Ayiti

Hey all! Glad to see there are some other FA'11 UCD students on GradCafe... I was beginning to feel lonely! I'm going for the doctoral program in ethnomusicology.... basically world music studies. I'm interested in how music is used as a tool of political protest for the disenfranchised majority in Haiti. I had a couple of choices besides Davis, but I ended up going with it because the campus in general seems much more friendly and community-like than some of the east-coast ivys. I came and visited for a few days, and the town is really beautiful. It seems like a great place to spend the next few years. Housing is a beast to figure out, but I would HIGHLY recommend taking the time to read through the Davis Wiki, especially the pages dealing with apartments. The page has links to all of the apartment complexes in Davis, organized alphabetically or by location. The user reviews were really helpful for figuring out which way to go. I ended up with J Street Apartments, on 3rd and J street. It seems like a great complex, although there were a couple others that looked pretty nice too. I was also looking at renting a room in a house, but a friend who just graduated from the theater program there said that the quality of life is a lot lower than in an apartment complex (he did four years in various single rooms, and two years in an apartment). Davis has 65,000 people, 25,000 of which are UC students, and I saw a lot of complaints on the wiki pages about people trying to take advantage of inexperienced renters (both undergrad and grad level). I think if you manage to get into a complex that would probably be a safer bet. Although I've heard awesome things about the co-ops, if that's more your speed. On a side note - if you haven't already, go to the graduate student section of the UCD website and sign up for WOW (Week of Welcome). It's an optional (and free!) orientation program for new grad and continuing grad students. I stumbled on it by accident, and some of the programs look fairly helpful.

I think at this point the institutions that haven't sent out their rejection letters are waiting to hear back from the acceptances they've already extended. I would imagine that they are waiting to make sure they don't run through their entire accept/waitlist list before they finalize things with a rejection. Of course, this is also the point where people have to make decisions between one place and another, so I wouldn't be suprised if the letters didn't come until after the 15th.

I got an email about a week ago from the phd program at UMich accepting my application but refusing to give me any funding. I just laughed and laughed - and then cried. How on earth do they expect students to pay tens of thousands a year in tuition on their own?! Anyway, I declined that offer. UC Davis and BU are my other options, but when I spoke to Dr. Yudkin at BU he made it clear not to expect much from them either. Everyone at BU seems super nice, so it's a shame that it doesn't really look like a feasible option... I'm going to visit Davis in the next few weeks, and hopefully I'll find good things out there. Otherwise, I plan to do a year of fieldwork (I've been accepted to a few places in-country), learn the local language, and hopefully shore up any gaps in my application for next year. I feel like this just wasn't an ideal time to apply for a lot of really good candidates - people better than me have gotten rejected from all their schools, and I know one guy with a 4.0 GPA, a 720 verbal GRE, and some field experience who applied to 15 schools and got waitlisted at one. I think I might just play the cards again next year...

So looking at the results board, it looks like accepts and waitlists have gone out for Harvard last week and Columbia this past weekend. Has anyone heard anything at all from NYU?

Can't believe I only found this site today. UGH. I made it to the final round for ethno, an on campus interview, on February 3rd. It was me and one one other candidate, and he just blew me out of the water. I knew when I left that it wasn't happening. I definitely made some mistakes (this was my first on-campus interview), and I wish I could have practiced on another school before going to Penn, but as you said diber, c'est la vie. I'm still in undergrad and the other guy was a little further along in the process, so it seems fair. Of course, Penn was one of my top choices, so I was incredibly bummed when I finally got the email. But, true to form, the email Tim Rommen sent was absolutely lovely, very encouraging. There are a couple programs where I firmly believe that if you have the chops to get in there, I think you would have to be on crack not to go. This is definitely one of them. I've also gotten into UC Davis (I couldn't make the big weekend visit, or else I'd be there now. I'm really bummed, my prof wouldn't move my midterm today, so I think my funding opportunities are pretty much defunct with them), as well as BU and UMich Ann Arbor, all for musicology/ethno. I plan to go to Mich's accepted students weekend, and I'm going to wait and see what BU can give me funding wise... Still waiting desparately to hear from Columbia, NYU, and Harvard. Any news from them??????