TakeruK

My philosophy professor didn't do anything like that so it seems like I left that class with a distorted view of what philosophers think about morality! But that's a good point. I don't think I consider myself completely a moral relativist because I do think some actions can be objectively moral/immoral (e.g. slavery, FGM, genocide, etc.) but I think that a lot of actions that are immoral by other moral codes, such as religion, are not necessary objectively moral/immoral (e.g. murder, stealing, lying). In the latter group, I believe that there are some instances where these actions can be moral, if it benefits the greater good.

One common reaction that I really dislike is when the other person says something like "Wow, you're a scientist, you must be so smart!! I was so bad at math/physics/whatever in school, I could never imagine doing this. That is so cool!" I don't like encountering this reaction because firstly, I think this view of scientists is harmful to public perception of science. Scientists are humans doing a job, just like other professions, fishers, doctors, teachers, plumbers etc. Secondly, this puts me in a kind of awkward situation...what do I say? If I disagree with them (and say something in the vein of "no, I'm sure you're smart enough to do it!") then it sounds very patronizing. I could also self-deprecate and downplay how cool/hard it is, but then that feels a lot like I'm downplaying science, and I don't want them to come out thinking that science isn't that great either. My current solution is to just side-step the issue and just say something like how much the topic excites me etc. I also often use self-deprecation as a way to interact with others and help others feel more comfortable. I don't mind laughing at myself. But I am realising that the encounter I describe above (which I dislike having) is because the other person is also trying to use self-deprecation. So that doesn't always work!! I find that conversations seem to go most smoothly when we talk more about experiences and what we find interesting rather than just the job. Sometimes the "what do you do?" question is just an ice breaker and they don't really want to hear about your job and so it's best to move on from that. Like others said above, sharing experiences is something most people can relate to. Also, discussing current events (non-controversial ones) is good too. I admit that I don't see myself as a very good conversationalist so in some situations, I actually research conversation topics beforehand so that I feel more confident in my ability to make small talk. Oh and finally, I generally avoid saying that I'm a MS or PhD student. When people ask "What do you do?", I just say that I am a Planetary Scientist and I study planets around other star systems. The experiences I tend to share that I feel people can relate to are things like experiences teaching students, making mistakes due to sleep deprivation when staying up late to observe, or frustrations that everyone encounters related to work, such as traffic, doing taxes, needing that coffee in the morning etc.

Didn't interpret any negativity at all. I was just realising that I was about to make some statements about philosophy while not being a student of philosophy, hence all of the conditional statements. It's interesting to hear that "philosophy construes morality more often as authoritative than not", because based on the one single moral philosophy class I took (obviously not going to be a representative sample), I thought moral relativism is how most philosophers thought about philosophy. I know it's silly to extrapolate from one single course but that was my only experience learning about morality in philosophy. Glad to learn new things, in any case!

When people with a job in the field ask whether or not they should get a PhD, I think two big (and similar) deciding factors are "Is the PhD necessary for you to advance in your career the way you want to advance?" and "Will you be obsolete in the future without a PhD?". That is, when you think about what you want to do in the future (whether it's to do more things or stay in the same position), do you need a PhD? To me, it sounds like yes but obviously only you know the full details! To address your other concerns: 1. I don't think you will be overqualified for a PhD program. Not sure about chemistry, but in my field, people often come in with prior experience. I would say 30% to 40% of newly admitted graduate students are not direct from undergrad--either with Masters degrees, worked in industry beforehand, worked as lab managers etc. Also, you say you are a year in your new job? Does that mean you are only about 1-2 years older than a BS graduate? Or do you mean you worked hard to get where you are and although you finally just "broke in" the field last year, you are a lot older and have a lot of past experience. There may be some concern if you are quite old (late 30s) because some PhD programs are ageist. 2. Opportunity cost is a real concern but as you say, it might be worth it in the long run. 3. In science fields, PhD students are paid a living stipend, which is usually just enough to support one person on a modest but comfortable lifestyle. Of course, whether this will be true for you depends on your own lifestyle and your actual program's stipend and the cost of living where you live. If you want numbers, my program is in the LA area (high cost of living) and campus-wide, our science student stipends are around $28,000-$32,000 per year (I think Chemistry tends to be in the lower end of this range). I think money is a valid concern. Only you can decide if the long term salary benefits are worth a pay cut now. If you have savings from your time working, you might be able to use these to maintain a slightly better standard of living. Or, if your SO is making at least as much as a graduate student, then that's usually enough for both of you to live pretty well.

It's been a long time since my college non-science electives, but I took them in philosophy and one of them was a moral philosophy class. I don't consider myself knowledgeable in this field at all, but I do remember one discussion in this course. In that discussion, we considered different mechanisms that regulate (if that's the right word?) human behaviour and how there can be conflict between what the law says and what your own morality determines (we read a lot about moral relativism). Similarly, in Grade 12, we read Antigone, where Antigone chooses to bury dead rebel brother despite the current ruler not granting permission (making it against the law). She makes this decision because she believes the law of the gods (which I interpreted as her own moral code) is more important than the law of the ruler. Being a complete novice (maybe novice is too kind of a word) in philosophy, I apologize if I used words stupidly or misinterpreted things. But this is why, in my mind, I distinguish between "having permission to do something" (i.e. something granted by some external form of authority) and "actions that are morally/ethically okay" (something granted by yourself and your own moral code only).

Although dealing with Sigaba's example of entitled behaviour from my students is certainly frustrating, demoralizing and annoying, I try not to let it get to me. So in that sense, I agree with random_grad's sentiments that different grading approaches are fine and grades don't really matter because the real world will sort the students out in the end. So if I end up having to grade more leniently or more harshly than I would like to, whether it's because the department policies say so, or the professor of the course wants the curve a certain way, I just do it. I don't think it's my responsibility to "defend" my worldview of what grades are supposed to mean because hey, it's just my own opinion and there's no reason that other methods aren't just as valid. Unless I feel that I am participating in a grading policy that does not have academic integrity or is actually unfair, I am not going spend a lot of my time or energy worrying about these issues. I do believe that things will sort itself out later down the road when grades do not really matter.

Hmmm morally permissible, that's an interesting angle. I rarely think "permissible" in terms of ethics/morals, because in my opinion, being allowed to do something (permissible, having permission) and whether they are ethically/morally right are two completely separate ideas. In that light, I would slightly revise my above answer to say that it is poor practice for a school to send an acceptance letter to an applicant after April 15 without any prior communication that the applicant might be on wait list / still considered for admission. This is disrespectful to the applicant and will cause more trouble for both the applicant and other schools if the applicant actually preferred the late-acceptance school and now has to withdraw from a previous commitment. However, I would not say this is immoral / unethical because I don't think it's that bad, just an inconvenience. I think that applicants should assume no communication by April 15 = rejection. I think it is perfectly fine (legally and morally) for a school to wait until the class is entirely full before rejecting people that they had no intention of making any offer. For applicants that are well below the waitlist (i.e. for sure rejection decisions), I think schools should either reject early on or wait until well after April 15 (e.g. May or something) before sending rejection letters. Rejections could result in a lot of work as some applicants will want to inquire why / try to appeal and I think the school's resources in the Feb 15 to April 15 time period is better spent negotiating with accepted applicants and on existing students! In my field, we also admit small classes (6-10 people max, usually). In programs with waitlists, what normally happens is that they probably make 10-15 offers to fill the 6-10 spots. Then, on April 13 or something, they would start contacting applicants on the waitlist (whether it's an official waitlist or not) and ask if the applicants are still interested in a spot at the school and let them know that they are on the waitlist and should someone decline, they might get a very last minute offer with very little time to respond. Usually a school would have to contact a LOT of people on the waitlist because at this point, most of the good candidates would have already got an offer elsewhere and may no longer be interested. I think this last minute notification/heads-up on waitlist status just prior to April 15 is the best practice. If they notified students about waitlist status too early, then this defeats the purpose of the April 15 deadline because everyone would ask for an extension of their current offers beyond April 15, which means the schools themselves won't know our decisions by April 15 and no waitlists will move. By waiting until just the day or two before, applicants should already know the school they would want to accept from all of their existing offers and hopefully declined all offers they are not interested in. Then, when they get the waitlist notification, they would know whether they would want to stay with their existing offer (and let the waitlisting school know they are not interested) or know they will want to accept the new offer (usually the waitlist notice comes with financial information too, to help people decide), in which case they would ask for a one or two day extension with their existing offer to see if they will get off the waitlist.

I am really against the idea that one should only give out X A-grades, Y B-grades, and Z C-grades etc. That is, I don't like the idea of grading students based on their performance relative to each other rather than against a well published and clear standard. There are some places where "relative" grading is useful, usually when there is a standard to grade against and a need to compare students performance relative to each other (e.g. GREs or other standardized tests). However, for most college classes, I don't see a need to grade in this manner and I don't think it's a fair way to grade. In my courses, I always tell students exactly what I expect for each grade. That way, they know what I want to see and they can perform accordingly. I'm happy to give every single student an "A" if they meet my standard for the "A" grade. But another point of debate, which is relevant to the title of this thread (note: from SIX years ago, so many of us commenting today might be part of the undergraduate cohort that article was talking about ), is where to set these standards. In my own grading metric, "effort" is never directly considered. However, there are enough ways to gain partial credit that someone who tries hard enough but still fail to get the exact right answer can still earn enough for a B- or so. I usually grade each problem out of 10 points and I usually only award 2 points for the right answer. The other 8 points are usually for things like 1) correct approach to the problem, 2) clear description of what they are doing, 3) clear statement of assumptions in their calculation, 4) demonstrating correct conceptual understanding of the system. There is certainly value in actually computing the right value, but if they simply made a calculation error in the first step that carried all the way through (so all actual answers were wrong but they demonstrated correct understanding of the physics), then they can still get up to 8/10. This is where "effort" comes in, indirectly. I find that students who have tried hard on the problem will take more time to explain what they are doing, which will result in more points for "clear description of steps/assumptions". They might have also thought deeply about the problem, and perhaps they make some critical conceptual error that only gets them part of the way, but the time they spent thinking probably results in a few initial steps being correct. So, someone who didn't fully understand every bit of it can still manage to get something like 6 or 7 out of 10 points. On the other hand, someone who saw the problem and decided to just give up without thinking very hard about it and just scribbling down the most basic of steps will probably only score between 0 and 2 points. Overall, I do think that in classes, more effort does (indirectly) translate to higher grades for my students. But that effort needs to be demonstrated in a concrete way and in a way that shows actual understanding to earn points. I never award points for things like "but I worked 10 hours on this!". Students that complain to me about grades with this reason are shown the grading rubric and I explain to them how to earn points for the problem. I also talk to them about why they took so long (usually problem sets are designed for 5-6 hours of work) and try to help them by identifying the point of confusion and helping them learn the material they need to get past the places they are stuck on. Sometimes it's just a misunderstanding of a theorem or equation in class or teaching them a method/technique that they somehow missed from a pre-requisite class.

My opinion is that admissions committee do not use TA experience as a criteria for MS or PhD program admission, so I don't think it's worth spending time on this in your SOP. Since you do have past experience as a graduate student TA, you could potentially work it into one sentence of your SOP as a demonstration of your experience balancing research, teaching, and coursework commitments**. And definitely include this on your CV. However, your ability or passion to teach has no effect on graduate program admission. Most programs do not place much value on strong teaching ability for incoming graduate students. Instead, they take the worldview that graduate students will learn the minimum teaching ability to function as a TA when they get here. **Note: From my own experience applying to programs with a previous graduate degree, I find that having past experience as a graduate student can be a double edged sword. It's great that you have some experience, and potentially maturity, behind you but if you overemphasize this in your application, it might work against you. For example, grad programs are interested in recruiting people with a lot of potential--a student with potential might be more appealing than one with demonstrated/proven mediocrity. Another reason is that if you come off with an attitude that you already know what you're doing then it might be interpreted as arrogance and/or unwillingness to learn/fit in to a new department--every place is different. So my advice would be to mention your past experience strategically.

I agree with GeoDUDE! I found that a lot of the material in my Math classes (taught by Math professors) were not really necessary in research. For example, much of Linear Algebra involved interesting and complex nuances of the Invertible Matrix Theorem, but knowing all N logically equivalent clauses of the IMT doesn't really help me use Linear Algebra in my research. I'm not saying that you should ignore all of the important foundation/math background. I think it's very important for quantitative scientists to know why the methods they are using work, because if we don't know the details, we will make mistakes and apply methods that are not valid for our data! We need to be able to justify to ourselves and to others that we are doing the right thing. That said, if you're taking these courses now as a MSc student, you will approach these undergrad courses with a different perspective than an undergraduate student. I find that undergraduate courses are very broad because they want to provide you with a bit of information on a broad range, as it's not certain what you will do with it later. As a graduate student however, while you will still want to know a little bit about everything, there are going to be some parts of the course that you want to go deeper, sometimes at the expense of other parts. Sometimes it's hard for someone not experienced with the topic to tell the difference between course material that is essential to know and course material that is just nice to know. If you take GeoDUDE's suggestion and read up on your research background readings now, then you will have a sense of what methods are commonly used in your field of work. This will help you get the most out of the broad undergrad courses when it's time to take them!

Makes sense! Just that both my previous school and current school's only official library archive for theses are electronic. They do not have a physical paper copy of my thesis--my supervisor and I have the only two printed copies. I had thought this was the norm so I was surprised to learn that other schools still keep physical copies and thus have requirement on paper types! But it's fun to learn new things / how different places do different things

My MSc grad school did not require a paper thesis submission at all. The only requirement was electronic, however, we were given the option of getting two copies of the thesis bound and shipped to whatever address at no charge. So, I made a keepsake copy for myself and one for my supervisor. I just printed it on regular printer paper. If I was in your shoes, I would go with the $27 for 500 sheets option because it seems like the cheapest/easiest way to meet the grad school requirements. From examining these two products, it appears that the more expensive paper will have a nicer feel to it since the finish is described as "wove" instead of "smooth". It does sound like it would feel a lot nicer to touch the more expensive paper! So if you enjoy this sensation or if you are making a copy as a gift for someone who would enjoy this finish, it might be worth it (up to your personal choice). Personally, I've had my MSc thesis for two years and I probably have only opened it 3 or 4 times since, so if I had used nice paper, it would have been wasted! I do occasionally refer to my MSc thesis but I always use my PDF version because I can search my annotations and the text! Also, a lot of the figures in my thesis were actually animations so I need the electronic version to render those properly. And I do like seeing the bound cover on my bookshelf (gives me warm fuzzy feelings of accomplishment!) so I definitely recommend getting a keepsake copy but I personally don't need the nice paper to get the warm fuzzies

Indeed, if you happen to be in the area or if you are going to be able to get there without a lot of time or expense then visiting is fine. I think most people here are just advising against paying for an entire trip or taking a lot of time away from work or other obligations because it's not worth it.

The majority of students that visit our program before they apply do not end up getting an offer. Whether they decided to not apply or whether they got rejected is never certain, but my experience agrees with what others have posted above--it's not worth your money to plan such a visit.

Yes and no. The tricky thing is that there are a lot of different organizations that care about your residency and each of them might define residency differently. I am a Canadian citizen living in California for graduate school. Here are the implications: Taxes: When I file my Canadian taxes, I file as a "factual resident" of Canada (see: http://www.cra-arc.gc.ca/tx/nnrsdnts/ndvdls/tmprry-eng.html).This means what you are asking--I file as if I never left Canada and I get to keep all the tax benefits (e.g. GST rebates etc.) When I file taxes in the United States, I file as a " non-resident alien". So, the answer to your question is yes, basically Canada is my "primary residence" and the US is my "secondary residence" (although these terms are not well defined). Health care: My last Canadian address is in British Columbia. I do NOT qualify for BC MSP (Medical Services Plan, i.e. our health care system). The eligibility requirements are here: http://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/topic.page?id=A24BB960F5234630BCB9DE847EEFD07Band the one that I do not meet is the "physically present in BC for 6 months/year". Therefore, I do not have Canadian health care coverage anymore. I will be able to regain such coverage when I return to Canada and go through a 3 month wait period. Instead, my primary health insurance coverage is now based in the United States, through my University as part of my grad student benefits package. This insurance covers international travel, so if I do get hurt while in Canada, I would be using my US-based health insurance's travel policy. National Student Loans: Sorry, I cannot help you here, because I do not have experience with this! Driver License: I added this category because I think it's helpful/important. This varies a lot with your Canadian province and your new state. In California, no international driver licenses are recognized and international students are considered "residents" in terms of licensing requirements. This means that an international student in California can only drive using their Canadian license for the first 10 days. After this, they must get a California driver license to continue driving (and this means taking both the written and road tests). Note that if you were just visiting California, you can drive for up to something like 90 days on your Canadian license because you're "just visiting" / "not a resident". However, being here for school means you are a "resident" in the DMV's point of view. Additionally, ICBC (the authority that issues licenses in BC) does not like it if you hold both a US driver license and a BC driver license. So, if you ever interact with your Canadian driver licensing authority, avoid telling them that you have a US license unless you are required to.

I can't speak to what Sigaba meant by their last point, but I would like to clarify my original post/suggestion in light of your statement about community. I suggested these resources because on my campus, these resources would be a place to find community on your own campus (I mean, the students in question probably take other classes on campus). I also did not suggest these resources simply because I thought you wanted to take actions, but on my campus, these resources would be great ways to just talk about your experience and/or reflect on it, if that helps sort out the disorientation. I should note that it's important to remember which resources on campus are confidential and which are non-confidential though. In my example, the Title IX Coordinator is a non-confidential resource in the sense that if you talk to them and in doing so, reveal some problem, they will take action. Our coordinators are very good at making sure the action is in the students' best interest and involve you in determining how the action is carried out. The staff at the Counseling Center are confidential resources, which means you can tell them anything and they are just there to listen and discuss your thoughts with you. So if you do look for community on campus, keep these factors in mind. Note that at my campus, the Counseling Center is just as much a resource for people seeking resources to best support others (e.g. your situation) as they are for people who need support / counseling directly themselves.

This really depends on your program and your field. In some fields, research assistantships (RAs) are just "extra" research work you do to earn your stipend/funding. In this case, this would be similar to contract work. You and your RA supervisor will have to discuss and decide on all of the terms of employment (# of hours, expectations, etc.). In other fields, like most sciences, RAs are just a formal way of your thesis supervisor paying you money to conduct research towards your PhD thesis. In this case, sometimes the value and the # of hours assigned to the research assistantship is simply arbitrary. For example, in one grad program, I was paid 1/3 of my stipend through an RA and at the official University RA rate ($21/hour or so), that amounted to something like 40 hours per month. However, I obviously had to work more than 40 hours per month on my research project in order to finish the thesis! The remaining work I did was paid through my fellowship.

Wow, this sounds like a very tough teaching situation. I can only say two things: I am not surprised that your department head and dissertation chair are mainly concerned with supporting you in your teaching rather than impact on student. This support is important but it sounds like you are wondering what else could be done? So, if you are still wondering what else could be done to consider/address impact on your other students, you could consider going to other resources on campus that can provide this type of support/information. The right resources may depend on your campus--for me, I would go to my Title IX coordinator and my school's Counseling Center to seek advice. Note: This is not an experience I've had myself. However, I think our school does a good job of training us on the resources on campus and if a fellow TA on my campus came to me and asked the same questions you just did, this is what I would say!

Yes, of course it is permissible. They are allowed to let you know whenever they want. What usually happens is that people close to the accept/reject cutoff might be placed on a waitlist (formal or informal) until April 15 as they wait for their top choices to make decisions. If they would like to fill more spots after everyone has made a decision on April 15, they could make some offers from this waitlist. Once they have filled all the spots (or if they decided no further spots need to be filled), then they will finally reject all outstanding applications. So, a common interpretation of getting a rejection after April 15 is that you were close to the accept cutoff so they wanted to hold onto you as an option until they heard back from other people. Some programs will even wait until the Fall semester starts before issuing official rejection letters because they might want to fill a last minute spot. Of course, because most decision deadlines are April 15 (as per the CGS Resolution), it is not in a program's best interest to respond so late since it's likely good candidates will have received and accepted other offers by then (as it sounds like the case for you!). The April 15 resolution says nothing about when the program have to notify you of a decision, it simply states that if they make you a financial offer, they should not compel you to respond prior to April 15.

With the additional details about the subfields and the rankings, I would say that I think both options can be really good choices for you (I guess that's why it's a dilemma ). But a positive way to look at it is that you have two pretty good options to pick from! I think the difference now is just personal and completely depends on what you want. At School A, you are making a compromise of not working on the subfield that interests you most. At School B, I'm actually not sure what the compromise is, because you just say "I don't see myself" there. Sounds like a fit type of thing? What you're willing to compromise is an entirely personal decision and I don't think there is a "right" or "wrong" answer. Sometimes we seek advice on these types of dilemmas (where we know it's a personal choice that others can't really help with) because we feel bad about making a decision based on some factor or other. If this is the case, I am saying that you don't need to feel bad (not that you need this validation, but just providing it!). People will not think less of you if you chose School A because of a bad fit (personal, research, whatever) with School B. And people will not think less of you if you chose a "lower ranked" (or whatever the reason is) School B because you wanted to follow your passion/interest and work on something you love. Well, some people will judge you no matter what but that's their problem It might be a tough choice, but given the information here, I don't think you can make a bad one.

I just want to say two things from the point of view of a moderator regarding the exchange above between thegraydude and bbdd2: 1. There is a difference between saying that one's comments are racist/offensive and saying that a person is racist and offensive. I encourage everyone, when they hear from another person that their comments were racist and offensive, to first examine and reflect on what they said and try to understand the reason for the offense. Resist the urge to immediately defend yourself (because it is not you that is being targeted, it's your comment) and listen to the other person. Hopefully when this happens, we find an opportunity to learn and grow. 2. Regarding "thread hijacking": GradCafe doesn't have policies that require a thread to stay on a particular topic and the original poster of the thread does not get to decide what is and what isn't discussed. Except in special cases, moderators here will not take action in this regard. Instead, we prefer to let the users and participants in the thread lead the discussion and the topic will naturally evolve over time.

@Mechanician In my experience, both quotes are fairly true. I think they do describe nuanced cases that is easy to take out of context though. For the first quote, professors in my department told this to all incoming students at the campus-wide orientation. A 4.0 GPA is too high. A 3.0 GPA is too low. They expect us to aim for 3.5-3.7 (roughly B+/A-). The second case is an example why you rarely see hard cutoffs published, especially for GRE scores. By setting a hard cutoff rule, they have to justify it to some authority if they want to override it. Usually though, the University-wide requirements will set some cutoff GPA for admission but as the quote says, if a professor/department is willing to go to bat for you, this will be waived. Since University-wide policies don't generally cover GREs, I find that most departments in my field try to avoid adding more regulations by not setting GRE cutoffs. If you ask the department carefully, you might get some information like "the median accepted score is X" or "the range in accepted scores tends to be Y-Z" which is helpful for knowing how you compare to the competition. However, they have nothing to gain by setting a cutoff and a lot to lose (more work, lose a good student) if they did have one. When cutoffs are published, they tend to be very low though. In the old 800 scale, one top school published cutoffs at 500 / 800 for both Q and V sections.

I feel like the second part of your sentence and the parts where you say people are just "excusing" their bad test scores are in contradiction with the first part (where you say being good at tests should not be necessary). If being good at tests is not necessary, then bad test scores and being a "bad test taker" should not be a big deal. I agree with you that one should never say that they are a "bad test taker" in their SOP or anything, because it does sound like an excuse. However, we evaluate a candidate, I'm saying we should not be alarmed by bad test scores if the rest of their profile is consistent with someone who knows what they are doing. I agree that some people do use "bad test taker" as an excuse for a poor performance. Perhaps for some people, a little more preparation would have increased their score. What I'm objecting to is that it sounds like you don't believe "bad test takers" exist at all and that in STEM fields, everyone with a bad GRE Q score could have gotten better if only they prepared more, and since they didn't, we should use this as a factor in admission decisions. As I said above, I think this attitude is harmful and it places actual bad test takers (as well as people who cannot prepare for or retake the exam) at an unfair disadvantage in admissions. Also, I don't think your claim that top schools require high test scores is true. As Eigen points out, they are getting more than enough applicants with publications and other research experience that they can generally use these factors to determine an applicant's potential as a graduate student. That said, having a super impressive GRE score might still make your application catch the eye of a reviewer. But doing well on the GRE is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for grad school acceptance. Just like having a first author paper is not necessary nor sufficient. I only noticed the "exam based" learning in the very large freshman physics classes (>2000 students per course). Very few students continue to ask me these questions when I TA 2nd year undergraduate classes and beyond.

Agreed with bsharpe that the relative rankings do matter. For the purposes of this post, I am going to assume School A is something like a top 5 school and School B is ranked around 30th. My advice is also dependent on what you want to do with your degree beyond your PhD. For this post, I'm also going to assume that you want to take a "traditional academic career route", which means your post-PhD goal is a postdoctoral research position. I'm not necessarily assuming you want a TT position in the end, just that you want a PhD program that will set you up for a good postdoc. Given those assumptions, my advice is that you should do what you can to maximize your chances of being hired for your skills at the end of the degree. Basically, I think we all need to find a good balance between working on the specific project that we love and working on things that will get us grants and jobs. The way I see it, as a graduate student, we should not be so focussed on finding a specific thesis topic that we love. Instead, we should just find the "subfield" that we're passionate about and then do whatever projects that will provide us with the means to reach our career goals (whether it's developing certain skills, fostering relationships with people that will be your champion, building mentoring relationships and learning from them etc.) To me, it sounds like School A is only a poor research match in terms of what you want to study/work on, not because the research projects do not match your skills and experience. That is, it sounds like you are set up for success in the projects you do at School A. When I think of "research match", I don't think of preference, I think of it as "matching your abilities/experience with what the project requires". It sounds like School A might have everything else you need for success, especially since you say that you "don't really see [your]self in [school B]". From this, I would consider School B if the type of work in School A and School B are actually in different enough subfields (and you're passionate about subfield at School B but dislike the subfield of School A). From your current wording though, it sounds like the difference is only in the specific research topic/project, not the subfield. To use a personal example, I wanted to go to grad school to use telescopes to investigate planetary systems (whether it's our own Solar System or exoplanetary systems). I didn't care what my specific project would be--whether it's to examine the processes happening on surfaces of asteroids, or looking for multiple star systems, or studying gas giant planet atmospheres. At the "topic" level, the specifics don't matter--go for the best match in resources the school can provide (facilities, money and people support) and the best match in personality with your advisor. I like to say that you can always change your research interests but you can't change some of the biggest factors that affect your success (facilities/resources/people-fit etc.). And to answer your main question--I don't think your dissertation work will completely define you as a scholar and limit any future work you might want to do. At least not in my field. Sure, your first postdoc might be related to your PhD work because you generally propose postdoc research idea while still a PhD student and you know your own work best. But if you are wise about your choices, you can make sure that while you are in grad school, you develop skills in the topics you do want to work in so that you can secure postdocs working on a different topic. I would say most postdocs I know do not work on the same topic as they did in grad school (but maybe something similar). Some people work on completely different topics by choice or because they were forced to (no jobs in their chosen topic). By the time you reach tenure track positions, almost no one is working on the same topic as their thesis (scholars are expected to grow much more by then!)

This is an appropriate question to ask. Instead of saying "If I were to work for you during the semester", how about changing that to "If I were to accept <School name> offer, would be there any funding included?". Just a small wording suggestion.