InquilineKea

Do you get your LOR-writers to read your SOP? Or do you sometimes get other professors/faculty to read it? My LOR-writers are very busy people, and they're going to have to fill out the "special rec" forms that a lot of schools give out. For most of the 15-20 schools I'm applying to. So I don't want to burden them with more.

Anyways, if this is of any comfort, read this: http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2011/03/wellesley-girls.html

Hahahaha. This is so hilarious. Anyways, I managed to get mine above 3.0, but it's still sub-3.5. Thank god astro departments require Physics GREs - those can really get an application looked at.

Well, it's not just this, but Wisconsin is also getting budget cuts this year. Not sure what the impact of this will be.

God, I hate silverfish too. Anyways, has anyone paid an assistant to digitize things for them? I really don't have the time to digitize all my collections.

What if it's unlikely that they've heard of the professor you've worked with?

Wow, I see. Thanks for all the wonderful replies! =)

Aw okay, thanks for explaining. Ah yeah, that's definitely true - those are good points.

Okay, that actually would be a good idea.

Okay, that can be a compromise idea. But then what should I label it? I don't want to sound too self-important by creating an "InquilineKea's Questions" thread.

No, I'm not. I have Asperger's Syndrome, ADD, *and* social anxiety, and I'm really just trying to ask them so that I won't make the mistakes I made in the past. I had depression along with those 3 too, but I'm recovering with meds and I don't want to stunt this recovery I honestly wish that I could have asked them (in other places) earlier so that I wouldn't have made them to begin with.

So I've heard that it provides free housing to students. Students going to most other colleges, meanwhile, have to pay for their own apartments. So does this mean that students effectively end up with more spare money if they go to Columbia? I know that the cost of living in NYC is generally higher - but part of that can be offset by Amazon Prime

Well, some of the professors and grad students here are even more horribly dressed. I know at least *three* professors who regularly wear socks with sandals (although they're all in different departments), and a physics grad student who goes *both* barechested and barefoot. So.. Would they care about a lowly undergrad who simply wears sweatpants and oversized sweatshirts all the time?

Oh huh, that's a good idea. I've *always* tried to find some sort of balance between speed/efficiency and independence - I'm not sure where the line lies, and it differs from person to person. Sometimes, it's faster when you ALWAYS ask for help whenever you get stuck for more than 30 minutes. But at the same time, that may get annoying, and make the professor less responsive to the questions that truly deserve attention.

Some people seem to have that sort of personality (since it sometimes is the type of personality that allows you to meet the most people without wasting too much time). But sometimes, you also get that impression simply since you first met someone in a context where they're inclined to chit-chat (such as a social context where they're all drinking beer), rather than to do research. Hm.

Thanks for all the responses so far! Well, I'm still an undergrad, so there are some weeks where my courseload is more intense than other weeks. So generally, they understand more. But this still doesn't always prevent me from wasting time. I mean, okay, maybe the guilt isn't the main issue here (the guilt is over past incidents). The main issue is whether or not people will think that you're dishonest when you say that you'll do things that you might end up not doing (or that you'll do them by a certain day and then you might have to extend it due to various issues that have arised). This seems to happen in academic contexts more than other contexts. Certainly, I've said that I'll take course X when I ended up dropping it, for example

Ah, thanks for the responses so far! I was mostly thinking about students asking their advisors to repeat themselves from time to time. Not just academic material, but other material as well.

I'm just wondering if this is too unusual, since I usually have to do this once or twice in each conversation.

Do you feel dishonest when you tell your advisor/someone else that you're too busy to do things for a week or two, even though you're still using up some time to relax/have fun in those two weeks? I sometimes feel that way. There's really no easy way for me to completely stop checking google reader/reddit/a few forums for several weeks. Certainly, I can try reducing the time I spend on those things, but I do feel that *in theory* there is a point where I'm only checking those things when I'd otherwise be inefficient (certainly, though, *in practice*, that is not the case, and I still probably waste several hours a day on the Internet because I'm not trying hard enough to stop doing that).

Ah - good points about undergrad research ideas. Thanks for all the advice - I really appreciate it all so far.

Okay, so curiosity isn't a trait to emphasize. That's for sure. But what about my resourcefulness when I'm stuck? Some undergrads pretty much bail out on the professor when they get stuck - they just wait for the professor to explain things to them - meanwhile - I collect huge amounts of resources [including research papers that might have attacked the problem from another angle] so that I can try to solve the problem on my own before asking for help (professors don't have infinite time, so they can't bail out people all the time - although some people do bail out on postdocs/grad students they also work with). I'm not sure how big of a problem this is in grad school (certainly people will get stuck from time to time). And I actually talked with a stanford undergrad about this - she said that professors at state universities were more patient and more willing to mentor undergrads than professors at private universities (she said that it was harder to get research at privates since professors weren't as willing to mentor undergrads who got stuck). I gave her the example that Caltech/MIT students have very high participation rates in research, but she said that it was because Caltech/MIT students all self-study so much over the summer.

Is this a good thing to show or not? I'm a very heavy self-studier and I have all sorts of ideas/hypotheses for various problems in astronomy/planetary sciences/applied math. This might help when it comes to thesis research - I might be able to generate a wide number of ideas - and the professor might select which one of them is the most interesting to him. And self-studying is an extremely important skill (that many people still haven't fully developed by grad school) because you're really mostly on your own when it comes to learning the things that you need to learn for your thesis (and this applies for future research of any other type too). But at the same time, your advisor wants you to work on their project and to stick to their project, even if it may not be the project that's most ideally suited to you. Of course, most people recognize that students generally do better jobs when they're researching something that they're genuinely interested in. But if you give people the impression that you're way too independent, then they might fear that you might not want to work on any of their projects. == - Also, how would *extreme* curiosity and massive interdisciplinary knowledge come off as? I'm curious to an *extreme* - in fact - there probably isn't anyone in the nation who is more curious than I am (anyone who knows me actually sees that this isn't far from the truth, although some people are probably *a lot* better at keeping it to themselves) - although this curiosity could be sometimes counterproductive to research since curious people want to maximize d(knowledge)/dt, and many aspects of research aren't exactly ideal for maximizing d(knowledge)/dt, so a hypercurious person could end up as a risk since he may be perceived as being more likely to defect to another field (or more likely to waste endless hours of time reading Wikipedia articles and journal articles of completely unrelated fields). At the same time, though, I can channel much of this curiosity into domain-specific curiosity (aka astrophysics) And with interdisciplinary knowledge, well, I'm going for a highly specific field - astrophysics. Now, some people certainly tout the benefits of how familarity with another intellectual framework can bring new (unexpected) insights to their field (for one thing, there are many statistical+mathematical techniques used heavily in other fields that aren't used as much as they could be for astrophysics - and people from other fields are often more likely to modify their assumptions/boundary value conditions - often in ways that people within the field wouldn't anticipate). And there is actually evidence from psychologists of science (Greg Feist's "Psychology of Science" and Dean Simonton's "Scientific Genius" and "Origins of Genius" - and Simonton's numerous research papers) showing that highly creative scientists are more likely than others to be familiar with many other different disciplines (I'm actually tempted to cite that in my SOP, but I'm pretty sure it will end up rubbing the wrong way) But of course, not everyone thinks that way. Furthermore, this, again, makes people question whether or not I would be committed to stay in graduate school for 6-7 years (I very much am, although I probably do waste significantly more time [articles and textbooks of different fields] than the average student). I would have to convince them that I wouldn't carry on this habit in grad school as well (this is quite possible, since I'm content once I've convinced myself that I've gotten a well-rounded education in all the sciences, and I'm getting close to that point). I actually self-studied enough molecular biology and neurobiology to be able to take a graduate level neuro/biophysics course without any prior biology courses (although I did get 5 on AP Biology, which won't go on the transcript) - and now I have enough knowledge to regularly read psychopharmacology journals for fun (or in other words, I've reached the point where learning more would simply be stamp-collecting, which is basically enough to satisfy me in that field). And I've also self-studied huge portions of atmospheric science (enough to get through at least 2 textbooks). And even if people might not think of the knowledge as useful, some may still regard massive self-studying as a desirable "signal" of other more desirable characteristics. Now, of course, the real question is - does anyone care? I, of course, realize, that in order to get ahead in academia, that I must pursue questions that are interesting to *other* people. That, of course, is something I'm willing to do. Having massive breadth makes it *a lot* easier to talk to people who aren't working in the same branch of astrophysics as you (you ask questions that are better-targeted, some of which may give them some unexpected insights). And in talking to them, I can get a good list of all the questions that people find interesting, and choose which of these questions I'm most willing to work on (this is more relevant after grad school than during grad school, of course). == The main problem here, though, is that there is actually substantial evidence that hypercuriosity has hurt my transcript. (I do view it as more of a thing in the past, since I have medications for my ADD now, but others may not be convinced). At the same time, curiosity is often seen as the ideal *defining* virtue of scientists (you will rarely see unrestrained curiosity respected as much in any other discipline). But academia is much more than just a playground, and many people have their own different priorities/criteria. == Of course, it could come out in the LORs. But I don't think many people mention curiosity in their LORs.

Wow - that's quite amazing. Thanks for showing up and answering my questions! I didn't anticipate that my thread would lead to that. Hm, it surprises me that the schools are so willing to provide that data (since professors generally don't like giving out their grade distributions to most students). That being said, greater transparency is probably a good idea, since it might resolve many of the problems that institutions are having with grade inflation. Do you know why grades of W are counted as 0's though? I've noticed that a lot of courses have course means below 3.0, but that's mostly due to the number of students who drop the course. Are there any plans to introduce the data for the median GPA as well?

Perhaps in a way that you wouldn't think of if you only stuck to one field? And might this apply for unrelated fields? I'm specifically thinking of fields as disparate as theoretical biology and astrophysics (so mathematical models might matter a lot). There are lots of techniques/algorithms that are effective for multiple disciplines and are commonly used in some fields, while maybe underutilized in other fields (or maybe very few people in those other fields even know of these techniques/algorithms).

Well, professors are always busy. And since they're always busy, they're often reluctant to reply to emails. But yet, even though they're always busy, many of them are completely open to chatting with students outside of office hours (just whenever the student chooses to walk in?). Often for 30 minute periods too. Why is that often the case? I sometimes feel that way too - I'm always busy since there's always something for me to do as well (if I'm "done" with everything, I still have to fill in some gaps that I have, and there will always be gaps in my knowledge). But I'm still open to people who want to talk to me (although I generally ask that they email me rather than IM me).