LJK

I'm thinking about this also. I am considering/being considered by two schools and if I decide to go for one of those locations it would just be silly not to buy. My brother has some money socked away and always wished he could get involved in real estate but moves too much for work, maybe I will approach him to co-own the house (he puts more money in up front, I live there and oversee the house while slowly putting in an equal amount is what I'm thinking of proposing). My thought is that I would see about moving out at the beginning of the summer and getting something temporary for a month or two, get the house and move in before school starts. It helps that this particular location is full of foreclosures on houses that are sometimes less than 10 years old and likely won't need much maintenance. I would acquire a roommate or two and have the whole mortgage and at least part of the taxes paid that way. 5 years from now I would expect the house to be worth considerably more since the prices are so rock bottom right now. But, it is a huge commitment. I should probably go back to focusing on choosing my program rather than looking at the real estate deals at one of the locations

If it is a separate department, which it sounds like it is, you probably cannot change graduate programs. Programs are usually relatively autonomous with their own lines of support and course work, etc. To switch you would most likely have to independently apply to the new department during their next admissions season.

Post-docs are often pure research positions used to get your publication count up to be competitive on the academic job market. But, there are post-docs that involve teaching. With one of these positions you might get less research done but you might be gaining teaching experience that will give you an edge over job applicants who don't have independent teaching experience. Sometimes the teaching is optional, some times it is required. As to whether the research is your own or you serve a support role, ideally you are developing your own research program. However, post-docs are often paid off grants that may have a general direction to them so that your work may have to find a compromise with the direction of the grant. So ideal: pure researcher, developing own research program and getting publications. But reality often intrudes. Also, for pay, Post-docs are often paid about the amount of a graduate stipend + the tuition that the department is paying for grad students, therefore they cost the PI about the same amount of money to have on a grant as a grad. They usually have benefits as proper university employees unlike many grad students. I would go with B. If you are driven and you are able to publish and get work out, you will be able to acquire a job or a post-doc position that you can use to leverage yourself higher with more independent, good and published work. There is too much of a sacrifice involved in becoming a trodden upon slave-like being for 5+ years in my opinion. You substantially increase the possibility of burn out or deciding to quit for other reasons. Everyone thinks that can't happen to them but the statistics say otherwise, and if I were you I would protect myself against it.

Most social sciences are not STEM. Psychology is a STEM field but anthropology, political science, history, sociology, etc. all are not STEM fields.

My guess, and it is a guess, is that they must be somewhat interested to ask you to go to the trouble of getting another letter. They would be able to tell if they were not interested from your admissions materials that included just two letters. They are probably looking for the third to see if they can get a better idea of whether you should stand out from the other qualified candidates. I would think its a positive sign that you are being considered but that does not mean that with your extra letter you will stand out. Hopefully you do though! Good Luck.

I can tell you that the interview day at UC Merced happened this past Monday.

I just did an interview where they are planning on accepting 6 out of 9 of the students they are considering in the first wave. The way that one of the professor's put it to me was that they may very well end up accepting all of us because some people will choose to go elsewhere. They ultimately want to end up with 4 or 5 students so once they receive 2 or 3 no's they will accept another person from those who didn't get an acceptance from the first round. He tried to emphasize that all of us were exciting applicants and if they had the money they would take all of us. It sounds to me like this department is running on a similar model. A month later, you probably didn't make the first round of admits but that doesn't mean that you are rejected. The silence might be because the first offers are still out there and your final admission status is still up in the air. I agree that it is totally acceptable to ask at this point about your status.

Generally it is a formality. I understand your concern that you have a GPA under 3.0 but unless there is an official requirement listed on the graduate school's website that shouldn't be an issue. If the director had a real concern that the graduate school might fight the department about admitting you, I doubt the director would have emailed you. If that was the case, they could argue amongst themselves without letting you know how close you came to getting in. In fact I think it would be pretty unprofessional for them to tease you with an unofficial acceptance if they had any concern about converting it into an official acceptance. Chin up! I think you are more than fine here.

Psychology tends to look at the individual within a cultural context or across cultural contexts, looking at how culture affects the individual. Sociology looks at the culture which is made up of individuals but tends not to look so narrowly at each individual. I think its a micro/macro type difference. You really need to decide which viewpoint you would like to come from to decide between the disciplines. Anthropology is also at the broader cultural level but tends to infer it from individual level experiences. If you are being drawn toward sociology, you should take a look at anthropology also. As far as overlap, my current institution has a few classes that are cross listed at the undergrad level. I believe at the grad level there are classes that can count across the departments but it is rare for a student to use a class in the other department for their degree. As far as competition, there are way more psychology majors than there are sociology majors at most universities (I believe) but then there are probably also more spots in psychology grad programs than in sociology programs. So that may be a wash. The real issue is funding. Psychology is considered a STEM field. That translates into more funded students, a larger stipend for students who are funded and an overall better funding atmosphere. If everyone in a program is funded, there is less financial based competition among students. STEM profs tend to believe that students should be paid to work as graduate students, other profs don't necessarily believe the same thing when it comes to work that directly relates to the student's degree. If the work is to benefit the prof, paid; if the work is to benefit the student, school work and therefore unpaid. That might not be true everywhere or of every prof but that seems to be the general difference.

I will give this a whirl From talking to my professors, there seems to be two main models of assessing potential psych grad students to join their labs. (1) Does this person have direct experience and/or a skill that is useful to the professor's research plan? It is easier to get into a lab dealing with a special population if you already have training with that population. Or if you have a skill that a soon to be graduating student has that needs replacement in the lab. (2) The other method seems to be one of assessing potential via good grades, a good SOP, an impression that this student is curious and driven. This is where you would probably fit in unless your skills from your other major are unique to some extent and are needed by one/some of your POIs. One prof I talked to is choosing not to take a student this year because there are no applicants that fit the first type. She is new and doesn't want to be working on setting up her lab and training a student from scratch on her special population at the same time. A different prof is very excited about a student who fits the first type, bringing a skill and some experience directly related to a project she is about to get a grant for. But should that student decide to go elsewhere, this prof has a person of the second type that she is less excited about but would probably accept if she can't get the first choice. My undergrad is in a related social science to my chosen field also. When a POI called to invite me for an interview, he conducted a short phone interview as well. One of his questions was about how I found the transition from the one social science to the other. He could see it being an advantage to have a wider perspective of academia and the literatures than someone who had only studied Psychology. But he wanted to make sure it sounded like I knew what I was talking about as far as Psychology goes. So even having the experience of a different field can be seen as a useful skill! My situation is a bit different because I am getting a masters in Psychology now prior to applying to PhD programs. This is from the prospective of a department that has individual labs to which students are assigned as they are accepted. The schools I am applying to are this way as well. The admissions formula of the school of the POI mentioned explicitly puts admissions in the hands of the PI with no adcomm in between. I think the power of the prof vs the power of the adcomm is a department by department thing. There are also considerations such as which professors deserve/need new grad students this year, and who has funding available beyond the department TA lines. Some professors may have a lot of sway regardless of whether they are on the adcomm and other may have almost no say. As people have been pointing out all over the board this whole process is a crap shoot!

I generally use SPSS (PASW these days) and excel at this point. Some people/schools use SAS as an alternative to PASW. Other programs I have heard of people using but haven't myself: Matlab and R. R is free and most stats people are excited about it. It got integrated into the stats classes at my MS program (after I took a PASW based class) along with SAS. I think that it R more modeling based than straight stats but I'm not exactly sure. Additionally there is a program G*Power which is a free program specifically for calculating power.

I will be meeting my potential new advisor. It will be advisor-student mutual-respect-and-admiration at first sight!

If you get offered the position, go back to your department and see if they can commit to funding you. If not, its still not irrevocable until you actually start. The thing is with these university level positions there are tons of people who would like to have it, so ducking out later might feel crappy personally but pre-training it's not like you are leaving them with no one - they will just hire someone else who doesn't get offered department funding.

I have heard a young professor who was accepting his first students last year reason about these same issues. There was one student who was overqualified - if he got into the other school he had just interviewed at he would go there pretty much not question. If this professor offered him a spot, and the student chose to sit on the offer into April, the professor would be scrounging around looking for a good student out of those who haven't accepted an offer yet. Did the professor offer him a spot? I'm not sure but I don't think so. The faculty decided to only offer acceptances to the number of students that they could guarantee 5 years of funding, creating a situation where each individual spot had its own rolling admissions. If the professor had offered the spot to the overqualified student he probably would not have ended up with his 2nd or 3rd choice but more like 10th or further down his list. This is a small program where most faculty have one or two graduate students so getting a crappy one means that unless they get a big grant that can fund another student or two independent of the department, that is who they are stuck with for the next 5 years. I see what people are saying about it being the low ranked programs (which I will extend to new, unproven profs in lab-based fields) that could make that decision, but seriously those are the only ones that people can be 'overqualified' for. If you are super qualified and applying to a top program or lab, the program/lab has every reason to think that they will be the applicant's top choice.

I don't think it is really possible for you to change graduate fields once you have applied. This isn't like undergrad where they take a large group of applicants and accept who they will think will do well somewhere in the school. Graduate programs tend to be run pretty autonomously from the rest of the school. They have their own funding lines, their own admissions committees. I think at this point, your choices are to continue you original plan to study Applied Linguistics should you get accepted to a program or to withdraw your applications and apply next year for the department you would really like to be in. The last, last, last thing you want to do right now is to try to get your application transfered. That will indicate to the schools that you are not interested in their program and that they should reject you, which they will then do. If you want to continue to have the option of going to graduate school next year, don't tell the departments that you don't want their degree, that you want a different one. Sorry that I don't have a more optimistic opinion on your options. Edit: if these are sub-fields, you may have the opportunity to switch within the department as wtncffts suggests. But again, I would not do anything to convey your change in focus until you have acceptances.

I have an interview the weekend before my spring break then the following weekend have a conference in the city nearest to my parent's home. I checked with my POI (my only contact thus far at the school) if there would be any issue with my doing a multi-city trip current location-interview city, interview city-conference city. He said not at all and I should even check if adding a third flight conference city-current location would bring the price down, in which case I could reimburse the whole thing (this wasn't the case alas). I think it really depends on the school and their policies.

Look for something else. You have this and can stay with it if you don't find something else that gives you relevant experience, but there is absolutely no reason not to look for something else. When it comes to research experience, I think it is about having a clue what research is about and perhaps gaining some research-useful skills. If you evaluate which skills you have, and which you don't at the moment that would be useful for the research you want to be doing down the road, see if you can find a position that will let you start to develop those skills you don't yet have. Side note, grad students are generally half-time employees. Depending on the school they may or may not have decent health insurance because of this designation. I don't want you to have the wrong idea about what you will be signing up for once you get to the grad student stage.

I haven't dealt with a situation like this. However, I will toss my opinion out there. It's good that you emailed the graduate director for clarification. If they won't put together a formal package for you, you need to at least find out what the funding possibilities are. Is there limited funding on a first come, first serve basis? Will the funding be guaranteed after the first year? Are there some positions that pay more than others? Maybe they can't tell you whether you will have a fellowship or work as a TA but they should be able to give you an idea of whether you will be paid regularly throughout your years in the program or if it will be a constant worry. If it doesn't sound like they are going to guarantee funding, you should wait and see if you get another acceptance. I wouldn't worry about them rescinding their acceptance because you are concerned about housing and feeding yourself while in their program - with the exception of those lucky enough to be independently wealthy all of us have these concerns. Also, conduct this conversation via email if possible so you have a record of it. If at some point the GD wants to talk on the phone about it, after the conversation put the key points into an email and have him confirm them.

I agree. Definitely have him call. A conversation about you with someone the POI respects could help them get more of a feel for you and be more confident that you would be a good choice over another student they didn't get to have a conversation about. Grad students are risks for the professors: they drop out, are lazy, aren't as capable as the professor would have liked, etc. If this professor has a trusted source saying that you aren't as much of a risk as other students it could be a huge benefit.

My understanding of how admission contracts are worded is something along the lines of the offer being contingent on comparable performance to what has come before. So if you have a 3.9 now you shouldn't have much below a 3.9 in the end. At the same time, I think it is mostly a legal out that most programs wouldn't invoke if you got a C, though with three Cs they may decide that you aren't worth the risk and revoke their offer. Basically, don't blow off your final classes because they can matter if really not good.

My experience has been as a graduate student in a department of small labs, so it maybe a bit different from where you are. Here we don't have any full-time RAs at the moment as there are only a few faculty with grants at the moment and they have chosen to support more grad students over having paid RAs. As a graduate student, I am expected to design, run, analyze and write-up my own research. We are required to have semi-independent projects in our first year to get started and then a substantial independent project in our second year to culminate in a Master's Thesis. I happen to work in a very independent lab where my prof, the other grad student and myself are all working on pretty different projects though they are thematically related. If there is an undergraduate or two working on our particular project, we oversee them. This semester my undergrad RA fell through so I am personally running all the participants for my MS project myself. Last year, I had a graduate RA-ship in another professor's lab off his grant. His lab functions more collaboratively with all the graduate students (2 permanent and my transient self during that semester) meeting weekly with the PI to design the main collaborative series of experiments. Everyone had their own projects going on separate from this main effort. The other grad RA and myself were to coordinate the collaborative experiments, from training undergrad RAs, to setting the running schedule, assigning coding tasks and initial analysis of the data. The lab grad students, particularly the other grad RA who is more 'into' the lab activities took the lead in writing up some of these results, doing the literature reviews, doing more extensive analyses and thinking deeply about what the results mean in light of the previous research. The job of a graduate student is to become an expert in their chosen sub-field and to gain the skills needed to become a PI after obtaining their PhD. We have a very diverse set of skills that we want to acquire: designing experiments, running experiments, supervising RAs (paid and undergrad), collaborating effectively, teaching, statistics, programming, presenting, scientific writing, grant writing, and probably some things I'm not thinking of at the moment. The grad student's advisor is the person who decides when each of these skills will be worked on. Some are basic: usually there is a first year sequence that covers basic statistical methods. Most psychology programs require a first year project as a first foray into designing, running and analyzing an experiment. After results are acquired, the presenting and writing up skills are worked on to effectively communicate the research project. PIs need to fully understand all levels of the lab, or at least have people who do under them. It is in the best interest of the grad students to understand how the experiments are being run for the immediate purposes of working with the data but also so that they can run labs of their own one day collecting related data. It does seem a bit strange that they aren't interested or aren't able to grasp the main project that they are working on parts of. At the same time, one of the reasons to have paid RAs is to free graduate students from some coordinating of undergrads and running participants so that they can focus on getting these other skills that I listed. The PI could be deciding that these writing-level activities are the ones that need to be emphasized for the grad students. While a well rounded student would want to understand every level of the lab, the PI might be directing their activities away from what she thinks is your job. If you are unsure what is your responsibility vs. what is the grad students' responsibility, ask. It is completely reasonable for you as an employee to ask for a clarification of the duties of your job and in what ways you are to rely on the grad students and in what ways they are allowed to rely on you. Are the students in your lab graduate RAs? If so, doing coursework for lab hours does not seem reasonable. At the same time, is all of it coursework? Publishable paper writing is lab work, as is all the literature review and endless data analyses that go with it. There are many PIs out there who don't know how to schedule participants - the last time they did it was when they found themselves without a graduate student or RA to do it for them which could have been 10 years ago on a completely different system. Some PIs are super involved in the daily activities of the lab and some are more removed. Specifically to your comment about not being behind with just doing writing: papers and conference submissions take a lot of time. It isn't like writing a paper for class. You have to read endlessly in order to do a thorough literature review, you have to analyze, reanalyze, graph and re-graph results, you have to coordinate with co-authors, etc. Then, you submit, wait months for the reviews to come back with a rejection or a revise and resubmit then get back to work writing and editing. Also, my understanding of the term PI is Principle Investigator, which is a technical term used in grant writing as someone who is sponsored by a suitable organization (university, research institute, research hospital, etc.) and is eligible to be the main recipient of a grant. All tenure track professors (assistant professors are tenure-track without tenure yet) and research professors are PIs by this definition even if there is a clear 'head' professor in your lab. Post-docs are not PIs because they are not eligible to get full research grants on their own. On the grant that your lab is run on, the one professor may be the PI, but the rest are still PI-eligible, if that makes sense. I think most people on the fora refer to PI-eligibles as PIs. (Edit: All work that goes through the IRB process at my university must be sponsored by a PI so I guess in that sense the assistant professors without their own grants are full PIs not just PI-eligible.) I wrote a lot here, but the main thing is: talk to the head professor, get a concrete idea of what your job responsibilities are and if at all possible get it in writing (email will do) in order to defend your position and time against the grad students who may try to dump more in your lap. She has all the authority to decide what are her students responsibilities and it can be vastly different depending on the her preferences and expectations. (Presuming the grad students have this 'head' professor as their advisor.)

It could mean that they don't have an official wait list until April. You weren't someone who was invited to interview but neither were they sure that they didn't want you. They have no reason to contact you with a 'waitlist' decision this early, they can literally be holding your application in case they don't get enough students with their first/second wave of admits who were interviewed. This is why I am annoyed by people who write that they are rejected in the results section because all interview invites have gone out and they didn't get one. Of this year's first years in my department 1 of 5 or 20% of the phd cohort was not invited for an interview. One prospective student for the slot he filled was an arrogant ass talking about the top program he was days away from being admitted to (which begged the question why he was wasting our money visiting our program), and the other prospective student invited was probably admitted but decided to go elsewhere. The student who is attending was probably the second person admitted to the slot even though he was not interviewed in person and a number of people interviewed with different interests were not accepted. No one knows exactly what is going on at a school unless explicitly told. I know that we as applicants want to know and perforce must speculate but you really can't know until an official decision is issued.

My roommates and I just discussed this. We decided that you don't say anything. You give them a hug, a pint of Ben & Jerry's, and complete control of the remote for the day/night.

This is an interview. Some of these visits are of the very top candidates who will mostly get in and some are very competitive with 50 people invited for 10 slots. You probably won't know which type it is until you get there. Be prepared to talk about your research experience and research interests and to ask lots of questions about the program (aka show your interest in them). You can find a lot of information in the 'Interview' section of this forum.

Also, before April 15th, there are sort of unofficial wait lists. In the model of grad admissions where a student is being admitted to work in a particular lab, with one, maybe two, opening(s), the PI has to wait until the first person they offer each slot to officially declines it before accepting an alternate student. If the first accepted student hangs onto all acceptances until late (it is much more polite to formally reject any offers you know you aren't taking as early as possible), or that particular school was the one the student had narrowed down to the top two they were deciding between but made their decision before April 15th, the PI had time to still do a 'normal' acceptance prior to formalized waitlists. The schools want to fill their funding slots and will keep accepting into May or even later if their slots aren't filled. This generally isn't a problem for the highest ranked programs but could be the case for some of the lower tier ones who lost their preferred students to the higher tier schools. My current program has been known to recruit graduating seniors into a funded MS in years that the phd applicants were not as promising or decided to go elsewhere.