nemo

Thank you both! Ill look into these options ...

Hi all, I was wondering if anyone had any gems to share about shipping one's worldly possessions over to the states? I'll be moving from Manchester, England to New York for a PhD so I expect to be there for 5/6 years at least. Has any one done or doing this? Any advice on who to use/ how much to bring/ mistakes to avoid etc? Many thanks in advance!

Me too. What residual excited hopefulness was left me last week has disappeared in a dim fog of premature dispair. way premature because i probably wont hear from most places until march at least - but people applying for my programme at other universities are starting to hear, and this does not help my mood. i think i will try a self-imposed ban from all internet forums and just limit it to checking my email seventy times a day. or, if that doesnt work, im certainly banning myself from checking the results page at least, because all i can possibly learn from that is that other people have heard from my unis and i have not. feeling too delicate to appreciate that information right now. oh god, this is such a horrible process!!

Do! it's that rare gem - a book that's profound and also utterly readable. let me know what you think!

oh man, NOW i feel bad. I quit at the end of september and took it up again in december. too much stress. also a trip to france didnt help. i figure theres not much point quitting now - my concentration wouldnt really be up to it. if i get in, ill quit for sure. if i dont, cigarettes will probably be my only consolation. 20,000 cigarettes and a bottle of wine. :!:

Daniel Everett's Don't Sleep There Are Snakes. It came out pretty recently and it's all about his experiences living with the Piraha tribe in Brazil. Highly recommended, esp if youre into anthropology, linguistics and/or philosophy of language.

thanks t_ruth! dont worry, i'm not holding it against you! Hell, as soon as i have the tiniest decision to make ill probably be on there every five minutes basking in the warm, golden glow of Dreams Achieved.

i do have a little bit of stomach churning, although i probably wouldnt call it hate. what i do hate is the fact that the board index now has a 'decisions decisions' section. i cant even bear to enter it, for fear that i wont HAVE any decisions to make... and i still have AT LEAST a month to wait. urgh. this reminds me of that gore vidal quote though: "every time a friend succeeds, a little bit of me dies". ugly sentiment, but theres probably a bit of truth in it somewhere.

Oh god reading this board has made me FREAK OUT. a whopping 50% of my applications are to UC schools - and I'm from the UK. how could this not have been made crystal clear from the outset?! ah well, nothing to be done about it now. i will just attempt to erase this information from my mind.

Yes *sigh*. Ive been feeling extremely negative about my chances of getting into any of the four ridiculously prestigious schools that i applied to (which are, for the record, berkeley, UCLA, Columbia and NYU). Rationally, it is entirely conceivable, if not positively likely, that I will be rejected across the board, not because my application is bad but simply because competition is astronomically high for all four. For a few weeks I berated myself for not having applied to any safety schools, but my measured conclusion is this: i applied to only the places I desperately wanted to go to. The enormity of a five-year PhD course is too significant to make any compromises on. I absolutely completely and utterly want to do this PhD but if this doesnt work out, life will lead me down another course, which is also not a compromise (just a different solution). Maybe rejection will give me the courage to travel around the world being a freelance journalist. That's always been a little daydream of mine. And then again, maybe, just maybe, i wont be rejected across the board!

As if I didnt already have enough outlets for my own masochism (grad cafe resultsts postings from previous years, apply corner, checking my status application twice a day x 4 applications = 8 mini-tortures/day) ive just discovered ratemyprofessors.com. http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/ i knew it existed but it took me til now to put two and two together. ive just spent an unhealthily long time reading student opinions on the good, the bad and and the ugly (and the good-looking of course) from my prospective schools. it all just makes me even more desperate to get into any of them. even the bad professors - just the fact of having an opinion about them is an utterly beguiling prospect!

Im from the UK too. Have been watching the board for a while (still not worked out whether it helps my own stress levels to read other people's stresses or not), but this is my first post. I'm applying for a philosophy phd.