kandeya

I was curious to know how your funding situations are turning out--good, bad or otherwise. That, and the boards have been awfully quiet lately. For me, Berkeley didn't guarantee a funding package, but the students I talked to during my visit said they didn't have to take out loans, and since I'm used to living lean I decided to accept the offer and see what came about. Now I'm waiting on the FLAS to see whether I'll actually be able to afford to go there. If I don't get it or any other funding, I'll probably pull out and reapply to better-funded universities for next year, and scrape up some work to do in the meanwhile. What about the rest of you guys? Funding situations looking decent (or spectacular), or are you all waiting on tenterhooks like me?

Academic year FLAS grants are only tenable at the home institution, as far as I know. They don't carry over to another university, because each university gets its own allocation to divvy up. Summer FLAS grants can be applied to external programs, though.

Keep the good news coming in--tell us how y'alls visits and POI calls went--it'll probably help out the next bunch of poor applicants who have to run through the gauntlet. Leafytea, I really loved Berkeley! It was a really different vibe from Chicago, where I did my undergrad. My program doesn't have a guaranteed set package of funding, though none of the students I talked to felt compelled to take out loans, so I think it'll work out in the end, through some combination of FLAS/teaching/sheer desperado action. But what's an affordable price range of housing that I should look for on craigslist/cal rentals etc? And a heads-up for people who applied for FLAS: this year is a reapplication year for many universities, so the results won't be out until June because that's when the federal government will approve the funds. It's keeping me on my nervous toes, that's for sure.

Congratulations FDT! I'm so happy for you!

Good luck with your waitlist, FDT (I'll keep my fingers crossed), and let us know how the call with Minnesota goes, titania! Minneapolis-St.Paul is a really nice city--one of my friends is from there and loves it.

No, I never said that. I wasn't kicked off of anything. But I thought you were telling titania to sit tight and not email Columbia because there was a chance she could be on the waitlist, and emailing them would ruin it. I probably misread what you were saying to titania. But at any rate, titania, my advice would be to go email them. Their decisions won't change, since they're already made, and you have decisions you need to make yourself. Don't worry FDT, nothing's going to happen to your waitlist spot. Columbia got an exceptionally high number of applications this year (double over last year, from what Mitchell told me in the rejection email), so you should be proud of yourself! My "project"--or what half-baked notions I have of a "project", at this point--concerns vernacular and Anglophone literatures, and while Columbia has amazing people in the English/complit departments, MEALAC itself leans more towards history and politics than pure philology and literature. Again, sorry for the misunderstanding. I had to wait a long while to get anything out of Columbia, and I suppose it made an impression, given how effusive Berkeley was in contacting me.

I got in for the M.A/Ph.D program, so I guess both, really! (I only have a B.A). I'm rather excited about it, though it's a bit tempered by California's financial woes. Still, I imagine it will work out for the best. The faculty are great, and the students are friendly, and the campus is really something. It helped that it was a perfect spring day when I visited, so the scenery was really working to the nines.

The problem, for me anyway, is that I would really rather be working with a department that wants me there instead of one that ignores me. Columbia's made its decisions, and if they kick someone off the waitlist just because they emailed asking for a status update, that would be unnecessarily cruel. titaniasummer also has another funded (a rare breed these days...) offer that she needs to consider. They explicitly say on their website that applicants with other offers are free to inquire about their status, so I can't imagine that their decision will change just because of an email. Congratulations on the fellowship, also, titaniasummer! What's your impression been of Minnesota so far?

That was me. I visited Berkeley last weekend, and their South/Southeast Studies department was so super friendly and awesome, that as soon as I got the rejection I accepted my offer from them. Funding still looks to be iffy, but they said there was a good chance I'd get a FLAS.

I wish the MEALAC DGS would get back to me sooner, though--I emailed him last Friday asking about decisions. Ah well, if it's a rejection the later, the better!

sorry to hear that, titania! but at least you're sitting on acceptances from Washington and Minnesota! and those two aren't schools to sneeze at, as they say. maybe our collective willpower will get Columbia to send out their decisions quicker, hahaha.

Anybody else hear from Columbia MEALAC? i've no more nails left to chew...

damn, that's a bit of a wait. hopefully it'll be good news for all!

My friend is currently doing his Ph.D at Penn's SAS and has no complaints. I would've applied for their Ph.D myself, but decided to apply to the English department, which turned out to be a fantastically poor decision, given that they got an incredibly high number of applications this year and cut their cohort size in half. But their faculty and the diversity of the languages taught there is pretty impressive--and there are several people with joint appointments to other departments, which is something I always like. The consensus of the forum suggests a master's can't hurt you as far as doctoral admissions go, so I'd say it'd probably be worth looking at.

I got waitlisted for UT Austin's English department, and have been rejected from all the other English departments I applied to so far, a curse upon this bad economy. I also wonder how accurate gradcafe's results for MEALAC are--there just aren't a lot of them, and it's quite possible that none of them could have come from South Asianists, given the much stronger and larger applicant pool for the Middle Eastern bit of MEALAC. So don't despair before it's time to, I'd say. What's SOAS like, titaniasummer?

I contacted the graduate adviser person for MEALAC last week--they said that the adcomm were meeting this week, so maybe we'll hear something next week? And can I just say how awesome everyone's research interests are? So cool!

Hey there, Good to see there's another South Asianist around! My interests lie in globalization, the modern literature and film coming out of South India (my languages are Tamil and Telugu, with a smattering of Hindi somewhere in there), and trying to do some comparative work with Anglophone Indian literature, and basically seeing how it all comes together. I applied to a bunch of English departments and will probably be handily rejected by all of them. I didn't apply to many South Asian departments, either because they had no South Indian language specialists or because they required an M.A (I'm looking at you, Wisconsin-Madison and UT Austin). Columbia looks super-interesting because of their focus on modern/contemporary issues. We'll see how my luck plays out. I got my B.A from Chicago, so I can tell you first-hand that Chicago is pretty awesome--the SALC department is especially tight-knit. I hope you get in!

Anybody apply to Columbia's MEALAC?

Chicago's a pretty good bike city, all told, and getting around campus and Hyde Park on campus is pretty common--there are bike stands all over campus, though probably not nearly enough. There's a lakefront path especially for bikers and joggers that goes up all the way to the North Side, and is quite beautiful. Though I've got no biking skills myself, several of my friends do bike without much of hassle--they just finished "pedestrianizing" the main quads, so the ride is a lot smoother. Chicago being a big city, you'll want to buy a good lock for your bike and take the appropriate anti-theft precautions--I've seen everything from people removing the seat to using really, really intimidating chains. As for the crime stats, I suppose I can only speak for myself when I say that I've never had a problem. UCPD (the university police dept.) patrols the area pretty frequently--and I lived on the south side of campus, closer to where trouble exists. There's the usual bevy of late-night van and evening bus options so you don't have to walk home late at night. Most grad student housing (the university-owned stuff, anyway) isn't on the south end of campus, and the buildings that they do own are in pretty safe areas--they just built a shiny new undergrad dorm on the south side of campus, so they're really working on keeping that area safe for appearances. The campus, for the most part, extends from 55th Street to 61st Street in a north-south direction, and Stony Island Ave to Cottage Grove Ave in an east-west direction. When looking for housing, try not to go beyond Cottage Grove, or south of 63rd (you can go as far north as 51st and still get to campus without much hassle, I think). UCPD's patrol area extends much further than the boundaries of campus alone, so that may be reflected in the crime stats.

While I didn't apply to Chicago, I did my undergrad there (and I was an English major! ), so if anyone has any questions about life in Hyde Park and the department and what-all, I'd be happy to answer. Also, I figured all the peeps who got into Chicago probably deserved their own thread. So have at it, and congratulations! It's an awesome place.

Applied for the m.a./ph.d programs at Columbia's MEALAC (well, formerly MEALAC, I suppose), and Berkeley's South/Southeast Asian department. Have absolutely no idea how that'll turn out.

i don't think english departments have interviews, that seems to be more of a sciences/social sciences thing.

i'll paraphrase what little red schoolhouse taught me. passive construction is not inherently bad. what is bad is breaking up the core of your sentence. the core is the character and the action (subject and verb, for the most part). if the passive voice keeps the core of your sentence intact, then it will read more naturally and quickly than the active voice alternative. also, look out for those nominalizations.