juilletmercredi

1) Coursework is not the way you learn stuff in a PhD program, so it's okay that you won't be taking a whole lot of classes. There are a lot of other ways to learn what you need to know. I think #3 for the cons is the biggest reason that makes all the other ones invalid. You don't want a PhD; you were pressured into getting a PhD by your father, who honestly gave you bad advice. You can always go back later for a PhD if you decide that you really want one - but honestly, dropping out of a PhD program is harder (emotionally and professionally) than most people think it is. I did not drop out of my program but I wanted to, in my third year, and I wrestled with the decision for the entire year and had to go to therapy to deal with the stress and havoc it was wreaking in my life. (Plus my job applications were unsuccessful. If I had found a job I probably wouldn't have a PhD today.) I think that it's a myth that the PhD open doors to more interesting work. It's just a different KIND of work. If you have a burning desire to do research in computer science, and you really want to LEAD a research team and write grants and/or compete for funding and resources in other ways, and you want the independence and autonomy that comes with being a doctoral-level scientist - go for it. But if you just want to work in the field of CS doing something interesting, you can totally do that with an MS. In fact, you can still do research with an MS, it'll just be under the direction of a PhD. Also, let me be the one to tell you that the high of simply having a PhD does not last long and is totally not worth torturing yourself for 5-6+ years for if you don't need it for what you want to do. I just finished mine, I thought I would feel euphoric and elated, and actually I just felt relieved and kind of numb. I'm happy I'm done, it feels nice, but the sense of accomplishment is not proportional to the amount of work that went into completing the degree. Moreover, most of the happiness comes from the fact that I now have access to the kinds of jobs I'd always dreamed of doing.

Agreed with all above. Don't work for free. Either find another advisor that can fund you or, if that is not possible, defer your admission until funding is found.

Your extracurriculars don’t really matter. The science/tech writing is interesting, but the only thing a future psychology department will care about is the research experience (and MAYBE the TEDx-type talks if they were on scientific psychological issues, but even that will be a very minor consideration). Your interests are far too wide-ranging. Personality, cognitive, and social are three different subfields, for example, and while you can combine them in some coherent way I don’t see evidence that you’ve done that. What do you mean by Jungian psychology? Carl Jung studied a lot of things. Do you have a rough “elevator speech” of your research interests? Something that can be summed in one sentence? For example, my research interests are in the connections between substance use, mental health, and sexual risk/HIV risk behavior in African Americans. Now that work cuts across social psychology, health psychology, cultural psychology, and takes influences from community psychology, but if I simply said I had interests in those areas nobody would know what I was talking about. Do you have a similarly simple description of your interests? Normally I would say that MA programs in psychology are pretty much useless, with two exceptions: 1) people who have no background in psychology but want to go to a PhD in psychology program, and 2) people with very low GPAs (<2.75) who need to prove that they can handle the graduate-level coursework. I say this only because MA programs are very expensive and funding for MAs in psychology is close to nonexistent at most programs. Besides that, most PIs want to see extra research experience. Personally I think that a 3.09 with a 3.15 in psychology is high enough that an MA is unnecessary - although taking a few graduate classes as a non-degree student at a local public university, if they allow it, could emphasize your psych abilities. There are other ways to narrow down your interests, and frankly, you need more research experience especially in the competitive social subfield. You can try to volunteer as a research assistant, or you can try to get a job as a project coordinator/research manager at a university psych lab, a lab in a related field (like psychiatry or public health/medicine), or a non-academic institution that does research.

Students don’t need to “earn” basic personal respect. Basic personal respect (not the professional respect as an expert in the field, but respect for your human dignity) is something that all people deserve regardless of their educational background or achievements. Ripping up your work in front of other people violates that basic personal dignity, and no, it’s not normal. That said, professors are like all humans: they range in personality. And some professors are assholes. This professor sounds like an asshole. One of the things that you will learn is that just because your professors are experienced and more educated than you does not mean that they are always right. In the beginning, you will take more of their direction because you are new, and you need it. As you become more advanced, you will take less of their direction, because you will be more experienced with a better handle on your own professional needs. For example, the images. You may not like the ones that he prefers, and you may like some of the ones he hates. In the beginning, there may be some real professional reason why the works he chose are better (and sometimes asshole professors are unwilling or unable to explain why). As time goes on, he may still be right - but you still have the professional ability to do what you want to do and take the consequences, good or bad, with that. You also may see things from a different perspective or have different priorities (aka, he's choosing your work with the assumption that you want to be an academic artist at a university, whereas you are thinking of going a commercial route).

It’s not that I find it hard to believe that people don’t know Columbia is an Ivy League school; as I said in my own post, a lot of people are not familiar with the schools that comprise the Ivy League. It’s that I find it hard to believe that most of the people the OP comes into contact with (which are bound to be primarily academics) do not recognize Columbia at all. Not because they should, but just because most people do at least in passing. Lots of people confuse Penn State and Penn - I’m a postdoc at one of them and people always think I’m going to the other. But I think that’s less a lack of familiarity with the schools and just that people tend to bungle the two similar sounding schools in their head. I would say I’m going to Penn State and people would say “Oh, Philadelphia” and I’d be like “no, not Penn, Penn State” and they’d be like OH. Moreover, I find it interesting so many people believe this person is a troll. I mean, it's a definite possibility, but I've met people who actually did think this way. I worked with undergrads at Columbia and several of them did have this mindset - often because these kinds of values were transmitted to them from their parents or home communities. It's not outside the realm of possibility that they brought that with them to grad school. Why castigate the person for something they are obviously struggling with? That's why I said I knew this thread wouldn't be good. I don't understand why people think it's okay to be mean to a person (troll or not) because they expressed an unpopular opinion that they are clearly experiencing some anxiety about. If they are a troll you're just feeding them, and if they're not a troll you're just making them feel terrible.

I don't buy fancy pens; my favorites are the Papermate Inkjoy pens (they sell them in black and blue and in funky colors. I use the fun colors to grade). My favorite cheapo brand are the BIC Round Stics. But I'm obsessed with always having access to a pen, which is why I buy inexpensive ones - I have them all over the place. I have two full pen cups on my desk at work and another one at home. I lose them pretty often, that's why.

I think that additional coursework is definitely useful, and will likely be necessary if you want to attend competitive top programs. Graduate programs are designed to build upon undergraduate knowledge, and by your own admission have no background in psychology. I think your math background will add a dimension of desirability to your application - especially if you are interested in quantitative psychology or a very heavily quantitative subfield/area of interest - but you are still, at minimum, going to need general psychology, research methods, and statistics (if you have already taken this in the math department you are fine). Most professors would like to see at least 1-2 other disciplinary classes, like developmental psych or social psych. You need to have a foundation upon which to build. I think you can do them both at the same time. You can try to get a position in a psychology lab. Then, while you do that, you can take some classes as a non-degree student at a local public university.

I have never quite figured out what people mean when they say "processed." What does that mean? A process is basically doing something. Are frozen vegetables processed? Are carrots with the tops cut off processed? Is white bread considered processed? Is milk fortified with vitamin D or orange juice fortified with calcium processed? (Probably yes to all of those.) And when I say processed I don't mean are they literally processed, because they all are (and probably every single piece of food that enters your mouth is, regardless of whether you grew it yourself or not) but "processed" in the sort-of disdainful way people use the word now. One website says that processed foods are "anything in a box, bag, can, or package." Does that mean my spaghetti sauce is processed? My bag of apples? My box of pasta? Am I supposed to make pasta from scratch and cut it in one of those pasta machines? I don't have time or patience for that. Am I supposed to make sauce from scratch? I do sometimes, but I use tomatoes from a can. Does that mean that my food's not clean? I often buy frozen vegetables because it's just me and the fresh ones go bad before I can use them up, but I don't want to go to the grocery store every day. As for fresh meat...how am I supposed to get that? I'm supposing that the packages of ground beef and chicken I pick up at the supermarket don't count. Am I supposed to find a butcher? I live in a small college town. (Actually, it's kind of in a rural area, so maybe if I drove 20-30 minutes outside of town I would find a butcher.) Like pumpkin pie spice. I make pumpkin pie from scratch (including the crust). If I have pumpkin pie spice in my cabinet (which I usually do) I use it. If I don't, I use the constituent ingredients, which I usually also have in my cabinet because I like to cook. Is there a significant difference in the health of my food using nutmeg, cinnamon, ginger, et al. separately and using the pumpkin pie spice? It doesn't taste different, unless I choose to use more of X spice. It is literally the same thing, except that I added them separately rather than in a little canister together. Why does that matter? (Also, most people I know actually do not have the spices already in their pantry. They might have the cinnamon and nutmeg, but only some have ginger, and almost nobody I know has allspice in their cabinet besides me. You can omit the allspice, though.) I mean, there's a big gulf between what's conceived of as modern-day "clean eating" and microwaving a TV dinner. I cook because I really like to make tasty meals; because cooking is (usually) healthier than eating out; and because cooking is also cheaper than eating out all of the time. But cooking doesn't mean that you're following a clean eating movement, because I use a lot of processed foods when I cook (see all of the above).

I made a post about that directly above yours. Basically, I have no idea on a more general level - it kind of depends on your individual study section/panel of reviewers, I would imagine. I do disease related research and I still managed to get an NSF, but in my proposal I "stepped back" and made the proposal more about the basic-ish science behind my work. (Not too basic, as I am an applied scientist by nature!) In my paragraph about the applications/implications of the research I did briefly mention that it could be applied to HIV prevention interventions within public health. My project was also about tracking substance use in a vulnerable population, so it was pretty health-related if not exactly disease-related, but I still got the NSF. Since your research has an application to a medical issue but can be applied more widely, I would focus the majority of your statement on the modeling research you do itself. When you have a paragraph about the broader impacts/applications of your work, you can mention the medical application as one of the potential benefits to doing your work. I think the NSF is concerned that you are not doing specifically disease-oriented work, but not necessarily about whether your work is applied to solve disease-related problems. They just want to fund people who are doing more basic scientific work instead of developing cures or interventions, I think.

Why not do a limited application cycle this year and see what happens? Apply to your top, top choice programs and also look for jobs. For what it's worth, I went straight into a PhD program in public health from undergrad. My undergrad GPA was much lower than yours (a 3.42); I did not do an MPH and in fact did not have a master's; and I didn't have any practical public health experience. I did have 2.5 years of research experience in undergrad, though. Your GRE scores are low-ish but still acceptable, I would say. You may want to retake them if you have the time and money. I would apply to JHU, Emory, and UNC this year and see what happens. That's what I did - I applied to four MPH programs and my dream PhD program, not expecting to get admitted. Well, I did.

I am not a DrPH, but a lot of friends of mine are. I think connecting with professors in most DrPH programs is almost as, if not equally as, important as it is in PhD programs. It kind of depends on the flavor of the DrPH program - in some departments (like mine) the DrPH was a research-oriented degree; PhD and DrPH students were nearly indistinguishable, and because of that having a defined research area and contacting professors ahead of time was always a good idea (although not completely necessary - I didn't contact anyone ahead of time at my public health PhD program). In other programs the DrPH is more considered a professional degree, the next step after an MPH - kind of akin to a DNP for nursing. In those cases it might be less crucial.

PsyDs do have the tendency to be more expensive. Most PhD programs in clinical psychology offer you funding - so at least a partial tuition waiver/coverage and health insurance and then a payment of a monthly stipend. Most of the top programs give you full funding, which is coverage of all your tuition and fees, health insurance, and a stipend that is large enough to live upon (frugally). PsyD programs, as professional programs, do not offer that kind of funding and expect you to cover the entire program in loans, our out of personal funds. There are three kinds of subfields that will allow you to do clinical practice within psychology: clinical psychology, counseling psychology and school psychology. Clinical and counseling are similar - there are subtle differences, of course, but being licensed as either will allow you to practice therapy independently. Counseling psychology is perceived as slightly less competitive than clinical. School psychology will allow you to do therapy - but, as you can imagine, with children in schools. (Also a lot of school psychologists spend the majority of their days working with special education students developing individualized education plans). Unless your undergrad GPA is really low, or you have zero background in psychology bc you didn't major in it in undergrad, you don't need an MA in psychology. You would probably be better served by getting research experience for 2-3 years, and maybe taking some classes as a non-degree student (on the grad level). A registered psychologist is simply a clinical, counseling, or school psychologist who has registered with their state board before or during licensure. In California, a registered psychologist is a PhD-trained clinical or counseling psychologist who is granted a special 30-month credential to allow them to practice while they accrue the hours necessary to become licensed as a clinician. I also suggest social work, and becoming a licensed clinical social worker. Another option in some states is the master's in mental health counseling, which will allow you to see clients and get licensed. An MA in clinical psychology will generally NOT allow you to get licensed to practice. Nor will the MA in health psychology, if one even exists.

One thing that was briefly mentioned is that PsyD programs usually do not offer funding, so you will have to borrow pretty much the entire cost of attendance to go to one. You don't really want to do that, because that's six-figure debt, and clinical psychologists don't make six-figure salaries (at least not early in their careers). Yes, it's still early in the year, so if you are a senior at Vassar I would look up the research interests of your professors and ask one of them if you can assist them with some research. Jannay Morrow does some work on mood disorders and mental control, and Michele Tugade does research on positive emotions and the coping process, which could be related to mental health. Either of them might be a good choice for a future clinician. After acquiring 9 months of research experience, at the end of your senior year you may be able to apply for lab manager positions/project coordinator/research associate positions in university labs and other kinds of organizations to get more experience.

If you are still at the application stage, I don't think you should rule out any places on the basis of location (unless you think you will be utterly miserable). I thought I was a big city girl and could never imagine myself in a small college town. I'm doing a postdoc in a small college town, and I really love it. You never know what a place might be like - you might carve yourself a little enclave in a large city. Also, big cities don't necessarily have high crime rates. Many large cities in the U.S. are very safe. I did my PhD in a large city that has a popular reputation for being unsafe based on media conceptions that come from the 1970s and 1980s (when most cities were undergoing blight). In reality it's one of the safest urban areas in the U.S. On the other hand, one of the most dangerous towns in America is not much larger than the small college town I currently live in. The 100 most dangerous places (take with a grain of salt) have a mix of large cities, small cities and small towns on it. The very, very large metropolis in which I did my PhD is not on the list.

Of course. I would wager that most public health students are actually social scientists. There's a whole field called history of public health, so if you still want to do history work, there's that. If you are just interested in urban/international health but not necessarily history, it is very possible to do that even without any biological sciences coursework. I have a PhD in public health and I have one biology course from undergrad (required science credit). My prior PhD program might actually be pretty perfect for you. I will PM you. Otherwise look into public health programs in the social and behavioral sciences. All of the top schools of public health have them - Yale, Emory (behavioral sciences & health education), Columbia (sociomedical sciences), Harvard (global health and population or social and behavioral sciences), Minnesota (community health promotion), Michigan (health behavior and health education), Berkeley (health and social behavior), UCLA (community health sciences), JHU (health, behavior, and society; or international health; or mental health; or population, family, and reproductive health depending on your interests), Tulane (global community health and behavioral sciences), UNC (health behavior), etc. Brown just started a brand new one that might appeal to you (Behavioral and Social Health Sciences).

I'm not going to say you should consider a another career field, OP, but I don't disagree with the folks who have suggested it. Moreso I think that you are going to have to do a lot of work in the interim to make yourself attractive to PhD programs. First of all, no, there is no website that hosts separate statistics. You have to look at each program individually. Few programs advertise their average GPAs and GREs, and when they do, they are generally in the 3.5 range and the 600s-700s range (on the old GRE). I think a 155 on each section is like the minimum that you want to score; with a low GPA, you really want to push into the 160s if possible. No PhD program is going to openly advertise that they accept people with low GPAs (and, as someone already pointed out, "low" means a 3.0 or 3.1 instead of a 3.6 or so). With alumni success - a few schools will have lists of where their recent alumni have ended up. Most do not. The best way is to ask the departmental secretary about placement rates in the last few years. Is social psychology lucrative? If you mean financially remunerative - no, not very, not relative to the amount of time you have to put into training. Basically, in order to give yourself a shot you will need to prove that you have the ability to undertake graduate level work and that you have grown and matured past your undergraduate mediocrity. Furthermore, you need to show that you have sharp skills in research in the area. You have not worked in the field in 3 years. So you have a lot of work to do. One way that you could, potentially, do this is get a job as a lab manager at a psychology lab (or related one - like a psychiatry or public health lab). In this role, not only will you be getting research experience but you can also probably take some graduate-level classes for free as part of your job benefits. Given your history you will need more time at this - I would say at least 3 solid years. If you do this and get some As in grad classes and glowing recommendation from your PI, that could go a long way towards helping. If you are unable to get this kind of job, you may be able to find another research associate position (market research, think tank, nonprofit) and then take graduate courses as a non-degree student at a nearby university. You will have to pay. But you really need to take a few classes and show that you can get As. Basically, you need to re-start your research experience and show that you still have a passion and that you know the skills. You also need to study for the GRE and get those scores up, given your low ugrad GPA. You will need 3 letters of recommendation. So if you can only get 2, you will need to do something to get a third (take a class, volunteer in a lab, etc.) Also Please do NOT do this. Your personal statement is not the time to exemplify your creativity and resilience. Nor is it time to discuss the obstacles you have overcome. Academics roll their eyes at these types of statements. Instead, your personal statement is where you discuss 1) your prior academic professional experiences - research experience, primarily - and how they have uniquely prepared you to undertake a PhD and led to your interest in group decision-making; 2) your current interests, and why X university will be an excellent fit for you given your interests and prior experiences, and 3) briefly, what your career goals are and how X university can help you get there. Think of it like an academic cover letter. You do not want to draw attention to your shortcomings. I know you said this tongue-in-cheek, but I also want to point out that the Peace Corps is also very competitive these days!

I had an NSF GRF. Yes. Yep! Nope! Nobody will be checking up on you. No, I wouldn't do that. If they don't have an option for a secondary major or minor field of study, I would just use a slash. Cognitive science/linguistics.

Ask your advisor if he has a template - not for the words, but for the design. That is a lot better then spending a lot of time creating tables and fiddling with margins. My posters usually have enough text to explain the generalities of the research on its own. This is in case I get terribly sick and a friend has to hang my poster - or in case someone just wants to read and doesn't want to talk to me. I prefer to read posters at conferences and only talk to the presenter if it looks interesting.

Stipends are definitely taxable. Whether the taxes are taken out of your check depends on how the university pays you. If the university hires you as a GRA and pays you a salary, then most likely you will have taxes taken out of your check. If you are given a "stipend" as part of a fellowship or other arrangement, then you may have to withhold taxes yourself. You are supposed to prepay estimated amounts quarterly in the U.S. I never did, so I had to pay the penalty, which I think was something like $50 a year (it's a percentage of your income). As an NYC resident my taxes were typically about 20% of my income (about 10ish% federal income taxes and the other 10ish% state + city). I filed as a single student most of my time in grad school.

I still think the All Souls thing is weird. Not sure what field it is, but in some fields 8 years is not an atypical time to degree. Let's say that you took 8 years to finish a degree in the humanities or social sciences, especially - maybe it just took you 8 years or maybe you took a year or two off because you had a child or needed to deal with a health problem. Now you can't apply, or you have to go through the hoop of explaining it? If they want to be satisfied that you will be finished before you start, they could just do the normal thing and ask for a letter from your advisor confirming that you are far enough along to be setting a defense date Very Soon. After all, just because I've been in my program for only 4 years doesn't mean I'm more likely to defend this spring than someone who's been in for 7. (in fact, in some programs it may mean I'm a little delusional).

Have you visited your university's library and spoken with a librarian? I used to work in a college library, and trust me when I say that even at a small institution there is likely a librarian on staff who can help you and would be thrilled to do so. If you go to a larger institution there may even be a librarian who specializes particularly in newspapers. It is really their job to help you with stuff exactly like this!

I don't disagree that social scientists have different non-academic employability issues than natural/physical scientists. But I still don't understand the point of the question The answer is no, I would not personally. But I think it depends very much on what kind of non-academic jobs we are talking about. Being, say, the Lebesgue integration to machine learning expert on a team of six computer scientists at a tech firm is a very different position with different specialization requirements than being the generalist computer science and technology policy advisor to a Congress member. Or, being the statistician on a cutting-edge longitudinal genomics project that requires the development of new software and tools is different than being an in-house statistician at a pharmaceutical company that mostly does different flavors of randomized controlled trials (which are relatively simple to analyze). That's true regardless of your field. I also think that - in the statistics example - neither is universally true. There are jobs in which a knowledge of general statistics along with other things can make a person employable (aka, a market research analyst position that wants someone who can design and analyze both very simple survey research and qualitative focus group research). And there are other jobs that require very advanced knowledge of statistics and some cognate fields like programming and mathematical modeling before they let you near the job. There are a very, very many jobs in between - that both social scientists and STEM scientists do. STEM careers don't have to be highly specific.

I'm gonna third (fourth?) the advice that PI personality > project. You do want your dissertation to be a foundation for post-PhD work - so you don't want to do something completely unrelated to your interests - but I think it's better to go a little far afield to work with someone who is going to help you develop as a scholar than it is to work on exactly what you want, but end up doing project management or cleaning pipettes in the lab. Also part of working with a PI is learning that PI's quirks and how to deal. The longer you spend in grad school the more you realize that your professors are just people with a lot of education. Them being people, they are also flawed and have personality quirks that might irk you even if you otherwise like them a lot. Maybe this PI is otherwise amazing but his personality flaw is that he gives vague answers and does not know how to rephrase. (Maybe, more deeply, this PI has never learned that it's better to say "I don't know" and instead gives some roundabout rambling explanation. Over time, you may come to understand within a few words that his rambling explanation is really code for "I don't know; look it up yourself.") You have to decide whether that's a dealbreaker. Are you prepared to deal with the fact that when he does not know he will not give you a direct answer? FWIW I had another advisor in grad school (I also had more than one) who would sometimes give esoteric and/or long-winded, roundabout answers to questions I asked him (sometimes veering quite a bit off topic). I found it amusing rather than irritating, and it's a personality quirk of his I'm actually very fond of. What I also found out, though, is that his answers seemed rambling and indirect to me at the time because I didn't know enough to understand it yet. It was a pretty common occurrence for me to be reading an article or book trying to find something out and thinking "Oh, that's what Advisor meant by that!"

Well, advisors/professors are human. And like most other humans, many of them are excellent at some aspects of their job and not others. Some professors are amazing teachers and terrible grant-writers; some professors are great mentors but terrible teachers; some professors are amazing researchers but terrible mentors. I also think the impact of this is overblown. There's no evidence to believe that most or a significant chunk of graduate students have terrible advisors who don't know how to interact with human beings. Some advisors may be awkward at mentoring, but that doesn't mean they can't interact with people. I think this is also an ideal time to say that your PI will NOT necessarily be your "mentor." An advisor for research purposes is actually quite different and not necessarily completely overlapping with a mentor. Some PIs are not interested in mentoring their graduate students, although they may be quite competent in guiding you in research and dissertation writing. Many grad students will have to seek formal and informal mentors in people other than their PI. Professors do not have regular training and supervision in advising because that is not the core of what they do, or even a significant portion of their jobs in relation to everything else. They're definitely not clinicians or counselors. I think that while sometimes some advisors are awkward and maybe even downright mean, many graduate students also misinterpret the role of an advisor this way. He's an advisor because he gives you advice on your graduate program - but that is NOT the same thing as a counselor, who is there to support you emotionally. If your advisor cares about your emotional needs, that's kind of a bonus. And frankly, at many institutions the department doesn't really care about the quality of their mentorship. They care about the grant money and funding they get, and the research they put out. If a notoriously terrible advisor is also productive and their graduate students are graduating steadily, that's seen as a win for the department. I mean, they don't want advisors who are actively scaring people into quitting and putting all of their students on anti-anxiety medication - but one who meets with students once a semester and never responds to emails? Eh, if he's producing.

*sigh* this thread won't be good. So you went to Columbia. As you have mentioned, people on the West Coast are unfamiliar with Columbia despite it being a prestigious school. This is because Columbia is largely unimportant to them. They probably don't know a ton of people from there; they do not live in New York or the Northeast, and have no reason to be familiar with Columbia's strength (although I find it hard to believe people don't recognize the name at all). But why should you care what they are familiar with? Are they in a position to hire you? Are they going to give you money if they recognize and value your school's name via casual conversation? The answer to the two of these is likely no, so forget about it. And so it is with UCSD. Top 15 is very good indeed. And a quick look at the NRC rankings show that UCSD might very well be in the top 10 (its S-rank ranged from 2-12, higher than Berkeley, higher than Caltech, higher than Columbia and UCLA and Penn). This is a very good, very well-known neuroscience program. The name might not be as recognizable to a non-academic as you might like. But you do not (should not) care about that, because these people are not going to hire you. Their opinion is worth little in terms of actual benefit to you. Presumably you want to go into a research career; if your department is the BEST place to do what you are doing, then others in your field will know that. They will not care that you went to Brown if Brown's program in your field is crappy. Furthermore, as you have already seen, going to a "prestigious" school is no guarantee that people will recognize the name of your college. You went to a top 5 undergrad program and people are still going "Huh, so where is that?" You will get similar reactions if you go to a lesser-known Ivy for grad school - basically one that is not Harvard, Yale or Princeton. A lot of people are also unfamiliar with the shinyness of Berkeley or Stanford, especially on the East Coast. What will you do if you manage to transfer from UCSD to Brown, for example, and you finish, and people are still like "Brown, where is that?" Or if you go to Berkeley and get placed on the East Coast, and people are like "Berkeley, isn't that a music school?" or "Berkeley, isn't that a state school?" Or recall how people frequently confuse Penn for Penn State and vice versa (I am currently at one of them, and people always think I am at the other.) Will you lose your mind if you go to Penn and people think you went to Penn State when you tell them? You said you won't be happy unless you graduate from a top school. But you ARE at a top school. You're at a school that is not only well-ranked in your field but is a well-known, nationally ranked institution. Since rankings matter so much to you - UCSD's undergraduate programs were ranked 37th in the nation and 8th among public universities. With 3,000 colleges and universities in the country, this puts it in the top 1-2% of universities nationwide. It's also been ranked very highly in rankings of world universities (from 14 to 63, depending on which ranking you are using). It's estimated that there are around 20,000 universities in the world, so even being ranked #63 puts UCSD in the top 0.3% of universities worldwide. I guess my question is...what do you plan to be getting out of it? Do you want an academic or research job in your field and to turn out important work? Or do you want the momentary pleasure of people telling you you must be smart because you went to X school? With that said - transferring is likely to be high-risk, low-reward. The chances of this going through successfully are low, since in order to transfer at the doctoral level you usually have to have a compelling reason to do so. And even if you finish your MA at your current school and drop out, you will essentially be "transferring" in the doctoral program sense of the word - i.e., you will need to explain to your new PIs that you were in a PhD program and you left, but now you want to start a PhD at a different program for a compelling reason. You do not have one - you cannot explain to potential PIs at MIT or Stanford that you want to transfer because their school's name sounds better than your old one. No one will take you seriously, and you will be deemed immature. But you also don't have any other really good reason - you admit that the research fit is perfect, so you can't really fudge that, and you can't talk about interpersonal problems (real or otherwise). You also need support from your current department to transfer programs. How are you going to explain to your current PI that everything is going swimmingly but you are unhappy because your school's name does not make unimportant people's face light up when you tell them where you are a grad student? * FWIW, I have a PhD from an Ivy League university (Columbia, actually). I do sometimes get the sort of shiny reaction from non-academics ("OMG, Columbia! You must be smart!") that it sounds like you are looking for. It gives a momentary feeling of pleasure, much akin to someone telling you your shoes are cute or your new haircut is banging. And then it passes. It means nothing. What is really important to me is the way that academics see my degree, and they are less dazzled by the Ivy pedigree and more interested in who I trained with and what I did when I was there. It also only happens very occasionally, btw, and matters even less as time goes on.