juilletmercredi

I think so! I worked 10 hours a week while writing my dissertation, and I felt like I had plenty of time - I certainly could've worked 5-6 more hours a week and balanced it. I agree that it also depends on the 9 hours - if those can just be research credit, then that would be ideal. I will say, though, that I had already completed all of the other requirements for my PhD - including comps - and didn't have to be registered for any credits or anything (we had a special registration status for dissertating doctoral students called matriculation and facilities. Super cheap, no credits.) Especially if you are contemplating a non-academic career, I think the internship experience is priceless - definitely worth a little extra stress/panic during the dissertation phase.

I agree with the above - there's no reason to put that time in your psych PhD on your CV. You can certainly put the publications from the time on your CV, and if you had some official title like "research assistant" you can put your work on your CV. If anyone asks you about that period of time you can be upfront and say that you were in a PhD program in a different field for 4 years before switching, but you don't have to worry about it being on your CV - you were productive, and few people are deeply interested in what you did before you began the relevant PhD program.

Hasn't happened to me, but I have certainly heard of it happening before to others. It's really unethical. I agree with Eigen. Approach your DGS and discuss the matter with them. Presumably there's at least one other professor who has to evaluate your thesis, so that person might be a good person to talk to as well. You could also go to a university ombuds and discuss steps to take with them as well; it's their job to solve problems like this.

In my field and department, it was quite common for students to work in more than one lab on projects in different areas. However, they usually had some idea about how the work in the two labs were related to each other, and their research married the work in some new and interesting way. I think it would be difficult to work in two completely unrelated labs doing unrelated work, especially if you are really only working in one lab for the research funding and mentorship and the other lab is really what you want to do.

While it's okay to be interested in a lot of things, you do need to have a specific area of focus to be admitted to a program to work with a PI. So basically, what you do is you just pick whichever one seems the most interesting and what you feel like you can work on for the next 5-6 years, and concentrate on that one. That is essentially what I did - I have a lot of different, varied interests, and I just pick one for stretches of time that make sense.

There's a test in the SPSS output that will tell you - it's called "Levene's test for heteroscedasticity" or "Levene's test for equality of variances". I think the SPSS output defaults to producing it, but you may have to check a box in the ANOVA command menu to get it to show up. If the test is not significant, then you read the line for equal variances assumed. If the test is significant (p < .05), then the variances are not equal and you need to read the line "equal variances not assumed." Basically what SPSS does in the latter case is adjust your degrees of freedom to account for the heteroscedasticity, with the net effect of making it more difficult to reject the null. When in doubt, the "equal variances not assumed" estimate is the more conservative of the two.

I'm a psychologist/public health researcher and collecting data was not cosnidered a primary/key part of my PhD. I did my dissertation with secondary data, and several other people in my department did, too. My research sort of leans towards the epidemiological, and I did use complex analyses in my dissertation so that's why it was sufficient, I think. Public health researchers very often use secondary data in our field so it's also more of a norm. I exclusively work with secondary data sets now in my postdoctoral work. The ones who collected their own data in my department were largely qualitative researchers using ethnography and interviews, because collecting data WAS a key component of their training. The plan, literature review, and methodology IS your proposal - that's essentially what a research proposal in the States is, except we tend to turn ours in sometime between years 2 and 4. When you do that you will get feedback from your mentor and committee about whether what you propose is viable and enough for a dissertation. But presumably in the process of writing that up, you'll be communicating with your primary mentor, yes? You should ask them if secondary data analysis is acceptable for your dissertation.

If I'm understanding this correctly, let's say that the scenarios are all about drug use for adolescents - so one might be a vignette about drinking with friends when parents aren't home, one might be about smoking marijuana when parents aren't home, etc. - and the questions might be something like "How confident are you that you could refuse to do this action with your friends?"; "How tempted would you be to join in?"; "How difficult would it be for you to turn down your friends' offer?", etc. And then maybe your domains/factors are "confidence/self-efficacy," "temptation", "pressure/difficulty," etc. Presumably you'd have one question for each factor asked across the 9 different scenarios - so 5 items for each of 9 factors. (Or maybe some of the items feed into the same factor - it depends). Maybe I'm missing something, but I can't see why you would have to account for dependency in that model, because the fact that your items are nested within scenarios doesn't seem matter. You're not expecting the answers on the 9 different items within each scenario to be more correlated within each other than the answers across the scenarios, because they are tapping into different domains/factors, right? (If you had multiple questions tapping into the same factor within each scenario, then the clustering does potentially become more of an issue. I think most scientists would ignore it, for better or for worse. You could do a multilevel CFA if you wanted, though, just to test and see the differences in your analyses.) I used Stata for a similar problem; specificying CFA there was quite simple. It is set up very much like a latent variable analysis - with the factors as latent variables with paths to each item you think leads to that variable, and paths constrained to be equal. You can insert a term that makes the structure multilevel to control for the correlation within scenarios. Paths constrained to be equal would be another way to solve that problem. You could play with it a bit and see what works. I'm sure that you could do it in AMOS, but I don't use it and I don't know how. If you know R you could probably also use R to do it, and I think SAS would handle it too.

I'm about the money, too, so don't feel bad! LOL! My advice: 1. So far, you have the word of one person that you need a PhD. That person may be knowledgeable, but they are still just one person. Before committing the next 5-7 years of your life, I would gather more information and opinions. What kind of position do you want to have in 10-15 years? LOOK at the people who are currently in that position - at your own company, at similar companies, on LinkedIn, whatever. Do they have PhDs? Most, all, some? If you can do some informational interviews with a few of them, that would be even better. Get many opinions; get a general consensus that a PhD is necessary and recommended for your next step. 2. Whether it's worth it really depends on the kind of work you want to do, your field, and what you define as "worth it." I have yet to make a decision about whether my own PhD was "worth it" - I could make similar money with a master's degree in the same or related fields, and not wanting to be an academic in the traditional sense, many of the jobs I want don't necessarily need a PhD. On the other hand, the PhD can be an asset for many of the jobs I want, and some of them do require one. I suppose that once I finish my postdoc and move into my actual career I'll be able to answer the question better. There are some personal fulfillment aspects to a PhD that might make it worth it to you. As for the salary - well, you can compare the average PhD stipend in the natural sciences (probably somewhere around $30-35K) with what you make now, multiply the difference by 5 or 6, and take into account raises you'd get in your current job (there aren't really raises in PhD programs), growth of any retirement accounts or investments you might have made in the 5-6 years. Think about whether your salary with your BS (or an MS instead) would reach the same level as the job you'd get with the PhD in 5-6 years. Or is there a ceiling effect in the PhD job, after which you really won't go much higher? If the difference is in favor of the BS/MS job, you have to decide whether the jobs you can get with the PhD are really worth the cost to you. (Or it may be that you really can't advance beyond a certain point without the PhD, which may mean that while the opportunity cost is high short-term, in the long-term it's better to do it now.)

My pitch kind of evolves a bit depending on what projects I'm working on at the time, but this is essentially what it is right now: I'm an HIV prevention and treatment researcher. I study how people's mental health is tied with with their drug use, and how that leads to risky sexual behavior and HIV transmission. I also study how mental health and drug use interfere with HIV-positive people's adherence to their medication. My interests are in health disparities, which means I'm really interested in how race and socioeconomic status produce differences in health and why minority races and poor people are more likely to get HIV and have poorer outcomes from it. [Most people do know what socioeconomic status means, but if they don't, I just explain that it's a confluence of factors - income, certainly, but also education and social class.]

Did anyone suggest humblebragging about where they went to school? (I am guilty of saying I went to grad school "in New York," but it's because people sometimes have odd reactions when I just say Columbia, although if asked directly I do answer the question.) A 30-second dumbed down version of the research is something that every mentor everywhere will encourage you to develop - even educated people outside of your field won't be able to understand it if you use jargon. My short version is that I do HIV prevention research; my slightly longer version is that I study how people's mental health, drug use, and sexual behavior are tied together and lead to HIV and other STIs (or some other varation of that). If I told people that I studied the psychosocial and cultural determinants of mental health and substance use in the context of HIV prevention and treatment...do you think people would get that? Honestly, I hate when scientists talk like that to each other. (And this is also supposed to be in response to people who ask about it, not a generic unprompted spiel). Also, people other than academics read the New Yorker. I think that's the main problem with some PhD students/holders - they assume that we have some kind of supreme knowledge and that others are dumber than us or something. I have a lot of non-academic friends who read the New Yorker. Most of the people I know who listen to NPR are not academics (in fact, I do not listen to NPR, and have had it brought up to me more than once by people without advanced degrees. It's just a radio program.) Personally, my solution to this has always been to just recognize that my job really isn't that special - I'm just a normal person with a normal job talking to a bunch of other normal people with normal jobs - many of them way cooler than mine, lol - and answer questions with the knowledge that my work is no more or less important than what they do. I also developed a lot of hobbies and interests other than research, so while I don't follow sports I can have minimal conversation about them (I at least know general trends and players). And I'm not ashamed to admit that I do follow celebrities and I watch quite a lot of TV so I can always talk about new TV shows or whatever the Kardashians are doing. Hey, you gotta do something besides read journal articles in grad school. I also disagree that there isn’t much to talk about if people say that they teach or are a SAHM; you display the same kind of curiosity that you would anyone else’s job. After you ask what grade and subject, you can ask them about the day to day, maybe something you’ve always wondered, or simply “How do you like it?” Other questions are what are their students like, how long they’ve been doing it, whether they’ve ever thought about administration, what they think about some piece of educational politics (if appropriate and comfortable in the setting - teachers do have a lot of FEELINGS about those things, trust me), do they have any techniques they think are especially winning, etc. With SAHM, I ask them questions about their kids but also about their own hobbies and interests. What are they reading? Did they watch last week's episode of Scandal? (If the answer is yes, we have an instant conversation.) I think when I was in my PhD program I did initially have a bit of awkwardness mentioning I was in a PhD program, but that’s because at the time I felt like it was something kind of special and also people had a tendency to have really weird reactions to it (mostly positive, but just weird). Now I just feel like it’s a kind of mundane thing about me; it’s rarely the first thing I mention about myself and usually if someone finds out it’s because they directly ask (“Oh, you just moved here from New York? What were you doing in New York for the last 6 years?”) or because they realize that my job requires one. I actually usually keep my answer pretty short and change the subject quickly, lol!

Also note that if you bring your own phone to these services, you can avoid the 2-year contract altogether. T-Mobile was the first and best-known company to do that. I also think that with a few of the new phone plans - like AT&T Next, where you purchase a phone with no money down and you just make like 18 to 30 monthly payments, depending on the term you choose - you don't have to sign a contract, because you are paying full price for the phone; you do have to continue to pay off the phone even if you discontinue service with AT&T, but you're not necessarily locked into a new contract. The easiest way, though, is probably to buy an unlocked phone from eBay or Glyde or something like that and just buy a SIM card and do a month-to-month plan. However, if you are doing a 3-year MFA program, the contract shouldn't be a huge problem. Most of them are for 2 years, and then after the contract is over you automatically switch over to a month-to-month plan unless you do something to extend your contract (like buy a subsidized phone from the provider). Then you could just pay the month-to-month plan until you graduate and move back home. I loved T-Mobile's customer service but their actual cell service wasn't that great in my experience (and that was in two major cities - Atlanta and New York). Verizon and AT&T tend to have the best call service nationwide. AT&T's customer service has improved greatly since I started with them way back in 2006 or so (after Cingular, which was my original provider, bought them). I don't have experience with Verizon's wireless service but I did have their Internet service when I lived in New York and they had the MOST TERRIBLE customer service I have ever experienced. No experience with Sprint.

So first - enjoy the starstruck-ness for a moment, but then get over it. Prestige is great, but reputation is better - and Wisconsin is a powerhouse in several fields. In my field, Yale and UW are both top 10 programs and really selection would be about fit. (in a lot of humanities fields, though, Ivies do still hold a lot of prestige and power behind them). What are placements like coming out of each program? Where do students end up afterwards? Can you arrange a visit? If you can, I would visit the department (ask if they can assist you with funding, and in a hurry, since they accepted you so late). Since you've already visited UW you want to be sure you are comparing apples to apples. At the very least, I would arrange Skype meetings with faculty and some current graduate students to get a feel for the department. Surely you must have mind-ranked them before you applied - which one was more appealing to you beforehand? If you do your due diligence and discover that you would really rather go to Yale, technically UW is supposed to formally release you from your decision to attend. In practice, very few PhD programs want to force a student to attend who clearly doesn't want to be there, and the contract isn't legally binding on you if I recall correctly (although you should check to be sure). Worst case scenario you do some light bridge-burning - UW might not be happy that you are backing out of the agreement, but in the long run you need to do what's best for you and your career.

I spent about 41% of my stipend (after taxes) on housing. You just have to be more frugal in other areas. It's quite common for graduate students and young professionals in NYC to spend more than the recommended 33% on housing; that's just the reality of life, even if you are sharing. I would try to keep it below 50% if at all possible, but it depends on the size of your stipend and your lifestyle. However, remember to factor in taxes into your stipend if you are a U.S. citizen or permanent resident! If you are going to change your residency to NYS you have to pay NYS AND NYC taxes. It ended up being about 15% of my stipend. My before-tax stipend was around $2500 and after taxes it went down to about $2200. (I don't know what the tax situation is for foreign nationals.) Honestly, unless you are rolling in dough I wouldn't expect to live alone - I'd look for an apartment share. It's too expensive for most young people to live alone in NYC; the only ones of my friends I know who live in NYC and don't have roommates (or romantic partners) come from wealthy families and bought their own apartments with a down payment gift from their parents. And even if you can afford the $1500 or so to live alone, having the extra $500 in your pocket is good for savings, for emergencies...you never know what might happen, and when your income is low there is less of a cushion in case of an emergency. Columbia gives preference in studios to couples and families, so I think it's not good to expect to get a studio in UAH housing (although the girl who lives across the hall from us has a small studio to herself!) However, you qualify as a domestic couple if you've been sharing finances, which for Columbia purposes means a joint bank account (that's actively used) for at least 6 months. Also, "subsidized" is a...well, I mean it's subsidized, but it's subsidized from the Morningside Heights prices so it's still expensive. My husband and I paid $1400/month for a two-room studio on 119th and Amsterdam (just steps from campus). I guess our studio would've probably cost $2400+ if it were on the regular market, which is ridiculous because it's small. I had already lived further away from Columbia my first 3 years in the city so I didn't get stuck in the bubble, but I think it is very, very easy to if you live close to campus. We joke that the undergrads don't go past 110th or 120th Sts. but there are a lot of graduate students who don't go too far south of the Upper West Side and too far north of 125th St themselves. (I had a friend who lived in Central Harlem but refused to go to the movie theater on 125th St, a short walk from campus. He'd insist on going to the one on 86th St, which was further. I don't know why!)

Nah, Guillaume, I'm in the social sciences and there are plenty of people in my field with foreign PhDs and positions at (top) departments. Oxford, Cambridge, ETH Zurich and Tokyo are definitely four of the schools that are on par with top departments stateside. I agree that life will be a lot easier with a PhD from Yale vs. Zurich, but Zurich won't be a liability. By now OP should have made a decision, but I do want to address a few things for posterity: 1) The most important aspect of any PhD decision is the coursework and the research and the faculty - basically, the program. Location should be a secondary consideration, unless you truly believe you'll be absolutely miserable in a certain place. Just the fact that OP prefers the coursework and faculty at Yale to me is a sign that he should go to Yale. 2) It amuses me when people say that X place is "gritty and unsafe" when X is usually a place traversed by lots of college students. New Haven isn't the prettiest city in the world, but Yale has been there for centuries and we haven't heard about too many axe murders and such. People often say the same thing about the neighborhood Columbia is in, which makes me roll my eyes. I'm fairly certain that OP will be quite safe in New Haven in and around Yale's campus, as long as OP keeps his wits about him and operates with some street smarts (just like he should in any major city). 3) I think it's quite a bad idea to go to Yale with the expectation that you're going to move 2 hours away to New York after 2 years. First of all, the coursework might take longer than 2 years to finish. Second of all, being close to the department is good for things other than coursework. It's important to go to departmental events, seminars, brown bags, colloquia, etc. Sometimes it's good just to be seen around the department so that professors have you in mind when something comes across their desk that would be perfect for you. For what it's worth, my advisor did commute from NYC to Yale for 2 years as a postdoc, but I feel like that's kind of a different thing. Lots of people move away when they are in the dissertation phase if they don't have to be in the lab. I'd say it's still ideal to be close by - in person meetings with committee members are better than distance ones - but possible to move away. Still, though, I wouldn't expect to be able to do that until 4 years into the program, at the beginning of year 5 (maybe year 4 at the earliest, after comprehensives are passed). Besides, NYC is way more expensive than New Haven. 4) Somewhat off-topic, but assuming that you want to be a professor...many of our universities are in the Midwest and you'd do well to be more flexible with what you consider to be a good job unless you are willing to consider alternative careers. Not that I blame you - I don't mind suburbs, but I don't really want to live in the Midwest (nothing against the Midwest personally!) and would like to be close to a city (within 2 hours). However...I'm realistic about the chances of that happening in academia, and am open to and actively seeking non-academic jobs. Academic jobs in large desirable cities are often very competitive - precisely because they are in large desirable cities - and few academics pick where they want to live. You'd better be a superstar, basically. And even that doesn't guarantee city of your choice, because the job has to be open. Also...professors don't move between institutions very often, let alone continents. If you got a tenure-track position in the U.S., that might be the last one you ever get. Sometimes if you are very accomplished you can get poached by another institution, but that's more likely to be another institution in the same country. It's highly unlikely that you'd be constantly rotating between those three countries - unless you took some non-academic international job.

It's not a general policy against Iranian students to general STEM programs. The Department of Homeland Security policy is based on a 2012 U.S. law that declares Iranian citizens ineligible for U.S. visas (student or otherwise) if they are seeking higher education in preparation for careers in Iran's energy or nuclear power sectors. However, every student's visa application is reviewed individually and decisions are made on a case-by-case basis. Students who have no intention of working in Iran's nuclear power or energy sectors should be fine. There's only one university that has made a blanket decision to stop admitting Iranian students to a narrow swath of STEM programs - that is the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and it was to chemical, computer, and mechanical engineering and the natural sciences. I suppose electrical engineering might fall under computer engineering, but UMass-Amherst is the only university who's made this decision. It's doubtful that this is the reason that the OP has been shut out of all programs. OP, if you are applying to PhD programs, it's quite rare for PhD programs to admit students in the spring. If your goal is an MS, then I would say that yes, most MS spring admissions will likely be unfunded since funding seems to run fall-to-fall. There are also often fewer slots in the spring. If you don't get admitted, you could always work in industry or research for a year and reapply next fall.

Rankings aren't everything - while program reputation does play a role in jobs in academia, they're not the end-all, be-all of getting an academic placement. Your field does indeed matter - it's more difficult to get placed in saturated fields. So going to a top 40 program may be more of a problem in English literature or history than in engineering or medical physics. For an example, I'm looking at programs in the top 40 in my field (psychology) that are ranked around 30-40, and right away I recognize some great programs. Two of those programs each has someone very famous in my subfield, and another two have at least 4 people off the top of my head I can think of that are very famous in a related subfield - who would be excellent mentors. Even some programs outside the top 40 are pretty well-respected in my area. I will say that psychology is a relatively large field with over 100 programs in psychology, and virtually every college in the country has a psychology major. At the same time, psychology is a field in which (believe or not) a substantial number of PhD holders actually exit academia and go to work in industry. So even the small teaching colleges and regional comprehensive universities will need psychology professors with PhDs, and so students in the top 40 - which are great programs - can be well-placed at one of these programs. So it really depends - what is the actual reputation of the program like in your field, aside from the absolute number of its ranking? When you look at the faculty listing of places that you'd like to teach, do they have faculty who have PhDs from programs that have a similar reputation to yours?

Yeah, don't go to the PhD if you want to go to medical school. It's a very dangerous proposition to go to a PhD program with the goal of doing more school afterwards, because chances are very good that you will be so burned out that you'll never want to see another textbook again after your PhD. 5-6 years is a long haul. I finished my PhD almost a year ago (!!!) and I finally feel like a fully normal person again, but I definitely don't want to do another degree any time soon, even though while I was in graduate school I thought about doing an MS (in statistics or computer science) to enhance my employability outside the academy. I have friends in medical school/who have finished med school in the last 5 years, and the thought of going back to do 4 years of that after 6 years in a PhD program makes me want to run away screaming. Everyone is different, of course - I do know some people who have gone to law school after their PhD. But you'll be adding 5-6 years on top of a career that's already long on training (4 years of med school + 3 years of residency + a potential fellowship. Best case scenario, that's 12 years from now). But the thing is, you want to be a practitioner that does some research, and to me the best way to do that is to get an MD, do some research in medical school, and then do a postdoctoral fellowship that trains MDs in research after you finish the MD. Then you can practice and do some research. (You could also become a nurse practitioner and get a PhD in nursing - there's a shortage of nurses and nursing faculty in particular, and that would allow you to practice and do research too.) Deferring is one option, but I would only defer if you know for sure that you'd attend the PhD program next year if you didn't get into a med school. It doesn't sound like that's the case, so I wouldn't defer. I'd decline and pursue medical school. I agree with the advice to potentially do one of those master's programs that's sort of designed for students who want to go to med school after. Columbia has a one-year master's in human nutrition that is a common stepping stone to med school, and actually a lot of our MPH students go to med school after too.

I went to Columbia SPH, and for you, Tulane sounds like the better option. Tulane is a top school of public health, it's cheaper from you, and you will have social support and a lower cost of living. Although I do feel like your education should come first, if you have two equally good choices having the support of your significant other and your parents can help be a tiebreaker. And trust me when I say living in NYC as a broke grad student is not the most fun in the world. You can't go wrong, but it feels like you are leaning towards Tulane and just feel like you can't turn down Columbia because of its reputation. I give you permission Tulane is awesome!

It is highly unlikely that School A will "badmouth" you to School B. Administrators are busy people; they don't have time to call up other admissions offices to gossip and posture about an admitted student. What possible purpose would there be in that, anyway? Their annoyance with you might have been great, but I highly doubt it's great enough for them to take the time and the personal hit to their reputation to call up School B and say...what, exactly? "This student was going to come here, but we couldn't find funding so he decided to go to your school instead!!" There's no reason that your next two weeks should be tough at all. Really, I think you are giving this outsized importance - you have to remember that administrators deal with thousands of potential students and your one problem is probably not big enough for them to spend much time trying to derail your career. Just call up B, accept their offer, get written confirmation, and then write a letter to A (email is fine) explaining that you can no longer attend because of financial circumstances and wish them well. Simple.

Do you want to work internationally? I feel like international reputation is only important if working internationally is a goal or priority for you. I'm having a hard time understanding the particulars of the funding, but it sounds like School A costs $32K a year and School B costs $22K a year, but with less flexibility of scheduling and more required coursework plus an RA. For me, I guess it would depend a lot on what my post-graduation goal was. If you want to go to a PhD program next, School A's flexibility and the ability to specialize in what you want might be a better fit. School B might be better if your goal is work right after, but you say they are both prestigiou schools. If this is a situation where you're comparing - say - Harvard to Stanford or something like that (or maybe Stanford to Northwestern) then I think professionally it doesn't matter unless you know you want to work abroad. So either way it sounds like School A is a good fit for you, and you want to go somewhere you'll be comfortable and can get what you came for.

My sister's field is exercise science, and in the course of trying to help her find positions relevant to her area, I have found far more positions that wanted someone with a degree in kinesiology or a related field than positions that wanted someone with a degree in psychology. So I don't think that would be a problem career-wise while you work in between. Conversely, for academia the name of the program doesn't matter as much as what you are learning. For someone who is specifically interested in sport psychology and aspects of that, I think a kinesiology degree that explicitly concentrates on psychological aspects is just as useful as an ed psych degree that concentrates on sports. The coursework will likely be relatively similar, perhaps with some exceptions (there are some things that exercise science/kinesiology students learn to do biomechanically). Add to that that MSU is better-reputed in your field, cheaper, has good sports teams and you like the campus more - I feel like that's your answer.

For those international students who will be moving to New York and can't visit, I strongly suggest that if you don't have a friend in the city who can visit apartments for you AND you can't afford, or don't want, to pay for a broker, that you arrange a short-term rental/sublet - like a month or two - and then use that time to find something more permanent in the city. It's generally a bad idea no matter where you go to sign a year's lease sight unseen, but I think it's especially a bad idea in New York's market because there are so many terrible situations you can get yourself into. It's not like a lot of American suburbs where most of the apartments are pretty similar to each other. As for the question about broker's fees, there are two amounts that I have seen most frequently: 1) the equivalent of one month's rent; or 2) 12-15% of the first year's rent. The amount seems to depend on the kind of broker you get.

Yes, I think this is relatively common. When I was investigating PhD programs I looked at programs in social psychology, health psychology, public health, and human development and family studies as well as a couple of other interdisciplinary departments like that. The program itself isn't as important as whether you can pursue your interests and scholarship at that program. From the two programs you are considering, they both seem to be concerned with issues surrounding the interplay between social identities and narrative/storytelling; they simply have two different disciplines. You'll be approaching the scholarship from different angles - in the UIC program it will be more focused on studying creatively written literature and taking a gender studies angle, whereas the Brown program sounds more media & communications-type focused. So the coursework you take and the orientation of the faculty members in the department is going to be different depending on where you go. But you can answer the same scholarly questions from both programs. Where the major difference will come in is where you can teach afterwards. For example, if you want to teach creative writing and literature courses in an English department, I'm betting that the PhD in creative writing & gender studies will prepare you better for that than the one in modern culture & media, both in the kinds of coursework you'll have to take AND in the line on your CV (an English department might be reluctant to hire you from that Brown program). Interdisciplinary PhDs are sometimes difficult to place because the perception is that we don't have a good disciplinary grasp, so I would ask a lot of questions about what Brown alumni do after that program and see if their placements line up with what you want to do in the future.

Your first obligation has to be to you. Sure, you want to be nice and deal with everyone with integrity, and I think you are doing that, but any final decisions have to be based upon what would be best for you and your career. If it is better for you to attend your top choice, then go there - you don't want to spend the next 5 years at a program and the next 30 years of your career with that program on your CV simply because you felt some momentary guilt. With that said, I agree - if they want a decision by April 15 and you don't think your top choice is going to get back to you by then, then you should ask if they can give you an extension to decide because you had an unexpected interview and an offer is pending. I then would contact your top choice and tell them that you're really excited about the prospect of going there, but that you have an offer from another department and you'd really like to hear from them soon. And you're not doing anything wrong. Every program has their own yield management strategies - they might have a waitlist, or they might have admitted a few more students than they intend to take in knowing that X% declines every year, or something else. Let them worry about how they are going to get the number of students they want; you worry about selecting the right program for you.