TakeruK

Good points, juilletmercredi, but maybe I didn't write some of my points clearly and I would like to further expand on them (so that if I'm still wrong, please correct me ) I guess what I really meant to say is that I don't think the possible values of out-of-college salaries for a particular person are actually normally distributed in the same way as the overall salary distribution. I know that's the usual assumption for large data sets (e.g. a university's entire graduating class) but I think the data might be skewed based on all the different fields and career paths. I'm not sure if this bill plans to break the published salary values into different degrees/majors/fields or if they will do very summarized "BA's make $X, BS make $Y, etc." I think this is important because in some fields, e.g. engineering, you can get a job at a good firm after graduation and make good a salary. Other fields, many students are going to be wanting to go into grad school. In yet other fields, students go into professional programs after a BA so if the statistic is "Salary earned 3 years after graduation", it might be very low but that number could be very high later. However, if the statistic is "Salary earned 10 years after graduation", the numbers might not actually reflect the degree earned at that particular university -- the person might have gotten a BA/BS there but have gone on for more graduate/professional schooling so their salary might not be necessarily "caused" by their undergrad degree. So what I mean is that if they published a value like "UBC's BSc graduates earn, on average, $42,000 per year within 3 years from graduation", this is not necessarily going to be true/useful for a particular prospective UBC student. Sure, if you pick a sample of BSc graduates from UBC, their salaries might be normally distributed, if you pick enough graduates to cover a diverse enough population. However, if a student is already decided on, e.g., going to teachers' college after their BSc, then their distribution might be different. Or if they want to be a biology major, or some other specific path in mind, the overall averages/distribution won't reflect the ranges/distribution of salaries actually waiting for them upon graduation. If they published the normally distributed 25th/50th/75th percentiles, that is useful for evaluating the entire graduating class as a whole, but it does not necessarily provide useful information to a particular prospective college student, unless that student literally has no idea what they will end up doing and is going to try anything. That is, I'm saying the normally distributed salaries published are a combination of all possible career paths with a certain degree, but a prospective student might only be interested in a certain subset of career paths, and this make skew/shift their potential salary distribution to something different than the published values. I'm saying since most students are not going to be completely random in possible career paths, so the published values might not actually be able to provide useful information to that student's potential outcomes. And in addition, if the student does not know this and assumes that the published values are indeed good predictors for their own outcomes, then this more harmful than helpful! I'm not saying the averages are wrong, it's just not that useful. Does that make sense? Or am I making a statistical interpretation mistake? Fair enough, I guess I was just tired of seeing headlines like "0.0% unemployment for astronomy majors", which is a true fact based on the study but it would be incorrect, in my opinion, to interpret that statistic as "everyone who wants to do astronomy will get a job", which was how a lot of articles were presenting it. You said (paraphrased) "so what if they don't work in their field, it shows that they are able to develop marketable/employable skills". And I agree, that's the correct way to interpret that statistic, in my opinion, but many people I know have said things that seemed to show that they thought if you go to school for astronomy, you are going to be able to get a job as an astronomer without any problems! I think having more data is good only if you have some way to judge the quality of the data (e.g. an errorbar if it's a measurement). When doing an analysis, if you weight data points by their quality properly, even really unreliable data points won't mess up your good data points because they will get a small weight. But if you treat all data points equally, regardless of quality, then you would be making a mistake. Like you said, if you are simply just providing people with more data, they might not necessarily interpret it properly to help them make better decisions.

I think it's important for students to know that a Bachelor's degree (or even a PhD for that matter) isn't a magical ticket to the happy adult land of having a job etc. This could be effectively done in high school "Career Planning" courses (in my home province, "Career and Personal Planning" is a required course to graduate high school) as well as in university itself (my department hosted annual "careers in Physics" evenings where they told students what career options they could aim for and what is the average salary range etc.) However, it sounds like while this proposed bill has good intentions, it's not going to actually work out and it will just be something the government can point to and say, "Look! We care about college students! Yay us!". Maybe I'm just cynical though! My reasoning for this is that generalizing statistics for an entire school isn't going to provide very useful information. Knowing that the average School X grad makes $40,000/year upon graduation isn't very helpful. Neither is knowing that 90% of School X grads get a job within a year. The student population is so diverse and there are so many different ways to get a job (or not get a job) that I really don't think most people will fall into the "average" bin. Think of it like a really hard test where a small number of people got 90% and everyone else scored 30%. The average might be something like 60% or 70%, but the truth is that most people did not even pass. This is also similar to an article published last year (Wall Street Journal maybe?) where it listed % employment by major. It made news in the Astronomy community because Astronomy majors in college had a 0.0% unemployment rate. That sounds really awesome -- you're going to get a job for sure if you are an astro major! But that kind of statistic is too broad and ultimately useless -- they might have jobs in completely unrelated fields and the ones with jobs in astronomy likely went to grad school afterwards too. Not to mention other problems like the small number of astronomy majors surveyed. "More knowledge is hardly ever a bad thing" is only true if it's useful and accurate knowledge. More "information" can be harmful if it's incorrect or can be easily misunderstood by people.

If you are 100% sure that you are no longer interested, then don't wait for them to accept you to say no. You can email the graduate coordinator directly and let them know the change in your plans. They will make sure the admissions committee know to not review your application anymore, saving everyone a lot of time and effort

I've known people who have had to change supervisors/labs/projects after 2 years and they still were able to graduate on time, more or less. I'm not sure about your program, but in most, the first 1-2 years are mostly coursework and getting used to the graduate school life of balancing coursework, teaching, and research. Since you are probably finished all/most of your courses now and have adjusted to the graduate student workload, you might be only "losing" a year or so of your time. A lot of people are saying to try to find a lab similar to the first one, but that might not even be a good idea. In the past, when people I know switched, they changed to something fairly different. The "fresh start" can give you some motivation too! You sound like you have a strong chemistry background, so at the very worst, joining a lab would put you at the level of a first year grad student. But more likely, now that you have had some considerable grad school experience, you could catch up to the new project faster than a brand new student!

For most programs, the letter writer has to submit the letter directly to the school you are applying for. So it's not like you can physically get the letters now and then hold onto them so they are ready to be submitted at the next application season. You could let your letter writers know that you intend to apply for graduate programs this fall and that you would be asking them for letters later this year. Usually people phrase it as "would you be willing to write me a letter" although the answer is almost always yes (if you have picked your letter writers correctly). But I'm confused -- you're already in a graduate program now you say, so didn't you get letters for this program too? Anyways, most profs expect their students to apply to more than just one program and 4 letters really isn't a lot. Most people apply to something like 8-15 programs. I normally would say that you probably don't need to start talking to people about writing letters until the fall but I guess it could be worth it to let your letter writers know ahead of time that you plan to transfer schools, since I think that might not be something they would expect. Of course, it might also not be a good idea to let them know too early, but I assume you know what you are doing if you are asking about letters now! But I wouldn't expect them to actually write the letter until it's time to submit the application. You will probably never see the letter either, unless your writer gives you a copy, and when you submit the application, make sure you check the box that says you waive your right to see the letter. Those are the main "unwritten rules"!

Safety schools definitely exist in the sense that for the majority of applicants, there are some schools where they have a very high chance of admission. The trick, as others said, is how to identify these schools. A safety school is useless if you don't actually want to attend that school though, but sometimes it can be hard to know whether or not you would really want to attend a certain school. There are so many schools, how can you know all the programs? Maybe random school you haven't heard of might actually be a good fit and safety school for you. I agree with rising_star -- I had a lot of honest and useful discussions with my advisors/mentors about my list of schools and they gave me tons of valuable advice about their personal interactions with various faculty members and their students. Since I was completely unfamiliar to the world of academia, I didn't know things like how people might want to see students not stay at their undergrad for PhD and they taught me tricks to learn more about an advisor -- figure out who their former students are (usually on their research pages) and search for papers coauthored by the advisor and their old students. You can get a good sense of how likely you are to publish, what quality of work you will do, and whether or not you would be the first author or would the advisor be doing the writing while you just do the work, etc. Having that conversation was really helpful -- my very first list of schools I wanted to apply for was very unrealistic!

I like snacks that do not get my hands sticky or dirty and that take a while to eat. Snacks that are too easy to eat are dangerous since I end up just eating instead of doing work, or finishing all the snacks within 10 minutes of work! So wine gums or other hard gummies work really well for me (I didn't realise how good they are for snacking while working until my office mate last year brought in a giant bag of wine gums that she got from Costco!). Baby carrots are also good when I want to feel less bad about my snacking! In the mornings, a hot tea or coffee motivates me to start the day or when the weather outside is crappy. I also really enjoyed walking to the Tim Hortons on campus to grab a coffee -- not really snacking, but the walk with my friends and perhaps a treat makes the following hours of work much better! Tim Hortons need to start opening stores down here in California!!!

I am also a Canadian attending a US school. I am on J-1 status though, instead of F-1 status. My school's International Student Program office is very helpful in understanding all the rules so going to yours would be the best bet probably. During our international student orientation, we had a whole session on immigration laws so I might be able to help clarify a few things (but again, I'm not a immigration law expert so I would confirm with my own international office, if I were you). 1. For F-1 students, the only off-campus employment you can work at are through the CPT and OPT programs (i.e. related to your field of study). You apply for this through your school's international office. 2. You can work on-campus up to a maximum of 20 hours a week while classes are in session (TA and RAships count as work though as far as I know). 3. You can work up more than 20 hours a week ON CAMPUS during "breaks" and "holidays" (probably summer counts as this?). On campus work doesn't require prior approval. 4. You can apply for special permission to do non-CPT, non-OPT off campus work (e.g. at Starbucks) if you can prove severe economic hardship -- you have to apply for this through your school's international office. 5. You can totally get married to a US citizen while on a student visa and like heartshapedcookie said, you can apply for a status change after the marriage. Then you will be able to work without restrictions, as far as I know -- other than whatever restrictions your school has as a condition of funding! Reference: In addition to the orientation information, I also used my school's international student info page: http://www.international.caltech.edu/employment/f1 but you might be able to find something similar for your own school too. I would imagine that all schools are subject to the same immigration laws though!

When international students are studying in the US, we are on F-1 or J-1 status, which does NOT allow us to work off-campus (i.e. in any actual job other than on campus work related to our degree, e.g. TA or research). After we graduate, we don't automatically get green cards/work authorization either (but there is some discussion about this: e.g. https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/provide-green-card-foreign-students-who-have-earned-masters-or-phd-degrees-usa-universities-and-have/RD1s6V8yhttps://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/provide-green-card-foreign-students-who-have-earned-masters-or-phd-degrees-usa-universities-and-have/RD1s6V8y). In fact, once we are finished our studies in the US, we would have to leave since our F-1 and J-1 status will expire. Unless, however, we get a job! (J-1 students can extend their status for up to 3 years after their degree is over if they have a job offer related to their degree, e.g. a postdoc). When a company hires an international PhD graduate, they can petition the US government on your behalf to grant you a work visa (H1-B, for example). But this is a time consuming and costly process, especially for small start ups that might not have the infrastructure. Bigger, established companies might not have this problem as much. However, the extra work and money makes it easier to hire a US graduate over an international one. I really think this is too bad, since highly qualified international graduates leaving the US work force/economy is probably a bad thing for the US. So I am hopeful that immigration reforms will fix this but I'm not too optimistic given how immigration laws are generally very restrictive in many places, including the US. In either case, I don't think anything will really change in the next ~5 years (i.e. timescale for this to affect current international graduate students).

U-Haul has a pod service (U-Box) that we tried out last fall. It was very cheap (50% less than other pod companies) but the entire experience was a complete nightmare. Basically everything negative you might read about in the online reviews of U-Haul U-Box pod service came true for us. Maybe we were unlucky, or that the locations involved were just incompetent/poorly trained. But here are some details you could consider: 1. Distance: about 2700 miles from the eastern Canada to western USA. 2. Cost: $1500 for the move, plus $120/month to "rent" the pod (and insurance), plus small fees to get them to bring the box to you (or to rent a truck to bring your stuff to them). Our total was about $1800. 3. Estimated delivery time: 10-12 business days 4. Actual delivery time: 1 month!! The problems we encountered: 1. We made the reservation with U-Box central office but the U-Haul location at our origin did not have the reservation info. 2. So, they did not have a Box ready for us (on our last day in that city) and no one available that was certified to move a box out of storage. 3. They had originally told us to come back another day (impossible due to travel and lease timelines) but after 3 hours, we finally convinced them to let us use the demo box they had on their front lot. 4. They screwed up the paperwork and the box was shipped 1 week late. I had to do my own research to give them the correct forms for this service (found on the U-Haul website). 5. U-Box uses a third party to ship the actual pods and their communication was very poor. When our box didn't arrive 10-12 days later, they had no idea where the box was and their 3rd party shipper did not return any of their calls. We finally got our box about 2 weeks late (1 week late if including the late shipping). We had to camp in our new apartment for about a month. Fortunately, the location at our destination was very professional though and they CC'ed me on every attempt at communicating with their head office and the shipper and the manager even gave us his private number since all calls to U-Haul actually go to their call centre, which isn't very helpful. They also rented us the equipment to unload the box for free. This gives me hope that the whole service is not terrible but that the majority of locations have (not yet) properly trained their employees on how to run U-Box. Some other "pros" of using U-Box: 1. Cost is much less -- other companies quoted us about $3200+ 2. Able to bring your stuff to a U-Haul location and load it on site. We didn't want them to drop off a box overnight in our parking lot / street where people could break into it. In addition, we lived in an apartment so there was no place that we were allowed to store a pod overnight in the lot. Also, this allows for more control (since we bring our stuff to them instead of waiting for U-Haul to drop off and pick up the box). 3. Easy online reservations (or so we thought) and clear transparent pricing / quotes. Maybe you will have more options than we did if you are doing a move within the US. Our only other options were expensive professional movers or shipping via something like UPS (which is not as convenient as using a pod). Hope our story tells you enough pros/cons for you to decide what is best for yourself! Personally though, if we had to do it again, it wouldn't have been so bad if we knew ahead of time the shipping would take ~1 month instead of 2 weeks. The worst part was not knowing where the stuff was at all and worrying about whether it crossed the border properly. But I guess you get what you pay for and we didn't really have another option on our budget. At least we don't have to move cities again for a good while. However, in the future, I am hoping that whatever job offer I get will include moving expenses so that we can just hire movers to do it. We definitely do not want to have that experience again a few years down the road!!

Hi Barnswallow, By any chance are you talking about McGill? 2 years ago, their Physics department accepted me on approx. Feb 1 and gave me 4 weeks to decide. Unfortunately, another one of my choices (Queen's) did not have an application deadline until March 1 !!! I emailed both schools and they worked together -- McGill gave me an extra 2 weeks and Queen's processed my application and sent me their decision before the deadline. Even if you are not talking about McGill, I think what you did was right -- emailing usually grants you an extension. Waiting a few more days and then calling before the deadline passes is what I would do too, in your shoes By the way, I feel that graduate admissions in Canada, especially in Physics/Math/Astronomy, is very much more "informal" than what we read about here on gradcafe. There are no April 15 agreement things and it's basically "rolling admissions" until they fill up all their spots. So, some people might not get an offer and/or visit until May or June. In Canadian Physics programs, it's also usually the case that the specific professor "hires" / "accepts" you as a grad student, instead of the department accepting you. So, as long as you meet the minimum requirements of the University and department, the prof can pick anyone they want. In some of my Canadian MSc letters, it very specifically said that "Prof X and Prof Y" are willing to take you on. This is unlike US schools where usually you are accepted to the department and then figure out who will work with whom after/during the first year.

While there are some grad programs that will flat out reject their undergrads simply for that fact, most programs will just "strongly encourage" you to apply and go elsewhere. For most people I know, the profs at their undergrad institution would check if their students got into a good school (by asking the student) and if they said yes, then they would either issue a rejection letter or really really strongly encourage you to go elsewhere. But more and more people (profs as well as students/postdocs) are saying that it's not really a big deal anymore to stay at the same place, especially if your undergrad school has a decent research program. I wouldn't stress about applying to the same school unless you know for a fact that they don't accept their own students.

I know I'm not in the social sciences, but I know that many graduate programs will treat NSERC and SSHRC in similar ways. So, like the others said, the school that you are applying to will not know that you have been recommended by a SSHRC (unless you applied for a SSHRC through that very same school!). You can definitely leverage the SSHRC to help you get admission -- and although SSHRC decisions are usually not made until end of March / early April, it's a little late but not too late! I would agree with n31290 that you shouldn't act as if you have already received the SSHRC (even if you indeed have a 90-95% chance of funding if you made it this far). However, I would definitely share the good news about your recommendation with your potential supervisors. I did this for my Masters NSERC. And I would definitely inform the school you're applying to as soon as you get the award! Maybe not in all departments, but in my MSc department, students with NSERC actually cost MORE money to the department. Not 100% sure if SSHRC has the same rule, but most profs in the sciences have NSERC grant money and there is a rule that prevents faculty members to use NSERC grant money to pay (e.g. an RAship) for a student that is also funded by NSERC. There's also a limit on how many TA hours an NSERC student can do. For non-scholarship students, the difference between TAship and funding level is covered by the supervisor in form of an RAship, but for scholarship students, the department has to pay for this difference. On the other hand, having external funding means your supervisor has to pay less for you so that increases your chance of admission / of that supervisor fighting more strongly to admit you. Just wanted to point out that funding is probably pretty messy so it's hard to predict what will happen. Overall, I do think that having an award is always better than not having one though!

I agree with rising_star -- wait until you get the official acceptance letter. If you get an official letter (which usually also tells you that you must decide by a deadline) without a funding offer, then you should ask! However, usually informal conditional acceptances are followed by an informal phone or Skype call with the purpose of providing you with more information and answer any of your questions. If they don't tell you about funding at this point, and they ask if you have questions, then it would be okay to ask about funding, in my opinion. They might say it's not confirmed yet (otherwise they would have told you probably) but they could still tell you the normal funding levels.

I agree with ridofme above and would say to just jump right into it for your introduction. If I was going to do my SOP over again, my first sentence would be what ridofme suggested. No -- the first few paragraphs sound like you are just telling people about all of your courses. That's what your transcript is for. For discussing your academic background, I would keep it to a short paragraph stating your major and what school you attended for undergrad. I would maybe mention one or two important courses that you want to highlight (e.g. maybe you did really well in a grad level course in your exact topic or you took a special course that was offered by a prof who is a leading researcher in your field). After this, you should talk about your research experiences. Condensing all of that intro-y stuff and course information into 1 or 2 concise paragraphs should save you enough space. Finally, I also want to echo the thoughts of uromastyx above and say you should avoid jargon (e.g. "10th standard", "senior year") and instead just use descriptive words (e.g. "my final year" or "4th year"). I think the freshman/sophomore/junior/senior thing might be something mostly used in the US (we don't use these phrases in Canada, despite having a lot of cultural similarities!).

I don't think sub-headings are particularly bad but maybe it's my science-field bias. Sometimes sub-headings can eliminate useless transitional phrases and cut down on length too! That is, why use a sentence/phrase to indicate that you are changing topic when a new subheading does just that. However, I'd think subheadings would really only be useful in really long SOP (like 2 pages or more). I wouldn't personally use sub-headings to clearly delineate the questions and definitely not for something as short as 500 words. That is, I feel that if you break up your SOP into sections that answer each question in the SOP prompt, you are turning something that is supposed to be one continuous unit into discrete chunks and you lose the "narrative" that people expect from a SOP. I also think that the SOP should do more than just simply answer the prompts -- those prompts are there to guide you not constrain your answer! So, I would only use sub-headings for a really long SOP/research proposal.

Reading this thread has given me the idea that if I ever get people that I don't know too well to "join" a project that I'm invested in, maybe some initial "probation" period would be a good idea. Like maybe something small first, with clearly stated boundaries / no commitments for the future. Thank you for sharing your experience so that others can learn from it! And I'll be interested in hearing the outcome!

Just to add my two cents -- our school did have a (~4 day) long grad student orientation: 1 day for our department, 1 day for TA training, 1 day for things like showing us how to register for courses, how to get resources/help when we need it, the school's honour code, Title IX, anti harassment training etc. and 1 day for "social" things like the grad student council hosting fun events (as well as these events happening in the evenings). And there were panels where profs and older graduate student (separately) talked to us about their expectations of us and what we could expect / what the older students wish they knew in our shoes. There was also a 3 day long international student orientation where we learned about immigration policies that might affect us, special resources for international students, and also a panel with international students/profs telling us about their experience in a foreign land!

I did my (astronomy) MSc in a physics department -- we had fewer classes but they still took a lot of time. During my first year, I think the rough time split was about 20 hours/week for coursework (attending lectures, doing readings, doing homework) and seminars (journals club etc.), 10 hours/week for TAing and about 10 hours/week on research. But somehow, I really did not get significant research done until May (i.e. the summer). I suspect a good part of that is due to my inexperience at balancing research and courses in my first year of grad school. In my current PhD program, courses are worth X units each, where X is the number of total hours per week we are expected to put into the course (attending class, readings, homework). We have 3 classes per quarter, each worth 9 units -- so nominally, I spend 27 hours on coursework. Full time status is 36 units and the last 9 units are registered in a "research course" (not an actual course). I also spend about 3 hours per week in seminars, so on paper, I am working 39 hours per week with about 9 hours per week on research. Fortunately, there is no TA requirement in our first year. However, I try to do more research because our quals are research-based and are only 7 months away now!! Overall, I think for our first year that is course-heavy, somewhere between 20% to 30% of your time on research while taking courses is probably good, depending on how much TAing you have to do. I know that in my MSc, I made more progress in the first few weeks of summer than I did all year since having solid full-time research is way more productive than sneaking in a few hours here and there between classes or assignments or marking. If you are not sure though, I think an honest talk to your advisor about expectations might be useful, if you are comfortable with that! I try to schedule weekly meetings even though I might not have that much progress to report (so it might just be a 10 minute meeting) but I think it's important to regularly touch base with my advisor(s) and it gives them a chance to say something like "hey, you should probably try to do a bit more next week" if they think I am falling behind, instead of suddenly finding that out a few weeks before my quals!

In this situation, personally, I would only list the proceedings and NOT the talk. Similarly, if you gave the same talk at multiple conferences, I would only list the most prestigious conference (or maybe the top 2 if they are both really good to have). Some applications explicitly told us not to list the same work more than once (i.e. replace the conference entry with a peer-reviewed article if that's more prestigious). One exception would be that if for some reason, you are NOT the first author of the proceedings but you actually gave the presentation yourself. Then it would be a good idea to list both the proceedings and the presentation (to show that you were the presenter), or to put a star (or other marking) next to your name in the Proceedings entry and label it as "presenting author" or something. Otherwise, it's safe for a reader to assume the first author of any proceedings is the presenter. I'd say that you should avoid redundancy because if you have a lot of presentations/proceedings already, then it's not necessary to list every work multiple times (as presentation(s) and proceedings) -- you will have other stuff to fill the space. On the other hand, if you have only one project that you presented at 3 conferences (perhaps a local/school one, then a regional one, then a national one) and have 1 proceedings, then it looks like really obvious CV padding to just repeat the same work 4 times. The way I see it, in my field, where it's Presentation < Proceedings < Peer Reviewed Articles, the idea of the Presentations/Proceedings sections is to show work that you still have "in progress" and have not yet made it to "peer reviewed article" stage. So there's no need to repeat entries. But, the "presentations" section is also useful to show that you have experience presenting your work in various formats, so it might be useful to repeat a few things here to reflect this experience, if necessary.

Maybe I'm just stating something overly obvious -- but I think the best thing to do is to just ask your department admin staff! From my experience, I've found that many schools have very detailed references that explain how they compute things like this for reimbursements. Sometimes you might be able to find it by searching for it on your University's Financial Department's webpage. But if you ask the all-knowing admin staff, they usually already know it (since they likely process this for many people) or they know exactly where to look! I think the standard is something on the order of 50 cents per mile? If you are just putting together an estimate though, then it's probably okay to use some standard published by e.g. the AAA or IRS. But it would look better, possibly, if you used the real University rate (which might not be published in an easy to find place). Again, sorry for stating the obvious if you already tried to ask someone!

We don't really have a "separate dining room" (or even a designated dining "area") but in the places we've lived, there's usually some convenient location in the living room that borders on the kitchen entrance where it makes sense to put a kitchen/dining table. We eat our meals on it and I also find it useful to have a nice big table (bigger than a desk) to sit down and do "project" like things (e.g. organizing all the bills/paperwork, decorating cookies, rolling up a ton of won tons to freeze etc.). But it's not really a separate "room", we just convert a portion of the living room for it. We also use it for the occasional time where we have 1 or 2 people over for dinner. However, for entertaining, we usually have a lot more people over so everyone is sitting in the "living room" area with plates in their laps, anyways. But the kitchen/dining table becomes a useful place to put the food for people to serve themselves with! Our current kitchen has enough space that we could put a small dining table and eat our meals there, but with all of the steam and heat created by cooking, I prefer having the meal outside of the kitchen itself!

I think it really depends on the field. Some of the schools I applied to explicitly told us NOT to include a URL to a website or anything in our application materials because they only want to evaluate people on the basis of the submitted application materials. So some schools might have this kind of policy which could explain why they didn't go to your page.

During my undergrad, we had good graduate student attendance and participation in our Undergrad Physics Society club. We had a lounge and a fridge and a vending machine so graduate students would often use our room for lunch breaks etc. The club also hosts events meant for faculty, grad students, and undergrads to mingle and network/get to know each other. The biggest activity is our semi-annual wine & cheese (unfortunately the freshmen can't go to this due to alcohol permits but otherwise it's very inclusive). A good fraction of our grad student participation is due to our former members graduating and staying for a MSc (In Canada, it's pretty usual for one to do BSc+MSc at one place then go elsewhere for PhD). We have the occasional "pub night" as well and graduate students often joined us (and sometimes faculty too). However, I think the club constitution reserved the key executive positions to undergrads only (although grad students can hold other positions, I think). In addition, especially in astronomy, undergrads and graduate students treat each other as colleagues, as most of us are involved in research in some way so we would often work together. The fourth year undergrad courses and first year grad courses in astronomy are also cross-listed (i.e. same lectures, but the grad students may be graded differently or have an extra project at the end) so we would often work together on that too. Overall, I got the sense that our department was one "family", where the undergrads are kind of like the "younger siblings" to the grad students. That is, on a weekly basis, we would often do our own things that won't interest the grads and the grads often do their own things where they might not want undergrads around, but once a month or so, we have social events for the whole "family". At my current (grad) school, there isn't really "undergrad club" or "grad club" (since we are really small) other than the Grad Student Council etc. Most clubs are open to everyone and it's a combination of undergrad, grads, post-docs, and even faculty members or members of community related to the school (e.g. spouses). This was an important aspect to me, I didn't want to be in a school where there was a "hierarchy" of undergrad-grad-postdoc-faculty. I was looking for something where everyone was more of an equal and would do things together. That said, I wouldn't do things like go to an undergrad party (or invite them to grad parties/social events) or try to make really good friends with undergrads (mostly since there's now such a big age gap), but I don't purposely avoid contact with them to maintain distance or anything like that.

I don't think they do that at all, and I'm not sure if it's a good thing or not. I know I would personally benefit from funding based on how much need one has (e.g. more funding for people with dependents). I believe in getting people to the same level is the right thing to do, instead of treating everyone equally. That is, perhaps the department should fund people to get everyone to the same standard of living, instead of funding people the same amount. So, for example, someone with higher medical needs/costs might get more funding so that they can enjoy the same standard of living as someone who doesn't need to spend money on healthcare, because they are already healthy. In the ideal world, every grad student would have whatever amount of funding necessary for them to not have to worry about finances etc. However, the real world is not like this because it's a "zero-sum game". If we are able to fund those with higher needs at higher amounts, then it would be unfair to take away funding from those with less needs. In addition, it raises the very tricky issue of what counts as "need" and what counts as "luxury". Does having a family count as a "need" or a "luxury"? What about having a car? What about being in-state vs. out-of-state -- e.g. no one is forcing anyone to go to school out of state, so doing say (and the extra costs) are a "luxury"?? The other problem obviously is this now imposes the school's definition of how students "should" live their lives. To be honest, sometimes I am frustrated when our department chair tells us that "your stipends are enough so that you can afford everything, except maybe a car [i.e. we should save for a few years]". This is simply not true for people who aren't single grad students that want to live on campus housing. While domestic grad students may have partners who are able to find work, the rules are very complicated for international students with partners/spouses. So it's a bit frustrating when the faculty say stuff like "don't worry about money, you're doing okay", and I'm thinking that my current budget is running very negative because health insurance cost for spouses of students are not subsidized at all here etc. etc. I feel that in a sense, by providing everyone with an equal amount of funding, the department is also kind of imposing what kind of lifestyle they want their grad students to live. But compared to a dictated list of what is "necessity" and what is "luxury", the current system is definitely the lesser of two evils. I don't know how to "fix" the current system either! So we just have to live with it for now. However, there are smaller ways that students with higher needs might be able to access increased funding. At some schools, my spouse's health plan would have been highly subsidized (thus providing more support to those who may have higher expenses). At my current school, there's a benefit for the additional costs of child care. At one of my old schools, when there was additional money allocated for our health benefits (through the TA Union), we decided to reserve a portion of that money to award as grants for those with higher health care needs (instead of simply allocating all of that money to everyone equally, regardless of need). So I think trying to get everyone on the "same level" can work out for small scale situations like this.