TakeruK

Again, as others on this thread have communicated, on TheGradCafe, no one "owns" the thread so no user can choose what the posters discuss or talk about. At this point, the conversation has steered quite a ways away from your original post/question and that is fine. If you do not want to participate in this thread anymore, whether because you have got what you came for, or if you feel that it is no longer helpful to you, or if you simply don't like the responses**, then the best thing to do is to stop responding to this thread and let it go in whatever other direction it is going. If you don't like TheGradCafe, then the best thing to do is to stop using your account. I'm not suggesting that you leave our forums, you're certainly welcome to stay, but I am making this suggestion since you mentioned account deletion. ** Note: When anyone posts an issue here and asks for thoughts/advice, people are going to provide information and thoughts from their perspective and they do this because they are trying to be helpful. Sometimes, their advice may not be the best for you / may not apply to you, especially if you (for understandable privacy reasons) only provided limited information, but it's your responsibility to sort through all of the perspectives given and decide what is best for you. Sometimes people will provide thoughts and advice that you don't want to hear. This is normal because we are a diverse group of people with a diverse set of experiences and worldviews. If you don't like their advice, you are free to ignore it, but in general, I think it's worth considering all points of views, even the ones you don't like. Finally, threads on TheGradCafe are here for the benefit of the community, not just the original poster. So, if you don't like the way the thread has gone or if you don't like the advice here because it doesn't apply to you, then feel free to ignore it and use your other resources to seek help. But the thread and content will stay as others might find the discussion useful to them. I reread all of the posts to make sure and I don't think anyone is accusing you, personally, of abusing the Title IX office. Also, no one accused you, personally, of any wrongdoing. Instead, people have written opinions of your current and past actions based on your original post. People have also written their opinions of your assessment of the situation. People have given you advice on what they think is the best path forward. Then, as a side conversation in this same thread, people discussed Title IX issues that have nothing to do with you (e.g. what happened at Northwestern). As I wrote above, the author of a thread does not own the content in it, and you cannot choose which opinions of you remain in the thread and which get deleted. You also cannot choose what gets discussed in this thread and what doesn't.

In the province of Quebec in Canada, there are 11 years of elementary+middle+high school, then 2 years of "CEGEP" (translates to "General and Vocational College") and when you enter CEGEP, you can choose whether or not you are in the "pre-University" path, in which CEGEP is college prep and you will do a 3 year bachelor degree after CEGEP (so the total time is also 16 years = 12 years public school + 4 years college) or you can take technical/vocational training to enter the workforce after CEGEP. (Or you can just graduate after 11 years and enter the workforce, CEGEP is not required). I think the only Grade 12 courses I took that I think would have been useful to me if I didn't go to college was English 12. I think reading the literature and discussing those ideas do lead to a better educated public. However, my other Grade 12 courses: Math, Calculus, French, Chemistry, Physics would only be useful as college prep and nothing else. (The other courses I took in Grade 12 were not technically Grade 12 level courses, just general electives like Guitar, etc.). In my school, for students who are not college-bound, the only required course to graduate is English 12, and they could fill the other 7 course slots with whatever interests them, which I think is nice. I am not sure what is better though: For non-college bound students, perhaps moving English 12 material in the 11th year of school and finishing school in 11 years, or keeping that 12th year so that all students have free access to enrichment/vocational courses such as the shop classes, music, drama, home economics, auto mechanic, etc.

These are interesting thoughts! The first bit is actually how many Canadian physics programs work in the "Maritimes provinces" of Canada (the ones east of Quebec, that kind of sticks out). These schools are smaller so the physics departments have split things up by speciality. One school is where you'd go for Astronomy, one for Medical Physics etc. After all, it's much better to have, say, 4 astro profs all in one place than 1 astro prof each in 4 places. This is for both undergraduate and graduate programs. But one danger of downsizing is restricting access. For example, not everyone can travel across the state to attend a school that offers a program in X. But if it is implemented though, I think the "slow death" or "dismantle by attrition" would not be optimal either. I wonder if you found other methods in your research? If I had to choose, I would choose some hybrid transition where the program stops taking students for 2 years (or whatever milestone is significant, such as all graduate students are post-quals) and then do a fast transition, where everyone moves to the new school within 2 years or so. Moving schools is disruptive for both students and faculty but I think the school can manage it via financial incentives (i.e. pay them a bunch of money to move) and setting up a good infrastructure for students who cannot / do not want to relocate. For example, for ~5 or so years after the move, the school can provide both temporary office space for the students who are staying and travel funds for students and faculty to meet with each other semi regularly (it would be in-state travel, so it should not cost a lot). They can also make reliable video conferencing rooms available too! As for private schools--I'm at a private school right now and it's not true that we do not rely on public funding. For example, the money that funds our research often comes from public funds (NSF, NASA, etc.). Our school recently presented the breakdown of where the money to pay for grad students come from and it's just under 50% from public funds. I know that the majority of the cost for my research comes from a NASA grant held by my supervisor (i.e. public funds) and a large chunk of my pay comes from Canadian and US government funding (not sure if the rest is coming from that same grant or private school funding). So, while I only have the stats for grad students, since most research faculty pay for grad students through grants for their own research, I would think the fraction is similar across campus as well (maybe still less than 50%, but still a significant fraction). But my private school does regularly evaluate its undergrad and PhD programs and cut/eliminate them where necessary. We're a really small school (< 300 faculty) and the administration has purposely chose to keep us small. Because of this, there are some degree programs we don't offer at all because we don't have faculty doing everything possible. And sometimes when faculty retire and new hires are doing something different, we shut down those degree programs (but we also start new programs if the new hires are doing something different!)

Addressing the Title IX issues only (I think the others who saw the original post addressed this particular case well): It does seem like different schools have different operating procedures. I did not see the original post, but if a student felt uncomfortable (even off campus) about something related to gender equality (for example, but not limited to: being targeted for their gender) due to what they feel might be caused by on campus interactions, then at my school, I would certainly suggest the Title IX office as one potential resource. Like rising_star, when I saw some of the words ("yell at") by other people, I thought Title IX may be applicable. In any case, the way my school runs is that if you think it might be Title IX related, you are encouraged to talk to the Title IX office and they will advise you. Students are reminded that the Title IX Coordinator (at least at my school) is a non-confidential resource, which means that if you report something, they will decide what action to take, if any. Our Title IX Coordinator says that, to the best of their ability, they will only take actions that the student is comfortable with, but if necessary to protect the community, they might have to do things whether or not the student wants it. But their goal is to act in the students' best interest. On the other hand, our school also have many confidential resources (through the Diversity Center, for example) where you can talk to someone more familiar with actions/pathways available and get advice without them taking any action at all. In my opinion, I never think it is a good idea to advise something against going to the Title IX office. I know I didn't see the original post, but if I ever meet anyone on my campus that said they were considering the Title IX office, even if I think their reason is unwarranted, I'm not qualified to determine that. My action would always be to let them know how to get to the Title IX office, inform them that it's a non-confidential resource, and let the Title IX office decide on the best course of action. I do this because there is always a chance that there is a lot more going on that the student did not tell me so I think it is in the best interest of the entire student community if I simply connect them to Title IX resources if they are looking for Title IX resources.

I've looked into EU and UK schools as a Canadian (not quite the same, but we would both be non-UK, non-EU applicants). And I found the same as you: In the UK, it is very very difficult to get funding for non-UK people. I have a friend from the UK who is actually ineligible for UK-based funding because he spent the last few years in Canada (doing a Masters) and in order to qualify for PhD UK funding, you had to be in the UK for the past N years (don't remember what N was exactly). And this person was a UK citizen!! Also, many UK schools say that they will only take an international student if the student can win one of their very few/prestigious international student awards. No self-funding allowed. In general, I found that EU schools are better for international students than UK schools. It seems like there were more options for finding funding and while we would still not qualify for a lot of EU fellowships, they seemed to have money for non-EU people more often. The only thing I should mention is that (at least in my field, maybe not yours), the EU schools operate more like Canadian schools, where a Masters is required for a PhD program, so it is good that you have that (while a MSc doesn't seem to count for much in the US).

But what about all of the other people that won't benefit from being forced to learn Latin and Greek at a young age (I'm assuming by "forced" you mean part of the core curriculum). I'm more familiar with STEM fields, so using Calculus as the "equivalent" example, I do think it's possible to teach more math in public schools (at the expense of other topics) so that one can master Calculus by early high school. Understanding even the first year of Calculus unlocks so much science! For example, when you learn calculus-based physics in college, you can basically throw out all of the physics you learned in high school and reduce a giant list of "fundamental equations" you had to memorize in high school physics and replace it with a few truly fundamental laws and principles plus the tools that Calculus opens up to you. But is this a good idea? It certainly would have helped me become better at physics. Out of 200 or so graduates from my high school, I'm the only one to major in physics in college. Maybe a few more found physics at the high school level too boring and if they were exposed to Calculus, they might truly love physics and we might have even got one or two additional physics major. Plus, the physics majors would be well prepared for University level physics and everything would have clicked way faster (it took me about 3 years, right after learning multivariable and vector calculus, for there to be that "eureka" moment and a lot of connections between concepts I previously thought were unrelated to suddenly link up). On the other hand, this would have been completely useless to the other 99% of students that do not want to major in Physics. We can expand the usefulness of Calculus to more than just Physics of course, so it's probably more like 90% of graduates from my high school would have not needed to learn Calculus at all. Their time would have been much better spent learning something more directly relevant to their post-high school life (for most people in my school, this does not include college). I think this kind of enrichment training/learning is valuable but it should stay out of public schools. The most common way I see young students receiving this enrichment is through private schools or tutoring. I have taught Calculus to many preteens who were either really interested or their parents were forcing them (I tried to avoid being hired to do this, but sometimes you don't know it's the case until several sessions in). The problem with this approach only is that it's not very equitable--not everyone can afford special enrichment programs for their children. So, another way this could happen is through cheaper (or free) summer camps or other after-school programs that get young students interested in these concepts and challenge them to push their horizons. I've volunteered / worked for several of these programs too, and I found it very fun!

Agreed--and I forgot to mention, but in fact, many of the languages are also BAAC and German was one of them in my school. French is really the only other language that will help a Canadian find work (it is preferred to be English-French bilingual for most government jobs). I agree that for the purposes of enrichment and creating an informed public, German and Latin would have similar priorities (in my opinion), with a tiny difference that a student might be able to use their course knowledge to have a conversation in German if he/she travels to certain parts of Canada or to Germany, while actually conversing in Latin would be much more rare.

I like your points a lot. I would say that I don't think it's a good idea to place limits at the graduate student level, only the postdoc level, because it's hard to know when you are finishing college (for some people, around age ~22) whether or not academia is the right way to go for you. And people are still developing so it's hard to know if they are right for academia too. And I agree with the others that sometimes graduate school pays about the same as what you would be doing otherwise (except that you are gaining future career benefits). I think it should be at the postdoc level, but it is reasonable for people to raise doubts about my opinion because you can argue that I might be saying this since I believe I have a strong chance of getting a postdoc. It's impossible for me to know how I would feel as a neutral third party because the reality is that none of us here are neutral parties. In general though, I do think we should restrict access to X** when the resources for X is not enough. It's better for there to be fewer people doing X and treated well than to have a lot of people doing X and being mistreated. The other alternative is to increase the amount of resources so that we can have more people doing X and have them treated well. (**In this case, "X" is something like permanent academic positions or some other non essential part of our life. I'm not sure if this same pattern would apply if X was something really important, like medical doctors, higher education, or school teachers, for example).

No, I do not know any Latin. I will concede that I cannot fully judge Latin's usefulness without having taken the course myself. But at the same time, I can still partially judge it based on my personal opinion of what a high school diploma should bestow the graduate with and what I see are desired skills in jobs past high school. For example, in my hometown, the desired languages are English and Cantonese (Mandarin is a close 3rd choice). Learning Latin is not going to help a graduate from my high school find work. Public high schools in Canada (or at least in British Columbia, my home province, since education is a provincial responsibility, not national) does not include Latin or Calculus or any of these specific skills in our core curriculum. And I think that's the right decision. Our school system has found a decent balance between "teaching general knowledge" and "offering advanced topics for motivated students" through what our system calls "Board/Authority Authorized Courses" (BAAC). BAACs allows for schools to offer specific special courses that will be allowed to count towards a high school diploma if there is both interest and expertise. Unlike the "regular" courses, the BAACs do not follow a province-wide curriculum and schools are not required to offer them. But if there is interest from students and a teacher willing to develop the course material and teach it, then the school can submit the course plan for approval/authorization. I'm sure the regulations have changed a bit since I was in high school, but I vaguely remember there being some limit on the number of BAACs you can count towards your diploma (to ensure that every student in the province has some minimum standard). At my school, some examples of BAACs are: Calculus, Psychology, Animation (computer), Business classes (e.g. we had an entrepreneurship class where the class runs the school store), advanced art classes (e.g. Photography) , Fitness, Journalism, Yearbook, Peer Mentoring, Creative Writing etc. I do think it is important for schools to do more than just meet minimum standards. But I think Calculus, Latin, and other topics mentioned above does not have to be part of a set of core courses offered by every high school. And, more broadly speaking, I do think that we should move public high school away from being simply college prep and instead, teach more basic concepts that have everyday application to students who don't go on to college, much less graduate school. I would much rather prefer to see fundamental skills like critical thinking and understanding of statistics taught as core courses rather than Calculus or Latin. But to be clear, I do want public schools to be able to get approval to teach Calculus or Latin if they wanted to, just not be required to. The downside of going all the way to just "basic general knowledge" in high school is that some students from less academic backgrounds might never be exposed to some of these "specific" skills/knowledge and thus might never find that spark or inspiration that gets them to go to college and higher learning. So I personally think the combination of "general knowledge" being the only requirement with optional "special skills" depending on approval/interest is a good balance to ensure public high schools meet the needs of the community as well as being stimulating for students with specialized interests.

Our school's grad student association offered a 2-hour workshop/tutorial on basics of Adobe Illustrator. If you're completely new, then something like this might be more helpful as an introduction before messing around with the program / googling. It was pretty easy for us to organize: 1) find a student (or some other person) willing to do this for free or a small honorarium, 2) provide snacks, 3) book a room, 4) advertise! We have a budget specifically for these types of workshops/tutorials (others in our series include python, MATLAB, Unix, calculus boot camp, etc.). The cost was about $200 for us. If you don't have the same budget though, you can skip the snacks and find a volunteer and do it for pretty much free. Maybe this is the kind of thing you can pitch to your own student organization? Or, if they don't generally do this type of thing, you can maybe organize an initial small workshop first, open signups, run it, and use that successful event as proof that this type of thing is both in demand and relevant to graduate student interests to apply for funding to do more of these workshops (either through the student association, through the school, or some other group).

(emphasis added). Yes, I do think so. Assuming in your simple example that both the BS car washer and the PhD car washer will remain car washers for life (or similar career paths that don't require either degree), I would say the person with the BS is better off because they didn't spend the time in a PhD program. I also think academia (and the nation in general, as funders of academia) is better off because we didn't train a person to receive a PhD so that they can work at a car wash. (Note: This last sentence is intended as the logical consequence of my argument applied to your chosen scenario where the cutoff is at the grad school level, i.e. limiting the number of PhDs created). I think it is a good idea to shrink the pool (but as I said above, at the postdoc level rather than grad school level) so that instead of spreading resources thinly over a large amount of people, we focus the resources on ensuring we take good care of a smaller amount of people. One tricky part, in my opinion, is where to make this divide as you don't want to make the selection too early in the pipeline. So, to modify your example to my suggestion, I would say that I think hiring a postdoc should be a bigger commitment than it is now. And that the idea is to weed out people at the postdoc application stage, so that the only people who get postdocs are the "smaller pool of people" mentioned here. That is, our community/academia should feel like the system has failed if we hired a postdoc that was then unable to be competitive for a permanent job in academia. Postdocs should be the first step of a permanent academic job, not a (potentially infinitely expanding) bridge between grad school and a permanent job.

I think this is very true. My suggestion was a way to use the existing system to force the existing system to change. By making it impossible for Universities to hire adjuncts or postdocs part-time to fill this need, it should hopefully force the Universities to consider a different model of getting the labour they need. My current school does something similar for graduate student stipends. For a little anonymity and simplicity, I'll use some made-up numbers and gloss over some details. At my program, the on-paper tuition costs $30,000/year but no one actually pays that money. It's just set to be equal to undergraduate tuition. Instead, the University simply charges "overhead" of $20,000 per student to each professor that has a graduate student. On paper, this appears as the professor/department providing $20,000 of tuition support and the graduate office supplying $10,000 of tuition support. The Graduate Office sets "suggested" minimum stipends on campus (let's say it's $28,000/year). I asked them what does "suggested" mean and the answer is that any department that does not pay their graduate students the minimum stipend will forfeit the $10,000/year of tuition support. So, departments have incentive to pay the minimum stipend of $28,000 (total cost $48,000/year) instead of trying to pay only $25,000/year but end up paying an extra $10,000 in tuition (total cost $55,000/year). In theory, even though cost of living here is high, I do believe that our school can get away with paying students less. When talking to my friends about what might drive stipend levels, we think this might be true. If we put aside the morality of paying graduate students enough to survive (or, if all schools already do this and now we're just talking about disposable income), some suggests that market forces would mean prestigious schools can get away with paying students less (since students would still want to go there) while less prestigious schools would pay more in order to be more attractive. After all, it does fit the current model that Universities adapted (get the most science output for least money spent). So I think the "incentivized minimum stipend" model that our Graduate Office enforces is a good way to avoid exploiting graduate student labour even more than it could be. I think similar programs at the postdoctoral/adjunct level could work too.

Hmm interesting. At the same time, out of the STEM fields, I hear the most complaints about the postdoc salary from my bio friends. Some of them even show that in some cases, you actually make less (or just about the same) money as a postdoc as a graduate student (since postdoc pay FICA payroll taxes while grad students do not). I just looked up the NIH minimums: http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-15-048.html. Hope that was the correct one. The minimums there are much lower than the numbers I had in mind when writing about minimums and I only see numbers for health insurance benefits, not other benefits. However, I'm not going to claim to be qualified to say what the postdoc minimum stipend should actually be. I guess the spirit of my suggestion is not simply setting a number, but changing the mindset of how our field treats the postdoc position. I feel like right now, when our field hires a postdoc, they consider them a temporary worker that will produce science but beyond that there is little investment in the postdoc. I would like to see the field change to treat the postdoc as the "entry level position" to an academic career instead of one that is still "in training" (that's what grad school should be). Postdocs should have access to the same benefits as faculty and when our field hires a postdoc, we should be investing our time and money into ensuring that postdoc will succeed in academia.

I've been thinking about this problem a lot too. In my side of STEM, this is a topic that comes up fairly often. In my opinion, the worst part of a career in academia is that you are expected to give up a lot and delay a lot of things in life (stability) in order for a chance at a permanent job. This is stressful and does turn people away from academia and as a result, we lose diversity of thought. I think the best way to address this is to purposely set up a limit somewhere so that you know if you didn't make it through that limit, you won't get a job in academia and you can move on to other interests / career paths. However, it is tricky where to place the limit because wherever you place the limit, you run the problem of someone getting cut that 1) has not yet reached their peak, or 2) the system has not yet allowed them to prove themselves. And losing these people also loses diversity of thought. If you place it too early, you lose people but if you place it too late, it has no effect. I think that graduate school admission is too early. I don't think it is possible to evaluate a senior undergrad (or a recent graduate) and know for sure that "this person will make a great academic" or "this person is not cut out for academia". At this stage, we are not anywhere being close to experts in our field! We have just begun. In addition, I agree with the other posters that academic jobs should not be the only desired outcome of a PhD and in fact, a PhD should be job training for a variety of careers. I think the long grind of postdocs, one after another, constantly moving, with no stability and maybe even no benefits, is what drives people out of academia. Personally, I am only going to do postdocs if I think there is a good chance it will lead to a permeant position (either TT or staff scientist). So, I think this is where the bottleneck/limit should exist. That is, I think (at least in my field), the problem is not that there are too many PhD graduates and not enough permanent academic positions, but that there are too many postdocs and not enough permanent jobs. I think we should drastically decrease the number of postdocs available so that you only get a postdoc if people believe that you have a good chance at a permanent job. And I think the best way to make this happen is to enforce minimum standards on postdoc salaries and benefits. If we make postdocs cost more, they will no longer be the "cheap workhorse labour" and every school will need to be a lot more picky on who they hire, and this will remove all of the PhD holders that are good enough for postdocs but not good enough for permanent jobs. Maybe this is not true for everyone, but if I am not competitive enough for a TT position and even if a TT position is my dream, I would rather have my dreams be "crushed" at rejections from all postdocs rather than go through 3-4 postdocs and finally realizing that it will never happen. In my field, I think the "eternal postdoc" is what we fear, more so than adjunct positions. But I think for fields where there are a lot more adjuncts, the same principle could apply. That is, the University tends to treat postdocs and adjuncts as people they don't deem good enough to hire permanently, but hey, they still need to get the research and teaching done! I think these positions are being exploited by many Universities. Okay, so how do we enforce minimum standards on salaries and benefits? I'm going to say what some people think are dirty words: collective bargaining. I'm thinking, for each field, a nationwide organization that collectively bargains on behalf of all the postdocs and adjuncts in that field. It won't be as complex as the detailed collective bargaining agreements that local unions have with their employers, but just standard minimum salaries and benefits packages (like a "minimum wage" law). We already have powerful organizations in place: things like the American Astronomical Society (AAS) for my field. The AAS runs all of the major American journals and conferences in my field. With support of the AAS and the major Universities, I think this can happen. Of course, the major Universities are the same Universities that have the most to lose from such an arrangement, so this will be tricky to handle. But if the AAS enforces minimums by doing things like "If you don't pay your postdocs this much, we won't publish any of your articles" and if the top 10 universities support the AAS in this endeavour (so that the AAS journals remains the highest impact journals), then I think it can happen. But this is just a dream for now. If I ever get in a position where I can push this agenda, I will!

Indeed, if you are worrying about fellowships in order to pay for your way through school, you probably don't have to worry. North American PhD programs in engineering will fully fund their students, international or domestic. However, if you are asking because you want to know what fellowships you would be eligible for, either to improve your funding package, get extra prestige, get additional research funds etc. then your best bet is Fulbright and your home government. There are two main Fulbright awards that I know of, and you would apply to these programs through your home country's Fulbright office. The first one is the "Traditional Student Award" and it is $15,000 for the first year only. The deadline may depend on your country but it is generally Fall 2015 for a Fall 2016 program start. The second major award is a the Fulbright Science & Technology Award, which is a 3 year award. Actually, when searching for information, it seems like the last cohort awarded was 2012 and this program is currently suspended. Sorry But the deadline for this one was really really early--it was Spring 2011 for a Fall 2012 start. Note: If you do get a Fulbright award, you would be in the US on J-1 status and you will be subject to the 2 year home residency requirement. Finally, it is also possible to get other fellowships depending on your field. In my field, there is a single NASA fellowship that is available for international students! So, once you start, you should keep an eye out for such opportunities.

I also agree that it is ridiculous to assume that somehow, STEM fields are able to adapt course difficulty while this is not possible in the humanities!! But to address another point brought up: The Graduate Dean position is changing this year at my school and the outgoing Dean recently gave a presentation to faculty and graduate students on some interesting stats / thoughts for the future. One interesting thing to see is the distribution of grades. It was a curve that was basically entirely contained between 3.0 ( and 4.3 (A+), with a peak at 4.0 ("A"). Or, for a better description, imagine an asymmetric distribution that looks like a Gaussian distribution at 4.0 with a sigma of 0.3, and then a long tail from 3.6 down to about 2.6, where it just cuts off basically. The recommendation from the outgoing Dean, which I strongly support and hope that our school adopts in the future, is to remove letter grades for graduate students completely. Instead, all graduate courses should be graded as "Pass / No Credit". If a student meets whatever requirements the instructor deems sufficient, they get a "Pass". If they do not, they get "No Credit" and allowed to retake the course. Note, this is NOT "pass/fail" because usually a fail grade in grad school has serious consequences. But students can effectively flunk out of grade school because there is a time limit (nominally 3 years) to advance to candidacy, which requires passing all required courses.

A large part of my French high school education (in Canada, we take French from Grade 4 through Grade 8, and then any language up to Grade 11 level is recommended for university-bound students, and Grade 12 level for BA bound students) was also about how Latin fueled French and other Romance languages. But ultimately, I feel like I get the same appreciation for language taking French as I would have taking Latin. But, French is a useful language in Canada and many parts of the world. Latin is mostly useful for specific careers or academics only. I feel like public high schools should be focused on training people with useful life skills rather than specialized academic knowledge. The latter is what universities and graduate schools are for.

I think ultimately, your decision results in no moral or ethical conflict, but from the train of thought in this thread, it does seem you were very close to the boundary. You are using terms such as "deferred enrollment" and "deferred admission" as if they are standard things at all programs. They are not. Your interpretation and description may be accurate for your particular program, but in general, deferring graduate school admission offers is a commitment to attend. In your particular case, it is not, because they are basically saying "we don't want to evaluate students multiple times, so if you want to attend in a later year, we know you have the qualifications, but we don't know if you're competitive for funding." There is another program in my school that does the same thing--they say all admission offers are valid for 1 year but funding must be accepted by April 15 of that application year. For this program, a student may accept an offer at another school, decide they don't like the other school, and attend my school the year after (as long as they inform my school soon enough so that they can make a decision on funding). So I agree with you that in your particular case, you do reserve the right to not commit. But I want to caution you that this is not generally the norm and when you apply to Fall 2016, you shouldn't expect other schools to have the same ideas on deferment. I also want to caution others reading this thread that deferments don't always work this way.

Yes it is possible. Your mom would be on a tourist visa (B class). She will have to apply for her own visa. Usually, B visas allow most visitors to stay up to 6 months. Before applying to her visa, she should know at least the following things: how long she is staying, where she will be staying, and how she will be paying for it. They will be looking for home residential ties to show that she does intend to leave at the end of the visit. So, it sounds like it is preferred for her to show the financial support from ties back in your home country, not with you. More information here: http://travel.state.gov/content/visas/english/visit/visitor.html Note that there is a lot of vague statements on the official site because a lot of this is on a case by case basis. But it would be a good idea to have all of the "recommended documents" listed, and of course, all of the required documents. Also, I'm not an expert on this, so if you can't find the answers from official websites, maybe talking to your International Student Program office or a lawyer would be the best bet.

Fulbright is an American organization that has a goal of knowledge and culturual exchange. They have many different scholarships, both for international students to study in the US and for Americans to study abroad! The main source of fellowships for international students are organizations like Fulbright, and your home government.

Update: It seems like there are a ton of Canadian airports with US border preclearance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_border_preclearance

Agreed with rising_star--find another place that has affordable rent or at least rent low enough that you are willing to pay to get your peace of mind / free time back.

I guess what I mean is in the table linked, $5700 is the accrued interest over the course of an example degree (a little over 4 years at 6.8% per annum) so whether you paid that in 48 monthly installments or a lump sum at the end, it won't matter right? In this example with $20,000 loan, the accrued interest after 1 year is $1360. At this time, you could choose to pay the $1360 right now (or maybe you would have already paid it in 12 installments). Or, you can invest it in something like a CD (I was thinking this rather than the stock market, sorry if "invest" wasn't the right word, because I agree, grad school timescales are not long term investments) and earn 3% on it until you have to pay it back. 3% per annum for a couple of years would not be that much on $1360, just a few hundred dollars but that could be about one monthly payment. 3% is not a lot, but it's a lot more than 0% you get from paying back right away. Or, you can "invest it in yourself" and let's say you put $700 towards a CD intended to pay off the interest later on and $700 towards your savings so that you take out $700 fewer in loans the following year. If you do this, when you go out of deferment, you will have an extra $700 applied towards your principal and you will be paying interest on that starting on the first day of deferment. However, by reducing the second loan by $700, you are saving yourself from having to pay interest on that $700 for the last 4 years of your program. These numbers are based on that example table, which is a $20,000 loan for a 4 year degree program. They would have to be scaled to match the actual loan needed. Maybe after doing so, the difference in how much you would have to pay is so small that it's not worth all of the hassle, or perhaps the student is the type of person that budgets better if they just pay off interest in monthly installments. I'm not saying that this way is the best for everyone, but it's worth considering

Just to be clear--the accrued interest only capitalizes once you graduate / go out of deferment right? See: http://www.myfedloan.org/help-center/faq/interest-faq.shtml If so, because it is "simple" interest like rising_star said, you do not have to pay off the accrued interest every month because while you are in deferment, the interest does not capitalize so you don't get charged interest on the accrued interest. For example, if you are in deferment for 2 years, you would pay the same amount of accrued interest (and avoid capitalization) whether you pay off your accrued interest in 24 monthly payments, 2 annual payments, or all at once prior to the end of deferment (when you receive your Interest Notice). Of course, setting aside money each month would be a good idea to avoid being unable to pay all of the accrued interest at the end. But since it makes no difference when you pay, if you are in a long program, it might be even better to either: 1) set aside that money and invest it so that you can earn interest or 2) add it to your savings and reduce the amount of future loans you have to take.

It can really depend on how each school defines the terms. Broadly, I would agree with your assessment. I would say that deferring enrollment means you have already accepted the offer (with whatever funding is involved with the offer letter) but you won't enroll in the program until later. It's similar to taking a sabbatical or leave of absence in the middle of your program, but at the beginning instead. Deferring admission is extending the time you have to accept their offer for admission but the financial support might not be there.