liszt85

I'm already attending and the ranking is irrelevant now. I'm just curious about its ranking..not that I'm going to transfer schools or anything if I learn that my school is not in the top 20! I'm extremely happy with the work I'm doing with my adviser here.

You know what's best for you, good luck.

Most useful: http://www.hotcoursesabroad.com/study/training-degrees/international/phd/wine-making-industrial-courses/slevel/15/cgory/wm.324-4/sin/ct/programs.html

couldn't have worded it better myself!

All we need is somebody with a US news rankings subscription!

My professor is interested in a girl who has applied to our lab. She is applying along with her boyfriend and he is applying to a different department (but a related one). My professor offered him partial funding in addition to offering her funding just to attract them here! They made it clear that they would attend only if they were accepted together.. (well, they hinted it and it was clear). So once you are accepted, you may consider telling your respective departments that there is this caveat. If they find you really attractive to the program, they will communicate this to the other department. (This happened here and the guy got an acceptance from the other department, which is slightly more selective than this!). There is no guarantee it will work.. but it tends to have an effect. So consider giving the professors a hint about it..be subtle but make it clear that its going to be a huge factor in your decision.

Me too, and I don't study at a top 10. Was just curious to know the ranking of my graduate program.

Agreed. I had to work hard for the A- I got. I worked hardest last quarter in a course which I ended up getting a B in. That was HARD! I freaked out just like the OP had. There was this other class though with this big name professor at this department. I topped his class and I believe I earned his respect (he's been saying good things about me). However, he handed out A's to almost everybody! It differs from professor to professor and from department to department. Sometimes grades are inflated, sometimes they aren't. In the end, I think the overall GPA indicates how hard we worked for it (and exceptions always exist of course). Now when I was freaking out about that B, I asked a few professors and a graduating PhD student for advice. The student's adviser is the big name prof I talked about above. The student told me that he has a good mix of B's on his transcript but that all that counts during his job search is his research. So I stopped worrying about grades that instant (well, after 3 professors told me the exact same thing..including my adviser. My adviser told me that it doesn't matter in the least). I just had an exam today. One of my friends was freaking out today..she'd had too much caffeine in her system as she'd panicked about the exam. I told her about my experience last quarter..that seemed to help her calm a bit before the exam. The exam today was stressful.. too little time and too much to do, and stats at that! I was however not tensed because of the attitude I decided to adopt. I had done what I could do (realistically, in the time I had left after my research). That's all I am willing to do towards these courses. I will however work extra hard for some other courses which are directly relevant to the research I'm/I'll be doing. Try to have this mindset, might help.

14% was the overall acceptance rate to grad school. I was accepted to linguistics last year.

All I'm saying is none of the grad students I know come with savings in their bank accounts. You should also consider this. You have family here in the united states. If you are in a real emergency, you have help at hand. Some of us are international students, moving half way across the globe (in my case, newly married) with no savings. We get lesser benefits from the US govt too (eg: my wife cannot work..cannot tutor, nothing..just partial health insurance benefits on the student dependent health insurance plan). If you want some savings to fall back on, keep aside maybe $1500-2000 and pay off the debt! Anyway, that's what I'd do. Preparing for emergencies for pets, for the end of the Mayan calendar in 2012, etc don't make sense to me as you can think of a hundred such emergency situations if you wanted to. Grad students are expected to be unprepared. If you wanted to be prepared for all financial emergencies, maybe you should look for a high paying job in the industry. Some of these are pearls of wisdom (sometimes exact quotes) that rising star offered me last year when I was applying and making my decisions.

Does any of you have access to current (US news?) rankings of Cognitive Psychology graduate programs in the US? If so, would you mind posting maybe the top 30-40 here? I never found a reliable/comprehensive ranking list when I was applying and I asked this year's applicants if they had and none of them had.

18K is the highest anybody gets in my department (~$1500 a month after taxes). That is because I already have a masters degree. I know people who get $1200 a month and live luxuriously (and not surprisingly.. if you are single, you can just rent a room in a house with others. That should cost you a maximum of $400-500 in moderately expensive cities. It will cost about $300 here. If you live in NYC, its a different story.)

I get $18K before taxes. I have a wife who cannot work (due to dependent visa restrictions). We manage just fine and already have ~$1500 in savings (its been just 4 months). So we never use more than $1000 a month (what I receive after taxes is $1500). The cost of living in this city is quite low, which is one reason. However, by low, I mean the rents are cheap. We pay $400 for the studio we live in (yes, we don't live in a mansion, we chose to live in a studio because we knew we'd be poor but we also knew that by making the right choices, we'd have enough savings to fall back on). So I find it surprising that students who only have themselves to support talk about not paying off their debts just because they want to feel nice about the huge amount of savings that they have in the bank! I think its not the right attitude to have. Medical emergencies can happen to anybody..not everybody is prepared for such life altering events, and not everybody just goes ahead and dies. You will probably go into a little bit of debt if that happens (you will have your insurance paid for by the school, remember?). So you choose to continue being in debt for the fear of having to go into debt (with a really minute probability) in the future?!

I'm not quite sure where exactly the chemistry department is. Anyway, you should look to live on the west side of high street. The east side is considered not so safe. I find the south campus area better in terms of safety (or the perceptions of it). I live near King Ave. Its quiet here too. So Neil Ave takes you from south campus to the perpendicular King. So any place around that area (Neil and King) should be good. If you arrive a little early (or if you visit to arrange housing), you should be able to find plenty of options around here in the summer.

I was accepted to Northwestern last year and an official survey that came to me after I'd declined their offer said that the acceptance that year was 14%.

So true! I'm a first year grad, TA. Just had to grade 300 exams in two days in addition to submitting a conference paper. So I just didn't sleep and one professor seemed mad at me because I didn't return his exams the day after the exams (there are 120 students in the class) and I'm assisting 4 courses. They divide up my 20 hours into 4 different courses..the division is entirely arbitrary. Fortunately for me though, my adviser is great. Gives me enough time, helps me out with research.. and I think our research is going to produce some great results. I'm not worried about getting job now.. at this point, there is nothing else I would do than this. I'm poor and have non-working (visa restrictions) wife to support but this is fully worth it, at least so far. That said, I'm sure many students will find your post absolutely useful and informative.

Not true if everybody starts doing this (in some ways, this behavior is exactly responsible for the current economic situation here in the US). If you have the money now, pay off your debts. If you get funded, you will have enough (and more) income to support yourself. If not, you are living with your parents now and you say you'll also have some money left after you pay off your debts. Do it now or you'll end up spending all of it! (I guarantee it).

I know that the cognitive and developmental areas have made their initial round of offers. No idea about social psych. They organize their own visitation weekend.

3 required in the first year. Basic stats (regression, stemplots and what not), ANOVA, and one more (not quite sure of what it is Not really A lot No No independent work 15hours same as yours but toned down. Yes and yes.

I'm a first year grad student and we had the visitation weekend for our program this week. I heard that its common to reimburse your flight tickets. So you will probably get your money back via a reimbursement. As for the hotel thing, it seems to me that he implied that he would pay for it. You never really have a written agreement for this sort of thing. The email should be good enough. I went on an internship to Europe (all the way from India) on such an agreement. I was reimbursed every penny. I guess you should just trust them when they say they will reimburse you the money.

How? (and Why?)

I would pick WashU. Not just for the high rank..for reasons of weather, cost of living, etc. Why would I ignore the better fit at NU? Because I do not yet know what I'll be REALLY passionate about..these are just guesses that I have now. I'm sure your taste will change as you progress through grad school. I myself chose a lower ranked school over NU (linguistics) and I did that, not based on fit (I perceived NU to be better of a fit) but based on the better vibes I received from the department (and adviser) I ended up attending. Also because I didn't want to live in a cold place like Chicago for 5-6 yrs. I am now working in a field that I never imagined I'd be working in and I'm thoroughly enjoying it! We have set our sight on a PNAS/Science journal publication towards the end of the year with what we've managed to do so far..so you see that there's no way I'd regret my decision! So while rationalizing, also let your intuition guide you.

I wish I'd done that for the University of Jyvaskyla interview that I had. He asked me how serious I was about going there and I got tongue tied. Sure enough, they didn't make the offer. He was very excited about my application prior to the interview though. Anyway, that was scary because that was way before I got accepted by the US schools. So yea, having stuff in front of you is definitely a good idea!

I understand what you're saying. For me, it ought to have been more about fit especially because I was changing fields from Physics (after completing a masters) to the social sciences (in which I'd had absolutely no background). So I needed to be sure I'd be doing research that I was comfortable with. So the decision was really difficult for me. I had two options to choose from, one was very well regarded (Ling, NU)and had a complex systems institute which had active collaborations going on with the Linguistics dept. The very first time I contacted a professor there asking if they'd consider me eligible to apply to their graduate program, I got 3 replies, one from the chair, one from the professor and one from a post doc who was a Physics post doc collaborating with these guys. So I knew they were absolutely interested in my application and that my undergraduate (and masters) line of work was highly relevant to what they were doing. To reject their offer (which was made 2 weeks after I'd submitted my application and writing sample) was one of the toughest decisions I'd made in my life. So post decision regrets clung onto me for quite some time! I chose my current university for precisely the reasons that you had for choosing MIT over other options. My intuition told me that my wife and I would prefer the more laidback settings of the campus (and city) here than the huge intimidating Chicago. Weather was a huge factor as well. She hates the cold and absolutely can't handle it. Chicago is not exactly the place to live for 5 yrs for people who hate the cold. Most importantly, I got the right vibes from my current adviser. It worked out well..its always a good idea to trust your intuition. I get all the attention I need from him, he is sufficiently involved in all his graduate students' work. He even comes in to the lab from time to time to help us with coding and stuff. I never see anybody else do that here. The senior famous professors in the department respect him a great deal because he's really good at what he does. He's also got funding from different sources and has promised to pay for my summers and any conference that I might have to attend (even if the dept doesn't support it). The first project I was on, was a language model. I wasn't comfortable with it and he realized that and shifted me onto a memory project. I'm having great fun with that.. lots of cool math (networks and graphs), cool experiments, etc and lots of concepts from Physics being used.. it was when I got shifted to this project that I lost all those post decision regrets completely. So it took quite a while!

That's not all that hard when its MIT you're saying yes to When you're deciding between rank 15 and 25, both decent fits (25 a little more, and you say yes to 25), that's when post decision regrets and "what if" thoughts come into play. That's what happened to me..but I ceased having those thoughts after a few months here.