TakeruK

Fully agree with surefire's advice

I would recommend a few thousand dollars for startup costs, but as you said, it depends on a lot of factors (so that "a few" might mean 2 or it might mean like 4!). Maybe it's more helpful for me to just list some of the biggest ticket items so that you can figure out a good estimate for yourself: 1. Flying to new city. This cost about $600-ish for me from Eastern Canada to California. 2. Moving our furniture. This cost about $2000 (but you said you're not moving stuff--just listing it here for completeness). This was the stuff my spouse and I had from our one bedroom apartment. 3. Apartment deposit. This can be as high as 2 months rent in some places. Our deposit was $800 (a little higher due to international status = no US credit) 4. First month's rent, which is due on move-in usually, $1400 for us. 5. Probably safe to save for 2nd month's rent too. We arrived in Sept but my first pay period was not until the end of October. 6. Deposits for various things like utilities. Every company wanted $100 or $200 from us because of the whole no US credit thing and no SSN (until a few weeks later). 7. Buying new furniture if necessary -- cost would vary a lot! 8. Initial grocery / cleaning supply run; extra costs of eating out or whatever as you get settled in and unpack/buy kitchen stuff...a few hundred? 9. You may have to pay big ticket student fees right at the start too (e.g. health insurance etc) So, the cost of rent and the move itself is really the biggest driver of startup expenses. I would say something like estimated cost of move + 3 months rent is probably good to cover most things. My school had a $2500 no fee no interest startup loan meant for these expenses exactly. They gave us 6 months of no payments and then you repay the $2500 in 18 monthly payments (no fees/interest!). Other schools pay you for each semester up front, so perhaps that is another way to help offset the high initial costs.

First, you should know that accreditation is not a magic thing that makes degrees into things that employers/schools must accept. That is, pretty much anyone can form an accreditation agency/body and "accredit" degree programs. The value of accreditation lies completely in the intended audience's perception of the accrediting body. A US school that is accredited by a ill-reputed accrediting body will not be very useful either. In terms of recognizing your degree, I find that most US and Canadian schools will accept a foreign degree if it is recognized by the foreign country's main accreditation board(s). But it's really a case by case basis as there is no international accreditation agency/authority. However, recognition of a foreign Masters does not always mean a lot in a US school. At my program, my foreign Masters was recognized (appears on my transcript and record and everything) but basically no credits are awarded towards a PhD because of my Masters. That is, they treat it the same as a US Masters! In order to answer your question, you need to decide what exactly you want to do with your MA from Spain in the US. If you want it to help you get into US PhD programs, then you are probably okay, but see what I said above. If you want it for employment purposes, then it completely depends on the employer. The employer is free to decide whether or not each applicant's education and experience meets their criteria. In practice, I would imagine that most employers would try to figure out if your school is well reputed worldwide/in Spain and maybe if the accrediting body for your school is in good standing. Finally, although it doesn't sound like it, if you are talking about professional accreditation, then you should check with the main authority for your line of work that is responsible for the area you want to work it (i.e. probably state level?) and see what their rules are on foreign accreditation. That is, there really isn't a clear-cut concrete answer!

This could depend on where you are but in the places I've lived in, landlords tell us that they basically will take the first person that qualifies. I think it's a form of discrimination that is illegal in some states/provinces to use income as a decider on who to rent to when the income is enough to pay the rent (i.e. using income to determine qualification based on ability to pay rent is okay but I think it's not okay to prefer someone who makes say $75k per year over someone who makes $50k per year when both incomes are more than enough to pay rent). I don't know if they actually do what they say they do though! However, every time we submit a rental application, if we were the first one to do so, they always told us to submit the deposit cheque (check?) with the application and if they approve us and then they will deposit that cheque and once they do, we have the place and first month's rent is due on the first day. In one case, we were not the first one and we were given the option to submit a cheque with our application so that if the first person's application falls through, they can process ours next. Alternatively, we could have chose to wait until they accept our application to produce the deposit cheque, but if someone else who is approved beats us to it, then they would get it. That is, my experience is that the building manager generally submits applications in the order they receive them and the first approved application with a deposit will get the spot. After all, there is no real reason for the landlord to waste time/energy picking the "best" applicant out of a pool of qualified candidates--they only need to know you can pay the rent. They generally will want the first completed application/deposit that meet their criteria (credit-worthiness, move in date etc.) because every day they wait for a "better" candidate is a day of lost rental income. Personally, I've had the best experience with larger rental companies that own several apartment buildings in the same city. I find that when a company owns 100s of units, an small issue with yours (e.g. needs repainting) is an expense that is a tiny fraction of their monthly income, so they are generally happy to do it to keep their tenants happy. When it's a person that owns just one building of say 4 apartments, an expense like repainting can cut into a large chunk of their monthly income so they tend to be more stingy. In addition, a landlord of 100s of units does not have time to micromanage each unit--every piece of paperwork is just routine! However, I can see the opposite argument made too (i.e. with 100s of units, one unhappy tenant is no big deal, they'll just find another) but my experience has been mostly positive with these types of big landlord companies while all of my friends' landlord issues come from individual or small landlord companies. Also, I like going to these bigger companies that own a lot of units because sometimes you are able to get on their notification list if any unit is available and then you might be able to view it and put in an application before it even goes up on craigslist or other posting services.

I agree with the others that it doesn't hurt to ask. Most programs in my field will not cover moving expenses for graduate students though, because as others said, travel is generally only covered if it's a work trip, not if it's a relocation. However, I know of one Canadian grad program that does offer $1000 per student for admissions-related travel. However, the $1000 is the total they will reimburse for both the prospective student visit and moving expenses, so you can choose to use it for one or the other (or, what I think the best combo is to use it for travel to visit the school and then use the rest to partially cover moving). So, it's not completely unprecedented!

I just imagined someone saying "Well, the last time *I* visited a supergiant star, it wasn't blue at all!" and cracked up. Or maybe because all the deadlines are this week for me ahhhhhh Back on track--I just want to agree with/highlight lewin's point that extra life/work experience doesn't translate to academic advantage!

Not in the social sciences. I think what you are describing is the norm for grad students in the physical sciences. When people become postdocs, I see their descriptors shorten greatly, so it's a one line summary of their project rather than a list of everything they did. Right now, I personally have 2-4 bullet points under each research experience describing what I did and I don't anticipate changing this until I'm ready to graduate and apply for post-PhD jobs. I used this "extended" format for grad school applications, fellowship applications and any conference travel grants etc. My thought is that until we have our PhDs, our research projects really are the extent of our research experience so this is the best way to showcase them. Eventually, we will have a thesis and probably a bunch of publications so those can speak for themselves instead of having to rely on our descriptions in our CV. So, unless your CV is too long, I would leave them in and don't really see a reason to cut them out. I think a normal CV length for graduate students is between 2 to 4 pages. My "max length CV" containing absolutely everything is 3.5 pages and when I tailor the CV for a specific purpose, it usually fits within 3 pages. I would say something that is 5 or more pages would be "too long". Note: the page lengths above is using the convention/idea that one is not using "CV" as a synonym for "resume". I think the normal convention is that a CV is a long document listing almost all relevant experiences in detail (suitable for something like a job application, fellowship application or grad school application) while a resume is a short document (1 page, sometimes 2) that just summarizes your relevant experiences. If it's a resume, I would just list one line per research experience stating the date, the location and the PI/project title.

This is pretty normal. One way to think about it is that part of the professor job description at some schools is to bring in $X in grants each year. So I don't think it is that the university "resorts" to shaving grants--it's actually standard practice. This is why universities grant tenure in the first place--because they are confident in the professor's ability to continue to produce good research and continue bringing in grants. It's also a good deal for professors, because when overhead is a percentage, then if you have an off year where you are not bringing in as many grants, you are still protected and you don't lose your job or your salary! At "soft-money" places, where you get to keep almost all of your grant money, the downside is that you might lose your position if you can't fund it yourself. Some soft-money places have a hybrid scheme where the institute itself has some money it can "grant" to its employees in case of a bad year. But too many of these "bad years" and you may lose your job too. There's definitely pros and cons to both! I think that many grants do allow for you to consider overhead when you apply for the money in the first place.

Here are the answers for a Canadian school, to add onto fuzzy's answers. 1. Yes, you should apply before you finish your degree, this is normal in Canada/US. Most Canadian schools have deadlines in Jan 2016 or Feb 2016 for a Fall 2016 start. You may or may not need the General GRE test to apply to Canadian schools--check with each program separately. Note that you should be careful to check the international requirements, almost all Canadian schools will not require the GRE for Canadian applicants, but make sure it's the same for international applicants! 2. It sounds like you are looking for a graduate program in Chemistry. In Canada, all good programs in the sciences will include funding for you to pay for tuition and living expenses. The reason they pay you is because you work on research and you teach for them (Teaching Assistant). One difference in Canada vs. the US is that almost all Canadian schools do not have a tuition waiver. Instead, they will pay you something like $40k per year and then you pay them back the cost of tuition. Graduate programs will pay you through a combination of research work (usually around $20-$25/hr), teaching work ($30-$40/hr) and fellowships that they award to their students so that the total pay is enough to live on and attract students. The number of hours you are contracted for research work is pretty arbitrary and most people do the work required to get a good result, since most RA contracts are something like only 20 hours per month. For international students, your tuition will be around $10k to $20k per year, but your stipend will also be higher than a Canadian student so that both of you take home about the same money after you pay tuition. **Note: Important funding difference / program structure. In Canada, the normal grad student path is a 2 year MSc followed by a 3-4 year PhD program. So you will most likely be applying to MSc programs in Canada and PhD programs in the US. However, unlike most US Masters programs, Canadian MSc programs are fully funded just like a PhD student because it's basically the first two years of a PhD program in the US. Most science programs will either allow you to "advance"/"fast-track" to the PhD program after 1 year of a MSc program, but most students choose to defend their MSc thesis and get a degree before going to a PhD program. You will have to apply to the PhD program separately while you are in your last year of the MSc program (even if you are planning to stay in the same school for your PhD). 3. I know this question was for US only, but just wanted to answer it anyways for Canada In Canada, you can apply for Canadian Permanent Residence (aka "Canadian green card") while you are pursuing a PhD (after your 2nd year of work towards a PhD) or right after you graduate from a PhD program. Permanent Residency is the first step towards becoming a Canadian citizen. Canada wants to attract smart people from around the world so there is a special immigration program for PhD students under the "Federal Skilled Workers Program". For more information, start here: http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/resources/publications/permanent.asp --- And one thing to add about OPT in the US that fuzzy mentioned. For fields like Chemistry, your OPT limitation is a whole 3 years, so it's perfect for a postdoc or something like that!

I also wouldn't worry about it. You might see lots of posts here about older people feeling worried about fitting in. In my opinion, the truth is that grad school is a new and scary experience for most people, no matter their age or experience, and I think it would help to remember that most of your cohort will share similar anxieties--they are probably as worried as you are!

I looked up some people in my old department because your question made me curious too. For this school, assistant profs tend to start around $80k. I found that someone like the Director of Finance/Operations of a department was paid around $90k. At the University level, I found that the Director of HR was paid around $100k. However, perhaps these comparisons are not quite fair. I would imagine that these director level positions would require many years of work experience and perhaps some professional postgraduate training while an assistant prof is a new university employee. On the other hand, an assistant prof does have graduate school + postdocs = many years of experience as well. In my opinion though, jobs like Professor and Director of Finance are both equally important/vital to the University's success and I think it's fair that both types of positions have pay ranges within 10%-20% of each other.

I have to third rising_star's and kyjin's advice and we did exactly the same thing. Our thought was that we spend 1/3 of our life in bed so it's worth the investment. So, we also spent a lot of money on our mattress ($1200 or so for a queen size mattress but that included frame, bed, sheets, delivery, taxes). It has lasted over 4 years now and I expect it to go for at least 10 in total, which comes out to only 30 cents per night. I'd gladly pay a quarter per night to flop down onto a really comfortable bed instead of one that is just okay (or even uncomfortable if you haven't had the chance to try it).

Like everyone else said, it really depends. Also, to add: many schools will charge overhead on all external grants that PIs bring into the school. Profs tell me that the overhead is something that is usually in employment contracts and it is a fairly high amount (like 30% to 50%). Sometimes this money goes into the general department fund for things like paying for seminar speakers, recruiting students, paying RAships etc. Other times, the agreement might be that a professor's base salary is X amount and then Y percentage of incoming grants is added to the prof's salary. In soft-money institutions, overhead is much lower but you will have to depend on grants for all (or almost all) of your salary. What fraction each grant goes to each expense just depends a lot on everything. In most grants, you provide a budget breakdown, and I've seen grants in my field where the prof decides this project needs a graduate student to work on it for 24 months (or whatever). The most common unit of labour I've seen is "person-month" (i.e. a grant for 36 person-months can fund 3 people for 1 year or 1 person for 3 years etc.). But you can even have 0.5 person-month or as Eigen said, in theory, 1/16th person-month too! So in some fields, where most of the cost is in paying people to run computer code, the majority of the grant is to pay students/postdocs/Co-Is. In others, where you need money to get equipment or materials, the salary portion might take up a much smaller percentage! Finally, there may be additional rules about what the money from grants can be spent on. For example, it used to be that in Canada, NSERC (equal to NSF) provides fellowships to PhD students (just like the GRFP) and the rule was that a student on a NSERC grad award cannot be paid an RAship out of a PI's NSERC grant. So this can cause complications as well.

This is definitely true--there is a definite cost to you when you miss out on important department events, meeting visitors etc. But there is a cost to most actions you take, so in my opinion, it's an issue of managing the costs and paying the price you're willing to pay for whatever your ideal is (or as close as you can get). Personally, my ideal would be some balance of choosing to schedule my persona life over work sometimes but also reschedule work / miss a few events for important personal life events other times. My philosophy is that I'm in academia because I want to be happy but if I find myself constantly making choices that make me unhappy, then why do this at all? Obviously, there is a lot of good reason to make choices that might make you unhappy now but will "pay off" later, but there also should be a balance!

Is the choice between going to school and maxing out loans vs. not going to school and not having loans? Or, would you already have some federal aid loan anyways from previous education/whatever? If your question is "would you take this option?", my answer would be no, for me, personally. I looked up the definition of discretionary income and it's "adjusted gross income above poverty line". The poverty guidelines are extremely low: http://aspe.hhs.gov/poverty/14poverty.cfm, so it's practically a 15% tax on your total gross income....well probably more like 10% to 15% depending how much you make. As GeoDUDE! said, this is about the same fraction of income that people try to put away towards retirement or other savings (house, car, vacation, children, children's college funds, whatever), so this means you won't have that for the next 25 years. This is not the life I would personally choose to have, so I would rather not get a graduate degree than to choose this life, but it's definitely a personal decision.

I think for you, the PGRE will be more important because you would want to have at least one area of your application be "above average". Like you said, everything else is "average" and generally, graduate students are not average BSc graduates--they tend to be slightly above average. If you were able to somehow rank every BSc graduate, I don't think the students that are at the 50th percentile will get into very many graduate schools. As many of us have suggested above, if you want to get into grad school, your best bet really is to study for the PGRE now and take it this fall, then apply for Fall 2015. If you don't want to wait a year, you can also start applying to the few programs that will accept Spring 2015 admission AND not require the PGRE but that will be only a small number of programs. But hey, if you do both and get into spring programs, then you don't have to worry about the other stuff anymore! But either way, now is the time to start studying and/or writing applications!

My experience agrees with bshrape's--all the important values are clearly over or under, never something like that January bar. However, these graph problems often show you a ton of irrelevant information (like those temperature curves) so that part is accurate at least.

I am not in a long distance relationship but I take about 4 weeks off completely from work per year. Our school official policy is that grad students get weekends and all official holidays off and also 2 weeks of personal time / vacation time. I usually work some weekends extra and I work most holiday days unless I am going out of town or have visitors. I count working these extra times as "banking" vacation days for me to use in other ways (see below). When family visit me (e.g. parents or inlaws) I take about a week off to spend time with them. Usually, they are here during the winter break or spring break so it's pretty normal for students to disappear at this time anyways. I also take a couple of weeks in the summer or added onto a conference/work trip so that I can have a vacation (usually my wife joins me after the conference). My work is not lab based so there is rarely any time where I have to be working. My supervisor does not really care if we work at home or in the office, or if we work 9-5 or 1-9 or whatever. The only commitments where I have to be working are when I observe at the telescope, when I go on work trips, and when I TA. This means I usually schedule my work around other life commitments so that I can take time off when I want/need to. So, I think it's pretty doable to schedule your visits around your work if you don't work in a group/lab where you must be physically present. Also, for me, I did all my courses in the first 4 quarters so that I would have this freedom. Personally, I don't mind missing class for good reasons but it's usually more work than it's worth to play catch up (especially with 10 week quarters). But for important trips in the past, I have taken time off classes in order to do personal things (e.g. honeymoon) as well as work things (e.g. conference). Overall, I'd say the first year is the least flexible (and you want to establish firmly that you work hard to earn your time off) but it gets a lot better afterwards.

Yes, it sounds like something I would include. I've seen some people include it the way Maleficent999 suggested, but I usually see awards being a completely different section instead that includes all of the awards rather than separating by school.

That is a fair point! To be fair, one should divide the time for things like GRE over the number of applications, so I wouldn't count 100 hours per application, but I agree that it's more than a job application (unless we are talking about postdoc / tenure track positions) But in any case, I do agree that the right thing for schools to do is to send a form rejection to everyone once they have confirmed their incoming class. Some schools don't do this until a week before their year starts though. Some students are able to attend with this much late notice, but if not, they can just decline the last minute offer. I think it's better to have a very late rejection (and students should expect no news = bad news once summer begins) than reject someone in May and then reverse this decision later if spots open up. However, I'd say the majority of schools make final decisions by the end of April at the latest and they should send the rejection letters as soon as they know they have no more spots!

I agree that applicants have the right to feel upset for not hearing an answer. But it's common in both academia and real life to take silence as implied rejection. Most job applications only call candidates selected for interview, they don't usually say "sorry we went with someone else" to the majority of applicants that did not even make it past stage 1. I don't think universities "owe" applicants an answer, but I do think it would be a courtesy if they did. However, applicants that don't hear by April or so (given the April 15 deadline and all) should have at least inquired politely about their application status. If the student waits until it's too late for them to attend before they complain/ask about it, then I'd think that it's the student dropped the ball.

I agree with Dedi that the SOP needs to speak directly to the adcom. Definitely use plain English and be precise, this is not a lovely piece of prose, it's a straight forward statement of why you are interested in their graduate program. Maybe this is very different from field to field though? My advice to people writing in STEM fields is to avoid scientific jargon. The committee is often made up of people from all fields of study within the department, and you don't want to alienate the people who don't study what you are applying to study. In addition, clarity is highly valued so if you can explain a complex idea using simple words, that would be desirable. Experts in your field of study will nod along, confident that you know your stuff and non-experts will appreciate the way you distilled the complex idea into something they can understand with only 30 seconds of processing. The readers have to read a ton of SOPs and if your SOP makes them have to reread a sentence/paragraph a few times to understand its meaning, then that would be both annoying and a sign of poor communication ability. The way I envisioned my SOP was that I imagined myself having a drink (coffee/tea/pop/beer/whatever) with the faculty of the department I'm applying to and they ask "Why do you want to be part of our program?" The answer to that question was basically the thesis of my SOP and then further paragraphs expanded on each of my reasons and gave evidence that I am capable of succeeding in their program and that I am someone they would want to hire/have in their program. So, keep it plain and simple is what I think. Don't use words that you would not use if you were standing next to someone, holding a cup of whatever and chatting about your research interests. Make sure you explain everything to the level of detail required and no further. Don't refer reader to any other source (after all, you wouldn't hand them these things, you/they are holding a drink!). This strategy worked very well for me but it's always hard for any of us to really know what parts of our applications were good and what parts bad. For all I know, I might have gotten my offers despite of my SOPs

Well, I think they still can because they probably are a part of some advisory committee for your progress. I don't really know if they can just instantly see your grades at will, or do they have to fill out a request, or do they just have to make a record when they do access your student file. I do know that random profs in the department can't just open up your student file and browse them for no reason though. For my quals exam (oral), we were instructed to prepare a single sheet listing all of our courses and our grades as part of the package of info we give to each exam committee member. I was a little surprised we had to do this since I would think that a quals exam committee surely has good enough reason to access my academic record through FERPA. It could be just that they wanted us, the students, to do the legwork of condensing our transcript (removing research/seminar credits etc.) and perhaps reflect on our own grades to help us prepare for the exam. Or maybe having the committee access my transcript would require more FERPA paperwork and by having the students just give this information, it eliminates that? Just something I wonder about!

I just tried to do this as an "additional score report" and this option is indeed after you select the department. You can tick off which scores you want to send and your options show both Subject and General scores. For the four free schools, you would only have the "most recent" or "all" options, not "any" but I think it should work out the same way. Hope it works after the system error goes away!

I did this back in 2011, before ScoreSelect existed. Back then, when you select your 4 free schools on the subject test, there was a checkbox to tick off (or click) if you wanted your General Scores to be included too.