TeaGirl

Public school with in state tuition or private expensive school? Also, better ranked by how much? 5-10 spots is one thing and 50 spots is another. You need to ask the department clearly how likely it is you'll get funding during your first year and later years. If it's a private school you're talking about 4-5 years here of $30 thousand/year so I don't think that would be an option. With in-state tuition, maybe it's doable depending on your circumstances. I personally wouldn't go to a PhD program without funding, especially in engineering.

I think the most important thing is to figure out who your prospective advisor will be, what it is you want to research and how strong that research is at each program, and what your plans are post-graduation. Each program is in a different country so that will change things a lot, and also, in Europe PhD studies tend to be strictly research (more like work) and 3 year programs while in the U.S. it's hard to finish in 3 years and may take 1-2 years longer and involves course work. Not sure about McGill/Canada. JHU is a top 20 school in EE, so it's a great school. As far as transferring, if your interest is in biomedical, I don't see why you can't do that in EE, but have a co-advisor from the biomedical dept. or take some graduate BME classes. I'm afraid I don't know enough about the other programs to help out other than they all have great reputations in Engineering.

If you get the admission and funding, before accepting Tufts, ask Rutgers if they will release you from the acceptance. I don't anticipate that they'll refuse especially if you are asking before April 15, and if/when they do go ahead and accept Tufts. Sometimes schools will give you an early deadline to pressure you into committing. I had that with one of the schools and simply asked that they extend it till April 15 and they agreed. Don't accept a program if you don't know the other will release you because then you'll have to blow off one of them, and It's not good to burn bridges like that.

The Atlantic data is showing how the employment situation is at graduation, which doesn't really reflect the job situation for PhDs. Some people may be lucky enough to actually have work lined up right after graduation, but 30% needing a couple of months to find a job doesn't mean the job isn't there, especially since a lot of that depends on how soon a person starts looking for work and whether they start well before graduation or not.

I've already scouted laptop, calculator, and, since all of my possible choices for now include cold winters, clothing for cold weather (perfect coat, boots, and gloves)! Although I won't be buying anything until I move. I'm using this as an opportunity to clean out my closet and minimize my wardrobe a bit. I'm also excited about hiking/outdoor possibilities, and nearby friends to visit!

When I first left home and traveled I felt the same way. I was very close to just forgetting about the whole thing and avoiding it because of the fear of leaving my family behind, fear of being alone, fear of not making it. I don't know what pushed me or exactly how I found the inner strength to overcome the fear. Maybe it was my parents who saw my reluctance and basically kicked me out of the "nest." In any case, I'm extremely grateful I didn't give into it. I decided then that I would never make decisions based on fear of the unknown. I think what you have to determine is if being near your family is more important than pursuing a PhD, or is it that you're afraid of being far away from them? Are you choosing to forget about a PhD because you don't want one and have rationally weighed the pros and cons, or because you're afraid of not succeeding or you've convinced yourself you're too old (you're NOT!!) There's a big difference in the thought process and how satisfied you'll be in life with your decisions afterward.

I agree. Two months isn't much at all, especially if you've been as stressed as you say you are. Do you need a full year? Maybe you can defer for a semester? There's no harm in asking them though. You can ask about deferment policy from the department secretary/graduate coordinator first to get an idea, and then talk to your PI's. Yours can't be the first time this has come up for them.

This resonates with me in the sense that it's easy to slip into tying your professional self worth with what your advisor thinks of you. This gets even trickier if the advisor doesn't communicate clearly if what you're doing is good or bad, and you end up wondering all the time. I think the best thing to do is to be confident in your own judgment and ability. I assume your judgment has guided you well in life so far, so if you feel your work has an exceptional quality then pat yourself on the back. You're doing well! It's hard not to get discouraged if you're not getting praise from your advisor, but maybe s/he simply not aware of what signals they're sending. You should ask them how they think you're progressing and if they feel you're doing enough, meeting expectations, etc. and then you could take the guess work out of it! I've grown some thick skin over the years. Failing a few times in life can do that and I had to learn to count on what I think of myself to feel good about things, even professionally. I found that doing that, I often do much better since I discovered that I have higher expectations of myself than others do of me.

Oh, yeah, actually they released new rankings just yesterday. Maryland is now 20, VT 17, UW & RPI 24. So yeah, I can understand about rankings flipping around driving one nuts I think one should take a range and assume all programs within that range are equal in ranking. I wonder why the difference in deadlines... that kind of bothers me. I emailed asking for an extension I don't know if they'll agree. Sometimes I think I should just go with it, but then again, I'd like to get all my offers in so I could make a decision without leaving room for regrets in the future.

Oh, that sucks. You did better than me though, I got rejected outright. Good luck though with your other applications, I hope you hear some good news soon! You should keep in mind that a PhD admission is a lot harder to get than an MS one simply because departments are limited by how much funding they have, and UW is extra competitive because of its proximity to Microsoft. RPI have asked for a decision end of this week, I assume it's the same with you? Maybe you can ask for an extension on the decision, I'm not sure if they'd give a month though. If you don't mind me asking, is there any reason you don't like RPI, or is it that you're interested in other programs? The reason I'm asking is that I got in there too and I think come Friday, I will be choosing it over my other options, even VTech. I'm having a little decision making anxiety about whether I'm making the "right" decision (whatever that means) so I'd appreciate any input! My reasons for picking it are because I'm excited about my potential advisor and also it seems stronger in my field of interest with great placement. Also according to NRC's R-ranking it's better ranked than both VT and UW, and within ten spots on USN so there didn't seem to be much difference ranking/reputation-wise. Maryland would make me reconsider, but a decision doesn't seem forthcoming soon.. or at least soon enough. I think I saw one acceptance a while ago on the results section but nothing else. Anyone heard from them yet?

I don't have common name at all, but if you don't want to change your name yet be easily searchable academically, then you need to help the search engines. Like Takeruk said, have a webpage or place where you have your bio and picture online. Go to websites like Google scholar, Microsoft academia, and other relevant places, and update your list of publications, add an institutional associations, field associations, and provide a photo if you want to. I'm sure people will be able to find you if they need to just by adding a couple of details.

Manchester is a pretty great school and you're saying you'll be working with a well known advisor which sounds like a big plus. Recommendations are important when it comes time to apply for a PhD. $10000/yr in NYC is not going to cut it. There's no point in going into debt when you have a great 1 year offer with full funding.

Yeah I didn't know exactly what I wanted to study in high school. In my head I'd bounce around from English to graphic design to chemistry to some type of engineering or math. It's just I always knew I would pursue some graduate degree beyond regular college whatever I majored in. I was also influenced by my immediate family most of whom have some type of graduate degree. If for nothing, then I wanted for the experience of traveling away from home and living independently, because from everyone's stories it sounded like a really great experience and I wanted to have that. Specific ideas about why I wanted a Masters degree or what I was going to study only developed during undergrad. I initially didn't think I wanted to do a PhD at all and felt pretty burned out after my MS. I only made the decision to do a PhD about a year after finishing my MS, when I had a break and a good deal of time to think about what I wanted out of life career-wise. Of course getting all rejections the first time around only strengthened my resolve and made me realize how badly I wanted it.

Most of the schools I've been accepted to haven't sent out funding decisions yet either, and of course unless I get funding I can't go. They seem to send out acceptances first and decide on funding later. I did get contacted by a couple of professors though.

Depends on you. I was 21 going into my Master's, but I hung out mostly with an older crowd, most of whom where 25 or 30 plus. I found them more fun than undergrads to be honest, and the conversations were way more interesting.

Depends. If it's a rejection, a quick one means you didn't make the minimum requirements. The longer it takes to get the rejection means you weren't obviously not good enough, or you may have been placed on some un/official waiting list. For acceptances, I think a very quick one is good because that means they took one first look at the application and said "Yes!" Otherwise, it just means they're going through the big pile of applications and trying to decide which are the best applicants. I have noticed that schools trying to attract the good students send out notifications early whereas the higher ranked ones seem to take their time.

I feel intellectually ambitious. I need to keep challenging myself to be happy and I don't want to settle. That's the main reason. It also happens that I love my field, living in different places, learning new things that interest me, and getting a PhD will let me do all of the above plus open up a career path that I really want.

Ohhh yes. Multiple spreadsheets, with colorful plots and graphs, columns, and equations. I got so confused and obsessed at one point I actually tracked down the raw data from the NRC rankings and made my own ranking systems with weights and averages based on my own priorities. I've added things like funding offers, advisor impression, general impressions of the school from different student reviews, scores of POI's on ratemyprofessor.com, different ranking sources, living index, h-index of both the department in the area I want and of the professor, career services, companies that come recruiting, placement data of both the school and the particular lab I want to join, weather, public transport, safety, clubs and activities available, etc. I even disliked the ranking "interval" of NRC and wanted a solid hierarchy, so I got the raw data and computed the weighted average from those 500 simulations (because just adding the outside intervals and dividing by 2 wasn't accurate enough). I gave them all a score out of ten (or proportioned the data accordingly) to get a final score for each school. I even made small variations in weights and data to check how solid my end results were. I realized two things while doing all of this. 1- I probably would've made a great choice had I majored in statistics and 2- I may have gone a teensy bit overboard ! I'm not crazy I promise!! I can however say it did help quite a lot in getting me to get all the needed info. The funny part is in the end, once I had all the information, my "gut" sort of made the decision.

Nope. Nothing at all since they updated the webpage about my application being complete. Nothing from Maryland yet either.

Lol. I may or may not have done the same thing

I'm looking at the data and I'm pretty sure that's a mistake, lack of data, or a lot of part-time students. RPI specifically says that the maximum allowed time for a PhD is 5 yrs if you have a MS or 7 if coming straight from undergrad. This makes it doubly weird because Colorado has that as 3.8 years which is unrealistic unless they don't have/accept part-time students, aren't counting the ~2 years needed to complete an MS for a direct PhD, or including MS degrees in their data. This would skew data big time as well as the completion rate. When it comes to research, RPI has half as many publications per faculty, but similar citations, which may be a better thing in terms of quality over quantity. Not sure how that factors into the ranking either. All of these make me hesitant to take any ranking at face value other than a tool to tell me the general reputation of a program rather than accurate information about how good it is. Simply because all the data is self reported by programs with no qualifiers to make the comparison even. I like the NRC rankings in that I can view each item individually and check what I think is most important. In the USNews major specific rankings (mechanical) Boulder is 32 and RPI is 27, but these are based strictly off of the opinions of department chairs. I don't know why there's such a big discrepancy for Colorado between the 2 ranking systems (at least RPI falls in the range). For civil, Colorado is 20 and CMU is 11. What's making me lean toward RPI is a potential advisor who's really great in his field, seems nice, and whose research is a great match to what I want to do. The only thing at this point that would make me pick CU is maybe a significantly better funding offer? I don't know. It's also why I'm not picking VTech which is a better school overall but which I think will be a poor research fit as it's not particularly known or strong in the area I want.

I wouldn't be upset. It's the nature of the thing, especially since you're talking about funding for an MS in engineering which is never guaranteed. I had to pay out of state tuition for my first semester because the professor I wanted to work with didn't have enough funding. I had to wait until he got a grant for a project and took me on, and even then it was only with a 1/4RA which I had to supplement by a 1/4TA to get a full tuition waiver. This was even though some other students were fully funded just because they happened to be there at the right time for the right project. Call it luck.

I did my MS at U of A and I didn't have a car during that time. Bus lines are pretty decent and reliable as long as you make sure you live close to one. A couple major buses run every 15 minutes which is really convenient, others are typically every 30min. Living within walking distance of Speedway was a big bonus as you can find almost any major store along that one bus line. Walking everywhere is not feasible because Tucson, like all southwestern cities, is very spread out. Biking is also possible. As far as getting to/from campus getting errands done, you can do it without a car. However, going out, especially at night gets tricky. For the sake of full disclosure, I did have plenty of friends with cars and when I really needed a ride I could get one.

That's true. Except, since I'm actually trying to gain some weight, I have to add more potatoes/bananas/carbs etc. to my version of it otherwise I get too underweight . I also still eat dairy (cheese and yogurt) since I don't have allergies and tried going without for 4 weeks and didn't notice much difference. Still, the main point is giving up processed food, bad vegetable oils, grains, legumes, and most importantly wheat which did wonders to my low energy, digestion, and bloat issues. I'd say around $150-200/month is fairly on the cheaper side of eating while not sacrificing or depriving yourself from certain things. However, I was only able to spend that much (while avoiding cheap fast food), by cooking at home 80% of the time.

Check the results section and search. I believe MIT and Stanford have already sent out replies. I haven't seen the others on there though.