virmundi

Check your PMs.

Check out Yale's Off-Campus Housing website at http://offcampus.yale.edu. I found my place there last year on their off-campus listings. It is a fantastic resource and a lot of the people that I contacted when I was looking had only posted there because they wanted people associated with Yale as tenants (hoping to get longer than single year leases by sucking in graduate students, professors, etc.!)... I've been really happy with the place we found so far and there is a great mix in terms of cost, location, and amenities!

The Macbook Pro Retina is a thing of absolute beauty! I went in the other direction though -- from the 2010 MacBook Pro 13" to the 2012 MacBook Air 13" (upgraded memory, but only 128gb of storage space)... the Pro was amazing, but the Air is superlative in every regard! It is light and beautiful with a long battery life -- and I am finding that 128gb is absolutely plenty -- but I do keep all of my photographs and iTunes library on an external hard drive (pretty cheap these days!)... You can definitely get a more powerful computer for your money by getting the Pro -- no doubt at *all* about that! -- but the Air's lightness won the day for me. After lugging the Pro around for a couple of years, it began to feel exactly like that -- lugging... with the Air, I never feel burdened down... it has been particularly good for travel for this reason! You really can't go wrong with Mac's superb laptops, I think... (oh -- by the way, I was a PC guy until I got my first MacBook too... don't think I can ever go back either!

I want to second the mention of the Yale Off-Campus Housing listings... this is a fantastic resource and it is how I found an amazing place in East Rock that had not been advertised elsewhere (my landlord wanted Yale graduate students as renters)!

Do you mean, rather, that everyone is rushing to try and catch up with Michael McCormick? (tongue in cheek, of course! :-) ) His work is amazing and the new GIS stuff that he's spearheading is extraordinary!

I love living in New Haven. I think that part of the rap with New Haven is that it can indeed go from nice to sketchy just crossing the street. That's definitely very much true -- but if you know where the safer areas are and act with a healthy dash of common sense, you are probably going to be just fine. A lot of the actual physical violence that is potential here seems to happen in those areas where you probably won't want to go to anyways (given, as gooner_88 said, that all of the fun stuff is downtown/Yale based -- and I'd add that East Rock Park is a nice local attraction too for casual hiking/biking, etc.!)... additionally, the things about "New Haven is the 4th most dangerous city in America" are based on per capita ratings and are partially skewed on the basis of Connecticut's colonial era town-planning which means that New Haven's crime statistics are a bit artificially inflated because the city itself doesn't include the surrounding "suburban neighborhoods in the way that a city in the rest of the country would. In any event, I live in East Rock with my wife and school-aged children and have yet to feel like I'm not safe! My $.02 for what they are worth -- we all have different expectations of what our community should offer us of course, but I hope that this perspective helps a bit!

I had friends who did last year. They loved their apartment (it was one of the places on Mansfield St. which borders a sketchy area -- but was a marvelous place).

Yes -- but if you work with an advisor at a top-ranked school who is not the best fit for you, you may produce a dissertation that isn't at the top of its game. Make sure your advisor can guide you appropriately. You don't want to have a well-meaning advisor who doesn't know much about what you are doing. Yes, this can work out, but it makes thing far far harder on you than it needs to be. It's definitely a trade off.

To be perfectly honest, I don't think that you can lose either way. Relative to each other, I would say that Yale's advantage is that it has New Haven (a city with *tons* of stuff to do, much of it free to us as Yalies)... Princeton's advantage is that it is not in New Haven (a city in which the issues of American poverty are front-and-center, although more exaggerated in terms of the "danger" factor than the media would have one think)... I do think that you are right about only having access to a single college, but somehow one of the graduate students here has access to all of the residential colleges... and in terms of hanging out in wonderful garden spaces, there are a few times when I've just lurked around the entrance for a moment or two until a student goes in/comes out and then enjoy the gardens... there are also events that happen in the residential colleges (I belong to a weekly lunch colloquium) and we still have to wait for undergrads to let us in (and this lunch series typically involves around 20 faculty and another two dozen or so graduate students!!)... it hasn't been much of a barrier to my enjoyment of things here so far! In any event, Princeton is darned amazing and is easily my favorite Ivy campus... Best of luck to you in choosing -- that is going to be a tough choice!

Be aware that at Yale, there are opportunities for graduate students to become "liaisons" of sorts with undergraduate colleges, which comes with the privilege of access to undergraduate colleges, facilities, and an opportunity to intermingle with them. I have a friend who has done this for two years in a row and has met some wonderful people. She also gets two free meals a week in the undergraduate dining halls (which are quite good, actually, as is the graduate hall in HGS). In return, she hosts one event per semester in the college around a quasi-academic (or just plain fun) theme... it isn't odious and it is meant to provide graduate students with an opportunity to mentor undergraduates, interact with them, etc. I am not aware that it is particularly competitive to get one of these positions either. In any event, as a current Yale Ph.D. student, most of my classes have at least two junior or senior undergraduate students in them and they certainly don't behave differently and nor do the professors or other students interact with them differently. In short, I don't know what your field is, but in my field (history), the divide is as big as you want it to be, essentially. Sorry about the brief Yale interlude -- back to all things Princeton.

To add a little to this great description of the area around Broadway/Table Mesa -- there are some really decent places to eat right there. A great, unpretentious breakfast place, several restaurants including a brewery that serves great burgers and an Indian restaurant that has a good lunch buffet... in short, while there isn't a night life, there are some really nice amenities right there if you feel the need for some vindaloo, a nice egg scramble, or something like that... My best friend lived in this area for several years and we had a lot of nice moments in that little area, very conveniently located near his home.

Yes -- this for sure. I would say that of the lots, the dirt parking lot behind the football stadium is the best deal and always has parking available (in my experience). It's lot 168. It is a rather bracing climb up a steep hill to get onto campus proper, but you can enjoy crossing lovely Boulder Creek and appreciate the beauty that is the Boulder campus and the mountains while getting a nice little walk in as you head to your destination. I really enjoyed those walks a lot and it was -- bar none -- the cheapest way to park on campus itself. Park-and-ride is definitely the way to go if you don't need a campus permit though for some reason!

Aka -- sent you a PM...

Hi there -- actually the PM was pretty private so forgive me for not posting it here as well... in essence, I do believe that all of the strictly Dept. of History decisions have been finalized and sent out...

It doesn't... I don't know where they are in their process yet!

Sending a PM... but yes, quite certain...

I'm not sure why they don't notify everyone all at once either, unless it is to consider who they are going to extend offers to enroll in master's programs with partial funding and the like. In any case, I am quite sorry to have been the bearer of this news -- I was on tenterhooks myself at the beginning of February last year...

All of the Yale decisions have been made for History this year -- and I believe that they've notified everyone now...

Yes -- this article definitely puts the shabby into HGS's "chic"! Dean Pollard has suggested that plans to renovate HGS (including the installation of air conditioning) are in the works, but also indicated that this wouldn't happen for years to come yet! In any case, I have a number of theories about why this building is in disrepair relative to the residential colleges, but they essentially boil down to the notion that we graduate students are, imaginatively speaking, often seen as living semi-monastic lives and don't bring in the same sort of cash that undergraduate tuition (and generous alumni who remember their "Bright College Years" so very fondly!) do... To offset this, I did finally meet a graduate student who loves living in HGS because she sees her friends all of the time... but that hasn't been the norm in my experience! In any case, East Rock is a lovely place to live and it is quite close to campus with some decent delis in the neighborhood and a good grocery store (an organic co-op) within walking distance. I am very very happy living there and I don't know any students who regret living in East Rock. Take my recommendations with a grain of salt though -- if you can, it'd be worth your while to cruise around and check out HGS, East Rock, and Wooster Square to see what suits your lifestyle best! Cheers!

I can't speak to the specifics of the dining plan, but a few of my friends lived in HGS for their first year and didn't care for it. The building hasn't been renovated since the 1930s if that serves as any sort of indicator. I'd at least consider looking around Wooster Square and East Rock as well. I live on the very far north end of East Rock and it is a 30 minute walk or 10 minute bus ride (free Yale shuttle that comes every 15 minutes or so during the semester). On the end of East Rock where most of my colleagues live, it is more like ten minutes. That's not to suggest that HGS won't be exactly what your looking for, but I haven't met anyone who thought that was a very great place to live -- and the meal plan is definitely pretty spendy!

Both my previous institution and my present one allow ABD students to teach a course or two. People here who have run out of funding or teaching opportunities in the department tend to get work adjuncting at community colleges...

Hmm -- both of the schools that I have attended thus far have FLAS funding, but only for languages that are deemed high priority by the U.S. State(?) Department. I think that this tends to include languages in the East Asian sphere, eastern Europe, and parts of Asia... There may be schools that place additional limitations on FLAS availability though...

TA-ships are not assigned on random criteria and not all of those criteria are restricted solely to professional concerns. This really is the case in many departments -- at least in my field.

In my current school, this isn't a problem. Undergraduates do have preference though, so if the course is completely full, graduate students get the boot -- or at least that's what I've been told. At my old school, we were not allowed to audit language courses -- and while the state in which I lived allowed retirees to audit courses at any state school with permission from an instructor, they were also forbidden from auditing language courses. Apparently the fear was that there would be a mad rush of people enrolling in language courses. Of course, at my current institution where graduate students are allowed to audit these courses, there doesn't seem to really have been any kind of issues along those lines. This seems like a good question to ask when you are off visiting campuses in the spring. What sorts of options are available for studying languages, what do students usually do, is there money for language study in another country in the summer, etc.

Not a strawman. You've been pretty clear that you want to help only explicitly on your terms and that you think the institutional response should be to privilege seniority. I feel, as I've been clear, that the institution should be humane and receptive to the requests of students who have needs. At my M.A. institution, I was once a TA along with another student. We both had to teach two sections for the class. Two sections were at 8am and two were at 2pm. The professor's initial plan was to assign each of us one of the early morning sections and one of the afternoon sections. In the end, the professor ended up giving me both 8am sections and the other individual the plum 2pm sections. Why? For an excellent reason: 1. Said other TA could not afford to live in University town (prohibitively expensive place to live -- few of us could afford to live there) and lived 20+ miles away. 2. Said other TA's bicycle (and all bicycles) were repeatedly stolen from storage facilities at the apartment complex where he lived. Commuting by bicycle had become impossible because the lease also forbade keeping bicycles in one's apartment(!) -- ironically, while the landlord apparently could not prevent theft of said bicycles, they could indeed tell who had bicycles stored in their apartments. 3. TA had to take the bus to the university -- and the earliest bus route within walking distance did not come by until 7:30am -- meaning that student couldn't physically get to campus before 8:20 or so with all of the stops along the route. As another student who couldn't afford to live in university town, I ended up having a 30 mile commute to get to my sections smack in the middle of rush hour making my average commute time anywhere between 50-80 minutes, meaning that I had to be up out and of the house at 6:30am twice a week so that I could sit in traffic to make what would, by 9am, have been literally only a 30 minute drive. Inconvenient? Absolutely -- it was inconvenient as hell. What was inconvenient for me, however, was literally this student's only way of holding onto his funding, receiving his tuition remission, and thus being able to stay in graduate school and fulfill his dream. He is now a first-year student in a Ph.D. program at a great university that, thankfully, has better funding and lower costs of living in his area. If the professor hadn't been flexible in the scheduling or had this option, this person would have lost his funding entirely since there were no other opportunities for said person to TA elsewhere in the department that semester that didn't involve the same 8am trap. So was I inconvenienced? Yeah. I'm not going to pretend that it didn't suck. But *it didn't suck as much as having to literally abandon my dreams because of an inflexible system*. I'm glad that my professor was looking out for students that way (by the way, the professor was my advisor, but not of the other student), and I am grateful that in a scenario where I wanted to TA for a certain professor because it gave them a chance to evaluate me as a teacher and say more about me when they wrote me a LOR, my department was willing to consider it and ultimately approve my request. Like I said before, there is a difference between people pitching in in an atomized and contingent fashion -- "sure I'll cover your section on Thursday" -- and being willing to bite the bullet without complaint one semester because someone advocated for -- and got -- a better assignment because of childcare issues, or a sick parent, or an upcoming surgery, etc. I don't have a problem with the latter. I've been both a "winner" and a "loser" because the institution *didn't* stick to a mode of "fairness" that solely considered seniority, but a mode of "fairness" that considered a myriad of factors, some professional and others personal. I prefer the latter -- it is more humane.