TakeruK

I think it is a standard reply that schools will tell people reapplying that unless a lot has changed, the outcome will likely be the same. This is probably a courtesy to help applicants decide if it's worth it to reapply. In my opinion, I think that your changes are quite large and it would be worth it to reapply. I would not tell the professor about your changes--just thank him for his response.

When I asked for professional references in the past (for other non-academic applications), my old boss usually would give me like 5 or 6 sealed letters along with an unsealed version and basically said "let me know if you need more letters". When I asked for academic references, the norm was that I do not see the sealed letter.

"Latino" generally means a person from Latin American descent, which does not include Portugal. However, I usually see this question phrased as "Do you identify yourself as .... [check boxes]" or "Do you consider yourself ... [checkboxes]". That is, I would say that you should answer this question based on how you self-identify, not on things like biology or genetics.

This is not crazy at all and in fact, there is a visiting grad student in my department that is on their 2nd of 2 years here as an ABD student too. This student is completely paid and funded through a fellowship and an RAship from their home institution (luckily, the cost of living in the two places are similar otherwise it could be really sucky!). You just have to meet minimum residency requirements for your PhD program and satisfy other requirements like TA requirements (perhaps you have completed all of them or your supervisor can "buy you out" of TA duties). At my school, the minimum residency requirement for a PhD degree is only 1 year in residence. I think most schools require 2-3 years.

ETS does not mail it anymore, from what I've heard. You can print it from the online report.

In my opinion, Golden Key and similar honour societies are really only beneficial if you are willing to be involved and put time in the society. Otherwise, it's just going to be paying a fee to add a line on your resume. I didn't join GK because I wanted to spend my time volunteering with societies within my university instead of something like GK. But it's up to you!

That's what they told me in 2011, but I should clarify and say that the point of my advice was that you should wait until your scores are ready before you order the score report. But again, perhaps things are different now in 2014 than in 2011.

(P.S. The quoted text in juilletmercredi's post was originally written by fuzzylogician, not me! But I think I would agree wholeheartedly with both posters!)

This is something that really depends on the norms of each field and the terms and conditions of each journal. I just submitted a paper last month and prior to submission, I had to certify that I have not submitted this same work for consideration to any other journal (even if the other journal is published by the same group). In my field, the correct/norm/ethical thing to do if you want to submit to another journal is to first withdraw your submission from the first journal and then resubmit. Some concerns about resubmitting: my field is small enough that it's very likely that when the second journal solicits reviewers, they will be asking some of the same people as the first journal! For your specific case, I think it is okay to respectfully bring up your concerns about copyright. But I'd also second wildviolet's suggestion to seek the advice of another grad student in your field or another professor you have a good relationship with.

When I asked ETS the same question in 2011, they said the scores are sent immediately. Therefore, they advise you to wait until the scores you want to show appear on your online account before you order your score report.

Please follow this link to reply to the duplicate thread in the Engineering forum:

Here are my answers/thoughts: 1. I would print the score from the myGRE website as a PDF. Then I would use Acrobat or Photoshop or similar software and censor/block out all of the areas of the page with information that the school did not ask for. Remove things like the list of schools you sent scores to, and previous scores etc. I would make it very clear (draw ugly solid boxes or something) that these areas are being blocked. 2. The percentage scores change every year on July 1 and reflect performance of test takers in the past 3 years. For example, the current % scores shown are your scaled score (i.e. the number out of 800 or 170) relative to performance of GRE test takers from July 1, 2011 to June 30, 2014. If you wrote the GRE in 2012, then your % score reported back then would have been your % relative to test takers from July 1, 2009 to June 30, 2012, for example. I would report the most recent % because when you send your official score report, that's the number they will see. 3. This is up to you. Note also that many applications will ask you if you have applied to the school in the past. I would recommend telling the truth becaue I don't think it's very difficult for a computer system to match your name/info with a previous application. However, I honestly do not know if they actually do this or if they would care.

In 2011, I got a paper copy of the scores about 2-3 weeks after taking the test (it was the first way I learned about my AW score). However, I've heard that ETS no longer sends a paper copy to you. Instead, you can print your scores from the ETS website to get the same info.

What do you mean Caltech is really expensive?? If you mean the city it's located in (Pasadena, CA), then yes, you are right but Caltech stipends are set with the high cost of living in mind. If you are talking about tuition then yes, it's expensive, but all PhD students are admitted with full funding and tuition waivers. You can find the stipend rate if you look around the internet--the standard Caltech ESE package is full tuition waiver plus about $30,000 per year and the TA requirement is very minimal (1 quarter per year in years 2, 3, and 4).

All of the schools that I applied to wanted transcripts mailed directly from the issuing school (this is also less work for you). In addition, the one school that wanted paper LORs (I didn't apply to this school in the end) wanted me to print out the form, sign the waiver, then mail it to my LOR writer then they fill in the LOR form and then they should mail it directly to the school. For some of the fellowship applications, they just wanted one single package per applicant so I had to gather all the paper LORs and transcripts and send them in. Some fellowships required sealed LORs and transcripts but some did not. This is another case of "it depends". So, you should definitely check with each school for their own policies. They should be online but you can also email/call them to check. If you do have the option to mail them yourself, it might be worth the extra effort to just mail one single package, as fuzzy suggested. However, either way should be okay!

What is actually allowed in the exam center depends on a lot the exam center themselves. Exam centers always choose to be more careful because they don't want to accidentally violate ETS' rules. At my GRE exam center, we were only allowed to bring 2 pencils, the key to our locker and our ID into the exam room. Everything else remained in the locker. I would imagine that most places will not let you bring in a piece of paper with anything written on it. However, this does not mean you have to memorize the university code! The exam software basically lets you search for your university name (either by full name or just by matching a few characters). Once you select the university, then the available department codes (if necessary) that are associated with that university will also pop up. I believe this works in a very similar way to how you can search for these same codes in your myGRE account online. I do recommend memorizing a few things though: 1. Pick which 4 schools to send to ahead of time. 2. Search for these four schools in the myGRE account thingy online to get their university code. At this point, be extra careful to see if any weird stuff pops up! For example, if you intend to apply to University of Washington, you might want to be aware that there is another school called Washington University. Also, sometimes specific institutes within a university might be registered with ETS as a separate entity (one of the programs at one of the schools I applied to had its own separate institution code). 3. Finally, check with your department's website to see if you need things like departmental code or any other instructions (in the above example, it turns out the separate institution code for my program is outdated and in fact I should send my scores to the university institution code). Basically, do a "dry run" through the ETS website online so that you know any pitfalls to watch out for

I had this problem with one school and it turned out to be an ETS error. I had another problem with a transcript because my middle name was spelled a little bit differently and for one school, this made the computer system fail. I contacted the school and they said that they actually have my transcript, but the computer system cannot and will not update to "received" because of the name mismatch. I think you should contact this school to follow up and check what happened! 3 weeks is a long enough time for you to be concerned (especially if all the other schools confirmed that they received the score).

When you are viewing your own version of the score report, you will always see all of the scores! There's no option to only display certain scores. For one school, the official score report somehow didn't make it to my application so they asked for an unofficial version to make the decision. This was before ScoreSelect but I didn't want to school to know about my subject GRE score (they didn't ask for it) nor did I want them to see where else I sent the scores, so I downloaded the "printer friendly version" and then use an image editing program to remove the information I did not want them to see. I did this in a transparent manner (i.e. I didn't carefully "doctor" the document so that the hidden information was not clear). Instead, I basically pasted a giant ugly white box over all areas of the page that did not show anything useful and wrote a note in the white box describing what I was doing. Thus, I basically blocked out everything except the details of the test they needed to see and my identifying info. I would recommend a similar action in the era of ScoreSelect. I think it's a good idea to block out giant areas of the page so it's not like they can count the number of whited-/blacked-out rectangles and figure out how many tests you are not showing. If you are worried about how the school will feel about this action, you can check with them first. However, in my opinion, I think it's really dumb to require a student to upload the unofficial score report as it contains so much private information. I feel that if schools are okay with receiving unofficial scores, they should just ask the student to self submit the score by entering the score into a form (in my application year, most of my schools wanted either self-reported unofficial scores or official ETS score reports; no one initially asked for the unofficial score report, save the special circumstance above).

I agree with 1Q84 that the key is clarity and precision. You also want to be concise. One handy set of rules is Orwell's rules, which are paraphrased and explained at many places on the Internet, here's one example: http://www.pickthebrain.com/blog/george-orwells-5-rules-for-effective-writing/. One rule in particular is (paraphrased): "Don't use a long word when a short one will do". I also agree with bsharpe that you want to express your personality more than your ability to write. In fields where they care about your writing, they will ask for a writing sample. So, I wrote my SOP with the tone similar to what I would use if I was in an interview with a professor on the admissions committee and the prof leans back in his/her chair and asks "So, tell me about yourself and why you want to go to grad school." So, I would write my SOP like I would speak in a slightly formal setting (i.e. not as formal as a presentation but more formal than the way I might speak while having lunch with my friends!). As for the big words in your example post, I would say that words like erudite and grandiloquence would not really work as words in a SOP in my field. That is, I cannot really think of an example where you would say that naturally. However, words like "indiscernible" or "convoluted" are pretty regular in my field. But as I said above, it's really the way you use the word, not the actual word itself. Sometimes you need to use a "big word" because you need to use the precise meaning of the "big word" and a "lesser word" will mean something completely different. In these rare cases, go for the big word. But remember that although sometimes a "big word" might be a tiny bit more precise than a "lesser word", that is not always justification to use it over the "lesser word" if the general sense of your sentence is still preserved with the lesser word. Also, don't use a big word just because you can and definitely don't use a big word just because you want to sound more intelligent! It will just sound fake and awkward. Finally, another one of Orwell's rules is (paraphrased, again): "If you can remove a word, then do so". Especially in scientific writing, this usually means stripping off all unnecessary adjectives and adverbs. I think SOPs and other scientific writing pieces become very clunky when extra adjectives are added, especially since this is the easiest way for people to add in "big words"!

I have seen some CVs where the authors list these types of successful grants as a "contributing author" or something like that. To avoid confusion with other grants/awards a grad student generally lists on their CV (i.e. grants/prizes awarded to you personally for academic or research achievement), you could list these grants as a separate subsection of your awards or your "publications" sections. You can even include one or two lines under the subsection heading that clarifies your contribution to these listings. That said, I am not certain whether or not it's absolutely necessary (or even helpful) to include these items in your CV. Perhaps someone in your field (or a professor) can advise you on that part! (Edited to add: the CVs where I see these types of grants listed are CVs of researchers who currently work at soft money institutions. That is, these are cases where their employment and salary depends on their ability to write successful grant to fund themselves and their research!)

For what it's worth, this is something I do see on CVs in my field sometimes. Usually, they appear on CVs of postdocs and professors as things like "interview segment with BBC on X". I agree with the above that you should only include cases where you were solicited for your commentary due to your expertise (i.e. not just one of those "let's talk to random people on the street" type interviews) and you should not include unsolicited materials (e.g. letters to the editor). I think you can definitely include them if you want, but I am not 100% certain how useful they would be. For postdocs and untenured faculty, having them on the CV is helpful because it demonstrates that they have earned the respect and reputation as being an expert in that field (in theory, either the researcher is active enough so that news outlets know who they are, or the researcher is well known enough that when news outlets ask a university for an expert, the researcher's name is suggested). This type of earned reputation/expertise is important for making hiring/tenure decisions. At the prospective grad student level, it's unlikely that we have this kind of clout in our fields yet (although there certainly are exceptions!) but also this type of information about an applicant isn't really something that is helpful to a graduate admissions committee, in my opinion. Again, if you have an exceptional media expert reputation then it would definitely help--just that for a typical prospective graduate student, I don't see this making a huge difference in your admission decision.

Caltech has a strong ESE (environmental science & engineering) program: http://www.ese.caltech.edu/ Sometimes you can learn a lot about a department's focus by reading the titles of the seminars in the past few years (seminar speakers are invited by the department, who generally invites people based on their own interest). Here is the 2013-2014 seminar list: http://www.ese.caltech.edu/seminars/by_year?year=2013-2014 (links on the right hand side to navigate through other years). At Caltech, the ESE program is now part of the Geological & Planetary Science division, which means it is easy for a Caltech ESE student to take courses or work with people in the earth science programs as well.

It sounds like you have your answer (at least for that school). I agree that the best people to communicate this to would be the administrative staff in the department that you are applying to. Note however, that although this puts an extra layer between you and the admissions committee, it's pretty common for the administrative staff to communicate with the professors on the admissions committee about the applicants. But I would not worry about this because you literally cannot have it both ways! I think if you want to be sure that you will be considered for the MS program, you have to trust that this information won't influence your PhD decision. And in honesty, I don't see why the professors would use this information against you. As CrucialBBQ said, this does show your determination in the program. But they also know that students prefer funded PhD programs. If they think you are good enough to be a PhD student, then they will make you an offer, because if they don't, they will risk another school making you a funded offer and then they won't have you. Graduate students do cost money, but if a school wants you, they are not going to think "well, we might get him for free if he takes the unfunded MS offer".

I agree some distance from this incident would be good for the OP. I think this is good advice, in the sense that it will definitely lessen the impact of the academic dishonesty. When I wrote the above, I didn't think about the possibility of working for 2-5 years before going back to grad school. As for the second part (academic dishonesty in undergrad ruining your entire future), I would say that the OP's future is not "ruined" at all. I think one academically dishonest mistake could be forgiven with some time in between undergrad and grad school, but this is two instances in the same class in two different years. But having no chance of getting into grad school doesn't "ruin" your life--there are a ton of other possibilities that the OP can follow. Research/academia cannot afford to have academically dishonest researchers since we would quickly lose all public trust and support.

In my English 101 class, we also did non-anonymous peer review (and in fact, we met with our reviewers the following class to discuss the comments).