
feisty
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Everything posted by feisty
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I also graduated in spring 2008, and even though I'm still a young'in I think it makes me automatically a little more desirable to have been out of school for a little while. I've only heard from 2/7 schools so far but I have some ideas The overarching theme of grad school admission boards is that they do the wacky things they do to be sure the applicant "really wants this" or whatever. This is especially pertinent this year. One way to tell is: "what is the applicant sacrificing to get a PhD?" and the most obvious way to calculate this is with money. We've all more or less agreed that more people are applying to grad school in general to avoid the job market, and for an undergrad this would be an easier move to make. An undergraduate probably isn't making a salary, so monetarily they probably have nowhere to go but up. Whatever jobs they hold as a student probably don't bring in a lot more than a stipend. And in this economy, I think grad school probably looks just as good as "looking for jobs in advertising"/unemployment. I am a 22 y/o still-new employee at a bizarre job that lies at the apocalyptic crotch of finance and journalism (read: doomed). Even with my little salary, when I saw how much my stipend at my one acceptance would be, the grim sacrifice I am making became abundantly, hilariously clear. Only 8 or so months out of school, I'm not any more mature than an undergraduate. I'm not any smarter. In fact I'm probably more rusty and restless. It's silly and arbitrary, but as a sort of quick and easy purge of excess applications I wouldn't be surprised if schools were more quick to dismiss a current undergrad, even if they didn't make a policy of it. Just a thought. There are probably other, better reasons. As I said: rusty, restless, etc.
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Out of curiosity, how many people here are applying while seniors in college? I have an unfounded hunch that this year in particular, schools are being harsher on people who are still undergrads. For a number of abstract reasons.
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I didn't have to take a subject test for history--do people feel differently about them? Are they equally ridiculous? They're much more expensive, right? I don't have any excuses for why I did badly on the GRE. I will say that by the time I took it I was not a student and was working 45-50 hours a week in a new city: I wasn't burdened, but my head (and my time!) was certainly elsewhere. The ETS, wtf.
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Visiting after applying but before their decision?
feisty replied to speeddemon608's topic in Waiting it Out
FYI: You probably know this but in case you don't UIUC (assuming you mean Urbana-Champaign) is a solid 2.5 hours from Chicago in good weather with no traffic. -
During the week before or the day (night, I mean) of. Cornell and Princeton about 2 weeks early since their deadline was so late, and I had all the material ready from doing the other ones. My LOR's were submitted at the eleventh hour--there's a reason I was friends with these certain professors.
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My good friend lived in a beautiful 2 bdrm in Astoria last year and was very happy with it. Long Island City is a little lolyuppie now I guess, but I would live there in a minute. I think what a lot of people don't realize about New York is that there are a huge number of people here who also moved to New York from elsewhere. It's part of what makes it such a magnificent place. There was a cheesy quote on the subway ads a few months ago about how the beauty of New York lies in the confluence of natives, commuters, and dream-seeking pioneers.
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I don't think we can say whether the poster is prepared or not based on one post on a graduate school message board. I would say step back and think about it. But really don't go to the Unviersity of Detroit.
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As someone who has spent great lengths of time in Chicago, Detroit, and the east coast, I don't see how being in Detroit would make it easier to stay close to family on the east coast. I mean I love Detroit like a brother but nothing about this seems to make sense. But what do I know.
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PhD in History (British). My scores were probably somewhere between 500 and 600 but I don't remember where exactly (rage blackout perhaps?) I don't know how I got in and I'm afraid to ask or dwell on it too much. I think for PhD they care less about GREs.
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I've noticed that for PhD programs in history, a few program websites (Chicago and Stanford, I remember) say, in not so many words, that they don't actually care about the GRE. From these I get the impression that it might bolster an otherwise weak application, but won't destroy an otherwise strong one. Really I have never been so outlandishly annoyed and curmudgeonly than I was the night before I had to take the GRE. It was absurd. If I recall correctly (I don't, obviously, because it was like 10 in the gd morning and I was in a weird room in Penn Station and I had to pee) all of my scores were below 600 or maybe 500 and I only looked at my writing score because I had to put it on my applications. Now I've gotten all started on the GRE.
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FYI: Rents are going down in Manhattan (slowly but surely), and even if they aren't plummeting it's becoming more of a renters market (meaning you can negotiate lower rent, free first months, amenities, etc., more than you could 6 months ago, without getting laughed off the island). When we were looking for apartments last summer, the most desirable parts of Brooklyn (Park Slope, etc) were just as expensive as Manhattan, or at least didn't run a hard bargain. That being said, the "less desirable" parts of Brooklyn really aren't that bad as long as you don't go too far off the reservation. Don't be too quick to rule out Manhattan. We found a phenomenal deal (huge, beautiful apartment, safe neighborhood, live-in super, attentive management company, lower rent than our friends in Brooklyn or Harlem) in that awkward area between the Upper West Side and Morningside Heights that has been slow to gentrify. My roommate is an NYU grad student, and doesn't find the commute downtown to be a problem. I grew up in a small friendly Midwestern town (I know, still worlds away from "Southern hospitality"!), and New Yorkers constantly surprise me with their friendliness and random kindness. Once you settle in, it can become a very intimate place. And yes, the subway/buses here are a feat beyond words, even if fare hikes are on the way.
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Agreed. Also the only thing more annoying than the GRE are schools that actually take the GRE seriously.
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The GRE is bogus. I mean obviously I don't have anything to substantiate that, but I was totally irritated that I had to take it, did terribly (really), and guess what I still got into grad school, no thanks to the ETS.
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30-40 below was what I had in mind
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Not going to lie, I grew up in the region, and the Upper Midwest is brutal in the winter. Below 0 degrees Fahrenheit, though not common, happens (as it did for weeks in Chicago during January). When it's that cold it's actually unbearable to be outside, but things like schools shut down if it gets too extreme, so you won't go outside. Expect it to stay pretty constant between 15-40 degrees from November to April, but Midwestern weather, especially by the Great Lakes, is unpredictable so expect anything, really. Michigan gets a lot of snow (I think usually more than Chicago, where I grew up). I would imagine college towns are good about clearing the roads though. Invest in an ugly but effective down coat, wear a hat. It sucks but people have been living there for a long time, and it's character-building. It is "that cold" but Michigan is a great school, and Ann Arbor is a great town, so it's worth it.
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I was wondering the same thing. On one hand it makes sense: schools seem secure at least for the next few years, a lot of people are being put in the position to make extreme career moves, 5-7 years for a phd sounds like a good time to ride out the recession outside of the workforce, etc. But it's remarkable to me that in a time of crisis so many people would be jumping into one of the most tumultuous and unreliable career paths a person can take (academia), especially in the case of humanities programs.
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I moved from the Midwest to New York. Not the same. But as someone who just moved to New York after undergrad in the last year from a very different place-- what would you like to know? I also live near Columbia, and this summer sublet for 2 months in Columbia grad student housing.
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I work from 9-6, email my friends from high school and college a lot, come home, maybe call my mom or another friend, watch TV-shows on various Asian bootleg sites, read a little bit. Try to do yoga or exercise before work every day, usually don't. When I was applying I was definitely stressed--I'd go straight from work to a coffee shop, work on my applications, then pass out every day. Since then, though, I honestly haven't been that stressed. It's out of my hands. I think about it a lot, but with a distant sort of nervous curiosity.
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Do You Feel You Deserve a Reason for Rejection?
feisty replied to DefinitelyMaybe's topic in Waiting it Out
Honestly I feel like in a number of cases there isn't a good reason. I'm sure a lot of people have some glaring flaw, but for many of us I think a rejection is the result of minutiae that, when articulated, are just a number of factors just out of our control that ultimately come down to not being a "good fit". -
Rescinsion of Acceptance - Does it Happen?
feisty replied to HisRoyalHighness's topic in Waiting it Out
This reminds me that I had a terrible and very realistic dream the day after I was accepted to my top choice that they had to rescind 10 acceptances because of the financial crisis. In the dream I was walking down my street to the subway, telling my roommate that I was one of the unlucky 10. I also had a less realistic dream that Bernie Madoff shut down the University of California system, which he apparently owned. -
I had the same experience. I hope I never delude myself into thinking being a historian with a PhD makes me famous (lol, right) and unapproachable. In contrast, other big seemingly impenetrable places like Berkeley, Chicago, and Cornell have overwhelmed me with their humanity.
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Re: disciplines being "right" or "left" The irony of this (possibly true?) stereotype is that I would gander a bet that the majority of federal government research money goes to subsidize work in the hard sciences, whereas the arts and humanities are probably more reliant on private foundations. No handouts for the painters.
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re: Princeton. Everything about them was distant and unfriendly. Definitely for the best. I also get the impression it's still a difficult place for women. One of the most brilliant historians in my field, Linda Colley, is there, but that's the only draw for me other than general prestige.
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Princeton reject. Lame form letter. lol.
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It depends on where you are in your life, I think. I got into a place already, but I had been working on the very high possibility that I wouldn't get into anything. I graduated undergrad in 2008, and obviously there aren't a lot of "career opportunities" for bookish 22 year olds right now. I guess my vague backup plan is to move somewhere other than New York, and do something "new" for work, maybe apply next year or the year after that, and in the meantime think about alternate paths.