starmaker

There seems to be a pattern of big state schools being more strict about minimum GPA requirements in this thread. Maybe it's just an anecdotal quirk, I'm not sure. MaxiJaz: The farther you get out of undergrad and the more you have to show, the less your GPA matters. GPA is a proxy for merit because most undergrads don't have enough meaningful accomplishments in their fields to assess merit (and the programs also want some assurance that you'll be able to pass the coursework/quals hurdles).

I was thinking that your requirements didn't seem unreasonable. $1800 or less for a 1-bed in a not-high-crime neighborhood? Sure, that's definitely doable. Then you put in the thing about wanting that $1800 to include AC, heat, hot water, and maybe electricity, Internet, and cable. You aren't going to find a lot of apartments that include all those things with the rental cost. Period. You might find one that includes utilities, though. Not many apartments in the Boston area have central AC to begin with, let alone covered in the rent, unless they're in pretty new buildings, which most are not. It drives me crazy, since I grew up in the Southeast, where we maintain a civilized difference between indoor and outdoor temperature. Cambridgeport and Porter Square seem like likely places. Possibly Union Square and Inman Square as well.

mocomoco: I am a domestic student (in the US). The fellowship that I've received for my PhD is only available to domestic students. However, the scholarship that I received for my MS was for both domestic and international students.

I can't log in. I guess it's possible that I actually did forget my password, but I also get an error when I try to reset it. So I suspect I'm out of luck. Oh well, at least I got an IGERT.

I just committed to the Brandeis computer science PhD program (plus the NSF IGERT fellowship program in Dynamics & Geometry). It's good to see other Brandeis people here! I live in the Boston area already, and am happy to answer questions about the area (or you can read the enormous City Guide thread).

I applied. Note that their awards are not all given out at once, since they're completely determined by the member employers.

mocomoco: When I was applying to MS programs, I was accepted with a Dean's Scholarship (the big college-level tuition scholarship for master's students at my MS university). I was accepted into two PhD programs this round (as I've said in previous posts in this thread). One offered me their normal funding package, the other offered me a two-year sciences-and-social-sciences-wide fellowship with a stipend about 50% higher than their usual stipend (with their normal funding package after the first two years). So while obviously it is harder, yes, you can get cool scholarships and such as a sub-3.

Yeah, I never saw this problem when I was in undergrad (elite private R1 with about 4000 undergrads). As an MS student, I'm part-time anyway, and my classmates aren't part of my social life, so I have no idea if they applied to PhD programs and how they're treating each other. I'm probably happier that way.

I lose. Oh well.

I have not heard anything.

It is specific "severely under-represented" minorities, and they don't exactly hide this in the description. The point of the fellowship is to encourage ethnically/racially diverse role models within the professoriate. The severely under-represented minorites that they specify are Black/African-American, Mexican-American, Puerto Rican, and Native American/Native Alaskan/Native Hawaiian, if I remember correctly. You can win a fellowship without being any of these, but they are quite upfront about the fact that they consider being one of these a plus for their purposes.

Silent_G: Yeah, the Porter Square area (which is partially in Cambridge and partially in Somerville) is locationally convenient for your situation, then, since there's a commuter rail stop on the right line there. I saw someone suggest East Somerville, which will be cheaper, but your commute will also be a lot more of a pain. You can probably find something for under $1600, but it's still unlikely to be cheap (you'll be lucky to get it under $1400). Your housing will be cheaper if you're willing to live with others (another couple, perhaps). There's the Green Line B branch (the same one that BU is on), but the parts of Newton that it goes to aren't really very close to Waltham/Brandeis. Another option to look at, though it'll probably cost similarly to what Somerville does, is the North End in Boston proper. You could catch the Green Line at the North End station and take it to BU, your fiance could catch the commuter rail at the North End station and take it to Brandeis. Very convenient. Here are some North End listings that have one-beds (not studios) for as little as $1650: http://www.bostonapartments.com/apartments-for-rent-BOSTON%20-%20NORTH%20END.htm

Waltham itself is one of the cheapest inner-ring cities surrounding Boston. People have suggested Newton, which is certainly nice, but pricier. If you don't mind a commuter rail ride, Arlington and Belmont are nice (though Belmont's expensive). I saw that people mentioned Weston...if you are living on a typical grad student salary Weston's going to be tough to afford, even compared to everything else I just mentioned. A note: Unless mass protests prompt the state to intervene (working on it!) the MBTA is going to see significant fare hikes in a few months. Your mistake appears to be trying to live in a place by yourself in an inner-ring city. There are exceptions, but people don't usually find affordable one-bedroom apartments. They find housemates. And Somerville, being a place full of three-story houses with 2-3 apartments each, mostly has rental stock that's meant for more than one person to live there at a time. There just aren't that many one-beds to begin with.

Are people getting calls still? My phone is busted and undergoing repairs right now, so I wouldn't even know if they called me.

Your overall point is a valid one - the pleas from the wait-listed people annoy me sometimes too - but the way you put it is really jerkish. Grad admissions decisions aren't some straight ranking of merit where all of the people who get accepted are "better" than the people who were waitlisted. They're influenced by things like whether your particular advisors of interest know that they're going to have enough funding to bring on a new grad student (or for that matter, how much influence your particular advisors of interest have on the admissions committee). Or the random chance of who on the admissions committee happened to be the one to do the initial read of your app. I'm not trying to claim that merit plays little or no role in admissions decisions - obviously it plays a very large role - just that it's less straightforward than you seem to think. I got accepted to multiple good programs in my field, and was not waitlisted anywhere, so this isn't my own self-interest or defensiveness talking here.

Yeah, I got my acceptance for IGERT and the university at the same time.

There's a large LBGTQ community at MIT, though I'm not sure how organized it is (I was an undergrad at MIT, so a context where you meet people naturally). If you are active around campus, which I realize can be tough as a grad student, I'd be very surprised if you didn't meet other LBGTQ people. Don't look only at grad-specific organizations. At MIT, mixed grad/undergrad/alumni student groups are very common. There's a lot of activist groups and such around the area. If you're under 23, there is BAGLY (Boston Alliance of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Youth). It might be a bit young for what you want, though, as the age range is 14-22.

It would be nice if they stuck to their posted timeline. These fellowship programs don't seem to understand that winning or not winning could influence someone's actual choice of program, which is due by 4/15.

Did anyone else apply to this? The website says that the winners will be notified in mid to late March. Has anyone heard?

Yeah, but why give 'em more ammo? Personally, I don't understand why TA/RA stipends don't count as credits-eligible wages with W-2s, either. That seems like something grad students could lobby for. I agree that fellowship students who don't have a service obligation in their fellowship are a weird category for this purpose, and I'm not sure what the right answer is there. For those who can't get student loans, like Behavioral, you might look at Lending Club (peer-to-peer lending site), as the rates there tend to be lower than those of normal personal loan rates.

dthomas0312: I don't think that's actually saying that you got an honorable mention. I vaguely remember some question in the app about whether you want to be considered for the honorable mention list if you don't get a fellowship. I think that "yes" means that you said you did. Being an alternate means that if a fellowship winner declines their award (for example, because they won another major fellowship and are only allowed to hold one at once, or because they decided not to go to grad school after all), that award goes to someone on the alternates' list. Honorable mention means "You were close, but you didn't quite get it." It's a way of conferring prestige but not money on the applicants that you liked but didn't quite like enough. I presume that alternates who don't end up with fellowships get honorable mentions, but I'm not positive about that.

My understanding is that Chelsea is quite a bit rougher than East Boston, crime-wise. The SpotCrime maps can give you an idea of the recent history of both, and also allow you to compare with the rest of Boston (though their maps for most other nearby towns, other than Cambridge, don't seem to have data). I will say that there's almost nowhere in the Boston area, that I know of, where I'd be afraid to walk alone, briefly, during daylight hours. There's not that "OMG never go there ever" feel that you hear about with some neighborhoods in some cities. However, there are places where I wouldn't walk alone at night, or want to wander around lost for a prolonged period of time.

If evaluation of applications has taken place, why can't they notify us already? Silly fellowships...I applied for five external fellowships and the only one I've heard from is the Hertz (which rejects non-interviewees in November).

nuvan: There is no "list" that I'm aware of. However, you should realize that some schools with minimum GPA requirements do not always stick to those requirements - I have certainly known several people to get into schools where they didn't meet the supposed minimum GPA. Your high MSc GPA will help. The applications will have a place for you to enter that, and you'll be expected to send transcripts from both your undergrad and MSc universities. I'd say apply to a range of programs, including some lower-ranked ones. Try to find programs in which individual faculty have a lot of influence in admissions and the department has more influence than the graduate school.

If you think Eigen's posts are confrontational, you're really going to get eaten alive.