starmaker

If doctoral students don't TA for MA classes in some of your programs, then who does? MA students? But if that's the case, and you don't think that people should socialize with people that they might teach, wouldn't that stop the MA students from socializing with each other? And the PhD students from socializing with each other? After all, they might end up teaching each other. And what about undergrad and 4+1 master's TAs for undergrad classes? I've taught friends when both I and they were undergrads, and I've been taught by friends when I was an undergrad and they were undergrads or 4+1 MEng students. Like I said, professionalism is important - I remember one class, with many TA sections, in which the staff made a great effort to put people in sections not TAed by their friends, and I think that's entirely reasonable if you have enough sections - but I'm used to an environment where anybody might end up teaching anybody if one is further along than the other in the same area. What are you supposed to do, not take a class in your area because the TA is your friend? So I do not understand the idea that such friendships are absolutely verboten. Not take a TAship because you know that some of your friends (who, again, might be on the same professional-hierarchy level as you, and thus legitimate friendship candidates by even the respect-the-hierarchy proponents) are going to take the class that semester? Zee, I think this MS/PhD divide is a program-by-program thing, rather than a sciences thing. I'm in the sciences and it hasn't been so rigid anywhere that I've been, though it is slightly more of a thing in my MS program than it was at my more we're-all-part-of-the-same-university-community undergrad school. I find the concept of different classes for master's and PhD students to be a questionable practice, but my own program does it with a few classes (the others are just normal grad classes), so I'm aware that it exists. My undergrad school didn't have this distinction, and it also allowed undergrads who met the prereqs to take grad classes at will, which seems like a sensible setup to me.

Why not, if they are people with whom you would enjoy socializing? I don't necessarily expect that to happen much, because people do tend to prefer socializing with those close to their age, and most professors are older than most undergrads. And you do have to be careful about friendships with people that you supervise, whether you're an undergrad TA for an undergrad class, or a tenured professor. That doesn't mean not having those friendships at all - some of them might predate the supervisor/supervisee relationship, for one thing - but you have to be on guard about your professionalism when you're in a professional context. Ultimately, though, if they seem like friend material, whatever your definition of that is, then maybe you should consider a friendship. Work is not social life. Professional hierarchies don't carry over to social settings. That's why they're professional. You keep claiming that you don't have anything against master's students in general, that it's just these ones that are the problem, but you also keep making statements (like the one that I quoted) suggesting that you DO think that their status as master's students is itself a barrier, even if you are willing to make the occasional exception (especially for those who want to hang out with the cool kids "superior" PhD students). Your thread title suggests that - it doesn't say something like "Quiet, laid-back student hanging out with partiers," it says "PhD student hanging out with MA students." When you describe offensive behavior, you make a point of saying that an MA student did it. I believe you when you say that you're just looking for friends who are more to your taste, but you do come off as having issues with master's students though the characterizations in your posts. I mean, why was it even necessary to bring up the MA vs PhD thing in order to have this thread? Why couldn't you have just said "I'm looking for friends at my university, but I don't enjoy hanging out with most of the other students in my department because [reasons], and in fact I'm worried that being sucked into their dramas will hurt my graduate career. And we don't have enough interdepartmental events for me to have met students in other departments. I want to have friends in my university community. How can I find potential friends?"

I realize that appearances are important in academia (or any other work environment), but honestly, you seem way too preoccupied with them. Why in the world would faculty look down on your for socializing with master's students? What's wrong with being in the grad student association? I'm also bewildered at what you're describing - at my undergrad university, it was pretty common for undergrad, master's, and PhD students (and young alums) to be part of the same organizations and even socialize together. Obviously professional life has hierarchies, but why should that hierarchy carry over into social life? Be friends with people who have common interests with you and modes of interaction that you can deal with. People whose company you enjoy. Even if they turn out to be *gasp* undergrads. I had good friends who were seven or eight years older than me when I was an undergrad (I eventually married one), and now that I'm a bit older, I still have good friends that are seven or eight years older, and also friends that are six or seven years younger. If you don't like the way that the master's students in your department interact, don't hang out with them, but realize that it's not about their being master's students, and don't drop them just because you think you'll look bad. One way to meet people outside your department is to join a student group. Maybe you'd be interested in College Democrats/Republicans (or the Canadian equivalents, since it looks like you're in Canada), or a club sport, or a community service club, or a university-wide grad student union. Or anything else that the university has. I am an MS student, by the way, applying for PhD programs this fall. A lot of people on here are master's students.

I had a friend get into Columbia's online EE program with very low undergrad grades (though from a top university) but some good work experience and good recommendations. Don't write yourself off completely. You don't have much to lose by aiming high.

Oh yeah, good point, I forgot about the chapel. It's gorgeous inside, too. And why are you using the Windows cluster machines when there are normal ones all over the place? I don't even remember what clusters besides the one in the 5th floor of the student center have Windows boxes. Anyway, to stop derailing the thread, I use LibreOffice now at work, and it seems to do all right most of the time. Apparently you can even make nice graphics in it, though I haven't learned much of this capability yet. For a written document, like a paper, you can use LaTeX (and pdf it), but it's got a significant learning curve. It makes your papers look nice, though.

Yes, this happened to me! Fortunately, it was a term research project for a class, rather than, say, a PhD dissertation that I was nearly done with. In my case, it was someone having done the same work that I was planning to do. So I took the next step - I looked at their results and said "Well, here's a relevant thing that they didn't address - I will tackle this!" The professor let me take an incomplete, and gave me an A once I finished the project. I got a poster presentation at a conference, on which I got lots of compliments, out of it. It worked out fine in the end. I was very distressed about it at the time, though.

In the natural sciences and engineering, a PhD student is like an apprentice to their advisor. The advisor provides more general mentoring, but also teaches them (or has a postdoc or senior grad student teach them) things like lab techniques and good paper-writing skills. The advisor will expect to review the student's journal/conference submissions, suggest revisions, and eventually give the green light, if the work is coming out of the advisor's lab. Commonly, in the early part of the student's career, the student is a co-author on a paper or two of the advisor's, and then moves into a first-authorship role (and perhaps a sole-authorship role) as he or she gains skills and the ability to work independently. The student's dissertation research will probably be related to other research being conducted in the advisor's lab. If the advisor likes the student, he or she can and often does use his or her connections to help the student get a job after graduation. I think this model holds in some of the social sciences (psych?) as well, but I'm not sure if it holds for all of them.

I think if it's for professional correspondence, "Name, M.S" looks fine. But then you get people who use the same email sig for everything, and who use their university email address socially. And it does look pretentious if you're sending email inviting your friends to come over to your house for beers and a movie this weekend and you have your job title and your master's degree and so on listed. This might vary by country, but I wouldn't bother putting that your MS involved a thesis, in your email sig.

I don't know enough about your background to know where you might get in or what might interest you, but I know that Columbia University and Stevens Institute of Technology both have online CS master's degrees, and I think NYU Polytechnic does too.

I think your grad is my undergrad (is the goddess Greek? do the cluster machines run Ubuntu?). Your undergrad is clearly NOT my undergrad, as it apparently only has one concrete engineering building, and has a building that could be described as "pretty brick".

There are a few places, like Tufts and Brandeis, that have post-bac programs specifically for people in your sort of situation - people with little or no CS background who want to get a grad degree in CS. I don't know the details on Brandeis' program, but Tufts' is intended to be functionally equivalent to a CS minor. You probably won't get funding for a post-bac program, but unlike a second bachelor's it's short and relatively cheap. If you would be okay with approaching things from the ECE side, rather than the CS side, you might also look at Boston University's LEAP program, which is designed to bridge people with no engineering background into MS programs in their engineering school. And LEAP has significant financial aid available (including the possibility of full funding once you hit the actual MS portion of the program). You could get an MS in CompE and then a PhD in CS (this is not uncommon).

Tufts isn't that weak. It used to be, but it's on the way up - they brought in a whole bunch of new blood several years back. Like a lot of mid-rank departments, it's uneven rather than uniformly mediocre...you get profs who are well-funded and well-regarded and doing top-flight stuff, but also profs who can't even fund their own grad students because they don't bring in any grant money. And if your advisor is one of the very strong ones, and you want to go into academia, your advisor may be able to place you in a postdoc in a higher-ranked program, which will add some blue blood to your pedigree and give you a better shot at a tenure-track position. geh_cs, the problem is that it depends on where you draw the line for "weak". You're right, all those programs are in the top 100. But some people think anything outside of the top 20, 40, or 50, is weak. If you want to be in academia, it does seem to help quite a bit to be in a well-ranked program. The CRA (Computing Research Association), when they do faculty salary surveys and such, makes a distinction between top-40 programs and others, so that might be a guideline that you could use, but it's not the only one out there. And some schools are a lot stronger or weaker in a certain subfield than they are overall. Going back to the point about uneven mid-rank schools in my first paragraph, I think the key, if you are interested in one (or can't get into and/or attend a higher-ranked one), is to do due diligence on prospective advisors, and make sure that you end up with an advisor who is one of the awesome, well-funded, people. If they post their CVs (or at least their publication list) online, which many profs do, it's not too hard to figure out which ones are in that category.

"Cluster machines" with Open Office? Now I'm wondering whether you and I have the same alma mater, or whether the use of "cluster" to mean a computer lab is more common than I realized. Anyway, yes, if you're going to create a PowerPoint presentation on Impress, I suggest either 1) using your own computer to give the presentation, or 2) turing your ppt into a set of pdf slides and presenting those (I have done both at various times). And if you're writing something in Writer and don't want the formatting to get screwed up on another computer, pdf it and send in the pdf.

Has anyone here pulled off eligibility through extenuating circumstances (i.e. you had too much graduate study already, by their standards, and managed to convince them that you should be eligible anyway)? What were your circumstances? I have too many part-time graduate study credits for the NSF right now (we won't go into what I think about their eligibility standards for part-timers, which is a whole other can of worms). But. I did my undergrad in a different field. When I switched to CS, I did a "Post-baccalaureate minor", which was designed for people new to CS who want to work in it or study it in a grad degree program, and was a mix of graduate-level and undergraduate-level classes, and meant to be equivalent to a CS minor. I'm wondering if I can make the case that, since it's a program for people without undergrad prep in CS, and they even call it a minor, like an undergrad minor program, I was in a functionally equivalent situation to an undergrad who takes grad classes as part of his/her undergrad program. If the grad-level class from the post-bac minor don't get counted "against" me, then I'm left with what I've taken in my part-time MS program, and I become eligible. Anybody had a case similar to this?

Admittedly, industry work is not the same as a grad program (though given your comment about undergrad mentality, you might give the former more credibility). But you commute to both. Anyway, my previous job was about 12 miles away from my house (I took the bus or biked). My current job is 1.65 miles away (or as I call it, "easy running distance"). I was okay with hacking the longer commute, but let me tell you, it is so much nicer being able to commute quickly, on foot. It makes me more willing to put in extra time at work, too. I live in an area with ridiculously expensive housing and heavy traffic (wouldn't the latter be a deterrent to a choosing a long car commute, for most people?). Some people don't mind, or actively enjoy, driving. Amongst non-drivers, some people don't mind long train or bus commutes - you get the time to nap, do work, etc. But some people don't like it, and those people are naturally going to recommend living close to work. To get to my MS program right now, I commute for about an hour each way (by public transit, but with the traffic at relevant hours a car would not actually shorten it much). It's definitely not optimal, for social integration into the program or anything else. It makes group projects, and coming in outside of class to meet with profs, suck.

Even in CS and engineering you're generally considered okay with at least a 750, even at top programs (top programs in fields that I'm familiar with tend to emphasize the GRE less than non-top ones anyway). Now, I am not in your field, and your advisor is, so I might be full of crap here, but it seems to me that your 750 should be fine if the rest of your app is solid. Congrats on the 800 verbal!

It's not that simple for some people, though. Some people have abusive parents, or parents who are willing to disown them over something like choice of major. I've had a number of friends in that sort of situation (a couple were able to sort of rescue themselves financially, after their parents cut them off, by documenting abuse, and using that to get the school to declare them independent for financial aid purposes). There's pissed and then there's pissed. I think some people are a little too flip about this kind of thing. The other side of that, of course, is that the terrible situation continues until you're able to buck it one way or another. In that sort of situation, it might be harder to break away, but arguably it's even more important to do so.

Keep in mind that cars are a money sink. It's not just a matter of gas and parking. You also have to deal with insurance and maintenance. I never realized how expensive driving is until I dated, and then married, a car owner. On the other hand, if this is an area with decent public transit, you may be able to do the commute without a car.

You mentioned that your publication probably wouldn't be in time for the app. If you can get it accepted, at least, during the application cycle, you can list is as being in press in the relevant journal/proceedings.

I can be this forum's test case for the upcoming application cycle.

"Recent grads" is the wrong phrase for me (I've been working full-time and working on an MS degree part-time for a while), but I've job-hunted twice in the last 18 months (first I got laid off, then I got a contractor job that was supposed to lead to a permanent job, then the company where I was contracting to got bought out and I had to leave when the contract ended, now I have a job as a permanent employee again). For me - and I make no claims about anyone else here - it hasn't been too bad. In both cases I spent about three months unemployed. I kept pretty detailed notes of my last job search, and around half of the places that I applied to gave me some kind of "bite" - a phone interview, an in-person interview, a questionnaire, whatever the first step in their hiring process is.

My husband dropped out of a grad program before I met him. I'm not anticipating serious problems during the PhD. We've done fine with me working full-time and MSing part-time.

I would say, go ahead and apply, and get it into your application that you have extenuating circumstances. Realize that you may not get in (3.1 is high enough to not be discounted at most places, but it's true that they won't love the downward trend). You might - I don't think you are out of the running or anything - but you might not. If you don't get in, work for a year or two while taking classes, and get higher grades in those classes. Then apply again.

I've heard a theory that for people (like me) in CS and engineering, there are some programs (not all) that will be really happy to see a high AWA score, because they see an engineer who can actually write coherently as a huge novelty. But even in that case (perhaps especially in that case), a 5 is a high AWA score! I think it's less likely to have an impact on admissions, perhaps slightly more on funding, but not enough that it's worth retaking the test to go from great score to even better score. Spend the time that you would have spent studying for the retake, improving the rest of your app, and you probably come out ahead.

I did my undergrad in neuro and am doing my MS in CS. Most of the PhD programs that I'll be applying to are CS, though there are a couple of exceptions (all are at least CS-relevant, but my interests are interdisciplinary and there are a couple of schools where the profs doing the work that is the best fit for me are not in the CS department).