levoyous

Insider tip: Boston College acceptances have gone out. However, at least one person has a strong competing offer, and last year people were still being admitted even after the visit day because some in the first round didn't accept. So there could be more to come.

Yep, they told me to write that you probably shouldn't go to their program unless you're rich or have special circumstances. 

I’ve noticed a few posts on here about NYU’s Draper Program, both when I was applying and since. Since there have been few posts from people who have attended, I thought I would try to give an insider’s perspective. I don’t believe in simple, do-or-don’t advice on graduate school, but hopefully I can give you enough information to make an informed decision on your own. The first few paragraphs will be merely descriptive, and then I will address some pros and cons below.
 
The program requires 32 credits (about 8 courses) and takes roughly two years, more or less depending on whether or not you attend full time. Draper has a couple of permanent faculty and a few others who rotate every few years, as well as a couple of adjuncts. Draper offers its own courses as well as allowing you to take courses in almost all NYU departments with the department/professor’s permission. (For example, I took courses in philosophy, comp lit and political science.)
 
All of the Draper professors are excellent scholars and teachers, and the courses are rigorous and difficult. There is a loose configuration of disciplinary orientations within its interdisciplinary environment, but most students tend toward either social sciences (anthropology, sociology), humanities (philosophy, literature, cultural studies), or arts (music or visual/fine art). Draper courses will give you a basic orientation in say, literary theory or “science studies” (something like contemporary philosophy of science), and then you can choose more specialized courses from other departments to complete your training. Figuring out what courses you should take is mostly up to you; Draper offers little in the way of disciplinary guidance or formal degree programs.
 
In my experience, Draper students are smart, motivated, and diverse. The program attracts a few different kinds of people, including rich kids who don’t know what to do with themselves, and (more commonly) people who have led very interesting lives but didn’t follow a traditional academic path. It makes the Draper student body very “real”; there’s very little academic posturing and a lot of genuine intellectual searching and people motivated to figure out their academic direction. Among both professors and other students, I met people who will be lifelong friends and advisers. The department plans lots of social events and extracurricular activities that help you boost your academic CV (the program’s journal, and student organization) as well as make friends if you’re new to the city.
 
The final project is a thesis of about 50 pages, which can be advised by a Draper professor or any other NYU faculty member (both are common; my adviser was outside the program).
 
Now, some pros and cons, and then some concluding thoughts.
 
PROS:
*Interdisciplinarity. Extreme academic flexibility, ideal for people whose undergraduate major is unrelated to their current interests, or who aren’t sure what discipline their work fits into.
 
*NYU. It’s a great school, it has top scholars in almost every field, and carries an undeniable weight on your CV. These are people who will be writing your PhD recommendation letters, and no matter what anyone might tell you, it matters where they’re from. I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that I got PhD interviews at more than one Ivy League school because of who my recommenders were.
 
*Opportunities to prepare for graduate school. Draper’s student journal, Anamesa, gives you a chance to both work on a peer-reviewed publication and publish your own work, both of which are great on your CV for PhD applications. They also have PhD workshops and boot camps every year, which help you decide on programs and get into the nitty-gritty of the application process. In general, Draper students have a strong record of successful PhD applications.
 
CONS:
 
*Price. Tuition and fees is about $7500 per course, times eight is about $60,000. As of 2013, all students get a 30% tuition discount, which gets it down to $40k. You also get 50% remission if you’re a full-time teacher. I worked full-time during the program, which is academically not ideal, but meant I didn’t have to borrow any more for living expenses. If you have to move to NYC and borrow for living expenses as well, there’s almost no question that you shouldn’t go.
 
*Disciplinary ambiguity. While Draper is a great place to “find yourself” in an environment that is challenging but not limiting, its lack of structure can also result in a continued indecision about what kind of scholar you are, which will kill you when it comes time to apply to PhD programs. Interdisciplinary is a noble goal, but most departments you apply to will expect you to demonstrate a commitment to their discipline. Draper is great if your goal is just to get an MA and become a generally educated person, but if you have scholarly ambitions, you have to be fairly driven and focused to get what you need to get out of the program (ie, scholarly training, quality work to use for a writing sample, and strong letters of recommendation).
 
*Isolation from the NYU graduate community. Draper has some of the best, smartest students at NYU, but they are generally less integrated into the university at large as students in disciplinary MA programs, who know and are generally treated the same as PhD students. This may or may not matter depending on your personal goals, but if you want to experience what it’s like to be a part of a disciplinary department, get to know faculty members beyond just who teaches your courses, have the “hang out in the department” feel, Draper doesn’t offer as much of that as other programs.
 
CONCLUDING THOUGHTS:
 
As I said at the beginning, I don’t think it’s possible to render a universal judgement on whether you should or shouldn’t attend a particular program. My experience is unusual in that I had an established career and was able to work while I attended, thus reducing the cost compared to many other students, and giving me steady employment after I finished. Even then, it is a very expensive program, and it was arguably stupid of me to take on that much debt for it. On the other hand, I was able to figure myself out academically, to find a fantastic adviser, and to be accepted to strong PhD programs in my discipline. Draper students (people I know, not just statistics) were accepted to Oxford, Berkeley, Irvine, UCLA, Penn, the CUNY Grad Center, Emory, Boston College, and others.
 
The one thing I will say absolutely: unless you are independently wealthy, under no circumstances should you move to New York and borrow six-figures-plus for an MA program in the humanities. You should look at amortizations and think long and hard about how long it will take you to pay that back, and the fact that you may may be crippled financially for decades for something that provides you no material benefit.
 
If you intend to go on to a doctoral program and have a clear idea of what discipline you want to study, you should look for an affordable master’s program in your discipline instead. The CUNY system, especially, has MA programs in virtually every discipline, is ridiculously cheap, and still puts you in a great city close to excellent scholars.
 
It’s impossible to deny that Draper can be a great experience, and unless you’re utterly clueless, will put you in a strong position for a successful PhD application. NYU is a top university, and there are few places in the world better to be a scholar than New York. That said, unless you can a) minimize your borrowing to just tuition or less; and b ) have a unique reason that a disciplinary MA isn’t right for you (you have no clue about discipline, have bad/unrelated undergrad grades, etc), then you should not consider Draper.
 
Please feel free to post questions or message me.

I'll bite in terms of answering the actual question. You're right that you should be worried about people moving...as well, I should add, of people retiring, and this is one of the main benefits of emailing POIs during the application process (even undergrad or masters advisers in the field may not be up to date on these things). For example, I can knock two potential graduate advisers out for you right now: Sam Moyn is moving to Harvard Law School (you might be able to work with him if you went to Harvard, but you'd probably want to aim your application at Gordon in the history department) and Martin Jay is retired from Berkeley and not taking any more grad students, as far as I know. You would definitely want to contact Megill before you apply at the very least, given he seems to require doing so before he agrees to take you (see his guide to graduate school in European intellectual history: http://people.virginia.edu/~adm9e/grad/grad.htm)
 
Of course, it would be helpful to know more about the intellectual history you want to pursue. From the people you listed, I'd assume continental philosophy, but if you're more open to British political stuff, you could also potentially work with David Armitage at Harvard. With regard to the more classically continental stuff, there's been a really dedicated circle at Chicago around Moishe Postone, though he's getting advanced in years himself and I'm not sure if he's taking anyone anymore.
 
Here at Cornell, Dominick LaCapra, who used to be a huge name in the field, is also now retired, but there are some younger scholars like Camille Robcis (who does a lot on French Marxism and psychology) and Claudia Verhoeven (who does German intellectual history in addition to her main focus on Russia) filling the gap; there's a new History and Theory Colloquium and Cornell's interdisciplinary emphasis makes it easy to work with people like Enzo Traverso, who's a big intellectual historian who happens to work in the Romance Studies (French/Spanish/Italian) department. The Society for the Humanities here is also like a sort of umbrella organization for theory-oriented work that tends to draw people interested in intellectual history as well. 

There is a fantastic new edited volume called Re-Thinking Modern European Intellectual History, edited by Sam Moyn and Darrin McMahon.
 
I highly recommend it because it will not only tell you what the current state of the field is, and what kind of work is being done now, but will also introduce you to some of the major (or soon-to-be major) names in the field.
 
(As a side note: I actually don't think Harvard is a great or obvious choice for intellectual history. The really path-breaking newer work has mostly come out of Columbia/NYU (and Chicago, Berkeley, etc). But, others may disagree.
 
Having said that, as czesc said above, it really depends on what your area of interest is. 18th to 20th century French or German is fairly broad. A place that is really good for, say, the Enlightenment may not be the best for, say, the 20th century continental theory. So, you should think about what kind of intellectual history you want to do.

I’ve noticed a few posts on here about NYU’s Draper Program, both when I was applying and since. Since there have been few posts from people who have attended, I thought I would try to give an insider’s perspective. I don’t believe in simple, do-or-don’t advice on graduate school, but hopefully I can give you enough information to make an informed decision on your own. The first few paragraphs will be merely descriptive, and then I will address some pros and cons below.
 
The program requires 32 credits (about 8 courses) and takes roughly two years, more or less depending on whether or not you attend full time. Draper has a couple of permanent faculty and a few others who rotate every few years, as well as a couple of adjuncts. Draper offers its own courses as well as allowing you to take courses in almost all NYU departments with the department/professor’s permission. (For example, I took courses in philosophy, comp lit and political science.)
 
All of the Draper professors are excellent scholars and teachers, and the courses are rigorous and difficult. There is a loose configuration of disciplinary orientations within its interdisciplinary environment, but most students tend toward either social sciences (anthropology, sociology), humanities (philosophy, literature, cultural studies), or arts (music or visual/fine art). Draper courses will give you a basic orientation in say, literary theory or “science studies” (something like contemporary philosophy of science), and then you can choose more specialized courses from other departments to complete your training. Figuring out what courses you should take is mostly up to you; Draper offers little in the way of disciplinary guidance or formal degree programs.
 
In my experience, Draper students are smart, motivated, and diverse. The program attracts a few different kinds of people, including rich kids who don’t know what to do with themselves, and (more commonly) people who have led very interesting lives but didn’t follow a traditional academic path. It makes the Draper student body very “real”; there’s very little academic posturing and a lot of genuine intellectual searching and people motivated to figure out their academic direction. Among both professors and other students, I met people who will be lifelong friends and advisers. The department plans lots of social events and extracurricular activities that help you boost your academic CV (the program’s journal, and student organization) as well as make friends if you’re new to the city.
 
The final project is a thesis of about 50 pages, which can be advised by a Draper professor or any other NYU faculty member (both are common; my adviser was outside the program).
 
Now, some pros and cons, and then some concluding thoughts.
 
PROS:
*Interdisciplinarity. Extreme academic flexibility, ideal for people whose undergraduate major is unrelated to their current interests, or who aren’t sure what discipline their work fits into.
 
*NYU. It’s a great school, it has top scholars in almost every field, and carries an undeniable weight on your CV. These are people who will be writing your PhD recommendation letters, and no matter what anyone might tell you, it matters where they’re from. I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that I got PhD interviews at more than one Ivy League school because of who my recommenders were.
 
*Opportunities to prepare for graduate school. Draper’s student journal, Anamesa, gives you a chance to both work on a peer-reviewed publication and publish your own work, both of which are great on your CV for PhD applications. They also have PhD workshops and boot camps every year, which help you decide on programs and get into the nitty-gritty of the application process. In general, Draper students have a strong record of successful PhD applications.
 
CONS:
 
*Price. Tuition and fees is about $7500 per course, times eight is about $60,000. As of 2013, all students get a 30% tuition discount, which gets it down to $40k. You also get 50% remission if you’re a full-time teacher. I worked full-time during the program, which is academically not ideal, but meant I didn’t have to borrow any more for living expenses. If you have to move to NYC and borrow for living expenses as well, there’s almost no question that you shouldn’t go.
 
*Disciplinary ambiguity. While Draper is a great place to “find yourself” in an environment that is challenging but not limiting, its lack of structure can also result in a continued indecision about what kind of scholar you are, which will kill you when it comes time to apply to PhD programs. Interdisciplinary is a noble goal, but most departments you apply to will expect you to demonstrate a commitment to their discipline. Draper is great if your goal is just to get an MA and become a generally educated person, but if you have scholarly ambitions, you have to be fairly driven and focused to get what you need to get out of the program (ie, scholarly training, quality work to use for a writing sample, and strong letters of recommendation).
 
*Isolation from the NYU graduate community. Draper has some of the best, smartest students at NYU, but they are generally less integrated into the university at large as students in disciplinary MA programs, who know and are generally treated the same as PhD students. This may or may not matter depending on your personal goals, but if you want to experience what it’s like to be a part of a disciplinary department, get to know faculty members beyond just who teaches your courses, have the “hang out in the department” feel, Draper doesn’t offer as much of that as other programs.
 
CONCLUDING THOUGHTS:
 
As I said at the beginning, I don’t think it’s possible to render a universal judgement on whether you should or shouldn’t attend a particular program. My experience is unusual in that I had an established career and was able to work while I attended, thus reducing the cost compared to many other students, and giving me steady employment after I finished. Even then, it is a very expensive program, and it was arguably stupid of me to take on that much debt for it. On the other hand, I was able to figure myself out academically, to find a fantastic adviser, and to be accepted to strong PhD programs in my discipline. Draper students (people I know, not just statistics) were accepted to Oxford, Berkeley, Irvine, UCLA, Penn, the CUNY Grad Center, Emory, Boston College, and others.
 
The one thing I will say absolutely: unless you are independently wealthy, under no circumstances should you move to New York and borrow six-figures-plus for an MA program in the humanities. You should look at amortizations and think long and hard about how long it will take you to pay that back, and the fact that you may may be crippled financially for decades for something that provides you no material benefit.
 
If you intend to go on to a doctoral program and have a clear idea of what discipline you want to study, you should look for an affordable master’s program in your discipline instead. The CUNY system, especially, has MA programs in virtually every discipline, is ridiculously cheap, and still puts you in a great city close to excellent scholars.
 
It’s impossible to deny that Draper can be a great experience, and unless you’re utterly clueless, will put you in a strong position for a successful PhD application. NYU is a top university, and there are few places in the world better to be a scholar than New York. That said, unless you can a) minimize your borrowing to just tuition or less; and b ) have a unique reason that a disciplinary MA isn’t right for you (you have no clue about discipline, have bad/unrelated undergrad grades, etc), then you should not consider Draper.
 
Please feel free to post questions or message me.

Hi all,
 
I'm a graduating Draper student starting a PhD this fall. Just posted this overview of the program before I saw this thread. Feel free to PM me with questions.
 

Not quite on topic but related: a POI recommended Pierre Bayard's very entertaining "How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read," which I found to be a good way to break the spell of the "I'm illiterate if I didn't read every word" panic. He argues roughly that the ideas in books rarely matter as much as their relations to other ideas, and that figuring out those networks of ideas rarely requires reading whole books. Even more relevant to grad school coursework, he says that sometimes reading carefully is actually a hindrance to the comprehension of broad context, which is really why books matter in the first place. 
 
I don't mean to suggest any particular conclusions from that about how you should approach course reading, but it seems important to remember that at least in some cases, "not-reading" is just a different kind of reading, not an inferior one.

Not quite on topic but related: a POI recommended Pierre Bayard's very entertaining "How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read," which I found to be a good way to break the spell of the "I'm illiterate if I didn't read every word" panic. He argues roughly that the ideas in books rarely matter as much as their relations to other ideas, and that figuring out those networks of ideas rarely requires reading whole books. Even more relevant to grad school coursework, he says that sometimes reading carefully is actually a hindrance to the comprehension of broad context, which is really why books matter in the first place. 
 
I don't mean to suggest any particular conclusions from that about how you should approach course reading, but it seems important to remember that at least in some cases, "not-reading" is just a different kind of reading, not an inferior one.

Not quite on topic but related: a POI recommended Pierre Bayard's very entertaining "How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read," which I found to be a good way to break the spell of the "I'm illiterate if I didn't read every word" panic. He argues roughly that the ideas in books rarely matter as much as their relations to other ideas, and that figuring out those networks of ideas rarely requires reading whole books. Even more relevant to grad school coursework, he says that sometimes reading carefully is actually a hindrance to the comprehension of broad context, which is really why books matter in the first place. 
 
I don't mean to suggest any particular conclusions from that about how you should approach course reading, but it seems important to remember that at least in some cases, "not-reading" is just a different kind of reading, not an inferior one.

There are many many strategies for this.  The only piece of universal advise I will give is that you can not read every word but you should turn every page.  As for me... when I was in course work I read every word of the introduction, the conclusion, I than looked at the notes to see what kind of sources the author used.  In part this is to decide if he or she could possibly reach the conclusions they do using those sources (this turns out to be a surprisingly easy way to spot massive problems in books).  I than pick a couple of chapters that seem most interesting or like they are key to why the book was assigned.
 
If chapters are repetitive, pick one.  Nature's Metropolis for example has three commodities chapters which are brilliant but for the sake of a grad seminar you really only need one to get the argument.   
 
Some people read the first sentence of every paragraph, which can work, but I don't use that very often. 
 
It may seem like a waste, but at least skim acknowledgements, after a bit you'll learn to read a lot into academic family trees.  Learn to read pictures and maps critically.  Are they there just for the sake of being there or are they part of the argument.  Hint, if they're not captioned well it's not a good sign for the book.
 
Articles will always take longer to read than the equivalent number of pages in a book.  They have to be read more closely.  Just the nature of the beast.
 
As for reading loads.... my masters program (respectable state school, not big name), was 1 book per week plus 1 article.  My phd program (ivy, big name), is between 1-2 books per week or the equivalent number of pages in articles but rarely both that many articles plus a monograph. 
 
In my experience "Reading" for course work, "Reading" for comps, and Reading for your own research are all very different and what I just said applies to course work.
 
For comps it's read the book until you get it and put it down.  In my program comps lists can be up to 250 books.  You can't spend a lot of time with anything and you learn to be super efficient.  It was my experience that books I really liked in comps I really had to have the discipline to put down.  If I liked it I had gotten the argument.

Most PhD programs offer funding, even for non-US applicants. Is there any reason why you were denied funding from all three?
 
Knowing absolutely nothing about any of the programs, I'd lean towards Princeton for the aforementioned prestige and resources, but if other schools are stronger fits, then those might be better for you.
 
Finally, I'll reiterate what's been said before: Unless you have ample family money (i.e.: enough to pay for 6-8 years' worth of tuition, housing rent, and living expenses without a smidgen of debt and without dipping into your savings), you should stay away from unfunded PhD programs.

I sent you a PM with some more detailed recommendations. I agree with czesc you should definitely look outside history, especially in Political Science programs that are strong in theory (Yale, Cornell, JHU, Columbia). Brown comp lit, Berkeley rhetoric, and French or German language departments. Some of the top politics programs get a crazy number of applications though, and I concluded from my own experience that it wasn't worth the effort to try to appeal to other disciplines even though my history background was negligible. I decided paying my dues to history was more what I wanted to do - not to mention history is doing better as a discipline than any of the others mentioned.
 
I also agree with Carthage32 that you need to narrow your interests a lot, at least for your application. It makes a huge difference who/where you would pick. I'd say the time period matters more than the country, especially since it's a good idea to get away from only doing one nation. So if you're really interested in the "French theory" era, it wouldn't make as much sense to apply to work with someone who does 19th-century France. 
 
I don't necessarily agree about Harvard; Harvard has a huge and diverse number of intellectual historians, perhaps more than anywhere else at the moment. And Boston in general is the other current capital of intellectual history, along with New York. 

I wanted to second czesc on the "bad" elite placement records. If you're graduating 30 new PhDs a year, some will go to other careers, some will be married to fabulously rich spouses and/or refuse to live outside a major city (more often than you'd think), and some will be in very specialized subfields that are hard for anyone to get a job in. That could easily be a third or half of the cohort, and if it's a "bad year" on the market, could pull the number even lower. This is not to deny the general badness of the landscape, but to say the big schools are a somewhat unique situation.
 
Another factor is that elite universities produce PhDs who generally expect to be elite researchers, which is not necessarily what the places doing most of the hiring (small colleges) are looking for. I know that most grads from Chicago are Yale are probably willing to go anywhere, but there is an undeniable perception that they'll be restless at a small school and looking to move on. So they are sometimes passed over for candidates from say, a very strong regional school that places a lot of emphasis on general knowledge of the discipline and teaching.

This is a modified version of a post I made under the forum "decisions, decisions." 
 
The most important question, I think, you should be asking yourself in this season of acceptances is not which program you should go to, but if you should go to grad school at all.  The history job market is very bleak.  It may well be better when you graduate, but it may well not be.  There are troubling trends like MOOCs that, many people think, will  restructure much of education in a way that will reduce the number of tenure track hires.
 
How bad is the job market currently?  According to Harvard, as of the fall of 2012, only 52% of Harvard PhDs who got their PhD in the humanities from 2006-2011 had an academic job.  (And it looks like, based on some other data they report elsewhere, that about 1/3 of those are in non-tenure-track positions.)  23% were "unemployed and searching."  (Due to self selection bias in reporting, this data probably underestimates the number of unemployed.) [1] And those numbers are those of one of the most prestigious grad schools in the nation.  Here is what Chicago history's numbers look like: https://history.uchicago.edu/sites/history.uchicago.edu/files/uploads/Placement%20Statistics%202002-2011.pdf
 
Many people in history from elite programs, for instance, spend several years after graduating twisting in the wind with low-paid, time-consuming, and short-term lectureships and visiting assistant professorsips before either get a tt job or quitting academia.  If you are really committed to an academic career, you may well be signing up for a PhD + several years of uncertainty and scrapping by after that.  While it is hard to get accurate numbers,  it looks like only 33% of Yale's history cohort of 2012-2013 got a tt-job.
 
Of course not all subfields within history are made the same.  Some of your fields have excellent job prospects; others, terrible.  20C US and Europe after 1789 appear to be the worst.
 
It behooves you to research the matter and think about the kind of bet your are making.  You are giving up 5-8 years of pay, and more importantly, 5-8 years in which you could be launching a different career.  When you graduate at age 30 with a PhD, you will have opened a few doors (for instance, you are an attractive hire for a private high school), but shut many more.
 
I am not saying you should not go.  Personally, I have found getting a PhD immensley rewarding.  But it has also come at a great cost.
 
[1]http://history.fas.h...s-2006-2011.pdf.

Wherever I go this fall, I promise to remain a committed informant on the 2015 thread.

Wherever I go this fall, I promise to remain a committed informant on the 2015 thread.

Er, I don't know of many programs that require discussions with POIs before admission, either formally or informally, and most programs don't conduct interviews. 
 
I severely doubt there's anywhere where you'd be categorically out of the running because you didn't speak to anyone there beforehand.

All right people, time to start declining those Penn offers!

I did! Finally. Thanks!

All right people, time to start declining those Penn offers!

All right people, time to start declining those Penn offers!

All right people, time to start declining those Penn offers!

As someone who has moved from California to Kansas, Kansas to California, California to Minnesota, Minnesota to Maine, Maine to Massachusetts, and Massachusetts to Maryland (Maryland to....?) all as an adult, I know a few things about moving.  
 
*Do not move junk, garbage, etc.  This may sound redundant, but I guarantee that you will spend the time packing and shipping crap you do not need nor even want.  
 
*Divide your stuff into three lists/piles:  the stuff you absolutely cannot live without, the stuff you can live without, and the stuff you are on the fence about.  You will notice that the pile of stuff you absolutely cannot live without is the smallest pile if you are honest.  Get rid of the stuff you can live without and honestly think about the rest.  
 
*Donate what you cannot sell (get receipts for tax deductions) and sell what you can.  Sell as much furniture as you can and keep in mind that IKEA and thrift stores are cheap.  
 
*Chances are high that this move is going to be temporary.  I guarantee you will still have stuff packed away in boxes when you finish grad school.  This is the type of stuff you should get rid of.  
 
*Store stuff with family if possible.  It is going to take time to set up your new place anyways, if something can wait, let it wait.  Have this stuff slowly shipped over time if needed. 
 
*Purchase boxes from Wal-Mart, K-Mart, Target, etc.  They are cheaper than purchasing from "box" stores, moving stores, etc. Of course you can cruise stores and businesses for used boxes they are tossing out, but...
 
*Try and stick with the same-sized box.  It makes packing and stacking that much more easier.  
 
*Try not to move during August; usually the hottest time of the year....
 
*Get friends to help with the move instead of hiring movers.  You'd be surprised at how much work a person is willing to do for a case of cheap beer and/or a pizza.  
 
*This is a matter of personal tastes, but there are websites that list items and services offered for free, including Craigslist.  If you are moving to a college town (ahem, Boston), chances are high that you can acquire a mansions-worth of stuff for free or cheap from undergrads who are moving back home and leaving their "stuff" behind.
 
*Penske and UHual are about equal in my experience.  
 
*If you require a moving truck and will also bring your car, just rent that car-tow-aparatus and tow your car with the moving truck.  It'll be cheaper than paying for gas for two vehicles.  
 
*Try to reserve a moving truck as far in advance as possible.  The closer to the 1st of the month it gets the more these things become unavailable.  
 
*Books are heavy.  A "small" box of books can easily weight 80 pounds or more.  Disperse your library between multiple boxes, filling the rest of the box[es] up with blankets, clothing, pillows, and other light items.  You will thank me for this tip.
 
*Begin packing/downsizing as soon as possible.  Believe me, it is never too soon to start the moving process.  I guarantee you have way more shit than you think you have and will find yourself scrambling to pack at the last minute.  This is when you will end up packing and moving garbage, stuff you do not need or want, etc.  
 
*Shipping stuff through UPS and FedEx can get expensive.  That 80 pound box of books is going to run around $90.  Ten of those boxes is $900 right there, which could be roughly the costs of a moving truck depending on how are you are moving. USPS has a media mail rate, which might be cheaper.  You can also ship via Amtrak and passenger plane...not sure on the pricing, though.  
 
The absolute cheapest way to move is to move with the least amount of stuff.  

Mine was the acceptance with Citibank loans to cover the $60k annual tuition, but I don't see it now.