kdilks

Not necessarily. Some schools try to place limits on how many people they take each year in specific subfields to keep advisors from getting overloaded. I think most schools would be happy to have an NSF fellow and accept you anyways, but I'm not so sure the very best schools would be impressed enough to go over their quota to accept you.

If you go to the university's housing page, they also have their own off-campus rental listings. My current landlord said he pretty much exclusively advertises there to avoid getting undergrads as tenants.

Not when it's your first day alone in your apartment, and you don't have any kind of TV/radio/internet to figure out what the hell is going on...

It hasn't been a problem for me. As a matter of fact, I believe the cost-of-education allowance is helping cover health insurance costs and student fees that a regular tuition waiver would not cover.

So I'm guessing you didn't find the league in Boston with 80 different divisions? http://www.neshl.com/

It's usually not the varsity team getting demoted to club status, it's usually more the varsity team getting cut and the existing club team takes over as the premiere program. Kind of the reverse of how people tend to think adding a varsity sport means the club team is getting a promotion, but it generally means they recruit new people for a varsity team and the club team stays intact. But yeah, IM is definitely more of what you're looking for. Berkeley got dinged a few points for shutting down their ice rink, and the fact that I probably could have made their top team.

You do get to keep your internal funding, you're just not allowed to use it concurrently with a fellowship. In a given year, you would choose whether you wanted to be covered by NSF or internal funding. Since things like the NSF can only be used for 3 out of your first 5 years of graduate school, you would use your promised internal funding during the remaining 2 years (or not, depending on how long you plan to be in school). The one exception is that you can take on HALF of a TA position (for pay) concurrently with NSF if your advisor deems it necessary for your "professional development". This is more for people that would be using a different fellowship when they weren't using NSF, and need teaching experience. I'm not sure if you would be able to do this if you were already going to be a TA when you weren't covered by NSF. There's also a little flexibility in what constitutes a "year". An NSF Fellowship "year" last 12 months, but you can choose whether it starts in May or September. To contrast, my university fellowship (and most TAships) only lasts the 9 months of the academic year. So you can work things so that you're covered by NSF during a summer when you'd like to be free to travel for research/conferences, or so that you're not covered during a summer when you'd like to take on a paid internship.

I'm guessing you've never been to a game at Northwestern or Minnesota. Also, go the hockey games. Don't ask questions, just do it .

It's all done through Fastlane. You technically don't even e-mail anybody, you just fill out the forms on the website.

For what it's worth, I found that people don't deal with housing until much later in this area. Back in Ann Arbor, people start figuring out housing for the next year in January. Here, people don't really seem to start until May.

That was during the big stimulus package. NSF couldn't award the Fellowships that were being covered by stimulus money until the stimulus package made it through Congress. So in early April they gave awards to the top tier like they normally would have, rejected the bottom tier, and left people that were at least getting Honorable Mention in limbo until they found out how many additional fellowships they had. It was good that I eventually got the fellowship, but it kind of sucked that I didn't find out early enough to potentially get off the waitlist at the one school I wasn't accepted to.

As far as I know, it doesn't have a reputation for being unsafe. But I also don't know any grad students that have chosen to live there. Apparently people really love the Wedge Community Co-op (near Franklin and Lyndale), which has your all-natural/fair trade/vegan/hippie stuff. There's a Rainbow Foods off of Lake Street inbetween Hennepin and Lyndale. It looks like there's also a Lund's in that general area. There's also a Lund's right in the middle of Northeast. There's probably a few more that I'm not aware of. www.metrotransit.org Check to see where buses go, and also when they run. Technically I live by a bus stop, but it's a crappy commuter bus that only runs 8am-6pm, and only takes me to a place where I can transfer to a useful bus line. Finding a 1BR that close to downtown for only $600 might be a bit optimistic (I'm currently looking for a 1BR in that general area). I haven't looked into it, but I imagine sharing a 2BR for $1100 would be much more feasible. Have you looked into the Midtown Greenway?

I personally don't think the Como neighborhood is one of the better areas to live. Even though it's on the fringe of where students would want to live and still be near campus, it doesn't transition into a more permanent residential area like other areas because it's boxed in by an industrial area, so it's pretty much nothing but cheap, crappy student rentals. At least that's the impression I got when I was looking at places over there. But it's also not North Minneapolis (north of downtown, northwest of campus past Dinkytown), where personal safety would be a major concern. If you're going to be taking the bus to class, anyways, I think you should look a little further away from campus in the direction of South Minneapolis/Uptown.

According to the 2009 thread, it is based on where you went to high school, which is why they ask where you went to high school on the application.

As others have said, public transportation is pretty good. I would not recommend commuting if it involved you taking the highways, they're miserable around rush hour. I'd keep an eye on that, because I believe that either just changed or will be changing soon. I think you might have to apply for a permit, now.

Other than making sure you don't have rear wheel drive (which apparently sucks), you don't really need anything special. It's more about knowing how to drive in adverse conditions than having the right kind of vehicle/tires (though no matter what, you should adjust tire pressure with the seasons, though that's easy enough to do). Drive slower. If you start to slide, pump the brakes, don't slam on them. If you start to spin out, turn the wheel the opposite direction to correct. If you're stuck in a parking spot, rock back and forth to get moving, don't just slam on the gas and spin in place. And once you do start to move, take full advantage of that momentum to power your vehicle through the snow.

Sounds like somebody needs to learn binary.

GO TO THE HOCKEY GAMES

In terms of microbrews/brew pubs, Arbor Brewing Company has a brewpub in both downtown AA and Ypsi, Grizzly Peak Brewing Company is in downtown AA, Jolly Pumpkin has a location in downtown AA (somewhat recently the New York Times did a review of various Belgian beers, I think 9 from the US, 9 from Belgium, 2 from Canada...brews from Jolly Pumpkin took 1st and 3rd), Blue Tractor BBQ and Brewery is in downtown AA, Wolverine Brewing Company is out on the west side (only one without food, to my knowledge). If you venture out a little further, Jolly Pumpkin's original place is in Dexter, and Original Gravity Brewing is in Milan. Ashley's doesn't brew their own stuff, but they're considered one of the top two beer bars in the state (along with HopCat in Grand Rapids) because of their wide selection.

As I like to say, you only need one school to make a mistake .

You said you don't start travel until next week. What's the issue? It'll be done snowing by Wednesday, major roads and any delayed flights will be dealt with by Friday, things are back to normal by the weekend.

As long as you have off-street parking, there's no problems with having a car. My life would be absolutely awful here if I didn't have a car.

Yeah, you want to be as specific as you can when you're looking at potential graduate schools. How well known your advisor/research group is known in the mathematical biology world is far more important (for your career) is the most important thing. Going to a big name/Ivy school might impress your friends/family, going to a school with a well-known applied math program might impress your fellow grad students, but going to a school that's good at mathematical biology will impress potential employers. Check to see what kind of seminars they have going on, which professors indicate interest in your area, try and gauge how active/well-known they are, etc.

When I was applying to grad schools, I only lived about 15 minutes from home, so I went home to show my parents my first acceptance e-mail. While I was sitting at the computer waiting for my dad to come home from work, acceptance e-mail #2 popped up .

I can't say anything about Waseda University (which says more about my ignorance of international schools than their reputation), but it would most definitely help to spend some time at Yale or Ecole and work with/potentially get recommendations from some well-known people.