Jump to content

hyperjulie

Members
  • Posts

    24
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Everything posted by hyperjulie

  1. That does sound like a really nice gesture. It might also be worthwhile to check if your university has any excellence awards for which this person could plausibly be nominated with respect to your interactions. The university I am currently at has awards for excellence in service, for example, and they solicit nominations each year.
  2. @fencergirl - I don't know if this is how it works for everyone, but in my experience part of the reason why you have an advisor is because you can bring ideas that aren't maybe 100% but are in the right ballpark, and they can use their many years of expertise to guide you. Some advisors are really harsh and difficult to please, so YMMV, but if you work with a reasonable person, even if they don't like your idea as is, they may help you to shift it in a good direction. Even as a fourth year, I went to my most recent advisor meeting with an idea for my dissertation. He liked it, and made a suggestion to improve it, and now it's something we're both super excited about.
  3. Eigen - I don't always find this distinction particularly clear in my field (cognitive psychology) because it is often the case that awkward writing and jargon obscure concepts that would otherwise be possible to grasp. Sometimes, I'm not sure if I'm missing something because I lack conceptual background or because the author has made that conceptual background really opaque when it could have been conveyed clearly. Now that I have a lot more experience, such that I am familiar with the concepts that these authors try to describe, it is a lot easier for me to pick out what they mean and recognize that it has been conveyed poorly. When I started though, I found I just didn't understand the majority of the papers I read and I had similarly assumed it was because I was not getting it rather than that the articles were poorly written. I have mixed experience with native versus non-native speakers. I think what it comes down to is that you have good and bad writers, and the good writers writing in their native language are probably better than the good writers writing in a different language. But the good writers writing in another language are generally better than the poor writers in their native language. My mentor is a non-native speaker and a good writer, but although he has been speaking and writing in English longer than I've been alive, I can still write somewhat more clearly than he can. Ultimately I've seen a lot of poorly written articles by native and non-native speakers, and I've seen a lot of well-written articles by both, too.
  4. To add to what danieleWrites said, my university makes a distinction between auditing and sitting in. That's not to say that it's the same where you are, but here people auditing the course pay a fee, but you can ask to unofficially sit in for free (not sure if this is a unversity sanctioned practice). Now of course, it is up to the instructor whether they are cool with you sitting in on his or her class, so you'd have to ask.
  5. My graduate program has a neuroscience-related doctoral program, and in my experience from that, other faculty in the department are usually not blind to these kinds of scenarios. We had a similar but not quite the same scenario where a tenure track professor in the department had managed to recruit a number of graduate students, but over the course of several years she failed to produce any publications, and the record length of any graduate student staying in her lab was 2 semesters. In her case, she was pretty verbally abusive, and she lost three of four graduate students within two semesters if their coming to the department. The last one was forced to find another lab after two semesters because she was not considered for tenure and left the department. In this case, other professors were really understanding and every single one of the graduate students in her lab was successfully absorbed into another lab. If the situation in your lab is really that problematic and the professor that unproductive, it's better to have to start over now than years down the line. If you really don't foresee the problem getting any better, the longer you wait, the more it will throw you off if and when you do decide (or need) to switch.
  6. I JUST put my offer acceptance in the mail about an hour ago. I cut it a little close but not too close. I still haven't heard from one school but I don't really feel like I want to go there now after having a few months after putting in my application to think about it. I felt right at home at one of the programs and it's a pretty good match for my research, so I decided to go ahead and roll with it. It does feel so much better once you send in your decision. Now I just have to make it through the rest of senior year and the summer without going too crazy.
  7. I'll tell you I almost made a huge mistake, as I considered turning down an interview to a graduate school that I thought I wasn't really so interested in after all. Then, I visited and I absolutely LOVED it. I couldn't have anticipated how well I got along with the current grads and my potential advisor. There's something to be said about the feeling you get when you visit somewhere. It can really have an impact and you don't want to be stuck with people who make you unhappy for 5 years.
  8. I suppose this won't really affect my decision much, especially since this is only hypothetical, but say that I am accepted to two programs, one which is much higher ranked than the other. However, the smaller one is also very strong in the niche area of research that I am into, and the professors are highly published including in well-regarded journals, although the program itself isn't really on the radar. Aside from the better research match than some other programs, this program is really excited to have me in particular. The smaller program is also in a much better location at which my stipend will go a long way and I will also have much smaller travel and moving expenses. Assuming I have funding at both, and the comparative amounts are not an issue, is it foolish to choose the lesser ranked program? This is really how I am leaning at this moment (in the hypothetical of course - I may ONLY be accepted into this one program). The location is much better, and the professors at the program have secured some pretty significant projects in the field and have many publications. Also, their graduates have really decent placements in teaching positions (tenure track and otherwise) or post-docs. That being said, the other programs are somewhat bigger names in their disciplines, but for some reason I'm just not feeling them as much... Any advice or reactions?
  9. I am pretty curious how things will be in graduate school as far as wearing my piercings will go. I have an interview and a scheduled visit, and I think for those I will take my eyebrow piercing out (which I can go a couple days without wearing at this point since I've had it so long) and wear a discrete clear retainer in my conch piercing as opposed to the large ring. I don't think that I should be judged on these things, but I usually err on the side of caution so that I don't put forth a bad first impression. As for new piercings or ink, I'm not really thinking that right now. I definitely can't think of anything I like enough to commit to as a tat, and I've had enough trouble with my conch piercing that I'm not interested in any more cartilage piercings, at least for a while. Aside from that, I don't really have a good nose for a nose ring and don't want to risk any of the dental problems that can happen because of lip or labret piercings (which I happen to really like, unfortunately).
  10. If you check the results survey, it seems like in previous years people did not get notified of acceptances into the physics program at UConn until late February. So I definitely wouldn't be freaking out.
  11. I had the same problem with UConn. For a few weeks, they just told met that they were still matching materials, but finally once all of the materials were definitely there and the status still said incomplete, I called and they switched it over for me. It's very likely that if they've already reviewed applications, it wasn't a problem since all of the materials were clearly there. The lady who I spoke to when I fixed my application status a couple weeks after the deadline said not to worry about it.
  12. I suppose I am probably too preoccupied with this, and my boyfriend teases me for spending too much time on this and similar websites, as well as lending way too much credence to what I read here. I am so troubled by this whole thing that I have started to do homework days ahead of time and am going to the gym regularly for the first time in my life because it gives me something to do other than sit at my computer periodically checking my email and status sites.
  13. Haha. A week or so ago I answered a call from an unknown number, hoping that it might be one of my grad schools. An older, confused sounding lady on the other end asked if she could speak to Inspector Campbell. Not what I was hoping for, but at least I got a chuckle out of it. (My boyfriend's response to this story: "Did you patch her through?")
  14. I was using online databases through my school's library like PsycINFO. I did look on her website which had some titles, but it didn't occur to me to click on the CV. Thanks for the advice everyone!
  15. Hello, So I have been contacted by a program that has informed me that I will be contacted by a certain POI soon. I'm not sure if this necessarily means an interview, but in case I've been looking more deeply into her research, trying to get a further understanding of where she's at. While I have a general understanding of the type of research she is doing, unfortunately since I am not yet well-versed in this specific niche of study, other than the broader umbrella terms (semantics, morphemes, phonemes, orthography, etc.), I really don't speak the lingo and I honestly don't understand a lot of what is going on in her research articles. This is partially a problem because most of what she has written is not available in full-text, so I can't go through the methods section to try to get a firmer grasp of the research techniques that she is using. I'm mostly looking at abstracts that are packed with jargon that I have never encountered before in the psychological studies I have read. My question is, is it likely that she will grill me on or expect me to know the specifics of her research? Also, is it acceptable to admit that you don't fully understand her research if you follow up with specific questions that will help clarify? I hope that she will be coming from an understanding that I am not an expert in the field but I am hoping to become one, but I really don't know. Thanks!
  16. I'm a straddler myself, though I didn't know what that meant when I clicked on the thread. Not a lot of college educated people in my family, and almost nobody with anything beyond a bachelor's. My mom works in a factory making labels for electronics and my dad works in a grocery store, so it doesn't get much more blue collar than that. It used to make me very frustrated and set back, but Behavioral and I are really on the same page, I think. There are definitely some things that are different about me than my counterparts, but I don't think most of them put me at a disadvantage. Sure, I lack some of the cultural capital that others do, and I definitely won't be getting any jobs or positions through connections, but I'm still smart and savvy enough to figure out a lot of stuff on my own. I just have to work a little harder at it. I started off my college career thinking in an in-group/out-group frame of mine, but I found the less I let myself feel bitter about it, and the more I allowed myself to just be happy for friends who had the good fortune of having such awesome life experiences, the less it has been a problem for me. It might not be fair but there's no changing it, so might as well have a positive attitude about it.
  17. Probably apply for residence hall director positions, or whatever other work I can find, and wait it out. Not great prospects with an undergraduate degree in psychology.
  18. I had problems with two schools in this regard. Supposely, both were inundated with applications, but the online status check for my earliest deadline school didn't reflect all of my materials for weeks following the deadline. The people in the admissions office just kept telling me not to worry and that they were just backlogged on matching up application materials, but I am obviously concerned that it will affect my admissions decision. The second school is a similar story, though now it finally says all of my materials are in, but that the application is incomplete. I called and same story - they're backlogged and getting around to it. I wonder if this is why they have us put our GRE scores and upload unofficial copies of our transcripts as part of the application - so that they can still process our applications even when our materials are not properly matched up in time. I certainly hope that is the case because I definitely don't want to get rejected for an incomplete application just because somebody can't sort the mail fast enough. I acknowledge that I cut it a bit close with some of my transcripts but the admissions offices definitely had them all before the deadline.
  19. Nothing all that crazy here, other than having a technical difficulty that nobody in the entire admissions department could explain. After selecting my program and level, I needed to select a campus from another drop down menu, but when I clicked on it there was nothing there other than "please select." It wouldn't let me submit the application without selecting something there. I ended up having to apply for a different program and have someone in admissions go in and change the department to the correct one afterward. They sent me through three people and the third one who ended up helping me couldn't recreate or explain the problem I was having. Annoying.
  20. Gellert and Pitangus: Thanks! That does make me feel a lot better.
  21. Oh, here are some of my fears: "What, this girl has four undergraduate transcripts and three different majors? Let's take someone more focused. No point in accepting someone who is just going to transfer." "No psychology subject GRE? Either she forgot to take them or she was too lazy to study for them. Either way, NEXT." "Undergraduate degree from Cortland? Where the hell is that?" "What is up with this personal statement? How boring is this girl?" "Psh, only 2-3 semesters of undergraduate research, and no internships? Who does she think she's kidding?" "She's 22 and just getting her bachelor's? Let's take someone more mature and experienced. GRE and GPA aren't everything. The rest just isn't good enough."
  22. Me too. I don't even know whether or not to expect invites for my programs.
  23. Hello, I saw a couple of questions in this regard, so I was curious. Do we need to file a FAFSA for graduate school, or is this only if the school specifically requires it? Secondly, I'm applying for a fellowship that I know is partially based on need. Although it does not require that you fill out your parental income, should I do so if my mom makes very little (and is my only legally recognized parent, although I really have two), or should I just include my own small summer and semesterly income? Thanks!
×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website. See our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use