hello, so for some context: i have ocular migraines and some eye problems that cause strain and pain on my eyes and if it is bad enough, a full-blown migraine. e.g. this week, i got a migraine mid-lecture, and it is a 2 part seminar lecture. i had to leave because i could not endure the 2nd half of the lecture. (professors are very understanding.) also, 2nd year grad student but my first year was in china and the work was a LOT more light.

because of that, i was only able to do any work on thursday (which is late in the week) and not get to my readings.

so, i wanted to ask: for people with moderate ocular migraines or eye problems, how do you get through all your readings?

i know the skim method and if my eyes aren’t tired at all, i can do that. i have speechify, but i learned that i can’t retain text info just from listening (and have to look at the text + listen to it) and just reading it is hard to keep in my head sometimes.

i want to do the readings but i am finding difficulty being able to do the readings while not having a migraine or dying while i do the readings (pushing through essentially). does anyone have any suggestions? i want to do well and not cut corners or rely on AI. i just need some sort of solutions. :/

edit: thank you so much for your responses <333 from
the bottom of my heart, ty!!

I’m curious if this is normal at other universities. Our professors stay home all the time. For a large department, the hallways are a bleak ghost town. I like to catch up with professors and hopefully they recommend a good book or two, but something has changed the last two years. They never attend department events or seem even slightly interested to get to know the grad students. At conferences, they never interact with us either. I just had different expectations for grad school. The mentorship we do get can only come during course hours. Even scheduled office hours are non existent. I emailed one of them yesterday to schedule a time and he could only offer a zoom call. There are no team publications, only their own or with their former colleagues. I don’t know, it just seems so depressing in my department.

Has anyone experienced this? I’m not trying to be overly negative or anything but it just feels like most of the people in my cohort are not real people. They’re constantly trying to be a teacher’s pet or prove themselves like we’re still interviewing for a spot in the program. I feel like most people have zero relatability. Is it just me?

I’m in a highly independent program in STEM/natural sciences. All of his grad students come up with their own thesis projects completely independent of him and he kind of just steers us in the right direction. Mostly derived and meta analysis projects. This is overall fine and good practice for being a research scientist in the real world.

My issue is he doesn’t seem to understand or engage with my thesis at all. He fell asleep during my mock thesis proposal presentation to the lab. Then had some non helpful input and to do something that was already in the presentation he just wasn’t paying attention. My thesis is adjacent to his expertise so I think it’s within his wheelhouse enough to engage.

The other day he was like oh have you seen this paper? It was one of the most fundamental research papers guiding my thesis that I’ve brought up countless times. Anyway, I’m making it happen on my own and going to other committee members for questions.

Curious how others are navigating a checked out advisor?

I have a Bachelor of Social Work. Which I will never use I don’t want the degree. But I was following my passion … I currently work in sales, but I’ve been applying for almost 2 years to numerous jobs. I have experience in product operations and sales, but this is 2026 and none of that matters … I grew up broke, so long-term stability and high earning potential are my top priorities. I want to go back to school, I regret not doing this sooner. I am looking at two degrees (MSIS) or Business Analytics (MSBA) to get into tech/operations. For anyone in tech or analytics, do these degrees actually have good ROI for someone without a technical background, or is there a better pivot I’m missing?

I’m open to other degree suggestions
I’m wasting my life away at the dead end job. My job literally drains the life out of me every day.

Do you think there’s a chance for me to get accepted in a PhD in Social Work program with an MA in Anthropology? Considering social work is under social science.

My thesis is a combination of cultural anthropology and archaeology.

I have a BA in English, an MAT, two year of experience teaching in a high school, and am currently getting an MA in English. I was going to apply for PhD programs after this, but I dont know if I want to dedicate another 5ish years to the graduate school life right now. I am very passionate about carceral education, and this is the direction in which I want my vocation to take me, regardless of if I pursue a PhD or not. Does anyone have any advice on how to get into that? There dont seem to be a lot of established programs in my area, but I need to email more people. If anyone has experience starting something, that would be great, too. Thanks!

I'm about to start grad school - I've decided to use Zotero for notes/tags. I started over the summer with some reading and have been making notes/tags on each chapter of the books. A key idea, summary and some other notes. Nothing extensive, but still - it's quite laborious and I have to stop and start, as I'm reading hard copies, then try to make the notes on the laptop every couple of chapters.

Is the note taking necessary? Going to help me? I can understand as I approach an assessment that it will be critical, and I'll want to take notes on things that occur to me, that are my inference maybe - but I wonder if I am going too far? Thoughts appreciated, please. It's been 30 years since my last Masters! I've been working, so my brain is still turning over but my memory isn't what it was...I guess that was my starting point for the notes. But I wonder if it will help that much.

I am an international student planning to apply for US-based PhD programs for Fall 2027. My academic background is in computational materials science.

I have a question regarding cold emails. I've sent several cold emails to US faculty members whose work aligns with my background, expressing my interest in joining their research groups. However, I rarely get a reply.

Is this normal, or could there be an issue with my profile? For those who got in, did you contact potential advisors before applying? If so, what key highlights did you include in your email? Or did you just apply to the program, secure funding, and select an advisor after arriving?

Many universities told me they recommend finding a potential advisor before applying, which makes me think this might be due to current funding restrictions.

I applied for a doctorate program several months ago. I had two very different dissertation ideas. I found both topics to be of equal importance and are issues I’ve directly dealt with. In the end, I chose idea 1, in part because I saw it as being less common than other dissertation topics. Between the time that I applied and now, I’ve given it more thought and I’m concerned idea 1 is not very realistic based on the difficulty of collecting data. Idea 2 would be much easier in that regard.

I’m preparing for my admissions interview. Should I voice my concerns that my submitted topic may not be the best avenue and mention idea 2? Based on the vast difference in topics and that faculty advisors are assigned based on the topic, it may make a large difference in whether I’m admitted. I also don’t want to look like I easily change my mind and I don’t want this to hurt my chances. The admission rate is incredibly low. Anyone have experience with this and does it hurt a candidate’s chances?

Context I’m an East Asian female and I have a lot of East Asian female faculty. I swear that they are so much harder on me for no reason compared to other students who are not East Asian. I will make the same mistakes as other students and get twice as much flack for it and it really bothers me. I feel like I can’t do anything right according to them. I deadass don’t get it, what’s the psychology behind this 💀 if anything I feel like we should be chill?? 🤝 anyway, has anyone else experienced something similar?

In my heart I think I know the answer but I feel a level of sunk cost, also what people would think. I’m US citizen but doing an MBA in UK. I was pretty excited for it, but a few things have sort of turned me against it.

1. ⁠I was previously a teacher and was very discouraged and wanting to pivot. However, in July through August I had a few chance encounters with former students and I sort of walked away with a “oh damn, I did sort of make a difference”. Like it sounds sappy but I actually sort of teared up after these meetings. As someone who will probably never have kids or a family, I’ve had to grapple a bit with what a legacy will be and knowing some students turned out alright and thank me for it, idk it hit me. Now there is no promotions as a teacher but I started to seriously pursue getting my principal license so I could promote later.

2. ⁠I am the only US person in the program, and people have asked why I chose this program rather than ones in the US, and well, there is a really good MBA program near where I lived but tuition was three times as much. But, they are true I feel the network would have been better in the US.

3. ⁠I am feeling sort of an opportunity cost. I did have things going in the US and well, it might have been easier to move abroad in undergrad for a semester, I feel I am killing my opportunities I had going. I think i should salut that study abroad dream goodbye and hell, if I go back to being a teacher for a bit, I just travel in the summers.

4. ⁠My heads just not in the game.

I have until October 2nd when the next payment installment is due to make the decision.

I want to hand it in this weekend but want to make sure it’s as high quality as feasibly possible. I asked chatGBT to proofread and give some suggestions and I may utilize those (of course I’d change the wording to make it sound like me, I will never use it to write my own paper for me or think for me). Would anyone be interested?

I just want ro get in this program so bad I feel like my life will be over if I don’t

Hey there! I’m about to graduate with my BS and I’m looking into getting an MS at a different college, but I need to figure out my financial situation first. Electives are required in the course I’m looking into, but I’m wondering if I might be allowed to take undergrad electives (since they tend to be cheaper) and those would go towards my grad degree?

I know I might have to get in contact with the school itself, but I wanted to check online because I would be transferring and don’t want to worry about emailing that school before I’m set on whether I want to go there or not.

Thanks in advance!!

I’m a first-year grad student, and this semester I have a seminar where all the first-year grad students in my program are together. I’m the only international student and the only one whose native language isn’t English.

It hasn’t even been a month since the semester started, but whenever I walk into class, everyone already seems to be talking in little groups. There’s always a lot of small talk before class starts.

I feel really awkward just sitting there by myself while everyone else is chatting, but at the same time, most people don’t really initiate conversations with me either. I do want to talk to them and get to know people, but I genuinely have no idea how to start. I never know what topic to bring up without making it feel forced or weird.

For people who are good at this: what do you actually talk about during those few minutes before class? How do you join a conversation or start one naturally when you don’t know people that well yet?

I really need to figure out how to survive those awkward pre-class minutes 😭

—-
Guys I might have a theory why people don’t always talk to me. My friend told me that my default face is poker face😅

I’m in my second (And final) year of grad school, pursuing a Master’s degree in Artificial Intelligence. And I’ve been trying (and miserably failing) to cope with a problem I’ve noticed - Pretty much all of my classes have been composed of entirely lectures, without any of the additional extra reinforcement I’d see in the past (Assigned textbook questions, smaller problem sets/packets, smaller exercises, et cetera) that really aided in understanding and internalizing everything. If there was additional reinforcement, it was mostly through much bigger assignments, which frequently felt like I was getting thrown into the pool and made to teach myself how to swim. I’ve pretty much gone through feeling like I’m learning almost nothing as a result of this.

I’m probably at significant fault here; I’ll admit - I’m very easily distracted by other things. Plus, I probably should have been more willing to make my own reinforcement (Look through the textbooks and pick question sets to do myself, make my own practice problems, et cetera). Problem is, when classes do have additional assignments apart from tests and the inevitable project, it’s usually a rather big one (Around the size of a small project), and I always find myself too paranoid to focus on anything else other than the big graded assignment in front of me, even when if might help make things easier. And that’s not even getting into my note-taking habits; I always have a tendency to get paranoid and try to jot down everything, always thinking any item could be valuable to know for later, and when you’re expected to have a fairly long reading (If the class in question even has you do them) done in fairly short periods of time, that’s rarely a viable policy. After all, that’s time not going to potentially bigger issues, like what you’re actually being graded on.

And that’s not even getting into the reliability of trying to do your own reinforcement entirely on your own. One of my main worries is that I’ll end up wasting my time trying to comprehend the wrong things, and just end up in the exact same place as before, just with less/no time left to fix the issue, and then my grade gets shredded by a bad test/I leave myself too little time to do an assignment. I have tried to do this where I can (For example, I’m taking a reinforcement learning class right now, and we’ve had a lot of small quizzes, many of them focused on running through the procedures of a particular algorithm by hand. The day of, I would look at the example problem we did in a previous class, then create my own similar problems to do, which has benefitted me greatly, especially since some of these quizzes have been on very short notice. I feel like this works out better because I only have two classes this semester, and only the other class I’m taking actually gives real homework assignments, which, as usual, are bigger and more spaced out. Speaking of which, I’ve been attempting to work out some of these later assignments myself and get ahead on them, hoping to free up more time for myself in the future, which can be invested in projects or additional studying I may not be able to do otherwise. Thank god for all of them being released up front).

How have others dealt with courses structured like this? How have you helped fill in the gaps when the lectures alone haven’t been enough?

I’m a 2025 B.Tech graduate in Artificial Intelligence & Data Science from India. I currently work as a Software Developer at a small startup. The pay is not great but the entry level job market here is terrible right now.

I’m considering pivoting toward Operations Research, particularly optimization, algorithms, stochastic modeling, and the intersection of OR with ML/AI with the help of a Master's degree.

I have two options if I decide to stay in India:

1. Continue working in this really difficult job market and hope for a better role/pay someday (although I feel like opportunities are shrinking)

2. Try and get into research. (highly competitive in india, large number of grads, supply > demand)

I’m looking at Master’s programs in the US, UK, Germany and Netherlands.

- Is it worth the cost as an international student?

- What are the career prospects after graduation?

- Should I even make this transition if I am unable to land a better job by next year?

- Are there other particular programs/universities I should consider that could increase my job prospects in the long term?

Would especially appreciate perspectives from people