spunky

we've got a TROLL in the house, yo! not a very good one, but still a troll.

Oh, I know. I was assuming the OP was doing it for the love of teaching only, not to make a living. The fact of the matter is that (as it was mentioned before) in academia no research = no grants = no real money to be made. BUT, on the bright side, adjunct profs only have teaching duties, which is what the OP is after.

I think a lot of people with teaching-only duties go for 'adjunct professor' positions. maybe you can aim for something like that?

the acting is not great but OMG there is so much truth about graduate school in that movieeee!!!

I did my GRE in 2010 so I'm not sure how it compares to the grading scheme now, but for the verbal section I got 640. When I started taking the prep tests online and from the books I borrowed from the library I was doing terrible. But I figured out very quickly that the only reason I was doing so horribly was because there were a lot of words in the analogies and other sections that I simply didn't know. So it wasn't that the questions were hard, they were hard for me because I didn't know the meaning of the words. The moment I realized that I started compiling those lists of words I told you about and simply memorizing them. By the time I had memorized the meaning of maybe around 150 of those words, I noticed my practice scores went up considerably. And that's how I knew all I needed to do was to focus on finding more 'GRE-type' words and memorizing them. Because I asked. I inquired at every program I applied to what was their policy on international students, particularly with regards to the GRE. And their answer (although harsh) was more or less in line of what VioletAyame said. If you consider yourself competent enough to go apply to graduate school in an English-speaking country is because you are capable of doing the same level of work at the same pace. Nothing is going to slow down for you to catch up with them. Sure, you get some leniency at first because you're the "new person" and you're "adapting" to the new environment and whatnot. But when classes start and you need to start writing down reports and research projects, you'll realize very quickly that it is you the one who needs to run twice as fast and work twice as hard to make sure you're still at the same level as all the brilliant people around you. Unless you can bring some exceptional talents to the table (or you know someone who really wants to work with you already), you are just like any other candidate. I am very honest with myself and I knew I was a 'good' candidate, but definitely not an 'exceptional' one. I knew I didn't have anything in my application that was going to make me really stand-out from the other hundreds of applicants looking for the same position I was going for, so I studied for weeks to make sure I'd get superb GRE scores. I could very easily imagine an admission committee going over my application and saying "why would we want this merely 'good' candidate with not-so-great English scores when we have another hundred or so 'good' candidates with much better English scores?". I guess the fact that I'm super competitive helped me out there

That's Cartman in his raccoon costume. You get only get 1/10 troll points for not even knowing that.

As a non-native English speaker who took the GRE and made it into graduate school I can tell you with absolute confidence that they look at the scores exactly the same way as they would for any native-speaker. Even though it is true that the GRE is not the *only* thing admission committees look at, the fact of the matter is that if you want to get into graduate school in an English-speaking country as an ESL (English as a Second Language) grad student, you need to do twice the work. That's the way it is, there is no way around it. The way I was able to improve my GRE verbal score was through a rather tedious but INCREDIBLY effective method: get all those lists of bizarre English words from as many GRE prep books guides as you can, put them all in a list, look up their definition in the dictionary and memorize, memorize, memorize. To be honest I don't think I remember a single one of those words now, but I got a decent-enough score on the verbal section to make it through. And in my case the GRE was my only option to get into a Psychology program because I did not have many Psych courses as an undergrad, so the stakes were pretty high for me.

i go on cycles of weight-gaining and weight-losing depending on whether i'm on school or not. right now i'm up 15lbs from my original weight. mostly because more time in school = less time at the gym or eating healthy. for the kind of healthnuts that live in this city, the food here at the university is pretty bad (mostly just bread in its various varieties). i also need to give myself 'sugar shocks' (that's what i call the copious amounts of chocolate i eat) when it's past midnight and i'm just half-way done with my work. but i know that once the summer begins and things wind down, i'll start sleeping more (apparently sleep deprivation also makes you fatter) and eating what my husband cooks (he is VERY health-conscious as an ex-athlete) so i'll go back to my usual weight. problem though (and i think this is just tied to the fact that we're all getting older) is that there's always maybe one or two pounds that stay there and just don't go away. not too alarming (yet) but i don't wanna start buying new jeans

hey! i remember you! CONGRATULATION on your acceptance! it seems like all that advice ended up paying off great. my 2 cents: this is very common for quantitatively-oriented people so take advantage of it like there's not tomorrow! true that. if you happen to drop by AERA's Division D this year (the methods/stats one) they'll be giving an interesting talk about the projected positions both inside and outside academia for methods people. read the abstract and things are looking good! ok, couple of things here... depending on the type of research you wish to do, it can be really cheap or super-expensive. all of my conference presentation/articles, for instance, have come from computer simulations done in my lap-top or large, public data sets. so the costs are minimal. if you are more into running subjects and stuff like that, then yeah, i could see that becoming an issue. the grants stuff is tricky though. just as a personal observation (take it just at face value) it is a little bit hard to get grants in Psychometrics unless they're tied to projects that people perceive as relevant like measures of educational achievement or performance in standardized tests. do you happen to know the kind of projects that these grants would be financing? overall, i do think that if you're willing to do all the GA/RA/TA jobs that you can get you should be OK... but if it's looking like you're gonna start sinking in...$80K in debt? then i dunno.... but then again, what's the worst that can happen? you enroll, work hard and if things don't pan out then they just don't pan out. you can always go and do something else with your life (or maybe you'll get into a fully-funded program in the other universities you applied to!)

and, unfortunately, of all the issues you raise i see this one as the one that will never change.

don't you find empty theatres kinda scary? i only did that once in our high school play (someone knew someone who would let us use a professional theatre). i was left alone with 2 other people doing the clean-up after everybody was gone... holy crap! i swear i could see shadows moving in the seats. i know it was only my imagination but i didn't hang around long enough to investigate

"There is nothing noble about being poor" - Brian Kinney, Queer as Folk

just look at this line and tell me how it doesn't scream I-love-to-BS: OMG! professors plead you? Do they also throw themselves at your feet begging for the privilege of taking you in as a student? Yeah rite. And, as a side note, it is interesting to see that if one just skips over all your oh-i'm-the-best-no-one-can-compare-with-me BS, you actually make a couple of important points about the lack of commitment in higher education.

oh, god, i hope this is not the case. i mean, how can anyone not see through the BS of the OP's post!? attention-grabbing headline followed by a long, long rant of his/her perceived superiority and unnecessary self-justifications? that makes him/her a rather unoriginal troll.

Well... on the OP's defense, we all get into graduate school with different interests and motivations. And making money is a valid one. It may not be your (or my, for that matter) favourite one but I guess we do have to accept that some people are in it to get a bigger paycheque... ... which sort of begs the question, though... ... if you really area after teh monie$$$... why are you even going to graduate school in Education? maybe something more business-like would generate a bigger payout in the end.

I predict this thread will become a goldmine of entertainment. And I don't really think the OP is meant to be taken seriously.

I feel like we're hijacking the OP's thread so I'll try to be brief here (unless you wanna open our own 'Canada' thread in which case I won't feel as guilty, lol) Yes, it is different. But I guess I wanted to highlight the fact that, in the eyes of immigration officers, certain professions and programs are more desirable than others. Which makes sense... they're in charge of making sure only people who address needs that cannot be addressed by native-born Canadians can take advantage of programs like this. Yes, it does count. But you need to make sure you're still employed throughout your application process. You hit the nail on the head with one key word: you did a funded Masters program. International students do not have as many options for funding coming from Canadian institutions. They do exist but, as you can imagine, they are usually a lot more competitive because citizens, permanent residents and international students are all applying to get them. Quite a few international students usually get partial funding from their own country and partial funding from the Canadian university they're in. That deems them ineligible under the PhD stream. Now, imagine if your Masters hadn't been fully funded and add to that the fact that international students pay 3-4 times the tuition fees that domestic students have. Suddenly, keeping those +$11K in the bank is not as easy as it seems. I did it because I have trust fund so I just had to do a wire transfer from it to my BMO account. But my program has no funding for international students, so I paid my own way from the beginning until I got my PR status. I can see how this could be impossible for most international graduate students. Uhm... that's a tricky one. I think there are lots of hoops and paperwork that you need to go through... but that's just it: paperwork. They don't really ask you for anything out the ordinary, but it definitely is an exercise in patience and I do believe they could work a little bit on getting their timing of things better. And no, I don't mean processing cases faster (immigration officers are human, after all, and the amount of cases they need to go through is astronomical) but more on their pacing of things. A general application case (assuming no problems) goes like this: you send in your application... in maybe a few weeks or so you receive your AOR (Acknowledgement Of Receipt) then nothing... no info, no communication, nothing for more than a year... and, suddenly, BAM! you get a letter with a long list of paperwork that you need to get in order to finalize your application. And you need to submit it in say 2 months from the date *specified on the letter. So, like in my case: my letter was dated March 1st of last year. It said I had 2 months for them to receive all the final documents. I physically got my letter on March 20-something. So suddenly those 2 months become like a month and a week or so. And you can't get any paperwork moving because you need that letter (which has important stuff like the barcode associated to your case for your medical exams) before doing anything. So yeah... that's the only real complaint I had... but then again my process was pretty smooth compared to other horror stories I've heard so I guess I was lucky there.

Well, I started off my education *not* being Canadian so I can tell you that I'm pretty well acquainted with the immigration process, given that I had to go through it and jumped all the hoops that were needed before I got my landed immigrant/permanent resident status. Couple of things to say about that... (a) The quota of 1000/year PhD students rarely (*IF* ever) gets filled up. I mean, just think about it. You need to be a non-Canadian student, from a federally-recognized institution (and this is important because there are many graduate programs out there which are not federally-recognized even if the institution itself is federally-recognized), with no financial aid from your home country, with work experience *IN* Canada, *IN* your area of study (so if you did a PhD in say English Literature but you work as a manager for Tim Hortons that doesn't count) AND, with MORE than $11,000 in the bank. And this is a big, big one. If there's less than that in your bank your application gets denied right away. Oh, and you need to be willing to deal with the immigration process, which a lot of students who come from other industrialized nations are uninterested in doing. So you can weed-down those 1000 slots to maybe 100/200. I mean, I started my process in November 2012. By then I thought it was going to be worthwhile to wait until 2013 because I was almost sure that those 1000 slots had already been filled-up. Do you know which slot I got? #83! Yes, out of 1000 available places, not even 100 had been used up by Nov 2012! ( b ) Yes, I'm familiar with that specific piece of news you're quoting. It may suck and we may not like it, but the fact of the matter is that a PhD of someone who specializes in Oil Engineering is gonna get his paperwork moving quite a bit faster than someone who did his PhD in, I dunno, Theatre or Visual Arts. It is just the way it is. I mean, have you looked at the list of the 24 eligible occupations? They can be summarized in one of two groups: either you're an engineer of some sort or you're a health professional. Both students were doing a degree in philosophy of science and technology or something along those lines. I also need to point out that those two students are the *only* cases that have ever made it to the media. And they themselves were the only ones who claimed to be viable candidates, with nobody else double-checking to see if this was true or not. The lawyer I hired to handle my process was very blunt and clear in quite a few things: if your work experience is not in your area, you'll get rejected. if you borrowed the +$11K from some place like a bank or some other lending institution that you'll need to re-pay, you'll get rejected (AND you need to show where those +$11K came from). if you take money from the +$11K and put it back at ANY point in time, you'll get rejected. The fact of the matter is that immigration is, for lack of a better term, an incredibly finicky, obscure process where even the slightest deviation can result in a rejected application. But then again, if you are the applicant, you're left with no choice but to do whatever they ask you to do. I remember what the immigration officer told us in the (small) ceremony where I got my PR status: becoming a resident of Canada is a privilege that you have to earn. And, oh boy, they make sure you know how much it costs (in terms of money, effort, time, etc.) to earn it.

what has changed considerably? i just got my Permanent Resident status last August and I have to say I found the Canadian immigration system... well, rather easy to navigate. sure, it's lots and lots of paperwork but that was basically it.

I was wondering the exact same thing. I was an int'l student a few months ago as well (in Canada) and even I got job offers from the States because I'm in STEM-like program. And if the OP really, really wants to stay in the U.S. (s)he can always marry an American citizen. #justsayin

INTJ HERE AS WELL!!! and sure we know that the Myers-Briggs is a little bit of the "astrology of Psychology" when it comes to Personality Tests. but honestly... even the more "scientific" ones (NEO-PI, BIG 5, etc.) are pretty 'out there to begin with'. Source: trust me. i'm a Quant Psych/Psychometrician. i crunch test numbers all the time and the Big5/NEO-PI are notoriously known for their bad psychometric properties. but we still kinda like them anyway

true... but it still doesn't take away from the fact that it's still pretty heavy in terms of quant methods, particularly because a lot of the research done in Social Psych is correlational, which kind of pushes people to learn how to use statistical controls. i mean, even if you just google JPSP (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) one of the first hits you get is Baron & Kenny's oh-so-classic-of-classics article on mediation and moderation, and it's not unusual to find some pretty deep quantitative, methods-oriented (e.g. simulation studies) articles there... as opposed to qualitative methods, which i think i've only seen once on JPSP? i do agree with you though that clinical tends to be lighter on this IF the emphasis is more on applied training. i think counselling/social work does a lot more qualitative stuff than psychology, at least that's the impression i've got from the projects i've worked on in the past.

this sounds like quite an interesting question, given that Social Personality Psychology tends to proud itself for it's strong quantitative tradition and its solid emphasis on research methods.

i asked my advisor yesterday (another friend of mine is waiting to hear from them cuz he wants to join my program) and she only said that "all the pertinent decisions had already been made" which i guess is code for invites are either on the way or should've already been received. apparently, clinical and social were pretty competitive this year. lots of good candidates

all my highlighters HAVE to be yellow. no green, no pink, no nothing. THEY MUST BE YELLOW. and i keep a research diary on a notebook that MUST be somehow related with the movie Nightmare Before Christmas (e.g. having Jack Skellington on the cover or something like that).