The Great Grad School Thread

GUESS WHO FORGOT THE CERTIFICATE OF CLEARANCE!! (It's me and i have four days until the final deadline, but I got fingerprints taken today and filled out the request)

 

math and science subtest scores release tomorrow night and also i am moving on to the interview portion and i'm NERVOUS. Like I know what I want to say and I'm a charismatic motherfucker when i need to be but OOMPH.

 

just so the circle of stupidity is complete here too, I'M IN.

 

Congratulations!

 

Thank you! They told me at my interview I'd hear back in a week or two and I hadn't heard anything in four, so I was very concerned for a bit there :)

 

i'm gonna be taking the gre in the fall and i gotta do well since i'm aiming high

 

Good luck! Essays were my downfall the first time I took it, so I'd recommend working on those as well.

I have... A Full Committee now, and am gonna be taking my prelims in the summer if all goes well. I'm dying of anxiety

 

Winnertesed, Saro. I'm glad you finally found a full committee! Are prelims like the quals my husband took? Either way fingers crossed for you, and Ipuntya.

edit: probably not seeing as your committee is involved? GOOD LUCK REGARDLESS!!

 

It may or may not be? It's kind of hard to say because different institutions do things differently. For me, I have a written proposal and an oral examination (administered by my committee), and if I pass, then I'll actually be a PhD candidate and not just a student, and be eligible to present/defend my thesis (when it's all together obviously, lol).

Thank you for the good luck wishes!

 

Ah! That's equivalent to the ATC then, I think. (advance to candidacy) that was nervewracking. Make sure you get lots of practice time speaking and writing if you have that going on. @syntheme wound up with a sleeve of equation transfer after the presentation was done bc relieved chalkboard lean.

 

Until like right after my ATC there was a requirement that there be one member outside the department too.

 

Oh man, "equation transfer". I loved having blackboards but man did I transfer a lot of equations, both complete and powdered, during my time in grad school.

 

hot question: how do GREs work? followup question: im a physicist do i need to write an essay for my GRE, what,

 

Yeah, my GRE essay was pretty crap, but I'm a mathematician so that's par for the course and the departments I applied to didn't care.

 

Okay y'all I have a grad school etiquette question

So I'm working on a big research project that involves using pandas (the Python library, not the animal) and network analysis. While I've done some digital humanities stuff before, this requires more advanced programming knowlege than any of my previous projects.

There's this postdoc in a related department who has led seminars on digital humanities stuff before. He also works on some of the same ancient languages that I do, so he's really keyed in to the particular difficulties of using digital tools on this type of material. I've attended some of his seminars, and chatted with him a bit about his research outside of the seminars.

So my question is: would it be appropriate for me to email him asking for help when I run into a problem? I know he has his own research to do, and I don't want to bother him and take up a lot of his time. I also don't want to seem like I'm trying to get him to do my work for me. But on the other hand, our departments are supposed to have a collegiate, collaborative atmosphere, and he's offered seminars and workshops on this stuff in the past.

 

Maybe start with asking him if he's alright with you hitting him up for troubleshooting? At least that's where I'd start pending the input of other people in here

 

Yeah, asking for troubleshooting or a bit of programming help shouldn't be going too far. I mean, there are two issues here: using up his time and having him do the research for you. The first is up to him, but as long as he's not actually doing the analysis for you then the second isn't really an issue. You're going to have an acknowledgement section of your thesis anyway.
If you're really worried about it, your advisor probably has the final say.