juilletmercredi

I am not a nurse, but my mother is, as are a lot of the women in my family, and I investigated nursing as a career myself. So here's what I learned. Hospital certificate programs are largely declining in the U.S. Nowadays, the most common way to get the RN is through a degree program at a college - either an associate's degree program (ASN) at a community college or a BSN at a four-year college. With that said, a lot of hospitals are transitioning to only hiring, or preferring, BSN-educated nurses over RN nurses with an ASN. For example, a lot of hospitals that consider themselves "top" hospital systems - university hospitals, trauma centers, etc. - have a clear preference for BSN-level nurses. The more competitive shifts (day jobs) and positions (ICU, mother/baby, etc.) often go to BSN-level nurses over ASN nurses. That's not to say that you can't get these jobs, but especially in metro areas with an oversupply of nurses you'll be competing with BSN graduates. Not to mention that a lot of nursing jobs that aren't floor nursing in med/surg require a BSN. For example, if you wanted to go into research nursing, consulting, community health education, nursing management, teaching, or public health nursing, you'll have a much easier time with a BSN. Also, as echase said, the standards in the field as a whole are moving towards more education. The AACN declared the BSN as the new model for entry-level practice in nursing in 2000 (http://www.aacn.nche.edu/publications/position/bacc-degree-prep), and the Institute of Medicine released a report in 2011 advocating for a more highly-educated nursing force (http://www.iom.edu/Reports/2010/The-Future-of-Nursing-Leading-Change-Advancing-Health/Report-Brief-Education.aspx). Both of these organizations are pretty influential in health and medicine in the U.S. No, a BS in statistics + an RN won't be equivalent/comparable to a BSN. However, there might be some really cool nursing-related jobs that you could do with that, like nursing epidemiology (although they typically have master's degrees) or research nursing. If you already have a bachelor's degree, there are a lot of accelerated programs for people transitioning to nursing fields that take 14-18 months - you get the BSN in one fell swoop. That actually would be faster than doing a traditional ASN program, although you would have to attend full-time for the year and a half it takes. There are also three-year entry to practice programs, that take non-nurses with bachelor's degrees in other fields and allows them to earn a BSN and an MSN in three years.

This thread is so interesting. Re: The Atlantic article, I don't even know if I want children, but I do know that I want a vibrant social life and my evenings and weekends back. I'm currently a postdoc at an R1, and when I look around me the people who are most successful in this field are the ones who come in on weekends to work, or who stay from 9 to 9, who think about science 24/7, and I just...don't see myself doing that.

Replicability/reproducibility is becoming more talked about in psychology, yes, but not more prestigious - at least in my experience. APS, especially, has spent a lot of time discussing what steps we should take in replicating research, like the registration of data you mentioned, spunky. But there's no reward in it, and that's the rub. Early career scholars need publications in order to get TT jobs and replications are difficult to publish and to convincingly talk about in job talks. Tenure-track scholars need publications for tenure, and the same issues come up there. And tenured scholars aren't going to be spending their time on replicating experiments. Some of them are still interested in promotion, and some of them have to fund significant portions of their salaries on grants, and the NIH and NSF aren't funding huge replication grants most of the time. I think LaCour's story is an interesting entry in current rumbling conversations about academia and the need for reform in the field. I think LaCour lied because he's a lying liar, and the subsequent questions about his dissertation data, other papers he's published, and some awards and grants on his CV pretty much support that. But it does raise some questions about the pressures on young scholars, especially those at high-flying programs. I went to a top 10 program in my field and the pressure and expectation is very much on for you to get an elite R1 job just like the university you came from. It's so unrealistic and stupid - there aren't enough of those jobs to go around, and it's not like they really prepare you for that eventuality anyway. But it's also ridiculous! We hired 3 assistant professors in the time I was in my department, and I got to see the CVs of the finalists they invited to campus (we typically invited 5 instead of 3; don't know why). These people obviously never slept. As graduate students, postdocs, and assistant professors with less than two years of experience, they had 15-25 publications (that's a lot for my field at this early stage), grants, and teaching experience, plus awards. The one guy who had 10 pubs (which is still a lot for a grad student) had a first-authored publication in Science. But they all had some splashy, sexy area of research. None of them were doing replications of other people's work, or anything close. Most people when confronted with the pressure wouldn't completely make up a study and fake some data, so LaCour's on his own. But when p = .06 means the difference between another first-authored publications and years of work wasted...yeah, I think a lot of people massage that data to get it down to p < .05 (which is generally the threshold for statistical significance, and by extension a publishable paper, in psychology). When you want the brass ring of a job at a top R1, or some new grant funding, or tenure - or all of those things - yeah, I think some shady things go down, and I think a large number of scientists probably do those shady things. I don’t think researchers have a duty to verify the papers we cite. First of all, that’s an enormous undertaking - how could I ever? You have to trust that the majority of people are telling the truth (mostly) and that the journals have done their job in peer review. Even in peer review, reviewers aren’t paid - so it’s not like they have time to re-run study results. Journals have to take it on faith that authors are not making up their data and analyses from whole cloth, until we get to the point that we’re banking data on a regular basis. Collaborators are a different story, though. If you’re going to put your name on a paper, you should verify that the results in the paper are correct and valid. That’s why I have disdain for this famous Columbia professor who’s trying to distance himself from the whole thing and put the blame on LaCour. Yes, LaCour bears the most responsibility, but each author on a paper is responsible for the paper as a whole. Would I turn in a fellow grad student? It depends on the extent of my knowledge and what they were doing. If I knew for a fact that they were making up data and I could prove it, and we worked for the same PI or they worked for a PI I felt comfortable with, then yes, I might say something. Otherwise…probably not.

^^^ I think this all really depends on whether your advisor has a truly bad memory or a selective one. From your description, it sounds like she has a selective memory - she doesn't like ideas unless she's thought of them; she tries to offload the consequences of her poor choices on her students; and she takes ownership of ideas that are actually her students'. My take is that you have to be really careful with advisers like that; there are mild versions and dangerous ones. The mild version is just annoying; she'll praise herself for her forethought and chew you out for not coming up with anything interesting, but you'll still get credit and authorship for the important work you do. The dangerous version is actually damaging to your career, because she'll steal your ideas and leave you off the paper (or put you further down in the authorship conga line than you deserve), berate you for your stupidity that doesn't exist, and constantly undermine any of your efforts to establish yourself as an independent researcher. For the professor with an actual bad memory, the solution is to start documenting everything. Take copious notes during meetings, and then send your advisor a post-meeting email - something like "Today we talked about X, and we agreed that we would do Y. Is that correct?" Then later when they try to contradict you, you have written evidence. This is especially important when you are writing your dissertation/thesis and your advisor tries to get you to start over a section or do something again because they forgot what they said and you don't have evidence. If she seems to be a reasonable person, you could also point out her contradictory behavior to her. For example, when she asks you to pitch an idea, you could say something like "I do have some ideas, but I feel like very often when I share them with you I get negative feedback." (There's probably a better wording than that.) Or you can push back a little bit: "Why do you think this idea is a bad one?" Or if she does ridiculous things like insists that research groups did not do X in Y way when you are showing her a paper that shows exactly that, you can turn it on her in a question: "Ok, I hear what you are saying, but this paper shows that Group Awesome at Awesome U did X in Y way. Are you saying that I am misinterpreting the paper or that the paper is incorrect? How would you like me to proceed?" IMO, being respectful doesn't mean not pointing out the flaws in people's reasoning. I think you should feel okay in saying "Past research has shown doing it in Z way is generally unsuccessful, as shown by Smith et al., Connors et al., and James et al. The protocol I'm using has not been tried before/has shown evidence of efficacy in Yates et al. How would you like me to proceed?" Say this is a detached, dispassionate away - no emotions, just facts. Then write that down, and send it in an email to her to get her to confirm. That way in 3 months when she rants that you did something wrong, you can point out that it was at her insistence and show her the evidence in the email chain she sent herself. Again, I think the documentation works regardless of her disposition, but the response assumes that she's a reasonable person. If she's the dangerous kind of selective memory professor, then this will just infuriate her and possibly cause her to make your life miserable. In which case my advice would be to GET OUT, but the less confrontational/more expedient thing to do might be find ways to put up with it. * Related: Two of my biggest academic pet peeves (not your fault) 1) The idea that advisers are so busy and have so many things on their mind. Sure they do/are. So is everyone else, including their graduate students and support staff. I have personally stopped letting my advisor and other academics off the hook mentally for forgetting things that he/she really should remember. The other day someone was joking (and I think it ended up as a PhD Comic) that academia is the only field in which you can ignore hundreds of emails and not get fired for that. Could you imagine if your lawyer completely forgot 50% of the things you talked about from week to week? Or if your doctor kept messy records and gave you the wrong medication because they thought you had a disease you didn't? You'd fire them. Buy a notepad. Get Evernote. Write it down. I see no reason why we can't hold academics to the same standards as everyone else. 2) The idea that advisors are the God of a little universe. Sure, they do have an inordinate amount of control over your degree progress, but you're a person too - an adult person with value, thoughts, and feelings. You're allowed to push back a bit, and you're allowed to be treated like a human being. You don't have to tolerate your advisor constantly putting you down. Now that may not mean snapping at her during a meeting, but it may mean gently pushing back or even switching advisors if that's feasible. I just don't understand why academics think they should be able to talk to their students/advisees in any kind of way and get away with it.

OP, has this been resolved? I'm curious. As general notes for posterity - most advisers are "required" or strongly encouraged to continue supervising their graduate students when they are on sabbatical. The extent to which they do, of course, depends on the actual professor themselves - particularly since professors with sabbaticals are generally tenured and there are few, if any, actual consequences for not continuing to supervise students. One of my advisers went on sabbatical twice when I was in the program. The first time I was a second-year in the program writing my master's thesis. He stayed in my city and I still met with him every two weeks; he was very available. The second time I was a sixth-year and ABD; he was gone for most of the sabbatical (physically); we had some Skype conferences and kept in contact via email but he was far less available. (That was okay with me, as I expected that). Some supervisors will be willing to advise you on sabbatical, but the point of a sabbatical is supposed to be a research leave for the faculty member to focus on his or her research and get out some kind of tangible product - a book, a set of papers, etc. They're supposed to decrease the other duties that they have, and that includes being available to graduate students. So it's no surprise that a professor preparing for a potential sabbatical would not want to take you on. Even you framing it as helping the research may or may not sway him, since how much you can contribute would be limited by your stage: if you were an ABD student who had been heavily immersed in the research from day one, you might be an asset. If you're still an MA-level candidate who hasn't already been involved in this researcher's work, you might be more of a liability, particularly if you need a lot of training or on boarding to get into the work. If this is truly the only person in the country that you can work with - well, first, that's a problem, because who will you do a postdoc with? But secondly, then you might also need to take a leave of absence until this person returns and is able to supervise you, if he is even willing to do so.

Yep, I've done this. In my field it's encouraged - it shows that you can do independent work not under the wing of your advisor, collaborate with several groups, and it expands your research network. I agree, though, in trying to see if you can get something tangible out of it. The brass ring would be a publication, of course.

I was an NSF fellow too, from 2010-2013. I think once you're in graduate school your undergraduate transcript is less important, particularly if you are a couple of years out from undergrad. Some reviewers may comment and some may not; I can't remember whether I got any comments on mine (pretty mediocre at 3.42). More important, of course, are your essays - particularly that research proposal - and letters of recommendation from your advisers. One of your recommenders could even address it, saying that the undergrad GPA is not reflective of your superb work now as a graduate student. The thing is...it costs you nothing to apply, other than the time to put together the application. Writing the essays is a good exercise anyway because it helps you formulate your ideas and lots of other fellowships have a similar process. So just go ahead and apply. Don't shut yourself out - let someone else tell you no rather than you telling yourself no before you've gotten a chance to try. Since you're in biotechnology you might also be interested in a National Research Service Award fellowship from the National Institutes of Health (commonly called an F31).

If you flip back through the earlier pages of this thread, many people have shared details of their personal budgets - rent, food, where they live, etc.

I liked DaKine backpacks. They're designed for skateboarders and snowboarders. Lots of compartments, padded straps, etc. I also like Vera Bradley's backpacks - there's one specifically designed for tech that has a padded laptop compartment and a tablet slot. I would recommend having a backpack (for every day) and a nice messenger bag (for times when you carry less, or conferences and other times you want to look more polished). I have a really nice Kate Spade laptop bag that I bought on sale and use at conferences; I've gotten lots of compliments on it. It also encourages me not to pack too much.

My general thoughts on this topic are: 1. I'm not saying you are, but in my experience students often ask this question sort of thinking that there's some magical workflow that makes this behemoth of a task more manageable/enjoyable/easier/I don't know what. There really is not! There are lots of PhD students who get by pretty well just using pen and paper. A colleague of mine still writes all of her appointments in a paper date book that she carries everywhere. I have friends who still print their articles and clip them in binders. Technology will not save us. The PhD sucks just as much with or without it I also wouldn't say that technology has helped make me productive, per se; it's helped me manage my productivity in ways that made my brain a bit happier. 2. There are hundreds of productivity apps out there; someone probably uses every single one of them. My workflow won't necessarily work for you, though. You kind of have to experiment with things to find out what works. With that said, here are some that I use: Reference manager: I loved Papers 2 (a Mac app). Then they "upgraded" to Papers 3 and it broke and it doesn't work very well, IMO. So I switched to Sente (also Mac), which is satisfactory. Better than Papers in some ways, but I really miss Magic Manuscripts. Another good reference manager is Bookends. EndNote isn't that bad, and a lot of systems have integration for it (including some journals that let you submit EndNote produced manuscripts) so you might want to try it. Your university might provide it to your for free. Word processing: Word is, of course, the standard. It's ok. My preferred word processors are Scrivener and Mellel. Scrivener is really great for writing large projects (like my dissertation) because it breaks them down into organizable sections. Mellel is good for shorter things (like journal articles), because it does give you an outline along the side bar and has Live Bibliography support that integrates well with Sente and Bookends. It's also for Macs only. Word is fine and great for most tasks, however, I would just advocate exploring some word processing alternatives to see if you like anything else. That includes Google Docs; the benefit to Google Docs is the syncing. To-do: I use Wunderlist, which is the best to-do app IMO. Google's to-do was too stripped down for me (I never tried Google Keep). Wunderlist lets you organize things by project/topic and has a lot of cool functionality and integration with other apps. Notes: Evernote is the best app for this. Syncing across devices, and there's an Evernote for everything (desktop, tablet, mobile, web). Cloud: Get a cloud storage solution. It really doesn't matter much one, but it's really helpful to have all of your stuff stored in the cloud so when you have to move between computers, you have access to everything and don't have to worry about keeping flash drives set up. I shamefully have cloud storage in four of the major services (Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive, and iCloud. a) I got Google Drive for personal use - both of my files and for mail storage for my Gmail account. I pay $1.25/month for 125 GB (I have a grandfathered plan - now they charge $2/month for 100 GB). I had to get Dropbox for sharing files with collaborators, because that's the service that they use. It's $10/month for 1 TB of storage. c) I purchased Microsoft's Office 365 service so I could use MS Office on my iPad and in the cloud, and it automatically comes with 1 TB of storage for $7/month. d) Apple forced me to get iCloud storage for my iPhone. I pay $1/month for 20 GB of space, which is outrageous. Personally I think Dropbox is my favorite, followed closely by Google Drive, but YMMV. Google is nice because they have a smaller increment than 1 TB, which you can choose if you don't need that much space. Dropbox only has the 1 TB option. Apple is super ridiculous with their pricing - they charge $20 for 1 TB, which is twice as much as everyone else, but it's not like the quality of their cloud storage is better or something. Moving on. Posters: I hate designing posters! If you're on a Mac, you can use PowerPoint for posters. MS Publisher is better IMO, but not available for Macs. I've never tried Adobe InDesign. I wonder if there's a good Mac app for this? Reading papers: This is going to sound terrible, but what I have discovered is that few people in my field (social sciences) actually fully read papers in-depth. They skim. Actively, but still skimming. Often they skim a few papers when they are trying to write a lit review, but you can be more proactive. Set up a Google Scholar alert to send you articles in your area, and them skim a few each morning. That way you keep up with the new literature in the field and don't have to play a huge amount of catch-up. You could potentially get the top journal in your area and just skim that, but honestly I have found that that gives me way too many articles I know nothing about and aren't useful or interesting to me. For example, sometimes Science publishes psychology articles, but only occasionally and they are rarely in my subfield anyway. So it would do me no good to scan Science. Even Psychological Science and American Journal of Public Health mostly post articles in things outside of my expertise. So if you're going to do that, pick a smaller specialty journal in your specific area. IHE/CHE: I agree - read IHE and CHE relatively regularly. It's good to know the field. But - I don't know how to say this properly - a lot of the articles are pretty depressing, especially about the job market. Enlightening, but depressing nonetheless.

rising_star already said everything I was going to say. I especially emphasize breaking the dissertation down into smaller sections. I broke my dissertation down into 2-3 page sections, and when I set daily goals, they were based upon those small sections. One additional thing I will add is that when you are writing, don't worry about the quality just yet. The first draft of everything you write is going to suck. It's supposed to - that's what proofreading and editing and revising is for. Just get some words on the paper; you will get that queasy feeling in your stomach that it's not quite right. Then set aside some time each week (maybe one day a week) for revising and editing - during which you take an already written section and revise that. (Or you can save all of your revisions for the end, although I wouldn't recommend that.)

I was going to suggest a Starbucks gift card...keep it small ($5) with a handwritten thank you. I'd appreciate that. But honestly, I wouldn't be expecting anything - helping undergrads get into grad school is just part of the fun. Taking them out to coffee to talk grad school and research could also potentially be fun - I had lunch with some of my undergrads who wanted to get into grad school and it was pretty awesome.

For cell service, I would go with AT&T or Verizon. I had T-Mobile during the first year of my PhD program. I got terrible cell service in my apartment - I lived in upper Manhattan, not exactly an out-of-the-way place. I switched to AT&T after my first year and had no problems with cell service. Calls are occasionally dropped because of high volume, but that happens on Verizon too. I had a friend who had Sprint and she seemed to have issues with cell service and quality. There are no smaller carriers I would recommend that have the same coverage as the big four. For one, you don't want to go with one of those providers that limits you to the metro area because grad students travel quite a bit for conferences. You can learn how to save money by trial and error in the neighborhood, or by asking people. It kind of depends on what you're trying to do.

Well, I think that you could probably do community health outreach and health promotion with an epidemiology degree, but it'd be more difficult for you to find jobs as an epidemiologist with a health promotion degree. In other words, the epidemiology concentration is probably more flexible, so I'd go with that. I also disagree that epi is always more about the numbers - I think it depends on the kind of epi that you are doing. There are some social epidemiologists at my alma mater that are focused on characterizing the social determinants of disease and health, and others who do research on the effects of illness and disease on people's health and well-being. They use sophisticated mathematical models to do it, but how much they are focused on the numbers varies by their job and their interests. You might choose an epidemiology MPH program where you can do a concentration (either a formal one, or one of your own construction) in health promotion, taking some coursework and then taking the exam to become a Certified Health Education Specialist (CHES).

Well, I think it depends on how far outside of your original area School 1 is. Many people will say that you can always change the direction of your research after graduate school; while that's true, the reality of the situation is that postdoctoral mentors will be seeking you because of your expertise in a particular area, and assistant professor search committees will seek you because of continuing expertise - plus you'll develop a strong foundation in a field on the basis of your dissertation and other work you do in graduate school. So you want to choose something that you don't mind working on for at least the next 10 years in some capacity. For example, my research is in HIV prevention and treatment, mostly in African Americans, mostly looking at drug use and risky sexual behavior. Let's say I want my project to be mental health, drug use, and HIV adherence in African Americans. School 1 doesn't have that, but they do have someone doing research on mental health, drug use, and sexual risk behavior prevention. I might take that, and be fine. Let's even say that they're not even focused specifically on HIV, but STIs or unwanted pregnancy - doesn't matter, because I can spin the focus a bit. Maybe the population isn't African Americans, but teenaged girls (of all races) or Asian Pacific Islanders - doesn't matter; I can still use the same techniques and use them in different populations later. Even spreading out a little into addiction and drug use, or mental health/depression and anxiety - without a specific focus on how that impacts sexual risk - coud still lay a good foundation for the work I want to do. But let's then say that nobody at School 1 is doing anything about sexual risk, drug use, or mental health; let's say that my choices are smoking and cancer prevention, or nutrition and cardiovascular health research, or physical activity. All of those are too far from my area and don't pose questions I want to spend my early career answering, so no matter how much more prestigious School 1 is - it's not going to get me to my goal. So I'm not going to choose that school because I don't want to switch into those areas. On the other hand, I place a major premium on happiness in a PhD program because I spent a good chunk of mine being unhappy. Life is too short to be unhappy for 5-7 years. So honestly, if you don't think you can be happy at School 2, I think your choice should be between School 1 or nothing (reapplying next year). Does School 1 have some lines of research that look interesting and some PIs who are willing to take you on?

Join a book club. Go to some lectures at a nearby university. Or take some graduate classes as a non-degree student. But definitely do NOT get a PhD just for the sake of taking some classes in literature with professors. First of all, discussion and shared learning is a big part of the PhD, and many PhD-level classes do involve getting critiqued by your classmates. In doctoral programs, you put away the student-teacher dynamic; you are a junior colleague, and so are your classmates, and you collaborate and work together to evaluate each other's work and scholarship. There's a reason they call it peer review. Second of all, PhDs are not about the coursework - the coursework is almost an afterthought, and a more minor part of the program. PhDs are about scholarship. You have to produce new knowledge in the field. Literature PhD students spend a lot of time writing about existing literature, not producing their own necessarily. If you have the money to spare and/or don't mind incurring vast amounts of unnecessary debt, an MA program might not be a bad idea. MA programs - particularly ones that are coursework only - will fulfill your needs; they are primarily coursework based, rely less on scholarship, and will give you your fix of taking more literature classes under the tutelage of professors. You'll be required to adopt reading proficiency in a language for most because they'll want you to read the text in the original language - often required to do the deep kind of delving you want to do.

I think that an MPH in health policy and management is probably enough in and of itself to do what you want, and that you should only get a law degree if you actually want to be a lawyer. However, I think you should take stock of the field. What kinds of degrees do people doing the job you want to do have?

^Agreed with the above. You have already done something unethical by accepting an offer, deferring it, and then attending another school in the mean time. Deferring an offer is asking the school to put your acceptance on hold because circumstances prevent you from attending the school in the semester in which you were admitted - family issues, medical problems, occasionally a time-limited but prestigious fellowship like Fulbright. Deferral is not intended for you to leave a program dangling while you try out another one to see which one you like better. If your original program finds out what you did, they could rescind your offer. And yes, although I wouldn't use the term "blacklisted," it can have repercussions for finding a PhD program in the future (if this is an MA, and if that's your goal) and/or employment in academia. You don't want to burn bridges. At this point, that's water under the bridge, so you need to make a decision. You can either tell School A (where you deferred) that you are no longer coming, and release them from holding your spot. Or you can drop out of School B (where you are currently attending) and go to the school that you deferred, and just hope they never find out that you attended a school in the interim. And yes, like @jenste says, you have to make an actual decision - no more of this putting one program on hold so you can try out the other one. You can't do that with jobs or anything else in life - you have to make a decision about which one you want to do, and then stick with that decision.

Basically any computer will suit your needs. You won't be doing anything fancy; the fanciest thing you might do is run a statistical software program on your laptop, like SAS or Stata. Those can both function with 4 GB of RAM. I would recommend going with 8 if you can afford it, but particularly if you get a computer with replaceable RAM, starting with 4 GB will probably be fine. But there are dozens of laptops that fit the criteria of small(ish), portable, 4-8 GB of RAM, and potentially has a SSD for speed. If you want Mac OS, there's the MacBook Air for super thin and light (13" or 11"). The MacBook Pro honestly doesn't weigh much more than the Air these days (I think 3.5 lbs. compared to the 13" MBA's 3 lbs.) The 13" Air gets 12 hours of battery life; the 13" Pro gets 10 hours. On the Windows side, lots of different brands offer ultrabooks that fit thin, light, portable, while still having some power. There's the Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon, the Lenovo Yoga 2 or 3 (3 is more pricy, but more advanced), the Dell XPS 13, the Acer Aspire S7, and the Asus Zenbook. All of those are recommended ultrabooks that are pretty slim and light with decent battery life.

Yeah, I agree. You're looking for a highly-trained contractor (doesn't matter that they are a student) and you're only paying $100/day? Assuming 8 hours of work, that's $12.50 an hour. That's low in general; it's especially low for the SF Bay Area. Particularly if you want an advanced graduate student; you have to be aware that the best advanced graduate students have the opportunity to contract out their work for better pay all the time. Even my own university paid me $20/hour for consulting, and when I went freelance I made a lot more. I think assuming an 8-hour day for 3 days, you should pay at least $30/hour, which will come out to about $720 for three days. In return, you can actually get an advanced graduate student (someone who has completed the MS and is past comps, perhaps).

@Madhini - Very broad question (or statement, rather). What is affordable to you - are you getting a stipend, do you have savings, do you have family support? Hunter is located on the Upper East Side, which is a very expensive neighborhood in NYC. You'll be unable to live there, most likely. However, East Harlem (above 96th St, east of Central Park - so between around 5th Ave and FDR Drive) is less expensive and a quick commute on the 4/5/6 trains to Hunter. To the west, between about 110th and 125th and between Morningside Park and 5th Avenue is the rapidly developing area that's being called South Harlem, but is pretty much still Central Harlem. Rents are going to vary - lots of luxury buildings in the area, but it's still Harlem. Right over the bridge are Astoria and Long Island City - both affordable neighborhoods in Queens that are a quick commute from Hunter. @nikolas.asteri - I think if you are frugal you can live on the remaining about. I set aside about 15-20% for taxes each year. After taxes I was making $2200 a month and my rent was about $900, and I made the rest of it work while saving a bit each month. If you cut the savings, you can make it work. Your groceries don't have to be $300 - I spent about $200-250 on mine per month as a single person living alone. One idea is to try to reduce the amount you pay to share - you can find a share in a less expensive neighborhood perhaps for $700-900. Will you be staying with a friend until you get paid in November? That will determine how much you should bring. @ravyn - Doable, as long as you're frugal.

I agree with the South Bronx; that part is still pretty bad. I have a couple of friends who lived there and didn't go home after around 10 pm - stayed with friends. Maybe Bed Stuy (in Brooklyn), but even that has/is gentrifying and is not so unsafe anymore depending on what part you live. Other than that, there's no place I would say I absolutely wouldn't live in for safety's sake. Now there are a couple of neighborhoods I wouldn't want to live in because of access to amenities and what's there in the neighborhood, but I wouldn't fear for my life.

I agree, you need to talk to someone - see if you can redo a major assignment or retake the final. Graduate schools is much more flexible than undergrad; someone might be willing to work with you so that you can finish for real.

I don't think it's particularly harsh. Grading in graduate school is very different - As are expected, Bs are okay but often a sign that your work isn't up to the expected standard, and very often Cs are a sign that you failed the class. A 2.98 indicates mostly Bs with some Cs, which is not an acceptable level of achievement in a PhD program. Did you go to disability services? You have to actually go to disability services and disclose your disability in order to get the help. It's not illegal for universities to not accommodate you if they don't even know you have the disability; it's only illegal for them to refuse to accommodate you once they know about it. With that said, I agree that you should try the appeal, particularly if your program director is on board - but I also think that your approach needs to be a bit different than evidenced here in your posts. It shouldn't be about how a 3.0 is an arbitrary dividing line (it isn't - it's pretty standard) or how you shouldn't be held accountable for MBA-level classes (why shouldn't you?) The focus should be on your personal health issues that made it difficult for you to achieve to your full potential, but those health issues are handled/you are seeking support with disability services to get accommodations for them, so now you can perform to expected levels. Good luck.

^That was going to be my suggestion. In many cities, this is quite posible. It does have the downside of having to move twice, but at least you won't be locked into a terrible apartment for a full year before you can move (or worse, you won't have a scammer running off with a big deposit, leaving you with nothing!)