fuzzylogician

I'd keep the request fairly general, and offer to supply them with a summary of relevant facts to help them write a more detailed letter. I think this will go over better than actually telling them what to include in the letter. It's their choice what to write, and they have enough experience to know what should be in there. When you write the list, it's fair to point out particular things you've done, but it'd be odd to tell them which personality characteristics they should write about.

This happens oh so very often. You could take 15 minutes for "professionalization" at the end of one of your sections. Especially for freshmen, there is a good chance that no one's ever told them half of these things, and they can easily cause a lot of anxiety. I like this piece on what students should know: https://tenureshewrote.wordpress.com/2015/05/04/your-emails-should-contain-a-greeting-and-a-closing/. Also, this wiki is surprisingly detailed: http://m.wikihow.com/Email-a-Professor. If it were more isolated, I might just say something in the reply email itself. For the "Miss/Mrs" thing, I've written something along these lines as a ps at the end of the email: "I wanted to let you know that some professors really do not like to be addressed as "Ms." or "Mr.", and "Miss" and "Mrs."––which are intended to indicate a woman's marital status––can be particularly problematic. When in doubt, it's best to use "Prof." unless someone tells you otherwise. Personally, I am happy to be called by my first name, but again, this varies so it's always good to check first. I know that this is new to many students, so please rest assured that I am not offended, and let me know if you have any questions."

Well, you're earning money in the US, paid in US currency. You'll be living in the US, and have expenses in US currency again. How does it make sense to do all of that through a foreign bank? You don't want to deposit your salary in a foreign account, because you'll pay for conversion fees, and you don't want to pay for all your everyday expenses with your foreign credit card because that again incurs an extra conversion cost. It may not register on your account as a separate fee, but trust me that the bank has a conversion rate that makes them money. If you're going to be living in a certain country for multiple years and earning money there, it stands to reason that you also have a bank account there. That aside, not every store or utility company will be happy with a foreign credit card. As for phones, if you have a plan with your current provider that would allow you to have cheaper services in the States than a local provider, by all means do that. For most people, I suspect that international charges and roaming would be much more expensive than just getting a local plan. You're not going to be a tourist or short-term visitor; you're going to live there.

Research experience means being involved in doing original research. Most undergraduates will not have done anything on their own that leads to a major publication, but you can still be part of the process of formulating a research question, doing a literature review, coming up with a new idea to contribute, choosing a methodology to implement your ideas, perhaps presenting it and/or writing it up in some form or other. A term paper could be such an experience. Often a term paper really means something you put together in a week or two at the end of the semester, and in that case it would be just the very beginnings of saying something original, but if it's a larger scale project or something you'd been developing over a substantial period of time, that would certainly count. Other things you might do is be a research assistant or lab manager, which might expose you to some administrative sides of the job and might have you involved with something that is someone else's idea and project, but still you make some contribution. Things like a lit review would be something you could learn from. If all you did was typesetting of someone's existing manuscript, that's a little less relevant. Still, all is relevant in the sense of showing initiative and seeking opportunities to get involved in research. For what you describe, your term paper sounds like a good example of an original project that is relevant. Presumably it taught you about the research process, from how to formulate a question, to data collection, to analysis, to writeup. All are good things to bring up in a SOP. Same goes for your other projects with original contributions (though for a SOP, I'd choose one or two experiences to concentrate on, and I would not spell all these details out for every paper I've ever written). As for your experience as a research assistant, that sounds like it was less productive, so you might discuss it briefly and try and think about what you did learn, perhaps about the behind-the-scenes aspects or what makes a good paper, or any other skill that is relevant to the life of an academic that this experience taught you. If you really can't think of any way that it contributed to your development as a scholar, perhaps it's best to leave it in the CV but not discuss it in the SOP; but it'd be hard to believe that you learned absolutely nothing from it.

This is really one place where all we can say is that it depends. It's obviously not impossible, but it becomes more difficult the more you restrict the kinds of jobs you apply for. So, it depends on how many jobs are available in your area that you would consider and how any applicants they get, and frankly it depends on how good you are and how much they would want you. The big problem, as I see it, is what happens if you don't find anything suitable in the first year of your search. It often takes people several years to land a job they are happy with. Will you be willing/able to compromise on your first job and continue applying for several years? Will you be able to continue doing research in the meanwhile? (Most schools will at least say that research matters, even if they are mostly a teaching institution.) As for applying ABD, it's not impossible to get a job before you have your PhD, but this is field and person dependent. Schools will be concerned that if you start teaching, you may get distracted and not graduate. This is something you can address by having a substantial portion of the dissertation done early, showing them you have a concrete plan to finish, and having letter writers address this and assure the search committee that you will make it. That aside, you will be competing with much more experienced candidates; if there are enough of them, sometimes ABD candidates are not even considered, regardless of how good they might be. Again, there are exceptions, and it's hard to know. But I would in your case probably suggest going on the job market to get the experience and try and make connections in the Bay area so they know you ahead of time and think of you if any opening comes up. It's time consuming, but generally it can be useful to apply when you still have the safety net of a possible extra year in grad school. One thing you can do to help your chances is start identifying the schools you might want to work at, and start networking there early, before you go on the job market. See if there are ways to meet the relevant faculty who are there and make yourself known. It's much easier to get a job if the current faculty already know and like you, and it's more difficult if there is no face or personality to go with the CV that is in front of them.

This is also relevant: http://psychology.unl.edu/psichi/Graduate_School_Application_Kisses_of_Death.pdf

Start here: http://forum.thegradcafe.com/topic/28621-the-sub-30-gpas-acceptance-thread/

In the statement of purpose you simply describe your experience with the language. Perhaps a brief explanation if there are many of these Ws but otherwise maybe not even. Say you had tutors, etc. Language proficiency is a tool, so you just explain what you know if and when it's relevant to what you plan to study in graduate school, and then you spend the majority of your time talking about those research interests themselves. Language knowledge is usually just a background piece you need to have in place to support those interests, and it would fit together with the other relevant parts of your background that you discuss to explain your future plans. You give the same explanation if this comes up in an interview. Again, you concentrate on what did happen and not what didn't (so if you had a tutor instead of taking a class, you just say that. If someone wants to ask why you didn't take a class, they will. You give a short explanation--whatever it is, the schedule didn't work, you wanted to concentrate on something different than the class did, etc.). When you actually start grad school, often you will have to take a proficiency test in the languages you claim knowledge of. This could be anything from a chat with a professor to a written exam. However, it's not anything to worry about right now.

First off, it's pretty common for people to refine and/or change their interests once they start grad school. It can often happen while/after taking courses in areas you had not been exposed to before, so this sounds perfectly normal. However, I think it would be useful if you stopped thinking of some of your new interests as "not science." That is sure to piss some people off, and beyond that it's just not a healthy way to think about your options. Not everything that doesn't look at DNA is "not science." And furthermore, regardless of how you define science two more important questions are what questions you want to ask, and what is the *best way* to go about answering them. I am willing to bet that if you want to study sociolinguistics, DNA just won't get you too far, but observation or large-scale surveys might. Finding a research topic is a process. The ideas you spelled out above are not really research topics, they are more like areas of exploration that might lead to a topic. So I propose doing two things. First, choose one area and taking the next step -- namely start reading to try and identify a more contained problem. Keep in mind that this may take time; especially when you are new, you have a lot of literature to explore before you really know where your field stands on your question of interest. Through doing that, one of two things might happen. Either you'll discover that actually the details don't interest you much, or you'll discover that you need to read a whole bunch more before you can identify an actual question. Both of these things are normal. It takes some back and forth to really identify a hole that you can fill. (The big problem often is not identifying something that's missing, but making sure it's a manageable size that you can actually reasonably tackle and have results for!) After you've done some reading and are sure the area you chose is one where you'd like to read more, take that to your professor. You don't need to already have a topic selected, just an area. Come when you have some understanding of the questions that are asked there; when you can say "I read XYZ and though ABC was interesting." Ask the professor to suggest more in that area, or if you have specific thoughts about anything you read, bring them up and discuss them with the professor. The second thing you should do is expect things to change. The process will be non-linear. Some weeks you'll make lots of progress and others not. What you started out with with likely not be what you end up thinking is most interesting. The methodology you use might change. This is all to be expected. The important thing to get started is to just pick something and start going from there--not to get overwhelmed by the big picture, but just start digging in.

^ Yep, authors are important. If you don't list them it looks like you did the work solo. Also, in most fields I know the CV is ordered in reverse chronological order, so you want to have the date before the title, listed in a way that's easy to find. I second the suggestion to follow the already existing conventions in your field and not invent a new one.

You can do an "individualized program" in linguistics. Not that I am necessarily arguing that this is the best option for anyone, but it does exist. I know people who are doing it.

Let's please not turn this thread into another "do grades matter" thread. In this context, getting an A is not meaningless. An A means "you are doing alright" and not getting an A would mean "this is a warning that you are not performing well enough." It's certainly relevant when someone tells you they feel like they can't keep up with their peers.

This post is so vague, I have to say I didn't understand anything. Are you just now starting? Are you a senior graduate student? Was your funding situation not clearly stated to you in writing when you were admitted to your school? If you've completed all your TA requirements, how come you need to do anything more -- is there some confusion about that? Who is accusing you of what exactly? In general, mistakes do happen, and regardless of who is to blame and whose job it was to catch them, these mistakes tend to affect the individual more than the organization. So even if it's not your job to stay on top of things like your official status as student/candidate/TA/RA/other, your funding source, your immigration status (when relevant), etc., it often pays off to do so yourself anyway so you can catch and correct any mistakes before they have a serious impact on you.

Thanks for the update. I'll just reiterate again that jobs that are over a month in the future may not be very high on your professor's to-do list, and that does not mean she won't do it. Good luck!

There are two priorities. On the "get this done" front, you need to take the GRE and figure out if there is anything else time consuming that needs to happen. (e.g. ordering transcripts from different previous institutions can sometimes take a bit of time.) This can take time, but it's pretty clear what needs to happen. On the "figure this out" front, you need to decide on two large questions -- why you are applying to grad school, namely what your interests are and what you hope to accomplish by going to grad school, and which schools in particular are right for you. These are difficult questions and can take a lot of soul searching to answer, but they are very important for writing a strong SOP and choosing the right school. If you end up at a place that can't support your goals, there is not much point in investing the time and money in doing this. For getting started on this, I would suggest sitting down and writing an early version of an SOP (which will change a lot down the line, most likely). This can help you think through your goals. Then try and identify potential LOR writers and go talk to them about your grad school plans. Ask for advice on where you apply. Also try to identify the researchers whose work you find most exciting (e.g. by browsing through the big name journals in your (sub)field, or looking through the programs of the recent major conferences in your (sub)field); read up on their institutions and see if you can identify other researchers at those same schools that are also interesting. As a rule of thumb, you want at least 2-3 options for potential advisors at each school you apply to. Once you identify schools, you go on their application page to see what they require and what their deadlines are, and you just take it from there. It is a bit late to just start thinking about this now, but not impossible to get it done.

Just chiming in to say that generally, 6 is not a large number at all. You shouldn't feel bad about asking your professors to write you LORs, it's part of their jobs. As for who to ask, you should really choose whoever can write you the strongest letters, regardless of whether you asked them before already or not. What's more, if they've already written a letter for you last year, it should be much easier for them to write you one this year. I assume that not all that much has changed, so they can use the letter from the previous cycle as a draft and build on it. That should make writing a new letter fairly painless.

I don't think you have any choice other than to submit your application to the graduate school. In all schools I know of, the admissions process necessarily goes through the graduate school and there is no way to circumvent that. There may be some official cutoffs, and you may not meet them. In that case, the department will usually be able to intervene and fight on your behalf. There is no way to tell how that will turn out as it depends on all kinds of factors like how much below the cutoffs you are, what other aspects your application has that the department can use to argue for your acceptance, perhaps how many other cases the department has argued for this year or in the past and how they have turned out. If the department says your low scores will not be a problem, you have to trust them that either there are no cutoffs, you meet the cutoffs, or they have the power to intervene on your behalf even though you don't meet the cutoffs. This all said, since there is no way to avoid this, my best advice is to simply submit the application. Let the people who told you they'd accept you know that you've done so. You could mention that you would appreciate it if they could follow up with the graduate school to make sure nothing goes wrong, because you worry about how things will be handled there. Then you will just have to wait and see how this plays out and take if from there.

This is an ... interesting selection of countries and continents. You can be from South America or from Mexico, but no other country in Central America; You can't really be from the Middle East, Africa, Australia, NZ, etc. -- those all go into "other," although you realize they are quite distinct. Same goes for different countries in Europe -- Germany is different from the Netherlands is different from France, all of which are different from the UK and from countries in Central and Eastern Europe. On the other hand, you can specify what particular country in Asia you are from (and I won't comment on the countries that have been subsumed under "China"). Given this odd level of granularity, I am not sure what we can learn about when people are from, if they happen to not be from several specific countries in Asia or from North America.

Not too many of us will have enough experience on both sides of the ocean to be able to make an informed comparison. A more productive conversation may take place in a new thread dedicated to this question, and perhaps it would be better informed if each of us to just describe what we know and ask how things are different in other disciplines/countries. A better venue for this discussion is probably somewhere in the Grad School Life forums, where more experienced students are likely to see it. I suspect that there will be great variation across fields. I any field where licensing is involved, there will be great difficulty in obtaining a degree in once country but working in another. In addition, I think there are trends in what is "done" in research in different countries, and at least in my field some things are more popular in Europe and others in North America. The education systems are also different. This is not to say that you absolutely can't get a job in another country, but the odds are against you. I think it's generally easier for people from North America to get jobs in the UK and Europe than the other way around, though of course there are exceptions to that rule. This was very vague, though, by the nature of the question. It also assumed top programs and TT jobs, but those are all not a given. Things will be different if we compare lower tier schools, or lectureships, etc. It would really help to better define the terms of the discussion.

One W will not affect your application. It would only be problematic if it were part of a pattern or if it were situated among many low grades, and that is simply not the case here.

It is perfectly fine to send your recommenders your main draft, and ask if they would like to see the specific SOP for each school as the deadline approaches (most probably won't). If you want advice from one of more of them on your SOPs, that's a different story altogether and I suggest you just ask. Re: tailoring the SOP for each school, I don't think it's necessary to write a new essay for each school. After all, your interests are what they are and your background is what it is. You should definitely tailor the fit paragraph(s), and you might choose to highlight different aspects of your profile based on the school you're applying to, but that shouldn't lead to a complete overhaul of the entire document, just changes to select paragraphs. You can see more on this and other questions here: http://forum.thegradcafe.com/topic/69040-applications-faq/

J. R., MPPA, what you posted here is very well written. It is compelling and eloquent and deserves to be read by the adcoms. However, it is not a statement of purpose. Your 9th and last paragraphs begins to do a little bit of what an SOP should do -- explain what your research interests are, why you are applying for a PhD, why you chose the particular program you are applying to, and what you hope to do with your degree once you've graduated. I am sure you have opinions about all of those things. You need to spell them out, and they need to be front and center in the SOP. Burying them in paragraphs 9-11 of the statement is not the best idea, in my opinion. I would suggest the following: keep what you have in paragraphs 1-9 as a separate statement. Statements like this are sometimes called a "personal history statement" though the name doesn't matter much. Find a way to submit it as a supplemental essay and you can even make reference to it in your SOP and allude to your unusual life story (or submit it as an addendum to the SOP). In your SOP, give a very brief summary of your background, as it pertains to your research interests -- maybe that's your daughter's diagnosis or your wife's struggles or some kind of combined wisdom that came out of all of it -- whatever it is, it shouldn't be more than one paragraph. Concentrate instead on your professional background: how your life experience have steered you in this direction (briefly!), how you've sought out education to round out your knowledge and help your pursue your larger goal of X, why specifically you are applying for a PhD and what you hope to gain from it, why that particular school, what you'll do with the degree. I can tell you one immediate question I have, and I'm sure I won't be the only one, is why a PhD. From your statement, it sounds like you want to do things, not just study things. Are you sure you need a PhD for what you want to do? Are you sure you want to spend 5 years researching a particular topic? Or do you want to have opportunities to act, be a leader? Is the PhD, or another degree, what will enable that? If the answer is that, yes, a PhD is exactly what you want, then that's great! Spell it out for the adcom, make them see why you should be there. Spend time explaining what you want to do in grad school and what you plan to do after. That is the goal of the SOP.

I'll go off on a short rant, then try and be helpful. This reaction you are having is so incredibly common. It starts here -- everyone is reading so much faster than me, everyone is writing responses that are so much deeper than mine. Later on it'll be -- everyone's topic is so much more interesting than mine; everyone gets into so many more conferences than I do; everyone's finding teaching so much easier, taking much less time to do their prep; everyone gets along with their advisor so much better than I do; and so on. And this will likely be reinforced by the fact that no one will ever admit to having any failures, struggling with writing, getting any papers rejected, etc. It's like looking at everyone's shining Facebook pictures, but not realizing they don't represent anyone's reality. I so wish everyone would stop pretending they are perfect and only admitting the slightest blemishes in private, whispering in a back room. Everyone looks at others and only sees the successes on the outside, not the struggles on the inside, but everyone struggles with something. OP -- your reaction is very common. I can't tell you if you are actually having a problem or not, but for your own sanity, it's good to know that this happens to everyone. If you are concerned and professors aren't helping, try and seek out more senior students. I am sure there will be some who will be happy to listen and share advice; they may not admit to struggling themselves (but if you do find one of those, keep them as a friend!), but if you just ask for advice on reading and getting through the first-year courses, you may get some wisdom out of them. Also, if there is a writing center, they may have some advice for you too. Remember that things do just improve with time, even if it's hard to see it while it's happening. Just keep going.

Sounds like you are having a stressful time all around. I have to admit that you sound like you have things way more under control than I did a month before defending (so, I don't think that being stressed out is very unusual for students who are about to graduate). I'm sorry that your partner isn't being more supportive. The best I can offer is to say that this is probably a hard time for your SO as well. You are getting things done and being very successful, while you say they are not. You may also be short tempered, self-absorbed, or otherwise difficult to deal with, as you take those last steps toward the finish line -- this of course not based on knowing you at all or anything you said, only on knowing myself and others when we were in that situation, so could be totally wrong here. It's a time of change for everyone, and you'll just have to give it time. Even if you move to your SO's city and that's something you both want, there is still going to be some adjustment period, as you shift from seeing each other on weekends to much more often. It does mean they have to change their life to accommodate you, so that's something to keep in mind. Since you've been long distance until now, this will be a major change. Maybe they're afraid that now that you're so successful you'll realize that they are not and want to break up? You never know what's on someone else's mind. I say keep doing what you're doing, and give it time. Things have a funny way of working out. Good luck with the new job and with getting that dissertation done!

I think there is a lot to be said for taking a break from studying and getting a "real job." It can give you some perspective that some people tend to lack if they've never really done much outside of school. Whether it's right for you is a personal decision that no one can make for you. Obviously, there is no single correct answer here. For what it's worth, taking a year or two off to do other things and solidify your career plans is not going to hurt your chances of getting admitted. If you stay in touch with your field and use the time to get more relevant experience, all the better. I would suggest talking to your professors before you leave about your graduate school plans, and ask them if they would be willing to write you letters of recommendation. If they do, explain that you might not be applying immediately, but you'll keep them updated about what you're doing in the meanwhile and when you decide to go back. That way, they can save whatever information they have on you for when it's relevant (some might even write the letter now and just update it later, if necessary). This way, you'll be spared the dilemma some people have later on if they've lost touch with their professors and aren't sure who to ask for letters of recommendation.