Quantum Buckyball

You have to accept the loan offer in August and the amount of loan they offer you is for both Fall and Spring semester.

This is part of the admission process. If all the applicants wait until April 15 to make their decision, then some schools might not have enough of money to fund all the accepted students, and some might have a lot of funding but don't have enough of students.

There are plenty of applicants willing to take your spot :-) Believe it or not, you're really not that special.

politics within the department are inevitable, especially between senior level professors .. make sure you talk to the professors in person and get to know their personality and mentoring style hmm...same for the current grad students....environment within the department....neutral, friendly, or hostile...etc...the stuff that you won't find on a typical school website.

I swear to god some of the prospective students were so arrogant and smart-ass, almost made me want to leave their ass in the middle of no where....

One of my colleagues is a 5th year domestic student, and he is in a research group comprised of 95% foreign, Chinese students. Here is the catch.... He said that when he first joined the research group, the group was mostly domestic American students, and maybe 1 or 2 foreign students out of total ~20 students. Then, two years later, all the sudden the PI (who is a foreigner himself) stopped taking any domestic students and let them graduated with a Masters instead of a PhD, and only accept international students from China since then. I thought he was joking at the time because there is no way this is legal mainly because most of their research funds in the US are funded by the US taxpayers' money and private companies in the US. After doing some digging and chatted with other senior-level grad students from that group. I found out the PI has another research group (academia) and a company in China. 9 out of 10 of the students graduated from the US group headed back to China and started research groups of their own. The research topics they're doing compete with the research topics that the US group is currently working on. From the legal standpoint, is this even legal...? I'm not a law expert but I found it very sketchy and conflict of interest? I understand that we should always collaborate internationally, but where is the boundary?

I think the easiest way to improve yourself is watching a lot of foreign TV shows or movies (US or UK)...with English subtitles , at least this was what I did and I thought it was very useful and convenient

Some schools require students to apply to RA/TAship separately after they got admitted. It's usually harder for a Masters student to get funding if the program is predominately for PhD students. You should definitely ask first before you reject their offer.

Does the schools you applied have a rolling admission? Please note that schools aren't required to send you any followup, I have never hear back from one of the schools I applied two years ago, well, they took my app money though

generation of entitlement

It's always easier said than done. You need to be able to convince the admission committee why they should accept you and not the other applicants with a very strong education background and GRE/GPAs, especially the ones are already in the industry and have years of industrial experience. You could do some volunteer work in a polymer lab at a local university to see if you enjoy the field or not. This will help you determine what kind of projects you want to pursuit in the future, and allow you to write a more focused personal statement when applying for PhDs or Masters.

There are plenty of research groups without a website. Over 70% of the physical chemistry research groups at my school either don't have a website, or have a website that hasn't been updated for over 10 years. Professors are not required to have a website online, most of them only have a short version of CV, which typically don't have the information regarding what happened to the former students.

I am aware that the way I worded may sound a bit offensive to someone, but the post was meant for the prospective students and encourage them to ask sensitive questions during visitation weekends.

Here is my 2 cents of the day and it's something for the prospective students to think about when selecting a research group. If you decide to join a research group full of foreign students and the PI is a foreigner himself/herself, and the group is publishing a great number of publications/year. Then, you are mostly will have a tough(er) time to land a job (both academia and industry) in the US after graduation, because there is always a bias against foreign groups like this and there is nothing you can do about it despise of your excellent track record and the number of publications. Of course, if you are an international student yourself, then you should know that there are research groups that do not take international students and only domestic students, even if you have a killer GRE/sub GRE score, a Masters, and published >3 papers. When you visiting the school(s) of interest, make sure you ask the current students about this question. Do not ask the professor(s) this question because they are most likely will deny it, but track record doesn't lie, people lie.

You might think you have a say in this but you really don't. The PI and the department pay you to go to grad school, and not the other way around like undergrad. All graduate students are replaceable. Make sure you talk to some senior grad students during visitation weekends.