rising_star

Yes. You'll have met the faculty, staff, and graduate students, seen the campus and facilities, and gotten a sense of the town. Do you need more than that to make a decision?

Questions about life in DC really belong under the City Guide, so I'm locking this post.

Have you visited either or both programs?

Personally, I wouldn't do it. But then I didn't like where I went for undergrad.

belowthree, a lot of those are already under "Officially Grads", if you read the description on the main page.

The Council of Graduate Schools resolution. Also, because the schools pull your funding package after April 15, which tends to be a deterrent to switching.

None of the programs I applied to for master's or PhD had students pay an enrollment deposit. If I were you, OP, I would hold off on doing anything until April 15.

It really all depends on what your post-degree plans are. Until you tell us, we're all just guessing.

Have you visited both departments?

Another important thing is that "top program" varies by subfield even within disciplines. My department wouldn't be a top program if your interest is biogeomorphology. But if you want social theory, we're one of the best programs in the country. So I think that's why I think the entire question of what makes a top program is silly.

I'm in the social sciences. The summer is for reading, which can be done anywhere, teaching my own course, and conducting some preliminary dissertation fieldwork (location may vary). I'd imagine if you have good access to a library, you may be able to leave for the summer. Of course, summer teaching brings in income, which is why I do it.

This too varies by field. In my discipline, it is VERY common for master's students to receive funding from the department.

This really varies by department so it's difficult to answer. My program offers funding to MA and PhD students but all at the same time, so it isn't like MA students get the leftovers or anything like that.

There's an entire thread here where people post about their funding packages, including the discipline and whether the university is public/private. Why not look there and see if it answers your question?

I think what matters most is who will give you the attention, mentorship, and professional guidance you need.

You have to ask the program what their TAs do. In my program, TAs lead discussion sections, serve as graders, teach labs, and teach their own classes as instructor of record. So, it varies.

What's so unhelpful about it? The OP didn't specify a field and cutting off "top programs" at 5, 10, or 20 is pretty arbitrary. After all, maybe "top 20" is great in English but, in a discipline like mine that only has about 50 PhD programs in the US, "top 20" takes an entirely different meaning. The question "What is considered a top program?" from the title of the post is the one I answered. Rankings, publication stats, etc. don't matter if you're applying to a program that doesn't have faculty in your area of interest. Going to a "top 5" program is meaningless if you aren't going to have the support and atmosphere you need to work in. There are countless factors, hence the general answer I gave. Would you care to set the cutoff point for the OP, belowthree?

I'm pretty sure this has been discussed over in Officially Grads before. If you really want to ask this question, I suggest posting either there or in "Applications" with a new post.

At my private undergrad, we never had TAs teaching classes. They led discussion sections only. Sometimes programs don't use TAs because they don't have an undergrad program for which they'd need them.

Posts like this belong in "Meet and Greet".

A top program is the one that has the best faculty in your research area and other faculty that you can collaborate with. No published ranking scheme can tell you that.

Probably meant Yale undergrad. No one going there for undergrad has that much in loans because of their financial aid policies.

First of all, Arizona just met this week. Second, they sent emails to US applicants last year. The notifications were around March 20 last year, I think. I would be skeptical of anyone that got in last week... Third, the admissions with funding situation at Arizona is pretty bleak. Hope that helps.

Sometimes people get rejected then accepted months later. This is definitely far from the norm.

You'll probably get better answers in the City Guide section.