TakeruK

How much time are we talking about? Also, check that your school's health insurance terms actually lines up with the academic term. For my current school, the health insurance term is Sept 1 to Aug 31, but the academic year is approximately Oct 1 to Sept 30. My school purposely offsets these months for the exact reason you mention--orientation happens in September (and mandatory for F1/J1 I think) so they make the insurance begin earlier to avoid the lapse of coverage. If it's less than 30 days, I think you should be okay with Traveller's insurance. Usually, these plans only cover catastrophic stuff / emergencies right? With traveller's insurance for the big stuff, you might be able to wait up to 30 days before you see your doctors for small stuff like vaccinations, checkups, etc. Some other options if waiting for student plan to kick in doesn't work: - You can contact private health insurance providers and sign up for an individual plan. It would be a bit pricey but if you need it, you need it. These plans are generally month to month so you can cancel them when your plan begins. However, watch out for deductibles and consider how much it would cost to just pay for whatever you have to get done before your school plan kicks in. A visit to a walkin clinic here will cost about $100-$200 depending on what you need. Many US providers have discounts for uninsured people too. It might turn out that just paying for care (other than hospitalization, which would be covered by traveller's insurance) could be cheaper than getting insurance for just 1 or 2 months. - If you are arriving extremely early, you can ask the school whether you can enroll in the health plan early. In my field, when students arrive and start work early (over the summer instead of waiting until September), they usually get paid for the summer months and also get benefits. Although most student health plans have limited dates per year that you can enroll, most plans have exceptions for "life events" like new school, new child, new marriage etc.

For me, I think about 75% of each SOP was the same and 25% was different, except for the few schools that wanted a special format or other restrictions on their SOP (one school only allowed one page). I spent about 75% of the SOP explaining why I am a good fit for graduate research in the field (through describing my past experience and successes) so this part was basically the same for each school. I agree with themmases that this part can be customized as well but I did not think it was worth the extra time. Not counting the time I spent brainstorming, I spent around 6 hours writing and revising this part. The remaining 25% was my description of how my goals (both research and career) fits in well with the school I'm applying for and how the school has the people, resources, facilities etc. that matches what I need to succeed. I rewrote this part (about 2 paragraphs) each time, however, there are some elements that remain the same. I felt that I had pretty clear goals so I only applied to schools that met a certain set of criteria. I spent about 30 to 60 minutes to write these two paragraphs for each school. I've said this in other SOP posts, but part of the decision to limit the time I spent on the SOP was because I don't think the SOP makes a huge difference in my field and because I felt my time was better spent on other things (e.g. finishing my Masters). In my field, I would say that a bad SOP can really hurt you if you are not able to clearly and concisely describe how you are qualified and why you are a good fit. However, an average SOP that achieves these things is not much worse than a well crafted SOP that achieves these things and is also really well written. In addition, I don't think having an amazing SOP would "make up" for the other aspects that might make you not as competitive. So, my philosophy with SOP writing was to make it not suck and stopped working on it after reaching "diminishing returns". Therefore, in my opinion, generic SOPs are just fine if you are applying to a series of very similar programs. Oh also, professors write generic LORs all the time in my field (just change the school name), including the professors on the admission committees. So, it would be really hypocritical of them to expect students to write unique SOPs for every school yet write the same LOR for their own students

I use a file cabinet at work but only because it was already in the office (although when I started my MSc program, the school had money to buy furniture so I requested one). I find it useful to store both my own coursework as well as students' work before I hand them back and other random notebooks and paper things I have for work/school purposes. I would probably find a way to live without a filing cabinet though, if I had to buy my own (I did buy my own for home but that's only for personal use).

In my opinion, if the experience is not related to your field of research, then I don't think it will make a huge difference. I think having some military experience before grad school would be similar to having some other out-of-field job before starting school. That is, I'd say it will have slight positive effects because most schools value diversity in their students backgrounds and not everyone has previous military experience. But the fact that is military experience instead of something else might not really matter (I'd say the people who are positively biased towards military will balance out those who are negatively biased). It's important to note also that even if the entire school gets tax breaks for having some number of veterans etc., it is the department that makes the admission decisions and usually things that benefit the school at the university-level does not really directly benefit each department (i.e. it makes no difference to them in terms of their budget). In addition, at some schools, the most precious resource is actually lab space / class space / professor time, so an applicant would need a fairly large monetary advantage for it to be a factor.

I love that gmail allows you to make multiple calendars (with different sharing options) per account though, so I don't have to make multiple gmail accounts to have multiple calendars! I might be taking the multi-calendar thing a bit far because I have like a half dozen active Calendars (but it's so pretty when there's all these different colours for different categories!). I have a personal appointments calendar (e.g. doctors) and travel calendar that I share with my spouse. But I also have work related appointments in a different calendar (e.g. classes, office hours, seminars) that I don't share with my spouse since they take place during regular work hours and it would just clog up her calendar!

Mendeley gives me 2GB of cloud storage so I use that instead of having to take up space in my Dropbox. If I import PDFs that are annotated (e.g. via Adobe) into Mendeley then the annotations appear in Mendeley too!

Oh, I almost forgot -- sometimes you can earn free conference registration if you volunteer to work at the registration booth / setting up / audio-visual etc for the conference. You can find this information through the conference website usually.

From the way I hear some residents of these colleges describe their experiences, it does sound like a "community" but maybe the experience is different for each person. Perhaps you still have to really put in a ton of effort in order to get the "community" feel. My idea of community is eating meals regularly with other people in a group setting and perhaps deciding on communal matters. My usual is to live in apartment buildings where I almost never interact with my neighbours so even sharing a living space with some common area is "community" to me. But perhaps this is not what the OP meant at all!! I definitely wasn't thinking "secret society" type stuff. I've never been part of a fraternity before so I don't really know what that's like. The undergrads at my school are "sorted" into 8 different houses and they seem to have a pretty strong community within each house, and it sounds a lot like St John's College at UBC. But it's probably a lot like "you get out what you put in" in terms of how each individual experiences the community?

Yes, some schools have the old British "residential college" system where grad students live in a small community (takes meals together, live in the same building etc.). For example, at UBC, there is St John's College: http://stjohns.ubc.ca/ I tried to search for these type of college communities online but it seems like the majority of them are undergraduate only. There are only 3 graduate residential colleges in Canada (2 at UBC, 1 at Toronto) and in the US, there is this list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_residential_colleges#United_States_of_America but it's not sorted by undergraduate vs. graduate population. These are formal "brotherhood" type communities but there are also less formal ones. For example, many schools will have graduate housing and there's usually some kind of community built around that as well.

This is generally true, but that said, my department has a travel grant award specifically for first year grad students who might not have completed enough research to present but would still benefit from the experience of a big conference! You'll be eligible for a lot more if you have stuff to present but it's not hopeless if you don't have anything!

I think practice makes perfect indeed. However, a 3.5 is not a terrible score for a Physics/Engineering field. My goal score when I took the General GRE was a 4.0 in AW. Remember that the percentile score is the score compared to all test takers in all fields. You don't need to score in like 80th percentile in every single test against every single graduate student to be competitive for Physics grad schools. I would think that a lot of Physics applicants will have scores in the 3.0 to 5.0 range, so you would probably be closer to the median score of all *physics* applicants. If you want to take it again, I think a good goal is to aim for 4.5 or so and you can get this by doing the "safe" strategy mentioned above. Just write a very formulaic essay that presents an argument composed of 2 or 3 supporting points and 1 rebuttal. Practice so that you can write faster and read through as many example questions as you can so you can get practice brainstorming the 2 or 3 supporting points faster. I would even say that you want quantity over quality in this case. It's far better to spend 5 minutes thinking up 3 decent points and then spend 25 minutes writing than to take 10 minutes to try to think up 3 excellent points. Quality might separate the 5.0 and 6.0 essays, but we don't really need to score that high! Also, practicing will show that there are some common themes that you can pretty much always draw on to write your essay!

I'm luckily in a "rich science field" so all of my travel and related expenses are paid for by my supervisor as it's basically a "business trip" since I am presenting work on behalf of my research group. However, sometimes, science grad students also need external funding because you've just started a new grad program and you want to attend a conference but have nothing to present or you want to present work you did at your previous school and your previous supervisor does not have money for former students or your current project is not funded by a grant or the trip is really far away so that it's too expensive without external funding. I've been in many of these cases before and everything fuzzy suggested is excellent! One thing that all grad students generally have to pay out of pocket is membership in their discipline's national society though (e.g. for me, it's the American Astronomical Society). They usually have discounted rates for students and new members but I'd budget around $50-$100 per year to cover this. Sometimes conferences hosted by these societies are the main one for your field and you must be a member to present. But more often, these societies actually offer travel awards to their own meetings as well as other meetings, so that's another way to be eligible for some external funding!

I use Mendeley to both read and organize papers so I know what you mean! I think the Mendeley PDF reader tries to emulate Adobe Acrobat, however, Acrobat has the ability for you to just type text right onto PDF files instead of adding the post-it note type thing. I find that it's hard to fit notes in the margins of double column papers anyways, so I don't miss it too much. If absolutely necessary, I can open the PDF externally using Adobe Acrobat and add my annotations this way and they will still show up on Mendeley. However, my advisor leaves comments on my drafts using the post-it note like feature all the time so now I'm used to it I guess. However, if you didn't know this, it might help to point out that on the right column, there are a few tabs. The first tab is "details" which shows the bibliographic information, but the second tab is "notes". Here, a collection of all the post-it style notes you make for that PDF is listed, ordered by page number. So, you can have all your notes on the right side of your screen and then read on the left side of your screen and just match up the little "note" symbols in the PDF with the actual notes written on the right side.

Or do you mean update to old advisors after you've already started grad school? I wrote my old advisors after the first quarter of grad school just to let them know that I'm enjoying the new place etc. For one advisor, regular contact was natural because I was still working with that group to finish up a paper and I was also planning my wedding in my hometown (where that advisor was) so I would be in town every few months so I would get a coffee with them every few months. After the first year, I generally write to them when something relevant comes up, usually an upcoming conference that we would probably both go to. We would meet for lunch or dinner or coffee during the conference week and catch up. I also wrote to them when I needed professional advice, especially during my last year of my MSc when I was applying for PhD programs. At this point, my research focus has changed enough that I don't significantly overlap with my old advisors anymore--we're still in the same subfield but we study different topics now. So, the majority of my interactions with old advisors have been social/fun rather than work-related (some of them even went to my wedding). But good mentors don't have to be working on exactly the same things as you. I don't think you need to worry too much about what is the "right" amount of contact--just do what feels natural!

And I would actually say the Quant score is not very helpful for very computationally intensive fields like Physics since 1) the math tested in the GRE Q is at the high school level, 2) the Physics subject GRE tests much higher and more relevant mathematical ability, and 3) almost all applicants will have very similar scores. Fields like Physics would still have some minimum cutoff for the GRE Q because a low score on that would be troubling but I don't think they are graded competitively. The GRE V might be considered the same way in Physics-like fields, or maybe even used to distinguish some applicants since there would be a larger range of GRE V scores. However, for fields with subject tests, I think the subject GRE score will almost completely overshadow General GRE score, so for these fields, just score above the cutoff!

I actually think an extra LOR could be harmful if you have 2 great ones (persons 1 and 2) and then 2 average ones (the other choices you mention). It's far better to submit 2 great letters and 1 good letter than 2 great letters and 2 good letters. You don't want to "dilute" the great letters! I think both of your "letter 3" choices are good. I would like to suggest that you don't have to pick between one or the other for all your schools. That is, you might use one person as your 3rd letter for some applications and the other person for another set of applications. You might want to ask both of these about potentially writing you a LOR in the next couple of months to make sure they will be willing to do so. Then, compile your final list of schools and discuss them with your first 2 LOR writers. Then, you might find that for some of these schools, "professor 1" might be a good 3rd choice but for others, "professor 2" might be better. Criteria you might use to determine this could be: maybe one professor's research interest/expertise is more well aligned with the school's interests, maybe one professor is well known by the members of that department (collaborators, used to work there, etc.), or perhaps they have written successful LORs for applicants to this school before, etc. You could determine this also by asking these two professors directly. If you have a good relationship with them, you can probably directly ask them for advice on which schools they feel that they can write a strong letter for you.

Hi, I am not in your exact same situation but I think I might be able to provide some help? I am a Canadian living in the US (not the UK) but I think some aspects of health insurance apply worldwide. But perhaps someone else closer to your situation can correct/extend this information. When you leave Canada to study, you can't use Canadian insurance to cover you anymore. You might be able to get a travel plan from Canada but it will only cover you for very limited (usually 1 or 2 months) and all the time you spend outside of Canada (even if you are living in the UK) counts against it! In addition, travel insurance does not cover much so you can't really use it as your main insurance. However, as you said, you will be covered by a UK health insurance plan while you are a student in the UK. Similarly, I am covered by a US health insurance plan while I am a student in the US. You should check into the details of this plan--most plans will cover travel too. When I was a Canadian student, my Canadian health insurance plan covers me when I travel away from Canada. Now, in the US, my US student health insurance plan covers me while I travel away from the US (coverage levels vary though). So, I would suspect your UK insurance will also cover you when you travel outside of the UK. But, you should definitely check that as soon as you can get the details of your new insurance plan.

It really depends on the people and the school, but in general, I agree with Sigaba--be careful who you choose to share this with. Similarly, for those writing SOPs, I'd say to highlight your research-oriented career goals over your teaching related ones! At my very research-intensive university, some professors who also value teaching have been told to spend less time doing it because their classes were "too good". I've only shared my own passion for teaching (and interest in a non-tenure track career) with a few professors I trust and these professors help me navigate and advise me on who else I should talk to (and who I should avoid). Generally, it seems the "old guard" professors tend to expect more traditional career paths out of their grad students, but there are plenty of exceptions!

At this point, I am not confident in my ability to lead research projects and to come up with innovative research ideas at the PI level. Maybe this will somehow change in the next few years as I start writing my own papers, but I feel very unqualified to be a research professor! In addition, I feel that I do enjoy teaching a lot more than research so my ideal position would probably be something like 75% teaching, 25% research. However, I fear that anything less than 50% research means that you aren't really spending enough time on research to get much done. Right now, in my ideal world, I would like to have a position that is mainly teaching and my research aspects would be not in a leadership role, but as a "staff scientist" in another professor's research group. i.e. an adjunct type position with proper benefits and job security (not tenure, but hired on a permanent basis rather than a term basis). From what I know, adjunct-type positions are not generally considered "real" or full positions, but I think they real/full adjunct positions are more common in Canada than the United States. I know several such individuals at my undergrad department (although they didn't have the title of adjunct).

I was thinking about the Canadian case too. But, in my field in the US, the MS degree is for completion of course requirements. "ABD" to me, means someone who has finished significant amount of the research towards their dissertation but has not written it up yet. That is, someone who finishes 5 or 6 years of grad school and would require another year to actually defend but cannot do so or chooses not to do so for whatever reasons (e.g. run out of funding, need more income to support family, lost interest in the field, etc.) If they leave at this point, they only get the MS that they received back in year 2. However, I'm not 100% certain that anything needs to be done. For people that I know in this situation (i.e. leaving the program after 5-6 years, at "ABD" status), they enter the job market with their MS/MSc and refer to the last 3-4 years of their PhD as work experience, instead of education. Sure, you still have to explain why you left the PhD program, but with proper "marketing" of your experience and skills, you can portray yourself to an employer as a MS graduate with several years of work experience. I am not sure a special degree status needs to be implemented since "MS + 3-4 years of work" sounds just fine to me. Finally, I don't think attrition rates of 50%-60% are necessarily a bad thing. Again, citing Canada's example where we do a 2 years Masters then a 3-4 year PhD, I would say that almost half of graduate students choose to stop after their Masters because they find that academia/grad school/PhD is not what they want to do in life. I think this is fine and the good thing about the separate degree programs is that graduate students make the choice to do a PhD after 2 years of grad school, where they might have more information about what to do with their life. In the direct-entry PhD scheme, you commit to 5-6 or more years right after your undergrad and without sampling what grad school is like first. The people who quit might do so after 3 or 4 years, which is a waste of 1-2 years!

I do what GeoDUDE! does and use Mendeley for reading my papers. I mostly do this to use Mendeley's excellent methods for keeping track of citations (I export BibTeX files). I understand what you mean about highlighting with a mouse though. My solution is actually I rarely mark up PDFs anymore. Instead, I just read them and don't make any annotations. This is obviously not a good way to retain information but I already have over 100 papers in my collection for my current project and I don't expect myself to know every detail of every single paper. Instead, I read the paper and I find that I do pretty good at remembering the main points. In the future, I just skim the abstract again and I remember what the paper was generally about. Mendeley has a box for you to type in whatever you want for each paper and I use this to make notes to myself, e.g. "Cite this for Method X!!" etc. The above is for the lowest level of paper. For papers that are more critical to my work, I keep notes for them in a separate notebook. I read the paper on the screen and then I write summary notes for each one. Maybe summarize the paper in one page of notes or something (i.e. longer than I would want to store in the Mendeley text box). Because I can write on a physical piece of paper, this makes noting down important figures or equations much easier. Sometimes, I would sparingly use the Mendeley built-in highlighter tool so that when I skim through the PDF again in the future, I know where the *really* important stuff is. With the "Find" function, I never have to highlight or otherwise annotate lesser details though. Finally, for the absolute critical papers to my work (i.e. <10 or so), I print out physical copies and keep them in my filing cabinet. These are the papers that I really want to know backwards and forwards and I write on them, draw things, take them with me while commuting etc. Since it's just a small number, having physical copies is very manageable. So, actually, I think the clunkiness of an electronic highlighter tool is a blessing. It makes me want to use it less, which means I only highlight things I really really want to remember. Many of my articles do not even have highlighter marks at all. In the past, with paper copies, I might want to highlight smaller references to keywords but now I can just use Mendeley's "find" function to search for keywords in all of my papers at once!

@Sigaba: Yes, you are right, we can and should consider the reputation of professors at schools we apply to so that we get LORs from well known professors. What I meant was that if you are already e.g. a senior undergrad applying to grad schools this fall, that train left a long time ago so there's no need to worry about things we can't change. But looking forward, choosing a graduate school with well known professors is important for LORs down the road, for sure! Also, the longest item in any of my applications was a 2 page SOP. I was not thinking about fields with writing samples when I said that I'd expect the finalists at competitive programs would have all parts of their applications read.

I have a key to access one of the libraries at my school so it's essentially 24 hours but no staff is around after 5pm. Fortunately, the checkout is on an honour system, so I can self-checkout a book if I need it at night for some reason (just sign my name on a sheet and the librarian checks it out for me the next day). However, if I just need a working space, I would just go to my office--I'd only go to the library to use a textbook on reserve or to check out a book!

This is exactly how I felt. Also, I feel that a SOP is one of those things that can hurt you if it's poorly written but can't really help much if it's well written. That is, if you are a great fit for the school and have all the experiences they are looking for, but you write a terrible incomprehensible SOP, you just wasted your chance to get that information across (although it might still come through in your CV and LORs). That's why I spent just enough time so that my SOP is not terrible and can clearly and concisely get my points across. On the other hand, if you have poor grades** and no research experience, it doesn't matter how well written your SOP is, it's not going to make up for a non-competitive GPA or GRE or whatever the school cares about. (**Here, I define "poor grades" as grades that are not competitive for the program you are applying for, which can really depend on the program!) So, that is why I don't think it's helpful for me to spend more than 6-ish hours writing it--there is almost no gain for me to sink more time in the SOP. However, as victorydance mentioned above, this might indeed be very field specific!

$10k/year does seem low to me. Do you know how much work a TAship would add? At my MSc school, TAships came in units of 5 hours per week and pay about $40/hr, so adding a small amount of TAing can help boost your stipend. Also, if the pay is that low, I think I would be fairly strict and make sure I actually only work 20 hrs/week on my RAship and try to spend at least another 10-20 hours per week earning money another way (TAship?). That won't leave much time for coursework though. Also, I don't think you need to "feel like a brat" if you complain about money. This is our job after all and it's perfectly reasonable for other employees to have legitimate complaints if their pay does not reflect the amount of work and time they put into their jobs. I think some programs still treat grad stipends as "manna from the heaven--you should be happy with what you get!!" type of attitude that is really outdated in the modern competitive job market.