Tairy

I've been in the area house-hunting so I'm fairly aware of the situation. It's very typical to pay either first + security OR last, while a decent amount but not all request all 3 of those. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but considering the rent prices in this area, a little over 1k simply won't work. To rent a room in a house or something, you can expect to pay an average of say $900 (with several hundred dollars +/- of variance depending on number of roommates, utility situation, and so on) and generally a fair bit more for actual apartment buildings. As a thought experiment let's assume you arrive with $1200 to spend initially on housing. If you work very hard you might be able to wrangle yourself a room at around $700. You'll likely be asked for first month's rent plus either deposit or last month's, therefore $1400 up-front costs. Obviously you can't pay that, and this is about the cheapest possible scenario. As an alternative, there are places that rent "month to month" as they call it which often don't ask for additional fees, but there don't seem to be tons of these offers and I find them a bit sketchy, but you'd be able to afford it. The housing market here is rough and you can't really expect to get something ideal, you have to scrounge around and take what's decent as quickly as possible. My impression is that it's safest to arrive with something like $3000, $2k would be sufficient if you absolutely insist on not trying for any place requesting all 3 initial fees. In any case you're going to need some supplementary money in all likelihood.

The website says that "The Department of Linguistics and Philosophy is in the process of creating a Master’s program in linguistics for speakers of threatened languages." so I don't think concrete answers exist for you yet.

On the first thing, if anyone thinks that, they are extremely and hilariously wrong. On the second, I can imagine this being true because in many ways linguistics is a little obscure, lots of people barely know it exists and many of those don't know what it does or why it's worth anything. That said, linguistics seems to be chugging along just fine in America for the meantime, though I don't know if the recent kerfuffle about the NSF potentially reducing "social science" funding will have a negative impact.

It's always tragic when a parent forgets to teach their child to speak so they grow up without a native language. You seem to have some command of English, at least.

I'm not surprised, the building under construction that's causing this mess was the biggest residence by a pretty large margin. It's a shame that 11 billion dollar endowment can't be used to somehow mitigate this.

I had almost every option on my list, cheaper things ranked higher. Like two of them were too expensive to bother ranking, though. I can't get over how much more difficult this is going to make my life. I don't understand how they expect anyone from outside the region to get there who doesn't have tons of time and thousands of dollars waiting around to dump into this stupid chore.

I failed to get an on-campus assignment at MIT so now I need to consider other options. In the spirit of making this take as few plane trips as possible, is it feasible to arrive a week or two before September, find a couch/motel/cave, and do my search then? Ideally I'd have contacted a few places to visit beforehand, of course. I'm a single person with pretty basic needs so I could make a decision pretty quickly, assuming there'd be openings. The MIT housing website seems to recommend doing something along those lines. It seems sort of sub-optimal to try doing that sort of thing too early, since I'd have to pay to fly there in advance to shop and then again to actually move, which I'd prefer not to do. And also because most of the listings I see for rooms and such aren't advertising openings in August/September yet. Maybe that'll change in a few weeks when the semester ends and people start thinking about this sort of thing with more immediacy.

Didn't get anything. I don't know what to do now.

Mhm, everything is together and my housing application is in. In my nosing around I noticed that the building currently unavailable for moving in due to construction is the largest one of them all by like a hundred people. That's not good news for availability, but apparently pre-existing residents can choose to remain there, and I hope they do! I've been hearing that MIT has a good amount of free food events between its own events and companies having recruitment events, and some of the residences seem to have various intermittent events and meetings that involve food. I don't expect to be starving but food you didn't pay for is always the best.

You've all heard wrong, McGill isn't the Harvard of Canada, Harvard is the McGill of the US! I welcome our new Canadian overlords.

Urgh, I got my MIT email etc. working and supposedly I have the web certificates installed properly, but I still can't access the housing application website. I only got this stuff today, so maybe I should wait and see if it works itself out before getting too annoyed.

Ha, I knew my declining UCLA would help you, thank me later! (Or right now, preferably with money.)

Ah, I'm glad you pointed out that Edgerton is unfurnished. That'd be annoying for me, so I can squarely place it lowest. I was looking stuff up today and saw that apparently last year 100% of incoming students were placed somewhere, so that's good, the question is how much more difficult it'll be this year since the one building is unavailable due to construction. Supposedly new students are prioritized, but I don't know what I'll do if I don't get something.

Good to know, why did it take so long for you to get the kereberos thing? Was it some external issue, or something I can expect to have to deal with? And do you need that to do the housing application? I see that you at least need an MIT ID and MIT web certificates installed. Personally, my stipend is such that literally any of the options are fine for me, with one exception: The 1 bedroom apartments in Edgerton are simply too much, so I figure that I'll simply rank that building lowest and hope that I don't happen to get assigned the literally only option that I can't manage. I hear Tang is crusty but the walk looks fine to me and it's cheap, so whatever, I don't expect to spend much of my time at home.

I'm currently starting to worry about housing, I plan to try to get MIT housing for the first year but it seems like this year might be tight, because one of the graduate residences is under construction. The issue for me is that I don't think I have the money to fly over and spend time apartment or room shopping or whatever. Is it feasible to try and do that soley over the internet? I'd figure that as long as I see some photos of the room and speak on the phone or skype or whatever with the relevant people it ought to be possible to set things up, and I suppose that international students and such have literally no option but to try and do this. I've never moved very far before, so this is all a bit overwhelming.