UnlikelyGrad

What field are you in? What do you consider 'decent'?

Do you mean a Master's degree with no thesis, only coursework?

This is exactly what I was thinking.

Do you mean reports to you or to the schools? I believe your reports come separately, but you can definitely request scores from both when you're sending to schools. So you only have to pay once to let the admissions office know both scores.

DEFINITELY keep your SoP focused on the present. Past/current stuff should be covered elsewhere; most applications have a place for you to record this. Also, your LoRs should mostly come from your past/current research advisors, who will attest to your research potential. (Adcomms would rather hear your boss say that you have research potential than listen to you say it!!)

I agree that you really have to tell your advisor ASAP. It is a disability which seems to be relatively non-treatable, so I imagine it would be covered under the ADA. Something popped out at me as I read your post: the stuff leading up to a flight is giving you panic attacks, too. It strikes me that this stuff builds upon itself, thereby making the actual day of the flight worse. Is there any way you could get someone else to take care of all your preliminaries--booking, packing, etc.? Would that help you make it on to the airplane relatively intact? (I assume you'd be heavily medicated after that point to avoid panic attacks etc.)

Exactly what I would have said. The letter from your PI will be worth twice as much as the other two (or three) letters combined. An additional reference from a class professor won't add much at all.

I agree. I think I read that on the computerized test, they start you at 800 and bump you down (and up and down) according to how you answer. So I can't imagine that your official score could be different from the unofficial score without extenuating circumstances.

My advisor bikes to school in all weather that's not a total blizzard. I've seen her biking on days when we get 4-6" of snow. At first I thought she was crazy, but then I realized...she's in her mid-forties, and she's totally fit. Now I worship her. Oh to have her dedication!

Yeah, I feel sorry for the organic synthesis people who are expect to publish 2x/year. In my field, where a lot is fieldwork dependent, it's hard to get out 1 paper/year. Thus, my department only requires 3 for graduation.

This. If you want to get tenure, they're not just going to look at # of publications, but also things like citation numbers. Publishing 10 papers that are total crap (and therefore are never cited) is not as useful as publishing 2 that many people reference. My advisor is VERY particular about what she publishes. However, her papers get cited many times, not just immediately but also for years afterwards. I have read recent (2010) papers that cite her work as far back as 1996...when she publishes something, people take note.

Well, the way tenure works at the universities I'm familiar with, the bulk of the tenure process is consumed with research. It's usually a 3-step thing: (1) The department decides whether it wants to give you tenure or not. This is the only level at which your teaching ability may be taken into consideration, but usually they just make sure you've been pulling in the research dollars, have been mentoring enough grad students through to graduation, etc. (2) External support: you have to drum up what are essentially letters of recommendation from people who are in your field but outside the school, saying that your research is interesting, novel, and potentially world-class. These LoRs have to be from pretty big names in order to count. [When my sister was going through this, she joked that there are only half a dozen people in each field who qualify to write these letters for everyone else in the world--her career goal was never to become one of them.] (3) The provost (usually) of the school looks over the department's recommendation, the LoRs, and issues an official tenure decision. To have a teaching-track tenure decision, you'd have to cut out step #2. What would you substitute instead? I'm not sure. I certainly don't think that they could use student evaluations of a prof's teaching, because students, at least freshman/sophomores, are pretty lame about knowing what makes someone a good teacher. So maybe they'd have evaluations from other profs who'd sat in on classes--I don't know. I do like the idea of teaching-track tenure, though. Last spring I was lecture TA for one of our departmental research superstars, who was teaching freshman chem. She did a decent job, not fantastic but well enough, and she really made an effort to reach out to the students. But behind closed doors, she often complained to me: "It's a waste of my time to teach this class! Every hour I spend on this lecture is an hour I can't spend writing grant proposals!" (Her funding rate was about 5x that of my current advisor, and might have been the highest of anyone in the department.) I loved working with this lady--she was a fantastic mentor for me. I can see that the department was wise to keep her around because she had both the funds and the smarts (and the heart) to mentor a lot of grad students successfully. But having her teach freshman chem might have been a waste of her time... On the other hand, my all-time favorite professor to take classes from was an older guy who'd already ended his research career. It was clear that he liked teaching, and from what I've read he burned out on the research fairly early on in his career. I think he would have been much happier going for teaching-track tenure, had that been available. Did he bring in a lot of research funding to the department? No. However, he did teach one undergraduate core course (fall, spring, and summer), two grad-level core courses, and one popular grad-level elective course. Given the number of times that my advisor has wailed, "OMG! What are we going to do when he retires?" I think he definitely provides a valuable service.

The resume that landed my husband several industry jobs (coming out of college in the middle of a recession) had the following for work experience: Latest Job: Internship @ Government Institution Job just previous: Summer Internship @ Government Institution 2 High School Jobs, both Intern @ Environmental Firms Then he had a category called "Other Experience" which said something like, "I paid my way through college with a variety of jobs: waiter, usher, prep chef..." (I forget all the things he did) So basically, he put all relevant and quasi-relevant work experience in reverse chronological order and lumped everything else in a blurb at the end.

My office is one of the few in the building that has no windows despite my serious need for tree-gazing. I try to take at least a couple of walks a day. Not necessarily "real" walks--sometimes just across the street to the library to return a book--anything that gets me outside counts. I will be moving offices at the beginning of the school year and am seriously hoping for an office with windows. Odds are pretty good I'll get one, actually, considering the building layout. I am also hoping I get to keep at least some of my awesome officemates...

At my school, the geology department has a bunch of TA slots but the environmental science dept only has 2 or 3 grading positions (for 40-50 grad students). This is not to say that you couldn't get into a master's program, funded as an RA--but you'd have to seek out a prof who had lots and lots of funding. I know my sister has funded MS students before when she was feeling flush.

I'm lucky. My department pays my fee for the student health plan, which is pretty amazing. Low co-pays, a high coverage limit ($2M). Plus vision and limited dental coverage... The one downside is that you have to use the student health center for your PCP. I probably should go in for an annual check up, to see how good they are. I do know that the dentist is absolutely awesome.

Wow--my office is about 10x12, and we have 6 people crammed in there!

I've found in the past that expecting myself to take time out to exercise (doing a workout video, going to the gym, etc.) just never happens for me. When I was doing my post-bac work I found the perfect solution: making myself walk places. So 5 mornings a week I walked 1 mile to the bus stop, then on the other end I walked about 3/4 mi to the far end of campus. In the evening I walked the same distance home. Plus I walked or biked to the post office (~1 mile), my friend's house, (~2 miles), library (~1.5 miles), and sometimes even tutoring appointments (~4 miles) or church (~3 miles). So I was walking 20+ miles/week and biking even more. I dropped 10 pounds that year. Unfortunately, the bus is TOO convenient in my new home--only 1/4 mile from front door to bus stop, and about that from front door to office/lab. And I've put 10+ pounds back on this year. I'm thinking of changing my routine so that I walk 1 mile to the other bus line in the mornings. Still debating whether or not to walk back from there in the evenings though--there's about a 250' elevation gain. It burns a lot of calories but I am usually pretty dead tired on the way home.

I had to send transcripts from 5 universities. I had the registrar's office at each school send them directly to the 9 schools I applied to. The only time I had a problem was when some secretary put the first two transcripts (which were had my maiden name) in a separate file...My app had included my maiden name, but they somehow couldn't get stuff to the right place!

You get an office to yourself? Mine is shared, and though I like the camaraderie of having office mates (all of whom are awesome, btw), there are times I just can't work in there...

Before I started applying, I thought that it would be a good thing for people who googled me (if they did so, anyway) to see an overwhelmingly positive site linked to my name. So I put up a small website that was almost like a pictorial resume--"this is what makes me, me." There were blurbs of text, but it was rather picture heavy. So, for example: "I've been homeschooling my kids for the last 15 years. Here I am with my friend Steve (also a chemist) demonstrating how combustion changes materials." [That was the day we used a butane torch on sugar, steel wool, and a bunch of other stuff.] "One of my favorite activities is serving as an instructor for the city CERT program. Here I am giving my lecture on light search and rescue...here I'm helping a student learn how to splint an arm...here I'm using a big lever to lift a 2.5 ton block." "I love to hike. Here are some pics from a backpacking trip where I took a bunch of teenage girls from my church on their first overnight hike." It was all overwhelmingly positive stuff--the sorts of things that would make people say, "Hey, UnlikelyGrad is a neat person."

Here's the link to mine, which got me into four schools. http://unlikelygrad.wordpress.com/2009/12/31/a-winning-sop/

Yup. Everywhere I applied they wanted undergrad cumulative GPA only. Which sucked for me, because I had a sucky undergrad GPA but a 4.0 GPA for postbac work.

It's actually pretty sad when the top poster only has 42 posts. During prime posting season, the number runs around 200.

Wow. I never thought that would happen!