tommy421

If you want to live near campus, you can either live in one of the apartment buildings over on Virginia Avenue (lots of noisy undergrads, though), look for an efficiency/room share on one of the streets off of Euclid Avenue or try graduate student housing. Most of the available houses for next academic year have already been leased. There are plenty of cheap options further away from campus, but commuting can be a nightmare and they are not always terribly nice. For any more information, just let me know.

imisscoffee, you should definitely come visit, we will show you a good time. Let the director know and he will try and find someone for you to stay with, although you should definitely come soon. It really is the place to be if you are into social theory. I don't know if you were given a deadline to make a decision, but I think they want all decisions made by April 15, so I wouldn't hold out for info to come after that. If there is anything you need to know, be sure to contact the director of graduate studies. Good luck.

Congrats, Geohomme. Hopefully we will soon here from the other's school and this is not a sign that only the admits heard first.

Just got into Kentucky with full funding. Would have been pretty embarrassing to get rejected by my own school.

They are meeting again tomorrow to finalize decisions, so I would say Tuesday at the earliest.

Michigan State told me Tuesday and Syracuse said they would at least have decisions made by then, so maybe a couple.

Got a rejection letter from Clark. At least this time it was a real letter instead of just a two sentence email that I got two years ago. They said I had, "fine qualifications," whatever that means. Also, for other Kentucky applicants, admissions committee met this week and are meeting again next Monday to finalize everything. They want to have all the decisions out before AAG starts so that they can meet up with admitted students at the conference.

My research interest is in biofuels, but I am still trying to decide which region to focus on (I have been learning Portuguese, but am far from fluent). Syracuse seems to have quite a few good resource geographers (Matt Huber, Farhana Sultana, Tom Perreault) and of course, I would be interested in at least taking a class with Don Mitchell. I've also met Jamie Winders a few times because she still comes to visit down here in Kentucky, although our interests don't really overlap.

So Geohomme, does this mean that you also have inside knowledge about Syracuse?

Agreed Geohomme, don't quite know why that is. Good choice of schools. I've heard that Rutgers is having very bad financial problems since nearly all of their state funding has been cut, so they can't really offer very much funding. I think this is probably going to be true at quite a few state schools for the next few years.

Kentucky is a good place to be if you are doing urban geography, especially urban economic. They are also quite strong in social theory and I would advise you that it is probably not your place if you are not into critical geography. Political ecology not so much and physical geography, forget it. There are people here doing these things, but there are very few professors in these areas, so you really have to work hard to make it happen. That's probably the main reason I am heavily leaning towards going elsewhere. All in all though, it's not a bad place, but you will realize very quickly that it is a very good department in a not very good university, one that doesn't take academics, especially outside of medicine and business, seriously.

So where is everyone applying this year? I am at Kentucky currently and applying for P.hD. programs at Kentucky, Penn State, Clark, Minnesota, Syracuse and Michigan State.

Hi Pinecone, I had very similar stats to yours when I applied last year (3.6 GPA, V620 Q640 and AW4). I was accepted at Kentucky (which is where I am right now) and I was rejected at Arizona. I also got rejected at Clark, Syracuse, Minnesota, Rutgers and Washington and I was put on the second-tier wait list at Penn State. From what I heard, the Arizona and Rutgers ones were largely based on the fact that they had almost no funding, since the stats that I had were significantly higher than what they reported on their website. I don't know if funding is any different this year (I would venture it might be even worse). There is one P.hD. student at UK who got his master's at Kansas, which based upon what he has implied, it is easier to get into and not as rigorous as UK. I know one person who applied to UNC, who had slightly worse stats than I did, and she didn't get in. Schools do tend to look at P.hD. first, especially in terms of funding. I regretted not applying to some schools that I absolutely knew that I would get into. From what I hear, it is much easier to trade up to a top tier P.hD. after your master's than it can be to get in at the master's level. Hope this helps. Tom

Going to Kentucky, still waiting on funding, but was told I am near the top of the waitlist for that, so fingers crossed.

I think that I probably will, most likely just Wednesday through Friday. I am kind of conflicted about the Krugman invite, since he claims to do "geography" when he really doesn't seem to understand very much about it. He actually had the balls to edit an "economic geography" anthology that had no geographers in it.