TakeruK

On my CV I have a heading called "Publications" Underneath that heading, I have two sub-headings, "Peer-reviewed" and "Selected Conference Presentations and Proceedings" (with the implication that these are not peer reviewed). I would put published abstracts like you mention under the second sub-heading. Of course, you might want to name your headings/sub-headings differently based on what you have to list. In my field, we do not list publications "in prep" on CVs (but "submitted" or "in revision" or "accepted" or "in press" is okay). If you don't have anything for the peer-reviewed subheading, then I would just name it "Presentations".

This happens to me too! I write notes like "not good for X" and then when I search for "X" and get them! I think we are supposed to be using labels/tags for this but I'm not very good at doing it properly either.

When re-reading my earlier post, I realise that my first sentence was not appropriate because it doesn't serve to help you in any way and actually turned out to sound a lot more like an attack (i.e. you should have known this!!!). So please accept my apology, I did not mean to put you on the defensive for asking a valid question. I also forgot to mention another suggestion: perhaps it might be a good idea to ask the advisor to clarify what he meant / which courses in particular he would suggest. It might be the case that he forgot about your undergrad work or he didn't mean the suggestion as a literal requirement.

It's a little weird (based on the norms in my field) that the first author is not the same person that actually submits the paper to the journal. Here is my advice: 1. Don't go around him and contact the editor. It's already submitted, let that part run its course. 2. When you get a chance to sit down with the prof, bring up this sentence again and ask him to explain why X and Y are different with respect to that graph (i.e. do it politely, frame it as a chance for him to educate you). Bring up your concerns as questions of understanding and see what happens. Maybe you were wrong and his statement was valid. Hopefully, if he was wrong, he would see your arguments against his statement. At some point here, you should reach an agreement on the wording (more meetings if necessary). 3. You will get a response back from the referees that may or may not address this point. Work with your prof to implement the change so that the statement is something that you, the prof, and the referee(s) agree with. 4. Revise and resubmit, and then...hopefully acceptance and publication!! Again, to reiterate: first, don't go around your supervisor!! second, the original submitted version is not the final version of the paper--you have a ton of time between the referee's report and the resubmit deadline to work this statement out with your supervisor. There's no need to be hasty and try to contact the editor etc. I sympathize with the frustration and the alarmed reaction (I would too, if I was first author on a statement I felt was wrong), but there is time to work it all out in a way that benefits everyone

It is unlikely you will get an admission offer rescinded based on one or two bad (but passing) grade that they didn't see at time of application. However, it can still affect future fellowship opportunities. Many people apply to a variety of fellowships in their first year of grad school, and these organizations will see your senior grades. In addition, some grad schools make fellowship decisions after all of the senior grades are in. For example, one of my schools made me an admission offer and a minimum financial aid offer of $X and said that I would be eligible for further fellowships that might increase my funding. But these fellowships would not be decided until the summer (after final grades are in). And some schools might still consider you for fellowships using your final senior grades which might not affect your funding, but it would be a shame to throw away a chance of getting a prestigious named fellowship if you can control your senior grades. Finally, in some cases, TAships might be awarded competitively based on undergrad performance (although admittedly this is rare). Overall, I would say that you don't have to worry about significant bad things happening (e.g. revoked offer) if you get a couple of Cs in senior year. However, they still can matter so if you are phrasing this in terms of "should I slack off in my senior year?", I'd say no, don't do it. I mean no offense by this -- I had the same thought in my senior year (i.e. wait a minute, if they don't see these grades ever, do they even matter?). I also apologize in advance if this is completely not the case and it is a matter of priorities (i.e. spend time to keep grades up or do something else that is also very important). If this is the case, then I hope my explanation of how your senior grades might influence grad school helps you determine where you need to spend your time and effort

I think it might be okay if you wait awhile before bringing it up (I'm sure you will approach it in a sensitive way!). The risk is that he might still be hard to contact and then you will have even less lead time for a backup writer to submit their LOR. However, the risk might be worth it if this LOR will be a lot better than another one.

I'm not sure why you are surprised by this? Most programs encourage breadth and it makes sense to take courses outside of your main department if they are related to your research interest. In both grad programs I've been in, the minimum requirement is only half of the total courses come from your home department. But I do work in a fairly multidisciplinary field, where most research interests generally span several departments so it's pretty tough for someone to both 1) take courses they are interested in and 2) stay within one department. As for the money "ploy", if you are in a funded program, this is definitely not a money ploy. In most places, how it works is that your tuition waiver goes to the school (paid by department) but then departments generally get tuition money based on class enrollment. So, encouraging you to take classes outside of your department generally means taking money out of your department and paying it into a different department**. If you are not in a funded program, this also doesn't make a lot of sense because it would be in the professor's best interest for you to take classes in his department so that his department gets your tuition money**. Finally, in general, professors are not salespeople for their school and they usually do not have motive to try to encourage students to spend as much money in the school as possible. However, if you are paying for courses, then I would say to audit/sit-in (i.e. don't pay for) as many courses as you are allowed to. (** I'm over simplifying here and every school works differently, but I think this is the general direction of how tuition money flows within a university)

Cutoffs are definitely not anywhere as high as 162. Top programs in my field that even publish cutoffs (many do not) usually list them at about 40th to 50th percentile. Don't trust numbers that show things like "Average GRE score of admitted applicants" because 1) these are not cutoffs and 2) you are making a correlation = causation logical fallacy if you assume that the GRE score is what actually determines the admission decision. I think these high numbers actually exist because many top students do score well on GRE tests, but that doesn't mean you need to score well on a GRE test to be considered a top student. Don't try to excuse your low score in any way. It just highlights the low score even more and making excuses is generally viewed poorly, especially in a SOP.

It was definitely challenging for me because I had no idea how grad school even worked in 2009 when I applied to Canadian MSc programs so in 2011, when I thought I had it figured out, I had to learn how applying to the US was different! Luckily, as I mentioned above, I had some great professors who did grad school (or even worked for a time) in the US and they gave me their feedback. I felt their mentorship really made a difference in my success rate. The extra things I struggled with were: 1) Writing an SOP: Canadian physics programs don't usually require an essay like the SOP (for MSc programs, they asked us to provide paragraph-length answers to 5 specific questions that are similar to SOP prompts but I had not written a 1-2 page document about myself before (I had written plenty of research proposals for things like NSERC or OGS before, but not about myself!) This is probably not a problem for those in this sub-forum 2) Taking the subject GRE (Physics) 3) Taking the general GRE 4) Explaining why I am in a Masters program and that it's normal to leave for a PhD. At one of the conferences in the US, I introduced myself as a student about to leave with a Masters and a prof told me something like "well that's okay; not everyone needs to get a PhD". After that, I made sure to introduce myself as a Canadian Masters student and that I am applying (or later on, got into) PhD programs. I also felt I needed to explain this in the SOP (although in hindsight, I am sure the US schools have had Canadian applicants before and know how it works...but better safe than sorry). I did include a personal reason for doing a Masters first -- at that time, my SO and I weren't married so she could not have moved to the US with me. We got married during my MSc program. 5) An extra concern for us was ensuring my wife can continue her career while we're in the US for my PhD program. There are two types of foreign student status with the US: F-1, the normal type; and J-1, the "exchange visitor" type. Spouses of F-1 are on F-2 status (not allowed to work at all in the US) but spouses of J-1 students are on J-2 status (allowed to work after applying for permission). The minimal requirement for J-1 status is "not mostly funded with personal funds" (i.e. you need full funding from the school or a fellowship) but it's the school's right to decide whether or not to sponsor you for J-1 status. For example, I met all of the requirements but Arizona completely refused to support me on J-1 status. 6) Finally....funding, the most tricky issue for the end! In my field, students are always fully funded both in Canada and the US. However, international tuition at public schools in the US are quite high, so in order for the school to fund us with the same take-home pay as the American students, we cost about 2 to 3 times as much!! So, this means that public schools in the US accept a very small number of international students. For example, at UC Berkeley, they accept about 5 or 6 students in Astronomy each year and about 1 in 10 students are international (i.e. one every two years). My profs who worked in the American school system told me that I would much better off applying to private schools in the US, because international and domestic tuition are both equally ridiculously high. That is, we would be at a disadvantage applying to US public schools but not when applying to US private schools. This advice turned out to be very good and very true. I applied to a lot of schools in California (the culture and climate is close to Vancouver, what we're used to). I got rejected at all their public schools but accepted at the one private school I applied to. Even though the private school is considered much more competitive and higher ranked than the public schools that rejected me. If you like stats/data: At the University of California school system (public), 10% of its graduate students are international. However, at private schools, the numbers are significantly higher (e.g. Harvard is at 30%, my own school varies between 40% and 45%). So, the biggest piece of advice I want to give to Canadians applying to US schools is: Don't be intimidated by big name private US schools. Due to the way funding works, we may be much more competitive at these schools than at public schools. In addition, I would say that it's not worth moving to the US for grad school if you aren't getting some special opportunity not available in Canada. That is, unless you need to be in the US for your particular field of work, or you are applying to a top 20 school (mostly private anyways), I don't think it's worth it. Top Canadian schools are generally comparable with US schools ranked in the 20s or 30s so if you can get into one of those, you can probably get into a Canadian school anyways. (Of course, there can be a million other reasons why the US is preferable for you, and if that's the case, ignore this advice!)

I use Mendeley for exactly what is requested here. I've used it on Windows, Mac and Linux with no issues at all (same features everywhere). This is how I usually use it (there are other great ways too): 1. Find the PDF for the paper I want to read/add to my library 2. Download it into a special Mendeley-watched folder and Mendeley automatically imports into my Mendeley library. (alternatively: I just download it elsewhere and import the PDF from the Mendeley menu separately) (alternatively #2: I sometimes use the Mendeley web importer tool to do this directly from the website with the journal article) 3. If you are importing a new-ish paper with meta-data, the author names, titles, other bibliographical information are loaded automatically; otherwise, I copy and paste the DOI or PMID or arxiv ID into the sidebar in Mendeley and hit a search button to automatically import this info. 4. I manually add a few more items if necessary (sometimes I copy/paste the abstract, add my own search keywords/tags [think Gmail labels], add a URL for the article if one isn't automatically imported and I want to access things like online datasets attached to the paper, add a citation key for BiBTeX) 5. I can now read the article and use Mendeley's highlight and sticky note tools to annotate the paper. The sticky notes are searchable and you can view a list of all notes for a certain paper (clicking on notes jumps you to the location of the note) 6. I can also write a summary of the paper in my own words Other cool things I use Mendeley for: 7. It works like iTunes in terms of file organization -- I can tell it to organize my PDF by author / year / journal etc. whatever. This means once I import the file into Mendeley, I can delete the original and Mendeley takes care of the rest of the organization. I generally used the "Watched Folder" feature and once the file is imported, I clean out the Watched Folders once in awhile. I love this because I never have to think about where to store things or how to name PDFs in a logical way. 8. I have never written a Works Cited / Bibliography by hand since I started using Mendeley. I use BiBTeX so all I have to do is export my library as a BiBTeX file (there's a hotkey for it) and then I compile it in my papers. I know there are also Word plugins if you don't use LaTeX but I have not used that myself.

I'm not in your field, but your thread title and opening post really resonated with me. You can see the names of my schools in my signature (I try not to write it in posts since I can always change my signature in the future if I wanted to hide the information). Here are the parts of my experience that are the same as you: 1. High ranked undergrad (usually ranks in the 30s in the Times Higher Education University rankings; probably in the 20s if considering US/Canada schools only) 2. Low ranked MSc program (does not generally appear in worldwide ranking lists; not even ones that count down to 200) 3. Wanted to do a 2 year Masters before committing to a 5 year PhD. 4. Wanted to (and got into!) a top ranked PhD program (usually ranks between 1st and 3rd, depending on which list) One big difference is that my BSc/MSc programs were in Canada (I'm in the US for PhD) where it's normal/required for people to do the 2 year Masters first, and then (either stay or move) do their PhD (3-4 years). The main purpose of a Masters program in Canada is to 1) make sure the student wants to do research at the PhD level and 2) make sure the student is qualified to do research at the PhD level. I think another thing that really helped me was that although the school I went to wasn't well ranked at all in my field, the person I worked with was relatively well known and I also worked with one other well known external collaborator. My advisor also knew about my goals and was incredibly supportive. He sent me on a lot of conferences and trips so that I can present my research to as many people as possible and get my name better known. I also worked closely with him and my BSc advisor to talk to professors at schools I wanted to go to for my PhD and they helped put me in touch with a couple of people. So, the answer to your main question is yes, it's totally doable. It sounds like others on this forum in your field have been successful too. For me, I think things might have gone a lot differently for me if I didn't make the effort to reach out to those who would help me.

I found it helpful to partition my life into three areas: Research Experience, Teaching/Outreach Experience, and Other Service. I use something like these three areas on my CV. In Research Experience, I put the obvious stuff--paid or volunteer research position for professors or other employers. For teaching/outreach experience, I put anything where I communicated science to an audience. So, TA positions go here. My tutoring experience goes here (I worked for my undergrad school to teach review lectures -- but I didn't include my private one-on-one tutoring positions). I also volunteered to teach classes in many topics (some related to my field, some not) to a youth group that I used to be part of, so that went there too. Finally, I volunteered a bit with my school's observatory / public outreach nights. For "other", I put things like leadership roles in student organizations (TA union, undergrad physics society, grad student government) and also non-academic things like leadership roles in community organizations (youth groups, community service groups etc.) A few academic things (e.g. organizing undergrad student conference, editorial board for an undergrad research journal) went here as well. In my opinion, although I keep my "work" or "research" section strictly for things related to my field, I think it's important for me to include all of the other stuff I spend my time on. One reason is to show that I have a diverse skillset. I think it's just as important for a scientist to be a good communicator or a good leader as well as a good researcher. I use this section to demonstrate that I am able to manage both people as well as complex data sets. Another reason is to show what's important to me. I am the type of person that really wants to be involved in their community and that means I spend a lot of my time on non-academic things. I want to signal to schools that I won't be happy if I spent all of my time on research and if they are looking for that, they should find such a student in someone else!

Good luck on the GRE! Just to clarify some things -- a PhD isn't about teaching. It's really about academic research and throughout your grad program, you may encounter a lot of people who will want you to just do as little teaching as possible or treat teaching as a chore that gets in the way of their "real" work. Just wanted to prepare you for that--graduate school isn't as idealistic as you might think (remember, academia implicitly supports the GRE by their continued use of it!) Also, some good news -- most GRE minimums are quite low (well below average scores) so that programs don't automatically reject an otherwise qualified candidate. Obviously, you want to prepare as much as you can but don't fear that your GRE will be the one thing that gets you rejected, because that is quite unlikely (unless you score completely terribly).

I agree with the OP's reluctance to start a job in their field (a kind of job they want might after their PhD) and then just quit 3 months into it. Especially since this is a job that starts May 2015, i.e. after you already made a decision on grad school!!. With this new information, I think you should accept the job offer to start in May 2015 and apply to grad schools this fall. If you get into a program you like and you decide you want to go ahead with the PhD, you should let Intel know ASAP. You might know about grad schools as early as February and I think it is your responsibility to make a decision as soon as you have all the information (i.e. don't wait until April 15 deadline). You will probably be able to decide sometime in March 2015 and that would give Intel over a month's notice that you won't be starting in May 2015 after all. I think it is acceptable to change your mind on a job offer prior to the start of your job. After all, in the current job market, it's perfectly reasonable for a prospective employee to be applying to a lot of different jobs/opportunities and to change their mind if they get a better offer from somewhere else. If you don't end up getting into grad programs this year, you can then start work at Intel and apply for Fall 2016 PhD programs. By Fall 2016, you would have been there for over a year, which is long enough that leaving for grad school won't be terrible if that is what you end up choosing. So, I don't think you have to worry about conflict between starting the job and starting grad school -- you will be able to decide in early 2015 and give proper notice to Intel if necessary. The real question is whether you even want to go to grad school. It kind of sounds like you do and I think it would be a good idea for you to talk it out (i.e. consider pros/cons etc.) because I find that doing this usually helps me determine what I actually want. And you have a nice advantage of a very good/strong backup plan so that you don't really need to apply to safety schools. You should only apply to schools where you would give up the Intel job to attend!

This is a tough dilemma (but not really a bad dilemma to have!). My advice is to think about what your long terms goals are and what you need to achieve them. For example, my long term goal for pursuing a PhD is to get a job doing research that is relatively secure and pays decently. So, if someone were to offer me such a job right now, in the middle of my PhD, I would strongly consider taking the job and not finishing my PhD (since I would already achieve my goal without the PhD). Of course, it's not so simple, since there's a lot of other factors--e.g. will I eventually be replaced by someone with a PhD? what if I lose this job, would not having a PhD hurt me in finding a new job later on? would not having a PhD prevent me from being promoted/moving up as much as I would want to in the company? etc. etc. So, don't think of it in terms of aiming "higher/lower". Instead, consider what you need to achieve your long term career goals. If you are in a field that doesn't generally require a PhD and the concerns I just listed above are either resolved or not important enough to merit going to grad school, then take the job! If you know that taking the job will only be a good decision for a few years but then you'll be stuck without a PhD, then perhaps grad school is a better choice.

It's too bad that you were not more aware of the differences with the US PhD programs. As others said, this is going to be true in almost all programs in the US. I think the best way forward is put more distance between your next application and your previous academic record. As others said, you already have a Masters so it does not make sense for you do take any more courses etc. Sure, that might show that you can now handle courses, but I don't think this will be that beneficial for you. Instead, I agree with those suggesting more work experience. In the sciences, the best way to make up for lack of academic performance is to demonstrate strong research ability. A lot of schools won't mind that your GPA is around 3.0 if you are producing a ton of papers and science. With increased experience you can try again in a few years. Or, you can consider finishing a PhD in the EU, produce a lot of research, and then get postdoc positions in the US? This will also allow you to end up with US experience and potentially a US career. Both of these suggested paths won't be easy -- as others said, you'll still be a tough sell since you were dismissed from grad school before, and it's generally harder for people with PhDs from EU to get jobs in the US and vice versa. However, it's not impossible! Also, I think if you don't succeed in these paths, then at least you have something useful (more work experience for other careers, or a PhD!), whereas if you just took more courses and then don't get into a new program then you will be just where you are today.

Double spaced writing is for drafts so I would say submit all application materials in single spacing. For what it's worth, in all my programs (different field than you), you actually upload the PDF so you control how the SOP is formatted.

Just make sure you are allowed to do so. Some of the programs I applied to explicitly said that we were not to include any URLs to external sources or upload any document that was not asked for.

Well if none of the study abroad courses form part of your major's course requirements (I think this is usually the case anyways?) then it would not be a big deal at all if your applications don't show it. Grad schools want your whole transcript but many programs specifically care about performance in your major. I would include a note in the appropriate place in the application (perhaps as a "note" box on your education history, or in a "special notes" section at the end) to let the school know that these grades won't be available until 2015.

Yay! Glad that it worked out and that you came back to give an update

I'd second bsharpe's suggestion!

If you presented at conferences (even if it's student conferences) then you should list them too. People who have published papers usually have a section for "Publications" which then gets subdivided into "peer reviewed articles" and "presentations". If you don't have any papers, you can just have a "presentations" heading. I would put this section right after research experience. I would also list a section for awards/fellowships/scholarships. If you have major (i.e. highly competitive merit based) awards then I might list them right after education, otherwise I might list them after publications. I chose to list my extracurriculars on my CV, in the last section (I called it "other experience" but "activities" are good too). Profs usually list things like outreach involvement, students they mentored, professional society memberships, etc. here. For me, I listed things like student organization involvement etc. I chose a mix of academic and non-academic things because I want to present a message that I do not want to spend 100% of time focused on work/research. Finally, for grad school applications, you might find it useful to list a "skills" or "expertise" section, especially if you are applying to an experimental/lab based grad program. I agree with GCool that you can also list this as part of your research experience. However, you can list specific software or lab techniques that you've mastered in a short section that a potential supervisor can glance at and know where you could fit into their research program.

The usual order of events is: 1. Grad School receives your application. 2. Grad school processes it (e.g. attaches transcript, GRE scores etc.) and makes sure it's complete. 3. Grad school sends it to department 4. Department reviews it and makes accept/reject decisions 5. Department sends its decision to Grad school 6. Grad School approves department's decision (mostly to make sure department doesn't admit someone below university-wide standard without a good reason) 7. Grad school notifies you of the final decision; you get an official letter. So it sounds like you are in Step 5/6. Usually, the department will also notify the student of their decision in Step 5 while saying that the decision is subject to final approval from the Graduate School, but not always. It's not common for the grad school to not approve the department's decisions. It does sound good if the department's decision was to accept you. Maybe this department does not like to informally give the decision and will wait until Step 7. Or, the prof assigned to give you the informal decision in Step 5 is away/busy/forgot to do it so you end up not hearing until way later than expected. This happened to me at one school!

Regarding the Canadian PIs -- not sure about your specific field but in mine, admission is (almost) completely decided by individual PIs (i.e. kind of like a job offer). When it came to Physics/Astro grad programs, here was how my emails to Canadian PIs went (which I thought was ideal for me, but that can differ from person to person): 1. One month prior to application deadline (i.e. early January for me), I emailed all the profs I would be interested in working with and said that I am currently a BSc student at UBC, working with Prof X. and that I would be really interested in working with them for grad school. I said that I would be applying to their program next month and asked if they would be interested in taking on students. I told them that I was planning on visiting the school in February during my reading break. I also offered to send them my CV if they would like. 2. The prof wrote back to confirm that they would be taking on students and mentioned a few projects they would want a MSc student to work on. Some of them asked for my CV. All of them said that it would be great for me to visit, and put me in touch with the admin person to organize that. I thanked them and said I would let them know when I applied. 3. When I submitted my application, I also wrote a note to the prof to say that I just sent it in. (**At Canadian schools in my field, what usually happens is that a small committee reviews incoming applications as soon as they arrive to check for basic qualifications, then they forward it to all professors in the department for each prof to decide if they would like to hire the student. So I thought it would be a good idea to let them know I applied so that they can be reminded of me and know to look out for my application materials). 4. During the visit (for most schools, the visit came after their decision but I visited one school prior to knowing the decision result since that school's deadline was March 1), I talked to the professors in person. This was when we actually talked about potential research projects seriously. I think it could be a waste of time for both prof and student to discuss this prior to applying. Some profs were not around when I visited so I skyped them.

Note: I anticipate that there will be a lot of differing opinions on this topic and I'm not saying my advice here is the only good one. But I hope my opinion below helps you decide what the best path for you will be! WIth only these details, I think my advice would be to not mention this at all in your SOP. As you said, it didn't result in horrible grades and it does not sound like there was significant impact in your performance. So, unless this experience/difficulty has direct impact on your academic decisions / reasons for attending specific schools, then I would not include it in the SOP at all. This is because in my opinion, the SOP is a place to discuss the professional / academic aspects of your life, not the personal ones (except for the reason I just stated). Instead, I think a more appropriate place to mention this is your Statement of Personal History, or Statement of Diversity, or whatever each school calls it. In my opinion, this is the place to discuss more personal aspects of your life and how these experiences have affected your performance. i.e. this would be a good place to show that you persevered through a difficult time and were successful. Not every school asks for the personal history statement though. However, almost every school gives you a chance to provide additional information about your application, sometimes in the form of a text box on the last page of the application (or sometimes as a separate uploaded file). If there is no personal history statement, I would put this information in this section. However, it's up to you whether you really want to include it since it does not seem like there is anything in your academic profile that needs explaining. In this case, the risk of stigma against mental health issues might be greater than the benefit of letting the admissions committee know that you persevered through difficulty circumstances.