The Transition...

[bionerd]

I know most of this board is dedicated to individual cities/towns, but I thought it would be interesting to have a more general thread. The topic: Transitions!

Did you leave small town life for grad school in the big city? Or did you cut all ties to civilization to pursue your studies somewhere significantly smaller? I'm very interested in how you made your decision to change your surroundings, how you dealt with the changes, what your feelings are about the experience now.

As for me, I'm still an undergrad in a sleepy southern college town. I've never lived in a city and have only visited them for short periods of time. At this point in my grad school search, I'm looking at both big cities and smaller towns, but I'm not sure if I'd like to live in a city, or if I could even handle it! So any perspectives from the "small-town-to-big-city" area would be especially appreciated

[Eigen]

My wife and I moved from living on a little house on a 10 acre horse farm to New Orleans for graduate school.

There are some things that really frustrate me- lack of space, people around all the time- but I just try to focus on the benefits of living in a city, at least for a few years. Lots of interesting things to do, etc.

I think a lot of it depends on finding an area in the city that you like- we moved to one of the older areas of New Orleans, and while it's a big city, and quite busy, it feels more like a bunch of small towns crammed together.

[anthropologygeek]

I moved from a small city to a large city for my masters and now back to a small city for my phd. I prefer small cities but big cities has their advantages.

[bee kel]

If any of you guys can give advice on HOW to transition as well, that'd be awesome. As in, how'd you find a new place to live, how'd you find a job, how'd you go about meeting people in your new environment, etc

[Eigen]

Well, to start finding a house I looked on craigslist, a lot, and also e-mailed some of the profs and grad students I'd met on my visit to get suggestions or see if they knew any open places.

As to finding a job, in the sciences you usually have at least some funding, and most of the time university based funding prohibits any other job- so no comments there.

I didn't really worry about meeting people all that much- I got to town a month early to start research, and mostly just hung out with the students in my group, since none of the rest of my cohort was there yet.

Once everyone else showed up, it got a lot easier- I found people to study with, and we started doing regular social activities. It helps that our department sponsors at least a beginning and end of semester party every semester.

Recently, I've gotten active in our Graduate Student Studies Association as a department rep, and that's really helped me meet people outside the ones in my program.

Other than that, I've built up pretty good relationships with neighbors, and met people at local coffee shops, etc.

[juilletmercredi]

I'm a city girl at heart, and I was born in New York, but I moved out when I was 5 (too young to remember) and have since only lived in small towns that are suburbs of large cities (usually no more than 30 minutes away from a large city - but not in it, you know?) Most recently I spent my adolescence and the first part of my young adulthood in a small town of about 2,000 people 30 minutes from Atlanta, but I moved to New York for grad school.

I love city life in general - I love the energy of it, I love the millions of people, I love all the interesting and exciting things that happen in the city on a regular basis. I also think in the city, it's sometimes easier to escape orbit from the university if you need to get away. My university is two small blips (main campus and medical center) in the larger city and so I don't really have to go very far to escape it's grasp - even a few blocks in either direction has me in a new neighborhood. I think in small college towns sometimes the university has a tendency to consume the rest of the town with its issues, especially if it's a Division I football or basketball team.

There are some things I miss about suburban life, though. Number one is space. In any large city the apartment you'll likely be able to afford is going to be far smaller than what you could get in a small town (although I will say Southern cities like Atlanta, New Orleans, Austin, etc., and some in the Southwest like Tuscon might be an exception - I could probably get an apartment in Atlanta twice as large as the one I have in New York for half of what I'm paying here). You'll feel at a loss for storage space and what to do with your clothes, especially if you have two sets (warm and cold weather). I have a relatively large two-bedroom apartment for New York but there are only two small closets in here, one for me and one for my roommate. I have mixed feelings about transit - I love the freedom of hopping on the subway and going wherever I want without thinking about it, and I love the extensive transit system of the Northeast (I go down to Philadelphia and south Jersey all the time on transit, and have visited D.C. a few times). And yet sometimes I would like the freedom of a car to get groceries and just drive to my cousins' in south Jersey without checking train schedules, but between parking, gas, and insurance it would make no sense to have a car in this city.

I found my apartment by contacting my university's off-campus housing office, and they gave us listings. A lot of people also find their places on Craigslist (that's how my current roommate found me), although you have to sift through a lot of duds. I am not supposed to work during my program while I'm on funding, which I still am, but since my program only funds for three years a lot of people get jobs if they don't have external funding. I'm in a school of public health that has close ties to the NYC Department of Health so a lot of people find jobs there; or they just look through professors' networks - a lot of the professors need project coordinators (these full-time positions usually pay more than the graduate stipend) or they know someone who needs a research assistant or a project coordinator. Most of the MPH students I knew who had jobs worked as PCs or research assistants; but the ones I did know who had off-campus jobs in the city usually found them through job fairs on campus (we have one at the beginning of the year for master's students who want full or part-time work) or they find them through the professors' foundation or center or project, or whatever.

Meeting people not in your immediate circle in New York is difficult. Everyone says that about this place - I don't know what it is, it's this artificial sense of intensity and busy-ness that everyone seems to project. When I was in college in my home city it was cool to just invite people over to your place to just chill, but here people usually either go to bars to meet up or you have to be having some kind of formal shindig at your house to get people over, it's so weird. Most of my friends are in the program, either in my cohort or cohorts that came before or after me - but everyone gets here around the same time and so we're all eager to meet other people and form friendships. You tend to drift apart after you stop taking courses, though; I'm done with coursework and I only see my cohort-mates when we're all in the research area together (which isn't all the time). So you have to all put forth an effort to really connect with people and hang out together in different settings - we've planned knitting parties, dinners out, dinners in (potluck), we contact each other to find out if anyone's going to conferences so we can room together, that sort of thing.

If you want to meet people off-campus who aren't in your program, that's a bit harder, but you have to be willing to get out there. I joined a social sports club league (didn't really work out as the others only wanted to booze it up at bars and that's not really my scene). You can also go to city events - for example in NYC if you're LGBT the LGBT center puts on a lot of events at which to meet people, there's SummerStage concerts, there are events on Governor's Island in the summer, things like that. And you can always check out the standby bar scene and just walk up to someone and talk, but that can be a bit awkward sometimes.