coyabean

I had a real life friend find me here, too. I took down all of my blog posts. I don't know why but I just don't want all of this exposed and spilling over into real life. It's been weird.

Awwww, honey. If I was there and, you know, not some disembodied e-person we'd totally hug this out. Not true for me. I got an email with subject "FW: Decision Notification" that was an acceptance. I thought, with that subject line, that it was surely a rejection.

I ditto the above about taking advantage of an uncommonly responsive prof. Now is probably not the time to make a case to be reconsidered. It won't help and it wastes a great opportunity to get first-hand feedback on your app. I had a spotty UG, too, so I think that may be less of a problem than the SOP? The thing with Anthro is that it has one of the highest time-to-completion degree averages (some schools, literally, TEN YEARS!) and I think that in this tight environment schools are looking for a hyper-focused statement to offset that trend. And it could well be that any concerns they had about your SOP you can already answer but it just didn't translate to the page. And anthropologists do seem to be a jealous sort like lily said. So anything to show a commitment to the field is helpful. Join student chapters of all the biggies -- AAA, SFAA, etc. -- and put it on your CV and in your SOP. And I second the master's advice. Several of the Anthro folks I did informational interviews with last summer took the master's route. :/ Again, that looooooong timeline for anthro.

LOL good one My mentor just told me last week that, God willing, I will never, ever, ever, ever have to apply to school again. And it hit me! I look forward to feeling like a productive adult with an opinion that matters. And a new address.

I'm also interested in dept feedback.

My experience: And a good primer: http://chronicle.com/article/How-to-Stand-Out-in-Your/64153/

Ditto all of the above. And keep in mind that bad credit is not new and people have been living somewhere, so, it's possible. You just need to clue into the local options. One, check your own credit. Depending on the age of your debt your score may not be as bad as you think. And you can actually have good luck with large property mgmt companies because they can absorb loss easier and are usually more market driven because they have so many units to fill. The worse case scenario is needing a large deposit -- one to two months up front. Be honest. The good thing about the current economy is that bad credit has lost some of its stigma. Everyone is having problems. I see signs up in my town all the time nowadays with "recession" specials; read: we consider more than your credit score. I also suggest entering "credit" into the CL search for your city. Some places market themselves as credit friendly on there especially when they are desperate to rent. And they won't say it to the general public but leasing agents will put out a temporary ad on CL. Also, find a local apartment relocation specialist. They know the complexes that are more negotiable and you usually don't pay them; they are paid by the company once you sign a lease. If all else fails get dressed up, explain your situation to some people at school and work the referral network. I doubt that a graduate student is going to be turned out. The alumni network is useful for things like this.

My position isn't exactly similar but I'll hi-jack your post anyway. I left a job making 50k in North Carolina to go back to school full time. With a part time job and fin aid refunds I think I immediately lost 38k/year of income. I bit the bullet and got a roommate. It's easy to say "get five roommates and live in a paint can! this is an investment!" but I understand being older and having concerns about the viability of that. The biggest adjustment is not sitting on the couch in my underwear. That one hurts. But its mostly worked out ok. I opted for one of those new apartment complex exclusively for students deals. First, separate leases means less hassle and its all inclusive of utilities/cable/internet. Perhaps you could check for one of those? Campus Communities owns the biggest, I think. However, I've seen similar arrangements in small, privately owned apt complexes near Universities. Fixed utility costs is a tremendous relief -- easier budgeting and less stress about keeping up with due dates and such. I also like the idea of another poster about freelancing if that is possible in your field. I was a copywriter -- among other things -- in a former life and I find one off gigs from elance, craigslist and former clients/employers. Also I transferred those skills to the current market. I'll do line editing of papers, grantwriting, anything for a stipend. My mentor calls himself a citation ho -- "i'll do anything for a citation!" -- and he recently told me that I'm a stipend ho. Be a stipend ho. It rarely hurts and it won't shame your mother. But, we'll see how this all goes for me in a few months! I'm moving to a pricier city and fighting hard to afford a one bedroom. I have to decide if $1k/mth with all utilities included is worth it to me. :/ ETA: I checked and quick search yielded: http://www.forrent.com/apartment-community-profile/1000005888.php. These are similar to what I live in. I don't know if its feasible for a couple though.

You win the internet for the Soul on Ice reference! My inner revolutionary is pleased.

Actually I have found locks to be very common among black academics, particularly women who, I think, are striving for ease in a busy schedule. I don't see many non-black people with them anywhere much less academia. But I can't imagine it being much of a problem.

I received a call the following week BUT I was told it could be as late as any time this month. And I don't think all the acceptances found out that early. There were some deadline considerations for fellowship noms. I think that kind of determines the responses as well as the relationship between the department and the grad school and all of their respective demands and deadlines.

Good stuff. A few questions and comments: 1. Re: keeping up with news releases about your Uni's plans might I suggest setting up google alerts? That's what I've done. I get an email digest of all the news about the schools on my list. It is very enlightening. Some of it -- like budget cuts -- isn't exactly going to be on the Uni's website. 2. Can your TA stipend be reduced if your letter states the amount and length of term? Like mine says something along the lines of "annual stipend of $17,500 for five years not inclusive of any additional fellowship awards." Can they change that? 3. Any feedback on differences between private and public? Would you say now is a good time to privilege private schools in our decision making process?

ditto I had the exact same experience. It's only a day or so after when they said it would be. Give it at least a week. The administrative stuff seems to take the longest. I think mine was a week later than I was told? But I'd just let it go awhile longer. Not only did I not want to bug people, but I did not want to seem overanxious. With an offer you finally get some power in this situation. I didn't want to undermine that by being too eager. And actually that's exactly what it probably is. My delay was due to being nominated for a University wide fellowship and I think they want to know how things are going to shake out before putting it all in writing. If they don't they'll just have to rewrite it after such decisions are made. Plus, it's a legally binding document. Those kinds of things, particularly the money part, often needs lots of eyes before it goes out.

Which is why I feel particularly blessed to even have an option.

Blame my inner philosopher but I found this a fascinating read. Cut and pasted for those without subscription access. On Lecturing in a Prison, Where Minds Are Free By Jefferson Cowie On a sweltering afternoon last August, I had the professional thrill of giving one of the kickoff lectures of Cornell's New Student Reading Project, an annual effort to knit the entire campus together in the shared intellectual experience of reading a single book. The uncomfortably hot crowd of thousands of students and faculty members assembled in the field house was the largest gathering I had ever addressed, complete with big-screen projections of the lecturers, like academic rock stars, floating over the stage. The topic was close to my heart: my favorite character, Tom Joad, grappling with the teachings of Preacher Casey, from one of my favorite books, John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. The issues of migration and family, environment and social crisis, economic calamity and occupational justice, it seemed to me, made the book extraordinarily relevant to the problems of today. Then in October, I gave the talk again. I shivered more from nervousness than the cool autumn air as I entered another strangely cavernous space—an almost 200-year-old maximum-security prison, Auburn Correctional Facility. Behind fortresslike walls rising above the small, historic town of Auburn, the state of New York incarcerates its murderers, thieves, and gangsters; put the first electric chair to use; and still stamps out license plates. As I worked my way through security to the prison chapel, I couldn't help recalling that the central characters of my talk had done time for murder and spent much of the book in violent scrapes with the law, much like those people I was about to address. On the Cornell campus, every time I'd attended the huge opening of the reading project, I was struck by the students' indifference and boredom. Whether the book was by Sophocles or Garry Wills, F. Scott Fitzgerald or Jared Diamond, the students seemed incapable of engaging with the lectures. A colleague blogged: "I saw students asleep, milling about, talking on their cellphones, texting, talking and laughing with others, and what seemed to be a precious few engaged by the presentations." The students' restlessness led him to ask them, "What are you doing here at Cornell?" The inmates who filtered into the prison chapel, on the other hand, knew exactly what they were doing at Auburn Correctional Facility: hard time, often for violent crimes they had committed when they were quite young. I arrived skeptical that my presentation would mean anything to them; I was motivated more by curiosity and civic obligation than grand pedagogic hopes. Clearly, these guys had bigger problems than literature and history. The 60 inmates enrolled in the Cornell Prison Education Program were, in contrast to the Cornell students, hardly bored, restless, or indifferent. They were on fire. They sat attentively without PowerPoint photos to keep them entertained, autumn walks through the gorges to look forward to, or fancy careers to anticipate. They occasionally tossed questions to me during my talk, testing my mettle. Then, when I finished, their hands shot up. For the next hour, I got a vigorous intellectual workout—an exhausting barrage of questions any teacher would relish. The questions came from every direction. How could Tom Joad, asked one, be the quintessential American working-class hero (as I had suggested) if Steinbeck had ignored the Asian and Mexican workers who had done most of the agricultural labor in California? Another, responding to how land got used in Oklahoma and California, asked if the constitutional system functioned in a way that enforced inequality. When I showed how Okie iconography was used in advertising and television in the postwar era, another asked if advertising and consumption were designed to prevent popular revolts. An inmate even asked whether the dollar was grounded in human labor, and whether human labor can be considered a commodity like any other. One prisoner asked a multipart question that I did not fully grasp. I dismissed part of it and moved on, but his hand went back up. Though it was rough around the edges, in academic parlance his question was this: Was the type of civil society that Preacher Casey struggled for ("Maybe all men got one big soul everybody's a part of") possible, given the social atomization brought about by computers and technology? I turned my head to the program's director, Jim Schechter, with an incredulous look—was this for real? Before the night was over, the inmates' questions had me delving into constitutional theory, Lockean property rights, spirituality, political dissent, the tensions between civil rights and economic rights, and the use of state power. Granted, there were a lot of grandstanding, polemics, and semiarticulated ideas floating around, but these guys were serious about what they were doing. At one point, carried away with the moment, I even delivered a spontaneous mini-lecture on Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks, which had been scrawled on scraps of paper while he was imprisoned in Fascist Italy. Gramsci tried to figure out, I told the prisoners, how market culture creates a common sense that ensures the consent of the governed. They murmured. They nodded. They got it. Rarely had I felt so alive as a teacher. After each of the big panels at Cornell, a small handful of the several thousand students would come up to ask the panelists follow-up questions. In fact, the open-mike question period of previous years had been eliminated because the bulk of students used the opportunity to make a quick exit. After the prison talk, in contrast, the men filed up to introduce themselves, thank me for coming, and ask if I'd teach a class in the program. Most simply looked me in the eye with affirmation, shook my hand, and headed back to their cells. Their humility was humbling. I wondered if it was simply the boredom and constraint of prison life that had the prison students so motivated; the well-prepped Cornell kids, of course, had every media device and distraction imaginable to draw them away from us droning professors. Maybe the Cornell students had worked so hard to get in that they now felt complacent, having made the grade. Maybe the Cornell kids were indifferent because the reading project was not a graded assignment. Yet the prisoners had also studied hard to get into the prison-education program. They were not simply looking for ways to pass time. They had other things to distract them if they chose, and they attended graded classes as well. My lecture had been purely voluntary for them. The experience at Auburn got me thinking about entitlement, motivation, and the life of the mind. It forced me to ask troubling questions about status and reward in our academic system. It made me wonder what I was doing with my life and my career, now in midpassage. The contrast between the free minds of the imprisoned bodies at Auburn and the imprisoned minds of the free bodies among some of the nation's most gifted college students could not have been more stark. Marcus Rediker, a visiting scholar at Cornell last year, also gave a lecture at Auburn, on slave ships. I heard that he rocked the house (the inmates do, after all, call Auburn the "slave ship"). Summing up his experience, he reported: "Most of all, I was impressed by the intelligence, the thoughtfulness, the engagement, the curiosity—in short, by the life of the mind—that I found among the people inside Auburn Prison. That mind, I am pleased to report, cannot be imprisoned." I wondered what the bars were made of that seemed to imprison my Cornell students, and what it would take for them to begin emancipating themselves. Jefferson Cowie is an associate professor of history at Cornell University. His latest book, Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class, is due out from the New Press in September.

Hahaha, good point. Basically the main things that are keeping me from outright applying for PhD programs are: 1. I have no desire to spend my career in academia (while I have all the respect in the world for teachers and professors, I have little patience and I can see myself turning into one of those crappy bitchy professors that students are scared of lol) Good for you for knowing that about yourself. It's those who don't figure that out that we should worry about. 2. While I love to learn, I'm starting to feel that I'm at the end of my rope. I seriously feel like I can knock out 2-3 more years of school so that I can work in the field or lab for more money - I'm just getting more and more ready to work. Again, good for knowing thyself! 3. Judge if you must, but personally it's becoming very important for me to eventually have a family, and I don't care about a PhD enough to put it off/give it up altogether. Who's to judge?! Those of us who cannot procreate until the day we die must consider these things. Having a family is a very noble thing. Although if it turns out I do want a PhD, I would love to get it at this school. *Sigh* I'd just feel like I'm cheating them out of money if I take the fellowship knowing full well I only want a MS lol. Here's the thing. You did not lie to them. If you knew all of this and had not articulated it that would be "cheating them out of money." At this point they are GIVING you their money. Like that infamous gift horse I always hear of but never seems to come bearing ME any gifts, but I digress. A free MS is a GIFT! And you should not feel in any way guilty for taking someone up on a bet with poor odds (I am finding it hard to imagine the circumstances where a program telling you to take their money and leave if you must is ever a good deal for them, but, hey, that's not your job). The odds in life will be stacked against you enough. Take the breaks where you can get them.

These days the odds of getting a job are as bad as getting a fully funded offer so I would take this as a GREAT accomplishment!

What I've heard from some very successful people: Being liked and wanted is hard to trump. When people like you and are interested, genuinely, in your research they go above and beyond to help you be successful, i.e. giving you a first authorship, introducing you to important people, recommending you for opportunities. Harvard is a wonderful school with a great reputation (understatement much?) but will you have someone there that is personally invested in your success? Are they willing to let you shine? Or, will you be fighting for the attention of famous people that are more invested in their own career? Having Harvard on your resume is great but having a personal enthusiastic recommendation from a mentor intimately aware of your work and abilities is the gold standard. If you can get that at both schools then, by all means, choose Harvard. The world is a prestige whore and maybe it'll occasionally get you a phone number at the club. But, if you feel like you'd have a team at the State school don't discount that. And another friend said it more directly: Graduate school sucks ass but it sucks much less when you like the people you are working with.

I hear you. I just add it to the long list of daily slights I have to navigate thanks to a range of -isms and keep it moving. My plan is to have a CV that negates all of that one day. But, yeah, it's a bummer. I'm an "extra" personality. I don't mean to be but I yam what I yam. I like sparkles and bright red shoes and belts and accessories and I wear them all with NO sense of irony. LOL I'm definitely not a Banana Republic type of person. I make conscious decisions for these types of things to take it down a notch...or three. However, I have a line. At a conference last summer a mentor -- with the best of intentions, I know -- suggested I wear my hair slicked back and all one muted color. Um. I would have felt like a ogre. I rebelled totally! A bright orange shell, 'ethnic' earrings and BANGS! LOL I still rocked it. The trick is to be louder than your outfit. LOL

I will have to disagree. I was counseled to do this by a mentor - tenured professional -- and it worked out well enough. I got two rejects that they were just holding out of the way and one unofficial admit. My friend did it and got an admit from the program that was holding out and a email that basically said, "please don't accept an offer before i get back with you!" 48 hours later they emailed her an acceptance and told her what they are trying to get her financially. So, my experience is that this is normal. Once you have an offer you don't have much to lose, unless you are not committed to the idea of going to that school. OP, it's all in how you ask. Very nicely say that due to the tough financial decisions many programs are being forced to make an existing offer from ABC must be responded to fairly soon. However, you are very excited about XYZ's program and would like to consider all of your options equally. Do they know when you might expect to hear from them. Whether its an acceptance or a rejection at least you'll have fewer questions about "what if". The aim here is to have as much info as possible. Good luck.

I just wanted to add to some of the excellent advice above. With your stats there is something in your packet that needs to be revised. It can be difficult figuring out what that is without some outside help. You mentioned that you are gainfully employed. That gives you a huge advantage -- you can afford services! I would contact someone in each department you applied to and see if anyone is willing to give you detailed feedback. Sometimes you find someone kind enough to help. Barring that working out yours is one of the rare cases that I think justifies a professional grad app service. Ask around to see which is reputable -- I have only heard of Ivy and one other, but i'm sure each field has its experts -- and have them give your app a look. A small investment could prove very beneficial in your case.

I had lots of hits from my spoken word days and then a ream of "letters to the editor" that, I'm sure, make me look insane! LOL Or, very into my civic duties. It depends on your perspective. I tried to add some stuff for balance.

I am less worried about harried adcomms than I am future peers googling and coming across something unsavory. And exes. I'm terrified of being found by exes. So, I lock everything up. A few months ago I also started scrubbing the web on my behalf. You might want to try creating some profiles to pad the google results for your name.

As a refugee law school admissions board member I feel safe saying that seadub might want to reconsider his/her field. You would fit in with the law school culture extremely well, and I do not mean that facetiously at all. You should look into it.

Yeah, one of the reasons I took my posts down a notch is that I was told that I was being notified before all the other decisions had been finalized (for f'ship purposes). And to the matter of professors not telling you before it's "official" for fear of egg on their face, I doubt that's an issue. If someone from a program communicates with you about admission there's been a group decision to do so; they're just the one to contact you. Everyone I know in real life that applied this year have been contacted informally first -- some weeks ahead of the letter. If a place wants you then they want to be on your mind early in the process or a prof liked you and wants to be the one to tell you.