liszt85

A guy in my lab had been down with some strange fever for about 2 months (the fever never left him). His parents came to visit him (from Asia). He hadn't told them and now they want him to go back home with them (he is fine now). Totally understandable. The guy has a history of heart issues and the like. Anyway, he decided to discontinue his studies totally and honor his parents' wishes. However, our adviser convinced him to defer (he had completed one quarter but I think he can still "defer") for a year and then make a decision whether or not to discontinue totally.

Nobody's experience here needs to be the best route for you. A friend of mine who had health issues decided to stop his studies and his mentor convinced him to defer and take a year off. What's best for you is, in this situation, something that only you know best. You cannot perform well with panic attacks to handle on the side. There's a person in my lab in your exact same position.. she takes medication for it as well and she is not doing well. Its a constant struggle. So if you think you need a break, that's exactly what you need. You might do yourself more harm by pushing yourself too hard than by taking a break and continuing after a year (as tough as it might be).

I was offered an admission to Georgia Tech's MS in music technology course along with an RA position. The department is great, as you say, but its relatively new. You don't have reliable statistics on their placement records, etc but I'm sure it will be good. However, if it is going to cost you $120K out of your pocket, I would definitely think real hard about it.. I would probably choose TU Delft. Also, if your intention is just to get an MS, the value of a European MS as compared to an American one might not be all that problematic for you in finding jobs. In the case of a PhD and if you intend to teach at a research university in the US, it is then that getting a PhD in the US becomes slightly more important. So I would advice you to go to TU Delft. Finding a job is difficult regardless of where you study. So its preferable that you study where you feel more comfortable at.

Can't you be upfront with the Cornell Dept and see what they think about this? Tell them that you are NOW interested in somebody else's work more than this professor's work you thought you might be interested in, in the beginning. I'm sure they will understand and will try to work with you to find a solution. Its immoral to get paid from someone's grants and then abort that project when you know very well that it is going to happen. They are not going to appreciate it, I give you my word. TU Delft is a very good university, so you always have that back up as well.

If you look on the offcampus housing website, you will find rooming houses (these are specifically for this purpose.. I know many people in your situation who have rented rooms in such houses until they found apartments they could move into). You can rent rooms temporarily until you find a place. Its fairly easy to find a decently priced place near campus. I am married and live just off campus and my wife is unemployed due to visa restrictions and we do just fine. With two stipends, you should have nothing to worry about. So my advice would be to rent a room in such a house temporarily until you find a place where you can move into.

It would be highly unethical to be on his funds and then change advisers because I'm sure his funds come from some source that is given for a specific project and he puts on you on that with the expectation that there is a long term commitment here. If you are not interested, you should be up front about it and get a new adviser immediately and start on the new guy's grants rather than waste this poor chap's money.

Have you communicated to this school that you won't be attending so that they'll find making funding decisions a little easier? Edit: I know you mentioned that you forgot but its not late still. If you haven't done it, please go ahead and send a clear email stating this. You know what people are going through these days from your experience on this forum. So I'm sure you also realize how important it is (well, was) to do this.

If you park on Neil (a little away from campus, which is free), its a 10 minute walk to the oval. I don't know exactly where the statistics building is. So if you park around 1450-1480 Neil (free off street parking), you probably can just walk to your department. Also, its probably best to just take the bus which is free so that you don't have to worry about parking. Better yet, find a place that is at a walking distance from your department (plenty available right now). I haven't heard anybody complain about not getting spots to park on those permits, so I'm guessing the cheap ones should do the job but I really don't know for sure since I don't own a car yet.

Welcome to OSU!

I'm at a public uni and I'm extremely happy here and I don't see any unhappy grad students here (except a few lazy ones who blame all their problems on the professors). This is also a top school for social psych. You may want to consider applying here next year because I know that most people are happy here and have not heard of high attrition rates. Also my adviser is probably the best adviser I could have got.. I wouldn't trade places with anybody (I would reject an offer from Berkeley, MIT, Stanford, etc) now that I've gotten to know him.

I did a 3 year long distance (met thrice a year, 4-5 days at a time) thing with my girl and we're happily married now. You may not be good at it but there are people out there who make it work without having to sacrifice much (other than some "cuddle" time). So your calling rogue callous, is by your own definition wrong. Rogue might be a person who is fine with making things work this way. There's nothing callous about trying to suggest to a person who is trying to get a higher degree to prioritize stuff and make some small sacrifices to both get your degree as well as save your relationship.

SAme advice as the others. Schedule interviews with them at different times so that you can attend all the interviews. Mention that you have also contacted a few other professors since this was your final attempt and I'm sure they will understand and appreciate your honesty. Nothing wrong with attending multiple interviews!

Mine is more like midnight - 3:30am. I can go for a long time on 4-5hrs of sleep per night. So I can do the midnight-3:30am with 8:30am classes for months if I so wish. I have tested it here for a few weeks, found that it still works. I'm only 24, so age is yet to catch up with me

I'm a first year PhD student who faced the exact same problem in my first quarter. To make things worse, I'm a GTA. I assist 3-4 courses every quarter in addition to the 2-3 courses I do. There's a mandatory first year project which I must complete (and present next month in front of all the faculty and students in the dept) and there's of course the MA along the way. I was put on a project, which though interesting, was quite impossible for me to do due to my lack of programming skills (the skills required for this particular project was way higher than what I possessed..I'm doing a course towards rectifying that this quarter). So after one month of NO progress, I sat down with my adviser and told him that I thought the project was very interesting but I also told him that I would like to be put on a different project of his (which I knew about and for which I knew he could use me because I had done related work in my ug). He told me that he was planning the same because he understood why I wasn't making any progress and promptly put me on that project. I showed immediate signs of progress. 1.5 months of work produced a conference paper and one more month of some additional testing will go into completing a journal paper which I'll send out at the end of the current quarter. So it did wonders for my research. Now, about the course load. I did 14 credits of coursework in my first quarter. Being a GTA, I was required to do only 9. I naively thought 14 would be easy. The 5 credit course is designed in such a way that 5*3=15 hours of work is assigned every week. The other two were 4 credit courses. So the coursework alone was 15+12+12 = 39 hours of work per week outside of lectures (They really did assign that much work). Exam weeks were hell because I had my own exams, some term paper submissions + ~300 exams to grade! I ended up with a 3.523 and nothing to show for research. I then decided to cut down on coursework. In my second quarter, I did 2 courses (4 credits each) + 4 credits of independent study. The independent study is supposed to demonstrate the amount of work that you put in to your own research..so that's something nice that they have over here that will let us manage stress + let us work on our research. I ended up with a 4.0 and with some nice progress on the project. So to summarize, in my experience its best to do the following: 1) If you have the option to do just 2 courses a semester/quarter + some independent study credits that will give you time for your research, consider it instead of loading up all the credits with pure coursework. 2) Sit down with your professor and explain to him that in order to make progress, one needs to have a certain love and passion for the project at hand because that's the source of the drive. Tell him that though you find his work to be extremely interesting in general, this particular project hasn't had that effect on you and ask him if he has other projects available. Hope that helps.

I believe USC is good (have a friend with similar interests as yours who is doing his PhD there), Rochester is good for quantum optics.., Maryland is overall very good for Physics, so if you say it has work on this stuff, it ought to be good. Stony Brook and U Chicago might be worth exploring as well.