Pius Aeneas

This is probably a bit late, but for what it's worth, when I sat down with the newly retired Head of the Classics department at my university to discuss graduate school choices, he flat-out told me that I shouldn't apply at Urbana-Champaign's program because it has declined in quality for a variety of reasons (retirements, professor departures and the like). I didn't push the issue for more specifics because I hadn't planned on applying there anyway (I'm more interested in the archaeological side of things). Just some inside info.

After consulting with my professors, I'm sort of leaning towards doing a PostBac. Money is an issue for me, and since I currently live and study in Chicago, it's really nice to see that Loyola offers a PostBac--I had no idea that they did until seeing this thread.

I'm applying there too, and I sent an email to tech support a couple weeks ago about there being no application to begin, and this is the response I received: "Thank you for your message. The online application is currently being updated and the institution has made the site unavailable at this time. You may check the page periodically for a status. For more information regarding this matter, please visit the institution’s website for their contact information. On some applications, you can click on "Contact Us" at the bottom of any page to contact the institution. Again, thank you for contacting Technical Support. Regards, Hobsons Technical Support" ....so hopefully it will be up soon. I might email the university directly if it isn't.

Okay, thanks for the info. I just feel really stressed about the whole thing. I've been wanting to go into Classical Archaeology for a long time as a career. I know about and accept all of the potential obstacles, so at this point, the idea of not making it into a good program is really weighing on me.

Hello, I've been perusing this forum for a couple days now, and I've decided to go ahead and ask some questions about grad school in the field of Classics-Classical Archaeology in particular. To start off I figure I should give some info about myself. I am a double major, Classical Civilization and Anthropology with minors in French and Latin, about to start my fifth and final undergrad year. I have about 3 1/2 years of Latin (four if a Summer course counts) and two years of Ancient Greek. My Classics GPA is a 4.0 without the languages and with them it's probably a 3.89 or something like that because I managed to get a B one semester for Greek. otherwise, all my language courses are A's. My problem is that my overall GPA is a pretty pathetic 3.4, on account of a couple slip-ups I had. I plan on taking the GRE next month, and from the practice stuff I've been looking at I'll probably do well. I have two professors who I know will write glowing recs for me, and two other options for a third. My question is this: will my low overall GPA be a serious roadblock for getting into a good Classical Archaeology program? The main programs I've been looking at are Michigan Ann Arbor and UT Austin (I've been looking at other schools for things like Latin MAT as a backup). If anyone can tell me whether I'm aiming too high or can recommend other schools to consider, I'd appreciate it.