UndraftedFreeAgent

Our program has one or two per cohort who were undergrads here. You could always just ask a professor. Alternatively, many programs list their grad students online and link to individual web pages with CV's. You may be able to see how common it is. You may also want to think for a moment about why you want to apply to the grad program at your university. If your interests match the program's strength, then go for it. But be sure you're not fitting your interests to what the program does rather than the other way around.

Man, moving in would've been rough if the tropical storm had actually hit us.

A few places to check out on your visit: Polos on Park, Evergreens at Mahan, and Blairstone at Governor's Square. All are pretty nice places on the east side of town. You can get a really good place if you're willing to take on a roommate.

If you have an RA/TAship, then you will be paid biweekly during the semester, according to university pay periods. You will probably get your first pay check in early September. Set up direct deposit as soon as possible, so you can find any unexpected problems early. If you have a tuition waiver, it only covers tuition, not fees and not books. The school also does not cover anything related to housing, unless that was specifically mentioned in your deal. Depending on the size of your stipend, Alumni Village is dirt cheap, but is "not a very nice place to live". Nicer places start at about 600 per month. Really nice places start around 800 per month. I've never been to The Pines, but I just looked it up and it is FAR from campus. If at all possible, you should visit Tallahassee before choosing a place to live. You can't really get a good idea of how the town works from satellite photos. apartmentratings.com is a good place to get ideas, but most people who submit reviews either work for the complexes or have had unusually bad experiences. The average resident doesn't bother to comment.

Check out the Tallahassee thread under City Guide. There was a pretty good back and forth on this topic there.

I can't speak to your particular program(s), but depending on your work ethic and study habits, you will want to spend as little time commuting as possible. Grad students, particularly those who require campus resources to do their work, keep odd (and long) hours. You will not want to make a long drive when exhausted. Similarly, weather gets pretty rough in the Winter and if you are not used to driving in heavy snow, it can get pretty ugly. There will be times when it is so cold and nasty that you will not want to leave your home at all, let alone for a long drive to campus. You may also end up getting stuck in South Bend during the worst storms, though I'm sure you will have friends with whom you could stay. I'm not saying that the weather is horrible, but I'm a fairly brave driver and there were times that I refused to use my car. Fortunately, I lived on campus and always walked to class.

Yes, Chicago is in the Central time zone and South Bend is in the Eastern time zone, so it will always be one hour earlier in Chicago. It's actually less confusing now than it was a few years ago, when Indiana was one of the few states that did not observe daylight savings time.

Year-to-year rankings wouldn't really be meaningful, as journals each take a different length of time to review articles before publication. Also, articles rejected by one publication may be revised and sent to a different journal. This leads to high variability in the year-to-year productivity of a given department (as measured by articles accepted for publication). You see this a bit in the rankings presented by SUNY Stony Brook. Pooling several years also creates a larger data set, as there are only so many peer reviewed journals in which one can publish. So anyway, a difference between a 2000 to 2004 ranking and a 2005-2009 ranking would be meaningful, but one between 2007 and 2008 would not. Also, just doing a five year moving average would have most of the same problems as looking at a single year.

Some people change their minds in the several months between the application deadline and April 15. The person to contact depends on the school. At some schools the contact for PhD and MA programs is different. But at any rate, the departmental secretary should be able to point you in the right direction.

Amen

Yes, faculty read this. Some programs also have graduate students involved in the admission process who are much more likely to scan forums like this (note that I'm not involved with the admission process, I just know that this happens). Why wouldn't they read this? Posters are revealing their preferences for free. Many posters give so much information about themselves that they can easily be identified, especially once acceptances/rejections start to get posted. For mid-upper tier programs, postings here can give adcoms a better idea about their potential yield and about personality types (good or bad) of applicants. I can't imagine a program admitting, rejecting, or cutting funding based on this forum, but stranger things have happened. What can you do to not hurt yourself? Think before you click "submit". Make sure you've done your due diligence before posting gossip, opinions about who's good/bad in what, and particularly before making any rude or inflammatory remarks.

I don't know about their engineering program, but I can tell you that $23,000 is more than enough to live in South Bend. I lived there quite nicely 2 years ago on $18,600. There are international student associations and I think there is a group of asian graduate students, many of whom live on campus. You might check the campus life part of the Notre Dame web site to see if there is someone you can talk to who would know more than anyone on this forum how South Bend is for international students.

I entirely agree with the sentiment that Political Science is the better option, but you may want to consider the fact that you are obtaining a biased sample. You may wish to solicit advice from applicants and current students who have a humanities focus (note that I haven't checked the other forums to see if you already did this). A point that I haven't seen mentioned in this thread is that you're likely to find that interdisciplinary programs will hire political science faculty, but political science departments are less likely to hire interdisciplinary phds. There is a trend in political science toward methods, formal/game theory, and other heavily quantitative work. This requires training that is usually only found in economics, political science, and some psych and sociology programs. While I personally think that demand side problems have led to a socially suboptimal supply of theorists, it doesn't change the fact that theory and qualitative jobs will be hard to come by and thus incredibly competitive. You may have more luck if your goal is a teaching job rather than a TT research track, but I'm willing to bet that most people on this forum hope to "play the game" in research. Best of luck.

Great post, coach. I'm very happy with my program, but I completely agree. Hope none of y'all have a recommender named Fredo.

I'm currently in the Political Science PhD program. The last thread had a lot of good info, but if you scour that and still have questions, feel free to ask.

Yeah, the GA's here aren't unionized... yet (we're working on that). They don't give us health insurance and the pay in some programs is nowhere near what it costs to live here, in a relatively inexpensive city/town. In retrospect, of course they can cut graduate courses. I was just constrained by thinking of how my current and MA programs have been structured.

Emory did last year and the experience convinced me to withdraw my application (because of my research interests, not because of anything that happened). Everyone who attended the interview weekend and everyone with whom I have discussed the matter believes Emory to be the only school that does this. Mind you, I think interviews (or at least a phone or email conversation) would be a good idea when it comes to funded offers. If schools are offering tuition waivers and assistantships/fellowships, then this is a significant investment. At a private school, that could be around $60k per year all inclusive. If the program lasts 5 years and the goal is for all students to complete the program, then why not spend $500 per visitor and know that the $300k is going to the right person?

I wish I could claim credit, but it's a Foghorn Leghorn-ism.

This was just speculation. I'm interested in seeing IF this happens. As for the adjuncts comment. Again, not all GA's get tuition waivers and health benefits. Plus, grad students are pretty much a captive teaching pool, as they can't easily move elsewhere to take a position the way an adjunct theoretically could. This weakens the grad student bargaining position and could make them cheaper. It sucks that your department isn't offering enough courses. Ours is kinda the other way around, where there are more interesting classes then I could ever fit into my program of study. Only our first year (plus one course) has requirements as to what we must take. Does your program let you do directed independent study for credit? Those can be really fun if you push yourself hard enough.

That differs from program to program. Not all programs have to fund everyone. I would be willing to bet that most do not.

ETS proves every year that they are about as sharp as a bag of wet kittens.

I'm not saying that programs would admit anyone that would not have been admitted in a previous year. I am saying that they would not cut back on admissions, just on offers of funding. Given that schools only admit applicants they feel have the potential for success and that this year's applicants are probably just as smart as ever, departments would have only themselves to blame for a drop in the relative quality of a cohort. Of course cutting back on funding would harm the yield, but if all or even most universities are having the same economic problems, then the decision will be shifted to the applicants. Again, a small yield is not a problem, as long as admits are of the same quality. Every year there are strong applicants who enter programs without funding. What interests me is the idea that state schools could benefit from this whole debacle. If strong applicants end up with no funding offers at all, but are still committed to entering grad school immediately, then they have an incentive to enroll in an in-state program. This implies that public schools could draw higher than normal quality students, even if those students plan to just attain a master's and reapply in a few years. Not all graduate assistants are offered tuition waivers or insurance benefits and given the prevalence of hiring freezes, can universities really add adjuncts? Also, as long as the department plans to admit anyone, they can't cut any graduate courses. I don't know how your program works, but in mine, your first year is spoken for with required courses that everyone takes. The only split in the cohort is for core seminars, which students don't officially choose until just before the semester begins. So it wouldn't matter how many students enroll, as long as there is at least 1.

Depending on the program, there may or may not be that many students willing to pay, but if the normal cohort would be 20, why not admit that many and let the students decide if it's worth it? Sure, yields (% of accepted who enroll) would be lower, but a small yield isn't a major problem. A higher than expected yield would be, as it would strain resources and faculty availability. This recession will not last forever. Some may enter in the hopes of later attaining funding.

It would seem irrational to reduce the number of admitted students. Reducing funding packages makes sense, but assuming the same number of faculty in a given department, their incentive would actually be to increase the number of admitted, unfunded students. Given that professors will be teaching courses and collecting a salary no matter how many students are in a course, it doesn't matter if there are 2 students or 20, so the school should prefer 20 and thereby collect the additional tuition. The only places where you should see fewer admissions are where students are guaranteed funding or where there are faculty cuts. An unlikely alternative would be that a program would accept no students, but suspending or curtailing a graduate program limits departmental productivity and would lead to a fall in the rankings. Reducing graduate admissions would also hurt the longer term strategic plans of some universities, which plan to increase the use of graduate students in the teaching of courses. Graduate teaching assistants cost less than 1/4 of what it costs to hire an assistant professor.

Studying math on your own is certainly better than not studying it at all, but unless you take a class and get it on your transcript, you can do little more than mention your independent work in your personal statement. Those minimum courses I listed are on topics that are rather hard to pick up on your own unless you have a natural propensity for it. If you've had at least most of them, then trying to learn on your own might not be too painful. If you do decide to try learning math on your own, the key is to not gloss over ANYTHING. There is a real temptation to say "OK, I get this" and move on. That's when you miss seemingly innocuous details which turn out to be quite important. Choose a book that has answers in the back including proofs. Since proof reading and writing is the biggest skill involved in this course (beyond memorizing theorems), it does you no good if you can't check yourself. If you find a book that looks interesting, find it on Amazon marketplace and contact the seller to find out if it has proofs in the back. An alternative you might consider is investing some time in learning a programming language or stats package. While R is the up and coming hot package, Stata, GAUSS, EViews, or any number of others could help your profile.