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feisty

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Everything posted by feisty

  1. Any word on the new NRC rankings? They keep getting pushed back.
  2. You don't need a car in Chicago. I never had one there, but I imagine they're relatively easy to keep (if you don't mind piling your furniture on the street and parking-regulation-by-mercenary-piracy!) and it would be an asset, unlike NY where it's a liability. Really really don't need one though.
  3. I wouldn't underestimate the importance of research interests, as laid out in the SOP. I got into 1 school of the 7 I applied to, and I think I got in because my interests matched eerily (down to minutiae) with my potential advisors', which I didn't learn until my visit. Fatefully, a lot of what they had been working on hadn't even been published/finished yet, and that happened to be a lot of the same topics I was working on as an undergrad, and talked about in my SOP. Otherwise I'm almost positive, based on my undergrad stats, I would be 0/7 (this year, at least, I think in more prosperous years I would have done better).
  4. It also has a giant lesbian population. Midwest h8ters are the worst humans, more or less. Please don't judge the US by them alone.
  5. I'd say a small city. Small enough to not be too chic and unaffordable, large enough to have a diversity of Stuff To Do and large enough that not everything is dominated by the university. Thinking Austin, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia. I guess it depends on what kind of grad school though--something like business or public policy might best be done in a major metropolis, whereas the humanities and hard science students living deep inside their own heads might benefit from the relative peace and quiet of a more low key place.
  6. feisty

    New York, NY

    I don't think it's across the board, every apartment building in New York. But I could be wrong. One of my roommates had a guarantor. In reality, if you make your rent it's very little obligation for the person who acts as a guarantor. The tricky part is finding one (she used her parents.) Get a second opinion from someone other than whoever you are talking to. Edit: I rembemer now: For my building, we had to fill out a short application and provide financial information, and included in that information had to be something...solid, I guess, to show you could make rent in the future. There were four of us: I had a job and a letter from my boss saying I had a job, my one roommate had a relatively large amount of savings, another roommate had a grad stipend from NYU. The only roommate who required a guarantor was the one with no job and very little savings. We all gave them totally different sets of documents. I didn't even show them my bank statements, and they didn't ask, my pay stub was enough. For my unemployed roommate, though, they wanted a bank statement. For the roommate with the stipend, they wanted a bank statement. It's less rigid then you think, I think. This was just my experience though, last year, with a small multi-building manager on the UWS.
  7. feisty

    New York, NY

    With some building managers/brokers you may have to get a co-signer who does make at least 40 times the monthly rent. For them, it's just signing something and proving that they have that money. You're still paying for the apartment, it's just a safety net for the landlord. It's not law or a city-wide thing, and I think it's not something you'll run into outside of Manhattan, and even within Manhattan you can probably avoid it. If your parents or a roommate's parents or anyone in your families make that much, then they can co-sign, and as long as you don't default on your rent you'll never have to revisit it again.
  8. Columbia lost/forgot mine too and they are total schmucks.
  9. I love you. Pretty much lost it at "Dr. Frasier Crane" Ann Arbor is great. The Ivy League is for squares.
  10. The Oxford histories are good. Also, more cultural and "British identity" blahblahblah, but very broad and good, Linda Colley's Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837
  11. that's awful. i assume your name found its way onto a very general mailing list via clerical oversight, but still, they should be more careful.
  12. Sort of. Expected to only get into 1 school, but didn't expect to get into the one I did (highest ranked of the 7 I applied to, applied to it on a brazen whim).
  13. I think the most important research experience w/r/t getting into grad school is your own. Some of my classmates in undergrad did work for a professor (mostly going through archives in the States while said professor was out of the country, or translation) but it was more of a summer job than a research opportunity. Assisting a professor doesn't seem to have the same value in the humanities as it does in other fields (those with lab work, pretty much.) Depending on what year you are--does your school have independent projects, senior theses, etc? The most grad-school-pertinent thing I did as an undergrad was receive funding to go to London one summer for my senior thesis research. I was able to spend about 3 weeks in the India Office archives in the British Library, and I think my--albeit brief--familiarity with archival research for *my own* work helped me more than anything.
  14. I did. They talked about it a bit. Basically: - The guaranteed funding for 5 years is a recent development. I think we are the 2nd or 3rd cohort to go in with funding guaranteed beyond the first year (before you had to reapply each year). - They were adamant about the notion that as a state university, they can offer less, but what they can offer is solid, dependable, and guaranteed. Again, I am more worried about private universities that rely almost entirely on endowments. - They do offer pretty substantial summer funding, for travel, language classes, etc. I went to Berkeley pretty worried, but I got the impression that they're not about to pull the rug out from under any grad students. There's a sense camaraderie in the department, a lot of communication, and an extraordinarily competent support staff. I am mostly worried about budgeting on what they have guaranteed, not about the funding changing.
  15. I am not sure exactly what to think. I agree, their stipend is low, esp given the area. People I met there seem to be surviving well, though, somehow. It's unclear how many of them have support from their parents/spouses, or have large savings from previous lives in the Real World, though--I won't have either. That being said, I met more than one person who showed up to Berkeley with like $200 to their names and are making it okay. I honestly have no idea how, yet I follow them into the abyss. As for the economy: I think state Universities that can guarantee funding right now are in better shape than private ones. A lot of them can't offer funding at all, but if they can (and Berkeley only accepted those they could fund, I think), the money comes from taxpayers and not only from an endowment, which are more likely to be obliterated by bad investments. The funding is guaranteed for 5 years, and I don't see it becoming un-guaranteed in that time. My only pressing concern is that after five years, when I have to re-apply, will there be anything left? Even though I'm "on my own" and "broke", I'm fortunate not to have any debt, and almost no responsibilities (no children, partner, car, pets, illnesses etc). If I can scrape my own existence, then that's all I need. If I can't, or the University truly goes broke (as in shuts down), I am pretty good at finding jobs. That being said, I've been actively looking for outside funding opportunities to apply to next year. It'll be a whirl, for sure. But somehow people do it.
  16. It wasn't horrible. Took up more time than I would like, but once my apps were in I wasn't stressed out at all. I've been out of school long enough to understand that there is a world beyond school, and I haven't been in the working world long enough to hate it. Sort of a good time to apply sans crises. Too expensive to "enjoy."
  17. feisty

    New York, NY

    Good advice all around, but the F train is bullshit. Especially at night. Avoid having the F train be your only option, if possible. I mean, if you find a great cheap place only serviced by the F train, take it. But just be prepared to wait 45 minutes for a train now and again (and again and again). IMHO it would be totally worth it to find a roommate and live in a 2-bdrm one of the neighborhoods mentioned here. Ft. Greene and Prospect Heights are truly adorable, and, I only say this with the best intentions, remind me of Sesame Street. Park Slope is gorgeous but, again IMHO, annoyingly chic. The great thing about New York is that people are always moving in and out, which means that if you look for "shared apartments" on craigslist, you are bound to find someone totally normal in a great apartment whose roommate just moved out, and needs a new roommate (ie, you!). Obvs there are a lot of freaks, but look into it.
  18. A friend of mine didn't hear from a school until October the following year. I haven't heard from one of my schools. I really do think that if there's no evidence that my application was processed I should get my application fee back/
  19. Has anyone else not heard from Columbia? I don't want to go to Columbia; already accepted another offer. However, if I don't hear from them by, say, the end of April, would it be fair to ask for my application fee back? Anyone tried this?
  20. My advice would be to look very closely at faculty research interests, beyond being in your subfield. I didn't, but by chance it ended up being what got me into grad school. My GPA was the same as yours (went up to a 3.6 my final semester). I got into only 1 school out of 7, which happened to be (arguably) the best one I applied to for my field. The individual professors I will be working with have almost identical current research interests as I do, which I honestly didn't know until I visited (their work on it is still mostly not published). I had a middling GPA, bad GRE scores, and my application totally rested on the substance of my SOP, writing sample, and recommendations; and I think that the project I presented in my SOP and my previous research are what got me into that one school during an extra competitive year, and what kept me out of lower-ranked schools that I was quantitatively qualified for.
  21. What a great site, thanks for posting that.
  22. feisty

    Chicago, IL

    liszt85- It's not ideal, and I don't know how easy it is to get caught, but there are jobs that you or your wife could do under the radar. Can you or her tutor anything (languages, music, etc.) for cash? Babysitting/nannying, a few restaurant jobs, fixing computers, fixing anything, cutting hair, threading, mending, one-time IT gigs, selling things, etc. http://ask.metafilter.com/59912/How-do- ... -jobs-work I don't know. Maybe it's a bad idea, but I feel like your wife's visa restrictions are the biggest problem. Is there no other way around them?
  23. feisty

    Bad Advice?

    I think it depends on a lot of things. If you are pretty certain you want a PhD and can get into a PhD there is no reason for it. Funding, also. I also think that if you have a specific career in mind that could be boosted ($$$$$) by an MA then it makes sense as well. I'm not sure how a history MA would fuel a career, but maybe for things like policy, international banking, global development, aid work, etc. you would want some specialized knowledge of a global region/issue and then get back into the working world asap.
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