ir_gradstudent

Thanks for the inside info! I was thinking of housing being cheaper outside of Georgetown, a short commute away, not living near the school within walking distance. For SAIS, it's located smack dab downtown, so the same "short commute" would see you paying vastly more rent. I think! Am I still wrong on this? And is there ample parking space for personal vehicles at Georgetown? Any grad student housing option from the school?

I forgot to mention the SAIS requirement that one of your two (or three) concentrations be International Economics. This requirement doesn't exist at Georgetown. That's several more classes worth of targeted study you can undertake if you don't need a harder grounding in quantitative economics.

SAIS and MSFS both gave me the same amount of funding. With all of my sources of funding added together, something like 75% of my total schooling cost for the next two years will be covered (this includes my tuition, rent, food, personal spending etc.). Here is my brain dump of what I've pieced together so far. MSFS and SAIS are both pretty much tied for #1 IR degree program in the world. So whichever one you pick, it's going to take you places for the rest of your life. The differences between the programs are bound to be minor. That said, MSFS has a focus on small classroom sizes, whereas SAIS often has 20-28 students in a class. MSFS graduates smaller numbers, while SAIS graduates larger numbers which could help networking later in life. MSFS is on Georgetown University campus. It's an actual, full-blown undergrad + grad campus, located on the edge of D.C. whereas SAIS has no "campus" in D.C., just the buildings where their grad classes and seminars are held. Housing and transportation will likely be easier/cheaper for Georgetown, although you will still have to deal with transportation when you go to downtown D.C. for your internships. SAIS is located just down the street from Barry's house, so you probably will be able to just walk to wherever your internship is in 20 minutes or less after class (or vice versa). I don't think there will be a chance to study abroad since this is a supercharged grad-level education lasting only two years, unless it's part of your program like Bologna or Nanjing (could be wrong). I heard someone say MSFS is more if you want a career at State, and SAIS is more if you want a career in other places. I don't think that's true. Individual school personalities may give SAIS a leg up on World Bank and MSFS a leg up on getting into the foreign service, but I don't think either school is going to cut you off from any careers you're thinking of pursuing. We will be massively qualified regardless of which school we choose. On the MSFS site today I saw that they give scholarships for one language course per term, provided you apply for the scholarship during the narrow time window given. The strong feeling I got was that it was 100% awarding so long as you applied for it exactly when you were told to apply for it. I don't know if SAIS has a scholarship like this. We are in a fortunate position in that we could throw our darts at the dartboard to choose between MSFS and SAIS, and we'd be pretty much equally qualified for our follow-on careers in international affairs. These differences are pretty darn minor. I'm going to talk to an MSFS student and a SAIS student to get their general opinions on what they wish they had known before they picked, etc. before I make my decision. That said, I'm leaning slightly more towards Georgetown at the moment. I'm a full-blooded American, but I studied at college overseas for three years and never had a chance to live or study at a U.S. college. I also like the smaller class sizes that Georgetown has. However, I'm far from decided. Georgetown has a powerhouse professor in the "area studies" region of Asia I'm interested in, while SAIS has an entire institute dedicated to that region. The schools are pretty much equally prestigious. It's such a tough choice. I really want to hear everyone's thoughts on what they think we should be considering in order to make the best decision we can.

Ohhhh, thanks! Just found it! Looks like I got about the same as Fletcher and SAIS, a little under 15k for first year.

Are you guys getting your financial award letters yet? I still don't know how much my award is.

It was in the second paragraph of my admissions letter:

DECISIONS ARE OUT! I just got my decision! Admission to SFS MSFS program, and a financial aid award! Not sure on the amount yet, but this just makes choosing between SAIS and MSFS all the harder...

There were two SAIS emails for the fellowship. One was an award letter, and the other was the notice that told you how much you'd be getting. For the generic "SAIS Fellowship", the award letter said "Students awarded fellowship funds must maintain full-time status and a minimum cumulative GPA of 3.4. Awards may be renewed for a second year if full-time status and a 3.4 cumulative GPA is maintained."

I have read opinion pieces calling for phasing out the "100% loan forgiveness" program and replacing it with something that is capped at paying back something like a max of $30k remaining loans. Would a change like this retroactively affect all of us? 10 years is a long time to be in that limbo.

I'm wondering if most people make it out to admitted students days, whether or not they've already decided which school they will be putting their deposit down on. I'm not loaded, so I'm probably not going to fly halfway across the country for a couple days of activities and questions. I feel like I can judge most of the important factors from afar and make my school decision prior to making the permanent move out to the east coast later this summer. What do you guys think? I'm on the fence. I do have the money and means to attend, but I'd just like to not spend the cash right now if it's not so necessary. Thanks for any insight.

Don't quote me, but I was looking at the SAIS course registry earlier today to try to answer this question, and just eyeballing it it seems at least half of the courses offered are during morning or afternoon. About 1/3 of the courses or so are scheduled from 6pm or later. So it's not like George Washington which boasts about "strategically scheduling" 100% of their coursework to be after business hours. I would still like to hear from an actual SAISer on this to be sure.

Some of the schools specifically ask you to include a section about this on your resume. One of my schools asked for "all" foreign travel experiences I've had, while another school asked for "all significant" foreign travel experiences. I didn't include this section on the resumes I submitted to schools which didn't ask for it. However, my overseas travel experiences are still fully accounted for on my resume in my academic history and internship/work history blurbs sections.

Just got an email entitled "Elliott School Fellowship Support" announcing that I got no fellowship! Too bad, but I like being flat out told nothing is coming, unlike other schools which only let you know by omission.

I'm guessing it might be an issue of people not customizing their applications for the schools in question, and just focusing their customization efforts on SFS and SAIS. For my Statements of Purpose, about half of it was the same for each of my six schools, and the other half of it was customized based on each Master program's available concentrations and with a shout out to one professor I hoped to work with in my particular field. Obviously the other factor is "fit", but I'd imagine all of the IR programs are looking for the same kind of person, to be honest. Some schools might have stronger specific "area studies" departments, and I think that was one factor in me getting funding from SAIS but not from most other schools.

ESIA did a lot of rolling admissions since Friday until yesterday, and fellowship/funding notifications always came separately. I'm personally thinking it's safe to be optimistic until the end of the week that we may get a funding email from them.

In my opinion, it's easier to read for admissions purposes to see it all in one concise space, rather than skim my transcript which is littered with unrelated general edu courses here and there. In my case, I was a double major. One of my majors was a typical IR major, but the other was a very unique area studies major. I definitely wanted to spell out clearly the coursework for my unique area studies major, since it tied in very closely with my entire written Statement of Purpose. I took four lines for each major to write a simple list of the relevant coursework I took for each major. I think it's just fine and appropriate, and even beneficial, to put it on a grad admissions resume like this.

I got into D.C. schools, so I am really sad I may have to turn down Fletcher and a good funding package so I am available for internship and employment opportunities in D.C. For me, I think being located in D.C. will be really important. Fletcher has done the most outreach towards me out of all the schools I was accepted to, so they've risen up to my shortlist. But I really think the D.C. thing might be a clencher for me.

I think it's something you can choose freely after you're accepted. Obviously for admissions, you wanted to tell them which concentration you intended to study, to show them you had a serious plan. But for most schools, after admissions you're free to choose completely different concentrations within your degree. Correct me if I'm wrong, please.

I spent my entire undergraduate as a foreign student at an Asian university in a country neighboring China. I have been on the receiving end of some classes taught in English that were severely dumbed down because English wasn't the students' native language, so that's definitely one factor. However, the low-level classes may also be an issue of the quality of instruction and that country's teaching culture. I do not have college experience in the U.S., so I don't have a good baseline to compare, but even classes in the native language of the country (which were the majority of classes that I took) were of very low quality. This is why I did not even consider continuing on to graduate school in the Asian country above, because after three years I was certain these big undercurrents were not going to change at the graduate level. Just some insights that may be relevant to the situation in Nanjing. If you have not been abroad to China for any length of time, I would still recommend a study abroad program like this, in spite the negatives! If you're interested in China, studying abroad in China is a no-brainer.

It's good to know that both of our ways of writing graduate admissions resumes work just fine for the purposes of gaining admission. I don't believe the hard-and-fast one-page rule for job resumes applies to grad school resumes. I definitely took the opportunity to sell myself on many more concise "international" qualities that I exhibited in previous work, than I could have fit into my statements of purpose. My resume for admissions was around 600 words in length, and I spent most of that going into detail using short resume-style "action sentences" about how my previous work experience was applicable to graduate studies in the field of international relations.

I didn't follow #1, and I know many other people don't. This isn't a job resume, it's a grad school application resume. You are allowed to write more on your resume if you want. I took one full page top-to-bottom to list my undergraduate degrees (two of them), GPA and class rank, graduation theses titles, and a paragraph each listing of the relevant coursework in each of my majors (even though this info already appears in my transcript). Then I took a full page again top-to-bottom to cover my employment history, which is just my military service and an internship. I took half a page for internship duties and qualifications, and half a page for the same for my military service period. The total length of my entire resume ended up overflowing about one full paragraph onto the third page. I also used my own self-made style that I loosely based on other resume formatting I've seen. I made it look nice and neat and as concise as possible, and easy to read or find a particular section. Mine is just black and white Times New Roman, nothing fancy. I use CAPITALS and bolded sentences for headers, and bullets for bullet point listings. The most important rule is #3. CUSTOMIZE your resume specifically for graduate admissions. If you have experience working with foreign nationals in the military, that's great and you should include that bullet point or sentence. If you can disassemble a PRC-E7 military radio, nobody cares or wants to see that on your grad school resume. You also don't have to customize your resume for each school individually, other than extra sections some schools tell you to add (such as overseas experience). You can submit the same basic resume to every school since each program will be relatively similar.

The difference between entry-level Foreign Service Officer (who has less than 5 years relevant prior work experience) at Bachelors vs Masters level is roughly $6,000 per year, which means you're pulling in about $500 extra each month of base pay. Most other gov't jobs will likely be similar. A $40k Stafford loan over a 10-year period requires you to pay about $500 a month. Just some ballpark numbers. I haven't done anything more than back-of-the-envelope yet. Also keep in mind that many U.S. Gov't jobs have Student Loan Repayment programs that could pay out up to $10,000 a year alongside your own payments, I believe. Each gov't Department will have different loan repayment program levels. I think some Departments have very minimal levels of loan repayment benefits, while others have much more. Play around with a student loan calculator and see what sort of monthly payments you could be looking at. This has scared me into making sure I minimize my student loans as much as possible. In the example above, assuming you made just the roughly $500 a month payment for 10 years, you'd end up paying $55,000 back on a $40,000 loan! That's comes to a sickening 37% of the total sum being pure interest! Now that 37% can be reduced drastically by paying more each month than is required and paying it off early (due to the effects of compounding interest, and student loans don't have any penalties for paying them off early), but that is still truly shocking for someone like me who never had to deal with student loans for undergraduate.

Interesting! Was that the Wolcott, or a generic ESIA fellowship?

Finally had my ESIA decision posted to the portal! No word on funding!

We'll see! In the meantime I've hooked up a spare keyboard so I can refresh twice as fast.