TakeruK

Hi! It looks like you did some kind of co-op work program during your undergrad! I did it too, and I found it to be a huge help and boost in building up a strong history of research experience. When it comes to the top grad programs, it's a crapshoot for everyone, even the best applicants. There are a lot of other factors, such as who has funding, or what focus the program wants to move towards. So, in my opinion, there comes a level where you have "saturated" your chances of getting in, and improving your profile beyond that will not make any difference. I think you have reached that level. You have the best chance possible of getting into these programs (as an international student) and there is pretty much nothing else you can do to improve your chances. My advice is to apply to a lot of private US schools because they are more likely to accept international students. Your list is a good mix right now. My other advice for Canadians is to apply to a Canadian "backup" school (if you want a backup school at all) and that, usually, it's not worth it to apply to any US school that is worse than the best Canadian school (but some people might have other reasons to choose a US school). Note that in many fields, the University of California schools are very very popular amongst international students so they are going to be more competitive. Finally, if you want a suggested tweak, I would say to "tone it down" a little on your plan for your Personal Statement / SOP. Statements like " 'I was born to do basic science research' - this PhD isn't my plan B" reads as very arrogant to me. And statements like "My ultimate goal would be to land a faculty position in a top department" sound a little naive. With your application profile, these two statements together give off a weird vibe that's hard to explain, but it sounds almost as if you are saying "if you don't accept me, you'll regret it" and that's probably not a good tone to convey. Certainly you should "sell yourself" in your SOP but there's such a thing as going too far and you are better off showing than telling (i.e. your experience and publication record will speak for itself). But maybe your field is different than the norms in mine! I'd consult your advisors and have them read over your SOP.

Like random_grad, I also scored higher on the real test than I did in the PowerPrep and I thought the PowerPrep was the most like the real test for me. But I took the "old" GRE (not the Revised GRE).

Hi there, In Canada, we normally do not get tuition waivers. Instead, we usually get paid some amount of money and then pay tuition out of that. For example, at my MSc program, the minimum stipend for PhD students is $25.5k but tuition is $7k so the take-home pay was $18.5k. Usually if a minimum funding amount is quoted, it is prior to paying tuition, unless otherwise stated. For international students, you normally get a tuition waiver (or an increased stipend) so that your take-home pay is the same as the Canadians. So you should definitely check and ask how much you would be expected to pay for tuition. If you need more help understanding your offer, feel free to send me the details in a PM and I can help you make sense of it and/or help you form useful questions to ask to your program.

There's a time limit for post edits (the feature is meant for fixing typos etc.). If you want to update some of your figures, maybe it would be best to just post them in a new post below.

I can't speak for your course's director but in my experience, I find that when instructors set goals like "write X with the goal of publication" they don't actually mean that you would actually be ready to submit the final product directly to a journal for publication. In particular, very few journals will be accepting review articles from starting graduate students (assuming you are one, since you are in coursework phase). Usually I hear this about final projects, and what professors usually mean is that the topic will be something novel and worthy of publication, if you choose to pursue and continue working on the project after the course is over. I think the course with the "publication quality" final review article would be helpful for you to write your own thesis when the time comes. Make sure you pick a topic where you can basically almost copy and paste that assignment into your dissertation so that you don't duplicate effort. If you are still worried about the course requirements, maybe it would be a good idea to clarify expectations with the instructor. I think you are savvy enough to know how to ask this without sounding like you just want to do the minimum work But even if you have to publish your review to get an "A", maybe a B is good enough? Overall, I think a course with this kind of end project is something that will help you. It will earn you points with your PI, it will directly help you complete a chunk of your thesis (and let's be honest, the background chapters are the most boring and motivation draining parts to write), and it will help you develop good writing skills that is useful inside and outside of academia (the published article is just the medium, communication is important everywhere!). I would just make sure you and the instructor are on the same page with the requirements (maybe wait until the class begins though). Maybe you can ask if you can write a review article in the style of a publication in something like Scientific American to maximize the course usefulness to you.

From your writing here, in my opinion**, you should be free of any obligation to Professor B because your term appointment with Professor B expired last fall and thus all obligations to Professor B should have ended with that appointment. To me, the only reasonable end to this situation is for the school and Professor B to consider the $500 already paid to be "overpayment" and you would just pay that money back (this is common in many GRA instances and even other types of jobs). If your GRA is a term appointment ending last Fall, then Prof B should have assigned you any work they wished to have completed last fall. Since they did not, you should not feel obligated to do any work now, this summer, over 6 months later. However, since they did "overpay" you, they are entitled to get their overpayment back. That said, rising_star does make a good and important point that if you are still obligated to do the work (i.e. if the GRA was an annual appointment expiring at the end of the academic year) then it is your duty to be on campus and available when Professor B asks for it. You cannot expect your boss/employer to be flexible around your schedule! I mean, it might work out for everyone this way, but the onus is on you to make it work. Luckily, it does sound like you should be free of obligations to Professor B because your term appointment ended last Fall (but we did not know this prior to your last post). In any case, I still think you have two options: 1. Do the work on campus that Professor B asked for and keep the money. 2. Talk to Professor B and any other administrative people necessary to say that your term ended last Fall and you are no longer available to do the work and you will pay back all overpaid wages. I don't think you are in a position to be able to do the work and make Professor B be flexible on how you do it. You either do it the way Professor B wants it or appeal to the expiration of your term contract to cancel your prior agreement. (**Note/Disclaimer: This advice is based on my interpretation of the information provided here and based on my experience with how these RA contracts go. You should certainly seek advice from your own institute to ensure that all institutional and department policies are met!)

I don't think I said "interacting" (I did a CTRL-F just to make sure!). Maybe "independent" ? You did already say something similar in your response, so I think you understand, but I would define "independent" variables as two randomly distributed variables where the value of one quantity (e.g. GRE score) is not correlated with the value of another (e.g. GPA). When variables/quantities do depend on each other, sometimes people call it "having covariance". There are multiple ways for variables to have "covariance", for example, as we both said, "good" students will likely have strong GRE and GPA scores. One qualitative way you can test for independence is to make a scatter plot of the two variables. For example, plot GPA on the x-axis and GRE score on the y-axis. If you see something that is like a horizontal line, a vertical line, or the cloud forms an ellipse, then there is little or no correlation. But if you see the points clumping into an ellipse (or line) that is angled, then there is some correlation. For example, you might expect to see that your points will lie on an ellipse with a slope going up from left to right. This indicates that students with higher GPAs will generally score higher on the GRE. The quantitative way to measure this is to compute the Covariance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covariance. If we denote COV(X,Y) to be the covariance of X and Y and VAR(X) to be the variance of X (where VAR(X) = COV(X,X)), then you can compute the correlation coefficient (lots of other names for this) as: correlation between X and Y = COV(X,Y) / SQRT (VAR(X)*VAR(Y) so if X = GPA and Y = GRE, you can compute how correlated your GPA and GRE quantities are. Numbers near 0 mean no correlation, +1 means absolute positive correlation (higher X -> higher Y) and -1 means absolute negative correlation (higher X -> lower Y). Note: this really only tests linear correlation between the two variables, and no linear correlation does not necessarily mean independence. However, we often assume our quantities are normally distributed, and in this assumption, no linear correlation does imply independence. Of course, if the R-squared stat you use does not require your quantities to be independent, then this doesn't matter! Finally, to compute error bars on the bins, one potential method is Poisson statistics, or "counting error bars". Poisson statistics are a good choice when your quantities are discrete (in your case, we always have an integer number of people with a certain score, we can't have 12.5 people scoring a 167!). If you assume that the distribution of # of people per bin is Poisson (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisson_distribution)then you have an easy trick: since the standard deviation of a Poisson-distributed value with mean of L is SQRT(L), you can then approximate it as a normal distribution so that the 68% confidence interval is the standard deviation (and 95% confidence interval is 2 times the standard deviation etc.) So, if you have a bin where you measure that 80 out of 100 people got accepted, you might report that the acceptance fraction is: 80 / 100 +/- SQRT (80) / 100 percent or, if you plug it into a calculator, it is: 80% +/- 9% (where the error bar represents the 68% confidence region; so it would be 80% +/- 18% for the 95% confidence region) Of course, this fails (because the approximation fails) when the numbers are small. Consider a case where you have 1 out of 5 acceptances, then your fraction would be: 20% +/- 20% (for 68% confidence region) or 20% +/- 40% (for 95% confidence region) and now the +/- 40% is rubbish because this implies you can have a negative acceptance fraction! Just something to be aware of when making this approximation (see the Wikipedia article or a textbook for more details).

I think this is a very thorough and interesting analysis. I am guessing you posted it here for feedback, but if you did not want feedback, then feel free to ignore this post 1. Although you do make a good argument for the non-arbitrary ness of the tiers, I don't feel confident in your splitting the Total GRE score into 4 tiers. I certainly agree that there is something going on at total score = 325, but the other tiers seem to be within statistical noise. That is, if you do something simple, such as apply Poisson uncertainties to each of your bins, you'll see that the difference in the "329 or higher" vs. the "330 or higher" bins are within this noise. The cutoffs in the Verbal score distribution pass this test though. I think your charts are more meaningful if you do the following: a ) Compute error bars on the height of your bins b ) Show a quantitative motivation to split the scores into these tiers. There are lots of statistical methods that compare the validity of two (or more) models. Compare a two-tier model vs. a three-tier vs. a four-tier model and show that your choice is statistically validated. You must also use the error bars computed in a) above in making this calculation. It is too easy to draw lines to "guide the eye" and point to misleading results. However, maybe I missed something you will point out for me. 2. I am also a little troubled by statements like "<variable> can explain X% of the data". But here, I confess my ignorance of your statistical methods as I don't know all of the nuances that come into the R^2 statistic. I work with Bayesian statistical methods, so I am unfamiliar with your method. I do vaguely recall that it is a measure of goodness of fit related to the chi-squared statistic, right? But in the chi-squared statistic, we must assume that all the variables are independent of each other. That is, we might require that GRE scores, GPA, and LOR quality are independent of each other in order to make the statements you made here. However, I would say that this is a bad assumption. I think there is likely a lot of correlation between GRE scores and the other aspects of an applicant's profile. That is, I believe that the high GRE scores of accepted students do not indicate that a high GRE score = good chance of acceptance, but that it is simply a side effect that the top students will generally perform well on the GRE too, because they perform well at most metrics in general. Again though, if your analysis does not require the assumption that GRE scores and other factors are independent, my apologies--please educate me! 3. Finally, I just want to note that it's interesting to see you say that the GRE Q might explain more of the score. I do agree with your assessment on why the data appears this way, due to score clumping in the GRE V. However, this is interesting since it's "common knowledge" in the STEM fields that the GRE V is what differentiates candidates (but this is probably because all STEM applicants score >90th percentile in the GRE Q so the only score with any sort of dynamic range is the GRE V).

I agree with rising_star. Since you are leaving soon and Prof B is hard to contact remotely, you must do everything you can to at least have one meeting with Professor B where you figure out what to do with the hours that you owe to Professor B. On July 8 you posted that you were still at your school for 3 more weeks but today you write that you cannot come to campus? I understand the process of moving is very time consuming (I've moved cross country twice now!) but if you are still in the same city, you really need to devote some time to making a plan to complete the work with Professor B. If you are already out of town, then I think you did make a mistake of leaving before all your obligations to the old institute are fulfilled. To me, I also think the cleanest and easiest option is to offer to Professor B to pay back the money that you were paid for work not done. Or, you fly back and complete the work that you promised to do (maybe just paying back the money is less costly though). Or, if you are lucky, perhaps there is some way for you to work those 30 (is it 30?) hours for Professor A instead, and then Professor A can pay the money back to Professor B (depending on the nature of the grant, this may or may not be possible). But 30 hours is only 4 days full time, or maybe even 2 or 3 days with very long hours. I notice that you said you offered to do other tasks for Professor B during the year but I don't think these tasks (e.g. other projects or grading papers) are usually accepted as alternative tasks to fulfill a GRA commitment. When a professor hires a GRA, they generally pay out of a budget for a specific project and thus expect the hours to go towards fulfilling said project. One exception to the above: If you think that you are in the right because while you are indeed a GRA that owes hours to Professor B, if there is a time limit on when Professor B can assign tasks, then you should maybe talk to the Graduate Office about this. In one extreme case, it is clear that it should not be your fault that Professor B paid you for work but did not ask for any specific tasks until after you graduated and separated from your institute. However, as you say you are still a student for 3 more weeks, I would think this means you are still obligated. But maybe the GRA contract with Professor B would have expired awhile ago, so maybe this is an alternative plan to pursue while you try your best to make a plan with Professor B.

I recommend comparing the two prices. If your parents' plan is a really good one, and the school's plan is really crappy, it might be worth paying the additional out-of-network costs to see doctors in your new plan. But in most cases, it would probably be best to switch to the new school plan. For most people, it's not that rare to have to switch plans every couple of years. So I'd switch to the plan for TAs while I'm eligible then go to the undergrads/students' plan. If you want to minimize the effect on you, perhaps you can find a doctor that is on both plans. Otherwise, when you switch plans, you may have to switch doctors.

sabq: It sounds like we are doing the same thing. I wouldn't say that is "spoon-feeding" at all (you mentioned that some might consider you're doing that). To me, spoon-feeding means that students are just handed the answer to the question, so that's probably where the confusion happened

physicsgre.com is a much better community for discussing the Physics GRE than TheGradCafe (which is much better for general grad school life issues). But to help you get started: There are currently five Physics GRE with full solutions available online. They are from 1986, 1992, 1996, 2001 and 2008. The first four are on this (old) website: http://grephysics.net/ans/ The 2008 exam is the most recent and also the most similar to the current Physics GRE. You will get a copy of this exam booklet when you register for the Physics GRE.

Sometimes the lab manager/professor is indeed a bad teacher but it could also be that you and the teacher just have two different styles. And since the professor is the boss and you are the "employee", you do what the boss says. For example, if I work at Subway and the boss says to layer double cheese on top of one another but I think it's better to tesselate the cheese so there's more coverage, I still do it the way the boss says because the boss is the boss! To address your lab specific example, I also worked as a lab TA (for sophomore students) for a year. I also tried to very rarely directly answer the student's question, at least the first time around. This is not because I want them to get it wrong so I can deduct points, but because I want them to figure it out for themselves. This was an electronics lab and a sample interaction might be: Student: "Hi, could you help us? Our oscilloscope display is showing wonky things?" TA: "Okay, that does look weird, could you describe to me what it should look like?" Student: "I am expecting something round and smooth but this is very sharp and jagged." TA: "Yes, so where is the signal coming from?" Student: "The function generator." TA: "Okay, what are the settings you've set on the function generator and why did you choose that?" Student: "It's set to 1.250 KHz because the lab manual suggests that. Oh, the manual said something about the sinusoidal wave setting but I didn't know what that meant so I just pressed this button here." TA: "Okay well this set of buttons here determines the type of wave being generated. Why don't you try the 4 choices and tell me what kind of wave they make. I think one of these four is the right setting!" In these lab situations, I try very hard to resist the temptation to just tell them what to do to fix it. Sometimes it's very clear that they just need to press a certain button or turn a switch, but I always try to answer their questions with leading questions so that they can figure out the answer, either by causing them to think about a point, or by teaching them how to determine an answer by experimenting with parameters (after all, this is a lab course!). This takes way longer but I think it's worth it in the end. If I told them what to press each time, they might get to the end of the lab but might not actually learn very much since they would have just been following my instructions. I would prefer to see them figure out the lab on their own and get through 75% of it than not learn anything but finish 100% of it.

Disclaimer: I am a UBC alum! If your main goal is a good PhD program in the end, I think you should go for the Masters at UBC. As you might know, the grad school system in Canada works differently than in the US. In the US, a PhD is earned through a 5-7 year PhD program after your BS. In Canada, everyone does a 2 year MSc after their BSc, and then go to a 3-5 year PhD program after their 2 year MSc. That is, the MSc in Canada is the same as the first two years of a PhD program in the US. This is why MSc programs in Canada are funded--if they were not, it would be equivalent to only funding PhD students starting from year 3 and beyond. I think the MSc program is a good path to an eventual PhD because what better way to show that you are qualified to be in grad school than to be in grad school? The downside though is that you would not be able to use the MSc time as "credit" towards a PhD unless you go to a Canadian school for a PhD. Also, you will be doing coursework as well, so it won't be as "full time" research as staying in Seattle and your pay will probably be lower. But you will be able to stay closer to academia. You will be able to meet visiting scholars from other schools, build relationships with other graduate students, postdocs, and professors that you can keep developing throughout your career. You'll also gain more academic reference letters. I definitely agree with the above posters that working at a research institute is not going to disadvantage you. I'm just pointing out that a Masters in Canada is very different than a Masters in the United States. Honestly, I think you would already have been competitive for the top PhD grad programs. But here, you have two awesome choices and both will set you up for great opportunities with PhD programs!

Oh I see! I had thought that a visa appointment in the home country might even take longer (and you would also have to disrupt your life to do so). There is an option to do a third-country visa application, where you apply for a F-1 visa at a US Consulate/Embassy in a nearby country such as Canada or Mexico. There are extra risks with this (some people say it's more strict but also then you might be stuck in a third country while waiting). Also, if Toothybear is from a country where a US visa/status is granted at the border, then you can do what some people call "Flagpoling", and just go to a US border instead of having to go all the way back to the home country. But these third alternatives are not really that viable! Hope your COS goes through fast! I think schools deferring start dates for grad students due to visa issues are not super rare. For two classes I've taken in the past, we had no TA for the first week or two because the TA encountered extra visa delays and could not be there!

To be clear, yes, I did not mean It's "RA funded or fail out", but I'd consider TA funded to still be funded. Usually I see things like "half funding" when a person is already past the end of guaranteed funding. In one case, a student was only half funded because the only reason they were still a student (7th year) was to finish a class that they needed to retake 2 times. This student was working on their thesis work half time, and taking that last course / teaching at a community college in their other half-time.

I use flight search engines like hipmunk (you can order the search by things like "price", "time" or "agony"). It allows you to search multiple airlines at once and has intuitive sliders so that you can exclude, e.g. 6am flights if you don't want that etc.

I originally said "awards" when talking about this potential outcome.

If you are already in the US, you do not need to get a visa. Visas are only for entry and nothing else. You do need to get onto the right status though, and keep in mind that status and visas are different things. (Of course, if you ever do leave the US, for a conference or something, you may need to get a visa to re-enter). It's important to keep in mind that F-1 visa and F-1 status are actually two separate things. The visa is a page attached to your passport that allows you to enter. It doesn't matter if your visa expires after you enter. Status is confirmed by your I-20 form and allows you to stay in the US for a specific purpose. You always have to have a valid I-20 while you are in the US.

You might want to know there is a law change that might prevent this in the future. For example, the current cost of insurance at my school is about $3000 per year, but we only pay $500 per year because the school pays the other $2500 as part of our benefits package. However, to add a spouse costs almost $7000 !! I, along with other students and administrators on campus, have been trying to convince them to lower this rate for a long time. We wanted them to subsidize or lower this rate for dependents so that the cost is about $3000. This year, the school has informed us that due to the Affordable Care Act, they are no longer allowed to charge a higher premium for dependents than they do for students. So, although the new rates are not announced yet, adding a spouse or child should cost the same as the unsubsidized rate (i.e. around $3000). So, we got what we wanted after all, due to the law change

I'll give you an example (with some details/numbers changed) of something that happened to another graduate student: Student has a scholarship that comes with the condition that you remain a student in order to receive the money. The scholarship is worth $30,000 per year and it is paid out in three installments: On Sept 1, you get $10,000 to cover Sept to December, on January 1, you get $10,000 to cover January through April, and on May 1 you get $10,000 for May through August. So, the student enrolls in September, gets the first $10,000, completes the full semester, gets the second $10,000 on January 1, but then halfway through this semester, on March 1, they decide they want to quit school. Since they did not complete their January-April semester, they become ineligible for the second $10,000 installment. They must then pay back the $10,000 received on January 1 because they did not fulfill the conditions of the award. Another thing that might have happened (I've seen this as a condition of other awards, but do not know about it actually happening) is the student might be required to pay back only $5,000, which is the amount of the award already paid out for March and April. So, you should check the terms and policies of your funding source.

What a surprise that regular posters at TheGradCafe are also the people that "get involved" at their schools lol

In the STEM fields, when we are funded "year to year" by our PI, it basically means that the two options each year: either we get continued funding and support or we fail. I have not yet heard of any STEM program that has "funding conditional on satisfactory progress" and that will say "You are good enough to stay but not enough to get paid". Unsatisfactory progress means failing out of the program.

Here are my thoughts. If you need to know some information from him before you start preparing your application (e.g. "Are you still working on X?") then contact them now. Otherwise, don't contact them until you have these materials ready.

As far as I know, F-2 dependents are not required to be on any standard of insurance (J-2 dependents are). However, it is a good idea to do so!! Your university insurance will cost more with a dependent on it and it might be a good value. Otherwise, a good alternative is the "Marketplace" plans, that is, the "Affordable Care Act" / Obamacare plans. Each state manages their plans separately. Expect to pay around $2000-$4000 per year for health insurance per person.