TakeruK

If the invitation doesn't already provide you with some of the details/logistics, it is definitely okay to ask about it while accepting the request (or wait for their answer if their answer changes which dates are available to you etc.)

I don't think you should do anything. I am sure the rest of your application package will clearly communicate that you know the difference! Good luck

This will all depend on the program. In my program, most students have stipends that leave them with about $2000-$3000 after major expenses and necessities are accounted for. So there's certainly enough for them to go home once or twice a year if they wanted to. But if you want to save for a car or just save for the future, then that might be difficult. It also means that we often have to choose between spending our limited vacation time and money going home or actually going on vacation. What I did (and what many students also did) was to visit home outside of peak travel times. Going home for the holidays is super expensive, but travel in early November or January is pretty cheap. After your courses are over you might be able to have more flexibility on travel times. We also had our parents come visit us. Finally, I ended up traveling a lot for work so I had a lot of points to use to fly home. I was able to use my points to pay for round-trip airfare for four family members to come to my graduation ceremony! The other money saving trip was to combine vacation with work travel so that I didn't have to pay for airfare for myself (just my partner's and of course, the personal expenses on the non-work part of the trip).

You need to face the consequences of your lie. I understand why you did it and perhaps I would have chose to do the same in your shoes! But whether or not you had a good reason to lie, you still need to accept the consequences. Good reasons don't justify lying or make it okay to lie, it just means that when you made the decision to lie, you decided that the benefits of lying outweighed the consequences. But you can't escape the consequences. There's unlikely to be an "easy" way out of this. In terms of your ethical and professional choices, you will have to choose between telling your boss and accepting whatever comes of that or deferring your grad school start date. What happens at your 90 day probation mark? You make it sound like they can't easily fire you after that but unless you have some sort of contract that says otherwise, they definitely can fire you even after probation is up. I think you are in California right, and California is an at-will employment state, which means they can fire you at any time for any reason. Also, lying in your interview is definitely a justifiable reason to fire you. Generally, if your position is protected by a contract after 90 days, then there are likely to be consequences for you if you terminate your contract early. If you do get a new contract at the 90 day mark, I think the best professional and ethical thing to do is to tell your boss at whatever meeting you have with them at the 90 day mark. You say this is February so by then, you might already know where you want to go. You might be able to smooth things over by saying that you didn't intend to apply when you interviewed for this job, but if you accept any further work at the 90 day mark, that would be very unethical and unprofessional. I think at the 90 day mark is a good time to tell your boss your plans. Maybe you can suggest your ideal plan of trying to defer grad school for one year. Feb. is still early enough to transition your work to someone else by the time you leave. But be prepared for them to choose to not extend your contract and be fired right there. Or, you can keep quiet about grad school entirely and try your best to get a deferral from your top choice school. If you are unable to get a deferral at your top choice, maybe you can get one from another school, or just reapply next year (if you get several offers this year then you are likely to get in again next year). You can tell the school you decided you wanted to work another year in industry before going into grad school. Then, you can tell your boss next fall when you are reapplying and everything will be on the level again. Note: If you are interested in a career in industry, perhaps finding a grad program that allows or encourages summer internships outside of the university would be a good idea! If you do this, you will definitely want to not burn bridges and get a good reference letter etc.

Echoing what the others said, no, once you are accepted into a department, the offer is good for that department only. If you are interested in BBMB then look into those profs when you get an offer from BBMB. Basically, treat them as completely different schools because grad programs are generally completely independent of each other. Meanwhile, make the most of your current opportunity! I can't believe that you can only think of one person that you might be interested in meeting with. You're not committing to their lab or anything! So cast a very wide net and pick 4 or 5 profs that somewhat interest you. If you are serious about a PhD in the field, you must be able to find some people you are interested in. You cannot be so narrow minded that someone must match all of your interests exactly in order to even meet with them. So what do you have to lose? Meet with some interesting profs and learn about their research. You might find something you didn't know you like, or at least, learn about what other cool things are happening in the world. If you are so self-centered that you only want to learn and hear about your own research interests, it's going to show and it will reflect poorly on you throughout your career. Also note that as you advance in your career, you'll be invited to give talks at other schools and you'll be asked who you want to meet with (these visits are usually long days where you meet with students and faculty and give a talk). You're going to be meeting a lot with people outside of your interests because as a scholar, you will be expected to have intelligent conversations about all fields related to your work.

Honestly, for a Masters thesis, I don't think it's worth having outside readers. They add so much work to you, the outside reader and your advisor. If you really want to discuss the topic with this other person, you can still do so via email or other communication. This will allow you both the flexibility of not having to commit to anything while also still getting whatever advice you wanted to get. Also, maybe one reason the advisor told you not to use the outside reader but told another student is that perhaps the outside reader is no longer active in their area of research that overlaps with yours, but this other method is something they are still working on.

Does the office immediately tell all of your advisors and instructors once they receive documentation? Or will they only confirm accomodations after you request them? Can you request that it be the latter?

I am sorry to hear about your family member and Celia's previous behaviour. Congrats on submitting though. I hope everything will work out for you and best wishes for the new year!

If you don't want to directly correct them (although it's well within your rights to!), you could just put your pronouns as part of your email signature when you respond to the invitation. The downside of this is that they might not notice it, but you could consider that if you don't feel comfortable directly correcting them yet. Similarly, you can also write your pronouns on your nametag when you go to visits etc. The major conferences in my field have pronoun stickers for everyone now.

I have not had this experience myself. But from talking with and advocating for students who have, it seems like most schools are good at keeping your information confidential. The students tell me the main downsides are that some schools require a ton of documentation that might not be easy to get and the hardship of going through the process. If your main concern is confidentiality, it could help you to talk to the disability office without disclosing anything to find out what your profs or TAs might know and how to disclose just enough to get help without giving up your privacy.

You should do whatever the instructions say, even if you only enrolled for 2 weeks. Sometimes the instructions ask for information about all past educational programs and sometimes it's only the ones where you completed a degree. The way I see it is that it is far easier and less stressful to just explain it than it is to explain why you misrepresented your application if you were found out to have omitted information that was required. You were able to explain it here in less than 1 paragraph and you probably would want to leave out a few details in the official explanation.

Agreed with what fuzzy said above. Responding further to your last question, reference letters sometimes have forms that directly ask the letter writer to make some comparisons (in addition to writing text). Sometimes they are questions like, "How does this candidate compare to other students you have advised in terms of....[series of qualities]". So, I think it's certainly within the scope of the "candidate's qualities" to compare these qualities to other candidates, past or present. So it's not much of a stretch to compare the candidates' qualities with that of the program itself. I had one professor tell me that he would write a comparison between me and another student that he had advised, who was a successful graduate of that same program I was applying to (hopefully it was a favourable comparison lol).

I would like to think that faculty will not hold a bad prof's students accountable for the bad prof's actions. From my own experience working with students in the fallout of similar situations, the faculty seem to work very hard to ensure that when a bad prof is fired, their students and postdocs (who have done nothing wrong) aren't negatively affected. So, I would say that in a rare case where a letter is absolutely required from a fired prof (e.g. the prof was your PhD advisor), it may be okay to use such a letter (I know people who have and have been successful), depending on the scenario. However, this is not your case. In general, a letter that says you got As in 4 classes they taught isn't going to be a very good letter in the first place. The committee can see that you have As from your transcript. So the risks that @lemma brings up are not worth this letter. Instead, if you don't have anyone else to ask for a letter that says more than "did well in classes", my suggestion would be to find the next prof in your department that knows your coursework and ask them to write you a letter about all of your 300+ and 400+ level classes. They can mention your performance in their own class specifically but also say that you did well in the other 4 classes (and whatever else you took).

You don't have to tell Belinda every detail of Alice's behaviour in order to achieve what juilletmercredi and I have suggested. There is no need to tell Belinda about the things Alice have said about Belinda, for example. That doesn't help anyone. In addition, if Belinda knows something about Alice's anger/dislike of them, they probably would not share it with you because it's not professional to do so. So it might not be necessarily true that Belinda has no idea what's going on. But you can (and probably should) tell Belinda that 1) you are concerned that Alice will delay your graduation and/or 2) you are concerned that Alice and Celia will force you to spend too much time on their project and that you won't be able to devote time to Belinda's project and/or 3) you are concerned that working with Belinda before Step 3 happens will cause more tension between you and Alice. You decide what to tell Belinda and what help you need. But my advice would be to keep it to the facts between you and Alice and your concerns about Alice delaying your graduation and/or withholding strong reference letters for academic positions. You don't have to say what Alice thinks of Belinda. (Honestly if Alice is that openly hostile about Belinda to you, a student, Belinda probably can figure out that Alice doesn't like them).

I don't think any graduate program have this type of "legacy" program. However, for better or for worse, professors have told me that they read letters of reference to get another scholar's opinion of a candidate. They then try to calibrate that opinion with what they know about the person. For example, if there's a letter writer that consistently writes letters that say "The candidate is the best student in 20 years" then the program might change how they interpret letters from the same person in the future. Or, if the letter writer is well known to the evaluation committee, they might use their knowledge of that person to calibrate the letter. So, if the letter writer is a recent PhD from the school, (some of) the profs there might still remember them and/or might have still been there when your letter writer was a student there. This could be good or bad, depending on what the profs thought of your letter writer. Note: I'm not saying this is fair or anything since I can see so many different ways for this to be abused or for unconscious bias to slip in. I am not convinced that letters of reference are a good evaluation metric but I can't think of a good alternative to the kind of metrics you get from a letter. That said, maybe the problem is that we should be using different metrics altogether, but that's another topic!

Good to hear that tuition waiver taxes may not happen. But I hope US grad students who oppose other parts of this tax bill continue fighting against it! I won't comment further since most of the other changes aren't on topic for this thread (although things like repealing individual mandate may make insurance unaffordable for students on modest stipends) and I'm not a US voter so it's not my business anyways. Just a general statement that I hope people don't fall into a trap of being "placated" if only one (or a few) of many concerns are addressed. Otherwise, it would be quite easy for lawmakers to throw in attacks on certain types of voters (e.g. students) then take them out as a fake "compromise" in order to get their other agenda passed.

Fair enough. I meant to present it as two perspectives on what the writer believes is the primary goal when they sit down to write. I presented it in hopes that it could help a grad student struggling to come to terms with their love of writing and what the field tends to expect, so that the student does not have to feel that they are betraying or losing the art form important to them in order to deliver what others seem to want. But, also, being completely uneducated in writing (my last formal writing instruction was in 2005 as a first year university student), perhaps I am not really able to appreciate good writing?

Is academic writing really an art form though? Or is it a tool used to communicate with other scholars? I view it as the latter. Academic writing is not about what the writer enjoys doing. Instead, it must conform to the norms of the field because its primary purpose is to communicate information.

Yes, you can find this information at TheGradCafe's Results Survey (really, a database): https://www.thegradcafe.com/survey/ It's also one of the four links above ("Results") that appear just under the banner. Although I was not here at the very beginning, my understanding is the results database came first and the forums we're using now only came about because of the desire to discuss these results and for applicants to interact with each other!

Very likely. One of my letter writers lost a family member near one of my deadlines and was able to submit a week late. Generally, schools allow letter writers some leeway beyond the deadline and will not hold things out of the applicant's control against them. See also: In your case, you're not past the deadline yet. I would try to contact your letter writer again 2 days before the deadline and then the day after the deadline if you still have not heard from them. Hopefully by then, they will get back to you and either say the letter is coming or that they need more time. If you hear back from them with an estimated time for the letter, contact the school whose deadline you missed and let them know what's going on. If you don't hear back from them after the deadline, contact the school to say that you are still waiting for a response from one letter writer and ask how much more time you have before the letter is no longer accepted. Just to reach out and be proactive. I would not speculate that the letter writer has an emergency though. Since you have already reached out to a backup prof, let them know your plan. You need to decide whether or not you want to wait for the original prof or use the backup prof anyways (with slight risk that the backup prof might end up displacing the original prof's letter). This depends on how strong you feel each potential letter is, given how much time they might have had to write it. You might choose to only add the backup prof either at the deadline or after the deadline (with a risk that you may not be able to add additional reccommenders in the system after the deadline, however they are likely to be able to override that).

I use Grab.app which is a default app on macOS. If I want an image from a PDF, Adobe Reader's screenshot tool works pretty well too. I believe that while Grab.app doesn't allow you to scroll and continue the screenshot, Adobe Reader's tool does. So if you want a long column screenshot from a PDF, the screenshot tool is better. Lightshot looks like a great tool though!

Oops I forgot to mention figures! Good advice here. For papers in my field, a figure really is worth at least 1000 words and I try to study the figures and reconstruct the story from the series of figures and section titles. This is helpful in the stages where I don't read all of the text. In doing this, you also quickly figure out what types of figures are effective at telling a story and what kind of figures add more confusion than information! Good to digest this and incorporate into your own figures and papers.

Hmm okay, thanks for the extra details. I agree with you that even though you are 95% sure of the job with B, you can't count on it until it's an offer in your hands. I think that until you have an offer, you should continue as you have been doing now. No need to break up with A until you have an offer from B. Glad to hear that once they approve you to submit, A and C don't have real power over you. However, as you said, if edits must be approved by A, I am sure they can find some way to delay that. If you can delay your breakup with A until these edits are approved, I think that would be better. As a last resort, perhaps you can use the evidence you have against A to appeal to the University to override A in that case. Maybe it would be a good idea to talk to someone outside of the department that you trust. Is there an "ombudsperson" or advocate office for students at the University level? Just to 1) get a sense of whether or not overriding A is possible, 2) if the university will be on your side if it comes down to you vs. A and 3) if they will be, giving them advance notice can help things move more quickly. At my school, for one case where I had to go against another University office (not academic related though), I talked to all of my advocates ahead of time and let them know that it might become an issue but I would not like them to take any action until it is actually an issue. Fortunately, it all worked out for me so no one had to do anything. But it was very helpful (and stress relieving) to know that I had the support and to talk through several options in case something bad did happen.

Just seconding that I don't think it's a "responsibility" but instead, just something that is the right thing to do professionally! Like AP and fuzzy, I also made the effort to reach out to new students every year. The two things I try to keep in mind were: 1) try to reach out to everyone equally, not just a couple of "favourites" and 2) don't push it if the junior student doesn't seem like they are interested in it. For 1) I worry that certain types of students get more mentoring than others because some studies show that mentors are more likely to spend more time with mentees that are similar to themselves and/or certain personality traits get "selected" more often when senior people choose mentees. So I try to make an extra effort to talk to all the new students approximately the same amount of time for the first semester each year. We get on average, 4 students per year, so this is not too hard. It's just a matter of thinking about how often I start a conversation with a student and ensuring I am not favouring one over the others. For 2) I try to gauge the student's interest in further discussions. In the first semester, during the "talk to everyone" phase, I try to continue initiating conversation with new students, unless they are very clearly not interested in talking to me. After the first semester, I'll probably check in with them to see how they are doing during critical times (e.g. quals) in the first year in case. It doesn't make sense for every senior grad student to "mentor" every single new student so of course, I don't continue engaging everyone at the same level after the first semester. By then, there are some students that where more interactions between us would be great for both and others who are better off just knowing the senior students exist if they need help. It's all informal so it's not like any one has a senior grad student mentor "assigned" to them. But on average, there is 1 student each year that I click really well with. For the others, I try to keep an eye out for them, especially if they are more quiet/reserved. Nothing wrong with that of course but I'll try to check in on a student if I notice a change in behaviour or if they stop showing up to events, classes etc.

It's just a word. Whether it looks bad to leave will depend partly on how you explain your decision to leave, how your reference letter writers describe it and the perspective of the person reading your PhD application. So even if I (or anyone else here) says yes it is "quitting" or no it isn't, it's not very relevant to how your PhD application will be evaluated. Personally, I don't think I would ever use the terms "quitting" or "firing" or anything like that, instead it's a question of whether the student chose to leave or the student was required to leave. I think you have a good case on explaining why you are choosing to leave your current PhD program. Research interest/fit is a convenient reason that has "good optics" because it clearly conveys no fault, poor performance or anything like that. It says that you're a good student and the program is a good program, but you two just aren't right for each other. So, the next step is ensuring strong recommendation letters from your current program. You want letters to confirm that yes, you are a good student and would be successful in the PhD program but you just have different interests. There would be bad optics if you either had letters that suggested the program wasn't happy with you or if you didn't include any letters from your current advisor at all. This step is a little tricky because you're going to have to have the tough conversation where you tell your advisor and other faculty members that you would like to leave the program early. I don't have direct advice here because the best way to do this depends a lot on the dynamics of each individual department. Perhaps you can talk to people you trust for advice on how to bring it up to the relevant people. Hopefully your advisor would be professional and will help you go on the path that is best for you. One other tricky thing to think about is whether or not you would stay in the PhD program if you end up not getting into anywhere else. The last part depends on what the person reading your application thinks of people who leave graduate programs early. This is completely out of your control so I would not worry about it. As long as you take care of the first two parts, there's nothing you can do if someone evaluating you is just prejudiced against people who want to change programs for whatever bogus reason. I think that the number of people that think this way is small, so apply widely and hopefully you will avoid most of them.