Become a visiting grad student at another institute?

[Tall Chai Latte]

So I recalled, back in my undergrad days, that my physical chemistry lab TA was a visiting grad student from Berkeley. Although I'm still in the nicer stage of grad school (still deciding and yet to start!), I'm curious what a visiting grad student could do and what can you gain from this experience. It sounds like a short getaway or a change of scene from your home grad institute. Thanks in advance you guys!

[Genomic Repairman]

This response is fairly limited to the science realm so I'm sure folks in the humanities might have other perspectives. I spent 3 months at another university doing research as a "visiting" grad student doing work with a collaborator. Although no classes or research credit originated from there I list my time there on a CV as a special collaboration project. It's cool to get away and while there I focused hard on getting the work done so that I could get back to my own lab and get back to my other projects at hand. These arrangements should be as short as possible, get your work done there, get home, and get your behind back in your bosses lab. My buddy drew the assignment of having to go to Norway in the winter for a month so keep locale and season in mind when setting these things up.

[Tall Chai Latte]

Thanks Genomic Repairman, I had the science field in mind when I asked this question. It sounds pretty cool to be able to get away for a short period of time, is this offered at most Universities?

Perspectives from the humanities major are also welcome!

[tarski]

Some of the programs I applied to let you go away for a year (humanities). One of them explicitly said it was only allowed once you were done your coursework, so I think it would be just for research. Unlike Gnomic, though, I got the impression we could go away to do our own research rather than a short term project with someone. Sounded like it would be a year of thesis work, but with access to another advisor, some particular library, and maybe audit a couple classes.

[fuzzylogician]

My department allows it if you are in good academic standing. I can see two main scenarios where it would be useful in my field:

- you want to work with an expert on your research topic who teaches at another university.

- you want to work on a language that has few/no speakers where you live. You can have access to more data and experts on the language through another university.

[Genomic Repairman]

In most cases that I know of this is done informally. Because your first year are two are spent on course work at your institution and you need those classes to graduate. Some grad schools get pissy with other ones about coursework from other institutions so this may be contributing to the decline in this. From my colleagues and my own perspective here is how it usually goes: Summoned to boss's office at end of the day. Boss tells you to pack your stuff you are headed off to Jamaica State University (fictional place, I think, if not my apologies, go fighting Rastafari!) to work with Prof. X. Usually you are either learning a technique to bring back to your lab or headed off to teach a technique (as was my case) to get them producing data for a collaborative project. Since I was working on such a short time frame, I was putting in 15 hour days, 7 days a week for those 3 months as the technique I bringing into the lab was labor intensive to set up and took a fair amount of time for just the experimental validations. Also you have to be concerned with living arrangements, you can be treated like a pasha like I was and put up in the faculty house (quite the swanky appointments), relegated to a unused dorm room, stay with Prof. X, or worse have to crash on the couch of Prof. X.'s grad student. So simple things like food, laundry, transportation (in some cases) can quickly become an issue. But luckily I visited a place that had a pretty solid night life so it was fairly common for the postdoc and that lab and I to go down to his local for a few pints after we knocked off work in the lab for the night.

[rising_star]

My department has a formal exchange with another department, so students can take classes or do research there. Usually people go during the coursework stage. It's pretty simple: either you email their Dept Chair or someone emails ours. It's a 1:1 swap, so you are able to get a TA position there (someone takes yours here, you take theirs there).

Otherwise, a lot of us do research internationally and thus affiliate ourselves with local institutions when we're in the field.