juilletmercredi

This could describe dozens of careers and jobs. Two things. One, you don't have to find something you are "truly passionate" about. You just need to find something that you are reasonably content to do for money that you don't hate and doesn't make you dread getting out of bed every day. Alison Green, of "Ask a Manager," has an excellent post on why you shouldn't follow your passion. The short story is that few people get paid to do something that they are truly passionate about; but then again, most people don't really need that to be happy. Much of work happiness comes from the environment and the people you work with. Two, I think there's this pervasive idea out there that the way careers work is that you find something you're passionate about in college/grad school and then you walk out with a job in that field and live happily ever. Reality is much messier than that, and many people find out what makes them happy by incrementally moving closer to it. So maybe their first job they like okay but really there is one big thing they hate, so they move to another position after 2 years that doesn't have that big thing they hate. But maybe it's missing something they really love to do, so they move onto job 3, which has that thing. But then ah, after 4 years at job 3 they realize that they really want to manage people now, so they go to job 4. And so on. You don't have to know what you are "passionate" about or even what you truly like right now; what you have to do is find a job that sounds appealing and try it out. If you hate it, you can always move on to something else! As a side note, research doesn't have to be too drawn out. I had that dilemma, too - I love research but I also love structure and quick results. I took a position doing research in business (specifically, UX research in technology) and this suits my needs very well. I see the results of my research in 2-3 weeks, and see the application of those results within a few weeks after that. It's an amazing feeling seeing my research touch products that millions of people will use. Might you be interested in genetic counseling? Another thing that comes to mind is consulting, which hits all the points - salary, respect, interaction, results, meaning. Whether you have a micromanaging manager is kind of luck of the draw, but that's unlikely with a consulting career. Software engineering is another career field that fits, but without knowing your background - don't know if you would like it. (And no, software engineers don't sit behind closed doors and code all day. Some of their day is taken up by that, but the job can actually be very interactive, especially if you're on an agile team. I talk to software developers all the time.)

I work in a non-academic research position that hires PhDs; one of my coworkers started here before he finished his dissertation and was able to finish and graduate from his full-time job. He hated it, though, and said if he could do it all over he would've delayed his start until after he finished his dissertation. He was also a lot farther along - he was in the thick of it, and he defended his dissertation within 6 months of starting the position (it may have been less than that). Frankly, if you have not even defended your proposal I think a two-year timeline is kind of fast if you are working full-time. It took me about a year and four months to go from zero (before I started working on my proposal) to a defended dissertation, and then an additional two months to put together the revisions and do a final submission of the dissertation, and I was only working 10 hours a week. Don't underestimate how draining a full-time job can be - I work one now, about 40-50 hours a week (and I also don't have to work from home or on vacations), and I can tell you I sure don't feel like writing a dissertation when I get home from work in the evenings. It also sounds like you will be moving for this position and so on top of getting adjusted to your new job you will also be getting adjusted to a new area. And time isn't just additive, if that makes sense - IMO, you can get more done in one 6-hour chunks of time than you can in three 2-hour chunks of time. That's because you don't have to ramp up every time and get into the swing of things. You don't think life will get in the way - but nobody does. It has a habit of getting in the way anyway. The people I know who have managed this successfully worked a research job that was somewhat related to their PhD/dissertation work and were sometimes able to devote some time at work to writing the dissertation. For example, they may have used secondary data sources that were provided or funded by their new employer, so working on their dissertation was directly relevant to the work of the institution and so "counted" as part of their duties. The positive thing is that you have the support of your committee. You can definitely have an ambitious goal of two years, but realize that it may stretch out to longer (maybe 3) and decide whether you are okay with that.

Yes, it depends. I had a personal policy to never pay out of pocket for research/school trips (and that included conference travel) but I never needed to travel for dissertation/thesis research, because I did it all locally. Things also might change depending on the location - an Amtrak ride and two nights in a hotel to study in the archives of a university 2 hours away is different from a year-long research trip to Brazil, for example.

All the time! I only read a small fraction of the books on my reading list from front to back. The rest I read the introduction, a book review, an abstract, a conclusion, maybe a specific chapter, etc.

This is unhelpful, but I want to say that I absolutely agree with what most people have said here about reminding PIs but for Christ's sake, it shouldn't be that hard for grown people to keep their own deadlines in check. Directed at the PI, not you, OP. Yes, sure, it's your responsibility to make sure they get their letters in but at some point it also becomes their responsibility as well. I feel like in academia we have become so used to professors using "busy" as an excuse for poor deadline adherence, particularly when it comes to recommendation letters. Everybody's busy; professors do not have the monopoly on busy. And yet many professionals in other very demanding fields don't have the cultural expectation that they will miss deadlines, ignore emails, and forget things all willy-nilly. If my current manager (non-academic industry) ignored 90% of my emails she'd get fired. If it were me, I'd be annoyed, and I might say something like "Oh, sorry - I sent you a mail reminding you about 6 days before the deadline; perhaps it landed in your spam folder/maybe you didn't get it?" and then move onto the next thing. You could even build that out and say "Oh, sorry - I sent you a mail reminding you about six days before the deadline, but perhaps you didn't get it. Would you rather me remind you in person or over the phone in the future?" I would find this kind of behavior a bit bizarre from a professor. It's not the students' fault that the professor doesn't read all of her emails; the student sent an email directed towards the professor with a reminder in it and the professor didn't read it. But that doesn't mean the student didn't actually remind the professor - it doesn't mean the reminder "doesn't count." The PI is well within her rights to clarify with the student that she'd rather reminders come in emails that are directed only at her and not at a group, but that doesn't negate the fact that the reminder was sent in the first place. The PI simply chose not to read it. That's her fault. And the thing is, she's only going to use this excuse again whenever she hasn't read an email very closely. Again, what is stopping this professor from making a quick calendar entry that says "Sally's recommendation letter due 4/29" and then adding a reminder to write the damn thing a week before the deadline? That is what every graduate student is expected to do when deadlines come and go, and this is what I did when students asked me to write a recommendation letter. I did ask them to remind me by X dates if they hadn't heard from me by then, but far more frequently I sent them an email letting them know I had finished the recommendation well before the due date. That's what electronic calendars are for. I know I'm banging my head against a wall and my irritation is not helpful, OP, but know that I am irritated for you. Nonetheless, others have given you good advice: -This professor has shown already that she is unreliable, so you need to do everything much earlier than you think you need to. 2-3 days isn't enough - she's going to need at least a couple weeks to get her shit together. Really, this is the most important thing. This is the kind of advisor who says she'll review your drafts in 2 weeks and really takes 4 weeks. -You may have to do some office drive-bys. I hope you live close to campus, because I'd be cruising by her office multiple times a day until I found her if I needed something. This is what comes of advisors who don't answer emails - they get ambushed by their students. Try early in the morning when she may be dropping her belongings off in the office or in the late afternoon when she may be gathering her things to go home. Or, if you know or can find her office phone number, call it. Professors get caught off guard when their office phone rings because they aren't expecting it. However, this might work only 2-3 times before it loses its effectiveness and she starts ignoring your phone number. -This is probably not the most productive thing in the world, but I use slightly passive-aggressive tendencies. Like if a professor said I didn't send them something, I do the "Oh, sorry, you must not have gotten my email! I will forward it to you" and then forward the email with the timestamp and everything still there. Of course, you have to know your advisor...if this is likely to piss them off, don't do it. But for me, I wasn't doing it to be deliberately pedantic (well, not completely). It was more of a record of yes, I am doing things when I am supposed to be doing them. -Find a secondary mentor who has a better sense of time. Cultivate that relationship. When you need a last-minute recommendation or someone to bounce ideas off of in the moment, you have this person to go to. Can you tell I had an advisor with some similar tendencies?

I was going to come in and suggest the iPad Pro, if you really want an iPad, or maybe a Surface 3. If I were going back to graduate school and wanted to annotate PDFs, I'd want an iPad that supported a stylus and writing precision. With the iPad Pro you could use the Apple Pencil (or with the Surface 3, the Surface Pen) to write/annotate PDFs through GoodReader, which is also the app I used in graduate school. Surface 3 has Windows 10 on it so you could use Adobe Reader or some other regular Windows desktop app to do this. However - Wacom does make inexpensive styluses for non-Pro iPad and iPad minis that include palm rejection technology. So you might be interested in one of those, and then you can get a regular iPad or iPad mini for cheaper. Also, tell your grandmother to look into Apple's refurbished iPads and also look at buying older model iPads from resellers like Glyde. You can get these for a fraction of the cost of a brand-new, current generation one, and tablets only have minor changes made to them in each iteration. (I would recommend going with an iPad with a Retina screen, though - it makes a big difference.)

A couple things: I'm so sorry about your mother. I wish her all the best, and you, too. You can take leave while on an NSF - it's called Medical Deferral status. If an immediate family member (including a parent) experiences a serious illness, you can be granted a Medical Deferral. You can then use the deferred months of your fellowship later on. You have to contact the administrator (coordinating official) of the NSF on your campus and get an approved medical leave from your university, and then submit a request for medical deferral. If you look at the NSF Administrative Guide it's all laid out there. (http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2011/nsf11031/nsf11031.pdf). This sounds like exactly the kind of situation a medical deferral was invented for. You may need to spend some time thinking about whether your anxiety and depression is due to PhD studies in general, to your specific program, or to the very difficult period you are going through in your life. That should help you determine what to do here. A leave of absence is a really good time to do that, even if you are spending most of it caring for your mother and getting treatment of your own. First of all, I think regardless of whether you stay or go, put yourself and your family first. You need to care for your mom and you need to care for yourself. That seems to signal getting out quick and getting back home to the Midwest. You aren't sacrificing your career opportunities. You are clearly a bright, intelligent, driven person who managed to get two independent forms of funding AND into a PhD program. You'll be able to achieve in your career. If your program is so terrible as to not be understanding during this very stressful time in your life, forget about them - it may be best to move on. Either way, focus on taking the time to care for your mom if you know in your heart that's what you should do. But after you get that squared away, then the idea is to reflect some and think about whether it's your department or the program that's stressing you out. Before your mom was diagnosed with breast cancer, how were you doing? Were you enjoying your work and were your professors responding to you in a different way than they are now? Or were you unhappy from the start? Think about the sources of your happiness, and think about your work. Imagine if you were in a lab with your favorite professor at this program, and they were supportive and you were doing interesting research. Would you still love graduate school? Would you still want a PhD? These questions are difficult to answer; I had a difficult time answering them myself until after I had finished my PhD. One recurring thing I see in your post is that your own perception of your work doesn't seem to match up with outside perceptions of your work. For example, three separate professors have said that they don't want to take you on in their lab because it appears that your interests lie elsewhere (which is a nice way of saying they don't feel you were engaged enough in the lab) and/or because it appears you need more mentorship (which is a nice way of saying that they don't think you are independent enough ). The fact that they don't even want to take you on even though they don't have to pay a dime for you is very telling - but telling of what is the question. Is it just that your mom's illness affected your work in ways that you didn't see or realize from the outside? Or is there a kernel of truth independent of your mom's illness? You say you don't understand their comments. Have you asked them what they meant or for concrete examples of this? What about the PhD student who advised you not to join her lab? Was her advice given in a constructive way or a petty way? Are you comfortable enough with her to go back and have a chat about what she thinks you need to improve? Is your mind open enough to hear some constructive criticism about yourself? Quite frankly, grit and determination are not enough. 16-hour days in the lab sounds very stressful, and if you were doing this for days on end while also dealing with your mom's sickness and traveling back and forth, the quality of your work may not have held up. Also - different labs are different, but in most labs you shouldn't have to work 16 hours in the lab to be productive on a regular basis (maybe occasionally, but not forever). Days longer than about 10 hours really aren't sustainable by humans for long periods of time, as studies show that really we can only do about 6-8 hours of productive work before our brain starts switching to other things and we lose productivity. When you're in the lab for a long time, are your days really productive or are you actually spending several of those hours procrastinating? And besides all that, what is the quality of the work that you turn out? 12 hours in the lab won't be important to your PIs if you don't have good work to show for it. I'm not saying you do or don't - I'm just saying examine these as potential reasons they don't want you in their labs. Another possibility, of course, is that this is the kind of program that expects you to sacrifice all personal and family interests in pursuit of Science, and that these professors are part of a culture that embraces that - so they are avoiding you in the lab not because of your work but because you have a sick mom and they don't want a PhD student who has a commitment to caring for her sick mom. It's unlikely this is the case, but it's still a possibility, so examine that as well.

What is your major? It would be the uncommon individual who is equally qualified for a PhD in comparative literature, continental philosophy AND religion...if you're a literature major, for example, you are probably competitive for comp lit PhD programs but not necessarily philosophy or religion. Exceptions would be if you are a double major, are in some interesting individualized major or if your research is at an intersection of the fields (i.e., a philosophy major may get into a PhD program in religion if his research interests are in philosophy of religion). That said, I'd consider not only what your interests are but also what you are qualified to do. If you want to switch fields you may end up having to take additional coursework; you could do that during your senior year or as a post-baccalaureate student if necessary. Secondly, how important location is in your search probably depends on your goals for the PhD and your own personality. IMO, location should be lower on the list if your goal is to be an academic - i.e., a professor at a university or college - with your PhD. The reason is that the humanities are already very, very difficult to find academic employment in, and you greatly raise your chances if you attend one of the top programs in your field (top 25-30ish or so). But the best programs that fit your interests and also have a good reputation in your field may not be in one of those really major cities. For example, Brown is a top-ranked school in comparative literature, but Providence is a rather small city. Purdue, Penn State, and Indiana are also all excellent comp lit programs that are located in small college towns. Obviously you don't want to be anywhere you are going to be miserable (and looking at the comp lit programs, actually most of the top ones are located in or nearby a large city in the U.S.), but consider fit and reputation and program placement alongside location when choosing a program.

When I moved from New York to Seattle last August my company contracted a pet relocation service as part of my relocation package to move my 60 lb. Lab/Boxer mix (Zelda) to Seattle. I was nervous about it because I had not heard good things about flying dogs and Zelda does not like to travel at all. But honestly, she hated the car too (she's stopped hating it so much in the past 9 months), and as much as a 6-hour plane flight would've stressed her out being in a car for 4 days driving cross-country would've been worse. Plus my experience with the relocation company was super-positive and I'd definitely do it again if I had to move across country more than a several hours' drive. Before the big day, the pet relocation company contacted me and gave me a very detailed list of everything I would need to do to prepare Zelda for the trip. I took some measurements so they could purchase a crate for her (that was included in the service). They instructed me to give her a Ziploc baggie of food and to include one of my T-shirts along with her so she had something that smelled like me for the ride. The coordinator also called me on the phone and explained the process to me - probably best of all was that they were flying with a carrier that does pets all the time and had a climate-controlled cargo compartment. Chatting with the coordinator put me more at ease and I felt a bit less apprehensive about it. They sent someone to pick up Zelda the day before the move, and the rep was sweet and Zelda went right with her (impressive, since Zelda's a little wary of new people sometimes). Zelda was waiting for me on the other end when I touched down in Seattle! There was a bit of a snafu and the company had her arrive at my residence 3 hours earlier than I was supposed to arrive, but the rep on the Seattle end stayed with her until I got there. She was obviously very relieved to not be traveling anymore but no worse for the wear. She was anxious for a few days after we arrived, but that could've been for any variety of factors - we were in a brand new apartment in a totally different space, she'd just finished traveling (regardless of the mode), there was a three hour time difference and I had a different schedule. She settled in and adapted pretty quickly.

I have a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon and I had a ThinkPad back in 2004 when they were owned by IBM. They're good, durable computers, and I highly recommend the X1 Carbon personally. But yeah, lots of brands are making good computers these days. Check out Asus, HP, Dell (the XPS line has good reviews, and so does their business-oriented Latitude line) and Toshiba.

A Chromebook isn't an option for you if you want to run statistical software packages directly from your laptop, as none of the ones you mentioned are available for ChromeOS (and a Chromebook won't have the RAM to make this worthwhile). One option is to buy a more powerful desktop computer that runs Windows or Mac OS, and then use a remote desktop client to run SPSS or R or MPlus from your Chromebook. That might be the cheapest way to get what you want - you can get a good solid powerful desktop that costs around $500-700 with everything you need to run intensive statistical software. A good desktop in that range can last you through your entire doctoral program - one because you never have to take it anywhere, and two because most desktops these days are customizable and will allow you to upgrade the processor, video card, hard drive and other components yourself as yours go obsolete. Then you could buy an inexpensive Chromebook - the Asus Chromebook is a good example, as it runs $250. Your total could still be less than buying an ultrabook or a MacBook Pro, which can easily run $1200-1500. But my guess is that if you want to be able to run these programs directly from your laptop you should invest in a more expensive laptop. For running those programs the processor is sort of important but any decent Core i5 should be able to handle it. What you really want is the RAM - and you really want at least 8 GB of it. 4 GB will run the programs but trying to multitask will be a pain in the neck. I have an HP Spectre x360 that I bought for $800; it has a 256 GB SSD, 8 GB of RAM, a touch screen and it's 3.67 lbs (very light). I can't remember what the processor is - it's an i5, probably somewhere around 2.4 GHz. I run Stata on it occasionally and it works absolutely fine for that purpose. Occasionally it hangs if I'm doing something that consumes a lot of RAM like having 26 Firefox tabs open. My work computer rarely does that. My work computer is a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon (issued by my company). It's an excellent work computer - sturdy, reliable, fast, slim and light, even lighter than my Spectre at 2.87 lbs (the new ones are like 2.6 lbs). It's an excellent workhorse computer - spill-resistant backlit keyboard, fingerprint scanner for easy login, durable construction, long battery life (they advertise 10 hours. I call bullshit - I've used it in the labs before to take notes and have forgotten to plug it in, and it usually dies well before the end of a 9-hour day in the labs. But I can get 6-7 hours out of it). They're not cheap, though; they start at $1150. However, the $1150 configuration is probably everything you need (it has 128 GB of space on the SSD, which is not great, but you can use OneDrive or some other online cloud storage solution. You get 1 TB of OneDrive storage when you get an Office 365 subscription.) Our last iteration of work machines were Asus Zenbooks, I believe, and people seemed to like those as well. I have heard decent things about the Dell XPS 13, and those are less expensive; you can get a decently configured one for $1000. A Surface Pro 4 would be the lightest option and turns into a tablet, but that's not cheap - the lowest configuration you'd likely need to run those programs would be $1300 and that's not including the Type Cover (which I think is $100-130). I have a bias towards Windows machines - I really like the Windows 10 operating system - but Apple makes excellent computers as well. Towards the end of graduate school and in my postdoc I had an Apple MacBook Pro - one of the non-Retina ones that was about 5 lbs. The newer ones are much slimmer and lighter, and have the processing power that you need to do what you want to do. I ran R and SPSS on that computer just fine. And yeah, external DVD drives are cheap - I bought one for $40 when I needed to use one - so don't base the computer on these.

Follow the money! The Canadian universities are good, too.

A good 2 to 3 bedroom apartment? I'm skeptical. I'm from Atlanta, which is far cheaper than Philadelphia as far as housing prices go, and you can't even get a good 2-3 bedroom apartment in Atlanta for $600-700 a month. At minimum in Atlanta, you're going to pay around $900-1000 per month for that much. Poking around on Craigslist and Apartments.com I did find some decent two-bedroom apartments relatively close to the university for $1000-1500 a month. It's harder to find one in the $800-1000 range, and there are few to none in the immediate area of the university that I saw, but there are some in Philly overall that you might be able to commute to. The only 2-bedroom apartments I saw that were less than $800 a month were in Camden. (And this is assuming you want your kids to share a room.) Like I said in my first post - it's not a question of whether it's possible, because it certainly is; there are millions of families in the U.S. who live in expensive areas of the country on very little. The OP's question was whether or not she'd be poor, and the reality of it is as a single mom with two kids on $30K in Philadelphia, yes, she'd be very close to poor. My cousin raises two small children in the suburbs just outside of Philly (on the NJ side) on more than that, and it's a struggle for her sometimes - and she's got lots of family support in the area (free childcare for her kids in the form of her mother and our aunts; all three of her brothers live in the area and have children; we have lots of other family and friends there). It's a personal choice for the OP, of course, but she won't be living a middle-class lifestyle on $30K with two young children in Philadelphia.

If tuition and years are not primary factors, what are your primary factors? What are your career goals? I was chatting with a friend who is a master's-educated LPC yesterday. I asked her if she ever wanted to get a doctoral degree; she was telling me in our current state it wouldn't make sense since she can make good money with the MA and the reimbursement rates for a doctoral degree aren't that much higher. But if she moved to another nearby state, she'd want to go back and get the doctoral degree because the licensing requirements are different there and there's a much bigger gap between reimbursement rates for the MA and the PhD/PsyD. So I'd think that's probably the biggest thing - where do you want to work, and what kind of pay gap is there between doctoral degree holders and MSW holders there? And do you care about that? Do you want to be able to, say, adjunct teach a few classes at a four-year college in the future? If money were no object and I didn't care about the number of years it would take me, then I personally wouldn't see a reason not to choose the PsyD - having the doctoral degree will objectively net you a larger income in all 50 states and will give you flexibility of practice. There are lots of agencies and hospitals that want doctorally-prepared psychologists. The prestige factor doesn't really matter if you want to go into clinical practice; neither social work nor clinical practice is a very prestige-focused field. I'd imagine most people aren't really aware of where their psychologists went to graduate school, and unless you want to do research or work at a prestigious hospital I'd imagine it wouldn't matter there either (and even if it did, a couple years of solid work experience might eliminate that concern anyway).

It doesn't matter whether you made the decision on April 1 or April 15 - that's why the deadline exists. It's the last day you can decide, but that doesn't mean you have to do so before then. I agree with @rising_star that since you already committed this is kind of a moot question now. But it really depends on your field. In some fields (philosophy comes to mind) it is not uncommon for people to get two or all three degrees in the same department at the same university, possibly because the undergrad departments that prepare someone well enough for graduate school in philosophy - and also spark a love in people to study philosophy at the doctoral level - are the ones with the best doctoral programs. In other fields it's not very common but it's not frowned upon as long as the graduate department is solid and/or there's a good explanation for why someone might stay there. In one of my fields (psychology) if someone stayed at Michigan or Stanford or UCSB for all three degrees, no one would question why - these are excellent programs in psychology. Also, let's say someone wanted to stay at a mid-ranked program because there's a great advisor there for their interests, or they've already got a solid program of research going, or they felt like they could accomplish more of them stayed. That could be a good reason, too, especially if they are quite productive in graduate school. Where it maybe becomes a problem is if it appears you stayed for comfort or familiarity but there's a mismatch between your interests and the school's, or you don't produce, or the school's ranking isn't very good. So how good is BGSU in your field? The NRC rankings are so dated now (they were compiled in 2005, and released in 2010) but they seem to indicate that BGSU is a middling program, with professors in the field having a quite variable view of it (the R-ranking range is from 14 to 82).

Yeah, on a PhD stipend of $30K with two kids in Philadelphia, you'd be low-income. You'd be low-income even if it was just you. Philadelphia isn't the most expensive city in the U.S., but it's still pretty expensive. A couple of sources say that the average rent for a 2-bedroom apartment in Philadelphia is around $1500/month. I don't know what a 3-bedroom would be from there - I'm not as intimately familiar with rents in Philadelphia - but I'd imagine the average would be closer to $1700-2000/month, which would be almost your entire stipend. However, I'm looking on Craigslist now and see 3-bedrooms in the Penn/Drexel neighborhood listed for lower than that, so hopefully you can chat with someone from Philadelphia or who has done school there and get a better grasp on real rents in the area - try the Philadelphia forum in the City Guide. Also, health insurance in the U.S. is expensive. Your funding may cover health insurance for you, but you would have to purchase supplemental coverage for your children (unless your university is more generous than mine). You may be able to go through the school for that or you may have to purchase it on the market. Teaching is usually included in the stipend. It's done partially in exchange - you do some teaching and some research. Now, would you be able to live? There are many many families in the U.S. who live in our expensive cities on $30,000 a year. But by and large, they struggle. For reference the poverty line in the U.S. for a family of 3 is just over $20K per year, and families become eligible for a lot of benefits in the U.S. (health insurance, food assistance, etc.) at 133% of the poverty line, which is around $26K. You'd be making just over that. But that line is an average for the entire country - including our lower-cost and rural regions. And it's generally acknowledged that the U.S. poverty line is too low.

Well, I think it depends on when and how you turn down the offer. Did you already tell them that you can attend next year and are now reneging on that agreement? Then yes, you will hurt your chances of getting accepted in the future; the program is going to wonder why you made that choice, and whether you'd do it again. The only time it wouldn't is if you have some serious issues to deal with - illness, military service, caring for elderly relatives - that weren't apparent issues before. If you haven't already accepted them this year, then it shouldn't change your prospects in the future too much. You can just send them a short note saying that although they were your first-choice program, you're unfortunately unable to attend graduate school at all this year, and you hope to reapply in the future because you are very excited about the prospect of working with XXX on YYY. You might include the reason if you think it's compelling, but it should be serious. Some programs do and some programs don't. I would imagine most departments keep a record back a few years (actually - I think FERPA might require them to keep your application on file for 3 years after you apply). Even if they don't, they still might remember your name. It's impossible to tell, and it probably varies from program to program. Some programs may not care that you rejected the offer especially if it worked out in the end, or if you had a serious reason for not coming. But applying to the same school but a different program - that won't make a difference. The different program wouldn't even know you applied.

I don't think it would matter either inside or outside of academia - both of them are pretty similar. The comms & media degree might give you a broader range of things to teach later.

Well, no, you haven't been consistent. In the first post you made you said But then you say But in the very next sentence: Even in your last post you list a bunch of different criteria ("salary, funding opportunities, employment goals, employment hubs (cities) etc. ") and then say only two criteria are important. I'm saying this not to be pedantic, but for anyone following the thread - because I really do think that more than two criteria are important and that how to decide what program you attend is going to vary a lot across fields and on your personal and career goals.

What do you hope to gain from telling the school this? "Value" you more? In what way? Also, I think this comes from the fallacy that private schools (and schools in a specific athletic conference) are "better" than public schools. In my two fields, UCLA, UNC-Chapel Hill, Michigan, UW-Seattle, UW-Madison, Minnesota, UT-Austin, and Virginia are better than several Ivies and other privates.

What are your goals? What about your field? As was already pointed out, in some fields it's worth it to borrow the extra money to go to a top school because it's far easier to get a job from those top schools than from lower-ranked schools, or the salary differential is so large that it makes sense to borrow. In other fields, it simply doesn't matter - the pay and opportunities don't differ so it doesn't make sense to borrow. What kind of field is your field? Not necessarily - it depends on the amount of debt. Speech-language pathologists tend to make in the $50-60K range, so borrowing - say - $120K wouldn't make financial sense. Norms and specifics mean basically opposite things. There are field-specific norms, which I think is what you are getting at, but that's why people were disagreeing with the statement that decision-making criteria should be constant across schools. What you said in your last post is essentially the opposite of what you said in the first one you made.

Many excellent departments do this for statistics and math courses (and probably for computer science courses, although I don't know for sure). In many statistics departments, for example, graduate classes are simply accelerated versions of undergrad classes. At some departments, they are cross-listed (so the undergrads register for STAT 4360 and the graduate students register for STAT 6360, but it's the exact same class at the same time in the same classroom with the same professor). And in other departments - like Columbia's, for example - they don't even bother to do this; the graduate students and undergrads BOTH register for STAT 4360. There are lots of top statistics departments in which first-year students are sitting in the same classroom as the advanced undergraduates. To be frank, there's not a whole lot separating a senior statistics major and a first-year master's student in statistics; there's even less separating a senior statistics major and a first-year master's student with a background in the social sciences who doesn't have a strong stats background. In fact, the edge goes to the undergrad. One quick glance at Chicago's course catalog reveals them as a latter case: the graduate course listings in statistics go from 30000 to 45000 level; 30000-level classes are advanced undergraduate and lower-level graduate student classes. The bachelor's paper, which is typically the highest-numbered undergrad class, is numbered in the 29000 range. As for the intro math stuff, like linear algebra and introductory programming - the other alternative is to simply require it as a prerequisite, which most MA programs in statistics do. They're clearly trying to lower the barrier to entry, so they just require you to take it in your first year instead and increase the overall credit requirement (many comparable MA programs require around 30 credits and this one sounds closer to 36). The program is aimed at social scientists without the background in math/stats and computer science; the idea seems to bring them up to speed in the latter area to enable them to be data scientists who work with social data. You use the basic statistical and CS fundamentals to do the analysis and the expertise in the social sciences to make interpretations and draw insights that can be of use to organizations. Also, co-authoring is the name of the game in the sciences - a co-authored paper with an established scientist is a good thing. My master's thesis was a co-authored paper that I later published in a scientific journal. That is BETTER than a single-authored thesis that never sees the outside of the stacks. There's nothing about this program that raises a red flag for me. I think the only concern is putting the program in its proper context. The basic curriculum of the program won't make you a data scientist capable of competing for data science jobs at top tech firms; it doesn't have the level of CS or stats necessary to do that. The stated goal seems to be to turn out quantitative social scientists who can manipulate and analyze very large social data sets and make interpretations. Think more analyst at the Census Bureau or economist at the World Bank than data scientist at Google. Given the name of the program, I'd imagine most comers would already know that, though, and that's how they are marketing it. I also just want to mention that a program being a 'cash cow' (i.e., a professional program mostly funded by loans or student self-pay, with little to no financial aid) doesn't necessarily make it an objectively bad program academically or professionally.

There's nothing fundamentally wrong with asking for more money, but $700 a year is less than $60 a month (or less than $80 a month on a 9-month stipend). In the grand scheme of things that's not really enough to be worth the hassle of trying to negotiate differences, especially if the school that offered you slightly less is the one you reallyan wt to go.

I'd say that your listed advantages of bigger names/more experienced professors are generally true, but the listed ones for younger/less experiences professors are more of a mixed bag. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that I don't think they're really that true - it really depends on the level of the professor herself and her own personality. For example, I think there's a marked difference between a mid-career associate professor who was awarded tenure maybe 2-3 years ago, but is still trying for national reputation or promotion to full professor (or who has to fund part of their salary with grants) and a full professor near the end of their career. And even then, there was a famous professor emeritus in my department who could go toe to toe with any of the young whippersnappers coming in on new developments in the field. He was still very research active, and still took on students, and was basically emeritus in name only. I've had more experienced mentors who were slowing down a bit and I've had more experienced mentors who published a lot, very often, very quickly. Luckily that is the kind of thing that you can check out. Look for the more experienced professor's recent publications and grant work - what has she done in the last 5 years? You can check out NIH RePORTER or the NSF website to see what grants she's been awarded when and on what. Chat with her students and they should be able to tell you how productive she is and her expectations for work. They should also be able to tell you how connected she is to the current pulse of the field. My primary advisor in graduate school was a new up-and-comer in the field who had been hired in the 2-3 years prior to me beginning the program. He went up for tenure the year I finished my dissertation and graduated (my university had a long tenure clock). I had an overall positive experience with him as a mentor, with some notes. He was trying to get tenure at a university that historically denies tenure to most assistant professors they hire and also requires professors to pay the majority of their salary on grants, so he was very "hungry" so to speak. As a result, there were always papers and grants being written in the research group, and I had the opportunity to observe these processes up close and see how it was done. When I graduated from grad school, I felt like I had a really, really good handle on the business of academia and what needed to be done in order to succeed in a postdoc and secure a tenure-track position, as well as a bit of what getting tenure looked like at a top R1. (In fact, my view may have been too good, because I resolutely did not want to do what he did.) My mentor was also a warm, personable person and pretty good at transmitting advice and feedback to students, so I felt like his mentorship in certain areas - like the improvement of my writing and thinking as a scholar - were pretty good. The other side of this, though, is that young hungry assistant professors are also very very busy. Yes, all professors are busy, but assistant professors in the middle of their tenure cycle (where your professor will be, should you choose to attend her school) are busy in a way that affects them differently psychically. They spend the first couple of years struggling to put together a research group big enough to sustain the fast clip of work they want to do, potentially transforming dissertation and postdoc work into papers, and getting their research program off the ground. And the next couple of years after that are a panoply of travel as they have to establish a national reputation (at top departments, at least) to get tenure and elicit good external letters of rec from the field. I remember my advisor basically going from trip to trip to trip with a couple days or maybe a week on the ground in between. (I felt bad for him. He seemed very tired.) And in my last year, he was preparing his tenure file and making plans, so...yes. I imagine it's probably very emotionally exhausting to be so worried about your own career and then have to turn around and try to develop the career of someone else, especially when you yourself are not so much farther along than they are. The lack of experience also shows in different ways. Everyone has to learn on someone and I was independent enough that I didn't mind being the guinea pig, but my advisor essentially had no frame of reference for getting people out into the job market or what you needed to do to be successful other than his own very, very atypical application process. Experienced advisors who have graduated dozens of students have more perspective. And then there's always the spectre of what if they don't get tenure? What will you do? If the tenure clock is normal at your school (~6 years) then you may be just about halfway through the program when your advisor has to leave if she doesn't get tenure. Will you still want to be in that department if she does not? For all of these reasons, I always advise students considering working with an untenured assistant professor to adopt a more experienced mentor - formally or informally - as a secondary person. Due to the nature of my program I had to have a secondary mentor and mine was a big name in the field and a very experienced person. There are many advantages to having an experienced, well-known professor in your corner. Grants, papers, postdocs, networking...all of it. Even clout within the department of getting things done - there were a few times during which mentioning my second mentors name made things magically happen. So at Program B, is there another experienced mentor you can identify as someone you might want to work with? The research fit doesn't have to be perfect; it just needs to be someone you feel like you can get to know, maybe work on a paper or two with, and who might be in your corner, go to bat for you, write you recommendation letters when the time comes, etc.

Psychology is my field, and while I don't have intimate knowledge of either of these programs, I do know that UCR's psychology department and doctoral program are way better reputed than GWU's. I would definitely choose UCR.