juilletmercredi

I think it depends on the program and the professors there. I think if you ask people who didn't get in anywhere when they applied before the master's and then got into programs after they did do the master's, you are automatically getting a biased sample. FWIW, I also did not think I had the credentials to get into a great PhD program straight out of undergrad; I was proved wrong when I applied to just one, and got into it. My advisers there told me that they were glad I didn't apply more widely because they believe I would've been competitive elsewhere. My own psychology program had a mix of people who had a master's and who didn't. The majority of students did not have a master's degree. I get the sense that's the trend at most of the comparable programs in my subfield - most students don't have a master's before they matriculate in the PhD program. Some do. Based on your other threads, you have a 3.91 GPA from undergrad in psychology. Your ability to do coursework and handle graduate-level coursework in psychology is not in question, so I don't think you need to do an MA in psychology, personally. I think it's odd that a professor would recommend an MA in experimental psych to show that you could perform in quantitative courses rather than just getting your quant GRE score up. Undergraduate GPA is a far better predictor of performance in coursework than the GRE (and the quant GRE is all basic math anyway, so I wouldn't really take that as a sign of whether a student could function in advanced stats classes...but that's just me). Part of the reason might be that most of your research experience is through independent studies and honors thesis work rather than supervised research assistance of a professor. Maybe you need more of that. I think that you need to raise your quant GRE score to a good solid 75th-80th percentile or higher. In the interim time, volunteer at a lab and/or work as a research coordinator. If you could get a job as a lab manager and take some graduate level psychology courses for free, that would be great. If you got into a free, funded MA program, that could be beneficial because you could get the research assistant experience and the grad classes for free, but I don't think you should borrow for an MA in psychology. You could've also just had an unlucky year. Social/community is competitive and 6 programs isn't a whole lot. It's not uncommon for even the most qualified social applicants to take 2 rounds.

I think stats students should have to do hand calculations. My entire first stats class was all hand calculations; we didn't start using computer applications until the second course. The hand calculations let you know what the computer is doing - it becomes less "magic" and more math and logic. I notice that when I served as a TA for classes that didn't require hand calculations, the students leaned more on the "magical thinking" - they had no idea what the program was doing, and thus, they did not know how to interpret the results. As I tell my students, I can teach a monkey to press the right buttons on the computer and print me some output. The important part is if they can look at the results and tell me what it means. I feel like doing the hand calculations - and thus realizing that the regression literally plots a y = mx + b type line, for example, or that ANOVA is simply when the within-group differences are bigger than the between-group ones - prepares students for that step. I also think that statistics taught in a psychology department should require a basic level of psychological theory and understanding. I think that's why intro psych is a prerequisite for the classes. I wouldn't expect the students to know my research area, and all the examples wouldn't be based only on my area, but they do need to have a basic understanding of psychological principles because we're applying the stats to those principles - that's the whole point. Even if students aren't going into research careers. Psychology and a knowledge of psychological theories and principles is useful outside of academia, too. Personally, I would make a stats class heavy on homework problems, critical thinking exercises and an analytical project. I wouldn't jettison tests completely, but they'd be weighted probably more around 30%. I agree with spunky. IN consulting, one of the biggest problems people would have is that they knew how to run and interpret the basic-level analyses but when something was a little different or went off the rails a bit, they got lost. Part of it is because they didn't understand the theoretical underpinnings of the statistical tests they were doing, so they didn't know how to adjust their approach.

Why wouldn't they? Florida State ranks higher than those two programs on other rankings, too (like U.S. News). That's not skew; that's simply that the rankings are based on a specific methodology that might be different from other methodologies, and that one ranking might be more relevant to certain students than others. The faculty productivity numbers cannot be driven upwards by the number of faculty, because that weight is created by taking the average number of publications and citations per allocated faculty member. They also do percentage of faculty having grants and awards, not absolute numbers. The rankings are also unlikely to be driven by any one factor, since there are so many factors. It's more likely that FSU is just ranked highly on the components that the NRC considers important in program quality, which means it's probably a good quality program.

I was offered a 3-year funding offer at my PhD program. I was skeptical because typically in my field, offers are for 5 years. But I asked them and they said that typically students find external funding for the rest of the program. This was my experience. I got an NSF GRF that covered years 3-5, and then an NIH T32 that covered year 6. (I took the NSF in year 3 instead of waiting until year 4 because if I hadn't, I would've had to work for someone who had a GRA position on a grant and my advisor did not have one at the time.) Also, after you finish your coursework and become a doctoral candidate, you only have to pay for matriculation and facilities anyway. That's significantly cheaper than regular tuition - at Columbia regular tuition was like $40,000, but M&F was only about $3,000 a year.

Choice in school matters; the reputation of your program still matters a lot in academic hiring. So does who you work with. You want to work with a PI who has some name recognition in the field and/or a large network of people, because his network becomes your network. The best advisors deploy their networks in support of their students and trainees - it could be as simple as you're applying for a job at Awesome University and your PI went to grad school with one of the SC members at Awesome U, so the SC member calls him up and has a chat about you. That doesn't mean you have to pick the most famous name in the field, but well-known and well-respected faculty members are a definite plus. But to me, "good" program means somewhere in the top 20-30ish; once you're in there, I think it's more about where you would flourish. You might want to take a peek at the faculty at the kinds of institutions at which you'd want to work and see what kinds of programs at which they earned their PhDs. Obviously if you want to be somewhere like MIT or Stanford, you need to go somewhere like MIT or Stanford. But the requirements may not be so stringent if you would rather end up at a mid-ranked public university or a small teaching college. Being able to come up with research problems to solve is a process, and that's what graduate school is all about - so don't worry about that. It develops as you go through the doctoral program. I was also worried about that in undergrad, but by the time I was finished with my PhD I was bursting with ideas, and now in my postdoc I am formulating ways to address those research questions and writing grants in my head for them. That's what the purpose of the doctoral degree is - to help turn you from a consumer and assistant in research to the one in control of your own research. I think the earlier you can pin down what kind of research you want to do, the better, but you don't have to know right away. I spent the first year-ish of grad school interested in something quite different than what I eventually ended up doing; and the direction of my research is changing a little bit in my postdoc, too. So I would spend some time in the first year of your grad program reading in some fields in which you are interested and getting some RA experience in those kinds of labs to see what you like. Also, the earlier you pick something, the better, because you can start gearing your seminar papers to help you write your dissertation. I had my area chosen by the end of my first year and the rough idea of what I would do my dissertation on by my second/early third. So I geared all of my seminar papers and my comprehensive exam topics towards my research area. It was great because I did less work on the seminar papers - I didn't have to reinvent the wheel each time - and ALSO because I was able to go back and mine those papers/exams for references and ideas when I was writing the dissertation. Networking: So a lot of people envision networking as something purposeful that you do, that there's some spiel or special pitch or preparation you have to have for it. Nah, not really - networking is simply getting to know people in your field that you like and who like you, and then doing something with those people. Networking in your department means showing up at departmental colloquia, going to the informal gatherings and events, and chatting people up. Then follow up on those chats, if you want to - reach out to people and see if they want to collaborate on a project or paper, or get coffee, or talk to you about a concept. Networking at conferences is just a larger version of the same thing. Lots of conferences are known for being great places for grad students and emerging scholars, so look up which ones those are and attend them. Some of them have speed mentoring sessions or lunches with prominent people in the field or other kinds of events tailored to help young folks out. Those things sell out early in my field, so register early and sign up for them. (One minor thing I would've told my past self to do is get a credit card with a small limit, and use it solely for conferences. Even if your stipend has a travel fund a lot of times they reimburse you, so you still have to have access to large chunks of money to pay conference registration fees and for flights and airfare.) Also don't be afraid to walk up to scholars in your field after symposium sessions or talks to introduce yourself and ask a question or have a chat. I met a lot of prominent people at conferences doing that. I chased down people in poster sessions who did jobs I wanted to do and asked them about them, lol. Get some business cards! People will often ask for your card. The university usually sells them discounted to students, so wait until you get on campus and have an address and phone and stuff, and then order some and bring them to conferences. Other than agreeing with what rising_star and TakeruK have already said, I am going to say something that might sound counterproductive: don't teach too much. I say it because you said you loved teaching. I love teaching, too, and so my inclination was to try to get as much teaching experience as possible. Teaching, however, is undervalued compared to research experience - and at most top schools, a person with better research experience and low amounts of teaching experience (but decent evaluations) probably has better shot at the job than a person with lots of teaching experience and low research output. So you want to get some experience, but not too much. TA for a couple of classes and then, if you can, try to teach at least one class as an instructor - maybe over the summer. (That is something I wish I did differently - I have TA and co-instructor experience but not quite instructor of record in the traditional sense.) Many elite universities offer graduate students the opportunity to teach classes in the department over the summer; there's also the option of teaching at a nearby community college or other four-year that doesn't have graduate students and/or needs adjuncts. Everybody needs adjuncts. But just do it once or twice - after that, it has diminishing returns, and teaching is SO SO time intensive. You need the time to work on your research and get publications. Last thought - one thing I did in grad school was go to the faculty pages of departments in which I'd like to work. Then I looked at the CVs of people in my field, and saw what they had done before they got hired to the department. It was nice because I got a rough idea of both the average and the range of things that people did to be competitive, but it was also a big relief - because I found that the reality is that most people did less than what most graduate students expected they needed to do in order to get hired, even at big places. This is how I found out that I was relatively competitive for even top places in terms of research, and why I'm finally kind of serene about my job prospects when I go on the market this fall (OHMYGOD).

So...your advisor is wrong about industry more generally: they do, of course, pay attention to internships when hiring. Now, I can't speak to the specific industry that you are interested in, but I do know that in general non-academic jobs and employers do like internship experience. Everybody likes to see that you have at least some experience in what it is you want to do for them, to help them make money. Now, here's the thing. Is your advisor supporting you with funding? If the answer is no, you definitely don't have to ask his permission. I did a non-academic internship during one summer of graduate school and I simply told my advisor what I had planned and that I also planned to continue in my research, and he didn't get the opportunity to say "no." But...I had an external fellowship. If your advisor is funding you (which it sounds like), then this can be handled more delicately, but I still don't think you need to ask for his permission. Your only concern is whether he will stop supporting you after you take the internship. Frankly, his opinions don't matter - you don't feel like it is a waste of time, and even if it does delay your graduation you either don't care or think it's a worthwhile trade-off. So the question is, if you go to him and say "I appreciate your input, and I've definitely considered it while deciding. I've decided that I am going to take this internship this summer. I will keep up with my summer work in XYZ ways" (XYZ being ways you have already thought about and planned), will he threaten to pull your funding? If he comes at you with the same negative views again, then I would say something like "I really do appreciate your concerns, Prof X, but this is something I really want to do. The project seems interesting, and I do want to test the waters to see if industry could be for more after my PhD. However, I understand the need to keep pushing forward in my work in the lab, and that's why I plan to do XYZ." Keep the focus on how you will stay engaged in your PhD program and your lab work, but make the decision sound like a done deal, and don't make it sound like you're asking. From that point, see what he says. His choices are 1) to support you, whether enthusiastically or reluctantly, or 2) decide to impose some sort of ridiculous consequences on you, in which case you have to decide whether you still want to take the internship. This gets trickier if you need a letter of recommendation; I ended up only applying to internships that didn't require letters, as I didn't want to have this conversation with my advisor before I even applied. If you think he'll refuse to write you a letter, then just seek a letter from another professor who will support you.

Disagree. You've got to think bigger picture here. Of course personality and work skills are going to be the first considerations, but of course it matters to you whether or not the student is a good one and/or is the type to publish 10 publications before graduation. First of all, on the most concrete level, a student who comes ready to publish can work with you to publish papers - i.e., you can work together and be first author on some and second author on others. Good students also foster better discussions both in class and in the lab, which may stimulate your own ideas and better work out of you. At more abstract levels, more publications makes your lab look better and your department look better, and a superstar lab mate becomes a well-placed networking contact in the future. The other thing is that you have to look at this task from the perspective of the person asking you to help with it. Your advisor asked you to help most likely because he trusted your judgment; if you keep a narrow view towards this and pick students solely based upon their technical skills (which I know wasn't the advice but stay with me), your advisor might be...skeptical about your judgment. You aren't hiring a lab technician or an undergrad RA; your advisor is asking you to help him bring on a graduate student. So you should be concerned with selecting a grad student - yes, someone who can help you in the lab, but on a broader scale someone you would want as a colleague both right now in your department and in the future as part of the field. That's what faculty members consider when they bring on people and you should, too. Think about if you wanted a grad student - who would you choose? Besides, you can't tell personality from pieces of paper or even social media sometimes. I rarely post on social media and someone who checked mine wouldn't be able to find out anything meaningful about my personality from them.

Definitely the full funding.

Many (most?) PhD programs are fairly flexible, so you'd probably have the opportunity to take a class in Python, Java, or R if you wanted to. Might be at the undergrad level. I agree that stats is important (I'm in a stats & methodology postdoc) but I wouldn't spend too much time trying to learn every package, programming language and technique on the face of the planet. Get a really good grasp of the basics and pick a signature area. The reason is because if you know your theoretical stuff, you can always learn new statistical techniques later. The underlying principles don't really change. All statistical packages do relatively the same thing - a correlation is a correlation regardless of whether you do it in R or Stata or SPSS. (I'm talking about all-purpose ones, not special focus ones.) What changes is how you do it. Once you learn one software package it's easier to learn another one, so if you can learn one or two very solidly in graduate school and have an interest in learning others, you should be fine. And which one you learn really depends on what you want to do. I only have a basic knowledge of R and plan to teach it to myself this year, and yes, R is what the statisticians and computer scientists are using. But most of the non-academic social science type jobs (think tanks, NGOs, nonprofits, etc.) I've been looking at want SAS, SPSS, and/or Stata. Most of them don't expect a programming language. That's quite useful if you want to go into data science or tech. But even at the tech firms that hire, for example, UX researchers - they don't expect you to know Python. They want a social scientist who can do social science work. (I'm not saying don't learn it - I think you should! Because it's fun and useful, lol.) The same is true of statistical techniques. Personally I have found intensive longitudinal data analysis methods (multilevel modeling, time-varying effects, survival models, etc.), mixture modeling (LCA et al) and SEM to be most useful in my own work, but that's because of the nature of what I do. For you it could be time series, data mining, or whatever. Causal inference is another area that I have less interest in but could be useful or interesting to you. Dynamical systems is a term that gets thrown around a lot where I am, lol. Project management is hugely important, especially grants management. A lot of non-academic places still compete for grants and government contracts. You can learn it in grad school but like most things, you need to specifically seek it out. Find a mentor (informal or formal) who has grants and sit in on how they manage it. When they write the next one, ask if you can help. Perhaps in your third year, think about writing your own - maybe an F31 or R36 if you do NIH-fundable research, or maybe an NSF dissertation grant. postdocs are great for this, too, as they generally encourage you to learn about grantsmanship. Writing is, of course, important - but it's often considered a "soft skill" and employers often don't realize that they are looking for it until they find someone who doesn't have it.

For me it's within the top 30 or so. Research fit is important; you want to be working on things you want to work on. Also, like rising_star said, sometimes the advisor at a technically lower-ranked school might be better-known in your area. My psychology department is like top 15-20 but my advisor is one of the biggest names in methodological research, so for someone like me who wanted to concentrate in statistics and methodology it was nice to have that name recognition (plus he's just a great person who was a good mentor, and his research matched my own interests). I picked a school towards the bottom of the top 25 (Ohio State, tied for #21) and found a famous name in self-esteem research; I think she recently moved there from Michigan. NYU is #30 but I know there are a couple of famous people on faculty that do research there; some of them aren't even my areas but I still recognize the names. Penn State is ranked #30 but is top 5 within developmental, for example. UCSB is ranked #40 but has several big names within my subfields. I wouldn't give the rankings much weight, since they are reorganized from year to year. It's major groupings that really make the big difference, and I think the top 30ish programs are similar enough in quality and name recognition that what really matters are the subfields, your advisor, and where you think you can get the best training for what you want to do. Like, if you know the #1 program in your field has a 100% placement rate - in academia - and you want to work in industry but the #20 school has crazy industry connections and the faculty seem much more amenable to students getting non-academic work experiences and training, then that might be the place for you.

AS far as undergraduate background, in my experience biostatisticians tend to have been math or statistics majors in undergrad (there are always exceptions; a friend of mine was a chemistry major and had an MPH in the social/behavioral sciences before getting her DrPH in biostatistics). Epidemiologists come from a wide range of undergrad backgrounds - sometimes math or stats, sometimes the life/biological sciences, sometimes the quantitative social sciences. I would agree with holykrp's characterization - biostatisticians (at the PhD level, and to a certain extent at the MS level) develop and refine the statistical tools necessary to do a lot of public health research, whereas epidemiologists use these tools to conduct substantive research in the field. Some epidemiologists are quite math-heavy and do participate in the creation and refinement of statistical tools, if they like; many biostatisticians also have substantive interests and their statistical research is geared towards that particular area.

Yes, I have several former students with BAs in psychology who got jobs out of college in a variety of fields. I also have some friends from college who got a job with a BA in psychology - 30% of our majors are employed at graduation (most of the rest decide to go to graduate school). BAs in psychology work in marketing and advertising firms, in business/corporate/general management, human resources, management consulting, banking, nonprofits (in general roles and especially as research associates), community organizations (ditto), educational testing firms like ETS and Pearson, school systems, social service organizations, colleges and universities (admissions, recruitment, advising, institutional research), and in mental health provision (usually in adjunct positions like rehabilitation counselors or residential staff at halfway houses or residential facilities).

I understand your frustrations, and I am not - in any way - trying to minimize them. I think that's a frustration that many recent college graduates have. But I think this recent article in the Washington Post is relevant: What do employers really want? Workers they don't have to train. A college education for a BA is not really supposed to train you for a specific kind of job, or even a specific set of jobs. It's supposed to teach you how to learn, and how to absorb information; how to think critically; how to solve problems; how to read and analyze tons of information. You are then supposed to use that information to learn the skills that you need in the work place. In the old days, employers hired college graduates because a BA signaled that they were able to do those things; then they offered some kind of training to get people up to speed on what they were supposed to do. Employers have gotten increasingly unwilling to spend money on training employees - they want employees who already know how to do everything right out of the gate. Nobody knows several statistical packages and a programming language out of undergrad - even the stats majors learn one, maybe two, and the basics of a programming language when they graduate. Certainly no social science major does. With time, you can learn another one, but many employers are unwilling to give that time - unless they can get you to do it during an unpaid internship. I'm saying that not to be argumentative but because it's relevant for a PhD program, too. PhD programs don't really train in specific skills, not on purpose anyway. You can acquire that information while you are in graduate school, but you have to make the personal effort to do it. I always say that the end goal of a PhD is really to teach you how to learn things on your own, because that's essentially what scientists do - teach themselves things first and then teach others things. Very few programs actually give you the practical skills to be a researcher or even a professor through the formal program, though. You pick those up on the side, by doing. As an example, I wanted to learn Stata, so I decided to do my dissertation data analysis in Stata instead of in SPSS or SAS (neither of which could do what I wanted to do anyway). At this point I can teach myself to use any statistical package (and have done so with proprietary systems in internships, too). Example two - most PhD programs do not teach you how to teach. You learn by doing it. I guess the tl;dr version of this is totally do non-academic internships and take little workshops on the side if you want to develop actual hard skills in graduate school. It's great to win external funding so you can carve your own time out to do these things and don't have to get permission for them.

I've heard of lots of people who work in industry and adjunct a class or two on the side. My thing is...why are you engaging people on these conversations during your interviews? In my experience, professors aren't terribly happy with applicants announcing their intentions to not go into academia. Not that you can't have those aspirations - I did - but you don't need to broadcast it to the people interviewing you. It's not terribly relevant to your admissions. Moreover, the majority of the professors with whom you are interacting know zero about industry possibilities after graduation. They themselves mostly likely went from undergrad to grad school to a faculty position - maybe with a few years of research experience post college and a postdoc post-grad school. But very few of them (in social and community) will have any outside work experience. So they can't really speak to your opportunities in that world. And the grad students who are there are just as uncertain as you are, and talking about it might make them anxious as well. When I was a grad student, if a prospective had asked me what I personally planned to do after grad school I would've answered them happily with whatever I had planned that particular semester. But if he/she wanted to engage in a conversation about the job market in our field/in academia, that would've made me anxious and it isn't something I would've wanted to discuss. My read? I finished my PhD in social psychology (and public health) 6 months ago, so I have colleagues who are recent grads. I have a lot of colleagues from my program who went into industry positions - a lot of consulting, marketing, data science, user experience research kind of stuff. The unemployment rate for PhD finishers is very, very low - so if you want to work after you finish your PhD, you'll get a job. Also, FWIW, I was like 95% sure when I started my own PhD program that I wanted to do the same thing - government or industry research, plus maybe adjuncting on the side. Six years of grad school and six months of a postdoc later, and I am fairly certain that I actually do want to be a professor - and in the fall, I plan to focus on academic jobs, although I will be applying to a wide range of positions. You'll grow and change a lot and your opinions and desires will change, too.

Generally I am straightforward if I think a student has plagiarized a paper, rather dancing around the issue. But other professors might not be - they might not want to embarrass you, or their university might have a long and onerous academic dishonesty prices that they don't want to get into. Regardless, though, it does sound kind of like he's accusing you of having plagiarized the paper (or rather that he at least suspects that the work is not your own). However, I can only guess! The person to ask would be your professor. The email is already sent so this might be moot - but I wouldn't ask the professor if we should meet; rather I would tell the professor that I wished to meet with him and ask him for a good time. Then discuss your concerns with him in person. You can tell him straightforwardly that you're aware that the paper might be poorly written and put together, but that it is indeed all your own work. Ask him what makes him feel like the paper seems like it was written by different people for a different assignment. It seems like he is offering you the opportunity for a revision, so I would ask him for some feedback on what you need to fix and what areas of concern are the biggest wrt a revision.

The thing is, beyond very specific circumstances that happen only rarely, your decision to attend a specific program is not a binding legal contract. It's just an agreement. You can accept a program and then revoke that acceptance on February 16, April 15, or July 7 and the outcome will likely be roughly the same - you won't go to that program. If you have to put down a deposit you might lose the deposit, and if you revoke acceptance on July 7 you might have some faculty members who are a bit upset with you (or worse). But as far as whether or not you actually have to attend the program...you can decide to pull out whenever you want. With that said, the program itself isn't playing very nice itself - they expect you to commit to a program before you know whether you can afford it. That's absurd, and I think that if they are forcing your hand in that way that you need to do what you need to do. I would first ask for an extension of time to make the decision - at the very least ask if they can wait until after you find out about their funding offer. If the answer is no, though, then you can accept their offer and wait and see what happens with the funding offer in March. Or you can decline, if you feel morally better doing that.

I agree that it is important to have good rapport with one's advisor, and that you should meet or at least talk to the advisor in the more interesting lab to be sure that your work styles are compatible. But generally speaking, you should make decisions about your career based upon what's best for you, not what might satisfy your advisor. If your advisor really thinks that highly of you, surely he must've expected you would've been a competitive candidate in other places and might eventually leave the lab. And while I generally agree that working with an advisor who cares about you and your career development is more important than the exact area...the area you work in does have a big impact on the future work that you can do. And if you can have both (a great advisor and the most interesting area), that would be ideal.

So - moot questions now - but one wonders why your cousin didn't simply inform Princeton of his illness, either when it happened or in Spring 2014 when he knew they were expecting him to complete paperwork, but he did not. The current 2015 website actually says that no more than 2 years is allowed, period. Was your cousin in contact with his advisor at all? I think your cousin should contact his old advisor from Princeton. See if the advisor support his return and him picking back up where he left off, and if the advisor is willing to support him in his quest to re-enter without reapplying. Support from a professor in the department would go a long way towards smoothing this out either way. The advisor might also be able to comment on whether your cousin's funding will be waiting for him when he gets back. The Director of Graduate Studies in his department is another person to talk to, since that person is responsible for administrative issues including leave procedures. Under Princeton's normal leave process, if a student doesn't return at the end of a leave of absence, he or she would have to reapply for admission the normal way. This may not be a big problem if the advisor is supportive and everyone understands that it's a rubber stamp to return to the program. The Dean of the Graduate School is the head honcho in charge of this stuff, so a conversation with him or her may be in order - potentially, though, after conversing with the advisor and/or the dean of students. But really, you've got to turn inward on this. If there's going to be any headway made then your cousin has to talk to people at the graduate school, and he has to have a really good explanation for why he didn't contact anyone either when he got sick or at any point after when he realized he wasn't going to graduate on time. And if he hasn't been in contact with his advisor, he'll need to explain that too.

I can't stand it when my students tell me that they don't like to read. It's usually in the context of an assignment. 1) I can't understand a person who does not feel remotely embarrassed admitting that they don't like to read, and 2) I don't really care. You still have to read the assignment.

I know several academic couples who were either dating before graduate school and went in at the same time, and/or have graduated and are doing their things together. There are many permutations of what they have decided to do. Some of them arranged their plans so that they could stay physically in the same place. Example 1: A friend of mine is in year 6 of her program. Her partner was thousands of miles away at another PhD program in a different field. Partner, for a variety of reasons that included their relationship, quit his program and moved to Grad City. He worked for a few years and then joined a PhD program in the metropolitan area of Grad City. Then the shoe was on the other foot; my friend moved to the suburban place where her partner is. She's on the market now, but she's looking only for positions in the metropolitan area around where her partner is in his program, since her partner still has another 3-4 years to go. I know of many examples like that. In some cases, my friends and colleagues were able to get postdoctoral positions at the same universities or nearby ones so they could wait for their partners to finish up. In other cases, friends and colleagues actually left academia, preferring to work nearby their partner than do an academic job far from their partner. In still other cases people got lucky and got jobs in the same places as where their partner was employed/still in programs. And in other cases, I have had colleagues move across the region or country to follow an academic partner. And some of them chose to be apart for some limited (or indefinite) period of time. I'm in the latter group and my husband isn't even an academic - but he started a degree program towards the end of my PhD, and I got offered an excellent postdoc, so I moved 250 miles away (with his encouragement). I know some other academics who have chosen to do this, and it is both less and more common than you'd think. It's more common in the sense that a lot of people do it, but it's less common in the sense of WHO does it. Most of the academics I know who live apart from their partners (academic or not) are older academics who are more advanced in their careers and have heard the mantra that you need to sacrifice if you want to succeed in academia. Most of the ones I know who have moved the earth to make things work are younger folks in my own generation, who have decided that they don't want to live apart from their families and would rather entertain a greater diversity of postgrad options. In my case, the separation has positives and negatives. The negatives outweigh the positives, of course, but a few good things are that I have a lot more time to focus on me and my own work without the (often welcome!) distractions of a partner and that I have an entire apartment all to myself, haha. However, we have jointly decided that this is the last time we are doing this (we were also medium-distance for the first 4 years of my doctoral program). After this we are living together; if that means that I have to leave academia, then I will. But he's also pretty flexible about the academic thing, so flexibility and understanding is key. The good thing about dating another academic is that they understand that need for flexibility and what academia is like. (My husband is incredibly observant and empathetic, so even though he is not an academic he has absorbed a lot of the norms of the field and he "gets it." People would ask what my dissertation was about and what a PhD is like during parties, and he'd explain it almost as well as I could lmao.) ** The thing to remember is that this is not limited to graduate students. Academics do have some location-limited jobs, but so do other high-powered professionals. You could later date an actor who needs to be in Los Angeles or New York; or a financier who needs to be in London or New York or Charlotte; or a public health practitioner who really needs to be in Atlanta. I thus agree with the general advice that you should take a risk and just figure things out as you go along. For now, enjoy the relationship. You've got 12 months before you really have to think about this. And then in October or November of this year, when it's more clear where he's going to be in the next couple years - see how you feel. A lot can change in a year. You may not still be together. Or you may be deeply in love and he decides he wants to stay in Your City until you finish. Or you may be deeply in love and decide to do long-distance for a couple of years until you get done, or at least until you are dissertating and can move to where he is. Lots of my friends in the humanities dissertated long distance so they could be with partners or family.

I don't understand the first line of your last paragraph - where you say that you can't transfer to a lab other than these three choices because either the other labs aren't well-funded or because the other PIs are enemies or friends of your PI. The funding I understand, but why should it matter whether your new advisor is an enemy or friend of your PI? If they're a friend, that's a good thing, because they will view your work positively and admire your PI's opinion of you. If they're an enemy (which I think is probably a strong word - perhaps your PI just doesn't get along with them)...well, he will be gone, yes? Even a PI trying to move to another university wouldn't let his grants lapse and be gone for months. Quite the contrary, actually - he'd have to make himself desirable to other places. There's something weird going on here. But to me, the whole point of going to graduate school is to do research that you like and are interested in. Maybe you won't absolutely love the research that you do in graduate school, but you should at least like it and be mildly interested in it. Still, it doesn't sound like you have a good option to do research that you like - the one advisor who does interesting research also expects 12-hour days and seven-day work weeks. If you are a third year and you think you can graduate in 4.5 or even 5 years (realistically) then that means you will be at your current institution for 2 more years. I think you need to have a frank conversation with your advisor about his plans for the lab in the next 2 years. You say that he's trying to move on - has he shared this goal with you explicitly (i.e., has he straight-up told you that he's trying to move elsewhere) or is this just what you've deduced from watching him? Either way you should still approach him, but how you approach him will changed based on that. If you know he's searching, ask him if he is seriously searching this year and what his timeline is for leaving. If he hasn't already started applying, then the earliest he could leave would be summer/fall 2016, and then you would only have one year left. He might be able to advise you remotely as you write up your dissertation and get out. I agree that staying with your advisor is probably your best course of action if you want to go into industry, because then you will finish quickly and his opinion will matter less. After that, the best option does seem like C. I know you said that you don't like Professor C's research. Is it at least mildly interesting, and can you work on a project in that field for 2-3 more years while you finish up? If the answer is yes, since your goal is industry I think the working relationship between you and your advisor is paramount here. A person who pushes his students to work 12 hours daily Monday to Sunday may not take kindly (or support) a student he knows wants to go into industry (I'm generalizing here, but I do believe this). On the other hand, the other advisor is well-recognized - he might have connections with a postdoc you want to do that you don't even know about yet; his research is useful (which is paramount in industry) and more importantly you'll be able to have the lifestyle that you want in graduate school without going crazy and/or neglecting your family. This is where the conversation with your current PI comes in. If he's upfront about wanting to leave, then I think switching makes sense. Realistically it might delay your graduation, but that will probably happen anyway - it would be better to control the switch yourself (and the delay) before you begin dissertation work than to wait to the last minute and find that you have to switch anyway, but you are halfway through your dissertation and now you have to get set back significantly or even start over. Most scientists are sane people who wouldn't deny their students recommendation letters - or be irrationally angry with them - because the student switched labs because the PI is leaving. What else are you supposed to do if he leaves?

I think most labs are open far more than 9-5. My work is community-based so I wasn't in a physical lab per se, but my friends and colleagues who did more experimental work were definitely in the laboratory after 5 pm - sometimes as late as 10 or 11 pm depending on the day and what they were doing. I would imagine that a biology laboratory would be open past 5 pm - and there will probably be some postdocs or graduate students in there - so you can get your work done after hours. Personally, were I taking on an undergraduate student I wouldn't expect a commitment of more than about 10-15 hours from an undergraduate. Unlike graduate students, research isn't the primary endeavor of undergraduates and they have a lot of other things - other classes, other activities, perhaps a part-time job, and their social development. If an undergrad WANTED to work in the lab for 20 hours a week that would be great, but I think 10 hours a week is plenty to get some good experience for graduate school and - if the timing is right - perhaps get authorship on a publication. But I think 10 hours is a completely reasonable expectation for an undergrad. And another thing - at least in my lab and field, nobody expects an undergrad to take full control of one part of a project. I don't know what ICF is and how big a job it is, so I don't know what's directly comparable in psychological research. But let's say cleaning data - if I assigned an undergrad to clean data, they wouldn't be the only person in charge of that. I'd either have multiple undergraduates doing it, or I'd give her a sub-task and finish the task myself or with an graduate student. It's precisely because the undergrad's time has to be measured in hours rather than in a dedication to completing a specific project. That's no hard feelings against the undergrad - that's just the way it is, and it's understandable. As long as she was sufficiently dedicated and did good work in the time that she did come in, that should be enough.

^This is my advice. Make it about your professional fit and research interests, and not about her mentorship style. "Thanks for the very generous offer! I am flattered that you thought of me. However, I am quite satisfied with my working relationship with Awesome Advisor, and I don't think that my research interests are a great fit for the traineeship. If you like, though, I can forward the information onto some colleagues who might be interested!"

I just wanted to note (for posterity) that I don't think being the only American in the lab is the problem...it's the vibe of the lab. Being the only American doesn't matter if the students of the other nationalities are willing to communicate with you in the language you share and do science with you. The problem seemed to be not that they were Chinese, but that for whatever reason they were uncommunicative (or exclusionary in the little communication they did have) and did not want to collaborate in the way that you wanted or expected. I'm glad you're happier in a new rotation, though!

Don't feed the trolls, people. Anyway, I got married right before the beginning of my fifth year of my PhD program! I had a bit of nontraditional planning period - my mother-in-law is a wedding planner and it was all planned very quickly. Honestly, looking back - I would do it the same way again. Well, maybe I would give myself a little more time, but...wedding planning is only as stressful as you make it. Popular culture says that you need to start at least a year in advance and get a big venue and invite 100+ people with a fancy gown et al...and if you really want a wedding like that, go for it! But you don't have to have it that way. The more you detach yourself from the things that no one will remember or care about, the better. What those are depends on you and your circle. Like, I know none of my friends and family would care about centerpieces (or flowers in general). I don't even remember what the centerpieces were at my own wedding - I think we used candles on mirrors with pretty glass beads and flower petals or something. Why spend $1200 on flowers if you don't care about them? And the reverse is true - if flowers are really important to you, then make them a priority, but de-prioritize whatever it is that doesn't matter (like shoes or matching bridesmaids dresses or whatever). Whether your program will discourage you taking time off to get married really depends on the individual program and your advisors, but quite frankly, screw 'em. If you have to miss classes, the proper way to handle it is just to notify the professor ahead of time that you are going to miss X class on Y date. You don't have to explain why. Then just make sure that you make up the work. As long as you only miss one class that semester (barring emergencies) it shouldn't be a problem; I've never had a professor have a problem. (In fact, I had a professor tell me to miss class for an event - namely, two presidential candidates came to campus to speak and I wanted to hear them.) I do encourage waiting on the honeymoon until a break, though. Winter break is an excellent time to take a honeymoon because you'll be at least a bit burned out and it may be bitterly cold wherever you are, so if you go someplace warm and sunny that might bring up your spirits. Spring break is another good time to honeymoon. My husband and I still haven't taken our honeymoon; it'll probably end up being an anniversary trip lol.