starmaker

Yeah, I think this is the key. I have a decent MS GPA, several publications, four and a half years of research-environment industry experience, a high GRE.

There used to be a nice thread where those of us with sub-3.0 undergrad GPAs could chat and commiserate and worry, but it hasn't been updated in a year. I thought it might be nice to have a thread where the below-three folks could post specifically about acceptances (or other happy events like winning or getting HM for fellowships, should any of us be so lucky). It might be reassuring to people convinced that a rough academic start means they'll never get in anywhere. Also, I wanted to brag. Me: Comp Sci PhD applicant, undergrad GPA 2.5 from top-10 university, MS GPA 3.5 from mid-rank program. Got my first acceptance today, to a mid-rank but quickly-rising program! Still waiting to hear from two other programs, several fellowship programs (not that I really expect to win any of the latter).

I was a neuro major with low grades and a systems & computational neuro specialty. I applied for neuro, applied math, and BME programs in my senior year, and didn't get in anywhere. I went to work for an artificial intelligence R&D company at a good salary. The following spring, while continuing to work full-time, I started taking post-bac computer science classes. I've worked at a few different companies (and spent a period unemployed), but I've been working for four and a half years. I started my part-time MS two years (plus a summer) after getting my bachelor's. Assuming I get into a PhD program this round, I'll have been in the industry world for five years.

Ditto rising_star. All of those places that you named have different undergrad cultures. I think it's a good thing to learn about, by the way. Not as a decision-maker, but just to know what you're getting into. You're going to be surrounded by undergraduates, and student life resources (which you may also care about) are going to be tailored to the undergraduates at most places. You might be in clubs and such with undergraduates. You might as well know something about them.

If your research is biomedical-related at all (seems unlikely with atmospheric science, but you never know) there's the HHMI International Student Research Fellowship. If you are a woman, there's the AAUW International Fellowship. If you are a woman and in something aerospace-related, as I assume that atmospheric science would be, there's Zonta International's Amelia Earhart Fellowship.

These people encouraging all of you to go to law school must not have read the stats on the current employment situation for new law school grads.

I'm not freaking out, not about this anyway. Though I would like to know my results. Oddly, trial-by-fire of the sort that oseirus is talking about doesn't make me less likely to freak out about comparatively petty stuff. It just makes me wonder if I'm psychologically broken for getting more upset over the comparatively petty stuff than the serious stuff. In this case, though, I went through grad apps before with my MS apps, and with a failed round of apps long ago. So I had a good idea what to expect.

If one offer has financial details and the other doesn't, you might be able to pressure the one that didn't into offering you more money (if they really like you) by informing them of the other place's financial offer.

I suspect it's #1, though obviously, not being in the room with them, I can't tell you for sure. If they were on the fence about admitting you, I doubt they'd have wasted their nomination for this fellowship on you.

Full-time day job MS thesis (and other class) Being an Occupy medic (woo walked in to what we thought was tear gas to rescue people, but it was just some &^%*^% idiot's smoke cannister) LARPing Running If anybody reading this knows me in real life, they just figured out who I am, if they hadn't already.

If you are going for a PhD - I can't tell if you are an MS applicant or a PhD applicant - then a GPA just over the cutoff combined with very strong fit and research experience is better than a very high GPA with mediocre or weak fit and research experience.

Heh, this is relevant in context and some of you might be entertained by it. Miss Manners, in one of her books, actually has tips for occasionally bragging to people who you want to brag to but who aren't close enough that you can brag unrestrainedly, in ways less likely to annoy them than straight-up bragging. She suggests couching it in incredulity ("There must be some mistake! I just got a letter saying that I got into X!"), anxiety ("Uh oh...I got into X and it's this incredible opportunity but what if I can't hack the work? and how am I going to pay?") or uncontrolled manic elation (I don't think I need to provide an example of what uncontrolled manic elation would look like, folks). Personally, I suspect that most of us will not have a problem with the uncontrolled manic elation option.

I'm figuring on 2/3 for actual programs. For fellowships...I don't know, probably 0/5 on the external ones (heck, I already got one rejection). I don't know how many internal ones are available. I got told by a friend who's at one of my applied-to programs that her advisor (one of my POIs, who I spoke with in person months ago) was asking about me the other day, and that I'm a leading candidate for one of their big internal fellowships. Which is nice to hear.

UIUC is super-prestigious in CS (as you're probably aware). I wouldn't take it as a sign of impending 100% rejection.

Ah, if that is what you are wondering...it is true that some people use credit cards to buy luxury items that they can't afford. However, some people who are in bad but temporary financial situations use their credit cards for basic items that they can't afford but actually need, like food, medicine, or winter clothing. Obviously, this makes it difficult to get out of the bad financial situation, because then they end up with high-interest loan payments, but we're talking about items that you don't have the option of going without. In other cases, people do have the money, or at least they think they do, but they don't have all of it at once. Let's say you want to make a big purchase, like a new laptop for school, that costs $1000. You don't have $1000 to spare, but it would be really useful to have that laptop, and once you have it you won't need another one for a few years. You have a net income of, say, $1200/month (not implausible for a PhD student), and that's enough, with your expenses, that if you are otherwise thrifty, each month you can put $100 toward paying down your credit card debt. Even with the high interest rates that many credit cards have, you can pay down your debt at a manageable pace as long as you don't lose your income. I avoid doing this sort of thing with a credit card, because I like the security of not having debt, but I don't think doing so is irresponsible or anything. It's just paying in chunks. Of course, things can go terribly wrong. Following on the example from the previous paragraph, let's say you buy the laptop, planning to pay $100/month, but then two months later you are hit by a car while riding your bike to school and you are seriously injured to the point where you have to take medical leave from grad school. Depending on the program, you might lose your stipend, so now you have no income, and you also have medical bills to pay. You can't find a part-time retail job because there are four applicants for every job opening (as you might have heard, the US currently has elevated unemployment). You still owe $800 plus interest on your laptop, and suddenly you can't make the payments anymore. You start using your credit card to pay for your food and pain medication, even though this puts you deeper and deeper in debt, because you can't do without those things while you look for a job. Now you are in serious financial trouble, even though you weren't being irresponsible to start with, because you got unlucky.

Yeah, I think you are incorrect about which people don't understand how credit works. I use my credit card for most things because it builds a credit history and I get cash back from it. Plus it means that I don't have to carry much cash. I pay it off in full every month. I have an excellent credit score. At least in the US, you need a good credit history to make a lot of major purchases (a car, a house) and if you don't establish that history, you won't be able to get good terms for, say, a mortgage.

I would be willing to entertain the possibility that some Occupy camp, somewhere, decided to go against what everyone else is doing and has designated official leaders, but it's not any camp that I know about, and the movement in general is strongly against having designated leaders for the camps. It's also possible that some idiot decided to declare him/herself "the leader" without anybody knowing (in which case people will notice pretty quickly when the relevant article gets printed). I suspect that these reports you're talking to are confusing official leadership roles with role specialization. At our Occupy, we have a Media working group. They write press releases/communicate with press, plan media strategy, manage the social media stuff, do some PR for the camp, keep track of what the press is saying about us, and so on. But they are still accountable to the camp as a whole, and expected to be transparent about what they are doing. Obviously, individuals also speak to the press (I've done so a few times), representing only themselves as individual protesters. I heard that the OWS camp in NYC had shifted decision-making models a bit and I don't know the details on what they did, so I am speaking here about the more common model that we use. General decision-making is done through the General Assembly, which is guided by a facilitator. Anyone can come to a general assembly, speak, make proposals, and otherwise participate in the process. Decisions are made by consensus, which is a sort of modified voting that requires 75% for ratification. It is a bit complicated, but, IMO, not more so than Robert's Rules. Working groups make decisions about their internal operations through their own meetings, most of which are publicly advertised (a few groups, like our Legal and Medical/Health, are less public about their meetings for the sake of the privacy of the people that they are serving). They can also bring proposals to the General Assembly (for example, if Medical/Health wants funds to buy stethoscopes, or Safety wants the camp to ratify a procedure for dealing with violent individuals, they can bring proposals to the GA). The non-profit's complaints were pretty generic. It doesn't really help that they went behind our backs to the mayor with these complaints (the letter became public later). They complained about possible health, safety, and sanitation issues. I believe that their complaints on this front are vastly overblown and based on stereotypes about what the camps are like rather than reality. We have active Medical/Health, Safety, and Sanitation working groups, and we had a major camp clean-up a week ago. We have been inspected by the city public health bureaucracy (and are subject to further inspections if they wish). Some local churches let people shower there, and we have personal hygiene supplies at the camp. Medical, of which I am a member, ran a free flu shot clinic in collaboration with a local public health clinic, where we vaccinated nearly 60 people. If they have something more concrete I wish they'd discuss it with us. They complained that nobody else can use the park while we're on it. I would be more sympathetic to this if they weren't stewards of a 1.5-mile stretch of park and plaza land, of which we occupy less than a block. They said that they had to cancel a big public event - why not just use the section 10 feet away? It's the same subway stop and everything, and almost nobody ever seems to be on that patch. When they have hosted farmers' markets on the plaza that borders the camp, we have been supportive, encouraging people to buy things there via Twitter and buying things ourselves. They also complained that the neighbors (this park is in the middle of the city's financial district; the neighbors are people who work at the various financial institutions around the area) are afraid to walk by because they fear aggressive confrontations. I have spent 150+ hours in this camp, and I have seen dozens of clean-cut people in suits walk by and through the camp with nobody paying them the slightest bit of attention. I am not sure what we can do about this short of posting signs everywhere that say "It's okay, we are not going to hurt you. No, really." We haven't harmed the random people who walk by or through (even the guy who went around the camp taunting people and claiming that we were all on welfare). Occasionally somebody on the sidewalk will try to hand out fliers for their pet cause or political philosophy, but that's about it. So yeah. The GA selected a small delegation, accountable to the GA, to enter mediation with the non-profit and the city. Apparently it didn't go very well. Disclaimer: I am speaking only for myself here, based on my own experiences and the research that I have done into other cities' camps. I am not speaking for Occupy, the Medical/Health working group, or my camp.

I got turned down. I'm wondering if it's worth it to ask for feedback.

Remember to pick programs not just based on ranking but based on how well your research interests match up with theirs. If you are really into neural networks, for instance, you might want to look at UT Austin as one of your "reach" schools. I think your three-tiered approach (reach, match, safety) is a good one. I certainly think that you have nothing to lose except application costs from applying to a few top places.

Man, I go away for a month and look what happens. I've been acting as a medic for one of the larger Occupys for a little over a month, and visited two others (a large one and a small one). I am supportive, obviously. That doesn't mean that I agree with everything that everybody there says, because not all Occupiers agree with each other on everything! But what I see is an amazing platform for mobilizing people and raising the profile of certain issues. Activists from different groups who never knew about each other before are talking to each other. People who are new to political action are getting in touch with experienced people. We're holding all kinds of joint marches and rallies with existing community groups, raising their profiles in the process. We've had a voter registration booth, and another local Occupy group had an "Occupy the Polls" event on election day to re-elect a well-loved local elected official. People are discussing ideas. And suddenly the media is talking more about issues that we care about. The people who think that it is nothing but a bunch of spoiled rich white kids trying to recreate the '60s are just factually wrong. Our camp is around 40% homeless people, and there's a significant faction of middle-aged and old people. Heck, most of the Safety guys are middle-aged blue collar townies who probably work manufacturing safety or something in their normal lives. Lots of people who live in the camp commute from there to their jobs. There's a lot of union members. There's a ton of veterans, young and old. I know that not all the Occupys are like that - another one that I visited (3000 miles away) was younger, whiter, and more full of hipsters - but my point is that the demographics aren't as homogeneous as people seem to think. The Occupy protests have been overwhelmingly peaceful. Even in Oakland, where for some reason nobody was talking about the peaceful protesters that were physically restraining the rogue violently-inclined ones and using their bodies to shield buildings from vandals. The myth of disorganization has quickly become one of my pet peeves. People think that because there's no designated leaders, there's no structure at all. But at all the large Occupys there's a tremendous amount of role specialization. Like I said, I'm a medic, which is a role that I perform through our Medical/Health working group. We have a wide variety of other working groups, including Legal, Logistics, Food, Safety (makes sure that tents are set up safely, keeps the peace within the camp, etc), Media (which could be called PR), Winterization (this is the Northeast), Direct Action (plans the actual marches and rallies), Community Outreach (builds connections with other local groups), and Sanitation (collects the trash from each tent and makes sure that the camp doesn't get trashy and filthy). The infrastructure is quite extensive. I think there's legitimate room for disagreement on the park issue. In our case, the city told us that we could use the (government-owned) park, but the non-profit that are stewards for the park has been complaining. This particular park takes up less than a block in a 1.5-mile stretch of parks and plazas. The next park in the sequence is literally 10 feet away. I am not too worried that people are being deprived of enjoying the lovely city parks because we're in a tiny bit of a huge stretch of them. I think that in general, Occupy camps should be careful that they aren't preventing local residents from being able to access parks, but most cities that I've been in have either very large parks or lots of small parks within easy walking distance of each other, and I personally - again, I can understand why some people might disagree - don't see why groups shouldn't be able to have long-term things like this on teeny-tiny fractions of city parkland (and yes, if the Tea Party people wanted to camp on a piece of park too, I see no problem with that - if we ever get to the point where enough groups want to do this that cities are running out of park, then we can figure out what to do about that). I'd be happy to discuss some of my experiences of participating in an Occupy and spending a whole lot of time in an Occupy camp with any of you who are curious and refrain from going ad hominem on me.

Speaking about US schools: Your work experience will be considered a positive. Some schools will want you to have a formal CS background (which doesn't have to be a degree; you can take non-degree classes). Some will be willing to substitute your work experience. Full funding with assistantship is not the norm for MS students, but there are plenty of people at major research universities who do get it.

I live in the Boston area. You say it's not exciting. I am somewhat boggled at the idea that Harvard Square is not exciting, but, different people like different things. What would you consider to be reasonably exciting? Perhaps I can make some recommendations. I agree with the people who suggested joining clubs. Get involved, make friends.

"Doing well in university courses" - I think less than 20% of prospective employers have ever even asked about my GPA. And it only matters less as you get further from your degree. "Side projects" - Yeah, these are useful if they're good. "Contributing to open source" - Yeah, also good, only useful for people in a few fields though. "Doing a practical internship/working on a company project" - This should've been #1. "Certification programs" - In software? Nobody cares about your certifications. "Work as an RA with a prof" - Useful if you're interested in academia, government, government contracting, or corporate R&D. "Competitions" - Eh, what the post said, pretty much. "Extra-curricular activities" - Marginally useful if field-relevant or if they're particularly cool/unusual. Otherwise nobody cares.

Around here (Boston area), there's a whole lot of biotech, and it includes plenty of non-PhD jobs. Silicon Valley...is a fine place, but not particularly a biotech hub - you want to look at Boston, DC, the Research Triangle in North Carolina, San Diego. Silicon Valley definitely has places, but not such a concentration of them. If you're interested in synth bio, there's a startup in South Boston called Ginkgo Bioworks, that offers year-long, paid, synth bio internships. If you're open to other kinds of work, you can become a patent agent with a bio degree.

I don't think that's an unreasonable worry. However, my friends who already have PhDs have mentioned that in their experience, employers seeking PhD-level people care more about the particular topic of your dissertation, than about the name of the department that your degree is from. That might not be true everywhere or in every field, but it may balance your concern a little. I don't know how high you're aiming, but there are some cog sci programs that are prestigious enough that you probably wouldn't have trouble getting an industry R&D job afterward (MIT, for instance).