r/GradSchool

Hi everyone,

I applied for graduate school in 2022 and was accepted into a small state school in the US for a stem PhD. Even when I was applying, my undergrad advisor told me to be prepared because we were entering times of uncertainty, and when that happens more people are drawn to grad school. I felt like it was competitive back then. I can’t imagine how it is after all the funding cuts in the US, and the fact that so many fields in academia are over saturated. I am curious how yall are doing? Do “safe schools” (AKA a school you apply to because you know you’ll get in) still exist? I always assume if I was applying now I probably wouldn’t get in with how competitive I imagine it is. Curious to know the state of affairs from people actually going through it. I hope it’s not as bad as I imagine!

This is mostly just a rant, but I'm getting increasingly burnt out and frustrated being the only grad student in my program who is required to work for a living in addition to doing a full-time grad program.

I spent five years out of school working in various industries and unfortunately the last one I worked in just had all of its funding cut so I ended up going to grad school to mostly just get health insurance.

I have a full tuition scholarship and a very, very small stipend and health insurance. But unfortunately, I still have to pay rent and groceries and all of the other living expenses.

As a music student, I'm expected, in order to keep my scholarship, to play alternating cycles of 12 hours a week of rehearsal for our orchestra. Unfortunately, this coincides with the hours that I work at my job doing instrument repair. So, whenever we have orchestra concerts, my hours get cut by about 50% for two weeks.

I'm kind of at the end of my rope because even though we are out of orchestra cycle right now, one of our required auditions just got rescheduled to the middle of my work day. And we had two weeks of orchestra last month, so I'm already very low on cash.

On top of this, the syllabus for my instrument requires three to five hours of individual practice on solo repertoire every day. And I'm also a member of three other ensembles, which require their own preparation and practice.

A few of my colleagues do have student jobs at the university. However, the student work only pays $10 an hour and has a maximum of 10 hours a week so that it's not viable for people who are supporting themselves.

Is anyone here a music student who had to work through graduate school and if so how did you manage to keep up with all of your classmates who have many free hours in the day to practice and parental support for buying instruments and strings and repairs etc?

Do you know of any funding resources that I might be able to apply for to help cover living expenses?

So we need to make a presentation which is worth 30% of our grade. I (F28) looked at our presentation today and one of the team members (M mid 20s) has added at least five memes into the presentation, one them mentioning bodily fluids. They’re also not funny, like deep fried jpeg memes from 2016 bad. The more I look the worse they are. They’re kinda on our topic but they just suck. I don’t what to confront him though as he is autistic and can get very snappy and rude if he feels I offended him. There is one other girl in our group but she is extremely quiet and agreeable. I have been in this situation before and i don’t want to be a nagging bitch but I feel like I’m always put in this situation since the other girl will just stay quiet. He will flip out if i tell him these are inappropriate but i don’t know what else to do?

We are currently preparing a manuscript for publication. It's me, a postdoc, and the PI on the project. I generated the last batch of data around a week ago and passed it on for processing and visualization to the postdoc, who had the scripts from the previous projects. The results that came out of that were puzzling.

Let's say we have Figures 1 and 2, the types of which are standard in our field. We know from our previous publications that Figure 2 looking a certain way implies Figure 1 looking a certain way. Instead, we got good results in Figure 2, but Figure 1 looked opposite of what you would expect.

My PI was horrified when he first saw it, on the fence about going ahead with the publication and suggesting I go back to the drawing board. We also tried to come up with alternative explanations, but all of them were unsatisfactory. By that point, I spent more than a month on an otherwise promising approach and, frankly, had no better ideas. Today (yes, we're working Sundays), out of desperation, I decided to dig into the data processing scripts. The key part of the script looked like this:

foo = 0.0
for i in range(0,N):
      foo += bar[i]
      foo = pesky_function(foo)

pesky_function() is the only modification from the previous projects for the purposes of data processing. And then I realized...pesky_function() should be outside the for loop:

foo = 0.0
for i in range(0,N):
      foo += bar[i]

foo = pesky_function(foo)

I immediately grabbed my laptop and ran to the postdoc's office. Told him that I think I found the source of our nightmares. We replotted Figure 1 with the fixed code, and...it looks exactly as you would expect from the previous publications! He shook my hand, emailed to the PI that I found a bug, and tomorrow we'll be rewriting the relevant part of the manuscript. My approach vindicated, publication saved, and overall a huge weight off my shoulders. Phew!

I started using cannabis, and I noticed it gives me just enough dopamine so that I can actually get started. Does anyone else do this? Or does it really just make us dumb and the work we think is so good is actually trash?

Hey so I am doing my masters and at the last semester we are expected to write thesis. Unfortunately I was sick one whole semester last year and missed many courses. I made my own study plan and aimed to do my thesis on January. My study advisor however suggested I push it a little to the future but I didn't want too. The problem is that master thesis are done with a company or research teams. Subconsciously I know doing it on January will be hard so I decided maybe next year Autumn.

But still I was hell bent on searching thesis projects and expos cuz my friends are doing it. I randomly applied to a research in my uni and didn’t expect an answer until maybe weeks later but the professor/ researcher responded a few days later saying he wants to set a meeting with me this week. I am not sure what to do. I want to first of all explore master thesis internships at companies. Not only that I might not even have the requirements to do it. I don't know what to answer.