biscuits

As others have said, this is very unusual for the area. The bombing itself is a freak occurrence, and now it just happens to be mobile (in the form of the suspects running around). If it makes you feel better, think about how the cities/universities responded in terms of security: 1) Watertown and Cambridge sent out robo-calls in the wee hours of the morning to instruct residents to stay at home 2) The governor/mayor shut down the entire transit system 3) Universities closed very quickly and notified students 4) Thousands of police and National Guard were mobilized (to be honest, they've been around since Monday) and are sweeping the areas 5) Even with the shootout, no individuals in the surrounding houses were hurt, and they already have folks on the ground to dismantle any explosive devices left behind. So, freak occurrence, but the cities have responded very thoroughly and quickly to the threats. Compare this to, say, the shooting in NYC last year where the police decided to open fire on a crowded sidewalk and ended up hitting several hapless pedestrians. Although I must say that I'm rather tired of being locked in my apartment. Hopefully this will all be wrapped up in the next few hours.

I'll be arriving mid-July to join the LBJ School! Still not sure what I'm going to do about housing. No matter what, it will be cheaper than Boston, which is a great relief! I am going to be trying not to adopt a dog, gooseberry - two cats is enough for now - but I will totally be snorgling other people's puppies.

Previous Schools University of Chicago Previous Degrees and GPAs: Anthropology major, 3.94 GPA GRE Scores: V 167, Q 159, 5.0 Writing Previous Work Experience: chronological: interned at Mayor's Office, affordable housing non-profit, and resource-access non-profit in Chicago; AmeriCorps year in Boston through a program with a focus on social entrepreneurship; ensuing 3 years at a Boston non-profit doing lots of quality assurance, program development, and grant-writing. Math/Econ Background: Three quarters of Chicago-required calculus (turns out it's good to have your medicine forced down your throat), one quarter of general statistics, and then intro to micro and macro-econ through the Harvard Extension School. Foreign Language Background: Native English speaker; fluent in German Intended Field of Study in Grad School: Public policy with a focus on social policy; specifically, poverty alleviation Long Term Professional Goals: Improving state or federal poverty policy with a focus on improving access to benefits and efficiency of delivery/success. Don't much care about the state/federal question so long as the projects are fascinating and creating an impact. Schools Applied to & Results: GPPI (accepted with $20K/year), Ford (accepted with $10K/year), Duke (accepted with full ride), Heller (accepted with full ride), HKS (waitlisted), LBJ (accepted with fellowship that covers tuition plus a hefty stipend) Ultimate Decision & Why: LBJ School (MPAff). LBJ has a great curriculum in terms of what I want to do, with an ability to specialize in the core sequences. LBJ also has a very strong focus on applied learning, which is very appealing, and relatively easy access to research assistantships. The atmosphere is very collaborative and perhaps the friendliest of the schools I encountered, which I appreciate - I loathe environments where folks are constantly jockeying for position. They also gave me piles of money. I'm a bit of a money-hoarder, so the opportunity to avoid debt entirely was hard to turn down. Lastly, my fiance was applying to economics PhD programs at the same time, and Austin turned out to be the best match for both of us. Advice for Future Applicants: Study for the GRE! Chances are you can stand to improve either your math or verbal scores. Verbal is relatively easy - sit yourself down with some flashcards - but math is harder. I literally spent the summer and fall of 2012 re-teaching myself high school math, partially because I had a crappy basic math background to begin with. Spend an hour a day working through problems. I recommend the Manhattan Prep books for anyone who has to re-learn concepts (as opposed to learning test taking tips). For those of you who are good at math, you'll still want to practice the type of problems that are on the GRE. A lot of them are stupid mind tricks, and if you get too far into trying to actually do proper math to calculate the answer, you won't have enough time to finish. If you ever feel the need to write out a proof or do calculus, you've put too much though into it. Check application deadlines early on. Now is a good time. LBJ technically has a rolling application, but HKS is also way out in front with that end of November deadline. You don't want to rush yourself or your recommendation writers. Speaking of which: ask for recommendations early on. Late summer/early fall is a good time - you don't want to start too far out lest they forget. Good recommenders will want examples of past work (if academic) or will want you to walk them through your resume. It's also a good idea to send them drafts of your SOP. In a perfect world, your recommenders will speak to things that you highlight in your SOP, and will burnish areas that you don't have time to delve into in great detail. It's also great if they can rate how wonderful you are. E.g., "Bobby is one of the top two employees I have ever supervised." You want everything to read as one nice, interconnected package. Start drafts of your SOP early on and keep working on it. Make other people read it. Accept their criticisms with grace. Stick to the word limit. Make an effort to truly customize each SOP to each school. You don't have to go crazy - you don't need to re-write the whole thing - but at least have a paragraph where you focus on what makes each school great. Make sure to include specific details rather than generic attributes. Also, make sure your SOP focuses particularly on what you want to do and why - it shouldn't be a re-statement of your resume. Resume. Ugh. Make sure it isn't hideous. I personally hate statements of goals or focus, but I think that's an individual thing. If possible, try to quantify your accomplishments as much as possible. Did you write an 800+ page RFP that secured $20M in funding for your organization? Great! Don't sabotage yourself by saying that you "create and respond to funding proposals". TLDR; Make sure that your entire application is a logical argument for why you are awesome and should be admitted. Do not give them any opportunities to focus on any real or potential weakness. Yes, you want to acknowledge any obvious problems (perhaps you failed statistics), but immediately re-direct to the strength (you re-took the class, or you re-taught yourself statistics in this job that you are awesome at). Think of yourself/your application as a sleight of hand performance. You always want to be in control of what the audience is thinking, to be able to anticipate any troublesome distractions, and to be able to re-orient them back on your chosen course.

I think that as long as you obey the golden mantra ("leggings are not pants"), you'll be fine.

East Hyde Park is actually fairly nice and has a lot of students (though perhaps less so now that the old Shoreland dorm has closed, but the other apartment buildings are still there). There are a lot of tasty restaurants and you're relatively close to both the Metra and the 6 bus, which are both much faster ways of getting downtown than the Red Line. Also, I think that the University has been busily building up 55th and 53rd street since I graduated in 2009, so I imagine there is a lot more foot traffic. Be a bit careful as you drift northwards from 53rd, as there are areas where there aren't a lot of buildings and you'll be strolling through empty stretches at night. As for using the lakefront in the morning, I'd say you are fine if you are male, but you should take extra precautions if you happen to be female. Some areas of the lakefront trail are fairly isolated from the road/other people, and there were a few reports of rape/attempted rape during my time there. Again, quite rare, but it might be a good idea to carry some pepper spray.

Depends on what you mean by Hyde Park area! There's also a big difference between the winter months and the summer (given that Chicago's "spring" doesn't fully take hold until mid May, you're basically looking at winter and summer). In the winter there's a lot less crime because it's too cold to bother chasing undergrads around. In the summer, you're not worried about frostbite, and you also have a lot of kids who are on school vacation - and hence bored and traveling in packs. Anywho. 9:30 should be fine if you keep to the busier streets - for example, north of campus, I'd use 55th and 53rd to get east/west, and Woodlawn to get north/south. Try to minimize the time you'll be spending walking by yourself on a dark and unpopulated street. In general, if you can see other people around you, you're fine. Some people recommend walking in the middle of the road, but I only think that's necessary if it's very late at night (past 1) or if you feel particularly sketched out. I'd say that in those cases, it's easier to take one of the night shuttles or call the Drunk Van.

And gossip, I might add, from a program invested in both recruiting you and guarding their own reputation as a top IA school

Rogers Park is not a death trap. It does house a lot of lower income folks, and sometimes has problems with violence - much like other Chicago area communities. I used to work right next to the Howard stop and never had an issue. I did see a few drug deals, but they weren't dangerous, and as long as you minded your own business there wasn't a problem. Rogers Park is actually a fairly community-oriented neighborhood, despite not being fantastically wealthy. There is a strong non-profit partnership network and plenty of community activism. Unlike many areas of the city, there's a lot of support for subsidized housing on the part of individual landlords. That's not a subtle dig; it's a sign that the community is actually interested in helping folks get back on their feet. Much like the rest of non-sanitized Chicago, it's a bad idea to parade around at night by yourself. But if you make an effort to know your community and neighbors, rather than rushing from classroom to college bar to apartment, you'll feel much more comfortable.

I think it's more of a difference in terms of how people are interested in creating change. Most PhDs - again, not all - are going to be in an academic setting, busily producing dense research and working on projects with multiple year timelines. Most MPPs are going to be working on projects with much shorter horizons, and are going to be working on more direct policy implementation (or evaluation, etc). Someone who likes to plunge in and mess about with the guts of a specific program - and who wants to see real-time change - is usually going to go stir crazy while working on long-term research projects that end in recommendations rather than more immediate impact. Conversely, someone who is interested in more theoretical underpinnings and proving outcomes beyond a shadow of a doubt may be a little agitated by the condensed timelines and programmatic compromises that come about when policy is put into practice. A classic example of the latter is someone like James Heckman. You have to admire the man's models, but I think he would be incredibly unhappy if he was working on the real world application of education policy and workforce development. MPPs need the PhDs to develop the evidence base and theory needed for smart policy; PhDs need MPPs to see the work get implemented in the field, and to translate some of the chewier research into more widely digestible explanations. I don't see the two groups as being starkly different in terms of personality - it's more about how they like to work and where their talents are best suited. There's always exceptions to the rule. For example, there are PhDs floating around government agencies, think tanks, etc. But by and large most PhDs go into academia or other research-focused settings.

It all depends on what you want to do. In Policy Land, PhDs are typically doing research and diving deep into data. With some exceptions, they don't really interact with the world of policy application and implementation. In other words, the PhDs are generating the theories and data analysis that then gets turned into workable policy by folks who tend to have MPPs or MPAffs. The "masters-level" folks, as stated above, are typically working in a professional context. This is not to say that the PhDs are somehow better than the Masters-level folks because they are doing "pure research", or that the Masters-level folks are better than the PhDs because they are actually putting policy into practice. The type of person who is interested in a PhD in global affairs/public policy is not usually suited to the work that a MPP/MPAff candidate is interested in pursuing. They tend to attract very different mindsets.

For me, at least, the phrase "one tequila, two tequila, three tequila floor" is accurate. Oddly enough I don't black out, but rather end up falling asleep for approximately thirty minutes and then waking up bright eyed and bushy tailed. It's happened like clockwork on multiple occasions. Anywho, tequila may not be the best choice for prolonged commiseration .

Yeah, unfortunately Chicago is still one of the most segregated cities in the country. There was a recent article in the NYTimes talking to Chicago residents about the violence on the south and west sides of the city, and it transpired that most folks on the north side had never been south or west of the Loop. Utterly bizarre to live in such a vibrant city and to voluntarily hole up in a mere third of it. You can also play a game I like to call "Spot the Giant Gaping Pothole", in which you guess when you've crossed into the richer wards by the state of the streets. Chicago does not allocate its funds particularly fairly.

I just read the course description that Prabhu sent out for Advanced Empirical Methods, and may have whimpered a bit. I have bad memories of game theory being used as a tool by sadistic/bored TAs to trick undergrads on exams. Nonetheless I shall take a deep breath, clutch my pencils, and soldier through....perhaps things will be better when the examples are actually applicable to real world situations as opposed to bargains over imaginary luggage.

The adequacy of public transportation in Chicago depends in large part on whether you are headed to Northwestern or UChicago (basically, north or south of the Loop). Transportation north of the loop is generally abundant, with multiple options. Transportation south of the loop reflects the city bureaucrats' general fear/disregard of poor people, to be succinct. (Keep in mind that although Chicago is still a segregated city, the transportation infrastructure went into place when there were fun things like restrictive housing covenants and other legal means of walling off various populations.) There will only be one or two El lines (red and green) that serve your area, and the buses will be much less frequent.

You know what's more irritating to a potential contact than the alleged pretentiousness of your business card? Waiting for you to scrabble about in your bag for a pen and paper, and then having to remember to keep the bizarre scrap (which may be mistaken for trash). I wouldn't hand out the cards like candy, but if someone asks you for a card, it's really best for everyone if you have one available. They're not setting up a sneaky judgment trap; they really just want your contact information in a compact, easily legible form.

I think the actual moving van is fine, and particularly something like a truck that has metal walls instead of foldable seats. I mean, think of all the other potential bedbug sites that haven't infected you so far: airplane seats, rental cars, hotel bedding, etc...I think the most common form of bedbug acquisition is when you physically bring something (furniture, clothing, etc) with a pre-established little bug colony into your house. If you're still paranoid, buy a tarp(s) from a home improvement store, line the truck, and put everything on top of the tarp.

Very good point. Aside from obvious things like upholstered couches, the little monsters can burrow into tiny cracks in wood furniture, as well. Nothing is safe! Burn it all with fire! *tiny screams of horror* Then again, you can get MRSA from subway poles, so...at some point, you must accept the fact that germ/bug beasties might get you and just go about your life. Just don't pick up furniture/books from the street in bedbug cities like New York and Boston. As long as you're not actively inviting them in your home and take reasonable precautions, you should be safe.

Samesies. I'm waiting until I visit LBJ to make final decisions, but Michigan's lack of significant funding puts the school near the bottom of the list for me. I've heard really good things about the program, though, so you fully funded folks should take the money and frolic into the (frozen) sunset!

Also, I think Camp LBJ is orientation, sort of? A month-long, suspiciously cult-y, optional orientation to the school/class bonding experience. Sounds like fun to me!

Prabhu's newsletter indicated that Camp LBJ would start in mid to late July, based on last year's schedule. No idea about cost, but I think the formal econ/stats boot camp (which is optional, but not free) comes before. There's a refresher class or two during Camp LBJ but it's not meant to be a prep course.

Keep in mind that the nasty creatures can go into a dormant stage if food (people) is not available...they'll just wake up when there's more blood to feast on. Also, if you DO have bedbugs, the only way to really get rid of them - and ensure the building remains clean - is to treat not only your own apartment, but also the ones directly above, below, and to either side. Obviously, landlords are loathe to shell out this type of money, so the bedbugs generally only get beaten back temporarily. You can clean your clothes for "free" by putting them outside in below-freezing temperatures for a few days. DIE, SQUISHIES! DIE! Also, to add to the hazard list: used books. Especially bad news for grad students

The clarification about religious comments is quite accurate! In general, folks will not be insulting you through the use of veiled comments. I was slightly scarred by a particular breed of Southern bible camp at an early age, so I am probably overly sensitive to barbed religious comments.

Boston actually has the second most expensive housing market in the country right now, and one of the highest rental markets. It's behind NYC, but then rent in NYC is obscene by any standard. Protip: if you're ever writing policy that will be consumed by the public, you may not want to piss them off by referring to their homes as secondary or lower tier. I realize you're not trying to be offensive, but in the words of Archer: phrasing! I don't have any loan payments at the moment, which is a good point, but it's a budgeting matter like anything else. I personally think you'd have to be deranged, from a financial perspective, to take out $100K of loans for any MPP program - regardless of previous loans that you may be carrying. Even $50K in loans would be pushing it. Kids and the timing thereof are a completely personal choice. If you want kids at a young-ish age, they need to factor into your budget. I think that's true whether you're deciding on grad school, a new job, or even a mortgage. ETA: eh, this was grouchier than I meant to come across. Having lived in several different regions of the country, I get very tired of the tunnel vision on the east coast which seems to shrink the world down to NYC, Boston and D.C (with San Francisco thrown in for funzies). Go west (and south), pioneers! I promise you'll find real people amongst the cattle and corn.

On the same note, please don't overdose on the Harvard Kool-aid. It has its flaws, just like any other program. I'd factor your total loan amount into your decision as a more important factor than the name on your diploma, if your debt burden will be substantially different between the schools. However, I've learned from these boards that the HKS name tag carries outsize importance in some countries, particularly if you're trying to work in the local government. In these cases, the Harvard name would be much more valuable.

Good lord. I currently live in Boston, one of the most expensive housing markets in the country, and currently make a little under $50K. I live in a two-income household, but I'm able to pay my half of the rent on an apartment in a great area, get all the groceries I need, spoil my little foodie heart at nice restaurants, and save a good chunk for retirement. I also can buy stuff like new clothes without crying over pennies. In other words, $50K is a perfectly fine income, assuming you aren't blowing all your cash on entertainment or rent. (Seriously, people, do not spend more than 30% of your income on rent.) I'd obviously like to earn more, but it's silly to scare people into thinking that they will be gnawing on ramen if their starting salary is at that level. Children are more of a concern in terms of budget,, but I'm not planning on popping any out for a few years.