karennakamura

Always, always, always try to contact your POI before applying. The worst that can happen is that your e-mail falls into a black hole.  Before contacting your POI, make sure you have a pretty good idea of what you want to do -- and what your POI does. But speaking as a POI, I'd rather have an unprepared scholar contact me and walk them through putting an application together, than getting an application from someone who clearly needed more mentoring and wouldn't be able to get into programs with the portfolio they submitted.
Furthermore, with some programs receiving hundreds of applications, the first evaluation of applications is often made by faculty outside of your particular regional/topical specialty. If a POI knows to lookout for an application, they can often rescue someone who was passed over in the first round. But if they don't know about you, your application can get lost. This has happened at all the schools I've been at, so it's not particular to my current position.
 

Im an alum of the program. The cost of one year tuition only at UChicago is $49,644/year. Their offer of half covers ONLY tuition. It does not cover the $749/quarter in student fees, plus $1000/quarter in health insurance. Then cost of living in Hyde Park. I was in grad housing and paid $837/month in rent, $45 in electric, $100 in cable/internet, and about $300 in food.

I actually am an alum from the MAPSS program and in my experience there are pros and cons.
Lets start with the Pros:
You can ask for more money. I started with an offer of 1/3 tuition and leveraged it to a full-tuition scholarship with relative ease.
Its fast...I mean REALLY fast. I started in September of one year and 8.5 months later I graduated in June. Only about 10% of the cohort will manage to do it that quickly, the rest graduate in August and a few stragglers in December. In this time you take 9 graduate level courses and write a thesis. Your thesis is only an article length work that matches typical length for your field. Mine was about 70 pages long.
Uchicago is a big gun, big name school, and in my experience having it on my CV has opened doors academically.
You get LOTS of personal attention. All you want. If you don't then it truly is your fault. Preceptors and staff in the program are so helpful its kind of ridiculous. Faculty around the rest of the university however...well its a crapshoot.
The program is inter-disciplinary. I see this as a definite pro for several reasons. 1. You are surrounded by your cohort constantly and they all approach problem solving and research differently which helps you learn to think better. 2. You are free to take pretty much any class you want at UChicago regardless of dept. 3. You can find your thesis adviser from literally anywhere on campus as long as they are wiling to work with you.
MAPSS gives out lots of free pub nights, alcohol, food, and at the end of the year a super fancy lake cruise with an open bar. Not bad.
Finally, and the reason I went, I didn't like the offers I was getting and figured instead of taking a dead year why not super beef up my CV with a really fast MA from a really good school.
Now the Cons:
First I will speak to their "impressive" PhD placement stats. Yes 93% get fully funded offers....What they avoid telling you are the real stats. Your cohort will be about 130-ish people. Of that 130 fully 80-90% will weaken under the stress of the very accelerated program and decide not to chase the PhD. Of the remaining 10-20% of the class that then decides they still want a PhD they have a 93% offer rate. BUT, they don't tell you that they put extreme pressure on you to apply to TEN (yes 10) schools across a wide array of rankings virtually guaranteeing that someone will give you the offer that you want.
Their Career Services was a joke when I was there. They touted it as a headhunter service that would stop at nothing to find you amazing jobs. In reality all he did was lead powerpoint presentations on how to make a resume, and how to network by using linkedin, and the alumni association. He was absolutely worthless, and this is not just me speaking but everyone in my cohort that went to him found him to be less than useful. In the interest of fairness I should point out that he somehow got promoted and his replacement is said to be quite good at her job.
No one assists you in any way in finding an adviser. The Preceptors may give some suggestions on who to talk to and ask, but you are really on your own. Since your adviser comes from outside of the MAPSS program and its inter-disciplinary you will find yourself with the overwhelming task of searching the entire university to find someone that you want to work with and more importantly is wiling to work with you.
Professors are hit or miss, but one thing is constant. You're at UChicago and everyone there knows what a big deal that is and by proxy what a big deal they are. I actually had a professor once tell me in office hours when I asked for clarification on a point he brought up in class, and I quote, "I spent my entire life learning that, why should I just tell it to you?"  The profs that want to work with you, or have any sort of interest in you can be great. My adviser was seriously FANTASTIC, but if you run across one that is full of themselves, and there are plenty, expect a demeaning and humiliating encounter.
You will have to take a class called Perspectives in Social Sciences. This class...LOL...is an experience. They will tell you that it will be the toughest class you take at UChicago. I disagreed. It's basic regurgitation.
Hyde Park, as mentioned above, is Hyde Park. You're about a mile from the most violent neighborhood in the country (Englewood...aka Chi-raq) and it shows. While I was there, there was a serial mugger who was robbing about 20 people a week at gunpoint, a kidnapping, several shootings, and robberies. If you go to the lake, its pretty, if you can see it through the constant thick cloud of weed smoke that hangs in the air. Drugs are EVERYWHERE. Even walking through Nichols park to go to class I would see drug baggies, used needles...its nasty.
Speaking of nasty, graduate housing SUCKS. My apartment, and this is by no means an exaggeration, had: roaches, ants, rats, mice (yep both), centipedes, and my personal favorite...bedbugs..throw in the lack of AC and you have yourself a real party! Except in the winter where it is...COLD. I mean COOOOLD. Layer up...seriously it will save your life.
Lastly the social game...Ok, I went to UChicago expecting a much higher level of maturity in my cohort. In reality it was so much like high school it was annoying. Cliques (not just within disciplines), rampant hooking up, gossip, drama, etc.. It was like hanging out with a bunch of 17 year olds. The average age seemed to be about 22, and since I was the oldest in the cohort by about 10 years, I just had no tolerance for it. By the second quarter I ended up withdrawing from socializing with all but about 2 people since I could not stand the drama any longer. Even though none of the drama directly involved me its ALL that was talked about in the lounge...its just annoying.
 
Ultimately the decision is yours. Like I said, I got through it in 8.5 months, it can be done. Less than 9 months for a degree from one of the most prestigious schools in the world isn't bad. There are pros and cons to everything that you do. If given the decision to do it again, honestly, I probably would. I would just do it differently. I would NOT live in grad housing, I would have never attempted to socialize with most of the people I talked to and I would not have listened to the sales pitch from the program director. For me, the decision was easier because I didn't have to pay 50k to go there.
So there you have it, my honest assessment of the program...good, bad, or otherwise. What you should do is read these assessments that myself and my fellow alumni have posted, do you research, and figure out if this program is right for you and what you want. If it is, take it, if not...hell use it as leverage to get the offer that you do want.

I'm a MAPSS alum, and I just went through my admissions cycle for my PhD. More on that in a minute.

The post above with the information from another MAPSS alum is pretty spot on. I'll add some random thoughts to it. Overall, if you have a funded PhD offer, I'd go for it. If you don't have another option, or you have unfunded offers staring you in the face versus a MAPSS funding offer (I had a quite generous MAPSS offer and nothing else, so I had to take it), it's worth looking into. Yes it's a cash cow, but it can also do wonders for you.

-Yes, there tends to be cliques that form along disciplinary lines. It's just something that is bound to happen. You have your preceptor group, which will group you with other students who are doing roughly the same things, which then becomes this sort of recurring cast of characters that show up in all of your classes. My MAPSS cohort was unusually large, so we were simply everywhere. After a while, I began to wonder where all the actual PhD students were, because it seemed like all my classes were 75% MAPSS, 20% PhD, 5% random smattering of undergrads and other professional schools (law, business). My preceptor seemed to be steering a lot of people into the same classes, so we kind of formed this little cohort within ourselves, and ended up bouncing our work off of each other as the year went on. That helped.

-MAPSS is tough, but keep in mind it's not strictly a 9-month program. Yes, you have 3 quarters to do your 9 courses, but you have a year after the end of your final course term to turn in your thesis and still have a faculty reader. You can take even more time after that (met a few people who were doing just that), but then you don't get a faculty reader. Personally, I came into MAPSS with a fully-formed project that got even better the more I got my ass kicked by my profs, and I turned it in at the exact minimum amount of time. I was lucky. The stats, if I recall correctly, are like 20-25% finish in the 9 months, another 50% finish by the end of summer term (essentially gives you about six extra weeks to write), and the vast majority of the remaining 25% are done within the year. Really, it's not that hard to do, they want you to write a journal article-length thesis. Do good work, but don't get overwhelmed with it.

-Do know that MAPSS can be a difficult social experience. You're there for 9 months. It's intense, you're busy, and it's difficult to make close friendships when you're basically all scattered to the wind as soon as it's over anyway. By the time you really know people, you're done.

-Now having been through the PhD application process with them, and talking to my classmates about their experiences, it seems on the whole people have been less than pleased with the actual involvement MAPSS has with your applications versus how they sold us on what that support would be. The only thing they will actually do is have whoever the point person is for your discipline write you one of your letters of recommendation. IF, that is, you apply to 8-10 schools, and they approve of where you're applying. You'll go to a meeting during spring quarter where Professor MacAloon will get up and give a really intimidating speech about the process, they give you this document on what to do, and send you on your way. It wasn't the clearest document, I found it incredibly frustrating at times, but I ended up doing most of what they said and got exactly one acceptance (so far, but it's looking like that's it), which happened to be my dream program. I'm lucky. I wouldn't be surprised if some of my classmates weren't. I talked to some folks who were applying at like 15 schools, others as low as 7. MAPSS' reputation speaks for itself, but it still only gets you so far. If you're not ready, they'll tell you. But the odds are, if you do everything, if you're competent and do good work, and you finish your MA by the time the application season rolls around, they'll support you, and the statistics show you'll probably get a funded offer somewhere (remember, MAPSS stats reflect funded offers only).

-Do be prepared for the fact that MAPSS has a mixed reputation amongst the faculty. Most of the students are pretty cool about MAPSS folk, but the profs are another story. It took me 4-5 months to find a faculty advisor for my thesis, which was an incredibly frustrating and demeaning experience at times. I ended up finding someone who was absolutely wonderful and helped me immensely, but it was a happy accident to say the least. My preceptor was helpful, but not as much as was possible. I got bumped from a class because I was a MAPSS student, I tried fighting it, and was told basically that the prof was within her rights to do it. Some professors really like MAPSS kids, some of them absolutely do not.

-Hyde Park is Hyde Park. Don't worry about living there, it's perfectly fine and has a lot of great restaurants and bookstores and such, but do take the time to figure out how to get out. And allow yourself to do it. Chicago is so incredible, with so much going on, that it's not worth sequestering yourself on the south side. Go and explore. CTA is your friend, as is the weekend UC shuttle bus that stops at the Roosevelt L stop until like 3AM.

-I can say, finally, that my MAPSS experience ended up putting me in the position to be where I wanted to be, and I'm 100% glad I did it. But I was a bit of an odd case in that I had a project that was ready to go, and didn't have to worry about things like figuring out a topic and searching local archives to find a project, which is what a lot of people end up doing. I found the program to be incredibly frustrating at times, UC can be an extraordinarily cruel and cold place, but ultimately, it is what you make it. Don't allow yourself to get sucked up in the negativity that MAPSS engenders in some people, make sure you go to all the grad socials and preceptor group nights and milk every last free drink you can get out of it, don't spend too much time at the Reg (the library) if you don't have to, get in, get out, get your degree. Move on with your life.

I'll also say that for a lot of people, they go into MAPSS thinking they 100% want to get a PhD, and by the end of fall quarter, that number has probably dropped in half. It's a great way of trying out graduate work without having a 5+ year program staring you in the face. If you find out you hate it, finish up, and go to the real world. If you can't wait for more once you're done, all the better.

If I can be of any more help, feel free to ask. I'm a longtime lurker, didn't want to register, but I thought it might help if I did for this.

Always, always, always try to contact your POI before applying. The worst that can happen is that your e-mail falls into a black hole.  Before contacting your POI, make sure you have a pretty good idea of what you want to do -- and what your POI does. But speaking as a POI, I'd rather have an unprepared scholar contact me and walk them through putting an application together, than getting an application from someone who clearly needed more mentoring and wouldn't be able to get into programs with the portfolio they submitted.
Furthermore, with some programs receiving hundreds of applications, the first evaluation of applications is often made by faculty outside of your particular regional/topical specialty. If a POI knows to lookout for an application, they can often rescue someone who was passed over in the first round. But if they don't know about you, your application can get lost. This has happened at all the schools I've been at, so it's not particular to my current position.
 

Always, always, always try to contact your POI before applying. The worst that can happen is that your e-mail falls into a black hole.  Before contacting your POI, make sure you have a pretty good idea of what you want to do -- and what your POI does. But speaking as a POI, I'd rather have an unprepared scholar contact me and walk them through putting an application together, than getting an application from someone who clearly needed more mentoring and wouldn't be able to get into programs with the portfolio they submitted.
Furthermore, with some programs receiving hundreds of applications, the first evaluation of applications is often made by faculty outside of your particular regional/topical specialty. If a POI knows to lookout for an application, they can often rescue someone who was passed over in the first round. But if they don't know about you, your application can get lost. This has happened at all the schools I've been at, so it's not particular to my current position.