dienekes

Sorry, I didn't mean to call you out exactly; I just get really tired of telling people where I live in town and they act like I must be in constant danger of getting mugged or something. Certainly, it's true that the area directly around 13th & F is a high crime area for Lincoln, Nebraska. I guess I'd like to see some kind of comparison of crime statistics, but the point really isn't as important to me as just stressing that the near south area is a perfectly fine and in fact great place to live! Convenient to campus and downtown, cheap rents, and honestly there are a lot of beautiful older buildings in the area; I just don't want "well there's this one bad block" to scare people away from the area.

Things I would add to this conversation, as I've lived in Lincoln for the past five years as an undergrad and then as a not undergrad for a year: based on personal experience, I've never, ever felt in any kind or level of danger anywhere in the city. I live a few blocks from 13th & F, actually, and my block is directly next to a nice little park and a few blocks from a grocery store. I'd actually suggest living in the area directly south of the capital! Rents are cheap, and you're within easy biking/walking distance of downtown, which is basically the only part of Lincoln that I care about. Not to be too harsh on previous posters, but "sketchy" to most people in Lincoln means "poor people and/or minorities are clustered in this area." The vast majority of my friends live somewhere in the area south of the capital, and I've heard exactly one bad story about a particular person's living arrangement but it mostly had to do with an upstairs neighborhood who was a jerk. I should say that I did have a bad experience at a particular building, too, but it was at bottom of the market, month-to-month rental place and basically everyone there was cool except for the guy who lived directly across from me. My current place is quiet and well-maintained and about $365 a month; never had any problems at all in 9 months of living here. That said: yeah, don't live in the North Bottoms. Lots of shitty, old houses that are rented out as party houses basically. And try to find someplace with designated parking, if you have a car. Generally: Lincoln is cheap, quiet, and there's not a lot to do unless you're a sports person (I'm not.). Places worth checking out in my opinion are basically the Coffee House, the Mill (another, less good coffee place in my opinion), Jake's Cigar Bar (great beer selection and you can smoke inside!)....Yia's Yia's (good pizza and good bottled beer selection), Duffy's is okay (get a fishbowl with your grad school pal's!), and I personally like O'Rourke's for the free popcorn and cheap pitchers. The Bourbon Theatre has decent music in-house on a, like, quarterly basis (you can tell if a band you've heard of is in town because there will be a line stretching around the block). Oh, and if you like Independent Cinema at all, there's the Ross Theatre, which is part of campus. And as far as Tornadoes: tornadoes hit the actual town I think like four or five years ago? It's mostly a concern during the summer, obviously, and it's very rare but it's certainly possible. You're probably more liking to get hit by a city bus than you are to die by tornado, though, so I wouldn't sweat it much.

I said this at my last grad school visit, but elections are my least favorite part of democracy and horse-race commentary manages to be both addictive and basically bile. We do ourselves and everyone else a favor by passing on the stuff.

Oh, certainly. Every decision you make about programs at this point (even if you've gotten into a top 5 program) has inherent risks and tradeoffs; all I'm saying is that, having gotten into a few higher ranked programs, UMass seems like a riskier prospect despite my general good feelings about the program currently and about the kind of program they may be farther down the road.

I forget exactly where UMass-Amherst is ranked (40s?), but I'd like to submit it for consideration. They've hired about 15 new faculty recently--most of them early/mid-career folks with serious potential to rise in status (from what one of my LoR professors has told me), and if you, like me, have a serious interest in digital media and politics, they have a number of faculty doing work in that area, including network analysis with serious collaboration with UMass's very good Computer Science department, and they've apparently just secured a large NSF grant to pursue a pretty massive, multi-year survey research project. I honestly really like their program (I was admitted w/ fellowship), but--although I admire a lot what they're doing there--I don't feel comfortable betting on the program they'll be five or ten years down the line.

My favorite is Franklin Pierce. Because (1) I wrote a report about him in fifth grade that was like 10 pages long (I think we were supposed to write like 3?) and (2) he's part of the Fillmore-Pierce-Buchanan trifecta of terrible/forgettable pre-Civil War presidents. In fact, being the middle of the three and obviously outclassed in terribleness by Buchanan, I'd actually argue he's the most forgettable of the three and is probably in the running for most forgettable presidents ever. Also the Kansas-Nebraska act was a big deal during his presidency, and 10yo me was from Nebraska and very impressed that anything important might have happened here that didn't involve covered wagons.

I think that's absolutely okay to ask grad students about that kind of thing. They're (in my opinion) actually the most important part of the visit because they clue you into all kinds of things that may not be apparent and won't be communicated by professors/administrators who either don't know or won't tell you. e: beaten!

Hey! I got the same email. /high five? Also: as excited as I was to get that email, they sure made it confusing to figure out how much the offer actually was. $47k sounds amazing, but it doesn't really answer the "how much money do I have to live on" question very well. I'm still waiting to hear back from three more places (and I'm planning on visiting several of the places I've already been admitted to), but it's getting harder and harder not to feel like Washington is the right place for me. I'm digital media + politics through and through, and the combination of a fantastic comm program, a fantastic iSchool, my POI (Dr. Bennett) currently involved in like four projects that directly address my research interests, and, now, a substantial fellowship offer makes it difficult to resist.

(Yeah I was kidding. I think you were too though so maybe we can be friends?) But also, I just got WashU's funding offer tonight; I was admitted two days ago! I mean, I can't complain too much because Wisconsin is a great school and getting admitted there made the past few weeks much more bearable etc etc, but there's no denying that the immense lag is kind of weird. Also: I hate to bum-out fellow qual-minded people re Wisconsin (I applied there specifically because I really liked the work that Dr. Walsh has done), but I've heard that the department has trended a lot more quantitative in the past few years, both in hiring practices and in the general culture of the program.

But tomorrow it will be clearly within striking distance of "a week and a half." Which, if I remember my rounding-to-nearest-week correctly, would be "about two weeks." Terrible! Absolutely terrible.

Yeah, I got an saying the funding package would be out in "about a week." That was 9 days ago.

I wasn't questioning his/her clarity, I was questioning whether it's actually possible to act upon it, given what I see to be a high level of variability between rankings, and their general all around dubious dubiousness. Ohio State: 4th Best Political Science Program in the World / 17th Best in the Country! Then again, maybe I just think the whole idea of a hard cutoff point is basically ridiculous in a subjective ranking system. If I go to the 26th best school in the country I'll be eating ramen for the rest of my life, but the 24th and I will be revered and respected throughout the field? And how am I supposed to tell the 26th from the 24th anyway?

ME TOO! High five for UW solidarity! And maybe I'll see you the 8th?

Sorry for bumping an oldish topic, but (and maybe this is just my ignorance) I'm genuinely confused as to what this means from a practical advice standpoint. There's no definitive list, but it's imperative that I make precise decisions about program quality anyway? All of the different ranking systems I've looked at place different departments all over the map--I've seen disparities from some schools being listed around 15 in one ranking and 45 in another. And that's a "global" ranking, not subfield specific. Granted, the top five or so schools stay fairly static across rankings, but--particularly if you're applying to public state universities--it seems like the rankings vary wildly. A professor at my undergrad institution who wrote me a LoR has been willing to give his best guess at program quality, but, yunno, that's one professor's subjective take on an already subjective ranking system. And it doesn't account for a fair amount of fluidity in program quality--new faculty, faculty retirements, faculty who take jobs elsewhere, researchers who produce important work, etc etc. I can understand this advice if you're making relative decisions and there's a clear (and large) disparity in quality (say, between a school that's in the 15-30 v. a 35-50 school), but it gets into weird hairsplitting territory between schools in the 10-30 range. I guess I'm just saying that trying to make a measured, rational decision based on imperfect information is a tall order, but, then again, the whole endeavor of pursuing a career in academia seems to require a rather lot of those decisions. Anyone want to weigh in on that?

Oyyy, you and me both. I got an acceptance email from USC tonight and when I went to post it and saw the Washington acceptance, it kind of spoiled the moment because Washington is my top pick right now. I want a phone call