rising_star

What do they have in terms of resources (lab space, library materials, summer research grants, etc.) to support your research? Does either program require TAing and, if so, how much and doing what? What would your PI be like in each situation? What is the placement record of each program and of your PI in particular? What are the travel costs to home (wherever that may be) from each school? Are there opportunities for internships, co-ops, etc. in either program in case you decide to go alt-ac? What kind of professional development support (in terms of career training, mentoring, conference funding, etc.) is available and is it competitive to get that support? Answering (some of) these questions might help you decide.

Lab A. Not in your field at all but it sounds like you'd be happier there and happiness can heighten your productivity.

I would accept School A. If you get the external fellowship, then you can ask for a release from your offer.

I would pick Texas personally. A bicycle is a great asset and you can easily go 4-5 miles in 30-40 minutes, or even more quickly if you're in shape. I would double-check with current students to make sure biking is relatively safe (as in, there are bike lanes or shoulders you can use so you don't always have to ride in the road). Good luck making a decision!

Hahaha, so true, Sigaba. Again, out of upvotes otherwise I would've put one on your post. And yes, you get a stable income for 5-6 years. But, you're assuming that you would really be unable to find a job that pays you a cumulative... $90K in 6 years. To be quite honest, you would make at least that, if not more (because eventually you'd be promoted into management), if you started working at Wendy's for minimum wage right now. When I think about the lost income of grad school, I think about what my peers were doing when I was 3-4 years in and how much they were making. Most of my friends, even after adjusting for cost-of-living, were making somewhere between 2 and 15 times what I was making back then. A friend of mine got a job working in a brewery (making beer) and made more money than me each year that I was in grad school easily (plus, he got free beer from work!). Did I get to do things in grad school that otherwise I wouldn't have gotten to do? Absolutely, yes. But, there were costs to that, financially and otherwise. It's great to have a stable income for 5-6 years. But, to return to my earlier Wendy's example, 5-6 years there and you'd potentially be moving into management. After 5-6 years of a PhD, you may then go look for that same job you could've gotten before you started. If you end up un(der)employed for a year or two, will the degree still be worth it? Will you be able to go back to living on $7.5K after having $15-20K for 5-6 years? Are you really okay with carving out a living making $1500-3000 a course? These are decisions that seem far off now but, will be in front of you before you know it. If you want a real reality check, read the Chronicle and VersatilePhD forums where people talk about the difficulties of securing a position. On the Chronicle forums, you'll get the academic market difficulties. On VersatilePhD, you'll read about the job market struggles of those trying to get out of academia, even those with the kinds of additional/alternative experience I suggested to lazaria already. Both of those reality checks are useful because, to be quite honest, I'm sick of people acting like it's so easy to take your PhD and find another decently-paying line of work. The market sucks. Having a PhD doesn't mean you can get a job doing anything. You're a strong writer? Great but so are hundreds of other people, some of whom will have more recent work experience or internships to make them marketable. Or, they won't have a PhD, so they're more likely to get hired for an entry-level gig under the presumption that they won't leave and that they're willing to start at a lower salary. Is that harsh? Yes, but it's also true. As Sigaba pointed out, you can go in with your eyes wide open and still be a bit shellshocked by the market when you go on it. You'll think that you did all the right things (publish, get grants, network at conferences, develop a sexy subfield that is trendy) and still get 100s of rejections. It's like being the last kid picked in kickball in school except that no one actually ever takes the last kid, you just stand around on the side trying to show them that you do have skills while they ignore you or laugh in your face.

I posted a whole bunch about my actual situation then realized it was possibly way TMI for a public message board. In a nutshell, the insurance company knows what's going on. They know about different residencies (as in different places where the cars are), which state my driver's license is from (not the same state as where the car is registered, btw), etc. This is all calculated into the insurance rate being paid on the vehicle on which I am the primary driver. It's really not a huge deal as long as you work with an insurance agent to sort it all out. At one point, my mom had cars that were in her name and on her insurance in four different states (three children all going to school in different states). This was something a national insurance company (think Allstate, Geico, Liberty Mutual, etc.) has dealt with before and is prepared to handle. They are quite accustomed to students leaving for college with the vehicle they got at 16 that is still in their parent's name. For most states, re-establishing residency is a simple and relatively painless process. It only tends to get complicated if you aren't a US citizen and/or if you are trying to establish residency for tuition purposes, which isn't the same thing at all. You can move to a new place, change your driver's license and vehicle registration, and be considered a resident by them in under a month in most cases.

ComeBackZinc, I'm out of up-votes so I'm sorry I can't upvote this! What you've written is soooo important. I think a lot of people start off grad school saying that they don't care if they can't get an academic job. I know I was one of them and I've known many others. Then, they spend 1-3 years trying to get a TT job and failing and have no clue what to do with themselves. They feel down in the dumps about it. They're reluctant to leave academia. They feel like their souls have been crushed. If you haven't gone through it, you really have no clue what it's like to get hundreds of rejection letters/emails (assuming they're even kind enough to reject you, that is!). You also can't necessarily say that you can get all those rejections and still be smiling about your life choices. Some people do draw the line after a couple of years, which I think is reasonable. I personally vowed to never adjunct unless I had an actual FT job and adjuncting was on the side. I also vowed not to spend more than 2 years on the market without landing a full-time academic position (so one year ABD and one year with the PhD in hand), which is less than some people advise. But, after a few years, your PhD gets "stale" and you'll find yourself passed over in favor of recently minted PhDs, ABDs from elite institutions, and current assistant profs seeking a lateral move. That sucks but it is also reality. lazaria, do internships to gain "alt-ac" work experience. Do informational interviews with people who have jobs you might want to have. Take courses in statistics/math/GIS if at all possible since those are marketable skills you can use to land a job after grad school regardless of your discipline. If at all possible, figure out what the trendy areas in your field will be in 5-8 years and add 1-2 of them as specialty areas now so you'll be ahead of the curve (it's worth noting that this is incredibly difficult to do). Go to the best program you can. Publish early and often in top-notch journals. And then realize that you can do every single thing I listed and still end up un(der)employed for a year or two after graduating with your PhD, during which time you will apply for hundreds of academic and nonacademic jobs and get rejected from most. Nonacademic jobs will deem you too qualified to be a receptionist or administrative assistant even as you're just concerned with having enough food to eat for the next week.

FWIW, shadowclaw, I haven't lived in the same state as my mom at all since we got this car and the insurance company has never asked those questions. Most recently, I had to use the tow coverage on my insurance 3 times in a month, all of which occurred over 1000 miles from where my mom lives. They asked me zero questions about why the car was there, how long it'd been there, etc. And, two of those tows were from quite literally the same address of where I presently live. So it's definitely not universally true that insurance companies would ask a ton of questions. My sister had a similar experience with her car being in our mother's name and living 3000+ miles away and getting into a few accidents. Again, no questions were asked by the insurance company (and this was a different company than the one we have now). Insurance companies are actually quite used to this scenario.

Check out all the threads about interviews and Skype interviews on the "Interviews and Visits" forum. There's tons of helpful advice there.

Agreed with 1Q84. If you haven't already been looking at the academic jobs wiki, you should be. See here. In rhet/comp, there were well over 200 jobs posted, which is part of the reason applying for 80 is a small number. Yes, there are jobs, but there is also stiff competition for those jobs. Hearing it repeatedly may ultimately better prepare you for actually being immersed in that market and its realities when the time comes. Lazaria, even getting a VAP is hard these days and, in some cases, being a VAP is no better financially than being an adjunct. There's a postdoc or VAP (can't remember which) that was the talk of the jobs wiki last year for offering under $30K with a 4/4 teaching load. I'm sure they got plenty of applications, as were many others who peruse the wiki. In some fields, people will post how many people they were told applied for the job. I'm in the social sciences and there were interdisciplinary positions I applied to and was rejected from that received 250+ applications. VAPs, especially multi-year ones, often receive hundreds of applications too.

That's what it sounds like though you do want to confirm this. I'd also be concerned about being stuck with TAing if RAs are the norm in your field.

I don't see what advantages you'd get from maintaining PA residency while going to school in a different state. I could maybe see it if you were trying to maintain residency in a state without a state income tax but PA has one, in addition to having locality taxes in many areas. FWIW, my car and its insurance are in my mom's name and it was never a problem that I lived in another state for grad school. Would you have to explain if there was an accident? Yes, but the insurance company doesn't really care where an accident occurs since you're paying them for coverage. It's immaterial to them whether that accident is 3 miles from your house or 1300 miles since people are known to take their cars on road trips, you know?

Yes, it means that if you're doing well and if the department has the money, they'll keep funding you. I would talk to current students about whether they have funding for all the years of their degree or only their first one.

Have you looked into the summer programs at Northwestern for K-12 students? I believe they're hiring...

You could go to a Ph.D. program after doing a MBA...

As someone that has gone on the job market, I'll just say that 80 jobs is a low number to apply for, especially for people in English. It can be an agonizing process because applying for jobs basically becomes a full-time job and then you hear nothing back for months on end, except when you check the wiki and learn that others have advanced to phone/Skype interviews or that they're being invited to campus. It really can be soul-crushing, especially given the sheer volume of work that goes into it. There's basically nothing else in grad school that prepares you for it, nor does having been un(der)employed before grad school because sending in 80 standard job apps is a lot less work than 80 academic ones which may require your teaching philosophy, teaching evals, research statement, statement about how you work with diverse populations, plus a 2-3 pg cover letter, each of which must be tailored to the specific institution. I thought I was prepared for lots of rejection and waiting when I went on the market but, having done it, I can say without a doubt that I was not. Others who have actually been on the market may agree with me.

ACA is definitely a better option than COBRA. When I left my left position, COBRA was something like $750/month.

Definitely contact the program director for the status of your application. Is the other program offering you funding?

Agreed with juillet! As I read your post, I thought C seemed like the best choice. If I were you, I'd go ahead and plan on moving there, start applying for full-time jobs, etc.

Definitely don't go to School A. If the placement record of your POI isn't the places where you want to work,t hen it's really not a good fit.

Not in your field but I've heard that it matters, especially if you're looking to work at a regional comprehensive school or more teaching-focused institutions. I was actually told this directly by profs in my MA program when I was trying to decide where to go for my PhD. They pointed out that smaller state schools in my home region might be reluctant to hire me if I did a PhD outside the region since they might not be convinced of my investment in that region. Schools hate to invest in someone that will leave the area for a different (or more prestigious) institution in a few years so having regional ties can bolster your ability to get a job. I interviewed at a smaller, semi-rural campus last year, and they were very concerned with whether I would move there and stay or if I was just going to use my time there as a pseudo-post-doc to gain teaching experience and get publications out so I could get another position. When I've interviewed for those positions and it isn't an area I'm from or have gone to school in, it hasn't led to an offer, though there could be myriad factors contributing to this of course.

I turned down more money to go with the advisor I thought would be the best for having an academic career.

Honestly, it's not really feasible. Many journals publicly state how long it can take for papers to be reviewed and/or provide a timeline from submission to acceptance. In my field, journals that move from submission to acceptance in under a year are quite rare, in part because they have a backlog of papers waiting to be published that would be ahead of yours in the queue. It also depends on how quickly you could do a R&R (revise and resubmit) since your speediness in submitting revisions will ultimately affect how quickly decisions can be made about your paper.

Hermitstock, the way this is done really varies from one program to the next. The best thing to do is check the Graduate Handbook for the specific departments you're interested in. ChelceCarter, it's really not a big deal if your advisor is on sabbatical your first semester, especially for a PhD program where you'll have a couple of years of coursework before you really dig into your research. It will give you a chance to begin building relationships with other faculty who will potentially be on your dissertation committee, as well as do some independent exploration into whichever topics interest you. I didn't do any research at all the first semester of my PhD program and it was totally fine.

The thing is, even with a low undergrad GPA, it's really not your only option. Instead of looking at the admissions requirements and credibility, you need to do another search where you focus on the programs that offer funding, rather than the ones that you think you can get into. There's a bunch of threads around here about applying to grad programs with a low GPA. People with a lower GPA are able to gain admission with funding in many cases, but that is definitely a better option than going $100K into debt for a degree that may not net you any more opportunities than what you have now.