juilletmercredi

It's a pragmatic and feasible plan, and there are worse things than getting an MS for tuition remission. That said, I do want to chime that it's sometimes harder (psychologically speaking, but also in real terms) to leave a PhD program than most people think. First of all, since the focus is on the PhD and not the MS sometimes it can take slightly longer for students to finish the requirements to do the non-terminal MS than 2 years. For example, it took me 3, although admittedly I wasn't motivated to finish my master's essay and complete all the requirements in less so I took/did them in a different order than I might do if I was. Also, Corvallis is a pretty low cost of living area relatively speaking, and has a huge HP plant, some smaller tech companies, and is apparently pretty well connected to the tech world (chapters of national tech orgs often have a chapter there). So I don't think it would be a bad idea to get a relatively low-cost master's from Oregon State and then leave the program if you couldn't get funding and pursue industry or another PhD program. Frankly, it would be like doing a terminal master's somewhere else, except that at the other place you might not get the tuition remission! And of course there is always the good chance that you do find funding of your own somehow. Normally I would say don't attend a PhD program without funding - especially if you think that you can improve your profile (or that luck of the draw just struck you out) and you can get in next year, and especially having only applied to 6 PhD programs this round. But if your decision would be to attend an MS program anyway, it's not a terrible idea.

Well if Bowling Green isn't a great fit, the resources they have kind of don't matter, right? They're not resources that will help you much because they don't match what you want to do. This one is probably going to be much more a personal choice than anything else. You do have tuition remission at the New School, which is decent - you'd only have to scrounge up living expenses. "Only" of course is a relative term; living in New York is not cheap. But you already live there with your partner. If they are willing to support you through 5-6 years of graduate school, then that could be a viable option for you - and it does come with the psychological and social peace of mind that living with your partner brings. One could argue that you have to entertain the worst case scenarios - what if you and your partner split up, what if your partner loses their job - but frankly, couples make all kinds of financial decisions on a daily basis that take into account both of their finances and assume that things will continue on as necessary. So I'll elaborate on my earlier post by saying that I personally would not want to attend a program without funding, but I don't necessarily think it's a bad choice given your circumstances, and especially given the prominence of the New School in social research. To me, another niggle is that the length of the New School is so long - "five years but probably longer." What is the probably longer, and why? That's just a longer period of time that you have to support yourself and potentially borrow (although by the time you finish coursework and are taking exams or writing your dissertation, you may be able to earn some extra money by working part-time and/or adjunct teaching at the many colleges around the New York area). How does Temple compare to the NS? You say that Temple is the best choice given the fit - is the fit better than the NS? My now-husband and I did long-distance during part of my doctoral program between NYC and central NJ. It's really no trouble at all to get from New York to Philadelphia; you could do it every weekend even if neither of you has a car. And once you got to the dissertation phase you could move to New York if you wanted to, and live with your partner and only commute in weekly or less to meet with your advisor. There are tons of graduate students in the Northeast Corridor with these kinds of arrangements!

I went to Mailman for my PhD. I knew a couple people in dual degree programs there, including one in the MPH/MSW. You're wait listed at UW for the MSW - what are the odds you get off that wait list? I think right now your only viable option is Columbia. It's more so just thinking about it in case you are taken off the wait list at UW. Columbia is a good place to go for mental health and health disparities for sure. New York is also a much more diverse city, which will be important for your practica/field work expereinces if these are your interests. I think Seattle would be a better city to be a grad student in, partially because of cost. (I've lived in both.) What is the chance that you can get in-state tuition at UW for your second year? Do they do that? I'd find that out. Both Columbia and OOS tuition at UW are very expensive for a career as a social worker.

Meh, it varies from school to school. First of all, as others have pointed out, programs vary in whether they want or allow new professors to take on students. Second of all, professors themselves vary on whether they actually want to mentor. Even if they want to, mentoring a doctoral student is VERY time-consuming, and if tenure is difficult at the university the new professor may want the first 1-2 years to put some extra work in on the book manuscript and get the preps down for the classes they are teaching. I would not say that new hires take more students; in my experience, it is the mid-career professors who tend to have the most students (aka tenured associates and early full professors). That said, I agree with the above advice. Contact this professor, mention that you were disappointed that you didn't get to meet with him during visit day but you'd like the opportunity to chat with him about his work and the program as a prospective student before you make a final decision. Only after you talk to the POI do I feel you can really make a decision.

FWIW I don't think selectivity of a program, or competitiveness, really matters. Those are inputs. What you are interested in is outputs. A program could admit 50% of its applicants because it's a small niche program with a self-selecting group of applicants, but 100% of its graduates get jobs within 3 months of graduation and they all make good money. So IMO, ignore "selectivity", which is usually measured in terms of acceptance rate. Ask instead about placement rate and starting salary and what people do after. They sometimes overlap but they are not 100% correlated. As for the salaries - I think the issue here is that because there are so many things you can do with QMSS, there is no one "expected" starting salary. You could end up as an analyst at a small NYC nonprofit making $55K or you could end up as an associate economist at a large multinational making $75K. It also depends a lot on the skills you come into the program with and the concentration you take - someone who knew how to program ahead of time and took the data science concentration might have higher-paying job opportunities than someone who is concentrating more on very applied social science type stuff. With a one-year program I'm betting a lot of job searching is going to be pretty dependent on already held competencies.

This did not happen to me personally, but I do know some people to which it happened. They had HM, but were told a few weeks later that they were offered a fellowship. We assumed that it was because some of the awardees turned it down to take other awards. I don't know anything about the practice or general guidelines for this, though - it sounds like it's completely a waiting game, and it depends entirely on how close you were to being awarded and how many people in your broad area turn down awards. (I'd be willing to guess, for example, that those in the physical sciences probably are more likely to have this happen to them than those in the social sciences, since there are more funding opportunities for the former than the latter.)

So things change from year to year. In 2015 you may have been one of their strongest candidates even with 18 hours left to finish, and they may have been glad to have you as a conditional admit with funding. In 2016, the competition may have ramped up and now you were more borderline. Also, it's very unlikely that the department chair has unilateral decision-making power. He may have been very excited about you as a candidate, but he may have been overstating his ability to get you into the program last year. He may really have anticipated you getting an interview in October once he received your application, and then had an "oh crap" moment when they saw the caliber of the applicants in January or whatever and realized they wouldn't extend you an interview. Maybe you did, indeed, get preference as a veteran but the preference wasn't enough to overcome the fact that there were stronger applicants than you. This really isn't a bait and switch. At worst, it's a chair that got a bit overexcited and made some promises that he couldn't keep.

History (and indeed, the humanities in general) is not my field. However, I've gotten the impression from acquaintances that exact advisor research fit is far less important there than in the sciences and experimental social sciences, since the work is more independent and the resources for it are less dependent on your advisor and their research group. I've gotten the impression that the important part is your advisor's relationship with you and ability and desire to guide you at a decently high level in your research. I would talk to someone actually in the humanities for more guidance on that. Also, humanities scholars will get no shortage of teaching experience if they want it. There are lots of universities and colleges in the general Research Triangle area that you could adjunct teach at when the time comes to get experience, and I'm willing to bet that there are lots of intro classes at UNC waiting to be taught. To be frank, teaching less (especially in the beginning) might be a good thing for you - it'll help you finish faster. You can discuss that with someone in the department for more details, obviously. But my thoughts are - particularly if you're interested in an academic career at all - the reputation of your program and department is going to one of the more important factors when it comes to landing post-PhD opportunities. So if one program is significantly better-reputed than the other, I'd think hard about whether there was a way for you to get close to what you want at the top program. (If they're pretty close to each other, of course, then other factors come into play.)

Glad to help! Yes, you can use my feedback to help future applicants. Keep in mind that my opinions are my own and don't necessarily reflect NSF's or all the reviewers' - they're simply my perspective having participated in the process.

I wouldn't take an offer from a school without full funding, especially not in NYC. Even if your partner can support you, that puts a financial strain on you that's unnecessary, and also - as the above comment pointed out - students who are fully funded sometimes get better attention. I feel like we need a bit more information - what are the differences between Temple and Bowling Green? Why do you feel like you are walking away from good research at BGSU - did you have a better research fit there?

Congratulations to all of the new NSF fellows and to those of you who got Honorable Mention! I had an NSF myself in graduate school (2010-2013). This year, I had the pleasure of giving back to the program by serving as a reviewer It was certainly interesting viewing the process from the other side. There are many things about the reviewing process we're not supposed to talk about, but we can give high-level information and advice. As for getting good comments but still not getting the award - I know, that sucks. The truth is two-fold: 1) Some reviewers simply write more detailed and helpful comments than others; we are encouraged to give information that will help the student improve their proposal for a second application. I tried my best to give the kind of feedback I would want as an applicant; I think my comments were a bit longer than average. and 2) I know it sounds cliche, but there really are simply many more really good quality applications than NSF can give funding to. Sometimes there's truly nothing wrong with your app; it's just that enough people had even better apps (even slightly better) that they got the award instead. There has to be a cutoff somewhere Also, yes, we have a lot of applications to review and not a whole lot of time to do it. I'd say most people spent more than 5-7 minutes. I think I spent an average of 30 minutes per application. And...if you look at the timeline, this is happening during the winter holidays Yes, please spoon feed! Bolding, underlining, highlighting out sections, it ALL HELPS. Make it really easy for reviewers to find relevant parts of your application. Think of them skimming through your app quickly in between bites of lunch before class or while jumping around between sections when referring back to itto improve their notes or while adjusting their ratings or whatever. People miss things. I would say that's both true and untrue. It's untrue in the sense that there doesn't seem to be systematic bias against people who took time off, and in fact non-traditional routes can be highly valued. It's true in the sense that unfortunately non-traditional students may also be evaluated (consciously or unconsciously) differently - for example, on the basis of what they did in the interim time they took off. I think in that sense it's somewhat similar to other types of unconscious bias. Publications and how they are weighted will vary by field - basically how common is it for people in your field to have publications at your stage of the game? Remember, too, that the NSF applicants are probably on average more accomplished/competitive than the average doctoral student. That said, you certainly don't have to have publications to win an NSF; I'd wager most of them don't. (I didn't have any when I won mine.) This is really going to be an individual decision, I think, and it depends on the quality and strength of your application in other ways. But IMO I would say it's a good idea to include a recommendation from your advisor in your current program, even if you don't know them very well. First of all, there are early impressions that your advisor can give of you that can be useful for reviewers trying to make decisions. Second, that recommendation can signal support from your program and advisor. Since the Intellectual Merit criteria includes you being reviewed on the potential to succeed in graduate study, and support from the department and your graduate advisor are crucial for that, it can be a good idea to display that. (However, if you've got three really strong references from undergrad and you don't want to displace one, I would say don't. It's really a variable thing, and it can work either way.)

Top 25 is still plenty good; I think you should attend the program that makes you happy, especially if they are offering you a financial incentive to attend.

What's the stipend like for the NYU program? I went to graduate school in New York and frankly, I wouldn't want to do it on less than around $25K a year. But otherwise it's a fun city to be a student in if you like cities and you don't mind living frugally. It gets a little old after several years (or at least it did for me - around year 5 it started grating on me to live in tiny spaces for a lot of money), but there are so many positives you get in return for the small spaces. And there are still some places in the city that you have a little more room if you are willing to spend a bit more time on the subway (Washington Heights and Inwood, plus some neighborhoods in Queens and Brooklyn).

First of all, don't go where you have no funding. If Alabama is funding you and Case is not, then your choice is clear - go to Alabama. Since you haven't heard back from Case about funding, I would wait until you do at least. Second of all, you want to go where you have support and feel happy. This is both career preparation and a significant chunk of your life. To me, contact and the way a program treats you ahead of time can be a definite signal - if the advisor at Case can't even be bothered with you to try and woo you to attend, what will she be like when you attend? Of course, there are many other reasons why she may not have reached out more, but it is a bit of a yellow flag IMO. On the other hand, you have an advisor who feels strongly enough about you to work on your behalf to find funding and fly you out, plus invite you to have dinner with his family. This is more along the lines of a professor who will work his networks for you and find money to send you to conferences or get you equipment you may need. Thirdly, you've already said that the advisor you met with has given you evidence of Alabama's success - with tangible examples of program graduates' placement. Nearly all have TT or industry positions within a year; that's an excellent track record particularly for a social science PhD program. The name of the university of your PhD doesn't matter so much as the reputation of the program from which you graduated. If the ranking list source is the NRC, those programs were last ranked in 2005 so if the program was created after that that's why it's not there. That's no indication of its quality. So go to Alabama and be happy!

I'd lean towards University of Chicago, for a couple of reasons: 1) If you think you might want a PhD, having two years to forge connections and gain a network of professors who can write letters for you is a good thing. Also, all CSS students write a thesis in the form of a scientific article with a faculty member; that's harder to do in a one-year MA program. 2) You say that you have no background in programming or databases. The CSS program is in the Computation department and has more formal coursework in programming, machine learning, pattern recognition and visualization. The QMSS program has a data science concentration that you can follow, but it doesn't have required coursework in programming - you'd have to add that on your own, if you could. This kind of coursework would be especially useful for either of the two routes you think you might pursue. The fact that this is the first year of the program doesn't really matter - if this was a PhD program you could be more concerned, but given that it's an MA program and Chicago has a pretty good reputation in both the social sciences and CS, I wouldn't worry.

Think about it: Will the name recognition make a difference if you are $100K in debt? Over the first 10 years of your career, do you think that Northwestern's degree will be worth at least $100K more (about $10K per year)? I say 10 years because that tends to be standard repayment. That's not including interest. Moreover, particularly in a field like SLP (which gives a decent middle-class income but nothing stratospheric), how can you expect to repay $100K worth of debt? Moreover, you have people in the field actively telling you to choose Elmhurst. In some (many!) field, prestige and name recognition simply doesn't matter.

Public health is my field. I also went to a public health program that only offered funding for the first 2-3 years and then expected students to find their own - it's quite common in the field. I got fellowships that covered the rest; most students did find TA or RAships or grant aid to cover the rest. (I'm also skeptical about UNC's program being a four-year program - I would ask for average time to degree.) 1) What's most important is going to vary from person to person as well as your goals. Personally, I think funding is the chief concern, followed closely by advising, research focus/opportunities, and program faculty/reputation (in that order). Student atmosphere, work opportunities near school, and location/weather/climate all come next - although in what order I think will depend on your personality. Before doing graduate school I would've said location doesn't matter. Having finished graduate school, I have changed my mind on that, and I think it's important to be happy during your grad school years. Work opportunities also changes in importance depending on what you want to do. If you know that you want academia 100% then they're less important, but more realistically speaking most PhD students should prepare a Plan B. So I think opportunities for internships, consulting, and part-time jobs nearby the school are really important - particularly in public health. I firmly know that my experiences helped me get a non-academic job after graduating with mine. That said, all three of your locations have good solid offerings in most of the important areas (Minnesota's climate may not be quite so desirable, though). 2) Yes. I don't think it makes sense to go into six-figure debt when you have two funded top 10 offers. 3) Average time to degree. How long do students take to graduate? What's the range? Post graduation placement. Where do students end up after they graduate? Academia? Government? Private sector? Ask about short-term and long-term. (If they don't know, that's a red flag IMO. Advisors should at the very least know where their students have gone.) Casually ask the students about their perception of post-second-year funding and the ease of getting this. Ask several different students to get different perspectives. Sometimes the faculty have an inflated view of how "easy" it is to get funding after the second year, OR they think arrangements that are unacceptable to students are perfectly fine. The converse can be true, too, though. Take note of the student atmosphere yourself and ask the graduate students what they feel the atmosphere is like. Do they all seem to know each other? Do they interact positively with each other? Do they collaborate with each other on research projects and studying for exams? Where are the advanced students (years 4 and up)? Do they disappear from the department or are they generally around until the end? (One thing I didn't notice when I visited my program that I learned quickly is that 4+ year students tended to go ghost - because they were working, writing at home, sometimes not even living in New York anymore. This can create a void in your department when it comes to seeking peer mentorship.) Ask the students about their opinion of the professors in the department and their mentorship. Is the department more "sink or swim" or is there more guidance? What is faculty teaching like? Ask both students and professors about their professionalization and career development opportunities in the department - both from your potential advisor but also at large. What you want to listen for is 1) what do they say is offered, but also 2) is there a big discrepancy between how much career development the faculty think they are doing and what the students feel like they are doing? That's at least a yellow flag. How much flexibility do you have in taking other courses outside of public health? For example, if you wanted to do a concurrent MA in statistics, or a certificate in computer science, or take some French or Wolof classes, how hard/easy is it to do that? How is work outside the department actually perceived? What about non-academic work? Do professors frown on you doing an internship with a nearby think tank? What about a private sector company? Are they academic purists who believe the only worthwhile work is university teaching? If you would like to explore non-academic work you should avoid places like that, or at least know that you have to keep your interest on the DL while you're there. 3) What should I ask/look out for as I visit the schools "in person"?

It sounds like you are leaning towards B, so I'd go there. I agree with TakeruK's characterization of what makes a new assistant professor different from a full professor. There are pros and cons in each situation, and what matters more than the rank itself is the personality and character of the individual doing the mentoring. One thing to note, though, is that new assistant professors tend to be very busy, especially when they hit mid-stream for their tenure file. My primary advisor in graduate school was an assistant professor who was on his third year (out of eight) on the tenure track when I started graduate school; he went up for tenure the same year I wrote my dissertation. He's a great person, warm, friendly, and generally attempts to be helpful. However, he was completely distracted as time went on. Particularly at top-tier research universities, assistant professors in the mid-years of their tenure stream tend to travel a lot as they attempt to set up a national reputation for themselves (often a criterion upon which they are judged), and then in the later years they are trying to push out the last of their papers and gather file materials. If you are independent, motivated, driven, and have a good idea of the professionalization you need to do to get where you want to go, that can be good for you - you can hop on all those papers, organize symposia, tag along at conferences and generally ride the train with your advisor. If you don't - and you need a little more guidance - this can be...not so great. (I thought that I was in the former, but it turns out that I was actually somewhere in the middle.) Likewise, being funded for fewer years can be positive in a twisted way. In my doctoral program I was only funded for the first three years, with the expectation that I would bring in a grant or fellowship to cover the rest. It made me very motivated to apply out, and it made me start thinking very early about the grant/money machine that is academia. your thinking when you graduate and go to a postdoc is very different if you've had to work to cobble together support (much the way a professor does) than if you've just relied on a fellowship for 5 years. (That said, I wouldn't necessarily wish that on anyone as they are trying to get through a PhD program. More funding is almost always better!) My secondary advisor in graduate school was a full professor who was pretty much exactly what you described - experienced, easygoing, had generally lower expectations. He had a sort of laissez-faire glide about it, and a lot of clout in the department and in the field in general, which was really helpful on a large scale. On the other hand, he had far fewer active projects going on in his research group to work on. And although he had published prolifically in the past, his publication clip was slower - so there wasn't a lot for me to co-author with him (we did get one thing out together). Also, he spent 2 of the 6 years I was in my program on sabbatical. (One was a fake sabbatical - he was around and available, he just happened to be writing a book and not teaching any classes. The second one was a real sabbatical, which ALSO just happened to be the same year I was writing my dissertation. So yeah, in my dissertation year I had one advisor who was AWOL trying to get tenure and another who was on sabbatical and literally not physically present or easily reachabe for 9 months. FUN.) Anyway, coming back around full circle, it sounds like you want B and like B is a good fit for you in a lot of ways. So go to B.

This is just my opinion. I think both programs would get you to jobs that you would enjoy, given your interests. I would lean towards the Columbia program if your main emphasis/interest is in the social sciences part, you really want to learn more about integrating social science interpretations/applications to the quantitative analysis you're building, and you feel like you already have a pretty solid foundation in statistics and CS (or are confident you can build these skills on your own). I'd lean more towards the NYU program if you want to focus more hardcore on the data science part, including more theoretical work in statistics and probability; if you think you may be interested in private sector work maybe in the future, or want the flexibility of choosing; or you feel like your stats chops could use some improvement. For context, I went to Columbia and heavily considered the QMSS program myself before deciding instead to get a PhD in a different but related field. (IF there was a QMSS PhD program, I would've been all over that!) The QMSS program seems really focused on social sciences who want to develop their statistics and research methods skills to the point where they could be The Research/Stats Person on a team of social scientists - but not really a statistician or data scientist. It's kind of evident in the alumni profiles they have - an associate economist at a public interest business think tank; an analyst at the Bureau of Economic Analysis; a senior fund analyst at an investment bank; an analyst in NYC's social services department. Essentially it prepares you for roles in which you'll be doing a lot of quantitative analysis in a social science context - hence the name. Could you go be a number cruncher at the World Bank or UN? Maybe, especially if you already have SQL and analysis experience. Could you be a data scientist at a crowdfunding site or a hospital or another social services agency? Eh. Unless you developed a significantly broader set of coursework during the MA program - to include more programming and coursework in the statistics department focused on big data, maybe some in the CS or OR departments focused on machine learning and data mining - they might go with a statistics MA or CS MA over you.* NYU's program is more focused on building competency in statistics (mostly applied, although I see some theoretical coursework in there) and some computer science. The focus is much more on coursework that's directly relevant to manipulating and analyzing big data. The choices of electives are more spread out in field that are directly relevant to that, too - general CS, large-scale computation, bioinformatics, mathematical finance, business analytics. But the only social sciences classes that are approved are ones that are very directly relevant to analysis (like econometrics for economics, measurement theory in psychology, quantitative analysis in political science and sociology). There's less of that "for the social sciences" woven in, and I'd be willing to bet a lot of money that most of the applied examples in your coursework will be primarily business, computer science, or maybe biomedical/biotechnology related. Very few will be social science-related, most likely. I'd also imagine that the peer groups are much different: the NYU students are going to be more focused on finding data science jobs in industry (probably primarily tech), whereas the QMSS students will be all over the map but probably much more likely to want to find public sector or public interest work post-graduation. That makes a difference - not only in encouragement and social capital amongst your peers, but in the kinds of speakers and alumni and recruiting the program brings to campus as well as the networking that you do after you graduate. Of course, with the flexibility of QMSS you could probably add more coursework from the CS, OR, and stats departments at Columbia to round out your program. One thing I have found about Columbia is that all of their departments tend to be relatively flexible when it comes to fulfilling requirements (undergrad and grad level, which is what makes me think it's sort of a university trait and not just limited to certain programs). I'd ask about that ahead of time. For example, the QMSS website lists electives like machine learning, applied data mining, and advanced data analysis. I happen to know that there are more in other departments (and in those) that are relevant to data science and that Columbia has a lot of support on campus for data science: despite the Institute being relatively new, there have been professors doing research on that for quite some time. (However, I'm pretty sure that NYU has at least a comparable level of support for it). So, the tl;dr is that I think you can't really go wrong, but it kind of depends on which way you lean. More public interest/non-profit-y, and contentedness with being primarily a quantitative social scientist? QMSS might be better. Want a mix, but really want to develop your chops to be a data scientist or statistician? Then NYU might be the ticket.

Are you sure there are no behavioral economics programs in the U.S.? There might not be any PhD programs that are explicitly called behavioral economics, but the field is very much a Thing in the U.S. and you could probably study it in either an economics or psychology department or a department in a related field (like business). I know that there were some behavioral economists in the business school (mainly management) and the psychology department at my graduate university, Columbia. However, if you want to design behavioral change interventions in health care, a health program might suit you better. Take a look at PhD programs in health services research and health policy and management. A PhD in epidemiology or health behavior and health education may also suit your needs, depending on the kinds of interventions you want to design.

In most states, an MA in clinical psychology doesn't lead to eligibility for licensure as a licensed professional counselor. (You'd instead get a master's in mental health counseling, or maybe another counseling field.) Are you sure your program does? In any case, It's okay to concentrate on one particular career - lots of people do that. It's part of the goal of going to graduate school, after all. If you want to be a clinical research coordinator, go ahead and try - but be sure that you have the qualifications for it.

Your instincts, and the things you have learned, are correct: the academic job market in philosophy is terrible. While I'm sure there are more than 10 or so positions, there are far more applicants than there are positions, and it's not uncommon for a position in a small out-of-the-way town at a small college to get 200+ applications. Positions that are more desirable - either because of the school or the location - can get far more. I read a short rejection letter someone had posted in a humanities field - I do believe it was philosophy - and the position had gotten over 300 applications IIRC (but I can't find it on the web). So, I think that aspiring to be a professor of philosophy, even at a junior college, is a bit like aspiring to be a successful artist or musician. There are lots of different ways to do that. A very, very few hit it big and get a record deal or worldwide fame and showings at prestigious galleries; some are able to find full-time commercial work doing art for businesses or recording commercial jingles or working as a session singer; and some go to other fields (or become the quintessential "starving artist.") That said, I don't think that means you shouldn't do it. Now, let me be frank. I only think you should train and prepare for an academic career - particularly in the humanities - if you have a deep yearning and passion for the career of a professor. Like if you feel like teaching and scholarship in philosophy is one of the few things that brings you joy and you feel utterly unsuited to life in any other career. Some experience working other kinds of jobs would be better at helping you identify this. Really, I'm one of those people who's in the camp of "only do a PhD if you really can't imagine yourself being happy doing anything else," although others might disagree. Honestly, I have one, and I don't think I would do it again given what I know now about myself and about the field. That said, somebody has to get those jobs, and that somebody could be you. And if you have a really strong desire and are willing to put in the work AND you have your eyes wide open and realize that the odds are against you and are preparing a Plan B, then you might decide that this is an acceptable risk for you to take. The idea of spending 6-8 years studying philosophy as a doctoral student might sound wonderful to you, and you might welcome that stage in your life even if you don't end up as a professor at the end.

A little bit by accident - I originally intended to become a high school guidance counselor. I knew I would need an M.Ed to do that and when I saw an advertisement to work with a professor in a paid RA-ship on child motor development, I thought it might be interesting and also help me get into the M.Ed program. As you can probably guess, I ended up really loving the process of research, and decided that I wanted a career in it. That professor also happened to be the assistant director of an undergraduate research fellowship at my college, and she encouraged me to apply; I did that for my junior year of college and decided that I wanted to get a PhD and pursue a research career. I was the first person in my family to get a bachelor's, so they were a bit confused when I wanted to go to "more school," but were generally supportive. I did want to be an old curmudgeon, though, and talk about regret/happiness. Basically, my opinion is that no one should get/finish a PhD they think they're going to regret not having one later. I'm a psychologist, and psychological research into happiness and emotion shows that people are absolutely terrible at predicting how they are going to feel in the future, especially further out than a couple of weeks. I think many people assume that they will regret never doing a PhD if it's something they wanted to do, and some of them may be right. I think a lot of people also just envision how they will feel when they finish - they imagine this feeling of elation and pure fulfillment when they finish. I'm sure everyone feels differently, but I didn't feel any of that when I finished. I just felt exhausted, and a bit daunted by what was to come re: postdoc and academic market. I defended in August of 2014, almost two years ago, and when people ask me if I would do it all over again I don't have an answer for them. Anyway, the only reason I bring this up is because we're so bad at predicting emotions, I don't think a future prediction of how you might feel if you did or didn't do the PhD should factor that strongly into your decision to do one or not. It should instead be an evaluation of what you want to do for your career and whether a PhD would be necessary or useful for that career. (And I'm not saying you should value happiness in the career you've chosen - aka whether or not you'd be happy doing research as a professor or industry scientist, or whether you'd enjoy the flexibility and mobility the career you want provides, etc. I'm saying that don't bank on the simply having the PhD in and of itself bringing a great deal of happiness that makes the work worth it.)

Why would you doubt this? Have you tried, have you applied to any jobs? Lots of people land a job with an economics BA. Scrambling around to find another major and get a degree quickly isn't really going to help your job prospects. There are a lot of non-GRE related reasons you may have gotten rejected, and some of them don't even have anything to do with you. The competition could've been especially fierce this year, or maybe your recommendations were average, or the professor who would've went to bat for you is on sabbatical or transitioning to another university, or whatever. Your personal statement may have been well-written language-wise but not especially compelling for the context it's supposed to satisfy. And so on. The thing you don't want to do is rush into another program just because you feel like you need to be in school next year. If your GRE is truly the only thing wrong with your application, you'd be totally wasting your time by doing a second bachelor's - you'd only need to retake the GRE and then reapply next year. If you really needed to bolster your app, doing an MA in economics would be a much better idea. Even if you wanted to change fields, unless you want to change to engineering or nursing doing a master's is a better idea.

I agree with you 85% of the way. The vast majority of lab meetings I have been to have been pointless and a waste of time, or at the very least boring. In my opinion, lab meetings should either about coordinating operations of the research group and keeping everyone abreast of what everyone else is doing or about sharing interesting research that is relevant to the interests of the lab, in the form of article discussions and sometimes guest discussions. Lectures should be verboten, as a lecture is not a meeting (it's a lecture...it has a name!) Personally I think the best setup that has worked is an alternating weeks meeting of about 1.5 hours, where one week is for handling logistics and short roundtable updates on what everyone is doing and the other week is for promoting scientific discussion through a journal club or someone giving a short presentation of their research (30 minutes of slides total, the rest discussion) or bringing a guest speaker to lead a discussion of their work. I'm like you and I have a hard time sitting still and paying attention for longer than an hour at a time, which I recognize as a personal flaw. Meetings are an inescapable and sometimes necessary part of working (although I think that the majority of meetings in academia are either pointless or too long. My experience with meetings in the corporate world have been much more positive; I actually look forward to some of them, and I don't dread any of them anymore). But I think they rarely need to be more than one hour long. 4 hours of lab meetings PER WEEK seems like such a waste of time.