TakeruK

From my experience, this stage, where thee's no union yet but plans exist to form one is a very tricky/contentious stage. Things get a lot better after a union is actually formed and agreements made and people realise that while there are changes, it's not actually the end of the world! It may even be better for everyone! My answer would be to probably avoid bringing up the topic. It shouldn't be taboo but since the topic is often quite contentious, it is an awkward topic to discuss with strangers. You don't know who is going to be pro or anti union, even amongst the students, and for a visit weekend/interview, it's probably a topic best avoided. In addition, even if you really really needed to know something about the union in order to make the decision (for some reason), it's not certain that the students you are talking to would know the answer and even if there is an answer now, it might change by the time you actually start. At this stage, things are likely still much in flux. It might be years into your PhD before the union actually ratifies and negotiates a contract. When making your decision, my advice would be to not consider the union. Finally, I am guessing it's not a secret that the students want to unionize since you know about it (unless you know this info through a connection or something). But during this process, not everyone knows every detail. The organizing team would know the most and unless you happen to talk to someone on the team, you might not get all the info anyways. Plus, they might not want to tell an outsider, since they don't really know what you would do with the information.

Calling the school is a good idea to check for sure, but also because if you need more time to decide, it's a great time to ask for an extension too.

Oh I forgot to answer your other questions: Your health insurance benefit paid by the school could count as taxable income, depending on how it is accounted. For me, it was not counted. Also, the new changes come with lower tax brackets. Under the old brackets (the 2nd tax bracket was 15% instead of 12%) and the 4k exemption, the same 30,000 stipend would have 3433.75 in taxes, which is very similar to the 2018 tax owing. However, what does change is the difference between what international students (without a tax treaty) owes vs. domestic students. It used to only be the $6350 standard deduction difference. But now, American students can claim 12,000 in the standard deduction, while international students get nothing. Assuming most students have most of their income in the new 12% tax bracket, this is a difference of $1440 in net pay for an American vs. international student.

Decisions are based on a large number of factors, so you should consider everything important to you and see which schools offers more. Research fit is certainly a big factor though! If everything else is the same and this is the only difference, then definitely choose the better fit. I personally would also choose UBC for many other reasons, such as being in a much warmer place

For a good start, I would read this article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_tax_in_the_United_States. The short answer is that you should expect to pay about 10% to 12% of your stipend on federal taxes. It could be less though if your stipend is low. Note that for the 2018 tax year and onwards, there will be different tax brackets. So make sure you are reading the tables for the correct year! Here is more detailed info. I'm making lots of assumptions for a "typical" F-1 or J-1 student here. Your country may have tax treaties with the USA that allows for more deductions. In addition, this is just based on my own experience, please consult a tax expert for official advice As an international student, you will likely be a non-resident alien for tax purposes (if this is not the case, then the text below will be different, but since you say you know nothing about the tax situation so I am assuming this will be your first time in the USA). Therefore, we don't qualify for very many deductions at all. Actually thanks to Trump's "Tax Cut and Jobs Act", the personal allowance (called the personal deduction) that used to be about $4000 is eliminated. Trump instead doubled the standard deduction, which non-resident aliens do not qualify for. So, with the exception of books and necessary supplies**, most non-resident alien students will not qualify for any deductions at all. (**Note: Books and necessary supplies refer only to materials you are required to purchase in order to complete your educational program. So, required textbooks, with receipts qualify. And if your program requires you to, e.g. buy a lab coat in order to attend the lab classes, you can deduct that too. But you can't deduct "optional" expenses not explicitly required by the course, even if you need them. That is, things like binders, papers, pencils are not deductible, unless your course requires you to buy a very specific type of that item.) So, the 2018 tax brackets are... 10% from 0 - 9,525 12% from 9,526 - 38,700, and 22 % from 38,701 - 82,500. There are higher brackets but not typical for grad students! Also, I include the 3rd one there just in case but most people will be in the first two. So, if your funding package is $30,000 plus tuition waiver, your tax owing will be something like: 10% on the first 9,525, so you owe $952.50 (9,525 * 10%) for that first bracket. Then 12% on the remainder (30,000-9,525 = 20,475), which is 2,457 (20,475 * 12%), for a total tax owing of $3409.50. This is an effective tax rate of 11.3%. But this is just federal taxes. Depending on where you live, you may pay state or city taxes as well. So it might be a few more percentage points. Another thing to note is that your stipends may have a large fraction withheld for taxes because you are a non-resident alien. When I was in the USA, about 15% of my stipend was withheld even though my tax owing is always less. So you will have to wait until you file your yearly tax return to get that money back.

Campus visits for most programs are a lot more than just seeing the campus. Usually the faculty, staff and students have planned 1-2 full days of events, including evenings usually, just for you and the other visitors. I found that these visits really help me figure out which school to go to and what I learned about each school during the visits really changed how they ranked in my head prior to the visits. In particular, sitting down with faculty members, one-on-one, to discuss research opportunities made a huge difference. It was also helpful to be able to find out where the department is heading in the future in terms of areas of work and investing in facilities etc. And talking with the grad students directly gave me a good sense of what it would actually be like to live there, what the work environment is like, what certain profs are like. I usually try to balance that "live in the present" and "prepare for the future" mindsets, but in this case, I think these couple of days make a huge difference in where you will be for the next 5-7 years of your life in grad school. If you can find another date to celebrate the birthday, that would be good. I personally would not bring the partner just for birthday reasons on this visit because it would be hard to spend a lot of time with your partner and also fully participate in the visit. But if your partner will be moving with you to wherever you go for grad school, then certainly bring them to have them part of the decision, but save the birthday celebrations for another day. On the other hand, if you have plenty of visit offers already and aren't really interested in this school, you could probably skip this visit. Reading back the above paragraph, it sounds a little too strong. I simply wanted to emphasize the importance of an actual program visit not just touring/seeing the campus. Whether these things are important to you depends on your values though!

Not in your field, but this could be generally true: 1. You can just use the heading "Selected conference presentations" and only show a few posters if the ratio is a problem. 2. Third year was the shift for me from mostly getting contributed talks instead of contributed posters. After my third year, I only had two posters and they were both at very selective conferences (<25% of abstracts accepted as talks). Typically for my field, everyone gets a poster contribution and 40-50% are talks if it's not very selective (usually means there are tons of parallel sessions and/or shorter talks [5-10 mins]) and 20% to 30% are talks if it's a selective conference (usually only one session and/or longer talks [15-20 minutes]).

To clarify, yes, I do think you should trust your instincts! If you feel someone is arrogant/judgemental or have said questionable things, I'd go with my gut and run. I didn't sense that in the original post though, but you don't have to share everything here, so certainly go with your instinct. And definitely visit if possible.

Ah okay, sorry for the misunderstanding. I will be honest in my answer, in hopes it will be more helpful: When something like this happened when I was a high school student, I felt annoyed at myself for not being the first one and a little jealous of the person who was the first choice. Back then, for some reason, my teenage self decided if I was not the best at something then I failed myself and I needed to do better. When this happened during my undergraduate, I didn't have any negative feelings. I was happy that I still got something and saw it as a challenge to work harder. When this happened during my early grad school years, I sometimes didn't care and I sometimes felt like this was a sign I made the wrong career choice and that I will fail at grad school. When this happened in my last year of grad school, it was for jobs I have been applying to. I honestly could not care if I was their 1st choice, 3rd choice or even 20th choice and I only got it because everyone else ahead of me chose something else. I was just happy to have something that I wanted. The job market is brutal. I haven't been a postdoc long enough yet to have competed in anything like this (didn't apply to jobs this past fall since I have a 2+1 contract), but I have a feeling I'm going to feel the same as my last year of grad school. And to answer your original question: the ideal program 100%.

Yes! I wouldn't worry about this awkwardness. I think Prof A is just really hopeful that you will get the NSF-GRFP and is letting you know that basically you're in his group for sure if you get that. Shortly afterwards, he must have realised that sounded like he would only take you if you got the GRFP so he corrected himself. However, the important takeaway message is that he has no funding for you right now. That may change with successful grants and such, but this means you'll probably be funded via departmental sources such as TAships. I'd certainly factor this into the decision. It's unfortunate that he doesn't know all the details of your application. Some people are just very absent-minded or maybe he had a lot on his mind that day, or he is just awkward about these things. In addition, there's no reason to expect the prof to remember the details of your application package---you probably spent a ton of time on it but they read it over very quickly and probably has not looked at it again since then. There are two scenarios to consider here: 1. Prof A may just be this absent-minded all the time to everyone and is very bad at small talk, it's not personal. So you just have to decide if this working relationship is a good fit for you. Remember that your advisor doesn't need to be your friend but you do need to feel like they support you. I know lots of people with super awkward advisors and they never ever talk about anything other than work/research because it just gets so painful. This could be fine since these people find mentorship from other people for things like career advice etc. It's probably better to have a nice and supportive advisor with cringe-worthy small talk conversations than a smooth talker that is very charismatic but doesn't actually care about your success at all. I also know a lot of people with advisors that are charismatic but unsupportive and they wished they made a different choice in the past. However, if you feel the dynamic does not work for you and would get in the way of getting what you need from your advisor, then that's a good reason to consider someone else! 2. Prof A may not be that interested in you after all and these are signs that he won't really care about you as a student. Based on the other information here, it sounds more like (1) than (2). Prof A spent a lot of time with you earlier to help with the application process etc. But you know your interactions best, and even if it's (1), as I said above, you might prefer a different dynamic. It's great that you have a Prof B to also consider. I think what I said above about the balance between interactions with your advisor vs. how much you think your advisor will support you. I think having someone show interest in you attending is nice, but it's not the be all and end all. Sometimes people are very different when they want you to make a decision in their favour than when you actually make the decision. Prof B sounds great, so I'd look into what it might be like to work for Prof B. If you can visit and talk to the profs, scope out the feel of the lab/group and talk to students, that would be really helpful. In any case, it does sound like you have two profs (both A and B ) that have shown interest in you and spent time trying to convince you to come. It's a matter now of deciding which prof's style fits you better. Just keep in mind that many people believe in a mentoring network approach to training, and you are able to find mentorship/advising from other people on campus besides your advisor, if it turns out your advisor is lacking in some areas of mentorship you might like. Even if your advisor is wonderful, it's still a good idea to develop several mentors over the course of your graduate degree and hear different perspectives.

I'll be more blunt here: you will probably need to get over feeling a bruised ego whenever you're not selected first for something in academia. From now on, every selection process will be much more competitive! When you compete for that grad school grant, are you going to care if you were the first choice or not? When you are looking for a job when there are 200 applicants for the same position, would you care if you got it by being the #1 choice or because choices 1 through 4 accepted positions elsewhere?

I don't think this is possible (a ballpark estimate, I mean). At one school, I only had scheduled time spots with 4 profs and one of them was the dept chair, not someone I would research with. At another school (my eventual school), I spoke with 6 out 7 available profs. At yet another school, every hour on my schedule was filled but it wasn't all prof meetings: included classes and seminars as well. Hard to ballpark estimate because the number of profs in the dept varies from school to school, the number of days per visit varies (mine were all 2 day visits though) and the number of profs relevant to your work varies too.

It's unpleasant to try to think up example scenarios of this type, for obvious reasons. But here's a generic one. If a student has a history of personal attacks on a certain group of people, and has expressed sentiments of violence, harm, exclusion, threats, etc. towards this group of people, it would contribute to creating an unwelcome and threatening environment. Basically if your actions will cause other people to feel like they are unwanted in a program, then you may be unwanted in that program. Obviously at this level of generic-ness, it sounds like I am stating something very broad and that even a slight (unintentional) insult towards others will cause you to be kicked out for creating an "unwelcome" environment. However, this is not the case and I hope readers of this post will use their common sense and know what example actions may reasonably fall under this category and what won't. Sure, there are some actions that fall near the boundary line, but I don't think it's productive to discuss which these borderline cases here (also no need to reveal more than necessary). Getting an admission offer rescinded or kicked out of a program is a severe/extreme consequence and it only happens for actions at the same level of severity. In addition, since your case involved posts in the past (that are hopefully no longer online), most schools do expect people to change over time and I think time will factor into how this is handled if someone successfully gets the attention of admissions officers by spamming them with screenshots. And, I think it is more likely that the first step after receiving these messages about you would be a discussion with you about the content of the posts and what has happened since then, rather than an automatic decision without any input from you. I think that demonstrating that you are not in the same place as when you wrote whatever it was in the past would make a big difference.

I think you are being too impatient. I don't mean it to be a judgemental statement, just a truth that I hope helps you. Was there a RSVP date to respond for the interview? If so, wait until 2 days after this date to ask. If not, then I would wait until at least next Monday before contacting the prof again. If the profs have sent interview requests to a large number of candidates, they need to wait until everyone has responded before they can start scheduling people, if their goal is to interview as many people as they can. So it would not make sense for them to assign you a timeslot now, even if you respond within the hour, since they want to hear from everyone first. (Note: some schools assign slots first-come first-serve, so you should always be expedient in responding to these emails but that doesn't mean you will get a speedy confirmation). As for the other two programs, it's not clear to me if you mean they have accepted you and waiting for a reply, or if they want to interview you too. If they are waiting for you to decide whether or not to accept them, then you should check how long you have to make your decision. If it's a long way away for both, then you might want to decide between those two and decline the less preferred one. If they both want you to decide ASAP then I guess hold onto them until you find out about your top choice since maybe only one of these other 2 programs will let you keep waiting. If the other two programs are wanting to interview you, again, see when they want you to send interview preferences. If it's soon or if it's first-come, first-serve, then select a time and hope it doesn't conflict with your top choice. If it does, then you have to see if either one can reschedule.

I can see why there are differences in "professionalism" expectations of medical school vs graduate school. I don't know the full story so I will withhold judgement. For graduate school, if your conduct is determined to be in violation or against the code of conduct or campus expectations of the school, then your acceptance may be rescinded, or you might be forced to decline the offer. However, holding unpopular views, even if they make you a terrible person (again, I don't know what was said, so I'm not saying you are!) doesn't usually violate these policies. It does depend on the school. Generally, breaking the law and/or violating policies on harassment and creating an unwelcome or "chilling" environment are potential reasons to kick someone out of graduate school (or, in some cases, rescind their acceptance). Also, generally, the standards/expectations for graduate students and medical students are understandably different. As a medical school graduate, you will have direct influence and responsibility over people's well-being. For most PhD holders, this is not the case.

I would not be worried. First, you say this is a "tentative" itinerary so things are certainly subject to change. When is your interview? If it's more than a week away, I'm sure there will be other events scheduled later. If not, feel free to use this time in your own way to get to know the students. If these slots are still empty when you arrive for your visit, check with whomever has been coordinating your schedules if you could use this time to either 1) explore the campus, 2) chat with students informally, 3) learn about on-campus resources, or 4) drop into a class (get permission from the instructor, either directly or through the coordinator). Definitely take some time to rest between interviews but don't feel like if there is nothing scheduled that it means you must do nothing From my experience, some schools schedule the days jam-packed and others have very loose schedules and things just come up (e.g. an interview may go longer, a prof or student might say, hey, if you have a spare block now, want to see a class/seminar/etc.). Sometimes students will arrange things like campus tours for you but these things are often not set in stone until the last minute, so they haven't appeared on your schedule yet, or they might be just super informal and you won't see it on the schedule at all.

I agree with the others: the right thing to do is to email School B and let them know that you would like to withdraw your application to their school. You don't have to say why---just say that. Thank them for the opportunity. It doesn't matter if they want to Skype interview you or not, you should withdraw now anyways. To be honest, you should have withdrawn right when you decided you would take School A over School B, no matter what (i.e. you could have withdrawn it when they invited you to the visit). But that's not a huge deal.

First of all, it is unlikely (but still not impossible) that they will revoke their offer if you ask about extending the deadline. You are allowed to consider other schools too. However, you said this is one of your top choices. How high is it on your list? What do you need to know before you can decide (I presume there may be other top choices you would want to hear back from, but you probably can eliminate some lower choices, if any, that were on your list now). You don't have to ask for anything right now. But reach out to the other schools that are your other top choices and see when they will make decisions. Maybe you already got rejected from some and they can tell you that and you will know. Or maybe they will make decisions in just a few days. In about a week, you hopefully will know how late your other decisions might be and then you can think about whether you want to ask for an extension. Finally, do you have a written offer from the school yet? If not, you can say that you would like to see a written offer before you can make a decision. It will hopefully mean something a little more secure---i.e. if the offer says you have until Feb 19 (or whatever) to decide, then if they try to revoke your offer before then, that is something you can fight (although if they are going to act that way, maybe it's better to just not go there).

No it doesn't mean you are accepted. People already answered your question in this duplicate post:

Wow, that's harsh! I think evaluations on metrics that are not revealed to the applicant is a little unfair, and this kind of thing means some people with anxiety may be disadvantaged. I completely agree that being flexible/adaptable is an important skill for graduate school though. For what it's worth, when I wrote about getting schedules at the last minute above, they were all for places where the student has already been accepted and it's just recruitment. So it's not an evaluation in the same way anymore. The last minute schedule is just due to how hard it is to schedule things! So just in case people are worried about what may be secret tests, just a note that sometimes they are just logistical issues Don't overthink it!

At many schools, the departments don't have constant lines of communication so each dept/area of the school generally doesn't know what other areas of the school are doing. There are just too many people involved. So it's normal for the list of applicants to be simultaneously sent to e.g. financial aid and international office (if applicable) and the department to make decisions. Financial aid just gets a list of names and contact info and works from that, without knowing whether or not the dept chose to admit you or even if you have accepted the offer yet.

Sure, I think the initial page instructions make sense. I like the examples you gave there and even though I have no idea what a "phoneme" is, what I understood was that you are trying to get us to match up letters that have the same position and sound in two languages (if this was not right, then oops!). I also like the example/test case of twig/zweig because it reminded me of the last screen. I was surprised to see so much text pop up after clicking on that answer, but it provided more instructions, which was nice. I did not really understand what "cognate" means though. And what I got from the explanation was that sometimes letters appear in the same place and have similar sounds(?) but aren't cognate and instead are "borrowed". This distinction is made me lost but I forged ahead anyhow! Then, all of the made up languages really really confused me. I ended up just clicking on the choice that seems to be similar in length and/or have similar vowels. It seems to work most of the time. The explanation that pop up after an answer made little sense to me. For example, the prompt was "rorir" and I chose "rorur" since it looked the most similar and got a message saying, "Correct! The root was *rorr". I have no idea what is meant by "root" and what the * means and where "rorr" came from (since neither word had rorr in it). To be honest the first time, after 5 or 6 of these, I got too lost and gave up. However, after returning here and seeing that there is a part 2 and part 3, I went back to went through the 26 questions in part 1 just to see what part 2 is. Part 2 with English and German made sense because I know English and not German! But I am not sure how I would transfer the skills from that example to the actual task. I recognize those * things from Part 1 but I have no idea how I would distinguish which word came from Language A vs Language B. I just clicked a few things and hit SUBMIT. You can probably guess that Part 3 was hopeless for me. I don't understand the symbols at all. I just guessed. In the end, I got 29/55. I guess that's a passing score? lol Note: I only went back to do parts 2 and 3 after your response to my question. So I guess if I had stuck to the end of Part 3, I would realise that the intended audience is for someone who actually knows these linguistic symbols. Oh well. I still had fun going through it once knowing that I would be seeing things completely out of my realm of understanding. Maybe some overview at the beginning to let people know what to expect in each part would be nice?

Usually the generic academic selection process, if you include all the steps might be: 1. Gather all applications, remove incomplete/ineligible ones. 2. Committee makes a "long list" of candidates they would like to discuss further. To save time, maybe only 1-3 committee members reviews each application at this point and they are just making the decision "keep" or "reject". 3. Out of the long list, committee meets and debates who to include in the "short-list" of people they might want to interview (Skype or on-campus) and/or go into further/deeper debate. 4. The short-list is ranked and the offer(s) are made. Those on the short-list that didn't get offers go on a wait-list. For grad admissions, they might not bother with a long list. Like @fuzzylogician said, it's a little unusual phrasing to use for grad admissions, since normally the process is all silent until Step 4. But I suppose some schools might want to let you know you are still in the running after Step 3. However, it could also be that this school uses "short list" to mean the same thing as what most other places call "long list".

In addition to Skype or in-person conversations being more efficient at conveying information, it also allows for more candidness. I would certainly never lie to a prospective student over email, but I would also think carefully about how I phrase things since email is written info and once it's sent, it exists forever. I'm sure at many departments, there are things that students may want to tell you but may not feel comfortable doing so over email or any form of written communication.

Maybe it's a depends-on-field thing? I hear "academic productivity" a lot. It's not often used as that phrase because I only hear "academic productivity" when the speaker needs to distinguish it from other productivity, like what a business may produce. Within academia, we often hear of "productivity", or "we expect you to produce X papers per year". There are even synonyms to the productivity theme, e.g. a faculty member who writes lots of papers per year might be "prolific" (as if they are fruit trees and papers are apples or something). I would also note that this is very closely related to the "publish or perish" model of thinking, which many people think is unhealthy (me included) but the reality may be that it is the truth. Few people want these metrics to be the way academics are evaluated but yet here we are. So I'll attempt to define what I think people mean below, but I do think this is a flawed way to evaluate each other. Ultimately, in this definition, productivity means academic "products" that are valued by the community and are useful to the community. So first and foremost, it means peer-reviewed journal papers. The ones with more citations are worth more. Another product would be conference proceedings. In many STEM fields, papers are valued higher than proceedings but it's the opposite in others. Some metrics used to evaluate these products might be things like h-index, total number of citations, total number of papers, etc. Note that in the above definition, I used "and". Currently, in my field, there are lots of products that are useful to the community but are valued at a much lower level. For example, creating computer code that is useful for others and building instruments don't seem to be worth as much to my field. Null results are also very useful but valued less. I would say that things like successful grants are valued but they may not be considered "academic productivity". Instead, academic productivity shows that you are a competent and deserving researcher, which earn you grants to do more research. So someone with many grants is likely very productive, but the grants themselves aren't these "products". Also, in this definition, the only things that count are successful final results. Productivity doesn't include progress markers, such as advancing in your degree, grades, passing exams etc. It doesn't include having already completed 90% of the work for a very large survey/paper. If it's not a submitted or accepted paper, it doesn't generally count. Finally, the most frustrating part of all of this is the benchmark question. There isn't a benchmark. How much is enough depends on who else is competing for the same thing. No one can really say "3 papers will get you a postdoc" since if everyone else applying for the same position as you had 5 papers each, then that's the new benchmark. Same for grants, faculty positions etc. This is why I didn't really define a different version for students and faculty---everyone is looking for the same thing, but as a student, you'd be compared to other students etc. This comic sums it up well: http://phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1995 ---- This sucks. I think it's a very unhealthy way to measure the success of a researcher as it basically reduces us to science-producing machines. It also creates high pressure and stressful work environments. It encourages competition in the bad way, not in the "let's all do our best work and improve ourselves" way. It's bad for our mental health (as evident by these rants!) It doesn't take into account life circumstances that affect our ability to do research. It doesn't factor in differences between fields and sub-fields (e.g. some people in my field work on mini-projects that "produce" a short paper after 6-9 months of hard work, while others need to collect data for 3 years to write a large survey paper). And it's a vague criteria, allowing the evaluator to insert whatever biases they might have and causes the student/postdoc/faculty to constantly doubt whether they are doing enough. Anyways, my advice would be to not worry about this too much. Know that although it's not ideal, the academic world will generally want to see these "products" from you but try to not get too worried about what it means and end up overworking, stressing out, and hurting your mental health. This is much easier said than done and there are many periods of time during grad school and during my postdoc where I felt the "academic FOMO" in the comic and/or felt like I was not producing enough. I don't have a cure-all, but my advice is to take time to think about the big picture. We are more than just researchers and our success or "productivity" in the research world does not reflect on ourselves as persons. We're not bad people if we don't get that paper in. In addition, I'd focus more on the process than the end result. Celebrate the progress milestones as you complete steps towards your degree or the next paper. You don't have to wait until the very end before you're allowed to feel proud of your work. Recognize that research happens from the constant, continual work towards the solution, it doesn't happen in leaps of "genius" that sudden solve things! Ultimately, we do have to be realistic and ensure that we meet academia's demands for "productivity" but don't let it consume you!