TakeruK

Just to clarify, the only thing a Canadian really must have at the border is the I-20, but it is highly recommended to bring supporting documents such as the offer letter from the school (with funding confirmation), proof of SEVIS fee paid (even though this should be in their system), marriage certificate (if a spouse is joining you) etc. Ultimately, it's up to the border agent to issue F-1/F-2 status and while complications are rare, it's best to be prepared! Since you are probably going to take these other important documents with you anyways, make sure they are packed in your carry-on (if you are flying) or in an easily accessible place (if you are crossing by land). Also, since it's up to the agent, you might be able to enter the US with some missing documents on the condition that you submit them within 30 days. For example, my school's international office has said that if you forget your I-20 when traveling (or forget your travel signature), it's likely you will still be allowed to enter. But this is probably more likely to be true if it's not your first crossing on this particular I-20/F-1 status.

The Division gives us about $90 per week to host the social hour and I think their secret motive is to encourage all of us to stay at work until 5pm on Fridays I don't know how "big" is "big", but I'd say we have about 40-60 ish people come every week (but definitely not the same people every week). Secret motive or not, I'm pretty happy that they do this for us Also getting the booze and snacks is the responsibility of the first year students so I'm doubly happy that I'm now in year 2

lol, are you being sarcastic or serious? Sure there are a few people that don't drink at all for personal reasons, but most scientists I meet do drink! I know scientists that make their own wine, beer, and mead. My grad school has a club specifically for making beer and they requested a bunch of funding to make and serve their beer at a school event next month. At conferences, poster sessions often have a cash bar (sometimes you get drink tickets to get a first drink free or something). I don't think the math/science people I know drink any more/less than the people I know outside of these fields!

I think it really depends on the people in your program. However, in the two grad programs I've been in, it's been pretty easy to get people to go out and do things. There are about 20 ish people in my program across all the years. A subset of us will have lunch together almost every day and there is at least one evening a week where a group will go out for drinks etc. It's not the same people every single week but there is something going on! Whenever one of us wants to organize some sort of event, a week or so notice is generally enough to get people to clear their schedules. But we are a pretty friendly group--I think most of us would prefer to spend time with each other (or our partners) so we have tons of incentive to reschedule work as needed to make time for social things! Friday evenings can be spontaneous because there is a department funded social hour at 5pm so going out to dinner sometimes comes naturally after the booze runs out!

I think there are some purposes: 1. Schools might wait until they fill all of their spots before rejecting anyone in case too many of their accepted students decline the offer. But this does not exclude schools from rejecting the bottom half of their applicant pool soon, for example. 2. Schools often reject over 80% to 90% of their applicant pools. E.g. a school might accept 10 out of 200 applicants. Even if they only need to keep their top 30 applicants, they probably wouldn't want to send rejection emails to the other 170 people right away. During the decision period, they probably want to prioritize their time corresponding with the ones who are deciding whether or not to attend their school! It would make more sense to wait and inform the remaining 170 sometime later.

Sorry to hear this! This sounds really crappy of the school too, to misinform you and then ignore you! But there is not much else you can do really, unfortunately Perhaps you can inform others you may know about this experience, if you feel that won't hurt you in some way. Be careful about bashing programs online, it's generally not professional, but I think stating some basic objective facts is usually safe (depends on how you do it of course!) I don't think your thoughts are invalid because you are not a graduate student. But I do think that the idea that graduate school and academia is all about the academic pursuit is naive and can hurt you in the long run. Unfortunately, resources (both money and efforts/time of faculty) are limited so graduate programs and research institutions everywhere have to make decisions based on the best allocation of resources. I would say that in many cases, a rejection is not really because the school did not think the student was smart enough or hard working enough to succeed at a PhD in their field. Instead, they can only spend the time and money (in some places, time is more scarce than money!) on a select few out of the qualified candidates. The schools will attempt to pick the best ones out of the qualified pool! So I would not say that a rejection is necessarily a reflection on your own ability to succeed! I think that bringing in research money is part of the job description when you are a researcher. As researchers, we also have to answer to and be accountable for our expenses to our funders (generally taxpayers!). So, we do have to have tangible things like publications and CV lines to justify their financial support of our work. And, when schools hire professors, they need to justify their decision (to the public and/or private donors) that they picked the best person and a person that has been able to secure grant money in the past is a way to demonstrate that they are picking a good person. Of course, it would be a mistake for academia to only care about metrics like publication count, grants awarded, CV items etc. There is definitely value in research just for the sake of knowledge too, and it's definitely possible to get funding for projects that have no direct benefit! However, it's also a mistake, in my opinion, to expect that the academic world thrives completely on the search of knowledge and is immune to scarcity of resources! I don't think the current state of academia is bad at all. It might not be ideal but I can't really think of a more efficient way to distribute limited resources. I do agree with your last thought though--the program should have been a lot more professional with you!! It is terrible that they treat students in this way (especially since if they know they can take advantage/exploit of young scholars in this way!)

Yes, this is what happens in past years. But I also know some cases where the "alternate" became "offered" in late August and/or September!

This (especially the people switching to English when I tried to use crappy French) summarizes my experience in Montreal exactly!

Maybe the area in Canada that you live is pretty expensive in general? In my above post, I was talking about Kingston, Ontario. The cost of living there is lower but some grocery items are quite expensive because they often come from Toronto (especially ethnic items). If it helps, in Kingston, my regular route was (and the best items, in general to buy from these places): 1) Walmart for canned stuff / cereals / candy 2) Bulk Barn for anything I can get in bulk 3) One or more of the province's discount grocery chains: FreshCo, Food Basics, No Frills (this one was a bit out of the way) for anything will last a long time 4) Costco for certain items only--it's really easy to overspend here! We save about $10 per month just on buying cheese and juice (we can get a 1kg block of cheese for the price of a 500g block in grocery stores). We also get meat here and other supplies like laundry detergent etc. 5) Finally, Loblaws (same owner as SuperStore) for our produce (we tried produce elsewhere and they rarely last the entire week) and sometimes meat (when we don't want a Costco sized amount). We also get whatever might be on sale! (We don't always visit every one of these places each week of course, just whenever there is something we need or we see on sale on the flyers). In Kingston, the Metro chain was definitely the most expensive grocery chain! So, I hope these specific store names will help. Maybe you can see if these places exist in your city and do some price comparisons. Now, we budget about $2 per meal per person. At 41 meals per week for two of us, we aim to spend about $82 per week I guess. I keep these numbers in mind when I want to buy something. Maybe you already do this but I plan our meals for the entire week ahead of time and buy things that can be used in multiple dishes, and also cook enough food to feed us for at least 4 meals (2 per person; i.e. lunch the next day). So if I use something expensive like chicken breast (can cost about $4, which is already the entire meal budget for 2 people), I pair it with cheaper ingredients. For example, I might buy a jar of butter chicken sauce/paste ($5/jar but there is enough to make 3 recipes=$1.67/recipe), add an onion, and serve it with grains so the total recipe costs $6. This recipe makes at least 4 servings for us (dinner and lunch the next day for example) so it's only $1.50/meal! My point here is that you can estimate your grocery bill ahead of time so that you are not surprised at the register! I try to pay a lot of attention to how much things cost and I have a good memory so I can remember standard prices for things (but if not, you can use a notepad or a spreadsheet). This way, I purposely plan my meals to not cost too much (we treat ourselves sometimes too) and if I see something that looks nice at the store, I try to figure out if I can make it in a meal that will cost about $2/serving. Finally, at some Loblaws/Superstores in Ontario, if you are a student and you shop on Tuesday evening, you get a 10% discount (maybe they don't do this anymore). It's really helpful

I'm not in anthropology but I have the same worries. My plan is that I will only stay in this as long as it is fun and I still think I am doing the right thing. I figure that the long track of an academic career is only worth it if you can get out whenever you find a better opportunity or decide that this path isn't providing the right opportunities any more. For me, this started with selecting PhD programs--my plan was to not even go to a PhD program if I could not get accepted by a program that I really fit well with. Right now, I will be ready to quit my PhD program if I ever felt that it's no longer worth it to do a PhD. At the postdoc stage, I'm not really willing to move my family (it's only 2 now but could be more by this time) all over the world for a bunch of 2 year stints that might not go anywhere--so if I don't get postdocs that will lead anywhere, I would be ready to leave academia. In short, what gets me through these worries is to take it one step at a time. Doing a PhD doesn't mean I am locking myself in academia for 10 more years (phd+postdocs)--it gives me relief to know that I can leave whenever I need/want to.

The last time I remember being this confused about math related stuff was when all those upside A's and backwards E's started showing up in my math classes! But seriously--can't you find common ground outside of research/academic interests? I'm not saying you have to, but you also don't have to limit your common ground topics to only research related things! The things that various math grad students I know like are: cooking, making beer, playing softball, celebrating pi day, running marathons, playing board games, etc. Basically, pretty similar interests to many other graduate students and non graduate students too!

We have fostered cats for a couple of years and worked with various pet shelters with cats of all ages (including a pregnant cat that gave birth under our care). I agree that kittens require a more care than adult cats. Maybe the shelter's recommendations are a little on the conservative side, but the people we worked with recommended that if a kitten is X months old, it should not be left alone for more than X hours per day. However, "kitten" can mean a cat from 0 to 12 months of age, so adopting a kitten > 6 months could probably be okay to leave alone for an average work day. I also know a lot of people who have very large ranges on how much attention they feel like they should give to a pet. What is "smothering" to some might be neglect to others! I won't put in an opinion either way but just give some comparisons: 1. Kittens need more time than adult cats, but Eigen is right that older cats might come with more issues that might be more difficult to handle. 2. Older cats are adopted less often--everyone wants kittens--so I think it's a good idea to consider them too if you can find a cat that will get along with your lifestyle. Good shelters will be able to tell you a little bit about each cat they have. 3. I agree that many shelters prefer their kittens go in pairs. The places we worked with did not enforce this but had an incentive so that adopting a second cat is only a tiny increase in adoption fees.

I think the best way to reduce grocery costs is to shop at more than one store per week. As you might know, most grocery store will have great sales in their flyers for certain in demand items as "loss leaders" so that people will come in for these items and then stay and do the rest of their grocery shopping with the other overpriced items. So, the way to take advantage of this is to buy only the loss leaders from each store (and stock up). In Canada, when the place we lived made it easier to do this, I had a circuit of stores I would visit each week and the entire trip takes about 1.5 hours. By looking through the flyers every day, you will get a good sense of what is a good price for the things you buy. When you see the price go down/on sale, buy a month or two worth of stuff! I bought a lot of boxed/canned goods from big box stores or discount grocery stores. I always bought my meat and produce from the "higher end" store though--I found that these things go bad really quickly from the discount stores. In total, our average weekly bill for 2 people was about $50 (the range was $40 on weeks where we didn't buy meat and up to $60 when we get some meat). Currently, the place we live in does not really give us the option to shop around--the stores are way too far apart so it's not worth. We do all the shopping at one store mostly now and we try to keep costs down by stocking up on sale items. But we are still paying a little bit more for some of our items that are not on sale! We probably spend about $80 on average per week, for the two of us on basic groceries, but this also includes getting some nicer stuff as a treat! It's much more economical to eat well on regular home cooked meals and treat ourselves on groceries than to go out for a nice meal!

In my field, I think there is definitely a small bit of disconnect between North America and Europe. Researchers from the two continents just don't see each other very often, so it's hard to build strong relationships. The advice I got was that if I wanted to work in one continent, I should do my PhD there. One exception would be a preexisting connection between your advisor and a US program and/or your advisor being very well known in the field. It's definitely true that we get people moving from one continent to another but it's less common. However, I would not say that the "tenure track" path is a tried and true path. It's a tough path and going to a top US school does not make it a sure thing! I think you should do what you are most interested in! If your advisor is as great as she sounds, she should be understanding that you might want to consider opportunities in the US as well as her offer. But if you are truly happy with staying, then I am not 100% certain that the Europe program will hurt you since you say that the advisor is influential and you will have connections to US groups. Perhaps you can discuss your future plans with your advisor and make an agreement that she will pay for you to spend X weeks per year working with the US lab etc.

In my program, we do almost all the classes in year one but at the same time, do two research projects. At the end of year one, we have an oral qualifying exam where we defend these two projects. The focus of the exam is on our research and the goal is to determine whether we have what it takes to finish the research required for a PhD. We will be expected to know stuff from the classes as it relates to our projects, but there is no direct testing of fundamentals. We have no other exams, written or otherwise, until our final defense. So I would say that in my program, we are definitely expected to spend a lot of time on both classes and research in year one and then transition to pure research by year three. But I would say this is something that depends on the program a lot--just giving an example that is not what you described

If you change schools, you need the new school to issue you a new I-20. You should let the first school know that you will no longer need their I-20 and work with the second school to get them to issue you a new I-20.

Like any other workplace, this completely depends on the personality of the professor. Some professors/bosses will say something like "I don't have financial resources to take a student right now" to mean exactly that--they would love to take you if they have more money, but they can also use it as a way to say no to you in a more gentle way (i.e. instead of saying "I don't think you will do well in my lab"). For some people, asking them a couple more times might show that you are determined and make them want to hire you (i.e. look for more funding if that's the case) but for others, asking them further after this point will just annoy you and they might wish you would just accept that they don't want to work with you. I think it might be worth talking to other students to see what kind of person this professor is in order to determine if it's worth pursuing this further and what would be the best course forward. I also think jenste's suggestion of finding your own funding is great (even if you don't want to work for this lab after all). It's always better to have your own funding and then you can have much more freedom and options on what you do research on!

This is helpful for someone moving to the province of Quebec: http://www.cmhc-schl.gc.ca/en/co/reho/yogureho/fash/fash_011.cfm Note: In Quebec, for leases of more than 1 year, it is a 3 month notice to vacate, so some places that are available for Sept 1 might go on the market as early as June 1. Or, if you are looking to start on the traditional July 1 date, then the landlord might have already posted the listing on April 1. Of course, there will be other options to rent other than taking a place after a tenant on a year+ lease has moved out, but if you want to have all the options, remember the 3 months notice!

It's hard to choose because no matter how awesome the choice you make is for you, it's never as awesome as the combination of all the possible choices you had before you made a decision. Making a choice might be tough because it feels like you are closing doors on the other routes. However, it is important to remember that the second option (all the possible choices) is not a valid option! This helped me feel like I am not closing myself out of other opportunities, but picked one that was really good for me. I also think that there is no "single perfect program". There are probably tons of programs that can be a good fit, and even if another one on your list would have been good, that doesn't mean your chosen program can't be good also. I think a lot of grad school is what you make of it Finally, I think the month or two after April 15 is the most self-doubt. But in the weeks leading up to starting the new program, I was super excited!!!

One of the rules I learned about academia is that almost any rule can be bent. I agree with LittleDarlings--talk to the grad school admissions office and see what they can do!

For me, my main career goal is to have a job where I am useful for a skill, not just manual labour. If I can design my ideal job, it would be one where 1) I use data to solve a problem and 2) I am able to teach/train new people. Whether or not the applications are scientific research or not doesn't really matter to me.

I am glad you are taking the honest/open approach To answer this question, yes, telling your PI at Y that you are waiting for another program which you like more will definitely send the message that you prefer X over Y. But there is no way around this. I believe that, as professionals, we should be honest with our future colleagues and not be afraid to take responsibility for our actions (i.e. choosing to wait for X). I think it would be unethical and unprofessional if you were to lie to Y about the reason you want an extension and pretend that Y was your first choice all along. However, I don't think that telling your PI at Y that you are waiting to hear from X will definitely mean that you and your PI at Y will have a bad relationship. Many profs will understand that students might have other choices, and it's not realistic for a prof to expect that every student at their school chose that school as their first choice. How the news that you preferred X over Y will depend on how you say it and how you act when you end up at Y. I think being honest will help as well as showing that you are also interested in Y too, even if you had (past tense!) liked X more before. Obviously, if you show up at Y acting like you wish you got into X instead, then things won't go well. But if you arrive at Y excited and ready to go, then it wouldn't really matter to anyone that you were waiting for X to respond in the past. Of course, things will depend on each individual prof, and your prof at Y might still be upset with you for waiting for X no matter what. If so, perhaps it's best to work for someone else! You can't make everyone happy all the time, and for cases like this, I think it's better to be honest and make someone unhappy than to try to lie just to hide something (especially if you get caught in the lie later). One way to help you until April 15 would be to keep your interactions between you and the department's official grad student coordinator instead of unnecessarily updating your PI at Y on every development. If you just request the extension etc. from the department itself, you might not have to explain yourself to the PI anyways. Finally, I am not sure if there exists any grad program that legally binds its students to its program after April 15. Like I said above, you can always quit school! I think the whole point of the "release" thing in the CGS agreement is to prevent schools from accusing each other of "poaching" students after April 15. This way, by getting a release, it means that you are going to school X with the blessing of school Y, and it won't be like school X is recruiting students out of school Y's pool. I also don't think a school will refuse to release you if you don't want to be there--why would they want to keep someone who will be unhappy with them around?

No problem! I meant that after you compute your tax return in the US, the total taxable amount will probably be 12-14% total, so if the school withheld tax at the 14% level, you should get the difference back each Spring when you file! Also, to be clear, it will depend on your school whether or not you get taxes automatically withheld. If they are not withheld, this does not mean that you don't have to pay taxes--it means you will have to pay it all at once later (or you may even have to pay quarterly taxes). At my school, US students don't get taxes withheld unless they request it but international students all get the 14% deduction at the source. (So, this also means if you are budgeting how much money you'll have per month, plan on not having access to about 14% of your income initially although you may get a few hundred dollars back each spring when you do taxes).

Agree with everyone else -- no this amount of debt does not make sense! It is also pretty hard to get a private loan in the US when you are a foreign citizen that has just arrived and have no credit history. We don't qualify for federal student loans and the best interest rate I've seen for private loans is like 9% per year, and you have to start making monthly payments immediately (and interest is computed immediately too). At 10% per year and taking out $110k, repaid over 10 years, you will pay $1453 per month for 10 years, and in total, pay the bank about $175k!!

In my official decision email to the DGS or equivalent, I didn't say where I was going. However, I also followed up with more personal emails to a few profs that I spent a lot of time with during my visit and/or via email before/after. I thanked them again for their time, expressed interest in seeing them again in the future and let them know where I was going to be next year--i.e. the same things I would say if I met them in person again. And I did see a lot of these profs again just 2 months later at a conference!