Trantorian

Great, I finally get to be disappointed in myself with concrete evidence instead of a vague critical voice in my head.

Is the only reason we believe it to be Tuesdays or Thursdays due to past release days?

It's okay guys, I didn't wear pants, so what I really need is to clean my chair and floor.

Wow, I just nearly pissed my pants because I looking through the thread.. and found this distraction. http://www.maniacworld.com/maze_game.htm

I can't connect to the site as well. @spivak: I can't see your link (it won't load), but where you check is like the first page of the GRFP section of the fastlane website. There's a link that leads to "awards list" or something like that. Unless you mean the status of your own application, in which case you have to log into your application and find a link somewhere within it. EDIT: If you mean the status of your application, you log in and you look to the right side. It should say something like Application Year: 2013 Application Status: Submitted Final Status:

I normally just lurk, but I thought it was important to contribute this one since I know it personally. For my program, my stipend is only about ~$1800/month for the 9 month period as well. However, our department also gets a "fellowship" tacked onto that which ends up making it around ~$2400/month. In addition, if you're talking about the same UC that I am in right now, our department (I don't know if our whole school has this, though) requires full-time pay as RA or TA for the summer. So, this adds about about $9000 for the 3 months of summer. I'm only a first year, but I haven't really felt like I have to watch my money very carefully (well, mostly the studying, classes, responsibilities take precedence over a lot of other things I do). I send my parents about $300~$600 dollars of my stipend a month to pay them back slowly for paying for my undergrad. I eat out about once a week, but mostly eat what I "cook" (rice and whatever the hell I dump into the rice cooker usually..). I don't really buy much stuff in that sense. I do fly back home about once or twice a quarter (a round trip can cost from $100~$200). Overall, I don't think that the stipend offered by my UC is bad at all, especially since we have nice housing (somewhat recently constructed) for a lower cost than the surrounding area for a good twenty minute radius. I don't know if UCs normally offer low stipends, but I think there is a kind of a set standard for stipends for the UC system due to our TA/RA unionization. However, in addition to those stipends, UCs will offer additional fellowships (like mine does, and I know that at least two other UCs do this too) for recruitment. So, if you have a much better offer from a comparable program (especially if your UC wants to rise in rankings), you probably could negotiate a recruitment fellowship addition to the stipend.. EDIT: I forgot to mention that the numbers I put were before taxes. In addition, my housing situation is about $733/month (+$10~20 for electricity) for a two-story apartment with two bedrooms with two people total living in the apartment.