danieleWrites

danieleWrites - It is understandable that college students are lower down the list of potential tenants but that alone shouldn't make the manager completely ignore my emails. Especially after I have signaled a strong intention to rent by already submitting the application and application fee. There is little in terms of your other suggestions that I can do since I am unable to meet her in person. I will just have to trust her even if she does send me the pictures. Thank you for sharing the links. I have gone through all of them.

juilletmercredi - Right now I don't even care what lease period I get. And thank you for explaining about the short term leases. All other places I have inquired with also offer only a 12 month lease.

Little update: I got a response from the university's off-campus residents office. Although they did not offer to view the apartment for me, the nice lady did talk to the property manager (rude lady) and told me that they are working on getting the pictures for me and will get back shortly. So things are looking a little hopeful. Let's wait and see.

Two words: Garage Sale. You can get some decent stuff at cut-rate prices. You just need some sort of truck to move things. You can rent those, like the small U Haul kind.

Protip: never buy a used mattress. Ever.
Protip 2: sofas can carry bedbugs, too.

Also, those rent-to-own places = massive ripoff. If you do without for a while and put the "payment" you'd be making aside, you'd be able to outright pay for the furniture, or better, much cheaper in a relatively short amount of time with no payments.

As for how much furniture you'll need? That depends on the place you end up getting and what you need for comfort. Your home should have something that helps you destress.

What you can safely demand from a potential and/or current landlord/property manager varies from state to state. By safely, I mean without getting ignored or not considered. It's all about what the laws say. Contrary to popular belief, the balance of power in the landlord/tenant relationship is usually more on the side of the landlord. Sure, they want a tenant, but they want the right kind of tenant (college students are usually at the bottom of the list, unless they provide a cosigner name Mom or Dad). For every decent property, there's dozens of people who want it. I got my place without credit checks, references, the application others had to submit, or first and last months rent, just a small security deposit, because I'm older and my guy and I showed up in khakis and polos with a country club logo on them. I'm not going to have kids, I'm not likely to party, the cops aren't going to be called, the neighbors aren't going to complain, and there isn't going to be a lot of damage to the place, or so the probabilities go.

You want pix from the property manager and she doesn't care? She seems rude or uncaring? That means that you aren't the only college student who wants the place, but she's probably holding out for a solid prospect. So, what to property managers want from tenants? No hassles, the rent paid on time, the rent paid for the entire year (they have to pay for the property all year, 9-month tenants are far less desirable than 12-month tenants), and the property treated with respect. You want her to want you more than others, so how can you show her that you're the more desirable applicant?

I imagine that your problem stems from a single thing: she hasn't processed all of the applications and has no intention of doing any extra work for people she hasn't decided to offer a lease. I would, personally, email her every few days about the application until she tells you if your application is approved or rejected. Once you know if your application is approved, then tell her that you are prepared to send her all required deposits and rents, but only once you have seen pictures of the actual apartment you would be renting and have approved of it. It's also possible that the place is not yet vacant, or, if vacant, not yet prepared for the next tenant.

Before you sign the lease, make sure you know your tenancy rights! If she sends you pictures of a model apartment, rather than the actual apartment, are you stuck with the lease? Because you can't see the apartment yourself, you can't be completely sure that she sent you pictures of the actual apartment. In some states, yes, you are. Here's some helpful links:

The first is to the US federal government's Housing and Urban Development website on tenancy in the state of New York. HUD is the federal overseer of housing in the US. http://portal.hud.gov/hudportal/HUD?src=/states/new_york/renting/tenantrights

The second is to the state of New York's attorney general website on housing issue, which includes tenant rights: http://www.ag.ny.gov/consumer-frauds/housing-issues

The final is to the county of Onondaga's commission on housing site, which includes tenant rights: http://www.ongov.net/humanrights/renting.html

If the city of Syracuse has different rules than the county, I couldn't find it. In the US, the way it works it to start with local laws, then state laws, then federal laws. The local laws generally already comply with state and federal laws, but have more specific and important laws that apply to individual situations.

Two words: Garage Sale. You can get some decent stuff at cut-rate prices. You just need some sort of truck to move things. You can rent those, like the small U Haul kind.

Protip: never buy a used mattress. Ever.
Protip 2: sofas can carry bedbugs, too.

Also, those rent-to-own places = massive ripoff. If you do without for a while and put the "payment" you'd be making aside, you'd be able to outright pay for the furniture, or better, much cheaper in a relatively short amount of time with no payments.

As for how much furniture you'll need? That depends on the place you end up getting and what you need for comfort. Your home should have something that helps you destress.

Financial aid disbursements are handled by the school. Every school is different. My undergrad gave them out in the 3rd week of the semester. My grad school gives them out a few days before the semester. All schools offer a short term advance. Prices usually vary. 

"I'm in college. Someday I hope to be a professor." When asked what I'm studying, I will add: "I've been in English long enough to learn that proper grammar is decided by the dialect a person speaks, not by a book. I've totally retired my grammar vigilante cape and tights."

I'm not embarrassed or ashamed of my education, but the whole English Teacher Horror Show gets old and as much as I would love to hold forth on my dissertation plans, no one really wants to hear it, except people who are also in graduate school and who find the distinction between phd, masters, and undergrad an important one. To them, I tell them I'm in a PhD program.

You could tell your supervisor the truth, that you're not comfortable with being so google-able. It will probably sound better than anything else you could say.
 
Are you sure you want that, though? When you search for jobs in the future, people will look you up. It's good for them to see something positive about you when they do, like that your supervisor wrote about your contributions on his lab page. I'd even consider this really good, because it's not just something you wrote yourself like a LinkedIn profile. If someone told me they wanted to avoid that (and didn't have a legitimate security concern like a creepy ex), I would probably sympathize with the impulse but find it a little old-fashioned and naive.

I would add one other thing to the "practice English" advice so far. Find out what courses you'll be expected to TA in, find out the books they use, buy the books, and then read them out loud. It's one thing to use mass media for English skills, but it's another thing altogether to use terminology and phrasing from your field. If possible, see if you can find online videos that offer instruction in your field or a related field. Coursera, Khan academy, education-portal, other MOOCs. There are tons of free, online course offerings in the US. Youtube, if you can access it, has practically everything. Since you're not trying to learn the subject, but rather how to use English to speak about the subject, it doesn't matter if the people giving video/audio lessons are trustworthy teachers, or offering lessons that will advance you in your field. Chinese is a tonal language while English is an analytic language (Chinese uses tone to indicate whether ma means mother or horse; English uses the position of the word in the sentence). This kind of all boils down to pronunciation and syntax (how to say it and where it goes in a sentence). Reading stuff in your field out loud will help you work out pronunciation and phrasing before your first day of class. I can't imagine trying to figure out how to say metamafic in another language without a lot of practice. If the book is out of reach, and you're still able to access journal articles in English, you can read them out loud, as well.

In my previous university, a few international students taught composition courses. While they wrote better English than the average American, they didn't speak English well. Sometimes, their accents were too thick for students to understand. I know this because students complained a lot.

Anyway. Here's the thing. Your ability to GTA in the US has nothing to do with your native country, beyond your ability to express the concepts in English, understand questions and respond to them, in English. Sure, students will complain about your English skills. If you were American, they'd complain about your voice, your fashion sense, the place you stand/sit during class, how often you use the book in class, whether or not you use a pencil or a pen, your religions, your politics, your state residency, your facial features, your (insert anything and everything here).

You've been offered the GTA. Accept it! What's the worst that can happen? You fail at GTAing and don't get it renewed by the department. A number of universities offer TAships in the language department to international students whatever their department. My previous institution offered Asian languages, but only when an international student from Asia could be enticed to teach them. Anyway, good teaching is about knowing your stuff, having confidence in yourself, and having concern for and patience with students. Yeah, they're going to say and think things that are hurtful, but it won't be because you're from China. They do that with everyone. Even the most beloved teacher on campus gets some student hate. Mostly, you'll never hear it.

University of Arkansas has a rhet/comp program and a tech writing program.

If you are not offered an assistanceship, do not accept the offer. Rhet comp isn't just research, it's teaching!

I would suggest that you look at the rhet-comp faculty in the schools of interest, log onto JSTOR, and read their publications for the past few years. I would also suggest that you get in contact with these programs, if the information isn't in the graduate school catalog, and look at what the program requires and offers in terms of classes.

I don't know about anyone else, but my "pay" is a stipend plus tuition. While I don't have to declare the payment of tuition as income on taxes (um. gonna go panic and make a screaming phone call in the morning to an accountant now), it is part of my "pay" package. So, I make about entry level or more per yer in my field.

I don't have a fellowship, but I am an older person with a significant retirement income from my days in the military. Frankly, I make more money per year than the chair. I have been told, to my face, that I should be ashamed of taking a TA spot from someone who needed the money and that I should not go after grants and fellowships because I don't need the money like people starting out do. One person has even spread it around that I shouldn't be in grad school, taking up the space from someone else, or potentially taking a job from someone else, because I have resources to fall back on.

I, and you, we're not "taking" from anyone. These things are earned based on merit. I do not justify my choices to my cohort and neither should you. The only thing I've ever said to these people, when I bothered with it: be honest with yourself, if you were in my shoes, you wouldn't give up grad school, the assistanceship, or a job either. These people are not worth arguing with, nor are they worth extending the kind of help one would to a friend. Civility, yes; friendship, no.

You earned your assistancehip, your fellowship, and any grants that come your way. Nothing stopped your office mates from applying for these things; the fact that they're awarded on merit, not need, is not your problem.

Here's some good news. It was easier to get into Harvard than it was to get a job at one of the two new Walmart stores that opened up in Washington DC.

But here's your answer: no one can answer your question except the admissions committees (adcomms) of the schools you're considering. Sure, maybe one of the PhD students in CS at Duke can toss a number out at you, or work the Lickert scale, or say pretty good or meh. But the odds?

If you want to stack your odds of getting into the right program, look for the right program that has people and facilities doing research into what you're doing. Don't look for the name on the school and try to tweak your application to make you look like you'll fit in with them. It would be kind of like playing up your abilities to develop web apps simply because MIT is all about web apps when you really want to research the semantic web.

You are, in essence, asking the exact wrong question. The question you should be asking is: I'm really into researching A, and University X has Dr. P and Dr. Q who are tops in that field. What are my odds of getting into University X? Should I focus my senior thesis/project on A?

I don't know about anyone else, but my "pay" is a stipend plus tuition. While I don't have to declare the payment of tuition as income on taxes (um. gonna go panic and make a screaming phone call in the morning to an accountant now), it is part of my "pay" package. So, I make about entry level or more per yer in my field.

I don't have a fellowship, but I am an older person with a significant retirement income from my days in the military. Frankly, I make more money per year than the chair. I have been told, to my face, that I should be ashamed of taking a TA spot from someone who needed the money and that I should not go after grants and fellowships because I don't need the money like people starting out do. One person has even spread it around that I shouldn't be in grad school, taking up the space from someone else, or potentially taking a job from someone else, because I have resources to fall back on.

I, and you, we're not "taking" from anyone. These things are earned based on merit. I do not justify my choices to my cohort and neither should you. The only thing I've ever said to these people, when I bothered with it: be honest with yourself, if you were in my shoes, you wouldn't give up grad school, the assistanceship, or a job either. These people are not worth arguing with, nor are they worth extending the kind of help one would to a friend. Civility, yes; friendship, no.

You earned your assistancehip, your fellowship, and any grants that come your way. Nothing stopped your office mates from applying for these things; the fact that they're awarded on merit, not need, is not your problem.

I figured it out a while ago when I figured out that good papers are written after reading a significant amount of discussion on the subject, not by figuring out the paper and then looking for sources. It was undergrad, a paper about the anti-Walmart movement. Good times.

Originality is one of those ridiculous words that means something different every where you go. Novel is just as ridiculous. Think of it less as "wowza, you cured cancer and solved for world peace!" and more as "what am I adding to the field?"

Isaac Newton said it best, and I paraphrase, he didn't consider his "discovery" of gravity and its laws as something novel or original. Instead, he thought of himself as standing on the shoulders of giants. We have an airline industry because of him, and we all think of him as this gigantic, original thinker. He saw himself as a person who was so familiar with the conversation in his field, that when the proverbial apple bonked him on his proverbial head, he was able to take what he already knew (from what others have done) and add his own voice to it.

So, nah, it's not finding a novel approach that's never been done before. It's finding your footing on the shoulders of the giants in your field.

I don't know about anyone else, but my "pay" is a stipend plus tuition. While I don't have to declare the payment of tuition as income on taxes (um. gonna go panic and make a screaming phone call in the morning to an accountant now), it is part of my "pay" package. So, I make about entry level or more per yer in my field.

I don't have a fellowship, but I am an older person with a significant retirement income from my days in the military. Frankly, I make more money per year than the chair. I have been told, to my face, that I should be ashamed of taking a TA spot from someone who needed the money and that I should not go after grants and fellowships because I don't need the money like people starting out do. One person has even spread it around that I shouldn't be in grad school, taking up the space from someone else, or potentially taking a job from someone else, because I have resources to fall back on.

I, and you, we're not "taking" from anyone. These things are earned based on merit. I do not justify my choices to my cohort and neither should you. The only thing I've ever said to these people, when I bothered with it: be honest with yourself, if you were in my shoes, you wouldn't give up grad school, the assistanceship, or a job either. These people are not worth arguing with, nor are they worth extending the kind of help one would to a friend. Civility, yes; friendship, no.

You earned your assistancehip, your fellowship, and any grants that come your way. Nothing stopped your office mates from applying for these things; the fact that they're awarded on merit, not need, is not your problem.

Handling argumentative students over grading is actually very simple, for the most part. Instead of defending your grading, teach them how to advocate for themselves. The first step is to reassure yourself that you're human and you make mistakes and, more importantly, if you change a grade after careful consideration and acknowledging your error in a mature fashion that you can support with your course, you will get more respect from the students in general.

To teach them how to advocate for their grade (because profs do make mistakes, or they grade when grumpy, or something), don't answer their question(s), ask them a question. For example, why did Joe get 20 points on this and I only got 19? Stop and look at it thoughtfully for a period of time. In composition, I spend about 1 minute of time considering a paragraph, no less than 30 seconds considering a sentence. In other fields, an appropriate amount of time. This has two purposes. One, it gives them the impression that you are taking their concerns seriously and they appreciate that. Two, it allows you to stop and really think about why you did what you did and how that relates to the assessment criteria you applied--not why they got the points the got, but how their work relates to the grading rubric/assessment criteria. The next step is to shift their work so you can both examine it, but mostly so they have a stronger view of it. Then ask them what grade they should have gotten and why. If you have a copy of your assessment criteria that they can view, get it out. Lead them into making a persuasive case for their grade. If they have a different grade for the exact same work, obviously you've got to fix your mistake. However, most grading isn't like a set of basic addition problems in base ten, where it's either a mis-mark or it's not. A lot of grading is subjective because no two answers will be the same. Even multiple guess problems aren't pick the correct answer, but pick the best answer. Teach them how to present an argument with supporting evidence. It should never be a case of Joe got a 20 and I got a 19, my answer isn't that different, it's not fair, you should give me a 20, too. It should always be: I think I should have gotten this particular grade/this particular problem right because of X, Y, and X (all taken from lecture notes, the text, other credible sources, and/or your assessment criteria.)

Usually the first time you do this to them, they're completely unprepared. Smile. Tell the student that you'd like to give them the opportunity to prepare a bit with the text/lecture notes/whatever, so you'll see them in the next few days (name a day and time that would be convenient) to discuss the grade further. By giving them a specific appointment time, you focus their attention on when it would be good for them to come see you rather than on trying to argue fair instead of arguing the material.

The key here isn't that you stop them from arguing with you, it's that you stop them from arguing stupid. You can't defend against a student's conception of fair because they've already made up their mind what the fair grade should be based on, usually, personal feelings. Instead, you teach them to argue with you based on course material, which you can defend because it's not about feelings, it's about the course material.

I hand my rubric out at the beginning of the course, along with a four paragraph essay my then 14 year old kid wrote, and I teach them how I (and most people in composition) grade essays. I explain why I don't really care if they end sentences with a preposition, but their next professor might react any one of the more disgusting scenes from the Exorcist for the same offense. Then I tell them that if they believe the grade they get isn't what they earn, then they should come to my office hours with the rubric and their paper and make a case for the grade they should have. Of course, the first day of class, right after I pass out the syllabus, I sit on a table (if possible) and ask them how they know I'm qualified to teach the course.

There are some students that this does not work for. They argue because they don't believe you have the right to "give" them any grade other than what they think they "earned." Be firm, but pleasant (as possible). This is the grade this work earned; see chapter two in the textbook. If they don't drop it, refer them to your supervisor. ALWAYS maintain a log. Date, time, potential witnesses, and the gist of what of you said without editorializing.

Student loans are still loans.

When you "consolidate" a loan, what you are doing is taking out a new loan that pays off the other loans. The interest rates don't "consolidate". You get an interest rate that's set at what the new loan is. Consolidation is good if you will get better interest overall. This can be hard to figure out if you've got a handful of loans at several interest rates.

There are two important words to consider before you go after consolidation: subsidized and unsubsidized. If you have subsidized loans, leave them be! A subsidized loan means that the government pays your student loan interest while your loan is in deferment. If you have unsubsidized loans, you are being charged interest every single month you have that loan. This happens while you're in school, while your loan is in deferment, and even during grace periods. It does not stop until the loan is paid off. Period. At periods specified by your loan contract, the interest is capitalized. This means that the interest you've accumulated since the previous capitalization will be stuck onto the principle and you will pay interest on it, as well. Many a student has thought, gee, I only have 20 grand in student loans! And then the grace period ends and the number suddenly looks more like 26 grand. WTF face is not a fun face to have when you're looking at student loan bills.

You can pay on any loan, even if its in deferment, whether you've consolidated the loans or not, unless you have a loan contract that specifically says you can't. Most financial advisers will tell you to pay your student loan interest every month whether you're in deferment or not. Unless you have subsidized loans, then there's no interest to pay.

Two things:

1. Start reading scholarly journals in your field. American Journal of Psychology, not Psychology Today!
2. Write. A lot. If you can, find an online forum where you can hold written conversations with people advanced in the field. I like to hang around sociology blogs written by sociologists.

Well, three:
3. There are some basic composition books that can guide you, like William Zinnser's On Writing Well or Joseph Williams' Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace.

The big thing is that writing is like speaking and walking and country line dancing. The more you do it, the better you get at it. The less you do it, the worse you get at it. And, like country line dancing, doing writing (or dancing) in a different field (or style, say, a the tango) will help your writing (or dancing) ability overall, but it won't necessarily improve writing in your discipline (dancing the country line dance) since you still have to learn the conventions and expectations (the dance steps) involved in your discipline's writing (country line dancing). I think the metaphor ran a bit long.

I'm in a unique position. More than half of the people in the grad school at my university have celebrated fewer birthdays than I've celebrated wedding anniversaries (we're a one-anniversary-a-year couple, no first this or first that. wedding only). My spouse has a crap-ton of education, but very little of it is collegiate. Come zombie apocalypse time, I'm hiding behind him.

I'm an introvert, which makes a difference in how understand the concept of "friend". I find them disposable, as well, even though I really miss certain people and the good times we used to have. I'm sufficiently weird, even to my cohort, in my interests and knowledge base. It's kind of creepy to exchange conversation with people who think Phantom Menace is the first movie. As if. I was there, in 1979, for the first movie. The people putting together tenure packets these days are my age.

Anyway. I have grad-school buddies. I call them friendquaintances because they're more than acquaintances but a bit less than friends. I have had no time for non-grad-school friends during my first year. I had a Paper that Ate My Life to get over. Anyway. Getting non-grad-school friends isn't that difficult, even for dedicated introverts (of the world unite! separately, in our own homes). I like to golf. So I joined a women's golf league and made some pals. I have a buddy who is a knitter, joined a knitting group. I've joined a book club (but there was a bitter feud of Earl Grey and the definition of socialism so I sneered like Stewie and went my own way). Be a joiner.

Most grad schools have a grad school-wide groups and programs that you can get involved in. I have an ethnic grad and faculty group that I joined that does work in the community. I have a skeptics group that I'm skeptical of joining. I joined professional associations.

Take it! While it's two jobs, it's two 10-hour(ish) jobs, which is about what most GA/TAs do anyway. If nothing else, it's a foot in the TA/GA door! I have two jobs now (20 hours TAing and 20-25 hours elsewhere) and it sucks because I love sleeping and I don't get to do much of it.

The key is to organize yourself and your time. It helps to know your specific hours in advance and I'm sure RAs around here and elsewhere have a lot of advice to give on managing their RA work.

The problem is how to be fair to students. Certainly, we should expect them to realize that getting help during an exam and seeing questions beforehand is cheating. The problem is that the person doing the cheating was a teacher who apparently presented some of this cheating as part of the class itself. Did they earn the A the way that other students in other recitation sections did? No. Should they be punished for the cheating the teacher did? Did the teacher tell them this was cheating? Or did they expect this to be his teaching style?

Whether anything happened to the students is likely a decision made based on whether or not the students were, themselves, involved in the cheating, or if the TA was cheating and the students merely benefited. If a teacher does a review for a test and the questions on the test along with the correct answers are part of the review, can you reasonably expect students to know this is cheating? If the teacher instructs students to raise their hands for silent help during an exam, can you reasonably expect students to know this is cheating? While the answer to this might be yes (obviously, the teacher shouldn't point out the correct answers on exam day), the fact that it's the teacher doing it means that students should be given the benefit of the doubt as to whether or not they knew this behavior was unauthorized assistance.

Before you take this up to the chair or dean or provost or ombudsman, the question to examine isn't the student grades, but what happened to the cheating teacher. Was the teacher sanctioned in some way that is in line with the university's academic honor code? Does the teacher still have the assistanceship? Is the teacher still teaching? If the teacher was penalized in some way, then I believe (from what you've told us here) that the professor met his/her obligations regardless of what happened to the students.

If the gossip mill isn't clear on it, I'm brazen enough to go to the professor up for tenure and outright ask what happens to TAs that violate academic integrity for their students. I might even speak with the chair or some other prof who would be in the know that I was buddy-buddy with.

I just wanted to provide an update on the situation.
 
I was so torn about what to do. I would wake up in the morning and say that I needed to drop the course and face the consequences, then go to bed at night and say that it's not over until it's over and I have never been a quitter. I actually logged into the system with the intent to drop the course but couldn't find the link. Instead of calling student services, I decided to take it as a sign to tough the course out. In my mind I rationalized that dropping the course would send the same message that failing the course would, that I couldn't handle it. The difference between the two was that I had the chance not to fail, it would be different if failing was certain. I emailed the instructors and informed them that I was staying in the course. After I sent the email, I immediately began diving into the material. Well two days later, we found out that the final was a take home final. Yes! No! Take home finals are notoriously harder than in class tests. I was more nervous. I have never put more time and effort into a written assignment. Outside reading, studying papers, and speaking to students in that department.
 
The semester is now over. I received the A that I needed to pass the class, as well as the A's that I anticipated in my other courses. All's well that ends well. Thanks for the comments and support.
 
Edit - could you imagine the panic/regret/anger that I would have felt if I had dropped the course, only to find out the final was a take home final???!!!

"Hooks" are personal, so you find your hook in your personal story. Everyone has a story about how much the love to read, and how Moby Dick changed their lives, so they want to be a literature professor now. Not a good hook cause it's cliche. Probably true (at least for literature majors with an unhealthy obsession with Moby Dick), but still banal.

I'd suggest doing some free writing. We call it writing as discovery sometimes. Just sit down and write or type anything that comes to mind about why you're into the field, into your research, into the possible career you're looking at, into school, into the subject you're most into (as in, not I love math because it's better than a Xanax for my OCD, but rather I love linear algebra because Susskind used it to turn the world on its ear in his attic), anything that comes to mind at all. Even if it's I don't really know why I'm doing this. Help!!!

Call it a personal inventory.

Once you've got some ideas to work with, then it's a matter of figuring out what question to answer. I went with the "why is graduate school right for me?" Moby Dick may have [not] changed my life, but it doesn't explain why I can't get a BA in literature and trot off to work in the field while reading Moby Dick every day. The hook should answer the same question that your SOP answers: why should you (you lovely adcomm folks) pick me to offer admission and funding to? You're a huge risk in time, reputation, and money, even if you pay for it yourself. We all are. Your hook is a good place to explain your personal investment in the process, aside from the exact same investment everyone else in every discipline has made to get to the grad school point (time and money and it's-always-been-my-dream).

I would also suggest that you look over the research that you've done on the faculty in each program and consider what the program seems to be interested in. For example, a faded cliche in sociology is that Harvard is a macro-theory school and Chicago is a micro-theory school. It's true, to an extent, since these schools have very serious history as foundational schools in American sociology. I would not wax poetic about my love of Talcott Parsons (he's my creative muse and I hate him for it) to the Chicago school because the odds are that the people in Chicago would be more interested in my BFF feelings for Herbert Blumer. Of course, I wouldn't apply to the Chicago school to begin with because I wouldn't fit so much, but there's the example for you.

Disclaimer: I'm a rhetoric-oriented person who has never been on an adcomm and can't begin to anticipate what the adcomms you're looking at are looking for.

I am finishing up this semester nine weeks pregnant, with all the fun bodily adventures that brings. As soon as I turn in my last paper, I think I'm just gonna sleep right into my second trimester! 

At the end of a semester I usually go into hibernation (literally) for about 24 hours, doing nothing but eating and sleeping, and then emerge from my blanket chrysalis as a newly refreshed butterfly. This is my favorite way to transition from an extremely heavy workload to an extremely light one

Way back when you had to have printers make up cards for you, I'd say no. Nowadays, you can buy decent cardstock with a decent price at an office supply store and print your own business cards.

I would print up a few business cards, even as an MA student, for conferences and any occasion where I might network with people in the field or who might be potential employers or PhD program adcomms. I would make the business card was rhetorically appropriate. Katzenmusick's template is an excellent one because it gives the information that someone asking for your contact details would need without giving a sense that you're inflating your importance. The only thing I would add to that would be to make sure there's enough room to write down key words about the conversation you just had so the person can place who you are. If you get business cards print professionally, don't go with a design that seems professorial. Go a bit plainer as suits your MA student status. That would be for academic contacts! Business people have a different set of expectations about how you should sell yourself. If I were an MA student in English heading off to comic-con, where I might potentially meet people who need writers or editors, or who might know someone who does, I would have business cards that look like a professional in the field, not like a grad student doing academic networking.

Nothing wrong with a card, just make it appropriate for the situation.