juilletmercredi

Meh. I'm in a joint degree program in two different departments in two different schools, so there were four orientations I could've attended: one for each department and one for each school. I attended two of them. I don't regret skipping the graduate school's orientation; the other school's orientation was fun and I met a ton of friends there. My primary department's orientation was boring and pointless. My secondary department's orientation was on the same day as the secondary's, which pissed me off, and honestly that one was far more useful: they gave out copy cards and the codes to all the locked departmental doors, plus other info that I ended up getting gradually over the course of the first year. I complained loudly and the subsequent years they made sure they didn't schedule the two orientations on the same day.

Opening accounts doesn't hurt you - it's the hard inquiries on your credit report. If you have too many in a limited period of time (and they're not connected to auto loans or mortgages), that can ding your credit - but only a bit, and they don't stay on long. As for the card, you have to have self-control. If you get a small limit and have self-control, you don't need to worry so much about the credit card. 5% really isn't that much, though. Even if you spent $1,000 at Target, that's $50. And given that the interest rate is likely to be around 20%, you're going to be repaying more than that $50 in fees and interest, unless you pay it all off immediately. It doesn't sound worth it. Personally, I would say get an all-purpose credit card - one that you can use anywhere. Then teach yourself the self-control to only use it in emergencies or for travel before reimbursement (most travel funds reimburse you rather than pay up front). Also, I apply online for credit and insurance and everything. I have yet to be a victim of identity theft. (Well, once - someone skimmed my debit card number, but that had nothing to do with my SSN or applying online. I actually think it got skimmed off a dysfunctional MetroCard machine in the subway.)

Different programs are different. I'm not sure that I was registered for classes at this point - I think I registered during orientation week. I definitely didn't have any syllabi or books. The summer before graduate school I basically lounged around and read some books for pleasure; the only thing I did that was related to work is that my advisor forwarded me a summary of his grant that he had just received that I'd be working on, and so I scanned through that. 2 hours tops. If you haven't gotten syllabi or books, neither has anyone else in your program, so you aren't unprepared compared to everyone else in your same program.

^I get why some people would not like to have their picture taken and put online - safety issues. That doesn't seem to be the OP's motivation, though; s/he just said that they feel like they'd be stared at like an animal in the zoo, which is quite frankly ridiculous. I understand this in the context of social networks (I personally do not like having my picture up on Facebook, although it's all but unavoidable at this point), but not for professional stuff. It's very very common for grad student pictures to be featured on the website, and if you go into academia, it's almost universal for faculty members to have their pictures featured on the departmental website. People like being able to associate a name to a face - especially if they want to look for you at conferences or something. It's not really being displayed like "an animal in a zoo"; it's satisfying the perfectly human drive to want to associate a name with a face. But if you are completely against it, don't just skip orientation - go and then explain that you are uncomfortable being photographed. There's no figuring it out involved - be direct, like an adult, and explain the situation.

I just bought a 2014 Nissan Sentra! I'm starting a postdoc in two weeks (!!!) with a pretty decent salary, so I decided to treat myself a little. I got a great deal on it, though, since they are trying to get rid of the 2014 Sentras because they're rolling out the model year soon. Got the deal on Edmunds.com (where I also did a ton of research before I bought it).

I agree with everything everyone has already said, but I also want to address this. I consider myself a client before I am student. Education is a business industry or at least that's what I think. Well, I am not expect anything from them but I just want to express my feeling on being ignored. This might be childish. I know. But my opinion is I pay for what I get. I would happily take a rejection and leave. However, being ignore is another matter. It means that they don't give a shit. and I think it is disrespectful. I work 10 hours to earn hundred bucks. and if somebody just throw your 10 hours out the window. Will you be pissed like me ? Not mentioning how many hours I have spend work on the application. 1. If you intend to succeed in graduate school, you really need to get rid of this attitude right now. You are not a client who is paying for a service; you are paying for the opportunity to learn things, but you have to do the work in order to get the education you want. I promise you if you let this attitude come across in your program, your professors will resent you and they won't want to do things for you. I have a friend who had the same attitude and we had the same advisor, and I could tell that my advisor did not like her and wanted to minimize contact with her because of that attitude that she had. It's especially nonsensical to think that the admissions fee is paying for a service...you're paying for them to process your application, and likely to keep in place the infrastructure for them to keep up the application, but that's it. Most schools send out form rejection letters because they don't have time to explain to thousands of applicants exactly why they were rejected. Jobs do this too, so you should probably get used to it at some point. 2. Everyone spends many hours on the application, but the office also spend many hours working on decisions. It is your choice to apply to graduate school - nobody is forcing you. It could've been a simple snafu - perhaps they had accepted you but the letter got lost in the mail or never sent out. But because of the attitude you took towards the department/school, even if this did happen, perhaps now they don't want to admit you and will rescind their offer. The waitlist thing is also a plausible explanation. The last thing is that sending letters like this looks extremely unprofessional and immature, and you never know where you might come across that admissions officer again. They may quit their job and end up working somewhere else - where you apply for a job, too. Admissions people also tend to know each other and have connections throughout the field, so you never know when this incident will come up again.

I am not in political science, but I am in another field where the majority of admits to PhD programs have master's degrees and I entered directly after college. I had a 3.42 cumulative GPA from undergrad, but cumulative GPA isn't the only thing about your application that's important. My major GPA was about a 3.6, if I remember correctly. There's probably no way to answer question #1 as I don't know if programs keep that kind of data and even if they do, they aren't sharing it and aggregating it. I think you should just apply, if the programs say that they admit people without master's degrees.

^I would give the same advice. You probably don't even need the registration confirmation - by the time you get to graduate school, your professors are assuming that you want to be in class - you don't have to, after all - and that you're not going to lie to miss class. So I would just approach the professor a week or two before the conference, after class, and say "Hey Prof X, in two weeks I will be at Awesome Conference so I'll have to miss class, but I'll catch up with classmate to find out what we covered and get the material." So go ahead and book your travel.

I know quite a few people who have had full-time jobs while working on their dissertations. I think it may be a deterrent in some fields, but not in others.

Where in France is your opportunity? There is the American University of Paris, which is an American-style university in Paris (exactly like the name implies). The AUP is accredited by a U.S. regional accreditation association, and the instruction is in English. http://www.aup.edu I was also going to suggest the Netherlands; they may have some undergraduate degrees in English there. Of course, the Netherlands may be further away than the UK depending on where in the Netherlands and where in France you are.

From just reading your post, it doesn't sound like are unhappy at all, you just have a general sense of unease when it comes to your research area or the quality of your program. The funding is a different issue - if you don't have solid source of funding for the next 3-4 years, then I would say yes, go ahead and look for other places in which you could get stable funding that will take you through the doctoral program. There's no reason to do a PhD especially in engineering without funding. But if you are overall happy but just want to do better work - there are ways to do that without leaving. You could collaborate on papers with people in other labs who do related work; you could begin to push your advisor by proposing ideas and doing much of the work on the papers yourself. However, if you're going to leave and start over, I think before comprehensive exams is the time to do it (otherwise you may be forced to retake coursework and exams at the new place). So no, it's not a terrible thing to leave a department that's a bad fit for you. The key would be to find someone at another lab/program who would be willing to take you as a student - you'll have to be upfront with them about your reasons for leaving your current PhD program, and you'll also need the positive reference of your current advisor.

My vote is also for Paris! My then-boyfriend of 7 years and I did a long-distance relationship in the beginning of my PhD program. He has since joined me in my city and we've gotten married. I'm moving again for a postdoc about the same distance (~245 miles, so about 40 miles shorter than London to Paris). I'm purchasing a car and there's a bus and we'll just have lots of weekend visits for 2 years. It's really doable.

Well, the thing is that your loans would accrue interest regardless of whether they were in deferment or not. They will be accruing more interest, of course, since you are not repaying. FinAid.org's cost of interest capitalization calculator says that a $50,000 loan that is deferred for 6 years without repayment would accrue about $20,400 in interest. But in the end, you're only paying about $8,000 more than you would've paid without the 6 years of deferment - because you have to subtract out the interest that would've accrued anyway during the 6 years that you were in repayment. So really, it's up to whether you think that extra $8,000 in accrued interest is worth the PhD. Honestly, a PhD in quantitative psychology is a useful degree both inside and outside academia - it's the subfield I wish I had gone into (I didn't know it existed in college!) and quantitative psychologists are in pretty high demand. Inside academia there are more job listings than there are quant psych PhDs; outside academia, you could work for data science firms or educational testing and measurement firms or as a quant, all of which are pretty lucrative fields. I'm doing a quant postdoc now to try and make the transition; my mentors are quantitative psychologists who have started a methodology center focused on applying advanced statistics to social science methods and they are typically supported by serving as the analytical consultants on people's grants. Also Option 2) I can try to find jobs in business that pay more now, and pay down my loans and either find an employer to pay for graduate school or attend part-time while I work and not accrue any debt. If you want a PhD in quant psych, you won't be able to do this most likely. You can't attend PhD programs part-time (most PhD programs, anyway; any reputable program in quantitative psychology wouldn't allow you to attend part time). You also wouldn't need an employer to pay for your PhD - I haven't heard of this happening, but most quant psych programs are funded anyway.

Craigslist. I honestly think that's the best resource, especially since you are already in NYC and can visit places. If you don't want to sign a lease, you can look in the rooms/shared section and try to find a group who has a leaving roommate and some time left on the lease. Fordham may also have an off-campus housing office that has listings that you can check. Since you will be commuting to the Bronx campus but want to live in Manhattan, I highly recommend upper Manhattan - your commute will be shorter and it's cheaper there anyway. Inwood would be closest; it's a nice neighborhood with lots of parks and cheap accommodations. If you live nearby the Bx12, that will take you right to Fordham. You could also take the A or 1 train to the Bx12 from several places lower in Inwood and Washington Heights, but that could get annoying if you live too far down. I Google Mapped directions from my old apartment on W. 172nd Street, and Google estimates that taking the A to the Bx12 to Fordham would take me about an hour one way. You may also want to look in Central and East Harlem. Fordham is nearby the B/D and the 4 lines. You could also live by the 2 line and switch to the 4 at Grand Concourse. That gives you range of anywhere in Harlem pretty much, lol. Central Harlem, in particular, is gentrifying and there are some nice renovated brownstones in the area that you can find for much cheaper that you would in more "desirable" neighborhoods in the city. There are also some less expensive places on the upper part of the Upper East Side (Yorkville - from about E. 80th to E. 96th, east of 3rd Ave) that you may find, but they tend to get snapped up very quickly and you may be annoyed by the construction on the Second Avenue line (which is supposed to be finished in very late 2016, but it was also supposed to be finished in 2008 and then 2012 and then 2015...lol).

Yes, you can use SPSS on a Mac, but not on a tablet. I think the answer to this depends on how you want to use it. I currently have a MacBook Pro that I use as a desktop at home and an iPad Air. Ever since Microsoft Office 360 came out with a good version for the iPad, I don't take my laptop out of the house that often - mostly I take it if I'm going on longer trips. Otherwise, I use my iPad. I bought a $30 Bluetooth keyboard from Amazon (Amazon Basics) and I take that with me to take notes and read PDFs on the go. I also can make PowerPoint presentations on my iPad (and have done so before). So I think I could get by with a desktop and a tablet. I think my ideal setup would be a Mac mini (desktop), a MacBook Air (for longer-term travel) and an iPad Air (for every day commuting tasks). Of course, that's an expensive setup. If I had to choose any two, I would get a MacBook Air or a MacBook Pro (with Retina) with a monitor + keyboard + mouse and an iPad Air. But if you already have a desktop, I think a tablet might be a fine companion as long as you don't want to do any data analysis on the go.

I don't have little reasons like that, because frankly (and this may be an unpopular opinion less unpopular than I thought, apparently) I don't think those are good reasons by themselves for graduate school. I take an entirely practical approach to deciding on graduate school. I love the idea of having an office, but many professionals have offices with bookcases (and I can also make myself one at home). I can learn about why things work using books and taking non-degree classes or joining discussion groups. I love to write and that will always be a part of me; no matter what it is I do in life, I will always be more thrilled by a well-written line (mine or someone else's) than a sports win. But I don't need graduate school/a PhD to do any of those things. Grad school is very expensive, both in money (especially unfunded MA programs) and time (5-7+ years for a PhD, even if funded). In the former case, that's a lot of debt to take on. In the latter case, you could spend those 5-7 years getting work experience and investing for retirement. So my opinion on graduate school is "go is if you need the degree to do the career you want to do." I went to get a PhD not only because I love research, but because I want to do it as a living - and when I looked at jobs that interested me, the ones that made me most excited all required a PhD.

First, I question whether you really need the MA. If your history grades are excellent, you have excellent GRE scores, and a strong and focused SOP - well, that's most of the battle. Your pre-med grades are going to be less relevant. If you have like a 3.2 overall but a 3.7 in history, I don't think a C- in organic chemistry your sophomore year is really going to matter to the admissions committee. (FWIW, I had a similar experience in psychology - an overall 3.42 GPA but a ~3.66 psychology major GPA, and I got in.) Anyway, in my experience most academic graduate programs do not defer - especially if you come in with a small cohort of students - with the exception of medical issues and military deployments. I agree that I would not ask for a deferral because you got a raise at your job - it's completely irrelevant to them. The bottom line is, what do you want - the job or the degree? I, too, would request it on the medical basis - if you know you are having a surgery in the next year and will have mobility issues, you can explain that. I was also thinking the same as jenste wrt salary negotiations in the future. Unless you plan to re-enter the same field, your previous salary won't matter much.

It's not really about the prestige (getting a Fulbright is an accomplishment no matter what kind you get) but more about the tasks. PhDs are research degrees, and therefore PhD programs want to admit people who have proven that they can do good scholarship/research. A Fulbright full grant shows 1) that you can win funding for a research proposal and 2) that you can complete a long-term research project in your field. The ETA doesn't really do that, and is kind of tangentially related to scholarship in the field, so that's why it's not quite as useful to a prospective PhD student as a full grant. I would say that it probably does help your application in a small-to-medium way. It is a prestigious grant and yes, it does show that you have some teaching experience (although teaching ESL classes is very different from teaching composition and/or literature). There's also something powerful about tacitly showing "This other very prestigious program picked me." But it's not the same as doing some kind of scholarship in your field in the interim or something.

I'm not sure you really need brand-name recognition either way. If you intend to continue in academia, you just need to do good work. I don't think either of those universities is a degree mill or some tiny dubious college, so I think you could go to either, do good work and parlay that into a great PhD program. You applied to Birmingham for a reason; there's something about the Modern Lit program that attracted you. What was it? Are there excellent professors there? Can you do comparative literature research there too? The name of the degree doesn't matter so much as the actual scholarship you do and classes you take, so if you can still study comparative lit to a certain extent at Birmingham I would follow the money. And outside of academia - prestige only matters in certain fields. If you wanted to be a consultant or investment banker then yes, the prestige would matter (although in this case neither of those are the types of "target schools" those fields go for). But other than that, I don't think the prestige will matter that much. Even if it did, though, would the salary bump Edinburgh would give you be worth the cost of tuition (including interest)? Probably not.

I think you should apply to both kinds of options. You do need to eat, and who knows what will happen - the right academic opportunity might not present itself next May, or you may decide that you like your new job and you want to stay, or you might not find a short-term opportunity or one that pays enough for you to survive. I agree with the above advice that the future is too uncertain, and you need to feed yourself.

I don't think the same commitment exists to unfunded programs, so I think you should go to your top choice once you verify that it has the things you need. But why can't you find out those things before you accept? Call the graduate housing office and find out if they have any more housing; if you explain that you were newly accepted, they'll probably tell you. Tell them it will help you decide. (Also, you don't have to live in grad housing - you can get an apartment on the regular market.)

I think it depends entirely on what you want to do, but as someone who is about to graduate I am also questioning the wisdom of this advice. First of all, some schools do like to inbreed. Harvard, for example, loves hiring its own graduates. Columbia does, too - many of the faculty in my department got their PhDs here. Even many of our doctoral students got their master's degrees here. Second of all, I have many friends who came to get their PhDs here (in NYC), decided that they wanted to stay, and made it happen. I was actually quite baffled, because the common wisdom is that you can't choose where you want to live in academia - and while I think that's mostly true, it's not universally true. In fact, I have quite a few friends who have gone exactly where they wanted to go geographically. A friend wanted to return to Atlanta and is at Georgia State; another friend wanted specifically work at the University of Michigan (her undergrad alma mater), got a postdoc there, and turned her postdoc into a faculty position; a third friend got two different faculty positions in New York (moved from a great NYC institution to another great one). The caveat, of course, is that they were all very accomplished and well-published individuals. Thirdly - if your goal is not academia, I think getting a PhD where you want to end up is a really good idea. You make connections in that city that are hard to form elsewhere. For example, I was doing a site visit at an organization the other day that aligns well with my research. Then I realized how many organizations my lab has partnered with in the city, at which I know people AND my advisor has partnerships and networks with. You can even work part-time during the later years of your PhD at an organization that you want to work with (in fact, I interviewed for an RA position at a nonprofit and was told that they wanted to hire someone who was close to finishing and would want to continue into a full-time position after they finished). I just talked with a friend who got a plum job at an international NGO because he started consulting with them part-time while finishing up. In your case, I would DEFINITELY attend University B. It has better funding, more amazing professors and one of the best departments. You have a better launching pad there.

I think this is largely dependent on the location and market of the town. This is true in some towns, but in others the rental market isn't as saturated and the property manager really is looking for people. Sometimes landlords and property managers are simply rude people regardless of their property needs. Some people are just jerks. Like others in the thread, I think you should insist on what you want. Don't worry about being pushy - if you turn her off because of the reasonable request for pictures of the unit, then you probably don't want to live there. However, doing a less than 12-month lease is a tricky thing. Although the property may technically offer shorter lease terms, they may only do it at certain times of the year and/or when they are more desperate for tenants. Summer is a big rental time, so they may only get people who are willing to do 12 months. If you get a 6-month lease in June and decide to move out at the end, they are stuck trying to find someone to move in in December, which is a slower rental period in general but especially for college towns. But if you were moving there in December, they might be more willing to do 6 months because your lease would be up in June, when they could more easily find someone to take over your unit. So that one I would just ask about and see if it's an option, but I would just straight up say that you don't want to live somewhere sight unseen and you need pics please. All of the apartment complexes I considered either had pics on their website or sent them to me when I asked.

You said when you were 19-20 or so, so I'm assuming that you are older than 20. You're an adult. Your parents cannot hold your financial information hostage from you. My mom has bad credit too and there's no way in hell I would trust her to "hold" a debit card while refusing to give me the information about the bank account. Call the bank or walk into a branch and close the account. If there's money in it, just cancel the debit card that your parents have, withdraw the money and then close it. Even if you don't have the account number, your SSN with some ID should be enough to close it, since it's in your name. I agree with the advice to check your credit.

Either, both, it doesn't matter. It depends on the context, but I use them interchangeably.