random17

As TakeuK says, it really depends on the policies of your department/school, since they're the ones who give out the scholarships. However, having just been given an OGS for my 4th/final year of my PhD, I know it is possible to get one in some places. (I'm international, though, and thus don't have any previous government fellowships, so I have no idea how that affects your OGS chances.)

Good point, I was realizing after I wrote my post that I'm coming at this from a very science-focused perspective, whereas things are quite different between the sciences and humanities in basically all aspects of academia. Teaching, in particular, is generally much more time-intensive in the humanities than in the sciences, and I was forgetting how much more of a time sink it is when you're instructor-of-record instead of a TA who's contractually limited to working 150 hours per year.

I have a lot of issues with the assumption that unless you work nights and weekends, in addition to 9-5, you'll never been able to land an academic job. I'm slightly oversimplifying here, but the major things for succeeding in academia are (1) publishing interesting papers in good journals, (2) networking through having a presence in your department and attending/presenting at key conferences in your field, and (3) a willingness to move anywhere for a job. (3) is obviously not related to your work style and I'll argue that it is completely possible to accomplish (1) and (2) while working a 40 hour week if you're also willing to have occasional nights/weekends for events, deadlines, etc. The caveat here is that you do need to be organized and efficient with your time, which means things like actually writing when you're supposed to be writing and not reading Facebook, figuring out all your technical procedures before you start so you have all the reagents and equipment ready to go, maximizing your meetings with your supervisor/committee by going in with a list of what you need from them, but it is completely possible.

Married and living with my spouse, but no kids yet. This is also a research-only semester for me, so my schedule would be slightly different if I had to work in teaching and marking. Lab days: 7:00-8:15 Get up, walk dog, eat breakfast, pack lunch 8:15-9:15 Commute to campus (subway/bus or carpool) 9:15-12:00 Mostly lab work, but also data entry, analysis, writing, reading papers, etc. depending on how much hands-on time my lab works requires and what deadlines I have coming up 12:00-12:30 Lunch with friends (the exact timing of this varies a lot depending on when we all have breaks in our work and will sometimes get skipped if I only have a 5 minute break) 12:30-5:00 Lab work, etc. 5:00-6:00 Commute home Evening: Make/eat dinner, clean kitchen, and hang out with my spouse, usually sitting in the living room reading books, browsing the internet, or watching a tv show. Once or twice a week we have friends over for dinner or go over to their place, but that's the same routine, just with 4 of us instead of 2. I almost never do work in the evenings (probably a handful of times in the past 2.5 years). 10:30/11:00 Bedtime Work-from-home days usually consist of computer work (analysis, reading, writing) from 8ish-6ish, with a half-hour break for lunch and an hour afternoon walk with my spouse and our dog. When I'm TAing, I try to do a lot of my marking on my commute or during office hours, so it doesn't cut into my research time too much. Weekends involve planning meals for the week, grocery shopping, errands, fun/social events. I probably end up working 3-4 hours one weekend morning a month, usually making up for time I took off during the week for one reason or another.

Yep, this is also true for the US state where I pay taxes. I'm a US citizen but a Canadian resident, so I pay taxes in both countries. Canada only taxes my earned wages (TAship) and my scholarship is tax-exempt, but when I file in the US I have to pay taxes on my Canadian scholarship income because it was not taxed in Canada. My dual-country situation is obviously complicated, but the main point is that tax law in my state (like California, and I thought also federally, but maybe not) also dictates that fellowship/scholarship income is taxable, unless it is a fellowship used to pay tuition. Like TakerUK said, your accountant is more trustworthy than random people on the internet, but this is what my trustworthy accountant has told me about US tax codes.

At York the union is both sessionals (lecturers) and TAs. At U of T it's the TA union that's striking, which does include a few graduate instructors, but it's mostly just TAs. (See also, this is why York is actually negotiating with their union whereas U of T is refusing--a strike is a much bigger deal when it takes out the people responsible for teaching 2/3 of your classes.)

The UTM shuttle is free for UTM-affiliated grad students. Figure on it being an hour each way, but it can also be 35 minutes if the traffic's good. (This may no longer be true given the construction on the Gardner, but even when it's an a 60 minute ride it's still one bus with one stop, so you can read or listen to music or whatever and not have to pay attention until you get to campus.) If you live walking/biking distance from St. George it works out to a free commute, which is awesome. I spent a year doing the downtown to UTM commute via biking and shuttle and it was so much better (and cheaper!) than the subsequent year I spent doing bus-subway-bus to get to UTSC. Rent will be cheaper in Mississauga, but tons of grad students live downtown even if they're based at UTM. I can't really speak to the program, but I'm an American currently living in Toronto, but I did my MSc in London, so I have lots of thoughts on comparing the two cities. This essentially boils down to that the year I spent living in London for my MSc was awesome and while I enjoy Toronto in it's own way, as a city it really in no way compares to London. Weather-wise, it's true that I lived in Toronto through the delight that was last winter and lived in London during the 2011-12 drought, but I found London to be on the whole much nicer. Toronto is probably less rainy, but still has the mid-west overcast bit and can have bitterly cold winters. London is also amazing in terms of free things to do all year round. In Toronto, the majority of the typical indoor winter things (museums, etc.) are really expensive, whereas in London they're free. London also has some great botanical gardens--again, wonderful for the winter months. Cost-wise, rent is higher in London, but you can find cheap student housing in both cities. (London in particular has lots of cheap housing catering towards international students.) London public transit is substantially cheaper (and better and faster). I find food in Toronto more expensive than in London. I'm mostly comparing my grocery bills between the cities, but restaurant prices were on par, I think. (Ontario dairy/egg prices are ridiculous--basically double what you'd pay for milk/cheese/eggs in Manhattan.) Transit: In London, crucially, not only is everything in the city itself super-duper-easily accessible by rapid, efficient public transit, but points of interest outside the city are easily and fairly affordably accessible by rapid, efficient trains too (especially with a student rail card). In Toronto, transit is reasonably efficient in the downtown core of the city (for all that it still can't match London), but there are many points of interest a couple hours drive outside the city that are completely inaccessible without a car; and even within those cities proper, there are many neighborhoods that are a huge nuisance to visit without a car. Health insurance is another big one. You'd have NHS in London, equivalent to what the Brits have. At U of T you'll probably get UHIP for free, but it's super basic and very few places accept it or even know it exists. Random other things: It's strangely hard to get high-quality vegetables in Toronto, whereas London had good things from southern Europe. (The growing season is short, and even in high season produce is only good, not great; out of season, produce is generally worse than in most northern US cities.) As an American in London you'll be obviously marked as a foreigner, whereas in Toronto everyone will assume you're Canadian. This has pros and cons both ways.

To add more anecdata, we moved for my PhD program in September 2012 and my spouse has still yet to get a permanent full-time job in her field. We knew this was a possibility before we moved, but underestimated exactly how important certain factors were (namely not being Canadian). In our case, we decided before we moved here that living together was our first priority and we had a contingency plan, so it's working out fine, if not our ideal situation, but I completely agree that it is very important to discuss all these possibilities before you start!

My spouse and I were both in course-based grad programs while we were planning our wedding, though not technically during the wedding itself. Basically, we turned in our Masters theses a month early, moved from Europe back to the US, did last minute coordinating things for a week (dress fittings, assembling table decorations, etc.), got married, packed up all our possessions, and moved to Canada 6 days later so I could start my PhD program. I don't recommend our particular strategy because organizing a wedding from a different continent is a pain, but once you have the time-consuming/in-person things figured out (like picking a venue) I found that most of the other wedding planning stuff is easy to fit in in the evenings/weekends when I'm taking a break from doing work anyway. Like Eigen and TakeruK, I also know many PhD students who have gotten married during their programs and many grad students (myself included) who will take a few days off to go to a friend or labmate's wedding. Again, this is a know-your-program sort of thing, but taking a long weekend for the wedding itself is generally perfectly reasonable. Most advisors understand that people have personal lives and as long as you're not spending an entire semester neglecting your work, it's unlikely to be a problem. Like others said, whether or not you can take a honeymoon right away depends on the demands of your research/program at that point. We never took a honeymoon since we were too busy with moving to yet another country, but if I were to be getting married now, I wouldn't feel at all bad about taking a week to go somewhere interesting as long as it's not a semester I'm TAing. If you're still doing coursework that might be an issue, so delaying your honeymoon until the end of the semester could be a good idea.

I was 22 when I started my first MSc and 24 when I started my second. For the first, everyone in my cohort was 22 or 23 and had just finished undergrad the previous spring. For the second, people ranged from 21-30ish, but again most had gone directly from undergrad into the MSc program.

What I list on my cv for my British MSc degree doesn't exactly match what's on my transcript, but no one has ever had a problem with this. I did my degree in the Basketweaving department, so even though my transcript only says Ancient Designs with no mention of Basketweaving other than in the course codes, I write it on my cv as "MSc Basketweaving: Ancient Designs". I think only listing the specific programme name and not the department is a strange British custom, though, and since I generally use my cv in American/Canadian contexts, it's simpler to make it match all my other educational entries and specify the department.

I know this thread is old, but I just want to point out that in my STEM field, it is not at all expected that a student will pay publishing costs in exchange for being first author! If you're grant-funded in a STEM field, there is almost defintely money written into the grant for publishing fees. These fees should be paid by the grant, usually with the lead PI as a co-author on the paper (or the last author, depending on your field). I don't know conventions for people not funded by grants, but grad students definitely shouldn't assume that they can't be first author unless they have a spare $400 lying around!

NHS only covers international students while you're physically present in the UK, so you right that you will need travel insurance if you wish to be covered while traveling elsewhere in Europe. Travel Nomads tends to be pretty reasonable and will cover you outside whatever you put as your country of residence.

Assuming you're driving, as long as your cat is in visibly good health, you don't need anything else to bring him from Canada into the States. If your cat looks sick, then the CBP reserves the right to not let you cross until he's examined by a vet, but it sounds like that's unlikely to be an issue. We always travel with our pets' rabies certificates because they're required to enter Canada, but we've never been asked for any records for our cats or dog when crossing the border in either direction (and the majority of the time we're crossing between Ontario and Michigan). FWIW, US customs has gotten pickier this summer about letting you bring in pet food. As always, it depends on the border agent, but be aware that the rules technically don't let you bring in open packages of pet food and also ban pet food with certain meat ingredients.

Just chiming in to add that this is the exact opposite of my experience! I've actually only lived in one place that was owned by a large rental company, so n=1 here, but we had a much harder time getting anything fixed in that apartment than in any of our the three privately-owned rentals. Our current landlord is the best we've ever had and he only rents out a single two-apartment house, but I also have friends in this city with horrible private landlords, so it definitely does vary a lot in both groups.

I think the new rule about having to turn on electronics is only applicable to certain airports, so it probably depends on where your US-bound flight originates and if it's an airport that usually has separate/extra security for US-bound flights. That said, I'd suggest making sure everything is able to turn on, so then you won't have to worry about it. I have a hard time believing they're actually going to make every passenger turn on every electronic they have with them, but I have been asked to show that various things work multiple times in the past.

There's various old threads on the topic in the International forum, if you search around for a bit. Do you have particular questions? I'm an American at a Canadian university and brought my car and pets when I moved here (though car-importing varies by province and I did this all in Ontario).

As a disclaimer, I'm generally out in all aspects of my life, so it completely never occurred to me to hide that from my supervisor and labmates, and I currently live in Toronto, which is very liberal in this regard. I'm also a gay women, so my experiences are likely slightly different. Posters upthread recommended waiting a while to gauge what people's responses are going to be like, but, personally, I never do this. People generally assume I'm straight, and I find it much less awkward to have them find out I'm gay early on, rather than telling them after we've known each other for months/years. Consequently, with new people that I know I'm going to see again (like when I joined this lab), I typically make a point of mentioning my wife in conversation. I've never sat down and had a conversation in which I explicitly tell someone I'm gay, but it comes up pretty naturally, i.e. the response to "I heard you moved here from City X, what were you doing there" is "Oh, my wife was doing her Master's so we lived there for a year and we both loved it!" or at a lunchtime chat about what everyone's weekend plans are "My wife and I are thinking about going hiking with our dog. Anyone know any good trails?" Like some other posters said, I never act like it's a big deal and usually no one treats it as such. Sometimes they'll do a double-take, but generally it's no different than if I'd mentioned my husband. With my supervisor, I ran into some of the usual awkward responses (telling me about other lesbians she knows so I would know she was okay with it, checking to make sure I wasn't insulted when she complained about her neighbors, who happened to be lesbians, etc.) but by this point in my life, a) I'm used to that and she got over that in a couple months. I'm the only out person in the group of 5 chemical/physical/life sciences labs that I generally spend time in, but either no one cares or they're polite enough not to mention it to my face. For all I know my very religious labmates or the visiting post doc from a conservative country don't approve, but they act the same with me as with the male grad students who talk about their wives, so I really don't care.

I have all my presentations at national conferences on my cv, regardless of whether I was an undergrad or grad student at the time. Similarly, I don't have enough peer-reviewed publications yet that it makes sense to take off the ones based on my undergrad research. I don't include any non-national presentations (whether for summer research programs or university-wide events), even if I was a grad student at the time.

Like everyone else said, it depends a whole lot on what city you live in. On the other hand, I currently live in a high COL city (Toronto) and spend about $20,000 a year. If I didn't have a car or pets (car insurance here is ridiculously expensive), that would go down to $17,000. Essentially, I don't think $16,000 is completely unreasonable, as long as you're willing to make some amount of compromises. I rarely go out to bars, but I will spent $15-20/month on alcohol to drink at home. I also cook most of my own food, make my own coffee, and rarely buy new clothes (about $300-worth in the past year), but none of these choices are ones that make me unhappy. Personally, I find the two major expenses are food and rent, because I've decided they aren't things that I'm currently willing to compormise on. I pay $750/month in rent and $250/month in groceries/alcohol, so that's two-thirds of my yearly budget right there. Rent (depending on where you're living) is fairly easy to bring down by either choosing to live with roommates or in a smaller apartment--when I was a grad student in Boston I paid only $400/month in rent because my apartment was considerably smaller than where I currently live. Similarly, my grocery bill was $100 a month cheaper in Boston for exactly the same kinds of food, because food and alcohol are much more expensive in my current city. I should also add that I don't have to pay for health insurance--as an intl student that might be something you run up against that could be expensive.

I'm coming at this from the different perspective of having married another woman, so there are fewer societal expectations for what I should do, but I didn't change any part of my name after marriage. I got married right before I started my PhD program, when the only work I had out was a bunch of conference abstracts and one submitted paper, so changing my name would not have been a major problem in terms of tracking the majority of my publication record, though I do like that I still have the same name as is listed on my BA and MS diplomas. However, even before I decided I wanted to go into academia, I had no intention of changing my name. I have a family first name, my mother's last name as a middle name, and my father's last name as a last name and the combination is just who I am and I had no interest in ever altering that. In contrast, my non-academic wife has never been very attached to her name and was totally okay with not passing it on to the next generation, so future children will have my last name as a last name and her last name as one of their middle names. When we got married she added my last name after hers, so she now has a two word last name, because it was important to her to share a last name with her children. Both of us grew up with mothers who kept their maiden name and this never caused any problems or teasing, but we figure that our family is already going to get enough questions about which of us is really the mother of our children that having a common last name will simplify things. She likes having retained all portions of her original name, but is totally okay with us being referred to as the "Smiths" even if that's not technically her last name and will use only Smith when it's simpler than explaining about the double, non-hyphenated name. Short version: Jane (Brown) Smith married Emily (Elizabeth Johnson) Miller, who is now legally Emily (Elizabeth Johnson) Miller Smith. I publish under Jane B. Smith and use that as my signature, same as before I was married. Her signature is now E.M. Smith. Our children will be Baby (Middle Miller) Smith. Socially, we're Jane Smith, Emily Miller Smith, and Baby Smith.

Both our "Goods Accompanying" and "Goods to Follow" list were very unspecific (only about 1.5 pages in total for everything the two of us own) and we had no problems whatsoever. We listed furniture or big things individually and grouped everything else by type, so our list included entries like "1 desk and contents of desk drawers, including books and decorations", "16 boxes of kitchen things (including cookware/bakeware, appliances, and utensils", "1 box of tools", "2 boxes of household linens", or "5 suitcases of clothes". We included serial numbers of electronics, but didn't include descriptions of any jewelry. We also widely guessed at values, because it really doesn't matter, as TakeruK mentioned. In terms of what counts as household and personal goods, you should definitely be fine with soap and cosmetics. We brought spices, partial things of shampoo, and things like that. As already mentioned, you're supposed to have owned/used everything for at least a year, but we moved brand-new things that were still in their packaging and no one ever noticed. (We got married 6 days before we moved to Canada, so didn't unpack most of our wedding presents until after we got here. There's technically an exception for wedding gifts, but we were never asked why we had unopened appliances, etc.) In general, no one seemed to care at all what we had listed--our lists were never checked against what we had in our car or our storage cube and the customs agent didn't do more than briefly glance at our list before stamping it. On the other hand, it may all depend on the whims of whatever customs agent you get when you cross.

I've had this happen a lot over the past decade--both with small backpacks and with rolling suitcases that are the maximum allowed size. It's usually much more common at European airports, but I've also had US airports weigh my carry-on at check-in. I never had an airline weight anything at the gate, but I have had them enforce the two item max rule. At any rate, airlines only seem to enforce carry-on weights about a third of the time,but I wouldn't rely on being able to put all your heavy things in carry-on to get around the rules. (Alternatively, have your second carry-on item be large enough to stuff things into so that you can get both things below the weight allowance, and then rearrange after you're through security.)

Yeah, it's hard to find information about how exactly applying for your study permit when you drive across the border works, but it's actually really simple. Here's how crossing from NY into Ontario worked: -Tell immigration officer at the drive-up booth that you need to get a study permit. They'll write down your license plate on a form, hand it to you, and direct you to park and go into the building. -Inside, give them all your paperwork. In my case, this was my acceptance letter, US passports for me and my wife, our marriage certificat , and my funding letter (which stated that the university was giving me enough to cover tuition and what Ontario requires for living expenses). For Quebec, I presume you need you CAQ at this point, as well. -Wait while they process the paperwork. It took about half an hour to get a study permit for me and a work permit for my wife at a busy border crossing in the middle of a Saturday in August. If you're trying to cross on a summer Friday or Sunday, it will probably take longer. Both permits were stapled into our passports and are good for four years. -Go over to a different window and pay the fees for the permits. -At some point in there we gave them a list of all our belongings that we had arriving later with a moving company and had them stamp that. This is very important if you are having stuff arrive after you, because we need that stamped list to clear your stuff through customs later. This list was pretty generic, and just said things like 20 boxes of books, 6 boxes of dishes, 1 bedframe and mattress, 3 crates of decorations, etc. with approximate values that we pretty much completely made up. -We had another paper with us listing everything we had in our car at the time, including serial numbers for our electronics. We weren't asked for that list or for proof of rabies vaccination for our cat and nothing we had in our car was inspected. I have no idea if our storage cube of things that came over later was inspected or not. I know my advisor moved from the US to Montreal for grad school about 10 years ago, and when he drove a UHaul with all his stuff across the border, they opened it to make sure the contents matched the inventory list. -If you're importing your car, i.e. registering it in Quebec while you're a student, there will probably be more paperwork you need to fill out at the border. Hope this helps!

Have you looked at FAFSA? You can use US federal loans as (at least some) international schools. I know multiple Americans who've done that to pay for tutition and living expenses while going to grad school in the UK.