University update

Pittsburgh turned me down, Texas has me on a waiting list, and Johns Hopkins has offered me admission.

In terms of my preferences, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and UCLA are on the first tier. Texas is close, maybe. On the other hand, I don't think I'll be able to wait for Texas to tell me if I'm off the waiting list or not--they probably won't get back to me before Chicago's deadline for my response to their offer. As for JHU, they're offering me a much less attractive fellowship package than Chicago's. So unless UCLA comes through with something stunning, it looks like Chicago is it.

Plans to visit the Chicago campus are pretty much finalized. It'll be a direct flight, so chances of meeting up with anyone are nil. I had to go through my boss to get the days off, so I took the opportunity to inform him that I'd be leaving by the end of the year to go to grad school, to which he responded, well, maybe they wouldn't accept me after all. I took that as I sign that my presence in the company is appreciated, rather than a wish of ill will as such.

If nothing else, the Chicago has a great sales pitch. Besides inviting me to visit their campus, they arranged a time to talk to me over the phone (they called me), and sent me a package of papers by faculty that they thought I'd be interested in. And maybe they're psychic, or maybe I just fit some stereotype of grad students working in the humanities, but included in that package was a large poster for "DocFilms", which looks pretty awesome to me. (And since the theatre is right on campus I probably wouldn't miss anything out of laziness, which happened a lot when I made plans to see flicks at Pacific Cinematheque.)

Just in case someone from Columbia University admissions is reading: you guys sent me an ID code and a URL, saying that I could use these to check up on the status of my application, and when I went to the website I found that any attempt to navigate around my account sent me straight back to the login page, where I would have to reenter my lengthy PIN and sundry information (using annoying pull-downs), and after some exasperated clicking around I discovered that results of admissions decisions could not be found anywhere on the above website, a fact that was mentioned neither in the letter I received nor on the website itself. You guys suck!