TakeruK

In STEM, almost all offers are for 12 months. I did get one offer where the first number they quoted was for a 12 month stipend, but then the following paragraphs did make it clear that it's actually two separate offers: a 9-month fellowship with a certain value and a 3-month summer RA with another value, where the summer RA is something I would have to apply to after starting the program. But after visiting and talking to the faculty, it became clear that this is just a formality in the way the funding is structured (the fellowship comes from the department but the RA comes from the professor) and basically everyone who is accepted has a professor willing to hire them as an RA and basically everyone who wants an RA can get one. However, students do have the option of not taking an RAship that first summer and doing something different instead (e.g. internship, going home and studying for quals etc.). This was the only program in STEM that I've heard of doing something like this but my humanities friends tell me this is normal for most of them.

I think I tried to address this in my post above but after re-reading it, I realise it might not be very well written. So, I'll try to present the ideas again. Okay, so the scenario is that School A is asking you about other offers. You have an offer from School B, which is a "better" school. You will answer honestly so there are two possibilities: 1. You prefer School A over School B and you tell them the truth: that you have an offer from School B but you are more interested in School A. I don't think the advice from the book applies here. This is because the advice from the book is correctly saying that schools don't want to waste a spot---i.e. they don't want to offer you a spot if you are just "collecting acceptances" or if you already have little intention of going there. But, if you tell you them (truthfully) that you would take a spot at their school over School B, then there is no reason to not make you an offer if you would otherwise get one. 2. You don't prefer School A over School B and you tell them that. You might get rejected from School A after this. But there's no harm done, after all, you prefer School B over School A anyways. There's nothing lost in being rejected from a school where you already know is not your top choice. In my opinion, the point of the admission season is not to collect as many acceptances as possible, but to get the one or two acceptances that are a good fit for you! So, I still think the best thing to do is to be honest---with both yourself and the school. When preparing to answer this question, you should already have enough information to know how excited you are about this school vs. the other offers you have. Of course, if you are more excited about this school and you tell them that you currently prefer their school over the other offer you have, this doesn't bind you to actually accept---it's clearly dependent on factors like the funding offer you'd get, how the visit goes, etc. But this is known---you don't have to state it explicitly.

My knowledge of the Harvard EPS program is a little skewed---I'm on the planetary science side and studying exoplanets and while exoplanets is in the earth science department at my school, it's in the astro department at Harvard. So, the planetary scientists that are in my circle tend to prefer the CfA over EPS. Also, on the topic of tenure at Harvard, I think it's hard for pre-tenure faculty anywhere at Harvard. I have heard it's one of the more difficult tenure processes, but maybe you both have heard something especially difficult specific to EPS! I have talked to astro faculty at Harvard and asked them about their tenure process (trying to figure out how other institutions do it as we're trying to effect some changes at our own). It turns out that the entire process is done at the University administration level, with very little input from the department and colleagues.

Yeah! Some things we always get at Costco: 1. Oral-B toothbrush heads. When it's on sale, it's $32 for 8 heads, which is a 2 year supply for 1 person. At Target and other places, it's almost $20 for 3 heads. (Save $20/person over 2 years = $10/year/person) 2. Dairy products, such as butter and cheese are, on average, 20% to 25% cheaper than the grocery store. Our favourite is the Tillamook Extra Sharp cheddar, we pay $9 for a 2.5lb block, but at the grocery store, we would pay $12 for a 2lb block. 3. Toilet paper, facial tissue, and paper towels are a lot cheaper at Costco when they're on sale! It's really hard to compare these prices though because the companies do a tricky thing where the sizes they offer at Costco vs. regular stores are different, so you would have to basically read the package to get the total surface area of toilet paper in a Costco package and then compare it to the surface area in a not-Costco package. I don't have the exact numbers anymore, but I found at one point we saved about 10% on average when only buying things at Costco on sale. 4. The over-the-counter pharmacy is a lot cheaper as well, for both brand name and generic medications, but you do get a lot at once, so I would only buy things you need a lot (for us, we get vitamins, acetaminophen, ibuprofen and allergy medication here). For other things, they go bad so it's not worth it. 5. Random other stuff that we find is cheaper in bulk at Costco: bath soap, hand soap, dish washing sponges, cleaning supplies, laundry detergent, ziploc bags, alcohol. 6. The food court thingy that they have makes a fast and cheap dinner (but not very healthy) so you can go to the Costco right after work and also get dinner there without worrying about having to cook on a weeknight etc. 7. Inkjet cartridge refills are cheap too but I found that I save more money by just not even owning a printer. Not everything is better at Costco though. When Costco is not on sale, it can sometimes be the same price as the grocery store. Sometimes the grocery store sale is better than the Costco regular price. So for things that you can buy in large amounts (i.e. you consume a lot of or it doesn't expire) are worth it. I never buy things like bread there because although the per-loaf price is cheaper, we don't eat that much bread for it to be worth it. Even if we froze it, 2 loaves of bread would probably last us 2 months and we don't have enough freezer space to store everything! Oh also the meat is both really good cuts and very reasonably priced there. We don't eat a lot of meat so I don't usually get it in bulk but if I wanted to have a dinner party and make a nice ham or a couple of steaks, Costco is the best deal. Finally, on the topic of crockpots---we have a nice potato soup recipe that we use often, but other than that, it's really hard to find crock pot recipes that aren't made with a bunch of meat. We're not vegetarian, but my spouse doesn't really like eating meat, so I usually cook with minimal amounts of meat. Anyone have some favourite meatless crockpot recipes?

I would also say you should answer this honestly. Like Eigen said, it could help you, or at worst, nothing will happen. I could see one situation where certain answers might result in a rejection. For example, if you told the school at which you're a high alternate that you actually really prefer the other offers you already have, then it's likely that this school will accept someone else instead of you. But this doesn't really hurt you since if you were honest about preferring the other schools over this one, then you don't need an offer from this school. (If for some reason, you really wanted to go to that school but lied and said you didn't want to go to that school, then this would be bad for you, but why would you ever do that?) I wouldn't necessarily send the other school's offer right away without being prompted to though. I would tell them something like: "Your school is the [top choice / high on my list] and I currently have received funded offers from Schools A, B, and C" (say they are your top choice if it's true, otherwise say that they are a high priority for you). You could also add that you are willing to send along a copy of the offer letters from Schools A, B, C if they would like, however, if they wanted them they would probably ask.

Citation statistics is easier than track record. But this can be field dependent. In my field, for citation statistics, you can search basically any major abstract database. The big one in my field is NASA ADS---you can just search the advisor name and you can see all of their papers, the number of citations in total as well as per paper and per year. Another one that isn't field specific is Google Scholar. Google indexes as many papers as it can find. But the citation estimate is determined algorithmically and it often overestimates (sometimes by a lot). I find it more useful to quickly see what papers a person has coauthored though. For track record, this is a lot tougher. You need to create your own list of all the students the advisor has graduated and then find out where they are now etc. I would start with the advisor's official CV, which often lists all students they graduated. Then, I would use one of those databases above and find out all the people they wrote papers with. Look for patterns in your field---for example, some fields have the paper authorship order as student = first author, supervisor = last author. In my field, it's often student = first author and advisor = second author. Finally, if you really want to be complete, you should look up the Library website for the school. Almost all school libraries will index every student's thesis. Using the prof's CV to determine which years they were at the school, search the dissertation database for dissertations from your department in those years. My department graduates like 5 people per year, so it's not hard for me to just look at all of them, but if you have a bigger class, then you could also narrow down by subject matter. If you can do a text search, then search the text of all the dissertations for the advisor's name. Almost every student will thank their advisor by name in the acknowledgements section (or at least cite one of their papers).

I also got one offer that was near $37k (in a low cost of living area, upstate New York) but this was because the extra money came from a fellowship. In my field, there is a school that often offers a bonus 1-time only fellowship that is a stipend boost of $18k for the first year. If the Chicago offer is coming from a source like this, it would be really hard for another school to compete with it, unless they also have fellowship funds available. And to be honest, if they did have the money available, they would have likely already offered it to you. My department also has a policy that all students are paid the same, regardless of how much TA or RA they do. The only exception is if you have an outside fellowship that is more than the base stipend here, then you get to keep the extra. Or, if you have an outside fellowship that pays for something that is not covered by our regular benefits, then you can keep it too. For example, the health & dental plans here are subsidized at a rate of school paying 85% of the premiums and the student paying 15%. But if you have a fellowship that specifically allocates money towards health insurance, you can use that fellowship to pay for the 15%. So, a few students here make about $600 more than the others. I second the others suggestions to properly compare cost of living and the other benefits. For example, consider how much you would pay in rent and health insurance premiums and copays etc. Rent is probably the biggest factor affecting cost of living so you don't have to worry too much about difference in things like groceries (unless you have a family and are feeding a lot of people). Usually, the best way to ask for more money is to show that you really want to go there, but the expenses are too high and the stipend not enough. But, if you want to just ask for more money from WUSTL just because you want more money, then of course it's your right to do so. However, this is likely to be pretty unsuccessful. As Eigen said, most schools are offering the most that they can. It might reflect poorly on you to simply bargain for more money just because you want it. But I also see the reasoning from the other side---sometimes schools do take advantage of the fact that students are hesitant to ask. So, it's up to you to decide if $28k is enough and whether asking for more is worth it. (For what it's worth, I went with a lower offer and because of a lot of personal reasons I won't get into, the stipend would have not been enough for the first year. Since I had an external fellowship from Canada, I asked for an increase and was told sorry, they pay everyone the same. But nothing bad happened, they understood the reason for my request and said they would like to help but they couldn't. Later that year, they were able to find additional money to help me out because of the external fellowship. So it's not always bad to ask! But in my case at least, there were both 1) a "good reason" to ask and 2) I was bringing in some external money [they said this was the big deciding factor that made it possible to justify the one-time stipend increase for me).

This is a great point! I keep a spreadsheet of my weekly expenses (update it each Sunday). It helps me keep track of my expenses as I go along and it also reminds me to pay my bills. Early on, I quickly learned how fast small things add up! I would spend $2 here or $4 there and pretty soon, I end up spending an extra $15 I didn't mean to spend that week.

Each field is different probably---but faculty at my program have also asked me about my thoughts on prospectives too. Although very informally, not like a formal meeting as Bubbala describes. And, in my program, all the visiting students are already accepted, so it's not like it makes a difference in admission, but some faculty might want to know to decide which students to take etc. So I just want to add that even for post-acceptance visits, it's important to always be professional and friendly. And even if the faculty never asks for our thoughts (not all faculty members ask the students), it's still very important. The grad students you are meeting with aren't just random people you'll encounter this one time only. If you attend the school, we will be your colleagues, your collaborators, maybe your TAs, your officemates, your friends etc. If you come off as arrogant or pretentious or offensive or otherwise, it will colour our impression of you when you arrive. And if you don't attend the school, then maybe you'll meet these same people again during conferences etc. My field is small enough that this will happen for sure! In fact, a bunch of grad student hosts from my visits are now postdocs are my institution! Also, remember to be courteous, professional, etc. to everyone: faculty, current students, other prospectives, and especially the administrative staff! The admin/office staff are the best people in the department because they do all of the hard work to make everything run smoothly. No need to suck up to them, but often people treat support staff with less respect and it reflects poorly on them. Finally, I wouldn't say that you should interact with current students in the exact same way as you interact with faculty, though. But maybe this is a difference in fields. Definitely be professional but you can probably be a little bit more friendly. When I meet prospective students, I am looking for future colleagues and friends. I'm evaluating them on the basis of "how well would they fit in with the current grad student cohort" not "are they smart enough to get into my program?". So, if you are too distant/professional with the current grad students in my program, it would reflect poorly on you as well. But I am pretty sure this is not necessarily universal---just providing my perspective.

In the US (and also Canada), dental insurance is usually considered separate from health insurance. The exception is when dental work is related to a health insurance thing (for example, you are in a car accidental and they need to do some work to remove broken teeth from your mouth). My school offers health insurance and dental insurance as separate policies. The health insurance is mandatory (we must get it unless we show proof of equivalent coverage elsewhere) but the dental insurance is optional (we can pay $150 per year to get dental insurance). What each plan covers will vary a lot, but most student dental plans do not cover orthodontics (braces) very well because most grad students are 1) too old to have braces (since most North Americans get them between ages 10-16) or 2) too young to have children old enough to require braces. However, my plan does cover orthodontics at the 50% level. Unfortunately, there is also a maximum lifetime benefit on orthodontics of something like $2000. So it's not going to cover that much. I also hate how US dentists operate, my experience with my first two dentists were like AP's. But I finally found a good dentist that will do two very important things for me: 1) when suggesting treatment, being actually honest with me about how medically necessary they are, and 2) running the procedure code through the insurance company and getting an actual quote before presenting me with my treatment options. Except for cases where there is immediate danger to my health, the dentist always offer a "do nothing for now" option and I am never pressured into doing any treatment. Vision care is not covered at all at my school, but we have been working to get it added. They have started looking at quotes and enrollment costs, with a potentially adding this benefit for students in a few years.

You also asked for some tips on keeping expenses down! Here are some that work for us: 1. When I cook dinner, I try to cook something that will make 6 meals (feeds 2 people three times). We eat it for dinner and then for 2 of the lunches during that week. Cooking at home costs something like $2-$3/meal but eating out is easily 2-5 times that much. 2. Bundle insurance! Getting all of our insurance from the same provider saves us a bunch. 3. Buy in bulk and know the sales cycles. We do this especially for Costco. I've gotten their flyers for a long time now and basically almost every item is on a 3 or 4 month cycle (i.e. if it's on sale in January, it will be on sale again in May). Each item is on a different cycle though, but if you get it on sale, you can easily save $5-$10 per item. Whenever we go to Costco, we try to only buy items that are on sale and we buy enough to last until the next time it's on sale. Sometimes you're off-cycle and you run out of toilet paper (for example) when it's not on sale---of course, we would still buy it because it's a necessary item!! But, then if it goes on sale next month, we would buy more, enough to last us the next 4 months so that we can get on-cycle next time. We only do this for the big items that we use a lot of (e.g. toilet paper, paper towels, etc.) or items that cost a lot of money. We save several hundred dollars per year this way, more than the cost of Costco membership. 4. Similarly, with groceries and other items, we establish a shopping route and try to get the "loss leader" items in flyers each week. So, we might do our groceries across 3 stores to save money and we also stock up when staples like beans etc. go on sale. I also plan the dinners for the week based on what's on sale. We establish an efficient route (i.e. plan out all of our errands for the whole weekend and do that with groceries too) so that everything can be completed in 1.5-2.0 hours. I think it saves us something like $700 per year. Each of these save us only a few hundred dollars per year, but the combined action of all the efforts can save several thousand dollars. For a grad student stipend, this can add up to 10% or even 20% of your total income, which I think is totally worth it!

Cost of living is so important to provide useful information! For a graduate student, I think the biggest expense that is affected by cost of living is the rent cost, so when I was deciding whether or not each offer provided enough money to live on, I took a look at the rents for areas I would want to live in. We currently live in a very high cost of living area now. I don't want to provide details of my budget online since it's a bit personal, but I can say that our total household budget has ranged between $40,000/year and $50,000/year for two people in a high cost of living area. The fluctuation is due to finally being eligible for my school's subsidized housing program, because the market rent here is so ridiculously high (if you only had a single grad student stipend and tried to rent in a one bedroom place, you would spend 60% of your stipend just on rent!); but also due to the Affordable Care Act making insurance for my spouse a lot more affordable (Thanks Obama!). This budget includes the costs of owning a car, expenses for many types of insurance (car, life, rental, liability), necessary things such as phones, internet and luxuries such as eating out and going to movies. When considering grad schools, our general goal in terms of finances was to be at a place where we would save at least $10,000 each year, on average, towards future things like eventually buying a home etc. Because we were international, there were a lot of hoops to jump through so that my spouse could find employment, so the first year, we had to dig into our savings a little bit, but since then, we have been doing a good job of meeting our savings goal. Overall, I would say that two grad students with stipends similar to yours should be able to live fairly comfortably. I would define "comfortably" as something like all of your expenses that you need to live add up to something like 80% to 90% of your after-tax income. Neither my spouse nor I are interested in purely spartan living for the sake of a PhD, so I turned down some offers with stipends less than $20,000/year in equally high cost of living areas because I felt it was just not worth it.

I don't remember exactly but 10-15 days sounds right for me. In the old days, it took a little time between the score being in the system and the score appearing online. In this in-between time, if you called and paid to hear your score, you would find out before it appears online. This was most relevant for the subject scores, since they would usually be in the system by Friday night/Saturday morning but the scheduled online release date is usually a Monday. And especially when there used to be a November subject test, the score would come out mid-December, so finding out a few days before is the difference between making the December 15 deadline or not, often. However, this score-by-phone option is no longer available. You can only find out and order score reports online now, as far as I know. If you do not get your scores fast enough, just let your schools know and they'll often accept the scores late. In my year, I decided on November 27 that I wanted to apply to a school that was due Dec 1. But the Subject GRE scores was not available til December 12 or something. So I just asked if I could send that score late and they were okay with it. There was also a school that had a deadline of Dec 9 and I asked them the same thing (I asked them months in advance though since I was on my honeymoon during the October test date so the later test, in November, was the only possible subject test for me).

I am similar to you and I had a lot of reservations about one visit that was with a grad student host. But, it turned out to work out fine in the end, I think. The evening stuff was very relaxing---one night we watched Toy Story and the other night we played a board game. It was in a very low cost of living area so many grad students had homes---this one had a 2 bedroom, 2 bathroom place so I had my own room and my own bathroom. The hosts were experienced and were very good at making sure I was able to have my own space and gave me lots of chances to decompress in my room if I wanted etc. I didn't end up going to that school but I stayed friends with my host! At another school, my spouse was visiting with me, and we did not want to stay with the graduate student host (for many reasons I won't get into here). It was close enough that I could drive there instead of fly (it was a 4-5 hour drive though) so I asked to use the money that they would normally use to fly me out towards a hotel instead. They agreed--they told me how much they would normally budget for a student visit and said it's okay as long as I stayed under that amount. So if you are really uncomfortable, it's okay to ask for something different, in my opinion. However, in both of these cases, I was already accepted, so I'd understand that you would be hesitant to ask for something prior to getting an acceptance.

Hooray!

I think one of the reasons that you got offered an overnight stay is that they wanted to treat all prospective students equally and offer everyone a spot overnight if they want it. I don't know your full situation so I can't really say what's best for you. I think if staying overnight with a student will help you properly be engaged in the visit events then I would stay overnight. A 30 minute commute could mean a lot of different things (e.g. is it driving to the next town over, or a 30 minute walk or a 30 minute self-drive in the city or 30 minute via public transit etc). If the method of travel is not going to be something you do regularly and if it will distract you from the visit (or even make you late) then I think it's fine to stay with the graduate student. I think you should default to politely declining and letting the school know you only live 30 minutes away if you are able to comfortably manage your own transportation. I don't think there is right/wrong answer though.

For Montreal, I agree with fuzzy and also second the thought that most grad students live off campus, and rent in Montreal is very affordable for a big city! However, if you are moving from a faraway country, I think it makes sense to start living on-campus at first so that's less things you have to worry about when you get settled in. If you are able to end your on-campus lease early, then that might be worth doing once you find a good place off-campus. I know that in Quebec, the typical notice to vacate is 3 months (unless it has changed since I was last there). So, in addition to July 1 being the most common lease end date, you would usually start looking for places to live 3 months before you want to move.

If you haven't been notified of your acceptance, then you are not accepted. I wouldn't ask at this point either. Just treat this as a pre-admission interview until you find out otherwise. I agree with Eigen that in my field, the visits are not that different from each other. Also, if the visit dates are just a little bit after the "traditional decision date", they might wait until your visit before making a decision on your application. So, don't feel discouraged/dejected if you see other people's results before your visit but you still have not heard anything yet!

Income from fellowships are taxed the same as income from any other source. But your overall tax might be different than in previous years where you were not a student because being a student allows you to claim some additional deductions. For example, if your fellowship is used to pay tuition or mandatory fees or other mandatory supplies, then you can claim some deductions. It's hard for us non-tax experts to give proper advice as every person has different tax situations. But in general, fellowship income in the US is considered like most other income for tax purposes.

Just to respond to a couple of points here. I was indeed thinking of one major grant with many aims, where there could be more than one project, so it makes sense to switch personnel between projects on the same grant. But I guess in my field, the grants are probably not as major---they often have enough to pay for one or two students, not an entire lab. So, a PI with many students will often have many major grants to pay for everyone (here, by "major" I mean enough to pay for an entire student or more). In my non-bench science field, research costs are pretty low---a few thousand for computers and then just paying salary mostly. I agree that a large part of academic science is in spreading knowledge and teaching others. I guess from my experience, I actually see more cases in my field where this phrase is used to take advantage of students rather than the other way around. I rarely hear students question "how does this benefit me", to their own detriment. But I agree that a balance is important---thinking of yourself all the time will hurt you in the long run, but always trusting that the faculty has your best interests in mind could end up hurting you too! I know you're not arguing for either extreme: I guess we're experiencing different sides of the balance.

Just to add to what Eigen said, I think there is a difference between simply "being paid by the advisor" and "being paid by the advisor for this specific project". I think if your advisor is paying you as an RA for Project A, that doesn't give them free rein to assign you work on Project B instead. I think for any work that takes a big chunk of your time, every student should be credited in one of four ways: authorship, money, course credit, or "quid pro quo". I couldn't think of a better term for the last one sorry, but I mean doing something nice for someone else in the interest of being collegial which will probably indirectly benefit you in some other way. I use a lot of vague/relative words because as Eigen said, everything is so field dependent. Money and course credit are generally straight-forward---it's either in the RA contract or not. To help solidify things on the other two things, I'll give you some examples of things I've done that did and did not qualify for authorship. Things I did for others that resulted in me getting authorship: - Collect data for a colleague while on "my" experiment (telescope) time and then analyzing it and providing the results as well as writeup description of what I did - Take someone else's data and used my own code and analysis tool to compute some numbers and helped my colleague interpret them and incorporate into their paper's main argument Things I did for others where I was okay with not getting authorship (i.e. the main value is "quid pro quo"): - Collect data for a colleague while on "my" experiment (telescope) time and then just passed the raw data on. This is a gray area---the first author offered authorship but since I did not have anything to do with the experiment, and since I have no understanding of the science, and since my only contribution was to provide a few data files that took less than 5 minutes to collect, I declined authorship credit and took acknowledgement credit instead. However, I might have decided differently if I played a larger role in the scientific analysis of the paper. Although I don't "keep score", I collect data for others and others have sent me their data for "free" too. - Consult with my colleagues on the analysis of their work. I do a lot of Bayesian statistics stuff and I often help other students and postdocs in the group develop statistical analysis tools that they use in their paper. I usually get acknowledgement credit for this. This is a "quid pro quo" because I think this is me "repaying" the group for all of the training and help I got when I was new. Also, the people I help are experts in other areas and I ask them to consult on what I'm doing all the time anyways. - Help teach another group member a computing language and/or help them write their own code to do something I already have code to do. Sometimes this results in acknowledgement credits. Again, I think this is a "quid pro quo" thing: senior group members help train junior group members. I feel like my department is really collegial---I would do this for any grad student in the department, not just my own research group. And also, I benefited from similar training/mentorship while I was new too! - Read drafts of papers for other group members (or other students). Attend practice conference talks (or quals or candidacy or practice defenses etc) and provide feedback to them. Bounce ideas around in the office or coffee room, etc. All of this things are automatic collegial things, in my opinion. I automatically do them for others without thinking and I feel others won't hesitate to help me in the same way. It's part of being in a great collegial department One gray area, to me, is when people want me to send snippets of my code so that they can edit it and modify to their own uses. I usually don't like to do this, because often a polished piece of code took me weeks to write. I would rather train them to write their own code (see point above), or run the analysis myself and be part of the paper. However, sometimes it's just a very simple or tiny piece of code (i.e. it's a common algorithm that didn't require original thought on my part---I just copied it from a coding "cookbook"). In that case, I don't mind sending it their way at all! Finally, a few things that I think are inappropriate for an advisor to ask you to do, unless they are paying you specifically to do these tasks: - "busy work" like writing emails for them, doing random IT work for them because they don't know how (e.g. downloading a list of papers that don't benefit you in any way), schedule meetings for them etc. - non-research related things such as house-sitting, babysitting (unless of course you are volunteering to do this or they pay you separate from your RAship to do this!) Anyways, hope these thoughts help you determine what is appropriate for your situation. But these are often so field specific that you have to talk to someone you know well in your field/department to get a sense of what's okay. Maybe some older students in your department would be a good resource. I feel like a big part of the reason why students get taken advantage of or end up in unhealthy relationships is when they don't recognize unfair behaviour when it happens due to the different ways every lab is run. So, I think it's a good thing that you are asking these questions

I definitely understand the source of stress and anxiety in wanting to make a decision sooner rather than later. My spouse is not a student and moved with me to my graduate program and February was the most stressful month for both of us while we wait for decisions to come in. It's really tough not knowing where you would be, and especially for the non-student partner, as there were also worries about finding work etc. But unfortunately, I don't think it's really possible to rush things at this time. In the above post, I gave some exceptions for some cases where I would check in, but they were all about grad school. I should have mentioned other considerations too---for example, I think it's okay to check in and ask about decision status if you are in a situation where e.g. your partner has a job offer in the same area as the first school that accepted you and that job offer has a strict deadline and you want to know if you still even have a chance at other places before making the decision etc. Note: I'm not saying that I think you have a partner or anything---just wanted to give examples to demonstrate that it's okay, in my opinion, to have graduate programs worry about the other issues that come with grad students relocating. Academics are humans too, not just research machines I'm saying this because in some parts of academia, it seems like being a nomad and being willing to move at a moment's notice is considered a good thing (or even necessary) to succeed in academia and I want to minimize this type of thinking as much as possible. I want to normalize the fact that there are lots of non-academic reasons to choose a school Edited to add: Also, my program will accept people for a fall start date but if someone is willing to pay you as an RA over the summer, you can start as early as you want---some people even start in May or June (usually people who are not coming directly from undergrad). Sometimes people who start this early even get a paper completed before the school year even begins.

I think this is actually atypical---either schools want the official transcripts upfront like HopefulPHD14 said, or they only ask for it when you confirm your acceptance into the program. I am guessing that you have made some cutoff in the program you're applying to but I think it's weird that they were okay with unofficial transcripts to make this cut but require official ones to make further decisions? Or maybe this is a way for them to ensure everyone gets to include their Fall 2015 grades. Anyways, it's certainly a good sign that you're still in the running. But whether or not this represents an initial cut or a final cut is hard to tell.

Don't check in. Let the programs go through their normal process in determining their admissions. Don't be the annoying applicant that thinks they're special and needs to know extra information because they got into another program already. The exception would be in cases where 1) the person you've been talking to at these schools asked you to keep them updated on your other decisions or 2) the school that accepted you is requiring you to make a decision prior to April 15. Otherwise, I would probably not check in with graduate programs until late March or early April (if there's one or two schools that you haven't heard from yet and you're pretty sure you want to accept a school and you just want to confirm that you got a silent rejection so that you can go ahead and accept the offer you currently have).

20 days out is a lot of time---cancel it now and everyone will be better off. It gives enough time for them to invite another candidate should they choose to. Also, for most hotels, you can cancel up to the day before you arrive so it will probably not cost them any extra money. It might not save them money either if they are putting 2 people to a room and they had an even number of people (but then some lucky student will get their own room). I take advantage of the free cancellation for hotels whenever possible---usually as soon as I register for a conference, I'll also book the hotel (if there's no fee to cancel and no deposit). Then, if I find better arrangements, I can cancel and switch but if I don't then I won't have to worry about missing the group rate deadline!