Chande

I go to USF for undergrad now and I'm used to worse public transportation than Tampa has. We didn't have even a single bus route where I grew up, so Tampa is pretty stellar by my standards.
Finding parking on campus is definitely pretty bad, though. I usually just walk because the heat is really not that bad as long as you stay properly hydrated and it's only likely to be a half hour walk each way. I live right next to campus and I've never had any trouble with loud parties or anything like that.
I was born and raised in Florida and I've never lived in another state or even seen snow so I guess my perspective is different. I am kind of looking forward to most likely leaving Florida for graduate school, but I will miss the weather here.
As far as restaurants go, I'd recommend Tazza Cafe. It's very small but the food and the service are both excellent.

Got my rejection email today. Passed my candidacy exam today so I don't even care really. Congrats to all who got it!

I got it, my project was in computational science / mathematics. And I got DOE CSGF too so I'll be deferring. Good luck to everybody!

I just got the award! I'm in Mechanical Engineering, and I'm another one of those people who got both the NSF GRFP and the NDSEG. I think I'll likely be accepting the NSF (the money is slightly better and I'm interested in NSF GROW), so hopefully I'll free up an NDSEG spot for someone else!

"It's not a contest, but if it were I would win"

Are you sure it's not you? I ask because you say you had a crappy life before this. There are people who are just miserable no matter what happens. Are you sure that's not you? Also, are these feelings just your interpretation or are they legit? Are your professors really sexist, do they really favor the male students who just pull things out of their ass, do they really shoot down all the intelligent things you say, do you really say intelligent things, do your classmates really talk down to you, and do they really laugh at you?

To new beginnings! *toast*
 
I got my ex into grad school. I mean by making sure my ex was on time for things, scheduled interviews, actually finished college.. etc..
 
Then I got dumped. We were a year apart in terms of graduation.. so off my ex went to grad school, dumped me, and then.. well, I was pissed. I had no one to carry my presentation across the icy sidewalks of Chicago for portfolio showings like my ex did. I had no one to help book my flights for school visits. I had no one to review my digital and physical portfolio and give feedback at 2am like my ex did. Oh.. i loathed my ex. The phrase "You'd be NOTHING without me!" came to mind an awful lot.
 
But then I realized that I didn't need my ex to accomplish anything. I recruited other friends to hold my giant box of portfolio stuff on the icy sidewalks. I talked to other students and faculty about my portfolio. I asked my family for help with travel planning. Turns out I was fine.
 
You'll be fine too. You just need to call in reinforcements when the time comes. You're not going to end up under a bridge.

Full disclosure: this post originally was incredibly snarky. 
 
There is never a perfect time to have a baby. Doesn't matter if you're married or not, doesn't matter if you're in school or not. You can waste your life waiting for that next promotion, for the market to come up a little more, for one more degree, one more publication, a tenure track position to come up.... Things could always be better.
 
My sister and her husband had been married for the better part of five years before she got pregnant with their first child. My sister was in her fourth year of a Doctoral program. She brought up the topic of kids and life schedules and such with her adviser, and he flat-out told her she should get pregnant then. Do not wait for graduation, do not wait for that perfect job. The timing will never be perfect. It's a lot easier later in the grad school career than it is the first year or two, but there are folks out there who have kids their first year (or in undergrad, even, as I did).
 
Pinkster: When you counsel people professionally, your opinion stays out of it. It's called professional distance. You do not get to state your opinion on your client's behavior and then proceed. That is unprofessional, and it will get you fired. You will deal with people who do a hell of a lot worse than get pregnant in grad school, and you keep your opinion to yourself. If you want to howl about the unfairness of other people having stable relationships that lead to them having children while simultaneously successfully completing their graduate studies, make your own thread.

See, sweetie, what you need to understand is that your experiences do not generalize well to the rest of the world. That's how stereotypes are created and perpetuated. One of my close friends got pregnant while she was both on BC and using a condom. Gasp! She obviously is a terrible person, right? Not a good mother to an adorable 4-year-old. Oh, and she's not married!
 
Also, your comments about being 'married' and 'responsible' are adorable. Guess what! You can be married and the most irresponsible arsehat on the planet. Marriage does not make you responsible. In quite a few cases, getting married is the worst decision you can make. Staying married because of children can be an equally horrific decision.
 
You can have your opinions. You can have your way of planning your life, and your perceptions. THAT DOES NOT MAKE THEM MORE RIGHT/BETTER/SMARTER/etc THAN EVERYONE ELSE'S. Just because you wouldn't have kids before getting married DOES NOT make someone who does so irresponsible, uneducated, or liars. The OP seems to have a stable, loving relationship. Just because they don't have a piece of paper that claims them legally binded means nothing.
 
I kind of hope you never get into an MSW program and go into counseling because I think you would do a lot more harm than good with these kind of attitudes. Especially with the changes in society's population today.
 
To the OP, it's hard, yeah. But I know several people in my program with kids (two are pregnant with their second) and they're both doing well. The first two years of med school are actually better than the last two when it comes to having kids (I have quite a few med student friends), so that's something to take into consideration if you want more. Congrats and best of luck to you in the future.

Lol a PhD in bio and unable to protect yourself from an unplanned pregnancy... That a shame.

You want to get an MSW in Social Work.
You have mentioned an interest in counselling.
The first thing you do when a forum member says "X has happened - I need advice." is to respond with "I can't believe you were so irresponsible as to let X happen!"
...Does anybody else notice a problem here?
 
Pinkster, if you want to last 5 minutes in a Social Work program, you need to accept a couple of things. 
When people tell you "X has happened (note the past tense) and I need help dealing with X" it is completely useless to berate them about how stupid they were for allowing X to happen. They can't turn back the clock. They can't undo what has already happened. For that reason alone it is horrible to condemn instead of assist them. In the course of your Social Work job, you will come across clients who have made TERRIBLE lifestyle decisions. This post is actually an example of the best-case scenario - somebody does everything right (use contraceptives, is in a steady relationship) and Thing X has happened anyway. In the course of your Social Work job you are going to come across clients who have consciously made a series AWFUL decisions: they've done everything wrong, their lifestyle choices have been ill-informed to the point where you have to suspend your disbelief that they actually did *that*. Their choices are based on principles you fundamentally disagree with from the core of your being. THESE PEOPLE NONETHELESS ARE COMING TO YOU FOR CONSTRUCTIVE, NON-JUDGEMENTAL ADVICE. If you cannot put aside your narrow-minded prejudices, inability to empathise or tone of moral superiority then you shouldn't be a Social Worker. Full stop.  
...I can't believe I even had to write this.

Believe me I know the stats of contraceptives, the chances of getting pregnant while correctly using them is not that high. Is it my fault that people aren't responsible, don't ask their doctors questions etc...? No. Like I said I haven't been pregnant from BC I don't personally know people who have. Most of my friends have been on BC for years and not gotten pregnant. I'm not saying it doesn't happen obviously I understand it does but I'm saying people use that as an excuse way more than it should be. I don't even know that that's is the OPs situation, either way it was irresponsible.

Support? Umm I think I was pretty supportive in the first post. I said "good luck" that's about as supportive as I can be with such irresponsible behavior.

...Yes, but just because you personally have not become pregnant after using contraception, it does not automatically follow that anyone who gets (unexpectedly) pregnant while using contraception is (i) stupid (ii) reckless (iii) using their contraception incorrectly. 

Wait...how is the OP irresponsible?
 
From the OP's post, it seems that he's in a stable relationship. He says he owns a home and two vehicles TOGETHER with his partner, so this is obviously not a random fling. 
 
Even if you take every necessary precaution, sometimes pregnancy still happens. There's no contraception that comes with a 100% guarantee. 
 
Anyway -- OP, congratulations. A close friend of mine recently had a baby; she's ABD and seems to be balancing the writing process and parenting life pretty well. Also, I was born while my father was still a Ph.D. student, and my parents managed fine. My mother had a full-time job, and my great-aunt was able to provide childcare, which really helped them a lot. As far as I can tell, I'm not any worse for the wear.   It's definitely doable, and I wish you and your girlfriend all the best.

In five years if he chooses to marry this girl and raise a child with her he will be exactly the sort of person you envy for "having it all" - so I don't know why you decided to reprimand him.  It sounds like he has things at least as together as your shrink who you cited as an inspiration.  
 
Everyone should take a moment and give the other person benefit of the doubt when these things happen.  Assume MrPootawn is an intelligent person who understands 'baby creation' and that sometimes things just don't go as planned.  
 
And I don't intend this to be a personal attack Pinkster; but I do want to have this guys back while he makes a complex and nuanced decision.
 
That said MrPootawn, I used to work in an industry that put me in contact with many people who opened up to me (ahemhairdresserahem) and the secret I found out is that almost no one has children the way they planned. And yet almost everyone you meet is thankful for their children and wouldn't change a thing. Conversely, marriage is something we try to plan and make perfect and plenty of people regret it. Bottom line - don't assume that the wrench in your plans is not better than your plans.  
 
And good luck whatever your choice!

To expand on my previous post... Your reasons for making a good wife are kind of embarrassing. What makes someone a good wife, to add on to what Loric said, is someone who is just a good person. I mean good person as in their all around "being." Learning how to live with each other comes later. The important thing is learning how to "be" with each other. That's why it's important to just know who you are, be independent, have a high character, be interesting, etc. That's what everyone should strive for, regardless of if they're looking to get married. 
 
On the other hand, your qualities for being a good wife are your ability to learn quickly (whatever that means), your obedience, your loyalty, your ability to stay in a conversation that doesn't interest you (I assume to please your husband). To be frank, it sounds like you're striving to be a robot. What was that movie? The Stepford Wives or something. You have a 1950's mentality that a wife should know how to cook and clean while the husband is at work and then ask good question (like, "How was your day, honey?") at the dinner table. 

The military offers a health professions scholarship that pays for a few of their officers to go get health professional degrees (MDs, DDSs, DOs, nursing degrees, clinical psychology, and MSWs depending on their service) in return for returning to military service for a few years as a clinical specialist.  It's been my very limited experience that most of the small number of men doing an MSW at my university were there for clinical social work (as opposed to community/child services type work) and many of them were there through HPSP, but that's because my university is a military-friendly institution. It may differ in different places.
Of course you aren't limited to your program, either.  All of the universities to which you applied have several graduate level schools - probably a medical school, maybe also a dental school and other health professional schools, definitely a graduate school with traditional departments (like biology, English, etc.) and maybe also some other professional graduate schools (business, architecture, engineering, international affairs, that sort of thing).  These graduate institutions probably have cross-school mixers.  I've gone to several of these and although my own primary department is predominantly female, the mixers are always more balanced because they bring in people from more male-dominated departments/programs as well as from more gender-balanced departments/programs.
 
I always joke that our mixers are partially intended to help students find a partner; while that's tongue in cheek, there's some truth to it.  A LOT of graduate students are at the point in their lives when they want to make a serious connection with someone else with the potential of it turning long-term, and they go to these mixers for that reason.  And there's nothing wrong with that, of course; I think it's good.  Graduate school IS a great place to potentially meet a long-term partner.  And if you're willing to move wherever your spouse needs to and potentially sacrifice your career for his (which I think is also a valid choice), then you may be the perfect academic wife, lol.  Academics tend to have less flexibility and control over where they move, and finding a faculty position might involve moving to the rural Midwest or suburban New England or wherever.
 
If you JUST started talking to the guy, as within the last few weeks, I wouldn't make any life decisions based upon that.  That's just me though.
 
*
 
Of course it bothers me - we're not doing it now (my postdoc begins over the summer), but we have done it before.  It's rough, and we haven't yet done it as a married couple so I imagine it will be rougher.
 
I think it all depends on the field.  I can't imagine getting a permanent job that's great enough that it makes me want to live apart from my husband indefinitely, but for two years, this is literally the perfect postdoctoral position for me.  It will help me advance my career in a really big way - I'll be learning techniques for my field and working with some big names in it.  The salary and fringe benefits are at a higher level than most other postdocs I can get.  It also helps that they are completely aware of my situation and are being extremely flexible on a work-life balance level (e.g., making arrangements with me to take some Fridays off or work from home so I can leave Thursday afternoons to go stay with my husband for a weekend every so often).
 
I also tell students that often more flexibility at the earlier stages of the career mean more flexibility at the later stages.  I chose my top 10 PhD program even though it meant living apart from my then-long-term boyfriend for a few years; we survived that and got married.  I also chose this postdoc knowing that it means a short period of time living apart.  But I have reason to believe that both of those choices - a top PhD program and a top postdoc - will mean that I have a greater variety of positions for which I am competitive when I go on the job market in 2 years, given my productivity so far.  That's because in academia, where you can seek positions is somewhat limited by the department in which you did your PhD and who you worked with.  It's not the same in all fields - social work isn't necessarily like that.  But other fields like law and business are also kind of prestige-driven, so a JD from a top 15 law school has more choices from a JD from the bottom 100, if you know what I mean.
 
But yes, it's true that I am not very needy and I don't need to be around all the time.  That also comes with time, though.  As you get to know your boyfriend/spouse over the years, you come to trust them and know them more and more, and your need for your own independent space increases.  My husband and I dated for 11 years before we got married, so we know each other very well and I trust that we can work things out long distance for 1-2 years.  However, a long-distance requirement is a deal-breaker for me career-wise - which is why I am doing all of these inconvenient things now, to give myself more options later.  I wouldn't search for a job in places where my spouse couldn't live.

No offense by this comment, I am shocked how people put school before families? Maybe it is because I am weird and want a husband and babies more than anything but if I had a long term boyfriend I would probably not even be applying to grad school if it meant not being with him.  My ex and I were together 3 months and I was planning a future lol, had we not broken up in Aug I don't think I would have started applying to schools.  I knew I wanted to go back to school, but with him being in the military I wanted to always be free to do whatever he needed you know? I don't know I can't imagine prioritizing school and research work and stuff over my relationship.   I would never leave school once I am in though either.  

I did not include my research experiences, but did include my teaching assistantship and tutoring jobs.

New Pokemon came out, so I did that for pretty much the whole weekend. It was awesome.

New Pokemon came out, so I did that for pretty much the whole weekend. It was awesome.

I wonder if "released" means released to the public, as in awardees may know before then!?  ::constantly grasping for more info::  haha  Thanks so much for calling and posting this info!

I called NSF today and they said that they are making the final selection now and the result will be released in the first or the second week of April...

"Of course you'll get in! I mean, you have a published book!" 
 
Yes, because my YA Fantasy ebook published by a small press is going to help me get into a Ph.D. program in science. Yes, that's totally how it works. *sarcasm* 

I can imagine how devastating that scenario would be.  That said, you do have responsibilities in this situation.  Some of them may seem unfair, but they're very important.
 
I want to note that I'm coming at this as a male rape survivor.  I was raped at 15 by a man who was a religious leader in our community and who I know has assaulted other kids.  I was called a liar when I tried to get help, and he has never faced any consequences for his crimes.  
 
1. The "too good to be a rapist" fallacy is just that.
 
Rapists often rape people they are supposed to protect, people who like or love them, and/or people who feel safe around them.  They often get close to people, or acquire authority, because they seem like good people.
 
Many survivors (me included) would never have predicted that their rapist would rape them.  This is a big reason that many of us are not believed.  The reality of it is that survivors have had it proven, in the worst possible way, that you can't tell who the good people are.  
 
2. Most rapists do not get caught: 97% of rapists never spend a day in jail.
 
Most rape survivors you meet did not get justice.  They know that a person who has not been convicted is not necessarily innocent.  They can't rely on that information to keep themselves safe.  They can't trust your word on the matter, because most rapists will insist that they're not rapists.
 
3. Nobody is obligated to feel safe around you.
 
It might be very painful and upsetting; it might affect your career.  But the reality of it is that rape survivors are trying to keep themselves safe, and the pain you experience is not more valid or more important than the pain they have experienced.
 
Hell, I don't even know you, and there is a part of me that doesn't believe you when you say you're innocent.  That's not your fault, but it's not mine either.  It's my rapist's fault, and it's every rapists' fault, because they're disgusting victimizing liars, and that has lasting effects on the people they victimize.
 
4. Okay, so what are you supposed to do about this?
 
- First of all, the people telling you not to talk about it and not to touch the subject of rape are absolutely right.  If it's important to you to help rape survivors, consider making donations to RAINN or something like that.
 
- If you do need to talk about it for whatever reason, don't bash or blame your accuser.  Most rape survivors are called stupid, attention-seeking, slutty, or crazy when they talk about what has legitimately happened to them, especially by the rapists, who want to reduce accusers' credibility to avoid punishment.
 
- If someone tells you they have been raped, believe them.  The vast majority of accusations are true, and people who are not listened to suffer additional psychological trauma.  
 
- It's okay, even good, to acknowledge that someone has no way of knowing whether you're telling the truth.  This would make me feel a lot safer if I were in conversation with you.  If you acted like it was ridiculous that I was wary (because there is no proof of your innocence), I would wonder why you didn't care about survivors' experiences.
 
- Do not get yourself in situations where you make someone (especially women) feel unsafe.  Do not have sex with drunk people (don't do this anyway).  Do not walk an intoxicated person home alone -- get a female friend of hers to come with you.  Don't loom over someone or make it difficult for them to leave an area.  Maybe you don't do any of those things -- if not, great -- but don't make it easy for people to look at you and see red flags.
 
- Do not allow other people to use your experience to say that "lots of" or "half" or whatever number of accusations are false.  First of all, it's not true, and second, men have an obligation to help stop rape culture and rape apologism.  
 
Well, sorry I ended up writing a novel here.  I hope it's useful and that it made sense.