feisty

Any word on the new NRC rankings? They keep getting pushed back.

You don't need a car in Chicago. I never had one there, but I imagine they're relatively easy to keep (if you don't mind piling your furniture on the street and parking-regulation-by-mercenary-piracy!) and it would be an asset, unlike NY where it's a liability. Really really don't need one though.

I wouldn't underestimate the importance of research interests, as laid out in the SOP. I got into 1 school of the 7 I applied to, and I think I got in because my interests matched eerily (down to minutiae) with my potential advisors', which I didn't learn until my visit. Fatefully, a lot of what they had been working on hadn't even been published/finished yet, and that happened to be a lot of the same topics I was working on as an undergrad, and talked about in my SOP. Otherwise I'm almost positive, based on my undergrad stats, I would be 0/7 (this year, at least, I think in more prosperous years I would have done better).

It also has a giant lesbian population. Midwest h8ters are the worst humans, more or less. Please don't judge the US by them alone.

I'd say a small city. Small enough to not be too chic and unaffordable, large enough to have a diversity of Stuff To Do and large enough that not everything is dominated by the university. Thinking Austin, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia. I guess it depends on what kind of grad school though--something like business or public policy might best be done in a major metropolis, whereas the humanities and hard science students living deep inside their own heads might benefit from the relative peace and quiet of a more low key place.

No idea, but MAGIC. Awesome.

I don't think it's across the board, every apartment building in New York. But I could be wrong. One of my roommates had a guarantor. In reality, if you make your rent it's very little obligation for the person who acts as a guarantor. The tricky part is finding one (she used her parents.) Get a second opinion from someone other than whoever you are talking to. Edit: I rembemer now: For my building, we had to fill out a short application and provide financial information, and included in that information had to be something...solid, I guess, to show you could make rent in the future. There were four of us: I had a job and a letter from my boss saying I had a job, my one roommate had a relatively large amount of savings, another roommate had a grad stipend from NYU. The only roommate who required a guarantor was the one with no job and very little savings. We all gave them totally different sets of documents. I didn't even show them my bank statements, and they didn't ask, my pay stub was enough. For my unemployed roommate, though, they wanted a bank statement. For the roommate with the stipend, they wanted a bank statement. It's less rigid then you think, I think. This was just my experience though, last year, with a small multi-building manager on the UWS.

With some building managers/brokers you may have to get a co-signer who does make at least 40 times the monthly rent. For them, it's just signing something and proving that they have that money. You're still paying for the apartment, it's just a safety net for the landlord. It's not law or a city-wide thing, and I think it's not something you'll run into outside of Manhattan, and even within Manhattan you can probably avoid it. If your parents or a roommate's parents or anyone in your families make that much, then they can co-sign, and as long as you don't default on your rent you'll never have to revisit it again.

Columbia lost/forgot mine too and they are total schmucks.

I love you. Pretty much lost it at "Dr. Frasier Crane" Ann Arbor is great. The Ivy League is for squares.

The Oxford histories are good. Also, more cultural and "British identity" blahblahblah, but very broad and good, Linda Colley's Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837

that's awful. i assume your name found its way onto a very general mailing list via clerical oversight, but still, they should be more careful.

Sort of. Expected to only get into 1 school, but didn't expect to get into the one I did (highest ranked of the 7 I applied to, applied to it on a brazen whim).

I think the most important research experience w/r/t getting into grad school is your own. Some of my classmates in undergrad did work for a professor (mostly going through archives in the States while said professor was out of the country, or translation) but it was more of a summer job than a research opportunity. Assisting a professor doesn't seem to have the same value in the humanities as it does in other fields (those with lab work, pretty much.) Depending on what year you are--does your school have independent projects, senior theses, etc? The most grad-school-pertinent thing I did as an undergrad was receive funding to go to London one summer for my senior thesis research. I was able to spend about 3 weeks in the India Office archives in the British Library, and I think my--albeit brief--familiarity with archival research for *my own* work helped me more than anything.

I did. They talked about it a bit. Basically: - The guaranteed funding for 5 years is a recent development. I think we are the 2nd or 3rd cohort to go in with funding guaranteed beyond the first year (before you had to reapply each year). - They were adamant about the notion that as a state university, they can offer less, but what they can offer is solid, dependable, and guaranteed. Again, I am more worried about private universities that rely almost entirely on endowments. - They do offer pretty substantial summer funding, for travel, language classes, etc. I went to Berkeley pretty worried, but I got the impression that they're not about to pull the rug out from under any grad students. There's a sense camaraderie in the department, a lot of communication, and an extraordinarily competent support staff. I am mostly worried about budgeting on what they have guaranteed, not about the funding changing.