fuzzylogician

This is interesting. In my field, Facebook is used much more often for networking. Almost everyone, from students to emeritus professors has an account. Some people also have Twitter accounts, but definitely not everyone, and they trend towards the younger students/postdocs, fewer faculty. I try to friend students and faculty at my school and also people in my field who I have at least met at a conference. I draw the line at friending (or accepting friend requests from) people I have never met, even if we have 30 friends in common and they are clearly in my field. I do occasionally meet people at conferences who I follow on Twitter -- that seems different somehow, and once we meet we add each other on Facebook. People in my field use Facebook to ask each other research questions, ask for articles they may not have access to, advertise student/postdoc/faculty positions, post pictures from conferences, organize carpools or hotel room sharing at conferences -- basically anything you can do online. Facebook is somehow pretty good at not showing me too much personal information about these people, I think I mostly just see professional stuff.

You should tell the VO that you made a mistake at the interview. I believe that they can fix the form, and this is a common mistake (in fact, it's being discussed right now in a post probably 2-3 threads below this one). As for being asked about who will fund your studies if the funding is cancelled, I have never heard of that happening, but if it does then just like in all other cases, answer truthfully. First, say there is no reason to expect that to happen. Second, say whatever you would do in that situation (take out a loan? ask your parents? if it were me, I'd stop studying because I would not go into debt for the degree). I understand that you are worried, but you have a letter from your department saying that you have guaranteed funding, so there is no reason to worry. I doubt too many people have actionable plans for what they would do if an unthinkably terrible thing would happen, and I doubt you would be expected to have one, either.

My main question would be what you hope to do after you graduate. Would it be teaching at a high school? At a university? I am afraid I can't think of too many opportunities for teaching Turkish myself (but, I am also not an expert). My advice would be to first identify the kinds of positions -- or perhaps even the precise positions -- that you would like to hold after graduation. Then familiarize yourself with the kind of teachers they hire: what are their credentials? You want to have the same credentials as the people who are currently holding the jobs that you might want to have. I don't know if that's concentrating on Turkish studies or on general linguistics, but if I had to guess I would say that a more applied route and a teaching certificate is probably a better bet than a general linguistics program.

I wrote a long comment that got eaten up by the post monster. So, briefly. First, I think that some things that are described in the article have nothing to do with being contingent faculty, like not getting notified -- that's a general awful practice at lots of places but has nothing to do with being an adjunct, and like being vulnerable to student comments and such. Now, that aside, my main thought as I was reading this article was the level of determination (or delusion?) required to continue chasing an unlikely dream for so many years. I know many people, myself included, who have sat down with loved ones and made a plan for when they will stop being on the academic job market. For most people I know, it's 3-4 years, though I do know people who have done with for 6 or more years. Continuing to have temporary jobs and not giving up is a choice. I recognize, being in the system myself, that it's a very difficult choice to make and that the system is set up to exploit that. I wish more advisors would have frank conversations with their students about it, and that more programs would include some more practical training and explore job opportunities for alums that are not in academia. As students, I think it's important to be aware of all this, although I think it's very hard to understand just how soul-sucking the process is until you're in it. There is a lot of shame and secrecy involved, and I wish more people would just talk about how difficult it is, how much the odds are stacked against us, and that we could all recognize that thinking of other options is good and healthy. A logically separate issue, I think, is long-term adjuncting. People who are not even trying to apply for TT jobs, but are continuously being hired as adjuncts, sometimes at multiple institutions, and have no job security, often no benefits, and low salaries. That, I feel, is just terribly wrong and is something that we should fight against. That's exploitation at its worst, without even pretending that there is a chance at improvement.

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1047

I would recommend not emailing at all. You mentioned in your other thread that the professor told you that he will email you at the end of the month. Just sit tight. And please stop opening new threads when your questions are still directly relevant to your older thread and in fact that information is important to know. On top of that, you don't need to "help" the professor. If he wants to have multiple people on the project, he will recruit them. Whether or not it's better for him to mentor more students or have more of them working on his project depends on other circumstances, such as how many other advisees he currently has, how much work is required for the project, what the timeline is like, and how much money he has to pay students. Trust him to manage his own group. If you absolutely do want to write an email, something more like A sounds better. I would probably phrase it differently: "Dear Prof X, following our conversation on DAY I wasn't sure whether or not you wanted me to work with STUDENT. If so, could I please have her email address? In addition, is there anything else I can do to prepare for our next meeting? Thank you, Stu."

Based on other recent threads that you have started, I am afraid you may have a tendency to over-interpret other people's words and actions. I'm not sure how you decide that someone "looks surprised" but if he didn't say anything, I would assume that nothing happened. The definitions are straightforward. A full-time student is a student who studies full time, a part-time student studies part-time and usually also has a job. It's not different in grad school than in undergrad. In both cases, the norm is usually to be full-time, especially if you are funded. Studying part-time usually means that you are older and/or have a family, and tends to happen when you are not funded and therefore need to work to pay tuition, rent, etc. Schools have different definitions of what counts as a full credit load, I'm sure you can find out what that means for your school by reading on its website.

At this point I will again suggest you reach out to the International Students Office at your school and ask, if you are still concerned. Someone there should have the knowledge and experience to give you an answer, or perhaps someone in HR would know what they need to have from you before they can pay you. That said, I don't think it's something you need to worry about now. it's probably something that can be figured out within a single day once you're there; I would bet it's likely that you can't do this errand remotely, even if you know you need to. It will be easier to find out all the details in person.

Look for a PM from me.

This is a followup on question that you asked yesterday. There is no need to start a new thread when there is a discussion going on in the old one, so I have merged the two discussions. I would suggest not reading insults that aren't there into other people's words and actions. This professor doesn't owe you anything; he is offering to hire you as a research assistant and pay you, which would indicate a favorable opinion of you. He apparently has enough work for a second research assistant. I think your interpretation of this as him "offering to hire" someone to help you is just misguided. If he wants to hire someone else, it's not an "offer" and it's not to help you (because you aren't good enough), it's because there is more work to be done than one person can do (or: that one person can do within the timeline that the professor would like it to be done), and he has the money to hire a second person. This implicates exactly nothing about your own abilities. It's not an insult.

I said that in response to the quoted text from Mechanician2015. I'm sorry that you are having to deal with this, I don't know why some programs take so long to send out notifications (of any kind). It can be nerve-wracking. I hope you find out soon.

Just a note, but a day or two is not enough in my opinion. You can't expect people to respond in 24 hours and send another email so soon. I would advise waiting closer to a week before following up on an unanswered email, unless there is a deadline coming up that requires faster action. Of course you could email if you haven't heard since January or mid-April, but emailing day after day will not come off well. It probably won't change anybody's mind if it happens once but it won't help either. OP, unfortunately you are getting very vague responses and for your own sanity I would recommend thinking of it as a rejection. If it turns out otherwise, you'll be pleasantly surprised. But in my experience usually if it's a yes and it's decided, they will just tell you.

Go online to the website of the program you're applying for. Look for their 'people' tab and find the students, preferably the first-year students. Some will have their own websites. Use their CVs as your example. They will be the closest to what you want to have. In the meanwhile, run a search on CVs on here, there have been a lot of discussions about how to structure a CV.

Only you can make the decision, but here are some quick questions to ask yourself and others: - How closely do you like to work with your advisor? - Is your advisor generally accessible and good at answering emails? - If you remain at University A, could there be a possibility of spending your dissertation year at University B, perhaps as a visiting student? - What are your career goals? If you want to stay in academia, your advisor's name will open more doors than your institution's reputation. If you want to go to industry, the opposite is the case. - Has University A dealt with this kind of situation in the past? Were they successful (=do they know how to accommodate a student whose main advisor is off campus? do they assign you a local advisor who can take care of the admin stuff so you don't fall between the chairs? have others who were in your situation successfully graduated or did they run into all kinds of problems)? - Are there other professors at University B who you would be interested in working with? You'll need to form a committee there, too.

The further removed you are from the difficult period, and the more positive and more recent results you have to show, the less it's going to matter. Applicants who are older and have more recent life experience than just the BA are usually judged more on that than grades alone. There are ways of addressing these early difficulties in the SOP to make it clear that they do not reflect who you are now, to basically tell admissions committees that they do not need to worry about you dropping out or not being able to handle school, that you've grown and overcome those problems. Once you're in a graduate program, your undergrad grades basically become completely unimportant. If anything, your grad school grades become more relevant, but most of the time that doesn't matter either -- it's the research that counts.

So you have a topic but there is one course you're missing in order to do some part of the analysis? You could still use the summer to find all the relevant literature for your work and do a lit review. You could collect whatever data you might need in order to do the analysis. You could start writing up the data. You could do other parts of the analysis, if that's possible. Depending on what the analysis looks like, you could maybe write up parts of the methods section or discuss possible predictions or outcomes of the analysis. I am guessing that you would like to have some discussion of why your topic is important and what the findings might teach us -- you could probably do that too. If I were you I'd schedule a meeting with your advisor to discuss a plan for the summer.

These things depend on the fellowship. You will need to look at the terms of the fellowship and maybe try and ask someone (e.g. call and ask without identifying yourself, if you are worried about that). Some fellowships will allow you to hold more than one fellowship at the same time, others will allow you to defer the start date somewhat, so there can be ways of making it work. Or indeed you'll have to give up your fellowship for the fancier one, but there is more than one way that could happen so it really depends.

There is no reason why the first text you produce to get yourself unstuck is anything your advisor should see. It's simply a way to get unstuck. As with other parts of life, then you exercise your better judgment about what you do or don't share with others.

Do you know what courses you'll have to take in your first year? If so, you could try and read up on the material that is likely to be discussed there. You could contact the program's admissions officer or the director of graduate studies and ask for his/her recommendation on what to do, and if there are any particular textbooks or article he/she would recommend perusing before starting the program. You may be surprised to learn that they expect at least some students to show up without much/any background and courses will therefore not assume much previous knowledge. You might still want to prepare some, because first-year courses can be very difficult to keep up with if you've never seen the material before, but on the other hand if the course is well-designed then you should be able to succeed (with hard work) without prepping over the summer. Either way, your program is the best source of information on this and the best people to answer your question. If you want to share what courses you expect to be taking, someone here might be able to recommend some useful background reading, in case your program doesn't have more specific suggestions. Also, to ease your mind, it's not all that uncommon for someone to come into an MA program with little or no background. Linguistics is not offered as a major and sometimes not even as a minor at many schools. Linguistics graduate programs are aware of this and know how to deal with it. Expect to work hard, but to nonetheless be able to survive and, by the end of the year, feel confident in your knowledge. It may not be fun while your'e in it, but it's doable. Once you're through the first year, you'll pretty much be up to speed with students who came in with a BA in linguistics for the fields that are outside their main focus. Within the second year, I would expect you to be completely caught up and in good shape in your chosen subfield.

You describe a close working relationship with this professor. Have you brought up these concerns with him in conversation? Does he have any suggestions for what you should do or how to solve this problem? If you are working with him and have previously expressed an writing a thesis in his area, he should understand the implications of not being there to advise you. What does he say?

You have several avenues available to you, depending on the situation and scope of the paper, you may say anything from "I don't know" to "well, the paper makes a broad argument for X and the data from my thesis only supports a small part of that argument." I am guessing here, but you say that the paper mentions not only your work but the work of several other people; if it's more of a survey article of work that has come out of the advisor's lab, you could say that. Specifically if it's an invited contribution, that's easier to explain.

It has to be about objective reasons and about you, not the PI. The best way to talk about it is to say that you've learned through doing this current rotation that your interests have changed and that they are now more in line with the work you were doing in your previous rotation. Make sure you say (and repeat) how grateful you are to have been given the opportunity to be in your current lab and how much you've learned. Thank the PI for all he's done for you, mention nothing about his personality. If he is great but you want to do research he doesn't support, it's much easier to make a clean break than if you make it about your personal fit.

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=847

The short answer: Contact your department, we can't answer this question. Longer answer: There is no way that we can give you a reply that is relevant to your situation. You need to talk with whoever is in charge of TA assignments in your program about their priorities, why you were not assigned a TAship for the summer (despite promises?) and the chances of that repeating itself in the Fall. How can anyone here possibly know the enrolment status of students in your program? That's something your own department may or may not know and share with you; we also have no way of knowing how assignments are made and whether a low enrolment rate would affect you specifically, being that you are posting here anonymously and anyway we can't know how the coordinator at your program chooses who to assign TAships to and who to pass over if there is more demand than need. Learning that someone else at another university/discipline had their TA assignment taken away or returned will not really teach you anything that would be relevant to your own situation.

Following up on an idea from another recent thread, I am curious to know more about everyone's "30-second" pitch. What is it that you do, condensed down to 2-3 sentences, delivered in ~30 seconds? This would be what you might tell a Dean at a job interview or your friends with non-academic jobs at a party. I'm sure there is a lot of interesting research being done by the members of this board! Mine: I study how our language faculty is organized, and more specifically how the structure of sentences we say maps onto their meaning. I work under the very general assumption that some characteristics of Language are shared across all languages while some other aspects need to be acquired when we are children, and I am interested in those parts that are shared: What is the underlying system that allows children to acquire their native language so quickly and efficiently, in a way that adults studying a language later in life very rarely do?