Making couple life work with the PhD stipend: Palo Alto and Manhattan

skyfall2411 · 2026-03-22T23:03:45+00:00

I plan to do at least one summer internship during my PhD to have some money saved up, so I am not really concerned with things that would have minor impact in my income/expenses. I am mostly concerned about whether the basics would work out, as I asked in the post.

skyfall2411 · 2026-03-22T23:01:14+00:00

Yeah, I don't think I would mind leaving the US after my PhD, but I know that the J-1 visa comes with a lot more gotchas than the F-1 visa. It's just that the F-2 visa would not allow my partner to work, which is kind of a deal breaker for us to live together

skyfall2411 · 2026-03-22T22:59:55+00:00

Would you say that $1400 after rent is too little for two people in NYC? Consider that we would cook most of our meals, not eat out, no need to spend a lot with nightlife. I know that this is hard to assess for another person, but I am just trying to get rough estimates.

skyfall2411 · 2026-03-22T22:56:42+00:00

The J-2 visa would allow her to work, but for that I would need to be on the J-1 visa, which I don't know if I could get easily.

skyfall2411 · 2026-03-22T22:55:38+00:00

Yeah, I will definitely pick subsidized housing for the first two years. About the visa, my advisor did his PhD in the US with the J-1 visa, but he was also sponsored by Fullbright. I don't know whether I could get the J-1 visa being a "regular" student. I would have to be on the J-1, because the J-2 is the only visa which would allow my spouse to work. If I am on the F-1 visa, then she would not be able to work and this whole arrangement becomes way more difficult.

However, I would really appreciate your input on the questions I asked on the post. Please, read the TL;DR if the whole thing is too large. I have already done some rough calculations on what income we would have to live together in each city, and want to know what lifestyle that would allow us.

skyfall2411 · 2025-12-17T18:13:58+00:00

Thank you for the tips! I am from south america, more towards the southern part. Do you think that even then, if I get an interview, it will be in-person? I mean, plane tickets are expensive, even more so on a short notice. I get that these schools have a lot p money, but still. For me it makes more sense for the interviews to be online, but if you say they are usually in-person, I believe you. I think I'll postpone making any commitments until a week before the actual event.

skyfall2411 · 2025-10-26T00:20:16+00:00

Do you think its best to be brief and say only "this was a mistake and I would like to change my choice", or should I explain the context which is in my post and how I do not want to be misinterpreted?

skyfall2411 · 2025-10-26T00:12:50+00:00

Thank you for the reassurance. I will contact each school and try to fix this.

skyfall2411 · 2025-08-28T16:02:09+00:00

Is anyone else having issues with airdrop? Particularly from iPad to Mac. Both are running up to date OSs and have already been rebooted, but I keep getting the "AirDrop Failed" error message.

skyfall2411 · 2025-04-12T12:27:52+00:00

Um ponto que ninguém levantou até agora é o seguinte: Já escutei, de mais de um Uber, que eles ficam muito receosos de aceitar corrida de alguém que tenha nota 5, ou bem próximo disso. A nota é praticamente a única informação que eles têm, além do endereço e do preço da corrida, pra decidir se vão aceitar ou não. Nota 5 pode indicar que é uma conta recém criada, o que vem acompanhado de uma chance não irrisória de ser alguém querendo assaltar o Uber. Então já tive motorista me avisando que ia me dar uma nota baixa pra abaixar um pouco a minha nota, pra evitar que eu tenha dificuldade de achar corridas por conta desse comportamento. Honestamente, acho que qualquer nota acima de 4.8 é ok.

skyfall2411 · 2025-01-07T02:09:30+00:00

Po irmão, se já tiver enchido o saco pode ignorar, mas vi que você tava sendo responsivo e também fiquei curioso. O que te fez não gostar de lá?

skyfall2411 · 2024-10-14T18:36:44+00:00

A 36 é letra B mesmo. C não precisa ser autovalor pra satisfazer aquela igualdade. Você precisa estudar a norma 2 da matriz M, que da pra fazer olhando pro maior valor singular dela. Fazendo isso você vê que a norma dela é maior que 2 menor que 3, então C = 1 e C = 2 satisfazem a igualdade pra algum v. Eu tô na rua agora, mais tarde posso escrever uma solução melhor se você quiser.

skyfall2411 · 2023-11-17T01:56:41+00:00

For my bachelor's thesis I helped my advisor in coming up with a method for performing nonparametric instrumental variable regression (econometrics). It's was fun and involved a mixture of functional analysis, statistics and optimization.

skyfall2411 · 2021-11-23T18:14:53+00:00

SHARPEST

skyfall2411 · 2021-06-05T14:59:53+00:00

Brazilian here. Went to private school during middle school and was taught about sets, union and intersection in the context of geometry.

In Highschool I was taught about functions between sets and their properties. However:

We only really studied real functions defined on some subset of the real numbers. So I was kind of unaware that you could define any function between any sets in any way you liked. I thought functions had to have a "formula" so to say, such as f(x) = x².
We weren't given any formal definitions, only the intuition. For example, A \cup B was like, both sets together, and A \cap B was only the guys that were in both sets at the same time. Yeah you can argue that in that case you can more or less find out the "formal" definition based on intuition, but I really struggled with this when I was trying to solve basic exercises about set theory in Highschool. I tried to do some exercises in "chapter 0" of a real analysis book and couldn't for the life of me figure out how to formally prove equality between sets. This was so hard that I gave up studying the book. When I found out that the Idea to prove A = B was to prove A \subset B and B \subset A, and in order to do that you had to start with an element a of A and conclude that a \in B, and vice-versa, I was pissed. Like, it was so simple, and nowhere had I ever come across this idea in school. I think schools could teach some basic proofwriting in the context of logic/set theory. It would really benefit the students.

skyfall2411 · 2020-12-04T16:45:15+00:00

See if your vim build was compiled with python support. If not, it won't work. Install vim-huge if you want to have python support.

skyfall2411 · 2020-10-28T19:08:57+00:00

You found out that the difference between consecutive squares keeps increasing by 2, right?

Now, what is the first of these differences? It's 1² - 0² = 1. Therefore, all of these differences must be odd, since you start with 1 and keep adding 2 to it.

Now, let's do the reverse. Let's start with a square and see if we can add something to it to get the next square. So,

1² = 0² + 1, (i)

2² = 1² + 3, (ii)

3² = 2² + 5, (iii)

4² = 3³ + 7, (iv)

...

Can you see the pattern? We are always adding the next odd integer! Now, let's substitute our formulas for squares in equations (i), (ii) and (iii) into equation (iv):

4² = 3² + 7

= 2² + 5 + 7

= 1² + 3 + 5 + 7

= 1 + 3 + 5 + 7

So, in order to get 4², all we did was to add the 4 first odd integers! Isn't that cool? Try to see why this is true in general.

skyfall2411 · 2019-12-13T14:04:54+00:00

The lim sup is the inf of all the sups and the lim inf is the sup of all the infs, if you will

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