Magnocaudax

Hi J, The tuition I gave is for one-year, whereas the cost given on their site is for one semester only. One "course-unit" here means one semester-long course. As for myself, I plan to enter a graduate program in classics, but I'm still deciding where to go. Veilside, You can of course ask for LOR from anyone you take course with, and many people do, provided that the professor knows you well enough to write persuasively. For this purpose, a smaller class is often better than a more populous one, and a graduate better than an undergraduate. You give presentations, translate, and do other works. There are plenty of chances that you can impress people in three months. In postbac seminars, we translate Greek and Latin texts (which we prepared before class) orally, (i.e. without previously written down translations), and we take mid-term and final exams which are exclusively passage-translations. As for the Princeton course, I don't know if anyone here had done that before. But you can always e-mail people to see if it could work out.

Hi Veilside, I didn't take the summer courses. I somehow think that they use Hansen & Quinn, but I'm not too sure about it. About course selection, yes, you can take graduate courses with permission from the teacher of that particular course, and you pay only the LPS tuition for it, which is half the original. Many people take graduate courses, and it's to your great advantage if you do well in them. But I don't think you can cross-register to Princeton and get credit from there. It's two hours or so by NJ transit to Princeton, by the way, so it's not quite practicable unless you drive there. The cost in tuition and fees etc., which I think you can find on their website, is about $ 2,400 per course-unit. So if you take, say, three courses per semester, it's about $14,500 a year plus health insurance. And living in west philly is not too expensive. You are eligible for loans, but as far as I know, not for scholarships. And if you take three or more course-units (two post-bacs and a graduate), you probably won't have much time to work along the way.

I'm currently in the Penn program, and as far as I know, we do have several post-bacs who get into doctoral programs in Classics this year, including some top ones. (that is, Berkeley, Harvard, Cornel, UNC, Princeton etc.) We have some 30+ people this year. The postbac admission is not so selective: people do come with different language backgrounds. Some of them come with only one-year or so in their weaker languge. But if you wished to get into a top doctoral program, you would come with more years in both, since the application process begins as early as November, and you have to impress your professors within that short time to get a persuasive LOR. Some of my classmates dropped out for various reasons, but those who stay do have a fairer chance to get in than those who apply directly from undergraduate insitutions, even when their language strengths are similar. LORs from the postbac advisors do carry a lot more weight, since they advise 20+ applicants each year and can make persuasive comparisons for you. But anyhow, whereas the program is an abusolutely wonderful one, I don't think it will guarantee that you get into any sort of program: you should come with some reasonable expectations based on where you are before you enter.