fuzzylogician

The site is still re-indexing posts following the upgrade to the new version of the software, but that should be done within the next day or so. At that point, PLEASE run a search for previous posts on this question. It has been discussed ad nauseam on the board, and you'll be able to find many opinions on the matter. The short answer is: Programs use this to gauge their competitor set. It helps them know how they are perceived by applicants and to formulate a strategy to better target the students they want to have in future years. I am not aware of any other use of this information. The way I handled it was to choose 2-3 other schools (out of the 8 I was applying to) that I felt were similar in relevant ways to the school I was applying to (strength in similar subfields, similar theoretical approach to research, similar ranking) and gave those as my other schools.

Fellowships for what purpose, exactly? There is no "resource" I know of other than asking other people. You can look at the CVs of rising stars in your subfield and see what grants they are getting. Also what conferences they go to and where they publish. That's generally not a bad thing to do once in a while, to stay current with the trends. Your more experienced professors should know what their students applied for (read: what they've written letters for) over the years, and senior students should have some idea what they can apply for or what the more senior students they remember from when they were junior did. That said, there really isn't all that much out there that I know of. The NSF DDIG is the one important fellowship I can think of that non-citizen graduate students can apply for. There is small stuff like travel stipends that conferences sometimes make available to some competitive students (more in psycholing than in theoretical, in my experience), and your university may have some small internal grants you could compete for.* The landscape improves as a postdoc. There is still some stuff we can't apply for, but there is more that becomes available. *Don't discount the small grants; showing that you can get funding--any funding--goes a long way, and no less important is the fact that you are aware of the need to get external funding and are trying.

The problem isn't so much getting a SSN (the US equivalent of the Canadian SIN), but rather not having a credit history. Most of the problems this causes can be fixed by paying deposits, paying with cash upfront, or similar tricks. It is possible to live in the US without a SSN; when you do your taxes for the first time, you'll be assigned a ITIN number. Your university should be able to pay you your stipend without needing either of these numbers. For banking, some banks have trouble with foreign students, if they are not used to dealing with them. This is due to their inexperience, nothing more. My best advice on that is to make sure to open an account with a bank/branch that doesn't seem to have this problem. Branches located near large universities, and the university's credit union (if one exists) will usually know how to handle students who don't have a SSN. For a credit card, if you bank won't issue you one, look into one of two things. First, another bank or a credit union; my credit union issued me a credit card immediately upon my arrival, before I had a SSN or any credit history. One problem may be that you are asking for a credit limit that's too high, so look into that. Another option is to get a secured credit card, meaning essentially that you deposit a certain amount of money into some separate account, which acts as a fail safe. If you fail to pay back your credit card debt in time, the money goes out of this special account. If/when you've built some credit history, you should be able to ask to switch to a "normal" account, and the money in the secured account will be returned to your checking account. For cell phone plans, there should be a similar kind of arrangement, where you pay some deposit before they agree to set up your account, and they pay it back if you keep up with your payments for X amount of time. For a drivers license, you'll need to get some document that says that you are not eligible to get a SSN. The most annoying thing (I think) is landlords who insist on having your SSN and doing a background check. Some will understand that you just don't have one, or even if you do you may not have a credit history. If they insist, sometimes that just means you have to move on because there is no way to fix the problem if they are not willing to take your references or history in another country into account.

Yeah, linguists weren't at all happy with that interview. There is an open letter to Terry Gross about it floating around Facebook. Here are a couple of other relevant recent articles by linguists about this issue, and I remember reading a few more recently. I am happy to see that people are not putting up with this crap anymore. http://qz.com/474671/move-over-shakespeare-teen-girls-are-the-real-language-disruptors/ https://debuk.wordpress.com/2015/08/03/how-to-write-a-bullshit-article-about-womens-language/

Imagine you were sitting on an admissions committee, reading someone's letter that came from their best friend. The letter is exceedingly positive, highly recommends the candidate for admission, really makes the candidate stand out. Now consider this: Letters from friends and family members are biased by their very nature, so the letter will be suspicious from the get-to.This author is in an unrelated field, making his perspective even more suspect. He presumably knows very little about the kind of research or even skills that are required in your field, and has no experience with them himself. He can't evaluate the quality of your work, and any opinion he offers on it can't be based on firm ground. This author has little/no experience advising students, even in his own field, let alone yours. He can't compare you to other potential candidates in your field and speak to your strengths compared to them, nor to your potential to succeed in grad school and beyond.This author has never been your supervisor or advisor, and cannot speak to your ability to produce work within a given schedule, take criticism, improve, etc. He has also never been your teacher and cannot talk about your ability to pick up new material/skills, participate in class discussion, help peers, etc. However positive the letter, does it sound like it could be strong? I highly doubt it.

Look, we can't guarantee you anything, but at least in my program I would expect such work to get an A. If you ask me now, in hindsight I think all the papers I wrote in my first year were pretty meh. Only one of them (out of 6) turned into something, in fact, but they all got As. Having later taught/TAed for such intro courses, I can tell you a lot of work at this stage is rough and not too well developed; that is within expectations and earns students an A. It is not expected that students will make groundbreaking discoveries in all of their classes and have fully polished papers within a semester. What is expected is that you identify the good ideas in your work and follow up on them after the course is done. *It is the research output that counts*. A final paper for a class is never the final stage of any project, often it is a rough first one. I think it would do you a world of good if you could seek out a senior student in your prospective program who would agree to share their experiences with you. I've done this before for incoming students in my program and I'm sure there will be someone willing to talk in your program too. Ask whoever you corresponded with when you got admitted for someone's name and contact information; say you have some questions about grad student life in the program. Ask the student to talk on Skype; people are more forthcoming when there is no paper trail. We can tell you what is likely to happen based on our experiences, but what you really want is someone who is already there and has knowledge particularly for your case.

Hello poster who started a professional (MSW) degree a year ago in Canada. Why are you giving such definitive-sounding advice to someone about to start a research-based PhD in the Humanities in the US? You clearly don't have any experience or knowledge of how such programs work. I assume you didn't mean to come across as dismissive of people whose degrees are from programs that have a "everyone gets an A" policy (a sizable proportion of people on this board, I would say, most of whom to my knowledge not studying basketweaving), but you did. As rising_star and I said above, the default grade in Humanities (and Social Science) graduate programs is an A. The letter grade is there because most universities are simply set up to expect it, but you are not studying for a grade anymore and shouldn't be worrying about it. You are not an undergrad anymore. These programs use grades simply to indicate "doing graduate-level work" (A) vs. "struggling, red flag" (B or less). Anything other than an A is very rare. I would urge you to contact someone -- the DGS or senior students -- at your prospective department and ask two questions: first, what is the grading policy in graduate courses (does everyone doing acceptable work get an A, or is there more of a range)? Second, how often are students kicked out of the program for poor grades? I would be willing to bet that it is exceedingly rare, if it ever happens. Don't pursue imagined doom scenarios to illogical conclusions; instead, find out what truly holds by asking the people with the relevant knowledge what the facts are. Also, see here for some more discussion of grades: http://forum.thegradcafe.com/topic/27201-do-phd-grades-matter/ . The thing to take from the discussion is that regardless of whether the program gives everyone As or uses grades differently (which you might notice correlates to a high degree with whether the program is in the Sciences or in the Humanities/Social Sciences), the expected GPA you have to maintain also changes accordingly. The minimum GPA you have to maintain is not going to be the average for the program, it is going to be significantly lower than that. So when people in that thread say "most people in my program have a 3.7 average" or whatever, that is clearly within what is expected for their program and is not a problem.

This does sound like too many changes, but there is a lesson to be learned here. Accommodations are given to those who ask for them. If others asked before you, they will likely be accommodated before you. The people who don't ask for much or do it too late end up with the worst schedules, because that's just how things always turn out. First you factor in everyone's constraints and give the ones who have many of them their pretty schedules, then you're left with some holes to fill and you give those to whoever is left, even though it's not very pretty. For now the best way to solve this is probably to target the TAs that have the slots you want and talk to them, and if you can't fix it then go back to the coordinator and explain again that you now can't afford the arrangement, ask for more help. Next time, make sure to put in your requests early on, and to give some idea of why this is important to you so that your requests get the attention they need.

Ever heard of self-fulfilling prophecies? You can succeed, but you have to try! I have no doubt that you can maintain a higher average than an A- since, as rising_star explains, in most Humanities programs I know of, everyone always gets an A unless something is *seriously* wrong. (As in, in my program I know of one time that one person got a B in the entire time I was there, and that person came in with absolutely no background in our field and was busy making up 3 years of undergrad material at the same time as taking a grad course. They are graduating with their PhD this summer!). More importantly, courses are *not* the most important component of a PhD program. They are there to give you some structure and teach you some background and skills you don't know, but what really matters is the research. You need to change the tune in your head NOW. You can do it, you are good enough. Don't give up without even trying, you will absolutely regret it later. Give it a year. (Not a semester, a year!). And during that year, do your best to make it work, as we here all know you can. Even if you don't know it now, trust all the people around you who have been telling you that you're just not seeing things straight. If you've tried and couldn't make it work, then you can explore avenues to pursue next. But don't negate all your hard work and walk away from a dream because of things you imagine happening that we have exactly zero reason to believe will come true.

You are over-interpreting things, and you are expecting too much from the administration. I understand that you are anxious, but if the old Dean stepped down *today* and the new one is presumably starting on Monday, I don't think it's particularly surprising that no one has followed up with you. The new Dean was not Dean yet on Tuesday and therefore wouldn't have been able to deal with your request. The new Dean stepped down today and was surely busy with other things during the day; not replying to a request within a single day, where the requester already knows that there is nothing you can do about the request, and when this is (as the requester knows) your last day on the job, is not arrogant nor rude. You have the right to get a timely response and to follow up with whoever is supposed to take care of your request, if they don't respond in a reasonable amount of time, but you also have to be smart about it. If the new Dean starts on Monday and the old one has already told you he can't help, then there is no point in emailing before Monday. Once the new Dean starts Monday, s/he will have a lot to familiarize him/herself with, and there will be plenty of other petitions and decisions to be made that the previous Dean has left behind. I'm sorry to say, but there are surely going to be other things that are more urgent than your GPA, or petitions that were made before yours. Expecting a response in the first few days, or even week or two, is probably just going to lead to more anxiety and disappointment. While this is important for you, it doesn't seem at all urgent; we are talking about a retroactive change to your GPA, based on already existing documentation, which you are not going to actually need at least until you apply for grad schools, which will be around December-January of next year. Before that becomes urgent, there will be other things that need to be taken care of fast so people can get hired/paid, courses can open in the fall, students can register for the fall, etc. I would say a reasonable time to follow up on this again is roughly the middle of the *second* week of the the Dean on the job, not before, and understand that even then it may take a bit more time. This doesn't mean the petition's chances are any worse -- but if you constantly email and come off as demanding and oblivious, that is not going to do you any favors (however respectful and professional you think you are).

Okay, so first off, this is normal, and revisions suck. That said, if this is your first major piece of academic writing, there is a lot for you to learn both in terms of how to write for your particular scientific community, and in terms of how to clearly and concisely communicate your ideas. This is not something obvious or necessarily natural; there are (sometimes unwritten) rules and conventions that you have to learn. Some of that you may get through reading articles in your field, but it's not always going to be clear what is important and what isn't, so you may get a lot of comments along those lines. Some of them may seem nitpicky -- and some of them may indeed be nitpicky if you have a certain kind of advisor -- but at least some of that is unavoidable. And then occasionally there are going to be places where there might actually be a problem or a question about the content that you haven't addressed, or your advisor may have an idea for something to pursue or look at based on her experience in the field and better familiarity with the literature. As a result, I don't think that receiving an early draft with a lot of comments is unusual or a cause for concern. Different advisors have different styles, but at least when I give comments, if you're at a stage where you're receiving lots of comments on style/clarity and some questions on content, then you are actually doing quite well. If someone has a paper with a topic that doesn't seem viable, or has some obvious glaring problem, or makes a wrong prediction, or misses important data/predictions/implications/literature/etc, then my comments will be concentrated on that and not so much on how they convey their point. I don't think it makes a lot of sense to spend time achieving clarity on a piece of writing that's never going to be part of the final product. It only makes sense to worry about style and clarity when it's clear that you are heading in the right direction. So, it's fine to put the paper down for a day or two and be upset, but then pick the paper back up and try to understand not only what the specific comment is about, but also why it's there and what it is a symptom of. There may (likely) be specific things in your writing that generate multiple comments from your advisor. As you become more experienced, you'll hopefully be able to see why you are getting the comments you are getting, and then you can decide for yourself whether you want to accept the comments or not. It's ok to reject a suggestion that your advisor made; you just want to think it through be able to justify why you think you made the right choice. If you're not sure, ask your advisor. With time, you'll also learn to identify your advisor's commenting style. Some people comment on every small stylistic choice you make that's different than they would make just so you know they would have made a different choice, but don't necessarily expect you to follow all the suggestions and would probably even make a different suggestion on a different day of the week. Others expect you to follow all of their many suggestions, at least as a young student, and think this is a good way for the student to learn what good writing looks like (or, they are very attached to their words and do it forever, and I personally could never be their co-author because I find it too controlling). Other advisors only comment on important stuff. Yet others may do early rounds where they don't say much on style and you may think your writing is great and then once they think your content is pretty solid, they'll suddenly tear your writing apart and you'll think you are going backwards when really they've moved to lower-level concerns and you are doing great. Identifying you advisor's style is a skill and takes a while, but that's natural and not something to get discouraged about.

The time right before you move is one of the hardest. Major changes are about to happen, but first you are forced to wait. The imagination can go wild. What you are describing sounds normal under the circumstances. My advice would be to make the most of these last few days when you're with family, make sure you have some nice recent memories. But when you're alone, spend the time planning for when you move. Read up on your city; there is a lot to know -- use google street view to learn about the neighborhood surrounding your university and your new apartment. If you don't have an apartment yet, read up on neighborhoods, browse some postings. If you'll be there in less than a week then now is not too early to begin looking. Familiarize yourself with the transportation system. Find out which cell company has the best reception in your area; read up on internet providers and see if you can already contact one (it can take obscenely long for a technician to come install your internet once you've signed up for the service). Read up on banks and local grocery stores. Find where the local thrift stores are, in case you need quick stuff to get you started in your new apartment. Look up furniture stores and large retail stores. Find out where the nearest mall is and how you get there. Find out who the mayor of your city is, when the last election was, what the state capital is, who is the governor. Start planning your life in your new city. Everyone has some kind of adjustment period and struggle when they first move, this is to be expected, too. The first semester may not be completely smooth sailing. However, your program clearly thinks you have what it takes to succeed, or they wouldn't have admitted you. Trust them! As part of your prep, if this helps you, read up on resources and requirements in your department and university. What are the first-year courses like? Are there other requirements? Will you be assigned an advisor immediately -- if so, read up on them. Who is the Director of Graduate Studies in your department? Who is the chair? What is the secretary's name and where is her office? Is there a student rep who might be there to help? Within your university, is there an orientation? Are there activities to help you make new friends? Are there support groups on campus? Where is medical and health services? (You might not need them, but the time to find out this information is not when you need it but long before, so you're not burdened even further when you're in need.) Is there a sports center? What courses does it offer -- is there anything you want to sign up for? Gathering information and making plans helps you have some control over your life. The hard part is having to passively wait and only know what you'll be missing at home, but not about all the new opportunities that will become available once you move. Thinking and planning ahead will help you get excited about what you'll gain by moving and hopefully remind you why you chose to do this in the first place. Remember that what you are going through happens to everyone, to some degree, but it doesn't mean you won't be as successful as your school already thinks you are. Good luck!

Please don't post the same question multiple times. I'll remove your other post, since this one actually mentions the university you are asking about, whereas the previous one didn't.

It might help if you told us what university you are asking about.

Or, how I would phrase this: please tell us what information your independent search has yielded and what questions (if any) you still have.

Fear 1 is highly unlikely. If he was going to say 'no,' he'd just do it. Deans tell people 'no' all the time. Fear 2 is possible. However, it seems unlikely to me that your petition will be denied since you have a valid case and documentation, and if the current Dean thinks it should be approved there isn't much of a reason to assume the new one won't think the same. That said, I understand it's still anxiety inducing; but I don't think we can help, you'll just have to wait. Other than that: patents count as research, and your experience setting up a company is most definitely relevant. As for your high school experience, I don't know that it's necessary to go into details. You can mention the troubles you've had in college briefly, but it's just not something to concentrate on if the goal is to get into grad school. You have far most interesting recent stuff to discuss. You want to highlight all those positive things you have going for you. I also would not advise going to any department heads or deans right now. You don't know that it's necessary, and firing the big guns before you know it's necessary might end up flagging you as someone who tries to pull strings to get special privileges, even if that's not true. I'd wait and see how this petition works out first.

If you don't trust our answers, why are you wasting our time with your questions?

Ask the schools. Since you got two answers the conclusion is that there is no one correct answer and therefore you want to know how the particular school you're applying to interprets the request.

In my first and second year, I presented at a couple of grad student conferences that happened either at my school or another one in town, so I didn't have to travel. They were good practice and mainly a good hard deadline to get something done by. They are long gone from my CV, but they were still good practice for "real" conferences, which I started going to in my second year.

If you want to do it, and have an employer who'd pay for it, I don't see what you'd lose by trying even if it doesn't lead anywhere. Not being from your field, my best guess is that a second masters could help here but there would have to be some additional things that happen. One is that you need to do very well in this one, and the second is that it would help a lot if you can demonstrate growth in thought or interests between the first and the second masters. If that happens, I think there would be a way to write an SOP that says something along the lines of "in the first masters my advisor left in the middle and I couldn't zero in on a subfield(?), but after working several years in a related industry and through my second masters, I was able to focus and redefine my interests and now I am excited to begin a PhD studying X at Uni Y." (Obviously this is not a suggestion for actual text you would submit.) This would also have to be backed up by strong LORs from professors at this new school. The real question down the line would be if a PhD is really necessary for what you want to do. If you have a good job that you enjoy and keeps you connected with your field, there may be ways to keep up with the field on the side without doing a PhD. The best advice I can give anyone who is thinking about starting a PhD is that if there is something else that makes you happy and doesn't require investing 5-7 years of your life without any promise of a return -- do that! This is something to consider at some point after you've been successful at a masters program, in my opinion.

I think this should be clarified: Good academic work does *not* mean sitting in isolation, thinking about some ideas, writing them up, and then doing a lit review to see who has said anything relevant in the past and creating a lit review. This often leads to re-discovering old ideas and generally wasting time. Good research means first reading up on what exists in the area that you are interested in, then building on those existing ideas and saying something new. This is harder and requires a lot of time studying up on your field before you can make an original contribution, but this is precisely why it takes a long time to get a PhD. It's not so easy to innovate. Westy, if for this writing sample you are not in a position to innovate in this way, that is okay, but pretending that you are is obvious (as a reader and grader of such papers) and wrong. One thing I often suggest to my students who face this problem is to read enough to be familiar with different approaches to something, and write a paper that presents and integrates these different views and adds something new to that -- e.g. how to take from one approach to enrich another, how to apply an approach that was developed for phenomenon A to phenomenon B, point out a problem that is addressed by approach A but hasn't been by approach B and either show how you'd do it or describe how it's a problem for B, etc. This is usually the first step to saying something original, and if done well is not bad for an undergrad. The most difficult part of this work is going to be coming up with a detailed enough question that you can actually read enough of the relevant literature to know what's out there and form an opinion. As rising_star already points out, your current topic is extremely broad, and therefore really impossible to seriously work with. I suggest you start there.

Yes, it would be plagiarism. It would in fact still be plagiarism even if you gave the citation. And if this is for an academic paper, a website is usually not an acceptable source. See here: http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k70847&pageid=icb.page342054#a_icb_pagecontent732741_paraphrase

I guess I would ask myself if it'd be a one-off project where I would learn the technique and I might not enjoy the project tremendously but then I'd be able to use the technique on my own, or if I'm always going to be dependent on the other person to be able to use it. If it's the former, then if there is a reasonable payoff, I might do it (though recently for a kind of similar case I decided against it because it really wasn't pleasant to work with the person I would have needed to be learning from). If it's the latter, then I think it's not worth it, as far as I am concerned. It'd have to be one hell of a serious payoff to make me participate in an unpleasant collaboration at this point in my career.

Read the terms and conditions of your reservation. You should be fine.

I have the same problem, but I have one collaborator who simply doesn't reply if the email is longer than fits on one screen or contains more than one question/request. Something always gets lost or ignored. So I've learned to be brief, and if possible mention everything important in the title or at the very top of the email. If there is just one issue per email, it's harder (though not impossible) to reply to the email and yet ignore what I asked. As I receive more an more email myself, I definitely appreciate the ones that are short and to the point.