juilletmercredi

Good luck, NonTrad14! I wish more programs would look to accepting older/non-traditional students, for several reasons. I think professors in the classroom who may have worked other careers first have a LOT to offer students. They tend to be a little more grounded, and maybe have better overall career advice, than professors who may have never had to work in the corporate world. Also you may see some "real-world" connections that lifelong academics might miss. In my program it's really common for people to begin their program in their 30s (although typically not much older than that) and the connections they are able to make with their work experience really enriches the class for everyone, especially since I have never worked full-time before.

Most schools I considered give the advise that strong grades were more important than actual class taken - as long as all pre-reqs were done. This is probably different per field, but has not been my experience. At least in my field, grad committees want to see good grades but also reasonably difficult/rigorous upper-level classes, particularly in the junior and senior years, that indicate that the applicant has gotten some depth as well as breadth. You're also expected to take them in your area of interest - so for example, an applicant for a social psychology PhD program would look strange if they didn't take social psychology in undergrad (which is usually a mid-level 200-level class, sophomore/junior level). There are also certain classes that are definitely looked on favorably - history and systems of psychology (usually a 400-level senior class), psychology classes with labs (typically 200- or 300-level), advanced statistics (often 400-level), those kinds of things. Also, in my experience, professors are not very impressed with a bunch of As in introductory-level classes. The expectation is that you take a course that challenges you, because then you'll be better prepared for graduate school classwork. So I'd argue that in your own major and related classes to what you want to go to grad school for, smaller upper-level seminars are way better than big 100-level intros. So I would suggest the extra seminar classes (even if you'll get a slightly lower grade) than the lower-level lecture class.

YES! You never know what will happen! Don't shut yourself out of programs because you're slightly lower on one indicator if you're an otherwise competitive candidate. Graduate admissions are holistic, and they look at everything. Furthermore, a 158 is not terribly lower than a 162. Go for it!

I think this is a common misconception, that taking time "off" between undergrad and grad school will somehow damage one's chances. No, it doesn't really hurt your chances, even if you don't do anything completely related for pay during your time off. Furthermore, it is FAR better to take 2-3 years off to cool down, figure out your life and take a "break" from academia than to start a program already feeling burned out. Trust me, burnout is real, and it sucks! So go ahead and take the years off. You might stay connected by writing freelance, writing a scholarly paper in your "spare" time, getting an alumni subscription to your library and reading articles, etc. As far as I know, internationals are generally treated the same as U.S. citizens for admission to programs. My own program (not English) has many international students - both green card holders who are technically international, but have lived in the States for years, and students who went to undergrad abroad and came here only to do their PhD. The issue that sometimes arises is funding - at least in the sciences, many of our available funding sources (NIH and NSF, mostly) are only available to U.S. citizens. But departmental and university funds usually aren't, so international students can often find funding. What really matters is just being an otherwise competitive applicant.

It depends on your field and your undergrad institution. In my field, if you went back to your undergrad for your PhD and your undergrad was a top-ranked program in your field, nobody would bat an eyelash. There are a lot of good reasons to return to Michigan or Princeton for your PhD aside from comfort level and familiarity. Even if your program is well-reputed but mid-ranked, but there are great people in your subfield or specific area of interest there (e.g. one of the foremost scholars in stereotyping and prejudice is at a middling psychology program). But if your undergrad's PhD was mediocre at best, many would wonder why you chose to go back there rather than go someplace better. That's when people start talking about "academic incest" and the diversity of experiences and such. The real red flag is if you are outside of your subfield - like let's say you study stereotyping and prejudice but there is nobody at your PhD program who does that kind of work. However, I've noticed in some fields (like economics and philosophy) it's very common for people to get all three of their degrees at one institution and still have academic jobs. So basically, if UMiami's program is great and well-reputed in your field, and you'd be well-supported there, go ahead and go back. If you're just going back because you loved Miami and the university and it may not necessarily be the best place for you academically, though, give pause and consider some other places.

The income based repayment essentially makes it so that you don't spend forever living behind the eight ball if you dont end up having a successful career. PAYE is new to me, so i'll have to see if i should push my old fed loans over into that. You can't - PAYE is a new program and so you have to have borrowed the loans after a certain date (I think it's in 2010 or 2011) in order to be eligible for it. Do they limit how quickly you pay off the loans? No, there's no minimum time limit - you could pay them all the month after you graduate if you wanted to. I always thought you couldn't consolidate private loans. You can't consolidate them federally or with federal loans, but some people get a private consolidation loan. All "consolidating" loans is borrowing another loan from some agency (bank or government) for the total of what you owe. The agency pays off your loans and you pay them, for however much a month and however long you have agreed with. I am just going to more than likely take out the max in student loans (20,000), then in Grad PLUS maybe I can take out a small amount like 5,000 a semester. As long as I can make my car payments and have a place to live I will be fine. Unless your tuition is covered you may need more than that. You will need enough to cover the $12,000 per year plus the amount it costs you live. $5,000 per semester may not be enough since your rent alone will be about $3,000 of that, and the remainder will barely cover food and gas.

I keep both in the bathroom, because that's where I use them? It never occurred to me to keep them anywhere else.

I think, in addition to what was said above, that in grad school, you can't always just "find free time" to do something. If you want to do something, you have to go and make the time available. This is why I choose Option 3, which is to make time for exercise in my schedule. No matter how busy a particular week is, I have a set X days per week schedule. Before it was 2x per week running 1 hour; then 3x a week schedule: two days of running and one day of yoga/Pilates. This semester I may either do the 3x per week or add a fourth day of cycling if I get my bicycle as planned. But no matter what I'm in the middle of, I finish it up, go on my run/to my class and then resume when I come back. I like running and love yoga so it's something to look forward to, and it gives me the energy to last all day.

Well, first, if your advisor is paying for all of your lab equipment and paying your salary, he's not stealing your data if he shares with with his friends or uses it to apply for grants. The data is his. Technically, if you remember from your RCR classes, it really belongs to the university - but given that he's the PI on the grant for all intents and purposes it's his. You're just working on the experiments with him. Also, if your advisor has purchased all of the equipment, reagents, antibodies, etc., for the lab...he gets to control who takes them. The issues about the number of Chinese students in the lab are irrelevant. So what if your advisor speaks his native tongue with his Chinese students? That has nothing to do with you. I'm assuming that at lab meetings and in his individual meetings with you, he speaks English, and that the other grad students and postdoc speak English with you. The real issue here is the fabricated data in the grants. Are you sure that it is fabricated? Perhaps another grad student or postdoc did the Western blots and other experiments, and you just didn't know about that. Maybe he's collaborating with another lab and that's where the additional graphs and data come from, and since you didn't read the whole grant carefully, you don't know. Re-read the grant carefully and if it still seems as if your advisor has fabricated data, go to the university ombudsperson and discuss it with them. They will help you decide on the best course of action, and will keep your conversation confidential until you decide what to do.

Admittedly I have no idea how grad financial aid works, but are you sure about this? My buddy is in his first year of an audiology program and his first two years' tuition are completely covered, yet he still took out the $20,000 federal loans for living expenses. I'm not sure if that is some weird circumstance? Yes. The total cost of attendance (aka the loan limit) doesn't just include tuition and fees; it also includes living expenses. For example, my university's cost of attendance is about $60,000 - it includes the approximately $40,000 that our tuition and fees costs, but also the roughly $20,000 the university estimates it costs to survive for 9 months in our university's city. I looked up TA and GA and they aren't offered to graduate students. So any advice at all? About working, or living on loans, or just not being a ball of stress all the time?! The OSU website says something different. GA actually stands for "graduate assistant." Check this out: http://gradadmissions.osu.edu/Costs.html. I'm not sure if you are referring specifically to the school of social work, though (or even if you are talking about a different "OSU"). I got into an argument with my mom the other day and she pretty much said that going to school for social work is pointless because I will not make enough money to support myself. I don't believe that, I can do this right? I mean I just have to budget and you can pay loans back based on your salary (federal loans) I can do this, I know I will never be rich but I think that even alone making 40-50K a year is ok, and then if I ever have an other half even if they made 30K a year we could still financially survive right? Actually in this case, I don't think you're jumping ahead of yourself. You're actually thinking realistically. OSU's tuition is $12,424 per year. They have graduate housing that's around $770/month, which works out to about $7,000 for 9 months (and $9,000 for 12 months, which I think is more realistic). I'd expect your food costs to be around $3,000 for 9 months or $4,000 for 12 months (at about $300/month). Other personal expenses...well, that depends on your personal spending habits, but I'd say another $400/month - so $4-5,000. So a conservative estimate is about $15,000 for 9 months or around $20,000 for the full 12 months. 12 months is more realistic because you have to be able to live during the summer, of course. So let's say $20,000 for the first year and $15,000 for the second, for a total of about $35,000. Add that to $25,000 ($12,500 x 2) and that's about $60,000 in debt over the two years, with a pretty conservative estimate for living costs. It's generally recommended that your monthly loan payment be no more than 10% of your gross monthly income; sometimes 15% is put forward, but that will give you some financial difficulty. With a $60,000 loan debt at 6.8% interest (standard), your monthly loan payment will be about $690/month. To stay within that 10% target, you'd have to make over $80,000 per year. Put another way, if your starting salary as a new social worker is about $45,000, your monthly payment will be 18.5% of your monthly gross salary. (If you made $50,000, it'd be about 16.5%). So you will probably struggle financially to repay that loan. Sure, it may be easier with two incomes, but your husband may also have some student loan debt from his educational journey. Now note that under the new federal programs (income-based repayment or Pay As You Earn), you can limit your monthly repayment to 10-15% of your discretionary income. You can play with the repayment estimator here: https://studentloans.gov/myDirectLoan/mobile/repayment/repaymentEstimator.action. Let's say that you make $50,000. Under IBR, you'd pay $410/month and under PAYE, $273. Every year you have to resubmit documents to re-establish your eligibility, but as long as your monthly payment under the standard plan would be more than 10-15% of your discretionary income, then you would be eligible for the plan. After 20-25 years (depending on the plan) they would forgive whatever's left. Since you are a social worker, you would likely be eligible for public service loan forgivenness, which means that you would only pay for 10 years and then your loan balance would be forgiven. The only downside is that you do have to pay taxes on the forgiven amount as if it was income, but that may be a lot better than paying $700/month for 10 years.

The late 1930s into the late 1960s - World War II, the Red Scare/Cold War, the Vietnam War and social upheaval. It's because I'm a social psychologist and I think society's conflicts and social movements say a lot about us as people, and there was so much change going on worldwide at that particular time.

I've heard estimates of $12-16,000 to cover accommodation, food, course material etc. I was wondering if this was accurate or not. That's too low. Unless you plan on going home during the summer, you probably will need 12-month living estimates. Personally my program is in Manhattan, and I would say trying to make it in the city as a single person with less than $25,000 after taxes is a struggle. MIT's living wage calculator seems to agree with me. Even in rural areas, I would say that $16,000 is too low. Even if you look at the living wage calculator for ruralish college towns like State College, PA (Penn State), West Lafayette, IN (Purdue) and Ann Arbor, MI (Michigan), the living wage is above $16,000. In fact, I would argue that there are very, very few college towns where that would be an adequate salary. Also, the source is meant to be a "living wage" - in other words, the bare minimum necessary to get the essentials of living, scraping the bottom of the barrel. So personally I would say around $20-25K is needed to live comfortably but frugally in smaller towns and cities, and $25-35K is necessary in the larger/more expensive cities like Boston, New York, Seattle, Los Angeles, etc.

How are you 100% sure, emmm? Did someone on the committee tell you that? This is partially because of selection bias. Students who go to Harvard, MIT, Swarthmore, etc. are more likely to 1) be exposed to careers that require a graduate degree, and thus 2) more likely to want to get graduate degrees than students who went to, say West Georgia or Eastern Michigan University, and are 3) more likely to have access to the resources that help improve their chances of getting into those programs. It doesn't mean that a student who went to Western Washington will find themselves unable to get into one of MIT's programs if they have an outstanding application package. Well, first, we're playing the "if all other things are equal" game, when they rarely are. Grad professors are comparing students on a variety of things, NOT just their undergrad institution, so it really depends on the context. Also, some PhD programs are more applied than theoretical, so they may prefer someone with a more applied focus. I would imagine it really depends on the quality of the research experience and the recommendation from the person who supervised it. Here's my example - I went to undergrad at what is IMO great LAC that's definitely not one of those prestigious/name-drop places. It is, however, a top-5 producer of PhDs in the social sciences. When I tell laypeople where I went to undergrad, most smile and nod vaguely, or maybe politely ask "And where is that?" A few will say "Oh, that's a great school!" but it's clear that they are only vaguely familiar because they don't know some of the defining characteristics of it (it's a women's college, for one). However, when I tell professors where I went, I typically get a head nod of familiarity and occasionally a comment like "Oh yes, they are great at preparing students for grad school" or something like that. In fact, my advisor told me (after the fact) that me coming from my alma mater let them know that my undergrad preparation was solid, and once I got here, I actually met quite a few people at my university getting grad degrees who had gone to my alma mater. More than I would expect given the tiny size and lack of general public name recognition. That's what I mean - it's not that undergrad school doesn't matter at all; but it's that professors are in general familiar with a far wider range of institutions than the general public is, and they are familiar with those institutions in a different way than the general public is. Sometimes they may have a grad school colleague or collaborator at the other department, or a 2nd-degree connection there that they can probe for information. They are also drawing upon their own experiences with students who have come through their program, and that experience may very well include someone who went to Hendrix or Auburn or Montana State in addition to the usual suspects. It's not the "name," professors are not going "Ooh shiny, UCLA!" especially if they work at a UCLA-type school themselves. They're much more interested in whether they believe you will have solid, adequate preparation for the rigors of their program.

Not ANY small gesture, but there are some things that could help you stand out. I think that for professional graduate programs (MPP, MBA, MPH) it's probably a good idea to reach out to admissions to have a chat if you fall below the cutoff in one area - my professional school's admissions dean actually encourages prospective students to do that, and he's very friendly and approachable. For an academic program, it's probably best to reach out to a professor.

In New York State, you can be certified as a school psychologist with a master's degree in school psychology. However, your scope of practice is limited to public and private schools, preschools, colleges and universities, and some state and federal agencies - you can't do private practice unless you get licensed as a psychologist. In NYS, that licensure does require a doctoral degree. You can do licensed clinical social work with an MSW - you don't have to do community social service work and work with only low-income populations; many LCSWs have their own private practice and do therapy. In order to get the LCSW in New York, you need to get the MSW, pass an exam, and then get at least 3 years of post-MSW supervised experience in psychological treatment (these are usually paid). Another option is to complete a program that will allow you to get licensed as a mental health counselor in New York. I have a friend with a master's in mental health counseling who does private counseling. I don't know where in NYS you are, but Adelphi, College of New Rochelle, Columbia Teachers College, all of the CUNYs, Fordham, Hofstra, Long Island University, Manhattan College, NYU, NYIT, St. John's, Touro, and Yeshiva all offer two-year MA/MS/M.Ed programs that lead to licensure as a professional mental health counselor in NYS. There are many other universities across the state of New York that do so as well. Many of these programs are part-time (like Fordham's), so you can even go straight to work as a school psychologist and make money like you want. Getting the PhD, of course, is more the sure bet - a PhD in school psychology will make you eligible for licensure anywhere, and many school psychologists have private practices. Not all states license master's level mental health counselors, and some of the states that do require that you practice under a doctoral-level therapist's supervision (which means you cannot have your own practice). So to answer your question, objectively the PhD in school psychology is the better option given what you want to do. BUT if you plan on staying in NYS long-term, either the MSW or the master's in mental health counseling will suit your needs. Actually if you plan to stay in NYS, I would say that the master's in mental health counseling is probably more along the lines of what you really want. Those programs really focus on mental health counseling theory and practice, whereas an MSW is a much broader degree.

1) No. 2) You do NOT want to do a PhD online for a variety of reasons. There are several legitimate MS programs in bioinformatics that are fully online, though. Johns Hopkins, Stanford, NYU-Poly, Maryland, UMDNJ,

Most schools in my fields do not have rolling review. There is a deadline, and the departmental secretary/administrator collects and organizes all of the applications until after the deadline. In my departments the professors don't even see the applications until after the deadline, and since our deadline is December 15, I don't even think they really think about then in earnest until early January.

You may transfer up to 18 arts and sciences courses from accredited two- and four-year colleges. We will evaluate your transcript to determine which courses are eligible for transfer credit at Trinity and determine which, if any, general education requirements have been met. Trinity College awards 1 credit per class, and they state that you need to take at least 18 credits at Trinity to get a Trinity degree. Generally their full-time students earn, on average 9 credits per year. It is ambitious to think that even a full-time student - much less a part-time student with a full-time job - could earn 18 credits at Trinity in just one year. I would apply to more schools and more programs besides Area Studies programs (such as International Relations, Columbia's practical Chinese MARSEA training program, International Business, etc) but my full-time job is willing to sponsor part-time graduate studies. So I can only apply to somewhat nearby schools that offer part-time studies... So given my strong language background, I was going to shoot for a higher level MA in East Asian Studies program, develop a solid foundation of the language, history, and economics of the region, and combine that later with a MBA to become a liaison for business or some other field. Given this goal, any thoughts on local/online/part-time programs I should look into? I don't understand this logic, TBQH. It looks like your eventual goal is to work in international business specializing in East Asia. I'm not an expert, but it seems to me that what would make you competitive for an MBA and/or those kinds of jobs is not necessarily an MA in EALAC, but 1) strong language skills and 2) business experience in those countries, especially in business. You already have the language skills, and it appears that you have a good deal of experience working at a top firm on projects for Chinese customers. Why do you even need this MA? I'm willing to bet good money that most people who do international business with Chinese/East Asian clients do not have an MA in EALAC. What they have is (besides an MBA) a good command of one or more of the languages in the region and knowledge/experience of the area through direct experience. Any business employer is going to value actual experience in East Asian businesses over academic learning, so honestly it may even just be better for you to stay in your current job and maybe learn a second language in your spare time than getting an MA in EALAC. At least at Columbia, the MA in EALAC is a very academic humanities type degree, and it's really designed for students who want to pursue further research into languages and cultures of East Asia, not necessarily students who need applied learning. The professors here in that department also do not specialize in East Asian economics; they are scholars of literature, sociology and anthropology, film, art, music. The people doing East Asian economics are in the economics department. Those amazing classes on Chinese and global economics are ALSO in the economics department. Seriously, I checked - you can look at our Directory of Classes here: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/bulletin/uwb/sel/dept-E.html. The economics department has classes like "Economic Organization and Development of China"; the EALAC department has classes like "Introduction to the History of East Asian Literature." The few classes I saw on economics in EALAC were on East Asian economic history. To me, it seems less expensive and more beneficial for your career for you to apply directly to MBA programs with strong international/global programs. Or, if you really want, you can do a dual-degree program with an international focus. If you need to stay close, options include Columbia's MBA/MIA or Yale's MBA/MA program in global affairs. Other suggestions are George Washington's http://elliott.gwu.edu/joint-degrees/ma-mba]MBA/MA (which you could do in Asian Studies, international affairs, or international trade and investment policy), or a special hybrid program, like Tufts' Master of International Business, or Chicago's MBA/MA in international relations. Another really appealing option may be Georgetown, either their joint Masters of Science in Foreign Service/MBA program or just their straight MBA, because of Georgetown's business school's focus on global business leadership.

Keep in mind also that most PhD classes are in the evening...so you scheduling will be tight and you will need to invest in extra help with the kids or daycare after school. This is certainly not true everywhere. In both of my departments, the vast majority of doctoral classes. In my 3 years of coursework, I only had one class after 6 (I think it was 6-8 pm), and that's because it was an overflow section after a required course unexpectedly filled up. I actually suspect that at the majority of PhD programs, most classes are during the day between 9-6. That's not the negate the advice that scheduling might be tight, though, or that you may need to hire extra help after school. If you are in the sciences you may be expected to be in the lab after school hours. In other fields it's easier to work from home or anywhere there's a computer. Whether or not you will make enough to live fully funded on a grad student stipend really depends on your needs and where you end up. Some places in the U.S. have a lower cost of living than others. For example, a lot of universities are in small college towns (like State College, PA; West Lafayette or Bloomington, IN; or Ann Arbor, MI) or rural/suburban areas where the cost of living is relatively low. A family of four with reasonable stipends (like say, 2 x $25,000) could probably reasonably get by in those areas if they lived frugally, especially since your children are old enough to go to school and won't need full-time daycare. Even some larger cities in the South and Midwest, like Columbia, MO or Atlanta, GA, can be relatively low in cost of living. But if you got into grad school in New York, San Francisco, Seattle, D.C., or Boston, for example, you may find it harder to live on two doctoral stipends. This is especially true if your stipends are lower than $25,000 and definitely true if they are below $20,000. It's not impossible, but it will be difficult.

My third year was terrible for me, and my fourth pretty bad, precisely because of mid-degree burnout. Years 1-2 I was running on pure adrenaline and excitement and energy I still had leftover from undergrad, but by year 3 I was confused and upset and depressed most of the time. I started seeing a therapist at the school counseling center. Your health insurance should include at least 10 visits with a therapist; at one visit a week that should take you through most of one semester. My exercise regimen and eating better definitely, definitely helped. Not only does being healthier make you feel better, but exercise gives you that time to just focus on yourself and maybe even to think about nothing for once in your life. I took up Zumba classes, body conditioning, and then running. Especially when I run, I can't really think about anything else besides putting one foot in front of the other and the beat of my music, so I let myself zone out and give myself permission to focus. I also diversified my interests a bit. I was getting really bored with grad school. When I was in undergrad I was a resident assistant, and I really enjoyed the job, so I got a part-time job as a hall director at the beginning of my fourth year - it involved supervising 10 RAs, being on crisis call duty and managing administrative and building issues for some undergraduate residence halls (20 hours per week). I loved this job so, so much and it was so great because it gave me something different to do besides think about graduate school, something that used different skills. I also met a group of amazing friends, some of which I'm still really close to now. I did that for two years; I quit in May only to focus more time on my dissertation in this (my final year). I'm pretty sure that if I didn't do that job I could've graduated at least a semester if not a year earlier, but it was so important to my mental health - I'd rather take 6 years and be healthy than 5 years and be a complete mess at the end. This can be hard to manage depending on your advisor; I did tell my primary advisor, but my secondary advisor didn't know (I wasn't actively hiding it; it was more that I just omitted it from any discussions. *shrug*). And you may not be interested in this at all. My point isn't "go get a job" but more discover what things are important to you and make time for those things, whether it's doing urban photography for 6 hours every Saturday or taking a ballet class 2x a week or just vegging out with Netflix for four hours every weekend.

When I began in my advisor's lab, he was a third-year assistant professor and I was in his group of first doctoral students. He had three: me, my labmate who came in at the same time, and an advanced student that he inherited from someone else who he only began advising that same year. He was also in the process of beginning his lab, so he had limited support staff at the time. My secondary advisor was a full professor with an established lab group. I was able to both compare the two of them and also I've seen the changes over the past 6 years in my primary advisor's lab group. 1. You must be very self-motivated. All professors are busy, but in my experience senior professors who aren't chasing tenure have more time for their students - more time for the little bits and pieces mentoring. This will vary a lot, though - my primary mentor is amazing; we've always met biweekly and he makes time if I need more frequent meetings. But he's also always flying somewhere to give talks or presentations or meet with people because he's trying to get tenure at a prestigious RU/VH, which is ROUGH. At the beginning of this year he was putting together his tenure file and we didn't meet for like 6 weeks straight because of the period of time; but I didn't mind, because I am very independent and prefer to work alone anyway. But if you care about that, that may affect your choice. 2. You will, at least in the beginning while he is establishing the lab, have less support. Mentors who are flush with money may be able to buy their students new computers and software and equipment; in the beginning with my advisor, there was no money for that. There may be less funding to send you to conferences from the grant (we didn't start getting that until maybe my third or fourth year). I do human subjects research, and in the beginning we couldn't pay recruitment coordinators or recruiters, so we grad students had to hit the pavement ourselves and do some recruiting to get participants. He scheduled all his own meetings, which meant some snafus and double-bookings, lol. How important these things are will also depend on departmental support; my primary department/school runs on grants so if your advisor doesn't have it, you don't have it. But my secondary department/school (yes, the departments are in two different schools; it is very annoying) is a little more egalitarian, which means that even grad students whose advisors aren't rolling in dough yet can still get support for getting office space, equipment, lab time, etc. 3. A PLUS is that your advisor remembers what it is like to be a grad student. Sometimes (but not always) that means a more humane advisor. None of this demanding 80 hour work weeks or wondering why kids these days aren't satisfied with ramen noodles and a cardboard box. My primary advisor is very sympathetic to financial and time-based issues, and encourages me to take breaks and recharge. However, this is also a very personality- and departmental-based thing. My secondary department (and to a certain extent the primary one too) values good quality of life and happy graduate students, so I don't know too many people working 80 hour weeks and lots of us have spouses and children and intensive hobbies (lots of runners, a couple triathletes, someone in a band, a NYT bestselling author) while still graduating in 5-6 years. Also, some assistant professors are either workaholics by nature or feel forced to become a workaholic to get tenure, so this is going to vary. 4. More established professors have better connections. My primary mentor is a great guy, and over the last 6 years he of course knows more people. But when I arrived he was pretty new and didn't know as many. My secondary mentor, on the other hand, is a senior and well-known person in the field - I mention his name at conferences and people immediately know who he is and what kind of research I do. His connections helped me get a postdoc. His name will look good on my recommendations. A lot of people warn graduate students to completely avoid untenured assistant professors as mentors. I don't, but I do advise caution. Remember that this new person is brand new to your department, your university, and to their role as a professor; they are going to be under a tremendous amount of stress, preparing new classes, learning the expectations of their position, and forging new connections among faculty. Mentoring a new grad student will not be the forefront of their mind. They will also be brand new to mentoring. Some people have a knack for it and will go the extra mile from day one, and some assistant professors may have had mentoring roles in grad school or in their postdoc and be better at it than some senior faculty. But others may have never really cared about mentoring in graduate school, and the majority will not have pursued any mentoring experiences in grad school because it's not rewarded to do so, so you are essentially a guinea pig - they are learning on you. Personally I don't mind being a guinea pig (and like I said, my mentor is fantastic anyway). IMO it takes a particularly level-headed, well-put-together, confident brand new assistant professor to be a good mentor in his first year. Even in my case, my advisor had had two years to get comfortable before he arrived, so he wasn't BRAND new. Two other pieces of advice: 1) If you do decide to do this, make sure that you identify another senior, tenured professor who can serve as an informal (or formal) advisor to you. At a bare minimum, some administrative things like chairing your committee may only be open to tenured faculty. But at a more practical level, you need someone who knows the ropes to help guide you. I got extremely lucky in that my senior mentor was actually on my junior mentor's dissertation committee and they do similar research, so they actually work together well! 2) You don't have to discuss this with your advisor (we never did) but in your own private mind, decide what you will do in the event that your untenured mentor has to leave, for whatever reason, before you finish. In theory, yes, you have six years (or more) until they go up for tenure. In practice, there are a lot of things that can happen. They could fail third-year review. They could decide an RU/VH is not ideal for them and move after the second year. They could displease the powers that be and get pushed out. They could see that tenure is not on the horizon for them and move on before the university has a chance to deny them. (Several assistant professors in my department did this. In fact, I can off the top of my head immediately think of three that I know of who left within their first 5ish years in the department.) This is ESPECIALLY a hazard if you are going to an Ivy League or other prestigious university, where new assistant professors tend to see their positions as "a good place to start my career" or "http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2013/07/21/the-awesomest-7-year-postdoc-or-how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-the-tenure-track-faculty-life/'>a seven-year postdoc"* because hardly anyone gets tenure there unless they were tenured somewhere else first (seriously, my university doesn't tenure something like 80-90% of its new hires). Also, as was pointed out, YOU may take longer than 6 years to finish. I chose my department precisely because I knew that even if my advisor were not tenured, I had my secondary advisor BUT there were also other professors in the department doing very interesting research whose lab I could join. I also (privately) decided to stay in my department if my advisor ended up leaving for somewhere else, mostly because my department was so highly ranked in my field and there were so many other prominent people in my subfield here, except in the unlikely case that my advisor ended up moving somewhere even better. And even then I said after I finished comps I was staying put, because F retaking classes/exams. *Ironically, she got tenure, and is still at Harvard. But Google "seven year postdoc" and you'll see she's not the only one who wrote about this.

I think natural and physical science students who do this are 1) insecure and 2) have never taken a humanities class, especially in at higher levels. An intro "humanities for non-majors" class isn't really enough to measure the difficulty of these fields. But I'm in an interdisciplinary graduate program that merges the humanistic social sciences, and I had to take a class in sociological and anthropological theory, and it was hard. Way harder than the math and statistics, in my mind (I'm a quantitative psychologist). The stats is easy to get, but thinking about the theory..? I also took an honors philosophy course during undergrad and it took some thought. I don't trust most IQ studies comparing...pretty much anything, since it's been shown that IQ varies widely by gender, race, and class because of the design of the tests. I would imagine that women and lower-income folks are more likely to be majoring in social work and education. Not to mention that psychologists who studied this haven't even agreed on a standard definition of intelligence, so there's no one test that can really measure overall/general intelligence (if there even is such a thing. I think the one thing that psychologists DO generally agree on is that there are different types of intelligences). Graduates of physics and theoretical mathematics tend to have the highest IQ scores. Citation? Actually it doesn't even matter, because there are citations supporting a variety of majors. One I found has pretty much equal scores for physics, English literature, math, economics, engineering, and philosophy; another I found says the humanities and arts, along with political science, are about equivalent to physics and some types of engineering and math; I found another one that ranked English and literature, foreign language, and philosophy as equivalent with physics and math. Whatever you want to find, you can find a "study" to support that assertion. Furthermore, some of the studies' results are patently absurd. The first one asserts that the top ranking majors' averages are all around 130, two standard deviations above the mean. This is absurd; IQ tests are scaled to be normally distributed, which means that 95% of people score within two standard deviations (30 points) of the mean (so between 70 and 130). The mean of any one major being ~130 would mean that 50% of the students in that major, for example, scored in the top 5% of IQ test scorers, which simply does not make any sense. The last study I found actually didn't use IQ tests at all; they used the SAT-to-IQ test conversion (flawed in and of itself) assuming a mean SAT score to be equivalent to an IQ of 103, and then used average SAT scores for intended major. The major problem with that, of course, is that these are high school juniors and seniors taking the exam, and their actual majors may be different from what they intended when they took the test. These "studies" also never really say who and how many students they tested. Unsurprisingly there aren't many actual peer-reviewed studies on this. I did a quick Google scholar search and found nothing.

Postbac/postbacc is short for "post-baccalaureate," or after your baccalaureate/bachelor's degree. So either postbac or postbacc is correct, but I choose to spell it postbac. There are also other kinds of postbac programs. One has already been covered - prerequisite programs in which post-bachelor's students take classes to prepare for grad school. Premed postbac programs are the most common, but they're not unheard of in other fields (my psychology department has a postbac program to help prepare students for doctoral study in psychology, most often clinical). However, there are also research-based postbac programs that are designed to help people get into graduate school. An example is the IRTA at the NIH, in which recent college grads spend 1-2 years doing research with NIH intramural researchers in preparation for grad or med/dental school. Another example is the one-year Hot Metal Bridge program at University of Pittsburgh and the two-year Bridge to PhD program at Columbia. Students in these programs take some classes but spend most of their time doing research with professors; the intent is to make students (especially from underrepresented groups) more attractive as candidates for PhD programs and help them prepare for the rigors of grad school.

I did not do a bridge program like this; I did other kinds of minority/diversity programs in undergrad - the major one being a two-year NIMH-funded fellowship in my last two years of college. It actually sounds quite similar to the Columbia one, with the exception that it's during junior and senior year rather than post-baccalaureate. Anyway, no, I don't think these analyses/articles will change graduate admissions significantly - at least not in the near future. I feel like admissions committees at top schools simply are not reading them. My department requires a minimum of 310 on the GRE; before that the minimum was 1200. My advisor was the DGS and I've been somewhat involved in admissions here, and I know that that minimum is pretty rigid. Individually, scores of 155 are about the 65th percentile on both sections; I'm not sure what the distribution is combined (information on that is difficult to find). What's more, I've yet to see any evidence that GRE scores are correlated with graduate school success. I think they're weakly to moderately correlated with first-year GPA in a graduate program, but in research-based PhD programs, who cares about that? Getting through the coursework in a science PhD program is the easy part; plus we have undergraduate science GPA as that proxy. But I think GRE scores are one of those things that universities do to try to get better rankings or something, and it's a game of chicken - Columbia's not going to dismantle theirs until Harvard does, but Harvard won't do it until Michigan does, and Michigan won't do it unless Princeton or Penn State or Wisconsin does...so on and so forth. Also, no I don't think these bridge programs are the answer to leveling the playing field. They're a start - but funding for them is limited (especially given sequestration); conservatives will always argue over them and try to defund them; and they have a small number of slots by necessity so that the program can give the attention to each student that they need. Plus, you have to know about them. I go to Columbia, am in one of the departments the bridge program serves, and I have never heard of this bridge program until now. What I think needs to happen is -Science faculty acknowledging that diversity in the sciences is important and actually does affect the good practice of science, and making actual changes in their admissions policies - either lowering or eliminating GRE score cut-offs; considering applications holistically; but - MOST importantly - doing recruiting and outreach where talented minority undergraduates gather. I worked in a summer program for underrepresented minorities interested in public health for the last two summers, and did advising with the students. I told them about graduate programs and careers that they never even heard of before, and spent an enormous amount of time sitting down with them to discuss this stuff. Now I didn't mind because that's exactly what I signed up for, but I thought it was a shame that these talented and mostly competitive undergrads were AT my university, clearly interested in public health but hadn't really heard of my university's unique joint program. (*I* hadn't heard of it, either; I Googled it when I was a senior in college.) I've suggested to my department (which is, by their admission, very interested in recruiting diverse undergraduates) to set up a recruiting table at http://www.abrcms.org/'>ABRCMS. One of our other doctoral programs already goes, we could just hitch up with them and do a joint table. -Science faculty and career services offices at these undergraduate schools becoming aware of these programs and recommending them to their students. Especially at minority-serving institutions and HBCUs. And faculty at these places - the "feeders" for minority undergraduates - attempting to make connections with their colleagues at the top departments so they can help funnel their students there. -Free or inexpensive GRE prep, while programs are still sorting out how to change their process to be a more holistic one. A really great model in my own field is the University of Michigan's psychology PhD program. Every year Michigan has a recruitment weekend, and their psych department has student groups dedicated to Latino and black psychologists. They have special events for undergrads of color and even invite up ones that haven't be admitted yet, pay for you. I know a couple friends who've done it and they say it's a great time. Michigan's in the Midwest, a place where people tend to complain it's difficult to recruit minority students. Now take a look at the department's pictures, especially in the developmental, personality, and social* areas (http://www.lsa.umich.edu/psych/programareas/personalityandsocialcontexts). And Michigan is a top 5 program in the field. I think it may be #1 or #2. Clearly, I have tons of thoughts on this.

I'm sure this varies from field to field, but I've served as a reviewer for papers and conference submissions and we do them double-blind. So credibility doesn't come from the name OR the institution for that; it comes from the actual work in the paper. And it's exactly for the reasons danieleWrites put - nobody wants reviewers assuming that the graduate student from Yale knows anymore what she's doing than the grad student in the same department at Podunk State. There's no reason to believe that from individual to individual. Where it more matters (and what I was talking about) was hiring. In my fields, the reputation of your department and your advisor are important in the kind of jobs you can compete for. Students who went to schools outside of the top 30 aren't really competitive for faculty positions within the top 30 (for better or worse), unless they did a postdoc at one of those institutions and/or published their butt off. My department has done two faculty searches in the time that I've been here, and we invited several candidates to campus; all of them had gotten their PhDs at either top 20ish institutions here in the U.S. or, in a few cases, at top institutions in the UK. And yes, advisor > university, but the well-known advisors tend to be at the top universities.