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acrosschemworld

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  • Application Season
    2013 Fall
  • Program
    PhD Chemistry

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  1. Do you have access to their library database yet? Maybe they have your textbooks at the library and you could borrow them if you need them? Also, did you look into e-textbooks (if you are confortable reading on a computer screen)? Many textbooks are now available in pdf format. The library can have electronic versions too, I was surprised to find some of my grad school textbooks on the library website.
  2. Very good advice from danieleWrites. I much second listening to online videos about the material you'll have to teach so you can hear the pronunciation. Make sure you take the time to pronounce key terms so the first time you pronounce them will not be in front of your students. The first few times you may find it helpful to give a practice talk of whatever you have to present in front of the students. One other thing I did in my second semester as a TA was to write a lot of handouts. That way students had important things in writing and my accent was much less of a problem. I recommend doing that if you are worried about your accent. Another advantage of handouts is that you can write them ahead of time when you are less busy, and if you teach the same thing twice, you will have to do even less preparation because you already have the handouts. Our department handled TA's like spunky's: just let us deal with it. I later learned that there was a 2-semester class offered by the Education Department for international TA's in all departments, that addressed things like English, accent, but also cross-cultural things that international TA's have problems with. Unfortunately it usually coincided with required classes in my department so nobody usually in chemistry took it, but maybe I could have done something to accommodate it in my schedule if I knew in advance about it. I recommend to check with your school if there are such resources that are helpful, but not required.
  3. The title says it all. Any tips on how to network with professors in your department in a professional way, especially in lab sciences where most of your time is spent doing experiments in your own lab and socializing mostly with your lab members and (if you are lucky) your PI? How do you establish meaningful relationships with other faculty members for such reasons as getting recommendations, getting them in grad school committees, or networking with their connections? For more specific advice, I am at the end of my first year and will probably need a recommendation from some professor other than my advisor in November, and I don't think anyone knows me well enough to write anything more than a form letter. I joined my current lab the summer before my first year and decided to stay, so I skipped the part of going to group meetings and talking to professors to figure out what group I want to join. I also had a slightly rough start to adapting to grad school and I don't think I left the best impression to most professors I had classes with, so changing that impression could be harder than approaching new people. There are these two professors whose research directions are closely associated with my project and I only talked to each for about 5 minutes but I feel I should do somehting so they get to know me a lot better. I asked the students working for one of them for lab-specific advice plenty of times and am comfortable to keep doing that, but I don't know how to approach the professor, especially because I'll probably keep having questions that his students could answer for me.
  4. I am a first-year PhD student struggling to keep up with everything going on in grad school. I do not know if what I am going through is normal for a grad student, or is because I might have an undiagnosed learning disorder, particularly attention deficit. I am an international student who got my undergrad degree from an undergrad-focused school in the US. My life until college is probably best exemplified by a math contest in middle school when I got a special award for the most ingenious solution to a problem, but actually only got 2 points out of 10 because I misread a digit from the problem text and carried everything through with that wrong digit. I knew for a long time that I have problems paying attention and tried hard to work on it, but with little progress (which also made me very insecure, because it seemed that I couldn't do anything right no matter how hard I try). I didn't know there was such thing as learning disorders until sophomore year when a friend randomly mentioned he wanted to see if he had ADD, and I went home and looked up on Wikipedia what ADD was standing for. I remember them listing a number of criteria and saying that people with ADD have at least 6. I realized I probably have 6. I also read that many smart people go undiagnosed forever because they unknowingly find ways to cope with it. So a few weeks later I went to the Counseling Center at my undergrad to see if I have ADD. I took some tests and talked to a counselor who said that I meet some criteria for ADD, but she was not sure if I am just influenced by what I read, and she wasn't an ADD expert but was convinced that people with ADD/ADHD don't have a 3.8 GPA like I did at the time. I did not pursue anything to get tested since then. Later doing an REU I did not do great because 10 weeks were not enough for me to adapt from research at an undergrad school to research at an extremely competitive research institution. I tried to analyze myself and what happened during the REU, and I realized that in basically every college class I start out slowly, my first few grades are average but I gradually get used to the class and the professor's expectations and by the end of the class I master the material well enough to be able to recover and most of the time get an A. Over time I became very good at slowly walking myself (or others) through concepts and read carefully (usually twice) to make sure I do not miss anything. I also initially made slow research progress at my undergrad school, but I had a patient advisor and soon I caught up and became the best researcher in his lab. The keyword in all this is slowly, which is not a good option in grad school. Now I am in grad school and I do not have time to walk through things slowly anymore, because the classes cover a lot more material, I also need to learn new research skills and have a non-tenured (read, demanding) research advisor, and I have other things to do such as teaching. Because of this, I do not get a lot of things done properly. I was not able to recover from my usual slow start in classes. My research advisor, who is a nice guy and is known to really care about students, made me several hints that I am not making enough progress for a first year. Recently, I started thinking again that the reason why I am usually adapting more slowly might be a learning disorder. But on the other hand, I know that grad school is hard for everyone and it's not uncommon for people to struggle. My question is, is it worth taking time away from research to go through the lengthy process of seeing if I have a learning disorder? Would it even make a difference to my life as a grad student, given that I will soon be done with classes so something like extra time on tests would be pointless? Would it help or hurt if my advisor (who is demanding, but cares about students) knew I might have a learning disorder? I know that at least in my field, there are important professors who became very successful despite learning disorders, but the current academic enviromnent is more competitive than ever.
  5. I would completely cut off the second paragraph. The admission committees do not care about when you became interested in science nor who influenced you and how, nor about how dedicated you were as a child. A rule of thumb is to not spend time talking about anything before college, unless you somehow did research or something directly relevant to your program. If you want to reduce the number of words, just rephrase to cut off some fill words. For example in the thir paragraph you have "It was here where I started to learn..." . You could make it "Here I started to learn" or "here I first learned".
  6. It is definitely not a problem. How is that different than asking them to recommend you to one more school? Whatever way the university handles admissions and scholarships, or whatever changes they made, is not within your control. So your recommenders should understand.
  7. I think that depends from program to program. My professor said that some programs accept a strong candidate no matter who they want to work for, but at others one professor should want to take you, otherwise your are not accepted. My inexperienced guess is that in the second case if you don't mention anyone your applicaiton might not catch any professor's attention. So you are still better off mentioning someone.
  8. I don't know if it is any different for masters, but I am applying for PhD and I am phrasing it something like "though I want to have options open, I am considering working for X,Y,or Z. Even if you don't say that, you are not committing to definitely work with one of the professors you mention. But at least for PhD it is very common to mention some peofessors.
  9. One of my professors said that GRE Chem is higher for internationals because they study only chemistry classes throughout their 4-5 years while we take 1-2 classes per semester and at least as many non-chemistry classes. It is normal that they should know a lot more chemistry.
  10. I heard that UNC favors students from North Carolina a lot more than other state schools favor students from their own state. So you being from North Carolina is a plus there. Make sure to phrase your SOP carefully and not say or imply that you think your school's chemsistry program "sucks". Grad schools will wonder if that is how you would be talking about them in the future and not take you!
  11. I second the advice of not asking about retirement, but about taking new students. I usually phrased it as "If I come to School X, would you have room in your lab for students starting Fall 2013?" That makes it clear that you are not asking for an application favor.
  12. Thanks for the feedback. I did not say I couldn't think of questions, but that I figured out the answers on my own. My questions about his recent past research are answered in his papers. His short-term future directions are listed on his website, and he talked about his plans at the talk I attended. And his plans are such a good match for him, that I am excited to pursue them just as they are. I don't need to talk to him about making small adjustments to fit my needs better. As far as the application process, it is listed in detail on the department's website. Anyway, I understand why what I did may seem counterintuitive to a lot of people. I would have definitely emailed him if I had a legitimate question I couldn't find the answer to. But if I did a mistake, I can't go back in time and fix it. Emailing him back now after 2 months would probably be kind of rude and hurt me more. So I am asking again the question: what to do under my circumstances? To rephrase my question, does my brief email exchange count as having "discussed my application" with him or not?
  13. Have you considered asking for 4 letters? I was also debating on who to ask for a 3rd letter, and ended up asking two people! It seems that schools prefer recommendations from someone who is on tenure-track so if you really want to stick with 3, I support choosing the full-time professor. But if you have 3 letters that fulfill the requirement and the 4th one is supposed to be great, I am sure it would only be a plus even if it does not come from a full-time professor.
  14. A while ago I emailed this professor because he is my top choice at his school. I wanted to see if he will accept new students at all, so I don't apply for zero spots. My email sounded like this: "I am applying to your school because I am interested in your work because it combines my interests in X and Y. Are you taking any students next year? I was hoping to ask you in person when I went to your talk at Conference X last week, but I didn't because (practical aspect why I left)." He got back to me along the lines "Yes, I will accept new students and please apply. I am sorry we didn't meet. Please let me know if you have more questions about applying." I never emailed him back because I had no questions I couldn't fgure out the answers myself online. I generally did not go out of my way to contact professors mostly because I think I have a pretty good application and don't want to sound like I am trying too hard, and because I am usually good at finding information on my own. Now the application asks if I have discussed my application with any professor. Does this situation count? Would listing him do more good, or make me sound like "I try too hard"? I don't want to mention going to his talk in the SOP because it is not what made me interested in his work, so if he matches my email with my application he will see that I am interested enough to have gone there.
  15. Other than the fact that grad schools don't see your SAT score, think about this: the point of college is to make you learn in a much more sophisticated way than a high school student. For example, a college-level student is more likely to understand that it is not a good idea to take an exam as impotant as the GRE (or SAT) cold than a high school-level student.
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