joebobthebumbo

I was recently accepted into Columbia's Medieval and Renaissance Studies MA, and I'm trying to decide whether or not attending the program is worth the cost (if this sounds familiar, I posted last week in a different thread, but I have since received my official acceptance with more funding information). Essentially, the total cost of the program would be around 80k, and I have been offered a 20k fellowship. I'm hoping I can also offset the cost to some extent with personal contributions and potentially finding a part-time job, but at some point I will need to take out loans to cover the rest. I eventually want to end up in a PhD program studying medieval history (I struck out on all of my applications this cycle). It seems the main benefit of completing this MA is improving my language skills--I'm comfortable reading in German and I took four years of Latin in high school, but I did not continue it in undergrad, which I think ended up hurting my PhD application. My hope is that I could refresh my familiarity in Latin and use some primary Latin sources in my MA thesis to use as a writing sample for the next application cycle as a way to demonstrate comfort with using Latin sources. I would really appreciate any thoughts you all might have on my situation. tl;dr: Accepted into Columbia's Medieval and Renaissance Studies MA, program is very expensive, trying to decide if attending is worth it.

Does anyone have recommendations on finding funding to complete MA programs? I struck out on all my PhD applications and just found out today that I was accepted to Columbia's Medieval and Renaissance Studies MA, but the cost seems prohibitively high--judging from their published costs, it would come to around $85,000. They have offered me a fellowship, but I would also need to find some other funding sources to make the program worth it. Anyone on here have any experience finding funding for an MA and could give me some advice? Naturally, I am very wary of taking too much money out in loans to help fund it as well.

@OHSP @telkanuru Thanks for the honest answer. Out of curiosity, though, what is the rationale behind releasing acceptances before releasing rejections?

Same, although if you look at results from past years, it looks like acceptances were spread out over multiple days. There's still hope for us yet!

Congrats on getting into Duke, @Karou!! On that note, is anyone else still waiting to hear from Duke?

Nope..radio silence from them so far.

@ipavineri Best of luck to you!

Stanford, Northwestern, Columbia, Yale, Duke, Berkeley, Michigan, and Harvard. What about you?

Just thought I would jump in on the whole "nervously waiting" thing. I've applied to a good number of programs for medieval history--broadly, I'm hoping to study medieval monasticism next year--and somehow the stress levels have been slowly ratcheting up.