TakeruK

Astrobiology can also be explored via the planetary science programs at various schools. Caltech has a big link to NASA (Caltech administers and runs NASA JPL). Geobiology could be a good angle too if your astrobiology interests are on extremophiles or finding Earth analogues to extraterrestrial life. One more thing: Astrobiology is a very multidisciplinary field. At top schools, one good strategy is to pick one aspect of astrobiology and excel at that. This will help you get into a good program. It sounds like you want to enter the program via a biology degree, which is a great idea. I know people who study astrobiology with Math degrees, Biophysics degrees, Astronomy degrees, Chemistry degrees and Geology degrees. There's a lot of ways to do it!

The last time I was able to access the phone scores was in 2011. I think in 2012 or 2013, they removed this service. Now, they are online at the same time they would be available over the phone so there's no need for phone scores.

Are you saying you didn't write about this project at all from a year ago? If that's the case, I think it's definitely worth adding a short paragraph (4-5 sentences) on this project into your SOP. You can end that paragraph saying that your contributions to this project is leading to a publication (and mention its status whether it's submitted/in review/accepted etc.). If you already mention this project in your SOP then just add one sentence to that section.

This is good. If you did research at University 1 or University 2, write a 1 sentence summary of your work in the first paragraph as well. You may also want to consider attaching a short CV.

Here are the answers, to the best of my knowledge, to your questions. This is assuming that you are applying to the CGS-M award. 1. No, it is not unethical to write a proposal for research that you aren't going to do. However, it is much recommended for you to contact a professor about a project and ask for a little bit of their time. For both my CGS-M and CGS-D proposals, I wrote them with about 30 mins of professor time (a quick phone call at the start to discuss the idea and how to lay it out and then I got feedback on one version of my draft). 2. No, your professors writing the LOR will not see any of your application materials unless you send it to them. 3. Yes, you are still eligible for NSERC funding. Double check their eligibility requirements. The time limits are all about not being in grad school for too long, there's nothing about time since undergrad degree.

To clarify, the reason why I did not include my supervisor in the USRA, CGS-M and CGS-D was that these are really more like scholarships/fellowships than actual grants. When it's an actual grant, the application needs to go through a lot more approval steps at the institution level such as the office of sponsored research etc. and it gets an account number and your salary would come out of that etc. Remember that the CCV is meant to take entries for everyone, from students like us to full professors with multiple grants that they manage etc. So a lot of the options don't really apply to us

1) It's not ideal but you shouldn't let this worry affect your ask. Ask them right now! 2) Usually yes, but don't rely on it. Tell your profs about the Dec 1 deadline and if they don't come in on time, then contact the programs and let them know that some letters may arrive late and hope that it will be okay. 3) No

Hi! I recently had to fill out the CCV as well for Canadian postdoc awards from NSERC. I did not include my supervisor for the USRA because these awards are not tied to the supervisor in any way. So, I listed myself as Principal Applicant for the NSERC USRA, NSERC CGS-M and NSERC CGS-D. I did list my supervisor as the Principal Investigator for a NASA grant I applied to (the grant itself also lists my supervisor as the PI). If you want to include your supervisor, then the only correct choice for the USRA is "Principal Investigator".

Yes, you can write about this in a diversity statement because first generation students are a minority group. But keep in mind that there are other minority groups that are more under-represented than us first generation students. Especially at US schools, there are 6 particular groups of under-represented minorities that have special status by law. So, plainly and honestly discuss the challenges you faced as a first generation student, what you learned. And especially important for these diversity statements, also talk about any work you've done for minority group students (e.g. if you are a mentor to a first year undergrad etc.)

There's no reason to lie. Being honest is good. I think they are asking because if they didn't have funding for you but you were still qualified enough to make some cutoff, they might offer admission with no funding. But if you don't want that, then this is equivalent to a rejection. (I treated all offers with no funding as the same as a rejection).

I agree with @telkanuru. Especially on the advice against using Glassdoor. You really need to know what the right salary is in your area for your type of work. A 40% raise is a huge blindside, but it's not impossible to get a large raise if you have a good case for it. I know a person who got a 25% raise after 1 year of good work because they accidentally undervalued their worth when accepting the job offer. You are in a harder situation because your salary is funded by a grant. Most grants are not very flexible on salary, especially those in some fields like yours. What you need to do is to compile a list of all your actual job duties. You should research your university's and other school's job openings for RAs and use the same words to describe your duties as in the other postings for your area of work (**Note: it does NOT have to be in the same field, just something similar enough). Typically the job postings do not indicate a salary, but if you research their HR pages, you can find different salary grades. Then, you can compare your duties and salary with the range of salaries for similar duties from other schools (or even your own university). The range of salaries posted often encompass something like 0 years of experience up to 40 years (or something like that) of experience, so you can't expect values on the higher end. I would take the lower end and then add 2% to 3% raise each year. Getting a 2% boost is pretty typical each year---it's not very good but that's normal in science, I think. Your best case for a raise is if they are paying you for a different level of work (like you kind of mentioned). When you make your request, ask for a meeting with whomever decides your pay and present your document. Have a specific ask (i.e. an annual or hourly amount in mind). But, do NOT make it an ultimatum (don't imply that you'll quit without the raise) at this time. You have nothing to gain by this extra pressure. What normally happens is that they will say they will review it. You have to be patient---it's okay to ask for a timeline though and follow up over the next few months. I think this might be what @telkanuru meant by a series of conversations. You don't just make a raise demand with the threat of walking away (unless you have an offer from another position in hand). It's also more professional to do it this way instead of abruptly quitting if you don't get your ask. It could take a bit of time to approve the funding allocations to change salaries.

I also second the suggestions to start with your research interests or your research question. Don't worry about being "abrupt", because the people reading your SOP are reading your SOP in a pile of like 10s or hundreds of other SOPs.

It's a small risk and it's up to you whether to do it. In the best case scenario, they will read your CV. In the most likely case scenario, they will just ignore it because it's extra info they didn't ask for. The worst case is that it counts against you because you didn't follow instructions. Are the conference abstracts the only thing that is in your CV but not elsewhere in your application? If so, then just add the conference abstracts to the "extra info". Or, incorporate it in your SOP etc.

I would recommend finesse, but it's possible to be honest, true to yourself and also choose your words carefully all at the same time. You don't need to spin everything to angle you towards research. However, I would not blatantly say that you aren't sure you want to do research. The way to finesse this is to focus on the positive and say what you want to do, not what you don't want to do. I am assuming that you are applying to Masters programs, not PhD programs. I would research the goals of the programs and what they want their graduates to be able to achieve. If you are applying to a Masters program that is meant to place students in the research track (i.e. the next step is a PhD program) then I would emphasize this goal more in your SOP. So, write about the things that attract you towards research. It's a good idea to write about skills you can learn too and you should spin the skills as being useful for PhD research plans. If you are applying to Masters programs that are designed to give you a specific skill for work in or out of academia, then you don't have to worry about spinning towards research so much. I would still avoid the negative aspects---no need to say that you're not sure about research. Just write about all the things you are excited about.

It's okay for your CV to be empty. I would emulate a graduate student's CV and just not include the publications section. If your CV is only 1 page, no big deal for an undergrad.

In my field, it's acceptable to use the "royal we" to describe work you did. You will even see single author papers writing statements like "We set the telescope to XYZ setting and took 5 images." or "When we write the equation in XYZ notation, we see that the momentum depends only on ABC." (I probably would not do this though but I have yet to write a single author paper). However, for statements of purpose or other essays we write for funding/admission purposes, it's a good idea to use "I" instead of "we". It emphasizes your contribution to these collaborations. This also allows you to use both "I" and "we" to distinguish between things you did on your own and things you did alongside with someone else.

Oh I see. I would say that 55% and 56% is the same thing. Although I don't know what an ideal rate is, I personally think that having a completion rate around 50%-60% is closer to ideal than 80%+. From my own experience, I think there is a good chunk of people that enter PhD programs that really should not have started one. I know about 20 students that did not complete their PhD (in Canada, we first do a Masters and then a PhD, so I'm counting the people that don't choose to continue on a PhD as "not complete"). For almost all of these students, the student was much happier outside of the graduate program (most of them choose to leave but a few only made this choice after not passing some milestone). Out of the students that left, I only know of one student that is currently in another PhD program (suggesting perhaps that this person didn't want to leave this career path). That is, what I'm trying to say is that I wouldn't think a rate where half of the students don't get their PhDs is necessarily a bad mark against the school/program. I think not completing the PhD is a normal part of the graduate school process. If you are still interested in Yale, I would recommend discussing this with the program when you are visiting or if you have skype/email chats after you are accepted. It would be helpful to learn how and why people aren't completing their PhDs. The reason I am pushing back against feeling like 55% completion rate is a "bad" thing is because I think students already have too much pressure from universities and other academics to complete PhDs and stay in academia. For some people, this is actually not the best path for them. It is far better for a student to realise that a PhD is not what they want after 2 years than to stay the 6-7 years to complete it. There's so much stigma towards being labelled as a "failure" for not finishing a PhD even though there isn't always a good reason to finish! What would be a problem though, is that there's something systematic about Yale that fails 45% of its PhD students. Procedures or milestones designed to "weed out" students are bad! I would still apply to programs that interest me but I would talk to current students about completion rates etc. before making any decisions on where to go.

You will have to look into the specific language of the lease. Usually the point of the guarantor is that if the landlord cannot get the payment from you, they can go after your guarantor. So, depending on the lease, your guarantor could be responsible for paying costs that you fail to pay. It is unlikely they will go after your guarantor unless you refused to pay them. I wish you luck! I want to note that you are asking for a big favour if you ask someone to be your guarantor. In most cases, you are causing them to be potentially financially responsible for you. I would not do this for anyone that wasn't a family member or a really close friend.

Hello! I was surprised to hear that an engineering program at UBC would require a writing sample and I did a quick check of both the MSc and MEng application requirements and no writing sample is listed. Where did you find the writing sample request? If the application form asks for an upload of the writing sample, then it might just be the program using the University-wide generic form that will ask for everything even if it's not required. This might especially be true if the writing sample request says "optional". If you only see the writing sample request in the application form, I recommend contacting the department directly to check if it is required. If you have found the requirement somewhere else that is more official and directly linked to the department, then it is worth asking the department for more details on what they are expecting. My field doesn't really do writing samples and science/engineering majors do not usually write 20 page papers (which is the typical length for the social sciences and humanities writing samples). Naively, I would recommend submitting a polished version of a final paper you wrote for one of your 4th year undergrad classes (i.e. talk to the prof after they have graded it to see if they have useful feedback for you). In the sciences/engineering fields, I think a final term paper is something around 6-10 pages. It should follow a lot of the same things fuzzy said though---you want to ensure that you demonstrate you can do a good literature review, that you can communicate scientific results, that you can perform a critical analysis of your work and others, but also that you have done some of your own original work/thoughts too. At most North American schools, a final paper like this is the result of a mini-project you've worked on for a few weeks, so it's not like you have publication level results to discuss, but definitely something you have spent a considerable amount of time and energy.

Yes, also I forgot to mention that some of the other evaluation criteria that do not explicitly mention the research proposal is "The ability or potential to communicate theoretical, technical and/or scientific concepts clearly and logically in written and oral formats". The description says this is evaluated based on your past performance and letters etc. but the way you communicate your proposal will probably affect this too.

Although I am not in your field and I was not applying to the same agency (I won the CGS-M from NSERC in 2009, and CGS-D from NSERC in 2011), I agree with what @eternallyephemeral says. I would recommend that you read the selection criteria for the CGS-M very carefully. In particular, the research proposal is one factor in the "Research Potential" criteria, which has a weight of 30%. If you look at the list of "indicators of research potential", you see 7 items, and only 2 are related to the research proposal: "Relevance of work experience and academic training to field of proposed research" and "Significance, feasibility and merit of proposed research". The first indicator is not really something you can do much about, because you can't change your work experience and academic training. However, this does mean that if your experience thus far as been in subfield X, you should write a proposal for subfield X, instead of subfield Y. **Note: Back in 2009 and 2011, you are not obligated to work on the actual proposed research at all, but that may have changed. I wrote my proposal for something completely different from what I actually did work on. The second indicator is the important one. In a 1-page proposal, you basically have room for just 3-4 paragraphs and you want to spend one paragraph on each of those three criteria (significance, feasibility, and merit). Remember the audience for your proposal---they aren't going to be experts in the topic you're proposing for. A good format for a short research proposal is something like: 1. First paragraph, demonstrate why the area of research is interesting or noteworthy. 2. Second paragraph, introduce the specific problem you are studying and why we want to know the answer. Paragraphs 1 and 2 should include a few citations to other studies working on the same problem so that you can later demonstrate how your proposed research will fit into the field's knowledge. 3. Third paragraph, discuss your plan to answer this question and why your plan will work. You can discuss general methods here and cite other works that have used the same methods successfully. But you don't have to have specifics like the details you asked about. 4. Fourth paragraph (this can be combined with the above), discuss your expected results. If you are proposing an experiment with multiple possible outcomes, discuss what each outcome would teach you and show that this is a worthwhile thing to do (i.e. you gain some knowledge no matter what, whether it's finding evidence for some hypothesis or a null result constraining other ideas etc.). Here is where you connect back to your introductory paragraphs and show how your new findings fit into your field. --- The detailed instructions for this year's CGS-M research proposal are copied below (hopefully it's clear how the 4-step framework fits this prompt). Provide a detailed description of your proposed research project for the period during which you will hold the award. Be as specific as possible. Provide background information to position your proposed research within the context of the current knowledge in the field. State the objectives and hypothesis, and outline the experimental or theoretical approach to be taken (citing literature pertinent to the proposal), and the methods and procedures to be used. State the significance of the proposed research to a field or fields in the health sciences, natural sciences and/or engineering or social sciences and/or humanities, as appropriate.

This is a national statistic that lumps a lot of fields together into one number and also a lot of different types of schools together. When all this information is lumped together, it's hard to really know whether this is a "good" number or not. I don't know what the "ideal" PhD completion rate should be. Certainly not 100%: I know many people who decide partway through grad school that they don't want to go on this path so having a 100% completion rate means that everyone finishes the degree even though a big chunk of those people won't have a use for it. And of course, 0% is not good either. I also think there is a lot of variance on the "tier" of the school. At least in my field, top tier schools have very high completion rates, something like 80%-90%. I think this means that most students feel that they will get good value out of their degree and opt to finish it. I think the lower tier schools have lower completion rates because if someone decided that this field isn't for them, they may not see the value in their degree outside of their field. Also, dropouts might include people who start in a PhD program at a lower tier school and then enroll in a new program at a higher tier school. Finally, it's also important to consider why people don't complete. Some of the 10%-20% in my top tier school leave because they get a good job offer or they start their own business (because they invented something). It would be useful to know the percentage of students that don't complete because they were forced out of the program. However, many departments can hide this number because usually they won't count someone who chose not to retake the quals exam as being "forced out" (instead counting it as "voluntary" departure) even though a student could be pressured to not retake or made to feel that they have no hope in a retake. Instead of the overall national average, I would focus on the specific outcomes of students in your prospective program (and maybe even focus on students with similar career goals as yourself, if you can find them).

Are you on a ACA/Obamacare/Marketplace plan right now? When I signed up for one, there was no check of assets in the bank---the decision was based on annual income. Since you would be a full time Masters student, your income will probably be low enough to qualify (assuming that you aren't also working full time in a high paying job!). Costs and qualification vary from state to state---in California, a decent "Silver" marketplace plan will cost about $3000 per year (without any tax subsidies). You could pay less than $100 per month if your income is low enough though. Alternatively, you could opt for a lower level of coverage that will really only help you if you get a giant hospital bill (otherwise you will be paying almost full price for every visit or pharmacy outside of the mandated ACA coverage). I would consider health insurance as a required expense, similar to rent. If you don't have benefits from your school or any future job, then can you take out a loan that covers this cost, or could you find a place with lower rent so that you can afford insurance?

Honestly, most of these systems have really cryptic "status" messages that can be mistakenly labelled or just sound misleading. I would not contact anyone and just wait to see if you get an official decision letter. Don't worry, they aren't going to force you to attend a school just because of an administrative error.

Maybe it depends on the field, but the majority of applications in my field have the letter request separate from the application submission process. One of the "pages" of the application form was "enter the reference letter information" and you can enter the person's name and press a button to request a letter from them. This allows you to submit your actual documents much later. I'm just saying this might be the case for you too, so just double check that there isn't a "submit letter request" button that is separate from the application materials. In addition, some of the websites I've used will allow you to upload the files, submit the application, then request letters and still be able to re-upload new files as long as you do so before the deadline. Check this out too (you can make a dummy account to see if it works). If you really do need to submit the final version of everything then I agree with rising_star that you should give 5-7 days notice as long as you also let them know about the upcoming deadline weeks ago. Make sure those 5-7 days don't include the upcoming Thanksgiving weekend (if your recommenders are in the US). I would treat these cases as the actual deadline being earlier to help motivate me to finalize my essays.