Jump to content

liszt85

Retired
  • Posts

    619
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Everything posted by liszt85

  1. WIth that additional information, I might echo what miratrix said. Talk to the students at school A and find out if the advisor situation is all that bad. If it is not, I guess its a clear choice unless school A is ranked some 100 positions lower than school B and that would cause severe difficulties in finding a job later on, which I guess is not the case. So its school A if you talk to the students and find out that the advisor is accessible for discussions about content, etc while the writing service is only for formatting and such advice. Have you visited either of these schools? It might be a GREAT idea for you to do so. I had thought initially that you'd have a good research fit at school B too but since your coursework heavily contributes to what field you'll be working in, unlike a lot of other programs, I guess that's a very important factor. Its important to do your PhD in the primary area of your interest. If you're interested in other periods, you could always cover those by postdocs.
  2. I'd go for the gap year focusing solely on research and would work hard and try to publish a few papers by the end of the year. It would go a long way in securing a PhD admission for you.
  3. I'm going to spend one month with my family in May, marry my girlfriend in June, then travel a bit with her, arrange for both our visas, and then fly to the US.
  4. It would have been an easy scenario had school B offered funding. You would probably take time until about Jan 2011 to complete coursework and other requirements to enter candidacy (I do not know if this is true for Art History but is true for most humanities and social sciences programs that I know of). Research interests might not be as good a fit as with school A but what's the point if the adviser is not accessible? I think that is a very important part too! Also as you seem to suggest, graduates from school B seem to be doing better when it comes to finding TT jobs. If you have the means to take a loan and live with a debt (and if you're confident you will be able to pay it off), then I'd say school B! Its horrible if you have to take your drafts to a paper writing service rather than your adviser! So I'd definitely say school B if you have the means to do it.
  5. Oh yea, I see it now. I should probably ask my newly wed wife to leave me alone and to let me go do my grad studies in peace. I don't understand what's troubling you when I'd had a frank discussion about this with the director of graduate studies at this particular school who seemed to understand every single word I'd told him. My friends in the sciences in the same city get about $5-6K more than I do and I was not asking them to double their offer to support my wife AND me. Do you see the difference between that and asking for 1-2K more?? I guess not. If you want to start being useful around here, why don't you tell me about the above? How did they manage to get their partners visas with work permits? I have asked a lot of former international grad students who had spouses. A change in visa status is possible only if your spouse is able to find some work or if he/she can get admitted as a student. If its the latter, then it needs to come with a tuition waiver at the very least even if they don't offer any stipend at all since now she'd be eligible to work 20hours a week. If you have an idea about that, post here if you'd like to start offering useful advice. Try to keep out details about your forecasts on how far I'd go in life.
  6. Fuzzylogician, thank you for the brilliant summarizing comment. You hit the nail on the head. Especially that part about :
  7. And how many times did I tell you that I would have been more than happy to do it had I not had the responsibility of taking care of one more person's financial needs? This is getting extremely frustrating now. I said that was the reason WHY I asked for more money, and did not say that it was why the schools should be OBLIGED to give me money which is something I never said. You seem to have a way with using words in two different ways for the same things that both of us did. You explained your earlier situation as "really just trying to get enough money to house myself, with a roommate,..." and my situation as "you should get more money because your wife won't be able to work..." or "expect the school to give you money because..". So what I wanted to say here was that you did a lousy job at pointing out a contradiction in my posts. I have friends who spend as little as $200-250 per month in LA (!!) on rent because they sleep in a living room with two other people. We're from the same country, with similar backgrounds and with similar dispositions. I can sleep on a couch for 5 years if that's what it takes for me to complete a PhD at the best place possible but I can only do it if I'm single and if another person's life is not involved in these decisions of mine. I'm tired, this is pointless now. Lets agree to disagree forever on this. Feel free to point out all the non existent "contradictions" in my posts. Good luck with the rest of your graduate life.
  8. Exactly what I think too.
  9. I agree and I apologized to rising star about that particular comment in the previous post. I even told rising star that she and I were acting in very similar ways in another post of mine (as far as being condescending was concerned). Comments like that just come from nowhere sometimes. I'm sure we have such moments sometimes that we regret later. That was one such moment for me. There are however people in here who've talked about people that ask for more money not being prepared well enough for the difficulties that accompany grad school. I continue being miffed about that. This is the very process of getting prepared! I asked because I had to, got denied. What's the big deal?! I never once said I deserved more money because of my situation, I was only trying to see if they had money to offer me in exchange for extra work. I have no idea how that translates to "You're barking up the wrong tree, have you any idea about what grad school is like?"
  10. According to popular opinion here, you should hang your head in shame for what you did and for what you just said. :|
  11. So yea, its fair when you ask schools for money and yes of course, fairness is a function of time and it was okay for you to do so because it was three years ago. I'll take fuzzylogician's advice here. Looks like we just have to agree to disagree. The discussion ends here. The comment about mood swings was uncalled for and I apologize. I was just pissed off that you applied different sets of rules to your situation and mine (and continue to do so). I could argue that you need nothing more than clothes and food (just as you have been arguing all along). You also seem to bring in questions of love in my relationship with my SO just because I refuse to ask her to make sacrifices which involve the possibility of her having to return to our country due to my inability to look after her basic needs and you also seem to acknowledge cultural differences that might prevent me from asking. I'm terribly confused and guess this is going nowhere. Great to hear that your parents made sacrifices for each other. Feel free to warn me within your powers as a mod but you should take a look at your own posts too sometimes. By the way, just to let you know, I am aware of the various different opportunities that might exist for extra employment and I had enquired about all such possibilities and was strictly forbidden by the department not to take up even a few hours of extra work even while being supported on a fellowship (legally I'm entitled to 20hrs per week of work but their demand is a fair one too keeping in mind that they offered me the fellowship so that I could concentrate on my coursework in the first year and on my dissertation in the fifth year). It is only after all such research did I ask them if I could somehow get some additional funds during the summer in exchange for any extra work that I might be able to do for the department. I'm still perplexed as to how this would be unfair to other students. This particular department I'm talking about accepts 1 or 2 people a year. I can understand your point about being fair if the cohort is made up of people from different diverse backgrounds, from different countries, having various different needs. I almost forgot that I had decided not to continue this discussion. It ends here.
  12. Do yourself a favor and take this above advice to heart. I wanted to say the exact same thing to you. You seemed to suggest that money doesn't matter while making a decision about which school to attend and you did it in a condescending tone that at least one other person noticed here. Why do you have one set of rules for yourself and another set while giving "advice" to people like me? What is your problem? I asked a program if they had any way to give me some extra money maybe in the summers in exchange for more work that I might be willing to put in. I got a negative reply and due to my frustration at not being able to go where my research fit is best due to reasons that you, by now I'm convinced, wouldn't be able to fathom or respect, I posted here AS A REPLY to somebody else who posted about schools that offer more money if they really wanted you. You decided to then trot in here and give me a lesson on morality which I did not appreciate and was vocal about the exception that I took to that. Ah, I now see where that cockiness came from. Yes, it would be discriminatory but some of these schools offer far too less. I think they should keep in mind the fact that international students who come there with spouses have to support one more person off this meager stipend. Since you start grad school at the age of 23-24 and have to stay there for 5-6 years, until the age of about 29, I think its unfair on their part not to assume such needs but of course, their obligation goes only as far as supporting their student is considered but that would have been alright had the US government not had all these restrictions on the F2 visa. Now I'm pretty sure none of this is registering but I had to give it a shot anyway. I see that you've given advice earlier to people who asked for advice on how to go about asking schools for more money without sounding like an ass. So I guess you were in between one of your mood swings at that time and you've also given me a partial explanation (though you did not intend to) when you talked about your frustrations with your own school's policies due to the present economic crisis. What you still don't understand is I'm prepared to make sacrifices, more than what you probably can imagine, but I'm not prepared to demand that my wife goes through all of that too. I can live off ramen, no big deal. I simply refuse to ask her to do that too. I've known what I wanted to do since I was 12. I'm not going to, as you've time and again done here, try and convince people that my decisions and choices have been the best and that this is the only way to go about choosing where to study and how to live life. I've just got this to tell you, practice what you preach. You've again come out with a lot of advice regarding my condescending tone, about how little I know about your experiences, etc. Sorry I assumed you to be a guy. You'll make one insanely assertive and aggressive woman, I'll tell you that
  13. This has to be the worst of all... Its horrible for the professor to not have informed you about this development! It may well have been out of his hands but he should have had the decency to call you up!
  14. Calling schools is perfectly okay as long as they have not explicitly instructed you not to do so. April 15th seems to be some kind of a date agreed upon by schools all over the country. So most graduate schools in the US would require you to inform them of a decision by this date.
  15. We feel your joy! Congratulations!
  16. Go where your heart tells you to go My vote is TC! Shorter program, so with three years more (than the time you'd have spent at Temple), you will also pay back the company that's willing to pay your tuition! (since if you serve them for 4 years after the 2.5 yr program, that will be 3.5+3..so with that 3 year extra service, you not only pay back your tuition, you also get a job as soon as you graduate and by the time you're done honoring your agreement, the economy hopefully should be back on its feet and you should be able to find a good job thereafter) So 6 years from now, you would have: Paid back the 17K debt you owe, honored the agreement with the company (in exchange for your tuition) + found a good job (when the economy is better).
  17. What is the minimum taxable annual income? Say I join a program in August. My stipend is $1500 per month. I'll get 4 full months and half a month of stipends, so that will be a total of about $6750 for the 2009 calendar year. Would I be required to pay taxes on this? (I'm an international student and I'd be getting paid in Atlanta, Georgia).
  18. Some professors and other people thought I'd get accepted by more schools but this is exactly what I'd expected considering I was shifting from Physics to a new field in which I have no undergraduate background. I'm however leaning towards accepting a MS offer which will give me 2 more years of research and training before making up my mind which field exactly I want to do my PhD in.
  19. With two term papers, one experimental project thesis work, theory project presentations and report, and one sociology project all coming up within the next 2 weeks soon followed by our end semester exams, I really don't think I can slack even if I wanted to. Believe me, I want to!
  20. liszt85

    J1 vs F1

    Yea, you're right I will do that but would help if there is some input from people who've already had the experience.
  21. Even if that may be true, not going to matter Its Berkeley you're talking about. You're not comparing MIT with say the University of Arkansas! Berkeley is higher ranked than MIT in most departments! I don't think graduates from Berkeley get jobs based on alumni connections. Or go do a one year post doc at MIT after this That way, your dad's wish will come true too.
  22. liszt85

    J1 vs F1

    Could somebody explain the difference? Is it possible for me to come to the US to attend a MS program on a J1 visa so that my spouse can get a J2 and hence can work if she manages to find work after she gets there? (F2 dependents cannot work in the US)
  23. Cyborges, I've been accepted to some PhD programs with full funding (guaranteed for 4-5 years) but I'm shifting from Physics to Music Research and some of these PhD programs require me to primarily do language work (which I like very much too) for various reasons. I will then get to do interdisciplinary studies on music with faculty from other departments. It would all work quite well for me but now I got a funded MS offer in Music Technology from Georgia Tech. I might most probably accept the MS offer not because its a funded one but because I will give myself two years to decide more precisely what it is that I want to do for my PhD or if I want to work in the industry. Also a MS from Gatech would render me a competent applicant to much better programs at the top ranked schools that I'd applied to this time and got rejected from (MIT, Berkeley, etc). I believe you might be in a similar position where taking some time off to decide more precisely what it is that you want to do might be helpful, and you have a half support from MIT. I personally think that if you have little debt so far, it could be worth going into a little bit of debt to be able to attend MIT and then if you still wish it, apply to PhD programs and probably get into the best departments.
  24. I was in a similar position but the thing is, your work will be more useful if it counts towards the background you need to build towards your thesis. So they might expect you to do your dissertation in a similar topic. This is what one of my schools told me since my funding for the summers came from the research grant of a professor. That professor told me that he would be willing to support my summers only if my dissertation was written in his field.
×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website. See our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use