[Current grad students: how many tries did it take?]

Chances are you're already aware of this, but I've heard from people who have applied to various graduate departments across different schools that your GRE scores can be used to "weed out" students in the initial screening rounds. I can see this point making sense for departments that have received a (unexpectedly) large number of applications for a given year. 

As others have already said before: as long as your GRE score is within an "acceptable" range (obviously this varies between each department/school), they won't matter that much. A close friend of mine did much better than me in the GRE (169V/165Q/5.5W - I had a lower V score) but he got rejected from several top schools. One exception I can think of is University-wide fellowships. I was told that my GRE scores had to be within a certain range - POI however didn't specify exactly what this range was - in order to be eligible for a University-wide 5 year fellowship package (I did receive said fellowship package, starting this August).

I did an extremely crazy/stupid thing and only applied to one American graduate program - I had about 5 schools in mind once I sifted through all the information I gathered, but 2 of them couldn't offer funding for the 2017-18 admissions cycle and the other 2 turned out to be not so good research fits. Granted, I didn't panic as much as I should have because I had a fully funded PhD offer lined up here in Australia, but I really wanted to change disciplines from socio-cultural/medical anthro to a more clinical field and thought anthropology wasn't a good fit for my research interests.

In any case, I've been wanting to attend an American university for about 10 years (since I was in high school) and I'm excited to have finally achieved this goal. Keep your head up!

[UNC Chapel Hill 2017]

On 03/05/2017 at 7:38 AM, haselnuss said:

I'm moving in from out of state, and I will not be able to visit to tour any apartments or anything. The area is really nice overall compared to where I live, so I'm not too concerned about safety or cleanliness, and I've already lived in some apartments with crappy landlords, dealing with maintenance, etc. You can also have bad neighbors no matter where you go. My plan is to find a nice-seeming place that is conveniently located and sign a year lease. If I don't like the apartment I can spend a lot of time on campus and move to a new apartment next summer.

To find a place, I've looked at google maps and typed the name of the building where I'll have my classes, then "apartments." Carrboro area is where a lot of grad students live. Durham is good for grad students too because it's inexpensive due to a bad reputation in the past, but over the last decade or two things have gotten really nice over there. This is information I got from students and professors. 

You can also search on apartments.com or rent.com, but once you find a place you would want to go to the apartment's website rather than dealing with apartments.com or rent.com. I'd always rather deal with the apartment management than a third party website. 

One thing I've noticed that I have never seen before is that rent goes up and up and up every day/week/month closer we get to August. They know students will need to find a place ad take advantage of the desperation we have for housing and jack up the prices. It's a good idea to try to secure a place ASAP rather than wait. 

Thanks for the tips! For me, living in a country where individual firearms possession is commonplace is daunting in itself (Australia essentially "banned" personal firearm possession after a massacre in 1996, although exceptions exist), but it seems most non-Americans get over it somewhat quickly. I'll have to get onto the housing search quickly, it seems

[UNC Chapel Hill 2017]

For those of you not in the area/overseas: where/how have you been searching for housing? I've searched for a few apartments but with conflicting reviews and whatnot on various websites, it's been tricky finding somewhere that seems decent enough (functioning management, not too far from campus). If I can deal directly with the management I'm willing to transfer any deposits/fees from Australia, but I'm not so keen to send money to a stranger on a listing who could simply run away with the money.

[UNC Chapel Hill 2017]

I'm planning to get to Chapel Hill by the first/second week of August - there are some mandatory events to attend for international students (mostly to do with visa paperwork) around the 16th. Got my I-20 a few days ago, all I need to do now is wait until early/mid May to file in the application with the Consulate in Sydney and get the visa issued. I'm a big NBA fan, so I'm pretty excited to go to some games at the Dean Dome (I managed to watch the NCAA title game against Gonzaga last week - ugly game, but a victory nonetheless)! 

[UNC Chapel Hill 2017]

Hello from Sydney, Australia! Very excited to head over in autumn (I know you Americans refer to it as "fall"...). Won't disclose publicly which program to which I've been admitted since it's a small department and there's a good chance I will be identified immediately, but I'll be sticking around for the next 4-5 years to get a PhD.