Category: graduate school
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Picking a Ph.D. Program
In the United States, most graduate schools require that you accept their offer for employment or study by April 15 to begin in the summer or fall. With that deadline just three short weeks away, I thought now would be the prime time to help you make the right choice. I am a second year…
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How to Win the NSF GRFP
It’s that time of year again – the time when web search results are likely flooded with this exact question. Students applying to graduate school for next year are looking for funding opportunities and some will target the coveted National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program, whose deadline is looming near in mid-October. I will…
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Learning Behind Bars
According to the Innocence Project, an estimated 200,000 people in jail right now have been falsely convicted and imprisoned, and that is believed to be a conservative approximation. Especially given this fact, I think it makes sense to make the prison experience less like a prolonged form of torture and more like one that welcomes…
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What the Flux
Climate change and world record atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations are not new topics in mainstream media. An ample source of information on the planet’s current and future conditions is at our fingertips, but a resounding question from curious minds and climate-change deniers alike is: How do we know the climate is changing? We might have a…
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Oh, the Places I Go
Living in a city situated between two scenic lakes, I had to wonder why my drinking water wasn’t coming from either one of them. Madison, Wisconsin gets its drinking water from a sandstone aquifer that sits 90 to 95 feet below the ground’s surface according to Madison Water Utility. Twenty-two wells and many more pipes…
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Hello, Madison!
Map of Wisconsin from Google Earth. The pain of waiting for an answer is over: I’ve been accepted to the University of Wisconsin-Madison to study Land Resources. The bustling capital city is located between two frequently-kayaked and very fishable lakes, Monona and Mendota. The city is sustainable in that biking and walking are the main…
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Grad School Purgatory
Since urban dictionary doesn’t quite spell it out for you, I will: This is when applications have been completed and sent, but there is neither an acceptance nor rejection from anyone. There is little to no knowledge of when an answer will arrive, if ever. This is grad school purgatory.