juilletmercredi

I have been trying to find contact information for some of my HS teachers for months. Not all of them are still at my old HS (in fact, about half have moved on, including most of the teachers I would thank). I'm about to finish and I wanted to let them know and thank them for their role, but I tried to send an email to one a few months back and got no response. I think addressing it to the Teachers of X High School is probably the way to go, and just sending it to the high school's main address with a request to post it in the teacher's lounge might work. Also, yes, teachers have thousands of students every couple years, but it's largely a thankless job and I think teachers are touched when you give them thanks and recognize them for the grueling job they do. I went back to my high school and visited about 5 years after I finished, and my old teachers remembered and hugged me and seemed genuinely happy to see me. And I've gotten personalized cards from students as well as e-mail updates on their life after my classes and it's always touching to see that I made an impact on their life.

We have a Wii and a PS3. The PS3 is my husband's and the Wii is mine. I mostly play Nintendo platformers - Super Mario Galaxy, Kirby's Return to Dreamland. I've been slowly working on Zelda: Skyward Sword. And every now and them my husband and I will beat up on each other in Mario Kart or Smash Bros. He plays way more than I do, though - mostly RPGs and wide-open sandbox games. I also have a DS; I want to trade up to a 3DS. There are a couple of games I wanna get. Am waiting to start the postdoc with the bigger paycheck, though, lol.

My social life has actually become a lot better in grad school than before. My first two years I only had other grad student friends, because that's just where I happened to meet most friends. After that, more of my friends began graduating and I started participating in the community more, so I made more working professional friends. I love it. I hate talking about grad school on my off-time when I'm socializing, and I find that some other grad students (especially doctoral students) love to either complain about grad school work or have philosophical discussions about research/our field. I want to talk about stupid stuff like Solange beating up Jay-Z, or not-stupid non-work stuff like...I don't know, the missing Malaysian plane or whatever. I don't think this is true at all, for a variety of reasons - and forgive me, but I think if a person has this problem it's one on their end, not others. I'm a very intelligent person - and my friends know it. They call me Google. I think most grad students are on some level very intellectual, and I'm used to becoming/gaining the reputation as the intellectual amongst my friends. (And my friends are no slouches.) But it happens slowly, in shades. Why? Because I don't want to have an intellectual conversation every time I'm hanging out, and to be honest, it really irritates me when people do. My husband is also an intellectual and so sometimes we do have philosophical conversations at home, but we are just as likely to argue about whether Superman would beat Batman in a fight (he totally wouldn't). Who cares if people say dumb shit? I mean, if it's prejudiced or bigoted stuff then yes, call them out, but dumb shit is entertaining sometimes. I find it incredibly relaxing to not always have to exercise my brain in the very, very taxing way that grad school makes me think and to just chill out. At our core, graduate students are just regular people like everyone else. We have interests other than our work, and sometimes we like to just shoot the shit. Sometimes I just need to get AWAY from grad school. ...but now that I am reading other people's comments, I think I may have a better handle on what you mean. There's a difference between friends who aren't as highly educated as you - but are still intelligent, curious people - and people who just...don't care about learning or intelligence. I have a cousin who's like a sister to me, and I love to be with her, but sometimes I don't know what to say to her because we don't share a whole lot in common - few overlapping interests and she doesn't have any intellectual curiosity (and will openly, proudly admit it). So I think the trick is to find friends who are non-grad students but still smart, curious people - or who share other interests of yours. There are plenty of people like that in the world of all stripes. My husband's working on his bachelor's right now but he is still one of the smartest people I know. I agree with Eigen's advice. Most of my current friends are people I met who were grad students outside of my own program (and have now graduated). It means that I know people in a lot of fields, and it's cool. I also think you grow out of them "I'm so immersed in science that I talk about it all day!" after you finish coursework. After I finished my exams, although I still loved my field and wanted to work in it I became very good at compartmentalizing, because I think I'd stick a fork in my eyes if I had to talk about science ALL DAY LONG. I actually used my dissertation years to reconnect with friends, start an exercise program and rediscover some other interests. It's why I decided to take an extra year of school, so I could move more slowly and enjoy it more rather than stressing myself out completely and becoming miserable.

ALso, at UCSF, both Mallory Johnson and Margaret Chesney do lots of LBGT and HIV prevention work. They're both psychologists, and while they're both at the medical school, I'm sure they can advise!

I think it's a combination of approaches that works best - checking departmental websites, checking citations and publications, and checking with people who are in a position to know. LGBTQ issues is actually my research area so I'm familiar (by publication, I mean) with quite a few on the list! Vickie Mays, UCLA (used to do more LGBT stuff but now does ethnic minorities and women, looks like; might be some intersections) Seth Kalichman, UConn (he's in social, but may do cross-disciplinary advisement) Jeff Parsons, CUNY-Hunter (in developmental, but ditto here on the cross-disciplinary stuff. Has a super awesome active lab) Brian Mustanski, Northwestern (he's joint in medical social sciences and psychology) John Pachankis, Yale (in epidemiology but could probably advise in psych) Dawn Szymanski, UT-Knoxville Arnold Grossman, NYU Mary Rotheram-Borus, UCLA (cross-appointed with medicine. Her stuff intersects with LGBT rather than being solely focused on it.) Also, Perry Halkitis does definitely do LGBTQ-specific research. He does do broader HIV/AIDS work, but most of his prior work has been with gay and bisexual men. Also, note that professors in other departments, and even other schools, often advise students in different areas of social psychology and across schools (especially public health and psychology) One of my dissertation committee members specializes in this area; he got his PhD in clinical psych from Yale, but worked with people in public health and the school of medicine in addition to working with folks from psych.

I'm in the social sciences. I have a 13" screen but I have a 24" monitor I use at home. 99% of the time if I am at home my laptop is hooked up to the monitor and that's what I work on. My dissertation was primarily written facing that. When I travel, though, my 13" laptop is absolutely fine for pretty much everything I want to do. The only things I wish I had more screen real estate for are doing side by side comparisons of documents and writing results of statistical analyses. I wouldn't get any laptop larger than 13", though, because the portability is definitely worth the extra screen space. I have a bad lower back so any weight I can cut off (even if I am toting it in my backpack) is a good deal for me. Honestly, if I could do it over again and had the money, I'd go with a Mac mini and a 13" or even 11" MacBook Air. (I have a 13" MacBook non-Retina Pro).

Even within a department, though, there can be many different ways of thinking and methodologies. I'm in two departments in an interdisciplinary program, and my methods and ways of thinking are quite different from most of the other students in my program. I mean, some of my psych colleagues use eye-tracking and fMRI data. And some of my public health colleagues do ethnographies and archival research. I don't do either. I don't disagree that people from the same department can have ideas and training more similar to each other than to people from outside that department, but I do think that depending on what kinds of experiences the student in question had, they can differ. Which is why I too think this is a really bad idea - there's no way for the OP to know why the professor in question was hired and how diverse she is (in thought and in identity) from the other folks in the department. A good person to talk to is the university ombuds. The ombuds is supposed to be there to help university officers (faculty, staff, students) get through conflicts that might arise. He or she may have some suggestions and thoughts for you on how to proceed, especially given that your advisor was her mentor. (However, don't assume that just because your advisor was her mentor you can't take your grievances to him. If your grievances are reasonable and based upon fact and not interpersonal conflict, he may be able to help you.)

I've never lived in the Arbor but I have a friend who has. She loved the Arbor! The only reason she moved out was because she took a hall director job, and she moved back after she quit the job. The Arbor is really a luxury apartment building; I suspect that it was built primarily for faculty and staff of the medical center who wanted a place to live that was close-ish to the medical center/Washington Heights but in a nicer, more upper-middle-class neighborhood. Unlike other student housing (and like most luxury buildings in New York), it has a parking deck, a lounge and courtyard and a fitness center. I think there's also laundry in the building if not in the units themselves. The area around it is super nice, too. Riverdale is a residential, middle- to upper-middle-class neighborhood. Lots of shopping, and lots of churches and parks. It is "far" from Columbia in the sense that it's not as close as the other graduate housing, but I consider that a plus, lol. Anyway, main campus is about a 30-40 minute ride away on the 1 train (which lets off literally at the gates of the main campus). There's also a shuttle from the Arbor to the main campus. The schedule is here; it runs pretty frequently. You'll soon learn that it's kind of a New York thing to commute and most people don't bat an eye at it. The trains are easy cake to take, and most people just kind of zone out. I have some friends that live way downtown - in Chelsea, one out by Battery City Park, and some more who commute in from Brooklyn. I also have a couple friends in Wash Heights/Inwood, although most of them go to CUMC. That's very reasonable for the area especially including utilities especially with just one roommate. If you look at listings on Craigslist in the Upper West Side, you'll see that 2-bedroom apartments on the market can easily cost upwards of $3,000-3,500+. Even in Harlem, you could pay that much for a nice quality apartment. For comparison, I was paying $900 before utilities for my half of a 2-bedroom apartment in Washington Heights, which is way uptown at 172nd St & Haven Ave (and is a cheaper neighborhood than Morningside Heights). After ~$60/gas + electric and $15 Internet, that was close to $1,000. Columbia housing is the only housing I'd accept sight unseen. I'm not familiar with that specific building. I know on the same block there's an independent bookstore (Book Culture, a Morningside Heights institution) and a post office (convenient) plus a bunch of other apartment buildings. You're in luck because all the fraternity houses are on 113th, so hopefully you'll be spared the majority of the noise. (I use to live on 113th.) The 1 train is just two blocks south of you at 110th St. Also two blocks south of you is my favorite grocery store, Westside Market. Lots of fresh produce at reasonable (for Manhattan) prices. There are a bunch of shops lining Broadway where you're at, and more on Amsterdam if you go downtown. Also, 110th St is about where Columbia's sphere of influence ends (and almost, kind of, where the real Upper West Side begins) so you're close to getting away from it should you want. Only downsides is that St. Luke's Hospital is about a block and a half from you and the fire department is around the corner at 113th & Amsterdam, so you may hear the sirens (I live 6 blocks from the hospital and I still do - you get used to after a while). Also, St. John's cathedral is at 112th and Amsterdam, but they're building a high-rise apartment building there, so you may get some construction noise. But it's NYC. It's loud no matter what. I hear garbage trucks at 3 am. Go figure.

The doormen say nothing. In fact, they often pet/greet the dogs. Our deposit was equivalent to one month's rent, if I remember correctly.

I also have to disagree with NicholasCage's comment. 90-95 percent of academic institutions in the United States are teaching-focused institutions; therefore, most of us will end up there. Your teaching skills are going to be an important part of the hiring process at those places. Plus, even research-intensive institutions would rather have a professor who can connect well with students AND is a great researcher than a professor who is a terrible teacher (unless that second research has mad money). My advice: 1. Don't spend an inordinate amount of hours preparing...well, anything for class. Learn to limit your prep time. Part of that is because the students are going to ignore a lot of it anyway, but most of it is because you need to learn balance early in your career. For example, I have a tendency to do line edits on students' papers, so I try to limit myself to editing only the first page to a page and a half and then add a comment like "You have errors like this throughout your paper; please proofread and fix." 2. Related to #1, learn to wing it. I create slides for my lectures but I no longer write extensive notes. I actually find I lecture better when I don't have notes, because then I'm more free-form. And I don't just mean talking extemporaneously - I mean switching gears when your students look bored or aren't getting it. As you get more experience this will become easier. 3. Create an organizational system for grading. Buy folders or binders or trays or whatever you want to organize 1) graded papers 2) to-be-graded papers for different classes. This way you won't have paper all over the apartment, which drove me absolutely nuts. You also will be better able to keep up with assignments, lowering the risk of losing one. If you have a choice, absolutely collect everything electronically through the course management system. Forget all that paper. 4. Totally agree with not assuming that upper-level students know how to write properly. If you are at an elite university, do not assume that your students are automatically good at whatever it is you're teaching them. I was kind of shocked my first semester TAing at the quality of work I got from students at my elite university - I went to a not-elite place and assumed that the students at the elite place would be simply amazing, since the students at my not-elite place were great. And they are amazing...in different ways...in the typical way that college students are amazing in their ingenuity and creativity (both for good and evil). But they're not substantially smarter or better than students from other, less elite institutions. They're just richer and better prepared (on average). A few years ago my younger sister asked me to help her with a paper that was very similar to a paper I was currently grading for a class very similar to the one she was taking at her regional public college, to which she commuted from home. My family is blue-collar; she went to a regular public high school and was a slightly above-average student. Her paper was better written than MOST of the students' papers in my class. 5. If you are TAing for a professor and it gets down to 2 weeks before the class starts and you haven't heard from them, contact them yourself. Most times you will get an apologetic "Oh yeah, I'm teaching a class!" If you get a brush-off equivalent to "Mmm, I'll think about it in two weeks," prepare for an interesting semester. I think the most important to remember is similar to what hashslinger said. Remember that we were the nerds in high school and college - we showed up shiny and excited to learn. Particularly if you are teaching an intro class, your students will not be as excited as you, and some of them will never get excited. They may be taking it because it's an easy GE requirement, or they need some extra credits, or they heard it was an easy A. Perhaps 10% of your class will decide to major in the field; maybe another 10-20% will not but will be genuinely interested. The rest will be some varying levels of "whatever." Visualize that 20-30% when you are preparing lectures, but realize that not even close to everyone is in that area and some people will be grubbing for grades. Oh, also, don't be afraid to indulge in geekery, as long as you don't go down the rabbit hole too deeply. One of the things that has reached my students is how geeked and enthusiastic I am about my interest area. Even when they think I'm silly and uncool, they still appreciate my passion, and in some of them it has led to really productive curiosity. ALSO. I lurk on the "In the Classroom" threads on Chronicle of Higher Education's forum. There are lots of experienced professors there and they have AWESOME advice (and really funny stories).

This seems as good a time as any to profess my undying love for Atlanta. Those apartments look soooooo nice and you couldn't rent a box in NYC for those prices, much less a downtown apartment with granite countertops and stainless steel appliances! Have you advertised yourself on Craigslist? That's how I found my roommates.

I get excited every time I buy a new electronic thing. I'm planning to get a new MacBook Air and iPad in August or September after I start my new job and I am ALREADY excited.

TOTALLY depends. -How many chores are they talking about? Are they reasonable, normal people or are they controlling neat freaks? Do chores include looking after their children? Are they going to make you ask for "time off" or okay vacations with them? -Do these people really understand graduate students? As a PhD student, you will be very busy, working 60+ hour weeks with an erratic schedule. I have found that a lot of people think graduate school is like college 2.0. I have to explain that grad school is much more like a demanding, low-paying job. They may get irritated if they think you have more time than you actually do. -Is the room separated from them? Are you basically living in the main family home, with your bedroom essentially next door to the kids? Are they going to know when you come and go, like if you go to get a couple of beers with folks? Can you come home drunk? I wouldn't do it for two reasons. First of all, people who want babysitting and chores are essentially looking for a live in nanny and/or housekeeper without giving you live-in nanny/housekeeper pay. Live-in nannies usually get free room AND a salary. If they are just reducing rent, that means they are charging you to do work. Heck no. (The word I want to put in there is actually stronger than heck.) It doesn't matter whether the children are over 10 or not - if they want a nanny, they should hire a nanny. Not only that, but if you go in with the understanding that something is a full-time or part-time job, you can get clear outlines and boundaries on that job - hours of work, days off, expectations, etc. These sort of informal "chores for rent" situations usually don't have those and can lead to misunderstandings. I also agree with the wisdom that you won't feel comfortable in the common areas of the house. It's THEIR house, not yours, and you will feel confined to your bedroom and the kitchen to cook. You do not, not, not want this. Second of all, I put a huge value on my privacy and control over my own time, and paying rent is totally worth that. I live in one of the most expensive cities in the country (NYC) and I would much rather pay rent and work a part-time job than this. In fact, last year I quit a job that came with free rent (live-in hall director) and opted to pay rent because I needed the time and space to concentrate on my dissertation work and didn't want middle-of-the-night interruptions in my work, and it was a job I actually really, really liked.

This depends a lot on your department, university, and most of all your advisor. My advisor is pretty chill and encourages breaks and vacations. I can also do all of my work from any Internet-connected computer with the appropriate statistical analysis program. This describes my laptop, so I can pretty much take break when I want to, although of course it's limited. There was no vacation or sick time; it was just..."Hey Advisor, I am planning to go to see my family for a week between X dates." In my first two years in grad school I went home about twice a year - a week in the summer and usually 2-3 weeks over Christmas break. My advisor was also out of town during the winter break so it didn't matter. I also spent every other weekend with my long-distance boyfriend about 80 miles away. These days, I typically go home once a year - during winter break - and for a lot less time - maybe 1.5 to 2 weeks. I only go home other times if there's a special thing, like my sister in law graduating from high school (so I'm going home for a week next week). My boyfriend is also now my live-in husband, so no more of that. Occasionally I'll visit my extended family about ~100 miles away in the next state over for a long weekend, but I bring work with me. ...so long story short, yes, you should be able to go home and visit your family once a year! You're a PhD student, not an android

I like it! I agree that it's way better than most academic websites I see out there - clean and smple while still visually interesting. It made me want to click around and see more, and it made me really interested in your work. Lots of PhD supervisors are going to really appreciate this. I agree with TakeruK's posts - those were also the first critiques that came to mind. 1. I half-agree. yourname.weebly.com is kind of - unwieldy. And I've always disliked the way weebly sounds, lol. Can you get webhosting with a different server and/or buy your name as the domain name? Hosting it on your department's server may not be the best idea because when you graduate...you'll have to move it all off, but owning your own domain is a good idea because you can also change the content as you progress through your field. 2. In your header, you might want to put "Your Name: Amateur Neuroscientist" instead of "...Amateur Neuroscience." 3. I honestly don't like the auto-play snippets at all. I agree that if you have them at all they need to go more slowly, but I've never been a huge fan of anything auto-play on websites. I think users should be able to browse the page at their own speed. 4. In addition to that...you may want to translate your snippets to non-jargon, non-neuroscientist speak. I know that the main audience will probably be other neuroscientists, and this may be a stylistic preference. But you never know who else might be using your site in the future - interested undergraduate students who want to understand your work; search committees who aren't 100% familiar with your specific field, even though they might also be neuroscientists; news media who are interested in reporting your work elsewhere; etc. THis is especially true because you clearly have research interests that are quite distinct from each other (song control systems in songbirds; the effects of oxytocin in homophobic people; pain management). For example, I automatically understood what you meant by "the implicit measure of the IAT" and "naturally occurring neuropeptide" because I'm a social psychologist, but I was totally lost on the songbird one, lol. So you may want to reword the snippets so that they are a bit less "conference abstract language" and more written in every day language that anyone could understand. 5. You have some grammatical and mechanical/structural errors in your "About Me" section. For example, after Ontario in the first sentence, you don't need a semicolon - you should just use a comma. It also reads a little clinically; you can use simpler language and diction. I grew up in a small town of Keswick, Ontario - colloquially known as "cottage country" and renowned for its ice fishing. Throughout high school I had wildly fluctuating future ambitions; I wanted to be everything from an English teacher to a physiotherapist. Unsure of what to do, I attended the University of Western Ontario, where I majored in kinesiology and psychology. I became fascinated with neuroscience during my second year of undergrad, while taking Introduction to Cognitive and Behavioural Neuroscience. There I learned the fundamentals in the study of the human brain. I was hooked! (I would later learn this addictive behaviour to be a product of my mesolimbic reward pathway.)* From then on, I sought opportunities to further study neuroscientific concepts and improve my research skills. I graduated from Western Ontario in 2014. *Here, you should probably insert a more specific research interest in a sentence or two. The first sentence of your next paragraph is not a complete sentence - the issue is the "where" in the second clause. Just get rid of it. 5. I thought the exact same thing - I like to open PDFs in my own PDF reader in my browser, or download them into Adobe. So I think you should have a PDF download link for your resume. 6. Agreed about the contact page - include your email address, and if you have an office phone, your office phone number. I would also list a business address (your department should be fine; most departments forward information to students if necessary). Oh. BTW, I found your research on oxytocin in homophobic individuals suuuuuuuper interesting. My research focuses on the consequences of homonegativity/homophobia on young gay and bisexual men so they intersect that way.

None of those fellowships are retroactive, so they would not. The only funding I can think of that retroactively pays your loans for tuition is the Loan Repayment Program, which you can only get post-doctoral (as a postdoc, professor, or other doctoral-level researcher). Also I'm not sure exactly what you meant by this, but the way funding for those fellowships work is that you apply in the fall of one year for funding beginning the fall of the following year. So for example, the deadline for NSF will be November 2014 if you want your funding package to begin in September 2015, in time for your second year of your MS. So you don't really have time to go through your first year of study deciding on where you want to focus research, at least in terms of your applications for NSF, NDSEG, and SMART applications. You'll need to decide over the summer so you can begin writing your application materials by August at the latest.

I changed my project substantially, for several reasons. The major reason is that I wrote my NSF as a brand-new, first-year doctoral student before I was fully aware of realities on the ground and the kind of support I would have. A year later, I had been more integrated into my lab and had a better idea of projects that I could successfully complete with the resources and lab work that was currently going on, so I wrote a new project that was more aligned with both of my advisors' interests. I didn't get HM my first year, and I won the award my second year. (My other two essays were very similar to the originals, and were mostly edited for style and structure.) I think this really depends. The secondary reason I changed my project is because the single best piece of advice I got on my proposals was from an informal mentor of mine, who told me that she wouldn't have funded my original project either because it wasn't really theoretically grounded. According to her, I needed to really ground my project in past research and a theoretical framework. By year 2 I was much more familiar with the theoretical grounding of the new projects I was working on, so I selected one of them to write about. (I also agree with the above comment that even if I hadn't won, the process of writing that research proposal was tremendously instructive. It helped me to focus my interests and learn a lot about the work of using theoretical questions and the scientific background literature to guide your work, not the other way around.) If you feel like your original project is already good, theoretically grounded and pretty awesome as is...then perhaps keep it? It's unlikely you'll get the same reviewers or that they'll remember your project the next year. If you think you can successfully edit it to talk about a follow-up just as well as you did about the original project last year, then maybe you want to edit it. This way, you can discuss the current project you completed as work in your previous experience statement.

When I was in college, my dream was to spend several years just kind of living a nomadic life in several different countries. I wanted to spend a couple of months somewhere, learning the culture and a little bit about the language, and then move somewhere else. There was actually a fellowship that allowed you to do that at the time (Watson). I also thought about joining the foreign service. At the very least, I wanted to teach abroad for a couple of years in another country, preferably one in East Asia. I had never lived more than 20 minutes away from home, with the exception of a semester abroad in Europe, but I knew I was quite capable of doing it. My semester abroad was freaking incredible and I was totally ready to ditch the U.S., lol. I decided to go to graduate school instead. I'm still trying to decide if this is a decision I regret. On the one hand, I'm almost finished, and I love my field and my research. On the other hand, I do really regret not spending more time abroad, since traveling internationally was one of my dreams (and not just traveling internationally, but living somewhere else for extended periods of time). If you're bored with Canada, why do you want to go somewhere that you think is similar to living in Canada? I actually don't think it would be fairly easy for you to transition there as an audiologist. If you're not bilingual in any Scandinavian languages, my guess is you'll have a hard time practicing in your field. Although I do think most Scandinavian adults learn to speak English, you'd probably have to practice in the native language of the country. I think the way that many Americans and Canadians work abroad (without going through a U.S.- or Canadian-based company with international offices) is teaching English abroad. Check out programs like JET, EPIK and CIEE for English teaching-abroad jobs. In many countries (including most Western European and South American ones) you aren't competitive if you aren't proficient in the home country's language, but in others (most Asian countries, many African nations, many Eastern European countries) no proficiency is expected.

As a doctoral student, I get asked for my business card almost every time I go to a conference. Usually I have them. Right now I am in-between cards (I need more but I want to wait until I move to my new institution in August) and it's been terribly annoying. You can get inexpensive business cards from Vistaprint for something like $5-10 for 25-50. You don't need many more than that. I wouldn't use the TA title; instead, I'd put "Master's candidate" or something like that. My old business cards said "Doctoral Candidate" and my next ones will say "Postdoctoral Fellow". One of the things I've seen recommended more often recently is making your own web presence. These days, everyone Googles you, and if you have a web presence you control it's better than people Googling you and finding things you don't control. My web presence is pretty squeaky-clean (and I have a common name) but one of my summer projects after I finish this darn dissertation is to set up a website. Wordpress dot ORG offers free tools to create a website, and you can get inexpensive web hosting through one of their partners - they offer a list here. Bluehost and Dreamhost, for example, both offer unlimited domains and unlimited space for $4/month.

Seconding the vote for forgoing the MS thesis. Publications trump a thesis anyway. If you can prove that you can do research and write, then most programs will be interested in you. (The process of writing a senior honors/master's thesis is only useful for one thing anyway, and that's as a dry run for writing a dissertation.)

Hey, you'll be across the street from me (Or would be. I'm graduating! But my husband will still be here.) 1. Well, it's on the high end of Columbia's housing even for 1-bedrooms. Is it a good rate for this neighborhood? Kind of. It's cheaper than most 1-bedrooms in the neighborhood, which can run $2,000 a month. Is it a good and/or affordable rate overall? Eh. $1600 is far more than I'd be willing to spend as a single person moving to New York. If you got a 1-bedroom in Columbia housing, it's probable that you'll be sharing with a partner, so that can be doable if your partner has steady income 2. They vary in size. My husband and I live in a one-bedroom, and it's decently sized. I wish I could remember how many square feet, but I'm bad at estimating size. And I don't have our floor plan anymore (I thought I saved it PDF, but I didn't) 3. You can't, but in my building lots of people have dogs even though it says no pets. I'm pretty sure we're an all-Columbia building (we have a doorman hired by Columbia and all our facilities people work for Columbia). And some of them are huge, like this huge sweet bulldog and a giant golden Lab adolescent. I'm sure tons of people have illegal cats (as a matter of fact, I know for sure that at least one of my neighbors has two or three cats because I've seen her gently push them back into the apartment with her foot as she leaves in the morning). 4. It has a really nice facade/entry way! Haven't seen past that, honestly. We're a block from a grocery store (terrible grocery store, but good for a quick "crap, I need tomatoes" run), and a couple of blocks from a nice small wine store. Butler is also right on the end of the block across the street from Morningside Park. It's a nice park during the day but I would approach from the Amsterdam side at night (not that you'd ever have a reason to approach from the other side; the park blocks everything, and Columbia is towards Amsterdam and away from the park). PM me if you have specific questions about the neighborhood!

You can't make this choice without knowing what you want to do - specifically. Working at a pharmaceutical company is not, in and of itself, a career. Getting a PhD in pharmaceutical sciences from Ohio State will position you to become a researcher in the pharmaceutical field. You could work as a scientist in research and development at a company that produces pharmaceuticals (which would include employers like Merck and Bayer, but could also include cosmetic companies for example). You could also work as a professor in a department of pharmaceutical sciences or an academic medical center. Regardless, though, your primary role will be doing some kind of higher-level research work. You may do more bench work in industry; some of it will also be research management. After several years (7-10) you may want to move on to research management jobs or up in the company, but I'm not sure about the specifics of that. Biostatisticians use statistical models and software packages to analyze data related to health and medicine - biomedical sciences, medicine, pharmaceuticals, etc. An MS-level biostatistician can certainly work at a pharmaceutical company crunching numbers for the researchers; they also work at academic medical centers, at hospitals and clinics, at consulting firms, and at nonprofits. Sometimes they take their work/expertise into other related fields (like insurance). As a biostatistician, you won't be doing bench science work - trying to discover new drugs. Instead, your work time will be spent essentially assisting the bench scientists by analyzing the statistical data they collect from their trials/experiments. You might help conduct randomized controlled trials for the pharmaceutical company. You might help plan the execution of these studies to ensure the fidelity of your data. You'll spend a lot of time managing large amounts of data - cleaning and preparing it for analyses. You'll also spend some time preparing the reports for people who don't know a lot about biostatistics, and explaining the data analysis results to those same folks. As you gain more expertise (or a PhD) you may actually begin to create models and statistical techniques that can be used on your data, and write programs or packages for the statistical software you use. Most top biostatisticians also develop strong computer programming skills. So it really depends on what you want to do. the PhD will enable you to take a direct scientist position. The MS in biostatistics leads to a career that's really more like research support, which can also be enjoyable and lucrative. Both can lead to good career promotion and it's difficult to predict ahead of time which field is going to "blow up." Personally, I think if you are unsure, you should get the MS in biostatistics. If you want, you can always go back and get a PhD. And IMO, the PhD isn't worth the extra time if you aren't sure whether or not you want to be a scientist.

Well, fair question. Usually I do answer the question "What grade would you give this draft?" when asked because I think that's helpful for the student to know where they stand. I mean, the student has a point - one of the purposes of getting feedback on a draft is to get a handle on the professor's evaluation and grading philosophy. But if I really didn't want to, I would say something like "I don't assign grades to drafts; the purpose of the exercise is for you to do revisions so that you can improve your work and get a good grade." To that response, I would say "Again, that's not really the purpose of the draft, so no, I can't tell you what grade I would assign to this draft." To the second part of the question, I say "No." Then I explain to the student that that's their job. I disagree. I give this kind of feedback on my papers all the time, and when I teach writing I teach students who are woeful and students who are good writers. Even the woeful writers understand what I mean by a run-on sentence or a colloquial expression. And when they don't, they usually Google it. Or sometimes, they ask me in class and I explain it to them. I've found that using this kind of feedback is much more helpful to them. However, I've rarely found that a basic misunderstanding of grammar rules is their problem. They know what these things are - they just don't know how to apply that knowledge to writing a paper, or how to avoid violating them in a paper. However, sometimes I do simply have to write "this is awkward." Often that's because their wording is really awkward and I don't have a good way to rewrite it so it's not (or, simply because I don't have the time in that moment to think of one). Usually these students figure it out on their own...and if they don't, they come ask me. However, I write more than "awkward," I write something like "The wording in this sentence is awkward" or "The structure of this sentence is awkward; it's too wordy and the subject is unclear" or the tried and true "I don't understand what you're trying to say here." I agree that just having this conversation seems to benefit my students, because they honestly don't get it sometimes. Many of them went to high schools where they were "taught to the test" - they were taught that if they followed a certain formula, they would get an A. They don't understand that there is no real formula for writing that results in clear communication 100% of the time, and they don't understand the idea of developing their own voice. This is actually brand new information to them. When I talk to them about it, some of them get excited about breaking the bonds of the stupid five-paragraph essay.

I don't post my phone number on CL when I list rooms, but I will respond in an email by giving them my phone number. I don't want spam callers or weird unsolicited calls. I also NEVER put my exact address on CL when I listed my totally legit place. I didn't want random strangers showing up at my apartment. I put cross-streets so they could get a sense of where it was located and scope it out on Google Maps. So I wouldn't say those things are red flags, necessarily. Also, depending on your city, first and last month's rent might be standard. It is in mine. I wouldn't pay all of that until the first day, though. I might give them first month's rent ahead of time and agree to pay security (and last month's if they request) on the first day of the lease when I arrived.

And don't opine on whether you have a chance or not - let the selection committee rule you out. I thought I had no shot at the NSF and I ended up getting it. And even if you really want to TA, you can always take on TA responsibilities on your own even with the NSF. Except now you get to decide exactly whether, when, and what you want to teach.