Usmivka

If anyone else has a similar issue in the future, I suggest emailing with a corrected document right away and saying something to the effect of "I accidentally submitted the wrong document, the correct one is attached, please append it to my application with a note to this effect." Pointing out the problem seems less useful than correcting it. tspier2, you can likely still do the same. Clearly it is minor in terms of the edit to fix it, and if the SOP is written to the prompt it is hard to imagine it being viewed as a "recycled" essay. I doubt anyone is self-important enough to take offence at the line. That said, I don't think that particular mistake is very common in grad apps, or at least I haven't seen any anguished posts about it besides yours.

Pinkster/corruptedinnocence--Folks on this forum have made a solid effort to provide you with advice to help with your life transitions, grad school and otherwise. I also provided suggestions in good faith, including when I suggested that another online community might be a valuable resource for some of the issues you've presented (a sentiment echoed multiple times since). I'm not inclined to provide constructive comments on this or any of your other very lengthy threads if you downvote me for the trouble. Unlike some here I have taken a leap of faith and am assuming you 1) aren't trolling the forum and 2) are actually willing to act on some of the advice presented rather than throwing up more roadblocks and "woe is me" statements. Maybe this isn't valuable to you, but what is left if you drive these responses away are the (sometimes entertaining) verbal slapdowns taking over all your threads. The forum etiquette I try to follow is to upvote folks often, save downvotes for the posts that are aggresively disparaging to individuals or groups instead of expanding on some idea, and otherwise write a post to express disagreement. Clearly there are other models as well.

I applied to one school. It worked out fine. It helped that I knew I'd be moving to a specific location regardless.

It seems to me that most of the issues and concerns you are voicing here are not specific to graduate school and have more to do with living independently. This users of this forum are pretty good at coming up with solutions for grad school related problems, but the self-help/life coach role you are casting for us is not a good fit. Do you have any college or high school friends that have left your area and gone on to careers or grad school that you could turn to for advice? Relatives in another city that might ease a transition to that location? Someone who knows you and has made the same life choices you are trying to make will be a better resource than most anyone here. While some of us are clearly enjoying your posts more or less than others, I don't think this forum is a very productive place to continue posting about the concerns you are voicing. Perhaps others disagree and will say so, this is just my nickel's worth. For more than a nickel's worth, if you'd like to hire someone as a personal life coach there are clearly many folks out there that would be happy to listen to your problems and provide suggestions on an ongoing basis for pay.

The Peace Corps and AmeriCorps are highly selective. Most folks are less likely to get into either program than into a graduate program (a big generalization here, obviously). They are looking for very self-sufficient and motivated volunteers to work in physically and emotionally taxing environments far from home and with minimal support from or interaction with other volunteers. I think you might want to try a smaller transition, and in a setting you will actually be able to meet more people. Maybe volunteer with the local Rotary or at a women's shelter.

It is grad school. If it is passing, does it really matter?

And chemistry departments will expect a calculus background.

I'm sorry to hear that has been your experience, though clearly I cannot "ask" your professors. These particular statistics don't tell us anything about attitudes, simply demographics, which is what I was getting at above. Incidentally, the stats for graduate study and earth/atmosphere/ocean sciences (all natural sciences, not physical sciences as defined by NSF) are actually weighted towards women. More recent numbers will come out in February, but over the last decade in a subset of schools keeping track of demographics in Earth/Ocean/Atmosphere programs (UCs, UW, MIT, Harvard, UH, etc...) female grad students are between 55 and 65% of the total. I doubt anyone will think twice about your gender in grad school.

I'm also confused by this point. And if we are going to go acronymn-happy, why add in art over, say, writing, or communication? Both are important skills in STEM fields. And STEM is in fact defined by the legislature, in the America COMPETES Act of 2007. Not that that takes away from other uses, but since congressional funding is keyed into the definition there, it won't do much good to redefine the term (anywhere besides congress that is) and expect that to suddenly make NSF money available for the arts. That is what the National Endowment for the Humanities is for--the arts funding equivalent of the NSF. Finally, according to NSF 65% of undergraduate degrees are not in a STEM field, and NSF generously defines STEM to include all of the social sciences including things like psychology and history. So that remaining 65% of undergrad students? They are in business, nursing, and (you guessed it) the arts. I'll take a guess and say that the majority of those are the arts rather than business and nursing students, since those tend to be small, competetive programs that are on the average more expensive--I'd assume demand is thus tempered by cost. So I think it is false to suggest that STEM fields receive a disproportionate share of applicants, or that the arts are somehow underrepresented. I think the more likely scenario here is that there are more people who take art degrees than one could reasonably expect funding for, and not all of them expect or want to go to grad school. For our society, how many artists per capita do you think is ideal? 1 in 100, 1:1000, 1:10,000? I don't know what is the right answer, but I'm pretty sure 2:3 is not it, which is what you'd get if you assumed that college degrees should reflect career paths.

Whether the thread is a joke or not, the questions raised are more or less reasonable for a grad student to consider, even if this particular forum might not be the best choice for airing them. If you are actually looking for advice, I'd consider reading the last 5-10 years worth of Savage Love, and then maybe writing him a question. I'm pretty sure I saw exactly these questions posed multiple times in the advice column back a few years ago when this was my local paper. It is important to determine what sorts of relationships are best for you in grad school in order to maintain a healthy (and safe) work life balance. Alternately, if you are making fun of Pinkster's thread, well done.

This thread... Keeps on going

OK, this is super nitpicky, but this line really stood out to me. I think your numbers are misleading. It seemed like an unlikely statistic since women earn about half of science and engineering degrees in the US, and the worst imbalance is in physics and computer sciences, at 18-19% women over the last decade (NSF statistics and references therein). Compare this to your value of 0.1% and it looks like your numbers are off by at least two orders of magnitude if the only pool was US degree recipients (I'm interpreting that 1.7 million number as physical science degrees based on how you wrote it--that said, there are 1.6 million total degree recipients in the US alone, so that can't be right either). I realize things are a lot worse in some other countries, but then the degree completion numbers ought to be much, much higher than 2000 women. Again from the NSF statistics (take a look in the appendices of the above link), there are more than 7000 women graduates in the physical sciences each year in US schools alone, which is about 45% of granted degrees in the physical sciences, or about 0.5% of all US degrees. Therefore I think your case is overstated, and women physical science degree recipients in general are about 5 times less rare than you've made them out to be, and hardly less common than their male peers. It is important to sell yourself to adcoms, but misleading (and in this case wrong) statistics won't help your case, and may seem disingenuous to an adcom if you are trying to use them as a selling point.

I'm unclear whether you are asking: 1) what the money goes towards in a funded degree? or 2) how money specifically awarded to you as a research grant is spent? In the first case, your research is generally not funded, just your tuition, stipend, and health insurance. The actual costs of the research are paid out of a research grant, most likely to your advisor or department. In the second case, where the research grant is to you rather than your advisor, you are legally obligated to spend all allocated funds on the research project it was dispersed for (or something related, sometimes a side project arises)--this money can't go towards personal expenses, which would be embezzlement. Unused funds have to be returned to the funding agency, but they hate that for paperwork and budget reasons, so in reality everything must be spent, on research, and there is nothing "left over."

Definitely go when you'll be there anyway, unless you think they will pay for you to return. I don't think the timing is a problem. It may work to your advantage, in that if you and a prof hit it off they can be on the lookout for your application in the near future.

On the other hand if people were more outspoken about experiences like this maybe we wouldn't live in a society where a quarter of female college students and one in thirty male college students are victims of rape or attempted rape. Not that the onus should be on any one person to take that on as a personal outreach mission because of past experiences. But advising someone to be purposefully vague or secretive about such an experience doesn't exactly convey the message that s/he isn't at fault. Hiding victimization can contribute to undeserved stigma and obscure just how widespread this problem is. I think this really comes down to personal comfort level. Yes, what you say to an adcom can get out, but with potentially bad and good consequences.

The advantage of a general biology course is that it can introduce you to and help you mentally integrate diverse topics--you want to know what you sort fo work can inform you on a given problem, and where to look for answers. I think you could do the same with sufficiently diverse upper level work, and the courses you already took for the other track probably serve the same purpose. Take a look at the requirements for a couple of representative programs you might apply to--if they require biology coursework that isn't covered by your past and current coursework, try to fill in those gaps, but otherwise I see no reason take something very similar to what you've already done. I took a "short course" version of physical chemistry different from what many other chemistry majors took because I didn't care about getting an ACS accredited degree--the grad program I applied to didn't care either. I suspect the biology track you take is similarly unimportant at at least some prospective programs. Also, I'm sure you've seen enough commentary on the site to recognize that your work and research experiences are more important than your coursework. You can learn a lot on the job that may not have been covered by classes, but applicants need to demonstrate research potential above and beyond simply doing well in classes--to be a good student is not sufficient to be a good researcher.

In answer to your question: Yes, the courses you take now (and even those that will not be completed prior to your application) matter to an adcom. They show that you are working to fill in educational gaps in a rigorous manner. Generally your classes are more important than something like a subject GRE that not all applicants will even take. Doing well on it will show you can cram and do well on tests, not that you've mastered the material or have the educational background to jump into graduate work. That said, there are plenty of ways to use a MechE degree in the life sciences that don't necessarily require a working knowledge of everything an undergrad bio major might learn about, so this will depend on the program and research topic.

I don't think you need to title it if it is submitted electronically in the "statement of purpose" section. Similarly your name and address are probably unnecessary if entered elsewhere. If you are writing large blocks of text, you should use a serif font like times new roman. Arial is sans-serif and therefore it is not as easy to distinguish words in text blocks. Size 10 is too small. You don't want ot make it hard to read, because then it won't be read! I'd use at least 11, preferably 12, font dependent.

I'm in a pretty large department, and any faculty that wants to can review and weigh in on applicant profiles. So I agree that anything you write in an application can become more widely spread than you may wish.

I'm pretty sure the 2011 solicitation had different wording than the current one, and I interpreted grad coursework as counting against you. Last year had similar wording to 2011, but this year looks like different wording that makes it clear that grad courses not in a grad program do not count towards the 1 year total. I had an acquaintance that did fall afoul of this rule, however she was in a 5th year MS program, which is probably more like what the rules were meant to prevent. Anyway, I blew it on that point. But as restated above, graduate courses taken as an undergrad are still not useful as transfer credits. Incidentally, every grad course I took as an undergrad showed up as graduate credits on my transcript, in a separate section from my <500 level credits, unlike Eigen's experience. They were mostly things like seminars and a music ensemble, so they didn't amount to much, and I don't believe they would have counted towards graduate requirements had I stayed at the same school. Anyway, this is what I meant when I said a grad course is a grad course. The above point about time off is a good one. Time away from academia is not necessarily time wasted.

I actually meant within CS. But you explain that here, and your reasoning makes sense to me. Too bad though. I thinkt he CC prof sounds like the better bet. A strong supporter that will go out of their way for you is better than someone who is flakey on getting back to you. You don't want to be waiting on their letter until the last minute! Also, the CC prof can speak to some of your outreach activities adn leadership potential, which a prof you've only had in classes can't. In this sense he is better than your first two letters. Or ask for all four, and just tell the schools which three are top priority to look at. That way if flakey lady flakes, no biggy.

If your research interests align and the potential advisor has offered to host you, s/he can most likely be counted on to speak up during the admissions process. There is no need to write something like "based on my interactions with Dr. Qwerty I think this is the perfect research program for me," but I suppose you could if you just can't help yourself.

I wrote separate fellowship apps on unrelated topics with each of two advisors I was considering. I ended up getting both, but then never followed through and applied to one of the universities because at that point I knew I was moving to another region for unrelated reasons. Is one pressuring you to work with him/her on writing a fellowship app that you've started with someone else? I don't think it should be a big deal to say something like, "I'm applying to two schools, and am basing my XYZ fellowship app off potential work at the other place." If you are really happy with either project, why not talk to current students in those labs to find out whether you think the advising style would be a good fit. If equally good, how about living situation and quality of life in either city?

Are you sure there is no way to get a computer science prof to write for you? It seems like a minor worth highlighting, in that you are doing something very different but still succeeding at it. Why should the number of courses or course number matter? I'd think a strong letter can still be found. How long ago was community college? It all sounds like good stuff for a letter to speak to, but if it was more than a few years ago I'd aim for something more recent. Option 1 is not sounding super positive just in terms of response time, if nothing else.

You are right, as of 2014 for the NSF and 2013(?) for the NDSEG, the wording and rules were changed to specifically allow this. hikaru1221, my apologies. Good catch Biscuits. Here is the link for anyone interested for NSF: http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2013/nsf13584/nsf13584.htm#elig.