UCLA PhD or Harvard MA?

[Quickmick]

On 2/21/2016 at 8:22 AM, hqqrory said:

Yeah...although my POI at Yale said there are tuition fellowship for some students in the master program. UCLA offered me a (ridiculously) generous funding with 30k for 9 school months and 7k per summer for four years. TBH Harvard has always been my dreamschool and thats probably why Im still hesistating btw the two. Thank you though!

I would echo @TMP's great advice and suggest that you curb your emotional input to what (in large part) should be a business decision.

Edited March 9, 2016 by Quickmick

[Riotbeard]

The fact that you are even debating this is crazy (I mean this in a nice way:) ).  UCLA and Harvard are comparable programs.  One is giving you a fellowship to a PhD program and the other is not.  Go to the dance with girl or boy who asks you.  Living in Cambridge is very expensive so even a tuition waver means considerable debt compared to no debt at UCLA and finishing your PhD at a younger age.  There is literally no upside to going to unfunded Harvard over UCLA.  Imagine two years from now Harvard and Yale have rejected you and then UCLA rejects you because you already turned them down. There is no real difference between the number 4 and number 1 program in your expertise in terms of prestige. The only person turning down UCLA would benefit is next person on the waitlist.

[insidethesun]

3 hours ago, Riotbeard said:

 The only person turning down UCLA would benefit is next person on the waitlist.

^^^^

[knp]

FYI, I think OP has already come around to the consensus opinion

[nkotb]

I'm late to the party and I'm sure OP has already made her decision. I agree that it's silly to turn down a funded PhD offer for a Masters, which comes with no guarantees and will cost you money.

But here is a third option to consider, since it sounds as though you are just out of undergrad, the most likely reason is lack of research experience and/or connections with the right faculty to recommend your application. In which case, you could check with UCLA whether they would allow you to defer your offer for a year, on the basis of wanting to get more research experience. You could then apply to be a full time RA for the Harvard professor you mentioned. You could reapply to PhD programs next year and if you don't get in you still have the UCLA offer. Just a suggestion.

[BlackBear50]

On 2/21/2016 at 1:12 PM, knp said:

Here's a thought experiment that might help: let's say that at Harvard right now, there are three East Asianist faculty, named A, B, and C. At UCLA right now there are three East Asianist faculty, named X, Y, and Z. If you switched the departments—such that X, Y, and Z now work at Harvard, and A, B, and C, now work at UCLA—would you still desperately want to go to Harvard instead of UCLA? For undergrad, the Harvard experience is quite different than the UCLA one. At the PhD level, though, the institutions matter far less than the people you're working with. Is there somebody in particular you're fanatic about working with at Harvard? Or is it just the Harvard name? Because let me tell you, the former should be the most important factor in your choice, while the latter should matter very little.

PS It sounds like you got an extra special fellowship at UCLA, too? Extra fellowships at top-5 universities in a field come around once in a blue moon—most don't award such fellowships at all; mine offered ~5 such fellowships for graduate students across every department in the university, so each department could expect one student to win that fellowship about once every ten years—so that is an additional strong reason to choose UCLA now.

 

Great point. Listen to this advice.

 

 

You really should accept UCLA's offer.