thepoorstockinger

Right, but what I am asking is if the deadline for applications is December 1 when do I need to take it in order for the scores to arrive before the deadline?

I used to have this written down somewhere and I can't find my notes, nor amazingly can I find a thread on this board but: How far in advance of my deadlines should I write the GRE? I am looking for the firm cut off rather than a recommended strategic time. I know I should give myself time to rewrite in case of disaster but if I am looking at a December 1 first deadline what exact date is the latest I can write and still have the scores arrive in time?

That Iggers book is absolutely terrible.

Two things: 1) Very few people ever get off the reversion list. They over offer OGSes with the assumption that many people will reject them in favour of a SSHRC or will choose schools outside Ontario. A huge number of people will need to decline it before it goes to the reversion list. 2) The deadline for acceptance of OGS is still a bit of a ways away. For some bizarre reason it is done with paper. This will take a long time to process. All of this is to say that I would be downright shocked if anyone who beats the odds and makes it off the reversion list will hear before early August. Hopefully by then the website is up.

UofT's grad programs are notorious for responding to applicants super late because lots of people will accept their offer even if it includes no money and comes in the mail in June.

Just out of curiosity, do Columbia students live in the Bronx at all? It strikes me that anywhere on the 1, 4 or D lines would be a much more sane commute to Columbia than getting there from many places in Brooklyn. Speaking of Brooklyn: Ignore everything nice that is said about Williamsburg. The second worse place in NYC behind Time Square. It's like a ridiculous amusement park where you go to watch parodies of trust fund hipster acting aloof, riding fixies and grooming their mustaches. Did you know that it has the lowest participation rate in the 2010 census thus far? Do you know why? Because ironic hipster can't be bothered to fill out ten questions and mail it back. Such a terrible place. Carroll Gardens and Clinton Hill are really nice though - and while they're both "cool" they still feel like a real neighbourhoods.

Abe is owned by Amazon. (It was bought out a few years ago) If you have no beef with Amazon then feel free not to hold a grudge against Abe either.

I think that purchasing books outside your reading list is a necessity in the humanities. (Or it just might be that grad students in the humanities like to hoard books that aren't actually all that useful to them at the moment). I think I spent about $300-$400 per course on average for my grad school books (10-12 books per class per semester seems to be the norm, sometimes less if the professor likes to rely on journal articles or if you can swing a lot of library borrowing). I probably spent around $1,000 above and beyond that amount over the last ten months on books I knew I just desperately *needed* to get my thesis done/know about but the library didn't have/is written by someone I like/was only $10 at a used bookstore/whatever. www.biblio.com is by far the best online book seller both in terms of variety (it's something like 10,000 used book stores linked together online) and in terms of not being evil (i.e. it's not Amazon/Abe).

Do you have any specific evidence to back this up or just a hunch and internet speculation?

What delays? I don't think I heard about my MA sshrc last year until May 13ish. This all seems pretty par for the course.

Students always hear about OGS before departments do since they update to a website. With SSHRC it's generally the other way around as departments hear first, then a letter is sent out to applicants. I actually don't think that there's a lack of co-ordination, there's just a lot of people within school departments/offices of grad studies who have no idea what is going on and take wild guesses which students take to be fact.

I know this may be nitpicking and totally off topic but: Asia is not a country or even a type of cuisine. It's a continent that the three countries you list are a part of. India is not in the middle east. Food from the UK is not "classic food" or the default natural or normal food that regular people eat. It's a type of food like any other. The way people talk about "ethnic food" just totally weirds me out. All that said, Kingston is a nice enough town. In terms of university towns it has a tiny bit more of a big city feel when it comes to things like shopping and food since it draws so much of its student population from Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal. (Whereas some of Ontario's university towns are mostly relying on students from rural Ontario). It is definitely a bit of a pricey town to find housing in, but I think it's par for the course in university towns. It is also a very, very white town and Queens is a very white university.

I don't believe it works that way. All disciplines have access to money from federal granting agencies. I am not sure of the exact numbers breakdowns but I think things are fairly even across fields.

Someone else might disagree but I don't think that many North American graduate programs give a shit about non-academic extra-curricular activities.

My experience was that the institution I had already accepted an offer from first heard that I got an OGS when I told them. (I applied from outside of Ontario if that matters at all)

I didn't have my status updated until at least the 18th last year, so there is a good chance that updates don't happen all at once.

Strict budgeting. I spend $45 a week on groceries, have a yearly book budget (and separate budget lines for research costs, conferences, etc.), and at the beginning of the month I take out $100 cash from the bank which is all I allow myself to spend on luxuries (this includes going out, buying lunch and coffee, purchasing personal luxury items, etc.). The key is to figure out a yearly budget, cut what you don't need and create mechanisms to force you to stay in that budget like avoiding the use of your debit/credit card on luxuries. If you can see how much you're spending its a bit tougher to over spend. Three key things: 1. Learn to cook if you don't already know how to. By this I mean learn how to do more than just throw something frozen in the oven. Chinese takeout is cheap and awesome, but what costs you six bucks at a greasey chopsticks place be made at home for $1.50 to $2. I can make two portions of mushroom risotto for $5 if I want to be real fancy. 2. Be smart about groceries. For health/environmental/cost reasons we only eat meat once or twice a week. I never, ever buy meat unless its on sale. Then I break it down into individual servings and freeze it in bags when I get home. Chicken breasts are affordable if you buy them at half off. The only pre-frozen food we have is "good" quality frozen pizzas that we buy eight of at a time when they go on sale for less than $2.50. It's not a replacement for cooking, it's a replacement for ordering a pizza. 3. Investing in some decent but cheap coffee making equipment is crucial for me. At home we use a stove top moka pot and a stove top milk frother. The end result is the ability to make something that approximates a latte on the cheap. At my office I have a driver (Abid sells them as "Clever Coffee makers" I think) which lets me make coffee in my office without having to go buy it for $2 or waste beans making an entire pot that either won't be drunken or will be drunken by someone who won't chip in. Coffee station coffee always ends up being so bad since people go cheap with it that half the people on a floor go buy coffee elsewhere whenever they want it and go broke. If coffee is important to you it's worthwhile to just drop the money on good beans and equipment from the get go in order to save money on getting it from a coffee shop.

re: the OP's question People get rejected from "lower ranked" schools and accepted into "higher ranked" schools all the time. Different programs are looking for different things and are drawing on different applicant pools in a given year. I certainly wouldn't think that just because school A rejected you and schools B, C and D accepted you that school A is the best school.

Aside from all concerns people may have about the very concept of quantitative rankings of university programs I would point out two major problems with what you said above: 1) The Macleans rankings only ever claim to represent the quality of undergraduate education at Canadian universities. (Obviously people can debate if they actually do a good job of that, I am on the side of the rankings being silly at best, dangerous at worst) This is a minor issue with your post referencing the rankings. 2) The much bigger problem is this: You fundamentally misunderstand how Macleans categorizes schools in its annual rankings. The first category you're talking about isn't medical schools it's "medical-doctoral." Macleans divides up all schools in the rankings into three categories: "Medical-Doctoral" (medium to large institutions which award a large number of graduate degrees across multiple faculties and have large professional schools), "Comprehensive" (medium to large sized schools which offer some graduate programs and may or may not offer some professional programs), and "primarily undergraduate" (generally small to medium sized schools which offer, as the title suggests, primarily undergraduate degrees and perhaps a few masters programs and MAYBE a few PhDs or professional programs). The break up the groups so that you don't have giant research schools ranked against tiny SLACs. No school appears in more than two or more of these categories. The reason why neither McGill nor UofT rank in the top ten in "comprehensive" is because they're not ranked in that grouping of schools, they're ranked in the Medical-Doctoral group. This doesn't mean that SFU, UVic and Waterloo are higher ranked than UofT or McGill - it means they're not being compared to each other.

This definitely bad form. Whether you're legally allowed to do it is a separate question from whether you should do it. If you are planning on moving on to a PhD after the masters then this will almost certainly follow you. I would be particularly uncomfortable doing this in the sciences where you're assigned to a specific lab as it can potentially fuck up the lab's work in addition to the program's offers. Why will you be able to make a decision in the summer that you can't make now? Be an adult. Make a decision.

Oh for god's sake... Are you basing this opinion off of the MacLean's magazine ranking? (I am asking this before I explain why you're wrong so that I don't go off in the wrong direction)

I am going to repeat a lot of what people said but: - Montreal is much, much cheaper than Toronto. Housing/food/transportation in Montreal is probably the best value of any major city in North America. It's actually astounding. - While visiting Montreal a few weeks ago I was reminded just how francaphone it can be. You can get away without french but you need to be willing to look foolish from time to time and you may feel a bit out of place at times. Montreal smoked meat makes up for this. - Toronto and Montreal both have good transit systems. I disagree with the poster above you claims you need a car to get around Toronto. As long as you stay out of the suburbs Toronto is fairly easy to navigate by streetcar and subway. - Toronto as a city is a good place to be a graduate student. There are lots of universities, archives, a fantastic public library system and you're within easy commuting distance of lots of other universities. - My understanding is that Toronto's Information Sciences programs are supposed to be the best in Canada and are certainly better respected than McGill's. Although they do have different strengths that I don't really feel comfortable trying to explain since I am not an MLIS student. - I also am constantly surprised by the international reputation of McGill. The way Americans in particular talk about it is very, very strange to me. It's one of Canada's better schools in general, but I don't think it deserves the praise non-Canadian seem to heap upon it. I don't know what I'd do if I were you, but I think it comes down to two things: 1) Toronto is probably a slightly better program 2) McGill will end up costing you much, much less

NSERC and SSHRC are two totally separate funding bodies and their decisions are not at all connected. So I wouldn't base SSHRC timelines on what NSERC is doing.

I don't know about those specific schools and I applied last year and am attending a Canadian MA program but the word around the department (and people I know at other schools as of Friday is: - Dalhousie has made offers - Simon Fraser have made offers - Queens has not (or have only contacted some people) - Trent has made first round offers - Toronto have contacted some folks, but not others. (My experience is that they don't contact everyone at once and can often be very, very late) - UBC has made offers

There's no way that this is a real poster or a real SOP (or at least one that is the result of any editing or acceptance of assistance by the author). I call troll. There is only one way for threads like this to be dealt with: