TakeruK

Yes. The best way is to contact the author directly and ask for a copy. In almost all cases, theses are copyrighted to the author, not the school (but the school generally requires the student to grant a indefinite, royalty-free right to reproduce it etc. Another possibility is to contact the supervisor if you can't get a hold of the author. But the best course of action is to try to contact the author.

Most likely yes. You can try to ask the program if they know but a lot of times, the tax laws are complicated and the department staff might not actually know. Your best bet would be with HR since they will deduct taxes but they might not know your specific situation until you enroll. I am in a similar situation--I am on a fellowship paid by my own university and my letter specifically states I have no formal TA or RA obligations. I get a letter from HR every year stating that the payment is *not* for any goods or services, so that I am not an employee in any way. But, US tax laws generally will tax fellowship income above our costs for tuition and books for graduate students too. That is, for the "stipend" part of our fellowships, we will be taxed as if we earned that money working in any other job. We do not get taxed on tuition waivers and we can claim mandatory expenses such as textbooks against our taxable income if we keep receipts properly. In the end, you should expect to pay a little more than 10% in taxes. You can compute your estimated tax due from the Wikipedia article on income tax (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_tax_in_the_United_States). As international students (and thus non-resident aliens) we do not qualify for the "standard deduction" mentioned here, we will only get the "personal deduction" of about $3800. The US has a progressive tax system, so you pay a certain percentage for each income falling in some tax level. Let's say your annual stipend is going to be $25,000. If we round the personal deduction to $4000, then you will have to pay tax on $21,000. From the Wikipedia listed tax brackets, you will pay 10% on the first (about) $9000 and 15% on the remaining $12,000, which means you will owe about $2700 per year in taxes, or about 11%. If you are married or have other dependents or other ways to claim taxes, you might get more money back when you file taxes. You may also have to pay additional state tax (above numbers are for federal tax) which will vary a lot from state to state. Please note that for budgeting purposes, you should keep in mind that many schools will actually deduct more tax from you than necessary. I think this might be because they want to make sure that international students don't run away without fulfilling tax obligations. From other students on this forum, and from my own paystubs, it seems like our schools take about 14% out of our monthly paystubs. So, if you are computing e.g. how much money you will have each month, pretend that you will have to pay 14% of your stipend in income tax, but you will get a small part of it back each year. Extra detail note: The US tax year is Jan 1 to Dec 31, so if you are starting a program in e.g Sept 2014, the school will deduct taxes from Sept-Dec 2014 pay stubs. However, your total 2014 tax year income will be only 1/3 of your full stipend, which means you might not even make enough to get taxed at all. So when you file your 2014 taxes (in 2015), you will likely get all of that money back for the first few months.

I generally disagree that departments should spend their time corresponding with rejected applicants in the early part of the admission season when they are trying to recruit the accepted applicants. Let's use some example numbers from one department I got rejected from, and you can scale these numbers up for much bigger programs. One place I was rejected from only accepted 5 out of 150 applicants (or you can imagine something like 30-50 accepted out of 1000-ish applicants for bigger programs). I would think that the rejection rate is something like 80%-95%. Even if they were planning to only make 5 offers, or maybe even 5 initial offers and keep 15 on a waitlist, one might argue it would be wise to reject the other 130 immediately so they know what's going on. However, when you reject people, you might expect some of them to respond back with some questions and requests for more details etc. Many schools will accommodate these requests, but only after the application season is over. But potentially getting tens or hundreds of emails from rejected applicants asking about these details at the same time as trying to communicate with the accepted applicants and arranging for visit days etc. would not be very effective! Don't forget that the admin staff in charge of these communications also have other work to do too! So, I think a more reasonable timeline would be something like: 1. Committee decides who to make the first round of offers to. These people are contacted and arrangements for a visit day is made (booking flights, answering questions etc.) 2. Once those people are confirmed and most of the details are sorted out, they might want to contact a few more people down the list if a lot of the first group declined the offer already (due to receiving better offers). Some schools don't even have a waitlist/second round though. 3. At this point, they can probably make a waitlist that is whatever length they expect they will need, based on previous years. This might only be 5-10 people. Or, this list might be as long as everyone who is qualified! It really depends on the school and who they are competing with. 4. Now, I think everyone who is not on the waitlist should be notified of their rejections, and the ones on the waitlist should be notified of their waitlist status. This stage would probably take place 2-3 weeks after Stage 1 and 2. 5. The waitlist people would only be notified of their rejection only when the class is completely filled. In many places, position on the waitlist might not matter, because they might want a balanced class so the people selected out of the waitlist might depend on who turns down their initial offers. In my experience, most programs made their offers in early to mid February, and I was notified of all my rejections by early March, after these programs have filled all of their classes. I think this is a reasonable timeline for applicants to expect. People on the waitlist are in a trickier situation, and they might not know the final decision until the end of April (after the April 15th deadline when the others have made their choices). I think a lot of time, people don't hear back from programs until so late because they are in an "informal" waitlist. I think that some schools basically put everyone who they might want on this very long informal waitlist because they want to make sure they can fill the class. They have to keep this waitlist long because, especially after April 15, a large number of their top candidates in the waitlist might have already taken offers somewhere else. In the case where the waitlist is super long, I can see why some schools choose not to tell applicants about the waitlist because "waitlist" has a connotation that you are close to being accepted, and they might not want to give false hope. So, I think there are a few things that admissions should do to make the process more transparent, namely letting people know of their status, even if it is just 'waitlist' and being clear on what they mean by "waitlist". Applicants can also do things that make life easier for all other applicants too. Most importantly, I think people should make timely decisions--don't wait until April 15 to make your decision! Definitely do not rush into a decision before you hear back from all your schools, but for people who have all the information already (many top candidates will know everything by early/mid March), you should spend some time seriously thinking about your choice instead of procrastinating until April 15. Having these people make the decision early can trickle down and help everyone else hear back sooner. Finally, ETS can also help by not scheduling the subject tests in April...maybe move it to June or July so that applicants who don't get in anywhere can retake exams in the summer, before the rush of the fall begins again.

I think schools really should provide funding package information, in writing, along with or as part of your offer of admission. I would not want to take an offer that did not promise any actual funding or if I would have to compete for funding again every single year. But this might depend on the norms of the field--all of my offer letters clearly stated that I would get X dollars per year for Y hours of TA and/or RA work. Most letters do not promise a certain amount over the entire degree, but they should at least say something like funding will be continued with satisfactory performance or something like that.

It could be the common "illusion" that more than half of a population will generally rate themselves as "above average" in things like driving, academics, whatever. e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_superiority Or, it could just be inflated adjectives or different standards. Some people might not think "great" means "above average". Maybe to some people, every LOR is "great", so theirs is "great" too. It's all very subjective! Here's my arbitrary subjective scale of what I think when people use these words to describe an LOR: Excellent -- a letter from a research advisor that will say exceptional things (e.g. best student in 10 years or whatever) Great -- a letter from a research advisor that will say positive things about the student's experience and ability (X is skilled in Y etc.) Good -- a letter from a professor that knows the student well enough to write a personal letter attesting to their ability to succeed in grad school Okay -- a letter from a professor that does not know the student very well; will contain just standard stuff that they might dig out of their files like "X scored Y on these classes, performed well in Z etc" I am sure that there are tons of people who will want to use different words for the categories I put up here. But my point is to show that these adjectives are super subjective, and it's entirely possible that every letter is "great" depending on what you mean when you say "great". In my scale above, I think that everyone needs at least one "great" letter to have a strong application.

I understand your frustration! I attended one school as a visiting student and had to request transcripts for grad school applications. However, this school only accepts transcript requests via snail mail (or fax) and the form you had to fill out was formatted for legal size paper, so when I printed it out, the boxes were small and hard to write in!

North American Transcripts are not very official looking either. But you shouldn't expect them to! My transcripts in Canada and the US look like something one would type up in a word processor. My US transcript does not contain information about what the grades mean either, but my Canadian ones did at least have a second page that included this information. So don't worry too much -- the school will ask for more details if they don't understand something!

The PGS-M did go away. Since the difference between the PGS-M and CGS-M award levels was like $200 and if you look at the stats from past years, the majority (over 90%) of -M awards were CGS-M. Very few PGS-M were awarded. Maybe these awards were all taken out of Canada? I think I am okay with the PGS-M going away. A Masters degree in Canada is a lot different than one in the US, for example, and it's probably better to prioritize funding for Canadian students to do Canadian masters (which are generally funded, while US masters are not). NSERC kind of expects that their award will just provide part of the funding and that the school will do the rest, but this isn't the case with the US schools. But I agree that having institutionalized CGS-Ms mean less freedom and choices for us. And also more work (apply for CGS-M at every school). And they might potentially reduce our funding--many schools in my application year have $3000-$5000 top ups for bringing in the award, but if each school knows exactly how many awards they will get each year, they have no incentive to entice award holders to pick their school anymore. On the other hand, I can see why the schools would want this. In the past, the CGS-M quota was set for each student's undergrad school, but the majority of students go elsewhere for their Masters. So, a big school like UBC or Toronto may have a ton of its undergrads receiving CGS-Ms but that is no guarantee of how many incoming CGS-Ms they will get. So, the system can be really unbalanced with some schools receiving a disproportionate number of CGS-Ms. And, it could still be a good thing. In the old system, you compete with your undergrad class for CGS-Ms. So, if you go to a big/top school in Canada, it's harder to get a CGS-M than if you had gone to a smaller school where the pool of competitors is smaller. In the new system, the top applicants to a particular graduate program will receive the CGS-M, instead of the top applicants from a particular undergrad program. I think this does make more sense. However, I think the -D level awards should remain institutionalized, similar to the way the US NSF funds their graduate students.

I think they are usually pretty good. Can you just join it for a semester and see how you feel about it? Usually the commitment is fairly small, right? Like an hour per week?

I don't think this is necessarily true (the "not supposed to interfere" part). We're not supposed to do things like ask probing questions about who is on the committee, or when are they meeting, and what did they think of X etc. etc. But, we are totally supposed to present as much of ourselves to the profs as possible. In my field, there is a huge Astronomy conference in early January, right during most programs' application review period or just prior to it. This conference is an excellent place for prospective grad students to find profs/students in their schools of interest and talk to them. One school even emailed all applicants a list of every single prof from their department that would be attending and encouraged us to reach out to them. It's also a good time to talk to the students to get to know what the programs are like, and maybe they can tell you about timelines (since they got accepted X years back). Also, some students serve on admission committees too! Like you allude to in your post, there are appropriate ways to do this, and inappropriate ways. I've seen really good interactions at conferences but also really bad ones. I would say a good interaction is a professional and low pressure one. The student should introduce themselves as being interested in the school, have a few sentences to say about their interests and then be able to gauge the other person's reaction. If they are interested, then they will probably ask you some questions and you should respond. But if they seem uninterested, then it's probably not a good time to talk to them and you should probably leave them alone instead of pressuring them to give you their opinion or promise to look at your application or anything like that. You should definitely give them the chance to see you as an actual person, but don't force it! I also think that if you are worried that you are below some published minimum, it's worth asking if your application would still be considered. They will very likely just send back some very standard, non-specific response like "We will consider the application as a whole etc. etc." but it is enough, I think, for people to remember you. In my field, like gellert mentioned, I get the sense that they will at least look at everything (or at least the list of publications and CV) to make sure that they aren't looking at some exception with low numbers but very good skills.

This might really depend on the field. PhDs in my field in the UK are always fully funded. In fact, many schools that I had looked into will not accept self-funded students at all. So the only way for an international student to enter that program was to win one of the university-wide graduate fellowships. Their reasoning was that it costs a lot more than just money to have a grad student (time to supervise, room in classes etc.) and basically the quota they are able to fund is equal to the number of students they have time to train.

Now that it is up to each school to determine their CGS-M awadees, it will really depend on the schedule of each school! For Waterloo, the timeline is listed here: https://uwaterloo.ca/graduate-studies/waterloos-harmonized-tri-council-cgs-m-timeline-2013 It sounds like the first notification will occur on April 1, 2014, which is the same timeline as it was with NSERC. However, based on the decisions of the first wave, they may award additional CGS-M's after April 23.

Yes, I was happy with Glacier but I didn't try anything different. Glacier was provided by my school for free, which was my main reason for using that one! My school issues the tax forms around the end of Jan and that was when they told us about the software.

I agree with St. Andrews Lynx, but I also think that there should be a standardized evaluation scheme across the department and I sympathize with your frustrations! I think that TA evaluation and feedback is very important and a system like the one described here (arbitrary criteria, no real feedback) is not ideal at all.

I think if you want to, it could be helpful people in your field. I don't remember it off the top of my head right now, but I saw a blog post by a PhD student that posted all of their NSF grant proposals. There were the first ones that didn't make it and the final one that did get awarded, I think. But for your own sake*, it might be better to wait until everything is all over. That is, wait until you are enrolled and started in a grad program (or if we're thinking negatively, once you are rejected everywhere and decided not to reapply in the future). (*Note: Assuming that there is potential for bad side effects for you if your privacy is compromised. Maybe there isn't, or you're not worried!)

It could really depend on your program, your funding situation, and even things like labour laws in your state/province/country. What is usually true though, is that your offer letter generally will say $X/year and that's what you will get. How the numbers work out each year may be very different though, and in most cases, you won't even see it. For example, in my current program, every PhD student gets paid exactly the same amount every year. All of our offer letters state that we are on a PhD Fellowship, and our tax forms reflect this too, clearly indicating that we are not employees as we are not paid for any particular services. However, the sources of the money for this "fellowship" varies a lot from person to person and year to year. In our first year, there is a pool of money from the whole department that pays our stipends and tuition waivers. Beyond that, the majority of our expenses are paid for by our supervisor's research grants. We work as TAs for a certain number of hours in our 2nd, 3rd, and 4th years (not in our first nor last year) and I think some of the money for our expenses come from the department because of this. In some cases (more students than TA positions), some students do not TA at all, but we all receive the same money. So, this indicates to me, that perhaps the profs and the department agree to fund us something like (90% from prof, 10% from department funds or something). Most of this is all very opaque though. I suspect that even though we don't get statements stating how much we got paid from each source, there is definitely some accounting going on, because profs have indicated that if I were to TA for a class outside of my formal department (but well within my range of expertise), this could cause problems because other departments want to use their TA money on their students and my department want me to actually TA if they are providing that TA money! Also, in many programs, a supervisor can "buy out" a student's TA requirements by fully funding the student themselves instead of whatever ratio of prof-to-department funding exists. Another program at the same school has the same amount of TA requirements, but all of the students complete all of their TAing in their 2nd year. The first year is also funded by fellowship and the final 2-3 years are paid for by the supervisor. But again, in all 5 years, the students receive a constant stable stipend and tuition waiver, regardless of what TAing they did or did not do. In my previous MSc program, the system was a little more transparent. At the beginning of each year, we all got pay statements stating that X dollars is coming from a RAship with our thesis supervisor, Y dollars from whatever hours of TA work we've been assigned, and then finally Z dollars from whatever fellowships we might have been awarded. We would receive our RAship and TAship income from our school's Human Resources department in the form of a monthly paycheque, but we would receive fellowship/scholarship income as a lump sum at the beginning of each year (or semester) from the school's Awards department. So, I think how you are paid can really depend. Overall, I think at every school where you are awarded multi-year funding, you can expect a steady stream of stable income, but the work you have to do for it, or the sources may vary and you may or may not even know it's happening. Finally, the amount of money each student gets can also vary. Like I said above, everyone is paid the same in my current program. In previous programs, there are different fellowship levels, so some students may be paid higher than others. Also, if you bring in external fellowships, you might get paid at a higher level too (but you don't usually keep all of the extra money--many external fellowships come with research expectations so usually this means a decrease in some internal funding but in some cases you will still get to keep a small amount extra). Some programs will give students a raise after candidacy. In my MSc program, students with fellowship will do half or no TAing at all (so they will won't receive TA income) but the fellowship value usually more than makes up for this lost income.

I guess this is a little strange. I would want to think that because this guy contacted you and asked you for extra details in your portfolio etc., it might mean that at least one person is trying to fight for you. If the whole committee wants to reject you, they would not have bothered to do this. But at the same time, a lot of the things they are citing sounds like made-up stuff that people bring up afterwards as generic reasons for rejection. Hope it works out!

I just want to add that even in my non-social science field, where we almost always put our supervisor as a co-author because they are much more involved in our projects, we can still use our peer-reviewed published papers verbatim in our PhD dissertations. Some variations in policy probably exist between different programs though. However, the prevailing policy I see at many institutions is that whenever you include a paper with coauthors, you must also include a statement at the beginning of your thesis detailing what you actually wrote yourself. Some programs require you to only include papers where you wrote all of the material but other programs will let you include material that you did not write yourself, as long as your own material is greater than some fraction, and that you have the required permissions from the coauthors. You should definitely check the thesis policies for both university and department of course, but just letting you know that co-authorship of a paper (and even if you are not the first author) can sometimes still be allowed.

In Canada, I always used software to file my taxes. It's way too time consuming to do it by hand. I use UFile for Canadian taxes, which is free for students, so that is pretty nice. They also have reduced rates if you are filing a simple return. My US school provides us with software to file our US taxes. It is called Glacier, or something like that. It sounds like similar to Sprintax. I plan to use it again this year My last post on this thread was about a year ago, before I filed my taxes for the first time! But for the 2012 tax year, I made so little US income (first 3 months of grad program) that I ended up getting all of my taxes back. I don't think that will be the case this year though. I learned a few things from last year though: 1. As a non-American, we cannot electronically file our IRS tax forms, we have to mail them in. As a Canadian living outside of Canada, we cannot NETFILE our CRA forms, we have to mail them in. This made it more difficult! 2. You can claim tuition money paid at a US school towards Canadian Education tax credits. Every dollar paid, even if you got a tuition waiver (to the CRA, this is income paid to you that you must pay back to the school). You also get the $400/month living expenses and $80/month book credit just like when you were an undergrad student in Canada. Fill out form TL11-A (and maybe TL11-D too?). I forgot about this until later in the year and filed a correction and waiting to see what the CRA will say. 3. For California, there is an exception to what I said above. You have to pay state tax on income from foreign sources (i.e. if you are funded by a Canadian fellowship) as well as American sources. This probably varies from state to state though.

I'm in a STEM field, but I do not currently have a "technical skills" section in my current CV. I do agree that it is important to communicate what skills I do have though, but I incorporate this in my "Research Experience" section. For example, one of my entries might look like: 2010-2012 Graduate Research Assistant at University X, Supervisor: Prof. Y - [Project Title/Description] - Used [software package name] or [Method/Algorithm name] or [Programming language name] etc. (but worded better?) My reasoning is that if I am using my CV to apply for a job in academia to do a particular project (e.g. numerical integration), then when a potential employer reads that I have worked on (e.g. a certain numerical integration package), then they know what kind of background/skills I have. That is, I think that my skills is implied by the list of projects I have completed. Furthermore, this allows me to show how I have gained each skill and what I have accomplished with it, instead of just simply listing the skills. However, if the audience of my CV is someone who isn't in my field, then I would reconsider this (I haven't written a CV for things outside of my field for a long time!). A "non-expert" audience (e.g. non-academic employers, or academics in a different field) won't be able to infer your skills and abilities from your experience and it might be a good thing for you to explicitly state them. I think if/when I eventually write a CV for someone outside of my field, I would probably include something like a technical skills section. If I do, I think I would want to carefully tailor this section to each specific audience to demonstrate how my skills in my field might be useful for whatever purpose I am applying to. I might also want to word/explain each skill in a way that demonstrate its relevance, because, for example, it might not be very meaningful to a non-chemist how the skill of "acid-base titrations" would help in a non-chemistry field.

I agree with most of what is said by jjduval, but I don't completely agree with this part. I don't think the admission committee needs to know any of the details for any "serious" reason, whether they are personal, medical, or otherwise. I agree that you should probably address it, but you can do so without providing details if you don't want to. For example, you could make a blanket/vague statement such as "I do not believe my GPA reflects my [ability to learn / level of knowledge / expertise / etc.]". Then you should demonstrate this by discussing something like your graduate level courses (if you have any), later work experience, or whatever else that can show the admission committee that you will make a good graduate student in their program! The reason why I don't think applicants need to give a reason for a low GPA is that the admission committee cannot judge how your circumstances have affected you. They are not in a position where they will accept or reject your "excuse"/"reason" based on what you say. The committee cannot, for example, decide that a car accident is a "valid" GPA excuse but "ending a long term relationship" is not, or vice-versa, because there is no way they can judge the impact of particular life events on a student. In addition, the committee also cannot judge how well you would have done if circumstance X did not happen. So I don't think providing the reason is very helpful at all. Your GPA is your GPA, that's just how it is. The GPA is not the only indicator of whether or not you can succeed in grad school. If you are not happy with your GPA, you can state that you don't think it is reflective of your ability and/or you can show your potential to succeed in grad school through other ways. So, you should not feel pressure to explain yourself to the admission committee. At the same time, as jjduval said, don't treat your few words about your GPA as a way to defend yourself or to make an excuse. Focus your SOP on demonstrating how you will be an excellent graduate student.

I agree with the above poster's response. In most fields, you can present a paper at a conference as well as submit it to a peer-reviewed journal. In some fields, the conference presentation is even more prestigious than a journal publication. You should be careful about two things though. Firstly, presenting at a conference before you publish the paper means that other people will know about your work before you publish it. Usually, this is okay because you generally don't present unless you are well into the project and are close to publishing. But, this does introduce a risk that someone will steal your idea and try to publish it first. Or, someone else might have been working on the same idea this whole time and when they see your presentation, they might realise that you are competing with them and that might spur them to finish their work and publish it. In most cases, however, the "publicity" you get from presenting your work at a conference outweighs the potential risks. After all, academia relies on the timely and effective communication of knowledge between scholars! The other thing you should keep in mind is some conferences might publish a conference proceedings, and usually presenters have the option of writing up their presentation or submitting their paper to be published in the proceedings. This is usually fine, but there are some journals out there that will not accept your article if you have published it elsewhere in the past, even if it was "just" a conference proceedings. So, if you plan on eventually submitting your paper to a certain journal, check their publication guidelines. You can usually opt out of the proceedings if your target journal will not accept your article if it contains previously published works. If you are worried about these aspects, I think the best resource would be to talk to your advisor/supervisor about this!

If you can't take a short amount of time completely off, would it be possible to reduce your workload slightly in order to take on something that currently interests/motivates you? Even just a few hours per week doing something you really enjoy could help. Near the end of my second year as a graduate student, I picked up a new sport/hobby and while it took about 8 hrs/week to do, I found that it made a good difference in my outlook and my remaining hours per week were more productive and enjoyable. Just an idea! It doesn't have to be a sport or hobby of course, it could be anything that you are interested in--student government? outreach? volunteering? more sleep? etc.

First of all, there is nothing that says we cannot see our LORs or that we are not "supposed" to see our LORs. It's all not true. What is supposed to happen is that the graduate schools want to know that our LOR writers wrote the LOR honestly without worrying about what we would think if we saw it. So if the LOR writer chose to share it with you, then obviously the LOR writer was comfortable with you seeing the LOR and that's no longer an issue. Most schools have you sign a waiver because of FERPA. FERPA gives you the right to see the content of your student record and if the school keeps your admission LOR in your record, then after you enroll in the school (and only AFTER you enroll), you are allowed to use your FERPA rights to view your file and thus your LOR. So, many graduate schools would be worried that if your LOR writer did not want you to see the LOR in the first place, they might be worried that you will later on use your FERPA rights to see the LOR later. So, to make sure the LOR writer does not feel influenced by this possibility, they give you the option to waive your rights and you should. Unless you signed a specific waiver to never see your letter (which would unusual), the FERPA waivers do not mean you are promising to not see your letter. Instead, it only means that you will not specifically use your FERPA rights to see the letter in the FERPA way. Second, to address the OP's situation, I think it's best to let the LOR writer know that there was a mistake and ask them what they think. If they don't think a correction is necessary, then trust their opinion. If the grad school thinks it's strange, you can always explain it in an interview, or they might contact the original prof to clarify and if you let the prof know, then they can provide the correction.

I think what might be happening is that the School of Graduate Studies have their own conversion scale for international grades, but based on the instructions you posted, it sounds like the department you are applying to want this formula computed instead. This formula would help them quickly compare different countries' systems efficiently! Otherwise if two people from two different countries reported GPAs of 4.0 and 7.0, it's hard to tell who got closer to the maximum amount of points. Even if they were reported as like 4.0/4.3 and 7.0/8.0, it's not as convenient as normalizing all the grades to be from 0 to 1.0. Good luck!