aaronschltz

According to the chair, departmental funding is limited to three years. After that, it is up to the student to apply for teaching gigs at Hawaii and near by colleges as well as some competitive scholarships. They essentially admit more students than they can afford to fund.

Apparently there is a cap on how long one can hold a TA position for, which is 3 years. After that, there are competitive scholarship options as well as the opportunity to teach (i.e. adjuncting work). The problem is that these are not guaranteed and so I would be essentially taking a pretty big risk by going out there. I am not an international student, so no hope for funding there.

I have recently been accepted into the PhD philosophy graduate program at UH. This was initially exciting news for me because my interests are primarily in Theravada Buddhism and Hawaii seems to be the best place to go for Asian Philosophy. That said, I received information today that I was previously unaware of, viz. the program only offers 3 years of funding. I still do not know if I will be offered anything, but even if I receive funding this seems like a relatively small amount given that, from my understanding, the program can take 5-6+ years to finish. Also noteworthy, I have an offer at Binghamton University with full funding for up to five years, possibly six and I still have one school I am waiting to hear from. That said, I am really struggling with the idea of turning down Hawaii just because Binghamton has better funding. Hawaii's program seems to be the obvious choice in terms of my interests and I am especially excited about the prospect of studying Sanskrit and Pali, both of which are offered there. What would you do in my situation; bite the bullet and dig yourself deeper into debt or goto a program that offers more support in terms of money and less in terms of academic interest?