TakeruK

I would personally prefer to not see the letter. If my letter writer was like "Okay I am finished writing it now, by the way, any interest in seeing the letter?" then I would say "No thanks!". But if the offer was phrased in a way that I felt like the prof wanted me to check it over before they sent it, then I would take a look! I don't think it's unethical -- it's just that I wouldn't want to know. And I agree with Lisa44201--I'd only request a change if there was a factual error.

I am very glad that this is true (sincerely, no sarcasm intended) but all of this is completely irrelevant to what she will write in her LOR. Science professors don't base their LORs on things that their students tell them about, they can only write LORs about things their students actually did under their supervision/guidance. In this case, what you did under her guidance was take her class, not your conversations about your knowledge of the field. (emphasis added below) In my opinion, taking full responsibility for an event means owning up to all of the consequences of said actions too, including not getting an LOR because you got had tons of chances to rectify your grade, and you chose not to so you got a B-. Again, like I said above, she will be writing this LOR as your instructor, so she will be expected to comment on your performance in her class, not about her opinions about your competence as a scientist. Now, if you had collaborated or worked with her and demonstrated your science research ability, then she could write about that. But in this case, she can only write about your classwork. I totally agree that classwork is one of the less important parts of being a graduate student in a science PhD program, but if you knew this, then you should have looked for someone other than your instructor to write your LOR. I still don't understand why you would say "classes are not important" and then asked your class instructor to write an LOR (which would be about classes). This is exactly what everyone else here is saying and I think this is the right thing to do. I even think it's a good thing. For some people, it's hard to say no so some profs will go the route of writing a useless LOR instead of saying no. You would have gotten a negative (worst case) or useless (best case) LOR from this person. I am glad for you that you learned why you did not get the LOR and that you did not end up submitting an LOR from this prof. I do not understand why you think this person did a bad deed and why you think it would be out of spite.

To me, a dummy score may also mean just to input something in the "GRE score" box so that the application system lets you move on. Sometimes the software won't let you submit until every single required box is filled in. So, you could fill the box with something that is very obviously not a GRE score, such as "4444" (since the old scale only went up to 800) or 000 (minimum score is either 130 or 200, depending on scale). This would allow you to submit the application and then submit your score report once the score is ready. This might be the best option if you actually do have older test scores now but you don't want to send in these scores until you know all your new ones.

I would agree that part of the responsibility of mentoring or supervising a student is writing a LOR. A responsible supervisor, at the very least, should be able to spend the time to write an appropriate LOR (it does not have to be glowing if the student is not great) and in the ideal case, would help their student make contacts and connections with others in the field in order to help their career. A responsible supervisor will also let their student know that they cannot write a good LOR if that is the case, instead of writing a negative one without informing the student at all! However, I don't think it's the same responsibility for a classroom instructor. In many cases, a professor may teach hundreds of students over the course of a year, and people might go as far as 2-3 years back for LORs! It's certainly very reasonable for a professor to have very high standards for a classroom LOR or even for a professor to refuse all LOR requests from anyone who is not working in their lab/research group. LORs should not be earned merely on "effort", either. LORs should reflect proven and demonstrated academic ability. I don't think a letter that says "Student X tried 110% but only received a B-" is going to be received very well. The way I see it, an LOR is a request for someone to lend both their time (very valuable) and their professional reputation (also valuable), in support of you. This is a big request and you can't expect to "deserve" a LOR just because you tried really hard or you are really interested in the field. Ultimately, a professor will only have time for X number of LORs per year and if they receive more requests than they have time for, then they will have to determine which X students get letters. If I was a prof, I would make sure to always have time for letters for the students and post-docs who are working for me (or who have worked for me in the past). If I still have time to write more letters, I would write them for students whom I think I can do the most good for.

I have no idea why you went on that train of thought in trying to justify why she said no to your LOR request. I understand that you may be emotionally invested in this but from an outsider's perspective, your reasoning makes no sense at all. I think you might be approaching the situation in the wrong way. I am not saying you are a bad student nor that you won't make it into grad school. Your professor's refusal to write an LOR also does not mean that you are a bad student and won't make it into grad school. All the refusal means is that your professor cannot write you a supportive LOR because of your performance in her class and your eventual grade in her class. It doesn't matter how much she knows you outside of class, it doesn't sound like this prof supervised your work, so the only role she can take as a letter writer is "Student's Instructor". As your instructor, the only basis she can write her LOR on is your performance in her class. Anything else would just be a personal recommendation, not a professional recommendation, and graduate school admission committees do not care at all about personal recommendations. It's definitely true that not every single class was important and that even if you made the right decision to slack off in this class (presumably to spend that time doing something more important to your personal or career goals right?), getting a B- is a very good reason for the prof to refuse to write you a LOR as your instructor. Let me say it again to make it really clear: You asked for a letter of reference from someone who would be writing your LOR as the role of your instructor, and thus would have to comment on your performance in her class, not your general desires and capabilities. So I am not sure why you are surprised when this person refused to write you a letter on the account of the fact that you did poorly in this class. I would doubt that this prof thinks that you are unfit for grad school, but just that she is the wrong person to ask for a LOR! Remember that LORs in STEM fields should ideally come from research supervisors and a "did well in class" type letter is not ideal. So, from that logic, it would make sense that all your "did well in class" letters better have come from the classes where you were the top student or close to the top! Finally, I feel like you were expecting everyone you ask to actually say yes, and that the only reason for "no" you would expect is something not related to you, such as the prof being too busy, not that you were not good enough. When this did not turn out the way you expected, you searched for other reasons for her refusal, again all of these reasons you think up are not related to you. Rejection sucks, but sometimes it might help to accept that you may have caused this (by slacking off and getting that B-) and figuring out what to change in the future, instead of looking for other places to shift blame. Ultimately, I agree with Lisa44201--I'd be thankful that I got a real rejection and not have to hand in a LOR that said I got a B- in that class (the committee can easily match up your LOR with the grade on your transcript). Also, I think that getting rejected with a real reason is a sign of mutual respect between you and this prof. If I did not care about a student, I would brush them off with excuses or ignoring them until they went away.

I think this is a fine letter for someone who was your instructor 6 years ago! If you think it is missing something (e.g. you wanted them to mention a specific detail or event) then it would probably be okay to remind them about it, assuming that they showed you this LOR for approval. In your shoes, I would be really happy that a professor that is significant to me (as he is the reason you decided to choose your major) would remember me so well and have such great things to say about me, even 6 years later. But the rest of this post will be written from what I think a grad admission committee might think. For science research fields, I would say that letters from instructors aren't that helpful, but maybe things are different when applying to science education fields. But this is an example of the reason why people say that a "did well in class" letter might sound nice but ultimately may not convey much detail. If you choose to go with this letter, then I would suggest think about what else could have been added in the letter. If there isn't anything else, then I would stop worrying about it and be happy about it. However, I would also consider using a different letter. Do you have any research supervisors at all during your MS or was it just coursework? If so, I would go with the research supervisors. If not, I might even get a letter from someone who taught you during your MS instead of your first year of college. Even though they only taught you for one semester instead of two, they are much more recent and can talk about how you handle graduate level coursework. Also, in my experience, my graduate level professors knew me much better than my undergraduate professors, even if we only interacted in the classroom/office hours. I feel that a graduate school would be more interested in what your graduate professors thought of you rather than your undergraduate professor from 2007. Finally, this last part might be plain wrong due to what different education degrees might mean in my area of Canada vs. the US. So, to me, a MS/MA in secondary education is not a degree program that trains you to be a teacher at the secondary school level. To me, a Bachelor of Education (BEd; which students take after completing a BA or BS) is the degree that trains you to be a secondary school teacher, while an MA/MS in secondary education is a research based degree in pedagogy and a Master of Education is further professional development for someone who is already trained (and potentially already practicing) as a primary/secondary school teacher. So, if I understood your intended graduate program correctly, then I am not sure if a reference letter from your private tutoring company boss is relevant. I might be completely wrong about what you are applying to though -- so just ignore this last paragraph if you are actually applying to a program that will train you to be a secondary school teacher.

I definitely would not mention it and I don't think it's even worth the time to redo the course or do another course in place of it. If you are applying to Canadian schools, I found that the majority of them (but maybe only in the sciences?) really only care about the 3rd and 4th year courses in your field of study. Every department I applied to had a "minimum GPA requirement" in these terms (i.e. upper level courses in field of study) or something like "the most recent X credits in your major". Also, if it's that early on in your undergrad, the grad schools can see that your grades have an upward trend and I think the trend in your GPA is important too!

I was going to write that since this LOR writer is so well known in the vet community, then its short length shouldn't be a negative. Someone who is that famous/well known isn't going to risk their reputation endorsing a less than stellar applicant. However, I re-read your post and saw that you are actually applying to PhD programs in a different field! So, normally, I would say that while a detailed letter from a famous person is the ideal, a short and to the point letter from a famous person that you actually worked with may still be better than e.g. a detailed letter from someone who will just say "did well in class". How did you see this letter? Did they show it to you? If so, and if they sound like they were expecting feedback, maybe explain that you were hoping for more details? Like Cpsych83 above said, maybe you can provide him with more details (CV etc.) if you didn't the first time around. If you won't be able to discuss this with the LOR writer for whatever reason, I think it's only worth trying to get a new LOR if you can get one from someone else who has supervised your work. Even if your writer may not be well known in the field you are applying to, I think this short and detail-lacking letter from someone you worked closely with is still stronger than a longer detailed letter from someone you did not work with at all (e.g. a letter from a prof that says Student X took my classes for Y semesters and was a good student etc.... all that stuff is evident on your transcript). Also the context of the letter matters. The committee will still see that this letter writer is a medical director (from his signature) and your close supervisor for a long time (from your CV and SOP presumably). That will add more weight to the letter, in my opinion. So, with only the information given here, I would say that unless you have a another research supervisor lined up for a LOR, it's probably not worth it to make a last minute change of LOR writer.

I think your question is so open and vaguely defined that it is difficult for anyone to give an actual answer!

I agree with juilletmercredi and just for more numbers, here are my working hours for different phases of my grad career thus far: First year and second year MSc in Canada (during classwork/teaching part of the year) 20 hours/week classes 10 hours/week teaching 10-20 hours/week research MSc program -- for terms where I only had to do research 40-50 hours/week research (add an extra 10 hours/week for the last few weeks before my thesis submission) During these two years, I took the equivalent of about 3 months completely off, where pretty much no work was done. First year PhD (heavy coursework, no teaching, during school year): 30-35 hours/week courses 15-20 hours/week research First year PhD (summer -- preparing for quals at the end of summer): 40-50 hours/week research 10 hours/week studying for quals in the 2 months before quals I'm currently in the second year of my PhD and I'm just about to finish classes and begin teaching again. I think the distribution will be something like 40hours/week of research and 10 hours/week of teaching during the quarters I have to teach. Since I started by PhD, I haven't really taken much time off work completely...maybe 2-3 weeks so far at most. I don't count travel for work purposes ("fieldwork" and conferences) as time off but I also didn't average out those much longer workdays into my weekly averages above. In general, I try to work about 40-50 hours a week. I think grad school is about setting your own limits to yourself as well as your bosses, because it's really hard for me to say no. So, I made it clear to myself that unless there is a deadline or something big coming up, I will limit myself to 50 hours/week of work and will allow 60hours when there's a deadline or something big. This means that in order to get my research done I might have to just not try as much in classes and I think it was hard for me to adjust from prioritizing classes (in undergrad) to just doing the minimum on classes (in grad school). Another way I look at it is working an average of 50 hours/week for 50 weeks a year (2 weeks vacation) is 2500 hours worked per year. Or, out of the 168 hours per week, if I work for 50 hours, that's about 1/3 of my time. That's the amount of work I am willing to put into grad school and into my career. If it's not good enough then I don't think continuing further in academia is worth it for me or for my future bosses. So, I thought to myself, if I didn't pass quals on this schedule, I would know that I'm not cut out for the PhD program. That didn't happen, so the next checkpoint whether or not I will be ready to defend in 4 more years on this schedule. Then, whether or not I get a post-doc that is desirable to me, etc. Ultimately, my philosophy is that I am working in this career because I think it gives me a good balance of happiness in my work and the ability to enjoy other aspects of my life that isn't science/research/school. If the career demands get to a point where this balance doesn't exist, it will be time for me to find a new career. Everyone has a different balance, and I know there are others who work 80+ hours per week and are super happy, but that's just not me.

I think the majority of all LORs are generic or only superficially personalized (e.g. change name of school in the first sentence). You can maybe expect a few extra sentences if the letter writer is close to you (e.g. a research supervisor you worked a lot with) and the letter writer has a connection with the school you are applying to.

I think it's really annoying when the short essay questions repeat things asked in the SOP. But when I see this, it might also be a sign that the questions are meant for different audiences. Sometimes, the short 100 word essay about "why you want to study X" is actually meant for the graduate school or for fellowship applications (so that they can say they admitted student Z or awarded fellowship Y to student Z so that they can study X". I wouldn't assume that this is the case though and if they ask the same questions as the SOP, I would just copy/paste from the SOP and reword if necessary. In most of my applications though, whenever there are individual questions, they actually do not ask for a SOP. So instead of submitting an essay, you just answer the 5 or so questions in short paragraph form. One school even wanted 5 separate PDF files, one for each aspect of the SOP. I think the school definitely expects you to write the answer in a word processor on your own computer and then copy and paste the text when you are done. Many of my time limited forms reminded me to do this. In the sciences, many applications for funding or other programs (observing time etc.) require researchers to type all of their information into boxes like this. These boxes are void of any formatting so that when the application goes to the judges, they all look the same, all have the same formatting, and all have the same font. There's no way to get around page limits by tweaking margins etc. For better or for worse, this makes the judgement based more on the content of the application, not the way it looks.

Actually, I think an award for "best student talk" at a nationwide conference is much "bigger" and more prestigious than "best dissertation from Department X at School Y in Year Z".

If you ask your department or school to make an award so that you can apply for it, then that is very likely to not go well at all!! If you think your school/department needs an award to recognize physics students and have a good reason (e.g. like you said, the social sciences have them but there aren't any for physics) then it might be worth bringing up to the department when they have feedback sessions between students and profs (usually separate sessions for undergrads and grads). But it would look extremely bad if you did this solely so you can apply for it and put it on your CV! Awards tend to require some kind of donor (even if it's a small award). So, I think the best way to go about getting an award like this is to get together all the other graduate students who feel the same way; hopefully you will have a majority in support. Then, you can approach the department together about potentially creating an award and volunteer to do the legwork to find a donor. Remember that awards are often endowed, so the award payment comes off of interest and usually the University or the Alumni Association has schemes in place for this to happen (Alumni associations tend to solicit donations/endowments from their successful alumni to fund new awards). If you find a donor willing to fund an award for PhD Physics dissertations (or maybe you want to generalise this to Science PhD dissertations) then you now have enough in place to have the department or graduate school seriously consider the award. Even if you don't want it to be a monetary award, then you still need people to agree to do the strenuous task of sitting down and reading every single dissertation. However, if you spearhead this award, it would probably take a lot of time and it would look bad on the award if you won it, in my opinion. This is something you would be doing as a service to the other students in your department/school. But if you accomplish something like this, that would be a great experience to have and also be good on a CV too. Other thoughts on this award idea -- if you limit it to only Physics PhDs, then it might be way too small in scope. If you have 30 grad students, that's an average of 5-ish grad students graduating per year. The best dissertation out of 5 isn't necessarily something that merits an award! In Canada, the Canadian Astronomical Society, as a whole, selects one Astronomy related PhD thesis completed in Canada [in the past 2 years], to win their best dissertation award. The prize is something like $1000, funded travel to the conference location and a 1 hour long prize talk. There is an awards committee of profs across Canada that judge nominations for this prize. I mention this because maybe this is the right way to get what you want. That is, apply to already existing awards outside of your university. Maybe something like the APS? Also, for smaller scale awards that look great on a CV, you can apply for things like "best student talk" or "best student poster" at many conferences. Sometimes you don't even apply for these, the conference will have committees that judge this. Other times, you can apply for a travel award to present your work at a conference, which are awarded based on some combination of how interesting your research is, how much you need the funding, and how good of a student you are (criteria/prestige varies greatly between awards)

Again, people on this site isn't a good representation of graduate students in general. I am a married graduate student that got married during graduate school but I met my SO way before grad school. I do know a bunch of other married graduate students, both in my current program and in past programs, but the vast majority of them met their SO before they got to grad school. A large majority of married graduate students are married to people who are not graduate students themselves. The smaller fraction that are married to other students had to overcome the "two body problem" in order for both of them to get graduate school offers in the same area/city/school. It's fine to consider "will this school/program/city help me find a husband?" a factor in your graduate school search. But I feel that some of your plans might be way too specific or detailed for it to make sense to think about at this point. Sure, you might get a great roommate and meet the love of your life in the first month of your new program. Or you might have a terrible roommate that never talks to you and you have to hassle every month to get rent paid on time. At this stage, I think you can only really try to find certain things (e.g. bigger cities etc.) that might enhance your chances of meeting a partner, but there is no way you can be even 60% certain that the school you choose will result in finding a SO.

The number of people's scores used in calculating the percentile would probably not change very much over time. As mentioned above, the percentile score is how you rank in comparison to the people who took the test in the past 3 years. It is a rolling window of 3 years. For example, right now, our percentile scores show how we rank compared to the people who took the test between July 1, 2010 and June 30, 2013 (even if you took the test prior to July 1 2010 or after June 30, 2013). Since population grows over time, the number of people taking the subject tests probably increases each year, but only a small amount. It's not like each year, there's an extra new batch of scores to be added (i.e. the oldest set of scores is removed). However, I would say that because they update yearly, the percentile rank is helpful in showing how the student compares with contemporary peers and accounts for the changing nature of the test and student knowledge.

I agree with Eigen -- the point of having undergrads in the lab is to mentor and train them, not to get useful work out of them. But I can understand the frustration when someone else doesn't take something as seriously as you because it's not as important to them as you! We don't know your situation so it might very well be that the undergrad is not even interested in working hard and is just a drain on the lab overall. Is the 10 hours minimum something that is required of them due to their research credit course? If they are not meeting the expectations of their research credit then it could important to talk to whomever is in charge of awarding/signing off on those credits. It is usually true that a grad student can make more progress on a project much faster than an undergrad. But the same can be said for graduate students sometimes. I might take 20 hours to do something that an experienced faculty member can do in 5 hours. The point of having students assist you (undergrad or graduate) is not to increase the amount of productivity, but to increase the amount of competence in your lab/field.

I don't think it is a misuse but I do agree that we don't have much political capital. This is why I think TAs should have labour unions so that certain privileges are signed into a contract and the collective political capital of the entire campus' TA population is used to gain better working conditions for TAs. For example, in a current place without a union, I would feel that I would be using up a fair bit of goodwill if I were to take a week off from my TA duties to attend an important conference (or if I was to get sick for example) and that if I have another request, it would be much harder to get it granted. In a situation where a collective agreement makes conference travel leave a fundamental employee right instead of a privilege to be requested, then we can free up our political capital for other uses. Also, as the above poster said, not everyone is able to gain the same amount of political capital. Some people are less forceful, or have stricter employers, etc. A union allows for everyone to have exactly the same rights and privileges, without needing to fight for it. Definitely true that there is a difference between "needs" and "prefers". But why should graduate students only get what they need and nothing more? I think this is where we fundamentally disagree, and I don't really think either one of us will change our mind. All the departments I have ever been in has always solicited our opinion about any parts of the program that would be considered part of "the suck" and I always try to give thoughtful and useful feedback. Even if this is a trap to identify the "bad students", I don't really mind because I believe that we should fight against parts that suck where possible (within reason) and if I don't get a job in the future because of it, then I would probably be happier elsewhere anyways.

The timing of shifts matter. I think most reasonable people would agree that, in most cases, a worker working a shift from 10am to noon, and then another from from 6pm to 8pm will require more time commitment than a shift from 1pm to 5pm. If everyone else has single shifts and the OP has split shifts, I think that is a good reason to bring this up so that the same people don't get split shifts over and over again. If everyone has these split shifts though (although that would be an abnormally large number of night classes) then perhaps there is nothing that could be done. Bringing up an issue and asking for a scheduling accommodation is not the same thing as demanding the department schedule things your way. If it's not possible, then it's not possible. But the department can't fix problems that it doesn't know about, even if they wanted to help accommodate students. On a side note, TA scheduling has come up at my MSc school before. TAs there are unionized so there is a collective agreement that governs issues like this. The current agreement stipulates a maximum number of scheduled work hours in one day before overtime wages kick in and also any scheduled work on Sundays are paid at overtime rates. From TA feedback, the union will be trying to negotiate "standard work hours" where a TA can be normally scheduled (something like 8am to 6pm) and any hours beyond that would require volunteering or overtime rates. Our department actually had this issue come up as well -- due to safety regulations, senior undergrads were no longer allowed to work in the labs on their final lab course projects unsupervised (the lab techs leave at 5pm). The department discussed the potential of requiring the TAs for these lab courses to hang out in the lab from e.g. 7pm to 10pm but this idea was shot down by many profs and students alike because of the very late work hours. In the end, they decided that they would have to hire qualified personnel to do this separately from TA contracts and/or not allow undergrads to access the lab when no one is around. Although my MSc school is not in the US and Canadian labour laws are fairly different from US laws (TAs aren't even considered employees in some places!), I wanted to point out that the "department schedules everything without regard to student preferences" is not necessarily a universal and inevitable outcome. Many departments are able to schedule TA work while considering student preferences just fine and it's not an unreasonable thing to at least think about or to ask the department to consider.

It should not be a problem and is actually not that rare for LORs to come in up to a week after the deadline. The deadline is really for your own submitted stuff. Definitely email the program to let them know, but when this happened to me, all of the programs basically said that as long as the LORs came in before the committee actually started the review process, it would be okay. And most committees don't start to review until mid January.

$25 will send all of the scores you wish to send in the past 5 year period, for both subject and general tests.

I find it very unprofessional and frustrating when anyone (not just profs) do not respond to professional emails within a reasonable time (for most cases this would be ~1 week). Some people have a hard time saying no, but I think it's part of one's professional responsibility to respond to emails. I don't think profs should be obligated to write a LOR for every student in the department, but they can at least say no when they cannot write one. However, I do think LOR writing is an obligation when you have supervised someone's research. I feel that agreeing to be student's supervisor is a commitment that includes professional development of that student through activities such as writing LORs. Even if the prof is in the wrong for not responding to the request at all, I really do not think that pestering them daily is a recommended path. What will it really accomplish? If you have to coerce a letter writer into writing an LOR, I am pretty sure it will not be a good LOR at all. I don't think the OP has anything to gain at all from doing this and it will probably make things worse. Some things might be worth doing even if it means a prof might "hate your guts"; after all, you can't please everyone. But this isn't one of them -- the only gain would be the satisfaction of overloading the prof's inbox, something the prof can easily get rid of with a spam filter. --- Finally, to the OP, I don't mean to pick on you especially since I don't know what you actually wrote to the prof but it could be possible that the request was not clearly worded enough. Some people have an annoying habit of only reading a few lines of each email and then skimming the rest, so if you try to discuss more than one topic in the email, they might not have seen everything. From your timeline, it seems like your Nov 10 request was only about the LOR so that was probably okay. But your Nov 26 email seems to include two topics in a single email, which I don't think is a good idea for professional correspondence. Remember also that the past weekend was a holiday long weekend.

Yes, this is what I think too. I don't think there is a "right" or "wrong" answer to "What do you want more?". For me, my life outside of school/work is pretty important, so I had a pretty narrow geographic criteria (among other criteria) for grad school applications and there will be similar criteria when I apply to post-docs (if I don't get a job in a location I like then I will probably do something else). It will have to be a really enticing position to convince me to move away from the North American west coast. Right now, I also think that getting a PhD might more a lot more work and less free time now in the short term, but I think it will ultimately provide me with what I want more in the long term, so I am in a PhD program. The day where this is no longer true is probably the day I will leave academia! But this is specific to everyone and just because I would ultimately put family and personal life ahead of my schoolwork does not mean that I think people who do the opposite are "doing it wrong". And it's not just a "binary" choice (to borrow words from previous posters) -- it would be very unhealthy in the long term for anyone to always choose to prioritize one aspect of their life, whether it's their own needs, their spouse, their work, their hobbies etc over all else. Happiness comes from a balance, I think, but the "balancing point" may be different for each and every person. Hence, I would say it's important to find out what balance works for you and then figure out how you can achieve that.

I don't think you're that weird of a case. As someone else way earlier in this thread mentioned, the population of people using GradCafe is NOT a fair sample of all the grad students in the world! I was in a similar case to you -- although I was not yet engaged at the end of undergrad, my then girlfriend was planning to move across Canada with me for me to do my MSc and we definitely discussed our plans for the future before making such a big commitment. The MSc program was two years long and we got married in the summer after the first year, which I think is the best time to do it because senior year is hectic and the final year of the MSc = lots of crazy thesis work. With all of the traveling home in the first year to visit family and plan the wedding (I probably took about 5 weeks off that year), I was a bit behind by the end of year one, but it was still possible to catch up! Also married graduate students aren't that rare, especially not in Canada. Here is a link to a survey of people doing post-docs in Canada: http://www.mitacs.ca/sites/default/files/caps-mitacs_postdoc_report-full_oct22013-final.pdf It shows that 69% of post-docs are in married or common-law relationships, presumably those formed during or before grad school and 35% of them have dependent children. Note that the survey respondents are current post-docs in Canada, which means that they might have completed grad school elsewhere but the survey also reports that 50% of respondents finished their highest academic degree in Canada. Canadian labour laws allow for pretty good maternity and parental leave though, for both graduate students and postdocs. The common maternity/parental leave time in Canada is 1 year, unpaid, but the new parent can claim unemployment insurance and the leave is job-protected, which means tenure clocks, thesis defense timelines etc. are all frozen for the duration of the leave.

I encountered something similar when applying to programs at UC Berkeley for Fall 2012 too. My research could lie in either the Astrophysics or the Earth & Planetary Science programs. I was not able to apply to both departments. On this page, https://gradadmit.berkeley.edu/apply/start.html, it says: IMPORTANT: Applicants may only apply to one single degree program or one concurrent degree program per admission term. You will not be able to change your program, after you selected it and created an application account. If you select a program in error, contact the respective department. Your individual case may be different and in fact, I think a lot of grad admission is case-by-case so your best bet is probably to wait and see what the departments you are applying to will say. In my case, it was not a huge problem to apply to only one program, because some programs allow their students to work with professors that are formally affiliated with a different department. Sometimes, profs may be affiliated with two departments (one full affiliation and one adjunct affiliation) which makes it easier for e.g. astronomy grad students who do planetary research to work with a professor that is in the earth sciences department. When I talked to profs at these schools, they basically said that since I'm allowed to work with people from outside the department (with approval) then which department I apply to should be decided based on which degree requirements (and thus training) I wish to follow and where I want to have an office etc. However this is only true assuming that the two labs you are interested in are actually related in some way, like in my case where my research interest is applying astronomy/physics knowledge to solve planetary science problems so I could potentially fit in both places. If you are interested in applying to two unrelated programs because you aren't sure what your interest is, then this may not be possible and you might have to make a choice at this point. But, again, this is really dependent on each case so wait and see what each of the programs say!