kdilks

Actually, I think their funding is comparable to most schools once you take cost-of-living into consideration.

Got any early favorites between Minnesota, Rutgers, and UIUC?

The saying I like to use is "your application is under consideration until it isn't". Even if there reaches a point where your chances of actually being admitted become significantly smaller, schools have little incentive to tell you that before they want to, nor do I feel that they should be obligated to keep you updated on intermediate steps in their admissions process. The April 15th resolution effectively eliminates any legitimate reason for needing to know your status before they give you their final decision.

The pattern is they accept the number of people they need to accept over about a week in early February, and everybody else's application is kept "under consideration" in case something goes horribly wrong with yield. About two weeks after visiting weekend when enough people have accepted, they turn most of those applications that are "under consideration" into rejections and a handful are formally put onto a waitlist. So far, they've accepted a bunch of people in early February, and told you that your application is "still under consideration". Things don't seem to be deviating at all.

The primary function of this website is to provide a database with information from past years that helps you answer these questions yourself. http://thegradcafe.com/survey/index.php?q=math*+michigan&t=a

You can definitely find places for cheaper than that in Ann Arbor. The place I stayed at 2 years ago was ~$900 a month for 2 bdrm/1bath within a mile of campus. Also, imean, if you're feeling too suffocated by the University you should hit up the bars in Ypsilanti. It's also worth pointing out that if you do have a car at Michigan, you also have access to everything Detroit has to offer. Four professional sports teams, lots of theater/broadway performances (second largest theater district in the country behind Broadway), Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit Science Center, Eastern Market is the largest historic public market district in the country, casinos, tons of music venues, and a whole bunch of awesome yearly events I could list off. Closest thing Madison has is Chicago, and that's at least two and a half hours away (not even taking traffic into consideration).

They shouldn't be able to force you to make a decision before April 15th. http://www.cgsnet.org/Default.aspx?tabid=201

Found the thread from last year. No additional awards to EEB, civil engineering, SPSS, cognitive psychology, conservation biology. Somebody who lists their field as "bioanthro/ecology" (not sure which one they applied to) said their field only added one new award (went from 6 to 7). Apparently a decent amount of the additional awards went to geology/geoscience and linguistics. Math got 41 new awards, going from from 22 to 63 (and leaving only 14 HM), which represented about 1/7 of all new awards. Math usually only gets in the ballpark of 20 awards per year. Even if the legislation didn't specifically say which fields the money should go to, it's clear that for whatever reason certain fields were targeted.

Maybe they're interested in nominating you for a university fellowship, but don't want to if you're really not that interested in going there? I suppose it's also theoretically possible that they're attempting to see if they can get you to come without offering something like a fellowship. There's really no reason for them to call you unless they're fishing for some kind of information. Technically it depends on your level of interest/competing offers, but I think good general advice would be to not give away anything too specific (unless you get a feel about what they're looking for, and can play it to your advantage), and give the general impression that you're still very interested in going there, but also still open to other options.

Not sure what you're trying to say. Last year they put up a list with the first round of winners, and when they got the additional funding from the stimulus packge figured out they just added the second round of winners to the list. In all documentation they are lumped together as "winners", and there is no distinction made between first round and second round. However, people on this forum would have kept track of how many winners there were in their discipline before and after they updated the list.

I think they started to show some signs of that last year. You can check the thread from last year to see if anybody kept more detailed accounts, but I know for sure that a significantly disproportionate amount of the additional fellowships from the ARRA last year went to mathematics, which lead many of us to believe that the funding had stipulations about which areas they went to.

Make a decision between all the schools you get accepted to. Tell the ones you're not going to that you're not going. Tell the one you decide on that you're likely going to attend, but are still waiting to hear back from the waitlist Harvard before you make a final decision. Do as much research on Harvard as you can in the mean time (hopefully you should be able to find what a standard TA position entails, if not then try and set some limits on what kind of pay/workload you would/wouldn't be ok with). If it's feasible/you think it's necessary, be prepared to make a visit on short notice. Hold out until the bitter end. You don't need to potentially compromise your future as a "courtesy" to anybody.

It didn't happen to me, but it's happened to a couple people I know.

I think last year and this year are roughly equally bad to apply in. Some schools went into crisis mode early enough so that they could cut back on admissions significantly last year, other schools didn't and are making the necessary cutbacks this year. --- To expound on what a few people have said, there are a few reasons Michigan is still doing so well. First reason is that a long time ago, the University realized that they couldn't rely on funding from the state, and focused more on private/government funding, so they've been mostly shielded from the state's economic situation. Second reason is the economic crisis hit just after Michigan finished a $3.1 billion fund-raising campaign. Third reason is that Michigan has taken advantage of the fact other schools/ the economy in general have been doing poorly to aggressively expand. They bought the recently abandoned Pfizer facility in Ann Arbor for dirt cheap, and are in the process of converting it to academic research facilities and hiring new faculty members to work there. I believe last year there was an initiative to hire something like 50 new junior faculty in various areas. I also know that at least in my department, Michigan was able to hire a lot of top job candidates because competing schools either had hiring freezes or couldn't afford new faculty. At Minnesota, things were pretty bad last year. There was a state-wide hiring freeze (not just academics, all state jobs), and at least my department accepted significantly less people than they normally do. There was also a bit of a teaching crunch because the university increased enrollment to get more money and asked some departments to create more sections to account for this, but weren't giving more funding to cover the TAs for those extra sections. Things are still bad, and the University is still pushing really hard to cut costs and adjust to the new economy, but it's no longer a full blown panic situation like last year. I've heard that MIT was having some financial issues even before the economic crisis as a result of poor investments in certain technology stocks.

Every apartment you look at in a region with real seasons will be adequately insulated. In my experience, landlords have always covered the heating bill, and the tenants pay gas/electric, so you don't have to worry about freezing. Also, keep in mind that when you leave for Thanksgiving/winter break, turn your thermostat down but not off. If you turn it all the way off, the water pipes will freeze and burst (not something to look for, just advice that seemed related). Air conditioning (if it exists) is almost always a plug-in window/wall unit (so you'd be paying for that), but you can get by with a box fan in an open window circulating air and as oscillating fan blowing air on you.

I'd see if the university is able to accommodate your two body problem (assuming it's an issue of your other-body not getting accepted). There should be a thread somewhere that covers this issue. The main point that I remember is that as long as one of you is accepted, it's appropriate to see if the university can make accommodations for the other (ie, have your department ask other-body's department for a favor, and accept other-body because they really want you). I don't know how frequently such attempts are successful at the graduate student level, but it's certainly something that commonly happens later on.

There's no point in e-mailing because they're just going to tell you that your application is "under review", which it will be until they get a full class and get around to mailing rejection letters sometime in March/April. I wouldn't say it's rude, but it's fruitless and bothersome to the graduate secretaries. Only contact them about having received all of your application materials, if there is some legitimate concern that they have not. Ask yourself if there's any real reason that you need to know right away, and if not, quit being impatient and suck it up like everybody else does.

I think it's amusing that you've been consistently trying to steer the argument away from my initial point of contention, which is that there's no reason for people entering technical fields to waste time studying to get exceedingly high scores on the verbal section like you did. The sub-text to "high scores don't help, but low scores can hurt" is that "average scores don't hurt", and that's the point you seem to be missing.

I was never at any point referring to the quantitative section, so I'm not sure why you brought it up. But I agree, it is the same principle as the verbal section, that "having a high score doesn't help, but a low score can hurt". It's just that if you're in a technical area the threshold for what "well enough" is on the quantitative section should understandably be higher, and since the test covers such easy material that percentile range ends up corresponding to scores in something like the 780-800 range.

March 30th, 2:07am.

People on admissions committees also recognize that GRE scores don't necessarily measure anything useful (it's not just a measure of time put into it, because it depends on how much you already knew), and by and large discount it. For another anecdote, one of my professors that's orginally from Eastern Europe said that when he took the verbal GRE, he would only recognize about half of the possible answers for any given question. He still got into Princeton. I don't know how you can tell me that I don't know what admissions committees are looking for when I asked professors that have been on admissions committees at multiple schools in my field. You're making the admissions process out to be some indecipherable mystery, when it really doesn't have to be. I'm a little concerned that you were considering entering technical fields, and are unable to recognize that there is a lot of room between 96th percentile and "sub-par".

Not really.

As long as hypothermia isn't a legitimate threat, you've just to not think about it, relax, and let it wash over you.

The main increase in applications due to the economy would come from people that are about to graduate and don't like the prospects of the current job market, not people that have already gone to "the real world" and would be returning to academia (though I'm sure there are also plenty of people whose recent unemployment has motivated them to pursue old dreams/try to increase their marketability).

It seems like you're just trying to justify the excessive amounts of time you spent studying, and encouraging detrimental behavior. An important part of graduate school is learning how to prioritize your time, and focus on the things that matter. Instead of not knowing what kind of influence verbal scores have on admissions in your field and wasting time that could be spent on better things, figure out what's expected of you and only study enough so that you're confident you'll score comfortably above that level.