liszt85
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Posts posted by liszt85
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Free place to live with petsitter? Hell, I'll live with your parents if you don't want to!
+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!
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When I was in my mid-20s, I was passionate about film and wanted to get an MA in Film Theory at NYU. I would have had to pay for it through loans, and I had no idea how the degree would pay for itself in the long run.
So instead of going into debt, I moved to Los Angeles and starting working in the film industry. I still read a ton about film theory and even wrote a bit, but I was supporting myself instead of going into debt. I found a career path in the film industry that interested me, and subsequently decided to get my MBA so that I could continue to advance in my career.
I took out loans for my MBA, but had no doubt that I would get a well-paying job after I completed my degree in order to pay off the loans. And I did.
I share this with you because, if the financial crisis has taught us anything, it's that debt is a serious thing. We should not take on debt unless we have a clear plan on how and when we will pay this debt off. There are many ways to pursue a passion, and not all of them are costly.
I imagine that I must sound like somebody's mother, but IMHO, I don't think that you should attend either program. You seem less than excited about the first program -- why waste your time? And the second program seems financially risky.
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.
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Thanks!
How are you doing? Ohio State going well?
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 -
I'm a graduating undergrad. My machines run various flavours of Linux and some of them run Windows virtualized or dual-boot.
Most of the software I use are actually programming languages: Haskell, Scheme, Java, and so on.
Aside from that:
R (still a programming language, but I use it to maintain budgets)
LaTeX for typesetting documents.
Vim, git, svn, and so on for coding.
Opera/Chrome/Firefox.
Mutt, procmail, and postfix for e-mail.
Various utilities: the ones I use most are ssh and screen.
How could I have forgotten LaTeX? TeXworks.
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Appeal was successful! Professor came through and re-sent the letter, and now I'm on the waitlist!
I am thrilled.
That's awesome news, congrats.. Something tells me that you're in the top half of that waitlist. Lets see, fingers crossed.
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I think that once you establish that you are getting enough funding to live reasonably comfortably, then funding doesn't have to be how you decide where to go - depending on your preferences, things like a closer fit, location and weather legitimately come into the equation. Assuming that the MA offer you got from school #1 naturally leads to a PhD if you remain in good standing (including continued funding) then I think it's a serious contender. I would probably still choose school #2, mostly because of the proximity to the archive you require, but you might have other considerations.
My vote's for school #2 too, for the same reasons as Fuzzy's.
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I got an offer from my top choice, but my interactions with my prof of interest has been quite awkward/strange. Although she is well known in her field and I'm interested in her research, she was quite unenthusiastic during the interview and never stated she was interested in taking me on. I even got the feeling she did NOT want me to attend that school. However, the rest of the department were wonderful and very friendly. I was surprised to get the offer after the interview, but I'm afraid if I accept, I may be stuck with an unenthusiastic/don't care advisor who never wanted me in the first place. I've tried to contact her current grad students for their opinions (they weren't at the interview day), but have no reply for two weeks!
My last resort is to contact the prof directly and ask explicitly: "do you want me in your lab?". Should I go ahead with this? I like the grad program there and the school's offer is really a once-in-your-life opportunity (I never expected to even get interviewed). But I don't want to be miserable for 5 years.
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).
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I'm messing around with it right now...it's pretty much a Pearson's correlation with more than two variables. Its interesting stuff though. So does psych use ANOVA quite often? We really don't use it in sociology.
Yea, Psych uses a lot of ANOVA..
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Steam- I second that, damn it's a great outlet after a long day. Beers and games. It's the best way for me to stay in touch with friends from back home too. Liszt, do you do any regression analysis in psychology?
Regression is being taught at a somewhat advanced level next quarter. So will have to wait and see how that's done.
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Choice 1 - OSU
Pros: Program is excellent and well known. Potential advisor is up-and-coming, and my master's work would be part of a group trying to set up a Long Term Ecological Research station in Cleveland (amazing!). PI and I also definitely get along. Department has many outreach and extension opportunities (I really plan on making my work relevant to the public). My first two years would be paid by fellowships (so no TAing until later and after I'm established) and total $24,500 both years;
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. -
Not attending yet, but I thought I'd throw Zotero on to that list. It's a Firefox add-on, highly recommended for managing your citations and maintaining a database of your sources. It takes some time to learn but very worth it.
I've heard better reviews for Mendeley..however its not for people who like open source.
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OS
Windows 7 Pro (free for students)
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.
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after i sumitted, i found that i made two mistakes on my resume.
when i was mentioning my education, i put wrong school address. I was supposed to write "new york" but i wrote "new york city".
second mistake was sort of typo. the correct one supposed to be " ... group" instead, i wrote "... group p"(one more 'p')
do you think that admission comittee would think i'm ignorant? would it heart my admission?
i am so worried.
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. -
Ah, Endnote! I forgot! And I really ought to get matlab for modeling too. You use SAS Liszt85?? Why do that to yourself!
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!
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*Everyone* should be in therapy? I won't deny that people with serious anxiety or depression should seek professional help, but *everyone*?
I don't think that every niggling bit of anxiety and unease is worth pathologizing by seeing a shrink. At least, that seems like the therapeutic approach, from what experience I've had with them..
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.
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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.
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NOW I'm beginning a new adventure ... I'd like to become a REAL scholar, with credentials from, if not a top-ranked university, at least a top-ranked program in an overall-mid-ranked university.
Take care, and remaining a friend(?),
John
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.
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Think of the workload as preparation for life as an assistant professor. TA workloads are not that high. This depends almost entirely on how well organized the professor is. If you work for an organized prof, you end up doing 15 hours but it can go up to 25 if the professor requires you to organize a lot of lectures, do all the grading, etc. Good profs will split the grading with you and generally keep it to 15 hours. I currently have a TA contract for 20 hours per week and get everything done in 10 hours.
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).
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"pretty much wasted my life eh?"
Boy, you're a right ray of sunshine, aren't you? as the Brits say.
Well ... you've hit a nerve and now I'm going to do my best to prove you wrong.
I'm currently enrolled in an MA in Germanic Studies at a probably Top-30 University, (4.0 average) already have another MA from that same university (3.8 avg), and the Chairman of the German Department has already told me they'd be pleased to accept me for a PhD in my current field (Germanic Studies).
But I'm setting my sights higher yet. I want to go to a very prestigious school, in a related but multidisciplinary field. And you MIGHT be right, it MIGHT be futile, but, dammit, I'm going to let THEM reject me, not give up because YOU say I should.
By the way, if you'd like to meet somebody even more pessimistic than yourself, there are other posters on this forum with whom I could arrange an introduction if you like.
So, damn the torpedoes, and full speed ahead.
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.
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For myself, I'm trying to find any way to score above 1500, preferably above 1550, which I hope will offset all of the many serious flaws in what will be my application.
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.
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Hi all,
For any of you who may remember me, I'm still not really satisfied with my most recent GRE score (740V 690Q).
Please, before anyone tells me that my undergraduate grades are more important and my GRE is already very good---my undergrad GPA of 2.7 from a 2nd-tier school STINKS---and I earned my BA in 1974, waay before most of youse people were born---or my letters or recommendation are really important---those are likely to be lukewarm too because of my personal situation, it's taken me five years to get half way thru a (second) master's degree. All of my 1st MA profs are retired, except one who died, and one of my 2nd MA profs recently retired.
So I'm putting all my eggs into hopes of getting a really superior, not just very good, but superior, stellar GRE score---hoping against hope that a top-notch school will forgive all if I explain the situation and show them I'm not a dummy and I'm not lazy, I've just had a lot more than my share of life-problems coupled with early immaturity.
To wit, regarding
They're VERY expensive and intense, but they actually guarantee a 1300 score even if you come in sub 1000 .... I talked to a rep on the phone. They claim to have a very extensive and accurate diagnostic system plus an individually tailored instruction course plus TONS of required and individually targeted homework ...
The guy I talked to said he thought there'd be no problem for me, if I take their course, to hit the upper 700's, maybe even an 800, in Quantitative, which is my Achilles heel. He claimed they regularly get people who come in with 500Q and after their course, score over 700Q.
Has anyone used this company, and if so, what did you think?
John
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.
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That's interesting that you even get an option. In my program, everyone works .50 time. Most weeks, you don't have to put in the full 20 hours but, depending on the assignment, you may find yourself putting in 45 hours in one week (yes, I actually did this!). It really does depend.
^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).
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A professor has admitted to me that her social psych program (and others) has unofficial affirmative action for more male recruitment into the program.
To what extent does that sway decisions? Probably not much, but she did confirm that there is some special attention paid to males (who are underrepresented in social psych grad cohorts)
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)
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zxcv, could you clarify what you mean by self employed? Nevermind, I misread your sentence.
As I understand from my undergraduate scholarships, scholarships are indeed taxable. However, you can deduct what you spend on tuition (but not housing).
I believe you can also deduct money spent on books and stuff required by the courses.
Excessive-Obsessive GRE worries in P Theory
in Political Science Forum
Posted
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.