TakeruK

I don't think you need to make your research proposal "specific to helping Canada", although maybe this depends on the committee you're applying to. I won a CGS-M in 2010 and a CGS-D3 in 2012 (but I declined it to take a PGS-D to the US, so hopefully someone got my CGS, if it even works that way!) and both of my research proposals had absolutely no practical applications at all. However, I believe that it really helped that my research statement described a potential MSc/PhD project that was both interesting and well motivated to appeal to a general audience. It might also help that I was in the Physics/Astronomy committee, which is more "pure science" so there is generally less need to justify your work with a practical reasoning. Instead, it's much more important to justify how your work can help other scientists in your own field! You need to show that your research will have an impact, but it doesn't necessarily have to be practical or economical. I really think the evaluation criteria given by NSERC on their webpage (at PhD level, 50% research potential, 30% grades, 20% community service) is an accurate reflection of what NSERC values in selecting their fellowship winners. The research statement is probably what is necessary to distinguish other good "on paper" stats (e.g. grades, publications). In order to write my research statement, I contacted professors at schools I wanted to do my MSc or PhD in, and told them that I am applying to work with them and that I'm applying for NSERC funding, so would they mind taking 30mins to an hour to discuss a potential project with me. In one case, we had a series of meetings where the prof assigned me some reading, then I wrote a draft, then we went over the draft, and finally I submitted it. I think it's really helpful to be writing a proposal about an real/plausible PhD project, because faculty members are the ones that know what is really achievable and can anticipate difficulties so you can address them in your proposals. So I really recommend that people get a faculty member to at least read over what you wrote -- I've found some of the NSERC proposals I've read to be either aiming unrealistically high, or were too vague (no goals set, just the "let's do science and see what happens" attitude). Basically, they are investing up to $100,000 (and their reputation as a federal granting agency) on you so you need to instill confidence in them that you will be worth their money. It is basically a grant application and applying for money is much different than applying to schools or writing an academic paper.

In 2010, my undergrad school let me know the results before I got the official NSERC letter. I think I found out from my school around March 28 or something. Last year, I only got notification directly from NSERC via snail mail. The letter was post-marked (i.e. received by Canada Post) on April 3, if that helps anyone! I was in Ontario at that time, so I received it the next day.

Or for example, that "Intro to Congress" course at Harvard! http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/280721-harvard-students-withdraw-after-cheating-in-intro-to-congress-course It's also important to point out that science / research / academia in general relies on the public and private funding. These funds are provided with the expectation that we conduct our research honestly. Although cheating in a course is removed from, for example, completely making up data in a paper, they are both cases of academic dishonesty. I don't want to be using a "slippery slope" argument, but when there are stories in the news of researchers resigning an retracting papers due to academic dishonesty, and stories about massive cheating in courses (e.g. above), I think it hurts the credibility of the people doing honest work. So don't feel bad about reporting them and doing the right thing!

They changed the OGS allocation system this year so I can't say for certain. In the old system (pre 2011?), there was a quota of OGS set aside for international students. However, the number was pretty low (30 out of 3000 awarded?) so they are pretty hard to get. My international friends expressed their frustration that the Ontario government did not really want to fund international students, but the 1% quota was just "for show". But now that OGS are awarded completely internally, I don't know what the rules are! Since OGS are Canadian taxpayer funded, it makes sense to mostly award them to Canadians and the quota might vary due to different governments' policies too.

I'm a Canadian student but I had lots of contact (and are friends with) many non-Canadian grad students while I was a grad student in Canada. In our field (physics, but probably true for other physical sciences), grad students (domestic or international) do not get tuition waivers -- instead, we are paid a stipend that is meant to cover both tuition and living expenses and then from that we have to pay tuition. International students pay a higher tuition rate, usually 2 or 3 times the domestic tuition rate. At many schools, this difference in tuition is covered by a special award -- so that your total stipend will be higher, but your tuition costs will be higher too. Sometimes, the tuition rate goes up faster than the special international tuition award amount. This is because the Graduate School determines the cost of tuition, while the special tuition award might come from a departmental budget (that might be funded by profs pooling their grant money together). When this happens, my friends tell me that sometimes they end up paying a few hundred dollars more tuition than a domestic student would. Most schools will only accept students that they can fully fund. Fully funding an international student means an increased cost so this means it's a bit harder for an international student to get in. Finally, international student might have increased fees compared to domestic students too. Basic health care (doctors, etc.) is covered in Canada by a government plan. Depending on the province, it's either free or comes at a monthly cost that is scaled to your income (most grad students will pay nothing). However, this is a benefit for Canadian residents only -- international students will have to enroll in a separate Health Insurance Plan, which will cost money. I'm not sure how much but I know that some schools will also offer increased stipend/funding to pay for (or at least help pay for) this increased cost. Summary: Physical science programs in Canada fully fund all of their students -- domestic or international and they will only accept you if they can fund you. Your "take-home" pay should be about the same as a domestic student, but you might have to pay a little bit more in fees, especially those related to health care.

Accepting an offer does not legally obligate you to any program. It is NOT a contract that you will attend the school. At least in my case, none of the letters of offer I saw actually required me to attend the school. Instead, the offer is IF I attend the school, THEN my funding will be $X/year for Y years. You can drop out of school anytime you want, including before starting school! So, if you want to withdraw from an offer, all you have to do is tell Rutgers that you are no longer interested in attending and that's it. However, there's more than just legal liability to worry about. The CGS April 15 resolution (if it even applies here) is meant to prevent schools from "poaching" students from each other or otherwise pressuring students to choose too early. So they have the whole "asking for a release" mechanism to prevent confusion. If you have accepted Rutgers' offer, no other school would want to accept you until they got a "release" from Rutgers confirming that you are not going to attend Rutgers. This is to protect themselves from being accused of trying to steal you away, I think. If you get an offer from Tufts and it turns out that you want to attend, you should first tell Rutgers that you now want to decline your acceptance to Rutgers. They can't refuse -- the most you can lose is any deposit you might have made towards courses/registration (unlikely that you would have had to make a deposit this early though). Hopefully, they will cooperate and write you a release letter (it should be automatic anyways). The department there will probably be unhappy that you are backing out of their program, but you have to do what's best for you. They will understand and it will probably not affect you in the future if you handle the situation properly. At worst, they might remember this if you apply for post-docs or other positions at Rutgers, but that could be over 5 years away! If they don't grant you a release (or take a really long time to), you should probably just go ahead and accept Tufts' offer anyways -- they can't make you come to Rutgers. But, you should probably let Tufts know what's going on though -- you don't want them to accuse you of wrongdoing and maybe they could even help you.

I think the type of thing that you present at a conference really depends on each individual conference and also your field. Usually, every conference will have a "call for submissions/papers/abstracts" that detail what they are looking for. What follows is mostly relevant to my field (and I think most of the physical sciences). In my field, a "contributed talk" (i.e. a presentation where you submit your abstract and hope they pick you to give a talk) usually involves original research. It doesn't have to be completely brand new. At many annual meetings, grad students give annual updates on what they've done (usually they would try to single out one accomplishment they made that year) so if you are familiar with their work, you will get to see progress and/or a new angle of their project each year. However, people generally go to contributed talks expecting to learn something new. If all you have done is put together a lot of research done by other people, that usually will not be accepted in most conferences. You don't have to use data to present at a conference. There are theoretical papers as well. Of course, no one really cares about a theory if it doesn't agree with data/observations, so you would want to show how your theory/calculations are consistent with real life (but you don't have to design an experiment and collect the data yourself!). It sounds like the kind of talk you want to give is a "review talk", which, like others above have said, are usually special invited talk slots. While a contributed talk might be in a parallel session and be something like 10-12 minutes long, an invited review talk might be the only event going on at that time and could be 45-60 minutes long. When the conference is planned, the organizers typically discuss who they would like to ask to come for review talks and invite them personally. These speakers are usually very distinguished in their field! I have never seen a graduate student give a review talk like this before! Overall, at our stage, the main idea is that our conference talk has to be both a showcase of our own research work (whether it's theory or processing data) and it should present something new. A research review paper is great for coursework, but generally not interesting to the rest of the scientific community.

I agree that you did the right thing. Sometimes, when cases like this happen, the plagiarizers try to justify their actions by claiming that everyone else is doing it too. The best way to deter plagiarism, I think, is to educate students on what is appropriate and by following through with all violations and make it not worth the risk!

Many schools will require you to formally accept or decline the offer. Some schools have an online form you fill out. My current school required me to sign a piece of paper, scan it, and email it back to them. However, it's also a good idea to email the profs (and maybe grad students) you've talked to and let them know you will be coming!

I also agree that it depends on your interaction with the profs there. In response to the posts about the "exit surveys" that you fill out after accepting/declining a school, I really hope those are made anonymous! So, I don't think you can expect your department/profs to know where you ended up going instead if you answered there! In my case, I did say which program I ended up going to because it was something that came up when we had one-on-one interviews during the visit days. I think my field is pretty open about where else we've been accepted/hoping to get into since that's one of the most common topics we talked about during the visits! I also think it's a good idea to say where you're going because it will help the profs remember you and recognize you in future work. Just be careful to not say something like "I'm going to School X because it's way better than your school", obviously! I felt safe using phrases like "we decided that School X was the best fit for us" since it's vague enough that you aren't saying anything specific and it's personal enough that they can't really argue with what's the best fit for you!

I think you should okay with taking time off to get married! During my MSc, I took about 10 days off for my wedding (it was on the other side of the country, in our hometown, where most of our family was from). Earlier in the same year, I took a total of 20 days off to do wedding related stuff (although I combined this with trips home during the holidays). All of this was possible because the time off was either during the winter exam period, the spring exam period, or the summer. However, for the honeymoon, I took a week off right in the middle of October (I combined it with a conference trip the week before). That was harder to schedule since I was TA-ing, but it was Canadian Thanksgiving week so my prof agreed to run the lab course by himself that week (we are usually both there) in exchange for me adding extra office / lab help hours later that term when students worked on their projects. After that though, I didn't really take any more time off (other than conference/work related travel) until I graduated! Overall, if you only count "work days", then I probably took about 20-something days off during the first 13 months of my Masters, but it was also the only work-days I took off during the 2 year program. Most schools usually say that grad students are allowed 10 "vacation days" (i.e. 2 weeks) per year in addition to the university holidays. They usually say something like it's up to the student and advisor to schedule them around their work, but if you count holidays, then there should be about 20 vacation days per year. If you need to take some time off for personal things, then you can always make up for it by working on a weekend or a holiday! I think most profs will understand if you talk about it early enough!

A lot of profs I know at Canadian schools have US PhDs (some are American, while some are Canadians that go to the US for a PhD). In Physics/Astronomy anyways, you definitely still need post-docs! Post-docs are a part of your path to a tenured position, not a necessity that only exists in the US. It's actually somewhat rare to find a Physics/Astro prof at a Canadian university that did his/her BS, MS, PhD, and all post-docs in Canada.

Sometimes if you email a school that is expected to make their decision later and let them know that you have an offer from another school, they might expedite your application process. When I was applying to MSc, one school made an offer in early Feb (and gave me 3 weeks to respond) while another school's application deadline was not until March! I asked the first school for a little bit more time and explained to the second school that the first school is expecting a decision from me. The second school ended up making a decision on my application before its application deadline had passed! So, communication can help make the deadlines easier for everyone!

I don't understand why you think graduate schools are against students taking leaves of absences. I know plenty of students who have done so, and also some faculty members too and sure it might be a little extra work to get back in the swing of things, but it's better to allow a productive person to take the time they need off, do whatever they have to do, and return motivated and ready to work. Most people on LOA do not get paid, so it's not a huge drain on school resources. My old grad school allowed PhD students to take a year's worth of LOA for each child and the maternity/parental leave benefit was allowed to be used twice per degree.

At both schools I've graduated from, when you apply for graduation, they always say something like they will be using the legal name you used when you were admitted to the school, and if you would like to have something else, you need to bring papers to the registrar's office to get that name changed. In my home province, spouses are entitled to assume/use their spouse's last name without a legal name change, so a marriage certificate is enough to convince the registrar to change your name to your married one (or back to your unmarried last name). I suppose you could call the assumed last name another "legal name", and then a married person (in my home province) technically has two legal names they can use as they please. As for publishing, there's no identity verification for your name. You can publish under whatever name you want -- but if you submit a paper as I. R. Superman or something, they might try to do an identity check. However, I suspect that as long as you can get your school department's directory to list you as the name you want to publish under / be known as, then that will probably be enough for journals to verify that I. R. Superman is indeed affiliated with Metropolis University. I say this because on papers where I am a co-author, there was exactly zero correspondence between the journal and me. It's up to me to ensure that our first author spelled my name correctly etc.

While I would agree that I personally would not want a 2-hour commute each way if I was going to be a new parent, I don't think it's fair to judge the OP so harshly on this fact. It sounds like they have thought it through, which is why the long commute is #1 on the con list. I think it's unfair to assume that the OP will be a bad parent. There are many ways to make it work -- the husband might work closer and/or work at home. The OP doesn't necessarily have to work / come to school every day after the first 2 years. They could only come in for meetings with professors or TAing -- if they stay for a few hours and do readings during the commute, then they can still get almost 6-8 hours of work done in a day. Again, I probably will not choose this if I was in the OP's shoes, and it's one thing to point out the increased complication of raising a small child with a long commute -- I especially agree with Queen of Kale's point about 2 hours being a really long way away if there's an emergency (hopefully the spouse is closer to home!). However, it's another thing to imply that the OP is going to be a poor parent because they aren't going to be home with the children. It's not the 1950s anymore, spouses can take turns being at home, or maybe they have family members nearby etc. To the OP: can you check with your school and fellowships for the Leave of Absence rules? The fellowships I've encountered usually allow you to suspend a fellowship (you won't get the money but you can still resume it without penalty later) for medical reasons (including childbirth and raising a child). Sometimes fellowships will even continue to pay you during your year off (but then the fellowship will run out a year early). We are planning to start a family at some point during my PhD too, so this was a big factor in making a decision! Personally, I would choose the second option because it seems more flexible and you will have a lot more freedom. The lower pay doesn't sound like it would be as big of a problem. It does sound like the first choice might be a better fit for your career goals, and maybe you can get what you want with a Masters. I don't know enough about your field to give more advice than that though. Also, I know a grad student who is recently a mother and she has a 2 hour commute to school. She did wait until courses were finished before having a baby though. She took a year leave of absence (standard in Canada) and now only commutes to work whenever she has to meet with her advisor. The rest of the time, she works from home and/or Skypes with her collaborators! It did help that she was on fellowship and did not have to TA though. Good luck!

I don't think it's a huge problem if you have a common name. When I'm looking for an academic with a very common name, I usually do a search like "Kate Smith + school + discipline". That usually gets me to their academic/research webpage, if they have one. Then, if I want to find a paper they did, or find out what they have written, I look for this on the website. It's much easier to do this than to search through databases such as Google Scholar because it's hard to tell which K Smith is you. So, I would recommend creating your own webpage with a list of all of your publications. It would be super duper helpful if you regularly updated it and provided DOI links to all of your papers so that people can go to the journal website directly and download them. I think most people nowadays are technologically savvy enough to understand how to find a certain person online, even one with a common name. Other tips to help identify yourself as the K. Smith they are looking for is to have a clear photo of yourself on your webpage and maybe even a short bio with your hobbies and interests. Assuming that you will talk about these things if you meet someone at a conference and then they later try to look you up, hopefully the photo and personal info will help them confirm they did indeed have found the right person. Also, I would include your email on your webpage and usually the corresponding author has their email published with the paper, so if someone did a search by email address, they would be able to find you too. I don't think it's that bad to have a common name since it's unlikely that people will just randomly try to look you up. They will usually have some starting point that will help them confirm your identity! For example, they might have met you at a conference, or maybe they have just read an interesting paper you wrote and want to find out more about you. So, just make sure that there is a "path" for them to find you for most common starting points. Even if you are not the corresponding author, your name would be listed with an affiliation. If it's an old school, try to get the old department to allow you to maintain a webpage with them that redirects users to your new school!

Ah okay, this clears things up! I know what you mean by wanting to know exactly where the money is coming from -- in Canada, it's very clear, RAs and TAs are paid hourly rates so we are told we are expected to work X hours for $Y payment. Also, I understand the appeal for paid maternity/parental leave for grad students -- my old school in Canada offers 52 weeks of unpaid maternity leave with potential to claim Employment Insurance benefits if you had accumulated enough work hours. It looks like in the US, the standard is a measly 12 weeks off, unpaid! My spouse and I are also planning on children while I'm a student but unfortunately, a benefit like that wasn't available at any of my choices. My school does have a stipend supplement for childcare though, so that's better than nothing. Are you saying that School B will pay you better than $29k/year for sure after the first year? If so, and if it's a significant amount more -- like if your stipend is going to be something awesome like $40k/year, then I would now lean towards School B so long as you can get the promise for the higher funding in writing. At the visit, you can probably get a sense of how likely you'll get a TAship this July at School B -- talk to the students, maybe some of them have gone your path in the past, and/or talk to the administrators about success rate of TA placement etc. But since it doesn't sound like you have actual numbers from School B, and School A already has a pretty high total funding package, unless School B is super awesome, the difference between the two schools will probably be pretty small. So it might come down to benefits like maternity leave and proximity to grandparents as well as how much you like the department during the visits more than actual stipend values!

My experience in Vancouver is that the people there (especially students) are generally more vegetarian / wholesome food friendly than many other places I've been to. It would also be a lot cheaper to not eat meat I think it's pretty easy to find other non-meat eaters in the city and due to the higher population, it might be easier to find vegetarian friendly restaurants, grocery stores, etc.

I'm not super sure what is your funding situation at B is like. Are you saying that your supervisor there cannot cover your tuition for the first year but she can for future years? Personally, I would probably go with A if everything else is roughly equal and it only came down to funding. With School A, you have an exact amount of funding expected for your first and subsequent years. Pretty good funding levels too, even if it's in a high cost of living area. But the main reason I'd choose A is that you are secure in knowing your funding is guaranteed and you can TA within your own department. Having to TA for multiple years is the norm (although it depends on what the load is). At School B, it sounds like you have a nightmare situation where you have to coordinate between multiple departments to get your funding. I would also be concerned about the lack of a quoted support level that you can hold them to. It doesn't sound like you will be guaranteed TA funding at B (likely the other department would prioritize filling TA spots from their own students first) so you might have to worry about funding every year at B. You also say that subsequent years at A will be funded at a higher level than B. Since you have savings, I would consider the total overall value of a funding package (spread over all the years) since having a few thousand more in the first year isn't going to make a huge difference (even if you invest it!)

When I see degrees on CV, it's something like PhD, 2016, Planetary Science, University of X BS, 2011, History, University of X So, I think it would be clear that you were in different programs even if you stayed at the same school.

I agree with others that this isn't a good way to determine which schools to apply to. But I also want to point out that many schools will just want unofficial transcripts, not official ones, so you don't have to worry about the hassle of ordering one (and paying for it)! Sometimes they will accept a screenshot from your online grades viewing system, or just order a transcript for yourself, open it, and scan it. Some schools even give you online access to transcripts with the words "UNOFFICIAL" all over them.

Maybe your advisor isn't expecting you to do this all by yourself. I would think that this is a process that an advisor would normally guide his/her student through, instead of just saying "go get the data, and then we'll talk". In the end, you may be the one personally responsible if your work violates protocols so it's probably safer to ask for more guidance from your advisor or maybe your university has a help desk / help line for people wanting to gather human research data.

I enjoy almost everything I do in grad school. Except maybe not some of the pointless aspects of some classes, but really overall, I'm happy to be learning it. I think people complain about it because firstly, humans like to complain. But seriously, it's not that we don't like what we do, it's because we are working very hard with not much guaranteed rewards. Grad students work 50-60 hours per week (some even more) for under $30k/year, usually. This goes on for 5-6, or even more, years, and there is a lot of stress in the job as well. Not to say that other jobs aren't as stressful, but for example, there are other jobs that easily pay double the salary of a grad student, for only 35-40 hours per week, and when you go home, you don't have any work left! So I don't think it's that we don't like our work, but generally, the quality of life as a grad student isn't as good as someone with a "real job". When I see what my non-grad school friends are doing, I have to admit sometimes I am a little jealous. But I view grad school as a training phase to get through, rather than the dream (i.e. most people I know don't think "Yes!! I am finally in grad school!" but instead, they are thinking "Yes! I made it to the next stage of my career/life goal! Let's get through this!"). However, all that negatives aside, there are huge amounts of positives that outweigh it (or I wouldn't be here in grad school)! My number one reason for going to grad school is to increase my ability to get a job that I will enjoy. Sure, that job might have longer hours and won't pay that well compared to how much effort one needs to put in to get the job, but I don't want to spend the rest of my life hating the 40 hours of week I work and only looking forward to evenings and weekends. The second reason is for the ability to travel. I love travelling, seeing new places, meeting new people, and academia gives me tons of opportunity to do that. When I was growing up, two of the places I wanted to see most in the world were Rome and Paris. Our family thought about a family vacation over there once but when we saw the cost of flights, we knew that it wasn't going to ever happen. But, in 2011, I went to a conference in France and was able to include sightseeing in Paris as a part of it! Grad school gives me the opportunity to have experiences that are not possible any other way. This is also the reason why I am pursuing a PhD instead of just a MSc (in Canada, MSc is what's required to teach at colleges) because lecturers don't get to travel but researchers do! It's also a reason why I went into astronomy-related fields -- observers travel to exotic places and the theorists, being jealous of observers, often plan their conferences in tropical/exotic places too! The third reason is personal freedom and flexibility. I like being able to set my own schedule and to some extent, make decisions in my work. I would not be as happy with a strict 10 days holiday that have to be booked in some strict protocol and a supervisor that tells me exactly what to do all the time. I know this is not true for all jobs, and that academics are still constrained by funding, grants etc, but having worked in "blue collar" jobs before, I know I definitely prefer the freedom of an academic. Finally, the last reason is that I enjoy science and the process of research! Although this appears last on my list, it doesn't mean I don't like academia at all. But if I had to prioritize what I was looking for when choosing an ideal job, I wouldn't mind a job that doesn't involve science or research if it fit the other 3 desires! Anyways, I like grad school because I am surrounded by people with similar scientific interests and motivations. I enjoy the sense of family with my cohort, that we are all doing this together and I know I can count on their support. I also like the sense of community in my field -- conferences are like mini-reunions with people you haven't seen in awhile. You also quickly build up an entire network of people whose couch you can crash on all over the world!

I think that's fine too. Most schools expect to get a pile of these so they aren't going to read it too carefully -- they'll just be happy get a response! If you are worried about curtness, you could add a fluff sentence about how you would like to meet again in the future or something. I'd say to keep decline emails to a max of 2-3 sentences!