ANDS!

No. All you have to do is explain the situation, and/or show them your award letter. Rentals care less about the "3-4" rule (that is hardly binding) and more about "Is this person going to bail. . ."

I saw go for it. If for no other reason so that you can come back here and let us know what awkwardness went down because this read has been solid-gold.

Well known in what? This isn't undergrad; the quality of the department is worth more than the quality of the name in many fields. Also Emory folks have been known to lurk around here. . .assuming you're using your full name.

I've always wondered about the people who find Windows 7 so functionally intractable that OSX becomes a major selling point for them.

There is no way I would spend money on Kirkwood if you're only interested in Set Theory from a non-mathemagician stand point. YOu should be able to Google "Basic Set Theory" lecture notes and be able to find an instructors course materials on the topic. Hell most ANY math book (even probability books) would have the basics of set theory if that is your goal. If you are dead set on a "formal" text book, http://www.scribd.com/doc/5655796/Halmos-Naive-Set-Theory'>Naive Set Theory linked in your original posts seems to read like a good introduction to the topic.

Count me as one of the MANY that has never had a problem with a Thinkpad. If your issue is software related there is a cure for that - reformatting the damn thing the minute you get it. Certainly what I have done on my (MANY) purchases of Lenovo. Though I suspect the people whining about "bloatware" or such have older machines. They have stepped it up in terms of delivering content that people actually need. I am currently sitting on a 430s - light, excellent workhouse, best keyboard bar none - all for a great price. And for what it's worth, no one who has been invested in Lenovo (IBM) Thinkpads since the 90's would consider the Edge a Thinkpad machine. In any case, no laptop manufacturer is perfect; however there is a reason Lenovo is still seen as the "professionals" laptop provider. A Series 9? C'mon now.

Buckhead is the farthest from campus of the neighborhoods mentioned and is not where any graduate student should be living. If you want to play there - by all means. Living there? No way. Most grads, seem to default to Campus Crossings - or a related complex - around Emory (if you are Emory bound). There are however, no shortage of roommate situations one can pursue on Craigslist that will take them away from the university, so that they have an actual incentive to discover the city. If you are going to Georgia Tech, you might be tempted to venture to the West of the freeway to live. . .don't. I would suggest something close to the East/West train line or the border between Midtown and Virginia Highlands. GSU folks can really live anywhere on a bus line as the train has a Georgia State stop.

Letting this dickbag ruin your appreciation and desire to go into research is like a future Anthony Bourdain (or however his name is spelled) being sullied by their experience working at McD's. Or maybe not. You have one cantankerous voice among the multitudes. If you can truly say that his or her comments are not needed to make the thesis work, then you should do what it appears you are going to do and attempt to negotiate your way out from under their tyranny. The only way I wouldn't have tried to kneecap this guy (figuratively. . .of course - ) was if they held some final word on whether you can move forward or not. If there is a head to go over, jump that SOB.

You can quite easily compare the Master/PhD programs of the individual schools and see where they do (and don't) line up in regards to their curriculum. If you are so interested in theory, then why are you looking at the Biostat route? If you're looking for "rigor", there's nothing stopping you from taking courses outside your program that meet your "needs". And you could do a lot worse than spending the next five years in Davis, CA.

I'd love to see the Subject GRE scores of folks coming from stat. programs. If you're trying to get into the best of the best, you should recognize that you're competing with the best for these spots, and as such having a weakness anywhere isn't going to do you any favors (and I don't consider a 60% on the subject GRE to be even close to weak - maybe for a math program but for stats. . .please). I would simply realign your wishes with reality. The pedigree of a persons school can only take them so far. If you are dead set on only getting into Ivies or New Ivies, then I would imagine you are in for a rough road.

They are asking if they should do an email meet-and-greet; I doubt it will matter much. I'm surprised that the research areas of the instructors aren't already clearly defined; typically they will be with a list of papers. For some disciplines, I'm really not sure what this gets a student.

I laughed. . .

An SSD isn't going to help something like Matlab perform faster - it will certainly load and shutdown faster, but if that was my only benefit, I certainly would not bother with an SSD. There is a point where convenience is not worth the price of admission. For anyone in research, CPU and Memory are going to be what they should go for in a laptop; an SSD is nice to have but it was at the bottom of my list in terms of a new laptop (certainly not splurging for the SSD model that retailers are dishing out).

The running of multiple programs will only be facilitated by more memory and more ram. An SSD's (and hell am HDD's) main use is read/write speeds - or "how fast can I access that. . ." For most users a 7200RPM HDD isn't going to seem much different than an SSD in normal use. This is not to say someone shouldn't update, but if cost is a factor, saving 200 (or 300) bucks on the manufacturers SSD option and holding off on an SSD (to see if you need it) is absolutely a viable option.

You will make friends simply by virtue of you being in the same boat as everyone else coming into your program.

The stock HDD on my T430s makes about the same noise as my SSD which is none at all (or rather none that you should notice). Given that much (if not all) the action on my laptop is done through the HDD, I would say noise isn't an issue. An SSD is great for system resumes and program performance, but - as mentioned - really isn't all that needed if one isn't really using programs where the bottleneck is read/write speeds. For data analysis the key will be CPU and Memory. That said, SSD's (which should NEVER be bought from the manufacturer) can be had for sub 200 bucks these days which, considering legacy prices, isn't bad. I went with a Samsung 840 120GB for 100 bucks. More than enough OS space.

Some people do have the money to pay for a doctorate.

Find roommates, plan your meals (and stick to them), utilize public transportation where available and try and get creative with entertainment.

Who said anything even close to that? Not one of my applications, once submitted, said anything of the sort. They certainly didn't say that - at my whim - I could get updates on the likelihood of my acceptance.

If you were inundated with emails asking questions about something that - in time - will be resolved, would you take the time to respond to them? I certainly wouldn't. Nothing in the application process says that the ad comm's or any of the instructors need to answer decision questions, certainly not "Well I see you guys have let some people in, can you tell me if I'm in?!" As for "ignoring" questions from admitted students, much of the same applies in spirit - these people don't come into the department once a year to admit students and then go back in hibernation. They have devoted a portion of their time to recruit students into the program but they still have other duties that need attending to.

How about the fact that any future scholarships or internship opportunities (at least those within the first year or so) will almost certainly be determined on the strength (or lack thereof) of your final undergrad moments. You have all summer to plan all the great and wonderful things you're going to do in grad school (and 5-years to do one-tenth of them); 60 or so days is surely nothing in the grand scheme of things.

Say what? This forum is full of stories about why people do what they want to do and why they enjoy doing it. I haven't seen a single thread where someone says "God I hate graduate school, but I have a gun to my head so there's really no choice for me. . ./sadface."

Thinkpad T430s (or a T420s if you can find it on the cheap). And while the Ideapads are not as rock solid as the Thinkpads (and aren't meant to be), the U series is a good buy for someone looking for Macbook aesthetics. I would check the Lenovo Outlet for any of of them (I purchased my T430s there for about 200 bucks less than what eBayers wanted - and much less than buying new from Lenovo).

The publishing output of the school I came from, from undergrad, is dwarfed by the publications of a single person I interned for one summer at another university. Of course it was a state school and the focus was on educating kids. . .so success is entirely relevant to who and where you are (they certainly weren't hurting in the income department as CA's public records show).

I feel like we've reached an age in laptop design and power that carry weight isn't an issue. My 2LB Thinkpad is the lightest thing in my messenger bag.