UCLA checks in

All the responses seem to be coming in now. UC Santa Barbara has offered me admission, and UCLA has notified me that I'm on the waitlist. I'm not very interested in UCSB any more, but UCLA is a different story. I'm still interested in both UCLA and Chicago.

UCLA ranks higher than Chicago on the all-important Philosophical Gourmet Report. But my interests don't always match up with the ranking criteria of the Report.

Money speaks in favour of Chicago. Chicago has offered a 5 year fellowship at $18,000/year, requiring 3 quarters of TAing during the 3rd and 4th years, and 1 quarter of lecturing during the last year. That's a decidedly light teaching requirement, so I'd probably want to do some extra teaching along the way, and that would yield extra money. In comparison, UCLA is offering 2 years of fellowship (and those 2 years are good), but only normally paying TAships for the rest. That would probably mean constant TAing through the last 2 or 3 years just to get by, and while that doesn't sound terrible I would greatly prefer to have the financial option to slack off concentrate on my studies.

And, again, there's the issue of timing. All the universities seem to have the same deadline for confirming acceptance of admission offers: April 15. Most people will probably deliberate, and want to keep their options open, right down to the wire. (Even though I've basically ruled out some of the offers I've received, I'm still somewhat uncomfortable with the idea of rejecting them outright.) This means that waitlisted applicants probably won't find out whether they're off of the waitlist or out of the running until after the 15th. So if I want to hold out for UCLA, I'll probably have to snub Chicago on the 15th and hope for the best. That's not my idea of fun.