PhD applicant

Actually, the federal loans go up to an amount they figure that includes tuition/fees and living expenses, so they will calculate some amount, then deduct the scholarships/etc that you are already receiving through your school, then offer you the loan amount that covers what is left. So it does cover living expenses. At least this was my own personal experience with FAFSA. The amount they figured was pretty generous according to my own personal living habits, so I was given enough to cover rent, books, etc. garbage that goes along with being a student. If you live frugal it's plenty. I really advise against this though, because I now have a lot of money to pay back and it's depressing. I should edit all of this to say that there is a cap on total amounts you can receive through FAFSA and they will cap you at some point and cut you off, so keep an eye on that too.

I wonder how many people do this. I remember I was the only person who did my math homework in pen. People are like, why do you do that? And I was like, I don't know. I really don't know. Maybe because I'm an arrogant showoff.

Oh my god, someone should totally make rap songs out of the logical forms.

I'm worried now, that one day I will be teaching intro logic and I'll be like, what's the form? Modus Muthafuckin' Tollens! oops, sorry students, I had this forum I used to post on...

I'm sorry, but this had me laughing for about 20 seconds straight so...

I don't think it's just computer-related fields, at my school anyways. My guess about this is because the agreement our school has set up with Google says in our user agreement that we may change our Google site URL to our host school/~username, as you say, but it will remain serviced within Google. These terms are set up for both students and faculty, so it would apply to students who wish to self-advertise also. But this isn't something they advertise, I only noticed it because I read absolutely everything when I'm clicking 'agree' to terms of service, even if those terms are mandatory for attending school. Turns out, our school has purchased quite a lot of cool app usage for students. But I do know that our computer science department has even more stuff for the students in that department to play with; however, I believe their labs are open to regular students to utilize the platforms/programs as well. It amazes me how many resources are available on my campus that no one ever gets told about.

My school has quite a tech support team for faculty and students, so there's a lot of help available as well. They also have a lot of good ideas for resources, since all they do is nerd out all day long looking for apps and ways to help people, going to conferences and learning about new stuff. So I would say to look around your campus for some helpful staff as well. You never know what you are going to find, hidden in a forgotten floor of some crappy old building; a whole department of tech shut-ins that are just waiting to help you.

No one responded to me when I tried a thread about this so I'll respond to you. My university has an ePortfolio host they purchased for their students and faculty to use. I'm going to use it to build the most awesome self-promotional site of all time, download it as a package and then upload it to my own host of choice, probably Google.The only reason I want to Google is because they have better privacy options, and for my ePortfolio, which will have copious amounts of personal information, I only want to have it accessible to the people on the admissions committees. Then I can also hook it up to other things owned by Google, like a personal blog, which I would make public, and my YouTube account, which I will host and post videos from and can have a channel on for self-promotional activity. I've thought a lot about this and am still refining my plans, but needless to say I will be doing a lot of work over the summer. Google sites is a little clunky to manage, but there's an option to plug in raw html code, so I will probably be doing that quite a bit because I want my site to rock more than their templates allow for rock-age. I like some of the peeps sites on this forum, and I think it makes them look cool, so I'm doing it to look cool too. It may not work out that way, but that is my intention.

Vineyard, don't ever agree with me again. And now I need to go bash myself in the head with something.

I might get downvoted for this, but since I am frequently the only person willing to say it I'm going to: I'm female... I find 'female only' groups or forums just as prejudiced as 'male only' groups or forums and refuse to join them. I don't believe in an equal and opposite evil being the appropriate response to prejudice. So, I'm not joining and I think this might explain why others who are not comfortable saying this will not join either. I find this type of thing annoying. Discussing your issues in view of everyone, if you think they are worth talking about, will probably do much more to further your 'cause' than hiding in a closet. This is probably more expressive of my general distaste for minority OR majority exclusive groups than for anyone or group of people on this forum.

Hmmm. Zombie larping. This sounds far more reasonable to me than the normal larping. Not sure why.

Yeah, I mean, I think there was a healthy mix here. The knife throwing classes didn't exist in my area last time I wanted to join and I just found out from the spanish pirate wannabe mentioned above that they have them now so I really want to go to them. I actually don't mind the people who think they were born in the wrong century, as long as I know what kind of crazy I'm dealing with. I actually have more respect for this than for the freaks we have - I mean - I guess I should call them totally respectable, um, also nerds, who dress up like sci-fi, cartoon, or video game characters and run around in the park hitting each other with nerf weapons and pretending they are just as cool as the SCA. I can't remember what it's called but those kids scare me. I don't think anyone would be allowed to do this anymore...

That's funny, I used to fence too. Mine was competition foil fencing. I tried to get into the SCA (several years ago), but since I'm a girl I got a lot of neanderthalic pseudo-romantic posturing that really annoyed the shit out of me. I've been thinking about joining again over the summer, but I would just stick to the weapons-related activities this time.

One of my letter writers told me this after my apps were all submitted: "School X will be calling professor Y, because they know him, so you should make sure he knows you." I was like "Is that how it really works?" and he said "Yes, this is a small community. That's how this field works." I did not, in the end, take that advice. I didn't think much of professor Y, so did not want to kiss up to him, and did not. I'm sure when he got the call from school X, he had nothing good, or nothing at all to say, since I had never taken classes from him. This was the "bad" connection I had to the schools I applied to. And I won't be making this mistake again.

Yeah, well, it's also possible that my entire application (materials, etc.) just sucked.