spunky

weight lifting at the gym 5x week + cardio (either 1h or half an hour, depending on the intensity) 6x week. my husband used to play hockey so he's got a good grasp of how to train and he's been helping me out. to be very honest with you, i hate every minute i'm at the gym since the moment i get there until i leave. but i hate to be out of shape even more (especially during the summer) so i just suck it up and keep going.

Oh that is entirely true. He definitely shares a big burden of the blame for the mess he got himself into… but I also think the overall system in which he was working made things a tad bit more difficult so that he should have worked a little extra in order to ‘Americanize’ (for lack of a better word) his experience there. For instance, he is the son of Mexican immigrants, so he’s fully fluent in Spanish. No one else in his research group knew English at the level needed for publishing in journals, so he ended up doing all his work in Spanish. And not many Spanish publishers offer English translations (most only do the abstract) which meant his hiring committees couldn’t even understand most of his research. He *could* have translated some of his research and sent it out to English publishers but decided not to. I also found it weird that he had no research methods courses on his transcripts (which seemed incredibly odd for a Psychology PhD, since they tend to be strong on their quantitative training). He said that research methods was something you tended to learn ‘on the go’ as opposed to taking formal courses on it. Now I found this odd, maybe he was right or maybe he just avoided taking those courses (which is something you just can’t get out of in the U.S.). Either way, not being able to show experience in research methods definitely worked against him. I totally agree with you that there is no formal ‘accreditation’ process between American and Spanish universities, but the point I’m trying to make is that the OP might want to ensure his/her experience is something potential hiring committees in the U.S. could relate to so it can be evaluated more fairly. This freedom at the graduate level that you mentioned can very easily work against you (like it happened to my friend) and end up like another Millenial poster-child : overeducated and underemployed.

a friend of mine did his MA/PhD in Madrid in Psychology and had a really tough time finding a job when he returned to the U.S. it was also during the financial crisis so that may have added to it, but he did get the impression that that American universities were not too impressed with what he did in Spain. the best he was able to score was a 1-year post-doc in order to try and beef up his CV/resume by working with people and publishing in journals that were better-known in the U.S. eventually he ended up moving down to Mexico because he secured a position there.

a friend of mine sent me this article about predatory publishing and some of the dangers associated with is. makes for a fun intro: http://news.nationalpost.com/2014/04/23/its-the-worst-science-paper-ever-filled-with-plagiarism-and-garble-and-journals-are-clamouring-to-publish-it/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NP_Top_Stories+%28National+Post+-+Top+Stories%29

it's a predatory publisher. stay away from that.

special emphasis on this.

just go over maybe your intro psych textbooks and one of the guides they sell out there and you'll be fine, i think. but pay att'n to the methods/statistics section. they love to throw in a few trick questions (ok, maybe not trick questions but the kind of question that makes sure you understand the methods you're using rather than just being able to mindlessly apply them).

well, the general trend of the sample (N=3) of people who replied to this thread and own their homes shows that we all have a significant other in our lives who contributed to our home-owner status (which TakeruK addresses in point #4). so now we know the secret for future grad students who want to own a home: get married! XD

Python is probably the friendliest/most useful language to get started at if you're starting out from zero.

the reasoning i've heard behind this is that if as a student you don't switch schools for graduate school, you're just exposed to the culture of one school and one program. so, for the sake of diversity, you should try and look for a different school. i personally don't see anything wrong with staying in the same school you started as an undergrad but i've also heard that it's 'desirable' for an undergraduate student to switch schools when they pursue graduate school. maybe to get some extra life experience? who knows..

once a year is about right for me.... i gotta agree with the above comment of becoming prone to implosion if left with the family for too long. my mom and i luv each other but we also hurt each other a lot, so placing some distance (a couple of countries) between her and i have worked wonders for our relationship.

i have no clue what this has to do with the topic we're discussing but i'm in Coal Harbour, assuming you know your way around Vancouver.

aside from your salary, is there anything else you could see yourself doing that people would pay you for? your profile says you're in journalism. maybe something with social media/youtube? or even something less glamorous like proofreading other people's work? diversifying potential sources of income is always a good move, even if it has absolutely nothing to do with your immediate area of expertise. like i found out i'm a good online retailer, even though it has absolutely nothing to do with my degree.

i think victorydance is just talking about his/her personal case?

first of all, sorry to hear about the whole debt thing. this is truly a growing problem that nobody seems to be addressing quickly enough and will blow up on our faces. i own my condo here in downtown Vancouver (Canada). there were two things that helped me out a lot. first, my undergrad degree is in STEM area (i did a double-major in Psychology and Mathematics) so I was able to find a work placement right after graduation and before i decided to proceed towards graduate school. i also chose my area wisely because as an undergrad i became very much aware that even professors with PhDs in Psychology are not trained very well in research methods and people in my program in Math/Stats had little interest in helping them out. so i figured that was a very big market where people were doing little incursion. the second thing i did (along with my husband) was opening an online business on eBay/Amazon. i had been doing this on- and off- as an undergrad so i had already built some reputation on both sites and once i graduated i just pushed myself to become really good at it and that has become my primary source of income. i think the combination of being self-employed + having and 'in-demand' major helped me save enough money to finally move out of the house we were renting and into our own place. as of today, i've managed to pay off all my debt (except the one i incur month to month on my credit card, which i always pay in full) and intend to stay that way.

looks like it. the whole irish flag and ivory coast comment on the world cup predictions thread might have been the straw that broke the camel's back.

oh god... the horror. i'm just extra sensitive to this stuff right now because i'm wrapping up a summer project crunching numbers (yeah, i crunch numbers during the summer. that's my version of 'fun') relating student loans to underemployment (basically a numbers/stats-backed version of saying 'if you graduate with a student loan, you'll probably get the first crappy job you can find, and you'll probably get stuck with it because you need to pay up) and things are dismal. like you know the whole situation is pretty bad, but you just get to see how bad it is. almost makes me want to weep for where our generation's going.

are you for REAL!? how does she expect to ever have a future owing that kind of money?!

Well… I am gay and started off in a field somewhat similar to yours (Statistics). It was… a little difficult, at first, because I didn’t know how these things worked and my advisor at the time was born in a place where homosexuality is very much frowned-upon (and by that I mean you either go to jail or get killed). I think I took the approach fuzzylogician suggested of making things just very casual. Like: “What did you do last weekend? –Oh, my boyfriend and I went rafting. It was very fun, what did you do?” and just leave it at that. No grand coming out moment or anything. I’m not sure whether my previous advisor not like it or simply didn’t care (he never brought the subject up and I was too afraid to say anything so I never brought it up personally either). I do know, however, that when I transferred programs he wrote a very nice letter of recommendation for me. You won’t be able to keep your personal and professional life apart for long, though (unless you’re willing to isolate yourself from everyone in your program) so the sooner this is a non-issue the better.

i honestly do think prestige can make you or break you. plus the connections that you can make at a place like Standford or Harvard are well-worth their ridiculous tuition.

i was born in a country where private education = good and public education = bad so i applied to Trinity Western. i got a very nice invitation from the Dean (computer-generated, of course) to tour the facilities when i first arrived in Canada. i went my my boyfriend (now husband). it was... very awkward, to say the least. ON THEIR DEFENSE, though, they DID imply that as long as i kept the gay stuff out from the school, they would gladly take my money.

well, the liberal arts/humanities haven't been seeing a lot of love lately. a friend of mine sent me this (somewhat recent) article from the new yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/joshuarothman/2014/06/fixing-the-phd.html which kind of touches on the issue of if-something-it's-not-very-profitable-we-gotta-do-something-about-it. i guess we just need to come to terms that the business model is the way of education, whether we like it or not. although, to be honest, i gotta say if you haven't finished up after 5-6yrs i do believe something's just not working.

as another international student who is not a native English-speaker i can say that it is very important for you to convey the idea that you can write and express yourself efficiently in English. i know for a fact that professors are wary of taking in students if they feel they'll spend too much time correcting their grammar or English style mistakes. if you feel like your verbal GRE is lacking, make sure your analytic GRE and your statements are top notch. i struggled with the verbal GRE as well, but found out that if you memorize a lot of the obscure English words the test uses, you'll be fine. it may be an absolute bore, but if you commit as many words as you can to short-term memory, you'll see a great improvement in your scores.

i actually knew someone who paid through her undergraduate writing other people's essays/doing their homework. when i asked her if she ever felt bad or weird about it she said the only thing that made her mad was knowing that the people she was writing papers for will probably go on and have a more successful life than her, because they were wealthy enough to pay hundreds (or thousands) of dollars to get their courses done for them in the first place. if you ever hang around a certain website that starts with the word 'freelancer' you'll see A LOT of people offering money to have their homeworks done, particularly in math/stats. i remember the founder of the website (an Aussie) even did an interview (i think it's on youtube) where he found funny that a physics student from Harvard got his coursework done by an engineer in Pakistan for a little over $200. over the years i've just learnt to shrug at it. not much we can do about it..

that's because we're EDUCATED nuts... not just your puerile, run-of-the-mill nuts.