TulipOHare

Totally. I have two great options, but if I let myself get worked up about it, it seems like I lose no matter what I decide...

You should get a letter from the school's financial aid office detailing your federal loan eligibility. The office's website might say when you should hear from them, or you can e-mail them and ask when to expect a letter.

I too don't pity anyone getting paid $60k to do nothing at all -- but let me assure you that most law grads are not getting paid deferrals. Most are being deferred and not getting anything. (Can you imagine if a school accepted you, and you enrolled, and then they called you and said "Actually, we can't afford you this year, so can you sit around and wait a year, and if we can afford you next year you can come?") And a whole lot of them are simply not getting jobs at all.

I'm out of school and working, but I am having a bitch of a time thinking about anything but grad school. Maybe that sentence should start "I have a job and I'm at work, but..."

Officially, all over the US, it's completely illegal for people under 21 to buy, drink, possess, or transport alcohol in any situation. Liquor stores, bars, and restaurants that sell to people under 21 can get stiff fines, or lose permission to sell alcohol. Exact punishments for underage drinkers differ depending on the state. How strongly it's enforced varies a lot on circumstances, but you generally have to do something stupid and call attention to yourself in order to get in trouble for it. Plenty of people drink for a long time before they turn 21 and never get in trouble... others, well...

Minimum quals for a job at the UN -- any job -- are a graduate degree in one of six general categories (check their hiring website for more info but I think a JD would work) and at least business-level fluency in two of the six official UN languages (I assume you're a native speaker of English, so pick your next favorite out of Spanish, French, Russian, Arabic, and Chinese). Good luck.

Okay, here's the tl;dr version. Equal at both: reputation in the field; overall quality; won't tell me anything about $ until after April 15th. Temple Pros: better known for research (so might be a better name if I go for a PhD later); I live near it already so wouldn't have to deal with moving or adjusting to a new place; half the cost of TC. Temple Cons: not very excited about it; program is a year longer than TC's. TC Pros: like their dept's style better; option of having NYC govt. pay my tuition if I work for the city schools after graduation; program is a year shorter than Temple's. TC Cons: costs twice as much as Temple; incredibly expensive place to live. Better? (Yesterday it all seemed so much more dramatic )

If he's OK with the huge commute, might as well live in Philly or on the edge of it. If you're OK with a boring town, I'd pick Trenton or something on the R3 West Trenton train line (http://septa.org/maps/click_map.html -- top right of the map). But I can't think of any place that isn't one or the other... I wish I had better news, but as far as I'm aware Trenton and Princeton are the most exciting towns in that corridor -- it's a giant field of boring sprawly suburbs (including Levittown, the birthplace of the sprawly suburb). And much further south of Trenton and your husband will have a 1.5 if not 2 hour commute. I had a friend who lived in Yardley and commuted to Princeton, and that took her an hour to an hour and 15. Traffic is just shitty in that whole area and public transportation in the burbs on the Pennsylvania side of the river is OK but not great.

Dear gradcafe comrades, I seek your wisdom. I am torn between two schools for my MA in SLP: Temple University, and Teachers College at Columbia University (hereinafter TC). The goal: Get my MA so I can work as a speech-language pathologist. Maybe PhD later, not sure. Program/Faculty/Quality: Temple's program is 3 to 3 1/2 years long; TC's is 2 1/2 years. Reputation in the field is similar. I really like TC's style of clinical training, but Temple's program covers some special topics you don't get to study everywhere. Temple does a lot more research and is better known for its research, but the faculty at TC do work that's more closely in line with my interests. (Fwiw, I already have 4 years of full-time research experience, plus 2 years as a work-study RA in undergrad.) Location: Temple is in Philadelphia, where I've lived for the last 7 1/2 years. So I wouldn't have to move or get used to a new place. TC is in New York City, which is a very cool place to be, but is very expensive too. The cost: I currently hold $17k in student debt. Tuition (added up over the whole program) will cost me $42k at Temple and $81k at TC. Living expenses are high at both, though obviously higher at TC. As I've whined in other threads, neither school will be letting me know about assistantships or funding until after I have to decide, so I have to choose on the assumption that I will get nothing. TC has one edge: the NYC Dept. of Education will pay my tuition there in exchange for service after graduation (2 years service for every year they pay), which would cut the total bill down to just fees and living expenses. My gut: I feel pulled toward TC, but the price tag scares the crap out of me! Though the NYC DOE service agreement gives me a way out of that (I have no problem being an indentured servant), I'm what-ifing "what if I hate or get tired of New York and then I'm stuck there for another four [EDIT] years." Temple would be so much cheaper and easier, but for no reason I can quantify, I'm more excited about TC. (Median pay in the US for SLPs is $57k, so I'll be making some money after I graduate... but... argh!) Okay, hit me... any and all thoughts are welcome! (And thank you for reading this far )

Ahhh. You're the one going to grad school, though, not him :wink:

zomfg you have filled me with renewed hope with this one post! Maybe they shut it down because so many of us are trying to make NetIDs to see if we got in!

Ahhh congratulations Miss Viking! That's fantastic!

Where's the "foaming at the mouth" smiley when you need it... !

Still waiting, and I know from the result search that a few people have been accepted to my program. :/ Only consolation: NYU is even more expensive than Columbia, and if I wasn't first round at NYU, I'm sure as hell not getting any $ from them. So if I'm gonna go to school in New York, I might as well drown myself in slightly less debt...

I'm in the same boat now, tkm256 -- I got an e-mail from my other school a couple hours ago, saying that exact same thing. Crap.

For about a year, my boyfriend and I were 3 hours apart and saw each other only on weekends, and we were fine. It also made us both REALLY productive during the week, because we wanted to make sure the weekend was totally free!

Are you planning on getting a PhD, either right after the Masters or sometime later?

kgrowe, do you know why Temple makes grad applicants wait until midsummer to find out about assistantships and etc.? Is something going on in the department or is it a university-wide thing? And if you want a change of scenery, going from a flat coastal place in the Northeast to a mountainous place in the West sounds like a good one. Particularly if you like doing anything outdoors, Colorado's a fantastic place for it.

Well, I dunno if it was the right thing to do, but I contacted profs after I was admitted to tell them how excited I was about the program and to ask about assistantships. Both sent happy messages back and told me something about when/whether they decide on RAs and TAs. No news since then, but hey.

Berkeley now. Then apply to Harvard for your PhD.

A thought that's crossed my mind more than once: "If the U.S. dollar becomes worthless, I don't have to pay back any of my student loans!"

cough cough Godwin's Law cough cough

Well, YOU asked. :roll:

Of course it's possible. Maybe one of the people accepted has to consider a spouse's wishes... or has second thoughts about the climate/geography... or has an anxiety attack and doesn't think they can hack it... or had a better "fit" with a prof at the #2 school in the country... or got even more money at another school... or got a more enthusiastic reception at another school's visiting weekend... you could come up with endless scenarios. However, it's also possible that no one will turn it down. You make it sound like anyone who turned this place down would have to be stupid... so, time to hope for stupidity! Oh, and DON'T FORGET to write back to Top Choice and tell them that they're your top choice!! Good luck!

I had one last night, for real this time! I dreamt that I was at NYU on the first day of orientation, hanging out in the department office with the profs and the other new MA students, chatting and talking and having a great time and being thrilled to be there. Then, out of nowhere (like, involuntarily) I said "I'm an atheist." Someone gasped and the entire room instantly fell silent and everyone stared at me. One of the professors said quietly "We have to talk" and he and a couple other profs started rooting through a desk and some file cabinets gathering papers. I walked over to him as conversation in the room tentatively resumed. He muttered angrily "We can't have that in our program." I started to say "What does it have to do with anything?" and he just shook his head and said "We can't have that here. You should have told us this when you applied. You would have saved us all a lot of trouble." They started handing me the papers they were digging out and I saw that it was my application, my FAFSA, copies of e-mails, every scrap of evidence that I'd ever had anything to do with NYU. Then two of the profs grabbed my arms, led me out of the building, shoved me out the front door, and locked it behind me. I was standing there on the street, stack of papers in hand, in total shock because two minutes ago I was starting grad school and all set for the next three years, and now I was locked out of my school and just... standing there on the sidewalk with no plans. I was already nervous because people are starting to hear back from my program at NYU and I haven't heard yet, so I'm sure that's what caused the dream. I woke up relieved that it didn't really happen, but now I've got this idea in my head that I've been rejected because of something totally random!