TakeruK

I saw this too and immediately saved it as a bookmark. I am planning to do this for my next poster presentation! I've recently checked back at spoonflower and it seems like they have even more fabric options now, maybe ones even better than "performance knit". We'll see! $25 is an awesome price -- my paper posters print at something like $70 to $80 (to get the high quality paper). The only downside (and it's a huge one) is that the processing time and shipping time at spoonflower is very long. I would probably have to submit my poster to them at least 2 weeks before I leave for the conference. Normally, this is when I would start making a poster! So, I will try to get my stuff together faster in the future (if results are even ready) and test out this fabric poster if possible!

I did not remember having to do this when applying to U of T (twice). The formula you have mentioned above is perfectly valid, and it is designed so that a GPA calculated in this way is on a scale of 0 to 1. Remember that not everyone uses the 4.0 or 4.3 GPA system, and if you use this formula, then U of T is expecting a max GPA of 1. The reason the maximum is one is because you have to divide by the "max grade". Alternatively, you can view this as a weighted average percentage grade. The weights are the number of units the course is worth, which is usually proportional to how much work is expected or how long the course is. For example, at my undergrad school, a 3 month course is worth 3 credits and a 6 month (year long) course is 6 credits. So, a grade in a year long course is worth twice as much towards your average as a semester-long course.

Not usually, I think. Here is what the IRS has to say about claiming relocation expenses: (http://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc455.html) and http://www.irs.gov/publications/p521/ar02.html Basically, the main problem is that unless you are employed "full time" for 39 weeks, you can't deduct moving expenses. Maybe I read it wrong though. I don't think most TAships count as full time employment, and 39 weeks usually means you would be a full time TA in the summer too. However, if you have a full time year-long RA ship, then it might work? I am not sure if RAs count as employees in your school, and whether or not the IRS will consider you as an employee. Here is a questionnaire you can fill out to figure out what expenses are okay to deduct: http://www.irs.gov/uac/Can-I-Deduct-My-Moving-Expenses%3F Finally, for international students, check out what your home government tax laws for relocation expenses are. You might be able to claim tax credits from your home government if you can't claim them with the IRS. For Canada though, while I think I could claim such expenses, I can only apply those moving tax credits against any income taxed by the Canadian government while in my new location. Since I don't pay taxes to Canada for my US income, there is nothing I could reclaim! But everyone's situation may be different.

Seems like United will take bikes and count them as one piece of checked baggage, but you have to pack them in a container. If the container is bigger than a standard piece of luggage, then extra fees apply ($100). http://www.united.com/web/en-us/content/travel/baggage/sports.aspx

In my first grad program (terminal MSc, which is the pre-req for all PhD programs in Canada), I didn't think location would be that important. In the end, it wasn't really a big deal since we were only there for 2 years, but at the end of the 2 years, we were more than ready to get out of that town! I can't imagine being in a crappy location for more than 2 years! So, when I applied to PhD programs, we put location on the same importance as academics. I only applied to schools where we both agreed that location and academics were a good fit. I am not saying that if you don't care about location, you must be some horrible person or anything like that! I just want to point out the fact that I noticed many grad students (including myself) having the stoic mindset that we should care about academics first, and not worry about personal things like location. However, I think personal preferences is a perfectly valid motivation for career decisions, and we should not be ashamed of doing so (or saying so!). If you want to be more practical about it, you might make an argument that being happy means you do better work, but I think personal preferences are still valid even if you don't make that assumption. Finally, I realise I am in the philosophy forum so this last part might be field-specific, but in the admissions interviews I had, when they asked "why did you apply here?", I always included personal reasons (like "We wanted to see what it was like living in California" or "It is close to Canada and home" etc.). The schools seem to appreciate my honesty and the profs I talked to said that they also think grad students should choose schools based on what will make them happy.

Great I think depending on how the actual interview goes, it might be okay to ask about the stipend near the end of the interview itself, especially since they will often ask you if you have any questions about the program and what it's like etc. If you want, you could also word it like "what are typical stipends" etc. or "how often are students funded?" (even if you know the answer), then it's not about you and not a promise they are making to you, but it can tell you some information about what to expect. Maybe this was what you meant by asking vaguely already though. I'd play it by ear and use your intuition to decide what kind of questions to ask during the interview! Good luck

Personally, I would avoid questions like "how much is the stipend?" until you already have the offer, unless you are in a lucky position where you are getting so many interview requests that you cannot do all of them, and thus you would like to do a bit of triage before you interview, or if there is a good chance that the answer is something so unexpected that you would not even want to spend time/energy on the interview (and thus could save both the school and yourself some time). The reasons why I would delay the question is that 1) Grad school stipends may vary a bit, but generally you would know if the program would be funded or not (but there's still a big difference between e.g. at $20k/year stipend and a $30k/year stipend, which tends to be the range for places in my field). However, I think this is something that you might wait until you have all your offers laid out before you compare School A with Stipend X vs. School B with Stipend Y etc. So, even though I don't think it should be considered "tacky" to ask about stipends early on, some people might view it this way and I don't think the additional information you get by knowing the information now (instead of along with your letter of offer) is worth the potential of looking bad while decisions are still being made. 2) You might not even get a useful answer even if you press them to give as much information as they know. The actual numbers may depend on who gets accepted and which fellowships go where. They might not know how much money they have towards paying TAs next year, or whether or not a current student will leave/graduate/fail/get a fellowship and free up a TA spot, or hold onto a TA spot etc. So, they might just be hesitant to say any number since they probably know what the minimum will be, but it might be low and they don't want you (probably one of their higher up picks since you are interviewing for a fellowship) to hear this lowball number and hurt their chances of recruiting you. On the other hand, they can't really officially say any number larger than the minimum possible, because they don't want to commit to a higher number--what if something changes and they can't offer you that anymore. It would look bad to go back on their word. So, I think it's best to just hang tight and see what their final offer will be. Although knowing the information earlier would be nice, I think since you don't/can't make a decision about schools until you get an offer from them, it is appropriate for them to wait until they write up the offer before they tell you the stipend. However, I think it would very appropriate to get the stipend amount in writing before you accept any offers though! The right time to be pushy, in my opinion, is when it's your turn to make the decision!

I'm not in the field here but here's my thoughts based on numbers (which I think I do know about!). California has a population of like 38 million while DC and Virginia (the next 2 on your list) have much smaller populations (0.6 million, 8 million). So it might be important to look at the number of federal employees per capita rather than just the total absolute number. Also, I think the area of California is much much larger than Virginia and DC, right?

In addition to the great advice above, you might get weird questions in a Fellowship interview depending on what kind of fellowship it is. That is, if the donors for the fellowship decided that it would be for some goal, they might have made it a requirement that the department ask certain scripted questions. For example, if the donors wanted to fund "leaders in the field" they might ask you a question like "Give us an example of how you have demonstrated leadership in the past" and so on. Or, you might get very strange scenarios. Also, the fellowship interviewers may be from way outside of your department if your fellowship is a university-wide one. On the other hand, admissions interviews will tend to be people in the department and thus are experts in your field. So in terms of preparation, definitely research the fellowship you are interviewing for. If it's funded by an organization, research their mission statements and goals. Also, make sure you will be able to describe all academic parts of your past to a lay audience, especially your past, current and future research.

Yes! My PS (for the schools that asked for one) prompts were pretty similar to these and I basically wrote what I wrote above in my personal history statement. However, I don't think these types of prompts should replace the current standard SOP prompt though. I think it is important for the school to hear about us both from the academic/professional angle (SOP) and the personal angle (PS/PHS).

Oh yeah, this is a good point! I waited until the day before the deadline to submit just in case there is something like this. There was one school that I changed my mind at the last minute and another school that I decided to apply to just a week before the deadline. I don't pay my fee until I submit, because they are usually non-refundable and I try to submit at least 24 hours before the real deadline so that the servers won't be clogged with a ton of other people submitting etc.

I am surprised that there isn't a more straight forward framework on how to set up a project. For us, the thesis/honours project was a course, which has a prof in charge of coordinating it. In early September, we had a "class meeting" where the prof detailed exactly what is expected of us on an honours project and gave us suggestions on how to approach faculty members to get them on board for advising. Most students did find someone over the summer though. However, we had about a month to find a project. The course coordinator also approached the faculty in the department and asked them each to come up with one or two project ideas and the coordinator put them onto the "course" website to help us out. In Canada, an honours degree/thesis is almost expected for grad school hopefuls so there is a large group each year that write theses. There were also "independent/directed study" course, which is just a smaller scale of the honours thesis (and you could do it before your final year). These are also just a single semester instead of a year-long course, but one would only register in this course if they had already found an advisor in the term(s) before they intended to start. Then it's up to the advisor and the student to determine the parameters/scope of the project.

Jargon is almost always used pejoratively and while I agree that just spouting out all the jargon (e.g. some TV science fiction scripts!) does not make you sound intelligent, jargon is absolutely necessary for quick and effective communication of information. So it is incorrect to make a blanket statement claiming that uses of jargon (even extensive jargon) is undesirable. Scientists should definitely avoid jargon when speaking to people outside of their field, but an academic journal is exactly the right place to be as jargony as necessary. A scientific journal article is almost never designed to be read on its own. Like Istoleart said, it is but one sentence or one thought in a long continuing story. There are exceptions of course. For example, the journal "Annual Reviews of Astronomy and Astrophysics" is a publication that is issued once a year with about a dozen review articles. These massive articles basically attempts to summarize all the current knowledge and experiments on one particular topic. These articles are meant to be read stand-alone, they do not assume any knowledge of jargon but will usually define important terms and use them so that the reader becomes familiar with them, and they are perfect for a newbie or a non-expert to get acquainted with a topic. But the "regular" journal article that just tells one sentence? They should not need to explain everything. Otherwise, we will have hundreds of articles with identical paragraphs defining a whole bunch of terms. If I just plucked out an article in physics but not in my field (e.g. semiconductors), I should not expect to understand much more than a very basic level. I would have to reread it and read related articles to really understand what the problem they were tackling and what solution they are proposing. The idea of grad school though (and Journals Club) is to get e.g. astronomy grad students, to the point where if they did pick up a random article in Astronomy, they should be able to be get a little more out of it than a complete newbie to the field. Journal Clubs helps us build a broad foundation of knowledge.

It depends on some programs, but I think in my field, and many science programs in the US, all of the applications are reviewed at once. The applications are collected as they come in and the admin staff put together packages that are distributed to the admissions committee when the time is right. Then, there is a period where they all review them and have a bunch of meetings to discuss what they think. In my current program, this happens in early/mid-January (decisions come late January) and sometimes we can see all of the profs suddenly disappear from their offices, locked away in one of these meetings, potentially! Or, we see windows minimized that have filenames like "Applications2014.xls" etc.

The OP is in a professional field, where they will not be funded. It doesn't sound like they will get a tuition waiver, but it does sound like some students can apply for TA and RA ships to get some funding. Also, on F-1 or J-1 status, we are allowed to work on-campus for some jobs (e.g. TAship). Regarding your comment about "can't find a better deal"...actually you can. Even adjusting for various costs of living differences, there are a ton of better deals out there than $27,000/year stipend for science fields. If I had stayed in Canada for my PhD, my stipend would be significantly higher than $27,000/year. In my opinion, there are two main ways people look at grad school stipends. One way is to compare it to undergrad conditions and say "wow, now I get free school and get paid to do it! what a deal!". The other is to compare to what you could be earning if you were not in grad school--for most cases, you are still "paying" to go to grad school. A person working a professional job after undergrad would make more than the average grad student, and 5 years later, would have 5 years of relevant work experience while a PhD would have the degree, be behind in about $100k of income, and have no real world work experience and be working as a postdoc (in the ideal case), making only slightly more than a grad student. Don't get me wrong--I'm not saying there isn't other value in being a grad student and that we could all get other jobs immediately. Obviously, I still think I am better off as a grad student (and I think most people would be) otherwise I wouldn't be one. But I think it's a bit naive to think of grad school as one of the best paths forward because you get "free school" and a "good" income. I think we should be realistic and face the reality that while we are not living in absolute poverty, grad students in general are underpaid for their qualifications. We are risking some opportunity costs at a chance of a better payout later on. I'm not too worried about making as much money as my peers--I only need enough to live a comfortable life and save up for the future. Most science grad programs do provide enough for a student to live on, but very few provide enough to help the student save for the future, such as retirement, a down-payment on a home, and starting a family. I don't like the overall culture that grad students are expected to be devoted to their work and they should only focus on building their career, not other aspects of their lives. So, while being a grad student is not definitely not a horrible deal or anything, but it's not that great either. Like most life/career paths, it's just another possible path through life. Finally, I am not sure why you say international students are expected to work "twice as hard". I would be very concerned if any place thought that and it would definitely not be a kind of environment I want to be in.

I also agree that I think schools should work harder to retain their current students too. This is something I have been a part of at other campuses and I am starting to take more actions here to work with the administration (if possible, otherwise, it might be working against the administration) to increase the quality of life (includes wages, benefits, how we are treated) of graduate students.

I studied for about 6 weeks, but an option between 1 and 2 months didn't exist so I picked 2 months. I probably put about 30 hours in memorizing vocab and learning how the GRE V works over this time period (about an hour a day). I studied for about 1 hour for the math part (did a couple of practice question sets to make sure I won't be surprised) because I felt very comfortable with math. I spend 1 hour the night before writing 2 practice essays because I think the AW is probably one of the least important sections. My goals were not very high--I just didn't want to do poorly and I thought I needed the most practice in verbal since English was not my first language. My reasons for not worrying too much was that I was in a MSc program and I rather spend my time doing that instead. Also my field has a subject GRE which I think people care about a lot more (and I spent much more time studying for that).

I don't agree that race and gender should not be admission criteria. I don't think the world should be an absolute meritocracy, where the only thing that matters is how much someone has achieved. I think the level of achievement should be tempered by the conditions in which these achievements were gained. The reason is that the job market, the world, academia, etc. is set up in a way so that certain groups have clear advantages over others. If we don't keep this in mind, it will be a runaway cycle. To me, it's more important to have a diversity of good ideas than just the very best ideas. A personality profile might be a good idea, but I doubt the ability for a metric to accurately quantify a personality. But even if it worked perfectly, do we really want to restrict grad school or any career to certain personality types only?

I agree that PDFs are the best way to ensure your presentation looks the way you want it. But you have to make sure you embed your fonts, otherwise if the fonts are not installed in the other computer, it will revert to some defaults and it might change the layout. Better yet, only use basic fonts that are sure to be installed everywhere. One thing I like to do on my slides is to have things appear sequentially, especially if they are individual steps or components of a schematic that I want to explain one at a time. I can do this in Powerpoint with animations pretty easily, but if I want to PDF it, I would have to make each "step" an individual slide. This takes a lot more time! And then if I want to change something that was in the original slide, I would have to do it on all the slides! My dream feature in Powerpoint or whatever is to be able to PDF of each step of each animation! (Most of my animations are just things appearing/disappearing, not moving, so it's not so bad).

Interesting. I would not want to be in a program where I am not secure in the fact that as long as I met the requirements, I would be able to continue (i.e. not a limited number of seats). In most STEM programs, there is an annual review of students too. But this is not a "competitive" process, that is, they are not trying to pare down a class. It is a review to make sure your grades meet the minimum standards and your research output is satisfactory. It doesn't even have to be stellar, just meet minimum requirements. This is partly to make sure that the school isn't paying a student to just watch YouTube videos all day, but also to make sure that the student is actually progressing, and it could be a way for an outside party to identify a problem like a toxic advisor (and the student may be too naive or inexperienced to even know that they have a bad relationship).

About the visa thing--that's correct! We had a very helpful 3-day international orientation here and they even taught us basic Immigration policies that cover all types of foreign students! It is important to know that there are two things that are often lumped together when people say "travel visa". For US Immigration, they care about two things: 1. "Status". The two possible types are F-1 or J-1. Most people are F-1 status, and the proof of your F-1 status is the I-20 form, issued by your school (DS-2019 form if you are J-1). This form confirms your eligibility to remain in the US to do a certain thing (in our case, go to school). For the I-20 form, you need to prove you have funds to pay for tuition and living expenses for 1 year (the DS-2019 requires proof for the entire length of degree). You are right that you will have to pay the SEVIS fee for US Immigration to process all your paperwork and allow you to be in the US. Your I-20 is always valid for the entire length of degree, but it will expire if you leave your program. You are able to extend your F-1 or J-1 status in some cases. If you start a new program, then you get a new F-1 or J-1 status. 2. "Visa". A visa is just "permission to enter the US". A visa generally comes along with a status, since they don't just grant permission to anyone for any reason. A visa may be # of entires limited or it may be time limited, or both. A visa looks like the photo page in your passport. Canadians do not need a visa to enter the US. This is of great help for us, since this means no interviews, and no worrying about valid visas. However, for non-Canadians who might read this, a visa can expire and as long as you already in the US, it's no problem. Remember, visa is only about entering the US, not about being allowed to stay in the US (that's what "status" is). However, if you have an expired visa (and for some people, a visa is only valid for one entry), you need to get a new visa before you can re-enter the US (extra hassle if you leave the US to visit family, go on vacation, or go to a conference). You can never "renew" a visa, you must reapply every time. Luckily for Canadians, we don't have to worry about this!! About proving your funding--yes you wait until after you get accepted. The general process is that you first wait for acceptance and then once you say yes to a school's offer, their International Student Program office will contact you to get biographical information needed for your I-20 form. At the same time, you should be figuring out how to pay for school, setting up loans as needed. You'll provide this information to the school and they will also add it to your I-20 form. Once that's all ready, they will mail you your I-20 form and then you use it to pay the SEVIS fee online. Then you can enter the US and start your program! It's probably a good idea to get all this sorted out about a month before your program starts, but really, the only time crunch is the time it takes between you providing all the info needed for the I-20 (including funding info) to your school and you receiving the physical I-20 in the mail (probably a week-ish to mail it). You might even be able to cross the border without the I-20 (depending on who you get at the border) but then US Immigration will expect you to mail your I-20 to them within 30 days!

My first programming language was Java and it was taught to me in a formal Computer Science course. I never use it for research. But from that, I was able to teach myself other languages such as C. I think object oriented languages are very important skills to have, even if you don't end up programming with "objects" as much later on. MATLAB, IDL, R, and similar languages are good but I feel they are more "scripting" languages than full programming languages. I would also strongly put in a plug for Python. It's free which is important because it means you can use it anywhere, no matter where you go in the future. My current school has a lot of MATLAB and IDL and Mathematica licenses so anyone on campus can use it anytime, but I know most schools aren't so lucky. So, over the past summer, I've started writing everything in Python so when I graduate and have to use my code elsewhere, I'm not dependent on my employer having a license for me. Also, I like python because you can use it without treating it like an object oriented language at all. And for research purposes, sometimes we don't need to write super elegant code--it just needs to do its job fairly quickly. Finally, Python has a lot of modules that are very easy to install to do useful calculations in science (histogramming, generating random variables, even MCMC schemes).

If you assume that a student who drops out has contributed nothing at all, then yes, losing a student is a waste of money. Also, if you assume that a graduated PhD who does not stay in academia is also zero contribution, then yes, people who don't go into academia also "wasted" the school's money. However, in STEM fields, this is simply not the case. I would say the majority of the money/costs that go into having a graduate student is returned in the value of the student's research labour/output and any teaching duties. Most PhD programs realise that the majority of their graduates will not be working in academia. The good programs don't consider this a failure and instead want to train PhD graduates to have broadly employable skills (e.g. data analysis). It's not a failure if a PhD in Physics ends up working in a career that uses no physics at all but does rely on the computing and critical thinking skills developed by the program. And if you want to say that there is a certain value in a PhD graduate remaining in academia and their future good work brings honour/recognition to their alma mater, then I think the increased value of 2/3 PhD graduates outweighs the loss of the remaining non-graduate. This is why some grad schools will accept graduate students who are in a committed relationship even if one partner isn't as qualified as the first. If one partner is very desirable to the grad school, they might prefer to take 1 great candidate and 1 mediocre candidate instead of 2 other good candidates. This happens for tenure-track position hires as well.

Yeah, $80 is well worth it! Wait until you enroll in a new school, if that is happening soon, because your new school may have it for free or cheaper than standard student pricing from Microsoft.

Paper reading clubs, i.e. weekly "Journal Clubs" are something that is in almost every single grad program in my field. The formality really varies. In some places, it can be a lunchtime session where people eat lunch and discuss a paper. Some places have beer or wine/cheese etc. In other places, it can be a seminar style, where grad students (and profs sometimes) are assigned a week and they pick a paper to present and people discuss it. I've also seen places where Journals Club is a "course" and some places even assign a letter grade for it. The purpose can be partly social/getting people from different fields to interact but also academic/educational. Sometimes, students are encouraged to present a paper outside of their own field, which requires them to look up and read related papers and broadens their knowledge. Students are often encouraged to ask questions and critically evaluate the author's methods, analysis, conclusions etc. From observing how professors and senior students critique the papers, junior students can learn about what makes a good paper, what doesn't, and also how to think about papers critically. Some Journal Clubs have discussion not just on the science, but also things like how the figures look, whether or not the wording is clear, etc. Also, papers in my field are pretty dense, so a simple statement might have an important implication that you might miss if you are not in the field. By hearing how other people who may be more of an expert than you discuss the paper, you might get a deeper insight than reading alone. And finally, if you are presenting a paper in your own field, you might take some basic things for granted. Someone who is not an expert in your field might ask you some basic fundamental questions, but this can help you take a step back and see the big picture, and also by explaining concepts to others, it might increase your own understanding!