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-UE
The difficulty of finding grad housing when there are no grad dorms.
This school is cool and all but has one problem for grad students: There is no graduate housing. Yes, they have a bunch of dorms for undergrads. But none for grad students. Not even graduate resident tutors/advisors in the undergrad dorms. Just to make it suck more, the school is located in one of the most affluent counties in the whole U.S.--so living is, to say the least, not cheap.
For grad students, you have a few options:
* an apartment complex that's barely on campus. This would be great, but: (1) there's a priority list to get into here; the apartments are primarily meant as temporary housing for incoming faculty and staff people (and grad students get lotteried in after that), and you can only stay here for up to three years anyway, and (2) the units are mightily expensive--we're talking $1325 for the lowest-priced one-bedroom apartment. Two- and three-bedroom apartments are more affordable...but only if you go and find subletters yourself. All utilities are excluded--you pony up for all the extras. Not certain you'll get a parking space either, if you're subletting from a current renter (though if you can successfully get a pad as a primary renter you probably have the first one).
* a room rented out by a nearby resident, in their home. There are some of these, but on par they tend to be kinda shitty arrangements--for example, someone finishes their basement with several walls and now they have a few rooms to rent out. Generally speaking you won't be able to use their kitchen, and the town doesn't let people install full ranges/ovens below grade, so you're lucky to get a fridge, sink, and hot plate. Oh, and the room's probably not furnished, or if it is, you can't help but worry about pests like bedbugs, especially if the place isn't all that clean. And be prepared for curbside parking if you have a car.
* finding some group of students/young professionals who are already renting a place together and have an empty room to fill, or finding a potential apartmentmate and renting out something together. You are a bit more constrained like this, and these aren't even necessarily all that close to campus, so you'll probably need to find a parking space for your car.
* rent an apartment yourself. In this area, there are. no. studios. Everything is billed as a "luxury" rental, and the very cheapest one-bedroom apartments run around $1300 a month and up.
* buy a condo. Again, there are no studios. The cheapest one-bedroom condos runs around $150,000--and what really sucks is that these are tiny 550-square-foot places that should just be studios but they managed to stick a wall and a door in them so they can call them one-bedroom condos and sell them at a higher price point. You can buy this, and your monthly mortgage payments plus community fees and utilities will run about $1000 a month, so it's nicer than renting, and you can resell your pad and get back some money later if you leave. However, you'll also have to take out a down payment of at least several percent of the purchase price, which is about $10000--good luck finding that in your bank. Or ask your parents for help--and even then, this isn't chump change by any means. And they're not even that close to campus either, so you'll need a car.
* the grad dorm that's being newly built and will be available this fall! gasp! except...it's on the wrong campus. It's about 15 miles away, and you either need to deal with very constrained intercampus shuttle times (once every hour, stopping at 10 PM or so) or you get your own car. And even then, the commute is (1) against the sun (east in the morning, west in the evening) AND (2) in the direction of commuting to/from the nearby major city (toward in the morning, away in the evening). The only saving graces are that there will be a shopping center next door to the dorm, for your living needs, and all utilities are paid for, and your room will be furnished. And everything's brand new. And rent's also cheaper. But that does nothing for the fact that it is severely far away.
IJBM: They didn't build grad housing, and I can't live with the undergrads.
NOTE: currencies are United States Dollars.
Comments
IJBM: No one else knows this feel.
few of us are grad students, glenn
for they are the scum of the earth
sorry, forgot you're not an english major. right.
Yeah, I made a conscious decision not to become a grad student, so there's no way I'll ever know how this feels. Still, that must suck.
What's so bad about grad students, again?
It's an stereotype I gladly enjoy to play along with, but the idea is simply that grad students are people who end up starting their careers up late to follow a much more demanding program that tends to not give them much benefits in terms of work.
But I should point out that if you're going to college just to get a job then...welp.
Yeah, basically with the exception of a relative few majors (English is actually one of said exceptions, especially if you're going into law), grad school is a complete waste of time and money because almost every employer relevant to your major will have way, way more things local to their specific workplace than you'll learn as a grad student.
Like, any developers that might hire me are going to have so much homebrew software and standing code practices that I wouldn't be learning much useful in CS grad school.
Ah, okay. There's also the matter of that extra money put towards education, while we're at it.
What do you mean by that?
That if you're not interested in learning or education (Or, in other words: you are interested in learning, but just for the sake of getting a degree and work) then you're going to find out most people will either find you over-qualified and that the degree by itself doesn't give you a job, as many people seem to think it does.
Learning is a big part of college education, sure, but I've never met anyone who goes to school solely to learn. No one has that kind of free time, so they're going to want something they can actually use from the time they've spent in college.
^^ Oh. I think I read the wrong tone into it, then.
Let's put it this way: the whole "go to college or you'll spend your whole life flipping burgers" line your parents fed you? Well now you're $50k in the hole and not even the burger joints will hire you because this high school dropout over here has prior experience at burger joints.
The only reason to go to college is if you've already decided on a very specialized professional field, and even then it's a gamble.
You don't have to have just one motivation. What I'm saying is, simply, that when you choose what you're studying, you should try to not be swayed by ideas like "This career is more profitable than this one" simply because if you don't make the effort, you'll starve either as a liberal arts major or as a law major. And neither of them will make a difference, unless they make edible diplomas in the future and it turns out that ink is a great nutrient. If so, you should go for Liberal, as it has more letters
Makes sense.
^ Then I'd totally major in Anthropology.
Or I could take advantage of parochial name differences, and major in Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Science. And get my minor in Brain and Cognitive Sciences so they'd have to write that too.
As for going into grad school in general, I think a big part of this is convincing people that you really want to study something, and can actually study it competently. And I've had a many times where I found myself unable to convince people of this.
Now I'm really not sure what will become of things if my phud doctoral degree turns out to be relatively useless. This is indeed something that worries me, especially in a field where even finding paid internships is not easy. Maybe I'll study law and become a lawyer or something instead. Pretty much the saving grace about this is that this school offered me a nice scholarship package.
Back on the original topic: IJBM my mom is very unwilling to consider a certain location for housing because it seemed like a bad idea early on, even though I've now shown that it's at least worthy of consideration.