TakeruK

It should be okay. Most profs will have electronic copies of their old letters and like your SOPs, they will just copy-paste the letter, change the name of the school and maybe fix up a paragraph to tailor it to the specific school!

It really depends on the school/department. At my current department, every student is paid exactly the same stipend. If you have any external money, then the internal sources are decreased so that you end up with the same overall amount. The only way to get a larger overall stipend is to get an external award that pays ALL of your tuition, fees, and a stipend greater than the department's stipend amount. Some other departments that I had visited/talked to said vague things about potentially increasing your stipend if you bring in external money. But all they could really promise is that you won't get LESS than what you would have got without any award. Some schools also have stipend caps as well. The way my school put it in perspective to me is that the actual cost of a graduate student to the department/university is much larger than the amount we see on our stipend cheques. There are a lot of fees/overhead that we don't see. I think the real cost of a grad student is somewhere between 3 to 4 times our stipends, depending on our international/domestic status and the school's overhead fees. There are also overheads in the grants that the profs have to get in order to pay for grad students. So an award that is even as high as $20,000 to $30,000 per year does not necessarily make a sizeable impact in the overall cost of a grad student (which I estimate, at my school, to be about $100,000 per year). It's worth it to ask though! At any rate, most schools expect you to tell them about any external award, so you can just ask about how this may or may not change your stipend when you let them know about your award.

I think a "half-life" of one year is a bit short -- I would probably think it's more like 2-3 years. In addition, Masters programs are usually 2 years and usually you only work with one person. Given that you would want at least 3 LORs in most cases, it's not realistic to expect to get all 3 from a Masters program. Last year, I was in a MSc program and applying to PhD programs. I got 2 LORs from undergrad supervisors, one from working with him in 2008 and another from my honours thesis in 2009-2010. My third LOR was from my Masters supervisor.

What stage are you at right now? If you are still applying, I agree with uromastyx, and that they probably won't tell you and that it will also look bad. But, if you are already admitted, then it's probably okay for them to know. I'm not really sure why you want to know though -- the only reason I can think of is that you want to know for an upcoming visit but even so, I don't know why that would make a difference. However, for the sake of argument, if you really wanted to know, I think it's a legitimate request if you are already admitted to the program. You might be able to find it out without asking directly if you ask for copies of previous departmental meeting minutes. If the meetings are open to graduate students (not all of them are), then you should be able to get a copy of previous minutes (just like if you are renting/buying a home in a strata, you can get some past minutes) to help you make your decisions. I'm not saying that you "should" in the sense that you are entitled to them, but it's a legitimate request and whether you succeed or not would depend on departmental policy. Usually, committees are decided early on in the year so the minutes from those meetings might tell you who is on the committee. In my former grad school, department meeting minutes, committee membership rosters, and teaching assignments (for faculty and TAs) have all been emailed to the entire department or are even sometimes available on the website. So you might also be able to get the information by searching or asking current grad students. I think that while the internal discussions of the admissions committee should be confidential, its membership should not. However, this is only for argument's sake. In practice, I would think asking about this will raise more eyebrows than it might be worth so it probably would not help you very much.

Asking the tough questions to grad students is a useful thing to do in person. If you are someone I don't know, I would not be so comfortable saying everything I really thought in writing. I would probably only stick to facts that I don't mind being traced back to me (for example, I might say "Course X is not very useful to a student in Y", or "The funding level here is really low", or "The department accepted way more students than they have funding for", or "I find the Journal Clubs meetings very poorly run and thus boring" -- not that any of these are necessarily true about my current programs, but just the level of honesty you could expect from a "cold call" email). I'm okay with saying these things to a "cold-emailer" because the statements are either true facts or opinions I have already shared with the department. But if you sat down and talked to me during the visit days, I would probably tell you more information, like, "Prof. X has been poached by University Y and is likely moving, although it has not been announced officially yet", or "Prof. X is not fun to work for", or "I feel that the Profs in Dept. Y do not get along very well", etc.. As for questions to ask the department / profs, I asked: 1.[To the dept head] What are the department's plans for the future? Do you see this department expanding and hiring more faculty? If so, will you be diversifying the research interests or continue to have the same focus? 2. [To a prof of interest] What are your plans for your research group? Are you planning on hiring more graduate students or staff and expanding research in more directions? 3. [To a prof] What are your sources of funding? 4. Many people have suggested asking about placement rate in academia, but you should also ask if they know about how their graduates fare outside of academia. When I asked this to one prof, I was surprised to hear him say that he has only had one graduate leave academia and that he was "very disappointed" and that he felt his time training that student was "wasted". Kind of a red flag there, for me! 5. When asking about graduation rates / quals passing rate, it's very important to be precise in the way you ask it, I think! Many schools I visited said numbers like "all" or "95%" or other very high numbers of their students pass the quals and eventually graduate. Then comes the qualifier: they mention these numbers are for people who chose to finish. Or, they might give very low failure rates (e.g. in the last 10 years, only 2 students have been asked to leave). Few schools actually tell you how many people chose to leave and they make it sound like the student really did want to leave. However, every student I knew that left grad school "chose" to leave in the sense that they were not directly forced to, but they left because of very poor dissertation support, or other circumstances caused by the school or department. Quals is an especially common time for people to leave -- most schools allow a "re-take" but sometimes they make it very obvious after failing the first one that they don't think you should continue so the student "drops out" even though it should count as a student that the department failed.

My school issues each of us a letter a few weeks ago that explained how much we got paid and whether the money was taxable. My internal fellowship was taxable, the letter said "You were paid $X and you provided no services" and my monthly paycheques had tax deductions (I'll get it all back this year though since I was only a US grad student for 3 months in the 2012 tax year). The letter also says that you can claim tax credits for "expenses related to COURSES that you can provide evidence for". So I guess if you had bought textbooks and kept all the receipts properly, you can claim them!

I haven't gone to a writing centre myself but my wife is a pretty great copyeditor My most common mistake is subject-verb agreement! I am still grateful that she actually agreed to read my entire MSc thesis for errors before final submission! My current school has a free copyediting service for our theses (when I finally get there) though. We can even sign an agreement and they'll make the minor spelling, grammar, and formatting changes for us! My worst "editing mistake" story is when I showed my MSc supervisor the first draft of my theory chapter. In the very first equation, on the first page, I made a mistake in writing out Newton's Law of Gravity. It's literally the first thing I learned in Physics 101 and it's the fundamental equation behind all of my simulations. Super embarrassing !!

Sorry if I wasn't clear originally, what you said is what I meant -- the department wants you to win the fellowship because it means they don't have to use (as much) of their own money. They can then use this money on other things. TAs are usually paid out of the department's budget, so "relief from TA duties" = savings for them (realistically, it means money they can use on another grad student). When I said "the department has done everything they could to get you money", I didn't mean that they exhausted their budget. I just meant that the decision for the fellowship is out of the department's hands now (and they've "fought" for you as best they could). So, accepting the admission offer now won't "hurt" you in terms of funding because the department isn't going to choose to reject you for this fellowship since you already said yes. This is a good point! I think it would be very bad for a department to do this though -- students can easily compare stipend packages and they won't be happy if people are paid unequally without actually earning fellowships etc. Not to say that this doesn't happen, and a department can easily "justify" the difference by making up a small fellowship but at every school I've been a part of, there are standardised and published funding levels. My offer letters generally gave a list of "you will get X funding if you receive Y awards" and there was a paragraph that described all of the standardised levels of funding (as well as TA commitment etc.). To the OP: I think knowing that there are indeed standardised levels of funding would lower any "risk" of hurting yourself with an early acceptance.

I don't think facial hair is going to determine whether or not you get admission. You would want to look clean, but beards and cleanliness are obviously not mutually exclusive. I would even say braiding or beading it, should you choose to do that, would be perfectly fine. Unless you weave an offensive beaded message in your beard.....

Yes, it's usually PhD programs that reimburse visitors, but some other programs will do it too. I know most of my friends in professional programs had to pay for their own flights to interview at a ton of schools, etc.

If you are certain you will go (and that you don't want to go anywhere else) then there's no reason to wait further. Chances are, when a department "nominates" you for an extra fellowship, it generally means that they have already done everything they can to help you get the money. I'm assuming this is a fellowship awarded by the University or even an external agency. So, it's better for the department if you get it -- since part of your stipend will be coming from the University then, instead of their own budget!

I agree with the first sentence, but not the second. If you know that one school is not going to be a good fit for you, then don't hold out until April 15th. Once you feel really sure that you want to withdraw and application or decline an offer, maybe sleep on it for a day and then send that declining/withdrawing email. Even if you know that you're not "taking up a waitlist spot" (some schools don't do waitlists at all), I think it's unprofessional to hold onto an option simply because you can. Just my opinion though.

I do not know of this scandal other than what was just posted in this thread. It's definitely a personal decision whether or not one would consider these points in making a decision, and I'd encourage people to do what feels right to them. To me, I don't think that would affect my decisions at all. I feel that there is a huge change from being a grad student and an undergrad student. At both of my grad schools, I chose to be mostly disconnected from the rest of the campus. The only thing that really mattered was things happening in my department and in my building. I couldn't care less that the entire Queen's Music program was suspended for a year (perhaps more) due to very scandalous things happening in the band. Well, that's not true, I felt that what happened was very wrong and I feel very bad for all the victims. But even though the story made national headlines, I really doubt that scandal will make people think any less of the degree I ended up getting. For example, there was the scandal at MIT with an admissions officer (I think?) and that Political Science class at Harvard. When I meet people from these schools, I don't even connect these events with the particular people I meet. I know it's really unlikely that the person I just met is actually involved in the scandal. From the other point of view, I was sad that Queen's Music had a bad scandal. But I did not feel responsible or connected to the action in any way. The only connection I felt to the event was that we were both students at the same school. But it's the same if something horrible happened involving another person living in the same city as me -- e.g. the "Stanley Cup Riots" in Vancouver, BC. I felt sad that people destroyed my hometown but when I meet people from other places, as far as I know, people don't think "oh that guy is from that rioting city" and I don't feel the need to apologize on behalf of my city or anything like that. So, if the scandal I heard was about my actual department and/or involved things that would directly impact me, then I would factor that into my considerations. But an entire school is a huge organization. As a grad student, I have very little interaction with the rest of the school (probably the only time I even interact with people outside of my department are when I'm at campus-wide graduate student events or meetings etc.) In addition, I think the reputation of your particular program/department is far more important than the reputation of the school. U of X might have a terrible reputation overall but if Dept. Y there is one of the best in the nation, then it's still a good place to go (and the only thing people at conferences / hiring committees will really care about).

At my last school, in Canada, PhD students are allowed to take 1 entire year off for paternity leave without any penalty (i.e. no loss of status, extra time added to deadlines for exams etc.). It's unpaid (but as selecttext said, people with fellowships can have access to other benefits) but the year off does NOT count against a year of guaranteed funding. It's basically like hitting the pause button on your grad school life and when you come back, everything should be exactly the same. In addition, you can do this twice during your grad school career. In general, Canadian laws require employers to allow their employees to have 1 entire year of protected paternity leave (i.e. you can return to exactly the job you had before you took leave) so it's natural for schools to extend this to students. Employment Insurance is often used to supplement income during leave. This also means unless your supervisor can show that you being missing for a year will completely undermine the project, they really should allow you to take the year off and pick it up later.

Sadie_Bea, you should also check the rules and regulations at both the School of Graduate Studies (or whatever it's called at UMN) as well as your Department. The offer letter isn't the only thing that you're bound to while a student/employee at a school.

Also, you can choose to run Skype as "voice only" (i.e. turn off video) if you don't want to show that you're in a really public place (it might be distracting) or if you're worried about the bandwidth/speed. It should be fine since not everyone has a webcam! Edit: I have had all of my Skype interviews during business hours so I was at school. What I did was use my laptop (or borrow someone's laptop) and find an empty classroom or unused conference room and did it there. Can you book a conference room at your school/work? I think having a quiet background can help with a slow/crappy internet.

By the way, although it is moot here, the April 15th rule only applies to financial offers anyways, not simply offers of admissions. I can understand why profs ask students these unsavoury questions. It might be the case where that prof has two students that they are interested but after negotiation with the admissions committee, they can only offer admission to one of the students, or that the prof only carries enough weight to "fight for" one of the two students. At the same time, they want to make sure they actually do get a student, so they don't want to fight for student A and have it turn out that A already wants to go somewhere else (while B would have been happy to go their school but ultimately get rejected). So, they send out these "feeler" emails. I think it's a little unsavoury, but they might make it vague enough or cause a false impression on students and to make students think/feel like they need to decide right away. It might prod a student who has already been accepted to their more preferred school(s) to realise "well, this school is 5th on the list of all the schools I've already been accepted so I probably won't go here if they are asking me to reply right now" and then the prof would be happy to know that and fight for the student who might actually attend. But if students are unsure about where to go, they would say something like all the above people have suggested and that would obviously be allowed -- they just wanted to apply a bit of pressure to filter out the ones who have already decided elsewhere. I think a more honest way to do this would be more like "Dear Student A, are you still interested in our school?" etc. but I think these days, most students want to keep options open to them as long as possible (sometimes unnecessarily long) so they will always answer "yes" even though it might not be true. So I think it's really the responsibility of applicants to be honest, responsible and timely in making their decisions and informing all of the schools as well as the responsibility of schools to not do "unsavoury" things to cause applicants to need to feel guarded and unable to act honesty in fear of harming themselves. Of course, I'm not saying people should rush and decide right away, but I know a lot of students who will procrastinate since the wording usually make it sounds like it's not "due" until April 15th, but really, it's in the best interest of everyone (all students nationwide and schools) if people decided whenever they are 100% certain (which might be as late as April 15th or later, for some people).

Even if schools have specific dates for visits, you can always ask them to reschedule so that you can make all the visits within one week and combine your reimbursements. It might not be possible to reschedule, but worth a try. However, keep some things in mind: 1. Some schools have weird/tricky rules about the location of the expense for reimbursement. e.g. if you flew from Home to X to Y to Z then home, school Z might not be able to reimburse any travel activity happening at X and Y. So once you know your travel plan, you should definitely work with the admin staff at all the schools to make sure there is a clear plan to cover expenses. In my experience, they are very good at doing this! 2. A lot of schools in the US will take 1-2 weeks off in March for Spring break and usually visits don't happen during the break. Sometimes visit days are right before or right after the break, so check these schedules to make sure you don't end up at a school during their break!

I agree that you should expect this clause everywhere from every grad school for the reasons that Usmivka said. If you have a fellowship (if it's a "real" fellowship, instead of just standard internal funding with a fancy name) then you probably do not need the extra money in order to make ends meet. So if you are well funded, it is probably much less stressful on your life to not have to worry about working 10-15 hours per week (and hiding it too) on top of the large amount of hours required in most PhD programs. But it sounds like you might want to keep this job for academic reasons? If so, I think it's probably a good idea to talk about this with the department. I think if you really want the job, maybe you can negotiate some compromise. For example, maybe you can "decline" the fellowship (in some way that allows you to keep the prestige) and/or reduce the amount of funding provided by your grad school in exchange for working the other job. If it's a teaching job, maybe you can get them to waive your TA requirement (and remove whatever funding comes with it) so that you teach at the other University instead. If it's a research job and you're in a field where students normally RA for someone other than their thesis advisor to get funding, maybe you can replace your RA with the other job instead. I'm just saying suggestions that come to mind but whether or not any of it is viable depends on the funding structure of your program. The only way to do this properly is to talk to the department. This is assuming that you want to keep everything on the books. And I think you should keep it on the books if your main goal for the keeping the job is academic reasons -- you would want to be able to talk about your experience in your CV, when applying to other jobs later on etc. Personally, I wouldn't think it's worth it to work on a side if I'm in an adequately funded PhD program but I do think that "no outside work" rules/laws should instead stipulate a minimum amount of hours you're required to spend on school stuff and leave the remaining hours to do as you see fit. So personally, I wouldn't think it's unethical if someone worked purely outside of their normal PhD working hours (e.g. teaching a night class at a community college) even if the rules/laws say otherwise. The exceptions I can think of are extra fellowships that don't make up your normal funding package and you chose to apply for/accept (e.g. NSF-like grants) and rules that prevent outside work due to a conflict of interest. That said, while it might not be unethical, in my own opinion only, for someone in your shoes to take an outside job, I also don't think it's wise / worth all the energy and effort. If you really want to earn a little bit of extra cash (I know that some "fellowship" level funding might be pretty low) then I think the easiest way to earn extra money as a grad student "off the books" is private tutoring! It probably pays more, per hour, than most side jobs that one can find and you can set your own hours.

Here are my thoughts, but everyone has different styles and obviously there are a lot of ways to make a good presentation. I think my style is one of these ways, but you can read it and judge for yourself. I would even say that 1 slide per minute is the fastest that you want to go -- don't be afraid to go slower (i.e. spend more than a minute on some slides). Remember that figures usually require extra time for the audience to digest (read the axes, look at all the lines/points, contemplate the relationship presented). From your original suggested outline, I would say with only 10 minutes, you want to spend more time on your own work (as others have suggested). Remember that a presentation does not have to tell people everything about your project. Just pick maybe 1 to 3 things you want people to walk away knowing and then structure your slides to lead up to these things. With your current suggested timeline, you are spending 4 minutes on introductory stuff. Things like "ideas in the field" or "theories we're looking at" can take up a lot of time and also divert the audience's attention (that is, they might end up asking questions about those things instead of your actual work). I would spend only 2 minutes total doing introductory things and only introduce the theory you need to explain your method or results later on. I would stick to things that motivated the project -- i.e. why should we care about your project? I really don't think it's possible to cover "many different" theories in just 2 minutes. For your methods, I think a common mistake is to fully explain every detail, as if you want the audience to be able to repeat what you did. Unless your method is the innovation, I would mainly gloss over the details and just talk about important steps (especially anything that is different from "normal" or any key steps/assumptions that can affect your results). They can always ask questions if they care about e.g. the exact parameters of your algorithm/software/experiment. However, this might not apply if this is for example, a presentation for a lab course or a presentation of your senior project, for evaluation. If it's a "conference-like" presentation, then the results are usually the most important part (and most people would already be familiar with common methods anyways). This should hopefully leave at least 5 minutes for you to talk about your results and their significance / comparison to others. But remember, you only really want to impress on the audience a small number of take-home messages so don't talk about everything. Just pick out the very most important ideas for this short 10 minute talk! Finally, practicing is important! I would also run through the slides with my coworkers/supervisor if possible. Ideally, I would find friends who would be presenting at the same conference and practice with them beforehand. Test your colour choices, font sizes, aspect ratio, contrast, etc. on projectors too!

I agree with this -- it's important that people, especially e.g. high school seniors about to decide what to do in college / career, have the right expectations for their goal career. Again, I'm not sure what the US high school career planning curriculum is like, but I had lots of resources about this in Grades 11 and 12. There are career databases that list general careers, a Government of Canada forecast for how much in demand this job would be in the future, expected salary ranges, the skills/education required etc. Usually schools get their students to research a career and do a project on it and/or do exercises that could give a student an idea of what kind of career they would enjoy. I agree that we are also mostly idealized about the idea of studying for the sake of studying rather than finding a job. Personally, I am in grad school because I want to have a good job doing something I like (e.g. science!) afterwards. I do love my research but I'm not doing this just because I want to contribute to the field or whatever. I am mostly doing this because currently, it seems to be the best path for me to have a decent career doing something I enjoy. However, I don't think the bill asking for every single college to list their graduates' salary ranges so that a student can use that information to decide between schools is very helpful. I think it is very helpful for a student to see that Job A's general salary is $X/year, Job B is $Y/year etc. and that if one goes to college, they can make $X/year after 4 years of school, or if they go directly in the work force, they could make $Y/year right away, or if they go to a trade school, then it's $Z/year after 1-2 years of school etc. etc. That's all great and I really appreciated having all of that information when I was in high school. But information like University of X BSc grads make $37k/year vs. University of Y BSc grads making $40k/year? I don't think that is particularly helpful. Maybe most of U of Y grads stay in City Y, which has a higher cost of living. There are just too many unmentioned factors that go into these grand/generalised averages that it would be harmful, in my opinion, to suggest that students should use them to decide on which college to attend. I agree that it's really tricky to decide who gets to decide what information is "suitable for public consumption" -- it leads to a dangerous path of information controlling. But since the government is asking for this information to be published, they have a responsibility to make sure that they are publishing accurate/useful information. It would be just as wrong for a government to request misleading information to be published as it is to request false information or to deny publication of information. And I'm not saying that just because some people here think this is a bad idea that it is actually a bad idea. Government is elected by the people and should represent the people, so ideally, someone in the Senate might realise why some people might think this information is misleading (either through their own constituents writing to them or their advising team) and then the Government would debate the pros and cons and make a decision in the interest of the people! (haha maybe too idealistic there). I am not against this idea because it will "upset the system", I just don't think it's useful information at all. I do think that colleges should have to be more "accountable" in showing potential students the job opportunities / market value of their graduates.

I agree with the others that if you are sure that you aren't going to like this school over the other two, then the right thing is to decline now. I don't think you can use the third school's offer to leverage the first two if you aren't actually interested in attending the third school. I think leveraging offers only really works when you have an offer from a equal or higher ranked school AND that you are actually willing to go to the other school.

I think telling them the truth, politely, would be perfectly diplomatic. If they are currently offering you an unfunded Masters, then they know that their offer isn't very enticing when you have the potential for funded PhD programs. So, you don't have to bring it up explicitly, I think if you say that something like "Thank you for the offer but I can't make a decision at this time because I have applied to PhD programs as well and I'm still awaiting their decisions. Could I have X more weeks to consider your offer?", that would be diplomatic enough! It would be unreasonable for a school to fault you for asking for something like that. (They might not give you the extra time, but you have at least 2 other offers to consider, and like you said, it's low on your list anyhow).

I think your last line said it best -- that you weren't 100% sure that you were ready for grad school after a BS, so you took some classes at a CC and found a job. But now you can say that the experience has led to you to know that you are now ready for graduate work. Even better, you can do more than just say it -- you can show/prove it because you are in the graduate certificate program. I think it's completely okay to say that you weren't ready / sure about grad school right after graduation. It's much better that you took the time to realise that you do want to go to grad school than to just jump into grad school right away. By explaining your thought process and showing that you are now doing things to get into grad school, it will show the committee that you are a person that thinks ahead about their future. I would definitely include the community college transcript if required. Some schools say include transcripts from every place you attended but some only ask for places where you received a degree (or were enrolled in a degree program). But either way, I think I would still include the fact that you were in the paralegal program but changed your mind. I think you have a way to frame the story in your SOP that would make your application stronger, not weaker. But maybe others have a different opinion!

I don't think this is a bad thing, either. In my experience, research groups work on a mentorship level, and it's not necessarily limited to mentoring between prof and grad student. If a prof is worried that their younger/junior students are falling behind, it totally makes sense for a busy prof to ask the more experienced senior students to lend a hand, or maybe talk to you and figure out what's going on. If you feel disconnected from your prof, chances are, the prof feels disconnected from you too. Maybe the prof feels that their entire research group (which might only include this other student) isn't as well connected to each other as he/she would like, so they are encouraging this by getting their group members to talk to each other more. In my opinion, the "professional relationship" protects things like the reason for a personal leave of absence, or your exact grades in a course etc. I don't think it's unprofessional for a prof to discuss with their senior students (or other profs) how they feel you are performing at research or classes in general (i.e. a comment like "Student X is really committed to classes but I really wish he/she would prioritize research more" or "Student X could use some guidance on performing literature reviews" etc.), as long as there is good reason (e.g. mentorship/asking for someone to help out) instead of just gossip. As for changing advisors, I don't think it's too late. I know people who have completely changed projects after an entire year of their Masters. They finished about 1 semester later, but that's not necessarily the end of the world (this was in Canada where the new advisors agreed to continue funding the student even past the standard 2 years of guaranteed funding -- so if you currently have funding now, perhaps you should also ask a potential new advisor what would happen after 2 years are up!)