liszt85

One year of good work is good enough. You should aim to get yourself in a research group ASAP. Talk to your own professors, I'm sure one of them could use manpower, esp if you don't demand to get paid. Some departments however cannot accept students without paying them and for this reason, you may find it difficult to get involved in research. So if you're in a taught course track, you probably are too late to convert that to a thesis/research track and probably will find it difficult to get into a research group. However, that's the only way you can get to do some research before you start applying. Look at other departments also. Computational linguistics I'm sure does work on the stuff you might be interested in. So contact professors at the math and linguistics departments and see if one of them will let you work on a project with them.

Congrats! Your son must now try to beat that

I married my girl (3 year long distance relationship) right before I came to the US to attend grad school.

Depends on a lot of factors: How much more expensive is the top ranked school than the lower ranked one? How low ranked is the low ranked one? I wouldn't consider rank 25-40 low ranked. I would consider 1-25 top ranked. I wouldn't differentiate much between 15 and 25. If its rank 1 vs rank 40, I'd probably go for rank 1, provided its not $20K more expensive than the lower ranked place. Also, it depends on how important the rank of the school you got your degree from is in your field. If its a PhD that you're going to do, the ranking will probably be less important than the actual research you'll be doing. So research fit and professors' interests would be of greater concern than the ranking of the school.

I had a 610V and 780Q. I think that was a decent score. I think that the quant is the more important score. Technical writing skills are not reflected by the GRE verbal score! If you score 800 on the verbal, its more likely that you'd struggle with technical writing (which requires you to avoid flowery language)! I'm just exaggerating..but you get the idea.

No, they meant exactly that. Even if I won a 25K award, they would adjust their own award (probably the tuition fee?) to even out things.. I'd end up with the 20.5 regardless of what award I win (unless its some graduate teaching award or something like that). This was one of the many reasons I chose not to attend NU.

My squib got me a bad grade in the syntax course that I did.. "too much information, not very well organized" was the evaluation. There were comments with question marks put in by the prof even on stuff that I quoted from the literature. So I got a B in the course.. he was pretty hard on me! I found that professors in any given dept give better grades to students from the same dept even if the performance levels are comparable with students from outside the dept. I don't have hard evidence for this..so I can only talk about it in here. Got an A and an A- in the other two courses = 3.523 gpa (B in a 5 credit course, A and A- in 4 credit courses). Yea, grad school is not easy but it wouldn't be grad school otherwise!

This is exactly what Northwestern told me. Their stipend (Linguistics program) was fixed at $20,500 a year. I asked them if I could get more than that if I applied to and won a scholarship/fellowship that carried a higher award. They told me that they had a policy by which I'd end up getting just the 20,500 in any case. They might make the necessary adjustment in some other form, maybe reduce the tuition support by an appropriate amount?

I did all of the above in my first quarter and it helped immensely! So rising star is absolutely right about the above. I know somebody who stressed about it so much (and worked extra hard, slept like 2-3 hours a night) that he developed an eye problem and had to go see a doctor after the end of the quarter. His gpa is 0.3 more than mine..but I don't think its worth an eye

Most of these are for US citizens. Do you guys know of any that international students can apply to?

Your username kinda suits you The thing is, with a 1600 GRE, 4.5 AWA (which is decent enough) and a 3.7 GPA, you have nothing to worry about, unless you have zero research experience, zero publications, zero projects undertaken, etc. If all you've got is your GRE score and your GPA, you probably won't get into a very good PhD program..but if you have research experience comparable to other applicants, I don't see why you should even post such a query here when people have a lot more to worry about than you, give your extremely high GRE score and a gpa that is better than good. I'm guessing you needed some ego boosting comments here which I think we all obliged you with.

I got an A, an A- and a B this quarter. I got the B in a class that I worked for the hardest. I topped the class in which I got an A but then the professor gave A's to most students in that class. I did almost as well as the others in the class in which I got a B and that was a 5 credit course which brought my gpa down by a lot.. however, things will be much easier for us if we accept the FACT that grades don't matter in graduate school. My own adviser told me this..and every single professor and every single 5th year PhD student I asked about this told me exactly the same thing. The only thing that matters will be the quality of research that you do and the amount of good work that you publish. So the advice they all gave me was this: spend time on courses that are directly relevant to the research that I'll do,..spend just enough time on other courses to take care not to piss off professors teaching those courses. This is exactly what I'm going to follow. I stressed about the B (after having worked my ass off for it) for a while.. but graduate school will remain a pain in the neck if we continue stressing about grades in courses, which in the end won't matter anyway.

What do you guys think is a good GPA to maintain in grad school? I got a 3.523 in my first quarter (which was very hectic since I come directly from a semester system which is much slower and easier..).

Nothing helpful here from me.. I thought you were talking about "the" Chopin and then realized it was Kate Chopin you were talking about.

Something similar happened to me once. I had asked my project advisor to write a letter of recommendation for me for an internship. He refused and gave no explanation. At that time, I was working hard on the project and was making good progress and he often commended me for the good work too and I had no idea why he'd refused to write a letter of recommendation. He later told me that he had a policy of not writing LORs for internships but then said he'd make an exception for me if I wanted him to but by that time, I'd gotten upset just like you are now as he hadn't offered this explanation to me at that time. I went ahead and told him that I didn't need his letter anymore as I got another one from a different professor and ended up getting the fellowship for the internship. Telling him that I didn't need his reco was awkward though.. and so like the others have already told you, make sure this is no misunderstanding before you refuse a letter of recommendation from this professor.

I think you'd have been better off had you experienced some of this in your undergrad. I experienced some of it during mine and so was somewhat prepared when I came to the US to do a PhD. I find that though I get the scores that I deserve when I work hard enough for some of the courses, there are others where it just doesn't happen. In fact, there is this 5 credit course (which can screw the GPA real bad) that I work my ass off on and still end up with 75-80% scores on the homework while most others get 90-100. This is a syntax course and I needed it for background information. So what do I do? I don't fret because I don't get the scores that I think I deserve.. it just isn't as important as we think it is. Fuzzylogician is right..these grades won't matter at all in the end. Focus on the courses that are directly relevant to your line of work and do just enough to keep the professors of the remaining courses from getting pissed off at you. This last line of advice was given to me directly by a professor in my area and I decided to take his advice. I also make sure that I spend time during the weekends doing nothing..or listening to music, chatting with friends, take my wife out to dinner, etc.. So I don't study a whole lot during the weekends. It helps.

I've heard that GRE scores are looked at when funding decisions are to be made. So it might be a good idea to retake the GRE just to be safe.

Get some coding skills if you already don't have some. You will have to code up experiments for your PhD work and some coding experience won't hurt. Python would be a good place to start. Learn to use statistical packages better. SAS, R, MATLAB, whatever suits you. Brush up concepts of probability. Read general stuff.. pick up research papers that look interesting and browse through them.. be aware of what's going on. This would be the perfect time to do all the fun reading. Once you start your MA/PhD, you will have time only for coursework the first couple of years.

Make sure of this. Funding situations change like crazy from year to year.. not just funding, research objectives change too! The person who showed interest in taking you on as a student last year may not this year due to reasons that may be out of his/her control.

The reason why I opted for the F1 visa was that the J1 is believed to be more difficult to get from the consulate, esp if the reason for applying for the J1 is solely so that the dependent can work. There were also restrictions that specified that we had to return to our country for at least 2 yrs after the visa expires before we can reenter the country (USA).

I think that's possible if you manage to find a job in a company that would do that for you. However for things that we're looking at, like working in a research lab here, they wouldn't deal with the visa stuff for us and I don't think they have the jurisdiction to do that (within the scheme of the university policies..). Also, its impossible to find a job in a company with a masters in Physics (that's her highest degree). A masters in electronics of computer science may give you better chances but with physics and no particular computer skills to talk of, its impossible to find a job.

PhD admission committees look at relevant research experience and I think you may not have enough of that. So I would suggest you to apply to both MA/PhD programs AND MA programs and try your luck. I'm guessing you'll see more acceptances to MA programs and funding might be hard to come by as funding is more abundant for PhD programs. Good luck, I don't mean to discourage you in any way, just giving you my honest opinion!

I'm an Indian student here in the US. I recently got married. I'm on F1 and she's on F2 and will not be able to work. Not even without pay! She wanted to take part in research here in a lab and the professor agreed to let her be part of the lab (with no pay mind you) but the immigration consultant here told me that even that would not be possible unless the position was something that in normal circumstances would be truly voluntary in nature (that is, would be an unpaid position even if an American citizen with full work permit were to get the position).

BS+MS in Physics. Currently in a MA/PhD program in Psychology.

I did 5 years of physics (undergraduate + masters), no courses in Psychology, a few in linguistics. I got into a pretty decent Cognitive Psych program and am doing just fine (so far at least.. been just half a quarter!). IF you have relevant research experience and skills, and if you can get a professor interested in your application, that's what matters more than what courses you've done as you will have all the coursework you need in the first two years of your graduate experience in the program.