sisepuede

sure, it's me. been ghost stalking the board for a while, so i thought i should let folks know. i'm certainly eager for every speck of info.just a general email form the grad school. feel free to pm me for other info.

i haven't gotten any housing info either, i'm just trying to figure out if i'll have electricity when i get there in a couple of days! i'm on the west coast and keep forgetting to call until early afternoon, so hopefully i'll get an answer soon....

younglions, yay for you being on the c-track! ....i'll be in b! i got a friendly note this summer about my *ahem* many years since I had either math or econ (it's been over a decade since i held a graphing calculator) and how i may want to *ahem* brush up. i have tried for three semesters to get into a local community college course in either micro, macro or stat, with no luck due to buget cuts. standing room only for microecon, what has the world come to? i'm doing some independent prep, but it's been tough to remain disciplined. next week i'm taking my husband to the san-diego comic-con, where i'm hoping to do some behavioral economics modeling on why people spend time dressing up as storm troopers, but do not spend time showering. hope that counts.

by the time i start this fall, i will have taken a year off twice since undergrad ( igraduated in 02). i think as long as you have other significant work when you weren't off, it shouldn't be that big a deal. however, if you had just graduated, and shilly shallied around as a lifeguard in malibu for a year and then applied, that would be a different story. but hey, even then, you could try to present yourself as an expert on coastal access policies.

hi y'all, i've been on grad cafe hiatus for a while, and missed this board completely. i'm headed for wws, and i'm in old lawrence too, FSIA (howdy neighbor). it was not what i applied for, but hey, i'm cool with it. we are headed to berkeley this weekend to apartment hunt for my husband, and i have to say, i'm just glad we don't have to deal with the ucb housing market. due to local budget cuts, i haven't been able to get myself into a community college class to brush up on econ or math (despite teaching at a community college myself the last semester). so i'm browsing textbooks and dummies texts (those suck to read in public) and trying to plot furnishing an entire apartment for less than nothing. anyone else showing up at princeton with a suitcase and not much else?

congratulations to the boston-bound! it's always good to hear happy endings.

i'm really really really late, but two quick things: linden: awwww man! enjoy georgetown! on the question of bobby and the bios on the admissions page: I told a couple of curent students i met when i visited wws that they sounded just like one of those intense bios i read online..of course, that's because it was their bio. very smooth. so i repeated this semi-joking story to the one of the admissions directors the next day and he earnestly asked how i really felt about it. i was very honest and said i enjoyed and was inspired by them, but was almost intimidated out of applying by them. which is true. he said that was feedback they need to hear. then i proceeded to tell him about linden's invented "bobby." he liked that too.

fighter and anxious, it's still totally possible!! i don't have any inside intel or anything, but hey, you've made it this far! might as well stay hopeful. i've been pretty out of gradcafe land since April 15, when my household switched to "agony over law school waitlists" mode for my husband. i know it's painful to wait for hks and others in our field, but look at what the yale law waitlisters have. this blogpost from the admissions dean with advice for waitlisted folks is intended to be funny...but damn. http://blogs.law.yale.edu/blogs/admissi ... alker.aspx

Congrats to everyone who heard some good news today! Things just got way more difficult/interesting/heart-rending, right?!

i've been stalking the boards lately waiting for someone to post their unbelievable hks scholarship ahead of the deadline....haven't seen it, so i guess i'll join the bets for this friday, starting at 1030aPST. if it's all on the myfaid, i would guess everyone's status won't change at exactly the same time. not anticipating a game-changer finaid offer from hks either, but still checking all the time anyway...i just haven't heard anything encouraging unless you're a ppia fellow (did anyone else completely miss the boat on that in undergrad? sheesh.) btw, after reading through the "mountain of debt" thread with great interest, i did an informal survey to see which of my three faves (hks, wws, berkeley) got better name recognition in a few non-academic world venues. here are my results from the last week, anyone have any other interesting reactions while we wait for aid offers? -classroom of 10th graders: impressed with harvard and berkeley, asked what a princeton was -parents: "which one is paying for everything? why would the other two matter?" -hair stylist: "wow, you hear that people go to princeton, but i've never cut their hair!" (my favorite, we were rolling on the floor laughing at the absurdity of this whole thing) -group of grandmas sitting around a nursing home: "harvard! ay dios mio!" -auntie whose expectations will never be met: "why didn't you apply to stanford?" :roll:

i live near san bernardino (10 min up the freeway w/out traffic) and took classes at UCR last summer and work with a bunch of people who did their grad work at ucr. i live on a hill and most mornings i can see the whole inland empire valley, or i could if the brown haze wall wasn't there. i've lived in some majorly polluted cities in my life and riverside is better than manila (when you cough or sneeze, black stuff comes out), probably about the same as houston (some neighborhoods, every other kid has asthma, others are ok) and just below la (ocean breezes just don't reach 70 miles inland to clean things out). i just spoke yesterday with a friend who did his master's at ucr with a 14k stipend, he said it was doable, but he has kind of a low-maintenance single guy life. riverside itself does have some neat neighborhoods and if i could choose where to live in the IE, it would be there. my second choice would be....riverside. seriously, the money you save on a neighborhood that's 10 miles away from riverside will be eaten up by the endless hours on the freeway, in your car, listening to audiobooks. hey, riverside is not a bustling metropolis. if you love target-anchored strip malls and the like, the IE is heaven. if you go during non-rush hour, newport beach is about an hour down the freeway. otherwise...well, you should be studying hard anyway, right?

you know, i lived in the pioneer valley for four years of undergrad and i was clawing to get out the entire time. however, i am a city person. I enjoy hiking, kayaking, etc on the weekends, but need a thriving, diverse city to have daily happiness. so here are my $.02 on living in the pioneer valley: pros: -the 5 college consortium. seriously, educational opportunities abound. and 5 meaningful, institutions mean boundless oppty's for interesting lectures, performances and the like.i had zero cash, but every night there are activity choices that are free or $5. one typical weekend i remember seeing the roots at umass, cornell west speaking at amherst, a great spoken word show and then a truly bizarre production of hamlet at hampshire. northampton clubs also attract great shows to small venues. this part i miss. -if you like the outdoorsey stuff, it abounds here. every school in the consortium has awesome opportunities for intramurals sports, hiking/kayaking/canoe trips, you get the drift. also, if you always wanted to take that ballet class, you have about 20 choices to fit into your schedule at the colleges. pottery, why not? there are usually about 6 different intro classes. --the pvta. the local free bus system is wonderful, timely and convenient if most of your trips are campus to campus (or general vicinity). --if you've always wanted to live in an idyllic new england town, this is it. local alderman govern the town, historic buildings everywhere, and except for a few neighborhoods around umass and noho, all is quiet most of the time. --if you want to live a natural/organic/vegan lifestyle, you will feel the love here, big time. --antonio's pizza is amazing. cons: --not the most racially diverse city. umass itself is the most racially diverse area/campus in the valley, but if you are trying to find a grocery store that carries food from the motherland, or a decent burrito, get ready to drive to boston. i grew up in other countries and then lived in california, so this drove me crazy. --some things were not convenient to pvta, like the cheapest grocery stores etc. this may be changing, because a couple of new strip malls, etc have opened up in the past few years. ---the weather is beastly. it snowed the day i graduated, which was may 18. prepare yourself for 7-9 months of the year to be filled with irrational cold temps/slush/black ice/snow. waiting for the bus, or walking across the umass campus in freezing weather can be a bit painful sometimes. i had no clue about long underwear till i lived here. --it's out there. the nearest city is springfield, the nearest bustling metropolis is boston (couple hours drive). unfortunately, getting out to those locations conveniently requires a car. hope this helps a little bit.

oh man! my contest lasted only three minutes! thanks fighter and others for happy thoughts. congrats to those who've got strong offers, from harvard or otherwise. baller26 and any others who may be interested in health policy, my thought was that A)because of the universal health care intitatives being pursued in the bay area and massachusetts, and B)faculty directly involved with them, that those are the best places to be to work on health care policy right now. would love to hear others thoughts on that....

my two cents are based on: correspondence and visits with faculty, alumni and students on both campuses last fall, recent conversations with current students about hks vs. cal vs. princeton. with all of the usual disclaimers about specific faculty, individual merits of the program, etc, i'd argue it's not that clear-cut. what cal has going for it 1) it's a small, strong program, with lots of faculty/student interaction, so if you want to build a relationship where someone well-respected in the field who can recommend you for later opportunities, it may be a better prospect. 2) it's cheaper than harvard. i know the bay area is expensive, but getting in-state tuition either both years or your second year is going to mean less loan debt weighing you down when you look for post-MPP employment. 3) the vibe on-campus among students is really collaborative and less about individual competition, which i think is valuable and better to leverage benefits from in the future. others may disagree. 4) you don't have to put up with snow/slush/freezing temps 7-9 months out of the year (ok, that one is a bit more personal, i admit.) 5) i think cal (and wws for that matter) are generally considered to be more quant intensive programs. and if that terrifies you (it does me) they have a great program of tutoring and extra help for that stuff. hks, well, i feel like the pros have been enumerated a great deal all over this board. for me, the one thing harvard has over cal is really the people you will meet (future obamas, etc) and learn from who will be helpful later in your career. good luck, congratulations on a great dilemma.

holy crap me too. you win runaround!!!!!