't write anything that sounds like a demand or doesn't understand your position with respect to the system. But yes, I don't think there is any harm in saying that although you are technically available, it would make for very long and difficult day(s) for you; since you live far from the school it won't be easy for you to go home to take breaks, so if you could be assigned one of the earlier sections, you would be very thankful. You understand that other considerations might make this impossible, but you wanted to bring this to your professor's attention in case that they can help.

What field are you applying in?

I would not go into details. I would definitely not say three times that you don't want to work on training or imply that your advisor deceived you (like you did in the post here).* Instead you can just say that once you joined the group you discovered that the direction it was taking did not fit with your research interests, and as a result you chose to leave it and reapply to a program that could better support your research. This said, it would be very helpful if you could get a positive letter from your current advisor that would repeat a version of this story -- that you were doing a fine job in the lab and have potential to be a successful researcher, but your interests just don't fit well with the direction of the group. If not a letter from your advisor, if you can get a letter from someone else at your current school saying basically that, it would still be helpful. Not having any letter from your current school would be a red flag in your application. * Same goes for any in-person interactions. It's better to stay positive; people don't appreciate students who say bad things about former programs of theirs.

Yes, usually PhD students receive a stipend that covers tuition and living expenses, plus some benefits (crucially, health insurance, which can be very expensive in the US if not fully covered by your employer and is different than in Europe so is worth reading up on in general). Here is what I found on the website you linked to: Most students receive financial support by working as teaching assistants. In general, this funding covers tuition and a portion of the cost of health insurance and includes a monthly stipend. As teaching assistants, students are responsible for a variety of duties including grading papers and exams, helping to design assignments, holding office hours, and leading recitation sections. More advanced students can receive funding as research assistants or graduate part-time instructors.The Graduate Teacher Program supports graduate students in teaching endeavors by offering college teacher training, supporting research skill development, and providing career preparation opportunities. The Office of Financial Aid also offers financial support for graduate students. So my understanding is that if you are admitted, there will be funding for you. Working as a TA or instructor is generally the most time-consuming, so if you can receive some kind of competitive fellowship or be selected to work as an RA, that is usually better for your productivity. (And instructors of record will generally be paid more than TAs.) The scholarships you linked to are partly ones you apply to in later years as a student and some are external (competitive) ones. They may help with funding your dissertation research, or sometimes you can use them to stay at your program an extra year, which can be helpful in some cases. You aren't required to apply for them, but you should probably try because it's worth the effort. But I don't believe that you need to get something like that or you won't be funded.

I'm glad to hear that you are feeling better! What kinds of questions do you have about funding?

It would be unnecessary in that case, wouldn't it? You will have already given your 3rd/4th year grades and GPA in the application itself. What do you gain from also listing it in your CV?