TakeruK

We went through almost a year of angst trying to figure out all the possible ways we could go to the US for me to get a PhD and my spouse to also do something meaningful other than school. After all of our searching, we concluded that the most viable way for spouses of graduate students to find work in the US is the J-1 visa, unless one of the two has immediate family members who are American/permanent residents! I'm sure in special cases there might be other pathways though. I'm always glad to share what we learned in hopes that it will help someone else too

No, it's a myth that Canada has completely "free" HealthCare everywhere. Each province runs its own healthcare plan and charges for them separately. In BC, the MSP is not free once you turn 19. The maximum rate was around $70/month when I last checked. However, the premiums are based on your income, and most student incomes are low enough that you would pay no MSP fees (or very little). In addition, many employers in BC will make your MSP fees a benefit for the employee and their dependents under 25 as long as the dependents are in school. So if your parents are working for an employer that does this, your MSP fees are being paid without you involved. (Note $70/month is far far less than pretty much every single American health plan!! Our plans here in the US are $200/month with much less coverage). In Ontario, OHIP is completely free. Since most people live in Ontario, this may be where the myth comes from. When I say "charged" to BC, it's because the doctors and hospitals etc. still need to get paid for their work! When you use your OHIP or ServiceCard, it goes on your records and the provincial government pays for the service. If your service/procedure is covered, then you won't have to pay anything. For some things, your ServiceCard/CareCard/OHIP won't cover and your doctor will let you know that you will have to pay for it. For example, getting a physical done for work purposes is not by OHIP and I had to pay for this report to be sent to my US school. If you are leaving BC and switching to OHIP then you don't have to do much with MSP. When you apply for OHIP, they will do all this paperwork for you and suspend your BC Services. If you are leaving BC and planning to stay on the BC MSP, you should follow the instructions in the links you provided and let them know you will be temporarily out of the province for school purposes. What is best for you depends on what you want to do. I think almost every undergraduate student I know from out of province will keep their home province services. Every single graduate student I know tend to keep their home province services but some of them do switch to Ontario since OHIP has no premiums. Students with dependents who are not also students (e.g. spouses or those with children) will tend to switch everyone to the new province's plans. For you, I don't think there is much difference between the two plans.

No, definitely do not explain it or ask anyone to explain it. Very few people have perfect grades and it's normal for an A student to have a few B's.

That sounds fishy to me, if it's just an application fee. Most places in California have a $30-$35 per person fee. Some places are not allowed to charge these fees at all! However, the $240 might be a $40 fee plus a $200 deposit (just using example numbers) if you get approved for the lease. I'd confirm with the landlord before paying anything.

It could happen. First get in touch with the first school to let them know that you want to apply to their PhD program again. Some schools actually hold your admission offer for 1 or 2 years (but usually you will be re-evaluated for funding with the latest crop of applicants). Others will require you to do a complete new application. You should definitely talk to the school you're interested in first and see what they tell you to do.

In my opinion, no, it doesn't make much sense to get this noted. Things like this don't usually appear on transcripts (although it may depend on the school). However, it's not that rare for a person to get one or two grades that don't completely reflect their performance (for better or for worse) and this is just a fact of life/school.

It might be more field dependent, but I don't think a PhD from a top Canadian school like McGill, Toronto, etc. will make you worse off in the US job market than a PhD from a low ranked US school. I think the main cause of seeing very few Canadian PhDs employed at top US schools is that the top US schools are far better than the top Canadian schools, as mentioned above. I definitely agree that the very best Canadian schools would be comparable to schools ranked in the top 25-50 in the US. I do agree that having a US PhD can help you penetrate more markets than a Canadian PhD mostly because everyone knows about the US and they are a superpower while Canada is not.

Sorry to hear that. Ultimately, it's the University's prerogative to decide whether or not to sponsor you on J-1 so it's hard to argue with them (one school refused to issue J-1s at all for grad students, no matter how much funding you have, and I didn't get very far with trying to change their mind). I think your best bet was to ask your department to help you out. I would be pretty disappointed to hear that you are basically not getting a DS-2019 based on a technicality (unless funding for later years is actually competitive). In my program there are no unfunded students--if you lose funding, then means you are also kicked out! They don't let you stay without funding. So, maybe this is why my DS-2019 includes future funding that is not on my offer letter. If the department has absolutely refused to help you out even with your explanation of why you need J-1 status, I think you might have to consider F-1 or find another school. I would reach out to some graduate students at Stanford though, perhaps their Grad Student Council or similar because this type of policy puts students with families/dependents at a major disadvantage. I know that if this happened at my school, the current students would definitely bring this to the attention of the Graduate Office and try to work out a policy that will help more international students with spouses to have J-1 status. B-1 status/visa does not allow you to stay for an extended period of time, nor does not allow you to work, as far as I know. Applying for a green card is pretty tough. The possible eligibility criteria are: 1) your spouse is a child or parent or sibling or spouse of a US citizen or permanent resident (i.e. someone else with a green card). I'll assume this is not the case or you would have a green card too and thus not need F-1/J-1 status 2) your spouse has a very employable skill that match their immigration search (they would have to come to the US to do this skill though, instead of as a dependent of yours) 3) the "lottery" The "lottery" is what a lot of people try to do, also known as the Diversity Immigration visa. It's designed to help increase immigration to the US from countries that send very few people to the US. Thus, only some countries are eligible (there's a limit of 50,000 of these green cards awarded to citizens of any country in the past 5 years) which changes each year. The chances of winning also depend on your country of origin. Finally, since a green card = permanent residence = immigration intent, this will make you look suspicious to a F-1/J-1 visa officer because to get a F-1/J-1 visa, you need to show non-immigration intent.

At my school, the first year advisor is purely academic and not research. This person helps you pick your courses when you arrive to make sure that you meet all the degree requirements etc. They are also the person that officially signs off on your course choices. Usually, this process does not begin until the fall, so you might be asking too early. My school is also on the quarter system, and this actually means we are still focused on the 2013-2014 school year. So, it might be that the first year advisor is waiting until a more appropriate time to worry about 2014-2015. At my school, the first year advisor is actually the same person for every incoming graduate student so they might wish to wait until everyone arrives and give the whole spiel about course requirements all at once instead of doing it one person at a time. We officially meet our first year advisor for the first time on the first day of orientation, which is one week before courses begin. I don't know how your school works of course, but just saying that if your school is like mine, you might be too early!

Usually, a minimum GPA means "you need this much to be considered for admission because it is a school-wide requirement", not "minimum you need to have a chance". I would say that most Canadian students in my field that make it into good programs (e.g. Toronto) will have GPAs around 3.5 to 4.0. Usually it is a lot harder for an international student to get in because you will cost more than a Canadian student, so professors tend to only want to make this investment for students with stronger profiles. Also, don't forget that GPA is only one small component of the application. They care about your research experience and overall fit with the department too. However, since both Waterloo and Western have not released any results yet, then it's not a big deal that it has taken this long at all. Good luck!

A 3.6 GPA is a decent average so it will be competitive. Most Canadian schools use a cutoff for the IELTS score (i.e. as long as you meet a certain minimum, it will be okay). I don't know anything else about your application so it's not possible for me to guess at your result. I also don't know your field that well either!

Okay, I see what you mean by "forged" now. Yes, this is a concern. My advice is to only deal with reputable landlords if you are going to rent a place unseen. As you pointed out, there may not be an apartment at all! In order to figure out which landlords are reputable, you can do some internet searching on the landlord company (but some scammers are pretty sneaky). My preferred way is to talk to the students and find out who they rent from and go with landlords that are well recommended. This makes your selection smaller but it's safer! Many people do rent from private/individual landlords but these usually come with the ability to see the place in person. Doing it sight unseen means I would take some precautions. In Kingston, our landlord was Homestead Land Holdings. They are a very large company that own a LOT of buildings in Ontario, including Hamilton (http://www.homestead.ca/search/hamilton-apartments-for-rent/). Companies that are like this are reputable and I would trust them when doing business online. As for receipts, the best receipt is actually a cancelled cheque. When we paid our rent deposit (in person), they made a copy of the cheque for us immediately. Our bank also sends us a scanned image of every cheque drawn from our account, so I keep those too. Homestead will also issue a paper invoice upon request listing the amounts and dates of all rental payments (this is more for proving rental history than a receipt purposes though). Yes, the equivalent to the BC CareCard is the Ontario OHIP card. Just so you know, the medical plan in BC is called MSP--Medical Services Plan, which you access with your CareCard. In Ontario, the phrase "OHIP" generally refers to both the plan and the card. As you are a student attending school in Ontario, you have two options when it comes to provincial health care. You can keep your BC residency and only be a "temporary resident" of Ontario for health care purposes. This means you will continue to use the CareCard in Ontario and it will be charged to BC. Alternatively, you can choose to declare your intention to become an Ontario resident and switch to OHIP. This is what I did because my wife was not a student when she moved with me so she would be forced to do this. When you apply for OHIP, you have to declare that you intend to stay in Ontario permanently, which really means that you don't have a plan to leave Ontario after graduation (not that you actually want to stay for eternity). It takes 3 months of living in Ontario before you can be an Ontario resident (and stop being a BC resident) so your OHIP card won't be active until 3 months after your move to Ontario date (as proof, you generally supply a copy of your lease or a utility bill). During these 3 months, you are still a BC resident so you can still use your BC CareCard. After 3 months is up, your BC MSP account will become inactive, but you can reactivate it if you move back to BC. In fact, I was born in Ontario but moved to BC at a young age so when I moved back for grad school, they were able to reactivate my OHIP card from 20 years ago! This is all automated when you apply for an OHIP card since the provinces communicate with one another.

I agree with everything else you said, but I don't agree that there is an absolute truth to what a word should mean or what word should be attributed to something, or even how one must spell a word. To me, language is just a tool and we, the users of the tool, should adjust and alter the tool as we wish. So, I think if a community defines a word a certain way, then within that community, that definition should supercede other definitions. If for some weird reason, a community decides to exchange the words "book" and "donkey" then that's perfectly fine within that community. In my opinion, whether or not it becomes "magically correct" or not depends on whether people, the users of the language, accept this definition. I think academics do this all the time. When I write about the colour of the star within the astronomical community, one common understanding of the word is the ratio of how bright the star looks when viewed with a filter that mostly lets blue light through compared to a filter that lets mostly red light through. This is not how colour is defined at all: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/color. Is this an incorrect use of the word because it's not in the dictionary? No, I don't think so, because this is a convention that astronomers have agreed upon and this is a fine use within this community. So if a community decides to use "donkey" to mean "book" and "book" to mean "donkey", are they wrong? In my opinion, if this is the generally accepted convention, then they are not wrong at all. Finally, appealing to the people is a type of logical fallacy but my argument is that there should not exist a "correct" language. In my opinion, dictionaries and grammar books are reference sources to some commonly agreed upon conventions of language, but they do not represent some sort of ideal "correctness" that we should uphold. As long as we write/speak in a way that is understandable and acceptable to others, then we are using language correctly.

The Canadian system is a little bit different. Grad school acceptance is more like a job hire. Although the end of May is a bit late, it's not necessarily the end for sure. Some people get an offer in June after it turns out more people reject offers than anticipated or if extra funding comes up. That said, I would probably guess that it seems more likely like a reject the longer you don't hear from them, at this point, unfortunately.

I didn't talk to my advisor about work until the school term actually started. I arrived about a month in advance but other than checking in to let them know I have arrived, I spent that month getting settled in and preparing myself. It's okay to not start right away, but it's also okay to get a head start if you'd like.

This kind of stuff is not normal!! Is there someone at your school that you can speak to? At many schools, the graduate student council or similar body can either directly help you or find you the right person to talk to! Your work conditions sound terrible and this is not a healthy advisor-student relationship. Find the right resources and get help!

First, I think you are worrying a little bit too much about this issue. I understand that you are feeling a lot of anxiety and worry about moving across the country and starting a big new step in your life! But rest assured, tons of young adults make moves like this every year and it will all work out. I am not sure what you mean by a "forged" lease. Leases in Ontario are not standardized by the government or any legal body. It's simply a contract between you and a landlord in which you agree to pay them rent and abide by their lease rules and in return, they are obligated to provide a place for you to live and respect your privacy etc. Leases are generally produced by the landlord company taking a template that they use and then adding the details like your name and their name and the address and the rent etc. in either by hand or via a computer. The file might be printed from a pdf or generated by photoshop but that doesn't make it any less legal. To be safe, when they send you the lease, you should read it over carefully and make copies of absolutely everything. They will have signed it first and then send it to you, so when you sign it and send it back with the payment of last month's rent, the lease is now legally binding and you have entered in a legal contract with the other party. You should read the lease carefully to make sure you are okay with all of the terms of the lease. Ontario has very strict lease laws that prevent what landlords are allowed to put into their leases. See the link in lewin's post for all the details! But for example, as lewin said, landlords cannot force you to sign additional leases after your first lease is up. Landlords cannot also have a "no pets clause". Any such clauses in a lease will not be recognized by the law so you are not obligated to uphold illegal terms/clauses.

I'm sorry for your loss. I don't think this one grade will affect your grade school chances at all. In the long run, all of your other courses will balance it out so a single grade will have very little effect. You said your GPA was 3.76 before this course, so it sounds like you have a A- average. If you had an A- in this course instead of a B-, that is one single grade point difference. When you average it out over 40 courses, one single point will affect your GPA by 1/40 = 0.025 grade points. So, I don't think there is really much you can do at this point to change much. A B- grade is not a bad grade. If it helps to know, I have several Bs and B-s in classes that are outside of my major as well as classes that are directly related to my proposed PhD research. I still ended up at a top graduate program despite this!

My experience with keeping up with my former supervisors match that of Eigen and fuzzy! I always look forward to our field's annual conference because I know I'll get a chance to catch up with them (and others!)

I just feel an urge to defend my alma mater for some random reason UBC and Toronto are the two biggest schools, not Toronto and McGill. McGill has about 40,000 students total, UBC has 50,000 and Toronto has almost 80,000 ish. I think these numbers include all their campuses but I think the ordering is still the same if you only count the main campus of UBC and Toronto. I don't know how these schools rank in the social sciences, just wanted to make that statement about the numbers. Again, sorry for not really contributing that much useful info but I just felt compelled to point it out

I had to learn to make this transition too. I think small steps are important. For me, I started by setting pretty generous time limits on how much time I can spend on each problem or homework set. I budget my time so that I first aim to finish everything and then go back to perfect little things if there's time. I find that it became easier to not hand in 100% effort work when you first hand in 95% effort and realise that nothing bad happened! Then go on from there until you get to a level that is a good balance for you. Other things that helped me was working on problem sets with your friends/classmates. I feel a lot better making a simplification and/or only solving the problem to order of magnitude if I knew everyone else does too. This became a lot easier in my second year--when I have to use a number such as the density of a specific type of rock in my computation, I just said well, it's probably 3g/cm^3, within 10% because most rock is like that. I think some of the newer students were spending the extra time to look up this specific compound of rock and found that it was 2.8 instead of 3.0. However, our grades are the same and the amount of learning we got out of the homework was the same. There's nothing to be gained from digging through a textbook for 20 minutes to find a specific number that does not change the main result of the question. So, another thing that helps me is for me to look at homework and courses as not a form of evaluation but instead, as a means to an end (increased knowledge on course material). I think if you think back to your undergrad courses, you might find that the courses where you learned the most doesn't really necessarily correlate with your highest grades (at least it's true for me). Getting an A+ in a course does not always mean you got what you wanted out of the course! So, like my example above, I consider my time to be a valuable resource and I would consider being more careful with how I use it, so I learn what I actually want to learn instead of just spending time doing busy-work. Having older students and other profs mentor me in how to use my time wisely helped me get over my perfectionism in my homework. For us, our grad courses have graduate student TAs so that really helps. In general, we understand the courses in our department are really a means to an end, so we don't get super nitpicky with our grading. Now that I am a TA, I completely understand when my students choose to not hand in a problem set or just completely skip some questions or parts of a question. Obviously, I still do not award points for incomplete work, but I don't give them a hard time for blowing off my assignments since I know they made the conscious choice to spend their time elsewhere. When they ask, I try to let them know which parts of the questions are most useful for learning (and I weight these parts more) so busy students know where to focus their time! Related to all of the above, I think the most important thing in making the transition from undergrad to grad student is to transition your priority from courses to research (at least for research oriented programs) and basically making the transition from "going to school" to "going to work". If it helps, very few people will ever look at your graduate transcripts. Almost no academic jobs will require you to submit your grad school grades! In the beginning of grad school, you might apply to a few academic based scholarships/fellowships that need grades (but most of your grades will be from undergrad anyways), but then as you progress further, your applications will mostly be judged on your research, not your grades!

Note that with most landlords, in order to actually sign the lease, you usually have to provide last month's rent--so if you were hoping to close on a lease before you arrive, you will have to send money via mail. Cheque is safer than sending cash of course. But some bigger landlord companies will be able to take credit cards through the phone or online. They will send the lease to you, then you will sign it and send it back with your last month's rent. If you are renting through an individual or a smaller company, they might not have the infrastructure to do all of the above remotely. (For my wife and I, when we signed the lease in June, we wrote them a cheque for last months' rent too. We then paid first month's rent upon move in.) A lease is a legal contract, so you have protections if someone takes your cheque, cashes it and then does not actually provide you with a place to rent. Sure, it's a big hassle so you should check and make sure they are legit before you sign the lease (and send the money). Most scammers will ask for money basically right away or claim to need $50 for a "credit check" or an "application fee". These fees are illegal in Ontario (but okay in some other places). It sounds like you are going to McMaster, and Hamilton is not as much of a college town as Kingston, so it might be easier to get a place after you arrive too. How far in advance were you hoping to secure a rental? Many landlords will not be willing to risk agreeing to save the apartment for you and not take a deposit ahead of time, especially in the fall when a lot of students are moving in. So, I don't think it's very realistic to expect to be able get someone to agree to rent to you and not give them any money until you actually arrive. Instead, most people either set everything up before they move (signed lease, paid last month's rent) or wait until they actually arrive and then look for a place. (**I might be wrong here--please correct me if my and my friends' experiences have not been typical). Some people choose to just stay in a motel for about a week while they look for a place, while some people choose to take a short term lease and then take their time in finding a new place. In Kingston, the first week of September is a horrible time to move in because that's when all the undergrads move into their dorms and usually their family go with them to help them out. This completely fills up all of the hotels and motels in town (and also increases the price by a ton)! So, check if this happens in Hamilton and plan accordingly!

I mean, it's not like your advisor will purposely *not* sign the form if you do have everything completed for graduation right? So, I think that it's always important to consider your advisor's experience and take into account that he/she thinks that these things might take longer, but ultimately, I do think that you should just push ahead and finish it on your timeline!

So I learned something new today! Many Canadian Physics graduate programs explicitly require a Physics BSc degree to be eligible for Physics grad school, but after checking a few universities, it does not seem that this is an explicit requirement for many US schools! That's good news I think it is worth repeating what I said above about being disadvantaged if you don't have a BS in a related field though. But as stated above by bsharpe and Eigen, you will need a lot of upper level courses, which in general will require you to take the lower level pre-req courses. Since you are not able to transfer credits, it might mean you have to retake these courses. So, at this point, you will likely have to take almost all of the Physics requirements in a Physics BS (if you can at least transfer your Full Sail courses as electives, then you'll have enough for a full Physics BS!) Eigen's list of typical courses a Physics grad program expects is pretty good! Note that some of them are actually multiple courses--a typical Physics BS usually has 2 semesters of QM, 2 semesters of EM, and there's also an intro level "modern physics" like course that introduces students to relativity and quantum mechanics. In addition, there are lab courses--usually one per year. Typically, Physics students are expected to take a few electives in Physics too. Some options are solid state, particle physics, biophysics, astronomy, optics (sometimes this is required, sometimes not). I think by the time you add it all up, it will be about 3 (+/- 0.5) years worth of courses, especially considering that you might not be able to take certain courses in certain semesters.

I also moved from BC to Ontario! Everything said above is very good advice. In addition: 1. Yes, you can use a cheque from any Canadian Bank, usually. I have not seen a listing that ever required cheques specifically from one bank only. 2. There is a 60-day notice to vacate in Ontario. So, if you want to move into a popular building by e.g. Sept 1, it will usually be listed in early July. Depending on what you are looking for and where you are moving to, there will still be openings if you arrive just before Sept 1, but it may be the case that a lot of the good apartments that have a good price will be taken within days of being listed. For example, my wife and I moved to our Kingston, Ontario apartment Aug 1 but we signed the lease on like June 4. Our friends moved from BC and arrived in Sept 1 and the only place they could find with such short notice was about the same niceness as ours but an extra $350 per month in rent!! When we gave our 60 days notice to vacate, our apartment was leased to someone else within a week of us telling our landlord that we were going to move. 3. Rent increases are locked to the inflation rate in Ontario. Each year, your rent can go up by a maximum of whatever % that some regulatory body decides. Our first year was 0.9%, the second was like 2.5%. It's nice that there are predictable increases in rent so you can plan for long term expenses. Your landlord may choose not to raise rent, but they will generally raise them by the maximum allowed amount. 4. Your landlord is supposed to pay interest on the Last Month's Rent (LMR). What usually happens is that you pay LMR at the start of your lease, and then this means your last month of tenancy is already paid for, even if the rent increases over the time you've lived there.