palabra45

tl;dr I'd accept the offer. I was in a similar situation last year. I applied at a top program because, for years, I kept saying I would. I got in and, after discussing it with my partner, we decided it was better for me to go ("It's been your dream since forever" and stuff like that). Very emotional things happened, but we both want to have a long-term relationship. The first year (which I'm currently in) is indeed brutal. The American system, for me, differs from the European one because you're caught in a near psychotic environment made of stress and coffee for three months - no time for a real relationship, as far as I'm concerned - then you are in a void. That's when you go back and spend a very good time with your partner. You can also meet once during the semester, making the wait shorter. Plus, if you're both committed, the long distance might be a good test for your relationship. It sucks, it really does, but when my partner and I talk on the phone or see each other we're back at the beginning of our relationship, on the verge of cheesiness sometimes.

Perhaps it's a bit naive, but if someone doesn't have the chance to visit an apartment before moving there, like an international student, what's the "safest" website to use? Zillow seems nice, but one never knows.

Room is 500-700 CHF, small apartment from 900 CHF, depending on how close it is from the city centre. Food I lived with 300-500 CHF/mo. Add your health insurance, internet, phone, electricity etc. and it's safe to say you'll need about 1500 CHF/mo at the least.

I lived with two roommates for 5 years. It's good for finances, but if you're not the most social person in the world I'd recommend living alone. I myself am not the most easy going, I love working from home and sometimes I wish I had my own apartment. I suppose it only worked because I've known one of the roommates for 21 years - since kindergarten - and I knew what to expect. I'm also looking for a new place now and I want some quiet.

Thanks for all your lovely replies. This actually helps. The plan with my current mobile phone includes unlimited calls and texts and 1GB data: I hardly ever used more, so I'll definitely consider Google's option. I was also thinking about hotspot, but I really need to see the speed there. I'm too used to the 150 mbps WiFi in my apartment (shared, it's pretty cheap) and I wouldn't want to go down to 1 mb or even less, especially because I prefer working at home rather than going to the library/office. I'll see, if I find a phone plan that includes 10-20 mbps and I can save some money with that, I'll definitely consider this way as well. And I thought globalisation had made everything the same, I didn't even consider that in the West there could be a place were calls in the same country are considered "long distance". Thanks for this tip.

Hey all, I'm an international student who's going to start their PhD in the US next fall. I found a few threads on the topic, but couldn't find a full answer to my issue. As I am planning on staying for quite a while, I was wondering if there exists, in the US, an affordable plan that includes internet and mobile phone (with internet access), or if I need two separate contracts. I'm not interested in having a TV, I've lived without throughout my undergrad and grad life. Cheers.

I'm speaking from a European perspective, thus I'm not sure what I'm going to say is valid for US schools as well. I personally feel there is an underlying hypocrisy in the academia because, on the one hand, they promote interdisciplinarity etc., but on the other, one with a Comp Lit degree doesn't really belong to any department. This is even more so when it comes to the PhD dissertation. For instance, when I brought up the argument with a professor, they first told me the story of how Comp Lit departments in the 80s were just pretexts to do theory and they weren't really interested in any literature, and then they went on saying that, in the context of electing a new person, if they could choose between X Lit or Comp Lit, they'd go for the former. My advice would be to obtain a Master's in French lit. Most of the departments are interdisciplinary anyway, and you can still demonstrate that you can work with different materials in your seminar papers. I wrote a Master's thesis in Comp Lit, though it counts as English, but I wouldn't dare to try Comp Lit for the PhD, I don't recommend it.

In my Master's I worked mainly on the Renaissance and the 18th Century but, funnily enough, in the past months I've been focusing mainly on post-unification literature, combined with super-duper-highly-today-hated theories. That's the fit with Brown. What's your focus?

Native Italian. My university offers language courses; I haven't taken any, but I know some teachers. I'll ask them if they can recommend specific books. I'm just wondering, but for Romance languages I have the feeling that if you know your Latin, sometimes studying phonological changes is strikingly more helpful than memorising declensions (for basic linguistic competence, of course, we all know phonological changes are not perfect). This is especially true for Italian: since the language was not "spoken" until some 60 years ago, there are but a few changes from Latin to Italian (especially compared to French). I should have a list of the most common ones. In case you want the doc, pm me.

Big shot, I was accepted at my top choice, Brown, and I'll be flying to the US soon. I'm still waiting for the last reply, formally, but I'll probably decline. How is it going for you?

Graduated in Zurich but leaving soon. If tips are needed send me a PM.

Everybody seems to like French here. I'm at the Italian Studies dpt and we're basically the same thing, so I thought I could find a friend. No, quick question. I got accepted at Brown but don't have the means to visit the school. Is it safe to assume it'll be crazy and I'll love it? Anybody going to Brown around here? Can you shoot me the name in a pm? I'm Swiss too and with the few universities we have here - of which only two or three make sense to me - I might even know the person.

* is also an interesting choice, but it works better in some languages (e.g. German) than in others (example above, it'd be tou* or tou*s). Of course, the implicit problem with this type of writing is that one might forget all the other instances where gender is displayed. It's not enough to use it with nouns, adjectives and participles, but you should also change articles and entire suffixes. Concretely, if "la paternité d'une oeuvre" is sexist, changing it to "la genitorialité d'une oeuvre" doesn't solve the problem, because it has "geniteur" as root, and not "genitrice". The solution might be "genit*é" but then it gets unreadable, apart from recalling "génital".

I had to answer these questions more than once: "Why would you study [foreign language] in [place where it's not main language]?" "Can't you already speak [random language]?"

I saw the person in that thread too and I was hoping I could attract them here. We'll see, I'm getting impatient but I suppose I cannot get but rejections right now. Knowing from my fellows that they are also in the waiting-limbo would take some stress away.