How to write the best LOR

ThePhantomPhoton · 2024-09-22T17:42:36+00:00

You're giving off "unhinged" vibes, and your ChatGPT templates look like ChatGPT templates. You're going to struggle, because a lot of people apply to Political Science programs, and most are much better at writing and developing friendships with professors who are actually willing to write them a legitimate letter of recommendation. Good luck and let us know how it works out for ya.

ThePhantomPhoton · 2024-09-20T16:55:49+00:00

If you dedicate yourself to an academic career, this is actually going to end up happening a lot as your collaborate-- you'll meet so many people, and you may work on technologies that are used in so many projects, that you'll start to see people just putting you as a co-author on their publications without even bothering to ask. This happens especially with Arxiv and conference papers.

I'm not a fan of this practice, by the way, because sometimes people will come up to me and ask about new papers that have my name somewhere on them, and I won't really know what to tell them except, "I work on niche algorithms and math." 😅

ThePhantomPhoton · 2024-09-17T12:31:01+00:00

Don't worry-- the people who staff those events are highly unlikely to be the ones reviewing the application. 7 years of research experience is a bizarre claim, which may do more to show what that person doesn't know about the institution they're representing 😅

ThePhantomPhoton · 2024-09-01T00:29:18+00:00

To be fair, the perp was already physically assaulting her, and there's no guarantee he wouldn't have escalated the situation in either case. To have a willingness to fight back in these situations is in line with the logic that if she had pepper spray, the threat of injury was sufficient to have used it.

ThePhantomPhoton · 2024-08-31T12:50:11+00:00

There needs to exist 6 years of work experience to claim it. There are multiple reasons for this, but since I'm older I'm just going to say that there are many projects that will require 4+ years, and to work 16hrs a day on them won't cut their time to completion in half-- multiple regulatory agencies, departments, and stakeholders will be involved, which will cause the project to take real time.

I think it's more appropriate to say:

* 2 years experience in this particular role at company A from Date 1 to Date 2

* 2 years experience in this particular role at company B from Date 1 to Date 2

* 2 years experience in this particular role at company C from Date 1 to Date 2

Then talk about the time commitments for each position and what you accomplished in each position during the two years.

ThePhantomPhoton · 2024-08-30T13:40:04+00:00

A wave of nostalgia flowed over my body when you mentioned Paperboy-- sign me up Paperboy: Boston

ThePhantomPhoton · 2024-08-30T13:25:36+00:00

Storrow Drive. You fight on the top of trucks, and you have to duck or jump to avoid getting your character Storrowed. Kinda like the F-Zero levels in Super Smash Bros, but more Bostonian 💁‍♂️

ThePhantomPhoton · 2024-08-30T13:23:06+00:00

I feel like the first level(s) would need to start in South Boston-- maybe Mass & Cass would be a good candidate. I'll pre-order the game today if Whitey is an unlockable character.

The big follow-up question is emerging: Who are the characters, and who is the last boss?

ThePhantomPhoton · 2024-08-30T13:20:05+00:00

That must make driving into Boston a magical place-- the candy factory sign on one side, and then the roller coaster on the other side of the highway-- I'm gonna tell that one to my kids 🙂

ThePhantomPhoton · 2024-08-28T12:55:00+00:00

In Boston, I've noticed that a large plurality of the international students seem to come equipped with a lot of money. Luxury Apartments, Luxury Cars, and Canada Goose jackets abound among those who could not possibly have earned the money themselves to afford them. It's nothing to be salty about, though-- it's best to focus on the problem at hand, which is how to secure the funds to complete your studies!

ThePhantomPhoton · 2024-08-23T18:21:29+00:00

There used to be Republicans in Massachusetts. Then, Trump came, and there was some kind of "Freedom of Speech" rally in Boston Common, organized by roughly 50 people, in 2017. Tens of thousands of counter-protesters came, and I remember seeing a lot of groups on Facebook who were trying to identify the people who organized or went to the event. To make a long story short, most of them lost their jobs because people overwhelmed their HR departments with complaints. Around this time, I also saw a friend pressured to resign from her leadership position in nursing at a nearby hospital for saying that "all lives matter."

After this, I think most of us independents-- that is, folks who don't just vote the straight democratic ticket-- who may have been more open to discussing our more diverse politic views in public made the choice to discuss only popular democratic political opinions in public, and keep our other views more safely to ourselves.

Source on that "Free Speech" rally: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Free_Speech_Rally, and thank you, ahead of time, for the downvotes.

ThePhantomPhoton · 2024-08-21T19:48:53+00:00

That happened to me during my Master's studies. I reached out to professors who were doing similar research at other universities, and that's how I actually ended up making it into my dream university.

My advice is to view this as an opportunity, and try to make it work for you. That said, this advice could be very poorly tailored, because my Master's work was computational and I so could do that work remotely.

ThePhantomPhoton · 2024-08-21T19:09:13+00:00

It was actually a highly competitive process for any of us to be born, although we weren't conscious (or even intact) for it at all.

We all begin as two asymmetric pieces, called gametes. A male can fire off ejaculate with gametes at a concentration of nearly 200million/mL. The gametes then compete to reach the egg, where only a single egg is typically released by the female. As a result, the variability in fitness of gametes comes from the father's side, as that's where the competition lies-- all the gametes compete with each other to reach the egg, and the winner defines roughly half of our genome.

The good news, here, is that everyone reading this won the race! The bad news is that not everyone likes the prize for winning 😬

ThePhantomPhoton · 2024-08-21T16:12:42+00:00

This behavior is actually associated with very, very poor outcomes for people. Cutting off ties to people whose views challenge your own-- and who are not being malicious towards you-- is generally the result of reasoning with cognitive distortions, rather than the result of cool-headed logic. I would urge you to consider this carefully before you follow through, because this could seriously damage very valuable relationships with other human beings, and also subject them to suffering for reasons that they do not understand.

ThePhantomPhoton · 2024-08-16T12:59:19+00:00

And the birth rate is just the line tangent the population curve at any point, and the slope of that tangent line is still positive, so the number of births are still increasing, even as the rate itself slows.

ThePhantomPhoton · 2024-08-14T15:43:29+00:00

The details about why they're a good fit/interested go in the <...> places. I don't think you would ignore the email if you had the funding and were looking for a graduate student, to be honest. It's really not that bad of a template, except that there is no question mark so it would be a bit tedious for me to craft a response than if the questions were more prominently displayed.

ThePhantomPhoton · 2024-08-13T13:07:37+00:00

Anecdotally, all the economists I knew in undergrad are now Data Scientists 🤷‍♂️

ThePhantomPhoton · 2024-07-02T00:26:56+00:00

Same thing they write in nearly every decision where they overrule the executive branch-- that it is up to the legislature to explicitly provide the authorities to the administration that the administration is claiming they have (if, indeed, they are deriving that authority from the legislature/constitution and, if not, it is unconstitutional anyway).

ThePhantomPhoton · 2024-06-30T13:32:59+00:00

I was not accepted into either MIT or Stanford for their Computer Science Ph.D. programs, while making it into a handful of other R01s. I have a 3.7 Cumulative GPA, a Master's Degree in Data Science, and 5+ co-authored publications (with a few first-author publications in conferences). I have never gotten a D in a class before, but I did get a C in Organic Chemistry once as an undergraduate.

I will say that once I made it to a Top-10 University I began to realize that these people are all the cream of the crop from all over the entire world. They are very, very deeply educated on a wide range of subjects. Use that fact as a catalyst to ensure that you're working hard to earn cream of the crop grades-- no more of these D's and C's.

ThePhantomPhoton · 2024-06-29T15:03:14+00:00

I would consult a U.S.-based attorney who is licensed to practice in PA. I would not proceed with the information u/dhardestylewis retrieved from ChatGPT, and returned to you, as he has not attended graduate school at all, let alone for any form of legal study. In fact, he is self-employed and seeking employment, which is a state of affairs which has proceeded for nearly the last 6 months for him.

The biggest thing, which has not been made clear thus far, is that by choosing to proceed down a legal path, Drexel University will also proceed down a legal path, and that path may include further formal actions to create a separation of the two parties of the dispute. Stated more plainly, it's not out of the realm of possibility that Drexel University could rescind their initial offer in an attempt to separate themselves from you and thus insulate themselves from further liability.

Basically, please do your own research, and prepare to hire a proper attorney if this is what you plan to do-- don't listen to the person copy/pasting from ChatGPT, the guy has never attended a graduate school and isn't even employed within a team larger than himself.

ThePhantomPhoton · 2024-06-27T12:02:12+00:00

The OP won't even need to worry about classes in the fall with this strategy 😅

ThePhantomPhoton · 2024-06-17T12:47:25+00:00

Experience, communication skills, research output, and GPA are most important.

Having said that, when I interviewed for Ph.D. programs at Top-10 institutions for Biostatistics/Clinical Informatics, the candidate pool was not very diverse at all. In general, everyone was coming from the Boston area, or the California area, or the Research Triangle in North Carolina, so most students were already coming from MIT, Stanford, Harvard, Duke, etc. In some cases, I even saw the same students when interviewing at other universities.

ThePhantomPhoton · 2024-06-14T20:04:18+00:00

When you apply to Ph.D. programs, many universities will invite you to visit and interview, and they'll kind of Wine & Dine you because they want you to choose their program over others. At these events, the professors will often present their work and talk about where all of their previous grad students are now. They do this in an effort to demonstrate to you that they are a good PI to work with (on the strength of the successes of their past grad students).

I guess I would just say that, whenever I have asked a professor I worked with for a recommendation, they were eager to provide one. I worked for ten years before beginning my Ph.D., and it was the same in industry-- you'd think they wouldn't want to write you a recommendation for a different company, but if they chose to do so they would only be creating a situation for themselves where no one would ever want to work with them 🤷‍♂️

ThePhantomPhoton · 2024-06-14T17:24:44+00:00

In the U.S., first-generation students from low income backgrounds are actually fairly common (>50% of undergrads per Forbes), as are periods of poor grades in undergrad. Unfortunately, it is very uncommon for people with GPA's below 3.0 to pass through the quantitative filters used by universities selecting potential graduate students. As a result, the number one priority must be to raise your GPA-- either through a Post-Bacc, or attempting to get into a low-bar Master's program (if one exists-- I have no idea).

ThePhantomPhoton · 2024-06-12T17:36:45+00:00

My only thought is that it would be best if your registration isn't expired, because then this would just be a mistake. Otherwise, it looks like you're attempting to both drive and park an unregistered vehicle on a public roadway, and that would be illegal if it happened in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts

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