TakeruK

Just to clarify -- if being a graduate student means spending most of your time working for yourself (on your dissertation that you choose, independently of your advisor etc.) then a lot of the stipends make sense since like others said above, the graduate student is only putting in about half of a FTE worker. But, in the fields I'm used to, graduate student is a full time entry-level job. In these cases, I think it makes a lot more sense to argue for higher salaries that reflect the quantity and quality of work completed. PS to juilletmercredi, who said: At many major Canadian universities (Canada being small so this is also "most" university jobs in Canada), these numbers are indeed almost true. The minimum starting salary for an assistant professor at Queen's, from the same document I linked above, is around $66.5k, but higher offers can be made to attract some applicants. At my undergrad school, one math prof I talked to said he started at the $80k level. Canadian Postdocs, on average, don't make as much as you would like them to make though, with the median around $45k instead of $50k-$60k (see Fig 12 in http://www.mitacs.ca/sites/default/files/caps-mitacs_postdoc_report-full_oct22013-final.pdf) If you can't run the world, perhaps you could at least run Canada

(and also to the others who asked the same question): Yes, this is a fair point. When I say the University "owns" the research I do, what I mean is that I cannot personally use my work for personal gain separate from the University. That is, let's say I spend my PhD years writing a very useful piece of code that analyzes astronomy images. The University "owns" this code now--I cannot, for example, personally benefit by doing something like turning this code into proprietary software that I then sell as an app or something. (Note: this doesn't mean this can't ever happen: I can reach some agreement with the University to create spinoff from my research). Similarly, the dissertation that I write will be copyrighted to me, but the University also owns a royalty free license to distribute or use it if they ever want to. As for the second part, yes, I will still have a lot to gain from my (hopefully good) work that I produce while I am a PhD student. But this is not a reason for me to be paid less, nor should it be considered a form of compensation. For example, let's say I am a lawyer and I work for Law Firm X and work hard to do really good work with X. My ability is noticed by other firms and eventually, Law Firm Y wants me on their team and they make me a job offer based on my good work record with X. This doesn't mean that I should be happy to work for X at an unfair salary because I'll benefit from doing good work because all this time, X is also gaining a lot from my good work. Maybe this is really a difference in field, but in mine, grad school isn't really about pursuing some pet project that we have. Instead, we are basically hired as research workers to work on our supervisors' projects. Initially, we probably just work on their ideas but eventually we also come up with our own ideas and contribute to the research. So, yes, while publishing paper and presenting at conferences has the benefit of exposure for me, my research output also directly benefits the University and my supervisor's research group, so I should be paid a fair wage for it. I agree that when we are talking about "salary" for graduate students, we should only consider the number of hours that we work "for" the school. But, when I count up my hours, this is about 35-40 hours a week working for the school, equivalent to a full time job. At this point in my grad program, with all coursework completed, pretty much 100% of my working hours are working for the school. Eventually, I will probably spend time working on my dissertation, and if the work is solely on dissertation related things (e.g. formatting the thing, writing extra chapters) then those hours should not count as working hours. However, I expect the majority of my dissertation to be a collection of papers I am currently writing for peer-reviewed journals right now, and those hours do count as work for the school. I actually do think that PhD students should be paid as adjuncts. I think that Canada does something like this, although it's not clearly labelled as "adjunct" work all the time. But basically, my pay in Canada came from 3 parts: TA work, RA work, and fellowships. Each pay source was handled differently and it's a very clear separation of our 3 working roles. Our TA pay comes from the department and our salaries were negotiated by our Union in a Collective Agreement and they were set so that a graduate student's wage is some proportion of the wage of an adjunct. Here are some numbers to compare: At Queen's University, the current Adjunct collective agreement sets the salary for a "0.5 credit course" (this is a standard semester length course in Canada; i.e. 12-13 weeks, 3 hours per week) to be $7406 in 2011 (increases to $7821 in 2015), so a 3/3 load would be around $44k per year. This is the "base level" (with 0 years of experience). An experienced adjunct (let's say 5 years experience) starts at $7961. In addition, there is a ~10% pay raise if your course has more than 120 students enrolled, to compensate for the extra work. Source: QUFA Collective Agreement (http://www.queensu.ca/provost/faculty/facultyrelations/qufa/collectiveagreement/WEBSITECAWITHLINKSSept252012.pdf) At Queen's University, the standard TA rate in 2011 (when I was there) was just under $38/hr. My total salary from TA a "0.5 credit course" (i.e. the same length as above) was 54 hours * $38/hr = $2052. I think this is a fair amount of pay given the amount of hours I put into the course compared to someone who was actually in charge of the course. At Queen's University, in the humanities, graduate students at the PhD level are often fully in charge of a course, and they are called "Teaching Fellows". TFs are basically adjuncts and as you said, they are actually paid exactly the same as an adjunct with 0 years of experience (the only difference is that time as a TF does not count as experience in terms of getting raises in future years). Sources for TA and TF rates: PSAC 901 Collective Agreement in 2011 (http://www.queensu.ca/provost/faculty/facultyrelations/psac/collectiveagreement/CAAug1612updatedwithlinks.pdf) (Note that ALL of the above applies to ALL employees on campus, regardless of the field they work) Our RA pay was also based on a certain amount for a certain amount of hours worked and the remaining pay came from fellowships, which do not come with any work requirements but in effect, are meant to supplement our pay so that we have a livable stipend. Typically, at Canadian schools, undergrad researchers are paid around $15-$20/hour and graduate students in the $20-$25/hour range. Note that in most of Canada, minimum wage is $10.25/hr currently (Ontario is going to go to $13/hour soon). So, I think this is a fair wage to pay someone with the qualifications of a BA or BSc. I agree that this should only be counted on the hours we actually work for the school though! So, my point here is to illustrate an example of a University pay scale that basically pays its students fairly for the work they complete and that paying graduate students as adjuncts make sense if they are doing the work of an adjunct. Overall though, I am surprised to learn that at the places you mentioned, adjuncts actually make less than graduate students! But in my opinion, the problem is that adjuncts are paid too little, not that graduate students are paid too much! There is definitely no rule, but keeping graduate stipends low basically creates a strong disincentive to either keep students from starting a family or discourage those who have families/want to start families from entering graduate studies. If I really put in 10-20 hours of actual work "for" the school each week, then yes, I agree a stipend of $15k-$20k is a fair one. But in my field, this is not true. I try to maintain approximately 35 working hours ("for the school", so coursework etc. is on top of that) each week. My stipend is $30k/year. I get 2 weeks of unpaid vacation, so let's say it's 50 working weeks a year and 35 hours per week makes 1750 working hours per year, which makes my average hourly rate be just over $17/hr. In my opinion, this is a little low compared to how much researchers in Canada get paid, but minimum wage in California is also only $8/hr, so I'm at about 2x minimum wage here, just like when I was at about 2x minimum wage in Canada. So, in that sense, I'm at about the same level. However, the cost of living here is way higher than where I was before, so I think graduate students here are not doing as well as other places when compared to the living wage.

I disagree with you here. The coursework that I completed in my PhD is not "for me". I have absolutely no use for it outside of academic work. It is not going to make me any more employable. And the research I do is also not "for me". The school owns everything I produce and therefore all of my research work is for the school. Teaching is clearly something we do for the school. I agree that a PhD is an in-training phase where I am being trained to become an independent researcher. But, in my opinion, trainees are not equivalent to free labour--they are entry level employees. Even in "real world jobs", every hour I had of training, no matter how mundane, has been paid work (at the full salary rate). So, I think it's expected that a school would pay for a PhD student's coursework because it is part of the training required to become an academic researcher and a PhD program is really hiring an academic-researcher-in-training. I'm not saying PhD students should be paid the same rate as actual fully qualified researchers (i.e. those with PhDs already). But we should be paid according to our output and qualifications. A PhD position is a job, like any other professional field. A good/desirable job would naturally have a lot of people wanting to do this work. There's nothing wrong with more and more people wanting to be a PhD researcher. When the market is saturated, then this will mean it will be a lot tougher to get a PhD position--the admissions standards will go up. This is not a bad thing. I think it's terrible to say that "in order to become a PhD student, you must be willing to make sacrifices or you don't truly want it". This is currently the case--PhD students are expected to make monetary sacrifices. This is a bad model as it prevents people who are qualified but have expenses greater than $30,000 ish per year (perhaps sick family members, or they have children) from affording a PhD so they end up going to work in other fields that pay them the wage they are qualified for instead. Even if a person can afford to live on grad student stipend right now, this effectively prevents PhD students from taking on other expenses such as raising a child or other things that they might want to do that cost money. In my opinion, when you purposely devalue a worker's labour and make up criteria that are not related to the labour (e.g. "have to love the job so much that they are willing to live on less"), then you are creating extra barriers for disadvantaged people from entering the field. This restricts academia to only those who can afford to do this. This is partly true. As an international student, at first my spouse could not legally work so being married was an extra expense, not an extra source of income. My spouse now has authorization to work and this has definitely increased our income so that our combined income now meets our combined expenses (my school is in a high cost of living area, otherwise we would be saving quite a bit of money). However, this is still not enough money to start a family if we chose to (especially since one of us will have to stop working since childcare costs is about the same as one of our incomes!) However, this part is a lot trickier. One way my school tries to help out students with dependents is to subsidize a small amount of extra costs (e.g. $100/month/dependent for health insurance, up to $4000/year for childcare if both parents are working [or if only one parent]). This is a good thing, but I feel it's still a little bit low (dependent health insurance through my school is $7200/year for adults, $3000/year for children and childcare is $20,000/year). In the ideal world, I think graduate students (actually, everybody) should be paid based on need. Someone with a serious health condition should get extra help on their medical bills etc. However, in practice, I cannot think of a fair way to implement this without the school making value judgements for students (i.e. whatever they subsidize would mean that they "approve" of certain things but not others, which can easily lead to unfair situations). Right now, although my school can effectively increase a student's income by up to 20% through need-based benefits/subsidies, it is not that much. I don't think it currently poses the unfair problem I just mentioned because this is low enough to not really make a huge difference. But I think it is just a little bit too low to make an impact, which means increasing the subsidies might cause a fairness problem (but not increasing it also makes it unfair) so I don't really know what the right path forward is.

This is a crappy situation! But first, I would advise you to not try to "diagnose" your advisor's reasons for neglecting you--I don't think it's a good idea to try to rationalize your advisor's behaviour as "she is in over her head" or "she has taken on too much". You are not your advisor--you don't know what "too much" is! I would recommend that you stick to things that you know for sure. That is, the symptoms that you feel are valid and legitimate complaints--not whatever reasoning you might think is "causing" these symptoms. I say this because it is both disrespectful of another person's individuality to decide for them that they are "taking on too much" and because it could cause you more problems if you focus on what you think is the "cause". So, what can you do? This depends on if you are ready now to switch to a different advisor or if you want to continue working with your current advisor (or if you have not yet decided to switch). It might help to first bring up your feelings of neglect and/or disconnect with your advisor. Remember to make sure to be clear on how you feel and not judging her work/priorities/advising. Perhaps your advisor does not realise how you are feeling or perhaps there is some misunderstanding. If you do not think the first step has resulted in any changes that you would like or if you are certain you want to switch advisors, it could be a good idea to talk to the professor in charge of graduate students in your department (e.g. a DGS or similar role). They might be able to help be a mediator and/or help you figure out what to do next in accordance with department and institutional policies. In my opinion, even if this advisor is the only one doing research in your area, that is not a good enough reason to stay. I think having an advisor that you "click" with is far far more essential to both your sanity and your success than having a research topic in your primary area of interest. So, if you can find another professor that you would have a good working relationship with doing something that might also be interesting, then I'd suggest you look into a possibility of switching to these professors. Hope this is helpful!

Oh. In that case, I would probably just resubmit the same CV I used in my application!

What is this for? If it is a CV for applications to grad school, a conference, or a fellowship and there are no page limits specified, then there really isn't a limit. I don't think most people will care about an exact page length (unless specified). Instead, it's far more important to just include what needs to be included and do not add extra fluff. Most graduate CVs I've seen range from 1-4 pages (2 pages is very common), depending on progress in graduate program (and thus how much stuff you have). What you should include really depends on the context though.

I don't think this is reasonable behaviour from your office mates You did not do anything wrong in securing more funding and to me, it does not seem like you flaunt the additional stipend in front of your officemates. This scenario is one reason why I am glad my department pays every student exactly the same (or within one or two thousand depending on external fellowships). If I was in your shoes and my officemates became snotty of my ability to win fellowships, I think the best course of action is to just stop mentioning anything stipend related to them. I enjoy celebrating with and for my colleagues who are successful but if they don't want to be a part of it, then I'll find someone else to share good news with. In my opinion, I think this is something that might be worth it if the graduate student body addressed this to the department. A factor of 2 difference in funding is extremely strange, to me. Even for the students who get the increased funding, it's very tough to balance budgets when your income changes this much over a year or two! It sounds like the "default" stipend rate might be really low if it's possible to get twice as much through an external fellowship. And to your question of "how much should a grad student be paid?", I would say that the value of our renumeration package (stipend, "tuition" and benefits) should be comparable to what someone with an undergraduate degree in your field could be making if they joined the workforce right after college, adjusted for cost of living in that area. I put "tuition" in quotes because I don't think the full value of your tuition waiver should always be included since a lot of it is weird money paid from the school to another part of the same school. So, I would say that you should only count the "value" of your education and that is very subjective with no real metric! However, I think I would personally agree with an estimate of somewhere around $10,000/year as the value we get from courses that we don't have to pay for. I think that a recent BSc graduate makes between $40,000-$50,000/year, and a health insurance plan is usually worth around $3000/year, so I think a fair stipend for a graduate student in the sciences is between $27,000 to $37,000 per year. My school's lower and upper limits on student stipends are $28,000 to $38,000 per year. So, these two numbers agree pretty well. (The sticker price of our "tuition" is about $40,000 per year but it's that weird funny money). Alternatively, if you don't want to use a "value of work" argument, you can consider "how good of a life does a PhD student deserve?". This is a lot more subjective. My argument would be that a PhD student should live well above the poverty line in his/her area. You can use federal poverty level numbers, or use the "rule of thumb" that "affordable housing" means that rent+utilities should not cost more than 25% to 30% of your total income. In my opinion, a PhD student should earn enough so that either sharing a 2 bedroom place with 1 person or splitting the rent with a partner on a 1-bedroom place should be "affordable". In my (very expensive) city, this costs about $800-$900 per month which is $9600-$10800 per year, so the range of affordable housing stipends should be from $32,000/year to $43,200 per year. This roughly matches the stipends at my school but we are going to use these numbers to make an argument for raising the range of stipends at my school (they haven't changed in several years now).

It really depends on how you bring it up. In my opinion, it's fine (and maybe even a good thing) to mention professors in related fields that have official adjunct status in your department. This is really common in multidisciplinary fields like mine--plenty of professors in my department are adjuncts in physics, chemistry, astronomy, biology etc. I think you have to be careful how you phrase these resources, though (the following may be dependent on field, so keep that in mind): 1. You don't want to just name-drop. Just because "Greatest Professor In Anthropology" (GPiA) is at the same school doesn't mean you'll magically benefit from being near GPiA. If you mention professors, you need to specifically say how you can utilize the resource. Are you planning on collaborating with them? Working under their supervision (if so, check that either they have adjunct status and/or your department allows co-supervisors from outside of the immediate department). Personal example--my research interests lie between Planetary Science and Astronomy and for many schools, the profs I wanted to work with were faculty in one and adjunct in another. Before applying, I reached out to these professors and talked to them about applying and got their advice on which department I should apply to. 2. I don't think it's useful to mention courses in other departments. The main priority of a graduate student is to produce research, not take more courses. Also, unless Course X in Department Y at your new school is especially widely known to be one of the best, there's no point mentioning it because pretty much every school will have "Course X". When you discuss specific resources and opportunities at a certain school, you want to target the things that are unique to that school. Before doing this, you should definitely look into your potential future department's policy on taking courses outside of the department and how widely encouraged this is. 3. Other resources--this is useful to check! My personal example is that the astronomy department at my school owns a portion of several large telescopes that graduate students at the school (not just those in the department) can apply for permission to use. So I definitely included this in one of my reasons to apply to my school's planetary science department (even though they don't run the telescope). You can check these possibilities by doing some research. Also, you should check if people in your department actually uses these outside resources. Sure, you can be the first one to do so, but it's a stronger case when you are suggesting you use an instrument/equipment that many others in your department have already used. In my opinion, I would not mention any courses outside of the department. In fact, I would say that it's pretty rare that a SOP would directly mention specific coursework as a reason to be interested in a certain school! Again, grad students don't go to grad school for courses. So, it would be weird, to me, to read a SOP that discussed the virtues of courses in an outside department. I would only mention professors in outside departments if you actually have a plan to work with them (I'd say to email them ahead of time and make sure this is possible before spending SOP space on it).

International student orientation was mandatory for J-1 status holders (maybe F-1 too? not sure). There were a few mandatory orientation sections during the "regular orientation" that cover Title IX, FERPA, TA training and all that. However, I think the school did hold alternate date workshops on these mandatory sections at other times in the year for those who cannot make orientation. But orientation was the week right before classes began so it's unlikely someone would arrive any later than that.

It happens with MSP too. I can't speak for the other provinces, but it would make sense that this is true for every provincial plan. The general rule is that you have to have lived in that province for the last 3 months (unless you are away for temporary reasons such as school) in order to use it. However, to facilitate changes in province, you are also allowed to use MSP and OHIP for the first 3 months you are away from BC or Ontario too. In your case, if you keep MSP in Ontario because you are there only for school purposes, then you can move back to BC after school and continue MSP without interruption. If you go anywhere else in Canada other than BC after you finish school, then you will have to switch to that province's plan and use MSP for the 3 months while you are switching. Or, you can switch to OHIP and use MSP for the first 3 months in Ontario. After you finish school, if you stay in Ontario then no further changes are necessary. But if you move anywhere else, including back to BC, then you have to wait 3 months before you can get back on MSP. But during this time, you can use OHIP. This is why I mean there are no advantages/disadvantages unless you know for certain where you will be after you finish school. No matter what you choose, you will not have a gap in coverage!

I agree with what hashslinger says about arbitrary 24 hour rules. I think it's possible to get the "cool off" period desired without appearing as the antagonist by simply asking that all questions about grading come in person rather than by email. 24 hours is not a magical time period that cools everyone off! Most of the time, when a student wants to discuss a grade with me, they send me an email and ask when they can meet me. This back-and-forth generally makes it so the meeting is not until the next day anyways! The only time I get a question immediately after I hand back the work is if they were confused about something I wrote (or if I just missed an entire page of work). In my experience, when students get a grade they were not expecting, they do take the time to review it and decide what they want to say to me anyways. So, in my opinion, there is no need to have additional and arbitrary requirements for talking to you!

Yes, this is true--if you stay in Ontario after your PhD then you will have the advantage of not having to go through all of the OHIP changes later on. But that doesn't "save you time" since you would have to do all the changes when you first move. Also, the waiting 3 months thing is not a huge deal because you can use your BC MSP plan until the 3 months is up. It's only a big deal for people like me--since I now live in the US, I am not covered by any provincial plan and when I move back to Canada, I will need to purchase a separate medical plan for the first 3 months. Note that if you switch to OHIP now then move out of Ontario, and then back to Ontario, you will still need to wait 3 months. It's perfectly legal for a person to lease a home without a company. Either way, they must follow the rental laws that lewin posted near the beginning of this thread.

This is what I do. I don't think it's realistic to do much more when you have weekly assignments. I want my students to be able to hand in assignments to my mailbox when I'm not around so that I don't have to worry about actually being present at due date times. So, the best thing is to personally be as responsible as possible, which is doing what jenste wrote above. I am still human so eventually I will screw up but it hasn't happened yet. No student has told me I've lost their assignment though. But if it happens, and I am certain I did not lose it, I will tell them that they need to take this up with a formal complaint because as far as I am concerned, they did not hand the assignment in and I will grade them accordingly until someone else tells me otherwise. One thing extra that I do though is when I count the number of assignments handed in, I also check who submitted the assignments. So, I can email the students who did not submit an assignment right away to let them know that I have not yet received their assignment and what the late policy is. Sometimes students just choose not to submit one assignment worth ~5% of the grade because they needed to study for a midterm worth 30% so I definitely understand--I just want to make sure they know I didn't get their assignment!

I don't think it's a good plan, personally. It will cost you $5 per month if you use any data at all and you only get up to 25MB. But if you just pay $5 more for the $34/month plan, you get 50MB included. Basically even if you load up one single webpage or receive a single email, your usage is over 0MB so you will pay $5. In my opinion, there is no point in getting a $$$ smartphone and then never using any of the data to save just $5/month. If you go with these plans, I would say just go for the $34/month plan and then you can use 50MB. But 50MB is not very much either--you'll have to turn off your data most of the time so that you don't accidentally use your data plan. As for your app question, yes, if you download it on your computer then you won't incur data charges. However, it's far easier to just set your phone to only download and upgrade apps while on WiFi so that you don't use data. Then you don't have to connect your phone to your computer etc. And for bus schedules, if the app has the schedules saved in your phone's memory so that you just pull up saved data, then it doesn't cost you data. However, many apps will fetch data as you need it to avoid storing a lot of files on your phone. If this is what the app does, then it costs data every time you look it up.

I agree that TAs should be nice and not overstep their "powers". But I definitely do not agree that we should be nice with grades and only give grades we would also want. Remember that TAs are graduate students who, on average, got into grad schools because they tend to do better in courses than the average undergraduate student. Therefore, it's not surprising that some of your students will do fairly poorly in certain classes and I would say that you should not be afraid to fail or give a D grade if that is indeed the quality of their work.

Although the law and policies are very supportive of parents, this doesn't necessarily mean the people that implement these policies are always so supportive, unfortunately. So I think there is still a lot of improvement that could happen in Canada! Laws and policies are a great first step, but education and training for professors to treat people fairly, whether or not they have children, is an important second step! I was really surprised to find out that the standard in the US is 12 weeks of unpaid(!!) leave. There is a bill in the California state assembly though that will help improve rights of pregnant grad students: AB 2350. You can follow its status here: http://openstates.org/ca/bills/20132014/AB2350/ (and also read the full text). So far, it's passed the Assembly with no dissenting votes and is under review by the Senate. If it passes, it would be one step closer to better parental rights for graduate students!

Hooray! Always happy to read updates with good news

I agree that if you did the school in 4 years full time, it makes sense to want to make it clear for all the reasons you said! I suppose that "weird" was not the right word for me to use. Basically what I meant was what you wrote here

The reason I would be concerned if I was in the OP's shoes was that since the official degree date is 2013, that means I would have to write on my CV that I got my degree in 2013 (and potentially show something like 2005-2013 at undergrad school, or it will look weird when full time work experiences pop up in the CV between 2009 and 2013). Or, when I fill in your "education history" in the application, I would have to write start date "Sept 2005", end date "May 2013", which would appear weird. Like I said above though, it's not going to negatively impact anything but it would be useful to have a note attached to explain that you actually finished in 2009. I think a personal note from yourself is sufficient (no explanation really needed even) and the transcript should be enough proof to show that you did finish all your courses in 2009. In summary--the fact that this happened isn't going to negatively impact you and I don't think any grad school will care that for some reason (explained or not), you got your degree 4 years after your last course was finished. However, I think it's worth a mention so that at first glance, it does not seem like you took 8 years to finish a bachelor's degree.

I think it will be pretty tough to convince them to change your degree date back to 2009 instead of 2013. However, this is not going to be super terrible, in my opinion, for grad school applications because your transcript will clearly show that you finished all but one course in 2009. Grad schools have similar issues often--for example, at my school, degrees are only awarded once per year, in June. So, you have to defend by May 30 or something in order to get a PhD in June of the same year. If you finish over the summer, e.g. you might defend and finally submit your thesis in August 2014 but this means your PhD will still say June 2015. In this case, you get a letter from the school saying so-and-so finished all their degree requirements in August 2014 so that you can show any potential employer the letter! So, perhaps you can get something official like that from your school too if they refuse to change the degree date. You aren't in the exact same situation since you didn't actually finish all the degree requirements until May 2013 according to their records! But it's worth a try to ask if they will provide you a letter explaining the issue that you can attach or show to any grad school that needs to know. Alternatively, almost all applications will allow you to attach an extra document to explain any weird situations. I would write this up as a separate letter, explaining the situation in your own words (but briefly--don't discuss any fault by you or the school, just state the fact that there was a mistake in the records for one course that was not sorted out until May 2013). Then, I would attach it to the application in the appropriate place. It might worth a single sentence in your SOP referring to this attached document if you are worried about it, but otherwise I wouldn't make a huge deal of it. Transcripts show the date of courses and that should be proof enough to show that you would have graduated in 2009!

I think this will be difficult but possible on $1800/month. I live in a similar area and it was already pretty tough with a stipend of $2400/month (mostly because rent was even higher than yours and also a lot of health insurance costs though). I am on J-1 so once my spouse was able to work, things are much better. Getting on campus family housing will save you a lot of money. But I agree with the above person--can you ask if you qualify for J-1 status instead? There's still time to do all the paperwork, I think. 50% of stipend on rent is not generally considered affordable. Apparently an affordable ratio is like 25% to 30%, so family housing will be a lot closer to that. Assuming that other costs are the same for us as for you, and not including rent or health insurance (as your case might be different than ours), we spend about $1000-$1200 per month on other expenses. About $350-$400 of this is for "unnecessary" things like eating out and doing date-night type things so if money is tight, you can cut this out or reduce it. The main expenses other than rent and health insurance are groceries (about $400/month), electricity+internet+phone ($200/month), and the rest is small amounts for laundry or other random expenses. I didn't include any medical costs here because our costs might not reflect yours but definitely do not ignore them! It can be really expensive in the US. In Canada, for similar treatment/coverage, we would pay probably something like $1500/year but currently it costs us almost $10,000/year here in the US. With the Affordable Care Act, this cost should hopefully go down but we haven't been on it for a year yet so it's not certain what our annual expenses will be.

There are a few different possibilities for you to get an initial recommendation but then ultimately rejected: 1. The department/program recommended you but it turns out that you don't meet the graduate school's requirement and they rejected you. Usually this would mean the program would appeal for them to make an exception for you. Perhaps they did and it failed, or perhaps they did overlooked something on your application and the grad school pointed out that you don't meet it and they decided to not appeal on your behalf. 2. The department/program might have recommended you to the graduate school so that they can see if you would qualify for some fellowships that might offset their additional cost since you're international. Perhaps it turned out that you did not get the fellowships so the department opted not to admit you since they don't have the funds to support an international student. 3. There was a mistake and the department didn't actually recommend you at all. Did you get any notification from the department about the recommendation? Usually the department will tell you as soon as they recommend you if they are prepared to accept you as soon as the grad school says yes. If you didn't get a notification, it might mean that option 2 or 3 is more likely than option 1. There isn't really much you can do--the decision has been made. Usually applicants do not have the privilege of knowing every detail/reasoning behind their decision. If you really want to see what information you can get, perhaps you can send a brief email asking if they are able to give you any tips about improving your application in the future. But only do this if you didn't get in anywhere else and plan on applying again next year.

I agree that this situation is often more tricky than when it's one-on-one with you and the professor. At my program though, I've learned that the culture is to still use first names in this case because undergrads call professors by their first names and professors will refer to other professors to their undergrads by first name. Professors will also refer to the dept chair and the president of the university by first name in front of both undergrad and graduate students so cues like this are useful for navigating awkward situations.

Many countries have very different grading systems. In most Science faculties in Canada, 80% is A- but in many US places, 80% is a B grade. In addition, whereas there are standardized %-to-letter-grade conversion across the degree program in most Canadian schools, I find that the conversion varies a lot between course to course or professor to professor at US schools. I've seen a syllabus that lists A+ at 97% while in Canada, almost all science programs will award A+ to 90% and upwards.

At some schools, they don't even want you to convert your international GPA and will do it themselves (they will probably calibrate your scores with others who have applied from your country in the past too)