TakeruK

You will have to check with your new school's International Office to get the facts/confirmed information. However, based on my knowledge of the F-1 OPT program, you get 12 months of OPT for each level of degree program. For example, if you were a F-1 student for undergrad, you get 12 months for undergrad and then if you start a Masters program, you get another 12 months. So, starting your new Masters program does not grant you any additional OPT time (but if you start a PhD later, then it would). However, two issues complicate your situation: 1. I am not sure if getting OPT and then not using it counts against your OPT time. I'm not sure if your record will show that you completed 0 months of OPT (since you didn't work), 3 months of OPT (since you left the US in July 2013) or all 12 months of OPT. My guess would be "3 months" but you should check with your International Office! 2. Also, you might know that in some STEM fields, OPT is extended by an additional 17 months (so you get 29 months total). You should check with your International Office to see if you qualify for this extension.

I think 19k/year should be affordable for one person to live modestly. I don't know how long the Thunderbird waitlists are. There are other options off campus though. Most of the graduate students I knew live in Vancouver itself and bike or bus in. All UBC students pay a fee for an unlimited bus pass (whether you take the bus or not) so bus transportation is very popular at UBC. It looks like the rent for a studio in Thunderbird is close to $1000/month and I think you find similar priced studios in Vancouver or even cheaper places if you share a 2 bedroom with someone else. Lots of people in Vancouver bike for long distances. The rain is manageable with appropriate raingear. However, on extra rainy days, you might choose to just take the bus.

No, I do not think there are any graduate programs that would consider this as a major factor in admissions.

My personal opinion is that while it would be "nice" to have job/career satisfaction, I don't need it to be personally happy. My family have always been "blue collar" workers (I'm the only academic) and so we always grew up with the idea that work is something you have to do in order to have fun later. The idea that work can also be fun/interesting was a little foreign to me. I worked in some blue collar jobs to pay for college and while I can't say that I liked it as much as I like what I'm doing now, it was something I know I can do in the future. Of course, my goal would be to find work that I find personally stimulating and satisfying that also pays well enough for me to have a happy life outside of work. But if I had to make sacrifices in one way or another, I would gladly choose work that I don't find interesting in exchange for happiness in the other 128 hours per week. However, the whole point of pursuing a PhD (for me) is so that I can find work that would be somewhat interesting to me!

My opinion is that in both cases, you are effectively rejected. Sorry For school 1, it sounds like they are going to reject you but are just waiting until after April 15 because it is their policy to not reject until after April 15. Perhaps they do this in case so many people decline offers that they might need to make more offers after April 15. For school 2, they have not made a decision by now because it sounds like this school also only makes "acceptance" decisions before April 15 and wait until later to reject. Edited to add: It's possible that in both cases you are on some unofficial waitlist (since it sounds like the schools do not reject until they've filled the class completely). However, since it is now April 14, I would expect you would be informed you are on a waitlist at this point so I feel like it's more likely you are rejected than waitlisted. But you're not actually rejected until you are rejected!

Agree with all of the above--go with a talk! In my field, they are certainly more prestigious than posters (usually poster presentations are assigned to those not selected for talks). In some circumstances, you might want to do a poster presentation because you can engage with individuals at a deeper level than a talk. However, it sounds like in this case, the best thing to do is to push yourself a little outside of your comfort zone and prepare a talk! The attendance might be small but think about it this way: this is a perfect chance to practice on a small audience now because you're definitely going to have to do talks with much bigger audiences in the future!!

I know many people who do something similar to the first suggestion and have two Facebook accounts, one for friends/family and one for professional contacts. But I don't know if I'd recommend the second suggestion. As psychkita warns, it could make the situation worse, because from my point of view, what I do on FB and how it might affect me professionally in the future is none of their business. It's a pet peeve of mine when people try to get me to do what they want under the guise of offering "advice" or otherwise judging my personal choices. However, it really depends--if a good friend offer this advice, I'd see it as a true desire to help but if it was only a classmate/acquaintance then I probably won't receive it well. (Not trying to say that there is only one way to do (or not do) things but just providing another perspective on this suggestion)

Indeed. In my work, we often have to use followup telescope time to confirm a measurement or detection. We propose for telescope time in 6 month cycles (e.g. for time allocated between February and August of 2015, we propose in Fall 2014). Therefore, it might be ~8 months between knowing you need an additional data point and actually acquiring it. In these cases, it is very important to be able to write as much of your paper as you can while waiting for more time! (Or work on another simultaneous project). In some cases, in my field, we even submit papers before we have all of the data and update numbers during the review process. For example, if you have two measurements of something and you want a third to get a better errorbar, but this does not affect the validity of your conclusions (or it would not result in an outright rejection), you submit the paper and then provide an improved measurement along with your responses to the referee report.

I spend more time on "other stuff" than the typical graduate student. This year, I took on a leadership position in my student government and that took much more time than my normal "other stuff" time. Currently, I think I spend around 20-25 hours per month** with my student government. The work has been very fun and very rewarding but I don't think it's sustainable to keep this up along with meeting my own career goals and having "down time" with my friends and family. Normally, I volunteer for one-off events that interest me. For example, I work with my school's International Student Orientation. This month, I am also volunteering at our International Food Fair and I'm organizing some food from Canada to be given out These things take maybe 10 hours of my time in total and they happen once a year. This is the kind of volunteering I like to do best, because the time commitment is over in a few weeks and I'm not making decisions on how my time is spent too far in advance that I might accidentally overload myself later. I also do some outreach like this too--when an opportunity comes up and if it fits my interests and my schedule, I volunteer for it. However, I also like to have at least one ongoing volunteering event. During undergrad, I volunteered with a youth group (the same group I was in as a teenager). During my MSc, I volunteered with my TA labour union. And during my PhD, I've been part of my student government. All of these are in non "leadership" role (i.e. executive or "Steering" positions), except for my current position this year. It's very manageable to be in a non-executive position throughout the year and I like doing this because 1) it keeps me in the loop with what's happening on campus outside of my department and 2) there are issues I care about and being involved allows me to do something about it. I think in a typical year, (i.e. other than this past year), I'd want to spend an average of 10 hours per month on "service".** Personally, I think service (especially work that is outreach related or helps improved our community, such as student government) is really important. I write about this on my PhD applications. Maybe this resulted in rejections at some places but if so, I'm not really upset since I don't want to be in a place that is opposed to this. Overall, I am glad that I took my 3rd year (the lightest year in term of workload in my program) to be extra involved in my student community. 20 hours per month is a big commitment for me, but this was the year I had the time to do it and I'm glad I did so! I try to make sure to be a little "selfish" in choosing volunteering opportunities. I choose things that meet one or more of these criteria: 1. Meets one of my interests (it has to be fun!!) 2. Allows me to help a group achieve something I'm passionate about (e.g. science fairs, outreach, student advocacy) 3. Allows me to learn something about academia (e.g. "unwritten rules", learn about what makes other groups on campus tick, what are their motivations etc.) 4. Allows me to advocate for myself (as a graduate student) (e.g. union representation, student government, etc.) I've found that usually (but not always), the things that are a waste of time are organizations that are not connected with education, your school, your department or your field at all that just want students to be warm bodies at some event. Sometimes they are half-heartedly passed off as "outreach events" but they don't really care about outreach and just want random people from your school to be present so they look good. Luckily, I haven't encountered many of these, but that would be an example of something I wouldn't want to spend my time on! (**Note: In all places where I write the # of hours, I mean hours taken out of the working day or, more commonly, during my evening/weekend free time. I don't count lunch hour meetings (since I don't work at that time anyways) but I do count time prepping and thinking about these meetings).

Sorry for the confusion. In my field, while we do work on projects for our supervisors, they are always considered "our projects". That is, "our project" does not mean that we necessarily came up with the idea, but we're the ones responsible for doing the actual work. I think whether it's okay to work on someone else's work at the same time will really depend on your department and your "first" advisor. If your funding is tied to doing RA work for this first professor, then you would have to make sure that you are meeting the requirements of that commitment. In my field, RA work and dissertation work are one and the same. It's rare for us to do RA work for another professor for funding only, without progressing on our dissertation. But I know this is different in different fields. In my opinion though, I generally would say that it's important to be flexible on what you want your dissertation to be about, especially if you are starting a new program. That is, I would actually pick a dissertation topic based on factors like: 1) does it teach me the skills I want, 2) is this subject a hot topic in my field right now, and 3) do I get along well with the professor and the lab. It's a lot easier for us to change our interests than it is to change these factors I listed.

I know how you feel. Someone else explained this feeling very well and it helped. They said something like: You are always going to feel sad when you make your final choice, no matter how great the school you chose or how much you wanted to go there. The opportunity/potential to attend all of these great programs is always bigger than attending any single great program. However, it's important to remember that it's not possible to attend all these programs simultaneously. Declining the other schools can feel like you are closing these opportunities but in reality, you never had the option to attend more than one school!! Of course, this is something we all knew coming in but knowing about something and actually experiencing it can be really different!! Good luck with your PhD studies!!

I agree with rising_star on both the important roommate attributes and the TAing issue. Of course, definitely check your own school's policies but I really doubt schools are going to be able to enforce a "no TAing for roommates" rule. As rising_star said, the important thing is to protect your student's privacy (but this applies to all of your students) and for you to not give your roommate an unfair advantage! In my program, we have almost no undergraduate students so all graduate students generally TA each other. I make sure to never grade in my office and always store assignments and solutions out of sight in a drawer. I also set my "office hours" rules so that when my officemates were my students, they didn't get an extra advantage (my rule was that students can drop in any time, so that every student can access me as much as my officemates could--however this only worked because I only had 6 students--when I had more students, I would have strict office hours held outside of the office).

Well, if you change your mind after April 15, the most practical and immediate consequence is that you might not have another offer to switch to. Almost all of our offers expire on April 15. Other than that, there's no difference really, the above comments about burning bridges still apply.

This really depends on your program. In my program, we are required to do two research projects that are not connected to each other (and then defend them at the end of the first year in a quals exam). So here, it's not only normal, it's required! Obviously I have a biased opinion because I chose this program knowing that this was the requirement, but I think it's a really good idea for most graduate students to have more than one project. I think that having only one project puts you at risk of becoming irrelevant if the trends in your field change (or if you get scooped). Also, if you want to continue in academia, having more than one project means you can churn out more papers and also have more than one network of people / skills / expertise / research ideas. I would say that students should still keep their multiple projects connected enough that they can go in the same dissertation though (unless this is a side project that you are only spending a little bit of time on). But in my field, dissertations don't have a lot of requirements and it's common for a dissertation from my program to be 3 separate projects with a common theme (e.g. using a similar method on multiple unrelated data sets). Overall, I'm not sure if the benefits of having side projects is worth it if they don't count towards your dissertation.

You should contact the people that requested the information for the I-20 in the first place. At my school, this is the International Students Office. At my school, the department admin staff does not know anything about international student status. My advisor would know even less. It's just not their job.

If your I-20 is lost, they will issue you another I-20. That is, other than the things we discussed in your other post, there is nothing you need to do. Unless you think this school is not a legitimate school and trying to scam you, you will get your I-20 eventually. I understand that you are worried and that the I-20 is important, but you will get it!

Jcof, I think the CoveredCalifornia plans would be a good place to look. See my post above.

I agree with Sigaba--the first step is to find out what (if any) agreement exists on the ownership of the product your friend created. As for the "citing" issue, if these maps were not published elsewhere, then it's not really possible to "cite" them. If you just mean whether or not the thesis should have explicitly mentioned your friend by name, then this is really dependent on the rules of the publication. For example, some journals in my field require authors to explicitly state what they contributed while others will only acknowledge names without details. For a PhD thesis, the rules are usually pretty lax and it would only be a problem if the school required a different form of acknowledgement. Without an agreement between your friend and the author of the PhD thesis, and without any regulations from your school stating otherwise, there is nothing legally wrong with what happened. As for ethics--I'm not sure, this might depend on the norms in your field. In mine, we usually do not acknowledge every piece of work explicitly, just by name at the end (although if I published peer-reviewed article using maps made by a colleague that I paid, I would likely include them in the author list; but this is not possible if the maps are only published in a thesis). With the information presented here and considering the norms of my field, if this happened to a friend, I would not consider it plagiarism or a breach of ethics. (Although it would have been nice for the thesis author to talk to your friend so that everyone was on the same page with regards to how the maps would be credited).

I agree with the others that I don't think Prof A knows that you and Prof B don't get along. Prof B might not even know that you aren't happy with them! I don't think you should blame Prof A for inviting Prof B. I also agree with the others that sometimes it's best to move on and that you will have to interact with people you don't like. The exception would be if being in the same room as Prof B would make you extremely uncomfortable (not sure why your relationship with Prof B is not good, but I can think of some reasons where it would not be possible for you to simply "move on"). If it is just not possible for you to be in the same room as Prof B, I have two suggestions. Both involve not placing blame on Prof A though, because it does not sound like Prof A knows inviting Prof B would upset you. Two potential suggestions: 1. Talk to Prof A and explain that you do not get along with Prof B any more. Explain why clearly. Maybe Prof A can talk to Prof B and ask Prof B not to come. This would only work if you and Prof A have a good relationship, which it does sound like you have. 2. I'm assuming this party will involve your old department, are there still students or other colleagues in the program that you can count on to help you? If so, confide in them that being near Prof B will make you very uncomfortable and ask them to look out for you and if it looks like you and Prof B are about to have a one-on-one conversation, ask them to come in and "steal" you away (e.g. "Hey niceweather! I need you to come talk to me in private for a minute...etc.) or redirect Prof B's attention or something.

And there was such a thing as a PGS-M that you could take to the US!

Very strongly agree with this!! My ordering above was what I used for graduate school applications and recently for some fellowship applications. In my field, the three most important things that people want to know about you is: 1) where you studied, 2) where you worked and 3) what you published. So that's what I list first! If I was applying to non-academic positions, I would definitely revise this to emphasize relevant skills and experience and bring education/publications lower down on the list!

You probably want to get multiple opinions on this specific case! My thought would be no, do not include it, and here's why (but almost all of this is subjective--it's just my opinion!): The CGS-M is now structured so that it is awarded by the school you applied to only--the decision is not made at the NSERC level (please correct me if I'm wrong here). So, it's no longer as prestigious as it used to be, in my opinion, to be worth indicating that you declined it. It also doesn't mean very much, in my opinion, to decline an award that is offered by one specific school only. However, if I remember correctly, you will still be able to indicate that you were successful in a previous CGS-M competition when you apply for the PGS-D next year. So this is another special case--since both the CGS-M and PGS-D are NSERC awards, they would already know about your success at the CGS-M level (congrats!) Here's the quote from the Instructions for the PGS-D: Therefore, the only people that care about your previous CGS-M success are your PGS-D evaluators and they will know this through your PGS-D application, so there's no need (in my opinion) to put this on your general CV. In fact, I don't think you get to submit a CV at all for the PGS-D, you have to fill out individual form sections like the one I quoted above.

I think Usmivka made a good point that I didn't think about with my earlier advice! I definitely think DEs are important, but whether you need to do it now depends on what your research work this summer will be like and also what your program / major is like! If you are doing numerical work this summer and if your research supervisor thinks DEs are important for your work then you should take it now. Otherwise, it would be fine to delay it if it means falling behind in your major. That said, some schools have a lot more flexibility in the order you take classes, so if it's possible to take a pre-req as a co-req next fall, then you might want to consider that too! Probably a good idea to talk to both your research and academic advisors on finding a plan of courses that best fit your needs

This is the same thread as:

In addition to what others also said, getting the fellowship on your CV is a huge deal. I think the thing that most NSERC (I'd assume this appilies to SSHRC and CIHR too) CGS-M winners have in common is winning the NSERC Undergraduate research award. And the thing most NSERC PGS-D/CGS-D award winners have in common is winning the CGS-M. Having won past prestigious awards makes you a much stronger candidate for everything. Sometimes. It's normal practice to put "declined" awards in some cases. For example, if you won a NSERC CGS-M for computer science at School X and you also won a "Microsoft Fellowship" (probably not real, just making up an external award) and you decide the Microsoft Fellowship is better for you, you can say you declined the CGS-M (since the CGS-M is also a prestigious award!). However, I think the CGS-M is a special case because it's an award that is tied to a specific school. So, I don't think you should include the CGS-M (declined) from a school that you are not attending. Another case where I don't think you should include a declined award is if you end up with a better award from the same granting agency. For example, if you applied to both the CGS-D ($35k/year) and the Vanier CGS ($50k/year) program and received both, you should not put CGS-D (Declined) on your CV since the Vanier is a better award from the same agency.