utsusemi

Ah, sorry, I forgot about this thread for a bit. It sounds like funding is usually divided into two lump sums (at our campus, at least). When it disburses seems to depend on when travel starts and (possibly?) on our quarter system. I admit I haven't been following each emerging detail quite as avidly--I've got my prospectus defense coming up soon, and wasn't planning to travel until after the holidays, so I can afford to wait a bit to start worrying about arrangements. I originally guessed a Nov. 1 start date myself, though. Now I'm somewhat glad things didn't end up moving that quickly on my end, given the delay in getting information out plus this 30-day lead time our coordinator has asked for.

as72, my university's program officer has been diligently keeping us posted but still hasn't received this year's handbook for awardees from the DoE, which apparently has all those concrete details you (and we) are looking for. They sent us last year's handbook so we can get some idea, but evidently things might change from year to year, so no one can make completely definitive statements about next steps until this year's goes out. At least we've been given a checklist of things like date of ATC, copies of passports and visas, etc. which we will need to turn in so they can submit it all at least 30 days before the research period starts. My school is quite large and used to dealing with at least 1-2 Fulbright-Hays scholars a year, so they seem to be quite well-organized, but they're still at the mercy of the larger bureaucracy...

They have an MA (I believe) and aren't a professor/assistant professor, but a Lecturer according to their dept website (I think that ranks below an asst. professor, but it might just be sideways-from?). "Mr." still seems too informal/business-y, though I'm willing to be corrected.

What the title says. I have an etiquette question! I went to a small undergrad where even the 1st-year language classes were taught by visiting or t-t profs. Now I'm headed for a big state flagship where language classes are helmed by "Lecturers," a new paradigm for me. I need to contact the lecturer of a class I'm hoping to take, and I'd better make a good first impression since I am asking for a favor! (permission to either join without taking the placement exam, or take it at a different time.) But I'm embarrassingly stuck on the salutation. Is "Dear Professor Lastname" appropriate even though this instructor is not a "Professor" by job title? Since he doesn't know me from Eve (and his name indicates he may be a native speaker of the language in question, which is culturally a bit more formal/respectful to teachers than US English) I'd prefer to err on the side of more formality...

Sure, but if the appetizer is really weird, you would probably notice... I personally perceive the scale of formality thus: Dear > Hello > Hi. Thinking about it, I generally don't go all the way up to Dear unless there's a clear status difference between myself and the addressee--potential employer, professor, etc. Then I end up working my way down depending on how they respond. I might steal the nice neutral 'Good Morning," though! Weirdly enough, I was drafting a letter (not an email, a paper letter!) for my current boss the other day, and she told me to change the "Dear" to "Hi" because, "I want to stay pretty formal with these people." Wha?

I was waiting for someone else to start this thread, for some silly reason. History here as well. And also planning to look for off-campus housing, though not in the market for a roommate since my SO is moving with me. FWIW, the History graduate advisor recommended Weyburn to me (before I explained about the SO), and students I met who've lived there seemed to like it pretty well. I also talked to two different grad students who'd met their long-term partners/fiances at resident social events there; interpret that anecdotal data as you like. xorge84, what field of history? Late imperial China, for my part.

April 15th has come and gone, and I finally know where I'll be next year. The university offers housing to all first-year grad students, but I'm moving with my boyfriend and we're not married, so it's not an option for us. This means we need to find an apartment off-campus, on our own. I've never moved long distance (well, not when I had more than a suitcase worth of stuff going with me), and am a little stuck on the logistics of it all. I woudn't want to rent a place sight unseen, which means househunting in person. We also have a small apartment's worth of possessions to take with us. If we paid a moving company to move it, that would solve part of the puzzle--we could pack everything up and then just leave it and drive down to start searching unencumbered by trailers etc--but it would also set a very firm deadline for finding and being able to move into a place. Can anyone who's done this before suggest the order of operations that worked for you? I'm moving to LA, not a small college town, so I don't have to deal with (or alternately, take advantage of) the need to rent in April to have a place in September.

littlewood, which did you end up choosing? I ended up accepting at UCLA for Chinese history, so I'm curious whether we'll be colleagues.

Eleventh hour as it is, I've finally decided between UCLA and UC Davis. (Not quite as obvious as it may sound to some; there were complexities. Aren't there always?) I'm really hoping it is not too late for someone else to get a nice funding package from Davis...

I think I have to agree with papercuts. These brilliant strawman applicants with great funding packages from Harvard, Yale, and Stanford, who are sitting on the lot and trying to extract more dough for the sheer evil joy of it--if they exist at all--almost certainly don't read these boards, which are after all full of friendly commiseration, stories of funding crisis, and sympathetic tales from the waitlist. The effect of the OP seems rather to have been to offer the undecideds--probably still a majority at this point!--who are already losing plenty of sleep over what may be their most important life decision for the next five or ten years, an extra helping of guilt over their terrible selfishness. I'd be willing to bet that most people on this forum who have more than one offer they're still considering could give you reasons just as convincing as the folks who've already been 'excused' in this thread. But blanket castigation followed by piecemeal exemption still spreads a lot of hurt feelings about. I understand the feelings behind this thread (adding to my own slow decision-making is the fact that I'm waitlisted at my hometown school), but it left a very sour taste.

Or it means they are a UC, and this is atypical for them but, in my subfield, they're stuck with it this year. Or so I am told. >_< It sounds somewhat as though it was either admit someone without guaranteed funding or admit no one at all. My School A faculty contact tells me the dept. can probably 'cobble together' some funding after the first year. But if the first year didn't come through, I'd be stuck without in the one year I'd have to pay out-of-state tuition. Trying to scrape up some cash to visit, so we'll see.

I am in a similar position to the OP, except that I pretty much know that I won't hear from School A until quite a bit later, maybe as late as early summer. Arg. And I feel like a jerk for waffling, because my School B has been very upfront about asking admitted people to decide quickly so they can spread around as much funding as possible.

Resuscitating this thread. *zap* I'm not positive about going to UCLA yet (best-fitting department I've got into, but funding is iffy), and honestly, one of my biggest uncertainties is whether I can live/stand to live in LA. I've spent about 24 hours total in the city, and that was seven years ago, so any information is valuable! Some background: I'd be moving and looking for housing with my boyfriend. Since we're not married, that's likely going to mean non-university housing, and I don't think he'd be very happy with having roommates. He has a car but dislikes long commutes; I don't have a car and haven't driven for years. Right now we live in a relatively central area of our city, with decent access to public transportation, so we're happy. So, how is the current market for off-campus housing for people with humanities grad student incomes? Is it reasonable to hope I'd be able to live somewhere affordable *and* get to campus without driving? How is the job situation? Given the size of the city, I optimistically assume that it's at least better than Portland, OR, where it took my poor BF six-plus months to find a job last year. And... as a person who's either a Bostonian or a Portlander, depending how the wind is blowing, will I be able to feel comfortable there? LA has a pretty bad reputation in both those places (smog, sprawl, people with more outfits than brains, etc.), but like all regional stereotypes, surely it's at least somewhat inaccurate.

StrangeLight, that anecdote sheds light on one perplexing element in my conversations with professors at a few of the schools I applied to. I was told several times, "I'm sure you'll have other offers"--twice in the context of referring my app down to an MA program, once from a top-50 program where I was asked 'don't string us along,' implying that I'd actually be in a position to do so (!). I was too polite to say skeptically, "Really? Sounds awfully optimistic to me...," but I was certainly thinking it (for my field, I have a deficit in language training that is a serious weak point in my apps, and in two out of four such conversations I was, after all, being turned down on that account). But now I realize we applicants probably have a clearer view of the big picture in some ways. Perhaps faculty are too enmeshed in their individual departments' financial crunches and the way it's affected their own recruiting last year and this year, and haven't yet truly internalized that their schools are not anomalies, that this is the new status quo, at least for now. I'm sure they know all the same dire statistics we do, but it may not have sunk in on a subconscious level that there's no longer such a good chance that the strong-but-not-quite-a-fit applicants one school reluctantly turns down will still have plenty of other offers to choose from. That said, my own undergrad advisor was pretty candid with me, I think--very kind and polite about my abilities, because he is that kind of person, but he nevertheless did tell me right off that he had had good students, even in better economic years, who didn't manage to get in anywhere despite applying widely.

Indeed, makes sense to me, since it sounds like they are paying for travel. So for those of us still waiting to hear about other fellowships... *shrug*

How funny. Mine went straight from the "You can also..." paragraph to the one beginning "If you have questions about the Department..."

I didn't hear anything of the sort either--like ResPublica, when I spoke to my potential advisor (finally got over the shyness today), it was just a matter of "if you decide to visit," and I was advised against coming between the 19th and 29th because of spring break. Perhaps the visiting weekend was organized by/for a particular field or group of fields, or only prospective students with guaranteed funding were invited?

My boyfriend of six years (gleep! That long already?) will be following me, as plans currently stand. Those plans are pretty nebulous, of course, since I don't know where I'll end up yet. Both my PhD acceptances are in California, where neither of us have ever lived or even spent more than a few weeks/days of travel... should be interesting. Also, lengthy car commutes disagree with him, yet I'll be dragging him to either LA (!) or Davis (where he'd likely end up commuting to/in Sacramento). I feel more than a little guilty because he has already followed me out of his comfort zone once--to China for 18 months, beside which I suppose moving to another state is nothing--but at the moment I am the one of us with more defined plans and aspirations, so. Though at least one of his potential plans is an MLIS, which fortuitously enough he could do within reasonable distance of either place I might go. I also wonder whether the fact that we're cohabiting instead of married might turn out to be troublesome. It mostly depends on whether I ever want student housing, I guess.

I kind of agree with your paranoia (I'm 5'4" and a wuss), but I think that although you're moving to a completely new place, you might find you're not as much on your own there as you think--other students will be starting at your program too, and dealing with some of the same issues at the same time, and continuing students might be willing to help out a newcomer as well. You're going to meet and make connections with these people as soon as school starts, if not sooner--you might be able to seek them out ahead of time and band together to help put together furniture, or even just to have another person there with you when you let the movers in. Also, I wonder if your grad school or future colleagues might have some relocation-related information resources available. Depending on the school, it's quite possible that most of their students have gone through this at some point. Congrats on getting in somewhere that's worth a 500-mile move!

If the various departments knew the extent to which we're all engaged in what basically amounts to reading the entrails (with an equal degree of predictive accuracy), I wonder what they'd think? Heh. *bites nails also*

I feel much the same, and am in a similar situation--2/5 rejections are actually applications sent down to Masters programs, but that still means being turned down by a program I wanted to go to. Those earlier rejections/transfers did come with a bit of personalized feedback, which made them less soulsucking than the generic letters I've had this week. Acceptances first is maybe less depressing overall, but it gives you way too much time to build the other places up in your mind rather than being grateful for what you get. In a way I wish it were possible to save all the decisions up and open them at once (glad I didn't try--not that I'd have succeeded!--because of things like fellowship deadlines and visiting weekends, but I wish it were possible). One big day of anxiety, followed by a few of dancing/moping/whatever, and then I could get on with planning my life. Sigh. Would also have been nice to know for sure that this year would be at least as terrible economically for grad admissions as I suspected, but I suppose even universities may not have known that back in November.

It sounds like the OP would be on the hook for out of state tuition for the first year, perhaps? However, I got an offer from another UC which mentioned that grad students can usually establish California residency in time for the second year, i.e., unless they don't do their homework on the residency thing, no one should have to pay more than one year of nonresident tuition.

Has anyone else been accepted by at least one program, but found themselves too paralyzed to get in and make contacts, research, etc. about that school/those schools because you're still waiting to hear from others? I'm a little shy to begin with, and am finding myself ridiculously hesitant to open interactions without all the facts on the table in front of me. I know this is dumb for a myriad of reasons, but it's still a block. Any tips for the shy on good ways to get over it and start talking to people? Reassurances that professors in my field won't hate me forever if I take up their time, visit, and then ultimately pick another program would also be nice.

From the results search it looks like both Stanford and Columbia have sent out acceptances (and rejects too, in the former case) this week for the past three years. If I still bit my nails, they'd be gone by now!

OP, maybe you caught someone on the phone at a bad time? I heard from UCLA about two weeks ago, because they wanted me to apply for a particular fellowship outside the department that had a February deadline--there's another poster on this board, also in East Asian history, in the same boat. But even having been told that decision informally, I've still had nothing from the department as a whole, from which I deduce that they've yet to send out official letters (and perhaps also that other fields didn't finish deciding as early as mine did).