fuzzylogician

What @tajob describes is the norm for linguistics programs in North America: you usually write papers on two distinct topics in two different subfields, and you spend the first year of the program taking courses in all the core areas of the field, before beginning to specialize more in your second and third year, but you usually still have to take at least some courses in topics outside your immediate interests after the first year. For me that was a main part of the attraction and what made me choose the US over staying in a European program where you immediately have a specialized project as soon as you start your PhD.

What a tenured professor can do and what you can do are two very different things. I assume you haven't been following the job market closely (you shouldn't be -- it's too early for you!). So let me tell you something: job ads often call for diverse candidates, often doing X plus experimental/corpus/computational work, or fieldwork. But then you compare that to who actually gets hired and you see that often they end up choosing more conservative candidates that are clearly X and less clearly "plus." Maybe by the time you are applying for jobs this will change enough so you won't have a problem. But keep in mind that what people say and what they do are different, and you can't extrapolate from what a senior tenured professor is doing to what will work for you. Being interdisciplinary is great, but eventually you will be considered as an X expert for X jobs and as a Y expert for Y jobs, and there will be far fewer jobs that will specifically look for a X+Y expert. So you will need to produce as much good work in X as someone who is exclusively an X expert, and similarly for Y, and that means a lot more time and a lot more work. It's not impossible, but it is most definitely something to take into account. Maybe you are the productive unicorn who can be that double-expert. But it's very dangerous to naively assume you are, or could be. Most people aren't, and can't. What makes a lot more sense is to have one area of expertise (narrowly or broadly defined) and to have collaborations with others who are the experts in other areas. You don't need to be the expert in everything.

No, while I do think at least a part of this is a perception problem, because the department is actually creating a two-tiered system in how it treats its students -- I do believe that language teaching is more work than TAing an intro class (although, it also depends on how many sections of the intro class a TA is assigned to and how many students are in the section, to assess how much grading they do). Language teaching is usually daily, involves multiple sections, and daily assignment grading, plus prep. It would be more than the usual intro to ling in-class time, prep, and grading, in my opinion. As I wrote above, it's hard to know how much more, some of it may be within the margin of error. It is probably noticeably more than anyone who gets assigned to TA more advanced ling class. The more advanced, the less prep and grading for a TA, usually. If English speakers get those better classes at least once in a while, but speakers of some languages always get the more work-heavy classes, that is a problem (assuming here the same workload for intro courses, which may or may not be justified). And yes, I also think that spending time on tasks completely unrelated to your coursework and research for 20 hours a week ( =language teaching) can be seen as less attractive than doing the ling courses, even though in reality again the ling TAing isn't actually really related to anyone's coursework or research. However, at the very least it'd be within the linguistics department and put TAs in contact with linguistics professors and students, while language teaching would take a TA to a completely unrelated department. And, again, I think the biggest problem is that the department is systematically treating some students unlike some others, and that just can't be good, even though I completely understand why it's happening.

Could you ask the editor what they recommend? (I recently had a review where a reviewer's identity was accidentally revealed, so I consulted with the editors and they said to just use the person's name, since I knew it. But they could have said otherwise, and it would have made us much sense, as far as I am concerned.) Edit: come to think of it, not long ago I actually had someone email me about a paper of mine they reviewed before the paper was officially accepted, and I think the acknowledgements still say something about the anonymous reviewers. But this is a case where that correspondence was private, so I kept it that way. So, not exactly identical.

My experience is that you prioritize what matters. It could be a hobby, family, friends, whatever. It'll have to come at the expense of some other things, but that is what life is all about. If you can do it in a way that doesn't disturb others, I don't think it should be a problem (so, if you have to leave the lab every day at 3:30 or everyone has to reschedule their life around your hobby on a regular basis, they might resent it more than if you step out early one day without bothering anyone -- obviously, those are extremes, but I hope the point is clear). At the end of the day, spending more hours at the lab does not necessarily mean being more productive. More often, taking time off to recharge is very important for our well-being and productivity. I would probably recommend starting with just one team, though, and seeing how it goes. You can always add the second one later. Especially if this is your first semester, there will be a lot to adjust to.

Oh, I see. That makes it... slightly better? Still terrible.

Wow. Just, wow. Also, no. No way, no how. Not only is there no stipend, they actually expect you to teach a course! It's sad that they are advertising this, and it's sad that some people will surely be desperate enough to actually do it.

I'm sure you'll do alright. This experience is meant to help prepare you to TA, but everyone understands that it's a stressful assignment. Just do your best: make sure you have materials prepared and that you go over your materials enough that you know what's in them and what you want to say. You may screw up or get tongue-tied, but that's ok. It may also happen in class, and it'll be ok then too! Try to pay attention to your professors -- I'm sure they get confused, or stutter, or say something wrong once in a while. It happens to everyone. The question is how they deal with it. If they don't make a big deal out of it and just correct themselves and move one, the students will usually be very forgiving. Most of the time you wouldn't even notice it or think twice about it if some small error was made. So it's best to adopt an attitude that no one is perfect, everyone makes mistakes, but you are the authority in class, and as long as you can correct yourself if needed and move on, everything will be ok. Likewise if you don't know something, just say so, and promise to look up the answer for next time (and if it's a real class -- actually follow up on that and tell the students what you found!). It's ok not to know everything, just like it's ok to make a mistake.

Short version: you were in one lab and quit after less than three months because you didn't feel like you were learning anything and you had a heavy course load. You were in the second lab for a month and quit because the PI told you that you were doing too many things, you should do fewer of them and do them better, because your current profile would make it hard for you to be admitted for a Masters program. Instead of taking this as the very wise advice that it sounds like, you got very offended and walked away. Yeah, I don't think this is useful research experience. And frankly, I am not sure you are ready for graduate school. Both your latest post and the one above it convey an undergraduate mentality and an immaturity you should work through before proceeding with a graduate degree. To answer your question about the SOP, if you are applying for a degree in physics, you'll need to explain why you are interested in it and how you are prepared for it, given that your education and work experience are in another field. This doesn't mean that you have to tell the whole story of everything else you tried and your disappointments (you really shouldn't do that!) but you need to explain to the admissions committee how you know that physics is really what you want to do and you need to convince them that you are ready for the degree both academically and emotionally, and that you'll be able to follow through and succeed. Someone who keeps changing their interests and can't keep an RAship for even three months would raise red flags, so you need to give this some very careful thought and have a compelling case for why someone should take a risk and accept you.

Sure, as a general case, there is no reason not to list research experiences that did not lead to a publication. The point is you have the experience, and that is entirely independent of whether the project was eventually successful or not. This is not about showing off -- no one is suggesting that you embellish or claim results that aren't there, and anyone listing a lab tour as experience is obviously not doing it right. That said, if you left the lab in the middle and not on good terms, then that is a bit different. The problem isn't that the project wasn't complete, but that apparently you weren't successful. You could still list those experiences, but then don't be surprised if your intended PI reaches out to your former PI and learns about what happened, even if you don't get a letter from them. To me, as a PI, the fact that this happened twice would be a red flag. (Though, frankly, if you hid this and I hired you and later found out that you were a problem student and got kicked out of two labs, I would also not be very happy.)

All the programs I know of want papers on two different topics in two distinct subfields. Some will let you fudge a little if you can convince someone that the topics/fields are distinct enough, some are more strict. But on the books, that's the requirement. Yes, this goes somewhat against the specialization idea, but so does the entire first year, if you want to think of it that way. There is a balancing act between getting a decent training in all the major subfields and specializing in just one. The qualifying paper is there to make sure you do something that's not your narrow interest beyond the first year for at least one topic. It's true that it helps to be specialized to get a job, but you also don't want to be too narrow. At the very least, you want to have worked on at least one topic that's not your dissertation research (assuming here, as is often the case, that your other QP could become a chapter in your dissertation). If you can get a publication or at least a conference presentation out of it, all the better.

Yeah, innovative work is great. But one (or two, or even three) course in cognitive science or computer science isn't going to make you an expert. For truly cross-disciplinary collaborations like you're imagining you'd want to collaborate with experts in those fields. You'd want to learn from them, not just from a textbook. And friendly job market advice from someone who straddles two subfields: that's not always the best way to go. Yes, I apply for jobs in both X and Y. But when there's a job in X, they worry I'm more of a Y. When there's a job in Y, they worry I'm more of an X. It comes up in interviews, although never directly. It's really easiest if you have a very clear specialty within one subfield. Once you have that job, you can do whatever you want. And you can always have collaborations with others, but you don't need to be the expert in everything. For your second qualifying paper, you probably can't study the same topic from two different angle, at least not at any program I know. You need two completely different projects. But hopefully with all the classes you've taken and the papers you've presumably written, there's at least one that can be developed more into a QP. QPs, like coursework (and like the dissertation, in fact), are requirements to get out of the way so you can do your real work -- your research. Don't overthink it, it doesn't need to be perfect, it just needs to be good enough to allow you to pass.

Yeah, see, your problem is you want to LEARN ALL THE THINGS. You can't. You're doing WAY too much, but not in the right places. By your fourth year you should be spending your time on dissertation research, and research more generally, not taking courses, so your department's policy sounds correct. A PhD isn't about learning a little bit of lots of things, it's about becoming an expert in one very particular thing. You should be transitioning from coursework to research already in your second year and certainly in your third year. You should find an area of specialty and work within it, and you should be able to pick up the necessary skills for your work without classes, because once you're done with next year (if I am reading this correctly, you're just finishing your second year now), you will never again be able to take classes to teach yourself new skills, but there will most definitely be new things you'll need to learn. Coursework requirements are something to get out of the way, not pile on more than you need to. It actually sounds like you're basically done with what you need to do and now you're taking on more and more extra work because of your insecurities. No one can guarantee you a job, but it would help if you knew what search committees actually look for when they hire. When you apply for jobs, no one is going to care what courses you took; no one has ever asked me for a transcript. What they'll care about is your research. Your actual output -- papers, presentations, etc. You work with others who have expertise you lack, and you pick it up as you go for things you really need to know. They'll also care about what you can teach, but that *does not mean* you have to take a class in everything you'll teach. You need to be able to teach yourself stuff you'll teach your students. If you want to be hired as a computational linguist, start doing research in that field, and build an expertise in some subarea. You might not know every programming language or relevant skill out there, but no one does. What matters is that you can convince someone that you're an expert in some part of it and can figure out what you don't know and how to fill in the gaps (work with others, teach yourself). Stop stressing over coursework, that's not where you should be spending your time anyway. * And the fact that the language department doesn't care about your research and wants you to do your job? seriously, that's something to complain about? this is what you're paid for.

Don't over-react, no one said you are necessarily not cut out for academia. But it's entirely correct that if you can't figure out how to make your TA workload fit with your research, you may not want to have a career in academia, because it won't get better, it'll get worse. And that is not to say it doesn't take time to figure it out or that you can't do it, but complaining about it is not the way to go. As for classes, frankly it sounds like you are doing way too much, and that is probably the cause for this crisis. No one should be doing 4-5 classes plus TAing plus auditing extra classes. I get wanting to learn more and wanting to take advantage of opportunities, but you also need to learn what workload works for you and you have to be able to prioritize and say no on occasion. You can't take every interesting class, you can't attend every interesting talk. You should be able to teach yourself necessary skills as you go along, without attending classes. I don't know where your advisor is in all of this, but if this is a normal program in North America, you shouldn't be doing more than three courses while TAing, two is best, four at the very most. More than that, and you're risking running yourself into the ground. Are you a first-year or second-year? This sounds like a mistake a lot of young students make, of trying to do too much. I know lots of first-years who try to sit in (and occasionally take) 1-2 seminars at the same time as their first-year classes. That almost always ends in exhaustion (and them dropping the seminars at some point). It's just not a good idea to push yourself that much, especially when you are TAing new classes that you're not prepped for. This is a marathon, not a sprint.

So, again, I highly doubt that getting to teach intro to X helps anyone's research. And I think it's entirely sensible for the department to assign intro to X to a student who studies X, I don't think that teaches us much. It's also natural for a professor to tell his/her X students to try to TA X, but you're extrapolating from that all kinds of extra facts not in evidence. As I said, it's not like it doesn't help at all, but it's really not that big of a deal. It will not stop you from getting hired in X after you graduate. Your experience TAing X or teaching a language course are both only somewhat relevant for being a professor of X, it'll mostly help you talk sensibly about teaching. Either way, you'll have to spend some time thinking about how you'd teach intro to X, advanced X for undergraduates/graduate students, what material is really important, if you'd use a textbook and if so which one, etc. TAing for intro to X might help you get started thinking about that, but you just need to get over this idea that you're being all kinds of mistreated by your department or someone else is getting is a big advantage from TAing intro to X, and trust that you can figure it out. If you can't, you won't be hired by anyone anyway, because as I said, you will have to do your own course prep for sure, and if you can only do prep for courses you've TAed for in the past, then you won't be very attractive at all. I am trying to look at this from your department's perspective. Assigning non-native speakers to language courses is both less ideal for the students and I am sure even more work for the TA than it would be for you. You already say that they are trying their best and it sounds like they are aware of the problem. You have to be smart about complaining, who you complain to, how often you do it. You haven't said anything about that and you might be doing it right. But given your bitterness here, I'd worry that you are (i) bringing it up too often, (ii) bringing it up in inappropriate situations, (iii) over interpreting it and thus making your case weaker than it is. I'd concentrate on getting materials, reducing course prep, and trying to get a promise to TA a linguistics course at least once, maybe twice. If you don't have an official role as student rep or similar, it's doubtful that you can act in the name of students who haven't even been admitted yet. And if you are, you need to get other students organized as well, not just complain on your own.

I highly doubt that the more relevant positions actually help with anyone's research. Mainly they're probably less work, but that would also probably depend on the particular language course, whether you can inherit materials, etc. vs. how much time it'd take you to prep/TA/grade for the linguistics course, and people can take more or less time. I see that within my own TAs this semester, some of them clearly take much longer than others to complete the same tasks. This is probably at least to some extent a perception problem, with the language teaching being viewed as less prestigious. I don't think getting non-native speakers to teach a language course is even possible. They just don't have the skills. And complaining if there is no solution in sight... well, again, even if you have a case, I'm not sure how that will help. Maybe there is a way to ask for some *small* increase in pay for those who do these less desirable courses. Or priority for summer funding, if that is at all possible. I don't know how else to solve this if the department simply doesn't have other TA positions, and it sounds like they're already aware of the problem and are fighting to get more of the better positions.

That is indeed unfair, but it's hard to see how you solve it if the program just doesn't have the money. But why aren't you telling prospective students about this problem? I'm perplexed. Wouldn't you have wanted to know?

You're not going to like what I have to say. You are not being over-worked, although, yes, you are at the high end of what they can ask of you. You may not enjoy it, but no one promised you that you would. Your department is trying to do everything it can to guarantee everyone funding, and since I assume there aren't enough courses in linguistics to go around, they have to have some students doing language teaching. Obviously, language teaching has to be done by those who can do it, so that means international students do more of that and English speakers do the other courses. If they gave you all linguistics courses, someone else would be stuck without funding altogether. It's the department's responsibility to make sure that doesn't happen, even if it sucks for you. It'd suck even more for someone else if they didn't get a stipend and couldn't afford to pay rent anymore. I assume that this is something that you could have easily found out about ahead of time if you had talked to current students about their TA experiences before accepting your offer. So yes, this is one place where you could have been more proactive to maybe save yourself this trouble, or at least be aware of it going in. Knowing as much as possible about a situation before getting yourself into it is always good advice. But now that you're in it, I think you need to accept it and do your best to work with what you've got, which, at the end of the day, isn't all that bad in my opinion. Course prep is time-consuming, so I would concentrate on improving your life on that front. I'm sure this is not the first time Language X is being taught at your school, aren't there materials around to be inherited from others? Maybe they can put you in touch with previous instructors or you could initiate a materials-sharing setup. Another, more realistic, request you could make of your chair is to be assigned the same courses next year as this, to massively save on course prep. FWIW, though, course prep will now and forever be a major time suck, if you want to be in academia. Best two strategies for dealing with that are what I suggested above: inherit materials from others and reduce new course preps as much as possible. This will be a useful life skill. Finally, for the good news: assuming you want to go on the academic job market, no one will care about the courses you TAed. Having 1-2 courses in linguistics is enough, combined with your other teaching experience. I would even guess that you could have no linguistics classes and do ok. If you apply for jobs in language departments, you'll probably even have an advantage. You'll need to write a teaching statement, but that's not about the content of the courses you TAed as much as about your teaching philosophy. Your experience will allow you to have informed opinions and specific examples about designing classes, prepping materials, your approach to learning, and all the other usual stuff that goes in a statement. A school will hire you because you are an expert in X, you are whatever else they are looking for, and because they think you'll be a decent teacher, as reflected by evaluations, letters, statement, job talk, and teaching demo (if you give one). They will assume you can prep courses you've never taught before, because TAing for a course is not the same as teaching it, and either way you most likely will be prepping courses you've never taught before. All you'll need to have are informed opinions about how you'd teach relevant courses in your field, you don't have to have actually taught/TAed them in the past.

If you can focus on research and coursework in your first year, that would be advisable. If you really want to, you could add TAing in your second year, but if your advisor has money to pay for you as an RA, why not do that? If you want to have an academic job then some TA experience would be useful, but its utility is pretty limited. You'd want to TA two, maybe three, semesters, ideally for different courses (intro, advanced, UG, grad) related to your field. Keep in mind that you'll compete against applicants who TAed throughout their studies and some who may have been instructor of record for some courses, so a bit of TA experience will help you write a more respectable teaching statement, but it won't make you shine. On the other hand, you will have more time to concentrate on research, which at the end of the day counts for more*, and can make you shine. Another factor to keep in mind is to try to TA for a professor who will write you letters of recommendation. Academic jobs want recommenders to write about applicants' teaching abilities, and sometimes you even have to designate at least one letter as (also) referring to teaching. If you don't think about this ahead of time and TA for some random professor in your department who can't also write about your research, you may have to trade a strong research-focused letter for a much weaker teaching-focused one, or have your advisors write about their second-hand opinion of your teaching ability based on your teaching evaluations and what they've heard from other profs. Better to have at least one advisor who can write about both your research and your teaching, if academic jobs might be a goal. * Unless you are aiming for mostly/solely teaching positions (e.g. at community colleges, etc). In that case, teaching experience will obviously matter more.

1. Figure out what your research interests are (this is a process, and a hard one at that. Take your time thinking this through; before you know why you want to apply for a PhD and what you'd study, you should not consider applying for a PhD). 2. Find the researchers who work on exciting problems in your area that you think you might enjoy having as advisors (browse prominent journals in your area, look at who is presenting at conferences and what they are talking about, track down workshops, invited talks, etc.). 3. Find out where the researchers you identified teach (this is straightforward, affiliations are easy enough to find, or you can google the names). 4. Read up on those programs to find other potential advisors at the same schools, information about funding, etc. 5. Repeat until you have a reasonably large set of schools that are in locations you'd want to live in, seem like a good fit for your interests, and whose requirements you meet. 6. Show the list to a professor you trust. Ask for his/her opinions about each school, and if they have other suggestions based on your interests. (Ranking, admissions rates, competitiveness, etc. are a lot less important than fit. I would not worry about those. You are much likelier to get into a higher ranked school than a lower ranked one if you have a better fit with the former than the latter. But if you're really concerned at least some of this info you can get on the schools' websites, and more info will come from bringing your list to a trusted advisor and asking for advice about these choices and others that they might suggest.)

The non-native speaker part of this is solvable, I think. For example, by having the letter translated and then returned to the writers for inspection and submission. What worries me more is that these sound like peer-evaluations, not a letter from a supervisor. It's ok to have one letter from industry and two academic ones, but you'd want the industry letter to be from someone who is actually in a position to evaluate your work. A supervisor sees different things than a peer. A peer wouldn't know about your job performance, complaints, or successes, outside of what you tell them. They can perhaps talk about observing you in class, if the teaching environment allowed for that, but beyond that not much. Can they credibly talk about your students' performance in examinations, beyond what they heard as part of office gossip (=do they have access to official results)? Are they in a position to compare you to others who've had this job in the past? And more importantly, is anything they can say relevant to the degree you are pursuing? If not, this is not much different than a Did Well In Class letter, except that depending on the content, this letter may say that you did well in things that are even less relevant than the potential DWIC letter.

I moved this post to a more appropriate location. Suggestion: in this sub-forum (Officially Grads), run a search on keywords like "baby" and "pregnant". There are quite a few discussions. I was going to post links here to recent discussions that I remember but the search led to more results than it makes sense to post here, so I'd suggest you just do the same search yourself

Instead of getting all suspicious, why don't you call the office back, say you spoke to someone about a possible acceptance but didn't catch their name, and say you were wondering if you could be put in touch with them again because you have a few more questions. That should tell you if it's a (very weird) scam or for real. If you get a person on the line, ask questions about a stipend, required courses, or anything else that comes to mind. I'd say this isn't exactly common but probably isn't unheard of. And speaking to university profs (less so, admins) on their private cell phones about official university business is definitely something that's happened to me.

Everything to do with your legal status in the US should be verified with a professional at your school who knows your situation, which we don't. However, to my knowledge, if you leave your program without graduating, either because you are dismissed or because you quit, you forfeit the grace period the F-1 would otherwise have and you have to leave the US immediately. This may be inconvenient, but is still fact. So take that in mind if you withdraw from classes (and verify this information with someone who knows!). You need to check your school's regulations about withdrawals. I would assume that unjustified withdrawals (which this one would be) would count as some kind of low/failing grade and would not look good. That could have a negative effect on any future applications for graduate education in the US, which would always ask for all your transcripts from previously attended institutions. I would highly doubt that you'd be able to re-enroll in classes after withdrawing this late in the year and I don't see what that would accomplish. Sounds like a kind of stunt that has a high likelihood of backfiring. Don't assume you can game the system. Play within the rules. That probably means just finishing the year, including all courses, and then leaving. It may cost an extra month's rent and leaving may be a pain, but I don't think there is any other course of action that wouldn't lead to even more harm.

Your post is so incredibly vague. If Method A scholars and Method B scholars agree that B is better than A, then of course this is right and everyone will then be teaching B and perhaps surveying A in some seminar or showing it as an old way of doing things in an intro. This happens.* Another thing that happens is that A scholars don't agree that B is better: B applies to a different data set, has its own issues and limitations, makes some bad predictions of its own. Now we're in a less ideal but far more realistic debate over which is better. You may think that B, but more often than not even if I (and most other linguists) agree with you, it's important to note that A does have a point. There will be ways in which B is not perfect, and most likely B (or A) is another step in our path of improving our theories and results. The next step in our theory could be an improved B, or an improved A, or a C that takes from both and maybe from some other theories as well. So best you can do is either know you are an A/B scholar and just do that, or (better, especially for a beginning scholar), go to an open-minded place that lets you study both and supports you in choosing which one to use in your work. *Note here that your example refers to theories that are 2000 years apart, more or less. But what I assume you actually had in mind are theories that are at best 50 years apart. Makes it more complicated to have the perspective to know which is right and which is wrong, and it's a bit arrogant, if you ask me, to assume that there even is a fully right and a fully wrong theory. And as for Newtonian physics, that is an interesting example, because we actually know that it is technically "wrong", but still very useful in many many cases, and worth teaching alongside quantum physics.