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aslabchu

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Everything posted by aslabchu

  1. aslabchu
    If I'm understanding properly, you're asking if you should go to the #16 program for free or the #1 program for a decent amount. I suspect I'd go with the latter, but it depends on your existing financial situation.
  2. aslabchu
    Well done. Was everything alright as-is, or did you have to shop around?
  3. aslabchu
    A little off-topic, but I don't really understand why there are so few MPA folks around here. Maybe public admin is just unsexy, I guess.
  4. aslabchu
    That's disappointing. That's an awesome nose.
  5. aslabchu
    I think it's actually some nonprofit or other, but I stole the idea from a brochure, I believe. The pic stuck with me. I can't find it now, but it's a girl at a Farmer's market with a sign.
  6. aslabchu
    Didn't know that. Oops. Looks like I can't edit now, so I'll just have to wear the badge of shame.
  7. aslabchu
    This forum doesn't seem to respect those rankings very much. There's more of a bias here toward private schools, seemingly motivated by reputation/brand name. For whatever reason, highly-ranked public schools like Syracuse and IU don't get much respect.
  8. aslabchu
    Do we get to meet your dog? If so, sure.
  9. aslabchu
    Looks like you're going to want to get a water filter. http://www.heraldtimesonline.com/news/local/city-water-quality-coordinator-says-bloomington-meets-standards-by-skin/article_d759df4c-ad88-576e-820c-1adf4a328926.html
  10. aslabchu
    I think the best way to handle this is through a PM. Check your inbox.
  11. aslabchu
    My understanding is that for a decent fraction of the group, the Service Corps assignment actually becomes their internship. Which makes some sense, if you think about it. You're losing this worker who's been there for about 8 months, working for free (from your perspective). Losing them over the summer might mess with the good thing you've got going, so it's not an outlandish idea to pay to keep them on for the summer (and the interns don't have to be paid by the higher Service Corps standard, unfortunately, although they definitely get more hours in the summertime). They won't have to re-adjust after having been somewhere else for a couple of months. And after that, they're back to being free labor for another 9 months, But that's not to say that the internship isn't super valuable by itself. And in my case, it may well be that a somewhat lesser Service Corps job will put me in a position to qualify for a more meaningful internship that's relevant to my interests. In particular, I'm trying to transition to a new area completely (I'm a teacher, but want to get into life sciences admin type stuff), so getting a foothold with Service Corps might actually help me qualify for that sort of thing. Provided I don't get one of the sadder ones, like manning a kiosk at the Farmer's Market for 12 hours a week.
  12. aslabchu
    I was a little surprised at how small Bloomington feels. If you live even remotely close to downtown, it truly feels like your entire world is about 4-5 miles across. But then I look at the stats and see Blooming has 70,000 people. I wonder where they're all hiding.
  13. aslabchu
    Well, I went apartment shopping in Bloomington. I gotta tell you guys: BE CAREFUL. There are a lot of shady companies out there. DO NOT get an apartment sight unseen. Management companies will try to tell you that all of the units are the same, so they don't need to show you anything other than promo shots. That's when you should know they're trying to mislead you. Be sure to Google these companies. Check out their reviews. You're likely to find some shady stuff going on. I'm from an area in Michigan with some truly awful economic hardship and I have never seen apartments (or neighborhoods; the entire block was like that!) as run down and gross as the ones I saw last weekend. In general, if they're charging less than $600, they're within 2 miles of campus, and it's not a house, you are in for some serious weirdness. You have to ask yourself: if it's so close and so great, why aren't they charging the market rate? (Answer: it's because it's a hovel.) Anyway, there are some reputable places left. I went with Meadow Park*. It's a little further away from campus than most (about 2 miles from my program's building), but it has an excellent reputation and is generally a nice-looking complex. Site here: http://www.meadowpark-apts.com/ They have another complex a little closer to campus, Fountain Park, but it's not quite as good of a deal. (More expensive for the same size.) http://www.fountainpark-apts.com/. When I talked to the company, they said they had tons of units left. *PS. They're not giving me any money or anything for this plug, but I kinda wish they would.
  14. aslabchu
    The smallest of bumps. Ending up getting a little more funding out of IUB, and that made them my best offer by just a hair. Because I have a relatively weak resume in terms of work experience, SPEA's Service Corps program seemed like a very attractive option. If I were to go to Washington or AU, I would graduate with just a fraction of the work experience (likely just a summer internship, maybe some GA stuff), and I think it would really hurt me on the job market. Plus, I'm not sure AU or UW would have done much for my career goals, as I want to live and work in the Midwest. No DC or NYC for me. And, of course, Bloomington is pretty cheap as far as major college towns go, and that's very appealing to me. But those are all the obvious ones. The little thing that swayed me quite a lot was that SPEA doesn't depend on IU or the graduate college to issue their degrees. My understanding is that the greater administration has very little influence on that. And what that means is that if SPEA says your class should count toward your degree, it counts. How this is useful is that SPEA uses faculty advisors, any of whom can sign off on those kinds of changes to your degree program. So if you've got a career plan in mind that might not benefit from the vanilla MPA experience (and you've got a faculty member on board with this), you can chop up the requirements and make them work for you. I think the only stuff that you can't mess with are the core classes, and there are only 5 of those. So you've got about 10-11 classes of wiggle room.
  15. aslabchu
    What were people's impressions from Experience Day? Did it make or break things?
  16. aslabchu
    One of the profs at SPEA has this in his syllabus (it's for the core Econ course). Might be good summer reading. Check it out: Enjoyable Materials* The following are books that I have found to be very accessible reading and excellent at conveying economic principles, even if it is just while you are relaxing at a bookstore: More Sex is Safer Sex: The Unconventional Wisdom of Economics by Steven Landsburg. The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies by Bryan Caplan. Economic Facts and Fallacies by Thomas Sowell. Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman. Why Popcorn Costs So Much at the Movies & Other Pricing Puzzles by Richard McKenzie Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explains the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven Levitt and Steven Dubner The Invisible Heart: An Economic Romance by Russell Roberts The Price of Everything: A Parable of Possibility and Prosperity by Russell Roberts Pop Internationalism by Paul Krugman
  17. aslabchu
    Are you doing anything to prepare for the upcoming year? Any summer reading (and if so, what)?
  18. aslabchu
    My understanding is that the buses are one of the best parts about IU. They're free for students, relatively prompt, reliable, and accessible (they have a phone app so you can see where your bus is). I talked to some of the various offices on campus and I was strongly cautioned not to try to park on campus on a regular basis, even with an upgraded permit. They give out many more than there are actual spots, so there's quite the competition to park.
  19. aslabchu
    It's definitely a buzzword. It's one of those post-hoc ways people pat themselves (and others) on the back. If suchandsuch a CEO does well and it's not immediately clear why, but they seem to have good social and personal qualities, obviously it's due to some kind of intangible "leadership." And suckers shell out top dollar to acquire it. Books, courses, expensive talks— you name it. So, yeah. In a certain sense it's a backward-looking way to describe success within an organization. There might be a more narrow sense where it describes a person's ability to inspire others, but it's grown away from that usage. Leadership these days transcends personal influence. CEOs are thought to use their leadership skills to influence people they'll never communicate with.
  20. aslabchu
    I want to circle back to my primary objection: SPEA is $54,000 at sticker price. That's very much comparable to those other programs. So if you're going to argue that people shouldn't attend SPEA, that cannot be your main point. After all, if SPEA is too much at 54, surely that makes several of those other schools you've listed too much as well. Also, SPEA is a mpa program, but yet you seem primarily interested in mpp programs. Could that be the source of your discontent? Mpa and mpp programs generally have different focuses. Personally, Ford's policy-minded focus turned me off; there weren't enough professional development type courses for my liking. On the other hand, SPEA has relatively few mandatory policy courses, and that's very appealing to me.
  21. aslabchu
    What metrics are you looking at? And which schools is SPEA more expensive than? It's certainly not more expensive than Humphrey, for example, which is virtually the same cost, and it's a damn sight cheaper than those east coast schools you're referencing. I'm wondering if you're confused as to how much SPEA costs. It's about 54k in tuition for both years. From my experience this cycle, I'd say that's average, and potentially on the low end. For example, Washington Evans is actually 72k, and a not insignificant amount of schools follow that pricing scheme, unfortunately. That's not even getting into cost of living, where Bloomington's is really low—and the others are virtually all quite high. Also, I had no problems getting funding, and my application was by no means the strongest, so I'm not sure I'm convinced there. My suspicion is that other people got some pretty good offers, and asking around has seemed to bear that out. That said, I have midwest-type goals, so SPEA makes sense for me. I don't want to work in Indiana, but I want to work in a neighboring state whose best program was too policy-minded for my goals (the Ford school, actually, which doesn't fit with my goals very well. I have essentially zero interest in policy, whereas they seem to have little interest in admin). I could see how people who want to work in the east or west wouldn't want to go to IU, though. But Humphrey and Wisconsin should really be in that same boat, so I'm curious as to why you endorse them over IU. Is it really just because they're better-funded, in the absence of other factors?
  22. aslabchu
    I wouldn't bet on it being around in the 12-ish years you'd need. Republicans are already taking shots at it.
  23. aslabchu
    This is what I've heard. It's a shame.
  24. aslabchu
    Accepted my offer, so I'll be there. They've got an "experience day" thing for my program on April 1st, so I'll be in town checking out the sights and doing some due diligence on the ol' apartment search. and, of course, being wooed in a tremendously boring way.
  25. aslabchu
    Just accepted my offer. Anybody else coming to Bloomington? There have got to be a couple of you. It's kind of odd how unpopular SPEA is on this forum, really.
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