cogneuroforfun

You shouldn't care about other people on the waitlists. When you know you won't go to a school, decline the offer. If you still think you might go, you should hang onto the offer. If you're doing PhD, you're signing away the next 5-7 years of your life, so you should make the best decision for you!

If you don't mind commuting a little, living in the foothills (north Tucson, up around Skyline/Sunrise and Campbell) is very nice; the drive takes maybe 10 minutes normally, but Campbell, 1st Ave, and other north/south streets get pretty packed at peak hours. They have plenty of very nice apartments up there, but I'm not sure exactly how expensive they are. I suspect they might be stretching a UofA grad stipend a little bit. Same goes for the houses. But if you can find something in your budget and don't mind a little bit of a drive during peak times, the area is very nice. There's a good amount of housing between Grant and Prince, and 1st Ave and Country Club. Some of those neighborhoods are kind of bad, but there are lots of nicer ones too. There are probably some houses for sale in that general area. Besides that, you'd really have to want to commute. A grad student I know lives way north in Marana, which takes her about 45 minutes in the mornings, I think, and she leaves before the morning rush. You could try finding some housing in the Sam Hughes neighborhood, directly east of campus. Most of the neighborhoods for a couple miles due east from the campus are pretty good, between Broadway and Speedway. Those are some general areas to start. I rented an apartment through undergrad, so I haven't had to go through a house search in Tucson.

Yeah, it certainly seems like you should be picking school #1 over Stanford. If Stanford's name is all that's causing you to question going to another school that is ranked in the top 5 or 10 for stats, then I think you should for sure be saying so long to Stanford!

I am obviously biased (rejected from Princeton, going to Yale ) but Yale does seem to have very nice spousal benefits. They have a career days specifically for students' spouses in August. Plus, your spouse will get a Yale ID and have all the benefits of that (free shuttles, reduced prices for music/theater, and a couple more). Also, Yale will pay for half of the cost for health insurance for a grad student couple (or full coverage for a single student), so your husband will get health insurance. I didn't look as closely at Princeton as at New Haven, but I thought the New Haven housing was cheaper. Apartments/duplexes in East Rock are quite nice and you can get a 1 or 2 bedroom for around $800-$1300, depending on how many sq.ft. you want, with a bunch of nice amenities (yard, washer/dryer, etc.). All that being said, I think you have to go where your research interests will be best served. Both should be fantastic places for you, from what you've said. I don't think you can go wrong. If you're ready to lock yourself into the Yale prof's area, that might be the best bet. But if you are not sure whether you might change your mind somewhere down the road, Princeton's overall strength in your area might be better for you. Sorry that that doesn't help too much

Can you find placement from the Stanford program? If its graduates go on to get professorships that you would want, I don't see why you would turn it down. The advice I've heard is that it doesn't matter what official name is on your degree, it matters what research you've done and what you want to do (and obviously the reputation of your program). How does the research fit differ between your two options? Sure 1) is a statistics PhD, but if faculty at Stanford are doing the research you want to do, then I think that definitely outweighs the name of your degree.

Its a difference in character, perspective, and goals, I think. Psychology undergrads/grads are going to be primarily concerned with doing well in school, doing some research, possibly doing some volunteer work, and most likely applying to grad school (social work, clinical, etc). Business students are going to be worried about internships, getting a job, and making money. Obviously they're all college students, so they have to do some amount of scholarly work to get by (and everyone eventually wants to make some decent money). But many psychology students will be continuing on into academia/research careers, whereas business students are planning on getting out into the work force and finding a good job. Its not like one is necessarily better, but if you want to have students excited about basic research or academia or something, psychology students might be better. On the other hand, if you are all about applying psychological research directly into the workplace, and you care more about the applied side than the research side, you might prefer business students. That's a very rough outline of how I think about it, but it will at least give you some idea of the kinds of differences, I think.

Different departments might have slightly different procedures, but the answer is almost certainly no. BBS adds 4k a year to your stipend if you bring in an external fellowship. Every other school I looked at does that same thing, although the amount they added to your stipend varied a little bit. For example, the NSF fellowship stipend is 30k a year. I won't get almost 60k a year if I get it though; Yale will bump up my stipend from ~29k to ~33k. (Note that there is almost a 0% chance I'll get it, especially this year ). Your department might add a little more or less, but I have never heard of someone getting a double stipend.

It seems that Yale funds their humanities and science grad students similarly. In neuroscience/BBS, I'm getting a few thousand more, but not too much. I wonder if there's more of a discrepancy in funding at other places; I've always been under the impression that humanities grad students get a good chunk less. I'm minoring in history and know that its a lot of work to be a historian, so that always seemed a little sad to me.

On my interviews, every potential prof I would work with asked where else I was visiting, and I told them. That didn't seem to hurt me when it came to decisions later on It might have helped, since then they knew I was committed to the topic I told them I wanted to study.

I'm fairly certain most schools are perfectly happy with that. You will almost certainly have to pay two application fees though, unfortunately. Although I did not do it, I know some cognitive neuroscience applicants who applied to psych and neuro programs at the same school. For two of the schools where I applied to the neuro program, they shared the applications with psychology by default. Within the psychology department, I saw some schools that made you apply to one area and you could not apply to, say, "social" and "cognitive" areas, only one. But I didn't see any that said you could only apply to one department. It wouldn't hurt to email a school and ask to make sure, but unless they explicitly say you can't apply to multiple departments, then you're probably good! Just make sure you're honest and consistent in your personal statements and interests to each: you don't want to get your app dumped in the trash because you told two different stories and the departments decided to coordinate on which would admit you

I'm going to try to come relatively early, like early July at the very latest. I'm definitely living off campus in non-Yale housing, hopefully in a nice East Rock duplex; I think my fiance and dog would appreciate living in as "house-like" a place as possible. I am not sure there's too much of a cross-department social scene, just because it seems like there are small social groups even within departments. I guess we'll all see when we get there!

Instead of thinking about the program doing something, you should look at individual faculty members to see what they do. Start off looking at some school you would like to go to and wouldn't mind living in its city/town. Look through the psychology department, business, marketing, etc., and find any professors who mention cool stuff on their departmental page. Then do a search on pubmed or google scholar and see what kind of stuff they do. Alternatively, look at any of the JDM articles you've read that are doing the research you want to do: where are those authors?

Rebeccafav's analysis seems spot on. It sounds like the graduate school doesn't have the money for you, but a professor might. I think most of the time from the third year on your thesis advisor pays your stipend from grants anyways, so there may be a chance a professor has some extra money now and can fund you for the full 5 years (rather than just the last 3). That is my best guess!

I'm not sure exactly what sort of JDM stuff you're interested in, but I am doing neuroeconomics and thus applied to some more behavioral JDM programs too. I highly recommend Carnegie Mellon's Social and Decision Science department. They have a joint degree in behavioral decision research and psychology which looks fantastic for more cognitive/behavioral (less neuro) JDM. As for psych programs with some good JDM faculty, a couple of the big ones I liked were Princeton and UPenn. Craig Fox at UCLA also seems like he would be a good advisor and is doing cool work. I definitely would not confine yourself to social psych; I found plenty of JDM faculty in cognitive areas, and I think cognitive psychology areas are a little less competitive than social psych area. I think social gets way more applicants for about the same number of slots.

Of course! The program uses rotations, so I'm not sure where my permanent lab will be. I plan on doing rotations with some combination of a bunch of the cognitive neuro people, like Daeyeol Lee, Marvin Chun, and Xiao-Jing Wang. There are also more people in the psychology department I am interested in, including Laurie Santos and possibly Jeremy Gray. So at the moment its kind of up in the air, but I like having so many people of interest to work with!

I interviewed for neuroscience at Duke and Yale and they both use TAs. However, it depends on department, I think: Duke's Neurobiology did not require their graduate students to TA, but Psychology & Neuroscience there did require 3 or 4 semesters as a TA. At Yale's BBS neuroscience, they require two semesters of TA.

I'm off to Yale's neuroscience program. Not psychology, but there are a lot of cognitive neuro faculty (and even some molecular/cellular neuro faculty) doing amazing research that is very relevant to my interests. I can't wait for this fall

Haha, very nice. Feels good right? I got 10 applications out there, have 9 responses (pfft, Stanford, don't worry about letting me know my status), and accepted an offer from my post-interview favorite program. It was a pretty intense winter, getting the applications out and then waiting to hear back. But I was very happy with my decisions about where to apply and extremely happy with the places I heard back from and interviewed at. Knowing where I'll be moving to in half a year, physically and academically, feels amazing after so long of having no idea!

I ended up accepting an offer from Yale's neuroscience program! Duke's cognitive neuroscience program and faculty were amazing, but Yale just seemed like a slightly better match for me, which was very surprising (I thought my tough decision would be between Duke and NYU). So there might be a couple spots opening up, although I think its still very early in the game and most people won't have decided yet. Good luck to everyone who is still waiting and deciding!

We had an interview weekend for neuroscience, so I'm pretty sure there's no other admitted students weekend for me. It was great, though, so of course if you have the chance you should visit!

I just accepted my offer today It took a good couple weeks of thought after my interviews, but I'm pretty sure its the best choice for me. New Haven actually seems pretty cool, too!

Both my parents have bachelor's, but no one in my family has done grad school. When I told my dad about how tough the top schools are to get into, he would just smile and nod. When I told him I got interviews/acceptances to some top schools and that I couldn't believe it and how excited I was, he would just smile again and say he didn't know what I was so worried about and that he never doubted I'd have my pick of schools. Thanks dad

I would recommend hearing him out, too. As long as you're fairly prompt with turning down the offer (if you get one), then there's no harm done to them or other prospectives, plus you get some more info to better judge your other schools!

I grew up in Phoenix and very much prefer Tucson. Its more calm and people are generally nicer. I'm not sure how Seattle is, but you need a car here. There's plenty to do, but you'll have to drive to it! Right around the campus is nice enough, and up north in the foothills is also very nice. I live a couple blocks north of campus, so I can't tell you much about driving to the university except that Campbell and 1st Ave, the two big north/south streets that border the campus, get quite busy from like 3pm to 6pm, as you'd expect. Hopefully some current grad students, who probably live farther from campus, can help you out more.

I'll be at the medical school campus primarily, so I am wondering about where I should look for housing. East Rock is farther away, but seems like a great place to live. On the other hand, living right downtown near the green is affordable enough, has some very nice apartments, and is within walking distance to the med campus. Is there much of a downside to living more downtown? Also, people I've talked to have said New Haven is nicer than its reputation, but there are "bad parts." Where are these, generally? West Haven and East Haven both seemed nice enough from my housing searches. I'm open to living farther away and having to commute 20-30 minutes, but where should I make sure to avoid?