Funding and Campus Visits

[tanagra]

I feel a little like I'm stuck between a rock and a hard place. The school that is lowest on my list (but still a top 20 in my field) accepted me via email and said that the winners of university fellowships would be announced a few weeks later. Even though they are lowest on my list of ten schools, still I have not received a firm offer of funding yet from any other school and want to keep my options open. The problem is that in that same email they mentioned an admitted students day, and strongly encouraged us to attend and asked us to let them know as soon as possible if we were coming so they could budget accordingly, but said that they would only reimburse a few people for that trip and that this reimbursement would only be decided after the fellowships were announced. I replied to the email and said, as politely as possible, that I was looking forward to hearing about the financial award decisions, but that since I had received admission to several other schools my decision to attend the prospective student's day would be dependent on hearing about said fellowship. But it seems as though they want us to buy plane tickets to come visit even before a) fellowship winners are announced and they even decide who they will reimburse for the trip. I am doing a lot of campus visits already, and didn't really want to shell out to attend a one-day event for the lowest school on my list, particularly before they even tell me whether or not I will receive a fellowship, but I think they might have found my response snide. Grrrr :evil:

[sundaymonday]

Might it be possible that they plan to make their fellowship decisions after meeting their perspectives at the welcome event? Sounds like you were pretty clear in your email. Maybe this is why you're still getting a vague answer.

[tanagra]

Yeah, its possible that they want to check everyone out at the visiting weekend before making any decisions. Hmmm. I guess ultimately I didn't want to spend a lot of money to visit the school that is lowest on my list for one day when they might not fund me or even reimburse me. Oh well.

[Minnesotan]

I'm sure that's why they arranged things that way. If you don't care enough to take a chance, then you likely don't want the fellowship, or their program, badly enough.

The strategy seems to have worked, considering you don't want to go there, anyway.