ktel

I would be surprised if the fact that you are married was held against you. I am currently in graduate studies at U of T, albeit in a very different field, however I know many individuals in my department and in other departments who are married and have children. In fact, from my observations, the university has a very active family care office that plans excellent events. While you may or may not have children, this is indicative of the university's overall tolerance towards families and those in relationships. Besides, married individuals are much more likely to finish grad school.

I would discuss it with your POI and leave it at that. No need to mention it anywhere else, although some schools ask if you have applied for external funding.

Replace "psychologists" with "engineers" and that's pretty much exactly how I feel about my program.

I believe you're treated the same as a citizen

I suppose it depends on your department and how everything works. My department is off campus, rather far from the downtown campus, and it takes me about an hour to get there or home. Because I do computational work, I can easily do my work from home, but choose not to for appearances and to get the sort of interaction I mentioned. Because my department is off campus we are all forced together, except for those who choose to not spend very much time there. Because there is really nowhere else to go, you always find people in the cafeteria and all the professors are quite readily accessible. I don't know that this would be the case if the department was on campus.

Absolutely. I distinctly remember a presentation on how to become an engineering professional, suggesting you obtain a mentor who is NOT in charge of your work in any way. This applies in the work place, but can apply to grad school as well.

^ Is everyone in your program new? I've noticed that my research group in particular seems to be not very social. Not to say they aren't friendly or helpful, but they have their own lives and their own friends and I respect that. I will develop that too, and quite frankly don't feel the need to have close friends within my group, although it would be nice.

I was never one to really have questions about my course work, so I never really spoke to many of my professors early on in my undergrad. Many of my professors happened to know who I was or at least recognize me due to me being a (blonde) girl in engineering, but that was about it. What allowed me to forge close relationships with professors in my final year of undergrad was via the first method surefire suggested. I took 2 such courses, one a design project, one a research project, that involved working with two different professors quite closely. I forged very close relationships with them.

There are negative aspects to consider in every career. Even larger companies have their internal drama and issues, because subcultures develop. I was speaking with a professor yesterday and he was talking about some of the stressful aspects of his job (back when he was in full swing, he's semi-retired now) and I simply said "That sounds stressful". And he proceeded to tell me that every job is stressful in some way. The example he used was our janitors, who both work multiple jobs to make ends meet. Nothing is perfect.

I too struggled with the social-skills aspect of grad school, even though in "normal" life I don't usually have problems with that sort of thing. So I dove in with both feet. I found I have been receiving the most helpful advice and information through very informal conversations, either on the bus, before/after class with fellow students or in the cafeteria eating lunch beside somebody. The other day I went to see on of my professors for help with a sample problem and ended up in his office for an hour receiving interesting information about being/becoming a professor and advice on the global financial crisis of all things. These informal conversations can easily morph into anything of your choosing, including inquiring about obtaining research projects. Even a professor who you might not want to work with will have useful information for you.

When I experienced my last break up after a decently long term relationship (given my age at the time), I not only threw myself into my studies, I threw myself into sports, social activities and clubs. It's amazing how much more time you have when you don't have a significant other. I then met my current boyfriend, who I am now in a long term relationship with, through one of the clubs I joined. Being busy helped a lot, but I still had a really hard time. Two months after the break up I could be seen sobbing in the living room of a Halloween party while my male friends could only say "Boys are jerks" over and over and insisted people couldn't see me crying. In the end it just takes time.

I don't know if SSHRC is the same as NSERC, but I basically wrote a random research proposal that had nothing to do with what I thought I might want to do in grad school. All they wanted to see is that you could write a research proposal. Now that I have a project I just had to send them a new proposal so they could ensure it wasn't clinical work or anything else that isn't funded by them.

You really really need to just relax. I had a very similar thing happen. I was applying to NSERC, which provides Master's scholarships for engineering, and was a little crunched to find letter writers. I found two who I was about to do a lot of work for, but I hadn't done much work yet. As a result one of the letters (the only one I saw) was really short and only said general things (but good things). Guess what, I got the scholarship, which is pretty competitive. Once again, relax

Depends on the program you're going into. For a research-based program, your ability to do research. If it was course-based you might want them to talk more about course work. In general your ability to succeed should be stressed.

My letter writers always asked for reminder e-mails, I don't think it's rude. They haven't submitted them yet, so you should remind them to, simple as that. I would literally just say "Just a reminder that application X is due on Y"

Yeah I turn powerpoints into pdfs so there are no issues with software or anything like that. There are Windows, Mac and Linux computers here so it's easier to just convert it to pdf. I use powerpoint to make presentations.

Is your boss mean and vindictive? If not, you are being too paranoid. Why would she write you a bad letter?

Do you have access to any letters written for you before? I often used those as a template, so I could see what other people wrote about me and try to phrase things similarly.

That's a very interesting idea, could definitely motivate a lot of people by making it more like a game. To add to the thread, I've been a varsity athlete for my undergrad career, and am continuing to play during my Master's. I now have 25 other girls that I can work out with, which is nice to have and it motivates me because if I tell them I'll be doing sprint training at a certain time, I have to show up. It can be difficult to schedule in an hour or so every day, but I'm trying. I'm taking a break right now because I almost pulled my quad after some fitness testing last week, but I hope I can get back into it again next week. What is mostly motivating me is I'm starting to break into a higher level of the sport, and it's being introduced in the 2016 Olympics.

I think your decision to seek a second master's in the same field will be more difficult to explain than the gap years. The way you've described it here is that you don't think you're good enough to get into a PhD program and want to get a Master's instead. That's not a very compelling argument to give an adcomm. I'm afraid I don't have any advice to make that sound better, other than to suggest that you do indeed try to apply to PhD programs.

I would definitely mention it, because adcomms will wonder why it took you so long. Some people get a PhD in that time, so they will want to know that you took that long because you were doing excellent research, not because you failed classes or something. On a somewhat related note, there's an interesting article (http://chronicle.com/article/The-Time-to-Degree-Conundrum/129360/) that discusses some of the benefits of taking longer to complete your degree.

I think I contacted professors in November and got timely responses from all of them. They are usually not travelling, past the busy beginning part of the term, past midterms, and pre-finals. Otherwise you could contact at a similar time in the Winter semester (around March). Summer can be busy for a lot of profs as they are travelling to a lot of conferences and some just tend to relax otherwise.

Even if you do visit it can be difficult to assess what the day-to-day functioning of a department will be like. My visits came in the form of open houses that I was invited to and it was all very structured and very much set up to make the department look as good as possible. Not to mention that the process can be quite overwhelming (for example, I was visiting 6 professors in one day) and it can be difficult to be very thorough.

Similar questions have been asked on this forum, and the advice is typically the same. Try to word your reason for switching as an academic reason rather than a personal one. While most reasonable people should understand personal reasons, it could also make you look unprofessional and like you're unwilling to sacrifice a little for your profession.

You should talk to your adviser now. You should also talk to the professor that is teaching the course. Since you are doing well in all your other subjects, they will likely want to do everything possible to help you pass so that you don't get kicked out. Hiding it until you fail is not going to help.