liszt85

Math doesn't require memorizing. Biology and Chemistry probably do but not math.. if you have the ability to "see" what these rules actually say, its very simple. Lets take the very simple example of a question that goes: Two sides of a triangle are 4 and 5. What is the range of values that the third side can take? You don't need to memorize any rule to answer this. You don't even need to have done any math at all in high school to be able to answer this. You would need to know what a triangle looks like though, is that what you mean by memorizing? Another question: 5 people can complete a job in 10 minutes.. after 2 minutes of working, one more guy joined in. How many more minutes does it take to complete he job? Again, do you really need to memorize rules to figure this out? So 90% of the quant section does NOT require any form of memorizing. Also not having done math for years is not a valid reason. You are expected to prepare for the test, you know? That is a sign of a good potential grad student. If you haven't practiced taking timed tests, you will be unable to complete the section and unanswered ones are penalized heavily which is one of the major reasons why many people don't do well.

+1. The very fact that you're considering it seriously tells me that you get along well with your parents and would not be uncomfortable living there and they would give you your space and freedom. About socializing with your cohort, not too much happens anyway during the week. You are going to have a lot of work..the only socializing people do are on Friday nights/breaks which you can do too if you have a car. So I wouldn't worry about the commute or the socializing. The only question is if you think you would be comfortable living with your parents (and equally importantly, if they would be too) and if you think you would have the right atmosphere there to get all your work done. If all these criteria are satisfied, I see no reason to spend $500 a month for 5 years (=$30000). Give that money away to charity if you don't care for it!

I would normally agree completely with the above but here, the OP seems like she would have a difficult time going through a demanding PhD program that doesn't interest her in the first place. Taking out loans for one year might not be such a bad idea if she has no prior debt.. also like one one the others pointed out, they could save some money on the Alaska trips and her husband might end up with a higher paying job, who knows? You cannot necessarily plan for everything. As long as she knows that she wants that MFA for sure, its perfectly justifiable to take out loans for a year.

Extremely hectic but I'm beginning to LOVE my adviser's kind of work and he's awesome! I also participate in the music cognition lab group which keeps me happy too. So can't be better! My adviser meets with me officially twice a week and unofficially whenever I need his advice/help. I have a feeling that this is going to be a productive collaboration, so I'm absolutely thrilled at the moment but remember the graph? http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=125

How could I have forgotten LaTeX? TeXworks.

That's awesome news, congrats.. Something tells me that you're in the top half of that waitlist. Lets see, fingers crossed.

My vote's for school #2 too, for the same reasons as Fuzzy's.

Your relationship with your adviser is going to be of paramount importance to your success in grad school, so you are absolutely right. You should dig deeper. Students not responding for 2 weeks is indeed strange. Also, you don't seem to be EXTREMELY interested in her work.. if you have another school that you can go to that you're more excited about (in terms of the research as well as the vibes you got from your POI there), you should considering rejecting the offer from your "top choice". Before you do that, maybe you should shoot her an email and ask what you want to ask (but try to make it as subtle as possible).

Yea, Psych uses a lot of ANOVA..

Regression is being taught at a somewhat advanced level next quarter. So will have to wait and see how that's done.

I support my wife (who cannot work due to visa restrictions) and myself on my stipend of $18K and we do just fine in Columbus. Your stipend of 24K is amazing for the city and you will live a life of luxury just in case this figures in your decision.

I've heard better reviews for Mendeley..however its not for people who like open source.

Wow, that's a sweet deal. Do many of you get this for free too? The best I could get from the university was windows 7 premium for $35.

No it wouldn't hurt your application but in the future, do have someone proofread your applications and stuff if you have a problem with spellings. For example, you got the spelling of "hurt" wrong here. It looks like you are not a native speaker of English. Neither am I. We guys need to be careful not to make too many of these mistakes as these do have an effect on how people perceive the application (in terms of the amount of effort that has gone in, for example). So have your friends who might be good at English proofread this stuff before you send them out. That said, the mistakes you have mentioned are extremely minor ones (compared to the spelling mistake you made in your original post here ) and you should be just fine, don't worry about it.

Haha.. THat's because its a course requirement. I doubt anybody would use it unless they were forced to (like I was). It was a tremendous pain just to get it installed on my 64X windows 7 OS. Anyway, now that I have codes that can be easily modified to do almost any design of ANOVA, I can do the ANOVA stuff easily on SAS but I doubt I'll do a lot of ANOVA and frequentist statistics because I got introduced to Bayesian methods and I'm totally in love. Your university should have MATLAB licenses that you can sign. I checked it actual price.. if you wanted a lot of the toolboxes, you'd end up spending thousands of dollars! Which is why I need to also learn to work in R (which I've started doing), and am also doing a Python course next quarter..so will learn to use pylab and stuff, which is free too. MATLAB is good as long as you stay in a university as a student/faculty. Most of us, I guess, will do that but its important to learn how to use the free stuff. Being in a university is awesome though.. I need to work on some humongous matrices and I've signed up to use the supercomputing facility here for free. All this is just so awesome. And yea I forgot, just downloaded mendeley..haven't transferred all my papers to that but it does look awesome so far and have heard great reviews!

Everyone needs therapy. I didn't think I did.. I handle pressure well and finish at the top of my class if I work real hard (and i do that only for courses which I really care about and it has worked just fine so far). However, this quarter has been hell. There is this other person in my lab who keeps complaining about everything under the sun: how the adviser thinks he/she;s dumb and how the adviser put in his/her name last in the email list (!!), how the TAs were being unfair to him/her (one of the homeworks where I did bad, got a score exactly like his/hers and I showed my homework to him/her and he/she had no comeback), how a visiting prospective student was overweight and how that disgusted him/her as he/she was hosting her, etc). All this on chat and I tried to play shrink for a while(BIG mistake..all those hours of endless typing now makes my forefinger shiver and the wrist hurts.. I read online that these are symptoms of carpal tunnel syndrome and being an aspiring pianist, this is the worst mistake i could have made!). After all, I should be supportive of someone who needs my support. However, I lost it recently when we were grouped together to do a class project. I was the only one who chose the problem to work on, did all of the coding, etc..all I asked these people to do was run a few codes because of time limitations. This person then began giving me lectures on what was an efficient way of going about writing the term paper, etc (the agenda all the time being to get me to do all the work, even his/her share of making a presentation (I'd asked him/her to do just 3-4 introductory slides and even for that he/she told me it was my responsibility to sit with him/her and explain all that I'd done for him/her to be able to make intro slides!). This person was the source of all my stress this quarter. I had very challenging courses (including this one where a group of 4 of us had to do a good challenging modeling problem which I ended up doing myself) but I believe I'm at the top of the class and that's because I worked hard. Courses never give me enough stress.. but human beings like this person do. I wish he/she would go to a real shrink soon so that the rest of us in the lab get to live life stress free (she has made allegations of mistreatment against the postdoc who works here too). Man! Done ranting for now.. got an exam on Monday and loads of grading.

Also for your field of interest, a lot of interesting work is being done in Europe. Maybe you should stop focusing only on top ranked grad schools in the US.. have you identified people who do the stuff that you would like to do? Have you identified potential advisers? If not, those are things you might want to consider getting started on.

Being the friend that I am, I am concerned about your obsession with rankings. What exactly drives your passion (other than wanting to go to MIT or wherever to prove all these people wrong)? What do you want to be contributing as a scholar to? All you've talked about is "I want to go to rank 1 (either university or department)". That to a lot of us is the wrong reason to go to grad school and more importantly will prove to be a major hurdle (the attitude) that will stand in the way of success in grad school. Some of this attitude will also be reflected in your SOP. Admission committees are very competent. They have this uncanny ability (most of the time) to see who's really passionate about the research there and who's applying only for the name/credentials/other non significant reasons. I guess this is what someDay was trying to say too. So the best thing for you to do would be to take some classes relevant to the field that you will be applying to, get some research experience (voluntary/unpaid if it needs to be), develop a keen interest and dedication to the field and then apply. You will stand a much greater chance of being accepted to your top choice if you do this than if you spent all your money on a GRE course or spent your time giving yourself motivational speeches "I'm not getting any younger" is not a good enough reason not to do this, unfortunately. EDIT: I just saw now, after many posts in this thread, that you've started talking about what your passions are. I also see you mention classes that you've taken. I see you mention these things after mentioning a lot of unimportant (bad) aspects of your application.. Now, I'm beginning to think you are the pessimist and again, this is going to be reflected in your SOP. So unless you stop worrying about your decades old ug gpa and start concentrating on the strong parts of your application, you are going to face difficulties getting accepted. I now sense that you probably have stuff in your background that could make your application strong, if you're willing to focus on those.

Yours probably is not the norm. I believe TA workloads are the highest everywhere and entails much more than 20hrs/week (for about half the quarter/semester) but if you calculate the total time put in over the entire semester, you would probably end up with an average 20/week figure but the reason why people say TA workloads are horrible is this: You get to do all that work (~40-45 hrs) during the weeks when you have your own exams, your own project presentations, paper submission deadlines, etc. The weeks you don't have too much work are the weeks you don't have too much work for your own courses (first few weeks of the quarter/semester). None of my 3 professors help me with the grading, I do it all on my own. I proctor exams myself (the professor of one course doesn't even show up), grade them, post them on the course websites, print out the exams, administer make up exams, grade them, look at doctor's notes, and whatnot.. at the end of it all, they all want individual item analysis and other statistics (which is okay if you are using scantrons but is a pain otherwise). So yes, TA workloads generally are the highest and people try to avoid TA positions during crucial years (might be difficult to locate the crucial years because it would seem like every single one is.. but I prefer doing my TA duties in the first 2 years. My professor has agreed to fund me for 2 years, and I prefer those two years to be part of my dissertation writing yrs).

First of all, you seem to have no idea about grad school admission procedures. You didn't mention your MA's and your GPA's in them in your original post. Grad schools tend to look at your recent degrees and pay less attention to your undergraduate gpa in that case. If your application was as weak as you claimed it was, I guarantee you that a 1600 would not have got you in at any of the top prestigious universities. You don't call me a pessimist, you call me a realist. Only when you acknowledge facts can you work towards improving the relevant parts of your application. Be as dramatic as you want to be, that's not going to change the truth. Now that you've mentioned your MA degrees, you might stand a chance.. Anyway, like I said before, you don't seem to have a clue about this which is why you didn't even mention those MA's. You believe your friends are the ones who say "Well done John! Well done.. you will get in for sure no matter what, go do it!" as opposed to "John, lets look at this realistically..here are the parts of your application you must improve, your GRE is good enough. I speak from experience, follow this advice and you may get good results". Your friends are not the ones who incessantly make you feel good, whether or not what you say makes sense. I thought these were lessons in life that you probably learnt even before I was born but looks like I'm mistaken. So yes, feel free to introduce me as a pessimist to whoever you want but none of that is going to change how admission committees work.

Probably won't happen even if you get 1600 and the rest of your application is weak (as you claim it is). Many people like you are planning to either take grad level classes for credit..to prove that they can fare well in coursework. I believe something like that will be a better use of your time. Feel free to get worked up but this is the truth and you will realize it sooner or later. Would be nice if you realized it before you wasted your money on an expensive GRE course when you already scored 1430.

If you want to prove to yourself that you're not a dummy and that you need no special advantage (due to the fact that you can afford something like this), work harder and you'll get the score that you want.

^Very true. Mine is a 50% TA position. Since I just started, I only assist courses (print out exams, make copies of them, get scantrons, pencils, etc..go to the disabilities office, administer exams there, grade exams, writing assignments, post grades on the course website, etc) but the problem is that they divide up my 20 hours arbitrarily. So I've been assigned to 4 different professors (my break up is 5 hrs for each course) but as rising star said, (for me) during exam weeks, I end up working ~40 hrs. The classes that I'm assisting this time are HUGE (120 students each in 2 classes and 60 in the other, the 4th professor fortunately decided not to offer the course this quarter). Then there are the undergrads who mysteriously fall sick during exam week. Scores of them trickle into my office the week(s) after the exam to take make ups. So I think I end up doing much more than the avg 20 hrs/week job but I'm not complaining because that's how I get paid.. They pay my tuition and a good stipend. The workload also is very department specific. So you probably would be better off asking grad students at your own school about this. There are many people who do manage to get this work done in addition to providing care for a baby but that's if you have a good support group around you (eg: spouse).

When I applied to Psych, all I saw on grad school/dept websites was : "We encourage female students to apply". While it may be true that females outnumber males in Psych depts, I don't think they consider males as underrepresented. I think it helps to be a female these days when applying to grad school (especially in the Sciences! I've had first hand experience with this..females with much lower credentials than their male counterparts got into much better universities last year, among people that I knew. I am not trying to generalize based on this but it does seem to be the case more often than not, correct me if i'm wrong)

I believe you can also deduct money spent on books and stuff required by the courses.