supplicant

Oh, I got rejected by a different department at Carleton last Friday. I figure either they knew they weren't going to accept me, so they didn't bother waiting for the OGS results, or they already knew about the informal results and that's why they rejected me, in which case the other department I'm applying to also has the results and hasn't rejected me yet. Or the FGPS didn't tell the department that rejected my application that I was applying to OGS. From what I remember (and based on the rejection e-mail I got), OGS applications are ranked by the department and then forwarded to the FGPS, which makes the final decision. I was competing with students from other departments and students at the Masters' level and current students, so the OGS competition is probably not representative of the PhD admission. In any case, I'm taking the silence as a positive sign. Don't have much choice at this point.

Well, I just got my rejection for OGS. I didn't expect to get it since I picked the first research idea that came to mind and just ran with it despite how incredibly stupid it was, but it does give me hope that the department was waiting to hear about my funding before offering me admission - Carleton started adjusting internal funding according to external funding. Come to think of it, Ottawa doesn't offer internal funding to people with external funding either. I never thought not getting any money would turn out to be good news. I'm going to regret saying that so much if I don't end up getting accepted anywhere.

I just wanted to keep my head down and finish my MA. Now that I sent all my applications in, there's nothing more I can do about it, so I wanted to just finish my work and wait to see how things turned out. Then I started checking GradCafe, which I expressly did not want to do. Then I got my first response last Friday and it was a rejection. I had some fun Saturday to keep my mind off things and finished some grading on Sunday. I'd like to get back into my thesis, but this is driving me insane. Based on the rumour going around here, it looks like the admission committees for my top two choices have met, so I'm desperately hoping that I got in somewhere and that my application is just waiting on funding or the Dean of Graduate studies. I could probably just walk down the hall and ask the grad administrator how the application process is going, but I'm afraid I'll lose it if they don't have any good news for me.

I applied to legal studies. I can't remember exactly when my application status switched to "recommended for assessment," but it was either the day after the deadline or the day I received confirmation that the department had received all of my application documents and that my application would be forwarded to the admission committee. Either way, I know it was listed as "recommended for assessment" before it was forwarded to the admission committee. I got the rejection e-mail today at 4pm today, so I assume my application was switched to "Decision made: Not Eligible" at that time. I'm assuming (read: hoping) that acceptance isn't posted until the faculty of graduate and postdoctoral studies signs off on it and funding is confirmed, so that could be why your status hasn't changed. Or the departments all use "recommended for assessment" to mean something different.

"Recommended for assessment" only means that you submitted all the required documents and that your application is being considered by the department. (I know this because one of my applications went from "Recommended for assessment" to "Decision made: Not Eligible.")

You can tell your supervisor that your partner has a medical condition and that the insurance is a pressing issue. They don't need to know what your partner's condition is exactly, just that not having insurance is stressing you out. It might also be helpful to talk with the graduate program supervisor/adminstrator. If you're part of a student association or union, definitely talk to them.

Bullying is definitely something the program director needs to be told about. It's likely that your former friend is just stressed out, but even so, he needs to find a better way to cope. Really, this sort of thing is the reason why everyone should fail at least once before entering grad school. Even though I get a little stressed whenever I'm waiting to get an assignment back, it never lasts. When it comes down to it, the ability to respond to feedback is much more important than succeeding right off the bat.

Previous peaceful protests have led me to believe that no one in a position of power is ever going to care about a peaceful protest. Previous violent protests have led me to believe that people in a position of power respond to violent protests with the same brutal repression that probably caused the violent protests in the first place. So unless people in the Occupy Wall Street movement start starving themselves to death (hunger strikes tend to draw more attention), it's not going to accomplish anything.

It comes every now and then, usually when my schedule is getting tighter, but I just accept it and get back to work. The readings don't make any sense? That's fine, they're useless for my research and they probably don't make sense to anyone else anyway. My funding proposal is garbage even though I talked to the program coordinator and went to a workshop to figure out what I should be doing? Now I at least have some concrete feedback to work from and I also got some really good ideas I hadn't thought of yet out of it as well. Getting my adviser (or anyone really) to reply to my e-mails is an ordeal of biblical proportion? Screw it, I just go by their offices until I see the door's open and ask them about it in person. I think it helps that I was hit with a really embarrassing failure in my last semester of undergrad, right after I was accepted in my MA program. It reoriented me towards a field of research I'm much more excited about and helped me put things in perspective.

My program has the same courses for PhD and MA students and it doesn't really change anything. The professors are aware of who's in what program and the PhD students I share classes with haven't started talking about theories and concepts that are incomprehensible to me, although this may be field dependent. I think PhD students have to write a longer paper for one of my courses, but that's it.

I decide how much work I want to do for the day, show up in the morning, get it done and go back home. It's been working reasonably well for about a week now. I really want to avoid working against deadlines (again).

Depending on where you go, choosing between sociology and anthropology might not matter. I don't know how widespread it is, but the institutions where I obtained my BSocSc in sociology and where I'll be doing my MA both have sociology and anthropology in the same department. I never took a course in anthropology, but the two programs shared a qualitative research course, so one of my references was an anthropologist, and my MA program allows sociology students to take anthropology courses.

I'm staying local, so I'll be dropping by my university this afternoon to get my student card/HR registration/account settled before the rush. Then I need to rewrite one of the papers I'll be using for my research proposal. Then I need to write my actual research proposal. It'd be mildly inconvenient for me if September got here faster. On the plus side, this is going to have to be the last time I procrastinate.

1) Quantitative and qualitative research courses were both mandatory in the honours degree I completed when I was an undergraduate, but I think the department offered other sociology degrees that didn't require the quantitative research course. I also had some professors who were focused on quantitative methods, but I think most of them were focused on qualitative. The university I'll be attending for my MA offers a doctoral program with a specialization in quantitative methods, but it's purely optional. For the most part, it depends entirely on the kind of research you want to do. 2) From what I've been told by professors, the government of Ontario gives a lot more money to universities for graduate students than it does for undergraduates, so funding is a lot easier to get and retain for graduates than it is for undergraduates. However, as my future GSA reminded me, there are about 3,000 Ontario Graduate Student (OGS) scholarships for 57,000 graduate students across the province. I'll be getting about $21,000 over two years for my MA, enough to cover books, tuition and miscellaneous expenses, but it wouldn't cover living expenses if I had any. The other university I applied to offered about $30,000 over two years, which might be enough to cover living expenses if you got a couple of roommates. As a general rule, I think external funding from the provincial or federal governments replaces internal scholarships from the university, but you'd still get a TA stipend and something like $1,000 worth of internal funding per semester regardless depending on the university. External funding also tends to be much, much higher than internal funding. In sociology, funding can come from OGS, which applies to everything, or the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). You can apply to both, but I believe you can only accept one of them if you're offered both. I don't know how they apply to international students, but I do know that some universities process OGS and SSHRC applications themselves and have their own internal deadlines. Also, they both tend to prioritize Canadian issues when allocating funding. In Ontario, that would probably be multiculturalism or issues related to the federal government. 3) No idea. Canada has an aging population, so I would expect the Baby Boomers to start retiring soon and I believe that the overall trend for universities is to increase tuition fees and class sizes rather than cutting positions and from what I've seen, all the departments get hit as hard. The provincial and federal governments will also be getting a lot of retirements over the next few years. They both have a relatively strong demand for social scientists and I believe the federal government will be replacing much of its work force with professionals.

- If you can attend a campus visit, go even if it means skipping a few classes. Even if you're only applying to two universities because you're stuck somewhere geographically and you only expect to get accepted at one, having information will be helpful if you do need to choose. - Make sure you know exactly where your documents have to be mailed, right down to the person in charge and the office number. If you can hand anything over in person or mail it yourself, do it. - Getting transcripts mailed in from out of province or state will be a pain. Get started on it early and follow up on the status of your application in case something goes wrong. - If possible, request letters of reference during the Fall semester. That way, you can combine your thank you note with a Christmas letter. - When requesting a letter of reference, prepare a package in a folder. Include all the forms needed with your part already filled out, your statement of interest, CV, transcript, research proposal and a writing sample. Your writing sample should showcase your ability to work with theories and your research potential. If necessary, included one theoretical paper and one research paper.