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.

How long did it take you people to get your MIT ID and such? I only just accepted the offer earlier this week, apparently the process was started.

Anyone have a sense of which on-campus buildings are best? The gist of what I've read is that Tang is crappy (if cheap) but I haven't heard anything bad about the others. I can't look at the application yet because I haven't had an ID assigned (since I only just accepted) but unless I recall wrong, you select 3 options, do you not? In which case I need to decide whether to make my 3rd choice the crappy cheap Tang hall or the more expensive Warehouse.

Generic everyday stuff, but my field is pretty informal and people don't care that much.

I'm currently starting to stress about housing. I'm thinking about just applying for the on-campus graduate student housing, since the prices (unless you get a single-occupancy assignment where the cost isn't split between roommates) don't seem much higher than the general costs in the area, and because apparently you're basically guaranteed to get something as an incoming student. The downside is that you only get to put in your preferences and take what they give you, and pay $250 if you want to decline the assignment. Shopping around for good deals seems too hard to do without actually being in the area to meet people and look at places, though. Even if I get a crappy on-campus assignment for the first year it'll be easier to move out for the next year since I'll be there, I figure, and I expect that I won't be in the place much regardless, except to sleep.

As a chronic overthinker, I think you're overthinking it. Not everyone thinks it's necessary to respond to things like that, especially if the content of it was basically just "thanks" without anything specific to respond to or something.

This, I got into about everything from the upper half of my list, but nothing from the lower half. I think this stems from the importance of research fit: My top choices were strong programs that were relevant to my interests, while my lower choices were places that I didn't have much of an affinity for but I applied to because they are statistically easier to get into. While I couldn't have know that things would go that way, something I likely did right was not bothering to apply to strong programs with which I did not have much of a match in research interests, I'm sure I would have been rejected from any of those.

What I've gathered from the graduate school application process and seeing other people's results is that in terms of PhD acceptances, where exactly you went to school means much less than the quality of your work and your interests. An MA from a prestigious school is, in of itself, not that influential to your application. Therefore I think that if you aren't very happy with your PhD prospects now, you're better off trying to improve your application over the next year and not take on a tenth of a million in debt. Especially if you'd need to take on debt for the PhD offer you have now anyway. I would try again the next application cycle and aim for getting a funded PhD offer so that at least you don't need to indebt-en yourself for your further education.

I expect to be, I have one visit to another place arranged that I plan to attend before I commit, but if I'm honest I'd have to have my mind blown to not accept to MIT. I also recently visited and felt very good about everything, except that apparently the summers are miserably humid.

This appears to have happened to me. For this school I had gotten a call from their DGS that I was being "recommended for admission" and even attended the open house, but not too long ago I got a rejection from the graduate school saying that my "application for graduate status has not been approved". Some parts of my record are unflattering so I wonder whether their administration didn't like me. I can deal with it, though. I've gotten concrete acceptance letters from some other places, so I think those admissions are official and safe, but I can't help but worry.

God, I keep having the stupid anxiety that for some reason my acceptances will be revoked or something even though there isn't really any reason to think so. I'm good at stressing about unrealistic hypotheticals, in general... I don't know if it means anything at all to you, but I'm not planning to attend UCLA, presumably opening up a spot, though I've heard that their entering class last year was super gigantic, so I can imagine if they don't feel the need to let a ton of people in this year. Who knows, good luck.