liszt85

PhD. On Windows 7. 1. MATLAB (for modeling purposes mostly, also use for plotting stuff) 2. SAS (statistical s/w used for frequentist statistics: ANOVA, etc) 3. R (free) 4. WinBUGS (free) (for Bayesian Modeling, will also start using R2winBUGS and MatBUGS to interface this with R and MATLAB respectively) 5. OpenOffice (free) (will start programming in Python next quarter and will also use some ERP data preprocessing s/w.. so the list probably will keep getting bigger as I progress through the program)

Shortlisted to be on a waitlist, is probably what they meant. No school uses the word shortlist for an acceptance. They always say "You have been admitted/accepted to the program", etc.

Its a masters program..so other than your thesis, there's going to be very little research and more of coursework. If you get an MS/MA from a good school, you will be competitive in the job market, even if you don't do exactly what you wanted to do for your thesis.. Its best to avoid debt because there's no guarantee that going to the other school will make you more competitive when you apply for jobs later on. So funding should be weighed in heavily here, I think.

High graduate (MS) GPA + excellent research experience + publications = deadly combo that will remove all focus away from your ug GPA. I'm speaking from experience and from what professors at very highly ranked universities have told me when I asked them the same question. My GPA graph was a rising one. It has a 3.6 on it as well as a 10 on it (on a scale of 10). All the 8's, 9.6's and 10's came towards the end (during the masters phase..mine was a single integrated 5 year long masters program which included undergraduate education as well)..so I finished off on a high and they were convinced that the earlier grades were an artifact of something else (which is true). SO yes, you can get committee members to think positively about your application if you do all of that.

Oh yea, I'm reviewing for a top venue alright but my point was that review procedures for conferences (including the top ones) in Psychology are far less rigorous than the peer review process for top journals. I say this because I, for instance, simply am not aware of most of the literature in the subject (because I come directly from Physics.. Psychology as a field is new to me). So when you have people like me do the reviews, the procedure is far less likely to be rigorous and stringent than when well published professors do reviews for top journals.

Think of it as a 100year long flight. You have parachutes and other fun stuff in the plane. There are some people who would jump without hesitation and have fun down on Earth rather than sit on their asses for 100 years. I guess that's what the OP was really talking about. However, if what you want to do with your life is understand how a plane works, and want to visit the pilot's cabin someday, maybe you should stick on and let others use the parachutes. However, if you have no interest in the plane and yet refuse to use the parachute, then you really should contemplate hard and start thinking about your purpose here on Earth (the plane in our analogy here).

I don't know if the accepted standards are different in social psych but for me (cognitive), my adviser has set a goal of two journal papers per year (first or second author). I'm only in my second quarter here and I've started writing up a paper for submission to Cognitive Science. 4 authors, I'm first author. I also have a collaboration with a professor outside the dept (in something totally unrelated) and we expect to publish roughly once a year too, so I'll be first or second author on those depending on who does most of the work in any particular project. So by the time I graduate, I expect to have at least 9-10 publications. My professor tells me that even that won't be very competitive.. a good number of publications in top journals is absolutely necessary to be very competitive in the job market. So if the final year PhD students don't have a single publication, that would be EXTREMELY strange to me and I would seriously consider digging into it deeper. Proceedings don't matter in Psych (cognitive) according to my adviser. Papers/talks in conferences/proceedings are good if you are in computer science but not in psychology. I have sent abstracts to 3 conferences so far..so having papers/talks in conferences is no big deal. The peer review process for that isn't too extreme and its fairly easy to get poster presentations (slightly more difficult to get talks). I myself am a reviewer for one big conference that's coming up and have been reviewing a paper and I'm only a first year grad student. So you can expect this process to be much less rigorous than a peer review process in a top journal. So I wouldn't even consider conference posters and proceedings when evaluating the output of the grad students at your prospective program.

I have invited him numerous times to go grab lunch with me but he never does. He stays hungry. So he eats twice a day but he does not seem stressed or anything and he's doing great in his coursework and research. The other person in the lab is someone who's not having a great time (some personal issues) and someone who believes everybody thinks she's dumb, she's also having a hard time with courses and research. So can't really expect fun there. So the lab is pretty boring.. I did meet a few interesting prospective students who were interested in our lab. So I hope to see some activity next year.. Anyway, I'm married, so I take my wife to the ballet, out to movies, restaurants, etc. We are going to a party in a few hours from now. So I do my share of going out/partying, etc. She is however going to be visiting family for 2 months (halfway across the globe) starting next week. So I'll have to figure out stuff to do.. I'll probably get back to piano playing as I can now stay late at night in the music hall. Might also take a trip somewhere in the Spring break with friends.. will invite him but I doubt he will come along.

My department also pays people with a master's degree at a higher level. So I get paid $200 more than the others which isn't bad either So doing a master's is not a bad idea.

Precisely. I do think she will need to retake and get ~800 on the quant. Its an uphill task (from 680, that is) but it can be done.

I don't know where your center was but my wife took the GRE yesterday in the US. There was a "no watch" policy, one that started just recently. So she had to put the watch in the locker before she could go in to take the test. She had time issues with the quant section too and couldn't do 6 questions (but I'd told her to make sure she guessed answers and completed the section because I believe incomplete/unattempted questions are penalized heavily. Anyway, she ended up with a verbal 410 and quant 680. Its a bad score esp as she wants to apply to 2 engineering depts here at the university where I'm attending grad school (and this is one of the higher ranked places and I doubt this GRE score is good enough but we're keeping our fingers crossed.. she is going back to India for a couple of months, she is going to take an advanced programming course, going to prepare her applications, etc. So lets see).

There's a Chinese first yr grad student who works in my lab. He said to me once "This is easy for me, as I have no life" but one thing he is obsessed about is basketball! Never misses a match (watches them live online), and plays basketball religiously every Friday. I guess that's how he keeps himself going.

I'm required to do outside courses too but they require that those courses be relevant to the research that I am/will be doing. Hard to convince them that a 2 credit course in jazz piano playing is going to go into my research in some direct way. Otherwise, I have taken a linguistics course, plan to take a music cognition course and maybe a few programming courses towards that requirement.

That's great. Grad school has put a sudden end to my piano playing and I still harbor hopes of being a working musician besides being an academic. So I decided to pester a professor from the music dept to accept me as his student (for a jazz piano for non majors course which is extremely difficult to get into because is the only person offering the course and he is only an adjunct). I finally managed to pull some strings (via the director of the music school) and got in. I then had to approach my dept for help with enrollment as this could only be done through them. The head of my area sent an email to my adviser saying that it was his choice in the end but that she thought I should be concentrating on research (I have already begun writing my first year project report (in the form of a journal paper that will be submitted to cog sci) as that is near completion, none of the others have started)! I then sent an email to my adviser saying that this was only a 2 credit course, and it was a 20minute per week meeting! I also sent him a mini academic type write up with references to studies that "proves" music helps in increasing attention spans, IQ (though this is debatable, being an academically honest student, I also wrote down counter arguments), etc. He responded by saying that I had convinced him but the department seemingly has a policy of not letting people do courses other than those that are directly relevant to the PhD. SUCKS! I have not given up. I will soon begin working on a music cognition project with a music dept professor. I will then make a case that this jazz piano course is a serious requirement I wish they understood without me having to go to all this trouble! I also hope they buy it (but they will remember that I made this request as "something I want to do for stress relief").

I would publish the analysis and talk about the facts that it accounts for, and then would also give a sneak peak of the kind of data that it would not be able to capture (a brief mention in the conclusion section). Say that the research is moving in that direction in the conclusion section.. How big is this conference? Anybody likely to steal your idea (AND solve this quicker than you will)? I would then shut myself up in a room for days/weeks and try to come up with a working solution ASAP and would type it up for publication as soon as I possible can.

If you wanted to stick around for a PhD, you had no problems doing it at this school. The school also told you that you were free to leave after the MA. I don't understand why you didn't grab the chance when you had the option to. Hope something works out soon..when it does, don't deliberate on it due to pricks of conscience because this is sometimes a rat race.. you just have to be ahead or you'll get punched in the stomach as you have been now.

Depends on the source of the funding. If you're competing for a university wide fellowship, I would believe that standardized scores like the GRE will play some role. If its a departmental funding, they could possibly evaluate you against other applicants without having to look at the GRE but how do you compare apples and oranges (when competing for funding at the university level for instance)? So I'm pretty positive that the GRE score plays some role in funding decisions of certain kinds.

I agree completely. I'm an int'l student and my undergrad institution is pretty well known (it is the best in my country for the program that I attended). I've had at least 3-4 professors here tell me that they thought my background was excellent for this kind of work (also because I'd attended that university).However, I didn't get in because of that. I got in because the research I was doing at my undergrad was VERY similar to the direction my current adviser wanted to take his research to (just in terms of analysis techniques, not the actual research goals)..and its been working out very well for the both of us.

Ah you're right.. my friends were applying to Physics programs and since we're int'l students, we rarely have interviews. Though I studied Physics with them, I ended up applying to Cognitive Psych PhD programs instead of Physics. My current adviser interviewed me over skype. That was sometime in March (but the school had already made its decisions in February..I was more of an add on to that because of this professor). However, I have heard that some schools take more time. For instance, U Minn (cog sci) kept me on a waiting list and didn't tell me about it until I emailed them with "I have offers now and I have to make a decision by next week.. let me know what my status is at U Minn". I got a nice reply that said that they were looking for funding but haven't yet found a source. There's a lot of activity in March, esp towards the end. If you haven't heard from so many palces, I'm sure you must be on some waiting list at least at some of these places. which is why I ask you not to lose hope.

I've heard that NU (Psych) makes decisions much later..don't know about the other places. Don't lose hope. Almost every single one of my friends last year (who all have better credentials that I do) heard from schools only in March. If you don't hear by the end of March, you should be worried. There's still time! Keep the hopes up.

Yes, I guess so!

Let me introduce myself. I was recommended for admission by two professors at two different universities last year (McMaster and UCSD) but the graduate school rejected me because of funding constraints. The professor at UCSD emailed me saying something along the lines of (almost exact quote) "I'd love to have you in my lab. I've tried my best and have recommended that you be admitted. However, its likely that the graduate school will reject you because our international student funding is very constrained this year" The grad school sent me a rejection 2 days later. It was not a very nice letter, it said something like "the applicants this time were really good...blah blah". I forwarded that to the prof and soon came the reply "I'm glad I warned you because rest assured that the only reason for your rejection is the intl student funding scene here right now. What they say in the generic letter is inaccurate." The one at McMaster was a funding issue too, again as admitted to me by the professor herself. She had told me that she'd recommended me for admission. If you see my posts from one year back, you will see me asking for opinions about McMaster and Hamilton (assuming naively that I would be admitted). So yes, it does happen. Funding should be lesser of a problem if you are an American citizen. So if you are, I think the chances are extremely high that you will be admitted. Good luck! P.S: Oh yea, I remember one more program that put me in a waiting list again for funding reasons (U Minn, Cog Sci, new program that started in 2009) but that was different because nobody really recommended that I be admitted. That was just a waitlist that didn't turn out to be an admission. I mention this just to tell the international students who might be reading this that funding situations are not as good as they used to be..so a rejection is possible (though unlikely) even if the department recommends you for admission.

Well, yea it was maybe 3 weeks worth of research that turned into a conference paper (hoping it gets accepted). However, we're collaborating with some computer science guys on this one. So there's that paper that I wrote and another paper on the same topic (but different line of attack) written by the computer science guy. My task is to combine the two to produce a good journal paper..they agreed that I should be first author on this one because this one's going to cog sci. The next one will be by the CS guy and that's going to some CS journal.. so its working out well. Other than that, its just homework.. lots of modeling assignments, so the coding keeps me busy. There's not a lot of time to do research but I'm learning to find some time for that as well since that's what we're here to do.

Wow, that sounds way more than what I'm doing! Also 2 papers and a conference talk already?! Its been just one semester..I was thinking I was doing better than most with one conference paper submitted and having started putting it together for a decent journal (cog sci), and 2 other abstracts submitted for conferences but they have all been on the same topic with minor modifications. I've been here only 4 months now and I felt like I'd achieved quite a bit until I saw your post

Same here. I have one good friend. However, I'm jovial and pay attention to what's happening around me. I spent hours last week comforting another student who believes his/her adviser thinks he/she's dumb. It was difficult as I had loads of work to do but the thing is somebody might need your support now, and you'll need their help at some other point in time. All of this is a huge collaboration and it helps to maintain a friendly atmosphere.