glueear

Also, do you have any insights into how the recent and ongoing reduction in state funding for higher education in AZ has affected UA and the program?

How much do you and your peers pay for housing?

With regard to getting a PhD, I can offer my story. I went to a low-ranked school for my masters but I've been accepted to two top-5 speech-language-hearing sciences PhD programs. I think what made the difference for me were the strong connections I had with professors writing me letters and the fact that I wrote a thesis. So, don't despair if you plan on academia but pursue a masters at less prestigious institution.

Both of the advisors I am considering have a lot of experience - they both are full professors with at least 10 years post-PhD experience. The more experienced one has about eight years on the other, though, and I looked at that extra eight years as a measure of the size of their networks, and, indeed, it seemed to correlate with their students' end placements and performance. So, neither is 'young' but both seem to still have passion for their field and had current students who said they felt supported and attended to. In the end, the bulk of my decision is coming down to my judgments about their research programs - their cohesiveness, fit with my interests, use of interesting methods with a lot of room to grow, etc. - and the results of previous students because everything else was so evenly matched. Take this advice with a grain of salt, though: I might end up regretting my choice... we'll see!

I'm in the same position you are, having been admitted to four programs but only seriously considering two. Being a fan of tables, I made a pro-con chart that considers: location, including distance from friends/family cost of living availability/cost of housing near campus program ranking school ranking outcomes of conversations with current students how well advisors' methods match my research interests my impression of how well-defined and cumulative the advisors' lines of research are advisors' years of experience, number of publications/citations number of students advisor has had in the past, including their outcomes (types of institutions they end up at, # of publications / year, # citations / year after graduation) funding my impression of advisors' personalities overall culture of the program With that chart in hand, what was a difficult and anxious decision now seems obvious!

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Despite it being a lot of tough work, writing my master's thesis was academically one of my favorite experiences. I really enjoyed seeing it all come together and found it a remarkable feeling to be able to talk confidently about a subject and to have some information of my own to contribute. After graduating, I found work as a speech/language pathologist, and, although I do like my job, I quite miss the excitement of learning something new. Also, clinical practice is somewhat less quantitatively exact than I'm comfortable with and I'm eager to take a turn back to clearly defined problems and objective data.