juilletmercredi

It's difficult to determine exactly what they want - but if your GRE quant score falls within their averages and you've taken calc I and stats I as well as bio (1/2 the courses they listed), then you should probably be fine.

But the OP didn't tell School A what happened - they just contacted School A to ask to withdraw their registration. They didn't explain that they were withdrawing so that they could finish a master's program somewhere else - which is why OP says "I will explain to School A what happened" in his most recent post. And no, School A did not implicitly give approval for the OP to do any such thing. Deferrals are usually granted for personal emergency reasons, not so you can pursue a degree somewhere else - and anyway, OP's master's program is likely to take 2 years. They say they are going to try to "squeeze" in 1.5, but even if they could, there's no difference between 1.5 and 2 years in practice because most PhD programs want you to begin only in the fall. If OP lays it all out on the table - tells School A "I want to do this master's for 2 years, so can you guys hold my spot until Fall 2015? But oh yeah, I might not actually come, because I really want to do a PhD at School B, so if they let me into their program then I won't come" and School A still agrees to hold a spot open for him for 2 years...well, then OP will have done nothing ethically wrong and can rest assured. But I doubt School A will hold a spot in their program for TWO years for someone who isn't even sure that they want to come to the program, and indeed, really wants to go somewhere else and is only using them as a backup.

Twice a month should be plenty for a meeting with your advisor. You should not expect multiple meetings a day or casual/brief chats with your advisor at this stage. You are expected to become an independent scholar, that includes being able to determine for yourself whether you are wasting time or whether a side project is a good idea. My advisor is not exactly absent - I'd say he's in the middle (we meet twice a month and he's usually very accessible by email, but every now and then he disappears for a few weeks at a time. On reflection, I imagine that some students would consider him absent/distant - one of my labmates certainly seems to think so). Independence comes with time, but part of it is taking the initiative in the relationship. Can you get your advisor to agree to a regular biweekly meeting time that he will set aside? If that seems far-fetched or he's disagreeable, then set the next meeting date at the prior meeting. Just come out and say it - "Let's set a date for our next meeting." And make it for 2 weeks into the future. If you are in a lab science, likely there are other grad students or postdocs in your lab or neighboring labs. They will become your new buddies to bounce ideas upon or have casual chats. Advanced grad students and postdocs are great for making sure that you aren't off-track or wasting time, and all kinds of grad students may be good for talking through side projects and ideas. Also, buffalowizard is exactly right about the summer. Both of my advisors do most of their disappearing acts in the summer, especially August. In fact, I've met with each of them once this month. Usually when the academic year starts, they're around more and you can meet with them more regularly and maybe even stop by their office if you have a quick important question. This is just personal and not advice, but I think this post just exemplifies different working styles. Your old advisor would drive me crazy, lol! One of the things I love about my advisor is that as long as I'm producing, he leaves me alone. In fact, the onus is on me to schedule our meetings, come up with agendas and direct my program of study, and I like that. He mostly talks me down out of crazy ideas and helps to guide me on the right path, but I'm the director and he's the producer.

"Going over [someone's] head" is never a good first step. Laughing at you does not qualify as harassment. It's rude, but it's not harassment. Sometimes, advisors can be surly for no particular reason. If this person is really so petty as to be angry with you for not attending a writing competition one or two years ago, he has serious issues. But he shouldn't stop you from getting the degree that you really want. Recognize that you are a person of worth and while your advisor may be more senior than you, he is not more human than you. You don't have a duty to "please" him; your duty is to produce good work. So politely challenge him without challenging him. When your advisor says that you are not producing graduate work, ask him (politely and matter-of-factly) what he means by that and for him to provide you with feedback to improve your work. When he tells you you can't take a class, ask him why you should take this class this semester rather than next semester. You have every right to ask for an explanation to understand his reasoning. You may be surprised - they may be valid. If not, then you'll recognize BS for what it is. (Also, do you have to get your advisor's permission to sign up for classes? I've found that grad students often ask for permission to do things they don't actually need permission to do; for my part, I have never really asked my advisor's permission to take classes. I just told him what I was going to take and asked for his thoughts.) If asking him for clarifications and explanations doesn't produce an understanding of his behavior, have a frank conversation with him. "P/A, perhaps I am misunderstanding our recent interactions, but I am getting the message that you don't believe my work is up to par. Is this so? And if so, how can I fix it?" Ask it with a genuinely open mind to hear what he says. If his answer is ridiculous, or you have independent confirmation that your work is fine (from other professors, not cohortmates), find out if you can you switch advisors. You can ask your DGS about this; you can cite a workstyle mismatch. But you have to try to make it work first, otherwise the DGS is just going to tell you to make it work.

I am in a somewhat similar situation to you. My husband is a year older than me, and we met in high school. He went to college a year ahead of me. I finished in the standard 4 years and went straight into a PhD program - I am entering my sixth year. He, on the other hand, spent 5 years in college, dropped out, joined the military for 4 years and then decided to return to school to finish his bachelor's degree. He managed to get admitted to the same university I attend as an undergraduate, so he's an undergrad here while I'm a PhD student. I have one more year left, and he has 1.5 to 2 years left. I have accepted a postdoc for 2014-2016 in a city 5 hours away. You just…have to go with the flow. I understand the compulsion to try to plan everything out. I'm like that too, and academia encourages us to make 5 year plans and 10 year plans. Life doesn't really work that way, especially when you are planning with a partner. I'll graduate in 2014 and my husband will graduate in 2015; he's not yet sure what he wants to do after he finishes and even whether he'll move to my new town with me or stay here in University City until I finish my postdoc and we can move together, or what. *shrug* You don't know for sure whether or not you'll be able to support him with your post-grad school salary (maybe you will, if you live frugally). You just have to go with the flow and deal with obstacles as they come while trying to plan as best as possible.

Personally, I think it's better to go home during Christmas than the summer. Nobody's around during Christmas, so it's not actually a good time to get used to the university - most things are closed and everyone is gone. During the summer, though, is when a lot of research work gets done. I stayed at the university during my first summer (and all summers), but I typically go home for a few weeks during the Christmas break. I would say if you really wanted to go home during the summer, you should plan to spend most of the summer at the university and go home for a month at most. Around here, the best time to disappear for a month would probably be August, as many people are traveling and things tend to slow down before they ramp back up in early September.

Health insurance typically *is* required at most schools, and is considered a "required fee" because schools require you to either have comparable outside insurance or pay for their insurance. I've never heard of a school telling NSF fellows to cover their own health insurance if they don't have it. In my case, the school covered it in addition to the other fees. Most schools will cover your required health insurance along with other required fees when you accept an NSF. In this case, I don't think Harvard "caved"; I think it's probably standard procedure for them to cover the health insurance of students with outside fellowships like NSF and somebody made a mistake along the way. Most schools welcome NSF fellows and encourage people to apply to NSF, and they don't intentionally try to make it difficult for you to use the fellowship. Generally the NSF saves the school money, as they were going to fund you anyway and now they don't have to pay you a salary or find one-quarter of your bill. It's just that administrative difficulties and changes in financial aid structure may introduce complications. My university recently changed their financial structure and the processing of my fellowship was moved to the medical center campus, where I am technically a student (even though I am enrolled through the graduate school) and where they are less familiar with NSF fellowships because most of the biomedical students aren't eligible for them. So that created some snafus that were easily solvable once I talked to people.

I think saving most of your stipend is likely not going to happen, unless you are living with someone who is covering most of your living expenses.

I think if you are willing to take the undergraduate classes for prerequisites, then you should be able to get into a CS program - but as the above poster has already said, plan to take a few semesters to account for sequenced courses. Generally speaking you'd probably have to take at least 5-7 CS courses to get into a CS master's program. That number might be fewer at management information systems (MIS) and IT type programs. They also tend to emphasize work experience more than coursework. A lot of them are online and designed for professionals.

This really depends on your targeted departments/schools. Some departments are much more embracing of this than others. I straddle two departments in my interdisciplinary program. In one of my departments, having a PI outside of the department is a totally OK thing to do and actually a lot of students have PIs in management, political science and neuroscience. Sometimes (usually) they have a co-PI in our department, but sometimes they don't. However, if they had applied to the program specifying only people outside the department in their personal statement, I'm pretty sure we'd wonder why they want to study in our department instead of the other department(s) mentioned. Liking our classes more and thinking the qualifying exams will be easier would not be good reasons. As a matter of fact, don't worry about the qualifying exams. The vast majority of the stuff you need to know to pass will be learned in grad school, so if you got a PhD in electrical engineering instead, I'm sure you'd be well-prepared for quals in year 3 (or 2 or 4, whenever they are). And at most universities you can take courses in other departments, so you could always take some mech E classes for electives. In my primary department, however, most advisers are within the department and having a main PI outside the department would be frowned upon. You could definitely collaborate with other people, but there are all kinds of rules that constrain your choice to people of main PI to people within our department. Also, your funding would likely have to come from a grant within our own department. These two departments are in the same university, so you can see it just really depends on the departmental atmosphere.

I realize that you may be being facetious, but graduate school is not really designed to help you personally enlighten yourself or find the meaning of life. There are a lot of other free or inexpensive ways to do that (books, mostly). Graduate degrees are kind of a means to an end - the purpose is to achieve a credential that will allow you to enter a certain type of career field. Do you want to teach and do research on political/legal theory? Then a PhD in that field is appropriate. Otherwise, it may be a frustrating waste of time for you. Also consider the idea that a JD or JSD may be a better option for you. 1) Yes. 2) For an academic program, a non-academic recommendation is pretty meaningless. At the very least, the person should have completed a PhD; how else will they know that you are well-prepared and able to complete one yourself? So you need three academic recommendations; or in a pinch, a recommendation from someone who has a PhD who has supervised you in related tasks. You may need to reach back out to a professor you were not-so-close to. 3) If you are at the point of having to look up publications, books, and essays and find one specific thing you want to study, you're not quite ready to apply to graduate school. Not this year for fall 2014. (Just noted that you want to apply for Fall 2015 - that makes more sense.) In that case, yes, that's a place to start. I think you probably already have something interesting that you want to research, so start there. For example, I started with HIV prevention in adolescents, so I started reading in that area and realized that my interests took me to the media's influence on sexual behavior in that age group, and I took that further into looking at where the gaps are. (I don't do that anymore - nor do I have an interest in it - so be prepared for your interests to shift in grad school). I don't think you need much guidance, as I arrived at my research interests with little guidance. However, you are more likely to find the gaps if you have some guidance, because if you're working with someone who has been in the field likely they know what needs to be done. 4) It's easier and better to edit and expand an existing writing sample that you got a good grade on. If you need 10-15 pages and all you have is a 5-pager, you may add 5-10 additional pages on the same topic and just edit the paper. But you can write one from scratch if you are sufficiently motivated and give yourself enough time. The major problem with that is that you are writing a sample that no one will look at before you turn it in. This is dangerous - you won't be able to get any feedback from other academics about whether it's good. That's why editing a writing sample is better; you've already gotten some independent feedback on how it is. All of these issues may also point to you doing an MA program first. An MA program will solve problems 2-4 - you'll get more people to get recommendations from; you'll narrow down research areas by taking classes and you'll likely have a variety of writing samples to choose from.

Proposed institution is actually considered - because the reviewers want to see whether you're going to be able to do what you want to do at your new institution. I actually think it's not harder to write well in fewer pages - it depends on the assignment, and honestly, I think 3 pages is pretty adequate for the personal statement and previous research. I have reviewed my 2 essays and there's a bit of padding, and a lot of overlap. This way the reviewers can clearly see connections between past experience, personal interests and future goals. 2700 awards! That's 700 more happy PhD students, whoo!

The NSF requires the school to top up any additional mandatory fees. I went through this with my school last year in a slightly different scenario; fortunately we have a great NSF administrator who laid the smack down on my department, lmao. See here: http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2011/nsf11050/nsf11050.jsp#a177 am on Tenure; is my GRFP Institution permitted to charge me the difference between the COE and the required tuition and fees? No. While on Tenure, Fellows are exempt from paying required tuition and fees normally charged to graduate students of similar academic standing. I am on Tenure; do I pay student fees? While on Tenure, Fellows may be required to pay any fees or deposits that are refundable in whole or in part, that are optional (e.g., non-required coursework or tuition at other institutions not considered part of the Fellow's principal program of study), or that were incurred prior to the actual start of Fellowship (e.g., an admission application fee). Fellows are exempt from paying required tuition and fees normally charged to graduate students of similar academic standing. If the health insurance is mandatory, your university is required to cover it for you. Oh yeah - congratulations to all the Honorable Mention folks who got bumped up to Fellows! That is AWESOME. What a nice summer surprise!

When I got my NSF GRFP, I had a 3.42 undergrad college GPA, I think 4-5 conference presentations, and no publications. It's not really about that, not solely anyway. Why are you awesome? Why are you studying for a PhD in the first place? Because you're passionate about your field and your research question. Why is that? That's what you address in your essays. In my research statement, I think the amount of time I spent actually outlining the method was like 3/4 of a page. The rest of the time I talked about my research question's importance to the field and to humanity (broader impacts!) and how my specific training and my university's resources would contribute to me developing this research area (intellectual merit!) My personal essay was dedicated to talking about how much I love science and where my interest in science came from (helping millions of people at the same time! by discovering cool things that we can use to fix social problems) and the various things I have done to advance science, including diversity in science, in my field (judging HS science fairs, volunteering at elementary schools, tutoring test prep courses) and what I wanted to do in the future to increase science uptake (teach statistics, mentor students in research, work at the CDC). With NRSAs it's a little different - much more emphasis is put on your actual project and whether it's feasible. But since NRSAs are training grants, they also focus a lot on the training plan. You have to justify your resources - why is your university the best place for you? What resources do they have? I'm in public health too, by the way. Consider also the possibility that the fact that you're in an MSc program may influence funding. Most science fellowships that I know of say they will consider MS candidates but the overwhelming majority of recipients are PhD students. Consider this your initiation into research funding. You will be rejected from far more grants/fellowships than you will get. You just have to keep trucking on and reminding yourself why you are AWESOME. It actually might help to make a list of all of the reasons you are fantastic and look at it from time to time.

I do what wildviolet does! Sometimes you just have to let the slump happen. Allow yourself to feel good about wasting a little time and getting some downtime, playing with your kids. Third year is freaking rough. That was the worst year for me; after it was over I just wanted to leave. It's very normal. If you are thinking about quitting, allow yourself to evalute it objectively. Is it the best idea for you? Do you want to finish or are you just going through the motions? Remember to separate your short-term feelings ("OMG SO FRUSTRATED RIGHT NOW") from the long-term thoughts ("You know, I don't actually want to do ANYTHING that requires a PhD.") In that sense, failure is an option - if you just don't want to finish it, you don't have to. But if you DO want to finish, you definitely can! Another way that I distract myself is that I do something else for pay. I always have a side job, number one for money, and number two because it engages my mind in a way that's different from the program. The last two years I worked for residential life and sometimes I just loved to concentrate on that stuff and not my PhD work. I also volunteer on the weekends, and this year I am going to play in the student symphony orchestra. You have to live your life and sometimes the rest of life is more fun. It's okay. I would get back on track eventually. Doing other things, and getting the slump out of my system, made me more enthusiastic about my work.

You can use any loans to cover your living expenses (either Direct or PLUS), but you may have to request more from the financial aid office. Financial Aid only sends you a tentative award letter; it doesn't mean that's all you're eligible for. Sometimes they will send you an award letter that just covers your direct costs to the university (tuition and fees) because they don't realize that you need living expenses, or it's just not their policy to offer you a loan based on living expenses at the outset. Universities have a cost of attendance, and you can borrow PLUS loans up to the cost of attendance. The cost of attendance usually includes an estimate of living expenses. So if you need the Direct loans and part of the PLUS loans to cover your tuition, you can request more loans to be certified to cover your living expenses.

Personally, I would skip a campus tour unless I really only wanted to go to 2 sessions. You can get a map and explore campus on your own, and I am the kind of person who loathes guided campus tours. I would definitely attend the funding workship and the networking workshop. I think I would choose the student-supervisor one as a third, because the wellness stuff is usually easy to find on the health services center website.

Actually, transferring earlier is better than transferring later in most fields. Sure you don't have a big track record, but if you transfer later you may have to start over. I have a friend who transferred to my program in his third or fourth year due to some adviser issues and he started over with me in my cohort. I didn't realize he had 3 years of previous doctoral program expereince until he told me in a conversation. I think it's better to transfer in years 1 or 2 than in years 3 or 4 where you run the risk of having to retake classes and re-pass qualifying exams to the satisfaction of the new program. Not to mention getting re-entrenched in someone else's lab and working your way up to the point where you are working on multiple publications. Typically you can't transfer after a semester - you'd transfer to the new program to start in Fall 2014, but you'd have to initiate a conversation about transferring in the late fall, and likely apply to the new programs. I think that transferring in year 2 is probably the easiest, because your PI can comment on your performance and support you in your transfer decision. It's also less suspect - if you attempt to transfer this year, you'll be applying for new programs with less than 3 months in your current program, and professors may wonder whether you're succeeding or trying to transfer to avoid a problem that's arisen, or whether you're really serious about graduate work. Anyway…you just started the program. I'm assuming that you either started this week or haven't even started yet. Try it out first - do a semester in the program. You don't know that you'd be more productive elsewhere; the only way to know is to try here. You may be surprised at what is there - there may be some advisers who are doing interdisciplinary projects in other fields. Or you may be able to start your own collaboration after the first 1-2 years there with a nearby university or someone you know. It seems that you don't even know what kind of collaboration you want to do yet; take your time in your first 2 years and figure that out. The other thing is that few people do exactly what they want to do in graduate school. It's possible that you get your PhD here working on something that you kind of want to do, and then move into a postdoc where you do something more along the lines of your actual interests - perhaps even in a med school or business school. The school's prestige won't necessarily make your transfer easier at this point because you haven't proven yourself yet - you haven't shown that you can handle the work there. Most likely, you'd be treated more akin to new applicants if you tried to transfer this year than a transfer PhD student. After you've completed a year, then the reputation of the program may come into play a little bit.

I came here to say the same thing. I will say that employers will not always know that you got an MA or MS for dropping out of a PhD program. That would require them to be familiar with the conventions of every program in the field, and they're usually not. This is especially true for employers that don't normally hire academics; they don't know how it works. I've been applying for part-time jobs that require an MA while I finish my PhD and nobody seems to care that it's a non-terminal MA earned along the way to my PhD. I've also applied to full-time jobs, when I was thinking about dropping out of my program, and again - nobody cared and nobody asked. And in many programs, you do have to do a master's thesis even to get the non-terminal MA - I had to write a master's paper. I published it later. Even if employers know that you left a PhD program, that won't necessarily matter. Most people don't leave PhD programs because they are incapable of doing the work; they leave because they don't want a PhD anymore for a variety of reasons. You can easily explain it as a career change, a desire to get out into the workforce and work on applied programs right at that moment, a change of interests - the same reason that career changers use to explain their job applications. So I agree with the above post - can you tell us exactly what it is you were expecting to hear or want to get out of this thread? Because right now, people are telling you stuff and you have a response to everything. I don't think anyone here is going to encourage you to do this unethical thing, so if that's what you want you may want to seek that elsewhere. But as far as negative things that might happen to you if you do this? If you do it right, probably nothing will happen to you realistically. You may have a problem with references for jobs, just because your most recent supervisors will be your professors, and that's only if they knew that you planned to leave from the beginning. If you are a good pretender and really come across like you just discovered that you don't want a PhD, then most likely nothing will happen. It just may take you longer than expected to get your MS because PhD programs are not geared towards giving people an MS, so instead of 2 years it may take 2.5 or whatever. But it's not like the gods of academia are going to rain fire and brimstone on you.

Most departments are like that, I think. My department has a "TA orientation" at the beginning of each semester. It's really not a training in teaching so much as it is an orientation for where to get certain resources in the department - like copying or the codes to the room where the Scantron machine is. But as far as actual teaching techniques, we were also thrown in there and expected to learn as we went along. That didn't bother me because that's how I prefer to learn anyway. There is a teaching practicum that you can take, but it's 1) optional and 2) an actual 2-credit course, so it takes a whole semester and you don't have to take it before you start. I opted not to take it.

Most of the time, the department or instructor will provide you with a copy from which to teach. You shouldn't be expected to pay for books for classes you are TAing. Even if the department or instructor does not provide you with the text, you can request it from the publisher free of charge. I did this with one or two classes I TA'ed.

I wouldn't, but it depends. I TA'ed two sections of the same class during the fall of my fourth year and I felt like I didn't have enough time for research and writing, or studying for my oral exams (which ended up getting delayed because of the TAing). But it depends on what the TAing is. I was TAing statistics that semester and the instructor basically showed up, lectured, and left. The three of us TAs were responsible for creating exams, creating homework, grading homework, and teaching our own lab sections which including creating and grading lab assignments. And I had to attend, which meant 4 days a week - two 1.25 hour lectures twice a week and 2 2-hour labs twice a week. I don't think you should have to take a supplementary class just to TA. If it's an area you're interested in, that's fine, but IMO making you take a class so that you can TA for them is a waste of your time. I would turn down the unfamiliar TA and just do one class in the fall and one in the spring, especially in your first year.

A lot of people do this with the assumption that the first two years of a PhD program are essentially the same as a two-year terminal master's degree program. And while on its face it does look like that, it's not entirely true. On a most basic level, often times the PhD class requirements are different. For example, my department has terminal professional master's programs, terminal research master's programs and an MA/PhD program. While I did take most of my classes with students from both programs, the requirements of my program were completely different and more research-oriented. I didn't have to take environmental health sciences or health policy and management; I didn't learn technical skills like program evaluation and healthcare marketing like the students in my department did in their professional classes. And the core is even different for the terminal MS students - they take core classes with the MPH students. Often even more integrated programs have doctoral only classes that focus on more theoretical and research issues. If you want to focus on more applied issues in neuroscience or want to learn technical skills that you can apply outside of research/academia, then you may be unhappy. And on the internship front, your professors will not support you doing an internship outside of research. Not that doctoral students don't do them - but they do tend to do them later in their doctoral careers, when they have more unstructured time. Which leads me into my next point. Everything in a PhD program is geared towards preparing you for research jobs that require a PhD, primarily academia. That's going to be especially true in neuroscience. It's not that neuroscience doesn't have applications outside of academia but even the most applied departments (like public health!) still have the expectation that their students are going to be professors somewhere. Most of the jobs passed around my parts are academic, and I feel like the "out there" student because I want to go do research in a think tank or a federal agency, and not be a professor. Trust me, it will drive you nuts. Also, people around you tend to drag their feet towards MS requirements when you are in the doctoral program, because it doesn't matter. I didn't get my MA until after year 3 in my program. Can you do it? Sure, and you will get the free master's, especially if you are a sufficiently good actor (or just keep your mouth shut) so that nobody knows you intend to leave. And realistically speaking, nothing bad will probably happen to you, as nobody will be able to tell that you had no intention of finishing the program if you do it right. But it's still unethical. I know that there are some funded programs in neuroscience; you may want to check those out.

UVa is a top research university; I'm guessing that there is quite a bit of statistical and mathematical research going on there. A quick Google search tells me that UVa's math department is in the top 50 nationally, and their statistics department around top 60. I also visited the statistics department webpage at UVa and it looks like all the professors are doing research: -Geometric information in statistics, including rotations -Bioinformatics and biostatistics, clinical trials, financial econometrics -Stochastic processes, complex systems, image processing, modeling in medicine and physiology -Neuroimaging, nonparametric statistics, Bayesian statistics -Microarray analysis, longitudinal analysis, semiparametric GLM I think you have exaggerated expectations of yourself and others. I don't know any freshmen taking graduate classes in their first years and I go to an Ivy League; the most they come in taking is cal III or differential equations. The "math genius freshman" is actually a rare breed and most of them come in taking cal II or cal I. But yes, you should be taking as many higher-level math and stats classes as possible, preferably in areas of interest to you. Follow your course sequence and then when you are a junior and senior, you should have an area of interest in which you can take extra classes. If you are already taking calculus III as a freshman you should be ready to be taking graduate classes maybe second semester of junior year, perhaps earlier. You should start asking professors if they need a research assistant once you've identified a potential area of interest. In addition to the statistics department, you may also find people doing interesting research in cognitive science, psychology, computer science, economics, mathematics, biostatistics, epidemiology, biomedical informatics, engineering and applied science. UVa has a Division of Translational Research and Applied Statistics in their School of Medicine (http://www.medicine.virginia.edu/clinical/departments/phs/translational-research-applied-statistics/translational-research-applied-statistics-contact.html). Undergrad prestige doesn't really matter that much, but UVa is a prestigious undergrad so you don't need to worry about that so much. Summer REUs in math: http://www.nsf.gov/crssprgm/reu/list_result.cfm?unitid=5044

Just as a note: most of your extracurriculars are irrelevant. Graduate admissions are not like undergraduate admissions in that they don't really care about your volunteer work or school activities unless they are related to the subject. So Habitat for Humanity, the homelessness awareness stuf, the pen pal program, the Relay for Life stuff, and the kennel, that doesn't matter for the purpose of getting into grad school (even though it's awesome). Your quant score is a little low; it's in about the 45th percentile. Whether or not it matters will depend a lot on the program; I think that an applied developmental program may not have as much of an emphasis on quant skills (as, say, experimental or cognitive). I think that you may be a good but average applicant - it looks like you have a year of research experience, average GRE scores but a great GPA and some added classes. A lot will rest on your research interests and how well you articulate your fit in your statement of purpose, and the strength of your recommendation letters. We can't comment on your chances, though, because there are too many contributing factors.