waddle

<br /><br /><br /> If you crash the AGU Fall Meeting, it might happen! Free beer Mon-Thu @ 3:30, champagne on Fri.

I recommend you check out the Student Doctor Network forums (http://forums.studentdoctor.net/) for pre-med advice.

I don't see a problem with what you're doing. I would recommend spending a summer at a different institution doing an REU-type program, and exploring other avenues of research, perhaps in one of the traditional fields of chemistry. But who knows? Even if you aren't a geology major (I wasn't!), you might end up liking the work you do in geochemistry (I did!), and you might even go off and apply to grad school in a non-chemistry subfield (I did!). P.S. Geologists seem to be more chill, in general, than straight-up chemists. It's probably the alcohol.

I sign my emails with a simple "FirstName LastName", but I've come across some grad students who have signed emails like this: Joe Bigghead Ph.D. Candidate Department of Departments Big Name University ... And my first impression (having never even met them in person) was always highly negative. I'm not sure what use there is to identifying yourself as part of the second-lowest class on the academic totem pole (it's as if they think that people they'll meet will actually care about some lowly unknown Ph.D. student ). The first and last name should suffice; if not, you're probably doing something wrong. Putting "Some Organization Fellow" in your signature is going way overboard.

There are 52 weeks in a year. Thus, 26 biweekly payments per year.

1. getting started early is never a bad thing 2. yup 3. I don't know what a SULI is, but REUs and SURFs are functionally identical. Usually, REU is the term used for NSF-funded summer research programs. 4. I wouldn't do that if I were you. One summer program is definitely enough, and summer is a great time to get research done back at your home campus. But if you'd like to do two summer programs (assuming you get in), I'd recommend going to different places, just so you get a feel for how things work at different institutions. 5. Nah. It's better to have diverse interests for undergrad, in my opinion. I did research in two completely different fields for undergrad (both not in my major), and am going to grad school in a third field, also different from my major. 6. Unless they're big grants (we're talking &gt;$10k, e.g., NSF GRF) for funding grad school, they're probably just padding for your CV.

Yup!

It's not med school. 'Nuff said.

I'm not a grad student (yet), but I'd just like to comment to clear up a few things. I don't doubt that "Tiger moms" would involve themselves in their children's college educations. However, they probably wouldn't do it in the way you suspect. From what I've seen, such parents are much much more likely to blame their children than to blame the teacher for a bad grade. These parents want their kids not just to get an A in the class, but to also get the highest A in the class. They push their kids to do their best, and if their child comes home with an A-, they will most likely try to get outside tutoring, not negotiate with the instructor for a better grade.

Just spam, reported accordingly. Good day!

I'll be brutally honest here (and I haven't read many of the previous posts so I apologize if I'm being redundant). If I were on an adcom, I wouldn't care whether you took Math 583 when you were 8 or 38. You came through an early entrance program (UW's, if I may ask?). Therefore, you were a college student, and a college-age student, and had all the responsibilities generally assigned to college students (not failing courses, understanding your limits, managing your time, etc.). So I think it's better to take responsibility for having flunked a course rather than trying to explain it away based on an "age" factor. Age really has little to do with intellectual ability, but there is something to be said about maturity (ADD may be a good reason, but it's hard to work into your application without sounding like you're trying to shirk responsibility--maybe get your most trusted recommender to mention it, instead of saying it yourself in your SOP?). If I were reviewing your transcript, I would question (whether justly or unjustly) whether you have since become wiser, and I'd need a good justification from you in your SOP to make sure that the Inquiline who failed MATH 583 at age 18 is not the Inquiline that will be working in my lab. After all, what PI would want to take a chance on a student who may decide on a whim to take 9 courses their first semester and flunk out of grad school? Maybe I'm being unfair, but it's always good to plan for the worst-case interpretation. Good luck! waddle

Some professors may inquire about why you decided to go to a lower-ranked state school (not maliciously, just to try to feel out how qualified you are), but for the most part, I've found that nobody really cares if you can show that you're just as capable (I think objective measures help a bit here, e.g., getting high scores on the GRE General (>1400) & Subject tests). I know or know of dozens of people who have gone on to "top ten" grad schools after graduating from a CSU. (Of course, there are thousands of other students at the CSU who don't end up getting into such places, but that's not your problem.) In fact, I think doing your undergrad at a CSU may actually play to your advantage--if you play your cards right, your letters of recommendation will invariably be better than those that students at e.g., UCs will get; the small class sizes really do help!

<tears up a bit> that was beautiful.

That's why I refuse to get one

:lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: Thanks for the laugh!

10-15, out of which all but ~3 responded.

I think (just a hand-waving guesstimate) that the upper & lower quartiles for the number of graduate programs people apply to are ~8 and ~3, respectively (i.e., most people apply to somewhere between 3-8 schools). This obviously depends on numerous factors, e.g., cost of applying, location, significant others, ranking, domestic/international status, field of study, intended final degree (Master's vs. Ph.D.). That said, 15 is probably on the high end, though I know people who have applied to 20 programs. Keep in mind that it gets increasingly harder to produce an application tailored to particular schools as the number of applications increase (you gotta spend time on each, and quality suffers if you're aiming for quantity). It's a trade-off, but I think 3-8 is good.

chaos, it seems like you still don't understand why posts like these often end up getting voted down. I think I speak for most GradCafe forumites in saying this: Posters have the right to provide as much or as little information as they are comfortable with. There is no reason that you should try to force anybody to tell you what programs they applied to--this is a (mostly) anonymous forum, and as such, people need not divulge such information that could potentially be used to identify them. In this case (and in other similar recent threads where your posts were voted down), giving you the program name would not help you answer the original poster's question any better. If you were to assist mickey in making his decision, it would have to be in general terms, anyways, since you are not in his field of study. This is what the other people who have posted in this thread have been doing (I don't see any Phys/Astro people here, other than the OP), and I believe this is what the OP is looking for--i.e., general advice. If the OP were to want advice regarding specific Ph.D. programs, he/she would have stated the names of these programs. TL;DR: if you are unable to respond to a post in a way that is useful to the poster, then it's best to not answer. I'm not trying to be a jerk, and it's definitely nothing personal (hell, I don't even know you). I'm just trying to help you become a more productive member of these forums. In any case, thanks for hearing me out, and please think about net etiquette before posting.

I don't see how going through law school would help you get into grad school; in fact, it might hurt your chances--it makes you seem as if you don't have focused interests, or changed your mind halfway through law school (or that you couldn't get a good job after law school), or that you are inclined to be a perpetual student. Not trying to be a jerk here, just judging your case from an outsider's perspective. Yeah, you'd be ill-advised to go through law school if you just wanted a Ph.D., especially if you'd incur massive debt for law school. You might be better off just applying to funded Ph.D. programs in the upcoming application cycle, and between now and December, you can get some decent research experience under your belt. Since you have three semesters of research already, I don't see what the problem is--that's plenty of research, and if you start doing research again, by the time you apply this December, you'll have more than enough to impress admissions committees (provided you can write about it well in your statement). Good luck!

Scrivener?

NYC's 'Dirty Water' Hot Dogs: 'nuff said. The Hat's Pastrami Sandwich: instant heart attack, on a bun

I see that some words are often typed in all caps, even if they're not meant to be an acronym. A common example on these fora is "IVY", which should be properly capitalized as follows: "Ivy (League)". Or school names such as "UWISC"--properly written "U. Wisc." or some variation thereof. What's the rationale behind this? I certainly don't mean to be a jerk, but it does seem as if the use of all caps for IVY is a bit pretentious, especially if all the other words in the post are properly capitalized. Is it because some people don't realize that "Ivy" isn't an acronym, or what?

As George Patton said, "a good plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow".

It usually takes me between a few hours and a few days (up to a week, if the emails are really piling on hard); on average, I guess it takes me 1-2 days to do respond to an email. I am wondering this exact thing! Thanks for bringing it up. A PhD comic that is related: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1047 (is it true, guys?)

If the organizers of a session at a conference invite you to give a talk, that's termed "invited". Otherwise, if you submitted an abstract of your proposed talk and it was accepted for presentation at the conference, then that's just a regular presentation. From what I've seen at science conferences, invited speakers are usually professors who are well established in their field; the other speakers are usually junior faculty or postdocs.