fuzzylogician

Is he the only one in the department who you would be interested in working with, or is there a backup in case something happens? This is a high-risk/high-reward kind of situation, and I personally tend to be risk-averse because the consequences of failure are too high. Keep this in mind as well: you don't immediately stop needing your advisor's support once you've graduated, if you want to stay in academia. You still want your advisor to use his/her connections to put you in touch with other researchers who are potential collaborators or who might be hiring a postdoc or TT faculty. And you will still want your advisor to write you LORs for jobs and other things. This will go on for several years; you can guess how many based on the average time it takes someone to get a job from when they graduate. So I would personally not take this kind of risk. He may still be around 10 years from now and be active and supportive, but what do you do if not?* * Not that this helps, but this can happen to anyone, not just with older faculty. Someone close to me recently decided to leave academia after her advisor (45yrs old) died in an accident, leaving her without a strong LOR for job applications. This kind of thing can be devastating. You can't do much about it, but the one thing you can do is cultivate multiple relationships as backups for each other and not rely on any one person too strongly.

Agreed on everything here. This is part of why I suggested looking at CVs of other students, as a way of deciding what is appropriate content and what isn't. (I didn't mention but yes, 12 pages is my 'everything included' length, but of course not every application needs to know everything, some content may not be relevant so I may leave it out or rearrange the CV so more relevant content comes first.)

It's better to have a letter from a faculty member. A common solution to a situation like yours is to have your direct supervisor and the professor co-write the letter, or have the supervisor do most of the writing (or create a draft) but then have the professor put in the finishing touches and sign it. That way you get both the benefit of the details from someone who really knows you and of the signature that carries more weight.

The CV is different from a resume. You don't need to fit everything on one page. It takes as long as it takes. Professors' CVs can easily be over 20 pages long (for reference, mine is 12 pages long). You might try looking online at the department's webpages that you're applying to, specifically at their 'People' tab. Find some students who have websites and take a look at their CVs for ideas about content, formatting, and length.

I highly doubt that anyone from a school you applied to would agree to go over your application materials with you and give you any kind of precise feedback in a one-on-one setting. You could contact them to ask for advice on reapplying, and that may or may not yield a positive result, but I would be a lot more conservative in what I would hope to achieve from such an interaction than you seem to be right now. The best source of feedback on your application should be your most recent professors (i.e., your academic advisor and other professors who you've asked for LORs, who presumably therefore know you quite well). They should be able to evaluate your materials and also tell you if they present you in a light that is consistent with who you actually are and if anything is missing or misrepresented. Hopefully they also have relevant experience sitting on admissions committees of their own and could compare your materials to those of other applicants that they have read. If there is a career center and/or writing center at your school, they could help as well.

Yes, he will likely not appreciate being asked at the last minute like this, but given the story you tell, that is unavoidable. Hopefully you explained the situation and were apologetic in your email. As long as you say something like "I understand if this is too last minute and you are unable to help me" or some such, giving him a respectful out, I think you should be fine. Just make sure you follow up as soon as you can, to leave him as much time as possible to do it if he says yes, and for you to find another last-minute replacement if he says no.

While this is generally advisable, it sounds like in this case the OP is well aware of the limitations of this potential letter and wants it anyway. I wouldn't ask someone who you already know can only write something quite limited if they can write you a strong letter; you already know the answer.

Oh, I see. I assumed that this was for grad school applications with ~December deadlines. For this kind of pressing deadline you might try calling Monday morning and asking the office administrator if the Prof is generally around or on vacation. If he is around, you might just try dropping by and hoping he is around. You may have to try more than once, but there is a decent chance that people will be starting to come back from vacation around this time if they are going to start teaching in September. But yes, this is last-minute, and probably not something anyone would appreciate having to do on such short notice and at an otherwise already busy time of year. If and when you do get in touch with him, make sure you do everything you can to help him write the letter: come prepared to give him a bullet-point list of what you hope could be in the letter, a description of what you are applying for and why you are a good fit for it, a copy of the SOP, a summary of your thesis and his report (which he could probably find on his own, but save him the time!), anything else relevant to his letter. He may or may not want any of this, but offer it and see what he says.

Yes. Whatever your finding is, you should be able to describe it in words. You should probably spend no more than 1-2 sentences on it, no visual aids. The SOP is not about the details of your past research.

It's summer. You wait, you try again, and in the meantime you do your very best not to make assumptions. I can't really promise he'll reply even if the answer is no, but I want to think that most people do. For emailing, it may be wise to wait until the beginning of the semester (i.e. the second+ week) to be sure he's back and not inundated in other emails and pressing matters. If you don't hear back at that point and this is your best option, if you can, you might try going to office hours.

No no, the question is what the letter will say, not (at least not only) who writes it. Can any of those people, or anyone else for that matter, write about your research, or has anyone known you for a long time and can talk about how you've always excelled or how you've improved or developed new interests or anything of that sort? Did you TA for anyone who can talk about that? Did you submit class papers that someone can talk about and praise? It doesn't matter as much what the recommender's interests are, as long as they are in your field. In other words: the letter you describe above is a "did well in class" letter, which is of very limited utility. Having a fancy name on it does little to make it less unimpressive. It's probably still perfectly fine assuming that your other two letters are strong, but can one of these other people write a more detailed or insightful letter?

What are your other options?

Well even if you don't file this year you will next. Or at least I really hope so, because if not then your program is underpaying you. So I would get out of the "it's really hard" mindset (it's really not). But yes, ask HR because it still is easier not to have to deal with it.

You don't need a semanticist, you need a tax expert. Or, you need to contact HR and ask for their advice. It's probably worth noting that even if your school does not withhold any money, the IRS may still determine that you owe them money at the end of the year (check with the withholding calculator: https://www.irs.gov/individuals/irs-withholding-calculator). As I understand it, the W4 is just about how much money gets taken out of your monthly paycheck, but when you do your taxes at the end of the year it may turn out that you paid more or less than you owe, and accordingly you may get a refund or owe the government money. If nothing is withheld from your paycheck, it'd be almost certain that you'd owe something. Whether that is better than overpaying and getting a refund.. well. I don't know. Disclaimer: I may be an expert in semantics, but I am most definitely not an expert in taxes.

Hello there. This site is not here to help students solve homework problems. If this is not that, it would help to explain what this is. (Is it GRE prep? if so, posting in the GRE forum would be a good idea.)

Please read this: http://psychology.unl.edu/psichi/Graduate_School_Application_Kisses_of_Death.pdf.

You can email professors, that is perfectly fine. It's the middle of summer now so I would advise you to wait until about a week or two after the start of the semester at the professor's institution. The first week of the semester can be pretty crazy, but by the second week things will have calmed down enough that your request shouldn't get lost in a sea of more pressing emails. It's a good idea to give them 6-8 weeks notice, so if you do this by the end of September, you should be good. If you don't hear back, the thing to do is simply assume that the email has been lost and try again, after an appropriate amount of time has passed (I'd say 10-14 days after the first email). By the time you email, it'd be good if you had a tentative list of schools you're applying to with deadlines. Offer to send them (a draft of) your SOP and other documents to assist in writing your letter. Also ask about setting up a reminder system: e.g. suggest that you will send a reminder two weeks before each deadline, then five days before and the day before if necessary. Establish this now, so you don't drive yourself crazy later when one of your recommenders inevitably waits until the last minute to get their LORs done. (All of this you should do only after you get a 'yes' for the request to write the letter.)

Agreed with @sjoh197 that the entire first paragraph is irrelevant. I only skimmed the rest. The main comment I have has to do with balance: you can say a whole lot about what you've done in the past, and that's great, but it makes it that much clearer that your future plans are very vague. I don't know what you want to study or why it's important, and I don't see why Awesome U is the place that you should attend. I realize that you left some of those details out, but it's not about what the professors study alone, it's about how it interfaces with what you want to do, and you didn't really say much about that. When the writing is superficial it can feel like flattery, and you want to avoid that. The last paragraph is really nothing but empty words. The second to last reads odd. I would get rid of "unsurprisingly" and make the "currently more interested" more forceful. Everyone understands that your current plans are just that, and that they might change. The SOP should be a forward-looking essay and should have an emphasis on what you will do and why it's important. Make the best case you can right now for why Awesome U is the best place for you to be to study Awesome Topic.

I would suggest talking to your current advisor about this. In principle I would think a 2/2 distribution would look much better, but this really comes down to the content of the letters on the one hand and how the selection committee is likely to use the letters on the other. Your advisor will know more about the content of the letters and presumably also about the selection process for this and/or similar fellowships. To me, a reasonable compromise would be 3 strong letters: advisor + 2 from other research experiences, and a weaker letter from someone else at your current program. This might be a good time to start thinking about cultivating relationships with other people in your program beside your advisor, because this problem is certain to come up again.

@TakeruK Those differences between fields are always so interesting to me. In mine, abstracts range from 500 words to 3 pages, with the most common requirement being 2 pages, 11/12pt font, 1inch margins. Most large conferences and many workshops and smaller conferences have proceedings, with a common length of 12-14 pages per paper. Journal papers are more like 25-40 pages, again with lots of variance. Of course, if your abstract is one paragraph, you would not have all those headings that I propose above. For a 2-pager, I find it quite helpful to have the extra structure. As a reviewer, I find it some much easier to get through an abstract that's well-structured compared to a 2-page block of text.

At this point your questions are pointless. The answer will depend on the particular school in question. All we can tell you are generalities, but we don't know the specifics of your case and the school. I would bet it's not as easy to have a student start earlier in the spring semester compared to the summer/fall; people generally have more free time and it's a new fiscal year so you can play with that. That said, it's just generally a lot less common for students to start in the spring, so I don't know how much experience any of us are going to have with that. And even if we could tell you that "at my school, always X", it's unclear how that would translate to what another unrelated school might say.

I probably won't be able to help, but for anyone who might be, you should probably say what field and degree you are applying for (PhD in political science? MA in international relations? something else?). It's hard to say anything about your chances without knowing that information.

Alright, so let's start here: as a beginning student, I would recommend only submitting abstracts on work that is in advanced stages, so you know that you have results and the abstract is much easier to write. At later career stages you may choose to submit abstracts about less mature work, but that requires having a good sense of a timeline for completion that would allow you to have something substantial enough by the conference time, as well as the ability to be creative with the abstract writing. I've done this in the past as a way to get work done ("let's see if it gets in, if so we'll have X months to get something going!"), and that has good sides (real deadlines mean real work gets done) and bad sides (last minute work under pressure, with the real possibility of inconclusive results). I would not recommend this for young students, it can easily backfire. Step 2: do you know where you are submitting and more generally what the prominent conferences in your (sub)field are? If so, I would suggest going to past years' websites. In my field conferences almost always link to abstracts from the conference program, so looking through some of those will give you a very good sense of what successful abstracts in your field look like. It will also show you that there is a great range and a place for personal style. Step 3: write. In early stages (and actually later too), it's good to get a lot of feedback on your abstract. Start with at least a couple of weeks to spare for the conference deadline you've selected, and make sure you get your advisor's feedback and go through at least one iteration with them, likely more. Here is a structure that I usually follow (for linguistics abstracts, which are data-based, so your mileage may vary): (a) summary: I will argue XYZ based on evidence ABC; this is important because [blah]; (b) brief background: the previous literature says [blah]. These are the things you should know about how that conclusion was reached. I will argue [not-blah]; or: that leaves open question Q; or: I will extend [blah] to [blahdiblah]. etc. Here is (briefly) what we know about Q/[blahdiblah], etc. (c) new data: describe experiment, or consultant work, corpus work, etc. at top, briefly say what I will show, then show evidence, walking the reader through why each new datapoint supports my conclusion, then repeat a version of "this shows [blah]" (this time probably a more detailed version of [blah]). (d) discussion: the new data should be interpreted [this way], showing [this thing] and arguing for [this theory]. (e) implications: this is why you should care about what I just said. (f) references. (I almost always have (a version of) these actual headings in my abstract, to help guide the reader along, and to give it explicit structure.) Step 4: rinse, repeat. Some of this is up to luck. A lot depends on which reviewers you get, and how selective the conference is. You'll also learn from comments you'll get on other abstracts later on. If you have the chance, try to get experience reviewing abstracts, maybe through a class exercise or professionalization workshop. You learn a lot by doing this. Here are things that I especially value as a reviewer: (a) be explicit: I appreciate authors who tell me up front exactly what they will argue, and what their assumptions are. I don't appreciate having to guess what theory someone is adopting or that they conclude XYZ because of ABC implicit assumptions. (b) be concise: don't tell me too many details and caveats that I don't need to know right now. You've been thinking about this forever now and have gone over all kinds of unlikely what-ifs. I don't need to know all that. In fact, I don't need the abstract to take me through your personal discovery process. I want to know the bottom line and what evidence you have for it. If the best piece of evidence for your conclusion is A, say that first, even if you discovered the far less convincing B before. Maybe B doesn't need to be in there at all. (c) give me enough information, and the best information, for your case. Don't leave out details I need to know to evaluate your claims, or hide them. Don't give me lame arguments when you have good ones. Don't promise things you can't deliver. If there is an important caveat that you do need to discuss, do so, but think about where it goes; you don't need to concede ground before you've even made your case. You are allowed to make the best case for X, then conclude with a brief "a remaining issue is Y". No work is perfect, so honesty is appreciated. (d) give credit where it's due: cite others who deserve to get cited. Situate your work in the context of what others have done. You don't work in a vacuum and you don't want to be, either. You want to engage in a conversation with others. (e) for the love of god, format the thing in a reader-friendly way. I don't like tiny fonts, and I can see when you play with the margins. Leave some white space, so it doesn't look like a big block of text. (Obviously this is all my personal preference, so make of it what you will. I know that not everyone is going to agree with all of this.) My field's society has this advice page, with some abstracts and comments on why they work. I don't know if the format is at all similar to conferences in your field (it's actually pretty different from most other conferences in mine!), but it may nonetheless be useful: http://www.linguisticsociety.org/resource/model-abstracts. You may find similar resources for your field, as well.

Where did you see anyone telling the OP to write off the professor's interest? No one did. An anecdote about a publication that came out of an originally flawed seminar paper, while great, should be flagged as such, and not over-generalized. Maybe it's true that most early student publications come from class work, but that doesn't mean then that all class work could lead to publications. We don't know that the OP's paper is publishable, or that the professor's comments imply that. In fact, the fact that the professor invites the OP to work with her on this or another topic to learn how to write better papers would suggest that perhaps this is not the paper to go all in on. Bottom line: maybe it is, maybe not, neither one of us knows, but it's good to keep expectations where they should be, and *ask the professor directly what she thinks without making too many assumptions*.

Yeah, this is normal. You are definitely not the first to worry about his or her application or to find the whole thing a bit overwhelming. I find that a good way to get over anxiety is to do things. Knowledge is power, and getting stuff done is better than worrying about what might happen and not knowing. So one thing you can (and should) do is start collecting the information that you need. If you don't know where you're applying, the first step is to figure that out. If you have at least a partial list of schools already, great! Go on each of their websites and start collecting the requirements they each need. You'll discover that they aren't that different from one another, but there are also details that are worth being aware of. For example, they will each ask for a TOEFL score, but may have a different minimum. They will want a SOP, but the length might be different. Same for the writing sample. They will want LORs. Some will say exactly three, some may say at least two, or give you the option of having a fourth and fifth. So you want to think about who you can ask for letters. Schools will also want transcripts; some may want two copies, some may want an official copy now, some may be fine with a scan for now and will only want an official one if/when you accept an offer from them. Collect that information so you can order the transcripts. I don't think it's common for programs to ask for transcripts from well-known European schools to be validated, but you would want to know now if that were a requirement anywhere. Some may ask for an additional one-off essay or document: a personal history statement, a diversity statement, a list of courses in your major, etc. This is a lot to take in, so create a spreadsheet or list, whatever works for you, to keep track of everything. Deadlines will be somewhere between early December to late January. Look up holidays in the US to know when you might expect people to be away, in case you have questions. Roughly in September, schools will open their application software for the new cycle. Mid-Sepetmber/October might therefore be a good time to create profiles for yourself on each relevant application (caution: if you start too soon, in some cases you may still be looking at last year's application! so watch out for that). Give yourself time to figure out any kinks, so you're not stuck with a problem at the last minute. Click through the entire thing to see what the application requires; sometimes you'll see it's slightly different from what's on the website, or there might be essay questions for you to fill out. Also keep in mind that some applications will let you send letter prompts to letter writers as soon as you add them to the system, but some (annoyingly!) only send the prompt after you submit on your end, so you'll need to take that into account and work on those applications earlier to leave your recommenders enough time. I know that this is a lot, but removing (or minimizing) the unknowns will help, I promise. It's always more stressful to sit and worry than to do something.