TakeruK

I think you have two very good choices but they actually seem very different to me. I'll tell you my choice (if I were in your shoes) and my reasoning, but I just want to make it clear that I don't think any one choice is objectively better than the other, it's is all due to the subjective things each of us values. I'd choose School 2. The only unknowns from your initial post were advisor fit (you've now said they are both great, awesome!) and actually being able to live on the stipend (not clear if this is the case for School 2). So if the stipend for school 2 is still enough to get by (i.e. current grad students aren't going into debt and the way they live is acceptable to you), then I'd definitely choose School 2. The reasons are: - I've lived in a place like School 1 before and I was miserable. - There's a ton of value in having more hands-on experience and direct interactions with your research. - I personally did not choose grad school for the college life/experience and I was personally looking for departments that ran more like a research institute rather than a typical college. - Not having to TA means more time for research Ultimately, for me, it all boils down to the fact that grad school is a big commitment and a huge chunk of my time. If I am going to do grad school, I'd want to make sure I am happy with my life (e.g. not a place like School 1 and be able to live on the stipend) and also that I get the most research-bang for my buck. The no-TAing, intensive research environment (i.e. everyone at the hospital is there for research, rather than classes etc.) and the hands-on experience sound like the ideal graduate program to me!

Sure. Here's from my most recent year where I did the full categories method, with some added notes for context in brackets. There are some lines that should be in the opposite section, but some of the "Routine" items were created before we thought of making a separate section for irregular expenses and then for ease of keeping the same spreadsheet line number between years, we never moved them. And some of the "irregular" items were indeed irregular when we started paying for them but then circumstances changed and made them regular monthly payments---however we kept them for the same reason as above. Routine items: Groceries and Supplies ("supplies" were things that are expendable such as toilet paper etc.) Furniture/Housewares Laundry Gas/Transportation Entertainment Personal (my partner and I had separate personal expense accounts that gave us a small amount of money that we could do whatever with---the rest of our financials were all joint) Rent Utilities + Internet Phone School Related (textbooks etc.) Car Payments (monthly payment) Clothes (this should have gone in the section below, but for historical reasons it was up here) Presents for People (this also should have gone in the section below) Miscellaneous (this was just a place to put random small expenses that didn't warrant a category, like mailing in tax forms for example) Irregular expenses (not paid every month) Car Maintenance / Parking (Parking later became a monthly expense but didn't move to the top section) Car Insurance (We paid twice per year) Renters + Umbrella Insurance (we paid once per year) Life Insurance (we paid once per year) Travel Health and Dental Plan (originally, we paid once per semester but this became a monthly expense; however we never moved it up to the top section) Medical (out of pocket, deductibles etc.) Emergencies Car Down Payment (for budgeting purposes although we made the down payment in the first year, I amortized the down payment across the same time period as the car loan payments) ---- As you can see this is kind of an unmanageable mess of things! I promise that it did start out much more reasonable when I started in 2010-2011 but it became a monster over the years so that prompted the "reset" I mentioned above. Also you might guess that this level of over-micromanaging actually didn't really help in the long run. It took me many many years into grad school to realise this, but now I can see why I did it this way. As a kid, money was always tight in our family and I think that stress came with me when I moved out on my own for grad school. I felt like no matter how well off we were (grad school didn't pay much but it was still more money I ever made in my life before), I used to have this huge stress where if I could not account for every expense, I felt like my spending would slip away from me and we'll end up accidentally broke. So the way I coped was to literally save every single receipt and write them all into this spreadsheet so that I could feel like I knew where every cent went. This was indeed important for a few years of grad school when money was indeed tight due to circumstances, but it was actually causing me unnecessary stress in the later years so I eventually realised this and stopped. If I were to do it again, I would probably still have the many categories but I'd probably group more of them together and use my long list as potential subcategories. I'd only use these lines to help plan a monthly/annual budget but I would pick some other simplified system of tracking spending that didn't involve typing in every receipt and doing a "good enough" job of approximating where I had budgeted well and where I didn't.

This is how I paid for everything too (sometimes just one credit card if I want to earn more there but sometimes two since some cards have better bonuses on different categories). I guess in my post above, I wasn't considering the method of payment to be part of budgeting, just how much is spent!

Definitely your supervisor is the right resource and it's okay for them to help you design a project too, not just a sounding board / giving feedback to your ideas. 1) In my field, it's common for Masters research to not be original research. It's not a requirement for most departments in my field (at least in Canada). Many people I know do a Masters thesis that is either a proof of concept / reanalysis of an existing result to prove that they have implemented something correctly before going on to do original research in a PhD. In your case, even something that is studied before but from another perspective would count as original research though, so I think it should be fine for Masters work for sure and maybe even PhD work, as long as there's enough to do from the perspectives not covered by previous work. 2) Agree with Psygeek!

Unfortunately, you will have to retake the exams for applications submitted and considered after July 2018. The usual process is that you submit your application with your scores and the school then accesses your score from the database or whatever and attaches it to your application locally. I think the school has to do this step before your score expires or they won't be able to get your score! So, since very few Fall 2019 programs will be doing this prior to July 2018, I think you will have to retake the exam.

I just want to say this is an awesome nickname and I will start using this (in my head) now!

It's definitely good to know these things at this stage where you can switch directions/approaches and make corrections much more easily than later on! You're right that this is a normal part of research. I think you are accepting the constructive criticism very well and you're doing the right thing to improve your research project! When I read your post title, I was thinking your post would go very differently. I am glad to say that it didn't go the way I thought it would. I think every researcher will have an experience like you had in this committee many times during the career, and especially at least once during graduate school. Although it wasn't my committee, I would say that my version of this experience in graduate school was much more harsh! But like you, I was fortunate that my criticizers presented their arguments constructively and that their comments came from a good place (i.e. they want to help and make my research project better). During grad school, one of the things I learned about academics and feedback is that criticism isn't the worst type of feedback. The worst type of feedback is when they don't care at all so they just nod and let you do whatever without regard to your success. Of course, there will be experiences where we receive criticism that don't come from a good place and that they might use them to hurt us or discourage us rather than help us. That's a different story though and I'm glad to see that it does not seem to be the case for you here Still, whether the criticism is well meaning or not, it does suck to hear that you didn't do something right. I know how that feels. I've learned ways to help me deal with rejection and criticism like this. I find that it helps to take some time to be disappointed that you didn't do as well as you've hoped and do something fun. I have a nice dinner, watch some escapist TV/netflix or something and take the rest of the day off (or the next day off if it's the end of the day). Then, I'm recharged and ready to start back it again!

Glad to hear it worked out

In addition to what @rising_star said and the linked discussion, here's what I would recommend you do for your specific case: 1. Decide whether you would consider an offer from UCLA above your other choices. This is a good time to email the program with any questions, maybe even ask to skype some of their students. You want as much info as you can get right now because the timeline for choosing later on can be very short. Ideally, within the next few days, you should talk to all of the programs you're considered (including this waitlisted one) and have a final ranked list of your own preferences. 2. If UCLA is not #1 on this ranked list, then withdraw yourself from their waitlist and accept your #1 ranked choice instead! You're done! 3. But if UCLA is #1 on your list (or could be #1 on your list depending on funding) then you should reduce your list to just two schools: UCLA and your top backup school. You can then decline the other offers (this is a good practice since it will help their waitlists move, and you are hoping someone else does this with their UCLA offer so you can hear back soon!). There are two pathways you could use to narrow down to 2 schools, depending on your priorities: Path "A": Schools #2 and below are all pretty much equally good to you and you want to maximize your chances of waiting for a UCLA offer, then... 4A. If you have not heard from UCLA around April 8 (i.e. 1 week before deadline), starting from School #2, ask them if they can extend the deadline of their offer to beyond April 15. If they say no, then move onto the next school down your list. Once you find a school that is willing to let you decide after April 15, then make that your backup school and decline the other offers. 5A. Wait and see if you get an offer from UCLA. If you do, then great! If not, then accept your backup school. Path "B": There is a clear #2 ranked school for you and if you don't get into UCLA, you would prefer #2 over the other ones on your list, then.... 4B. Decline schools #3 and below on your list. 5B. Around April 8, ask school #2 if they will be able to extend the deadline past April 15. 6B. Same as "5A". ---- In any case, if the request to extend the deadline past April 15 is denied, then on April 15, accept your top choice backup school. If you get an offer from UCLA after April 15, follow rising_star's advice (i.e. ask if you can be released from your accepted school and then accept UCLA).

I think @Pennk handled the situation very well and this is a model response to a tough situation where the school doesn't give you the standard April 15 deadline. Not that you need my approval of course, but I just want to point this out to others who may be wondering how to proceed. I think it would be a good idea to answer the question about where you would be attending instead since in academia, it's important for people to know where you are and they will quickly learn this anyways if they want to (e.g. department directories, seeing you at conferences or other academic meetings). But maybe the norm in some fields is to be more secretive about this (not sure why though).

To be clear, I do believe you took the best path possible between some pretty bad options and you don't have to justify yourself to me, of course! The "lying" part that I was referring to was not about your family but that from Andy and Cecilia's perspective, you had agreed to complete the experiment after your defense, but now you have a job that will require A & C to get Ben's permission for you to work on their project, instead of having you all to themselves! I think A & C are definitely wrong to ask you to do this work as a volunteer, especially after offering a real salary, but it does not sound like you ever said "no" even after they changed the terms. Instead, you just found ways to push off the start date until you got the contract with Ben. Again, I am not saying A & C are acting ethically either, but this is probably why they are upset (i.e. they see it as you agreeing to their terms, then asking for a delay for family which they granted and now you reveal that you didn't want their terms at all). And again, I am not sure if you really had any other options, especially if one of them was holding your degree hostage. I probably would have done the same thing in your situation, to be honest. Sometimes there is just no way out of a tough situation that doesn't involve some damage to yourself, sadly (as you have also said). I am so happy for you that you are free from this anxiety. I also hope that the planned path forward will help clear things between you and A/C for the future. Good luck

Hello! I found this challenging when I had to learn it as well. Fortunately for me, my Masters defense was only 20 minutes long and I had other presentation opportunities (classes, other conferences) that gave me 30 minute time slots, so it was a lot easier to work my way up to 45 minutes. However it's an incredibly useful skill to have! The 45-60 min length talk is standard for the end of your PhD and beyond, and by the time I graduated I gave more than a dozen hour-long talks from visiting schools around North America. Here are some tips that I learned: 1. Practice really really does make perfect. And yes, the 45 minute time length does make it hard to practice. But it's not impossible. For the first few talks, I really do recommend actually practicing the entire 45 minute talk at least once, if not two or three times. The way I would approach it is to first practice the entire talk, just to run through it, identify problem areas, etc. The goal here for me is to just go through it---I don't stop to make changes. Then, break your talk into chunks and really fine tune those chunks. For each chunk (~10 minutes) I would go through it, make changes and go through it again. No stopping for each chunk. If I find some slides or places where I mess up or where I think it doesn't sound that smooth, I would practice that individual slide and make edits, practice again etc. Once that slide is good, I go back and practice the whole chunk. Then, I move on to the next chunk. Once I'm happy with every single chunk, I practice each chunk again. Then I go for at least one run through of the entire talk. Usually there are issues at transitions between chunks so I might practice those individually before moving onto the entire talk. If it's a very new talk to me and when it was one of my first talks, I would want to practice the whole thing, after fine-tuning at least once or twice. Space out your practices over a week to not burn yourself out! I'll be honest though: this level of practice is not sustainable in the long term. But after practicing this intensely for one or two talks, you'll improve a ton and you won't need as much practice in the future. At one point in my PhD, I was giving enough of these talks in a short period of time** that I only practice a few key slides. I choose these slides to be really important ones where I really want to make my message clear. And also the first 1-3 slides because I found that once I start strong, it stays with me through the talk but if I have a nervous talk, the whole thing is affected. In the past year though, I have given fewer of these talks and I under-prepared for a recent talk. It was still fine but I know I could have done it better. So I need to follow my own advice to practice more too! (**There was one especially tough week where I gave 4 talks at 4 institutions in 2 cities over 4 days. Very exhausting, would not schedule that again!!). 2. Pace yourself / go slow! I limit myself to no more than 1 slide per minute. Cramming in more than 45 slides in a 45 min slot means you'll talk a lot faster. I also try to talk extra slow when practicing because I want to have the "muscle memory" of going through it slowly. A longer 45-minute seminar is much different from a short conference talk, in my opinion. Going slow helps the audience stay engaged, especially if they missed an earlier point or are still digesting it. I also like to put in planned pauses and breaks for people to ask clarification questions. Sometimes they are explicit breaks where I ask people for questions, but sometimes I just pause after a very info-dense slide to a) allow people to digest the info, b ) allow people to raise their hand for a question if it's allowed and c) to take a breather/drink of water and "reset" myself (I often start speeding up after such a slide). 3. Make your talk modular. This will apply more when you have done several of these talks, but it will really help you practice and be able to build on your past experience. I try to spend a lot of time designing slides in the first place that can be used for more than one talk. I currently have about 3 hours worth of talk material that I can construct into different 1-hour talks based on who I am talking to. Usually the motivation/intro parts of my talks are all very similar so this means I don't have to practice them as much. I can just focus my practice time etc. on the new stuff. But this isn't as helpful to you right now, other than whatever parts of your previous conference talks you can either use as modules or expand. 4. For this type of talk and especially for non-sub-field expert audiences, take your time with your introduction. Start from simple concepts that everyone understands and then build on that. It's okay that there will be some members of the audience that know some of the stuff already---they can be nodding along and feel good about themselves that they know what you are going to say next. It's always far better to explain something the audience already knows than to skip something critical and confuse them. Furthermore, I would say that you should aim about 80% of your talk to the least knowledgeable person in the room. Make sure that someone who is science educated but not necessarily experienced in your subfield can still understand ~80% of the talk and be able to leave with the same main takeaway point as the others. However, you can and should spend a little bit of time talking at a very advanced level for the few experts in the room (you want them to leave learning something too). A good strategy is to leave this part near the end---you gain your audience's trust and confidence by showing that you can explain things that they can understand. Then, you might go for 1-2 minutes very much in depth into one topic and maybe not everyone can follow you in those few minutes. However, you should then quickly go back to familiar ground again. 5. Avoid jargon for your subfield where possible. Just take the time to say what you mean or the long form of something. Even if you explain it in the beginning, it's hard for people who don't use the jargon every day to remember it.

This is a tough decision! Some people (including me) would rather not go to grad school than to go into debt for grad school. If that is a priority for you then I don't think there is anything wrong with that! Maybe apply again for more programs in a future year. However, choosing to take on some debt for a future opportunity could be a good investment too. Does School A and B offer enough funding so that you won't take on any debt for the school year? If so, and if you are not ready to abandon grad school plans for 2018 yet, then you can consider either school and then only do summer research if you have the funds to do so. Or, if there are ways to greatly reduce your living costs while you do this summer work (e.g. work in the summer to pay the bills and only spend a little time on your thesis). Or, maybe it would help to chart out exactly how much it would cost you for summer research and what a MA thesis will provide in terms of long term career benefits (e.g. a path to a PhD program? a job?). If the cost is low and worth it, then it might feel less stressful to accept an offer that means more debt? (If you choose this option you can always back out a year from now).

As I wrote to the other poster, you are not legally bound to the first school (the one where you formally accepted the offer) but going back on your word can have other consequences professionally / be frowned upon. The extent of this depends on the culture of your program/field and a little bit on the personality of the people you're dealing with too. Hindsight is 20/20 so my best advice to others who are about to be in this situation is to not accept any offers until you are sure you want to attend. If you're waitlisted at your top choice and have an offer from a second choice, then decline the other offers but don't accept the second choice until the April 15 deadline or until you hear from the top choice, whatever comes first. (Do reach out to the first choice to find out their timeframe though). The April 15 convention thing goes both ways----schools are supposed to promise to not make you decide before April 15 and students are supposed to take the time to make their commitments actual commitments. The exception would be if the second choice school forces you to decide before April 15 and before you can hear back from another school. Then I would feel a lot less bad about going back on my word. For your specific situation, my advice is to be upfront and honest about what you are doing. Keep in mind that the school probably has set aside resources for you (funding, class space, office space) and probably declined/waitlisted another student because you took the offer (and this student might have already taken another offer in the meantime so they can't get that student back). I'm not saying this to discourage you from switching---in fact, I think you should switch if you strongly feel the top choice is a much better opportunity since I think it's usually true that the better fit school is worth the consequences of switching. But instead, I'm just letting you be aware of how the school might feel about your switch. The way I would do it would be to first accept the top choice school's offer, then immediately email the second choice school to apologize and say that you would like to retract your previous acceptance and that you will not be attending their program. It's up to you whether or not you want to be explicit about the reason why (e.g. attending X instead). I think you should but you could also choose to wait until they ask the reason for your withdrawal to tell them if you prefer. Make sure that you email both the official person to withdraw (e.g. dept chair or maybe grad school dean) as well as someone who you would have closer academic ties to (e.g. your POI or your future advisor or whomever appropriate that is "local" to the department). Make sure that you go through whatever steps is necessary to withdraw. After this logistical stuff is all done, it's worth emailing any profs that you had close contact with and who might expect you to show up in the fall to let them know you've changed your mind (for these people, I think you should definitely tell them where you are attending instead).

Contact the schools directly and talk to a real person. I am sure there is a way for you to get the required documents. And then if you cannot, then you have at least tried your best and it is more likely that NMSU will waive this requirement if they know you have tried everything possible. For what it's worth, I did have to submit ALL of my transcripts, including one from a school where I took a single class as a visiting grad student (MS). That school required you to fax a legal-sized form in order to get that transcript. Ugh!

My main method is a spreadsheet. During my student days, I kept a super detailed sheet. I had like 15-20 categories (depending on the year). I budgeted an annual amount for each category to ensure they added up to be within my income. That was the budget part. I also used the spreadsheet to track expenses and compare with the budget. I had a sheet for each month with the categories (annual amounts divided by 12) and a separate section for one-time (or other non-monthly expenses, such as car insurance payment). I entered expenses into each monthly sheet every week and tracked my spending. At first, when our budget was really tight, this was a good way to ensure I stayed within budget and helped me not stress about running out of money. Later, as our family income grew, we no longer used it to keep within budget but instead just to track how we were spending. Maybe once a month we would review it and be aware of any areas that we might be overspending and make small adjustments, but we didn't change each week's grocery spending (for example) to match the budget any more. After graduation, life became much more complicated with lots of non-regular expenses (lots of startup costs to having a kid for example!) So now I still use a spreadsheet but I'm no longer tracking each individual receipt/expense. I basically only log things that go in or out of our bank accounts (so it's just a glorified bank statement that tracks all income/expenses across all of our bank accounts). No more categories either---we no longer find it helpful to track all these complicated categories, just an overall picture of how we're spending. However, we put everything on the credit card (so only the credit card payment appears on my budget sheet now) and the credit card online account breaks our spending into their categories for us, which is not always accurate but still a little helpful. Although I don't use it, I have also heard great things about the Mint app. My main hesitation is that the best use of Mint involves linking your bank account with it (best as in, automatically updates your entries) but I don't really want to link that. You can avoid the linking by manually entering each transaction but that is too much work for me at this point.

Yay! Always nice to hear updates and especially nice when it's good news

I don't think there is anything that legally binds you to the first offer. Unless you signed some special contract (but even so, I have never heard of an academic contract that prevents you from dropping out or withdrawing from an academic program). You're right that doing so would be highly frowned upon. The extent of which it is frowned upon would depend on the culture in your field so I can't speak to that. But what I got from your post is that there's no indication from you that this other offer is any better than your first offer. You said it was one of two programs tied for top choice, but now that you know something from both programs and their offers, which one would you prefer? I think before you do anything, you should probably decide for yourself which of the two offers you would take if you had them both on the table. If you decide that the new offer isn't any better than the first one, then you don't have to worry about whether it's even possible to back out of your current offer. If you end up deciding you would prefer to take the new offer, hopefully by then people here would have some insight on what the "costs" are to changing your mind and you can decide if the new offer is worth that cost.

I voted yes, but then I realised I might have misunderstood what you were asking. In any case, there are lots of things that can be described as "student apartment complex". So here are some thoughts, separated into two main categories of housing (i.e. university owned/run vs. open market). University-owned and University run apartments. I would definitely consider living in University-owned student housing if there were a complex/building/community for graduate (and professional) students only. Sometimes they include undergrads with families in this category, which is fine with me too. I would personally prefer an unfurnished university-owned grad housing option (i.e. it's like any other lease except the school is the owner), and my partner and I did live in one of these arrangements for 2.5 years because it was heavily subsidized (half of the market rate). I would also consider University-owned furnished housing set aside for graduate students. At my school, these are primarily 4-bedroom apartments that with individual locks for each bedroom, 2 shared bathrooms and a shared living/kitchen space. With a partner, this isn't really a feasible option for us (although there are single bedroom apartments that cost more for people in our situation), but in general, it's potentially a good idea. It could also be a good idea for at least the first year so that you don't have to worry about moving and finding a new place (i.e. gives you a home base to start looking for new apartments). However, I would not live in University-owned housing that is undergraduate focussed. At most places, these are very tight/cramped areas and it would make me feel more like a student instead of a professional-in-training. Also, they often only offer housing for fall and spring, sometimes not during breaks or summers, and that would be a pain. That said, if housing is really expensive or hard-to-find, a temporary stay in this housing situation might be good as a home base to look for other options. For all university housing options, they usually have pretty low fees for breaking your lease early, so it might also be reasonable to start searching for housing shortly after you get settled and moving out / breaking your lease as soon as you find something better (for example, getting to know other people who are willing to share a house with you or maybe you make some friends with an opening in their house!) Open-market apartments. I wouldn't really worry about other undergraduates living in the same building unless for some reason the entire building is all undergrads and/or the condition of the building is very terrible due to the fact that only students live there. This was what I had thought you originally meant, which was why I had chose "yes" (although for most options above, I would have said "yes" too!). Similarly, if you can find a lease that allows you to go to a month-to-month status after some period of time, this will allow you to make better arrangements for yourself in future years.

I'm sure you've already seen the prompt and the evaluation criteria? I think this part of the application is the one part where you really should present your personal story / narrative and how it shapes you as a doctoral researcher. You should go into as much depth as you need to effectively answer the points in the prompt. Since you mention the length limit, it sounds like you might be worried about fitting everything in. So, my advice would be to first remember that the main goal of this essay is to answer the prompt in the way that best addresses the evaluation criteria, not to tell your personal story. So, if you are running out of space, think about how you want to address each of the listed criteria and what story/stories from your past that you want to use to address them. Can you think of ways to present the story in a short/direct manner that minimizes the amount of exposition you have to do, or perhaps there is another story/simpler story that has the same effect. Note that in the evaluation criteria guide, it lists 6 points to consider and only 2 of them are directly asking you to share a story from your past life circumstances. The other points ask you to discuss your leadership experience and how you used your leadership skills, rather than how has your history shaped your work today. So be sure to cover all of the suggested points!

For someone in your own department, if other students attend these practice talks too, one strategy is to get a friend to raise their hand to ask you a question immediately after bully-prof asks their question. (Or if it's appropriate in your department's style of practice talks, they can just blurt it out as soon as you answer the bully-prof's question following the above advice). This helps move things along to a different line of questioning and takes the stage away from bully-prof. Prep your friend(s) so that they are ready to raise their hand / blurt out a question as soon as you are finish answering.

The purpose of the Q&A period is to benefit the entire room,. It's not an exam and it's not a chance for one person to get on their soapbox to talk about their pet issue with you. So this advice is also really good even if the questioner is just aggressive rather than bullying/harassing you. Thinking like this also helps me to frame the situation as not having an individual discussion with the questioner while the whole room is watching (ahh super stressful), but instead, the questioner's job is to raise an interesting point for you to discuss further for the benefit of the whole room (much less stressful---you're here because the room came to hear you speak and your expertise...it's not an exam!).

I used State Farm while I was in California because it was also my auto insurance provider. Bundling your insurance plans saves money! I actually had 3 policies from State Farm: auto, renters/apartment, and a personal liability umbrella policy. I found that it was much cheaper to purchase only the very minimum in personal liability for auto and renters insurance and then purchase a large personal liability umbrella policy instead. Having 3 plans with State Farm instead of just 2 gives a much greater bundle discount, in my experience.

Completely agree with you. Like fuzzy said, it seems like this bridge was burned a long time ago to me too. That said, even though I still believe you were justified in your actions, lying to your advisors is still a bad thing to do and it comes with consequences that you are now experiencing. I also agree that the double standard exists and it will continue to exist as long as there is a power imbalance between advisor and student. Unfortunately in your case, it seemed like you were forced into a dilemma where you had two tough choices. You chose what you did and ended up avoiding having to work for free at the cost of upsetting your advisors. However, if you chose the other option, you might not have made your advisors that much happier and the cost might have been no postdoc at all, continue working on an experiment at student's pay and being miserable. I think you made the right choice and this is a case where making the right choice / doing the right thing still harms you or costs you in some way. It might be tempting to think about what "should" have happened, or what A & C "should" have done. It sounds a little bit like you might have wanted a solution where you get what you want and keep a perfect relationship with A & C. But I don't think this was ever possible and it does you no good dwell on that. Sometimes there is just no way to please everyone. I'm not saying that you were faultless but I'm not here to assign blame! In hopes of helping you, I think you should take fuzzy's advice to try to think about where A & C are coming from. Not because they are right, but thinking about how you affect others can help you reflect on the decisions you made. Think about what you might have learned from this situation and how it can help you in the future, but don't dwell on what-ifs and should-haves. Also, thinking about it from A & C's point of view can help you maintain as good a relationship as you can with them while you finish up this experiment and get your publication.

In my field, attacking/bullying in guise of a question is unacceptable. The expectation is that the session chair should moderate the Q&A period so that question askers are only allowed to ask actual questions, e.g. for clarification or to gain your insight on a topic, not to attack you. However, in reality, many session chairs are quite junior and may not be able to stand up to or successfully get a senior bully to back down. In addition, many bullies cleverly skirt the line between a genuine question and an all-out attack, relying on the session chair's and audience's disbelief that anyone would actually go up and bully someone in order to get away with it. That's the bad news. The good news is that more often than not, the audience is on your side, not the bully's side when these attacks happen. So fuzzy's advice is very good---you don't have to "prove yourself" to the bully (unlikely to be successful) nor the audience (they already know the inappropriate nature of the question). Redirection is a very good strategy when you get a question asked in bad faith. Just answer a different, related question instead. And fuzzy's suggestion of something along the lines of, "thanks for that comment/feedback, let's talk more later when I have some time to think about it" is very good and something that happens often. If this happens to you, the first thing I would do after the talk is to bring it up with my advisor or other mentors and see what they say. It could be that the person asking is a known bully in this way and it's not worth your time to engage. I've been in so many conferences now where it's the same 1 or 2 people that get up almost after every talk to point out some nitpicky detail. So if you have seen this person do this to countless others, know that it's not personal at least!