bluetubeodyssey

We have good taste in cats!

Orange cats upside down are the best!

Most of the really nice apartments in the area are located close to campus, like around the intersection of Reseda/Plummer and on Lassen. The farther away from the campus you get, the worse the apartments are. I live near the intersection of Parthenia/Balboa, and while I have a huge one-bedroom apartment for the best price in the valley ($850), it is in a crappy apartment building in a crappy part of town. If you want something a little bit more luxurious, I would recommend looking around Sherman Oaks, possibly Encino too. There are some really nice apartment buildings there, and the vibe on Ventura Blvd is a little bit more like LA City, whereas the valley is distinctly more podunk. Near the campus students tend to hang out at Chipotle/Starbucks/Baskin Robbins/Chili's/Korean BBQ and Hookah lounges. There might be more to do that I am not aware of because I'm not a student at CSUN, I only live in Northridge because it's halfway between my job and UCLA. But so far that has been my experience while living there for the past 3 years. I must say that the great thing about Northridge is the variety of ethnic restaurants. If you get a chance, go to Shamshiri (Persian), Pita Pockets (Mediterranean), and the Galleria supermarket (Korean). Maria's Italian Kitchen is good too, but expensive. Good luck!

There is a Burmese fellow in my Classics Post-Baccalaureate program who, I believe, did originally live in Burma/Myanmar and there is a another guy who is Chinese and came directly from China just for the program. Also, there were two Korean-American ladies in last year's program. So while I don't know any Malaysians, there are indeed people of Asian descent and some who grew up in their native land within the Classics field.

I got my BS in Cybernetics at UCLA (now called Computational and Systems Biology), which was like an undergrad version of bioinformatics. One of the professors listed on the UCLA Bioinformatics faculty website was the head of the Cybernetics dept. He was a bit unorganized and eccentric, but did create a program from the ground up that was amazing in terms of exposure to leaders in all the different related fields and got us a lot of funding to have nice things, especially for undergrads. He would even ask us what else we wanted out of the program, and our opinions on the program. I think he played saxophone with a couple other students at our graduation ceremony. But you would be in Math Science and Boelter Hall all the time, which are the two ugliest and dreariest buildings on all of UCLA campus. Then again, Westwood is much nicer than the neighborhood surrounding USC, especially with the recent tragedy there. I'd say that if you want to go the safe route and go some place that already has a good track record for pumping out competitive alumni, go to USC. However, if you want something that is fresh, new, exciting, and perhaps a little risky, go to UCLA.

World's fastest couch potatoes!

I had four cats in a studio apartment (no separate bedroom, but a separate kitchen), the only problem I had was that they kept me up sometimes at night or woke me up early in the morning because there was no proper bedroom to shut them out from and if a cat deposited something fiercely stinky in the litter box, the smell permeated the whole apartment. Other than that, the cats seemed very happy, there was plenty of cat furniture for them to play on, even one that went all the way up to the ceiling that we built ourselves. Now I have four cats in a one bedroom apartment with a balcony and it is even better. The bedroom is a cat-free zone so that I can sleep (two of my cats enjoy sitting on my head and licking my face at all times of the night and morning, it's tough sleeping through that) and we converted the balcony into a cat room. There is wood lattice against the rail that covers the entire face of patio, then shade netting is zip-tied to that. Next we put outdoor carpet on the ground, and then put cat beds here and there. I feed them out there too, they love it and there's no way for them to get out. I also have no problem with a cat smell in the apartment because I scoop the used cat litter into a Litter Locker every morning. The only time you smell cat is in the couple of minutes right after a particularly smelly cat bomb is dropped in the litter box. Also, cats are amazing bug catchers. You will have no problems with bugs at all in your apartment. I was reminded of that this morning when I stepped out of the shower and all four of them were mercilessly destroying a black widow on my bathroom floor. Edit: I forgot to add that my friend has two cats in a tiny bachelor and it stinks! This is because she only cleans the litter box every three days though, and she only has one litter box for two cats. I have three litter boxes for four cats and by cleaning it every day the smell is virtually erased. So I think the smell issue comes down to how often you are willing to clean the litter box for your one cat.

I have four cats, two from shelters and two I trapped as kittens from a feral colony. They don't take up too much time, and the apartment doesn't smell like cat at all because I clean the litter boxes everyday. The only tough part is that I had to switch them to an all-wet-food diet because one guy develops deadly urinary crystals with dry cat food, and even cheap wet food is more expensive than high quality dry food. Oh well, still love them lots. Here's a picture of three of them sleeping on each other:

Yup. I learned about this the hard way: a program offered me funding, then was told by school that the funding they had been assured earlier had now vanished due to a "grim economic climate" and the state cutting their budget. So they, miserable and embarrassed, had to tell me that my funding was rescinded. Fun times.

My undergrad was Cybernetics (mathematical modeling of biology), my post-bacc was Classics, and I'm entering an Indo-European Linguistics Ph.D. program in the fall. What a fun and crazy ride it has been!

This is strange, I'm at UCLA (post-bacc) and from what I've seen their Classics department is really on top of everything. If you care at least to get an explanation, I would try contacting them. Perhaps it was simply human error and you got shuffled into the wrong pile or something. On a related note, has anyone ever tried asking for their application fee back if they weren't ever given a response?

Thank you to everyone who has contributed information so far. I am trying to find out if I'll be eligible for loans through my school on top of the funding my department offered. My department's funding offer more than covers the school's estimated cost of attendance, taking care of tuition, fees, and is about $1500 over the cost of living, books, transportation, etc. Does that mean I will not be able to take out any loans through my school's financial aid department? Even though the stipend is over the school's cost of attendance, it's not that much for living in California, and I was hoping for a little extra money via loans just for my first year in school.

I was lucky enough to attend a regular public high school which offered Latin. I don't think anyone else in my Post-Bacc program had any previous Latin experience before university. It's pretty rare in American high schools except for in private and Catholic schools.

I haven't heard anything from Harvard yet, is anyone else in the same boat? I saw that rejections, interviews, and acceptances all seemed to happen last month, so I'm left wondering if they lost mine or perhaps I'm in some weird wait-list pile.

Princeton rejections are rolling out