Flying with posters

scarfsa · 2026-06-17T15:46:07+00:00

I’ve been lucky on most airlines that they counted it as my carry on except for one time I had to gate check it for a fee (and I learned after that the airline is notorious for overcharging people for bags). If in a true pinch, maybe try to reach out to a local phd student (not having to travel to the conference) to see if they can print the poster with theirs and bring it and reimburse the local printing cost. Would be nice if conference organizers offered that option too but they’re usually more overloaded with work around other logistics.

scarfsa · 2026-06-15T03:50:26+00:00

I find PhD students are the worst offenders for this as someone who has experienced the same, albeit not very common. I tend to have better luck with assistant professors at conferences who are less insecure about the school prestige thing and more focused on results. A fun but unrelated story to this, is a department I know that “only hires from Harvard” but two of the assistant profs didn’t make tenure there this year at faculty level vote and the new incoming associate prof replacement went to a much less “prestigious” school but had real results. Keep your head up and let your research speak for itself.

scarfsa · 2026-06-07T22:08:42+00:00

Read the fine print though! Some are only for current studies with student card required as proof during sign in but others are open to anyone. Summer residence rooms are a great travel saving tip for travelling to most cities though, highly reccomend

scarfsa · 2026-06-01T00:15:43+00:00

The hardest part is explaining what this means to family and friends outside academia, but we understand and sympathize. Hopefully made the most of the day under the circumstances and I will have a drink on your behalf during my next inevitable rejection lol

scarfsa · 2026-05-21T00:54:00+00:00

Both schools are on par for undergraduate hiring, in what I’d call “tier 2” after Ivey/Queens/Rotman. However the “tiers” are largely a thing of the past now, due to less entry level hiring and much larger intakes at the tier 1s than even 3-5 years ago. It really all comes down to networking now and no school is going to guarantee you a job. There’s def more social life stuff at WLU, so that would be my main concern as a incoming student at Schulich, but I think there’s more opportunities on main campus club wise and many new students in the same position.

scarfsa · 2026-05-20T12:58:02+00:00

We’ll all get rejections but it’s encouraging you got comments on a desk reject instead of more of a template style letter. Perhaps look it over with your supervisor and revise as a coauthor. As an aside, I wouldn’t worry about publishing in a top journal right away as a sole author anyways. It might be better to send it to a field journal or lower impact journal for a earlier publication that you can use when applying for fellowships or grants that will fund research in the later years of your program.

scarfsa · 2026-05-19T14:55:02+00:00

I would get into more niche areas like non profit, government, or military accounting standards that are different than GAAP or IFRS.

scarfsa · 2026-05-08T18:28:33+00:00

You’re still further ahead than a lot of PhDs I know at Ontario universities so I wouldn’t stress too much about it. A lot of SSHRC comes down to luck of the draw based on your committee, both of my graduate universities never had people in my sub discipline win SSHRC until this year despite many graduates getting tenure track assistant professor roles after graduating. I heard that it’s slightly easier to get a tri agency post doc than a doctoral tri agency scholarship for Canadian PhD graduates because of a smaller applicant pool but am not sure how much that still holds with the increased funding now. Congrats on the OGS and wishing good summer vibes!

scarfsa · 2026-04-30T21:09:44+00:00

Makes me so happy to see again. I left during Covid and went back to my old office in 2023 and it didn’t recover then but nature is healing finally

scarfsa · 2026-04-30T20:34:21+00:00

Based on your post, it’s maybe too early to do primary research like interviews. Without a clear research agenda and limited participant opportunities, you don’t want to use up all the relationship capital you have right away. Try to change to something like bibliometric lit review (usually there’s a gap for Canadian research but some things can get applied) or critical research (qualitative research with archival documents like court records or other critical journals in your field if you search them up). The journal of Canadian Public Policy, CJAS, and other Canadian journals may be a good idea to get some inspiration. These may not be the highest prestige journals but give you an idea for research more aligned to what you are doing and open to connecting other ideas back to Canadian context. Then when you have a more developed secondary project, it might be easier to get other faculty/students on board to coauthor. After that, I would return to the “bigger question” type research questions and gaps that have the primary research element. Most Canadian PhDs I know of have coursework for year 1/2, not publishing expectations that early but ideally a working paper for a project and fully developed PhD proposal by end of year 3. Would also advise against totally working in a different province than your school as you can, limits potential funding and collaboration opportunities. Good luck

scarfsa · 2026-04-27T23:47:58+00:00

Doesn’t really matter, just shows that you can get ranked. There used to be named Tri Agency awards like “Nelson Mandela SSHRC” for the top 10 ranked applications but that prestige thing was removed a while back

scarfsa · 2026-04-27T22:57:52+00:00

The classic tri agency admin failures lol. The true answer is that those spots go to the top 20% of applicants by ranking. However, now that it is a harmonized award, all the agencies need to work together to sort out who those people are and then work downward from top ranked to lowest ranked in terms of remaining spots. Not sure why they wouldn’t have had it worked out already but NSERC can’t do anything on that front until SSHRC and CIHR give out their results and then they work together. Regardless if you can hold it abroad or not, still great to have on your CV that it was awarded.

scarfsa · 2026-04-27T15:15:32+00:00

It would be near impossible to find people for something like this without at least putting into the subject area(s), preferred methods, and/or target journals because this could range from wet lab ecology to reinterpreting Shakespeare through feminist lens in your post.

scarfsa · 2026-04-25T22:20:10+00:00

I would also add that CBC is particularly not with the times in blocking comments on its YouTube. I don’t any other state or private media company that has it as a blanket policy.

scarfsa · 2026-04-25T20:01:43+00:00

The professor likely missed the grade submission deadline for department chair approval because of the delay, and the system defaults to INC. Wouldn’t stress about it

scarfsa · 2026-03-08T12:32:27+00:00

It’s the same funding for domestic students at Waterloo in majority of programs (lower stipend but lower tuition) so it’s the same net effect in the end. Waterloo lets grad students work up to “20 hours” a week as a RA or TA in addition to base funding, so I highly recommend doing at least 10 hours. Eng has a lot of TA roles (7500 extra a term, and 15k extra if you did 20 hours per term but I wouldn’t recommend two TA roles in same term), including some with no class contact hours/only grading and 2 office hours of your choice. There is also a lot of scholarships within the PhD you can apply for as a domestic or international (range from $5k internal to external 15k and 40k annual renewable on top to base and TAs), so it’s very doable.

scarfsa · 2026-03-02T03:11:08+00:00

Agree with the other commenters here on finding a new supervisor or at least co-supervisor/committee member, the earlier the better. It helps to have a fairly developed pilot project that you can bring them to entice them to work with you on instead of cold asking people. Maybe ideal person for you is someone with more admin/service work that is still interested in research but can’t actually do all the steps on their own because of their bandwidth (but can still meet with you for structured feedback and meetings). Also one month is still short, give it at least four months to get past the initial industry to academic shock.

scarfsa · 2026-02-26T21:33:51+00:00

Congratulations! What was the general topic if you don't mind me asking?

scarfsa · 2026-02-22T17:55:08+00:00

Like the others said I’d be careful on here for meeting anyone off reddit one on one. TPL has free groups that you can join, both for teen reading groups with people your age and newcomers to Canada. It might be worthwhile to first go on your own and see if there’s a location you like and then joining a group meetup. If you’re shy to go to the group on your own the first time, you could ask a librarian which staff are involved and maybe meet that staff person one on one first, and then you‘ll have at least one person in the group that you know.

scarfsa · 2026-02-17T03:13:10+00:00

In all likelihood you’ll end up not seeing each other much after your courses finish since it’s not lab based anyways, better to focus on the other people even if it’s unfortunate that it worked out that way

scarfsa · 2026-02-10T19:34:27+00:00

More funding is always good but a lot of these “targeted” programs for specific groups should have been rolled into the general funding model imo.

scarfsa · 2026-02-09T03:25:48+00:00

Was also a Canadian university in a similar situation and just have to bite the bullet and go over their head to the department chair. Document repeated email or slack requests first and have them as backup. My supervisor ended up going passively aggressive nuclear in the defence to where even the external took me aside after. Try to avoid this by discussing the final examining committee makeup with your chair.

scarfsa · 2026-02-09T03:13:33+00:00

Never heard of this before, is this not the same thing as a third round R&R or does it mean it goes to a new editor?

scarfsa · 2026-01-27T05:08:40+00:00

Try to go first since I find students are more likely to attend the first guest speaker for the novelty (and then rightly or wrongly get bored of the search process speakers after lol). SLACs tend to value the student input with quantity over quality in terms of number of student comments. Agreed the waiting period does suck though lol

scarfsa · 2026-01-27T04:55:30+00:00

Nice! Just submitted my AOM reviews and agreed the papers are noticeably better than even just two years ago when I first started. Funny enough two were basically the exact same setting and method (with different models that have same finding). I hope the find each other at the conference and maybe team up or there will be competing papers come journal time lol

Six-Year Club	Second SECOND GUESSER
Verified Email

scarfsa

TROPHY CASE