juilletmercredi

Well, that's not true. It's about both. The publications and grants certainly matter but so does the reputation - and yes, prestige - of your department. That said, OP, the only reason I think you should turn down the PhD is if you're not sure you want a PhD. Otherwise, it sounds like the PhD program is a good fit for you and you originally wanted a PhD in the first place (which is why you applied to all PhD programs) so go ahead!

It seems to me that if you are comparing three programs to each other and nothing about the academics of the programs themselves are significantly different enough to make you want to eliminate one, then you can turn to other factors. Location is one of those. If you truly can't decide between these three programs, but you don't like New York, then it would make sense to eliminate Columbia and focus on the other two. Now, if you love Columbia the best and you are only waffling because you don't like New York then I'd say strongly consider going anyway, unless you think the city will make you utterly miserable.

To the OP, I want to come back to the obvious point that others have alluded to, but haven't explicitly said: You're comparing Penn and Harvard. Penn and Harvard. It's not like you're comparing, let's say, UGA and Harvard or Binghamton and Harvard - both very good schools, not quite the same name recognition. Penn is an Ivy League school with an excellent reputation, especially in education - they're both top 10 programs in that field. Yes, Harvard will give you connections, but so will Penn. You'll still have that elite, connected network that you want. That said, I do agree that for a one-year master's I would probably value post-graduation connections more than the experience itself (especially since both Philadelphia and Boston could lead to a good experience), but I doubt there will be significant differences in the level of your connections and ability to land a job after graduation - not at a level that would hold you back at Penn. People react crazily when you say "Harvard" because Harvard has managed to do a really good job in promoting its name and its usually the school people associate with top prestige. That doesn't mean anything, though. It's like saying you drive a Tesla instead of a Fisker - more people are familiar with the former but they're both luxury electric cars. That, in and of itself, is not a good reason to choose a Tesla over a Fisker - or Harvard over Penn. Honestly, I chose not to even apply to Harvard when I was applying for public health programs. They didn't have what I wanted.

There's also the option of living apart for 2 years. An hour and a half isn't so bad - that's close enough to visit each other almost every weekend. My husband and I have done this before, three times - once for four years when we were about 2 hours apart; then once for a year when we were 4 hours apart; and now, for what will be 9 months, when we're 2,600 miles (a plane ride) apart. This one sucks the worst because you can't simply pop on a plane. The 2-hour separation seems like a breeze by comparison. The time goes by quickly, but it's really up to you what you're willing to do.

True, but wearing a backpack is not one of those things. Seriously, in academia nobody cares if you carry a backpack. FWIW, I have moved into a non-academic field but now I carry a messenger-style work bag every day (I don't have that much to carry around anymore - just my laptop, a notebook, and a few personal effects). I got it from Lo & Sons; it's called the Brookline. It has excellent features: made of nylon and so resistant to staining; a back pocket that unzips to become a trolley sleeve; copious pockets for storing different types of things. It's also bigger than it looks - it maintains a pretty slim and professional appearance while carrying a lot. (One might even say it's bigger on the inside.) It also has a pretty sturdy crossbody strap and a set of leather handles to carry it by hand should you want to. It's a bit pricy, but the L&S website has sales all the time so I would wait for one of those to come along. It's normally $198 but I bought mine for around $130-140. For those of you who like a more upright bag, look at the TT from the same designer. I originally found out about the brand from a coworker who was carrying the TT at work. It's also a laptop tote but it's long instead of wide. But even here, in my Corporate Environment...my boss's boss and many of my coworkers still carry around bookbags. And some of them I'm quite certain they've had since their own graduate school days.

@CatRobutt: Not all of them are propeller planes; I've taken connecting flights out of State College on small regional jets with no propellers. They didn't feel much different from a connecting flight anywhere else. There is a mix, though. However, do note that Phildelphia and Pittsburgh are both 3 hours away and New York is 4 hours away - I would much rather take a connecting flight from State College than add a 3-4-hour drive to my trip. Not to mention that there are only a few buses that go to Pittsburgh and New York every day (and only one that goes to Philly), so you'd have to schedule your travel very carefully and may have to add a couple additional hours of killing time at the airport unless you were prepared to drive and pay for parking at one of those airports. (Harrisburg is about 1.5 hours away, but you'd still have the issue with connecting flights). @OldBat: I lived in Toftrees when I live there. Very nice apartments, and they are located on the bus line that goes directly to campus and downtown as well as shopping. The ride from Toftrees to campus on the bus was about 30 minutes (could get longer in bad weather or if the buses were delayed). $850 a month for a 4-bedroom sounds seriously overpriced. I lived by myself in a 1-bedroom in Toftrees (which is above-average for State College in price, I think) and paid $925 a month for it. You could easily share a two-bedroom apartment with one other person for like $500 a month in State College. And the town is so small that I don't really see much of a difference between university housing and non-university housing unless you really want to be able to walk to class. @jlt646 The best places to live away from campus but still on a bus line are in the apartments along Waupelani Drive. Examples are the Amitie condos (you can often rent one from someone looking to sublet), Nittany Gardens, Lion's Gate, Briarwood, etc. I believe that some of these are also walking distance to at least one grocery store, which may be useful for grocery shopping. Toftrees and Vairo Village are also on the bus lines, but those buses come less often and there are fewer lines that go that way. Those bus lines also go to grocery stores but they're a bit more removed and may be inconvenient for regular weekly shopping. You might also want to look for some of the units in downtown State College, where you would be walking distance to campus AND to some grocery stores and definitely close to a bus line. But you very well might live next to a frat house (or just noisy undergrads) and housing downtown is far harder to get, especially if you start looking in March. Much of the best housing in State College is rented out by January. @rhombusbombusTry looking at sublets on CL. State College is such a university town that getting a lease off the regular academic year is difficult, so you're going to want to sublet/rent a room from somebody on CL who's kind of desperate or maybe moving away early. I'd also check out some of the apartment complexes frequented by professionals in the area because they are more likely to rent at different types of year. For example when I inquired about housing in Toftrees in February, they had availability from April on. So if you are interested in June I'd start poking around there. Briarwood, Nittany Gardens, and Lion's Gate are two other complexes to check out. (You should know, though, that Nittany Gardens has a 30-lb weight limit on dogs. I think Lion's Gate might be a 50-lb limit but I don't remember.) I'm not sure on the first-time renter thing - some places might want a guarantor, but this is a college town. They have lots of first-time renters. If you have good credit and verifiable income you should okay.

A couple things. 1) 30 is not that old, and is actually pretty young to begin an academic career. Most new academics are in their late 20s and early 30s because of the amount of time it takes to finish a PhD and a postdoc or two. It's maybe a little older than many people begin an industry career, but right on target for people who do a PhD and enter industry - nobody would expect you to be younger than around 30 knowing that you had a PhD. So don't worry about that. I'm 29, and lots of people in our parents' generation are concerned about age in a way that we don't have to be - they got married and bought houses and had kids sooner, but we're delaying all those things in pursuit of education and career. To them by the time they were 30 they were already in the workforce for nearly a decade and maybe had a couple kids, whereas to us that's maybe unthinkable. I started my first PhD-job when I was 29 and nobody was concerned about my age at all. (I sympathize because my mom harped on this too - that I would be spending my "best years" and my fertile years in graduate school rather than making money and potentially having babies. Ugh, lol.) You should note, though, that you probably won't be 30 when you start an academic job. More likely, you'd be 32-35, because these days most professors (even in engineering) have done a postdoc or two for 2-5 years before beginning an academic position. So keep that in mind. 2) Professors don't make a whole lot of money in the U.S., either. The average starting salary for an assistant professor is around $68,000. Of course that varies based on the job - science professors do tend to make more (and engineering professors the most), and professors at research universities and more prestigious universities make more than professors at teaching colleges and less-well-known colleges. I would say as a beginning engineering professor you could probably expect to make $75-90K. In my book that's plenty, especially in most localities in the U.S. - but of course you could make a whole lot more as a PhD-trained engineer in industry (or even as an MS or M.Eng trained engineer in industry). That's up to you, though; most people who enter academia don't do it for the money. They do it because they love research and are utterly dedicated to the independent, scholarly pursuit of new knowledge. THAT said 3) $18,000 is a really low stipend - for anyone, but *especially* in engineering. Engineering PhD stipends are almost always north of $25,000, with full coverage of health insurance. Even though Houston is lower COL than, say, New York or Boston - $18,000 doesn't sound like enough to live on. Personally I would not accept an offer with a stipend that is not enough to live on and with less than 100% health insurance coverage, and I wouldn't advise anyone else to either. In that sense your father is right - you may struggle, and it may be kind of miserable. You won't be making $2,000 a month. You'll be making $2,000 a month before taxes, which is really more like $1,600-1,700 a month after taxes. Even if they don't take taxes out of your stipend you will still have to pay them in April when you file, although I don't know exactly how that works for non-U.S. citizens. And that's only if you divide the stipend by 9 months: if you divide it by 12 months, then it's closer to $ $1,200-1,300 a month after taxes, which doesn't sound like enough to live on at all. Check and ask whether this is a 9-month stipend or a 12-month stipend. If it's 9 months you may be able to pick up additional RA work over the summer to cover the other 3 months of the year, but that also means that you'd have to scramble every year to find that (will probably be easier the more advanced you get). But remember that most PhD students don't go home during the summer: they get an apartment with a 12-month lease and they stick around during the summer to do additional research and write publications. 4) It's really common for the combo of excitement and imposter syndrome to motivate people to choose paths they wouldn't otherwise take, including a PhD. Of course it's exciting that you got into a prestigious PhD program and makes you feel a little like maybe you didn't deserve it - maybe you were borderline, just scraping in, etc. Know that *everyone* feels like that, and moreover, it's probably not true. Even if it was, it's irrelevant. Furthermore, if you were good enough to get into a PhD program at Rice, that means you are good enough to do a lot of other things too. So don't value the difficulty of getting into the program when you make your decision, because that information is irrelevant when it comes to deciding whether or not the move is a good one for your career. 5) This is *not* a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Please don't view it that way, because that may lead you to make a decision you don't want or need. If you got into a prestigious PhD program one year, chances are very good that you can get in again later. Graduate school is always going to be there. (Besides, even if it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, it wouldn't matter if you didn't want it, or it didn't help you get to your career goals, or if the opportunity wasn't that great to begin with.) My major concern here is that you don't know what you want to do after the program, which to me indicates that you probably shouldn't start a PhD - although opinions will vary on this. My thinking is that you have access to most industry jobs with just an MS, which typically takes two years. A PhD in engineering can take 5-6 years. So by pursuing an MS, you are sacrificing 3-4 additional years of salary and saving for retirement. You're also signing yourself up for 5-6 years of hard work and stress that might be unnecessary (because even if you love the work, a PhD program is stressful!) Why lose out on 3-4 years of salary and add stress if you don't need to, and your career outcomes are similar? Especially if you can always choose to return to get a PhD later after getting an MS? Others might say that you should go ahead and get the PhD either way, because particularly in engineering you'll be able to get a job out of a PhD program with it. You may only make slightly more than you would with an MS (if at all), but the PhD is usually funded so you will have little to no debt. You'll also open yourself up to a greater number of jobs - both in industry (as many industry research positions require a PhD) and in academia. And it's sometimes more difficult to return to do a PhD after you've worked for a few years, gotten out of the rhythm of being in school, and gotten used to the lifestyle afforded by an actual income. I don't disagree with some of these arguments, and it's information to consider. While I wouldn't do my PhD over again if given the chance, if I had to do it I would say my 20s were the right time, and it did allow me to be considered for (and hired into) jobs that required a PhD. The caveat here is the academic career. If you have even a little bit of a desire for an academic career, you should seriously consider the PhD program. The only route into an academic career is a PhD. (However, I still might not attend a program that provided me with an $18K stipend. That just sounds like a recipe for disaster. I wouldn't have wanted to live on $18K even in the small college town at which I did my postdoc, much less a city like Houston).

Any ranking differences within schools in the top 10 are negligible, especially in a field like engineering (where there are more jobs than people). Of more concern is the funding. I'd never attend a PhD program that didn't offer full funding, so there's that. You want a good fit, and you don't want to go to a school with a bad fit. If the funding was equal, I'd tell you to go to School B. Even if the funding at School B was less but still adequate to cover your living costs, I would say School B. But if School B's stipend is not large enough to cover basic cost of living, then I'd say go to School A. I don't think that's how the NRC rankings work. The S-rankings are built on criteria that faculty say are important, and the R-rankings are based on the similarity of a given program to other programs faculty have ranked highly. Just from the information provided on the NRC page, though, you can't 'control' for diversity. You'd have to have access to the original regression analysis that NRC used and add a covariate (or remove diversity) from the methodology. (It's also not really "tied for first place", because as you noted, the NRC gives a range estimate instead of a point estimate. The true ranking of Dartmouth's student outcomes is not actually 1; it is somewhere between 1 and 33.) Unfortunately, both anecdotal evidence from search committees and actual research done on this topic provides evidence for the opposite - ranking/prestige of your doctoral program has a huge impact on where you end up as faculty, such that it's quite possible for a less-published person from a high-ranking program to get a job over a well-published student from a lower-ranked program. See this Science Advances paper: http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/1/1/e1400005 However, this is discussing rather large differences in rankings. Two programs both in the top 10 won't be substantially different on job placement especially in a field like EE.

Ignore the "Ivy League" label. Public or private isn't the question here, because some of the BEST engineering schools are public universities - like Michigan, Berkeley, UIUC, Purdue, UCSD, UCSB, Georgia Tech, Maryland, Minnesota, Texas A&M...) What is the reputation of the public university in your field? Which university is it? Ask them where MS students tend to go after graduation - what's job placement like and do any of them go onto PhDs? Where you go for your master's is a little important for admissions to PhD programs but not terribly important. As someone said upthread I think people vastly overestimate the importance of institutional prestige for their MS program with respect to admissions to PhD programs. Also, think about it this way. Sure, maybe going to Princeton or Cornell would give you a tiny leg up - but would that leg up be worth $120,000 over the course of the first 10-20 years of your career? Because that's just going to be the principal on your debt if you have to borrow for the entire thing. That's not even looking at the interest. How long is it going to take you to repay that? What will you have to sacrifice or delay to repay that kind of heavy debt? It's true that there's a community between highly-ranked institutions, but that's true for ANY high-ranked institution, not just Ivies. For example, in my field, a person is just as likely to be respected if they got their training from Michigan or UCLA as if they did from Princeton or Harvard. That because Michigan and UCLA have top ten programs in my field and the training is roughly equivalent...in fact, UCLA and Michigan are ranked higher than my Ivy graduate school in my field. Also, frankly, I find the concept of "lower Ivy" to be ridiculous. All 8 of the Ivy League institutions are excellent schools. But typically speaking, when people say "lower Ivy" they mean Cornell, Dartmouth, Brown, and Penn, and usually also Columbia. They usually are not referring to Yale (and never to Harvard or Princeton). You know, I used to think the same thing. But I currently work in the Seattle tech industry. When I was looking for jobs (just last year), as well as when I idly browse jobs (this year for my husband, who's looking to move out here), I've actually found a LOT of jobs in the industry that ask for STEM PhDs. Most of those jobs are in statistics/math, in computer science, or in engineering. There are a lot of technology companies that are recognizing the value of research-trained PhD scientists on their staff, especially companies that are trying to develop innovative new products to stay ahead of the market. For example, at my very large technology company we have an entire division that's set aside for basic research and they primarily hire PhD-level researchers. I've noticed that most data science positions are preferring people with PhDs in the related fields (statistics or CS). My team is also made up mostly of PhD-level social scientists, and in my field, the PhD is a commonly asked for credential. Add that to credentials creep - you need a BA to do even the most low-level work in a lot of companies nowadays, and more challenging field-based work is for people with experience or MAs - and a PhD in the sciences and engineering is not as useless as previously thought. I'd still give the general advice that you probably don't need a PhD to go into industry, and that an MS would be just fine...but I would temper that advice by telling the candidate to double-check by doing some job searching right now and see what kind of credentials are asked for in job ads that look interesting to you. You can also look at people's profiles on LinkedIn and do some informational interviews with folks in industry positions and see what degrees they have and what they feel like you need to have to succeed in their industry. I also think it's not necessarily far smarter to get an MBA - it depends on what you want to do. In my company I think someone with an MS or PhD in a science field is just as likely to advance to a managerial position as someone with an MBA. For example, in my chain of command (UX research), my boss has an MA in my social science field, her boss has a PhD in my social science field. His boss (who manages our team as well as engineering/techical teams) has a BA in engineering. That guy's boss's boss has an engineering BA, and his - who's at the executive level and reports to the CEO - boss has an engineering BA. You don't hit an MBA until you get to our CEO in our chain of command. Lots of leaders in technical fields don't have MBAs and instead have a BA or MS (or PhD) in engineering/science/tech and some years of experience/climbing the ladder. Again, though, looking into this on LinkedIn and by talking to people will illuminate this more.

Exactly. And there is, in fact, an entire tier for universities that grant PhDs but are not research-intensive universities. They used to be called "Doctoral Research Universities," but as of the February 2016 update, the Carnegie Institute has gone back to the R1/R2/R3 designations: R1: Doctoral Universities – Highest research activity R2: Doctoral Universities – Higher research activity R3: Doctoral Universities – Moderate research activity http://carnegieclassifications.iu.edu/classification_descriptions/basic.php Like anything else, they're a range - R2s include the College of William and Mary, Lehigh University, and Dartmouth College in addition places like Cleveland State University and Nova Southeastern University. R3s include places like Oakland University and Lipscomb University but also Clark University, Rochester Institute of Technology, and San Francisco State University.

If it's any consolation, I think two years is actually pretty short in a crowded market. This is particularly true if you were ABD last year - applying ABD in most fields these days is a losing proposition. In the humanities it's become more common for people to do elite postdocs and visiting positions for a couple years, and in the sciences and social sciences a lot of people spend 2-4+ years postdocing or working as a research scientist (or both) before getting jobs. I'm in psychology, and I have several friends who are at 3+ years in a postdoc: one friend about to go into her fifth year as a postdoc (after a disappointing year on the market); another friend going into her second year as a research scientist (after two years as a postdoc - so 4th year post PhD). I have another friend who spent what I think was seven years as a postdoc and a research scientist before finally landing a tenure-track job, although in her case, she loved the city she lived in and only wanted to move if she could go somewhere better. I think professors who say that their students will have "a ton of interviews" in a saturated field are in denial. Even the very, very good usually don't get "a ton" of interviews, much less multiple choices at the end of the search. A handful of superstars might have 3-4 interviews and some good/lucky people might have 2, possibly even three competing offers. But there are many, many excellent scholars (especially in saturated fields) who only get one offer if they get any. I've observed that lots of professors are completely out of touch with how rough the market is now, even the ones who were more recently hired. That's especially true if you're at a top program, because the recently hired professors in your department were the superstars their years on the market. The new assistant professors who were hired into my department all had 20+ publications in a field when it's uncommon to have more than around 5-10 when you graduate (and even 10 is a lot). And most of them still had one or two years of experience as an assistant professor somewhere. Seems like these days academics expect their new blood to be roaming nomads for the first 5-10 years of their career post grad school. Either way, their advice is not very helpful if you are a more average or above-average-but-not-crazy-prepared applicant. Anyway, a lot of the market is luck. The right jobs have to be advertised at the right time, and you have to not be competing with the person who is slightly better. I didn't just consider it, I actually made the jump. I finished my PhD and did one year of a postdoc before deciding, for a variety of reasons, academia was not for me. Part of it was definitely witnessing the brutality of the academic job market. I saw so many accomplished, competitive new PhDs who really, really wanted it getting either no offers or getting offers only in parts of the country they didn't want to live in. And then a few of my friends did make it to the Promised Land of the R1 job - including one friend who got an assistant professor position at the #1 program in my field. Then the stories of the 80-hour workweeks came out. Frankly, being a new assistant professor in those positions sounded worse than graduate school to me. I was ambivalent about an academic career in the first place, and I lacked the passion for the independent pursuit of knowledge the way a lot of my friends and colleagues had. I love research and science, but I was more interested in the applications. I wanted faster paced work and I wanted to be able to choose where I lived. Conversely, choosing my exact project didn't matter to me. So I applied for non-academic jobs. It didn't take me long to find one at all. I love my job - the work is interesting and fun, I love my coworkers, I love my new city, and the workload is reasonable (I work 40-50 hours per week...but some of those hours are spent playing video games :D). And I'm well-compensated for the work I do, which doesn't hurt. Plus the new field is a robust one and steadily growing, so I feel like if I ever want to move on from my current company and role I have many options in the city I currently live in.

Do you mean changing careers? I left academia after finishing my PhD and one year as a postdoc. I work as a researcher in industry at a large technology company. I started thinking about leaving academia before I even started - my original goal when I began my PhD program was not to be a professor, but to work as a researcher in industry or government (although in a different field). Sometime along the way in graduate school I started considering academia but I was never 100% sold, so I decided to try it out as a postdoc. Ultimately I was not happy with the work or the way my career would play out even if I was successful in academia, so I decided to change careers. However, since I had been thinking about it so long I did many things in graduate school to prepare myself for an eventual non-academic career. The most significant was probably the six-month internship I did for a market research company; the work is directly related to the first non-academic job I got out of my postdoc (the one I am in now). But I also did some part-time statistical consulting, some academic advising, and some educational program management and curriculum planning. Having those experiences were all helpful for preparing me for non-academic job searches after my postdoc. I also started investigating potential fields and non-academic options when I was early in graduate school (around my third year) and looked at job ads to see what skills and competencies those jobs wanted. I worked on increasing my skills in those areas. So by the time I knew I wanted to leave academia, I already knew what fields to look in, what keywords to search, and how to tailor my resume and cover letters to those kinds of positions. I also knew what issues to address in my interviews (namely, the concern about whether I could work in a fast-paced environment coming from academia, and how I could translate the more narrow and theoretical knowledge of academia to the broader and more applied work in industry).

Personally, I never asked my PI for permission to do a summer internship or any of the part-time jobs I did in graduate school. Whether or not I told him depended on how much time the internship was going to take and whether it would interfere with my work or responsiveness. The summer internships I did I usually let him know, because those were often 40 hours a week and I'm pretty sure he would've noticed me not being around for stuff. Some of the part-time jobs I never mention because they were far less demanding time-wise and I just felt that he didn't really need to know. Don't go seeking approval from other academics; they are almost universally going to tell you that the summer internship is a waste of time. They're both right and wrong; it depends on the context. A summer internship won't help you get an academic job (unless you get a publication out of it), and most of them are answering you from the standpoint of advising you to be an academic. But a summer internship can be really key if you have even the remotest of interests of going into industry. And no, postdocs don't count as an internship (although some industry jobs can value them). Does your advisor have control over your funding or something? Do you think he will threaten to cut off your funding if you do the internship? If you don't think your advisor would cut you off, or you are willing to finish out your program with your scholarship funding only, then I wouldn't ask permission - I would just tell. "By the way, I just wanted to let you know that I will be doing X internship at Y company from May through August this year. I've already accepted their offer. Here are my plans for how I am going to get other required work done." If you think your advisor is going to be a jackhole about your funding and you aren't willing or able to give up the additional 40% of your income next year, I'd sit down and have a serious conversation with him, that involves you pushing back a little bit more than you may have been until now. Your job is not to convince him of the utility of the internship or that it won't delay your graduation, because 1) you won't be able to convince him of the first one and 2) the second one is irrelevant. (So what if your internship delays your graduation by a couple months? The experience and potential job it can net you will be worth it.) The goal in this conversation is to get him to agree not to yank your funding if you do it, so that should be your primary focus. You are going into this meeting NOT TO ASK HIM PERMISSION (because you are an adult and you can take a damn internship if you want to) but to find out how this would affect your funding. I still think that you should go in with the assumption that you are going to do the internship, and a realistic plan outlined for how you will juggle the internship and some research work for him over the summer - because let's face it, you're not going to be able to drop PhD work completely. Present that first, but more gently than you would in the above scenario (maybe like "I have been offered X internship with Y company from May through August of this year. I'd like to accept their offer, as I think it would be an excellent opportunity for me [because reasons]. Here are my plans for how I am going to get our research work done this summer." Then wait to see what he says to that. Note that you aren't asking anything; you are stating facts and seeing how he responds. When I would ask is if he's kind of a passive-aggressive jackhole, and he says no you can't do it, do realize - again - he can't actually prevent you from doing an internship. What he can do is introduce consequences for you if you choose to do the internship, which may include yanking your funding (or, if he's extremely petty, becoming obnoxious and delaying your graduation because he's mad. This could be in the form of taking forever to read your chapters, giving you petty little things to fix, making you go through onerous rounds of revisions, etc.). I would go from indirect to direct for the former - start out more indirect ("I hear that you're not in favor of me taking this internship. What if I told you I really wanted to do the internship this summer? It's important to me.") and if he still dances around it, go to more direct ("Are you saying that you might take away my funding if I decide to do this internship? I just want to be really clear about my options here.") The latter you just have to assess based on your knowledge of him. Also, last thing. You have to recognize that this conversation and pushing back may change your relationship with your advisor in ways you don't want. Some adviors take any interest in a practical internship or part-time consulting opportunity to mean "They're running away to industry, egads!" And some advisors do not take students who they perceive as wanting to go to industry seriously. It sounds like your advisor is displaying hints of that. It's not unheard of for advisors to suddenly become less responsive to students they think are going to leave academia - less helpful, less likely to refer you to things or network on your behalf, less warm, etc. Not all advisors are like this, of course, but yours is showing some potential signs. So before you do any of this, weigh the potential impact it'll have on your working relationship for the next year or so. If you only have a year left in the program and no interest in academia that may be okay for you, but if you've got more time, or your advisor is petty, or you're unsure about whether you want academia or not, that may change your calculations here.

Geographic location doesn't matter much at all in the academic market. The academic market is a national one. When you go on the job market for professor positions in math, the departments are generally not going to care whether you're applying from Madison or Seattle. A very limited potential exception could be small Midwestern colleges that are concerned about retention - they may be worried that people unused to cold Midwestern winters in rural areas won't stay at their tiny colleges for very long. However, they'll probably be almost as concerned about someone coming from Madison as they would someone coming from Seattle, so *shrug* no big deal there. Industry is a different story. Geographic location absolutely can matter in industry. I work at Microsoft, and we have a large proportion of people here who went to UW. I also witnessed this in graduate school myself in New York - I realized at the end of five years that I had so many connections all over the city. The fact of the matter is, being physically located somewhere can turn into opportunities - for part-time jobs, for internships, for consulting relationships, for volunteering and shadowing, or simple connections and networking. One of my new colleagues got this job by geographic networking: she did her PhD at UW; she knew the person in the job before her, and that person recommended her for the position. That said, I went to Columbia, which is on the opposite coast, and spent my entire life before August on the East Coast. Large companies hire from all over the country. My Seattle friends are rarely actually from Seattle, and most of them moved here from all kinds of places to work for one of the large companies here (often quite recently; most of my friends moved to Seattle within the last 2 years). I don't know a whole lot about Madison's industry and culture. I've heard really good things. (Madison's not the middle of nowhere.) But I will say that Seattle is an excellent place to be, employment-wise, if you have quant chops and an advanced degree. Everybody here is hiring! Everyone has gobs of data and just wants a math or stats major to throw at it. Heck, they'll throw a physics major at it if they can get one. I will also say that Seattle is a city with a lot of immigrants and internationals. The tech world is an industry that's really open to going through the visa process to get people hired here. Both for issues of representation and issues of employment, you may find it easier here (but again, I don't know that much about Madison).

Well, what's more important to you? Conventional wisdom is to go with the professor you most want to work with. But if you have your eye on industry that change a bit, since the reputation of your advisor is less important for getting a job in industry (usually). Sounds like the only downside at UVa is that it's in a more remote location. At UCLA, the biggest cons seem to be distance from your current friends/life. At Boston U it sounds like you don't really like the atmosphere, the weather, the cost of living or the lifestyle that you'd have there. Some thoughts: -Sounds like you currently live in NYC. If you move to Charlottesville or Boston, you still probably won't see your friends that often. A PhD is a lot of work and takes up most of your time. Of course, hopping on a train is a lot cheaper than flying (and getting from NYC to Boston is no problem at all). But you'll also make new friends and a new network. -How far away from diabetes pharmacology are the professors at UCLA? That may or may not be a bad thing. If the work they do can be directly related or tied back to diabetes in some way, or the professors there are willing to branch into new areas and support your work there, then that could be good. Might be worth it to pick some of those PIs' brains about connections between their work and your proposed work. -I'm willing to bet that UCLA, at least, also has a great career services center - and UVa probably has one, too. Based on what you have said, were I picking I would select UCLA. I'm pretty sure that UCLA has good industry connections and reputation, but the work/life balance also sounds good - you have friends in the area, the program is well-funded, you like the location and the departmental atmosphere. All of your New York friends will want to crash with you in LA eventually, and out of a department of 100 faculty, not all of them need to publish in excellent journals all of the time. Some is just fine. As an East Coast transplant to the West Coast (I live in Seattle) I greatly appreciate the slower culture. I love the laid-back vibe of the West Coast.

Columbia's SSW is really good - I have had lots of friends get their MSW there, they have had good placements and found good jobs throughout the city. The school has a great reputation in New York. However, it's very expensive, and unless you have significant personal funds the outlay of debt is going to greatly exceed your salary as a social worker. NYU also has a good school of social work with a good reputation in New York - I am less familiar with it because I didn't go there, but the fact that they gave you money is a big tipping point. Personally I'd be choosing between them and Hunter. Hunter. You can't ignore the fact that Hunter is dirt-cheap for a New York resident, and that's especially important for a social worker. I'd do a little digging into their internship placement and job placement after school. I'd always had the impression that Hunter was a good school but just not as highly regarded as Columbia or NYU. Still, you've got to weigh the debt proposition.

An hour can be short or long depending on transportation options. I'm assuming the Northeast Corridor can get you from Providence to Boston - looks like Amtrak is about an hour and 15 minutes. But be real: as a PhD student, how often do you think you're going to have time to travel the hour to go to Boston and make the contacts you need to make? Boston is great for entrepreneurs, but is it great for tech entrepreneurs? The Research Triangle has lots of tech companies that have significant presence there and ALSO has lots of pharmaceutical and biotech companies with significant presence. I'd also take a look at the university resources themselves. There are some universities that are very invested in being tech incubators and potentially spawning the next Zuckerberg or Brin/Page. Those universities have set up open laboratories, formed relationships with companies and investors and mentors in the tech world, hired applied scientists into their departments, sponsor conferences and hackathons...I'd do some investigating and see whether opportunities like that exist at Brown and Duke and at which place they seem to be more robust. I work in tech and I have to say that the Research Triangle + Raleigh is starting to get something of a reputation as a little tech hub. Providence not so much. Personally I would lean towards Duke. (I can't say that warm weather and socials aren't a factor, too - I'd rather live in the Triangle for 4-5 years than Providence.)

Statistics and actuarial science are quite different...Do you want to be an academic? If so, I would think about in what department you'd like to teach. There are probably more departments of statistics, but from what I hear business is far less competitive. There are actually fewer applicants for faculty positions in many business fields than there are open spots. I'd imagine that's true in actuarial science, since a PhD in actuarial science probably has many lucrative non-academic options to pursue.

Public health is the field I earned my PhD in. I would never go to a PhD program without full funding for at least the first few years, no matter how prestigious it is. I've seen this happen at my own PhD program: your advisor has no money, so you have to work on another advisor's grant. How that works really depends on the two people involved. Generally speaking, if a professor puts you on their grant they want some work out you, because they are paying your salary out of their own pot. Sometimes, the advisor has a connection in the department - a collaborator who has a pot of money, for example. So let's say Dr. Smith and Dr. Jones work closely together, and publish lots of papers in virtually the same field together, but Dr. Smith has no funding and Dr. Jones has a GRA position. That situation could be fine - you're still going to work on what you want, probably, and while Jones will probably manage a lot of your day to day project work Smith can still give a lot of input and collaboration and advisement. But let's say that Dr. Black is new to the department and doesn't really have anyone who does something similar to her there, or collaborators she works with. The closest she could find for you is a GRA with Dr. Yates, who does something only tangentially related to Dr. Black's work. Yates will fund you but you have to work 20 hours a week on her stuff, and basically do your own research with Black "in your spare time." If you desperately want to go to UCLA, I would do a little more pressing and investigation into the funding situation at UCLA. A red flag for me is that your advisor is not helping you engineer this funding situation; she has basically told you to find it on your own. She is the one who knows her colleagues in the department and could far more easily find out who has a GRA spot for you than you can...but she's choosing not to, and making you do it. To me, that would be a flag in a couple of dimensions: it could signal less than optimal relationships with others in the department, or it could signal a disinterest in the mechanics of your actual degree funding and progression (as opposed to the amount of work you could do for her). But ask them point-blank: How are students usually funded in the department? (If everyone else is offered a fellowship except you, run away.) What is the likelihood that you will find funding - how often do students have to self-fund their own PhD through loans? (For one example, my own PhD program - Columbia - only funds people through 2-3 years. But almost everyone finds an external source of funding for the remaining time.) However, my real advice to you would be forget about UCLA and go to UCI. Follow the money.

That's the way it is in my field, at least. Which is why my old advice was typically to make weather and location a secondary concern. Obviously no one should go anywhere they'd be absolutely miserable 4+ months out of the year. But in my field and many others, graduates of top programs are more competitive and have far more options when they are applying for jobs, as it's generally understood that you can only go down and not up in prestige (this is crude language but you get what I'm getting at). So someone who attends UIUC - a top 5 program in my field - might have to spend 5 years in Urbana in the cold, but their doctoral program is not going to limit them in terms of where they can apply come job market time. Someone who attends Loma Linda might have an excellent five years in southern California but then be unable to find a decent tenure-track job they want to stay in long-term. And let's face it - long-term jobs in desirable locations are very competitive. BUT...that's the ideal. As I've gotten further along in my career, my thinking has come to lean more along the lines of rising_star's - she has a really good point. So often advice for academic careers involves denying your own needs and desires and pretending that the period of time you spend in graduate school (and a postdoc) isn't Real Life, but it totally is. I went to graduate school in a generally desirable city (New York) and did a postdoc in a small, isolated college town (State College). Five to seven years isn't a short amount of time, really. I loved my time in New York; I made lots of great friends, grew a network, did some exciting and awesome things, and got a chance to live in a city many people dream about living in for the early part of my 20s. On the other hand, personally, I couldn't imagine spending 5+ years in State College. In fact, my experience there, while positive, was one of the reasons I left academia altogether and went into industry. I wanted far more control over where I would live eventually than I would ever have in an academic career, and I didn't want to make a series of lateral moves to get somewhere nice. But some people do want that - or the experience of having lived for 5-7 years somewhere really beautiful gives them the wherewithal to stick out 2-4 years somewhere worse for their postdoc if necessary, or for their first job. I had quite a few friends who actually hated the town but made the most of it because they loved the career that they had built there, and they found ways to make the time bearable. Different strokes. So, like many things in academia, I think it really depends on your priorities and valuations. There's really not a wrong choice here, because different things are important to different people. The other thing here is that weather is not the OP's only consideration - there's also departmental fit. Let me say that departmental atmosphere is extremely important to your well-being - and possibly your performance, too. Friendly, helpful profs can make calls on your behalf, help you get publications and generally reach out to mentor and nurture you as a researcher. Top researchers are great and all, but they become functionally useless if they're so far up their own you-know-what that they don't have time for graduate students. Likewise, the doctoral students you go to school with will be your cohort; you will spend inordinate amounts of time with them, at least for the first 2-3 years or so. You will be stuck in the labs with them, potentially studying for comps with them, maybe collaborating on research with them. I love my cohort mates from my doctoral program and I still talk to some of them. Go where you feel welcomed, for sure.

I love statistics and data, but I really don't think that this is a decision you can make with an easy quantitative method. I think you'd put more time into designing the method and coding it than you would actually making the decision. How many programs are you choosing between? You've got some time. I'd make a new decision every 2-3 days and sit with it. How does it make you feel?

Personally I liked having a roommate in graduate school. Aside from practical concerns of lower rent, I didn't feel quite so lonely. But 6 unrelated people in one house sounds like too many, IMO. I agree that there are other options in between - I'd look for a shared situation with 1-2 other roommates, and then talk to the roommates about their habits and social life.

You should definitely retake. Your quant score is the first percentile and the verbal score is in the 33rd. And your GPA, while decent, is not astronomical. Change your test-taking mindset from a fixed one ("I'm naturally bad at this") to a growth mindset. Taking standardized tests is not some natural or innate quality that some people are born with and others aren't...standardized test techniques are learned. You can learn them too, with some practice.

I do understand your frustration, @rewindmind, but they do have to draw a hard line somewhere. Students who use smaller margins and a smaller size font are essentially giving themselves more room than others to write their essays, which is unfair. When they start letting exceptions slip by, they will get into a crisis. If they allow 0.9 and 11 point font for you, then the applicant who used 0.7 margins and 10.5 point font so they could fit all their citations on the page might have an argument... While I would say that most people can't visually discern a 0.1 margin difference, most people CAN discern a 1-point font difference - especially if you are reviewing 30-40 other applications that all have the same font size. And noticing that the font is different might make a reviewer compare in other areas. Interdisciplinary fields? No, of course not; interdisciplinary fields are reviewed all the time. The feedback that the field of study is ineligible sounds less like a quibble with the interdisciplinary nature and more like a problem with the field itself, or the research topic. Did your friend propose disease-related goals or clinical research in his proposal? The problem could be "essentially" cell/systems biology and still come across as public health or disease-related or focused on clinical or seemingly clinical areas of study. If he can submit supporting letters for his appeal, how about a letter from an uninterested/neutral third party in the field who can attest that the research is basic science oriented and not clinical or disease-related?

I moved from the East Coast (New York) to the West Coast (Seattle) in August to start a new job.