juilletmercredi

In my experience this varies a lot from lab to lab. In my research lab (which was more the "think tank" type than the wet lab type), my time was very flexible with no expectation of 9-5 hours. I could work from wherever I wanted, even if that was not in my university's city. I didn't get time off approved by my advisor and he certainly couldn't "deny" me time off. Still I probably took about 4 weeks total - I usually went home for about 2 weeks during the holiday season (but sometimes I worked during that period - I just worked from my hometown and not New York), and then I usually took spring break off and then sometime during the summer. But then, I wasn't an employee, either, and I was funded on external fellowships through virtually all of my graduate I personally would not have gotten along very well in a lab that required strict 9-9 hours or in which advisor felt like they could deny me time off. FWIW, I currently work as an industry researcher, and my job is actually more like my grad school experience than the other - in fact, I don't even get my time off approved; I just tell my manager when I'm planning to take time based on my projects and work. I have 3 weeks' worth of time off.) I think the approach to take here is to ask your advisor what his expectations are for your lab work, on a weekly and a daily basis. Don't specify your preferences yet; just listen. Then you can decide whether or not you can work with that style or not. (Also, you may have little choice if your PI is funding you or if everyone in your department works the same way, but at least you'll know.)

A lot of people have made some really good comments about the logistics of transferring/starting over at a new PhD program. I do want to push up, though, that I think it's a perfectly valid choice to decide to start over your PhD or leave a PhD altogether to be closer to your significant other. It's not ridiculous or insane or a bad thing. To most people, there are many things that important to them in life - and there's nothing wrong with putting your relationships and personal life ahead of academics and career. Long distance is rough and grueling and for some people - not worth it! Another thing you can consider, if you are considering leaving altogether, is taking a leave of absence for a year. Move to live with your boyfriend and see how it feels. You'll be able to decide with some experience under your belt to help you make the choice.

You mean actual most interesting question or most "interesting" (annoying/meaningless) questions? When I was a grad student the most actually interesting questions I got were inevitably from people who were passingly interested in or familiar with my topic area and wanted to know more. It was usually some permutation of "Oh, wow, really? Why do you think that is?" It gave me a chance to flex my expertise a little bit and talk about potential mechanisms or explanations for psychological phenomena. By far the most annoying question was "When will you be done?" Now as an industry researcher, one of the most interesting questions I get is "What did you do before you worked here?/How did you go from there to here?" from people who know about my public health background (I currently work in tech UX research).

What kind of proposal? A grant? A fellowship application? A dissertation proposal? How long is it supposed to be? I've written all of those kinds of proposals of different lengths (ranging from 3 pages to 20-30) and different tips hold for different types.

@jdc1004 - Those are housing options nearby the Columbia medical center campus - are you a medical center student? Those are the only ones who can get those. I went to Columbia's medical center campus (public health, 2008-2014) and I lived in Washington Heights for three of the years I lived there. I lived on Haven Avenue actually one or two buildings over from 154 Haven, in a non-Columbia unit, and I had friends who lived in the Georgian and 154 Haven. If you have to choose between Columbia housing options, I think 154 Haven is better than the Georgian. The studios in 154 Haven are bigger, and it's newer and brighter, and Haven Ave is way quieter than 168th St. The Georgian is on the corner of 168th and Broadway, right across from the ambulance bank of the ER (so ambulances all night, yaaaay) and next to one of the busiest thoroughfares in the city. Haven Ave was pretty quiet and residential, and you're half a block from a nice park with a dog run and just like a block from Broadway if you want to walk there for shopping. Both of these were dealbreakers for me because their kitchenettes have no ovens. I just felt like $1200-1400 was an outrageous price to pay for a tiny studio with no oven - you can find an actual decent-sized studio with an oven in the same neighborhood, or pay for half of a 2-bedroom with a living room and kitchen for a lot less than that in that neighborhood. Overall I just felt like the medical center campus's rental rates were overpriced for the neighborhood. All of those cities are less expensive to live in than New York. However, you can find a shared apartment with a roommate in which you pay less than $1200/month with roommates in New York.

OP, I totally get where you are coming from. I found being a doctoral student from a working-class background difficult in a more philosophical/existential space than an actual effect. In my department regular financial support from parents was also pretty common - I know people whose parents covered their rent, or covered their living expenses during the summer; and people whose parents bought them an apartment or at least paid the down payment on an apartment in my very expensive graduate city. It also made me feel a little weird, because that was such a foreign concept to me - my background is really similar to yours (I went to college on a full scholarship and haven't had any significant financial support from my parents since I was 18; I lent large sums of money to my parents to keep them afloat while I was in graduate school, and never got all of it back). Sometimes the conversations we'd have or the expectations of the childhood experiences that we'd had heightened my feelings of being on the outside in this specific set of circumstances. You're not imagining things; this is so commonplace that there are actually two books about it. The best-known one is This Fine Place So Far From Home, edited by C.L. Barney Dews and Carolyn Leste Law. The other one (which is actually older) is called Strangers in Paradise, edited by Jake Ryan and Charles Sackrey. Both are anthologies of analytical essays written from the perspective of academics who grew up working class and how they had to navigate the environment, which felt foreign to them. One memorable joke from the first book (paraphrased) is an author who made reference to the wine and cheese gatherings that academics tend to have; she said that when poor people really need to talk to each other, they don't spend time trying to balance a small plate in one and and a glass of wine in the other while standing up. They sit down! It was funny to me, but it also resonated because my awkwardness and wine and cheese events (or any event with highboy tables where you stand up and eat!) was encapsulated there. It was not something I had ever been exposed to before. This was my experience as well. My stipend was $32,000 a year and that, to me, felt like so much money. I felt like I could do everything I wanted and still save. But...my wants were pretty small in scope, things like buying new clothes and eating out sometimes, or being able to replace my personal needs before they ran out. My husband always teases me about hoarding toothpaste and toilet paper but that's because I grew up with those things running out and my family not being able to replace them quickly. So I was really baffled when I would hear fellow cohort mates complaining that we made so little.

@PizzaCat93- It's really difficult to quantify this in any meaningful way without doing a large scale study comparing the academic outcomes of GRF holders with non-GRF holders, and even then there are several confounds for that (GRF holders may also have been more likely to still be successful even if they didn't win). I can give a little anecdotal experience, though, in saying that I'm a social scientist who had an NSF GRF and I have found it to be a useful signaling tool on my CV. The directors at my first postdoc explicitly made a big deal about it. I currently work in a non-academic job but one that is staffed by PhDs and in which the hiring was done mostly by PhDs, and I think in the cohort of 3 junior scientist hired last year two of us were GRF recipients. We also just did two interview loops (i.e., top candidates who made it to the campus visit - our process is stunningly a lot like the academic hiring process, just much much faster) to fill two more positions this year and one of them was a GRF recipient as well. I think it has a certain level of prestige and to a lot of professors 'says something' about you as a young scholar. So my take is that it probably helps in the job market, but you have to have the other signs of scholarly promise to back it up. Combined with enough publications and other activities, it has the potential to make you look like that coveted 'hot young rising star'. (I heard that phrase thrown around a lot, although I certainly didn't feel like one.) @farflung It's paid out over the course of the 12-month tenure period. Think of it kind of like a salary increase - that's essentially what it is. @ashcanpete - Are you having a hard time getting by on your department's current funding levels? An extra ~$300/month is nothing to sneeze at, but neither is having a whole additional year of funding should you need it. PhDs have a tendency to take longer than you think they will - I thought I would finish in 5 and it took me 6. I gave up a year of institutional funding to take the NSF early (although in my case, it was because I would've had to switch to an advisor who had RA money and it didn't make sense to me to switch advisors over rmoney) and I did end up having to seek external funding for a sixth year that I didn't anticipate. If I were you, I wouldn't think about this in terms of losing money in the long run. First of all, it's not money that's actually being taken out of your pocket; the NSF is pretty much potential money. (I mean, the same argument could be made if you graduated early - but you wouldn't delay graduation just to get more NSF, right?) It's provided to help you finish your PhD; if you don't need it to finish your PhD, it doesn't actually exist relative to you. Secondly, even if you do lose that logic, the loss of an extra year of funding - sounds like just under $30,000 in your case - is so much larger than the lost of $4,500, should you need to take an extra year to finish. Even if you only need to take one extra semester, that's still about $15,000. It's better to have some cushion. It won't look bad if you delay it or don't delay it, at least not writ large (how your individual advisor and department reacts to it is different). But if your advisor is advising you to delay the fellowship and stay on the training grant, even though you leaving the training grant could free up funding for other potential graduate students, I think that's advice you should take seriously. @Superres - I gotta say, quite frankly, without context, this looks like bizarre advice. You are saying yourself that the director of your program is advising you to wait two years, take the departmental funding, and then take the NSF funding after the third year. Why would you then tell someone else to do the opposite and take it right away? The issue here isn't really whether going the action of going against a graduate school/department's recommendation is a good idea; it's about the actual choice of whether or not to take the NSF early.

It's kind of like the difference between being fired and quitting yourself. If you ever apply to another graduate program and you have to specify the conditions under which you left, you can truthfully say that you quit on your own and control the narrative a bit more ("the program wasn't a good fit for me; I decided to redirect my interests..."). If they kick you out, you have to say that you involuntarily left the program. You also leave it so that recommenders from your program, should you ever need them in the future, don't have to say that you were kicked out of your program. So choosing to drop out yourself is probably a better option here.

You haven't even gotten to college yet - please focus on your freshman year of college and succeeding there! You may be surprised and find that as many AP and transfer credits as you thought are not going to be accepted; you may also find that you still need 3 years to complete all of the major requirements. Even if you transfer in with 60 credits, they may not be the right 60 credits you need to fulfill requirements, and many courses are sequenced and require 2-3 prerequisite courses before you can take them. You're also assuming that you will have 3 semesters and a summer of research in total by the time you finish, but that's assuming a lot. A lot of students don't start doing research until their sophomore year - some labs have a policy not to take freshman because they want them to focus on the introductory coursework. (Brand-new freshman, quite frankly, are not really useful in the lab. They don't know enough yet.) And a lot of summer research programs don't take rising sophomores for the same reason. Actually, most of the summer research programs I was looking at as a college student took rising juniors and seniors only. You may find one to take you your first summer, but you may not. So, at best you will have three semesters and a summer of research experience, which is not very competitive, but you might not even have that. I advise that you see what happens and revisit this topic at the end of your freshman year - you may find that you don't have to worry about this because it's not actually possible. To answer the question, I think a lot of professors would choose not to admit a student who had only spent two years in college. You simply don't have the research experience or expertise to compete with students who spent longer - if for no other reason than a student who spent four years in has more research experience than you. If you do apply in the fall of your sophomore year, and best-case scenario you've actually gotten into a research lab as a second-semester freshman, you'd only have one semester of research (and maybe a summer) under your belt before applying. They'd be concerned with 1) whether you've even had enough experience to make a well-reasoned decision that you want to go to graduate school, and 2) whether the research experience you've had to date was deep enough to actually prepare you for the rigors of graduate school, since it's going to be stuff you can do with only intro-level knowledge. Now, if you were kicking butt and taking names and proved that your research was on par with the senior-level applicants, that'd be different.

I agree that TFA is shady - there are lots of articles out there about how shady it is. I had a former RA who did TFA and she emailed me towards the end of her first year to tell me about the experience; it was not positive, although she learned a lot. (She wanted to understand the needs and problems of low-income children before going to medical school, and boy, did she get it.) With that said, I would encourage teaching experience if you are interested in careers in academia in a school of education. Many faculty positions in these fields require 3 years of K-12 teaching experience, and many of the PhD programs strongly recommend it. You'll find it less in educational psychology but very much in curriculum and instruction - because C&I is a field that often involves faculty members teaching and preparing K-12 school teachers, and how can you teach a teacher to teach if you haven't taught yourself? You won't lose potential letter-writers. Professors will still remember you in 2 years. I still remember students I taught and mentored longer ago than that. You'd just provide them with a resume updating them with what you've done since college, plus a few other materials.

I went to Columbia for graduate school. The School of Professional Studies is simply the division under which Columbia houses many of its interdisciplinary professional degrees that don't really belong anywhere else (because...they're professional). Some of them are for sure highly regarded in the field, and the classes are taught by Columbia faculty who teach elsewhere - like the MS in actuarial science is highly regarded and the courses are taught by Columbia math, statistics, and business professors.

To clarify, what I think rising_star means is that you cannot transfer to another program in the sense that you would get much (or any) credit for the work you'd completed at the first program. You can certainly apply to other PhD programs, and you might even get admitted - but more than likely you'll be asked to start over, or from very close to the beginning. It would be much like getting admitted as a brand-new applicant who had never been to a PhD program before. (You would still want to get a recommendation letter from your PhD advisor, though.) Here's my advice: if you are already thinking about transferring when entering a PhD program, don't go. It's a good indication that the program isn't really for you and/or you don't really want to go there. In my opinion, no, you shouldn't go to a low-ranked PhD program if your goal is academia. It may be possible to get an academic job - as in theoretically possible - but you're making it many times harder on yourself to get the best, well, everything - graduate-level fellowships and grants, publications, recommendations, postdocs - that prepare you for an academic job. The likelihood is low.

Yeah, I agree about the benefits of networking and graduate classes are a good way to do that. But other than my two advisors, only one of the other 3 professors on my committee was someone I had taken a class with. Not coincidentally, I had the deepest connection with her, as she'd read my work and had a high opinion of it. But the other professors I'd networked with in other ways. So definitely network with your professors and colleagues; taking a few extra classes beyond what you need can be a good way to do that. And I do agree that taking courses a little outside your specialty can be useful - they can enable you to teach courses in the future that may be valuable (like teaching something in an interdisciplinary department or a lower-level course in another subfield), which can be useful on the job market; or they can teach you additional skills in research (like a class on neuroimaging or statistical analyses or ethnographic research). But don't take as many courses as you can. Coursework is, frankly, unrewarded in the PhD and academia; you can use the extra time to write papers and do research. If you want to re-approach authors or theories in a different way, write a paper. If you want to learn about a new area, you could take a course, but you could also do an independent study and write a paper. And I would definitely transfer in all 24 hours. You can always take additional courses if you want to, but transferring in the hours ensures that you are not required to take those additional hours in case something happens and/or you decide not to take a whole lot more courses.

Before you go to making any demands, I would definitely advise doing the things that fuzzy, TakeruK, and Lynx pointed out - especially summarizing your topic and making it easier for your advisor to give you the feedback you want and leaning on your other committee members. Since the whole committee has to pass your master's thesis, they should be able to understand it at least on a base level. Even if they don't 100% understand the topic they should be able to evaluate whether or not you've made your arguments adequately and point you in the right direction. (In fact, I wouldn't demand anything; even if things get hairy, I would ask for an extension.) Many U.S. schools don't have a student organizing union, and while the student union may be able to help you with things like work arrangements they can't necessarily help with something like this. And lots of U.S. universities don't have a policy document stipulating a timeline for the return of thesis materials (even if they give general guidelines, they aren't requirements. And there's no incentive for professors to adhere to them anyway.) At the beginning of each meeting, give him a summary of each chapter, a summary of the changes that you've made since the last draft, and a list of the specific concerns that you currently are trying to solve. Write it all down - it'll maybe be 2-3 pages long. Try being clear and direct. If he wanders onto the topic of your data tables, change the conversation back to your thesis. If he doesn't get a gentle hint, give him a stronger one: "Thanks for that Professor Smith, but my primary concern is Topic Z. My specific question is [insert here]. What do you think?" If things still haven't improved by now - and you need to graduate soon - talk to your DGS. This is the kind of thing a DGS is there for. Be direct and unemotional; just lay out the facts of your case, and leave out the other students' (not your concern). Ask for help.

It just really depends on your interests. You can practice as a therapist/counselor in pretty much all states with a master's - either in mental health counseling (LPC) or social work (MSW/LICSW). As you mentioned, master's programs usually are not paid for; you typically have to finance them with loans, although occasionally you can get an assistantship to pay for part of it. That said, if your goal is primarily to practice as a therapist - either in private practice or at a hospital, clinic, school, etc. - a master's is all you really need. You can practice semi-independently in most states. (In some, you may need technical 'supervision', but that often just means meeting with a doctoral-level therapist once a week to chat about cases.) I have a friend who has a master's in mental health counseling and is an LPC and she works in private practice now. It's your secondary interest that would push you towards a doctoral-level degree. If you want to do clinical research at a university, you will need a doctoral degree. There are a couple of options in those fields: you could get a PhD in clinical or counseling psychology, or you could get a PhD or DSW in a social work program. I wouldn't recommend the PsyD if you are interested in research; PsyDs are clinical degrees that are focused on clinical practice and developing you as a high-level clinician. The PhD is the research degree in this case. There are a lot of PhD students at mainstream schools studying mindfulness (I knew tons and tons of people doing research on mindfulness in psychology and public health), and many people in mainstream programs take an interest in spiritual approaches to therapy. One option that may appeal to you is doing an MSW, getting licensed as a clinical social worker and practicing for a few years, and then returning for a PhD in social work. I have a few friends who have or are working on their PhDs in social work and this is generally the route they took. You need an MSW to get a PhD in social work anyway, and this will also allow you to practice part-time while you earn your PhD (good for earning money!) You could also get an MSW and then get a PhD in clinical or counseling psychology, or get an MA or M.Ed in mental health counseling and do the PhD in either psychological subfield with the same outcome. If you're at all unsure about the PhD, I would personally recommend doing the master's and working first. The PhD is always going to be around. Yes, master's cost money, but PhDs cost you time and opportunity costs. That's 5-7 years that you could be working, saving money, saving for retirement and just living your life with your free time (which is something that I didn't value as much pre-PhD as I do now post-PhD). There are also ways to reduce the costs for master's programs. For example, I would highly recommend doing a master's at a public university in a state in which you are a resident. Neither social work nor therapy is a particularly prestige-focused field, and if you get a PhD later your PhD school is the one that will matter anyway.

Do the Fulbright! The teaching position will likely understand.

Go to the University of Toronto. I went to Columbia Mailman for graduate school. It is an excellent school, and the program's reputation does mean a lot both in the NYC region and across the U.S. Career services is great and living in NYC is a blast. However, UT is also an excellent school, and the program is literally $100,000 cheaper than Columbia's. Public health is not a field that pays a whole lot of money, and if you can minimize your debt at an excellent program you absolutely should. Toronto is a great city (may seem less so to you since you live there), and UT has a really good program. Even if Columbia does provide slightly better professional opportunities, those opportunities are not going to be worth $100,000 in debt, nor will the salaries be higher to the point that repayment would become more possible. This is especially true if you want to get a PhD afterwards, because where you go for a master's doesn't really matter for a PhD (particularly in public health). You could always go to Columbia for your PhD later, for example, except it'd be funded. Even if there's no required master's thesis at UT, I'm sure you can do an independent research project under the supervision of a professor. And you probably won't regret turning Columbia down "for the rest of your life." Once you graduate and get started in your career, you will barely think about graduate school. After your first 1-2 jobs in the field your graduate education starts to matter less anyway, and your experience becomes more important.

^This. I think a lot of students consider the rank because it's a common misconception that you have to go to a top-ranked MS program to go to a top-ranked PhD program. But in most fields, it's not really true - the institution at which you get your MA/MS doesn't really matter as much as what you do there.

I don't think a PhD is worth it without funding; especially in a field like engineering where funding is so readily available, I'd consider it a sign that your program doesn't have a lot of confidence in you. I'd switch to an MS or MEng and get out of there.

Depends on what kinds of jobs. In my experience, most jobs don't really care too much about your GPA, including academic jobs. They may ask for transcripts or verify your attendance just to ensure that you actually have the degree in hand, but the GPA likely won't matter much. Of course the GPA matters for PhD admissions, though. A 3.0 for an MA program is perceived as pretty low in the U.S., and may make admission to PhD programs difficult. Before you go more deeply into debt for another MA or an MPhil, I'd consult with some trusted advisors in academia and see if a second master's degree would even help you with admissions to a PhD program. In my field, even one MA is more than you need; a prospective student with a lowish MA GPA would be better-served by working as a research assistant (university is ideal; industry is okay too) for a couple years and maybe taking a few graduate-level classes to show competence. The glowing recommendation of a research supervisor about the research potential of such a student could be worth a lot. However, you may be being too hard on yourself. I am not very familiar with UK grading scales, but a bit of poking around seems to indicate that a 65% upper second class honors in the UK may actually be closer to a 3.5-3.7. The World Education Services grading conversion scale (https://www.wes.org/gradeconversionguide/index.asp) seems to indicate that upper second class honors is the equivalent of a A-/B+ average, which is usually a 3.3-3.7 range. Anecdoctal accounts seem to indicate that a 65.5% is actually relatively close to a first class honors, so that would push you up the scale towards a 3.5ish at least.

Perhaps because you have other skills or experiences that the company wants? (Also, a two-year postdoc on a particular topic might actually be a lot more valuable than a dissertation, especially if the postdoc was productive.) I work in user experience research, which is a subset of human-computer interaction; my background in social psychology and public health. I actually did zero related to HCI before I came to this job. But I got the position over many candidates who had their PhDs in HCI or more ostensibly "relevant" areas of psychology (like cognition, perception, etc.) From the outside looking in, it may make no sense. But I have a special skill set and experience in an area that's difficult to find in this field. The thing is, though, "industry" is not a catch-all - different industry jobs want different things. My position is a generalist research position; we don't do research into any one thing very deeply. So instead of a subject matter specialist, what we really want are people who are broadly trained in my field and who can learn a bunch very quickly. But some industry positions *are* specialist positions and they want people who have been doing research in a specific area for a while. Those places are more likely to care what your dissertation was about and what you worked on in your postdoc.

It depends on where your family lives and how competitive the market is in that area, as well as how competitive you are as a candidate. If you're a superstar with lots of publications and glowing recommendations from high-level people in your field, your chances are better to end up where you really want to be. If you're a pretty average candidate, you may have to take what you can get. If your family is in a place where fewer academics want to live - the rural or suburban Southwest, for example - you may have better prospects. If your family lives in or near New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Chicago, etc., you may have a harder time, as lots of academics want to live in these areas. Sure there are more institutions there, but the competition is great. (One thing I noticed when looking is that small, lesser-known colleges in urban areas have more distinguished faculty than you would otherwise expect, or than comparable/peer schools in rural or suburban locations. I think it's because graduates from better programs may choose those colleges just so they can live in a certain area). The other thing is it depends on what you're willing to do to get there. Some people manage to publish their way into a position they want - so they may go do a postdoc after graduate school for 2-3 years, then start off at a college in a place they kind of don't want to live in, and then in a series of moves move their way up or laterally into the geographic location they want to be in. If you have to be there right off the bat that can be tricky, but if you are willing to try to sashay your way there over time you may have a better chance. (Of course, any honest academic will tell you that - especially in certain fields - the first academic job you hold may be the only and last offer you ever get, and you may never really get a good chance to move. And even if you do, it may be to somewhere equally distasteful to you personally.) This is just my opinion, but I think that if you have somewhere really specific that you want to live and you know you wouldn't be happy unless you lived there, you should probably try to prepare yourself for a non-academic Plan B just in case.

I think it's normal to a point. You should have a stable general area of interest; for example, I'd think it weird if a student who'd applied to do research into HIV and drug abuse research suddenly decided she was interested in obesity or cancer or Parkinson's disease (and there was no common thread or relationship between the new area and the old area). But if you were interested in representations of women in 18th century African American literature, and then changed your mind to being interested in gender performativity in 18th century African American literature or African influence in 18th century African American literature or even representations of women in 20th century African American literature, that's not surprising. It's about the scope and magnitude of change. Your interests will grow and morph over time, and you will add new interest areas to your wheelhouse. But of course you will have time to read literature you're interested in - in fact, you should.

If you don't know what you want to do, you can't rush into a graduate degree. You need to devote the time to this to figure out what you want to do. It's great that you have it narrowed down to 'medical/health field', but there are lots of careers in that field. Many jobs out there don't require a specific kind of degree. Some jobs will ask for one, but they'll hire a competent person who has the skills but not the major. What about healthcare administration? Surely there are hospitals, clinics, and doctor's offices where you live; look for some entry-level jobs in that field. You need an income and some work experience while you figure out what you want to do. That way you go into the right program. You don't want to spend 3 years and hundreds of thousands of dollars to get your DPT only to realize 2 years into your career that what you really wanted was...something else. So my first piece of advice is that if you don't know what to do, renew that job search and work for a while. The other thing you'll need to do is start getting the experience that you need to get into programs. Those are both programs that like to see some experience. PA programs usually require applicants to have between 500-1000 hours of direct clinical care experience (usually gained as an EMT, CNA, or nurse), but realistically speaking the most competitive applicants typically have between 2,000 and 4,000 hours, which is the equivalent of 1-2 years of full-time work in that area. Physical therapist programs usually require that you have experience shadowing a PT or OT, and at least one recommendation letter from a PT who can speak to your potential in the field. I chatted with a PT student at Columbia one time and she told me that she and a lot of her classmates had a BS in biology, but then went back to school and got an associate's degree to become a PT assistant, worked at that for a few years, and then applied to PT school. Because these fields are competitive, and especially because the PA degree always designed for mid-career health professionals to transition to a higher level of work, they look for experience as a distinguishing characteristic. A first step, then, would be to get a credential that you'll need to get the experience. Becoming a PTA would be advantageous for both PT school and PA school (it'll give you the direct patient experience you need in either program). But of course, that's another two years full-time, and more if you go part-time. Becoming an EMT or a CNA is a much shorter course of study, but the pay's a lot lower. You may also need more years of experience because your GPA is lowish for professional health programs. There are other options in medical care - both direct patient care and non. In the direct area, you could always stop at PTA or OTA - they make decent salaries and do direct clinical care. There's also the option of getting your bachelor's in nursing (BSN) and becoming a nurse. There are a lot of accelerated BSN programs that allow you to earn your BSN in a year to a year and a half; there are also direct entry MSN programs that allow you to get an RN/BSN and an MSN in 2.5-3 years. The nursing experience can help with getting into a PT program, but can also lead to a career as an RN or as a nurse practitioner, both of which have good salaries and flexibility. NPs also have a wide area of practice - they do primary care. For some non-traditional takes on patient care, there are lots of options: medical physics, genetic counseling, respiratory therapy, dental hygiene, diagnostic sonographer, hospital social worker, licensed clinical social worker, hospital epidemiologist, registered dietitian, speech-language pathology, optometrist. With the exception of medical physics, these are all things you could do without much further prerequisite coursework - you'd have to get a further degree to do all of them, though (an MS in all of them except for diagnostic sonographer, which is usually a two-year ASN program, and optometrist, which is a four-year program leading to an OD). With medical physics you'd have to take at least 5-7 undergrad classes in physics to prepare, and then get an MS. Check out this website: http://explorehealthcareers.org/en/careers/careers which will give you an idea of the careers available in health/medical care.

In my field, the prestigious postdocs have an application deadline sometime between October and December but most formal postdocs have application deadlines in December and January, and some of them are as late as February. Then there are what I call 'informal postdocs' - postdocs that aren't part of a training program like a T32 but are some professor hiring a postdoctoral fellow to help them in their research. Those can come at any time of the year, really. In my field, postdoc start dates can be flexible. I actually committed to my postdoc more than full year before I started (April 2013, and I started in August 2014). Some people applied under the regular deadlines but started in January instead of August. It's not quite like graduate school when you have to start at a specific time.