psycholinguist

This! My family name makes me sound as if genealogically speaking I must be half [nationality] thanks to my father. As it happens, I am half [nationality], but it's because of my mother, and [nation] has absolutely nothing to do with how they met!

I felt like this last year! It's nothing but a good sign. If you've done all your paperwork, found a place to live (if applicable), chosen your classes (if you can yet), and set up your flights/road-trip/other (also if applicable), and quite possibly lurked around your new department's website looking at people's personal pages and handouts and papers and so on, then...what? Hang in there at work (if you're working), read (recreationally and/or about your field, if you need to!), take up a new hobby (ever wanted to learn how to use a sewing-machine? How to roller-skate? How to draw manga-art? How to grow your own fruits, vegetables, and herbs?), and spend plenty of time on Grad Café boards continuing to get excited.

I agree with this. Don't worry about what people might be thinking when it comes to office-chairs and such: if they're annoyed, they'll ask someone, and get the truth. For everyone who needs a cane, a wheelchair, an insulin-pump, a back-support, a whatever: use it as much as you need to, and nonchalantly. These things do exactly what they're meant to do: they compensate for health-issues so that those affected by them can lead normal lives. (Hey, quick poll time: how many people here are wearing glasses/contacts? * grins *) In other words, go for it! Pretty well everyone knows what it's like to be ill and/or injured and/or otherwise restricted by physical limitations; if you act as if your health-aids are no big deal, they'll come across as no big deal.

I live a kilometre (in this case, about eight blocks) from my department, and I love it. Although I can understand the feeling of wanting to go home to a place set apart from school, in the middle of a big city I don't even have to walk by campus if I don't want to, and the neighbourhood I live in doesn't feel like a student-ghetto at all. Meanwhile: if I forget something, I can go back for it; if I find out about a meeting twenty minutes before it happens, I can get there with time to spare; I walk between home and campus and grocery-stores and downtown and so on often enough that I don't have to bother going to the gym; and I don't have to rely on public transit. Well, I don't mind buses too much, and I actually like the subway; but it's really nice to be able to lock my door and set out knowing that I'm not going to have to stand around waiting for something. (I realise that this is also true for people who bike, but I personally don't feel safe biking in a city of this size. * laughs *) It is more expensive: this is true. But I'm so fond of living this close that a few hundred dollars a month is a reasonable price to pay for a huge increase in my quality-of-life.

Why not just add it to your CV under 'presentations' with a "(presented in [language] by [person] of [institution])" appended?

Check out the on Toronto. The Toronto LiveJournal community often has some great questions and answers as well; do a search and/or check the 'for rent' and 'moving' tags. Transportation really depends on where you live. If you're within walking-distance of campus, grocery-stores, and entertainment, then you might pay only about $40 a month on subway-tokens (also usable on the buses and streetcars); but if you rely on public transit for everything, then you'll probably need to invest in MetroPasses.

Awesome! Congrats!

Yay! Congrats, everygirl and mangetout!

Congrats!

Go for A. Who knows: at a top-ranked school you may find a new great match right there in the same department! Best of luck!

Congrats! That's awesome!

Right on-target! * grins *

More stories of hope and support here!

Agreed! There are definitely ways out of this; just stay in contact with any sources of help until something works out.

Hello! It's doable, but it's going to be close. I'd say you can expect to pay anything from $800 to $1200 per month for a bachelor-apartment in the Annex; I'd start looking for September/October vacancies early (May or June at the latest), and visit if possible to wander around looking at buildings and touring apartments. Try to find a place with utilities included; be careful with the food-budget and transportation-costs, and you'll be all right. If you can, though, make a bit of extra money over the summer. I did that last year and I'm really glad; having things delivered, buying furniture and sheets and such, and going to five booksales in a row on campus in September and October all added up to a little more than I expected to be spending in the autumn semester. (I did get most of my furniture secondhand, though. Kijiji is always full of good bets; if you fall into the habit of skimming the ads on there once or twice a day, you'll probably find everything you need in styles you like within a few weeks.)

Honestly? You're being routinely abused and manipulated. Your mother may have started out with good intentions, but along the way she's convinced you that you aren't entitled to freedom, independence, or any self-worth whatsoever. She and her boyfriend are threatening to kill other family-members if you don't do what they want you to? This is exactly the sort of thing that kidnappers say to their victims in order to keep them from running away and getting help. Sounds like a personality-disorder, possibly several at once. One way or another, their actions are bordering on brainwashing. This is NOT okay, NOT normal, and NOT something that you or anyone 'deserves' for any reason at all. It is way out of control. My advice? Call the police. Tell them you're in an abusive and otherwise inescapable home situation and need to be rescued. They can act as a barrier between you and your mother/her boyfriend; for instance, they can impose an order-of-protection on the situation. See here for more details. Best of luck. Please keep us up-to-date.

Just finishing your degree, having a finished honours-thesis in hand, and having more up-to-date letters-of-reference can make a big difference to your application. Taking additional classes can certainly bolster your application, though. See how it goes!

Congrats!

Heh! Sorry, I meant simply in terms of the living-arrangements. Small-ish rooms, brick walls, shared bathrooms, etc. (It's also possible to be an out-of-house member, but that's not directly relevant.)

This.

I have all these ideas for projects and research, and I want to be able to do something with them. I'm part of a field that I miss terribly when I'm away from it. Can't get enough of coming up with new thoughts and sharing them. Descriptions of about 95% of the jobs outside academia make me want to run away screaming, and the remaining 5% are all either almost impossible to get into (e.g. lexicography) or extremely difficult to make a living at (e.g. creative writing). I've always liked the environment of a university-campus, and I tend to very much enjoy the company of anyone intellectual-ish. All this marking and homework and research and teaching and committee-meeting-attending and email-writing adds up to a pretty busy life, but it's one that I absolutely love and that has never come close to making me feel burned-out. The issue of job-prospects makes me mildly nervous, but at the end of the day I can't get too worried about that, because I'm doing exactly what it is I want to be doing.

I agree with this. Even when I was careful one time to find a student at the same school to live with, it turned very negative very quickly. That doesn't always happen, of course, but caution is a very good idea. By the way, I wholeheartedly second the recommendation of using Google Street-View! To find my place in Toronto, I: a) spent a couple of weeks doing the legwork on there and getting a good feel for which neighbourhoods looked the most appealing to me; got on sites such as viewit.ca to do a general apartment-search and zeroed in on the single area I liked the best, identifying a few buildings that looked promising; c) flew out to Toronto in July, went out to that neighbourhood (okay, can I just say that wandering around a place you know well thanks to Google is incredibly weird? * laughs *), went by the buildings I liked the look of, wrote down phone-numbers for all of them, made calls to find vacancies for September, and made a few appointments. The second apartment I toured, I absolutely loved, and it is the one I'm sitting in right now.

I've heard mixed things. One person I know went to live there but found it almost uninhabitable: intolerably unclean, with everything out-of-order. Another lived there for a semester and apparently liked it fine but did recently move out. Reportedly it's a little expensive, but hey, the location is difficult to beat. (Massey College is a grad-residence, too, but as I understand it, it's a little more undergrad-dorm-like.)

Very interesting. I'm glad it ended up making a lot of sense!