InquilineKea

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1413 Obviously, there are some professors who pretty much sign their name the same way no matter what (even if you're trouble, they might still sign with just their first name). So I'm mostly interested in those who *do* sign their name differently. And it sort of scares me sometimes. But maybe there are profs who use some of those ways but not others? like, maybe they might sign with their initials capitalized from time to time, but might never sign with their initials uncapitalized?

Ah yeah, I know about that place. I do want to work at a place where I could share my work with others (where there aren't non-disclosure agreements), and i heard that these agreements exist for NASA and some other governmental agencies. Not sure about USGS and NCAR (they're probably more open, but still might have some of them).

Oh cool - I'll definitely check that out. Thanks!

Oh wow - thanks for the answers everyone! Soo - what exactly is the norm for postdoc length in the geosciences right now? And grad student length? If your work is computational rather than fieldwork-based, does this affect the average time it takes to graduate? The one thing the article pointed out was that there are more roles for the mathematics+computational parts of geoscience. That being said, I'm more familiar with atmospheric science than geology.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v473/n7346/full/nj7346-243a.html

Judging from the profiles from PhysicsGRE.com, much easier than both physics and astro grad schools. Suffices to say that there are physics majors who get rejected by almost all of their physics schools, and yet still get in some TOP geoscience programs.

So I'm an astrophysics major with no prior experience in environmental science (but I do read numerous environmental science papers for fun - I love interdisciplinary-ness). Also, most of my LORs will come from atmospheric scientists.

If he attacked everyone, how did people even allow him to become department chair?

Wow, that's horrible. Yeah, my name is SO common that it's impossible to give me an h-index. Or to search for anything that comes from me (I can easily find my own stuff, but most people are nowhere as tech-adept as i am, and probably won't put quotation marks around the name or put in special google search terms). What culture do you belong to? I'm Chinese, and the limited number of Chinese lastnames is going to become a HUGE issue soon (ESPECIALLY as China's prominence in academia rises). A name change might disappoint one of my parents, but *really*, there is really no "proper" way to change a chinese name to an english one (there are multiple ways to do it), so if they REALLY care *that* much about it, I can just change it to a form similar to the Pinyin form but not totally identical. The romanization of the name really shouldn't matter if they care about their own name. That being said, my mom told me not to change it to anything "too weird" and also told me that it should still be chinese because people are going to think I'm weird if they see an American name and see an Asian face instead. == Wow, this just came up in Nature: http://www.nature.co...ll/473124a.html

^Ah yes, I'm in the exact same predicament. What's worse is that I've just discovered that A LOT of people simply google in last name + title of paper (or field of study). == Thanks for the responses so far, everyone!

http://db.tt/b6hUzS1

In fact, George Mason economists are really active on the blogosphere, so they're often the most famous economists among undergraduates, especially those from fields other than economics. So do they have very unusual admission policies, especially for schools of their ranking? Do they get to pick and choose which students they want the most?

By "volunteer" research, I simply mean unpaid research. And if they get kicked out, what happens? How does it happen most of the time? Sometimes, the prof stops responding to emails and the student gets the message (the professor may not have intended to stop communication though, since many professors are quite busy and forget to reply to emails)

Hmmm... maybe you shouldn't have asked him for a LoR? Or did he actually write a good one?

Just wondering - what are your thoughts? This forum seems to cater more towards those who are applying, while PhDComics.com caters more towards those who are already in. Phdcomics and this place seem to tolerate a fair amount of silliness, whereas the other places (discussed below) have little silliness on them (although CC has plenty of it on the other subforums) == And what are your thoughts about the other forums? There are several others as well: Physics Forums, PhysicsGRE.com, MathematicsGRE.com, College Confidential, several subreddits, Quora, and a few others. You could also try SomethingAwful and other forums that have lots of intelligent twenty-somethings (they have fewer threads about grad school, but people often post more enthusiastic replies because there are fewer such threads) Here are my impressions: Physics Forums mostly has a small core of posters who are well past graduate school. They sometimes offer really useful advice, but there's also a high chance that your thread will get no replies. There are also several posters who are pretty mean and attack lots of people. Still, the forum archives probably have the best targeted information for science grad schools (whereas this place is better just for general advice) PhysicsGRE has the most useful information for Physics+Astronomy grad schools. But again, there's a problem of the "small core" that often attacks people. College Confidential: hmm, hard to say. All I'll say is that it's WAYYY too easy to get sidetracked and then to start posting silly threads in High School Life. And then get banned by the mods. I normally don't get banned from most forums, but I have at least 10 permabanned accounts at that place. =/ subreddits: AskAcademia is dead, but you can get some useful information through AskScience (which has a higher density of science grad students than anywhere else on the Internet) - but they don't like too many questions about grad school Quora: low chance of getting a helpful reply, but occasionally worth a shot. == That all being said, I've found useful application-related information (i couldn't find elsewhere) on all the other forums (except possibly phdcomics proceedings)

Also, maybe resourcefulness matters more than people think? It's SO easy to do a project for 40-50 hours, and then realize that ALL your effort was useless because you didn't use the right technique, or you discovered that the python package you wanted to use couldn't actually do what you ultimately wanted to do, or some other reason. It takes a certain degree of resourcefulness to prevent this from happening.

Oh cool - nice! Does anyone know of ways to auto-convert LaTeX files to HTML form? It's a bit of a pain when I have to make changes for my CV, but have to then manually make them on both PDF and HTML form.

Has anyone else done this? How did it turn out? Ideally, it would be a webpage that showcased your research and some of your interests. I would make even more, but it is sort of a pain to deal with copyright when displaying images from journal articles.

I am thinking about getting a permanent name change sometime in the near future. But I don't know if it's a bad idea to get it right before applying (I've heard that it's a very tedious process), and it may also look somewhat suspicious, as if i have something to hide. On the other hand, I would prefer to get it before I get too many publications.

http://www.washington.edu/about/accreditation/internal.html My university has intense self-study reports for each department, and they're intensely useful for projecting the future of each department (and its research). As such, they're extremely valuable documents for researching grad schools, especially since they're the only documents where you can get information about the difficulties that the department faces. But what about other universities? Do they have the self-study reports?

Ah okay. Well, computational astrobiology is about things like using models to predict the atmospheres of exoplanets (which I what I hope to do). Or simulations of just about anything (anything can be simulated, really) Example is here: http://www.ifa.hawaii.edu/UHNAI/CASS2011/

Wow, so interesting. Thanks so much for the reply! Are there a lot of "weak" applicants who might just be applying due to a lack of other options? Astronomy+physics grad schools do seem to have higher acceptance rates (gradschoolshopper.com), but they also seem to have somewhat stronger applicants.

Wow, interesting. Which schools are known to do this?

Actually, you can. At least in the astronomy department over here. I don't think it's that different for the atmospheric sciences.

Do they do pre-admission interviews in earth science? They almost never do them in astronomy or physics so I'm very curious.