eco_env

technically, the only one of does in New England is MA. Also, a lot of those top schools are actually cheaper than state schools if you are really poor- they can afford to fill 100% of demonstrated need. But of course few college applicants think of it that way...

I wonder how people who are so disorganized manage to get so far along and become professors...

You might be able to stretch the money to 12 months, but it looks like you might be able to get summer funding. If you don't get summer funding, I would recommend looking for a summer job relevant to your research or for some kind of fellowship to fund your summer research. As long as they aren't giving you money they can't stop you from getting a job elsewhere.

say you are interested in their research, ask specific questions that aren't answered after reading some of their papers and website, and ask if they are accepting students, and maybe if they are willing to have a phone conversation with you.

I mean more in the sense of using them for some kind of meta-analysis- not necessarily discussing the content of every paper.

Based on my experience with applications, I'd say to write about area B. I think you are more likely to find an advisor if you propose to do work that relates to you previous work. My attempt to change my research area didn't work- I got rejected until I talked to someone who did work similar to my previous research.

I can't be much help; I'm trying to figure out how to write a good review paper too, but I think this approach is kind of dishonest, at least in the sciences. In fact, one approach that is becoming popular in ecology (as far as I can tell) is to search for a specific set of keywords and include all relevant papers found with those keywords in your review, so that you don't exclude papers that are inconvenient for your argument. That's a little too comprehensive for my purposes.

I'd think that as long as they are interested in getting a chemistry grad degree, they'll pay attention to your emails. All the emails I got were from programs unrelated to my interests, so I didn't pay attention, but I certainly would look at an email if it said something like "U of A Ecology Program: List of Faculty accepting students".

In many grad programs, you have to maintain a high GPA to stay in the program, so grade inflation (in the sense that most students get A's and B's as long as they do the work) is common and accepted.

I can't speak for everyone on GradCafe, but I don't mind people posting links, as long as they are relevant and not posted multiple times.

they probably will. can't you get an unofficial transcript online?

1. That's what i did- I posted a grade report without any grades, just a list of the courses I'm taking. 2. Maybe you need to say what you are correlating with what? The important thing is to show how your methods will test your hypothesis (though I'm not sure what the difference between methods and procedure is).

If you write a thesis, you might be able to use thesis committee members as recommenders- though if you start the thesis in your senior year it might be a little late to start developing a relationship. I'm having a similar problem- I'm in my first year of grad school and applying for fellowships now, and I'm not sure how to develop relationships with faculty quickly so that I can ask them for recommendation letters. In certain classes (most) I don't develop the kind of relationship with the professor where I'd want them to write me a letter- sometimes I need to ask questions (about assignments, for ex) that reflect badly on me. For undergrad I ended up asking a professor I didn't do research with to write me a letter- I took 2 classes with him, one of which involved having meetings with him about presentations/a small research project. Otherwise, I asked professors whose labs I worked in- for 1 of them I mostly interacted with an older student in the lab, but I still met with the professor at lab meetings, and later when I started my own research project. If you are doing research, go to lab meetings and ask the head of the lab if you can do some independent work, so s/he will get to know you. Also, a letter from a postdoc could be good- a postdoc wrote one of my letters (but s/he was also my instructor for some classes).

I've been going to all the social events that I can, and still I find that the rest of my cohort has social get-togethers without me. Not only is it depressing that I don't have anyone to have causal interactions with (no spouse or family around either), but I could be missing out on networking opportunities if I don't interact with other EEB-ers.

Yeah, I think the best way to get exercise in grad school is to live someplace where you have to do some walking or biking to get to campus- I have a 15 minute walk to the bus stop, which gives me at least 30 minutes of walking on a typical day.

I got a 4 and got accepted to 1/5 programs I applied to, with interviews at 3/5. But this is in science.

I realize now that I was completely unprepared to apply when I did- my research interests were very unfocused. I've been reading papers in ecology for ages to try to develop a specific interest, but it wasn't until the summer before I started grad school, with the pressure of having to write an NSF fellowship application, that I started narrowing down my broad interests into a specific set of experiment ideas and reading about the overarching theory related to those experiments. At this point, it's about 3-4 months since I settled on a theme and context for my research and I'm still finding new papers (new to me, but at least several years old) I need to read. I think with the library I've developed over the past few months I would have been able to make much more informed decisions about where to apply and would have done a better job of convincing POI's that I'm a good fit. If you can write a good NSF research proposal, your interests are probably focused enough. But it's too late for me to test that hypothesis, so I don't know if I'm right. (This is why I fantasize about applying to grad school again- because I think I could do a much better job now)

I would accept any offers for rec letters- as long as the school allows extra references. I needed an extra letter for some schools, so I asked 1 professor to send letters just to those schools. Eventually s/he found out that i was applying to other schools and didn't ask for rec. letters for those. It was a little awkward, but hopefully s/he recognized that there were other people more familiar with my ecology-related work.

[a] If it's the type of talk that has co-presenters, yes, but invited talks often don't have a list of presenters, so I would expect . I would also expect him/her to let me know about it before the presentation, and ask me if I wanted to provide input.

what about research interests/experience? you can list those. I think any teaching experience is worth mentioning. Also, list any presentation relating to your research interests, even if it was in a non-academic setting. Eventually you'll want to take this stuff out, but since there's nothing else for you to list now, go with whatever you have. If you got any merit based scholarships/research awards, etc. list those too- they show you are capable of convincing people to give you money. I even listed related coursework for a while, since my major was not exactly in the same field as the programs I applied to.

I use a combination of keyword alerts and RSS feeds from a few journals. I had it easy in undergrad- I could use one keyword, get a manageable number of papers a week, and it wasn't likely that I would miss any papers I really needed to read. Now it's much harder to define my area of research with a set of keywords. I created a search with a few keywords and alternatives for each, but I don't think it's finding all the papers I should read. So I'm also skimming the RSS feeds of 8 journals- though that's probably not enough. It's hard to know what journals I should be looking at, because just about any ecology or entomology journal could have relevant papers, in addition to Nature, Science, PNAS, Bioscience... Few papers are directly related to my research, but it's good to expand my horizons a bit. I use one database- Web of Science. Any paper worth reading is likely to show up there (with the exception of my paper ). Google scholar can also do email alerts, but it tends to produce too many results.

I'm not that impressed by the number of people on academia.edu. The authors I'd want to follow aren't on there.