TakeruK

I also agree with you and Sigaba that those who work more hours are going to be more competitive. But there's another way to interpret the same fact: I know I am disadvantaged when competing with someone who works 60 hours per week consistently and that is fine with me. I rather work 40 hours, be happy, and find a less competitive job than work 60 hours in order to compete. To maintain my own sanity, I try not to compare myself with others--even if I work 60 hours per week, there is always another metric I can use to say "People in Group X are still more competitive than me". In addition, I should be more explicit and say that the 9-5 / 40 hours per week schedule is the maximum that a graduate student should feel "required" to do. I feel like I am doing "good enough" when I work this much. On occasion, I will feel particularly inspired or motivated to try something and I'll work extra to get it done. But this is because I want to and because I made this choice for myself, not out of obligation.

It could really depend on field here, but I don't think this is a good idea in mine. Conversations are easily forgotten and people can easily confuse who said what. Also, if these conversations with your group are not recorded somewhere, then there's no way to confirm this later if a dispute does come up. And finally, not everyone "takes a hint" the same way, especially if working with people from different backgrounds/experiences. Instead, I would recommend that you formulate ideas via email. However, if you feel that someone in your group might steal ideas, then perhaps not collaborating with them is the best bet. I don't think I would enjoy working with people that will steal ideas!

It depends on the rules of the state** you live in. But in general, you will have to get a US driver license and you will have to register your vehicle in the state you're moving to, which means new plates and new stickers. Also, you will have to make sure your car meets the emission/safety standards for your state. I'm not sure about Mexico, but Canada and US have different standards and my friends who have brought older cars into the US sometimes have to pay $500-$1000 to ensure their old vehicle meets all the standards. Newer vehicles sold in North America are probably made to meet all of the standards though. ** In California, you have to do all of this within 10 days. Also, you have to retake all of the driving exams (written and practical) because California does not recognize driver licenses from any other country.

No problem! It seems like my link doesn't actually work, but I found it through CTAN (https://www.ctan.org/pkg/ednotes?lang=en)

I was really lucky and managed to move the initial money I needed when the Canadian dollar was at par or even slightly better than the US dollar! My school offers an interest-free, fee-free startup loan ($2500) for new students. You get it a month before the program starts, then there is a 6 month grace period, and then you pay off the $2500 in 18 equal monthly installments. This is extremely helpful for things like apartment deposits and other startup costs! Maybe your school can offer something similar, which can help you keep your savings in Canada (all of our savings are still there!)

We use BMO in Canada. I like BMO because you just need a minimum balance in one account and all accounts do not have extra charges. The way we transfered our money was to first open a US Dollar account at BMO (it also gives you a slightly better exchange rate) and then we wrote bank drafts in US Dollars out of that account (the drafts are drawn from BMO's US Bank affiliate so it counts as a US cheque). BMO creates these drafts for us for free and we just carried these across the border and deposited them in our new US account. Having a US Bank Draft makes things go a lot faster because it only takes a few days for the money to clear, not weeks! Another option is to use TD, because they have branches in eastern US too and they actually allow you just make this transfer online. This would be the best route to use! However, this wasn't an option for us since TD doesn't exist in California

Digging through the documentation of ednotes, I found a useful command that called "IfLemmaTag", which appears to allow you supply two different versions of the text, one for the main body and one for the note. The following line compiles the way you want it on my machine (i.e. the "in" is italics in the main text but not in the footnote) \Anotelabel{1}\IfLemmaTag{in}{\textit{in}}\pause{1} principio erat Verbum et Verbum erat apud Deum et Deus erat \resume{1}Verbum\donote{1}{Jn. 1:1}} Looking at the new part carefully, \IfLemmaTag{in}{\textit{in}} the thing in the first pair of { } will appear in the note and the thing in the second pair of { } will appear in the main body. The documentation also says there is a command called "\notinnote" but that users may find \IfLemmaTag more flexible! Hope this works!! (PS: The documentation I was referring to is: http://mirror.math.ku.edu/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/ednotes/ednotes.pdf)

I'll send you a PM!

Your reference letters should be from someone who has an academic or employment relationship. Although research supervisor is often the best choice, it does not have to be so. It is not clear to me what you mean by "formal" relationship. I would say that a "formal" relationship is not required (i.e. there does not need to be an official record of collaboration or advising between the two of you). However, sometimes people ask about relationships like a professor who is a family friend, or a relative, etc. These relationships are not appropriate for LORs unless they also have an academic or employment relationship with you. Still, I know some people will warn against letters from someone who has both a personal and a professional relationship with you, so I would say those are decided on a case by case basis.

All TA offers (pretty much all funded offers) come with some kind of conditions. Usually they are worded qualitatively like "satisfactory performance" and "continued progress" but you do get the occasional quantitative requirement (e.g. GPA > 3.x). However, your I-20 does not state the requirements and if the school is willing to commit the first year funding to you on the I-20, it is good enough. The visa officer's job is to ensure you meet F-1 visa requirements at time of application. Things can change but they cannot predict the future so generally, these issues are not considered in your application. It is up to you to ensure you remain compliant with F-1 status requirements once you enter the US. By the way, usually the only way you do not reach "satisfactory performance" or "continued progress" is getting kicked out of the program. Very few programs will decide that you are not good enough for basic funding but still good enough to remain in the program!

If you want the absolute best answer, you should ask the International Office. However, in general, your I-20 serves as your proof of funding for visa/entrance and status purposes. I also had a copy of my school's offer letter stating the funding amount, just in case, but they did not ask to see it. I do not think you will need the Affidavit of Support from your department directly--the I-20 is a more powerful/authoritative document. I would recommend having copies of any letters of admissions/funding that were already sent to you for your visa interview, just in case, but you don't have to request additional documents. The VO will not ask for more funds than the requirement, unless there is some reason to believe that you will have higher costs (e.g. you are supporting F-2 dependents). However, the VO is expected to go by the cost on your I-20. You do not need an affidavit of support from your parents because you already have more funding in place than the minimum cost so you meet all F-1 requirements. I think it would be best if you reviewed the F-1 requirements and ensure you provide all documentation that is asked for. It would be best if you did not provide extra unsolicited information!

One of the grad classes I took had one prof who graded individual problems in a homework set as 10/10 (correct) or 0/10 (not correct). I think this grading method did teach us some useful concepts/lessons for academia. For example, in some cases (e.g. getting a paper out before your competitors), the only thing that matters is whether or not you achieve your goal in the end, not how hard you tried to get there (or what mistakes you might make along the way). Personally, I don't think this is the best grading method, but since grades in grad school do not really matter, it was not a big deal. The unimportance of grades in grad school allows for different approaches to grading and instruction (as well as different strategies on learning the material), which, overall, I find positive and refreshing. For example, few of my classes have closed-book exams where we have to cram useless materials--instead, we work on projects that are related to our own research and the reduced emphasis on grades means that we have flexibility to prioritize our research over classes etc.

I also think GRE scores are only relevant for "entry-level" fellowships. I recently applied for a NASA fellowship that is meant for people in the last 2-3 years of their program and no GRE scores were requested at all. Transcripts were still requested though, but word-of-mouth says that they are not very heavily weighted. In my field anyways, funding decisions made after the first couple of years of grad school heavily focus on research productivity/output. If you want to best improve your chances at future funding beyond the GRFP, spend the X hours you were planning on studying for the GRE on your research

As others already said, definitely doable. Just wanted to add another voice in support of taking weekends off If you want more examples of current graduate students sharing their schedules, see: see that while it's not strictly 9-5, many students are able to choose how to structure the hours they work each day (and which days they work each week). One of my officemates works from 2pm to midnight each day and takes weekends off because their SO is in another (nearby) town. I also work about 40 hours of productive work per week and schedule my work hours around my spouse's workday (typical office schedule). Also related to taking weekends off is vacation time. I also take my school's vacation policy seriously. We get 10 vacation days (2 work weeks) plus all 12 of the institute holidays plus the "special release days" between Christmas and New Years that the school closes. So that adds up to about 25 work days (~5 work weeks) of vacation annually and that's approximately the amount of vacation time I take per year. Usually I choose to work on the random long weekends (e.g. Labour Day, Memorial Day, etc.) and take different vacation days off instead. Or sometimes, I might come in on an extra Saturday or two so that I can take a long weekend off later that month for a friend's wedding. The only catch to grad students taking vacation time here is that we need our supervisor's approval (but this is basically true at any workplace too). So I obviously cannot (and in my best interests, would not) choose to take vacation on the days where I need to use the telescope to get critical data for my work! And finally, having the ability to choose your working hours means you get to schedule some things at more convenient times (e.g. dentist appointments) and then just make up those hours another day (or just count them as vacation time).

Be careful with the school policies. At my school, there are two main policies that cover this, and they are "conflict of interest" and "conflict of commitment". Conflict of interest refers to vested interest in your research/graduate studies--for example, if you are doing research on drug X but are also employed by company that makes drug X on the side, then this might be a conflict of interest! Conflict of commitment is probably what this case would be and that refers to conflicting obligations you might have with a side job that detracts from your ability to be a graduate student. So, if you are reading handbooks, don't just stop at "conflict of interest". And make sure you read all the regulations regarding your funding as well, sometimes the school regulations are not as strict as your funding source. For example, my fellowship requires me to work no more than an average of 10 hours per week (including TAing) while holding said fellowship. As to the "what they don't know won't hurt them", I agree with the spirit that graduate students need to take care of themselves and that we should be able to work evenings and weekends if we want to. But if there are regulations that govern our funding or our status as students, we have the responsibility to follow them too. I think if we feel these regulations are unfair and wish to protest them, we should do so properly--for example, go through the conflict of commitment process and/or appeal the existing regulations. It's up to you whether it's worth the fight though. But overall, I think it is a pretty bad idea to knowingly and sneakily circumvent the rules governing our status and our funding. At my program though, I know people have gone through the conflict of commitment process and got approval to do side jobs when they wanted to. For many cases, it wasn't even a necessity, just something they wanted to do.

I am not 100% sure why my friend's visa officials always know about his nuclear physics work. Maybe it was his CV, or they did a search on his publications, or they asked him to provide details about all former employers, or they asked him what his undergraduate research was about (his undergrad was in the US too). He is currently in Canada and whenever he applies for a visa to go to the US (whether for vacation or for conferences), they always know about his past work so he thinks that there is a note in his file ever since they first found out about this. Also, I meant to put a point #3 in my advice above, but for some reason, after I typed #2, I thought I was done and submitted my post and then left the page! But it was basically what fuzzy said here:

I did not use Magoosh but I also used word lists that were categorized the same way. For me, I found that the best way to improve your V score is to learn as many words as possible that might be on the test. Therefore, my plan was to learn all of the "common" words first before going onto more advanced words. If Magoosh categorizes words based on how often they appear on the GRE, then I would also think the best strategy is to learn the words that are most likely to appear on the GRE first. That is, it's better to focus your time studying the words that make up the majority of the questions than the advanced words that make up the last little bit.

I think you will get better advice from immigration lawyers and experts than us here at GradCafe. Here is an anecdote that might help, but honestly, I want to repeat that this should not substitute real legal advice. One of my friends is from a Middle East country and his past papers have titles that include "Nuclear Physics". Of course, he was studying highly theoretical stuff about the forces in the nucleus of atoms, but visa/immigration officials see that title and think weapons first. This makes every US visa processing take much longer and he says that they get this information from his past papers even if he does not bring it up first. From his experience, the advice I would give to you is: 1. Don't lie to any officials. 2. Instead of trying to avoid being placed on TAL, plan for it as the "worse case scenario" instead. So, now that you have your I-20, start your visa application right away so that the extra weeks of processing, if it happens, would not impede you from starting your program on time.

Agreed that I was oversimplifying it there. The link you provided is for US schools only right? My point of making the R1/R2 comparison was that UBC would be a R1 school if a similar scale was applied in Canada while SFU would be more like R2. I was using the Macleans magazine classifications because Canadians may be familiar with those terminology instead. I did not mean to imply that "medical/doctoral" and "R1" are synonymous. Responding to (1): You are right, but I believe I only conflated these two groups in the last part, where I discuss resources. My main complaint against the authors' argument that meritocracy in the current system requires graduates from the top 10 units be 2-6 times more productive than graduates from the third 10 units. The authors' reasoning is that there are 2-6 times more faculty placed from top 10 schools than the third 10 schools. I do not think this is a fair way to assess merit because I don't think there should be a linear relationship between production and whether or not you get a faculty placement. Even if there is a meritocracy and we were magically able to rank everyone based on merit and hire say, the top 10% as faculty, I think the differences between those who get hired and those who do not would be marginal. (2): I definitely would not separate resources from prestige. Prestige is one very important way for the school to gain donors and thus resources for its scholars! (3): Indeed, my preference would be to simply admit that academia is not meritocratic. Why do we need to be different from other work environments? (4): This was the guideline I used to apply to graduate schools. And this will be the guideline I follow when I apply for postdocs! At the start of my PhD application, we decided that given the way hiring decisions are made (easy enough to infer from the CVs of faculty at places I'd like to work; and from statistics like only the "top 10%" of people become professors) it's not worth investing ~10 years of our lives in grad school and postdocs if I'm not going to be at the top ~10% of places the entire time.

The paper that telkanuru linked has also been discussed in this other thread earlier this year: While I definitely agree that there is certainly some aspects of the hierarchies that cannot be explained by merit alone, I have some reservations about the way the authors of the study "measured" merit. I also do not think academia should be purely meritocratic and I do not think meritocracies are some kind of special ideal state. My main complaint about meritocracy is that we have no objective way to measure this and therefore it is impossible for us to evaluate people based on merit only. I wrote more about this in the linked thread.

Teaching adjuncts are severely underpaid. However, I don't think it's fair to say that there is an injustice if the majority of the tuition cost does not go towards paying for costs related to that course. This is because the reality is that tuition pays for a lot more than the cost of running the class. Tuition is a major source of university income that pays for all of the other things the University wants to spend money on. I know that in my last department, each department's budget is set by the Faculty of Science based on how many students enroll in their classes. This money is then used to pay for graduate students (TAs), pay for external speakers to give seminars, pay for administrative staff, pay for professor salaries, etc. So basically for a research oriented department, teaching is often the task that professors have to spend some fraction of their time doing so that they can bring in the money to do the other stuff they also want to do. However, universities have found a way to exploit this--let's hire adjuncts and pay them crap so that we can get the most tuition money while expending the least amount of money! What I mean to say here is that I don't think it's correct to view tuition how much students pay in order to take a course. Instead, it's the money they pay in order to support the school that is providing their education. I still find the treatment of many adjuncts reprehensible but I don't think the solution is to decrease the gap between "tuition income" and "adjunct pay". Instead, I think the right thing to do is to stop hiring adjuncts and hire tenure tracked professors that also benefit from the tuition income in the above ways.

I think it's also important to point out that UBC and SFU are generally regarded as two different types of Universities. For example, Maclean's classifies UBC as "medical/doctoral" (i.e. what Americans might call "R1" research institutions) while SFU is a "comprehensive" school (what Americans might call "R2", but it's a category for schools that do have graduate programs but perhaps not in every field and they may not prioritize research as highly as teaching). In Astronomy, SFU does not really have a big graduate research program and many SFU astronomy undergraduates do their honours theses with UBC faculty.

I'm coming from a different field, but I think you should also be prepared for the possibilities that you will get nothing waived. I came to a US Planetary Science PhD program with a Masters in Astronomy from Canada and my current program does not waive any requirements if you have a Masters from anywhere. If your classes from your Masters overlapped with the required classes in your PhD, you will get to waive those requirements, however you will have to replace them with higher level elective courses. Policies vary a lot from school to school though. Another school said they would waive the "minor" requirement for people with Masters, which is the equivalent of reducing your courseload by 80% of one semester. Another school said they evaluate this on a case-by-case basis. So it might be true that Biostats has uniform policies across all programs, but it's more likely that you will see varying policies at different schools. So, you should be prepared for the possibility of not having anything from your Masters (except for what you gained in experience) count towards a PhD.

I think this is a good way to point out that rankings are not "precise" and my statement about "top 20" is just an arbitrarily chosen number. Something ranked, say 18th to 22nd (again, more arbitrary numbers!!) could fit in either tier. That is, I don't think these divisions are super strict and as pointed out in the other McGill vs X thread, where a school falls can be really field dependent. So, I don't usually want to try to differentiate between 1st and 3rd ranking, or 15th and 17th or 21st and 25th etc. My attempt to categorize schools into 3 or 4 broad tiers tries to eliminate these fine details but of course, at the arbitrarily chosen boundaries, we'll run into the same problems. But I hope the intention of my above example was clear--that the elite US schools are a step above Canada's best schools in the physical sciences. But these elite US schools are all well funded (mostly private schools). It is hard for Canadian public schools to compete and I think the Canadian top 3 is stronger than a lot of US state schools. I don't think it's fair to compare the elite US private schools with Canadian schools, or other public state schools in the US and elsewhere.

The home residency requirement is often stated as a requirement that must be fulfilled before the student can apply for an immigration class visa to the US. I can never find definite clear wording on this, but to me, this sounds like as long as you do not get a visa that is on track for immigration/permanent residency (e.g. the TN visas, additional J visas, or some H1-B visas) you don't have to fulfill the 2 year requirement. However, in fuzzy's link, there is also a "12 month bar" which requires you to be outside of the US for 12 months before getting the J visa needed for research scholars and professors. My personal plan, if I stay in academia, is to use J-1 AT (36 months) for my first postdoc if I want to do that postdoc in the US. If I do stay in the US for my first postdoc, then doing a second postdoc in Canada would fulfill both the 12 month bar and the 2 year home residency requirement. If I end up in Canada for my first postdoc, then everything is fulfilled even earlier. In any case, I'm not worried about the home residency requirement because the earliest I have to deal with it would be 3 years after my graduation, which is a long enough way away that so many things can change by then.