neuropsychosocial

The problem is that if you need to make a claim on your car insurance, there's a very good chance that they will find out that your car has been "garaged" in Michigan (that's the term, regardless of whether the car is in an actual garage) and then deny your claim based on fraud. So if you don't need to make a claim, you won't have any problems, but if you need the insurance, it will be retroactively cancelled, which seems like a catch-22 to me.

I would highly recommend changing your name before entering graduate school, if possible. You'll still need to provide all names that you've ever been known by on your application, and your transcripts will remain under your old name, so it won't look like you're trying to hide anything. You're about to meet a substantial number of people who don't currently know you: if you apply under your current name, they'll have to learn both your old and new names, and depending on whether you're changing your first or last name, you may need to frequently correct people or explain your name change. If you do it now, everyone will know only your new name and it will be a lot easier/less annoying in future. I speak from experience. (If you're a woman changing your last name after marriage, this probably doesn't apply as much, because people are used to that. If you're changing your first name or changing your last name for reasons other than marriage, you'll have a lot of correcting/explaining to do, and in my case, the explanation was somewhat painful [never met the man who gave me my birth last name; legally adopted my mother's last name after her death] and it was distracting - and made me a little sad - every time that I had to tell the story.)

You're not talking about the life of a professor. Professors don't need to ask for days off. If they need days off, there is no "first consideration." It doesn't matter why they want a day off. They just take days off. There's a limit to how many days one can "take off" if one teaches, but the number of days that colleagues will cover classes for each other is greater than zero. At some point, of course, you'll get in trouble for missing 25% of your classes if you're teaching, and if you're un-tenured, you should be careful. But even if you're untenured and you qualify to compete at the bowling semi-finals, your colleagues will be supportive, generally. The problem that you describe is very real and present in many work situations, but the OP specifically asked about the life of a professor. Professors don't sit around deciding who gets to leave early on Tuesday. They just don't.

If you go to the athletics department website and poke around, there should be options for "tickets" under some menu or another. For my future school, it was difficult to find information for out-of-season sports, but it looks like football and men's basketball involve somewhat significant cost, women's basketball something, baseball $3/ticket, and everything else free. I think I may become a groupie of the gymnastics team.

Depending on your department and your tenure status, one of the biggest advantages of being a professor is schedule flexibility: if you want to pick your child up at 3PM and go to soccer practice until 5PM, you can (as long as you can negotiate a class schedule that ends before 3PM!). Doctors' appointments, sick days, etc. are all somewhat easier than in other jobs. That time needs to be made up, though. It can be at 2AM or on Sunday, but I think most professors work 60+ hours a week. At the same time, how many professionals with similar levels of education work less than 55-60 hours a week?

Since you asked about humans and animals... Spouse: "Hey, hey!" Dog: "Do they have squirrels there?" Puppy: *pees on floor*

This depends a bit on the position and what tasks one considers to be part of the "job." When I was a TA, I was paid for 20 hours a week, but I never worked more than 10, except for the weeks of the midterm exam and the final exam. My coursework and research, including both my thesis project and a project that I worked on with my advisor, were on top of that, of course. Of course, just about every graduate student "works" more than 20 hours a week, but trying to limit the duties of one's assistantship to 20 hours is a good idea, if it's possible.

The first part strikes me as legalistic language: if the department's budget is cut by 50% next month, they have some wiggle room in the contract that they offered you. On the second point, it might be worth checking to see what .XXFTE means to your department. I'm moving from a master's program that talks about "100%" and "50%" appointments to a doctoral program that talks about "50%" and "25%" appointments: they mean the same thing (20 hours or 10 hours of work, with a full or half tuition remission), but my master's program talks about appointments relative to graduate appointments (i.e., 20 hours/full remission is "100%" of the possible offer to a grad student), while the doctoral program talks about it relative to full-time employees, who work 40 hours per week. I'm still having a hard time adjusting my language and I briefly panic each time that a new document arrives noting that I have a 50% appointment. I wonder if it's possible that your department has a similar situation, where they use a different FTE% than most schools use to mean the same thing.

Just to clarify: have they notified you that they won't be offering you funding, or have they not yet notified you about funding at all? If it's the latter, I think it's perfectly acceptable to email or call your POI or the graduate secretary and ask - they will understand that you have multiple offers and need all possible information before making a decision. If they have informed you that you won't receive any funding at all, that's a difficult situation. Personally, I think it's a mistake to do a Ph.D. without full funding, and I also think it's a mistake to do a Ph.D. at a place that won't offer you the training or opportunities that you want. The point of a Ph.D. is the job that comes after the degree, not the degree itself, and the degree is useless if it can't take you where you want to go.

Oh goodness, yes. Professors can get annoyed when students harp on "Does it look like I'll get an A?", but "Does it look like I'll graduate?" is a totally different situation. If you're not already aware of the scale in the class, definitely ask. You may be panicking because your average is a 42, but that might turn out to be an A-. Good luck! (Obviously I can't speak for your Ph.D. institution, but I can't imagine that a single bad grade would influence your acceptance, as long as you received your degree, your GPA stayed above 3.0, and it didn't indicate a pattern of slacking off. I once heard of a med school acceptance being rescinded for straight Ds in the final semester, but this seems completely different.)

Could you take the class at your grad school and transfer it back to your undergrad? Or take it at another school this summer and transfer it back? Is it required for your degree? Good luck - I'm sure that you're working as hard as you at it. Don't forget to go to office hours and to see if there are tutoring resources available for the class. My undergrad institution was quite good about providing tutors for most classes; my best friend's school was not, and she hired a grad student to tutor for one class that she needed to graduate that she just didn't "get." It allowed her to squeak through the class and her degree was definitely worth the $200 she spent for the tutoring, even though it was hard for her to find that money at the time.

Don't pay if you're not intending to apply! Try calling the grad admissions office and explain, or hit "report spam" on their emails; they should stop eventually even if you can't convince a human to stop them now.

Canadian Dollar.

I applied to one school where I needed to pay the fee before they would create the account where I could fill out the application - sounds like the same process that you just encountered! I wavered about whether to pay, but decided to do it - and by the time that I actually submitted the application, really regretted applying to that school. If I hadn't had to pay the fee weeks before applications were due, I wouldn't have applied. Maybe that's what they intended?

I think that it's very normal to feel mixed emotions when closing doors, even if other doors are opening. At the same time, it sounds like you have some external forces (location and whatever is tying you to that location) exerting some pressure on you, which can definitely raise more doubts or mixed emotions. I clicked on this thread because of your title: I apologize for picking on you when you're feeling down, but I find the phrase "retarded" to be inappropriate in this context. You're sad, not intellectually/developmentally delayed or disabled. As with the phrase "that's gay" to mean "that's not cool," using "retarded" to mean "I shouldn't be feeling/thinking like this" contributes to the marginalization of individuals. One of my favorite things about the English language is its richness: there are so many creative and explicit ways to express displeasure than just @#&#, and there are a lot of different phrases to express displeasure with oneself than to say "I'm being retarded."

I'm a little older, about the age of newly-minted Ph.D.s who started immediately after undergrad, and I think that I'd actually really enjoy rooming with a new professor who wasn't in my department or any related field. I can't fathom living with my advisor or a professor in my department, however! Field work seems like a slightly different beast - I'm not in a discipline with field work, but somehow that seems less awkward than the day-to-day living at home.

I've never taken a class where attendance was mandatory, but attendance is always expected and classes are small enough that absences are noted. (And a large percentage of the course grade is usually based on participation.) My personal scale is: if the thought of telling the professor that I'm not going to class is less anxiety-producing than the thought of getting to/sitting through class, then I don't go. It might be worth dropping the professor an email or stopping by office hours to note that you're having some "health problems" so that the professor doesn't think that you're wantonly skipping. I also hope that you're under medical care and taking care of yourself. As a undergrad, I had a health crisis that included insomnia as a side-effect, and even after I got better, the learned insomnia stuck around. It was awful. It's hard to describe what it's like to "live" on so little sleep - and it's not really living at all. Even if it feels like a symptom or side-effect of your condition, keep tabs on it and perhaps try to treat it as an important health problem in its own right. I really wish that I had addressed it much earlier than I did, because it robbed me of a few years of my life.

I have always hated sandwiches and bread. I do not like them in a box. I do not like them with a fox. I do not like them in a house. I do mot like them with a mouse. I do not like them here or there. I do not like them anywhere. (That's a Dr. Seuss reference, for anyone spared Seuss growing up.) However, I once had this amazing sandwich in Vermont: french toast made from sourdough bread, ham, sharp cheddar, and real maple syrup... yum! I salivate, just thinking about it.

If I were me (which it was three years ago, except that I was deciding between a master's or an extra year of undergrad followed by application to Ph.D.), I looked at the job prospects for my then-current education, the admissions statistics for bachelor's versus master's in my field, and the job prospects for master's-only. For me, it was a no-brainer: a master's was the entry-level degree to work in my field. I was lucky enough to have a 20-hour a week job that paid for my tuition; if I had needed to take out $50,000 in loans, it wouldn't have been worth it. As I applied for Ph.D. programs this year, I found that having graduate-level research experience was invaluable; lots of undergrads say that they like research, but don't really understand what graduate school is like. I was able to claim that I knew what I was getting into and still wanted to do it. If you never get into a Ph.D. program, will having the master's degree be worthwhile? In Immunology, I would guess that it would increase your job prospects/pay grade significantly, but I try to avoid the biomed end of campus as much as possible so I don't really know...

One school gave me an email address as soon as I applied. The school that I intend to attend gave me one as soon as I was admitted, so that I could "explore" the school portal. Unfortunately, a) I HATE HATE HATE HATE the specific email address that I got under the school's system I am not eligible to be "upgraded" to the google apps version until I accept.

I would recommend thinking about which ones you'll actually use. How much of the information is available online? I've realized that when I need to know something from a lower-level class, it's usually easier to just google it, rather than spending the time finding it in the book. There are a couple of classes where the articles on wikipedia are more detailed than my understanding of the material, and I'm keeping my undergrad text because I understand how it presents the material (cognitive neuroscience, I'm looking at you!). I've moved my undergrad texts three times now and I'm selling most of them on amazon before I move again - it's not worth moving the textbooks, for the most part. If you do want to take books with you, media mail is a great way to send books cheaply - maybe $15 for 60 pounds? If you mail them the day before you leave, you'll definitely beat the package there, assuming that you're not walking from Oregon to Florida. The packages needs to be MEDIA only, and if you're sending books, I highly suggest wrapping them in plastic, just in case they encounter some water on the way... although I probably shouldn't have bothered sending an entire box of old National Geographics, anyway.

That Rolling Stone article is at least a decade old and very old, inaccurate news. Student/professor relationships are just as uncommon at all-women's SLACs as they are at co-ed SLACs - which means that everyone has a story they heard from a friend who heard from their RA about this person in their dorm a few years ago...

It's extremely unusual and (I believe) illegal for schools in the U.S. to adjust stipends or fellowships based on dependents; if you're taking out loans, however, I believe dependents may increase the allowed loan amount, but I'm not positive about that.

A 3.95 from the main campus of a state university is not "mediocre" and will not hurt your application. Your LORs will matter more, perhaps, than someone with a 3.95 at YPH, but I think there's a huge advantage to coming from a less competitive undergrad environment: it's easier for your letter writers to honestly say that you are one of the best students that they've seen, which is one of the things that adcoms *want* to hear in LORs. If graduating from UHM is truly your biggest concern at this point in the application process, stop worrying. (I know, easier said than done.) I'd worry more about adcoms in New England worrying about whether you can handle their weather. (FWIW, many soc departments will give full credit for an MA, so it wouldn't necessarily delay the completion of your Ph.D. by a full two years. I'm sure that policy varies by department, though.)

At the very least, I wouldn't have to worry about a future roommate thinking that I'm crazy because I participate in online fora!