Just a few comments on the funding packages: it's rare, but not at all unheard of for AM students to be fully funded. The Divinity School offered 5 applicants full funding this year (as in, people who started fall 2011), and while not everyone to whom a full ride was offered chose to attend, that's still a decent number if you consider that the size of the cohort (for the first-year AMs this year) is only 40-ish students.
As someone who was offered and accepted a full funding package, I think (although of course I can't really know - the vicissitudes of funding are totally mysterious!) that a big part of why I received such a generous offer was because I had a great deal of language preparation in the field I wanted to enter. I also had a background in religion from my undergrad, but emphasized in my application and SOP the interdisciplinary work that I'd done and how I wanted to continue that at Chicago (which is allllll about the interdisciplinarity). A quick note on what chicagodivstudent said in the last post: my GRE scores were actually not that great: 700 or below for both sections. Not bad, but nothing outstanding.
Speaking of languages, if you are studying a language like Chinese, Arabic, Turkish, Hindi, or any that the US government deems "critical languages," you could be eligible for a FLAS, which the Foreign Language and Area Studies grant. I don't know all the details, but basically you get full tuition plus a stipend for each year that you are continually enrolled in classes in whatever language you applied for. I'm hardly complaining about getting a full ride from the Divinity School, but a stipend would have been nice
To be blunt, it will also help if you are a woman, a minority, or both. I distinctly remember looking around the intro class (which everyone has to take together their first term) and being like "Wow...there are a lot of white dudes."
Good luck and hope to see you around Hyde Park next year!
