nrunyan

I've spent four years as an undergrad in Fayetteville and I think it's a nice place to live and study. It's a small-ish college town in the mid-south with a big-time college sports program, which makes for an interesting combination of "vibes". Football is HUGE around here. Games are on Saturdays in the Fall semester, so be prepared for an extra influx of traffic and people. The football stadium holds over 70,000 fans (which is even on the small side for an SEC school like Arkansas) and it's usually full to capacity. I would recommend avoiding campus on game days.... Fayetteville, to me, gives off sort of a hippie vibe. Maybe it's just the people I tend to encounter, but it certainly seems like there are more vegan, Buddhist, peace activist, anarcho-syndicalist types than one might expect to find at a large, public university in the South. But it's fun. You can meet all sorts of people of all different life-styles. I've met Buddhist monks and Mormon missionaries, Young Republicans and Green Party Congressional candidates. As previous posters have mentioned Dickson Street is the place to go for food and drink and live music. I've not done much socially in my time here, but the town is not dead by any means. The cost of living isn't too bad. I've never really paid attention to that sort of thing until I moved off campus this year, but apparently it's pretty good relative to the rest of the country. I'm living in a 1 bedroom apartment about a 10 minute walk from the very center of campus and rent is $410 including water. Electricity runs about $25/month on average. I have free Wi-Fi access and don't use a TV, so I couldn't tell you about that. From what I hear, my rent is pretty reasonable for the location I'm in. It's really close to campus, very well maintained, clean, and no sketchy folk hanging about. Oh, and there's a well-shaded park and bike trail across the street from me, too! Arkansas has an 11% sales tax on food. I don't know what kind of funding you have from your department, but you shouldn't have to live in abject poverty. This is a good place to start looking for off-campus housing: http://offcampushousing.uark.edu/ The university maintains a pretty efficient bus line which runs all over campus and goes into town. It's definitely easier to have car, and outside of campus it's definitely not pedestrian friendly, but campus itself is actually very easy to get around. For the main public university in the state, it's probably about a 20 or 25 minute walk from one end of campus to the other. It's definitely a hilly area, though, so riding your bike around campus might be an interesting experience. Here's a link to the bus line, including videos of each route: http://parking.uark.edu/67.htm I hope this helps. I think you'll enjoy Fayetteville!

I'm going into my final year as an undergraduate for degrees in History and Classical Studies and I'm considering applying to Notre Dame for a master's degree. There are two programs that interest me- the MA in Early Christian Studies (through their Classics dept.) and the Master of Theological Studies (MTS), in which case I would choose their 'History of Christianity' option. Both programs involve Latin and Greek and French and German, but I feel like the Early Christian Studies program has more rigorous ancient language requirements, which I suppose is appropriate for a Classics program. I'm not sure if I want to go onto to a PhD program, so I would like for my MA to be as rigorous and scholarly as possible (regarding languages, especially) in order to market myself as a potential high school teacher of history, Latin, or (if I were at a private school) religion/theology- even though I've been doing quite a bit of undergraduate work on the history of Christianity, I'm starting to become more and more interested in the history of the big, world religions.... I'm studying Hindi right now and would like to branch out into Sanskrit someday. So, what program should I go for if I want to have rigorous training in ancient languages and the history of religion(s) but I'm not dead-set on going onto a PhD? And does anyone know of similar MA-level programs I should consider that would help me transition into a PhD program if I finally decided to take the academic plunge? Should I be considering divinity schools? Thanks for reading!