TakeruK

Disclaimer: My undergrad is at UBC! So I'm a little biased maybe UBC is a well regarded institution. It may not be able to compete with top 10 schools in the US like Harvard, Yale, etc. but I'd say it would be equivalent to schools ranked around 20th in the US. In the world rankings (e.g. http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/world-university-rankings/2013-14/world-ranking), the top 3 Canadian schools (UBC, Toronto, McGill) consistently end up in the 20s. When I applied to US PhD programs, UBC was a name recognized by profs/students I visited/talked to. In addition, (again, potential bias), I think worldwide, UBC ranks higher than the other 3 schools on your list and much better known, as you say so yourself! I don't think you will gain any real advantage because your PhD is from one of the other three schools instead of UBC. In fact, I think you will have a higher chance at a US job if you go to UBC (the better known school). iphi also does bring up a lot of good points about quality of life--I love Vancouver and it's a wonderful and multicultural city. Your profile says you are from Iran. If it's important to you, I'd say there is an Iranian community in Vancouver and that it would probably be bigger than the other 3 places you list. However, there are 2 potential downsides: 1. The stipend you list $1300/month(?) is pretty low. I think it can still be affordable but you will definitely be sharing with others since Vancouver does have a high rent market. I also hope this is the number after you have already subtracted your tuition cost (much lower than US schools but still something to consider). 2. As I said above, you can still network and talk to American colleagues as it's not that far to travel to the US for conferences. Also, how easy/difficult is it for you to get an entry visa (for business) to the US? While in Canada, I have had some international student friends who had to occasionally cancel a trip to the US because of US visa processing delays or rejections. So, if you are expecting to have a very hard time getting an entry visa to the US, then there is a slight advantage to going to a US school since you don't have to leave the country to go to a US conference! However, it's really up to you whether you think this is worth the other benefits of significantly friendlier immigration laws in Canada!

I agree with GeoDUDE! Without more information, it would really be hard to pick grad school or job. I also agree with GeoDUDE! when he says to consider it as "grad school or job", not "Oxford PhD or job". The choice can depend on a lot of things. If you know, with reasonable certainty, that you will want to go to grad school in the future or that your goals involve graduate school training (i.e. in some fields, you might get good work without a PhD but you really need a PhD to advance), then I think you should definitely pick grad school over the job. However, if you know that your main goal is to get the kind of job you have just been offered, and you were just planning on grad school to achieve that goal, then you should take the job and bypass grad school. That is, if you can see yourself achieving your career goals without ever needing a PhD, then take the job! There's no real glamour in a Oxford PhD--once you have a job in your field, it's all about what you are doing now, not where you came from. So, if this job will grant you everything you need to fulfill your career goals, don't bother with grad school. To summarize: If this job doesn't offer everything you want and you know that you will need a PhD eventually to achieve what you want, then go for the PhD now. In this case, it would be easier to delay finding a job that meets your interests than to find a great fit PhD program. However, if you were just applying for PhD positions since you were not able to find a job that meets your goals before now and this job now meets your goals, then don't get a PhD just for the sake of the PhD/education/knowledge (learn on your own time instead). Finally, some scholarships/admission offers allow you to defer for a year or two and enroll later. So, maybe check if this is possible and try out the job for a year or so and see if you want to stay / go back to school. (Edit: Also, in response to Chiki--yes, the OP mentioned the job doesn't pay "a ton of money" but the later comments about a steady income indicate that the job would pay more than the Clarendon scholarship. I looked up the scholarship, it pays all tuition and fees but the living expense is only 13,726 GBP which is only 25,000 CAD or 23,000 USD. Minimum wage in Canada, $11/hr in Ontario, would be 22,000 CAD per year, so it's very likely that the OP will make more than the stipend at Oxford, even without considering the UK's high cost of living!)

I think I might remember seeing some schools that have three tiers of tuition (in-state resident, out-of-state, international) but I might have remembered wrongly! However, one thing is certain is that US citizens that are out-of-state can usually gain in-state status after 1 year of residency. International students can never become in-state residents so this is why it's still cheaper for a school to take a US citizen than an international student. (In fact, some schools will only provide tuition waiver for the in-state rate for American citizenships beyond year one).

It depends on the specific policies of your school and your funding sources. At my (research intensive) school, graduate student often form startup companies based on their skills. However, they have to be very careful to not ever use any school resource for their own private company! For example, while you are at school, using school computers or internet etc. you should not be doing any activity connected to your business, including responding to emails from your clients etc. In addition, my school has both conflict of interest and conflict of commitment policies. The first policy is to ensure your academic integrity--grad students can't do activities that might cause a conflict of interest with their academic integrity. The second policy is to ensure your ability to proceed along your degree in a timely manner. So, at my school, it would basically be okay as long as your research is not affected. However, there are some things that are automatically considered conflict of commitment. For example, a graduate student in a position like CEO, CFO, CTO, etc of their company is automatically considered in a conflict of commitment. So, for the graduate students whose companies take off and do well, they are given the option of appointing someone else to take over the CEO role or take a leave of absence (with permission of their supervisor) for up to 2 years to get their company where they are comfortable handing it over (or selling it). In all cases though, grad students in your position at my school would have to declare their competing interest (i.e. this website) and sign some forms affirming that it is neither a conflict of interest nor a conflict of commitment. So at my school, you would get in trouble if you try to hide it and get caught. I think you really should check with the policies in place at your school to be certain. There may be people at the university level that you can get confidential advice about this.

Indeed, it's also totally legit for the school you applied to give you a copy of your own LORs because they want to (or even because you ask). Upon graduation, a student I know said their school gave them their entire student record, including the LORs that came with their application (admittedly, I only have their word that this is true). This wavier is just waiving the right to legally obligate (via FERPA) the school to allow you access to the letters.

Definitely waive the right always (unless you have a very good reason not to). Everyone above has given good reasons to waive it! Just to clarify, the waiver of your FERPA right is not a certification that you have not read the letter. Instead, it is only the agreement that you will not use your FERPA-granted right to see your student record, which might force the school to show you a submitted LOR. So, even if the prof shared their LOR with you, you can still waive the FERPA right on the application. Or, even if you waived the right, you are still permitted to ask your professor to show you the LOR. In addition, some schools make it clear that you only have a "student record" established once you enroll/register for the school, so at these places, even if you do not waive the right, you still will not be able to view your LOR if you do not get accepted.

Yes, the screen on the test is a lot like the form on the ETS website when you register / pay for additional score reports. You can search by school (there is a list A-Z, but you can also type in like "Harvard" or "Ohio" and it will work like a search engine. Once you pick the school, you can then choose from a list of departments that accept GRE scores at that school (again, this is searchable). So you don't have to memorize anything! However, there are some things that might be helpful to remember about the four free schools before going into the test: 1. You should know whether the program you are applying to wants you to have both the institution code *and* the department code, or just the institution code. This is especially true if you are applying to more than one program at a school--in these case, you might not want to have a department code to ensure that both departments can get the score (i.e. check with the school before you write the GRE to find out what they want you to do). 2. If they want a department code, if you are in a multidisclipinary program, make sure you know which program code is the right one. 3. Also check to make sure the program you are applying to doesn't have its own separate institution code. At one school, there was a separate "institute for planetary science" (not exact name but you get the idea) that was run by the planetary science department. This institute has a separate institution code than the University it was attached to and I didn't know where to submit it and just guessed. I forgot what I guessed but it turns out I was wrong and I had to resend the scores! So, no need to memorize all the numbers, but definitely look them up beforehand so that you are familiar with any potential pitfalls

I use my Google Calendar on "weekly" view so it's rare that I have two entries scheduled for the same time (in which case I might switch to "daily" view for that day). Also, having separate calendars for research, teaching, classes, seminars, personal appointments, etc. means I can just click on these buttons to turn them on/off when I want to focus on certain responsibilities!

This response might come too late but it could help others. I had to tell the front desk staff that I wanted to use the bathroom and then I had to sign out (writing down the time), then they gave me a key. When I came back, I had to sign in again and they went through the whole security check stuff (empty pockets etc.). So, go to the washroom at the beginning of your break to not miss out on time for this!

I've only used e-books when they were free (e.g. through the school library's subscription or something). Normally I prefer electronic version of things but I agree with the others that physical textbooks are easier for learning material! However, I try to buy as few books as possible. I only buy books if I know I will use the book as a reference after the course is over. Since my PhD program, I have probably only purchased 3 books for the 11 courses I've taken. For courses with books I will not use afterwards, my first attempt is to try to borrow the book from the library. Sometimes if the library has like 5 copies in stock, only one will go on course reserve and the rest will be available for checkout. In many cases, I've found that you can check out an older edition of a book on reserve or an alternate textbook that cover the same material. If none of these options work, then I have just used the course reserve copy in the library (but it must stay in the library at all times). There is a library in my building and students in the building have 24 hour access to the library so I can go and use it whenever I need to. Another method to get access to books is to share with another student who does want to buy it because they do want to keep it afterwards. Or, you can borrow and/or rent it from an older student who took the course in the past. If I do something like this though, I always make it up to the student by buying them lunch, paying rent for the book, quid pro quo for another book in another course etc...whatever is a fair exchange for the burden I've caused. Reading textbooks is not as important for the courses in my field though. Usually 90% of the material is covered in the lectures and profs will often point us to papers instead of the textbook for additional sources. But if the course is far enough from my main interests that I wouldn't use the book after the course, I usually am happy to just miss out on the remaining 10%--after all, I usually run out of time after getting through 90% of the material anyways. Finally, for my classes, most of the assigned textbook readings are meant as a secondary reference to class lectures, not the other way around. So, as GeoDUDE! mentions, I usually only absolutely must see the textbook pages if problem sets are assigned from the textbook or if an assigned problem (or similar problem) is solved as an example in the book. But for these cases, I can just go to the course reserve copy and write down / take photograph / make copies of the required information.

2 months completely off from research does seem like a lot of time off, so I can understand why a professor might be worried if you just flat out told them that this what you would be doing. I think a better approach may be to remind your supervisor that your comp exams are approaching and that you would like to discuss a plan with them for research/studying schedule. This approached worked well for me and my colleagues. In my program, we take our quals at the end of our first year and they are like 90% research based (we defend two projects we complete in the first year). These are mini projects though--mostly to demonstrate proof of concept and our ability to do independent research (i.e. no need to completely finish and have a paper by quals time). However, these are the only exams we have (no comps exam here). The exams are late September every year and at the start of summer (June ish), we all talked to our supervisors about our projects and the exams. We basically took that time to mutually agree on the "scope" of our project. That is, we both decided what stage the project should be at before the exam, and a timeline of goals so that I would also have time to study. I think this method would work better because 1) you are involving your supervisor in the decision which affects him as well as you (i.e. you wouldn't want him to unilaterally decide your study schedule for you so it makes sense for you to not unilaterally decide when you are going to stop working too) and 2) it's in your own best interest to use your advisor's wisdom/experience in helping you determine where is a good stopping point for your research so that you make the best possible presentation for your exam!

I'd say headphones are not rude at all! Instead, at the departments I've been to, the culture has been that headphones on seem to be the agreed-upon signal for "please don't bother me right now". Of course, if you just stare at someone blankly and put your headphones on while they are still talking to you, then well, I guess that's pretty rude

If this is the case, then this would be equivalent to my experience prior to both "Revised" and "ScoreSelect".

Does Zotero not already keep track of the citation, dates, DOI, etc already? Or do you just prefer Excel's method. I use Mendeley and usually it can self-populate all of these fields by just scanning the PDF (for newer articles). Sometimes it misses a few things or gets messed up by accents in authors names but if I just manually type in the DOI, Mendeley will correctly populate all of the relevant fields (including generating a citation automatically). And these fields are all searchable Me neither, which is why I make Mendeley do it for me Might as well fully commit to this whole Mendeley advertising thing and say that for my journals, Mendeley picks up the subject keywords determined by the authors/journals automatically and allows me to, say, click on some keyword(s) and display only the papers that have those keyword(s). In addition, you can create your own "tags" for every paper that are searchable in the same way (e.g. you can create a tag for papers relevant to a particular project, or shows a particular result, or something like "authoritative reference" for a collection of papers that you pretty much always have to cite for particular methods etc). And when you add a note, Mendeley automatically records it with the page number as well as the date and time of your note. Mendeley is definitely not the only program that does this--I just use it because someone told me about it when I started my MSc and it was free and I've stayed on since then. I am sure other article databasing software are just as useful. My point here is mostly to say that there are a lot of software available to make our lives a lot easier than even just a decade ago. For example, in 2005, my freshman English professor was insistent that learning how to write MLA bibliographies is completely essential to our academic careers and that I would always be using by "Little Brown Handbook" to ensure I have my citations correct. However, since 2010, I have always used Mendeley's BiBTeX output to generate citations for me. I never have to remember whether it's a comma or a period after the title, or when to list all the authors, or what etc. I'd argue that nowadays, bibliography formatting only needs to be taught so that students understand the importance of ensuring the reader can access their sources, but the hours that was spent in teaching us the exact MLA style are no longer necessary! So, likewise, having well indexed databases of the papers in your library doesn't have to be a lot of work anymore. I don't mean to say that everyone has to use these software--hey, if you have your own system that works for you, then great! But for new students, don't be intimidated by the vast amount of metadata on all the papers we need to read. Give some software a try, it might be easier than you think!

No, for the subject tests, you do not get any evaluation of your score before you decide to accept the score. The option to cancel your subject test score is more meant for you to "throw out" the test if you know for sure you did poorly (e.g. you severely underestimated the difficulty of the exam or otherwise know you screwed up). Yes, you will lose the four free reports if you wait until you can see the score and then use ScoreSelect. Fun fact: I took my General GRE exam before the "Revised" version and also before "ScoreSelect" and before they showed me my V and Q scores on the computer, they asked if I would like to accept my score. The message was very clear that I had the choice of canceling my scores (without seeing them) or accepting my test result (and then I would be presented with preliminary scores).

Here are three more data points to show how diverse programs can be: 1. In my previous program, the standard teaching load is 2 classes per term, for 2 terms per year. Each class is 4.5 hours per week, so it's a total of 108 hours per term (12 weeks). This standard load is usually for 5 years if you do a PhD. If you have external fellowships, you only teach half as much. 2. In my current program, the standard teaching load is 1 quarter (10 weeks) per year for years 2 through 4 only (i.e. you get a pass on your first and last year). So this is a total of 30 weeks of TAing throughout the whole degree. Officially, the university defines a TA load as 15 hours per week but our department has small classes so I think my workload last year was more like 10 hours per week. Fellowships do *not* change your teaching requirement. 3. In another program at my current school, the students only teach during their 2nd year (first year is supported by department fellowship, 2nd year by TAing and all later years by their supervisors). They would TA for all 3 quarters during their second year, which is also 30 weeks total throughout the whole degree, just distributed differently.

I agree with victorydance! I've found that it is way too difficult to keep detailed notes on hundreds of papers, some of which only contain small amounts of directly useful information. So, my goal is to try to summarize the main arguments and results of each paper in a few (i.e. 3 to 5) bullet points (using a helpful box that Mendeley provides for this). For more important papers, I might take more notes (using Mendeley) that basically highlight certain parts of the papers, especially if it's something like an equation or value that I will keep coming back to. Unlike espeletia, I don't mind rereading papers. I actually find that it's much easier for me to just know most of the papers at the surface level and then go back and skim a paper when I need to know the details. For the majority of the papers in my database, I mostly only know where to find what I want, but not always know exactly what the details are. I also have to admit that I have not fully read a good number of the papers in my library--I try to at least read the abstract, intro, and conclusion and skim the results/discussion. I only read the results/methods when I need to know exactly how something was done. I find that almost all of the papers use well established methods so I just need to categorize what type of analysis they used and understand that type of analysis once (and often, the best way to learn about the analysis is not through the very abbreviated forms discussed in the papers!).

I don't know how universal this is, but the annual meeting of the national Society for my fields tend to require you to submit abstracts 3-4 months in advance and sign up for the volunteering at this time too. However, the cheapest "early bird" registration rate usually lasts for about a week after abstracts are due and "normal" registration deadline is not until a month or so before the conference start. For the student rate, the normal registration fee is usually only $10-$20 more than the "early bird" rate. So, if this is the case in your field, you can also often submit your abstract and sign up for volunteering and then you have about 1 or 2 months to arrange all of your funding before having to commit to paying the registration fee, hotel booking, flights etc. 3000 is small??! The "big" meeting in my field is about a couple of thousand, and the main meeting for my subfield is about 1000! I also enjoy small conferences (but this means 150-200 people to me) because then there's actually time and space to meet with most of the conference people

Sometimes sharing first helps other people feel more comfortable sharing. If something like this happened to me, I would go to some of my colleagues first and say something like "hey....my stipend got drastically reduced this year...did yours?" But I feel pretty comfortable asking people about these kind of things, since I don't feel like they should be secret. (I just recently surveyed grad students across my campus, asking for their funding level, in order to see if we need to make an argument to the school about raising the minimum stipend so that paying for rent in our very expensive city is affordable!)

Fair enough. While I knew that time to degree in the humanities was longer than in the sciences, I was unaware that actual average time to degree is 10 years for some fields--I had thought stories of 10 year degrees are outliers!

I agree that there is some sense to reducing funding if students are expected to be off campus and/or finding other jobs while ABD. But, I think there is a difference between a program telling its students "We will fund you for $X for Y years and then $Z for the remaining years" than suddenly changing the funding scheme just prior to the start of a new year because of an unforeseen circumstance. I interpreted OP's situation to be more like the latter than the former. In addition, while there is no legal obligation without contracts, I think that a responsible academic program should ensure that the length of time before "reduced funding" happens accurately reflects actual length of time to degree. For example, I think that if the program's median time to degree is, say 5.3 years, then I think reducing funding after 5 years is not a responsible thing to do, as this means at least half of the students will be on "reduced funding" for some portion of their degree! "Not obligated to be on campus" should not be synonymous with "must spend more time off campus / not working on dissertation in order to pay for living expenses". I think that if a program finds that students are taking longer than the typical amount of time they are funded for, the program should do some self-reflection to see how they can reduce any unnecessary time-to-degree.

If you do not have a promised funding amount for a certain length of time / contract when you accepted the offer, then there may be no legal recourse available. But this is not necessary the same as there is nothing you can do! It's just that there is no legal obligation but you can still fight it or get support. This scenario would sound very unusual in my field because the sciences tend to fund their students well so all students tend to start their programs with a funding promise for some number of years. I have never heard of a department decreasing funding amount over time! In fact, many places actually increase the amount of money you get once you are ABD because some schools charge less tuition when you get to ABD status (or sometimes candidacy). However, I don't know if it is unusual universally. If you and other students are unhappy with this and want to do something about it, I think a good first step is to go to your department and let them know that you are not satisfied with their solution. You can also go to both your student government and the Graduate Studies Office. Perhaps these organizations can apply more pressure to the department to find a better solution than forcing its ABD students to take outside work and/or take out loans. In addition, the school itself might have some reserve funding that they might be able to distribute. At the same time, you should also check to see if your school has a minimum amount of funding that departments must provide for their graduate students. This can vary a lot depending on the school, though--at some places the number is truly the minimum livable stipend but at others, it's far below the poverty line. In my opinion, it's the department's fault that they are not able to meet their financial commitments to their students and they are the ones that should take out loans or cut back other expenses. However, I know that reality is not always fair and sometimes a fair solution really is not possible. Either way, my instinct would be to make it clear that a sudden decrease in funding is making grad school unaffordable for many students and pressure them further to find a better solution. Even though without a contract, they legally and technically do have the prerogative in making these decisions, I would want the department to feel a lot of responsibility in ensuring their students have fair/livable stipends. I would also want for them to know that actions that negatively affect student lives like this would be met with very strong negative reactions from their students.

In addition to what fuzzy said, if you do have a strong writing sample, you should still check with the school to make sure they want you to submit it as an "optional" document. For almost all of my applications, my department's application instructions clearly state that we should not include a writing sample at all (they are not commonly requested in my field). However, in almost all applications, there was a page to optionally upload a writing sample. When I check with the schools, they were clear that we were to skip that page and leave it blank because that the schools use a common online application form so the "optional writing sample" page is always included. I think in these cases, at best, they ignore your extra document and at worst, it makes your application look bad because you did not follow instructions (I don't know how badly this may reflect on you though; could be very minor). There are no "trick questions" on these applications. If they do not ask for something, it is not a "trick" to see if applicants will supply it anyways! So if you are worried about seeing that writing sample screen, it might be similar to my situation where the optional pages always appear no matter what you are actually applying to.

I know some anthropologists whose "field work" could be close to home too. For example, one anthropologist I know works with disadvantaged youths in American cities. However, I do agree that while yes, you can still be a competitive applicant and a serious scholar if you limit your the places you're willing to work/live, this does limit your options. But this is not always a bad thing and I agree with victorydance that you should have a long term plan because if you do want to continue in academia, know that in pretty much all fields, jobs are pretty competitive and a limit on location is a limit on opportunities. But this is not all bad. I really wanted to be on the west coast for my PhD to be closer to my family (even though I'm in a different country now, I'm much closer to home!). I did apply to grad schools on the east coast too though, just to keep my options open in case I change my mind. So if it's not a huge financial burden, it might be a good idea to also apply to a few schools away from home that interests you just in case something changes later on and you are able to (or want to) move further away. My long term plans are geographically limited too. I feel very certain that I do want to have a career near my hometown because my wife and I want to raise our children near their grandparents. My long term plan was that approximately ~10 years after starting grad school, I will be living near my hometown. So, currently, I'm planning to continue the academic track and willing to live in other places for my PhD and one or two postdocs. But eventually, if I have to choose between continuing in academia or living close to home, I'm probably going to choose living close to home. I think that my grad school program is a strong one that can help me find work outside of academia (part of the reason why I chose it). However, even with all that said, I might change a lot in the next 6 years so who knows what will really happen. Maybe I'll change my mind, maybe I won't, but right now I don't really have to worry about it because either path has the same beginning! So, my overall thoughts on this topic is to go ahead and make location a priority if that is what makes you happy! But I would also do little things that don't compromise my goals yet keeps opportunities open where possible (e.g. applying to one or two schools further away, just in case).

I applied to NSERC and while I did not have as many paper presentations as you, I had some space issues because we were required to list all coauthors and I am one of 29 coauthors on three of the papers! In addition, on my NSERC research contributions, I have to provide headings to separate the type of contribution, which takes up an extra line too. Here are some things I did to maximize my space: 1. Reduce the font size for the blank lines in between contributions. You have to use size 12 font for the text, but I used size 6 font for the blank lines 2. I included all of my peer-reviewed work but selected my "best/most impactful" work for non-peer reviewed stuff. In the end, I only picked out 3 of them, and I did *not* include a presentation that I have converted to a peer-reviewed publication, unless it was at an international conference (or an invited talk, if I had any of them). 3. I did not include all of the bibliographic details for the non peer-reviewed work. For example, for one presentation, I listed the authors as "F. Name and X Collaboration...." 4. Finally, check that it really is a 1 page limit. Maybe this is a SSHRC vs. NSERC difference but this document was 2 pages for me, however, I have to include all three parts into these two pages (Part I = list of papers; Part II = discuss your top 3 contributions, Part III = "applicant statement" re: research experience, community activities, and special circumstances). So, I ended up with 1.3 pages for Part I and 0.3 pages each for Parts II and III. For the PhD level awards, NSERC clearly states it weighs proven research ability and potential the highest at 50% (with academics at 30% and leadership type activities at 20%) so I felt it was justified to use more than half the space proving my research ability/potential with my publication history. Hope that's helpful!