TakeruK

A related piece of advice on doing things that are more useful to you is choosing the topics of your class projects that line up with work you need to do anyways. I'm not sure about your field but almost all grad classes in my field have a term project where you either do a lit review or a mini analysis. If you choose these projects to be things you need to do for the next paper or thesis chapter, then you can reuse it

It means what they said. You are very likely to be admitted but they haven't finalized the decisions yet.

I haven't thought about the thesis that way but that does make sense. I approached my dissertation/thesis not as a way to show my work, but a way to prove that I had done enough to earn the degree. I think all of them say something like "submitted in partial fulfillment for the degree of XYZ", right? So that became the purpose for my thesis, to fulfill said requirements. My goal was to do the minimum amount of work necessary to fulfill that requirement. Ultimately, only 60% of my efforts during my PhD went into my PhD thesis. A small chunk of it were things I tried in the first few years that didn't go anywhere interesting so I left it out. Much of the work I did in the last 1.5 years didn't go into my thesis at all, it's going in a paper I'm now working on as a postdoc researcher. I found that from talking to my colleagues in other areas of the world, European theses are meant to be incredibly comprehensive tomes. People spend a ton of time in the introduction to do a super comprehensive literature review that summarizes all modern knowledge on their thesis topic. I just feel like it's not the greatest use of time, as every other PhD student has compiled something similar and frankly, the student gets almost no benefit from doing this work. There are also invited review papers and chapters in book compilations and such that also review the topics in question. But I suppose that your interpretation of the purpose of the thesis here makes more sense with this approach to thesis writing. On the other hand, my introduction was about 12 pages in thesis format. Because the "meat" chapters were my articles copied into thesis form, those chapters were written for the expert audience and while they do have their own small introduction/reviews, they are very narrowly focussed on one research question in each chapter. So I wrote my introduction for the more general audience (the audience in my mind was a 2nd or 3rd year undergraduate student interested in planetary astronomy) and the purpose is to introduce and motivate the big picture question that connects the following "meat" chapters. The conclusion chapter was only 8 or so pages tying everything up and hinting at what I am doing next. The reason to mention future work was to show that the results of the previous "meat" chapters lead to new questions, which these new studies could address.

Hi! I think I might have replied to you in the past? I was in the USA on J-1 with my spouse on J-2 from 2012 to 2017 and my spouse was able to get an EAD and work and earn good money with no issues. I'm glad that you're all settled now. 1. I'm sorry to hear about your experience with that border agent at Pearson. The crappy thing about the US immigration system is that despite whatever rules and laws exist, ultimately, the border agent has the final say on whether you are admitted. Sometimes this power makes them do crappy things like that. In the many many entries I made to the US on J-1, I am happy to say that the majority of border agents are nice and competent. But sometimes you get an extra grumpy one and you hear stories all the time from other students encountering scenarios like yours. Hope that was your one and only really bad border crossing experience! One tip that I found useful: say as little as possible to these agents and answer their direct question only. My spouse and I have never been asked about the employment status of my spouse. The border agent is technically right that the J-1/J-2 status is not meant for your spouse to find work and I guess they (unfairly, wrongly) suspected that your PhD program is just a big ruse to get your husband into the USA to work as an engineer? ugh. Anyways, the main reason your husband should always give for being in the USA is to accompany you as your spouse while you study in the USA. He should say this even after he has an EAD and a job. I would recommend that he doesn't even mention his desire for a job, his job, or anything about him unless directly asked. In the eyes of US immigration, his sole purpose to exist in the USA should be to be with you. 2. Does your school provide a template letter for the EAD? Mine did. I can send you one via PM if you would like. It's very very simple and it's what you said. You need to show what your funding is and provide a simple budget breakdown. Basically, you have to show that you can support yourself and your husband with only your income. You can always tweak numbers to make it so that you have enough without having too much (but honestly, as grad students, we're not going to have too much). Then you say that your husband wants to work to further his career and to earn recreation money. I think it's also okay to say "save up for the future". You just can't say "help with rent" or "pay for food" or anything US immigration considers a living expense. 3. There's no limit to what a J-2 can make. In fact, once the J-2 gets the EAD, the J-2 basically has the full working rights of any American and way more flexibility and ability to work in the US than the J-1. The only limit is that the J-2 status is only valid as long as the J-1 is valid. When my spouse had the EAD, they made more money than me, could work in any field for any number of hours at any location. In contrast, the J-1 can only work as part of our degree program (TA/RA etc.), on campus, and only a limited number of hours per week. Even when J-1s go for Academic Training status, we are still limited to only working in our own field.

Most earth science departments I visited are definitely not business casual. Wear what you are most comfortable in. Clean, untorn, unwrinkled clothes with no offensive messages is a good choice. Also, I realise from talking to various people that we might have different ideas on what "casual" and "business casual" etc. means. I'm more familiar with male clothing so to clarify, "business casual" to me meant things like dress pants, dress shoes, dress shirt (maybe tie, maybe not) etc. This is likely over-dressed, but it's not a huge problem if you are overdressed. Instead, during my own visits to earth science departments, it's very typical for men to wear "casual" clothes such as slacks/khakis, polo shirt, etc. There was another guy at one of my visits that wore exactly the same thing as me and we were the only two guys. There's a reason that people joke it's the "male academic uniform". But I also see many people with other shirts and pants that fit the description above (clean, not torn, not wrinkled etc.) Being comfortable will help you show your best self. Finally, my school's visit date includes an optional field trip/hike so check your itinerary for things like that and pack accordingly!

This is a good point---I had come to this from a different perspective. In my field, you write the journal articles along the way so you have them already submitted, accepted and probably even published (except maybe the last one) by the time you get to your dissertation. So it was just a matter of reworking the articles into thesis format. My school didn't have any specific rules about doing a thesis as articles: it's all up to the committee to approve or not. Instead, the rules were just documentation: we had to give the full citation to the article in which we are including at the beginning so that it's clear that this chapter was reproduced, we had to write a statement of our contribution to this article (usually no big deal if you're first author but if you're not then you need to justify why your contribution to the article was significant enough to count in your thesis) and finally you needed to submit some evidence that you have copyright permission to use the chapter to the school (in my field, the form where we sign over copyright to the journal states that the author also maintains the right to use their own articles in their own dissertations). Ultimately, since it's down to your committee's approval, it's really down to your supervisor. Anyways, since I already had my articles completed (the last one was accepted 6 weeks before my defense!) it was pretty easy to put together my dissertation as articles. My advisor told me to spend no more than 2 weeks on my dissertation. I spent 2 weeks writing an intro and conclusion/future work and another 1-2 weeks on formatting. However, the three articles in total took over 3 years to go through the writing process (the first one took especially long since it was my first time). On the other hand, for my MSc thesis, I didn't have any articles published so I wrote it all from the start. It took me 5 months, where most of the writing took place in the last 3 months. I didn't have to deal with all of the issues mentioned here by TK2! However, since we are expected to publish articles during our time in grad school anyways, in practice, it's easier to just submit a thesis as articles instead of taking valuable time away from research in your final year of grad school to put together a dissertation. That time could be so much better spent getting postdoc/post-PhD research projects started so you have a running start in the next position.

During grad school, I kept fluctuating between whether I liked living close to campus for convenience or whether I liked the physical separation to help with the mental work/life separation. The majority of grad students at my campus lived in graduate student housing, which was built right next door to campus, so depending on where you worked on campus, it was a 2 minute walk or at most, a 10 minute walk from home to office/lab. For other reasons, I didn't live in this housing unit but sometimes I wish I had that short of a commute! Although physical separation is nice, it's also nice to be able to come home right at 5pm and get dinner started etc. and then go back to work again from 9pm to 11pm, (for example) if I really needed to get things done at a deadline. With a long commute, even a "short" one like 30 minutes, that would mean that I would likely have to stay and work the extra two hours (to 7pm) lest I waste another 2 hours commuting back and forth. Also if I had to work a 10 hour day, I find it much more pleasant to work for 8 hours then a break then 2 hours than to work 10 hours straight. In addition, my partner also worked on campus, but isn't an academic so they have a regular work schedule. I think the mental switch of working at my desk to meeting up with my partner and commuting home together was a nice way to break up the day and enough of a mental switch that it helped to separate home/work. (Plus also as soon as we get home, I get started on household work such as cooking dinner which is pretty different from my work-work lol). If I ever had to work late, I would always go home first and have dinner and come back since we only have one car, which would make coordinating our commutes more difficult. So, in this sense, the convenience of the commute creates a much larger positive contribution to quality of life than the physical separation does. And, right now, with a small child at home, I would love to live right next to my work if I could! I'm back on the "prefer short commute" side of these fluctuations. My 40 minute total commute time is my least favourite time of the day because I would much rather be spending that time with my family (or, sleeping, or working so that I could spend other time with my family). Unfortunately, like rising_star, considering real estate prices, I might end up with that longer (up to 60 min each way) commute out of necessity...

Check with your advisors / mentors / letter writers / profs from your current department for things specific to your field. Although things could vary with field, at School 1, with 2 TA positions / semester for the last 4-5 years, which is like 16-20 TA positions would probably be way past diminishing returns! Note: Don't just go by what the job application asks for, since not everything each application requires is weighted equally. At many R1s in my field, job applications will still require a "teaching statement" or something like that but profs have told me that it's not very heavily weighted. They put it in the job ad so that they can point to it and say "see, we care about teaching!" but as long as you don't write something ridiculous, it will have little bearing on the final decision.

Okay in that case, here is what I would try, in order: 1. Ask for the flight for the original visit date. Let them know the current cost estimate. It's only $200 more and a drop in the bucket compared to all the other costs they have. Reschedule whatever other meeting you might have. Sorry if I am wrong but you still have not yet asked for a flight at all right? They might not even know you want a flight. Don't mention the flight increase or anything, just say that: I won't be able to drive X hours that weekend, could I take a flight (cost estimate XYZ) instead? The best course of action is to almost always start out by asking for your preferred option first. If you want something, ask for it. 2. If that doesn't work then you have to decide now if you want to commit to a visit later. If you do, then plan a visit in late March and commit to it, because you don't know what will happen in the next few weeks. If you do decide to attend somewhere else and already accepted that offer, then cancel your visit. It's not the best thing to do but it's better than going on a visit when there is zero chance you'll attend. It's part of the costs the school has to accept. If you are really unlikely to accept this offer, then you can instead just say that you can't visit at this time and would like to talk again in a few weeks to set up a potential visit for late March/early April. Then leave it at that. They might say okay, hope to hear from you soon, or "sorry, we won't be able to accommodate that" but either way, you're not worse off than you are now. --- Finally, for the waitlisted program---you may not be able to visit if you get off the waitlist. You won't know when you'll get off for sure and it might be too short notice to set up a visit. However, it does sound like you're much more interested in the waitlisted program than this current (safety?) school. So, I wouldn't worry about holding a weekend for the waitlist program if you are setting up a visit for this safety school in late March. If you do get off the waitlist, just cancel the safety school visit if you need to.

What kind of teaching does School 1 actually offer? Will you be an instructor of record and/or have significant teaching responsibilities that will actually make you competitive for teaching jobs later on? Also, in your field, what is the typical "saturation" level where it's no longer useful to have more teaching experience? Two classes per semester sounds like a huge teaching load which means either 1) these are significant teaching responsibilities and you'll end up spending all your time teaching or 2) these are more like TA/grading/discussion group leading positions which will still eat up a lot of time but having 4 of these per year for 4-5 years means you'll have way too many. That is, for my field, a teaching experience like a TAship where you grade and/or lead discussion sections and/or run small group tutorials is a good experience to have, but once you've done it 2 or 3 times, it doesn't help you get a teaching position. Having 20 of these vs having 3 of these are the same value, even for teaching heavy jobs. A strong candidate, in my field, for a teaching focussed job would have decent research experience, at least one major teaching experience where they did more than just TA and then 3 or more TA positions. However, most candidates don't have the "major teaching experience" since most STEM grad programs don't do this, so there are still many instructors in my field that are hired without this. For the two schools you're looking at, it seems like School 1 is likely way too much teaching. However, School 2 might not offer enough. I went to a school like School 2 and while my primary goal isn't teaching, I also wanted to do more than the minimum TA experience. So I sought out extra teaching responsibilities. For my TA work, I asked the prof to take over the lectures for 1 week and that worked out well. So, I think you have more flexibility at School 2. You get to teach on your terms, not because you need it for funding. Also, you may be able to teach as an adjunct prof at a nearby college too. Ultimately, if you want the most options open in 2022, I would advise you to take School 2. It gives you more options because it provides the most valuable resource: time to do what you need to do. So, in 2019 or 2020, you might refine your goals a bit more and you can use this time to either focus more on research or teaching. At School 1, you're stuck teaching (and perhaps at no value to you) no matter what. Finally, in my field, even teaching focussed schools will want their instructors to do research as well. All these schools, even those without PhD programs, want to raise their research profile. Despite what they might say about valuing teaching and such, they seem to be hiring on the basis of research as long as you demonstrate some interest and aptitude for teaching. Maybe this isn't the case in your field, but talking to many people in teaching focussed schools, this is what they tell me!

Don't send a physical card for this. Unless this is some custom in your specific field? Also, top programs often do admit from waitlists because some of the people that get into a top program are likely to get into multiple top programs. So, since each person can only accept one offer, it's likely that some top programs will admit from the waitlist. After all, why would they even bother with a waitlist if they didn't want or need to use it. For example, my PhD program did not have a waitlist because they admit about twice as many people as they would want to come and usually it works out (if not, then they adjust it in the following year).

Seconding this! Otherwise, if there really is no chance you'd attend, then declining to visit is fine too.

Seconding this. Another postdoc and I are hiring an undergrad intern for this summer. For both of us, it's our first time directly hiring someone (we've supervised students before, but through our advisors). So we have been reading resumes, cover letters and we picked some number of people to interview. But it's like...no one trained us how to do this, we're just making it up as we go along. Yet we are making decisions that will affect these students' lives! Next week, we are going to interview and we'll need to make up our own questions. We got some ideas on what we want to ask, but we're not really going to know whether these questions will get us the information we need to make the final decision. So, yeah, definitely feeling like we're just making it up as we go along. Non-academic example: My partner and I have our first child now and whenever something unexpected happens, we just google "is it normal for babies to...." or "should my baby be doing ..." etc. I wonder how our parents raised us without Google!

I treated my grad school time as having a job/career. Whenever people outside of academia asked what I do, I said that I am a scientist / researcher / planetary scientist / astronomer at [University], depending on who I am talking to. I generally avoided saying "student" because then people think I'm still in college or something. Usually my status did not come up in the conversation, but if it's a longer discussion (sometimes those seat partners on flights really like to talk!) then I would tell them that I'm working towards my PhD and explain how grad school worked if they didn't know. If the other person is familiar with academia, they might ask if I am a professor or something and then I would thank them for the promotion and explain that I am still working towards my PhD. When it comes to things like banks or whatever and they need to know my job / income source for credit applications and such, I would just say "Researcher" and my employer was my school and my salary is X dollars per year. So, in the above official sense, yes, 100% treated my grad school like a job. But maybe you weren't really asking about that, and maybe you mean more like how I viewed my "job". My answer would be like fuzzy's. I chose to work pretty regular hours, mostly because halfway through, my partner got a job on campus and they had regular hours so I matched my hours to theirs. However, I often worked extra hours and took extra time off because I might as well take advantage of the fact that I have a flexible job. So, I always scheduled my doctors appointments etc. during working hours because it's way easier to get those appointments (instead of having to wait weeks) and then made up those hours on a weekend or in an evening. In general, I considered certain events on campus as mandatory professional requirements (seminars, group meetings etc.) and made those my "core work hours" and everything else was flexible. So I wouldn't skip my department seminar to go see my dentist, but that 8am to 11am block that's always empty on Wednesday mornings is fair game. Ultimately, as you progress along in academia, this is how the faculty also schedule their work, although the more senior you get, the less empty blocks of time exists! So enjoy it while you can If you are also asking about whether I felt mature/independent/etc. with my job. This is a mixed bag. It's certainly harder to feel like a mature working professional in the first year(s) when you spend most of your time in classes. But later on, after reaching candidacy, I definitely felt different. I gained much more experience to feel confident in myself. It's subtle change, but suddenly you become the foremost expert in your topic in your department. You know more about it than even your advisor and other faculty ask you questions to learn more about your field. You get requests to peer review journal articles from others in your field. You might get conference invitations and seminar/colloquia invites. You might guest lecture in a classroom. You take the lead in your research projects. You start mentoring undergrads and junior graduate students etc. At least in my field and in my experience, the last 1 to 2 years of grad school is a major transition to an independent researcher. You become experienced enough to do your own research and take charge of your own projects on the day-to-day basis, but your advisor is still there to help you set long term goals, or help you figure out things when you get stuck, or help you make tough decisions since you're reasonably experienced but there's still lots more to learn / lots of things you haven't seen yet. For example, while I was fairly comfortable leading the analysis in my work, I still sought my advisor's advice when I had to review a paper for the first time, when I submitted my first job application, when I prepared my first lecture etc. Beyond the academic side, I am afraid that the personal side of things doesn't feel very "adulty" as a grad student though. Most grad schools offer very little pay compared to professionals in your field (perhaps fair, since we're trainees) and almost no benefits. With some very low cost of living areas, grad students aren't really saving up for their first home or saving for retirement etc. So in that sense, I really did feel in limbo while in grad school---as if I had to put the non-academic parts of my life on hold while I complete this retraining and rejoin the "real" world. Especially near the end, when I was about ready to graduate, I really felt a strong urge to finish grad school and move on with my life. This was a great motivator near the end of the marathon that is grad school though! The worst limbo was the final year when I knew I was ready to move on, but you still have to find a job and you spend months applying, not hearing back, interviewing and not knowing what part of the world you'll even live in later that year (a bit like the limbo of applying to grad schools!) Now that I am past grad school and in an independent postdoc position, it's easier for me to look back with rose-tinted glasses and pick out the good things about grad school. There are certainly some good things, such as: - Not having to worry about how you are going to fund your research: your advisor/dept/school takes care of that for you - Knowing that you have your advisor as a "safety net" to shoot down your bad ideas / help you refine good ideas (note: you still get some mentorship beyond grad school but not at the same level and there's an expectation that you are supposed to figure these things out yourself - Stability of being in the same location for 5+ years. My postdoc is a 2 year contract (with a 1-year extension option) so while I got last fall off from applying, I'm back on the job market this fall. I feel like I've just moved and finally settled in! - Things like health insurance and such can be cheaper through your school since the premiums are based on the typical student, which are generally young, healthy people. So if you're not young or not healthy, you can get a much better rate through your school than privately on your own. So there are some good things that you should certainly take advantage of while you're in grad school. But to be clear, it's not like I wish I was still a student or anything! I'm so happy to be finally finished and "moved on" In my ideal world, grad students really should be promoted after achieving candidacy because they are almost-independent researchers at that point. The promotion should be an end to tuition and some kind of junior staff/internship/apprenticeship employment status, representing a decent pay raise and some benefits. In my field, you often double your salary from PhD student to postdoc, so I would be thinking that the first few years of grad school is the same, and you get a 50% raise after candidacy. I think this model better reflects the value the student researchers provide to the school and will help make it feel more like a real job/career that is worth investing into.

This is part of the reason why I am using it more too. I use it so that no one automatically has to out themselves if they use partner and I think if it's a universal term, then this will be better. It's the same reason why I am trying to identify myself with pronouns more regularly too. I think most people would assume the correct pronouns for me if they met me, but on conference badges, I still use my pronoun stickers. The conference organizers make enough for every attendee (although they are completely optional). For both "partner" and the pronouns, I just think it's better when it's not the default to assume heterosexuality and pronouns. That said, I did also think about not co-opting terms from a group I do not belong to. For both of these cases, I believe that that these uses are encouraged by LGBTQ advocacy groups.

@FishNerd: I think "partner" is very commonly used, especially where I am now. It's actually now my new favourite term and my partner and I are starting to use it more often to refer to each other. I have been saying "spouse" a lot in the past few years, especially on these forums (for some reason, "spouse" seems more naturally when written but doesn't sound as nice verbally, although I usually just use their name). The reasons why I like "partner" is that it is the most true description of our relationship. I also like that it is gender-neutral and "legal"-neutral. By that I mean it doesn't require you to be legally married to your partner (for some people, they might come from countries where it would be illegal for them to be married, or maybe from cultures where they would not be accepted as a married couple). I also like that it doesn't imply a judgement on how committed you are---i.e. an unmarried partnership isn't any less valid than a married one. Our Graduate School policies uses this term as well because they don't want to treat married or unmarried partnerships differently (keeping in mind that some partnerships are more accepted by various laws/societies than others). So, for example, the school has benefits to help pay for a partner's health insurance and the school doesn't discriminate between married couples or not. So I've been using "partner" more and more. Originally, I think people from same-sex partnerships and those who cannot or do not want to be married used this term more. But now, everyone uses it and I think it's great to normalize all relationships Significant other is also nice but it's a bit longer!

Agreed with the above about trying to schedule a chat with your POIs either in person or on Skype and finding out more about how students are paired with advisors during these chats or the visits. I think talking to students especially about the advisor selection process is important. It's good to know the policy from the department and how the professors view the process, but ultimately, the ones most impacted are the students and you want to hear how it really works from their perspective.

When I did this years ago, most profs weren't into Google Docs lol so I did it by hand. Great template though! My only question is what purpose did you have in mind for the "Received" column? Most profs aren't going to be checking on this sheet to figure out if the school received it because well, profs submit hundreds of letters per year and it's not really feasible for them to check that each one of their letters went where they are supposed to go. It's the student's job. Also, not all schools tell you when they have received the letter, so if you don't update it and a prof does check, it could cause extra unnecessary concern. But it's still a useful column for your own bookkeeping (let the prof know that they don't have to worry about that column though). Also, I would recommend sharing the link to the spreadsheet to the prof(s) when you send them reminders since they might lose the original email with the link! When I applied to postdocs last year, I just copied and pasted the table into the body of the email each time with the remaining schools.

We got engaged the first month of my Masters (we had been together 5 years), married in the first summer of my Masters. Starting my PhD, we were the only married couple in my cohort---not surprising since we also moved from Canada to the US where it's the norm to enter a PhD right after undergrad. Since I took 5 years to do my undergrad (co-op work option), we were 3 years older than our cohort. However, within a year or two, a few other classmates also got married (mostly people with serious relationships prior to grad school as well). There were plenty of older married grad students though. I think at one point, I counted about 30%-40% of grad students either married, engaged or in a similarly serious/long term relationship. Meeting with these married students while I was visiting the program was what sealed the deal for us. The department we joined was very family friendly and basically every (non-academic) event was open to partners and spouses as well. This was also generally true of the entire campus. Talking to these married students on the visits gave us a good sense of how we can balance work and life etc.

Generally, in the sciences, finishing your dissertation is a lot more than just writing the dissertation. The OP's sidebar says Geophysics, which would usually operate under a very different model than other fields where it's more common and easy to go away for the last part of your PhD since it's just writing the dissertation. In the sciences, it's not really a matter of academia as a lifestyle or not (I also view it as a job). Instead, it is a job and the grad student is expected to be present in the department, take place in department events, seminars, etc. Depending on the source of funding, they may also be working on research and it is reasonable for a boss to expect their employee to be present at their workplace. So, while yes, your advisor cannot stop you from going off campus. But they can make you choose between finishing your degree with them and moving off campus. Maybe you can find another advisor willing to fund you and advise you remotely. Most schools don't have a very long "minimum residency time" where you must be on campus but everything else generally requires advisor approval. I think another difference in sciences and other fields is that the advisor and student are more committed to each other. I think a student wanting to take an unauthorized leave of absence is enough grounds for an advisor to drop a student as their advisee. But it doesn't and shouldn't come to these extremes. It sounds like your advisor is asking for a real dialogue and he does bring up a good point about changing priorities at inopportune times. In addition to what others wrote here about having access to the right resources and funding. It does sound like your advisor will still keep you as their student though but rising_star brings up important points about how you value this relationship. I know some students in similar situations as you and they usually work out some arrangement where they spend some fraction of their time away but never all of their time. Usually the summer semester is a good time to be away since not much is happening on campus or in the department. Then the student might spend one month out of the 4 month semester out of town, which totals 6 months present and 6 months away. You can normally work it out with your advisor on key times you need to be around. At least at my PhD school, you also need approval from the University to go on "detached duty" in order to keep your student status and funding while physically separated from campus.

That sounds fine. Hope you get the reimbursement, or failing that, at least what they would have paid for you to drive. By the way, would they have paid for your mileage if you drove? I can't see how a 6-8 hour drive is considered more economical than a flight.

Best of luck with the OGS and SSHRC! Glad to hear that your TA package will be worth a decent amount. Funding does vary by field, as you mention. My Physics MSc minimum funding was around $24k but then there was $7k of tuition, so the minimum take-home pay was $17k. Winning things like the OGS or NSERC/SSHRC/CIHR brings it up by a few thousand, depending on each department. However, there are certainly science programs in Canada that pay around the same level as your offer, and from my friends in the social sciences, I have heard many offers like yours. So to not mislead you, there are certainly better offers out there but it's not like they are extremely lowballing you or anything. One more thing that threw me off when I started my Masters: winning external fellowships often decreases your internal funding. So the $15k OGS or $17.5k SSHRC CGS-M might replace your $7k scholarship. Still, that would represent a net increase of $8k-$10k. Sometimes they may also decrease your TA load so be prepared for that (but on the plus side, it does mean a lower workload): my MSc school reduced the TA load by 50% if you win a OGS or higher award.

Just jumping in to say that RA does have meaning outside of "research assistantship". I currently work at a place that employs no students (we're a national lab type place) and one of the "ranks" of staff researchers here is "Research Assistant". There is also "Research Associate", which is also shortened to RA. But even outside of my current workplace, a research assistant, abbreviated as RA, is a job title I've seen often for someone who works in a lab as employed staff (in both Canada and USA) rather than a degree-seeking student. The grants I'm familiar with will have to allocate these raises ahead of time in the grant request, or there has to be room for it somehow. From my (albeit limited) experience, most grants will budget X dollars for personnel salary (for say, N FTE) with a certain amount of expertise. They will use the host institution's pay scale for this estimate, and if they are looking for a FTE over several years, then the standard increases in pay are factored into the grant budget. For some fields, the grants use the granting agency's payscales instead. So it is possible that the money available to pay salaries is capped based on whatever they asked for. But maybe they did factor in some additional money in case they were going to hire at one salary grade higher and they were able to hire you at a salary grade lower than budgeted so there could be extra room. Or maybe the grant allows for some shuffling of money from one area to another. Or the University itself has sources of funds that a PI can apply for to cover extra costs like this in order to keep a over-performing RA on staff. It's hard to say because financials are often opaque and it might be possible for the PI to pay you from different sources of funding so it's not like you are only limited by the grant (but you might also be). I second Eigen's advice above. One really important thing to do with raises is to find out what is reasonable. Perhaps you can talk to your HR department (assuming you are still an employee of the University even though you are paid from a grant, rather than an independent contractor) and see what the pay scales are for your position. Then, a reasonable raise might be to ask one extra step on the scale than what you might normally get. Or, if your school doesn't have discrete steps but percentage increases instead, ask for a slightly higher than normal percentage increase. However, if you are asking for a raise not just because of "merit" but because you think you have been undervalued, you should look up what other schools in the area pay their RAs or find out what your colleagues are getting paid (careful, although most states have laws that prevent you getting punished for asking about your colleagues' salaries, this doesn't stop schools from acting against you). If you are at a public school, these salaries may be published online (or you can check the ones for the public school nearby).

Did they say how much the TA position is worth? How many hours? The Collective Agreement for McMaster TAs states that a full semester of TA work is a 133 hour assignment. At a rate of about $42/hour, for TAing both semesters, this should be valued at around $11,200. So your total funding package may be something like $18,200. It's not great but it's certainly on par with Canadian graduate student funding. Also, is this a PhD or MA program? Many schools have minimum funding levels for PhD students (but not MA), although these minimums are around $18,200 too. You will still have to pay tuition out of this amount, and that makes it pretty hard to live on the minimum stipend. Hope you have other offers you can use to get this one matched!

My PhD school had no minimum chapter requirement and no formal organization instructions for the body of a thesis/dissertation. It could be just one giant chapter and the University would have no problem with it. However, there still remains a difference between the minimum requirement from the University and what your advisor/committee would want to see. But I'd imagine this would be individual to each committee.