UnlikelyGrad

My brother-in-law also went to school in MI. I happen to know he kept his CO residency the whole time.

Yup. I did it, and the prospective grads who come through MyU do it all the time. Funding can play a major role in school choice, so it would be silly not to ask.

This pretty much sums up my experience as well. I loved WAMU. Chase...bleah. I closed all of my Chase accounts for good a few months ago, but prior to that I had switched most of my money over to MyU's credit union. I get the best customer service there.

Well, that depends. If you live in America, it's very common to see Asians with totally American names. One of the profs in my department is Asian (by birth, not Asian-American), but both her first and last names sound American. (Yes, she married an American.) My mom is Asian-American (both of her parents came over from China). She's one of the many many Asian Americans with an English first name and Chinese middle name, and for the last 48 years she's had my dad's very English last name as well. Most people don't see her middle name ever, but I haven't seen people surprised by her appearance for at least 20 years... Here in America, there are so so so many people from different cultures, and so much intermarriage as well, that it's common to see someone who looks mostly American but has an Asian last name or vice versa. My mom's family is from Hawaii, where diversity started happening about 100 years earlier than the rest of the nation, so I have cousins who are 1/4 Hawaiian, 1/2 Chinese, 1/4 Japanese...1/2 Chinese, 1/2 Indian (not native American)...and much more! We are an interesting crew!

Just got my rejection packet today. 2 Goods and an 1 Excellent. Date on the packet was 4/27--I guess it took a while to actually get it out to me, not to mention get it through campus mail...

One thing I learned as a stay-at-home mom--you can't compare anyone to anyone else. I had a son who learned to read at age 2 1/2. Then I had a son who could not make any sense out of reading at all until age 7. The obvious conclusion to draw is that son #2 was always lagging behind in the reading department, but noooooo...he went from 0 to 60 in 2.5 seconds. (To be more precise, he went from stumbling through the 1st grade reader to reading Tolkein in 6 weeks.) The fact that he started late is not a handicap to him at all, now that he's in high school. In fact, I think he reads more deeply and thoughtfully than his older brother. I like to think about myself the same way. Yeah, I'm a bit late out of the starting gate, but I can catch up to all the young'uns--and pass them. (And I'm ahead of them in one department: I don't have to worry about when in my academic career it's best to have children...)

At my school, there are very very limited slots for TAs in the summer; summer class offerings are pretty light. So there may be 3-4 openings (as opposed to 25+ during the school year.) During the summer, most people's priority is to do research. That goes doubly for those of us (like me, and--if you're in ES--you too) who do field work; it's a lot harder to do field work during late fall/winter/early spring, at least in this climate. So summer is when we try to spend as much time as possible outside. In my department, even profs who don't have funding for a school-year RA for their students will try to give them funding over the summer. It varies from prof to prof, though.

For me, twenty times just last summer!!! I am now pretty darn good at fixing my analytical equipment...

My school pays bimonthly as well. The payment schedule for grad students is posted on the website--you might want to check to see if your school has their schedule posted, too.

Interesting...still waiting here...

We really can't help you unless you narrow this down. It doesn't matter how good your scores are: if you are not a good 'fit' in terms of research interests, you won't be admitted. End of story. Spend some time reading journals and thinking about your strengths and weaknesses and get back to us with better research interests. Or--if you aren't sure--talk about your current project, what you liked about it and didn't, and maybe we can help you refine your interests somewhat.

I find it amusing that the title is "7 Worst Parts of Grad School..." but she only lists 6. I wonder how she scored on the GRE Q? Anyway here's my feeling about the whole thing: (1) As MoJingly said, I have learned to start stretching out frequently, not to mention exercise on a regular basis. My back has given me less trouble in the last 6 months than it ever has. (2) Yeah, I gained 10 lbs. my first year in grad school. But if you consider that I gained 50 over the 7 years preceding grad school, that's really not too unusual. (I've lost 7 of those 10 pounds since I started exercising.) (3) Mental Health Problems? I've had those all of my life. I learned to cope with them pretty well on my own before grad school, and in grad school I also have access to !FREE! counseling which has helped even more. (4) I filed for divorce while in grad school. But my marriage had been on the rocks for 5+ YEARS prior to my filing the paperwork. The reason it finally happened while I was in grad school? For the first time, I could see that I was a worthwhile person, not the grumpy bitch my ex made me out to be. I finally realized that the problems in my relationship were not all my fault, and that I had done everything a reasonable human being could have done to fix them. Grad school helped my self-esteem. (5) No more hobbies? As Zouzax said, it's a time management thing. I still have hobbies. I hike. I dabble in photography. I do woodworking. I do charity work. I am an officer in a campus club. I read. I do jigsaw puzzles. Who doesn't have hobbies? I feel sorry for that person. All work and no play make Jack a dull boy--and I think "dull" here means not only boring, but not bright in regards to thinking. My hobbies help my mind attack research problems from a new angle. (6) Bitterness is a choice. I have met people who have suffered incredible amounts of tragedy and injustice in their life and are not at all bitter. But my soon-to-be ex-mother-in-law, who has had a lot of stuff handed to her on a silver platter for most of her life, is very bitter. You can choose the attitude with which you face tough situations. If you are still bitter, it's your fault.

I agree with whomever said to ask ETS. My school requires the GRE, and I've met a number of Indonesian students here (with only one name), so I know there must be an official way to do things!

Do you live near a university of any sort? If possible, take some classes as a non-degree student--if possible, classes taught by someone whose research you find interesting. Impress the professor (go to office hours!!) and try to land a gig doing part-time unpaid research. If you follow this path, it may be a while before you're ready to apply for grad school...you're probably looking at the 2013 application season at the earliest...but at least you will have something more interesting than bartending to keep you occupied in the interim. (I'm not saying you should quit your job in the interim, but it shouldn't be the focus of your life.) BTW, I think it's not uncommon for people to work at menial jobs before deciding what they want to be when they grow up. On orientation day, my department had all the incoming grads stand up to introduce themselves. One stood up and explained that after undergrad, he'd sold mattresses for a couple of years...another shouted out, "Hey! I delivered mattresses before I came here!" We all had a good laugh over that!

L1- Land Protection here. Still no rejection packet (I had the same reaction as most of you last year when I saw the fat packet)...trying not to get my hopes up too high!

As I've mentioned before (and on my blog) I took 15 years off, and when I went back I was nervous as hell. Not just because I thought I might have forgotten too much (I did study enough to make up for what I did forget), but because I figured the "kids" would have 10X more energy than I did. I'm not saying the "kids" do, but seems to me they apply a fairly low percentage of their energy to studying. I had no trouble keeping up, at all. I was also afraid that I'd be friendless because, well, everyone else would see me as too old. And while I don't get invited to a lot of the after-hours parties, I still have a couple of really good friends as well as a whole bunch of acquaintances I like to hang out with. I'm not ostracized nearly as much as I thought I'd be. (Also, I find I like hanging out with younger people--they are less cynical than some of my older friends.) All in all, I think taking the time off was incredibly good for me. I think more deeply now than I did when I was younger. Also, my teaching experience has helped me to understand the fundamentals (math, chemistry) so deeply that higher concepts come a lot more easily to me now. And I've learned to think about things from 10,237 angles instead of just one.

Actually, we mostly rely on user reports. I do look at all the topic titles at least once a day, scanning for obvious spammers, but other than I mostly act on stuff that gets reported.

Lately it seems that most of what we do is get rid of spam posts. Some are in Russian, some are in English; some hawk porn, others are trying to sell pharmaceuticals or handbags. I have been amazed at the ingenuity of some of the spammers. Every once in a while we actually have to tell people to cool it because they're going over the top. But that only happens once every couple of months or so. (By contrast, we usually get several spam posts per day.)

You need to stop thinking of this as a process involving just your application and realize that it is a process involving potentially hundreds of applications that have to be compared. You're right that it can't take more than 10-15 minutes to review an application...if there is only one. But if yours is at the bottom of a stack of 100, it will be a lot of minutes until they get to it. And keep in mind that profs may have 2-3 hours per week max to work on this because they also have to teach, manage their research crew, etc. My department gets considerably less than 100 applications, of course (it's a relatively small department), and as a result we have a different admissions process than larger departments. All of the applications go direct to the professor in charge of the grad committee (usually my advisor, though she's on sabbatical this year). She gives every folder a once-over, then forwards the info to the prof the student is most interested in working for. If that prof gives the applicant the thumbs-down, my advisor then passes the folder on to the next prof the student might work for, and so on and so on. For interdisciplinary programs like mine, the folders may even float from one department to the other. As you can see, for prospective students who are top-notch, the 'yes' may come quickly; for those who are so-so, it may take a while, as the application gets passed from one prof to another. And, of course, there is always the possibility that a prof may say, 'Yeah, I'd take applicant X if I had the money, but I've already said yes to applicants A, B & C, so I have to wait until they see whether they turn me down or not...'

YAY!! It's amazing how few people stick around here after they start grad school. Thanks for joining the few & proud!

I've been here through three application seasons and have found that it does drop off sharply over the summer. Most of my blog visitors come from this place, so traffic there seems to parallel that here. I do have a graph over there that you may find instructive. http://unlikelygrad.wordpress.com/2011/02/01/trends/

I totally understand the entering-college-early-and-crashing thing, having done that myself. I think this is because it's hard to make it through an astronomy (or physics) program as a weak applicant...you have to be pretty tough to graduate with one of those majors! (*cough* tried myself and failed *cough*) I have nothing real to contribute, I'm just wondering...how do you do computational astrobiology? I'm a wannabe astrobiologist myself--a biogeochemist who could very easily jump the teeny-tiny gap to that field.

This. Also, I should add: Some men flirt with any woman who's within 5 feet of them, and it doesn't mean anything to them. I have been friends with some of these guys, and having hung out with them for a while I can see that it's a habit more than anything--they don't stop to think, "Shall I flirt with this woman or not?", they just do it indiscriminately. There's a single prof here like that. I thought he was paying me a lot of attention when I was in his class. But then I saw him interact with his research group (75% women) and he flirted with *all* of the women. It's just him, it has nothing to do with me.

If you want to do conservation science, I really would encourage you to choose Columbia. From what I remember about the Stanford & Columbia programs, the latter would be a better fit.

I'm pretty much going to echo what Eigen said. It's the flexibility that makes academia such a good career for a parent. My dad, a professor, was frequently the one who picked me up from school. We'd talk as we drove home; it was a good bonding time! After he got home, though, he'd usually be grading papers or doing lesson prep during the late afternoon. He did teach the occasional night class, but usually night was when he took a good hard look at the research. He was at a more teaching-heavy, research-light school, though. One of my committee members is the department's most-funded professors, and is also the father of young children. His wife is currently only working part time, but there are days when he is the designated after-school-care parent. On these days he leaves about 3-ish, but takes his laptop with him. I assume he spends his afternoons working on grants etc. He's a nice guy whom people love to work for, and he seems to have about a zillion students working for him (which explains why he manages to get out almost a dozen papers a year!) but somehow he's still an involved father.