Jae B.

down stairs

loose fit (aww, cute! wiggle time!)

Thanks so much for telling your story -- I'm in the same kind of situation where I just started getting involved this year. Maybe I can continue in some things like you did. But I'm sure there will be new opportunities, too.

Great website, thanks! Makes it much easier to see where places are. I'm starting to apartment hunt in San Francisco, now that I know I'll have class there four days a week. (Yay journalism!) My first semester I will only have class on campus on Fridays -- what a change! To kandeya: I think mid-June leaves you a safe amount of time to find a place. Good luck with your fellowship results! I hope you'll be at Cal. I've never considered using Cal Rentals...will look into that and whether it's any good for SF.

^… THIS! I completely missed out on that before. Probably because I was so concerned about getting into grad school! But it seems now that professional organizations are more important, haha. Nice! It's good to know campus organizations are still an option, at least. And neat community involvement!

I'm sure this is different for every school, but at my university, I've noticed TAs and readers are usually present at most classes -- maybe missing one of two classes a week. So at minimum, the TAs go to one 1 1/2 hour class (if not two) and host one to four 1 hour-long discussion sections per week, depending on how many sections they lead and if those meet once or twice a week. So the time commitment can vary a lot, especially once you add grading responsibilities! When my time comes, I'd primarily be interested in TAing for either of my two undergraduate majors. But since they were interdisciplinary, there are even more departments I took a significant amount of coursework in and could assist. Ditto the importance of shopping around right now. Looking at TA's backgrounds at my school, it seems that securing a position is very competitive....

show down

Heading straight from undergrad into a master's program, I'm wondering if it's too late for me to get involved. I was a student in interdisciplinary studies for undergrad, so I had lots of diverse courses, discussions and opportunities on campus without joining anything. But now that I'll be specializing (and in a professional area no less), I think I might miss academic discussion and action around other topics and issues. I noticed a lot of graduate students at my school participating in higher-education activism; organizing protests, anti-cuts / pro-funding rallies, walk-outs, strikes, etc. But other than campus politics (in which our interest is a given), do graduate students form or join any campus clubs or organizations? Or, Toastmasters excepted, are those undergrad only? Are your get-togethers mostly informal now, or do you just utilize community organizations instead of campus ones? (I do that anyway.) Not that I'll have a lot of free time, between my work and my family. But I could get into something before I start working as a TA my second year or so.

I like it, so far!

talent show

tooth ache

metal head

Thanks so much, and GO BEARS! I actually wrote for my small community college paper. Never the big, glorious Daily Cal, if that says anything about qualifying experience. It always perplexes people ("But you love journalism...!") because the Daily Cal seemed like the "duh" thing to do in my situation. And I really wanted to write for them! But when I work on journalism projects, I tend to let them take over my life.... Since I've been a double-major and a long-distance commuter, and I knew I wanted to finish undergrad within two years of transferring and not a second longer, I never had time to write for the Daily Cal. I never even made it to one of their recruitment sessions. The best I did was grab some fliers from their promotional table on Sproul. Interestingly, I wrote the Daily Cal a letter the other day, and they offered to publish it. I don't necessarily want them to publish that, though....

As an update, I'm officially comfortable with -- and way excited about -- my decision now. This school is my perfect fit. I got assigned to my favorite newsroom, and I'm already starting my grad school homework. I got a financial aid packet in the mail from the other school today, showing how they offered me about 25% of my estimated student budget in federal loans. Since they also offered me about another 25% in scholarship, that left coming up with the other 50% of the costs on my own. And this is no chump change, either, especially for just one year of study. It's very expensive. I am so happy I'm not trying to swallow that other 50% in private loans right now! That would not be a good feeling.

artistic taste

galvanized metal

financial advice

of course

Your research is correct. If you are interested in Columbia or USC, go ahead and give it a shot this year. However, a little experience would not hurt you -- especially if you're interested in Berkeley. If I were you, I would try to get some journalism experience this summer. It's not too late to find something to put on this year's application, to show you mean business. Call a local newspaper (daily, weekly, some type of publication that could use free help), tell them about yourself and say you'd like to write something. Volunteer to do some type of online news -- that's basically what I did last summer to have something recent on my app. (My clips were still nearing two years old, though.) Do something to get a clip or two, preferably three. If you're feeling really confident, write some news stories on your own. If you have taken any journalism-related classes in college, that would make your application seem less out of left-field. If you haven't, if you have time to take something this summer -- perhaps at a community college -- that would be a good idea. Overall, don't overestimate the amount of experience you need. You only need enough to show you are serious about journalism, dedicated, and that you have potential. Passion can go a long way. I assumed my own "experience" wouldn't be enough (four journalism courses in a media / communications major, one year on a college newspaper staff as a writer and web editor, and one summer doing web news and communications work for a nonprofit), but it was! Good luck!

A lot of people had cardboard letters on top of their caps at my graduation. Very cute. Best I saw was "Hire Me!"

garage rock

off kilter

for show (Yes, Bay Area! Go NorCal! )