flotsam

Hahahahaha! Perfect!

If there is any way you could go visit the 2 schools, speak with the profs and current students, check out the career/hiring stats for alumnae, check out the college scene and the town, you might find the decision easier to make. Most speech pathologists have so many choices for placement when they get their degrees! It would be great if you could see what the internship and externship options are at each school (hospital/clinic/school) so that you can determine what types of experience you'll come away from each program with. Good luck with these hard decisions. :-)

My son visited there last year as part of his final decision-making process. He loved the area and the campus is very exciting. The program was HEAVY into the bilingual side of speech therapy and while he is bilingual (Spanish), he was more interested in other areas of Speech Path. Plus, the emphasis was on the educational setting and since he was more interested in a clinic approach, he decided that it wasn't a good fit for him. As far as working and going to school, he has a TA-ship and that is about all he can handle outside of classes and clinic work. Maintaining a job outside of the program might help defray costs but it would add time onto getting out of the program, which would mean more expenses in the long run. I have been in the teaching field for a long time. Some of our speech pathologists have been hired from the local university to lighten the caseloads of existing speech pathologists. They get paid well to do this and it counts as clinic hours. They do everything from holding IEPs to setting up programs for the students that qualify to evaluation/modification of existing clients. That might be an option for some of you looking to kill 2 birds with one stone.

Don't be so sure that even she knows what she's done. There seem to be some discrepancies, as shown in her correspondences.

I didn't see that in any of the links. Do you know that from one of the links attached recently? It would have been remiss if the prof hadn't at least contacted someone in the hierarchy regarding the contact from this woman. The more people you have on your side, the better the case against her for pestering/stalking later on. Witnesses are a good thing.

I hope the guy she is defaming is documenting EVERYTHING and has some legal and professional support. She is a stalker and could possibly become a real threat if she is that imbalanced. She looks a little wild-eyed but then so do I when those voices in my head start arguing with one another. (No, you don't!) [Yes, I do!] (We never argue with you) [What do you call this???] JK...bad joke. "We'll" go stand in the corner.

Hahahahaha! Doubtful that any other school is clambering to offer admission. Can you just imagine someone this unstable trying to fix this country's economy? (Hey, on second thought...)

jblsmith---If they DO end up revoking your funding due to a misreading of your application, be sure that you post your obsessive rant in a different font so we don't get you mixed up with the loser that keeps posting on this site.

I went out there a few weeks ago with my son to check out the housing situation. We spent 5 days walking the city and taking the metro everywhere, trying to get a good feel for the different neighborhoods. We were both amazed at the diversity from one neighborhood to the next and while he will have to wait until he goes out again at the end of this month to secure a place, he was able to get a good idea of what neighborhoods to gravitate toward and which ones to avoid. If you are willing to commute to the nearby areas in Maryland or Virginia, you get a lot more for your money. But DC has wonderful public transportation (bus and metro) and there are pockets of students everywhere since there are so many colleges all around. If you want to stay close to the campus, get a map of the area. AutoClub has a good map of the area and it includes a metro map on the bottom so you can see how close the stations are to a particular neighborhood. We shopped around on Craigslist and looked at some of the roommate ads on the GWU off-campus website. Things are coming up all the time. My advice to you is to find a place to plant yourself for a week or so and make yourself totally available for the Open Houses that are offered for vacant rooms in established houses/apartments. Craiglist also has some ads for students who are looking for both a place and someone to live with but it might be easier to find something already established that needs a roommate.

I have recently poked around the internet and found an interesting site. Check it out: http://www.studentsreview.com/ and pay close attention to the student/alumni reviews as well as the interesting pie charts depicting what percentage of the interviewed students would actually return to that campus if they had to do it all over again. The "report card" format on the survey pages makes for interesting reading. My only complaint is that I haven't found the link on this site that specifically targets graduate school. I hope there is one and I'll investigate soon.

Cunni, the college's initial (and probably highest) recommended scores for potential applicants come from the list of early acceptances they filter through and offer admission to. That way, they can sort through the brightest and the best and use their scores to report to the ed. organizations and media and receive their place on the ranking list. The "others," meaning the ones who are not offered early admission, are either rejected, waitlisted, or moved to the piles of applications that will be reviewed during the normal time in Jan-March. But by then, the test scores and GPA's of those candidates who accepted early admission have already been submitted to the folks who crunch numbers and create lists of rankings. These averages may be modified later on to reflect all of the scores of the students making up the incoming class, but, like I said, the initial info with the higher test scores has already been used and students are hungry for that info so that they can choose among the highest ranked schools to send their applications to. This process happens long before the students begin to sort through which schools they want to investigate for matriculation so the rankings comes from the information from the past 1+ years. To complicate things for potential students, some schools do not cater to these deadlines and do not play the game as viciously as other schools. So their place on the ranking list might be low or even absent but the quality of their programs may be very high. This is why it becomes imperative that students visit the campuses or do their research and find out as much about the professors, research opportunities, and employment success of each program. It could be that a smaller, obscure college may offer more attention and be more willing to take a risk on a particular research project than a larger, more "prestigious" college. Or a larger college may give a student more access to outside research...it just all depends. So much of what attracts students to certain colleges/programs is the result of what amounts to a beauty contest. Reputation is vital as long as it is based on student success and not something the administration may have padded for the media. It makes sense to talk to both current and former students and add their input to the mix of data needed to make an informed choice of what schools to apply to. Look at the professors closely to see if what excites them in the field is aligned with your interests. Sorry for being so long-winded. Are you still awake out there?

I just finished reading a book called The Gatekeepers. It's about the process used by university admission officers to filter applicants from the search for students with "the right fit", through the application-filtering stage, to finally choosing students who come off the waitlist. It explains in detail what part of the process results in those tests/GPA scores used by colleges to calculate their average entrance scores and rank the schools. It was a fascinating read and I came out of it feeling a bit disillusioned. Yes, there is a great amount of the process that is subjective, making it seem so arbitrary to the applicant. So much depends on the essays and letters of recommendations. An incredibly low GPA and GRE can be an initial dealbreaker but if your experience is strong and you have the ability to put it in writing and get back-up from people who are respected in your area of interest, a set of average scores could be counterbalanced. The colleges, it seems, WANT an over-abundance of students to apply for a very limited number of spaces because it makes them look better. That makes those LOR's and SPO's all the more important.

There are websites that have actual GRE practice tests that are formatted, timed, and scored just like the real thing. Most of these websites cost $$, depending on how many practice tests you want. I am not sure if the written sections are scored, but the prompts are very similar to the ones you'll get at your sitting. Of course, you could always wait and take the new GRE. Here is a website with some info on that: http://www.manhattangre.com/newGRE.cfm?gclid=COq4s_iOlqgCFRphgwod33KhBg The books with test stategies for the old test are good. Make flashcards of the vocabulary words and start to think about how things are related analogously. Memorizing, at this point, will only stress you out more. Just familiarize yourself with as much as you can so that you won't have to spend so much time trying to decipher the directions on the test. The worst that can happen is that you will want to retake the test. Take a deep breath and remember that this ridiculous rite of passage will take you one step closer...

Beware the "Seattle Freeze." And take a good pair of galoshes.

I am so sorry this is happening to you. I think you should make a phone call or, if you are local, go in and visit with the powers that be. At this point, emailing sounds like you won't be able to state your case effectively. Put the names of the people who've given you the financial offer before the dept or, better yet, speak with those who have extended the financial offer and find out how this happened in the first place. Who is in charge of screening applications and offering admission? Do they have a copy of your GA letters? If the money is being offered through the student activities dept, don't they check their admissions list before making offers? I wonder if this lack of communication and organization is prevalent at this school.