mesoarch

3 pages, 1.5 spacing

Mine are ranging 1100-1200 words

I think the department just lost far more funding than they anticipated, a lot of universities have been slimming down social sciences more dramatically than usual.

Yeah I'm sure Dr. Saturno's set, I had just heard some horror stories about students having their funding yanked after being in the program for a year or two. That started happening in the department where I got my Master's, and I'd rather avoid reliving that headache

As far as I know, there's nothing wrong with visiting before submitting your application. I visited the two state schools I'm applying to and both departments said they've had a pretty steady flow of visiting applicants already.

There's an app called GRE Vocab Genius made by Brainscape that is $9.99 and was worth every penny in my opinion

I was planning on applying to Boston as well but I started hearing a lot of stories about funding nightmares and people not being able to secure money they thought they'd get. Has anyone else heard anything, or know someone actually in the department?

Maya archaeology here - applying to Tulane, UT Austin, SMU, UNC, Harvard and U of Arizona

It's certainly not too late to write to POI's. I'm sure some people will disagree with this, but every professor I've spoken to has said not to include attachments in your initial e-mail. I've read here on the forums of people who attached their CV and had success, but my profs seemed to consider it more of an annoyance. I've been sending an e-mail with just 2-3 sentences summarizing my research interests and experience, then a couple of straight forward questions like if they're accepting students or other faculty they think may align with my interests, and I've had a great success rate - 7 responses out of 8 contacted. 1 was the generic "looking forward to your application" response, 2 gave info that helped me scratch programs off my list, and 4 have turned into longer exchanges.