Alea Iacta Est

I'm turning down a master's in medieval history at Oxford. Amidst slight pangs, 'tis true, but I'm happy with the choice I made.

I accepted Notre Dame's offer as well.

I'm a card carrying member of the same club. I'm utterly relieved to have been able to get in to a good school this time round, because as an international student from a country, an MA is simply not an option for me, either in the US where I simply don't have enough money, or back at home where there is simply no instruction in my subject of interest. I was already stunned (and not a little terrified) to see how much better qualified than me most of the Fall 2010 applicants were, and my chances would only have deteriorated significantly after this year. I truly hope that's not the case for people who plan to reapply next year and that you get opportunities to improve your application profiles and fit (whatever that means) in the intervening time.

Like trlux, I don't drive, so I'm planning to live on campus for at least the first year. However, the prospect of being stuck on campus five or six years without a car sounds utterly dire, so how do you actually go about learning how to drive in South Bend?

It's true that undergraduates don't usually associate with grad students, even the younger ones. That said, it's not as though Princeton's social landscape is completely impossible to navigate by any stretch of the imagination. This is purely anecdotal evidence, but my sister was also in her early twenties when she attended Princeton for grad school and she had no significant problems meeting people despite the fact that she isn't the most social person. Also, the girl quoted in the article said that she was already married and had a group of close friends. It doesn't seem as though she actively sought out a social life when she came to grad school. I think it might be far easier to make friends if you're actually looking for them.

Jonathan Strange And Mr. Norrell might just be one of my favourite books ever. The English Regency, the Austen-esque prose, the magic, and the footnotes. What's not to love?

http://www.dailyprin...10/03/09/25483/ There's a story in the student newspaper about this today. Granted, the Prince is not renowned for stellar journalism, but something is better than nothing, I suppose?

I have a long reading list to tackle once I finish and submit my senior thesis. - Elidor by Alan Garner. I read The Owl Service when I was a kid and remember being freaked out by it in the best kind of way. I'm hoping Elidor will do the same thing. - Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman. I've heard mixed things about it. I love his novels and I loved most of Smoke And Mirrors but there are some stories that just didn't do it for me, and I have a feeling that this might be very similar. - The Book Of Lost Things by John Connolly. Recommended by someone's whose taste I trust, and I love modern interpretations of fairytales. - Misfortune: A Novel by Wesley Stace. Recommended by the same person, and apparently the book is full of batshit crazy characters, which makes me even more curious to read it. - Nightingale Wood by Stella Gibbons. Because Cold Comfort Farm was made of awesome. - The Peacock Spring by Rumer Godden. Recommended by someone whose taste I do NOT agree with, so I'm going to read it to see if I can shoot it down. - The Girl's Like Spaghetti: Why You Can't Manage Without Apostrophes! by Lynn Truss. Because I enjoyed reading and empathised with the author's other ill-tempered rants. - A Laodicean by Thomas Hardy. I'm interested to see how Hardy deals with non-OMG!TRAGEDY! themes. - Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens. Started this a couple of months ago, but life got in the way. - Gilgamesh. Because it's there, and I haven't done it before. - And finally a couple of random P.G. Wodehouse novels. Because you can never have too much Wodehouse in your life.

Ditto. I think the medieval guy might just have sent out personal emails to all the medieval history applicants with the 1.5 admits figure.

I got into Notre Dame's (medieval) history PhD program after all! It's my Holy Grail of grad schools so I'm thrilled beyond belief. The liquor stores were closed when I got the news; I celebrated instead with vodka.

Got my Harvard rejection in the mail today. I've been staring at my phone ever since I got out of class at 12:30 PM today and I still haven't had a call from Notre Dame. They said they'd send out acceptances today, so I guess this means I am rejected/waitlisted. Sigh. The Notre Dame thing was just incredibly hard to deal with. They dangled this immensely enticing carrot in front of my nose all the time I was there while keeping me intensely aware that the great, fat stick that could very well fall to my lot instead.

I'm working on my senior thesis which is due on April 6. I have a complete draft deadline on March 8, so I'm aiming for at least 60-70 pages by that date, and then looking to scale up to 80-100 in the following two weeks.

I'm going to reiterate what the other two posters wrote, and say that coming from a famous undergraduate institution would in no way equate to an automatic acceptance. Nevertheless, I think that you have a couple of advantages that people from lesser-known schools might not have access to. The first thing that springs to mind is having access to a well known, well connected faculty, whose glowing letters of recommendation would hold more weight with grad admissions committees. The second big advantage I can think of is the increased number of opportunities to do research as an undergraduate. Well known institutions frequently have more resources for people who want to do independent work and the like. So on the whole, I think it's the way you exploit the opportunities your school put your way that counts rather than a passive boost by virtue of mere attendance.

Congratulations ResPublica! That's great news. What are your specific research interests?

The reactionary in me is glad that I took the old test. I would hate to have to use a calculator in the test since it basically seems like an Irrational Numbers Ahoy! alert to me. I like my solutions to be nice, round integers. In the old test, if I got a solution like 7.467938, I'd know that I'd likely done something wrong. Having a calculator would just deprive me of that guarantee. Furthermore, I'd be tempted to use it on problems that would probably be faster solved mentally.