TakeruK

Shows that I've watched for awhile, that are still active, and that I am excited to see each week: Fresh off the Boat, Big Bang Theory, Modern Family, Veep, Walking Dead/Talking Dead, Better Call Saul. Netflix shows that I try to watch when I can: House of Cards, Orange is the New Black, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. If I had to pick one favourite, I would pick the one show that I noticeably enjoyed a lot more than many other good shows recently, and that is Netflix's Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.

I agree with fuzzy's suggestion to schedule a meeting to come up with a plan. In my field, it's actually not that rare for students to work on projects related to a certain course prior to taking that course, because there might really only be 10% of the course material that you absolutely need to know before you start analysis/working on it. You often can learn this 10% with guidance from your supervisor before you begin the project. Then, you can just learn the extra stuff in the course as background material.

I personally would recommend using both software and checking it yourself to make sure you are not missing anything. For international students especially, there are software designed for us (e.g. Glacier Tax Prep) and it can find the right tax treaty. One year, I earned around $9,000 in US income but I didn't know about the Canada-US tax treaty where if my total US income is under $10,000, I pay zero taxes (but $10,001 means full taxes). The proper way to learn about the tax treaty yourself would have been to read the complicated tax law (in all its legalese), so the tax software was able to catch that for me and save me about $500 in taxes (I can only claim the personal deduction, so my taxable income would have been around $5000 if I did not know about this treaty).

Agreed with fuzzy. You might also want to contact your school's awards office / sponsored research office to see if they have advice. If these are awards that other students have juggled in the past, they might already have a solution (and in general, they know the policies better). It's in the school's best interest, usually, to see that you get the most money possible, so they might be a helpful resource.

Hooray! I can sympathize. As a non-resident in the US, I cannot file electronically and as a Canadian living outside of Canada, I cannot file that electronically either. Also, the free tax software for federal taxes that my school provides does not do state taxes, and I cannot use California's electronic forms or calculators to fill out my state taxes. And, being married means I can't do some of the simplified form, however, I always have to file as "married, filing separately" as I am not a US resident so I do not qualify for some of the deductions. But, my spouse can claim me as a dependent in Canada (since grad student income is not taxable there), but we have to properly claim her US income too. Anyways, figuring it all out the first time wasn't fun, but this year was a lot easier. The state taxes were the worst because I had to read all of the instructions (which referred to paragraphs in various different documents)--it took me about 5 hours to properly figure out what to do last year. It only took 20 minutes this year though!

I agree with Pitangus--the only person responsible for doing your taxes correctly is yourself. Even if your University tells you incorrect information, if you make a mistake on your taxes then it is still your fault. Although perhaps you might be able to have a case against your University. This is why many schools (including my own) will provide absolutely no information. They just give us the tax form and direct us to tax software (international students get free access to a TurboTax-like program). I think Eigen and the IRS makes it extremely clear what items are allowed to be counted for education. Basically, only expenses that are required for you to be a student in the program count. So, for example, required textbooks for courses count (but "optional" or "recommended" textbooks do not). If you must buy a specific notebook in order to complete a lab course (i.e. your work is not graded unless you do it on this notebook), then that notebook cost will count as a deduction. However, if you are just buying notebooks for use in taking notes, then they do not count as a deduction. Similarly, pens, pencils, erasers, computers, printer paper do NOT count as a deduction, even though you technically need something to write with to do your work. But since unless it is an explicit requirement that you get that specific item, it is not a deduction. Personally, the only deduction I can make is the tuition and fees deduction. I spend about $100 per year for the first 2 years on textbooks. However, my first tax year in the US was only 3 months long so I paid no taxes. My second tax year, I was mostly paid through a Canadian fellowship so my US income was under the tax treaty limit so I paid no taxes to the IRS that year. My third year I had a little tax owing but I didn't buy any textbooks since I no longer take courses.

Agreed with above. To add to this: 1. He might be saying that he is not able to supervise a new research project made for you at this time, because there is nothing that he needs done that you are a good fit for (in terms of experience etc.). However, it sounds like he is already working on another project with someone else and he would be able to pay you to help out on this project. This probably means that this will not be "your" project, you'll be an assistant. This is a good experience though. 2. He is able and willing to pay you. Why do you say you cannot take the money?? Also, note that most professors I know (although could be field dependent) do NOT want to have volunteers work for them. They much rather pay for an employee that will commit to the lab and the work. I'm not saying you will do this, but many undergrad students that volunteer with researchers end up putting other priorities ahead of the research work (e.g. courses, other jobs, etc.) if they are only volunteering. So, many professors would rather not have anyone work for them unless they can properly pay them. 3. There is either enough funding to hire two people, or there's more work than one person can do, or he just wants to train two undergrad students at the same time. Professors also benefit when they mentor/train students, so if there are two students interested in a project and enough funding for both, it's better for them to put both of you on the project! Overall, I agree -- take the offer, accept the salary and do your best work!

Tough question! I will have to go back home at some point (I'm subject to the 2 year home residency requirement because I am on J-1 with Canadian funding). All I know for sure is that I want to aim for postdocs in my field and that a lot of what I do require access to telescopes, which US schools have a lot more access to! So I think I will want to do my first postdoc at US schools (I'll use my 36 month Academic Training to extend my J-1 to my postdoc). Beyond that, whether I even stay in academia depends on a lot of things (where I can find work, what kind of offers I can get, how well I do). While California is a very nice place to live, I can't see myself living here or anywhere in the US forever. But it's still many more years before I am at the point where we'll "settle down forever" so who knows what might change by then. But right now, I feel too much like an outsider compared to the "standard" American viewpoint (mostly on social policy and issues of "liberty"). I feel that many people in academia lean left like I do, but I often hold the most leftist point of view in any social group of Americans--it's not so different when I'm with work friends, but when I'm with people outside of academia, it's a huge difference. Anyways, maybe my views will change in the future, but I just don't feel this is the right country for me, right now.

Again, I think you are interpreting what GeoDUDE! and I are saying in a way that lets you best present our statements as ridiculous statements. Or maybe it's just because we are not saying things very clearly. So I will try again: 1. I don't mean that all scientists should literally memorize and rehearse an exact 30 second elevator pitch. 2. I don't mean that if you do not do exactly this, your chances of getting grants is severely decreased. 3. What I do mean is that we should take the time to think about what parts of our research is important and/or interesting to each specific audience. For some people, it really might mean memorizing an exact 30 second pitch because they are the type of people that do that well. For others, like me, it means preparing myself for every scientific conversation (with scientists, since now we're talking about grants and career stuff rather than small talk at a party) by outlining a few key points that I want to make sure I get out in 30 seconds or so. I like the not-memorizing part because I am bad at memorizing and I also feel that this method gives me more room to customize to each audience. 4. When people evaluate your grants, they are not going to call you up and say "Give me a 30 second pitch, NOW!". The sentiment behind our statements was simply that researchers should take some care to think about how they are communicating, not just what they are communicating. If you don't take time to think about this, it will reflect poorly in other ways when it comes to grant proposals. Off the top of my head, it can hurt your grant proposal because i) your proposal (with strict word/page limits) may not be the tuned well enough to convince the judges, ii) proposals in my field are NOT blind, so the better you communicate your work at conferences or other presentations, the more people already know about your research and your ability prior to judging your proposal, and this helps, and iii) good communication ability will help you supplement your scientific ability by showcasing what you know and can do in the best possible light; this will indirectly help you do things that are good for your career and getting grants (e.g. getting oral presentations instead of posters, being invited to give talks at conferences or seminars, etc.) Overall, I hate it when I go to a conference and I meet someone at the poster session or coffee break and I ask "what do you work on?" and then they spend 10 minutes boring me (and I'm too polite to just walk away) or they have clearly not thought about what they wanted to say to me, so the narrative is convoluted and I don't remember it as well as they could have. This means I probably will not talk to them again in the future and will know less about their awesomeness. Similarly, some people give incredibly poor oral presentations at conferences and this not only causes me to tune out (and not learn what awesomeness they are doing) but I will also remember this person in a bad light. In a field where there is a lot of interesting work going on, when I have to pick what talk I attend in the future, there's no way I'm going to waste more of my time listening to someone I know is bad at communicating when there are tons of other people that do it so much better.

My friend, an international student, is now working at an engineering firm after completing her MS in environmental engineering. They were on F-1 OPT status but just recently started the process of obtaining H1-B. If you want more details, send me a PM and I'll see what I can find out.

Yes. Most Canadians I know bite the bullet and pay the tax. I live in California where the rules might be a little bit different though. Here, foreign students are considered residents for DMV requirement purposes so we are not even allowed to continue using Ontario plates even if Ontario would let us since California will not allow it. If Georgia does allow it, then maybe you can check with Ontario's Ministry of Transport to see if they have exceptions to the insurance thing if you are temporarily outside of Ontario for school reasons. I guess the only other thing I can say is to check whether they used the correct value for your vehicle when estimating the tax. For a used vehicle, it should be the current value of the car, I think, not the original purchase price.

This is definitely important to keep in mind--ultimately, the responsibility lies on us to make sure we are credited with authorship where appropriate. It is definitely nice if you have someone looking out for you but you can't rely on that. Sometimes if there is another coauthor (maybe your supervisor or a senior graduate student) that is already on the authorship list, having them on your side can help make the conversation with the first author go smoother.

@Crafter: Note that the contract case is probably the exception rather than the norm, and it is not something a graduate student would suggest or try to unilaterally enforce. In that particular case, it was a project with collaboration from 30+ people at a dozen different universities across 4 countries. So also keep in mind the context--it might be out of place for a contract to exist between a few people in the same lab or university (although maybe not in some instances!)

I don't memorize things word for word but I definitely decide ahead of time what I want to say in the 30 seconds. When I actually say it, it's modified based on what the audience is actually interested in. By the way, I don't do this only for non-academics. When I meet with visiting scholars, or when I go to an academic conference, I prepare ahead of time what main points I want people to come away with when they are finished speaking with me.

I think it is a great idea that you want to frame this as simply an issue of not being interested in this lab's subfield and would prefer to pursue another subfield. Definitely do NOT bring up any other reasons for leaving. I think it will help you if you know more about what your work with the other lab will be. Have a very clear and concrete plan for what you'll be doing in the other lab. Not necessarily long term, but just what you will be doing next. Have a vague long term plan too that clearly shows you should be in the other lab. You're not committed to any of this of course. I just find having a plan like this helps me internalize and solidify that I am making the right decision and this will come off in the conversation as more confidence. This might be necessary if the "bully PI" tries to convince you to stay, or if they start asking questions about your future plans. Being sure that this is what you want to do and having good reasons will help eliminate any potential thoughts that you might be leaving for personality reasons too. In addition, I echo everything fuzzy said about being grateful etc. Finally, my school has resources in the grad office that will help you "break up" with an advisor like this. They can give tips, role play the scenario etc. If you think you would like that type of support, maybe see if you can get the same at your school! Good luck!

I just want to say "shortened to 30 seconds" is not the same as "dumbed down". To me, it just means I have to pick out the most important/interesting aspects of my work and communicate it in 30 seconds. To me, "dumbing down" means something like explaining something in a wrong/infantile way that insults the listener's intelligence.

I am on a TMobile plan like juilletmercredi described. After about 1.5 years, my phone broke and I needed to get a new one. I bought it from TMobile with a $50 downpayment and I am paying the rest of it off in 24 monthly installments. This is not a contract though, I can discontinue my service with TMobile whenever I want (however, I will have to pay off the remainder of what I owe on the phone immediately, rather than continue the monthly installments).

No, you just call them and tell them you do not want to continue your service anymore. There may be rules in the contract that says how far in advance you can end it (maybe the next billing cycle) but in my experience with Canadian and US companies, they will just end it on the day you ask service to end. Of course, the people you call are trained to retain you as best as possible (sometimes people just call to "cancel" in hopes of getting a better rate from the company) so they will repeatedly ask if you are sure and make you some offers. If you just firmly say that you would like to end the contract -- no, I cannot transfer it to someone else, and no, I am moving away and am not interested in keeping the service, they will end it for you.

Oh, I didn't think "immoral" had anything to do with the definition of murder. I thought it was simply a premeditated killing. The dictionary I just used says it is the "unlawful and premeditated killing of another human". (But as I said before, I don't think lawful and moral are always the same thing).

Unless there is an authorship contract signed, it kind of is the arbitrary decision of the authors to decide who the coauthors are. These decisions depend on the norms of the field so this also depends a lot on field. In my field, your contribution will certainly merit authorship. In general, if you contributed something that was directly used in the data analysis or discussion (whether it's collecting data, making a plot (out of your analysis), writing one subsection to provide one analysis, or performing some computation), you would be considered a coauthor. For some projects I've been on, we signed a contract indicating authorship order and inclusion (the contract stated everyone who built the (balloon bourne) telescope would be on every paper that uses the data from that flight and the lead scientist on that paper's particular analysis would be first author with everyone else in ABC order (regardless of contribution). We also tend to invite** people involved in writing the telescope observing proposal to be on our author list. Big telescopes come at a cost of just under $100,000 per night, so these proposals a lot of work. Usually people who are involved in the proposal are also part of the analysis but not always--sometimes they are there because they help conceive the idea or their expertise helped make the proposal stronger (by providing yield estimates, for example). **By invite, I mean the first author will go through the whole analysis and put together a first draft of the paper. They will send it out to all proposal coauthors, even the ones that did not collect the data nor work on the analysis thus far. The invitation to join the author list usually has some clear commitment requirement (generally, to read the paper carefully and provide edits). The scientists who respond accordingly are added to the authorship and are expected to remain involved in future revisions and submissions/referee responses. Overall, in our field, the general rule is that it's better to have your invitation to coauthor declined than to have someone feel slighted that they were left out. Our papers are generally 6+ authors anyways (due to the nature of observational astronomy) so at this point, adding a new author (even if they do not contribute much) does not hurt anyone very much, but getting into a fight about authorship inclusion can really hurt you, especially if the first author (the one responsible for the paper) is a graduate student, as the case generally is. Because of this, the norm in the field is that you'd expect the first author to be the one who did almost all of the work, the second author to generally be their supervisor, and the third author also contributed a significant amount. Beyond that, coauthorship meant that you were critical to some part of this paper (i.e. you still contributed something important) but you were probably not so special that the authors couldn't have found someone else to do it instead. So, it's important to find out the norms in your field before deciding what to do next!

I am currently working on multiple (but related) projects and will eventually tie them all together into a dissertation in a couple of years. So, I'm working on and updating multiple "pitches" at the same time. My main pitch summarizes the main theme of my thesis (I also put this in the other thread): I study planets around other stars called "hot Jupiters". They are big puffy gas giant planets that are similar to Jupiter, but they are very very close to their own star. While it takes Earth one year to go around the Sun, it only takes hot Jupiters a few days!! But we don't know how they got so close. We want to find out if they formed far away and moved closer, or if they formed where we find them today. A secondary "pitch" summarizes the observational method I use. This is a quick explanation I use when people ask me about staying up all night to "look through" the telescope: We use telescopes on Mauna Kea in Hawaii to look for planets around other star systems. The telescope is really a very sensitive digital camera. But Earth's atmosphere makes this difficult. Because of our atmosphere, stars look like they are twinkling. This is pretty but makes it hard to do scientific measurements. To beat this problem, we put telescopes on a tall mountain (Mauna Kea is at 14,000 ft) and we use a mirror that can change shape to correct for atmospheric distortion. --- I like to use www.wordcounter.net when trying to draft these quick pitches. I try to aim for about 80 words in 30 seconds, because any more than that means I'm speaking too fast for people to understand. But I also have a slight lisp that makes it harder for people to understand me at first. The website also has a "Reading Level" estimator (don't know how accurate they are though). In general, I try to aim at the "high school" level. The website says my first one is "9th-10th grade" which I think is not bad, but my second pitch is still rated as "College student". Although this might be because it is more technical in nature. But I am still trying to work on make it more accessible (without dumbing it down or removing the key point, which is the technical challenge).

This sounds very interesting to me, but I'm afraid this is over my head. If you don't mind, would you be able to provide some examples of what you mean by facts and moral interpretations? And the "moral language game"? Or, perhaps it might help me if you could explain how the moral realist and a moral anti-realist would consider the morality of a concrete example, such as murder (do they think it is moral? immoral? something else? and why do they think it is this way).

You can't go through life / academia without making some people upset sometimes. The important part is whether or not you are doing what's right for you. If you feel like School Y is what you want to do and where you want to go with your career, then it is okay to let School X know that you have changed your mind because of a last minute offer from School Y. School X will understand that you didn't set this situation up on purpose--the physics department at School Y rejected you originally. School X will also understand that you need to do what's best for you! Although School X will understand, still be prepared that some people at School X will be upset. Be polite and apologetic if it happens. Remain professional. These things happen and both you and School X will move on! After all, it's not like they are planning their whole future around your attendance--they might be disappointed but it's not going to "ruin" anything.

If I was in your shoes, I would be personally very uncomfortable having a direct discussion with my employer and saying things that indicate I will continue on as a permanent full time employee when I know I will be leaving in a very short time (2 months). However, I want to be clear that I completely agree that you have all the right to only give 2 weeks notice and that I am not "judging" you (not that you should care what I think). I only mention this because I think you should also consider what you're personally okay with doing as well as what you're legally able to do and make sure that's it's okay with you. When I was in between college and grad school, I didn't need the extra 2 months of income to help support myself (Canadian schools were cheap enough that working in the summers paid for all of my costs) so I would have the privilege of doing what was "comfortable" to me. However, if I needed the income from those two months, I would agree with random_grad and I would do everything I can to ensure I had the necessary income. Note: I've given the opposite advice (don't tell the employer) in the past before on these forums. I just wanted to point out this case is different (in my opinion) because: 1. You are about to have a conversation that is directly about your future with this employer. 2. You are at a point where you know for certain that you are leaving in 2 months for grad school. A lot of other threads in these forum were scenarios like "I am applying for grad school, when do I tell my employer" or "Should I tell them in an interview that I am currently applying for schools". Finally, there's a lot of unknown information here. What kind of job is it? Is it a profession/field you would want to continue later? Do you need a reference from them in the future? How difficult would it be to replace you? (I'm not saying you have to provide this information here, but just that these are things I would consider in the decision as well).

A few more things to add after reading some very interesting insights here! 1. I agree with Sigaba and others who said that the more you know, the "less able" you are to explain what you're doing to a lay person. This doesn't mean you cannot do it, it just means that you are no longer able to fully explain your work. This is okay because the point of PhD-level and beyond research is to expand human knowledge to what is not known by anyone else. This is true not just to lay people but even other scientists! There are some aspects of my work that are so technical that I would never discuss them in a conference-style presentation to other scientist. The key to communication is not telling them everything you know, but telling them what they want to know. This applies to both scientific and non-scientific audiences. 2. As others pointed out, some people really don't understand the difference between grad school and college, or the whole MS, PhD, postdoc structure at all. If I use the word "student" in my description, people think I'm in school like a college student. I could spend 5-10 minutes explaining how academia works but that's probably not what they wanted to hear when they asked me the "what do you do?" question. So, I usually say I do research and teach about X. Or, sometimes I might even just say "I work at <University Name>". Depends on who I'm talking to. 3. Basically, I generally start with just a tiny bit of information, because often the "what do you do" is just an icebreaker and people might not even care about your answer. It's like the "How are you?" question--most people just want to hear one sentence and move on to something else. If people ask me more details, I'll be happy to tell them all about grad school and my work etc. but I let them decide to dig deeper. 4. I agree with GeoDUDE! and others that say as researchers, we must be able to condense the essence of our work in a very short "pitch" for a lay person. In my field, we are mostly funded by public/government money and I feel it is our responsibility to be able to tell the public what we do if asked. In my opinion, every researchers must be able to give a 20 to 30 second description of their work that is both understandable to the public and not dumbed down (respect their intelligence!). 5. I sympathize with posters like MathCat when they say theoretical work is really hard to explain. When I worked on theory, my "30 second pitch" was nothing about what I actually do (which is mostly writing code), but instead, about the question I'm trying to answer and why that question is interesting. Sometimes it really helps to just construct an analogy and explain via that analogy instead of what you're actually doing. If you want more ideas of what people have done, google "3 minute thesis". It's a competition where PhD students explain their entire thesis to an non-expert audience in 3 minutes and just one slide. This is not the same as party small talk (here the audience is guaranteed to be interested and you have 3 minutes plus visuals!) but the strategies these presenters use to make difficult concepts more understandable without dumbing them down is very good. Overall, I do feel lucky that my field, astronomy, is something a lot of people are already interested in and will have some basic background knowledge. Here's a 30 second pitch of my current work: I study planets around other stars called "hot Jupiters". They are big puffy gas giant planets that are similar to Jupiter**, but they are very very close to their own star. While it takes Earth one year to go around the Sun, it only takes hot Jupiters a few days!! But we don't know how they got so close. We want to find out if they formed far away and moved closer, or if they formed where we find them today. (** I do make the assumption that people know what Jupiter is.)