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waddle

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Everything posted by waddle

  1. Shoot them an email, ask when they'd like to meet. IMO, there's no need to give them more sheets of paper to read. Just talking with them about where they'd like to take their research projects in the near future is a good start. You've got your economics backward. Being seen with other professors is probably a good thing, it might make them more interested in you (since there is a perceived demand (or at least interest) in having you as a student).
  2. I had no idea grad student lounges and offices with microwaves/fridges existed! I mean, we have labs to congregate in .... which also have microwaves and fridges and conveniently-located cabinets to stash chocolate in ...
  3. They're uncommon. This is an unsubstantiated, and probably distorted/untrue, rumor, but I hear (or vaguely recollect hearing) that Yale geoscience interviews are actually competitive, whereas most other schools--if they even have interviews--use visits to confirm fit (instead of with the primary purpose of culling candidates). (Take this with a gigaton of salt.) That said, you'll probably be just fine. Get a good night's sleep (perhaps try to get yourself used to waking up on Eastern time a day or two before you fly out; that is, if you actually have a sleeping "schedule" ). This will help ensure that you don't babble incoherently or accidentally offend someone without meaning to (and not realizing it until way afterwards! ).
  4. also Dia (like Visio, open source), Inkscape (vector-drawing software)
  5. Engauge Digitizer? though my guess is you've already tried / are using it. I've got no other suggestions, sorry :/
  6. I don't need to improve my score but I'd be interested in seeing what those tests were like way back when!
  7. Well, yeah ... it's your dissertation project, right?
  8. Can you post a minimal working example? Or better yet, try consulting the good folks over at tex.sx. They might be able to help.
  9. It doesn't have to be that way! I sometimes walk across campus at an odd hour and appreciate that I have it all to myself. And when I walk across campus during the day and it's crowded, I try to think that there are so many nameless people just like me!
  10. They'll probably shoot you an email if they're interested. Perhaps following up with an invitation to chat over the phone or in person. Or even with an informal acceptance!
  11. With a caveat: beware of conflicts (personality- and research interest-wise) associated with co-advising. You don't want to be the rope in a tug-of-war between two faculty members trying to take the project in different directions.
  12. Cruise + C-MORE course would definitely be masochistic. The cruise might be better than the summer course! (Depending on where you're headed, and on the ship, heh.) How does the tutition for the summer courses work? Does one's advisor usually foot the bill?
  13. Welcome to the dark side! http://forum.thegradcafe.com/uploads/emoticons/default_wink.png' alt=';)'> CONVERT OR YOU SHALL BE CONVERTED The easiest reference for me to consult for basic things is the Wikibooks on LaTeX (http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX). I've found it invaluable for quickly finding the command for easily-forgettable, but common things, like how to change the size of page margins. This. I've been using LaTeX for two years now, and I only started because I decided I would turn in a darn-good-looking report for a class (rather than something put together with Microsoft Equation Editor), and so I bit the bullet and spent a full weekend setting up LaTeX to do what I wanted (fancyhdr and all). If you are on Windows, I would download the MikTeX distribution (I use the portable version (comes with TeXworks, a great little editor)) and start putting together documents with pdfLaTeX. MikTeX is great in that it auto-downloads any packages you call that are not installed on your computer. I always just start with a basic document (see below), and expand from there (add packages for features you find you need (google works great--the LaTeX community hivemind is really good about figuring out solutions to problems or workarounds for TeX's many idiosyncrasies). LyX never worked for me, and after trying some of the more feature-packed (bloated, IMO) TeX source editors, I settled on the no-frills TeXworks. In a pinch (e.g., on somebody else's computer), I'd just use notepad and compile elsewhere. \documentclass{article} \usepackage{lipsum} %calls the package "lipsum" (lorem ipsum) \title{A Basic \LaTeX Article} \author{waddle} \date{\today} \begin{document} \begin{abstract} \LaTeX is awesome! \end{abstract} This is the introduction to my document! The next few paragraphs are generated by the \textsf{lipsum} package. I haven't actually compiled this file so I hope I haven't made any major typos. \section{Meaningless Text} \lipsum \section{This Code Box} \ldots it's not doing what I want it to. What's with the colors? \end{document} Take the plunge! You'll like the way it looks. I guarantee it!* *I'm not really going to guarantee that.
  14. http://www.bp.com/sectiongenericarticle800.do?categoryId=9036591&contentId=7067599
  15. Came across this, thought I'd share http://www.mbl.edu/education/courses/other_programs/pdf/pbi_brochure12.pdf
  16. it's not that late. Some professors will email right back, some will get back to you in January or sometime after the app deadline has passed (presumably because they saw at least part of your application package by then), some will never get back to you. Or since we're talking about the Earth sciences, some people you contact may actually be out in the field (I had that happen and wondered why they took 3 months to get back to me ...).
  17. this looks fishy to me (haven't opened the link, though)
  18. Define 'disillusioned'. Didn't get what they bargained for? Could be due to a number of factors, as mentioned.
  19. I don't think I've ever see this numeric designation for terms before ... but generally, each calendar year begins with "Winter" quarter, so the first quarter of 2011 would be "winter 2011", then spring, summer, and fall. Each academic year begins with fall quarter, so academic year 2011-2012 is from the beginning of fall quarter 2011 to the end of summer quarter 2012. Hope this helps
  20. Sorry to double-post, but just wanted to comment that my understanding of peer review is that it was originally meant to be a gatekeeper to ensure scientific integrity and technical accuracy, not a way for the "top" journals to assess the contribution/impact of a paper to a field--that was supposed to be assessed post-publication, to be critiqued in the literature (again, by techincally-correct follow-up/rebuttal papers). Now that we're slowly moving to online publication, isn't it time we started thinking about new ways to (more quickly and openly) assess the impact of an article? Perhaps a Reddit/Digg for academia?
  21. Actually, it costs the author / funding agency a lot more to publish an open access article (e.g., in PLoS) than a subscription-only article. (See http://openwetware.org/wiki/Publication_fees.) There's a huge financial disincentive for researchers to publish open-access, especially with limited grant funds. Of course, there's always the "green" route of open access, i.e., self-archiving on the interwebs. The arXiv is the archetype of this model. I wish other fields could learn from the high-energy physicists. Especially since the type-setting "services" provided by many of the major publishing companies (I'm looking at you, Elsevier) aren't really much better than what a researcher with a little bit of LaTeX experience and a basic understanding of typography could do themselves.
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