lxs

oh yeah, the downtown northwestern location is awesome! it's a really beautiful campus. make sure you go to the evanston one at some pt too...they have their own beach! i don't know that either living or commuting to hyde park is dangerous per se.. just be smart and don't walk around alone late, etc. for me, it would be more of a matter of convenience and whether the one or two buses that go between hyde park and downtown run at night. the cta sucks, and, for example, the bus on my street - which is a major street - stops running at something like 10pm. if your bus stopped running early and you were in HP you would have no way safe to get home! maybe you could play around with hopstop.com or chicagotransit.com to get an idea of what your commute would be. i just glanced at craigslist and saw that there are reasonably priced 1brs and 2brs to be had in the south loop - i saw 1300 for a 2br which is not outrageous as far as chicago apts go, so you might want to check there. if you look in that area, though, i would not look any further south than the harrison red line stop. people will try to tell you chinatown is safe but i wouldn't live there for anything. also, when you are looking at apartments, be very wary of rental agencies. they are great about helping you find places but are notorious for preying on people without much familiarity of neighborhood boundaries - i ended up in a pretty dangerous neighborhood my first year in chicago that way. you also may want to consider your courseload vs. your bf's. i know my first year of grad school i only had to go to campus three times a week for class (unless something else was going on) and so having a far commute wasn't a huge deal for me then. if you have class two days a week and your boyfriend has it five, it may make more sense to live closer to where he's at. i'm sure, also, that the neighborhood orientation will become much clearer once you actually visit and see the way the area works.

mew - You're smart to think of near downtown. I'm not sure if Northwestern's med school is in their downtown campus or Evanston campus, but your bf would have a nightmarish commute from HP if the latter is the case - easily a few hours. If he is in Evanston, you would probably be best off finding somewhere in the south loop. He would need to be pretty close to the loop to catch the purple line, which is the only train that goes to Evanston. He would also have the option of taking the red line until it ends at Howard (to the north) and then transferring to the purple line there. If you lived somewhere just south of the loop, you could catch a bus to HP that lets you off pretty close to the art history dept. and he could catch the train to Evanston. Of course if he's at the downtown campus, the commute from HP would be not great, but also not as impossible. I do know people who have found affordable places downtown, although I've always thought of it as being out of my price range. My bf works downtown, so I had planned on checking out apts in the south loop if I ended up at U of C. I just wouldn't go any further south than that, aside from, of course, Hyde Park.

mew, if you need any chicago suggestions at any point, just let me know!

i live in chicago and i did visit. for the record, it took me a good hour to get there, even though it is only a few miles from where i work. public transportation between it and the rest of the city is next to impossible. lots of people call it where fun goes to die, because all that is there is the campus, really. hyde park itself is pretty nice, but it is surrounded by very rough territory. the school seems to do a pretty good job of patrolling the area, etc. that said, the campus is really beautiful, and the smart museum is awesome.

congrats!!! when i saw the post on whogotin, i thought it was probably you. you must have done an awesome job in undergrad to get so many early acceptances from top schools! i have no idea what's going on with u of c. my friend also applied there and has an appointment next week to meet with the person she's applying to work with to discuss her research interests...one of those meetings that should have happened back in november or december, but he kept having to push it back. i have no idea why this would be happening if they sent out all their acceptances today?! i'm pretty bummed, though, chicago was one of my top choices. time to go drown my sorrows in some cake!

who_got_in on lj says that someone got accepted at U of C! It sure wasn't me.... :( Has anyone heard from them?

Wow, congrats on the interview! I know people who applied to the program and weren't interviewed so the fact that you were must say something for your chances.

ahh!!! i'm so glad you called. you rule! everyone i talked to did say that no one hears from chicago until march...they must have changed that policy when they changed their funding situation. let me know if you hear anything and i'll do the same!

i know! i work with someone who is currently in the department and she hadn't heard anything about it, and she said that she usually does when accepted students come to visit. so hopefully the posting is for something else entirely.

I was told the same thing - the person I talked to there said that this is actually the first year for this funding scenario. On a related note, did you hear anything about a prospective students day at U of C? I saw that someone posted about it on the art history post on the livejournal who_got_in community. Hadn't heard anything about that. I'm in Chicago now (and have been for the past three years) and really like it. You're right about the winters though - it was -5 when I went to work this morning. Yuck.

wow - thanks a lot polisci! Very informative and thorough.

halifax - Re: Penn, my transcripts did end up showing up as received, although it just happened last week. Did you ever get that situation resolved?

I read this article: http://chronicle.com/forums/index.php/t ... 917.0.html posted in another thread about the application process which says that applications which don't meet the cut-off for GRE or GPA don't even make it to the department. I know this varies by school, but does anyone have any ideas or knowledge of what scores are used to weed people out? I asked at all the schools I applied to but was given responses along the lines of "there is no cut off score" or "we consider everyone based on their entire application and not just the GRE." My score wasn't abysmal but also wasn't amazing and so the Chronicle forum post has me pretty nervous. I'm applying to PhD programs in the Humanities, FWIW.

According to whogotin on livejournal and yuster.com, people heard from Northwestern and Columbia at the beginning of Feb. - so potentially less than a month for my top choice! I need a drink.

Thanks for the link! Have any of you been using other grad sites? From whogotin, it looks like the earliest people have started to hear back from art history programs is early Feb. - only a month but it seems so far away!

Did you see it on their website??? So strange. As I understood it, they fully fund every HoA student, too, so why the need for the application for funding? Oh well...I guess I wasn't banking too much on getting in there anyway.

That sounds really interesting! What sort of artists/theorists are you looking at?

It may boost your confidence to know that my undergrad GPA and GRE scores kind of suck. I had a 3.25 overall GPA in undergrad and a 3.95 in my MA program. Did so-so on the GRE - the first time I took it (before my MA program) I had 590Q/600V/4.5AW. I took it again this fall and got 690Q/610V/5.5AW. I didn't study for quant. part AT ALL and studied verbal FOR MONTHS AND MONTHS AND MONTHS so I have no idea how I improved in one and not the other. I'm really nervous that these numbers are going to get me knocked out of the running. Everyone else has such impressive standardized testing scores.

Not to totally dominate the forum but herakles - have you heard anything about your Harvard application? I don't even know if they're considering mine at this point. I sent everything in and submitted my application. It was accepted, I received a confirmation, and my checking acct showed that the payment had gone through. I logged on again to see if the online application showed my status and lo and behold, I hadn't realized there was a second part to the application dealing with financial aid. I filled it out and submitted, but this was January 3, and, of course, the deadline was January 2. So, who knows where I am in application limbo with them. Just wondered if they had given any information as to where application status can be checked.

NEVERMIND, I just logged on to my Penn application and it actually says that both my transcripts are missing as well! Maybe they just haven't entered transcripts yet? I sent mine well before the deadline.

halifax - where are you seeing your application status? I never got anything from Penn notifying me that I could check. This scares me. I had the same problem with another school, but it turned out they just hadn't had time to go through the mail yet, and it showed up soon after. I wouldn't worry too much about it yet. Also NO8DO, there were a number of people in my MA program who had BAs in things other than art history so I would imagine your chances are just as good as anyone else's....or maybe even better, as there doesn't seem to be an enormous number of people working on Spanish art.

I'm actually not so sure what I'll end up doing. Right now I'm working as a research assistant at an art museum and really love it, but who knows what will change in the next five or so years. What's your master plan? What other non-art history programs did you apply to?

.

Anyone else applying?