TakeruK

I put all my liquids in a ziploc bag at the very top of my carryon. When I get to the security line, I take the bag out and put it in one of those trays. You also need to take your laptop out and put on one of the trays too. It's much easier for them to see that your liquids are harmless if the liquids are fully visible!

Just before going on school visits, I invested in a decent carry-on sized bag (didn't have one before other than a backpack) for about $50 (we took advantage of a sale). At $25/checked bag, it's definitely paid for itself! It's also super convenient to be able to get off the plane and just walk out -- no more dreaded conveyor belt waits. However, I don't understand why you would assume schools won't reimburse for checked bags unless they specifically said otherwise (or specifically said they would reimburse for airfare only). You probably won't need to check a bag for a 2-3 day visit but if you feel the need to for your own convenience, it's worth asking. In my experience, the school should reimburse everything (up to whatever dollar limit they might have) including taxi fare from your home to the airport, meals while traveling (if you're traveling long enough), etc. The only thing that has been a gray line are things specifically forbidden for reimbursement due to funding laws, e.g. alcohol and gratuities (although if you have a per diem allowance, then this is not as much a problem anymore). I mean, for the purposes of avoiding unexpected costs to yourself, you shouldn't assume that you'll get that money back, but I would expect that the school would be reimbursing for checked bags (and would ask for it if needed).

I think most sensible admissions committees would consider your official application materials with higher weight than "unofficial" information (if they will even consider that at all). They were probably just poking around and checking some names out -- it would be really silly for them to print out your LinkedIn profile and then replace your application package with that! So I don't think it's worth worrying about

Here is the agreement discussed: http://www.cgsnet.org/ckfinder/userfiles/files/CGS_Resolution.pdf It's important to note two things: 1. The cross-school agreement is an informal agreement between a lot of schools. There does not seem to be any consequences for the school if they choose to violate this agreement. 2. The agreement is for responding to offers of financial support, not for admission. I think the intent of the agreement is that a school cannot say something like "We offer you a fellowship of $X / year but only if you accept now, before you hear from other schools." That said, usually financial support and admission go hand-in-hand (few students would accept an offer without financial support!) and indeed the majority of schools and programs will follow this convention and tell you the deadline to respond to both admission and financial support is April 15. They will also link you to that document too! However, the safest bet is to check your actual official admission letter. This is the real contract that governs your relationship with the school. That official letter should have the details of your financial support and the deadline for you to respond. Most likely, it will be April 15 and cite the agreement above. But you should check it just in case. If it doesn't say, I would ask the department instead of assuming it's April 15. Most schools will expect you to have other offers and they will always give you time. I don't think they would ask you right then and there whether or not you would accept the offer.

I don't think there is a "right" or "wrong" choice here -- it depends on what YOU want to do! Some things you can think about though: 1. Do you have lots of other research experience? An extra REU could help you on fellowship/scholarship applicants in your first year of grad school when you have very little grad work completed. 2. Is the project exciting / interesting to you? Like rising_star said, this could be a great opportunity to meet other researchers and make more connections! You might also be able to continue the work as a side project in grad school and get a publication out of it. At the very least, you might be able to present your work at a conference during the first year of grad school, since most first year grad students won't have much time to get a project to a conference-presentable level until near the end of their first year. This project could help you get an (extra) conference in that first year. 3. On the other hand, a 10 week project is really short and sometimes these things are designed more to get an undergrad student their very first taste of research. If you have a lot of research experience already and it's one of these types of project, and there is something else you rather do, then maybe you want to consider it! However, since this is 10 weeks of full time research, you might actually get more done in this 10 weeks than 4-5 months as a grad student (since classes, TAing etc. take up a lot of time!). 4. But even if the REU might not help your research experience very much, $4000 plus room+board isn't too bad! Also, if the REU is in a place you'd like to visit, you can just work on the weekdays, and do sightseeing/have fun in the evenings and weekends. In the summer after undergrad, I worked with my thesis supervisor for an extra 2 months (May and June) and then took July and August off before grad school. I enjoyed having that half summer "off" but was also able to extend my thesis work to eventually lead to a couple of publications!

You can also let them know that you can't afford the trip out but would like to interview via Skype, etc.

My program didn't have many admissions interviews (only one school did them) but during visits, prospective students were scheduled for many 30-minute meetings with various faculty members. I found that my actual formal admission interview was no different than these visit meetings! I found that most faculty will not really know your profile down to the smallest detail. So they might not even notice that gap. But I found that these interviews/meetings are mostly to get to know what kind of person you are. So they will probably ask you lots of questions about yourself and give you many opportunities to bring up your exciting travel experiences. It's not going to directly help you show that you will be a good graduate student, but it will allow you to tell them interesting things about yourself. At the very least, it will help the faculty remember you. I think you did the right thing by not mentioning this experience in your application but the interviews/meetings are a great time to talk about this and other hobbies or interests that are important to you. If you're lucky, you might even run into someone with some of the same interests! Or maybe you might share some of the same travel experiences with the people you're talking to. Things like that don't always directly help whether or not you get admitted / get into a certain prof's group but having a common point or something interesting to talk about initially can change the tone of the interview/meeting positively and help you/the prof relax and have a fun time! You know an interview went well if you left thinking "wow, that was a fun talk!"

Hi, also a Canadian in school in the US here (California). Like anthropologygeek says, we will have to file income taxes in both Canada and the US. Income from Canada (e.g. for the 2012 tax year, if you made any money in Canada before moving to grad school, if this is your first year) will be taxed in Canada at Canadian rates. We still qualify for all of the basic exemptions so unless you were making a ton of money, you probably will get whatever tax you paid back. If you have no Canadian income, you might not have to file taxes (since you won't owe anything) but it's still a good idea to file these blank returns, in my opinion. It will help you keep track of any tax credits you want to carry forward (you might have a lot of educational credit leftover, for example). Income from the US is taxed at US rates. This gives good summary of US federal tax rates: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_tax_in_the_United_States See the examples below. Take your total income expected for the tax year, and subtract out the $3800 personal exemption (if you are single). Then the table tells you how much tax you pay for each part of your income. Note that although the example on Wikipedia also shows a $5950 standard deduction, we are NOT eligible for this benefit as we are not residents for tax purposes (all F-1 and J-1 students are non-residents for tax purposes for the first 5 years). We would also have to pay income tax for our state (and in Canada, for our province). This spring will be the first time I file taxes in the US. My friends in the US say, on average, they pay about 10% taxes, after considering all the deductions. So far, my school has also taken about 14% off my stipend payments too. A Canadian friend of mine also says there is some kind of tax treaty between Canada and the US so he thinks he got all his money back when he filed taxes (although he admits he doesn't track it very well).

Usually your offer will at least guarantee you funding for the first year (usually it's for longer, based on "satisfactory progress"). So, this allows you to apply for external scholarships during your first year of graduate studies (usually the deadlines are in the fall!). For internal fellowships (i.e. awarded by the school), the department will let you know if you need to apply for them, usually. Sometimes, this might happen as late as May/June because the department might only be able to nominate a few of the incoming students for these awards, so they want to see who is coming for sure first. Usually these internal fellowships do NOT change your funding offer, it just changes the source (i.e. from the school instead of the department). However, as a non-American, I know there are a lot of scholarships (especially the external ones) are not available for foreigners! I did a lot of research into finding funding for Canadians in US programs and I've only found 3 major award possibilities: (1) there is one single NASA award available for anyone registered at a US PhD program, (2) Fulbright foreign student award, and (3) your home country's federal funding agency (for me, NSERC is Canada's version of the NSF). So for non-Americans searching for external awards, I would say your best bet is to look at your own government and see what awards they give to grad students in your home country. Usually, they do allow you to take the award outside of your home country under some conditions (e.g. a lower award value). Good luck!

From talking to people at the schools I visited during prospective student visits, they say that most programs generally expect about 30% to 40% of the people they admit to actually enroll. I think it also depends on the financial situation of the program -- they want to offer admission to as many good students as possible because if you waitlist someone, there's a good chance they will hear from another school (and accept that offer) first! But if you offer too many spots, there's a risk of having more students enrolled than desired. But if your department is well funded, then it can absorb abnormalities if 60% of the accepted students enroll instead of 40% in one year (then of course, they will adjust the numbers next year). However, I know that my current program doesn't seem to do the whole waitlist thing. They accept some number of students in the program each year and whatever number decide to enroll, that's the number they get! The numbers of enrolled students from the past few years range from 0 to 7 (with a very "tails heavy" [both tails] distribution). So I think it really does vary between schools and programs! I found that most departments were very willing to tell us about these numbers while we were visiting (of course, by then, we already knew that school's decision but it was still interesting to know). By numbers, I mean most places said something like "You're part of the X students we accepted out of Y applicants and invited for a visit. We usually have an incoming class size of Z".

Although you might still be in competition with the other students who are visiting, I'd say to keep a conscious effort to not allow this fact to affect how you interact with the other visiting students! If you attend the school, then it's likely many of them will be your future classmates. A lot of times, there will be a period where you either sit down one-on-one with a grad student (like a prof interview but with a student), or be in a group of only students. Usually, it's the students that take you out to lunch, without faculty present. During this time, most students will remember visiting as well and they might even prompt you to ask them questions you really want to know the answer to!

A responsible prof would also normally tell you if they are planning to retire within the time you're there. When I was visiting schools for MSc degrees, there were some profs in their early 60s that were planning to retire within 5 years (and have emeritus status) and they talked to me about it. In Canada, the MSc and PhD degrees are separate and it's not uncommon for a student to change project, advisor, or even schools between MSc and PhD. Some profs said that they would be full-time while I'm on my MSc for sure, but if I was planning to stay for a PhD, I should know that they are reaching retirement age. Most of them did say that they would still advise me after retirement (as a prof emeritus) but some of them made it clear that they were only promising to work with me for the MSc! So hopefully, the prof will bring it up themselves so you don't have to ask the awkward question. But if you have already met them face to face and are seriously considering them as a potential advisor if you accept the school's offer, you should try to bring it up in a phone or in-person conversation. Since it can be a pretty personal question, I wouldn't ask it unless you are seriously considering accepting that offer though!

Ah, sorry for saying blatantly obvious things then! haha! I do understand where you're coming from when you say print journals are preferable to online articles though. I find it pretty hard to take good notes, even with things like Mendeley, so I find myself printing out articles that are very important to my research and putting it in a binder. I don't think we have software that makes annotations on the screen feel as natural as writing notes in the margin -- not yet anyways!

Yet another vote for PI over project for the reasons mentioned above. Also to note that no matter how much you might like a project initially, after working on it for a long time, the novelty can wear off and it's like any other project. I think most students will go through a cycle of hating and loving their thesis topic!

Icarus is a similar type of journal -- it's published by the Division of Planetary Science, which is a subset of the American Astronomical Society, which is the astronomy equivalent of the APA! I tried to find the similar page for the Journal of Applied Psychology and I ended up here: http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=browsePA.volumes&jcode=apl That page shows "purchase PDF" links instead of "view PDF" but if I am on my school's VPN (or using a school computer), then I can view all the articles for free due to the subscription! Hope it is helpful! When you access the journal through your school's library, APA is indeed "paid" by the way -- the school pays the subscription fees for all its students (one of the perks of being affiliated to a school and arguably one of the reasons why you pay tuition and fees). Of course, they pay some flat rate for access by all its members so it's much more economical than buying each paper individually or even subscribing individually!

You, too! I don't mean to be interrogating, but just curious! I still don't understand the advantage of having your own subscription instead of using the school subscription! For example, I can also see the whole journal of e.g. Icarus, a planetary sciences journal, by going to the journal's website. For example: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/00191035/222/1 I basically get the table of contents for any issue I want and clicking on the the article gives me the PDF. But to also add to the discussion, I find that "journals club" type meetings are very helpful to keep me up to date! Sometimes they are a formal class and other times, they are just informal gatherings of people with similar interests and we discuss the latest articles. A diverse group could be good or bad -- diversity allows you to be exposed to work in other sub-fields but still in your area of expertise and also allow you to hear interpretations from others outside of your topic. A weekly meeting with students, post-docs and/or faculty is pretty helpful. Sometimes you can do "virtual" journals club, for example, this website: http://astrobites.com/ is run by astronomy graduate students and they summarize very recent astronomical publications (for an undergrad level audience). Sometimes the journal club discussion can just be the "table of contents" of the latest issue of Journal X, which helps determine which articles are interesting enough to spend your time reading. Another way I keep up in my field is to use pre-print servers. http://arxiv.org/ is the popular one for some fields (mostly physics and astronomy) and people tend to upload their articles once they are "in press", so we no longer have to wait for the slow publication process to finish. Sometimes people upload materials prior to submission in order to get comments too. There is no real peer-review though, but it's easy enough to pick out the articles that are immediately interesting to your field. I know this is in the Psychology sub-forum and that my links refer to astronomy articles but hopefully the ideas of these methods are transferable to some equivalent website/service in everyone else's fields. And if not, starting something like a graduate student journals club meeting is probably not too hard to do at your own department

Schools appreciate the fact that their applicants have other commitments like jobs, family, etc, so if you are only going to be away one weekend in Feb, it's easy enough to reschedule. It could be a problem only if you will be away for a really long period of time, without internet access! But a weekend getaway is probably a great idea, especially in the middle of the stressful application response season!

As for the flight being more/less expensive to leave the next day, I don't even think they will check that. So don't stress about that part either. For the extra hotel night, you should mention that you are willing to pay but since most schools/departments have a preferred rate with the hotels that they lodge their visitors, you should let the department know your plan to stay an extra night. They might be able to get your their preferred rate for that extra night too! Sometimes schools will even pay for the extra night. In 2010, for my MSc programs, one place agreed to pay for 2 extra nights of hotel to see the city/find-potential-places-to-live but they would only provide a meal per-diem for the one day I was visiting the department (it was great!). Just tell them your plans, and offer to pay for the extra expenses and you might get lucky.

Can't you just access these journals through your school library's subscription? Being a student / junior member of your field's national organization is a great idea, sure, but I don't think I've met anyone (students or professors) that have their own personal subscription to a journal (as far as I know).

Also want to add that this is a circumstance where they might tell you their maximum coverage (or a good time to ask about it). If you are visiting multiple schools, each school might even be able to pay for some portion of the international/overseas flight. However, many financial departments have the limitation that they would only pay for travel to/from their school directly (i.e if you flew to X, Y, and then Z, school Y might not be able to pay for any flight into or going out of X or Z from/to your home country due to whatever policies). When I was visiting multiple schools in one trip, I worked together with the administrative people from all the schools in order to divide up the costs so that each school is contributing an approximately equal amount and that I was getting the maximum reimbursement possible. So if you are planning to do this, make sure you are communicating well with all the programs!

Cornell allowed (and paid for, although the marginal cost was minimal since we drove instead of flying so the mileage cost was the same either way) my spouse to visit with me. Visits are not all academic meetings etc. -- there are lots of social / get-to-know-the-city type events too (usually with the grad students) so they included my spouse in such events (including meals). Usually you have quite a bit of "power" in a visit since they now want you instead of the other way around. In order to save money for everyone, I rescheduled some of my visits so that I can visit more than one school in an area at the same time. Sometimes, the best thing to do, especially when you would like your spouse to visit with you (in my case, my spouse was a big part of the decision making process), is to say that your spouse would like to visit, ask them what is the maximum support they can give you (and offer to pay the rest out of pocket or something) and usually you can work something out. They might not be able to fully pay for your spouse's visit but maybe they can include her in enough things (or pay for a good fraction of it) so that the visit is still worthwhile for both of you.

I think it's important to distinguish between reputation of undergraduate and graduate programs, or even University reputation vs. department/program reputation. But I do think that Cornell is both reputable and selective all around and many Ivy League schools have good graduate programs since they have the money! So, going on the assertion that Cornell is indeed a highly selective school, I think there is some issues with your interpretation of the numbers. For example, page 4 makes it clear that there are two main types of programs -- "research" degrees and "professional" degrees and that a M.Eng degree is a professional degree. On page 31, it shows the breakdown of funding support for the types of degrees. For a professional masters degree, a whopping 97% (750+ students) are listed as "self-funded/unknown" (i.e. not funded). Only 52% of students in a research masters degree in engineering programs are funded by the school. This number is in line with the university-wide funding scheme (charts at top of page 30). So, I think it's pretty clear that engineers in MS or MEng programs are usually not funded (there are over 10x as many students in MEng than MS programs too, from page 31). But how many students enter Cornell as MS/MEng vs. PhD? Page 18 implies a roughly 50/50 split (63 PhD students enrolled and 85 MS+MEng students enrolled [again with 10x more MEng than MS]) for CEE. If we measure selectivity as # admits / # applications, the report doesn't show the selectivity of CEE PhD vs. CEE MEng. However, from the chart on page 9, we can see University-wide results, showing that PhD selectivity is low (looks like 10% to 15% overall) while professional masters is higher (about 50% overall). The text below also says that the latter number has been rising over the past few years. Anyways, what I'm trying to say is that you probably cannot compare "selectivity" between e.g. English Language and CEE because programs with unfunded degrees (e.g. MEng) can accept a lot more students. So, I guess the answer could be yes to your question that the field could be a "cash cow". However, that possibly gives it an unfair negative connotation -- professional degrees serve a very different purpose than research degrees so there could be good reasons to not fund these students. For example, Law and Medical students do not normally get funded degrees but if they are successful, their careers should be enough to pay back the loans (in theory anyways). Overall, I don't think selectivity is a good way to measure the quality of a program! But if you do want to measure selectivity, you would have to only consider the selectivity for fully funded degrees -- it's easy to accept lots of students if they're paying their own way. Also, selectivity can vary a lot over the years as the number of applicants changes, or as funding changes. And results from previous years can impact the future year (a program with more matriculated students than normal might admit fewer students next year).

In my experience (and field?), it's rare for a group to actively recruit research assistants with BSc degrees and/or post job postings for such positions. You're talking about temporary/short-term positions in a lab/group so they usually hire their own undergrad students, their own grad students, or post-docs, depending on the level of expertise required. However, that doesn't usually mean that these positions are not available. I think that most profs have a lot of project or project ideas on the backburner -- usually more projects than available funding or workers. I have found that one can be much more successful at finding a position like this if you actively seek them out yourself. Usually one could start with profs in the department where they have some connections (e.g. alma mater, etc.) and just ask around if anyone is looking for someone to work on some project. In an ideal case, you could find a prof with a project that he/she wants to do but doesn't have the funding to pay for a graduate student to work on. However, since you are not a student, it would cost them much less to hire you on an hourly basis since they don't have to worry about your tuition etc. Also, they can just hire you for as many hours as they want you to work on the project (10/week? 20/week? more?) without worrying about your other commitments such as courses or TAing since you are not a student! In a less ideal situation, but sometimes necessary to get initial experience, you might find a group that has an interesting project but no funding at all to do it. You might consider volunteering in the group just to gain experience but hopefully it will lead to a paid position later on. There's lots of other consequences of working for free, including allowing yourself to be taken advantage of and potentially taking away a job opportunity for a paid worker, but sometimes you just need to volunteer for a semester in order to build up some experience. I think the bottom line is that these types of positions are usually initiated by you, especially if you are no longer enrolled in a school! I would recommend starting with the department where you did one of your masters because they might know you, or at least know what your education background/skillset might be!

I did my MSc at Queen's (but not in History) but if you have questions about the school, send me a PM!

I don't understand why you are giving up now -- it is worth at least one more attempt to contact him now that the new year/term has started. If you don't think it's healthy for you to continuing pursuing this, then fine, but don't "tell [other schools] that the last recommender is having medical issues" !! You aren't in a position to diagnose him and it will just make your application be more strange.