I had an NSF GRF. As others have said, you want to be telling stories in your proposal and essays. If you can't write for ****, get help from people who can. The committee reads proposal after proposal and you want yours to stick out (in a good way).

Letters matter. It's probably the reason that few undergrads are competitive with the folks already at top graduate schools, because the people writing the letters are NAS-level scientists.

In looking for grad school, don't focus on just one professor that you could work with. You want a department where you could conceivably work for 3 profs, minimum.

Good points all. I didn't intend to imply "only look for one person you really want to work with." Many (most?) departments have 1st-year rotations to get a taste of different labs. Also, most students who come in with NSFs likely obtain them while tech-ing post-undergrad. Expect several rewrites of your app.

Side point: letters of rec are VERY different in Europe. Several undergrads I advised were Pearl Harbored when they asked a German faculty for letters. She didn't take them seriously because apparently in Europe they're sort of a joke, and her letters hurt these undergrads' applications.

Unless things have changed, ETS reports all GRE scores that you've taken. The time for opting out was before you viewed your score (after taking the exam).

http://www.ets.org/gre/general/scores/send

I had an NDSEG. The advice itt is good. Have a good research plan (this is hard, but you don't actually have to follow your plan!!!), and have good letters. Find out who at your school has a big nsf grant and ask them to proof your essay. A govt-based job or reu can't hurt for NDSEG of course.

Neema is right on about looking for profs. Go somewhere you get along with and could see working with a bunch of people. **** happens with advisors and sometimes you want to change. I did a few times before finding a good fit.

Re msu vs Harvard: an msu might reject a clearly overqualified candidate to free up room. If there's 0% chance that X would accept there, you might as well make another student feel wanted and try to lure them from rutgers or something.

Yes I know this. What I meant was it is not necessary to submit your GRE scores to the NSF to win a fellowship.

Sorry, i misunderstood.

TLDR, except you may be considering going to grad school if you are reading this thread, in this case there are no more TLDR's for you.

Just reading this thread and being a grad school dropout, I would like to take the opportunity to discourage as many people as possible from going to grad school. I think it is a huge beat for about 70% of the people who go, the best thing possible for maybe 10%, and EV neutral or thereabouts for the rest. Most of the reasons for this are clearly laid out ITT. Basically for there to be any chance of all of going to grad school to be a good decision for you, you should have a story similar to the one Max Raker posted here. Of the many people I knew/know, those were the guys that enjoyed grad school, although not all did well. The normal people, who just liked the subject and wanted to learn more, wanted a challenge, thought it sounded cool, etc., it is not for them.

For all the glory of doing original research on an exciting topic you like, it really boils down to working 60+ hrs a week for 20 grand a year. Even in the poor economy these days (which is not as bad as they say for people with a shot of getting into a good grad school) that's not a good deal unless you come from China or India, which is where 40% of your classmates will be from, and even many of them leave to get jobs after two years (they mostly just want the student visa, maybe this was just a physics thing though). Some may say that they are not interested in money, my personal experience is that this changes for most people after they get a taste of the moneyed lifestyle a real job can bring. Also, some people may want to start a family (this was a big reason for me leaving). Good luck doing this when your first paying long-term job won't come until you are 28.

About the research, what you will often find is that much of what is being done is not done so much to be cutting edge or really make big advancements as it is to satisfy those in charge of issuing the funding to get the next big grant. Almost regardless of field, it is highly likely that a large portion of your time will be spent on work more related to this issue than your dissertation. At least in physics but I know of this to be true in many types of engineering as well, most of the work being done in experiment these days involves either highly incremental advancements, or proving stuff that is basically overwhelmingly likely to be true, since the risks are too high on both PI and funding manager sides for more interesting projects. I found this to be one of the extremely depressing aspects of academia in general.

The opportunity costs are really pretty similar to poker - most of the people capable of succeeding in grad school in something like the hard sciences would also be capable of doing extremely well in a wide variety of careers. The level of intelligence and especially work ethic of the people you meet at any top tier institution in a hard science is going to be incredibly high. This is why you see Ph.D.'s filling so many of the quant and consulting jobs out there - these people couldn't care less about your wanker particle physics or whatever you did, they just want someone willing and able to work long hours with minimal help while often being treated like dirt, which is what the Ph.D. is. Now, you may very well be incredibly intelligent with a very strong work ethic. The question is, do you want to enter something where basically everyone else also meets these criteria, and the rewards are mediocre at best, when you could go into business or engineering and probably soul crush people?

About admissions, grades are important, get at least a 3.7 but 3.5+ have a chance, if there is a subject GRE in your field, that is very important and the regular GRE is almost useless. If there is not a subject GRE, the regular may well be important but it is a very poor differentiator as most people will get close to 800. How it really works though is that most of the students that are actually admitted either have profiles that are far, far above the average profile for the class, or profiles somewhere near the average combined with strong letter(s) of recommendation from a professor that is either extremely well-known in the field or has a personal relationship with someone on the committee. Publications are not even worth worrying about unless you get extremely lucky to be a first author on a major paper in a top journal, basically unheard of, and the content of the letters is not even that important other than it be positive and related to research. The single most important thing is that at least one of them comes from someone known by a member of the committee. Remember also that at the top schools, everyone has a near-perfect profile, so there is little room to get in solely on the basis of strong academics. By the way, many schools will post an average profile of accepted candidates. Remember that 40% of the candidates come from China and India. These students nearly always have perfect GPA's and GRE scores (other than verbal) and there are tons and tons of applicants coming from these countries, most of them borrow the money and send apps to 20+ schools, often paying to have their personal statement and recommendations written for them. As an American student, for various reasons, you can get in with slightly lower qualifications and your odds are not as dismal as what will be listed although I again stress the importance of the letters of recommendation.

As for what school to go to, I would suggest you are wasting your time if you want a career in academics but aren't going to one of the top 20 schools, and again, the very biggest names are much better. And if you want to get a Ph.D. followed by a job, you are 100% making a horrible decision anyway, go get a job now and then have a better one with your seven years of experience in seven years. If you look at the names of tenure track researchers, even if you are willing to go as low as the top 50 schools, nearly all got their Ph.D. from schools in the top 10-15 in the field, or the top 1-3 in their country of origin. Some of this is due to the selection bias that the top students in undergrad naturally get into the best schools and so they will of course be the ones most likely to succeed in research and go on to get the best jobs, but honestly this probably only accounts for about 30-40% of this. The fact is that in academics, all that really matters is name recognition, and people DO automatically assume that you are more competent if you went to a top school and the opposite if you went to Podunk U., and this even includes people at institutions outside of this category. In fact even with an awesome pub record you will still face major challenges moving into more prestigious institutions from grad to postdoc.

Finally, some advice I wish I had, I think many rip on people in the academic fields for having poor social skills, and there will be tons of these people around that you will encounter in grad school. Let me assure you that social skills are just as important for grad students and maybe more so for anyone above that in academia as they are in an actual workplace. Most of the stuff you will be working on, should you choose to go to grad school (and you probably should not) is going to be too hard to figure out on your own, especially if it is worth doing. In both academic and business worlds the key to getting a project done is finding the right person or people that know how to accomplish a subset of your project and convincing them to do it for you (actually you get them to tell you how to do it since grad students do all the actual work), until you can get to the subset that you are capable of doing yourself. This subset may well be zero, despite this you may well have made the most significant contribution simply in getting everyone else's knowledge together in a useful way. In any case, if you are lucky this person you need to talk to will be your advisor or someone in your group, if you are less lucky a collaborator, below that a random person such as another professor or engineer (but it is still very fortunate that you even know this person), and worst of all but also most common, a competitor or other group that will never quite tell you what you need to know. In either case it is extremely important to your research that you communicate well with these busy people and convince them that you are worth their time. This will come not only in talking with them directly, but also in your presentation of scientific talks and other representations of you and your research group - and I hope you enjoy giving these talks because you will be giving many even as a grad student often to the detriment of more useful things.

The good part about going and getting a Ph.D. in the sciences is that it's usually not that bad if you don't like it and decide to quit. You can usually get a masters after like a year and a half whether you did well or not, and that is worth something. The key is to try and decide early on if you are going to stay, then if not (and even if you are really) try and put yourself in a position through research where you can get some viable, employable skills. All fields have this and most but not all research projects will involve useful skills. Furthermore if you go to a good school you'll probably have a nice alumni network and career center that can land you some interviews, plus you may be able to leverage your undergrad as well, from there it is basically up to you to get hired. Just don't expect to get anything special with a masters, you will likely be applying to the same jobs as undergrads unless you have some extremely relevant work experience. I personally got a job that I could have got as an undergrad, only it would have been very unlikely for me to actually get that job when I was an undergrad, this is the case for other people I knew in my position as well.

^^^^

That was beyond TL;DR (but I read it). Some thoughts:

I have some disagreements, and these may be physics vs biology kind of things, or different schools we went to, but anyway.

1) 40% of my classmates were not Indian or Chinese. It wasn't even 4%. But this happens when you go to the top public school for bio in the country (and no, it's not ****ing Berkeley). Public schools can't let in foreigners who don't have funding, including Canadians, so they're pretty American-dominated.

2) Subject GREs in most fields are worthless unless you were at the top or bottom of them. I've been on admission committees, no one gives a **** about them (maybe they do in physics). Criteria is GPA > Letters/undergrad institution > publications/other ancillary stuff > test scores. My first interview, my first question was about my undergrad research advisor (wrote a letter, obv), and I knew it was smooth sailing after that.

3) If you want an academic career, it's more like top 10 schools. It's even worse in fields like law, where all the profs are from Yale, Harvard, and Stanford. My undergrad institution had 3 members of the NAS when I was there, and it's top 20 USNEWS. My grad school had at least 80 NAS + NIM profs. That level of faculty + connections can't be beat.

4) You don't get a Masters for doing nothing. You still have to pass your qualifying exam, and depending on the field and school, those passing rates can be as low as 60%. And yeah, an MS isn't **** without work experience.

Also for many positions a PhD is reqd. I took a finance job that was PhD-mandatory.

Generalizations about schools, requirements, and class composition are bad. I didn't need to pass quals for a masters, and my class was a good mix of American, Canadian, Latino, Asian, and other.

A bit of a tangent here, but I just got an interesting email. I asked a prof at another institution if they would write me a rec letter. They agreed to write me one for their school but no others as they didn't want to send me to a competing school. How should I take this?

Wtf? I take that as being unethical. LORs are for the students' benefit, not as a means for institutions to compete with each other.

true, but that's not the only reason someone very talented might not get into a program "below" their talent levels. There's a very large stochastic component to the process involving personalities and "fit."

WOW was that tldr. Bottom line, for OP and others itt thinking about grad school:

Know WHY you want to go, and make sure that you can TOTALLY dedicate yourself to the lifestyle for the next 5-7 years. Do NOT go just for the sake of having "PhD" behind your name.

There are plenty of articles about this floating around, some of which are linked to in the above link-containing post. There are others, which I'd be happy to provide if requested.

There are all kinds of reasons that one might not be accepted that are impossible to know without being there. At my Ph.D. institution (a top school) there were grad applicants who were rejected simply b/c they wanted to work with a particular faculty member who had alcohol and depression problems. He was a complete mess and the faculty never admitted students to work with him. Plenty of great students probably got rejected from my school only to be accepted at lesser schools for reasons completely beyond their control. Other faculty members only considered students for admission every other year, so that they would be staggered. No matter how great a student was they weren't getting accepted on an even year. Other students got rejected because they applied, inexplicably, to do work on ancient Mesopotamia, yet they had no one who did that. They may have been great, but they weren't going to be accepted. Meanwhile tier 2 school may have accepted them b/c they had a scholar there who did that work.

You never know which is why you should apply to a bunch of schools. You should also talk to people in the department before you apply. In many fields, especially in the humanities, you absolutely need one faculty member to agree to be your advisor before they will accept you. It's worth talking to the person you want to be your advisor before you apply.

I do as well. I'm just unsure how common this is and if I can trust this person has my best interest at heart if I go to their school.

I wouldn't trust anyone who is so obviously looking out for the wrong person (him/herself). In fact, i'd be likely to forward the email to the Dean and ask if this is the official school policy on LORs. haha

just wanted to say the kind of discussion from the last dozen or so posts is probably more helpful than most other resources in just seeing the perspective of the graduate school process by those in it or who have been through it.

HajiShirazu's whole post should be required reading for anyone thinking about grad school. My experiences in English (dropped out during my dissertation and went to law school) are very similar. The only thing that is different for English is that while the jobs in the research universities and top liberal arts colleges are almost always going to go to graduates from top 20 programs, there are opportunities at smaller regional universities, branch campuses and smaller liberal arts colleges for the graduates from less prestigious schools. So I wouldn't say that it's top 20 or bust. That being said, even the smallest colleges are in a position to demand that their candidates have publications in hand and are willing to teach 5/5 loads for less than $40,000.

I mostly agree -- for people not in the sciences. In the sciences, a MS or a completed PhD can be very useful. Many companies need credentialed employees to make their shareholders feel better. In some cases, your time is better spent working your way up, but there are many jobs that just require the degree. I just finished (math), and I'm working at a company where everyone has a PhD, for instance.

Some public schools do take Canadians that don't have funding.

For an academic career in the biosciences a top school is important but really postdocing in a top lab and papers in very high impact journals are much more important these days


Oh...and where did you go if it wasn't Berkeley?

Good thread, I could use a little advice on my current situation. Might be a litte TL/DR (cliffs at bottom.) I recently was made aware by my department that I was going to be SOL in terms of a assistantship or pretty much any kind of substantial funding. No one on campus is able to give me much advice past "wait and see" or "hope for the best" and something might turn up. I am looking at a cost of approximately 12-16k per semester and I have only completed one semester so far.

So the way I currently see it is I have a few options:

A: Suck it up and pay 15k per semester until I hopefully stumble on to some money that may never show up.

B: Have a reduced schedule this semester, continue looking for on campus opportunities and re-evaluate closer to spring semester. (This would still cost about 8-10k unless I got a part time job which would take away from opportunities to be involved in the department)

C: Defer and/or look at other schools that could provide me better opportunities.

Do you think that telling my department that I need to defer for a semester to reevaluate and look at other options is a reasonable request? Is transferring from one phd program to another something that is difficult to do or is that a rare occurrence? My biggest fear is starting this process and either not getting accepted into other schools along with burning bridges with my current school while asking for letters of recommendation.

Cliffs: School is screwing me out of funding in the near future and has no idea when positions will become available. I am afraid of the massive financial impact along with the simple disadvantage of not having an assistantship and the experiences that come with it on my CV. Is transferring a legit option and will my department be supportive and provide good recommendations?

Edit: My undergrad gpa wasn't great and my gre scores were mediocre so its not like the world is my oyster to get into any program. I did get a 3.9 my first semester as a phd student along with 2 presentations and 2 grants for whatever that's worth.

If the school didn't guarantee you perpetual funding when you came on board, then they are not "screwing" you out of funding. You have to realize that the economy has wreaked havoc on the academic system. Many states are facing massive budget cuts, which naturally filter down to the universities. Very few people are escaping without some suffering. I have grad students with a dozen publications who are scratching for half time funding.

If your GPA/GRE isn't great, then you have little chance of getting into a better school that will guarantee funding. You would likely have done that in the first place if you could.

My advice is to suck it up, take out the minimum amount of student loans you can to survive, eat ramen noodles and potatoes a lot, and start networking with any and all professors who have grant money, in or out of your dept. If your name is in the loop, and you're doing good work, you may find that this situation is only temporary.

It's probably a very short list. Canadians are not eligible for funding from NIH Training Grants and things like that.

Yeah, but getting top postdocs and big papers is super hard outside the top programs.

UCSF.

cobra, that sounds like an awful situation. ouch...makes my situation seem much less bad:

I am starting in the fall. When I was deciding in the spring where to go, I received a fellowship at my institution. My potential advisor emailed me and said this was great news, it saved her some grant money, so she could supplement my base income, giving me about 4k extra. Additionally there would be extra funds around for things like moving costs to new university, travel costs to attend a conference, etc. I accepted.

The other day I met with my advisor, and she hadn't really thought about funding at all. She had to look up how much my fellowship was, then told me that she wasn't sure if there was enough money in her grant to give me that extra 4k - ish. She said that she wants to save some money for travel costs to conferences and save it for next year in case I don't get another fellowship.

I will be okay without that extra money, but I'll be living a pretty basic lifestyle with very little spending money. After rent, food, cell phone, I'll have like $100ish per month. So that 4k makes a big deal to me. Also, my advisor said she wants to extend her grant money one more year, so she doesn't have to write a grant proposal this year. This frees up more time for writing manuscripts, she said.

Currently my relationship with my advisor is very good (I've only met with her a few times), but this comment upset me. She is getting paid 3 or 4x what I'm getting paid, and it seems like she is cutting corners. How about writing the grant proposal AND the manuscripts? Isn't that her job?

In our meeting, I didn't bring up the email where she had kind of offered the extra money. I figured that would create a lot of tension so early in our relationship. But what can I do about this? She said she'll look into the funding, see how much is left, and I should remind her in a few days.

When you email her to remind her, do so by replying to the original one with a note at the top saying "hey, just following up on our conversation from last week where you said you'd check into the funding discussion below."