rising_star

I think any grad student who tries to eat out for every meal is living beyond his or her means.

I think it should in some ways. The decision you make now will affect the life you have later. So that's a good thing to have in mind. Get a sense of the placement record of your potential advisors. Find out if their graduate students have gotten external funding for their research. Do they publish with their graduate students / do their graduate students publish while in school? These things will help you figure out if the lower-ranked school is better for you than top-notch school. P.S. I totally understand where you're coming from with the weather considerations. I definitely consider weather, mostly because cold weather affects my health negatively. But I'd say money may be more important than weather. Plus, if you go to school someplace warm, there are more distractions from doing work (you'd be amazed at how many afternoons of reading I piss away when it's 78 and sunny out).

It might've been a bit more but she definitely spent less than $10/day on food. I've never spent that much on food in my life. If you eat on $10/day as a grad student, you're living beyond your means, I think. I typically spend about $25/week on groceries and maybe an additional $10 eating out. That averages to $5/day for food...

My sister lived in Stanford on less than this. She had a 1 bedroom furnished apartment and it cost her $1050/month. She lived right near campus and mostly used her bike to get around though she did have a car for big grocery trips and that sort of thing. So I'd say that $22.5K/year is definitely liveable. I think my sister spent right around $15-16K/year on living, including her housing, while she was out there. Also, she lived in the grad housing apartments her first year and they weren't really that bad from what I remember when I visited her. No idea about their cost though.

Ask them if they would like to see additional materials from you.

Nope, not really. Well, at some schools yes but in lots of places human geography is rooted in fieldwork and qualitative research.

It wouldn't work out. You all tend to turn your noses up at qualitative and mixed methods approaches, which are the basis of my research.

Payroll deduction.

I've never been in graduate housing before but it's definitely affordable compared to other things in the area. A lot depends on whether it's Butler Apts, the tower things, or the Old Grad College building... Dunno if you'd want to do meal plan unless you live in the more dorm-like one (the Old Grad College or whatever it's called that's on the golf course) but the campus food is outstanding. Yes, you need a car to do grocery shopping though the bus picks up on Nassau St and will drop you off right at either Shop-Rite or Wegman's (though obviously this is easier with a car). Undergrads rule the campus and generally think grad students are weird.

LOL, maybe we'll both be Jayhawks? Dmh, would you pick Kansas over MSU?

I think he might mean external funding.

Committing to 20 hours often doesn't mean actually working 20 hours. Esp if you're grading papers and stuff for someone else's class. There are busy times and slow times and I think the idea is that on average you will do 20 hours...

Intaglio5, I applied to TFA, made it through the interview, and realized at the interview that they were going to reject me. Why? Because I answered the question, "Would you quit for any reason?" with honesty. I told the interviewer about my friend who had been physically threatened and actually hit by a middle-school student while doing the Baltimore City Teaching Fellows Program and said that if that happened, I'd quit. The look on her face told me right then that I should've lied and said "I'd never quit!" but, to be honest, I value my health and if someone threatened me with physical violence, I'd have to think twice about showing up every single day. I think if I'd lied, I would've stood a better chance...

Okay, when I visited for master's, the schools provided me with an individual hotel room. On one of those, they took care of all of the arrangements and I just had to catch a shuttle to the hotel then check-in and there was an individual room for me. This week I'm going on a visit and staying at a bed and breakfast (I could afford it with the reimbursement they're giving me). For another visit, I'm staying with current graduate students just because the reimbursement isn't enough for airfare + hotel. My preference would be to have an actual visit weekend with my own hotel room that would give me the chance to get to meet potential cohort-mates but have a place to retreat that's all mine.

Rider and TCNJ are not far away. I know TCNJ is a public school so it should be affordable. Rutgers would be one stop north on NJ Transit.

I'd just go ahead and start scheduling things and work them in as necessary. Are the schools helping pay for your visits at all?

Golden Age lit was my fave. I wrote a huge paper on the picaresque novel comparing Lazarillo de Tormes and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. Good luck!

I don't think you'll regret the UW choice, FWIW. They're a great school, particularly in area studies. I almost went there to do African studies stuff and there Asian studies blows the African stuff out of the water. Plus, UW is respected by plenty of employers. So, like I said, I think it's a great choice. But remember, your MA is what you make it. I'm having success with PhD apps, not because I go to a big name school or work with a well-known advisor, but because I've been doing all kinds of things (co-organizing sessions at the national conference, doing some interesting research in two different areas, co-PI on a grant w/another grad student, great GPA, presenting at conferences). Those things help. As does what I imagine was a phenomenal letter that my advisor wrote. Make those connections and you'll be fine.

It's not so bad if you get a master's while you're there. In my discipline, it's pretty common to do a MA at one school and a PhD at another. I would definitely visit the campus and ask as many questions as you can to get a better idea about what's up with those wild cards.

Why freak out if you still haven't heard from two programs? And why did you apply to a program you don't want to attend?

Have you visited either campus? Have you talked about issues of advisor accessibility, particularly when you're in the fieldwork stage? Maybe it comes down to a factor like required coursework, number/sequence of comprehensive exams, or... weather?

You don't have to give them an answer before April 15 though it's polite to turn them down before then if you already know you won't go. You could also tell the folks that you're waiting to hear from other schools before you make a decision so you can fully consider all of your options.

I think you'd be crazy to pass up a full ride for a "maybe/what-if". If anything, go to the school and if you hate it, leave with a MA and apply to other top 25 programs.

Going to school B would be silly. I'd go to other factors beyond the advisor to decide between Schools A and C. What's the funding like? The potential cohort? Is the student atmosphere what you'd like? Course offerings? Place where you'd be living? External funding record for students (Fulbright, NSF-DDIs, etc)?

Hey Quarex, I'm going to describe how I found MA programs, since it'll maybe be more useful to you. I changed fields (from humanities to social sciences) and only had a vague clue of what I wanted to do my MA thesis on. There was no geography department and no geographers at my undergrad so I went about the search perhaps unconventionally. I didn't know what I was doing and I had no one to talk to. So, I used google. I found a list of pretty much every geography dept in the country on this website and it listed some of the program foci. So I used that and narrowed my search geographically. Then I looked up faculty and applied to the schools that really interested me (6). My criteria included warm weather and good football. I had no clue about rankings and, as it turned out, I got admitted to two top 15 programs with funding. So I'm at the lower-ranked of the two now because it was a better fit for me. My PhD search was much more traditional. I thought about programs that had good reputations at conferences, talked to faculty around my department and other graduate students, made email contact prior to applying, and applied to a total of 7 programs (including to do the PhD where I am now). In some ways, it was harder this time because I knew what I wanted to do, which eliminated a lot of programs. There aren't a lot of geographers doing fieldwork in Africa so I expanded my own interests to the Caribbean where, lo and behold, not a lot of geographers do fieldwork. *sigh* I played up the theoretical angle in my SOP and made it clear that while these regions and topics are of interest, I know that interests can change through coursework and stuff and that I'm open to that. (After all, I came to do a master's on development in Africa and ended up doing a case study of an American urban park.) I think presenting some flexibility and maybe focusing on a theoretical approach could help...