juilletmercredi

I'm a big advocate for taking time off between college and graduate school, even though I personally didn't. In fact, it's because I personally didn't. If you are unsure about your subfield and what you want to study, I think it's the best option - take some time to think about it, potentially work in one or two of those fields to help you narrow it down. You can certainly think about it over the summer, but you don't want to put pressure on yourself to decide quickly. And sure, there are many subfields that can suit you - but different subfields have different job prospects and approaches, and I think it's good to think about it a bit systematically rather than just selecting one and hoping for the best. There's a pretty big difference between genetics and bioinformatics, for example. To be quite frank, most professors have never done anything besides academia. Many of them don't really have a good sense of the kind of careers that are out there in their fields other than academia, and some of them have really odd ideas about what the non-academic work world is like. They just assume that the smartest and most capable of their undergrads should absolutely go to graduate school, because that's just what really smart people do. Then there's the whole concept of generativity - the idea that the field has a responsibility to generate more junior academics, which many professors take pretty seriously and take great pride in. They may be advising you not to take a year off for a good reason, but I'd put my money on them pushing you go to now so you don't change your mind in the interim. That doesn't mean you have to let them pressure you into it - graduate school will always be there, and you can come back around to it in a year or three or however many if you are ready later. Examine your feelings. Do you feel like you're not ready because of imposter syndrome (you really, really want to go into a science career, but you just have this vague sense of not measuring up)? Or is it something deeper, that you're not even sure that you want a science career/career in research? If it's the former, then I would say push through it, because everyone feels that - it's pretty normal. But if it's more than just imposter syndrome, there's absolutely nothing wrong with waiting until you feel more ready and deciding to do a post-bac instead and not apply to any graduate schools. If you do decide the latter, just present the choice to your professors as your decision and not up for debate. If they protest, you can say "I understand your concerns, I really do! And I appreciate you looking out for me. But I've decided that this is the best option for me right now." Someone with as much experience as you must have multiple people who will write for you, and in the very unlikely case that one of your professors refuses to write for you because you are only applying to postbaccs, you can always ask someone else.

I renamed your people with names because that's easier for me to manage than letters - Alice, Bobbi, Carol, and Dani. To be quite frank, this has nothing to do with you (or Bobbi, it sounds like). The original situation is between Alice and Carol. The roommate situation is between Carol and Dani. l You can be a good friend to Alice, but you can't force Carol to talk about it, and you can't decide for Alice what she should do re: reporting. Your job as a friend is to simply be supportive, be a listening ear, and be willing to help Alice access resources if she decides she needs them. I would definitely encourage her (and Dani, maybe) to access the counseling center and speak to a professional, because a professional can help her decide what to do. Alice especially sounds like she needs some help because she regularly gets blackout drunk, and that's a general life problem. But you should not be trying to coerce or convince Alice to report Carol - that should be her decision and her decision alone, and putting pressure on her might alienate her from you. Second of all, you can file a Title IX complaint if you want, but every single piece of information you have about this is second-hand AND note that if the office decides to open an investigation, they may contact Alice. You can file an anonymous complaint, but I think it'll be pretty easy for Alice to figure out who reported it based on the information included. So you have to decide if you want to make that complaint, knowing that Alice may eventually find out that it was you AND knowing that it may force Alice to speak to investigators, even if it's only to tell them that she won't discuss the matter further. Also, I'm not sure why you guys hang out with Carol or include her in your stuff, but it sounds like you'd be a much more functional group of friends if you just cut her off completely (regardless of whether this is because Carol is actually terrible or because you all just have an extreme dislike of her, or both). But you can't expect Carol to rearrange herself to avoid you so you have to rearrange yourselves to avoid her. For example, if you want to sit away from Carol in the student lounge, request to have your desks moved; don't try to force Carol to move away from you. That's usually how it works anyway. You don't have to be rude about it, but you can be straightforward: "I've/We've decided that things are better if we don't socialize with you." if she asks you to hang out or go somewhere. As a side note, I always think it's a bad idea to say you want to meet with someone without telling them what it is, and it's especially shady when that person asks you what the meeting is about and you refuse to tell them. It's especially weird when - by your admission - you don't talk to the person that much anyway. My response would be to refuse to meet with you until you told me what the meeting was about.

I did graduate school in a city where graduate students couldn't really afford to live on their own and consequently those of us who were single (or whose partners were long-distance) almost always had roommates, and you wouldn't pay $600 even if you had 3 other roommates. How much is your stipend? How big of a difference is an extra $300 going to be a month? Well - I think extra $300 a month is going to a big deal no matter how big your stipend is; that's $3,600 a year, which is likely 12-15% of your yearly salary. Roommates don't have to be stressful; I think most people have heard of one roommate horror story, but I've never really had a bad roommate and I had four in graduate school (one for just a summer). In fact, I'm still close friends with the three roommate I lived with for at least one academic year - my first roommate and I lived together for two years, and it was pretty great. For me, having the extra $300 hanging around would be so worth it on a graduate stipend. You would of course have to find someone who was okay with you having people over occasionally, but you'd also have to be a good roommate and choose not to have your partners or visitors over constantly or even just most of the time. I agree, though, that you need to at least Skype the person first if you can't meet in person and chat with them about how they like to live, hobbies, interests, expectations, etc. Cleanliness and money seem to be the things that roommates fight about the most, so if you guys can be out in the open about how you treat those things that would be good. Given that you are going to a relatively inexpensive place, the two of you might shell out a little more for a bigger 2-bedroom, 2-bathroom so you can each have your own bedroom, your own bathroom, and maybe even your own little "wing" of the apartment depending on how it's organized.

I have an iPhone 6S Plus. I recently had a Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge+ for about 3-4 months, so I have recent experience with both Android and iOS. My job has a takeout program for most devices so I've also recently played with a Samsung Galaxy S7 and a Microsoft Lumia 950 (Windows Phone). I really wanted to try a Nexus 5X, but it didn't have the storage capacity I wanted - I wanted at least a 64 GB phone (I have 128 GB on my iPhone). I agree that it's a personal choice, and frankly, I think the two major phone operating systems - Android and iOS - do pretty much the same things for the vast majority of users. Most major apps are going to be available on both systems in pretty short order; some apps come to iOS first but are pretty quickly put on Android. Each has its little idiosyncracies and quirks. To be quite honest, I prefer Google's suite of services and offerings - Hangouts has always been more stable and better quality for me than FaceTime or Skype; I love Gmail, Google Photos, Google Drive, Google Maps, Google Calendar, Google Keep and Google Chrome. I absolutely love Google Now - it's a bit creepy, but it's a service that reads the patterns you make (searches, emails, commute, etc.) and then gives you useful information on that basis. For example, if you leave for work every morning around 8 am, at around 8 am every morning Google now will have your morning commute and a traffic report. It'll give you news based on what you searched recently. If you have flight confirmation emails in Gmail, it'll give you information about your flight (delayed, on time, gates, etc.) and ping you when it's time for you to leave for the airport. Google Calendar also automatically pulls things from your email and schedules them for you. Most of these apps are available on iOS too - I use them all - but they aren't baked into the default experience they way they are with Android, and they made managing my life so much easier, if you are willing to accept the minor tradeoff in privacy. (Apple, for example, is still trying to make Apple Maps happen, and there's no way for me to make Google Maps my default on my phone.) I also loved that I could customize my Android phone with widgets - I could make it look however I wanted to, get my notifications however I wanted, put weather and email and even my bank account on my home screen so I didn't even have to go into apps to access that information. There's also the case that if you ever want a different phone on Android, you can do that, and Android phones come in a variety of styles and prices. You can also choose any of the many Android Wear watches if you want a smartwatch. With iOS you are locked into the iPhone and the Apple Watch. (and as someone who owns an Apple Watch - they are far uglier and clunkier than the Android watches, most of which are quite sleek and attractive. The features that third-party apps can use on Apple Watches are also far more limited than for Android Watches, but I find the Apple-only watch apps to be pretty useless for me, so honestly - the watch is not that useful for me at all.) Samsung also has a couple of interesting things they've done in the last couple years. There's Samsung SideSync, which allows you to easily access files on your phone on your computer and also text from your computer (which is something I dearly miss - I have a Windows 10 computer, so no texting through my iPhone). They also have Samsung Milk music, which is a digital radio app that was actually really good. At the last minute I decided on the Edge+ because of the edge gimmick, but when I walked into the store I had originally planned on getting the Note 5 - because I still like to take notes on paper and I thought that the S Pen plus OneNote or Evernote would allow me to take notes on my phone. I still regret not getting the Note 5, even though I eventually sold the phone. (The edge added nothing to my experience; I hardly ever used it.) The S7 has a really beautiful screen and I think you get a free Samsung Gear. You also get wireless charging with some Samsung models, which is pretty nice! But iPhones have their perks, too, which is ultimately why I switched back. First, I found Android OS releases far buggier than iOS releases - if I updated my iPhone I rarely experienced any OS problems, whereas my Edge+ was crashing all the time. Second, even after 3 months with my Android phone I felt like I didn't really know how to use it - I kept forgetting how to do things or find settings because the UI is not intuitive, and some settings are grouped poorly. iPhones also offered more storage than all but the most expensive Android phones, and while Android phones used to offer micro SD cards, fewer of them offer that anymore. (This was important to me because I have a lot of music and other apps - right now my phone has 45 GB worth of stuff on it, including 11 GB of music, and that 11 GB of music represents about 15% of my overall music collection. This is why I really needed a phone with at least 64 GB of storage, and why I decided the Nexus 5X ultimately wouldn't work for me even though I really wanted to try it.) But the biggest thing - which probably doesn't really matter much to anyone else but me, lol - is third-party hardware support. I'm the kind of person who changes my phone case every month or so and likes cute external accessories and branded cases like Kate Spade and Isaac Mizrahi. If you walk into a Best Buy right now, I guarantee you there will be 4 walls full of cases for the two different iPhone sizes and about 1 wall for ALL of the different Android phones out there, including maybe 2 or 3 for the Samsung Edge+ and Note 5. If you don't have a Samsung phone - ha! Good luck. There were more cases for the S6 and S7, but I wanted the big phone because I read on it all the time. I also make custom nerd culture cases (anime characters, pop culture, video games) on websites like Zazzle and Redbubble, and many of those websites didn't have a template for my Samsung phone but they did for the new iPhone as soon as it dropped. There is also a lot more hardware for iOS, like portable chargers (most support most phones, but a some only support iPhones), headphones with remotes and mics, and alarm clock/speaker systems. Like I said, I could get all the Google apps on my iPhone pretty simply and completely free, but I couldn't solve the latter couple of issues easily with Android phones, so I switched back.

Not trying to dampen the fun or anything but actually a lot of these things aren't so outrageous and can be pretty true depending on the program and yourself. For example, I really do think that doctoral stuents should be able to stay fit - grad students are busy but you can certainly take 3-5 hours a week to exercise - and keep up at least some of the hobbies they had before graduate school. It's demanding, but you don't want to fundamentally change who you are as a person and eliminate everything that's enjoyable about life to you for this pursuit. That's a quick way to burn out. But yes, I did put on a lot of weight in my graduate program. I shed quite a bit of it after I graduated and got a non-academic 9-5 job. I was actually astonished at how quickly I lost the weight after I finished even though I wasn't trying (I was happy with my size) and didn't change my exercise regimen a whole lot. But I was eating more regularly and healthily, sleeping more regularly, and was on a regular schedule - and was also a lot less stressed. That makes a big difference! You can also make the conscious decision to keep PhD work to 40 hours a week, especially after coursework and maybe comps, but with the knowledge that you might be trading off some research productivity. (That said, it's the rare graduate student who does more than around 50-55 hours of ACTUAL work a week. You'll hear many of them claim to be working 60-80+ hour weeks, but in reality nobody can sustain that level of work long-term and a lot of that time may be spent procrastinating or doing unproductive stuff.)

The whole beauty of the NSF GRFP is that it gives you the freedom to decide what you want to work on and with whom. It's a shame that some professors have a sense of entitlement to a graduate student with outside funding just because they provided help (helping graduate students secure outside funding is part of their job!), and especially distasteful that they feel the need to trash other colleagues. There's nothing unethical about you deciding to stay in your third rotation - there wouldn't be even if you originally came to your school to work with PI #2 and changed your mind later. That's the whole point of the GRF. But make no mistake - this isn't about you or your funding. This is just the way this PI is, and she'd be this way if there was a different issue on the table too. Frankly, I'd be wary of having a person like that on my committee. It's a potential recipe for trouble if you have a PI who's volatile and doesn't get along well with others, or has an outsized sense of entitlement.

^This was going to be my suggestion. If there's no way to salvage the exact project you proposed, you can usually substitute in a closely related set of analyses and present that instead. I see people at conferences with different titles and projects on their posters than are in the abstracts all the time! It's sort of an occupational hazard of requiring abstracts 6 months in advance when - face it - most people have only run cursory preliminary analyses by then. You may have to run a simpler set of analyses than initially promised, but you don't want to go in with completely wrong analyses. There's always a (decent!) chance that someone who knows the method well visits your paper out of curiosity and notices the error. That's not the end of the world either - conferences are supposed to be about getting feedback on in-progress work, and that would be a useful piece of feedback if you didn't already know there was an error. By the way, don't beat yourself up about this. Advanced statistical methods was one of my concentrations in graduate school. Often the only way to really know a new method is to just get in there, roll up your sleeves and try it out. Blundering around with it and making mistakes is completely normal: you are going to screw up the code, violate assumptions, get weird results and tweak and tune the model until one day it clicks and you get it right. That's what the process of learning brand-new methods that no one is around to teach you is about. When I was writing my dissertation I spent at least 3-4 months trying to get the dang model I built to run and fixing it so it made any kind of sense. I pored over lots of theoretical articles to fix little aspects of the data and the model itself to make it work. It's fun! Or it should be. Don't be afraid to make mistakes; mistakes are part of the discovery and learning process to success! And when you make them, you learn what to avoid later for round #2. There's nothing inherently wrong with planning to use statistical methods you don't 100% understand, as long as you set out to understand the method in the process of using it. (And even then, you may never 100% understand the underlying theoretical/mathematical base of the model, but nobody expects that either unless you're a statistician or mathematician.) Also, I don't know what field you are in, but in my field everyone does not assume that someone other than the student designed the project. I think most researchers understand that beginning students didn't design the entire larger project from beginning to end, but the understanding is that even first-year students often design smaller experiments within the project or take a chunk of the data and independently decide on a research question and plan of analysis to pursue.

One of the secrets of academia I found out around my third year is that very few people actually read journal articles for the "fine details". Most researchers quickly scan articles - they read the abstract, and then if they decide to read further, they skim the methods and results with a quick glance at the discussion. The volume of research papers that come out every month in an area is just too great to devote time to close reading of each article. When I studied for comps I didn't set reading goals. Instead, I set goals of being able to answer certain questions that would mirror what I'd be asked on the exams. For my written exams, there were past exams that I could access with examples of questions that had been asked going back 10 years or so, so I spent some time looking at those questions, then determining what I needed to know to answer the question. Early in comps study, I worked backwards from there and worked through my reading list in a rough priortization order - starting off by reading the material that I most needed to answer the questions, but had new concepts that I didn't already know from prior classes/readings. Then I went and filled in the gaps, and lastly I read the sort of supplemental/extraneous material that really just fleshed out the answer. All along, I practiced answering questions by outlining and then writing full responses. You want the truth? I think I read maybe 10-15% of what was on the 12-page reading list for my program (which including full-length books!!), and a lot of that I skimmed really well. Honestly, you don't really need fine details for comps (well, most comps, in my experience). You should be able to cite big/seminal works in the field, but nobody expects you to remember all the little details of the results and design and xyz for your comps papers.

Around my third year in my PhD program I started to have the same feelings. I could've written your post myself - I hated conferences because other than chatting with and meeting people (which I later found out was "networking"), there was very little that interested me about them. I hated reading and writing journal articles because I felt like I was trapped in an endless cycle: writing papers so someone else could read it (or "read" it) to write their paper, so that later I could read it and write another paper. I wanted my research to have direct applications to real changes in the real world, not a tiny audience only of other social scientists. The longer I stayed in academia the more sure I became, although I did decide to finish my PhD and even did a year of a postdoc to be really sure. What I ended up doing was taking a non-academic research job in the private sector, where I use my research skills to conduct research and give recommendations to non-researchers to make changes to their products/designs/plans. I love my job and leaving academia was the best decision I made. So I agree with fuzzy in that you should separate the question of whether you want to finish your PhD from whether you want to continue in academia. It is entirely possible to finish a PhD without drinking the Kool-Aid - or maybe as much of it - and entirely possible to leverage your PhD into a non-academic career. However, like fuzzy says, I would highly encourage you to start seeking out opportunities to intern or work part-time to get a taste of non-academic experience. I did this when I was in graduate school because I was never really sure I wanted academia, and it helps a LOT when you go on the non-academic market and can point to non-academic experiences you've had. If you do choose to finish, you can view the rest of your PhD as a paid professional training ground - time for you to take the time to prepare for the career you really want while having secure employment. Continue to do your research, but make time to slot in other professional activities. Join professional orgs in your city for career areas you're interested in, do some informational interviews with people who hold careers that seem interesting, and try to find some kind of internship or part-time opportunity that you can gain some non-academic experience in. (Feel free to conceal from your advisor as much as you need to. I told my advisor about some things I did and not others.) There's no harm in putting out feelers, and you can do these kinds of activities while still publishing actively and getting academic research experience - you just have to be planful about it. Of course, if you have been nose to the grindstone with research spending an inordinate amount of time in the lab, you may have to cut back your research hours a bit to make time for professional development. That's okay, too. Remember that the PhD is an academic program and a professional development program for YOUR career. It's a nice secondary bonus that your advisor gets help in her career, vis-a-vis your work, but that doesn't mean that's your primary goal. I also agree with the advice to visit the career center. My university's career center was surprisingly excellent for graduate students, and actually had a whole little program for PhDs who were considering non-academic careers (or careers in higher education that were not faculty positions). They brought many alumni speakers to campus who had successfully transitioned and would read and review your resume and cover letter for free, including having a 30-minute consultation with you about it - and more, if you wanted that! I started attending these workshops pretty early, probably around the beginning of my third year, because I was curious. Just hearing about it made me realize the variety of careers out there for someone with a PhD in my field and let me know what I was interested in. That helped a lot later, when I decided for sure to leave academia, because I already knew which fields I'd want to move into. Lastly - you'll never know for sure whether a new job/career you've never tried is something you'll enjoy until you actually work it. This is not a bad thing. Honestly, in careers outside of academia, it is FAR more common for people to reinvent themselves and their careers a couple times over the course of their working lives. Whatever the next thing you choose to do - even if that next thing IS academia - doesn't have to be the last thing you ever do! You can try it on for a few years and if you don't like it, you can lateral yourself into something else. Don't be afraid to try things out!

$15K for a 2013 Ford Fusion isn't such a screaming deal that you should make a rash decision based on its availability. A quick Cars.com search found me 38 Ford Fusions, model year 2012 and later within 30 miles of my ZIP code (a higher cost-of-living area) that cost less than $15,000. Most of them had a few more miles than the one at home, but nothing completely out of the ordinary for the age of the car. That's not even including all of the other low-cost makes and models you can get if you have $15,000 to spend on a car. Unless you're afraid your car won't even make it to Grad City without sputtering and dying, why not wait until you are in Grad City to make a decision? Then you can see how much you drive around and whether it's necessary to purchase a new-to-you car or whether the Mercury will satisfy your needs. And even if you do buy a newer car, you may not need to buy a $15,500 car - you can buy a lower cost car. If you're currently driving around a 2001 Sable with 128k miles, even a car in the $8-12k range will be a huge improvement over that, and many financers like Capital One will finance a car that costs as little as $7,500. Keep your monthly payments low, and/or pay off the car a lot more quickly.

Perhaps by now you have made a decision, but I am truly baffled by this rationale. If the two schools are about equal in reputation and fit in your own estimation, why on earth would you pay a lot more for one? You've already considered most of the academic and professional reasons to decide between the two and are still coming up short, so by all means, let the costs make the decision for you. There's no reason to pay more for an equivalent experience that will get you the same things as the more expensive experience.

No, it's not worth it. Where you go for your MS before the PhD doesn't matter, as long as you will get a solid educational experience there and can get the research experience and recommendations you need to proceed on. Besides, how on earth would you repay $200K on the salary of a physics professor? Why would a Brown MS cost $200K anyway? Tuition is about $50K per year, so $100K over two years, but you should be able to cover living expenses for $25K a year in Providence. It's still a moot point, because even $150K is way, way too much to borrow for an MS in physics, particularly when you have a partially funded offer at a great public university - and still more than you will be able to repay.

It's probably not a great idea, unless that MA is one in mental health counseling and will allow you to practice as a licensed counselor after you finish. (If it's an MA in clinical psychology, it will not.) I don't know what your background is, but clinical psychology is so competitive that qualified students routinely get turned down for 1-2 cycles before they are accepted somewhere. So sometimes the remedy is to just apply again, and apply to a wider and deeper pool of programs. But sometimes there's something you're missing to be competitive, and it's usually not an MA. Most psychology PhD students don't have a terminal MA from another program and it's not necessary to have one before starting. If your undergraduate major was in psychology, and you have a decent GPA (3.5+ for sure, probably 3.3-3.4 as well) and good recommendations from faculty members, then what's missing is probably research experience or clinical experience or both. It sounds like that's the case ("I haven't even had experience related to the field." You don't need to pay $60-80K to an MA program to get that. The best way to get research experience after college is by working as a lab manager or research associate in psychology or a related field somewhere for 2-3 years. Barring that, you can volunteer in a lab or work part-time. Most people volunteer to get the clinical experience. Think about it this way: You already have $40K, and if your MA program is just one year and you borrow $60K ($40K tuition and $20K for living expenses - which is really a low estimate, and only sustainable in a lower cost-of-living area), you will have a total of $100K. This is before you go to a PhD program; many PhD students do rack up a little bit of student loan debt to supplement living costs for whatever reason. Anyway, psychologists earn $72,000 a year on average (BLS data). This is not the kind of salary that enables you to repay six-figure debt, and you will struggle repaying these loans. No, it's not too late for you to back out - you can back out at any time, even after you start the program. The department probably has a departmental secretary; I would speak with them first to get an idea of how you can withdraw ("Unfortunately, due to personal circumstances I won't be able to attend your program in the fall. How can I go about withdrawing from the program?")

Yes, there are certain areas that are more popular, although that's not necessarily because they're more interesting. I'm willing to bet that cognitive aging is one of the least popular areas (this was an area I was starting to become interested in just before I left academia, particularly in people living with HIV, and there was huge interest in the area from the NIH but few people pursuing research in the field). Mood disorders (depression and anxiety) and eating disorders are fairly popular but there are lots of different ways to take research in those areas. The other thing is that certain departments may attract a cluster of interested students because of faculty interest. My psych department, for example, had a large number of students interested in social applications of cognitive neuroscience - but we had a strength in that area.

It would depend on your title and duties, of course, as well as the firm. The government has a salary schedule that you can look up; generally speaking, a brand-new PhD would be GS-12 in scientific professions. The base salary for GS-12 step 1 on the government salary schedule is $62,101. However, there's also locality pay for higher cost of living areas; many large urban areas in the U.S. have special locality pay. So if you were to work in DC at the NIH, your starting pay would be $77,490. If you worked for the CDC in Atlanta, your starting salary would be $74,260. However, your salary does increase somewhat rapidly; advancing between the first 4 steps takes 1 year per step. So in the DC area, at the beginning of year 4 on the job you'd be earning $85,238 (plus about 1-2% more due to annual cost of living increases). That's a jump of almost $10K in just 3 years. And you only need one year of specialized experience to apply for GS-13 jobs internally, which come with an even bigger salary boost. In short, the earning potential in the federal government is pretty good. In biotechnology I'm pretty sure starting salaries for most scientists are in the $80,000 to $100,000 range, depending on the size and resources of the company you apply to. Genentech, for example, seems to be starting its new associate scientists in the $100-110K range or so (it's a bit hard to tell, but Glassdoor and Payscale data seem to reflect that). Celgene looks to be starting new scientists in the $90-100K range. So I think it's reasonable to expect to start somewhere in the $80-100K range - top end at larger well-known and well-funded biotech companies and lower end of the range at smaller, newer companies and startups. Glassdoor seems to indicate that pharmaceutical scientist salaries are a bit lower (maybe in the $70K to $90K range), but I'm less familiar with that field. I find Glassdoor to be relatively accurate in my corner of the professional world (tech), but it relies entirely on people actually entering their starting salaries into the tool so it's going to be biased a bit. The thing to remember when comparing salaries in the private sector is that these are just base salaries, and private sector jobs come with other forms of compensation. For example, a lot of companies (most biotech and many pharma, probably) have profit-sharing in which you get an annual bonus that's usually some percentage of your income (e.g. at my company it can be up to 20% of your salary). There are also potentially signing bonuses, relocation coverage and/or reimbursement and the value of your benefits.

I didn't use the credit union, no, because I was already a member of USAA and I liked it so much and it was national.

I too would recommend waiting a bit and investigating local credit unions in your area. The university you're going to might even have a credit union - I was a postdoc at Penn State and they have one, for example. Most metro areas have several credit unions and you might be eligible for one or more just on the basis of being a student in the area. Actually I just did a quick look and Maryland does have a partnership with a credit union - SECU. https://www.secumd.org/university-of-maryland I bank with USAA (my husband's a veteran). I love them, and credit unions in general. I don't pay any fees for having a checking account and I can go to any ATM and get money and not pay a fee - they don't charge you for using a non-USAA ATM AND they reimburse you for ATM fees that other banks/networks charge you, up to a certain amount per month - more than I would ever use. Since they're a credit union they have tools on their website to help me save money, manage my money, and plan for savings and retirement. They also have other useful services like a car buying service, which contracts with certain dealerships to get you discounts. I have my renters and car insurance through them as well. My husband and I want to buy a house in the next 3-5 years and they have tools to help you plan for that, too, and will help you find an agent and get veterans' benefits. Their customer service is generally amazing. Before that I had Bank of America. I banked with Bank of America for 10 years - I opened my first checking account with them on my 18th birthday back in 2004. I hate them. They nickel and dime you for everything. They used to have a checking account that was free if you rarely went into the branch, but they cut it (without telling their customers - one day I realized I was being charged $12/month for my checking account). The minimum balance and transactions you have to conduct before they stop charging you are too high (with Bank of America it's a $1,500 minimum average daily balance, which could be too high depending on your stipend). And they reordered my transactions so smaller ones would go through last. They claim it's for your benefit, but at least once due to a miscalculation it resulted in me getting hit with multiple overdraft fees instead of just one - if you spend $1.25, $6, $7 and $900 on the same day, and the $900 takes you over, they can reorder your transactions from $900 to $1.25 and then charge you a $35 overdraft fee three times for those transactions. And on top of all that, their customer service is awful! Towards the end I got the sense they were trying to get better because they had so much bad publicity and lots of customers were leaving for credit unions, but it's not great, and not comparable to a credit union. I had so much glee when I called them to close my account. Chase is the same. Wells Fargo might be the best option of the big banks; their monthly service fee is $10/month but they waive it if you make at least 10 debit card purchases per month or have qualifying direct deposits of $500, both of which are manageable for graduate students. You can also get their next tier up if you get a total of $1,000 direct deposited and that checking account bears interest. I also second the suggestion of an online bank, like ING Direct or Ally. I had Ally for a short while and they seemed to be pretty decent; their customer service was really great. They have 24/7 live customer service either over the phone or via chat, and their online system tells you (accurately) how long the current wait times are so you can decide whether to call or come back later. Most online banks have free checking accounts, will reimburse you for ATM fees (Charles Schwab has unlimited reimbursement) and some of them bear interest (Charles Schwab does, and some Ally accounts do too). If you're going to a PhD program you also may want to check out local banks that only have a few branches in the state/city you're going to be in. Often they have lower fees, better service and more perks than the national banks do. The downside is often that they don't have as robust support for online and mobile banking, so you'll have to go into the branch more. That may be a positive for you if you like a bank with a branch and you want to go to the branch for most things. And more smaller banks are moving into this space, so you never know. So IMO 1) credit union 2) online bank 3) smaller bank in your grad city 4) big bank only if you absolutely have to.

To the question of whether you need a PhD - it depends on what kind of research you want to do. Do you want to lead the research or are you content with carrying out research-related tasks? For example, think tanks and government agencies like the CDC hire master's level research associates to assist in research. Especially with experience, these research associates may end up doing some pretty heavy tasks - contributing to papers and memos and briefs, helping with the planning of research studies, grant-writing, etc. You can go pretty deep down the rabbit hole with the MA, but some companies may limit your career ladder positions due to lack of PhD. In other places, it may limit your salary, and in most places it'll limit your autonomy (you'll rarely pick the projects you work on independently, although you may have your choice of projects amongst ones already underway). In technology, I will say that most business researchers are hired in at the master's level. I actually work in social science research at a large tech company. Although almost everyone on my team has a PhD, most of the other business research teams at my company are staffed mainly by master's degree holders. However, I am seeing a small, slow shift in the industry. When I was looking at job ads, I saw more and more ads that were preferring PhDs or explicitly looking for them. A lot of technology companies are hiring social scientists to do several things: UX research (using social science principles, mainly psychology, to make products easily usable by consumers); field/consumer/purchasing research, which they often call "business anthropology" (sending people out into people's homes or naturalistic living spaces to observe how they use products and services and glean information about how to improve them or sell other products and services); process research (almost like operations research, but using social science research principles to improve working processes and procedures) and personnel/HR research (using social scientists to improve the hiring process, the creation of teams, and the way that people work together at the company). I do the first one and I love my job. But I saw all of these types of jobs when I was looking for places to take my PhD in psychology outside of academia, and most of the positions sounded pretty interesting! No, you don't need a PhD. But it helps, especially if you want to go to a big company like Facebook. That said, if you were 100% sure that you didn't want an academic job, and were really interested in exploring industry jobs that are research-related but not about heading up research projects in the sense that a true sociologist does at a university or think tank, I would really seriously explore the possibility of getting a master's instead. Although I couldn't have my exact job had I gotten an MS in human-computer interaction, for example, I could have had several jobs LIKE my job, and I may have eventually worked my way up to it. Meanwhile that's 4 extra years of salary, retirement savings, and living like a normal person!

Five years is actually a pretty long turnover rate in today's world. I would probably pick #2 or #3 depending on what "the middle of nowhere" was and what the city was. There are few places in the U.S. that are both very dangerous and also so far out in the boondocks that there is no Wal-Mart and no equivalent stores. (Also, the absence of a Wal-Mart is not necessarily a bad thing - there are lots of other places to go grocery shopping and get inexpensive goods, and honestly, the produce and selection is better at grocery stores.) I don't think I would really want to live in New York or Boston or Chicago, though - not unless I was making a huge salary, and probably not even then. It's not that $80K isn't enough to live on in New York, but it's just that I know I'd be living out my life in a small apartment rather than in a larger condo or house. If the middle of nowhere was like 2 hours from a major city I could make that work for a little while. What's important to me? When I was looking for jobs these were the things that were important: 1) Job satisfaction: I wanted a job that was challenging and intellectually stimulating, one in which I could work on interesting projects. Something that was research or felt like research (like consulting) was important to me. I also wanted a job that had immediate applications to improvements or changes in some kind of outcome (process, product, didn't matter). 2) Work/life balance: I knew that I wanted to work somewhere between 40 and 50 hours most week and generally keep a regular 9-5ish type of schedule. I didn't want my work to follow me home. 3) Location: I wanted to live in a medium-sized major city with lots of shopping, good restaurants, cultural activities, music venues, etc. (By medium-sized i meant no New York, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco; something like Austin, Portland, Seattle, Denver, Pittsburgh, Charlotte in size. Something in the 2-5 million range, as far as population in the metro area goes. I was willing to make an exception for DC and maybe LA.) There were a couple reasons for this - smaller cities tend to be less dense and individual people have more space, and I wanted some space. But I also knew that I wanted to get really integrated into the community and do a lot of networking, and it's easier when the community is smaller. I also like the outdoors and wanted to be somewhere with beautiful scenery and great outdoors activities available and accessible. And I didn't want it to be ridiculously expensive. I knew I wanted to live in a less-dense area, too. Related to this was weather: I was DONE with the bitterly cold winters of the Northeast. While doing location research I became completely enamored with the weather on most of the West Coast of the U.S. The Pacific Northwest has rainy, mild winters and warm, beautiful, sunny summers. And then California from the Bay Area on down just has sunshine and warmth all up. After a certain point I was concentrating my job search primarily in California and the PNW (also the industry I entered, technology, is mostly there), and secondarily in the Southeast in smaller cities between DC and Atlanta (Raleigh, Charlotte, Richmond, etc.) 4) Co-workers: I wanted people I could work with, and a collaborative environment where people helped each other, worked on projects together, and maybe got lunch or coffee together. 5) Salary: I had a certain number in mind and I wanted to make more than that. 6) Structure: I wanted my job to have some structure. I like having organizational structure and a flow of products in place. I didn't really want to choose what I worked on; rather, I wanted to have the autonomy to be given a project and handle it however I saw fit, but with tools and processes to make that work. 7) Professional development opportunities: I wanted to go somewhere I felt I could get promoted and go up the corporate ladder. It didn't necessarily need to be in the same company, but I know that my goals are to move into management and then leadership some day, so I wanted to go some place I could achieve that. 8) Locational security: I really wanted to work at a company I knew I could stay at for at least 3-5 years. I was tired of moving around every couple of years and I wanted to stay put. But, more importantly, I wanted to move to a metro area I knew that I could live for at least the next 10-15+ years. I wanted to invest and play the long game in a particular area. I wanted to develop long-term friendships and connections. So I new that I needed to find a city that not only had my company but had other companies in my field/sector that I could hop to to develop my career, if I wanted. I didn't want to have to move again should I choose to move on from my job in 5 years. 9) Reputation/prestige: OK, I am willing to admit - I wanted to work for a company that most people have heard of, potentially working on products that most people have heard of as well. This wasn't as important to me as the other elements on my list but it was something i wanted.

My answer is similar to rising_star's. I waited until I finished graduate school until I got a dog. Then I adopted an almost fully grown dog (my dog was 10 months old when I adopted her, which was still younger than I originally intended - I wanted to adopt a 3-4 year old dog). My personal advice is not to get a puppy. Obviously, people's tolerance levels are going to vary, but - as already mentioned - puppies require a LOT of time and training. Just their potty schedule alone requires a dedication from you to run them outside every couple of hours to train them. Then they need classes and socialization, lots of exercise and training. And they cost a lot of money. And they CHEW. If you want all the love and warmth and fun of a dog you can adopt an adult dog and get that. I've talked to a few friends who insisted that they wanted to adopt a puppy because they wanted to make the puppy "theirs" by setting its personality from a young age. A lot of a dog's temperament is hereditary anyway, but if you adopt smart you can find an adult dog that has a temperament and personality like what you would've raised had you had them from a puppy. A lot of people also believe that adult dogs can't be trained out of bad habits or retrained, but that's simply not true. My dog was still kind of puppy-ish when I adopted her, but she was very trainable. She learns super quickly even now at 2.5 years old. And even if you adopted an adult dog around 3 or 4 years old, you can still train them. Some dogs are quicker learners than others. That's why I highly recommend adopting from a rescue that fosters their dogs, so you can talk to the foster owner and get an idea of what the dog is like. Foster owners also usually start the training process - by the time I adopted my dog she was already house-trained and crate-trained and had an okay command of "sit." Another reason I didn't adopt in graduate school is I knew I would be traveling a lot. There are conferences and then there's also personal travel. Dogs are expensive to board. Sometimes you can find a friend or someone to watch them for cheap or free, but I've always ended up having to leave my dog with a sitter. I use Rover.com so that my dog is in someone's house as a beloved temporary pet rather than in a boarding facility in a kennel, but the costs are similar - in lower-cost areas I paid $20-25/night and now I pay around $40/night (which is about average in my metro). Plus constantly staying with someone other than you can be stressful for the dog, and some don't like traveling. My dog is normally happy go lucky but she hates traveling - she barely even wants to get in the car to go to the park. When I used to live in State College and drove to New York one weekend a month, I brought her with me, and she hated the car ride even though we stopped every hour for her to stretch her legs and take a walk. (However, she doesn't mind staying with my dog sitter, who has an enormous backyard and two other big dogs for her to play with. That's doggie heaven for her.) I will say that my dog is a motivation for work-life balance - I know I have to leave work at a certain time so I can go home and feed and walk and play with my dog. She also helps me get exercise - I am always looking for opportunities for Zelda and I to do things together so we can both get active. We've started going hiking together. I think she likes it, and she's really tired afterwards which is a plus!

It depends on the program, and what you are looking for. Some higher education programs may be viewed as stepping stones for people who want to go on to a PhD or EdD, but I'm betting that most of the are professional programs that are looking to prepare higher ed professionals for work. Moreover, your career goals matter, too - if you want to be a higher ed professional and not a researcher in the field, research experience may be less important to you. The question is - what do you want to do? Does the research interest you, do you want to do it? Is the commitment worth it to you to balance alongside your other commitments, purely on the basis of interest? Or are you only even considering it because of how good it might look on your resume? If it's the latter, I think you've answered your own question.

My sense, actually, is that this is not actually a postdoctoral fellowship in the traditional sense of the word but is an opportunity for doctoral degree holders who want to spend a year in New York - but draw salary from other sources - to do so. I think the real target is mid-career and senior professors who have a sabbatical or research leave they can use to come live in New York for a year, and this is an opportunity for them to have the privileges the Fellows program offers free of charge to them. But then I think some recent PhDs are probably using the program as a postdoc for whatever reason (their spouse is in the city for X reason and they need an affiliation; they really want to stick around in New York while they go on the market another year; they're geographically bound; they're supported by family and don't need a salary; etc.) This is the part of the ad that made me think this: Announcements of the year's awards are in August; generally at least one but no more than three awards are made in any one academic year from a pool of applicants that numbers from three to seven each year. The Fellows come from a wide variety of disciplines and stages in their academic careers. Several of the Fellows have been recent PhD recipients from Fordham and other universities, one has been a full professor who wished to spend her sabbatical in New York City, while others have been mid-career scholars or academics from abroad. The Medieval Fellows program has drawn a wide range of post-doctoral scholars to Fordham for terms lasting from four months in the Fall (F) or Spring (S) semester, to the entire year (Y). I do notice, however, that the privileges include a library carrel but no office. The notable omission of an office is making me think that while this may have originally been intended to attract mid-to-late career scholars on sabbatical, the university can't actually afford them, and what this appointment actually attracts is one of the following: 1) Wealthy mid-to-late career professors who really just want to spend a year in New York, and are being paid by someone else OR are being supported by a spouse or partner who is also sabbaticaling in New York 2) Scholars visiting from abroad who also are being paid by someone else and also just want to spend a year in New York 3) Unfortunate, wealthy, or desperate early career professionals who are treating this as a postdoc. (The program stationery might have been thrown in to appeal to them...letterhead is useful on the market.)

I'm first-generation and I had this issue, but for a different reason. I like to think a lot before I speak up in public and often by the time I had my thoughts formulated the "moment" had passed. I solved this problem (mostly) by writing notes out beforehand, including making little post-it notes of 2-3 comments I could potentially make in class. As to whether or not you should share it - I think this depends on what you intend to get out of sharing it, and how you think it'll help your committee help you or frame your needs. Personally I would see no benefit to it 80% of the time - "I'm shy and am working on this" conveys all of the necessary information, and your advisors can help you without the backstory. But you may feel more comfortable with them knowing the backstory so they have some context for the advice they give you. So it's really up to whether or not you feel comfortable and want to tell - but you don't have to.

The other thing to remember is sometimes, getting no acceptances is unfortunate luck of the draw. It doesn't necessarily mean anything is wrong with your application, that you're not competitive, that you can't get in anywhere - it could simply mean that circumstances aligned so that you simply didn't work out anywhere you applied. That doesn't mean that you can't improve your application in the mean time; it simply means that you shouldn't feel disheartened or feel like you don't have a chance. This is especially true in clinical psychology, which is just super competitive anyway. I would definitely recommend trying to get a position as a paid research assistant or a lab manager. You can do this at a university lab, but you can also do this at a government agency or think tank or nonprofit that does research. This is the time of year to look for these jobs, as the incumbents often just got into graduate school themselves and are leaving and their PIs are looking for their replacements.

@Cat_Robutt She is absolutely named after Princess Zelda from The Legend of Zelda.