Usmivka

It wasn't clear: Your opening post asks "And do you have any suggestions of how I can weasel myself out of having to find a Latin translator in RURAL CHINA?" This implied that you in fact didn't know how to go about dealing with your undergraduate college and getting a notarized transcript, since you were instead seeking a local translator rather than contacting the school you matriculated from. There was nothing there about deadlines, exemptions, or how to approach things with the place you are applying until four hours after your initial post, so I don't think it's crazy that we all focused on practical advice for dealing with the degree-granting institution. As for the Latin degrees, I get where you are coming from now, but again, what was asked in your first post was more or less "do you agree that degrees in Latin are so common that this is an unreasonable request on the university's part?" This is the other question I answered--they are not common. There are lots of smart folks on the forums that can answer just about any question you ask, but I guess the net out of all this is that it is important to ask the question you actually want answered. Hopefully you have a plan of action at this point. I won't post again here since I've said my piece and don't want to seem hostile--I do hope you found some of the above advice, from any source, useful.

I already provided advice on how to get a notarized diploma translation. You don't have to be present to get the stamp, and the university will have a licensed notary public in the records/diploma office. Ask for an official hard copy plus print out of the translation to be notarized and mailed directly to the admissions department of the place you are applying. Your location doesn't matter for this problem, and most admission offices can take care of a simple request in a few days, particularly if you let them know the urgency. Similarly, the place you are applying must realize that four days is insufficient to get a new diploma and translation sent, and will most likely accept your current submission conditionally until the new copy arrives--this is an easier request than an exemption. I'd say of the 4500 colleges in the US, the above is a small and homogenous list (small, private, exclusive, East Coast only). Even most analagous shcools (eg other Ivy's and SLACs) no longer print in Latin. I'll stand by my comments and the hour or so I spent researching the question. Also, if that is most of the colleges you know, you are familiar with a surprising number of women's only colleges at the expense of, say, any public institution. Finally, we can provide more specific advice and workarounds if you provide the details in your initial post (eg the deadline). Edited to take into account posts after 9:30EST

I'd say that by and large, the most successful grad students I know (with the best work/life balance as well) came back to school after a 2-5 year gap. The ones that come straight in from undergrad seem the least grounded, and a year seems to be just long enough to forget how to operate in academia but not enough time to really develop an identity independent of being a student. So I'd argue for more than a year if you have been a full time student without significant work (and life) experience independent of classes. But obviously do what makes sense for you, in your current situation.

I think the discussion is pertinent to the question of experience that you seem to be focused on. The question was phrased differently, but people got into the pros and cons of joining a prof at various career stages, and I think the whole discussion is generally applicable (and my comments came from the perspective of working in an analytical chemistry lab). I have a PI with a great personality, but in large part because of experience and career stage is a poor fit for me. And both experience and career stage are pretty directly related to age in this case. Knowing what I do now, career stage (and the risks that go with joining a PI at any given stage) would play a significant role in deciding betweeen advisors if I was to have a do over.

I think it must be a master's degree of some kind (both since those are slightly less rare than undergrad degrees written in Latin and because, indeed, why else would a diploma be needed?).

When, from 1500 to 1850? At what point did US schools stop issuing degrees in Latin? I have trouble imagining this being a recent switch. Let me know quickly before I lose myself to googling on the topic. EDIT: I have evidence of optional latin diplomas from some Canadian universities within the last decade...not a default, but apparently someone can choose to have their diploma printed in latin. The threads discussing this also mentioned having trouble getting a notarized translation. Nothing from Britain...and heresay but no images or statements regarding US institutions. I'll keep digging. EDIT 2: And Harvard appears to have switched to English in the 60s, Yale in the 80s. BU gives medical and law degrees in latin, but not undergrad degrees. Edit 3: OK, WUSTL appears to offer some (but not all?) BAs in Latin. I'm going to stop now, but I am really curious if there are any US universities that still confer BA/BSs in latin without a graduate specifically requesting it. Anyone who knows more, please do post. Or help the OPer with their original question, sorry to highjack the thread, but I do think my assumption in my response has been born out (ie, degrees written in latin seem to be very uncommon in the US, and have been for decades). EDIT 4: A final note for the OPer--the only schools currently or formerly granting latin degrees that I can find post translations directly on their websites.

My diplomas were not issued in latin...I don't go around asking people about this, but I feel like a diploma entirely in Latin (in fact, Latin for anything but honors status) is not something I've ever heard of before, much less the norm. You clearly have access to the internet, so I don't see how your location bears on this at all--send the request to your university, and they will take care of it. Finding a local translator doesn't do you any good since they want a notarized copy (presumably fromt he university itself) which means you need a US licensed notary public to stamp the thing after watching whoever made the translation sign it.

Go here: http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f1040es.pdf Fill out your estimated taxes and file quarterly (deadlines are the third month of each quarter). If that is a hassle, you can pay all at once at the beginning of the year (but lose your interest) or pay all at once at tax time (but are supposed to calculate and pay an additional fine based on late payment). Come tax time, you'll need to fill out a regular 1040 and include the 1099-MISC or 1098 NSF gives you and mark it in the additional income box as "fellowship," or fill out the whole scholarship/fellowship additional forms associated with the 1040 (see Pub 970 below for names and links). You are not self-employed, so ignore anything about self-employment tax and additional forms. Anything not used towards qualified academic expenses (http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p970.pdf) will be taxable--if you are confused about the compensatory/non-compensatory fellowship designation (yours is the latter) read a little more here: It doesn't really change the above. If you have state taxes, you may have to file those quarterly as well, they may be keyed into federal taxes but have different deadlines. EDIT: My advice is based on the experiences of myself and other fellowship recipients I know, but view this as an opinion that you should corroborate by doing your own reading. Only the IRS or a certified tax professional can give you accurate and up to date tax related advice.

Things usually go better when you decide who will have what responsibilities and authorship in advance. The list can always be revised downwards if someone doesn't significantly contribute. I can certainly see a scenario where a PI decides your contribution is no longer significant enough to meet a journal's authorship criteria if you helped with the initial work but not any of the necessary followup experiments, more in depth data analysis (discussion section type content, not just plotting up raw results), or a significant chunk of writing and editing. Based on your second post, it wouldn't surprise me if this is the case here--even if you want to stay involved, you've left the lab and your former advisor is under no obligation to include you in ongoing work that may in fact comprise the bulk of the project. Up to this point, it sounds like you've done about as much as an undergrad lab assistant might on preliminary work--enough for an acknowlegdment, but perhaps not enough for authorship. As suggested above, I would not delay this conversation any longer if you want authorship. Personally, I would ask for a face to face meeting, lay out your case that you've invested enough time to be an author on the work, and find out exactly what the expectations are for an authorship slot (wait and help edit, write a section, do more of the data analysis?). TakeruK's point above is just as important--will your new boss be interested in seeing you spend time on something that doesn't benefit him/her? Even if they see value to your education in collaborating with other labs, will s/he see an authorship far down the list of names as a worthwhile use of time?

No and maybe. A PI may call and try to find out more when deciding between multiple applicants to support (a faculty member must commit to funding the first year for a student before an applicant can be accepted). Also, PIs may call to get a verbal "I would come if you offered me a spot," if they have multiple prospective students and only have money for one--the stakes are high for them in that if they offer to you officially and you don't accept, they may not get a students, but if they offer space to two students hoping to get one they may end up paying more than they bargained. That likely won't happen until the adcom meets in the next couple weeks however.

It is still January, and this is on the early end for application reviews. I'd trust her to follow through as she said she would, assuming she likes your application and wants to follow through. Maybe send an email on the 27th, since that is the last week of January to the effect of "hi, have you had a chance to review my application yet and are you still interested in scheduling a skype interview?"

Those poor cherry trees. Holes through the bark and into the phloem like that are what let in the fungal spores that develop into the infections that kill trees. It can take years or decades, but fungal infections are the ultimate cause of death for a surprisingly large proportion of ornamentals and fruit trees. Would it hurt your ritual to target, say an invasive tree? This article has a handy list on page 794 to guide your hammer blows: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1472-4642.2011.00782.x/pdf. Or if you live west of the Mississippi, feel free to target these East Coast interlopers: http://www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/detail/national/technical/nra/nri/?cid=stelprdb1041705.

One last update since this got me digging around and I remembered a conversation I had with a manager at the IRS after a very long hold last year: For US residents reading this thread, TAMU has a really nice summary (http://www.tamus.edu/offices/budget-acct/tax/taxmanual/scholarfellow/), which defines the myriad terms being thrown about here. The net out, is that "non-compensatory fellowships" as a definition only relates to the requirement for the university to report your earnings to the IRS (they don't have to). This has no bearing on the "qualified" vs "non-qualified" criteria for your income. The IRS has a handy table that tells you what is and isn't qualified. But in short, if it isn't tuition or books, it is almost certainly taxed, except for two specific "service" fellowships written into section 117 of the tax code (the NHSCSP and the AFHPSFAP). Functionally, what these rules mean is that the university won't report your income, but you are still obligated to pay taxes. Obviously many people don't, since how would you get found out if you don't self-report? This is where the widespread, random audits of grad students in MA begin to make more sense. Many grad students here are on non-compensatory fellowships, but still owe taxes (and as evidenced in repeated threads on this forum over the years, there is plenty of confusion about this). There is a good chance an audit dragnet of this sort will pull in folks that might not otherwise report their income and pay taxes. But if you are in a state that doesn't have income tax, I imagine the chances of the feds catching tax-dodgers in this category are pretty low. The rules for international students are a little different, in that for any fellowship, 14% is supposed to be withheld by the university. The majority can be reclaimed as a refund since you don't have to pay FICA taxes (social security, medicare). So the university is required by existing tax law to report your income and withold from it. Not all do, again because of this widespread confusion about how non-compensatory fellowships get treated and a sort of gray zone where these overlap with tax withholding requirements for international students.

Your employer/university is legally barred from giving tax advise like "shouldn't be taxable," so while I agree that sounds hopeful, it is not definitive or even useful if you get audited. Also, whether they do or do not take a withholding for you doesn't mean anything about your tax obligations--just whether they are required to withhold from your paycheck. As a non-compensatory fellowship, they don't have to treat you as an employee for payroll purposes, which means they don't have to go to the bother of payroll deductions for you and the paperwork that entails. In this case they are just shifting the burden to file quarterly taxes to you. Whether you do or do not owe taxes is not necessarily directly related to the paperwork aspect. You might want to talk to a tax preparer that is knowledgable about graduate stipends your first year here.

My favorite is now posted on the door to my lab to greet me in the morning: "Today is probably a huge improvement over yesterday." I like the combination of optimisim and hedging there.

Generally, no, but not always.

Yes, that is too specific in my opinion. Interest in general kinds of problems are great (mass transport, glaciers, volcanism), but specific goals that are very focused in a subfield (volcanism at slow-spreading hydrothermal ridges, turbidity currents, subglacial channels) may pidgeon-hole you to the point where if there isn't a PI doing exactly that (or that PI doesn't have money for a student, or the PI doesn't know you're applying and skips reviewing applications this year), the adcomm may view you as a poorer fit than someone who is more flexible in their research interests. Also, unless you are the best applicant in the pool, stating whether you are or aren't applying elsewhere won't necessarily help you. And who knows what "best" is for any given program or year--a PI with grant in hand that really wants a student can swing things so that admits favor an applicant that fits her criteria, which through no fault of your own might not be you.

I actually think the BU training grants for that program were tax-free for a time (I know someone who got a similar departmental training grant at BU). However, the IRS updated its wording on fellowships not so long ago to make it clear(er) that unless you receive one of two named fellowships (the National Health Service Corps Scholarship Program and the Armed Forces Health Professions Scholarship and Financial Assistance Program), you are obligated to pay taxes on all stipend income beyond what you use for qualified academic expenses (details at http://www.irs.gov/publications/p970/ch01.html#en_US_2013_publink1000177991). I know there is a lot of wording in there about how you are required to pay taxes on payment for services, but that doesn't mean that you aren't taxed on non-compensatory grants--there is superceding language that states that anything that is not a qualified education expense is taxable, and those expenses are clearly defined. You might argue that there are still some fellowships in the gray area, but honestly the ~$4000 a year in federal and state taxes I might save just isn't worth the time and hassle of an audit to me, even if I'm in the right in claiming tax-exempt status--grad students are favorite targets of tax auditors in Massachusetts, and nearly a third of the students in my program have been audited. So in the great majority of cases, if you use your stipend to pay for books or student fees, that portion is tax free, but anything you use for room, board, savings, etc. is taxable at the federal level. Some states levy taxes as well, and their rules may differ slightly (for example in MA, your room and board is tax free but only if you are living in university owned housing and do not live in state enough of the year to be required to file as a legal resident [130+ days?], while in WA there is no state income tax at all). Also, unlike what Takeruk described in the note above, schools will not always deduct taxes from your paycheck on certain kinds of grants. I believe yours is one of those that will not have taxes deducted, like many training with an ultimate federal funding source. This means you are personally responsible for filing estimated taxes every three months, and may be fined if you fail to do so. It's a pain in the ass.

All good advice... You qualified the statement above, but in my program I'd say by and large the students working 70+ hours a week are only working for new advisors. The older ones have more reasonable expectations. Just my program though.

Many grad students work on their PhDs for more than six years. In fact average in psychology from the 70's to early 2000's was 7.2-7.3 years, and hardly faster in chemistry, 6-6.5 years (http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/infbrief/nsf06312/...there are more recent updates to this, but I like the long-term synthesis here). Meanwhile tenure can take anywhere from 4-8+ years, depending on the institution and extended tenure clocks for things like pregnancy, or shortened clocks for profs transferring from another institution. So there is a very real chance that it that time your professor may not get tenure, or may find a better postiiton elsewhere in the country, or may decide that the grind of grant-writing all the time is not what they really had in mind and leave academia. A young, motivated prof can be great in terms of enthusiasm and getting work out the door, but you don't want to put yourself in a place where you are in competition with your advisor. They need to crank out papers to achieve tenure and build recognition for grants--that can mean they have an incentive to publish at your expense, but which I mean rushing publication on something you are writing up, or taking over the writing alltogether. This isn't always a conscious thing. Overambition at the research end can be just as bad, and end up with you overworked and unhappy. Having worked with first time advisors, mid-career professors, and older, tenured profs nearing retirement, my personal experience has been that advising quality is pretty much proportional to time advising. Part of this has to do with less stress for them and more time, more practice advising, and most importantly learnign how to communicate as an advisor--sometime new profs are pretty close to you in age and have trouble putting a line between professional and peer relationships. New advisors also lack management experience--super important for PIs, essentially ignored in graduate programs. I'm not saying it can't work, but you are taking a much larger risk than if you joined an established group. A useful book I have only just discovered but wish I had 3 years ago, is A PhD is not Enough! by Peter Feibelman. It itemizes many of the mistakes that have made grad school less than pleasant for me. Number one on his list is don't be a guinea pig for a new advisor. You can always put this super awesome person you want to work with on your committee and still get face time.

I use the Mendeley plug-in for Word. Is this what you mean? I don't believe Word has a built in citation manager. I've found that you need to be careful in looking at what options are selected that the citation style you want is actually the one selected. Also, Mendeley and other web or text-crawler based reference software doesn't always collect all the details correctly or assign a source to the correct category (eg it might read a paper or book chapter as a webpage depending on how you access it, which would then read differently int he citations).

Just make sure it is accredited. Some "schools" offering courses with names like this are not licensed to confer dergees, and I think that is doubly true if you are looking at distance education. You can check with the state government, most have a website listing all accredited institutions of higher learning. Also, even if it is accredited, many for-profit universities have abysmal gradaution rates and are exorbidantly expensive, which is why they are the subject of a Senate investigation as potential scam outfits (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/30/education/harkin-report-condemns-for-profit-colleges.html?_r=0). The folks on this thread may be able to give you specific recommendations if you post a little about your mobility (have to be local, can move to a school) and educational adn work background.

This one is my favorite: Tyrannosaurs ate lots of bones, pooped them out, and then lots of things slapped onto the impressionable poop. Museum Studies, University of Colorado

I imagine my jobs as being something of a career profession. 1. Sequence dinosaur DNA from a number of charismatic species 2. Genetically engineer and resurrect said dinosaurs 3. Build dinosaur safari theme park on remote island off Central America, insert dinosaurs--They do move in herds! 4. Survive and escape dinosaur safari theme park, leave the clean up for a small Central American country (repeat steps 1-4 at Site B )

Yes, you did. We can see who votes up and down on each post. Maybe it was an accident, in which case I'm sorry to be crabby. I hate it when I put time into a response and someone traipses through and downvotes it without taking the time to post why they disagree. EDIT: in response to below, the easiest way to monitor what you are or or not voting for is to go to your profile, choose reputation, and look at the "reputation given" tab.