TakeruK

Definitely check out the rules for the society/organization that is hosting your conference (perhaps just email the appropriate contact person). In my field, it's the same as fuzzy and St Andrews Lynx--papers are often withdrawn from proceedings if the author is not presenting it (except for special cases, like when the sequester prevented government funded people from attending certain meetings). Also, in my field, the benefit of actually being at the conference and giving your talk, meeting the people, having people see you etc. is way more beneficial than a line on the CV about your proceedings. But each field is different!

I agree with jenste--there has to be some reason that the OP needs an actual rejection, and not just withdrawing. But the OP may not want to share, for privacy reasons! To the OP: I assume that you know there is no practical difference for you between a withdrawal and a rejection. If you don't think you will get an unwanted acceptance and you are patient, you will most likely get a rejection by the time the summer comes around. Or at least, by then if you call them and ask what's going on, they will likely tell you it's a rejection. If you are afraid you will get accepted and you don't want others to know that you got accepted and then turned down the offer, you might try to call them to ask them to reject you and give a reason and they might do it. Or, they might not, because perhaps the department gets their admission decisions audited and it might hurt them if they rejected you, a great candidate, and accepted a lesser candidate. However, your application and the admission decision is private information and you don't have to disclose it to any other agency if you don't want to. If for some reason, you have to demonstrate that the school you actually want to attend was the best one you applied to, then just don't even disclose the fact that you applied to this school. Also, if you need a rejection letter for some non-official reason (e.g. jenste's example of family pressure), you can easily fake a rejection email, or just tell them you got rejected. Some of the places that rejected me just sent me a one line email like "Dear TakeruK, Unfortunately we could not accept you to _______ because we were only able to admit X out of Y great applications. Best of luck, Prof. X"

You also have to remember the PhD movie was made by graduate student volunteers over a few weekends in their spare time! I agree that it is nowhere near the quality of e.g. a made for profit movie, I think it captured the true spirit of PhD Comics by having graduate students make the movie about graduate student life! But perhaps I am biased since many of my friends were involved in it I wanted to say The Pelican Brief to this question but I guess med/law students are not exactly the same as grad students. It's funny--I did a Google search for "movies about grad students", found a "top 7 list" and all of them are actually about law/med students!

Related to "age structure" of faculty, consider "expertise structure" of faculty. Does the program have several people in a small number of focussed subfields, or are they more diverse and have maybe only 1 or 2 studying each thing. I'm not in your program but when I visited, I always asked the department chair if they were planning to hire more faculty and expand, or if they were just going to replace their retiring faculty, or if they actually want to downsize. I also ask where they see the research focus of their department going -- are they trying to broaden and cover more topics, or really focus on what they are already good at. Where do they see the department in 10 years? etc. And to add to academic factors, don't forget to ask about how often faculty get tenure and how often they leave too! Finally, I also second the "ease of accessing a major airport" (I assume you mean a hub airport)!! When I lived far from one, every trip I took was an extra 8 hours (4 to get to the airport, and then 4 waiting because flights don't line up with bus times). Once, going from middle of nowhere Ontario, Canada to Portland, Oregon, it took me longer to make the trip than other researchers from Brazil!

When I do list dollar amounts, I only list them for awards that fund a large portion of my stipend/tuition waiver and only to demonstrate the competitiveness of the award. So, I only do this for awards that paid at least $10,000/year. A lot of my fellowships are from the Canadian version of the NSF so I list the value when applying to US grad schools so that a US person who doesn't know about the different NSERC awards can see that my award was similar to the NSF GRFP, for example. At this current stage (early PhD), I don't have dollar values on my online CV. I think I will include them again when I apply for postdocs (to show that I can get myself well funded) but right now, I don't really have a use for dollar values if a random person wants to see my CV or if I use it to apply for a travel award or something like that.

I think there is a slight disadvantage sometimes. In my field, it's well known that the quality of your output is not just a function of your own skill, but also a function of how much resources you have. At a top school, you have a ton of resources, and sometimes people will wonder if your ability to generate great results is because you are a great scientist, or because you have access to the best equipment in the world, and basically anyone who is competent can get good results from this kind of instrument! So, a school that is lower ranked and has less resources might worry that you might not be able to do as good work as someone who also came from a resource-lacking school and learned to be clever with less than ideal resources! However, I think this is only a disadvantage if you let it be one. If you are at a top school and don't let yourself get complacent with your resources (i.e. always pushing yourself to learn more, and do more) then I think this is not really a problem at all!

Wow, that is unfortunate! Is your undergrad university an American one? Here are some potential places where your application may be lacking: 1. Your SOP (I don't usually offer to read them but if you'd like, you can post it here or PM it to me and I'll take a look) 2. Your letters of references might not be as strong as you think? 3. What have you been doing since you graduated? 4. As an international student, you might be applying to schools that can't afford to the costs of an international student. I was rejected from lower ranked public schools but got into almost all the higher ranked private schools. 5. Maybe the quality of your research is not impressive? But still, I'd think two papers should demonstrate good research experience and potential to succeed in grad school!

However, advising students and producing a lot of research are usually criteria for getting tenure, which ensures the prof continues having a job/getting paid (and usually, a promotion = pay raise).

Living in grad housing the first year and then moving out later is a very good idea, I think. Especially if your grad housing allows you to move out early, then you can take advantage of fluctuating rent prices. In my area, rents are lowest from November to February, I think, and it's only $300 to break the grad lease early (compared to savings of $50-$100/month on rent with a better lease).

Cornell Astro & Space Sciences does something similar to UCSD described above, I think. Their cap is $37k though and you can achieve this through a fellowship from their school alone.

That's a good point--but these students must know that they can't stay in the US forever. I guess if they just want to spend some time in the US, do some school, get some worldly experience, then that's great too and yeah, probably they will apply to less competitive schools. But I know that many international students want to study in the US so that they can get US jobs and permanently move. Usually, this means most of us will aim for the top programs. For international students like me (not necessarily wanting to move to the US forever, but also not trying to leave my home country forever), I only applied to top programs because if I was going to go through the hassle of living in another country, dealing with foreign status etc. then I might as well go for a school that is higher calibre than anything in my home country. That is, I only applied to US schools that were better for me than the best Canadian school.

Oh, your school doesn't allow the instructor to put copies of course textbooks on reserve at the school library so that people can't check them out (but allow for use if you stay inside the library)? Also, I sometimes take an older edition out on loan for the term if I want to take a book home! But in my field, books are rarely the only reference for anything and we don't have to read books and discuss them--most of the time, I only use the book to look up an equation (or Google) or if the homework was assigned to be "Problem 5 on page 195" etc.

You can stack some, depending on how each is worded. The most I have ever received in one year was the first year of my Masters in Canada [same as a first year PhD student in the US]--I received something like $43k of support. $17.5k was from a national fellowship in Canada which did have a restriction that I cannot accept any other nationally funded award and any that I cannot do more than 400 hours of paid work per year because the intent of the fellowship is pay for my time as a researcher. I received a one-time $5k signing bonus from the school for bringing in nationally awarded money because in 2010, people with the national fellowship could take their award anywhere in Canada. I received a one-time $6.2k tuition award (tuition actually costs $7.2k though) because the Graduate School awards this to the top 1/3 of incoming grad students. I also worked a half-TAship (108 hours total, compatible with the national fellowship limit), which was worth another $5k. Finally, I received about $11k in internal fellowships from the school, which was just a fancy name for money coming from a common departmental pool. These internal fellowships have no service/work requirement, so they were compatible with the national fellowship too!

I've done the same. The only minor difference is that I only buy books in grad school that are going to be useful for me as a reference after the course is finished. For books I just need for a class, there is a library one floor up from my office and I just use the course reserve if necessary. However, since we can be much more selective in grad classes, the majority of books I needed for grad classes make excellent addition to my reference library too

A professor at UC Berkeley said that 75% of all their applications are from International students.

Right, when I wrote the first post, I did intend to mean that the couple in question is definitely guilty of not reporting if the policy was to report. When I wrote guilt in this post, I meant guilty of actual academic misconduct or as you mentioned, FERPA/privacy (instead of just breaking a University policy). I agree that FERPA/privacy concerns are important. I also agree that this situation (having your SO as your student/TA) should definitely be avoided where possible. But there should not be actual regulations against it (although there should be disclosure policies certainly). I also agree that it is tricky when you are living with a student you are TAing. The university policy in your example is very reasonable and I think it is possible for two people to be in a personal relationship to follow that. I do agree that it may not be very believable but in my opinion, I think if the school wanted to accuse a couple to be having extra office hours/help at home, they would have to somehow demonstrate this is happening, which would also be very difficult. However, I do not think it is fair to automatically assume personal relationships break rules all the time. Sometimes TA assignments are not made until a few days before the course begins (or a change happens). Thanks for the clarification of facts. I am not sure what you mean by a compromising recommendation (unless that is what you were describing the sentence immediately following). Your facts only show that the personal relationship exists, not that any academic misconduct occurred. I also definitely agree that the TA has not properly followed University policy from your description. It's not clear what a policy means when it says "remove from a position of authority" -- it could mean anything from not grading that specific student's assignment, to not being a TA in that section, to not being a TA in that course at all. I agree with everyone that the TA should have notified the professor as soon as they discovered that they will be in the same section. I don't think there is anything directly wrong with a TA suggesting that the student enroll in the TA's section if they immediately notified the professor that a student they were involved with has enrolled in their section and then let the professor decide what to do. (Obviously, the simpler solution would to have the student enroll in a different section but they should not be forced to do this until the department forces it). As to what could happen--it depends on the school. At my last school, breaking a policy like this is an employment related infraction. It will not appear on the TA's transcript or student record at all, only their employment record, which is destroyed after they graduate. The consequence though, might mean no more future TA work for the grad student as well as dismissal from their current TA position. This means a potential loss of funding, but they won't be kicked out of their academic program solely because they violated the disclosure policy. If the TA did do actual academic misconduct (aided cheating of some kind, for example) then the TA would have an academic infraction on record and might face consequences beyond employment related ones. At my current school though, there is no separation between your role as a graduate student and your role as a TA, so I suspect that breaking a policy like this might have more serious consequences too.

There is a whole another website/forum for Physics GRE related stuff: http://www.physicsgre.com/ There is a lot of discussion of study guides, test taking strategies, profiles of students with their scores and where they got into over the past 5 or so years etc. I'd suggest also going over there if you want more help! It's also more active than the Physics subforum here. As for difficulty, I am very bad at these kinds of tests so I found it very hard. My first try I got 640 (44th percentile at the time) and then the second try was 690 (53rd percentile at the time). I was a physics/astronomy major and I would consider myself a pretty good student. The first time I did not study very much and was very unprepared. The second time I studied for a couple of month, several hours per week plus a weekly study group where we discussed problems together. I did all of the 400 (at the time) available practice problems. But the real test still kicked my butt! Fortunately astronomy/planetary science programs are not very picky about their PGRE score

In Canada, there is an external fellowship granted by our equivalent of the NSF (the Vanier) that is $50,000 / year for 3 years. International students are eligible and each school generally has a quota of 1 awardee in each of the three fields that our "Tri-Council" governs: Natural Sciences/Engineering, Social Sciences/Humantiies, and Health Research. In Canada, stipends are awarded first and then we have to pay tuition out of that, which is about $5000 to $7000 per year ($2000 if you're in Quebec). However, some places will still let you TA a little bit so the net income will probably still be around $45000-$50000/year. That's the highest stipend I've ever heard of! I know a good number of Canadian grad students in the sciences on external funding (equivalent to NSF GRFP) that have take home incomes around $33k-$35k per year. I also think Harvard pays its astronomy graduate students pretty well (something above $30k with tuition waivers). They also award a one-time fellowship of $18k on top of the regular stipend for some top candidates.

Yes, you are right--the OP should not bear the burden/responsibility of proving the TA's guilt. What I meant is that if the OP suspects something bad is going on, they should not talk to the other graduate student first (as suggested by someone else), but instead go directly to whoever is responsible for handling cases like this. I wrote the suggestion to "gather evidence" if the OP wanted to do something but wasn't sure what. However, upon reflection, I should have written this more carefully to not imply that the OP play the role of a detective and sneak around getting evidence. What I intended was that if the OP knew some unethical behaviour was happening, for a fact (e.g. instances where he/she overheard the TA [or the TA telling the OP] about their misconduct) then the OP should document it (e.g. record date/what was said) and then tell the people responsible for academic honesty. I am sorry if I was sloppy in my writing and that it sounds like I wanted graduate students to become detectives! But I just want to point out that eventually, the school will have to prove the TA's guilt, and I don't think lack of proof of not favouring their SO is proof that they favoured their SO in grading. [Which is exactly why reporting policies happen so that everyone can avoid this type of complicated scenario!] However, I should not have implied that the responsibility for providing proof is with the OP or other graduate students! Finally, I do want to explain one policy at my current school. I think this policy is a little strange and not typical of most places. But it's interesting to note to also show the diversity of how these situations are handled. At my school, as a TA, if I notice potential plagiarism in my students' work, the policy is for me to report it directly to the campus-wide organization for academic honesty, not the professor of the course. In fact, at orientation, we were trained to not even mention it to the students involved or anyone at all. I am to make a copy of all the materials and then grade the work as if I did not notice the plagiarism and submit the proof to the campus-wide organization. This organization performs their own investigation and decides the outcome. This might mean an instance of cheating is not caught until after the term ends so that the grades might actually be retroactively changed to a F. The reasoning behind this policy is that it is intended to 1) protect students from false accusations. If the TA is wrong in their judgement of academic dishonesty, then no one (not even the prof of the course) ever knows the student was suspected of dishonesty other than the TA. This protects them from being negatively judged because generally this type of investigation has bad results for one's reputation even if it results in an "innocent" or "not guilty" type verdict. 2) since the investigation begins before the accused student knows it's happening, it reduces the ability of the student to hide evidence once they know they have been caught. I'm not entirely sure I agree with everything behind this policy (e.g. I feel it's a bit of an entrapment issue), but I do agree with some of its intentions. I do think we can learn from a policy like this though, which is why I think if actual unethical behaviour is happening, the OP should not confront the suspected TA about it! (Edit: Just to really clarify--if there is suspected wrongdoing, I think the OP should go to the proper authority and not say anything to the TA. If there is no suspected wrongdoing (other than an unreported relationship) and the OP is worried that their colleague might get in trouble because the relationship may be unreported, then the OP should talk to the grad student in question first, instead of immediately reporting it the authorities.) I guess this part depends on the field/school a lot. Even at my state-school-equivalent undergrad, physics/astro majors are very small so enrolling in another section is not possible. We also have a lot of required classes, so it's not like you can just not take a class because your SO is TAing it. It is possible for a person to separate their personal and professional/student life. A student should not be barred from enrolling in a class where they have a personal relationship with an instructor. I agree that the couple in question should have disclosed their relationship at the start of the course (and who says they haven't/didn't?) but the couple should be protected from any negative consequences of this disclosure. The student should not be prevented from taking the class and the TA should not be removed of their guaranteed TA allocations (and thus lose funding). Ideally, the TA would be assigned to a different section/class, but this might not be possible with all of the other constraints that comes with TA scheduling. I do think that a rule like "don't enroll in a class where your SO is the TA" (or vice-versa), is a rule that enforces arbitrary standards/opinions (i.e. people in personal relationships cannot act professionally) instead of a rule that protects wrongdoing. I think the version of this rule that protects wrongdoing instead of punishing behaviour is "personal relationships between a TA and a student" should be disclosed to the department as soon as the people involved find out that they will be in the same class. I feel that your opinion here does not adhere to the concept of "innocent until proven guilty". It is not fair nor ethical to assume that every person in a relationship will not be able to act professionally. Personal relationships are an aspect of people's private lives, and unless the school has reason to believe that academic dishonesty is happening, they should not have any negative impact on the people involved. On the other hand, reporting policies (provided that they are done in a fair way) are good, because it helps the school figure out arrangements so that academic integrity is preserved. But other than reporting a relationship when necessary, students/TAs in relationships should not have any further responsibilities that they would not have as single people anyways (i.e. TAs are expected to grade everyone fairly, whether in a relationship or not!)

If you know for sure you will attend that school, then you should tell the department the decision so that they can make whatever plans necessary based on this. You'll have to officially accept the official grad school offer eventually though. Since you are "unofficially" accepting their unofficially offer, if the real offer is not what they made it sound like (i.e. not actually the funding level they had talked about before), then 1) you haven't officially accepted, so declining officially would be easy and 2) people should understand that if they significantly change their unofficial offer, you can't be expected to take it. I would say that while you do this, you should not decline any other offers though, until you have officially accepted the official offer from this school, just in case something changes!

I'm going to respond to a few posts, but my central theme is this: As a colleague (I'm writing this from a point of view of a graduate student finding out his/her fellow graduate student in this situation), your professional responsibility is to not judge consensual acts between adults. Would I be in a relationship with a 20 year age gap? No, that is not my personal preference. Does that mean that it's automatically wrong when other people do this? No. As a professional, I try to keep my own personal viewpoints when it comes to the personal lives of others. As a fellow academic, your only real "responsibility" is to not be negligent in reporting academic dishonesty, if you know for a fact that it has happened. In addition, at some programs (e.g. mine), graduate students regularly TA other graduate students. One of my TAs last year was a friend from college and my best man at my wedding. Just because that relationship exists (sure, it's different from a romantic relationship) doesn't mean that my friend should be suspected of giving me special treatment. At these types of programs, it's pretty common for TA/students to be in a relationship even if they are both graduate students! (Also, it seems like people are assuming male TA and female student, but that is not really said anywhere!) Yes, if the student is underaged, then that's another story. Otherwise, we have no right to say what goes on between consenting adults. I disagree with the notion that if you think something unethical is happening, you should report it / tell the TA about it. If you are not involved in this class at all but you suspect something is going on, I think you should just collect facts. If you collect enough facts that shows something unethical is going on, then you should report it directly to the department or whatever body at your university governs academic dishonesty. If you report it to the TA first, then that just gives them the opportunity to hide/cover up. However, if you just think there is something unethical going on just because a relationship exists, then I think you are the one that is in the wrong. I understand the need for personal disconnect in some professional worlds when there are high stakes. However, the result of a class is hardly life/death stakes that strictly prevents any sort of personal relationship. I agree that it's better if TAs don't date their student because it makes us more comfortable. We can sit back and say "Good, the relationship between the TA and his/her class is strictly professional." But just because it's easier for us doesn't mean that it's the right thing for everyone to have to do. It is definitely possible for two people to be in a personal relationship and remain professional for work/school related things. I think we should give people the benefit of the doubt and act on an ethics standpoint only if there is factual evidence to indicate something unethical is going on. If a student in the class wants to accuse the TA of grading unfairly, that's their right. But they would have to prove that the TA graded unfairly and I don't think the fact that a personal relationship exists should be strong enough proof by itself. I agree that with the policy at the OP's school, the TA should report their relationship. After all, they presumably agreed to the policy at some point before they started TAing. But I don't think other people should try to "police" the relationship. Let the TA report it themselves. The only time an outsider needs to step in is if academic dishonesty is actually happening, because that affects the entire school! I agree that there certainly are schools that require these relationships to be reported. I was responding to hashslinger's comment that they think there are no schools where it won't be required. I said that that is not true everywhere, not that you don't need to report relationships anywhere! While it's your right to be bothered by the power relationship, it's not your right to act on anything because of this feeling. The two of them have the right to have whatever relationship they want as long as it does not violate academic integrity. "Wait until semester is over" does not work for pre-existing relationships. I agree with you that if a TA and student met while in this class and became attracted to one another, the "least hassle" way of doing it would be to wait. But unless university policies state otherwise (they don't in this case), the TA and student should not be required to wait if they don't want to. Rules exist to protect serious wrongdoing, not to modify behaviour so that they meet some arbitrary set of "standards".

Thanks for the update Sorry you didn't get what you wanted, but it sounds like you have a good deal overall!

Wow, thanks for the enlightenment!

Basically anyone who is outside and not in their office/lab is an undergrad Sadly, I am only half joking

It's definitely NOT a firable offense everywhere. It's definitely OK at my school. It's OK at every other school I've been to. There is also no rule against professor-student relationships either. At my school, the policy is that the TA is suggested (not required, I think) to inform the professor of the course about the potential conflict of interest due to the personal relationship. The TA and professor (and if necessary, the department) will then figure out how to preserve academic integrity. Usually, for large classes, this means that the TA will never mark an assignment of an undergrad that they are involved with. For small classes (with only 1 TA) this might mean the professor grades the undergrad-in-question's assignment, or the department will switch the TA to a different course. In my opinion, I think the TA only needs to inform the professor that a personal relationship exists. The TA should not be forced to reveal which undergrad it is unless it is necessary to preserve academic integrity (as in above paragraph). I do not think the school or program has any right to prevent professors, graduate students, and undergraduate students from dating each other (also undergrad are also TAs in many places). The only right the school has is to prevent instances where a TA/prof unfairly grades a student because of a personal relationship. In the best case, the TA would never grade their SO's work, but if that is unavoidable, the school has not right to assume that because the personal relationship exists, that there will be something inappropriate happening. The school would have to prove that the TA is guilty of doing something wrong! To answer the OP's questions: 1. Is it common? I would not say it's common in the sense that most graduate students will have a relationship with an undergrad. However, I think it is not rare at all. I think most graduate students will know of at least one graduate-undergraduate relationship. I know of at least 4 (including professor-student ones). 2. What kind of trouble can a grad student get into if it's not reported? Depends on the school's policy for not following their policy! But do you know for a fact that this isn't already reported privately? (Not questioning you, just clarifying). I think by default, the TA can really only get in trouble if the school can prove misconduct. I don't know what kind of penalties exist for something like not reporting a relationship (I don't think it should be high). 3. Does this stuff ever get caught? I don't know how to answer this because I don't know of any of these kind of relationships that were not "kosher" (i.e. they were all reported when necessary and/or did not require reporting). Finally, to everyone -- If you think it's creepy, then that's your own personal view. You don't have a right to judge them (even though as humans we tend to judge anyways). I'd advise to stay out of other people's personal lives (unless they are sharing all this with you). The only exception is if you know for a fact that academic dishonesty is occurring, then you should talk to someone!