ElusiveMuse

Yeah, but then you'll live in Bloomington. They have to have affordable housing there because that's pretty much all you've got to work with. When you live in a city, you're paying to have it be your backyard, essentially. That's how I see it.

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I am doing really nice mugs and gourmet coffee or tea, depending on the prof's preference. I say give the professor what you bought. I am sure even if it isn't the awesomest scotch, the gesture will be appreciated.

It is sort of evil how this soul-sucking process coincides with the necessity of writing MA theses, doesn't it? I emotionally detached from my waitlisted schools a while ago.

Um...well I hate to be the one to tell you but nothing is going to change. You have to sit down and make a decision. What exactly is it that is preventing you from choosing?

I am definitely a coastal girl through and through but I have always enjoyed my time spent in the Midwest. Now I'm very sorry to say that for the most part, the South gets little love from me. It has its awesome enclaves to be sure, but on the whole, F-.

I've never been to Columbus, but I think it's true what they say about Cleveland- it rocks! Of course, I wouldn't want to ever try to get a job there. But as a grad student, you could do worse. Also, it is not necessarily true that humanities grad students don't need a big city. Try being an art historian in a city without a major museum. I will humbly submit Los Angeles as a great city to be a grad student. Everyone commutes, so it is entirely possible to live away from where you work. There is something for everyone in terms of stuff to do and networking for your career.

I don't think that would be appropriate. You should visit Penn if you think you would go if you were accepted from the waitlist, and if you don't...well at least you know for next time.

Could you imagine how participating in this could come back to bite you on the ass, if you say the wrong thing about the wrong person and it gets printed?

I would say that in this economy all bets are off. I'm in the same position, so I feel your pain! I have a Plan B lined up and I have been psyching myself up for it.

I don't think it's any more of a problem than any other moderately sized city. I feel perfectly safe parking my car, sleeping with my window open, walking at night. Certainly there are neighborhoods that are not as nice as others. But on the whole I don't think crime is something you should worry about overmuch, or at least any more than you would in any other city.

Hunter the best advice I can give you is to try and find something close to the 60, 91, or 215 freeways, but not too close to campus or you'll be dealing with undergraduate BS all the livelong day (and night :roll: ). Downtown Riverside is actually pretty neat, you could walk to a bunch of coffee houses, pubs, and the like, plus there are art galleries and the Riverside Art Museum. And if you wanted to use public transportation it's a straight shot down University Ave. to the campus on the bus. So if you look for places that are within walking distance to University that could be a start.

I think for some people, a small loan at the onset is inevitable. It isn't free to pick up and move to a new location. Besides the expense of the move itself, there are deposits and things you have to consider.

I've lived in some pretty dismal places, when I was married to someone in the military. Twentynine Palms, California. It's literally one road, a few miles long, with a few fast food places and tattoo parlors. And the very tiny base. And a lot of sand. I ended up working for the Red Cross, making some lifelong friends, and dancing with a civic ballet company. It was awesome. I guess what I'm saying is that sometimes you live somewhere that feels like the wrong place for you. Chances are, as an academic, this will not be the last time you're faced with this sort of situation. So my advice is that if you can't be happy, be as happy as you can. Sometimes going into a situation prepared for it to utterly suck is a blessing in disguise, because you start to find yourself pleasantly surprised at every turn. If you don't mind saying, what are your geographic options?

If you can afford it, I'd go with option 3.

Wow, that is an incredibly awful oversight on their part, to send you these documents. I am just curious though, why is blue ink more cruel than another color?

I was pretty devastated at how poorly I did, but it wasn't across the board rejection so that's something. I applied to 11 programs and the best I got was waitlisted at one of my top choices. Problem is it's probably a lot of applicants' top choice, too. So...I don't know. I do have some perfectly respectable MA offers but it wasn't what I was hoping for when I began this grueling and expensive process, for no reason other than I would just like to be settled in a program for the PhD and not go through this again in two years.

You are in good company. I could have written the original post myself. :|

Look, everyone wants to finalize this. I think it is not unreasonable to say that one is being spectacularly ridiculous if one is holding onto offers with no intention of accepting them. At the end of the day there is only one way to move this along and that is for people to notify their programs of their decisions. Only people with offers can do this. I am not sure how asking that this be done in some sort of organized and/or timely fashion can be construed as selfish on the part of waitlisters, particularly when confronted with "I've been decided for two months but I'm fretting" sorts of posts.

I am not sure I understand why the burden of research ahead of time and an idea of how you would handle an offer is on the waitlister alone. Should this not have been every applicant's responsibility, back in November/December when we began this process?

Not all wait lists are ranked. In some cases I would imagine that your chances of being accepted are dependent on who declines an offer. Meaning, for example if you are in English and you study Victorian literature, and another waitlisted person studies 20th century American literature, you would have more of a chance of being accepted if a Victorianist declines their offer, but the other person would have a better chance than you if an Americanist declines. Does that make sense? Either way, I don't think sending your shorts would help your chances :wink:

Trust me, I benefited from the fee waiver (only covers half the cost of the exam, and you can only have one so if you need to re-take the exam, you can't get another) the free software, and I applied to 11 schools. (Which was in large part due to my qualifying for application fee waivers. I would never have been able to afford so many without those waivers.) So I still had to pay for 7 score reports. I felt like the free prep software was not helpful, at least nowhere near as helpful as the prep courses seem to be. For example, I was scoring consistently higher on the prep software than I scored on the exam. In my experience the exam was quite different from what the prep software gave. I just think it's a bit ridiculous that something which is nowhere near an accurate measure of one's capability to perform at a graduate level, and which also happens to be a pretty booming business and money-maker, is keeping otherwise excellent candidates from funding and acceptances. Do you want someone who can fill in bubbles or conduct research and publish their work?

I think it's unfortunate that the GRE is so important to admissions and funding because it seems like a bit of an unethical big business to me. The prep classes are outrageously expensive, it costs a fortune to sit for the exam, and another small fortune to send your scores to schools. I feel like higher education already tends to be a bit of a classist institution and I absolutely disapprove of yet another financial stumbling block. I think for certain disciplines, tests like this can be important. I'm thinking certain sciences maybe? But in the humanities? Does it really matter how well you can take a multiple choice exam? Isn't it more important that you can write well? It should be...

Some grad students and MANY profs live in Los Angeles and the surrounding areas and commute. I'm not going to lie, it's Southern California traffic. You'd have to give yourself an hour and a half or more depending on the time. Unfortunately the Inland Empire is just not all that pleasant a place to live. I've been miserable the last three days running my air conditioner to combat the 85 degree blazing sun outside. Downtown Riverside is trying really hard to be a nice space to hang out, and there are some coffee places and bars and parks and art galleries to spend time in. But yeah...I'd say the farther WEST you go down the 60 freeway, the nicer you're going to find things. ETA- If you're coming here for Religious Studies, I have taken some seminars and they are really pretty awesome, so I hope that will keep your mind off Rivertucky. June O'Connor is ten kinds of amazing.

Fortunately for me, my partner is a computer engineer. :wink: