memepool

Ah, thank you very much for your kind words/advice, though, uh, I don't think I'll go quite as far with the making other mistakes as you suggest! One thing I'm doing on the living-life front is absolutely positively not looking at the results list on this site anymore -- it's just too much torture. What I realized is that if last year I had been checking the site and making the assumptions I'm making this year, I would have been convinced that the program I'm angsting about had rejected me then, too. And... the schools I consider completely and totally dreamy still haven't made any decisions whatsoever. It's just so annoying how hard it is to reason oneself out of regrets, y'know? If I had been told I'd get into into [good but not quite ideal program] two years ago, I'd be beside myself with joy. Objectively, I know I'll fit in well there. However... Good luck with your programs, btw! Even though I think the results search is kind of diabolical, the commiseration community the forums provide is invaluable...

Last year I got into some fairly sweet programs in English/media studies, but ended up turning them all down when I got a surprise offer of a pretty lucrative one-year contract job doing software development for a startup -- I have an alternate life as a coder, which I dropped to go back for an MA upon realizing that I hated coding for a living. I figured, though, why not give it another shot, and, anyway, it'd pay off all my student loans... and knowing that it was just for a year allowed me to be pretty shameless about spending my non-working hours aggressively applying to schools hither and yon. Well, money's nice, but programming for a living still makes me miserable (I know, poor me...). So, I got back into one of the programs that had accepted me the previous year, though not necessarily one I'd consider a dream school -- it's a lovely place and the department has quite a few people I'm looking forward to possibly getting to work with[1], but the school is somewhat geographically isolated and, more importantly, not nearly enough of a name to make me feel comfortable about my job market prospects coming out of it. For the rest of the schools I've applied to, though... reading the tea leaves at the results list on this site indicates pretty clearly that I'm not getting back into at least one of the programs that a) I very badly wanted, and accepted me last year. I'm guessing this "get accepted, turn them down, apply again" thing marks me as a dilettante. So, anyway, as problems go mine aren't so bad. I'm sitting on one acceptance, I'm debt-free, yadda yadda. But oh man do I want the schools I turned down last year... [1]: I'm almost anxious posting this, since I'm afraid that some of those profs might be idly reading this site. But -- the people there know that if [foo] or [bar] or (*crosses fingers*) [baz!] accepts me, that's where I'm going.

Go to your dream school. You're on this site. You're applying to grad school. Academia is what you're about (either that, or you've made a horrible, horrible mistake applying to grad school). If you go to anything but your dream program, you will resent your partner and it will wreck your relationship. Apologies for being so blunt. The way I think of it is the academy and the church sort of share a common heritage, and going into one is remarkably similar, lifestyle-wise, to going into the other. You do it if you have a calling -- and callings have a way of asserting themselves even over relationships. The two body problem sucks. Sorry you have to deal with it...

Same field, different folks -- there was a big shakeup and a lot of retirements at the UW a few years after I got my BA, so the department in large part doesn't really resemble the one I went to for my BA. There's one big name at the UW doing the cybercultures stuff I'm interested in; several big names at NYU, but none of whom do exactly what I'm into. Also, at the UW I'll be doing interdisciplinary stuff with the folks over in the Geography department, which is considered top-ranked in that (small) field. I could most likely do the same sort of work with the same caliber names if I went to NYU, though I'd have to work through the consortium of NYC schools to do it. That said, although the UW has more people doing exactly what I'm into, I'm not sure if it'd be stultifying to be in a place where people are doing /exactly/ what I'm into. Side notes: -I had a much better rapport with the professors at the UW than at NYU when I visited, even though the NYU folks were more aggressively courting me. This is possibly a distortion effect caused by it being my hometown school, though. -Oh, lordy, I want to live in New York. I wonder if it would hurt to call them...

Main thing is moving back to my hometown for five+ years (not something I originally pictured myself doing), combined w/ angst over whether doing BA and PhD at the same school will be a negative on the market. Another factor is that NYU's on a hiring spree, while the UW is most definitely not. However, the UW has stronger people in my sub-subfield right now. The thing that makes me angry at myself is that I sort of went with the UW as a snap decision, based on, well, relationship reasons. This, one and all, is exactly the recipe for resentment one would expect. Hooray for things one only tells anonymous internet forums...

I figured that if I'm having a freakout, I should probably have it on a freakout forum. Thank you, grad cafe. What follows contains a bit of narcissistic whining. But, hey, we're grad students here. We're used to it. So at the last possible moment I decided between my top two schools, and have been regretting it ever since. Here are the offers I got: NYU English, 22k, five years funding, two years TAing sections of a lecture class University of Washington English, 14k, five years funding, teaching 2nd, 3rd, 4th years. Opportunities to teach junior and senior level courses in the 3rd and 4th year. The reason I ended up ultimately going with the University of Washington was out of paranoia about going on the job market with so little teaching experience, even though I know that as a rule the profession privileges research over teaching. Also, I felt more of that "home feeling about the UW than NYU while on my campus visit, but, well, that's possibly due to a complicating factor. I grew up in Seattle, see. Lived there until I was 22. Even (oh, man, did I just hose my career?) did my BA at the UW, though I've been away for several years (two of which were at another school getting my MA). And do I really want to live back in Seattle for another five years? Before I did campus visits (and, admittedly, before I found out that there wasn't any individual teaching at NYU and wouldn't be any time soon, due to the administration not wanting to give grad students leverage for another strike), I was dead certain that I would be at NYU next year. Woo! Getting to live in New York! Getting paid enough to sort of survive, provided I live over in Jersey or way out in the outer boroughs! NYU! Big name school, sorta! Heck, it's where Felicity went! A couple of times over the last two weeks I've been very, very close to asking NYU if they could reopen the offer, even though I know that I most likely wouldn't be doing myself any favors asking. But... it's nagging me still, especially since I was able to get an extension on the April 15th deadline from them -- they said that they weren't going to be grabbing anyone off the waitlist, so I wasn't keeping anyone from getting a spot by delaying. Gosh, what should I do?