maengret

@Daenerys I didn’t get my SLU schedule until shortly before my trip. The morning was Q&A with students and DGS. Lunch was provided and we got info from the department director and more current students. An hour to tour campus, and hour tour of the library, then time why faculty. The last part was (hosted) dinner, followed by an optional poetry event. They had us scheduled 9am to 7pm plus the reading. I don’t know if they’ll change it up but wanted to share in case it helps you in your planning. The school covers food so you might want to offer to pay your husband’s way for the dinner if you opt to attend. I’m going to PM you.

I only have one to go on, th they reimbursed me within a week of submitting the receipts. In that case, the department had its own accountant and didn’t have to send it through a larger bureaucracy for processing.

Oh, Purdue...

And @Daenerys, too... I wanted my husband to travel with me since we’re both relocating. If he’d been able to arrange time off, I wouldn’t have hesitated to inquire!

If it is SLU, and if the agenda is the same as what mine was for last month’s visit, I bet it would be okay. Most of the events were tours (campus, library) and social gatherings (dinner, happy hour). Several current students told me significant others are a big part of the grad students’ collective social life. One current student’s spouse dropped in to the welcome day and fielded some questions while she was waiting for her s.o. to arrive.

Yay!! Congratulations. What made the campus visit so amazing?

Hi @GameofLoans16 and congrats on your offers! There's a few too many unknowns for me to say for sure which is best so far. For my own offers, I did a spreadsheet similar to what you've started. I also did cost of living comparisons between the cities I was considering. According to this one, Starkville's cost of living is 27% cheaper than Corvallis's, so your stipend looks like it will go further there. My offers had a lot of variations on things like insurance and fees. I know we're in different disciplines, but I'm listing these from my comparisons in case any of these are helpful to you: Is your fellowship in addition to the stipend? (I have a fellowship but that program structures all the funding so that everyone gets the same dollar amount; so my fellowship comes with perks but the cash awarded me doesn't change.) Are the monthly stipends for 12 months, 9 months, or 10 months? What is the actual cost of your share of insurance? (It looks like OSU covers 88% of insurance, does Starkville (MSU?) cover that much? What are the case costs to you?) Does the insurance coverage carry through the summer months? If not, can you opt-in for coverage and at what cost? What is the TA courseload? (Mine all are 20 hours/week, but some require teaching 1 course / semester, and some 2 courses / semester. @GreenEyedTrombonist touched on the other differences I saw in my assistantship descriptions) How many credit hours are you required to take each semester? (Some of mine require at least 6 hours/semester but one requires a minimum of 9 hours--in addition to the 2-class TA load.) Some of my schools had a foreign language requirement that would have necessitated me spending $$ to meet the requirement. The classes wouldn't count toward my degree, just the requirement. Are there any similar requirements in your programs that would make you pay for courses that add to your tuition or program length? Is working outside of school explicitly against policy? (Some of my offers don't allow this and one just discourages it. My fellowship comes with the stipulation that I don't work outside school. The school that had the least favorable insurance program does not allow for outside work; I thought it would have been hard for me to ensure I could pay for insurance without at least overlapping school and work at some points of the year.) Good luck!

@Warelin, @la_mod , et al: there's some helpful info about taxes and living wage over at this site, too: http://www.phdstipends.com/faq

@Warelin @la_modOh! I see, this is a new column in one of the sheets! I wasn’t in that one so didn’t notice it. Does the column reflect purchase power of the stipend in that locale? Or does it reflect that city’s living wage as compared to the national average?

Not sure how you arrived at me already being qualified, but thanks for the vote of confidence I was hoping for questions and information that would help me make a decision, hoping particularly to hear from the forum members who have some hindsight on the PhD.

Are you trying to which stipends are livable wages for their respective cities? I used a few different calculators when I was doing that: Living Wage Calculator - tells you the hourly wage needed to support various household sizes in different cities Cost of Living Comparison - let’s you compare two cities. I used this to compare new city and current city, and also potential school cities to each other. Sorry if that’s not what you were looking for, though.

Paging @punctilious -- anything you and DH can add?

Congrats! I can recommend a good realtor if you’re in the market.

Sorry, just seeing the reply now. I'd recommend a phone call.

@automatic I’m going to add to my earlier comment now that I actually negotiated something I didn’t ask for everything that would have been nice to have. But I did ask for the one thing that I thought would help me most and that was the TA load. They agreed. I thought to ask that because I read in the grad student manuals that while the stipend itself is the same for everyone, some students receive fellowships that allow them to TA fewer classes for a semester or so.