jeffster

That's a bummer, I was in a similar situation a few years back. I was working full-time, going to school part-time, and training taekwondo five days a week, while drinking lots of caffiene - mostly coke and coffee - in the course of my day. One day the stars aligned and I didn't have to go to work or school, which was rare. So I went to the gym in the morning, started training, and just... crashed. At first I couldn't figure out why, since I had slept fine and all that. Then I realized that in my NORMAL work/school routine I would have had several hits of caffiene by then, which had all been skipped that day. I quit caffiene cold-turkey right there, and didn't have any for about three years. When I finally started re-introducing it in small amounts, I found I was hyper sensitive to it. Now I regularly enjoy one cup a day, and it gives me a significant energy boost. So, while everyone is affected by it differently, if you can handle the week or two of discomfort I recommend going cold-turkey for a bit and giving your system a break. Then reintroduce slowly and in moderation, and whatever you do avoid re-escallating.

Oh, sorry, by "self insure" I meant YOU are insuring it. From your bank account. AKA it breaks and you fix it

That was my point, really. They've always had weight restrictions, but only this summer have I been seeing them enforced. And I've flown international a ton. In all my years flying before this summer, the only time I ever recall anyone caring at all about my carryon (aside from security) was when I had to fly on a tiny puddle-jumper with no over-head bins. Anyway, maybe I just got unlucky twice somehow, but I thought it was worth a note of caution!

Building on this, I also recommend against extended warranties. I worked in retail computer sales, followed by computer repairs, for several years out of high school. These are incredibly profitible for the companies that sell them, because they don't pay off for the average purchaser. Unless you're at a point where buying a new laptop later would completely ruin you, but you somehow have a few hundred to throw away now on the warranty, you're better off self-insuring that risk.

I'm not in CS, but I do spend the majority of my time programming these days, mainly in Python, so here's my take: I use a Windows 7 laptop with a 15.6" screen and 4 gigs of ram. This has the advantage of being cheap, and having enough memory to handle most of what I do. If I'm dealing with a particularly huge dataset that requires more than 4 gigs of physical memory, I make a trip to the lab or use my schools virtual computing lab. I find the screen size is a good balance - bigger makes the laptop more expensive, heavier, bulkier, and kills the battery life. Smaller and I don't have enough desktop space to view multiple windows at a time while I work, which I almost always need to do. Personally I recommend against buying Mac laptops, unless your budget is approaching unlimited. No doubt they make great-looking, trendy products that work well, but you'll pay something approaching triple what you would for a Windows or Linux machine. Macs are reliable and have good warranties... but again, if you have the misfortune of getting a dud of a Windows machine, you could still buy yourself two more brand-new ones for the price of one Mac. Both my wife and I have had good luck with Acer. Mine is approaching 5 years old now and I use the hell out of it. On the other side, I made the mistake of getting my wife a Compaq a few years ago and it felt cheaply-made and broke in a year and a half. YMMV. Edit: The other thing that's nice about the screen size I've got is that there's room for a full number pad on the keyboard, which is super useful.

I emailed all three of my LOR profs with a maybe five or ten sentence thankyou email. All three of them replied enthusiastically. Actually I wish I had sent them cards by mail now, in hindsight. I can't think of a single reason you wouldn't go a bit out of your way to thank them for their support!

I had basically the same situation. I took two years off after undergrad so my wife could finish school, then applied for PhD programs. I had three professors I developed relationships with who I thought would be willing, and I approached them right around graduation and casually explained my situation and asked if they would be willing to write a letter for me in a year or two. All three had no problem with it at all. That way the bug is in their ear, so to speak. I even managed to meet briefly with two of the three a year later, when I made a short visit to my campus town, just to keep things fresh. The other I made sure to email. I think the key is to make your intentions clear while your abilities are fresh in their mind, then just make sure they don't have time to forget who you are before you apply.

A lot of people seem to be discouraging applying to schools you don't love, relative to other schools. That's not really the right way to look at it... if you apply to two schools and your top choice is Harvard and your last choice is Boston Community College, but you don't get into Harvard, it should be irrelevant to your decision just how much more you like Harvard than Boston Community College. The only comparison that matters is Boston Community College versus not going to school at all, because those are the choices available to you. So, I'll just toss out there, it's absolutely worth the effort to apply to some safe schools, even if they're far from your first choice. It's very, very hard to accurately judge your own merits, as anyone who has gone through grad school aplications is no doubt aware. Applying to some safe schools can literally save you an entire year, by avoiding having to reapply with lower expectations after a year of all rejections. With every potential app, ask yourself what you would do if you got into that school and no where else. If the answer is "go to that school" then you might just have yourself a "safe" school. If the answer is "not go to school" or "retry applications next year" then you should skip it. I think most people would be surprised just how much you can make of an opportunity though, even at a "safe" school that isn't a perfect fit.

Poor email response rates from graduate departments seems to be the norm, sadly. My own department is a place you send emails to die quietly. Let that be a lesson to every one of us would-be professors! Reply to student emails and save them some anxiety.

One tip I want to add, now that I've completed my first year of PhD work, is that you have to develop a certain level of... I'll call it apathy. This has been a consistent theme when I speak with others in my program as well. What do I mean by apathy? Well, at the start of your first year doing PhD work you'll likely be somewhat frantic. Everything must be perfect! You must study all of the hours! If you don't you will fail! For me, the realization hit right after my first midterms. I was just so tired from the pace I was forcing on myself that I couldn't do it anymore. I started the second half of the term feeling like I wasn't doing enough, but was too tired to change it. But as things progressed, I realized I was getting basically the same marks on my work. Then finals came, and... again, basically the same scores. I think what I observed was probably due to two things: First, you trade off a little less work for a lot more relaxation, and it balances out. Second, I think the key is to identify diminishing returns. For example, I had a professor who assigned really long problem sets of increasing difficulty, one a week, all semester long. I found I could put in 25 hours or so and get a 9 out of 10... or I could put in 10 hours and get an 8.25 out of 10. And combined they were only worth 10% of your grade, anyway. There were way, way more productive things I could use those extra 15 hours a week for than gaining another tiny fraction on my final grade. Your situations may vary, of course, but I think most PhD programs will require more of you than there is to give over a sustained period, and it will be up to you to figure out how to manage. In short, learn to give up the idea of perfection in favor of doing well + keeping your sanity. It's not worth the pending emotional breakdown if you try to sustain an unsustainable pace the entire time!

Nothing unusual about the carryons I brought. In fact I dare say smaller than average. And yeah, it never happened to me before, ever, and I've flown international a dozen times or more in the last five years. The first time they weighed it at the gate, after I had already checked in, on a flight from Detroit to Frankfurt (Delta). The second time they weighed it at checkin, right along with my checked bag, at Dulles (Lufthansa).

One thing that has worked for me in the past, when faced with way too much unstructured time, was to go out of my way to put myself in situations with deadlines. I don't mean the sort of soft deadline where you say to yourself "I'll finish this by July 27th!" and then don't, whereupon you just feel even worse about yourself. I mean something involving external commitments. For example, does your department have regular speaker or presentation series? See if you can volunteer to present yours. Are there people at your institution or in your town that you don't necessarily know, but that you could set up meetings with to talk about your work? Basically the motivation to MAKE these hard deadlines hit you is easier to come by than the motivation to just flat-out do the work. At least it is for me! Edit: The important thing is to know that it's not at ALL unusual to need deadlines to be productive, you shouldn't feel bad or deficient because of it, and you can turn it into a strength.

For anyone flying international (haven't tested domestic), I've found the airlines are now weighing carryon baggage and charging for overweight, or making you pay to check it. I just had it happen twice this summer, with two different airlines (Lufthansa and Delta). So, be careful if your plan is to pack all your books and other heavy things in a carryon bag and fly somewhere for school! That used to work for me all the time...

1. Don't worry about feeling insecure and nervous about it all. Applying to grad programs is an exhausting, nerve-wracking, and sometimes borderline degrading (it can feel a lot like begging and being rejected at every turn!) process. Literally everyone who applies feels the way you're describing. 2. That said, the advice given in the thread so far is good. Don't go to grad school out of intertia! It's tons of work, and I think everyone who starts a PhD, at some point, feels like they probably would have been better off not doing it. What gets you through is the knowledge that it will be worth it in the long run. So, you need to be really clear on that part before you go in. Will all the time, effort, stress and money be worth it in the end when you're holding your degree?

It's hard to give advice for these things, because everyone is different. My recent comp exam was 5 hours long, four questions. I ended up hand-writing about 20 pages worth of equations and narration and graphs. I think what worked for me (and I passed on the first try, so I guess it did work!) was about a week off (between the end of classes and the start of studying) to relax a bit, another week of casual studying a few hours a day on my own, followed by two solid weeks of intensive studying, mostly with other people. In the intensive stage I did no less than 6 and no more than 10 hours a day. The real key for me, I think, was finding two people in my program who are at similar levels of knowledge and skill, and had similar work habits to my own. There are some people in my program that are just so far ahead of everyone else, studying with them is at best pointless and at worse frustrating. My study mates kept me motivated and on-schedule (we always made sure to set solid times and places to meet). Studying full-time is exhausting. As you can see, what worked for me was pretty specific to the program and format I was facing. But maybe you can pick something useful from it. Good luck!

Another problem you might run into is name recognition. If you go to a fine European institution that isn't much known in the US (and there are a ton of them that fit that criteria) then you might be at a disadvantage against a pool of applicaints for some future position. Obviously this isn't so much a problem if you go to a high-profile school, like Oxford or the Sorbonne. At least in my field, my professors generally discouraged going to European institutions unless you wanted to work in Europe, or it was a high profile name and program.

Don't make the mistake of thinking you'll learn one statistical package and forget the others though; it's more important to learn what you're actually DOING to the data when you analyze it. You can ALWAYS learn new sets of commands, if you understand what's happening in the background. In other words, don't think of statistical software like a little black box that spits out magic answers when you click/type the right combo. This is very important because you don't always get a choice. Stata is very popular in academia, but different fields and even different employeers within the same field use different statistical packages. For example, if you're going to work for the government in DC you simply must know SAS. I personally use Python for everything, but I'm currently working on research for a professor who uses Stata, but we're dealing with a dataset that comes only in SAS format. So I have to know a little of all three for my work. Tinker with as many of them as you can (if data analysis is what you'll be doing a lot of, that is). Or even better yet, if you're clear on what you want to do with your degree, find out what package is used in that area and stick with that as much as possible. Otherwise, there is no right answer. They will all get the job done in the end, and the one you'll like best is the one you know how to use well!

I think it's hard to signal your math skills to a committee beyond the traditional way of taking the actual classes. It is possible, however, especially if you have at least taken most of the requirements traditionally. For example, I took up to calc 3 at my US institution, but I took a single class (that didn't have an obvious name describing the content) that was a combination of calc 4 and analysis at a European institution, so I used a bit of my letter to outline my math strengths. My school isn't as math-focused as some, however. I know on a few apps they actually had a supplemental page that wanted you to list all of your math classes and all of your marks in them. I don't even think it asked about your econ classes.

I think the hardest part for a foreigner moving to the US with a family will be health insurance. Unless your spouse gets a job that provides it, then it is usually expensive and doesn't cover a lot. If anyone has a pre-existing condition then it's especially problematic. Added to that, all of the health care laws are changing 1 January. Schools offer health insurance, but it's frequently very expensive to add family on to it. You should check that out carefully. Good luck!

I always sort of felt like there was merit in the professor getting their leanings out in the open, early. Not to use as a bludgeon, but so the students know where they're coming from. Obvioulsy subject matters - none of this should apply to a calc 1 professor. But I had a poli sci double-major in undergrad, and at least two of my professors were very open early on about their beliefs. Most of the others tried to keep the neutral facad up. Both seemed equally viable to me, depending on the personality of the professor.

There's a free, regular shuttle from Tenleytown to AU campus, but that's the only one. I think the N4 and N6 also run to campus, and possibly a couple others. Georgetown has a free shuttle from Dupont Circle. For both AU and Georgetown students, looking up Wisconsin Avenue in the Glover Park area is a pretty good bet. Most of Glover Park is about a 25-minute walk to both places, or less on a bus. It's a little farther from GW (more like a 35-minute walk), but still accessible. Or for AU students, looking over the border into Maryland is a good bet. Bethesda is very expensive, but past that it gets reasonable (if a bit boring). If you have a car and are somehow thinking you're going to drive to (or through) Georgetown, you're insane. I've never seen worse traffic in my entire life. The main intersection at Wisconsin and M St is frequently in a "cross traffic is stopped in the intersection due to a light farther up the road, blocks green light... clears in time for one or two cars to go... then that direction stops in the intersection due to a light farther up, and now the cross traffic has to sit through THEIR green light" situation. Save yourself! Do not try to drive in Georgetown. Just general advice for everyone - be very wary about bargain hunting for apartments in DC. Housing in DC is insanely expensive, and you should expect to pay for what you get. If you're seeing studios or one-bedrooms in the city (not MD or VA) for under $1500, it's almost certainly in a shady neighborhood. Use the crime map provided by the DC police or the Washington Post, or even better yet, ask a local.

To make the cut in a top-25 econ program, you probably need a maximum quant score on the GRE. At most one or two notches down from max, but you'll be at a disadvantage against your competition who will largely have it. Retaking is definitely a good option if you think you'll actually do better. You didn't leave a lot of detail to go on, but you could probably swing the lower-end of the top-50 if you have very good marks in the math classes you do have. Consider taking differential equations.

Your lack of math is definitely a hurdle, but not an impossible one to overcome. Most econ departments require you to do the core econ work first, then focus on fields second. My school doesn't do behavioral econ, but the format still seems to be pretty standard. So, expect to have to take your basic PhD econ courses, which means math. Take this with a grain of salt though, since I suppose it's possible the behavioral-focused econ programs are on a completely different math schedule than the rest of the field, but I doubt it. You didn't mention your level of calculus that I saw, but you simply must have at least covered multi-variable calc (usually calc 3 in the US system). If you've got that covered, you probably meet the math minimum for lower- and some mid-tier programs. Less than that is not viable. That said, having diff eq (calc 4) is hugely beneficial. After that, having analysis is important but not as crucial outside of top-rated programs. Anything you do beyond calc 4 and analysis 1 is just icing on the cake. That is to say, may make you look better than other applicaints the committee is selecting from, but probably isn't strictly necessary for consideration (or even most of your coursework). Good luck!

That is difficult. Given that it wasn't a deal breaker either way, you might consider letting this one go. Misunderstandings develop easily over electronic communication, you'll likely need to interact with the person when you're there, and I'm assuming it's already settled that you're going there regardless of what you find out about this issue. Why light unnecessary fires? Give them the benefit of the doubt for now, assume there was some confusion somewhere and that it wont happen again. Then start on good terms with the department head.

Sigaba, how did you turn this into a thread questioning the OPs integrity? My goodness. Obviously everyone should be careful about how much they disclose on the internet, anywhere. It's valid in any thread on this forum. You brought it up, great. If the OP isn't concerned about it, stop trying to badger them into it.