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dhm0219

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Everything posted by dhm0219

  1. The broker fee is a one time fee when you sign a lease, as I understand it. A "full fee" is equal to one month's rent, and half is half a month's rent.
  2. dhm0219

    MIT

    As am I. And I keep finding the perfect place. Except that it always costs 30% more than I can afford =(
  3. Just filled out my acceptance form for the offer from MIT! Very excited to be done with this whole process and to get started in the fall!
  4. dhm0219

    MIT

    I'm coming to MIT in the fall as well, nice to meet you folks. I will be moving with my fiancee, and I got to see one Westgate apartment when I came to visit. I was not a fan, but here are my thoughts: - $1,300/month for a one bedroom. It had a very spacious living room, medium sized bedroom, but the kitchen and bathroom were essentially closets. It would be impossible to have two people in that kitchen at the same time, so that was a major negative. - I believe utilities were included, but parking was not, and we will have a car. From what I was told, a single parking space comes out to >$1,000/year. - We would ideally like to live in a small 2BR so that we can turn one BR into an office. From what I was told it is basically impossible to get a 2BR if you don't have kids. Also, you are required to put down a deposit when you list your preferences, so if you don't like the room you are assigned to, you have to lose the deposit if you choose to live elsewhere. - This was a little unclear, but it seems that you need to re-apply for your room after your first year, which means that even if you end up in a place that you love, you may have to move the following year anyway. - The rooms felt very much like dorm rooms in that they were old, had very little character, and were a bit depressing. All in all, I think we're better off looking for something off campus. It will likely be a bit more expensive, but it's important to us that we have a space that we like and that won't depress the hell out of us, having to come home to it every night. We've been using padmapper to look for places, but we were walking around Kendall the other day and noticed that there are a lot of new-ish looking large apartment buildings a few blocks from campus. Anyone know anything about these places? Are they affordable for grad students?
  5. Anyone know what the situation is with on-street neighborhood parking passes? Do they issue these in Cambridge? And what do they cost?
  6. dhm0219

    Providence, RI

    I'm not sure about relative price, compared to Seattle, but with only New York to compare to I have always thought that produce was really cheap. There are also some awesome CSAs that I don't personally subscribe to, but I have a lot of friends who have been really happy being a part of them. http://www.farmfresh.org/food/csa.php?zip=02903
  7. I'm interviewing at the last recruitment (this weekend). Hopefully they get back to us quickly. I so badly just want to know where I'm going so I can start planning my life...
  8. Yeah I mean unless sending the letter was aimed only at helping your chance of acceptance, I would still send it. If you're truly grateful that he took the time, then thanking him shouldn't be dependent on your admissions result.
  9. Of course. You should absolutely talk about your preliminary results and just show that you have a sense of what they mean, how you should interpret them, what the caveats are, and what you will try to do next. Remember that they are likely not interested in the actual result, per se, but rather your ability to understand the result and think critically and creatively about the progression of the project as a whole.
  10. Not I. The closest I've gotten to a question like was either general questions about what I would like to study, or, in some cases the PI would talk about a few open projects and ask if I would be interested in working on any of them. In my experience, though, the interviewers haven't really even expected me to know what they work on, so questions about a specific thesis project would be very out of place. Maybe it's different for Pharmacology, though?
  11. Part of it is preparation, part of it is acclimation. For preparation: Wear layers. When it gets really cold I (a guy) wear an undershirt, T shirt/sweater, sweatshirt, and winter jacket. A hat is a must during the cold winter, especially because the wind can be really bad. When it gets really bad I will wear longjohns or PJs under my jeans, and you need to have good waterproof boots. Your apartment will likely be cold during the winters and at night, because unless you live in a new apartment building, most buildings and houses in New England are old and not very well insulated. You can crank the heat all you want, but you will end up paying enormous energy bills and wasting a lot of the heat as it seeps out the leaking windows, doors, and walls. So get a bunch of sweatshirts to wear around the house, warm pajamas, and lots of heavy blankets for your bed. As for acclimation, there's not much you can do. I have live in the northeast my whole life and don't mind the cold at all, as long as I'm prepared for it. I will regularly go out in short sleeves during the fall and spring and am only really bothered by it during brutal stretches during the winter (this winter has been amazingly easy). My fiancee, on the other hand, has lived in New England with me for 7 years since moving from California, and she still absolutely hates the cold. She bundles and wraps up in blankets, but she's pretty miserable from November through March. On the bright side, though, you will never enjoy the first warm days of spring as much as you will after having endured a brutally cold winter =)
  12. Brandeis is in Waltham, not Boston. I haven't lived there, but I'm sure it's cheaper than renting in Boston or Cambridge.
  13. Don't give up hope on TJU. I just got an acceptance from a school I interviewed at three weeks ago, and I know they starting sending offers two weeks ago. A lot of schools do waves of offers, where they make offers to their top choices and people who they are fairly confident will accept first, and then as they start to hear back from those people they slowly release more acceptances. If you do end up taking the year off, focus on a few things: 1) concrete evidence of your results. This means abstracts, posters at conferences, papers if at all possible, etc 2) think about the big picture of your research as you're doing it. As you know by now, you need to be ready to field questions beyond the minute details that you deal with every day in the lab, and more focused on why you are doing what you're doing and what the next step(s) would be. 3) contact PIs at the schools you are most interested in ahead of time. This has the potential to really help your application. 4) work on your SOP. From people I have spoken to who have worked in admissions at the school where I am currently working, the SOP is one of the most important aspects of the application. Taking the GRE again probably couldn't hurt, but I actually don't think GRE scores carry as much weight as research experience and your SOP. Good luck!
  14. Do not bring a powerpoint to your grad school interviews. Even if the figures are great and super-clear, the interviewers want to hear that you're able to talk about your research and think critically about it. They don't care about your data and you're not there to educate them about your findings, they just want to see that you really understand your research and can answer questions about it.
  15. I think it would be fine to have a letter from someone who you have actually worked alongside in the lab. I used four letters for applications that allowed it, with three being from PIs that I worked for and one being from a PhD student that I worked with in one of the labs (who has since graduated and gone on to work in industry). I think two letters from professors and one from a post-doc would be fine, though, assuming they all write well for you. If you can get a meaningful letter from the prof of the course as well, I would do so and send four when you can.
  16. I (male) have been to three interviews now, and would not recommend wearing jeans. At all three the attire ran from khakis and a dress shirt (most casual) to suits and ties. Maybe 15-20% on the khaki end, 30% wearing suits, and everyone else somewhere in between (kahkis tie and blazer, slacks and dress shirt, something like that). I have no idea how to evaluate the formality of female attire, but I don't remember anyone wearing jeans.
  17. Yeah I've asked a few programs about the % of interviewees that get acceptances, and responses have varied. One school interviews 60 students for 10 spots (but will likely offer ~25-30 acceptances), one interviewed 50 people for 15 slots (a better school, so probably ~30 offers), and one school told me that they were bringing in 80 interviewees and would make offers to "most" of them. It really depends on the program. All of the departments where I inquired were very upfront about it and answered directly. I'd email one of the program coordinators though, and not someone on the adcomm to ask, just as I'd be worried about making a bad impression by asking a faculty member a question like that.
  18. Is this a PharmD program, or a PhD program? Here's an outline of PhD program interview weekends from the ones I've been to or have the details on: Most likely the interview/visit will be, at the longest, from Thursday to Sunday or Saturday to Tuesday. Usually you will have a meet and greet with students and/or faculty on the first evening, then they will either take you out or back to your hotel. The second day you should expect some introductory talk about the program, the structure, the department, and details like avg time to graduation, core courses, etc. That day you will likely also interview with a few faculty, and possibly see some student research presentations and/or short faculty research talks. Then you may have a dinner with faculty and students, with optional evening activities in the area. The next day is more student-life oriented, with campus tours, local activities and outings, and possibly another student/faculty dinner. Then you would depart on day 4. Basically the idea is to get as much interaction with you and both current students as well as faculty. They will want to evaluate you and answer questions like, Is he able to talk about the research he has done? Why does he want to go to school here? If we make him an offer, will he accept? Is he interested in research going on in our labs? Does he seem serious about completing a rigorous PhD program? They also, however, want to give you the opportunity to get any questions that you may have about the program answered by both faculty and current students. To do so they will try to schedule some less structured and informal events like cocktail hours, dinners, lunches, and outings. My recommendation would be to do plenty of research beforehand on the people you will be interviewing with. You should be familiar with their research so that it's not completely foreign to you and so that you can ask intelligent questions about it. Also try to get a sense if there are PIs that you could see yourself working closely with for 4+ years, and try to get a sense of whether they have funding and will be taking on new students around the time you will be joining a lab. This will be a little hard to do, since that date is ~2 years away, but it doesn't hurt to ask and gauge their response. In doing so you are also showing that you are interested enough that you are thinking about the details of actually entering their lab and doing research. Ask the students about quality of life, flexibility in the program, housing options, what the qualifying exam is like, how they chose the labs they rotated in, and anything else that you think will influence your decision. Also, bring at least one dress shirt and tie with slacks and shoes to go with it. You won't need to be dressed fancy every day, but I will be wearing a tie on all of my interview days. Good luck
  19. Okay, so I'm finished with my first interview weekend, and the experience was not quite as expected. Basically it seems at though every interview varied based on the direction that the conversation naturally took, and based on the approach of the interviewer. My first interview was with a faculty member who was on the adcom, and he essentially wanted me to talk the whole time. He asked me first to describe my progression through various labs (I have worked in three labs between undergrad and post-bac work), explaining why and how I got into the fields in which I worked, and what I was working on in each lab. Then he asked me what I was planning on doing after completing my PhD. Along the way I tailored my responses to issues and questions that I had about their program, for instance, "I've worked in a variety of fields and have not yet committed to exactly what field I want to join, which is actually part of the reason why your school is so attractive to me. I want somewhere where I have the freedom to try working in different sub-fields and flexibility to try a lot of different areas of cell bio research. I was actually wondering if you could talk a little bit about how fluid the interaction is between departments..." He didn't really grill me on my individual research projects, but he gave me a chance to ask plenty of questions about his department through the course of the conversation. My second interview it was clear the prof had done some reading on my previous work, as she was able to talk to me about the pathways I had researched previously. She was very friendly and wasn't grilling me, but was interested in the process by which one previous project had developed. She then spent the majority of the interview actually talking about her own research as I asked her questions about the pathways she was working on and the model systems the lab was using to explore them. My third interview was with my faculty host, and I was grilled pretty brutally and specifically. He asked me to describe the research I was doing, starting with my current lab and then progressing backwards, but we never actually got past the lab I work in now. He asked very specific questions, such as "are there homologous enzymes to the one you are studying in other organisms such as yeast?" "Is it known whether the mechanism of action of any structurally similar enzymes have been solved?" "What are the interacting partners involved in specificity of targeting for the enzyme?" and similarly specific questions. I really wasn't ready to answer a lot of these, and this interview went fairly poorly compared to the others.
  20. Good to know. Slacks, a blazer and tie seems like more than enough at basically every interview, then? How about for some of these really long (3-4 day) affairs? I assume people only dressed up for the day they were being interviewed? I only have one suit and one blazer so I'm not going to be able to pack for three days worth of formal-ish attire!
  21. This seems like a really useful question to ask them, as it will give them a chance to talk a bit about the department and program that they work in, and letting them ramble a bit on the topic may end up being pretty revealing about the strengths and weaknesses of the program. I feel like a need a few more open ended questions like this in my arsenal to use in situations where they ask if I have questions. Maybe questions like: "how well prepared are students to enter the workforce or find good quality post-docs at the conclusion of their studies?" or something like that? Or "Do students generally head into academics or industry, and is their support within the program for their career development?" I have plenty of questions about PIs' individual research projects and details of their findings, but those types of questions seem too specific for this kind of discussion. I feel like those more specific questions will just come up naturally during the course of discussion so I'm hoping to find some more general questions that will give the PIs a chance to talk about the school.
  22. Excellent list. Did you have questions prepared for each interviewer? And were they specific questions (about their research or their lab) or were they about the program as a whole? Any examples you care to share? One question I always find really hard to answer in a context like this is "what are your biggest weaknesses?" I obviously know that I have weaknesses and I know (and am very self-conscious about) what they are, but when I get myself into the mode where I'm trying to sell myself as awesome this question always throws me off. Anyone have any good responses to this question? I know you're suppose to talk about weaknesses that might really be strengths--I work too hard, I get too buried in my own projects, etc--but those kinds of answers just ring so insincere to me that I find it hard to spew something like that out. Any suggestions?
  23. Hey all, I thought it might be helpful to have a thread with some questions that you were asked during on site grad program interviews with profs. Interview season is just starting (for me anyway) and I think everyone will be more prepared if they see some sample questions that people have actually had to answer on their early visits. My first interview is tomorrow and I'll try to remember anything and everything that I can and post it here afterwards. This, or another, separate thread, might also be a useful place to post questions that you asked, or wish you asked, PIs and current grad students during your visit. I know I have a long list of things to inquire about, but I'm sure I am missing a lot of important stuff too.
  24. What kind of programs were these interviews for (what department?) and do you mind saying what schools? For the first one, was there any notice about how you should dress? Business casual?
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