TakeruK

I agree. I think we should always assume the OP (any poster really) is telling the truth, or as much information as they feel comfortable giving. This is a mostly-anonymous internet forum -- people with questions provide whatever facts they wish to share and the rest of community offers their helpful thoughts based on experience. Claiming that a poster is lying doesn't help anyone. If you don't think the story told is realistic or if you think a poster is trolling, then just ignore them. If you believe that someone has posted information that is incorrect or if you don't agree with their assessment/opinion/advice, then post your own thoughts.

As you said, the entire writing sample is great, so there's no need to worry about it. They are not going to throw out your application because of something like that.

I was also worried about the ethical issues of providing a gift while they were writing letters (although maybe it wasn't a big problem since I already given gifts to these people before) and/or while they were still supervising my work and could potentially be part of my thesis defense committee! And half of my recommenders were far away (at my undergrad school) and I didn't want to send them a gift in the mail either. So my solution was to write appreciative emails to everyone at this time and then I waited until August 2012 (when my MSc degree was finished) before writing another card and attaching a small gift. At that time, I was also able to provide more details in the note and I was able to convey my excitement and my gratefulness for their help in getting me the exciting PhD opportunity! I was able to circumvent the "mailing gifts" problem because I went back home to visit my family before going to my PhD school so I was able to visit my undergrad school during that time.

How is the question asked? Are you expected to attach a page, write a paragraph or just list them in a small text box? If I had to answer the question with only the details given here, I'd list things I've done in lab courses as well as research experience, but I would try to qualify the experience somehow. e.g. Practical Skill A (sophomore lab course) Practical Skill B (senior lab course) Practical Skill C (senior thesis) etc.

The classes you mention here are usually first- or second- year level courses at a 4 year university. So, I think it should be fine to take them at a CC. If you had spent the first two years at a CC and taken these courses and then transferred to a 4 year university and got your final degree there, most grad schools won't even notice it. So it's a little strange that you are taking the first/second year level courses in your final year, but I think it should be okay!

In addition to what Sparky said, sometimes it's risky to find funding for interdisciplinary programs. I think the administrative paradigm is "discipline" based, where the smallest administrative unit is a department that usually covers a specific discipline. Being in-between two or more disciplines/departments can cause one or more of the departments to "pass the buck" when it comes to funding or other logistical matters. I worked on the TA union at my old school and I noticed that we had to word things carefully (e.g. hiring preferences: Department X students should preferentially get TA positions in Dept. X) in order to make sure interdisciplinary students without a single department would not be excluded. Generally, I think a program with a good reputation gets that way by providing great support for its students. But I would really really recommend talking to students already in programs that you're interested in and find out if they encountered any problems by being "in-between".

I first saw this a few weeks ago (when the letter was more recent I think). I also remember some other content in this letter so I think this is edited a bit. I don't disagree with the numbers exactly. I read about some other profs comment on the letter and they said that yeah, they probably worked 80-100 hours some weeks in order to get where they are. I don't doubt that in order to be the top of your field, you do need to put in these hours. However, like Eigen said, this is not what all grad school is about. You don't have to go into grad school with the goal of being the top of your field. That's not my goal either. What I don't like about the letter is the tone. The department asked its graduate students for feedback and after the students' honest feedback, this was their response. In addition, the tone of the letter would make someone like me, i.e. someone without the ambitions of being the top 5% or whatever, feel very discouraged. There is nothing wrong with encouraging the "elite" to perform better, but there is something wrong when you tell other students that they are not working hard enough. Especially if you imply that having a family (or wanting to do things with your life other than research) is a "disadvantage". The other thing I don't like is that the expectations are unreasonable for the "reward" that we get out of grad school. We are paid very little for the number of hours we put in and even accounting for the benefits of education, experience, etc. it is not worth 80-100 hours of my life per week. I work about 50 hours a week, maybe 60 when things are really busy and I plan to continue working that. 80-100 hours is a large amount of time to be putting in every week and I feel like some of this is "when I was your age, I walked uphill both ways to school" kind of talk. My school's (Caltech) graduate student council recently released a survey of grad students asking them how many hours of research do they do per week. Our astronomy graduate students work a median of 40 hours per week. I think the 95th percentile in my department is 60 hours a week. So, I encourage others to NOT think of this letter as representative of graduate programs at all! By the way, here is more context. Here is the full letter: http://jjcharfman.tu...-correspondance From the longer text, and from matching up certain names, abbreviations and other terminology, the consensus is that this letter came from the University of Arizona's Astronomy Department. Their website is here: https://www.as.arizona.edu/ (if you want to check / match up terminology). Finally, I've also heard that not everyone that supposed "signed" that letter actually wrote/agreed to all of the text. So, I interpret this letter as the opinion of a small number of people that found this technique/work habit worked for them, but I don't think you can generalize this opinion to the entire UofA Astronomy department, and definitely not to all of graduate school.

No problem I saw that you changed your name awhile back actually! Glad to be helpful -- you can always send me a PM if you want to ask a direct question too, by the way (or if you want me to see a specific thread). Most schools will help you out with the immigration paperwork -- the department might not know but the International Student/Scholar Program offices are very good. In my case, they ended up actually filling out the real paperwork for you -- they send me a simplified form asking some key questions and then they tell you what they need from you (e.g. if you are going to show funding through personal savings, you generally need a letter from your bank).

Although it doesn't sound like she is being very helpful in her criticism, I don't think she is doing anything actually wrong that is worth bringing this up to the dept. chair. I have to disagree when you say that teachers have to find something positive to say about a student's work -- although it's nice, I don't think that is necessarily true. You are not going to like everyone you meet and not everyone you meet will like you. In your shoes, I would accept that the prof and I are too different to get along and be glad that I won't have to work with them anymore after the semester is over. I would probably try to keep the person off any committees (e.g. for your comps, thesis, etc.) and to not take the bad relationship so personally.

I agree -- if they aren't going to write you a LOR now, they will not be more helpful to you in the future. Just don't do anything that would be unprofessional (obviously) but there is no reason to be afraid of coming off as too "demanding" at this point.

No, I think there is a large bias in the results section. I think people who do better (i.e. have higher GPAs/scores) are more likely to post their results so you are probably only seeing the top admitted students, not all of them. I think the most useful part of the results section is figuring out the times that you'd expect to hear back (and whether or not there are interviews) based on previous years.

I don't think that LOR writers have much incentive to "inflate" their rankings. In fact, I think there is disincentive -- if they rank you lower than your actual ability, there is no harm to them. But if they say you are a great student and then you arrive at grad school and don't live up to it, then the LOR writer's reputation is damaged. So I do not think that many students will be rated in the "top 1%" category. I think if someone is ticked off as "top 1%" in everything, then the rest of the application better back it up. Admission committees aren't just going to go by those numbers -- they will check everything else for correlation. Of course, being "top 1%" in the eyes of a junior faculty member also means a different thing than "top 1%" for someone who has supervised tens of students.

I agree that if the OP wants the profs to write the LORs and give it to the OP to keep on file, then that's is very abnormal! But I think the OP is suggesting that they ask the profs to write the letters now but keep the letters on file (just keep it for themselves). If it's only 1 year gap, then it is unlikely they will really forget you. But it's definitely good to let them know now that you plan to apply to grad school in 1 or more years. In addition, you can say something like "I'm letting you know in case you would prefer to write the letter now and submit it when I'm ready to apply" instead of telling them how to do it. Like the others said, give them the option but respect their choice.

Consistency is the most important, but, depending on the field, many people might not even know all of the conventions. Canadian convention is also weird since we mostly follow UK conventions, but American styles are also very prevalent. In addition, not every prof at a American/Canadian school will be an American/Canadian. I wrote all of my SOPs and I continue to write in Canadian style at my US school. I figure that it is like my "accent" -- I'm not going to change the way I speak, so why would I change the way I write? For journals though, it does make sense to write to whatever style they request because they would want consistency in publications. But they usually provide very detailed Style Guides, while graduate schools generally do not. In addition, this is also an argument for using whatever convention you want -- all academics have to be familiar with both styles if they are publishing in international journals (e.g. in the sciences, the journals Science and Nature are the two highest impact journals and they use American and UK conventions, respectively).

Calling them would be a good idea. However, I found that the Prometric people are generally more worried about sticking to the standards of ETS than actually helping us have a positive testing experience. If it helps to know though, there is a 1 minute break between sections so that is a good time to exchange scratch paper. The reason why you have to turn in the current scratch paper to get more is because they want an easy way to keep track of everyone's scratch paper. With this system, they know that every student always has 4 pages (2 pieces of paper) at all times. If you ever have less than this, then they know you might have did something with one or more pages! If you aren't able to get special permission for more paper, my only recommendation is to limit yourself to 4 pages during practices. In the old test system, you cannot skip questions, so there is never a need to look back at old scratch notes -- if you need more paper in the middle of a section, it's about a 20-30 second process to get more. But now that you might want to go back to questions you've started, perhaps you want to strategize your testing order so that you either skip a question, or finish it if you start (i.e. don't start a question and then leave without answering). In my opinion, you should make the decision to write or skip the question almost right away, because going back is going to cost more time anyways. When in doubt, skip! However, no matter the outcome, you should perhaps write to ETS afterwards and suggest that they allow more scratch paper. I think the old rules might have been writing for the old test conditions (no skipping) and maybe they did not consider how allowing you to skip questions might impact the amount of scratch paper needed.

Don't worry about it! Rejecting a student purely on a spelling error is ridiculous and while there is a lot of mystery with grad school admissions, I am pretty sure academics are still going to take an academic approach to evaluating applications (i.e. judge and weigh all aspects) instead of using arbitrary rules to make the decision. Rejecting purely because of a typo is as silly as a rule like "let's reject everyone who submits their application on an odd numbered day". Of course, it's probably not the best thing to misspell an important theorist's name, but I'm sure the rest of your application shows that you actually know what you're talking about!

Hi there, I went through the same experience last year (well, earlier this year technically!). In my experience, I did NOT have to provide proof of funds before I got the first acceptance letter. Remember that there is usually two stages to acceptance into a PhD program. First, in about Feb/Mar, you get a letter from the Department saying that you are accepted and you are asked to reply by April 15 with your decision. After you do so, they will request your final transcripts etc. and then send you a real "official" formal acceptance letter (usually in June or something). This is when you need to provide proof of funds etc. The second acceptance is just a formality -- unless you lied about your credentials! Sometimes the first acceptance comes from the Department while the second formal acceptance is from the Graduate School (but not always). In my experience, no one asked to see the funding info before the first acceptance. For one school, as soon as I got this first acceptance, they immediately asked for the funding info (but said that I didn't have to submit this info unless I was going to attend their school). For all other schools, they said that the International Student/Scholar Program office will get in touch with me regarding I-20/DS-2019 / funding etc. after I accept their offer. Indeed, I accepted the school's offer by the end of March and in April, they started the process of getting my paperwork in order for immigration papers. By the way, if you get a PhD program, you're likely fully funded, so that counts as funding! Working as a TA counts too, of course. In addition, the form you fill out depends on your what student status you're trying to get. For F1 status, you need an I-20, which only means you have to provide proof of funding for the FIRST YEAR. For J1 status, you need a DS-2019, which requires proof of funding for the ENTIRE DURATION of your degree program!

I also think going to the office in person (instead of phone or email) can make a difference. I had similar problems at the beginning of the term, but when I went to the Human Resources office (they take care of benefits), the matter was resolved within a week.

My current school has a policy that every graduate student gets 10 business days off, in addition to the 11 institute holidays (i.e. days the schools would be closed anyways, e.g. Thanksgiving). So, the official policy is that we can take 21 business days off in total per year. However, and the school officials even confirm this when they told us the vacation policy, the actual days taken off is subject to advisor approval and depends on the nature of your research (e.g. labwork/experiments vs. computer simulations). In addition, no one really keeps track of the days because the general idea is that both students and advisors want the project to go well, so as long as we are responsible and get work done, our time will not be "policed". The rationale behind the official policy is that in the event where the above ideal situation isn't working and there is a conflict between how much time off, there is an official policy to fall back on. My last school (MSc) had unionized its TAs so we had additional rights in regards to TA duties while taking time off. For example, we were granted sick days so that it's the school's responsibility to find a replacement TA if we were sick. Also, we had the right to take time off from TAing in order to attend a conference. We also had personal leave from TA duties in event of a family emergency etc. Again, under normal circumstances, these things are a given and if I was going to miss a TA session, I would try to switch sections with a colleague, or talk to my prof to reschedule classes, office hours, whatever. And most profs will not say "No, you cannot go to this conference because I want you to teach this tutorial". But the reason for the policy again is to have something to fall back onto when the ideal situation breaks down. For your situation, is there someone else in the department that you can talk to? Usually there is someone that is like the "Graduate Studies Coordinator" or "Director of Graduate Studies" whose job is to mediate potential problems between a student and a professor. They would know what the norm is for your department's students' vacation/time off and whether any policies govern this. They can also determine whether your supervisor is being unreasonable and they could help you approach the subject with your supervisor. Good luck!

Rounding can be hard when the numbers aren't spaced far apart. So maybe a good strategy is to only use rounding when the choices are like...an order of magnitude apart (e.g. 0.2, 2.0, 20 etc.) instead of 11, 13, 15 etc. For your specific example, I notice that rounding 0.452 + 0.055 to 0.45 is not a good idea. I don't think you should ever just remove an entire number. Rounding 0.452 + 0.055 to 0.50 is a much better (and easier compute 0.50 times something anyways). One rule of thumb you could use is to only round off one digit. So for the sums, instead of keeping all three decimal places, bump it down to just 2 decimal places (e.g. 0.31 and 0.50). When I did this, my answer came to 37% which is closer to 33%, the correct answer (of course, you'd wouldn't know the real answer so that is not really a useful statement). Another rule of thumb is to keep track of whether you are underestimating or overestimating. For example, "430" for the second number is pretty accurate. But rounding 1027 down to 1000 is a bigger leap. This means your 310 number is an underestimate. Since you will be taking the difference of 310 and 430, underestimating 310 means that you are overestimating the numerator. Also, since you are dividing by 310, you are underestimating the denominator. The combination of overestimating the numerator and underestimating the denominator means that your overall answer is an overestimate. So, if you get e.g. 39% and the two choices are 33% and 45%, it's more likely that 33% is the correct answer since you know you are overestimating! This is a bit more work and it might cancel out the time you save by rounding in the first place! It depends what you are comfortable with. One thing you can do is to first simply round the way you've been doing, and see if your answer is one of the choices. If it lies in between two numbers, then analyse your over/under estimates and decide if your overall rounded guess is too high or too low! Sometimes you might purposely round a certain way just to ensure that you are consistently under- (or over-) estimating.

At my international student orientation, they said that we should NOT be carrying our passports everywhere we go, because it's a good way to get that stolen/lost! Instead, we were told that we should be aware that ID from our own country may not be accepted in the US so we should always use our passports when we know we need to really verify our identify. The passport, I-94, and I-20/DS-2019 together prove that we are who we say we are AND that we are legally allowed to be in the US for school. So, they told us to bring our passports if we are going to e.g. go to the Social Security office, the DMV, etc. but not just on a regular basis. One potential exception is going to bars/buying alcohol. Some places will only accept in-state Driver Licenses or passports. For these purposes, we were recommended to get an in-state ID card or driver license ASAP. However, so far, my Canadian driver's license has not caused any trouble yet (other than a few extra moments to locate my DOB since it's in a different place).

I really think you should never make a negative statement when trying to sell yourself (e.g. in a SOP or an interview). Not even if you are making a negative comment about a rival school to praise the school you're applying to. And especially never make a negative statement about any of your past schools/employers/etc.!!

I'm just wondering -- do your profs/TAs care about these minor differences as long as you are consistent? That is, would they really think your paper would be improved by using US (or UK) convention (e.g. would you have points deducted because you used one style over another?). I've had a few "Canadian" spellings (e.g. centimetre vs. centimeter) circled but mostly because the marker wanted to make fun of my Canadian ways. Even in my undergrad English courses, the profs told us that both styles are acceptable as long as we were consistent. So I always thought that these differences were really really minor (like saying "poe-tay-toe" vs. "poe-tah-toe") and no one really cares. But maybe this is because I ended up in the sciences -- does it become important in higher level English programs?

I think it's too early to make contact with profs at your prospective grad schools now. Fall 2014 is a really long way aways! However, it's not too early to start gathering resources to think about grad schools. It's actually the best time right now!! You should be making contact with profs at your own school. It sounds like you have at least one research project (the lab assistantship). You could ask to sit down with the PI of that group and let them know you are very interested in grad school. They should have lots of advice for you and they will probably tell you to work as many hours (full time is nice if possible) during Summer 2013. Then you would have at least two strong research projects under your belt when applying to PhD programs. They might also suggest other profs you can talk to in your current department. Alternatively (or in addition to doing the above), find some other profs at your school (or another school in the same city if there's two) and start talking to them now about working for them in Summer 2013. From your description, it sounds like you will have a very strong GPA but grad school is about much more than just academic talent. Schools want to recruit students who have demonstrated research talent (or potential for research talent). So if I were you, my focus from now until Fall 2013 would be to increase my research experience. From my own experience, Research assistants get paid a lot better than teaching assistants anyways, so if time is an issue, I'd also prioritize a research/lab assistant position over a teaching one. TAing is a big part of grad school, but doing at least one semester of it is more than enough to help you get into grad school -- doing more won't help. I'd try to find some time to do the GRE sometime next summer. And maybe start making contact with prospective profs sometime next summer too, after your summer research project/job is well underway (then when you introduce yourself to prospective profs, you can mention both research experiences that you've had). Hope that was helpful! My intention was to outline a possible list of things to do to help maximize your chances of getting into a school. But I realise you might have another concern -- maybe you are wanting to contact profs to help you get more information earlier to prepare for a move? If that's the case, then I still think you should hold off talking to profs until next summer if you want really concrete answers. If you ask profs now about 2014, only the ones that know for sure they will be away (e.g. a planned sabbatical etc.) can give concrete answers. Everyone else will likely say that they will be looking for students, but they can't really say anything about how likely they would want to work with you in 2014 when they haven't even met the 2013 applicants yet. Finally, I apologize if you already know this information about normal timelines. For you, applications will probably be due Dec 2013 to Jan 2014. You will probably hear back from schools between Feb 2014 and April 2014. Some schools will begin their terms in August 2014 but others might be as late as October 2014. In the best case, you might have about 6 months, which isn't a lot of time to move an entire household, and in the worst case, only 4 months!! My (also awesomely supportive) wife and I don't have kids yet but we had some similar concerns when applying to PhD programs. We are from Canada, so there was also the worry about me getting the right student status so that my wife could apply for permission to work. What we found helpful was to work together in the whole admissions process. I first compiled a list of schools with programs that interested me and then both of us went over it and eliminated any locations that would not work for us (e.g. not possible for my wife to work/find jobs, or not a place we want to raise kids [we want it to be easy for us to visit our parents and vice versa], etc.) At this time, I also contacted profs to rule out places that won't work anyways. Before I applied anywhere, there were 8 schools on the list, but they were really grouped into 3 different geographical regions, each with their pros and cons. We found this process to be helpful in managing our worries about uncertainties in the future. While waiting for application results, we could at least look at what housing, health insurance, all that stuff would cost in each of the 3 places and make plans for how we would move all our stuff, etc. After deciding on a school (we made the final decision around April), we were worried about finding a place to live. Many schools have special housing for graduate students with families (usually unfurnished so it's basically an apartment or townhouse where the school is also your landlord). They usually have very flexible leases -- for example, my school does not make new students sign a lease with them (there is a 1 month minimum stay though) and it's only 2 weeks notice to move out. In California, the standard move-out notice is only 30 days (so we would not be able to really look for a place to live until 1 month before we got there!!). So, our back-up plan was to live in graduate student family housing until we found a place to live. However, some schools have long wait lists to get a spot in this type of housing, and we learned that they accepted wait list applicants as soon as you've been accepted to the school. So, keep an eye out for these things and sign up for the wait list as soon as you hear good news from the school -- you can always cancel your application (check to ensure there's no fee though) if you change your mind about that school. Fortunately, we did find a place to live before the term started but it was a stress relief to know that we did have a backup option. Sorry for writing so much, but I hope the second part was more helpful at addressing some of your concerns! We were really stressed out and we didn't have kids and were just renting, so I could only imagine how much more stressful it is for you and your family. Definitely take advantage of all resources (e.g. the housing/waitlist options above) though -- sometimes they are not very well advertised since most students are not coming in with families!

I think Americans can write and recognise both styles. For example, the high impact journal Nature uses British style so many American researchers have to use British style, not just see it regularly. In addition, a lot of profs at American researchers are not American! Personally, I used the style I was brought up with (mostly Canadian) but for some reason I naturally use the "ize" ending instead of the "ise" (I had to go back to "fix" recognise in my first sentence above! lol). I still write in this style for my essays and other assignments here in the US.