starmaker

If you are okay with a roommate, I disbelieve that you can't find anything under $1500 in JP. The people I know who live there (with roommates, I can only think of three people in all of my local social group who live without roommates and/or a partner) are paying $500-650, roughly. That said, the other places that you mentioned are certainly a little closer to most of BU's campus than JP is.

"Core" classes. Algorithms would be an excellent one, or possibly theory of computation. A computer/operating systems class would also be good.

It is slightly a fringe area, but there are still plenty of people doing it. I think, though, that if you want to work with a particular prof who does GA/Evo, it is reasonable to talk about GA/Evo in your SOP, and mention the relevant prof by name (you are better off if there are at least two profs in the department who do it, though). Academic AI can be very political sometimes, although I think it's gotten better as it's gotten bigger. On the whole, I think GA/Evo's status is mostly benign, as a rather marginal but thriving subfield. Now, the debates between people who like GOFAI vs people who hate it, those can get contentious.

You should be aware that while Asher's book has lots of good tips about good writing, and lots of fantastic sample SOPs, some of the advice isn't great for PhD programs because he's trying to address academic master's and PhD programs, MD programs, law schools, and MBA programs all in the same book. And guess what? Those all have really different admissions criteria, and want different things in their essays! For example, he stresses certain kinds of leadership and character-reference activities a lot that are basically worthless for PhD admissions (though they might be useful for certain fellowships). Nobody in PhD admissions cares that you founded some random club, or that you were a resident assistant in your dorm. They care about your research potential and ability to complete the program (as demonstrated by research experience, recommendations, grades, and GRE), your focus, and to some extent your professionalism and professional involvement (which can be demonstrated by involvement, service, and leadership in the professional societies of your field, the student clubs in your field, the honors societies of your field, etc). I felt that of all that was in the book, I got the most out of reading the sample SOPs in areas of study similar to mine. I don't recommend against the Asher book, but I suggest that you combine it with other sources that are tailored to PhD applicants. Here are two very good ones (science-oriented): Katherine Sledge Moore's site http://sites.google.com/site/gradappadvice/home Philip Guo's pages on PhD applications advice and fellowship application advice, respectively http://www.stanford.edu/~pgbovine/grad-school-app-tips.htm http://www.stanford.edu/~pgbovine/fellowship-tips.htm

I'm not a Brit, but I was reading this thread anyway, and have some advice about this. 1. Don't apply to a program unless there are at least two potential advisors that you'd be glad to work with, preferably three. That way, if one leaves, you still have another good one. 2. Look at the tenure status of your potential advisors, and make sure that at least one is tenured. If they are not tenured, they are more likely to leave (they may be forced to, if they don't get tenure). It is true that many professors who leave for other schools are allowed to take their existing students with them as a condition of their new job, but that could mean moving across the US, possibly leaving a social support network behind or transferring to a less prestigious department. If you pick the potential advisor who is not tenured, cultivate a relationship with the one who is as well - that way, if your untenured advisor leaves academia or switches to a department where you can't/don't want to go, you have some chance of being able to stay in your same department and switch to the tenured prof's group. 3. When you're applying (or before), and you're contacting potential advisors, work in the question of whether they plan to stay. Also, it doesn't hurt to make sure that they are actually in the department - when I was applying for MS programs, one of my potential advisors, who was still listed on the department website, turned out to have retired the year before.

I second East Arlington. I live there and there are a lot of young families. Also, in addition to the bus and the ease of biking, parts of it (like my place) are within walking distance of the Red Line (Alewife Station, which is in Cambridge near the Arlington/Cambridge border).

By the time I start a PhD program (assuming I get in), I'll have finished undergrad five years earlier. It's not "time off," though - I've been doing full-time research in my field for all that time (except for a few unemployed months, because the economy did its thing). I don't especially like the "time off" phrasing, since it implies that what I've actually been doing for several years is lying on a beach, sprawling on the couch watching TV, or traveling the world, rather than work, but I realize it's the standard phrasing in grad app forums. I've also been taking classes, first as a non-degree student and then as a part-time MS student. I have seriously beefed up my CV since I got my bachelor's degree. I am not particularly nervous about it because I've been immersed in my field for all this time, between work and part-time school. My employer will fund employees seeking PhDs (though if I voluntarily leave I have to pay back any education benefits from the previous 12 months) who continue working there part-time, so I get career continuity as well.

Why not talk to professors with whom you're interested in working, rather than program directors? Usually, people applying for grad school contact potential advisors and ask them about the direction of their lab, whether they plan to take new students in the next couple of years, and so on. Here is an excellent post about dos and don'ts for such an email: http://science-professor.blogspot.com/2007/12/writing-to-me.html In the case of students and alumni, you want to know about the political climate of the department (not "are people liberal/conservative" but things like "do the people from different subfields get along? Are there lots of turf wars?"), how far the financial support really goes, whether any training is provided for TAs, how formal the department is, how difficult quals and other exams are, whether there is adequate preparation for quals, why people don't finish the program. Things like that. With alumni, you also want to know how they fared in the post-degree world and (if they used it) how the university's careers office was. And why Thursday? It's great that you want to get a quick start, but you have some time...you'll probably write better emails if you stop and take a breath.

More likely, Craigslist and BostonApartments were just more comprehensive than the sites that I was looking at. I was at work when I made my last post, and didn't want to get sucked into the big sites (and felt that I didn't need to because everyone I talked to around here who has ever apartment-hunted has agreed that a clean non-shared apartment in a safe neighborhood with convenient public transit that is not filled with undergrads, for $850, is about as likely as winning the lottery jackpot). The sites that I was looking at seemed to have few studios. Allston/Brighton, being known as the student slum, is a good place to find relatively cheap apartments. It would not meet the constraints of the earlier poster because it is full of undergrads and often noisy (and, while not a high-crime area, not really low-crime either), but you might not be bothered by that. I am actually kind of surprised that you found studios for under $1000 in Brookline. Most of Brookline is fairly upscale - it's comparatively quiet and known for Jewish culture and cuisine. Kenmore is full of BU undergrads (plus a few MIT fraternity and sorority houses), as well as not being the most convenient for the earlier poster since it's on the wrong branches of the Green Line and just far enough from SMFA to make walking a pain, but it's a nice vibrant area. If you have a car that you need to stash (this and length of commute were problems that my friend from my previous post ran into), parking in some of these areas can be a pain. A lot of them don't have off-street parking, or they have that hideous thing known as tandem parking, and so you end up having to compete with other neighborhood residents for on-street spaces near your home. If you don't have a car, this is obviously not a problem. That said, you should check out these places before diving in, and try to get a feel for the landlord. Brookline is probably okay, as the properties there tend to be well-maintained, but any area with lots of students will also have lots of slumlords trying to take advantage of the students and recently-graduated folks (I say this as someone who had to call the Somerville Health Department on the landlord of my previous apartment). You should also note that apartments that want people for student-move-in dates go really quickly, and relatively cheap desirable ones go even more quickly.

A couple of other places to check out: http://eplex.cs.ucf.edu/ (University of Central Florida - Evolutionary Complexity Research Group) http://www.cs.ucf.edu/~ecl/ (University of Central Florida - Evolutionary Computation Laboratory) http://demo.cs.brandeis.edu/ (Brandeis University - Dynamical & Evolutionary Machine Organization) http://ase.tufts.edu/bdl/ (Tufts University - Biomimetic Devices Laboratory) As you mentioned Computational Creativity, UCF's Evolutionary Complexity Research Group did Picbreeder. http://picbreeder.org/

I'm a bit late to this thread, but for the record, I think AI and working in industry can go together (I'm in AI and working in industry, so obviously I have some bias here). Government contractors and EECS-oriented FFRDCs take AI people. Robotics companies take AI people. Increasingly, biotech/bioinformatics companies take AI people (specifically, machine learning/data mining people). Any company working on information retrieval or Internet search takes AI people. I've been through two (successful) job searches in the last year; I've seen who takes AI people. However, as has already been pointed out, AI is huge. Theoretical AI has fewer industry applications than the application of machine learning to information retrieval, for example. I had mostly worked in machine learning and sensor processing in the past (and enjoyed them), but now I am working in morphogenetic robotics, which is a lot of fun and closer to what I would want to do in PhD work.

You are going to have trouble finding a non-shared apartment with reasonable public transit access for $850 in the Boston area. Period. And I'm not factoring in utilities there. Big shared apartments in JP can often be found quite cheaply by Boston-area standards. But that is not the same situation as non-shared apartments. I had a friend who wanted a non-shared apartment in a safe neighborhood for a max of $1200 (she didn't care about public transit). She ended up in Billerica, which is more than 20 miles from Boston and has no Boston public transit except for a stop on a commuter rail line into North Station. I just gave a quick look to a few rental sites, and I found a 1-bed in JP, with heat included, for $1300. I found a 1-bed with heat and hot water included for $1500 and a 1-bed for $1200 without heat or utilities included. I didn't find any studios at all. I found a 1-bed in Mission Hill (near SMFA) with heat and hot water included for $1425 and another with the same included for $1400. And one for $1285 without heat or utilities included. There are a number of 1-beds in Allston (the "student slum," which probably violates your criteria) for under $1500, some of which even have heat and hot water included. I did find a 1-bed in Roxbury, with heat and hot water, for $950. I found 1-beds in Dorchester for $1100, $1025, $850, and $1100 (no heat or utilities) and one for $1400 (heat and hot water included. Roxbury and Dorchester are the worst (and generally the cheapest) areas of Boston (well, parts of Dorchester are not so bad, but those are not the parts these apartments are in). They violate your criteria, because you want somewhere low-crime, somewhere where you could walk safely at night. The reason why I bring them up is to illustrate my bottom line: You can 1) revise your expectations of what you are going to pay significantly upward, 2) decide that sharing an apartment isn't so terrible after all, 3) get a car and start looking at places at least 10 miles out of Boston (beyond the reach of the subway), or 4) keep all of your expectations the same and hope that you get lucky and manage to get the one place in all of metro Boston that satisfies all of them. I'm sorry to sound so harsh here, but I think you deserve fair warning before you end up in a panic because you can't find a place that you like.

Let's see...phone bill, Internet access (unless you plan to go to campus every time you need to look something up online), gasoline if you live in a place that requires a car, car maintenance, car insurance, taxes, utilities, heat, medical expenses (copays, any deductible that your insurance carries, etc). Plus, there may be some first year setup costs for someone who lived in a typical undergrad dorm and doesn't already own things like pots and dishes and a bed for the new apartment. That said, 24K is pretty standard in engineering. Possibly a little on the high side, depending on your discipline. I've certainly known a number of people around here who were able to live on that. You can also bring some of those numbers down - I don't think I've ever spent 1k on clothes in a year, not even the year that I got married. You can probably get enough food on $50/week (I live in a high cost-of-living area, so I have some idea what you can expect). You can buy used textbooks online. Unless you're in Manhattan or something, you can probably find a place for under 1k/month if you share the cost with others - even around here, which is one of the most expensive areas in the country housing-wise, it is possible to get a room for under $500 if you go with the right neighborhoods and are willing to live with a whole bunch of people. If you just need a laptop, and it doesn't need to be a good one, you can get it for under 1k.

For what it's worth, not all of the MIT grad dorms are exactly on campus. They're pretty near it, but they're all either in Cambridgeport or on the edge of campus (or both). There is plenty of land owned by MIT northwest of Albany St, but it is not "campus" in any real sense, it's random property owned by MIT. If you're worried about being unable to escape the academic life, the location of the grad dorms won't be a problem (the fact that all the other people in your building are MIT students or families of MIT students might be, but that will also be true if you get a place with people from your department). Personally, I don't know that I'd want to live with people from my own program. At least students from different programs would mean that I'd be seeing some new faces. There's a huge number of young professional MIT alums living in the area, and there's always an apartment shuffle in that community. You might know people who know people, etc. I'd say look beyond just the people in your program.

Yes, Grace Hopper is a huge amount of fun, and I've presented a poster there before, and it was great! I think you're misunderstanding the direction of causality here. The reason that there are women's organizations and things like that in CS in the US is because there aren't a lot of women in the field, not the other way around. Back in the 1950s or so when CS was a low-prestige field, there were many women working in it. As it gained prestige, the men came in, and the women got pushed to the side, because it was still a time when there was a lot of institutionalized discrimination against women in the US. And this society has a long and sad history of assuming that science and technology are not for women, that predates CS as a field. Unfortunately, there is still prejudice and discrimination against women in CS in the US. It does not happen everywhere, and it does not happen to the same degree everywhere, but it does exist. If you have not experienced this, you are fortunate. I have mostly been fortunate, but I did experience a case of a startup owner trying to trade sex for a job offer, a handful of openly prejudiced peers when I was a kid, and one openly prejudiced science teacher. I have friends who have been sexually harassed at their workplaces and at conferences, and who have been victims of pay discrimination. I met a couple of grad students at Grace Hopper who were told that they would lose their funding if they became pregnant. It happens. The point of women's groups, women's conferences, etc, is to give women a forum to connect with each other, feel like they aren't the only one in the same situation, maybe even discuss strategies for how to respond to sexist behavior. Sadly, some girls in the US grow up being told that science and engineering are not for women, and so going to a conference full of women scientists as an undergraduate, or being part of a schoolwide group of women in CS, can be a huge growth experience for them, prove to them that the crap that people told them wasn't true. Some of those women's groups do outreach with younger girls, to make sure that they never internalize those bad messages to begin with. Some of them help recruit freshman women - you may have known that you wanted to do CS when you arrived at college, but some girls who would like and be good at it never considered it before. Anyway, I wouldn't worry about a school emphasizing its women in CS groups. Most likely, they are trying to say that their department is a welcoming place for women. Yes, that shouldn't need to be said, you should be able to take it for granted that every program is welcoming to women, but unfortunately it's not true. Don't worry about being good. If you weren't good, they wouldn't have admitted you. They aren't going to admit students who they think will fail or go on to represent the school poorly. The profs don't want students who will be a burden rather than an asset in the lab. The point is that now that you're admitted, they want you to choose them, because you're good. So they are trying to promote their strengths to you, including being women-friendly.

9/1 is an absurdly busy date in the Boston apartment world. There are tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands, of undergrads, graduate students, and post-docs, in Boston and the surrounding cities, and they are all looking for something for 9/1. I'm not sure exactly when it becomes too late, but you want to start looking as soon as possible. You sound like the quintessential JP resident. If I were you, my only concern about JP would be the commute, and that would depend on where your post-doc is (is it at the main university campus? Harvard Medical School? Harvard Business School? a teaching hospital?). If your post-doc is at the main campus, that's probably a 35-40 minute subway commute from JP. If it's at, say, the med school, the commute will be much shorter. JP is a bright, colorful area, with everything that you described yourself as wanting. However, while it does not, according to the Boston crime map, have high crime itself, it is very close to some of the worst areas of Boston. If you got out of the subway station at night and started off in the wrong direction, maybe after having had a little too much to drink at a pub with your labmates, you could end up in a bad area within a few blocks. Lower Allston would also be a good fit for you, but Allston in general is kind of a student slum. Don't get me wrong, it has plenty to do, is very vibrant, but it's more run down than JP and has more crime (like I said, JP itself doesn't have much crime, it's just near some high-crime areas). The subway service is not as good as in JP - the Green Line can be a pain in general and the B branch of the Green Line has so many stops that it takes forever to get anywhere. The roads are bigger than in JP and there's more car traffic. On the plus side, you will never run out of things to do and there's probably more pubs in Allston than in JP. If your post-doc is at the main university campus or the business school the commute from Allston would be better. JP is more left-wing/counterculture in the way that you are looking for, in general, than Allston, but if I'm remembering Lower Allston correctly, it fits that bill too. Lower Allston is a less distinct neighborhood than JP, though...it blends more into the rest of Allston. You should also consider Cambridge itself, and Somerville, especially if you will be working at the main university campus. You would probably like Harvard Square in Cambridge or Davis Square in Somerville. They also have all of the features that you want and lots of left-wing/counterculture types. But they are likely to be more expensive than JP or Allston (both of which are cheap by Boston-area standards).

wallyca: I am an MS student at Northeastern, and I live near Alewife (at the end of the Red Line, just past the parts of Somerville that are on the Red Line). My commute between home and school is roughly an hour. It is not the best commute (my commute between home and work is very short), but most of it is on the T, so I can read a novel, relax, listen to music, do my school readings, etc. The residential neighborhood that's very near to Northeastern is Mission Hill. My impression is that it is full of undergrads and that town-gown relations in the neighborhood are extremely strained, because the people who aren't undergrads are local families with kids who don't appreciate the nighttime partying and such. Roxbury borders Northeastern, but it is a bad area, high-crime. If you want a Cambridge-like (counterculture, liberal, lots of young adults, dense housing, walkability, eccentricity) environment that's nearer to Northeastern, I heartily recommend Jamaica Plain. It's also cheaper than Cambridge, based on my conversations with friends who live there. It's cheaper than the parts of Somerville that are very near the T (e.g. Davis Square). It's probably no more than a 15-minute commute to Northeastern on the Orange Line - it might even be walkable, though I haven't tried it. If you live in Central or Harvard Square in Cambridge and commute to Northeastern via the Red/Green lines or Red/Orange lines, that should take 40 minutes or so. East Cambridge is probably about the same unless you live right by Lechmere or something, in which case it will be quicker. elizalou: Central Square and Harvard Square are rather different. Central is more inner-city (also, it is full of Indian restaurants - if you like Indian food, it's a great place to be). Harvard is more upscale and expensive in general, and it's packed with independent stores and restaurants. There are lots of Harvard University students and faculty around all the time, and it's a very intellectual sort of neighborhood. If you are planning to drive places, the traffic is a little less bad in Central, IMO - nowhere in Cambridge is very good for traffic, but Harvard Square is notorious (a lot of my friends will deliberately avoid driving through there). In general, if you are commuting from some place in Cambridge, Somerville, or Boston, to somewhere else in Cambridge, Somerville, or Boston, you don't want to drive. You think it will be shorter, because you don't have to depend on mass transit. This is because you haven't seen rush-hour traffic in these cities. Your commute won't be much shorter - it might even be a little longer - and at least on mass transit you can do relaxing or productive stuff rather than focus on the road. I do not know what sort of area you are looking for. If you don't mind something suburban, you might be best off somewhere on the north end of the Orange Line. where you can take the Orange Line to Bunker Hill Community College and walk a mile. Another possibility is living in Charlestown itself - it's not a bad area, and you could walk. Another way to get to the Charlestown Navy Yard is to take the subway to some area downtown - everything is very close together there - walk to Long Wharf, and take the commuter ferry.

That depends. Comm Ave is long and goes through a lot of areas (same, for that matter, as the BU campus), some of which are nicer than others. For example, in most of Brookline, I'd call that an excellent deal. In Allston, you can probably get something cheaper. I'd consider it a good deal in the neighborhoods that I've lived in, but none of those are near where you are looking.

I don't know what subfield you're in, but if it's programming languages, go with NEU. They're big shots in programming languages. If you have questions about what NEU is like, I'm happy to answer - I'm an MS student there. The MS at UMass Amherst will put you in a good position for getting into a top PhD program, assuming that you do well and take advantage of opportunities there. That is a lot of money to shell out, though. To a large extent, this is going to come down to whether you're willing to spend, which is not a decision that we can make for you.

This is very, very, field-dependent. My friend in biotech (with a PhD from a top-10 program) did all the right things in his job search, and it took him 9 months of regular application to get a job (though when he got one, it was a very good one). My friend who's a software engineer (with a BS from a top-10 program) with a preference for web development at small startups, had a new job lined up within a week or two after he decided to leave his old one - I think it was the first place he looked at. I'm in research-oriented EECS, and it took me three months. My husband's a tech writer, and when he looked for jobs a few years ago, I think it took him seven months. In my own case, for my recent job search, I applied to about 60 jobs across about 30 companies over the course of three months (most within the first month - after that, a lot of what I was doing was interviewing and such). Of those 30 companies, about half got back to me expressing some interest, and maybe 10 of those actually gave me an interview. Make sure that you're applying intelligently, and not just working hard. Don't just send a bunch of apps to places and hope for the best. Write cover letters. Talk to headhunters, if you're in a field that uses them. Go to local career fairs and industry networking events. Use your school's career center. Use any restricted job boards that you have access to (e.g. one run by your alumni association). Get on jobs-related email lists - your school/alma mater's alumni association may have such a list. Ask your friends if their companies are hiring and if they will refer you. Ask your friends if they will introduce you to their friends who work at companies that are hiring - sites like LinkedIn and Facebook will tell you who's a friend of a friend. My own job search worked out quite well this time - I got my dream job, pretty much. I found out about the job from a friend who works in the relevant group at the relevant company. I wrote a cover letter, and got him to refer me, which allowed me to bypass the resume-filtering and phone-screen parts of the hiring process. Then I had to prove myself through all-day in-person interviewing, a research talk, and a difficult programming/algorithms test. The process took about a month longer than it should have because holidays and inclement weather kept interfering with interview scheduling.

Well, some of us have been conducting research full-time (as academic lab techs or research hospital techs, as junior scientists in industry or government, etc) for one or more years. And you do find undergrads who have legit experience...I knew people who had 3-4 years of working 10-15 hours/week as undergrad research assistants, and had co-authored peer-reviewed publications, by the time they finished undergrad. They were special cases to be sure, but they're out there. What do you mean by "for its own sake?" If you mean "for no reason except to have a PhD," then I'm not sure that's the best reason to get one. You're making a big commitment; most people want to have more to it than jumping through a hoop for no reason except that hoop-jumping is cool. If you mean "for the love of your field," then I think there are many people who want PhDs for primarily that reason (my sister, for one). For myself, it's a combination of field-love and more practical reasons. But I have not had serious doubts about pursuing a PhD in this field since I originally decided that I wanted to. I have had some fleeting doubts during nights when I'm especially stressed about MS classes, and thinking that life would be so much easier if I stopped with school, but the doubts go away when I get through the work.

Research ability should probably trump everything - you're applying for research programs, after all - but what makes you think that GPA and GRE are reliable indicators or research ability? They don't and aren't meant to measure it. They don't correlate particularly well with success in research-based graduate programs. On the other hand, the point of letters of recommendation and the SOP is that you (SOP) and credible practitioners (recs) can talk about...wait for it...your research ability. Good SOPs and recs talk about concrete skills and accomplishments on the part of the applicant, rather than just indulging in flowery vagueness about how smart you are. Publications are different. Peer-reviewed publications are actually very highly regarded by PhD admissions committees! After all, they demonstrate that established practitioners in your field reviewed your work and judged it up to the standards of a full-fledged practitioner - what stronger endorsement could you get for your ability to succeed in a research-based program? And even publications in places like undergrad journals are valuable, since they teach you about the process, which will be useful later on when you ARE trying to publish in peer-reviewed venues. But most applicants, even most good applicants, don't have any publications, so you can't just rank applicants based on number of publications (and not all publications are equal, either). Publications are more of an icing-on-the-cake deal - if you have them, it can help a lot, but if you don't have them nobody will look at you askance. The problem is that there isn't a quantitative measurement of research ability that you can expect strong undergrads to have participated in. This is why we make do with flawed proxies - quantitative ones that aren't really about research ability, and non-quantitative ones that are. If you really want to evaluate somebody's social skills, the best way to do that is probably the on-campus interview.

*laugh* I was going to be a little bitchy at you for complaining about your "lowish" between-3.4-and-3.63 GPA on the sub-3.0 GPAs thread, but then you said we were cool, so I won't. Anyway... - UF is not a degree mill, it's a respected major research university. - Your GPA is fine. Don't worry about it. Sure, it's not a 4.0, but it's high enough that you're going to be evaluated largely on other parts of your application. Which brings me to the following point... - Don't stick around for another year just to boost your grades, but you might want to consider sticking around to boost your research experience, research credentials, and letters of recommendation (research supervisors often provide the most valuable recs), if you can afford the tuition. Those are going to be more important than your GPA, and staying for the fourth year will give you a significant advantage on all of them. Also, since you are a chem major, beware the influence of the premeds, and their worries about anything that's not an A, on how you perceive your own grades. PhD programs don't evaluate applicants with the same weighting of factors that MD programs do.

DCA-John: I agree that a big complex is more likely to be de-leaded, and will probably have more families. Also, this one appears to have central air conditioning/heat, which is a huge luxury around here. The location is a little meh, in my opinion (and it sounds like you value a lot of the same things that I do in an area). It's certainly nice enough (it's right on the border with Belmont, and Belmont is a little ritzier than Cambridge or Wartertown), and Fresh Pond is great to walk/run/bike/rollerblade around when the weather is decent, but that part of Huron Ave is wide and full of traffic during much of the day, and the walkability to stores and restaurants is, while far from bad, less good than a lot of the places that you have mentioned - some of those restaurants that they picture on their website as being "in the area" are a couple of miles away, at least. Ditto for the malls and shopping centers. Plenty of bikability, though - a couple of miles goes quicker on a bike than on your feet, and the combination of the Fresh Pond paths and a lot of bike lanes in that area make it relatively bike-friendly. itaal: If you are splitting an apartment of that size in Cambridge/Somerville, you should be able to do better than $800-900/month. Having done it, I'd expect that you can get into the $650-750/month range. That's not including utilities and heat, though. Those dorm prices...do they cover utilities and heat? Because if they do, that's a much better deal than the raw numbers indicate, and about as good as you'll find anywhere. And some of the dorms provide furnishings, which will also save you money. If they don't cover utilities and heat, then you can do better for a convenient multi-room apartment, but probably not for a studio.

Yeah, no stairs will be hard in any of the areas that you mentioned. $2000 will get you a 2-bedroom, but it's unlikely to be 1300-1400 square feet. That's huge for a 2-bed around here. I live in a very nice 2-bed that's maybe 1000 square feet. In general, the big apartments with lots of common space are also the ones with more bedrooms. I lived in Davis for a couple of years, near Tufts, and we didn't have problems with noise. You can always ask who's in the other apartment (most houses have two apartments in them, some have three). Cambridgeport definitely has families. East Watertown definitely has families, and probably fewer young professionals than most of the areas you mentioned - Watertown is heavily Armenian and Greek and is to some extent like other "ethnic" enclaves, with restaurants, multi-generational families, etc. Most of these areas have a mix of families, young professionals, and students. Most of the students are not 24/7 party animals - they go to nerdy colleges. Everywhere that you mentioned has pretty good walkability, as do Porter Square, Union Square, East Watertown, and North Cambridge. I'd say that Strawberry Hill and Huron Village have a little less walkability than the others, but still pretty good. I don't know what it costs to rent in Huron Village, but that's some seriously expensive real estate in that area, which might translate to higher rents. That's Tory Row country (well, not literally, but it's right there). Union and Inman are probably a little less safe than the others. Really, though, I don't find anywhere in Cambridge particularly bad compared to what is considered bad in many cities. I'm a young female, and I walked alone through what is generally considered the worst section of Cambridge (Area 4), in the dark, dozens of times, without a problem. Not that I necessarily recommend this, but my point is that, for example, a little kid walking to school ought to be fine in any place that you or michpc brought up. I will add the caveat that there's some sketchiness near Teele Square - when I read Tufts campus police reports when I lived in Davis, it seemed like most of the incidents happened within a small area. All of these places meet your distance and public transit criteria.