liszt85
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Posts posted by liszt85
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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).
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Thanks so much for the reply !!! I am only interested in a masters as doing a PhD in design doesnt really make sense to me. I did my undergrad in mechanical engineering, and wanted to specialize in a not so technical field so i chose industrial/product design. Georgia Tech has asked me to take 1 year of preparatory courses because of my background. THis is the main reason why i dont wanna go to Gatech. Also, gatech is considerably more expensive - $40,000 (tuition + living) and for three years , it totals up to $120,000 !!!! TU Delft on the other hand costs about $40,000 for both years (tuition + living) and I can afford it even if i dont get any aid.
I wanted to go to Gatech because I am interested in design of musical instruments and they have a pretty famous center for musical technology that does research with my department (industrial design). But on mailing those profs, they said they were not in a position to give an RA. So i am pretty sure i will have to shell the money out of my pocket.
TU delft has one of the first industrial design departments in the world, it is famous. They have a specialization in automotive design which I am interested in. The only problem is the job scene. Though I am allowed to work in Netherlands for one year after completion of course, I keep hearing tat getting a job is difficult. Is it really so? But during that one year, I can go anywhere in th EU looking for a job. And is getting a job actually a problem after Masters? Because I remember, during my final year at undergrad, there were hundreds of companies wiling to hire us.
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.
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Thank you guys, I really appreciate the time you took to answer me.
Actually, I have another offer from a university in Europe which has a much better topic. However, I am really in dilemma since Cornell is a big name which gives me the possibility to work all over the world and also US. Is that worth to take risk and go to Cornell with this wish to change the advisor or it is better to stay in Europe. The university in Europe is TU Delft. I would really appreciate your comments
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.
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Hey guys!
My girlfriend and I have both been accepted to graduate programs at OSU and will be moving from abroad to Columbus this fall. I have two questions, that I was hoping someone here might be able to answer:
1) All the grad-housing on campus seems to be meant for either single students or married students - does anyone know it there is any on-campus housing available for unmarried couples without children?
2) If we'll be staying off campus, we will probably need around two weeks to find the right place. The only temporary housing available seems to be for those who have on-campus housing contracts for the academic year... then there are hotels/motels obviously, but that's way to expensive. Is there really no affordable option for students needing temporary housing while they settle in and find off-campus housing?
Thanks in advance!
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.
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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.
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Ok, now I officially feel like a jerk for posting this, and would remove it if I could.
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.
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Thanks to all of the posters; there is a lot of great information on where to live. It seems like VV, Grandview, and Clintonville are the names I see mentioned the most.
What I didn't see any information about was parking. I looked through the OSU transportation and parking website and there are a lot of different levels of passes. It seems as if funded grad. students can buy an orange faculty pass. From what I can ascertain, these passes range from pretty cheap (~$80/yr.) to really expensive (~$600/yr.). I think that the cheapest gives you access to the lot on Western whereas the most expensive allows parking on campus and in the garages on campus. Is it worth it spend a ton of money to get a surface lot and/or garage pass? That is, can you find a spot in either case or are you just wasting money? Any advice on the parking/transportation front is welcomed and appreciated.
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.
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In short, be a contrarian. Whether it's grad school, investing, or just about anything, in my 35 years it has served me well. And now, as I head off to get a PhD at 36, I am once again being a contrarian.
Welcome to OSU!
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I seem to sense a trend for public unis to be more depressing than private - am I wrong? Does anyone know which departments are known for happy, productive students and low attrition rates? I heard Stanford has a zero attrition rate, for example.
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.
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How callous. We have been "making it work" for almost a year now. It's a two hour train ride to his house from mine. Actually that's not even to his house; that's to the Bronx and then he has to pick me up and drive another 10-15 minutes. And I'm not even going to be living in New Brunswick; I'll be living at home, which is 25 minutes away. "Barely qualifies as long distance"? Everyone has a different experience. I don't handle long distance as well as other people.
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.
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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!
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Interesting, I always thought I was alone in that time frame (10pm-4am).
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
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I'm a first-year PhD student and am taking a full load of courses. I am also under an RA-ship. I haven't had much time to focus on research because of the course load and I am wondering what is really expected of me as a first-year PhD student?
My professor has me on a research project that I honestly hate and it's just me that is working on it. He gets upset when I don't make progress but I am trying to navigate my classes, and I honestly am not interested in this topic. I'm not sure what to do. He is very frustrated at me, but I'm really doing the best I can. Plus, whenever I ask for clarification, he gets mad at me for asking so I have no idea what this project is or what I'm supposed to be doing. If I can't ask what the project is about, how in the world am I supposed to do the research?
What are expectations of first-year PhD students (I'm getting my Master's degree along the way)? How much research is really expected of us?
Any suggestions/thoughts?
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.
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Hello guys!
How do you think what are the best American PhD schools for research in the field of quantum information technology, quantum coherence theory and other conceptual problems of quantum mechanics?
I have no idea which of universities are top in the field, for example I know that kind of study is available at Maryland or at Nortwestern University, but I wonder how strong are these schools.
thanks!
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.
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But I'm scared of turning into a cynical old unmarried journalist either
You will regret being a bored housewife than being an old unmarried journalist, I guarantee it. But of course, there is no way to know it because if it does happen, its going to be either of the two. Then again, neither might happen. You might be a happy married journalist, married to someone as intelligent as you are (your kids can still go to expensive schools and you can still rule the house). How does that sound?
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I am at a total loss as to what to do. I applied to Penn's PhD program in Earth and Environmental. I haven't heard a thing. I'm panicking. Should I email someone? I'm already in the department (trying to switch from a Master's to a PhD) so I know most of the professors. Should I just email one that I know fairly well? Or do I email an administrator? I thought I had a good chance, but I feel less and less confident by the second...
Help!
Email a professor that you know well.
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To make good looking documents you really should be using LaTeX. No word processor comes close. Also great for bibliographies, indices, tables of contents etc. Check out the "Not-so-short introduction to LaTeX": http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/info/lshort/english/lshort.pdf
+1. No version of word can beat this. Its use is inevitable, as you will soon find out, so it might be a good idea to get used to it. You don't need a mac if its the writing and good looking docs you are most worried about. Also some statistical/modeling s/w can have problems on macs (eg: WinBUGS that I had to use for a course did not run on macs.. the only people who could do it also had a windows boot).
A mac is sturdy and looks awesome.. if you have the money to spare, go ahead and buy it! If not, get a decent Dell/Toshiba (or whatever else) laptop. I''m extremely happy with my Dell which I bought on Black Friday
Its a dell studio 15 and it does everything that I need it to do, all for $600 (4GB ram, 500 GB hard drive, slot loading cd/dvd, and an awesome battery life). I didn't buy any extra software. I get antivirus from the university. I use openoffice and latex for docs, presentations, etc. Everything else that I need for courses and research is provided by the university. So unless you have the money to spare, you might do the same and avoid overspending on a laptop. -
I majored in Physics (and went on to complete a masters). I did 3 linguistics courses, one of them a grad level course, and my professor was really happy with the way I thought about stuff and wrote me a recommendation. I also had a nice writing sample from a term paper I did for that grad level course which was pretty decent for somebody who didn't have a background in the field. I got into Northwestern's PhD program in Linguistics (with full funding, because everybody who gets admitted gets full funding and at the same level). So as long as you show demonstrated interest, your major doesn't really matter because they will assign you enough coursework to make up for the deficit. It will be tough because some of your classmates will have had a lot of background..you may feel lost sometimes, but if you're really interested, you will overcome all those difficulties. A background in the sciences/engg helps according to the professors at NU who were in touch with me. Some of their most successful students had been ones that had come in with math based backgrounds for instance.
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Not always the case. My current dept doesn't have such funds, instead the grad students often pay out of their own pocket (and their advisor reimburses them usually).
Same here. I paid out of my pocket for the student I was hosting. No reimbursements of any kind..but it was just one meal, ~$7. The rest of their meals were at the dept.
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the offer letter should be evident for financial support right?
The amount will be mentioned on your I20. If that amount exceeds their estimated expenses+tuition,etc for a year, you won't have to show anything else.
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What do you all think about going to grad school at the same institution where you attened undergrad? I was accepted to my undergrad institution to work with a different mentor than those who advised me as an undergrad (although in the same psychology department), with full tuition funding and a hearty stipend. My concern is whether "academic incest" is a factor that may hurt my ability to get a post-doc or even a tenure position down the road at any school. If I don't accept this admission offer I'll have to find a job once I graduate and re-apply to grad programs in a year or two. What would you do?
I would accept the offer, get started on some serious research and try it out for two years (and get the MA) and decide if the research is awesome enough for me to stay. If not, consider transferring (but be careful not to burn bridges.. that can be difficult). In the end, it all boils down to how awesome your research has been. If you've done truly marvelous work, nobody is going to stop you from getting a tenure track position regardless of where your degree is from.
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Wow! You're going through a PhD program in the sciences and you have time to read about 12 brainless novels a week? What school are you at and how do it get in! I can only hope to have that much time to read.
She said "go through".. you know what that means, that's what we sometimes do for classes when we have too much on our plates. We "go through" papers assigned for the week so that we get the gist of things..
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At one of the Phd programs I interviewed at recently (a large state university) a professor was dating one of the students in the same department's Phd program. Granted, the professor and student were in different subfields. I personally don't mind that kind of thing but I can foresee situations in which it could become really thorny. Imagine if that student were given a funding award that was decided by a committee that the professor was on. Then imagine that you're a student who lost out on that funding...would you wonder if the other student's relationship with the professor had any influence?
If you got to know this just by visiting, I'm sure they are aware of it too. These things are done with a certain level of professionalism. He would just sit out of such a meeting. My adviser is on many a funding committee but he would sit out if I was going to be one of the applicants. Something similar would be done if one of the committee members was known to be involved with an applicant.
Cancer
in Officially Grads
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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.