ajumpingpenguin

I think that mentioning individuals you'd like to work with, regardless of whether they are part of the admissions committee or not, could be a good way of showing "fit".

While I was trying to decide which to schools to apply to I contacted people I was interested in having as my supervisor to introduce myself and see if they were taking on new students. Probably around October.

Can you also run windows on your computer? (like with bootcamp or parallels desktop?) Unfortunately it looks like you need windows to run the program.

One suggestion for looking for cheaper housing would be to look for things a little further out from the center but on a train line that would make it east to walk to the Strand from Waterloo Station. More central, some people who were at King's (so next door) lived near London Bridge, Paddington, Canary Wharf, Whitechapel, and Camden (for some potential places to look). Thinking about convenient bus routes for when the trains and tube stops running might be useful. Public transport can be annoying and a pain sometimes, especially when there are strikes but especially since you're familiar with commuting and navigating in a big city hopefully it shouldn't be too much of a drag.

Either of your choices for student accommodation would be very convenient to either school. Though, they'll be residence halls so you wouldn't be getting your own studio or anything. There are some individual flats, but as far as I know those are only for couples. I know a few people who've lived in some of the intercollegiate halls and they found them to be alright, pretty standard/typical student accommodation. International Hall didn't have much in the way of cooking facilities because it's catered. I'm guessing that it'd probably be same for the intercollegiates. Flats are apartments, so may or may not be studios. You could look on sites like gumtree if you want to look for private accommodation. Also the university accommodation office might keep a database of available places. If not walking distance try looking for places along bus routes or near tube stations that will quickly get you to Russell Square/Euston Station/Tottenham Court Road.

I'm more interested in medieval government, rather than religious history but just wanted to say that Notre Dame seems likes a great choice for your interests. Also got a chance to meet Van Engen who seemed like a lovely person and people I talked to really liked him as a supervisor. Not sure if you're considering Medieval Studies programs too, but at least for Notre Dame you might want to take a look at the structure of the programs in the History Department and through the Institute and see which you might like more, if you haven't got a chance to yet.

<br /><br /><br /> I'd say probably dressing nicely, but not all the way towards a suit...business casual? From what I've seen so far there's also a fair number of people wearing jeans, but slightly more dressy darker ones usually. (Not sure if this was to do with it being in the cold north and so slightly less dressing up was expected) For mine I wore a blazer w/ jeans one day and slacks the other day.