Columbus, Ohio and OSU, what can you tell me?

In My Humble Opinion
21

Hey there. I’ve been going to OSU since the fall of 2000, and I’m applying to the grad school here for education. I’m not sure if I have much to offer that hasn’t already been said, but I’ll agree with whoever said to live about 10 minutes away by car. There are lots of housing options within walking distance of campus, but you’ll be able to find something cheaper if you go outside of walking distance, and you still wouldn’t have to be too far. Also, it gets extremely loud in the university district on the days of football games. I lived on campus for two years and it’s my third year in an apartment near campus, and I am so sick of the noise and the broken glass every weekend. I know you said you’re used to it, so maybe it wouldn’t bother you as much as it does me.

Also, I don’t think I realized so many dopers were affiliated with OSU. If you come to visit sometime, we can all get together and give you a tour :slight_smile:

22

A tour would be a wonderful idea!

Anyone who doesn’t think the area around OSU isn’t a slum hasn’t lived where I’ve lived. We had two leaks in the plumbing that the landlord didn’t fix, so we had buckets everywhere. I had ONE outlet in my room, and whenever I tried to use it the breaker would flip. You also have to get a permit to park there, which on top of your OSU permit costs tons of money.

If you live on campus, there is graduate housing available which puts the slums to shame. It’s a little more expensive, but you get your own bathroom and a lot of quiet. The building I was in had its own pool and a few pieces of workout equipment. I also found out about entertainment opportunities and campus meetings, and we had get-togethers and other things.

For the quiet, the bathroom, and the convenience I would definitely recommend living on campus.

I’ll show you around if you want :slight_smile:

23

I know south and south east of campus are slums but is east of High really that bad? I never got that impression when I walked through but then again I have never lived there.

24

I had a pretty decent (clean, quiet) apartment … west of campus on King Ave. for $365/mo. two years ago. I loved living there.

25

As others have mentioned, try looking for an apartment not immediately near the OSU campus. I recommend looking north along High Street towards Morse Road (Clintonville). Also check out apartments on Indianola Avenue (still Clintonville). I used to live near Morse Road and drove down Indianola to the campus almost every day while in graduate school.

If you must live as close to OSU as possible, I suggest you stay away from the south campus area and those east of High Street. It’s mostly undergraduate students - noisey, dirty, and it has a crime problem (although it’s not as bad as it used to be).

There’s quite a bit to do, expecially if you have a car. Others have mentioned the Short North - a neighborhood just south of the campus on High Street before you get downtown. The first Saturday of every month the Short North has the Gallery Hop - all the stores, boutiques, etc. stay open later and lots of people go just to hang out and enjoy the ambience.

There’s two newish malls - Easton and Polaris. If you like that sort of thing, I would recommend both as there are some nice restaurants.

Columbus has several independent theaters - the Drexel Theaters. One is located in Grandview Heights (Drexel West); another in Bexley (Drexel East); and the newest is right downtown in the Arena District (near the Nationwide Arena where the Columbus Blue Jackets play there home games) - the Drexel Grand. There’s also Studio 35 (on Indianola).

OSU itself has the Wexner Center (art exhibits, bookstore, films, etc.) and the Mershon Center (for live performances - saw Wynton Marsalis there back in 93 if I remember correctly).

Lots of restaurants - Hyde Park Grill is one of my favorites (best stake I ever had). Monk’s (in Belxley) is also very nice (although I’m not crazy about their menu). They are pricey, however…

The Nightlife isn’t as pedestrian as some think. It’s been a while since I stepped out regularly, but there are some fairly trendy nightclubs downtown or near the downtown area. The local weekly - The Other Paper - will clue you into what’s happening throughout the city/suburbs. A small nightclub that I particularly like is Barrister’s (especialy for the jazz groups that play there).

A popular place is also the Columbus Zoo. It is especially trendy during the holiday season as they have an extensive holiday lighting display that brings out people in droves.

With respect to graduate school, the history department has a good reputation (from what I understand). Where I currently work (local community college in Columbus), one of my collegues got her Ph.D. in history (I think - if not, then she had history faculty on her committe and her disertation was history oriented) from OSU (within the last 4 years). If your interested, I’d be happy to talk with her and get more info.

If you’ll be working as an RA or TA, then the money you’ll earn as a stipend is pretty good (enough to survive) compared with other institutions. At least, it was when I had a TA. Things could be different for OSU historians versus OSU geographers (my background). The Geography Department is one of the best in the country, so that may have had some influence on how I well I was treated (in terms of pay; you’ll learn soon enough that grad school is no bed of roses :wink:

In any event, here’s wishing you a warm welcome and hope that you enjoy your graduate school experience at OSU!!!

26

I lived in Columbus for 11 years. It’s really a pretty generic city - the kind of place where you wouldn’t be able to tell which city you were in unless you saw a road sign or asked someone.

Probably the best thing Columbus has to offer is cheap housing. My two preferences would be either to take an apartment in one of the outer suburbs and drive in each morning (better housing but potentially bad commute, plus harder to develop a campus-based social life), or to live in the Grandview/Victorian Village area and ride your bike to school (reasonable housing and no commuting worries). Don’t mess with the areas very close to campus (too loud and rundown) or on-campus housing (if you’ve ever had your own apartment, you’ll feel like a sardine in a can). Also, learn to enjoy football, alcoholic beverages, Skyline chili and cornhole.

27

I’ve been living in Columbus for 12 years now. This town was a pretty good place for me to be for a while, but I’m ready to try living somewhere else.

Columbus doesn’t really feel all that generic if you’re in the Clintonville, German Village, Victorian Village, or campus areas. Outside that region–like, in the suburbs–Hyperelastic is right. It’s pretty sterile and bland. There are cool things hiding out there, but you have to really hunt for them.

There is a relatively low cost of living here, which is nice. If you’re not supporting anyone but yourself on what you earn as a TA or RA, and you’re in decent health, you can cover your basic expenses with your monthly pay.

If you are planning on supporting yourself with a TA, you might want to keep this in mind–OSU’s TAs and RAs aren’t yet unionized. This means you can be worked an awful lot of hours, you have almost no job security, there’s no transparency in hiring, and the pay you’d receive is much less than it is at a lot of places with grad student unions. The health coverage we get is improving, but it’s still not as good as the deal grad students get at, say, Michigan. We’re working on forming a union now, and, hopefully, we’ll have one by June. But no guarantees.

Something else you might want to keep in mind–if you’re a TA or RA at OSU, and you’re starting in Fall Quarter, you won’t get your first paycheck until the end of October. That means that living expenses for October have to come out of whatever savings or other job you might have. I ran some of the TA orientation sessions a couple of years ago, and I was suprised at the number of people who thought they’d be getting a paycheck at the end of September.

The weather is beautiful from about mid-September through October. Spring and early summer aren’t bad, either. Other than that, the climate in central Ohio leaves much to be desired. Summers (from mid-June until mid-September) are hot, muggy, and mosquito-filled. Winters (from November until at least mid-March, sometimes later) are cold and wet, with the kind of damp chill that goes straight to the bone.

Despite the lousy weather, there are some neat things to do. You’re near the Hocking Hills, which are beautiful year-round, and there are bluegrass festivals and the Ohio State Fair in summer. (I live in the northeast campus area. No, it’s not as nice as Clintonville or Victorian Village, but I get a great deal on my rent.) For more info on things you might want to check out, see TellMeI’mNotCrazy’s thread about Columbus.

I agree with other posters who say that you really have to have a car to live here. That’s very true. There is a bus system (called COTA–Central Ohio Transit Authority), but outside of the downtown and OSU areas it’s pretty lousy. Even downtown, you can spend quite a while waiting for a bus. (Here’s a joke I heard recently about COTA: Question: How do you say “COTA bus” in German? Answer: Der Nevercomin.)

Really, how happy or unhappy you are in Columbus will have much more to do with how much you like your department than anything else. As a grad student, your life will be dominated by your schoolwork and teaching. If you can make friends with other people in your department, you’ll find a way to be happy.

28

I’ll definitely have to second this. If you are unhappy with the department (faculty, staff, and other grad students), then your tenure as a grad student will be difficult and unpleasant. Grad school is enough of a grind in and of itself - it makes it even more of a grind if you don’t like the people you are dealing with on a daily basis. Fortunately for me, I met and worked with some really great people - it’s good to be able to share similar experiences/commiserate with others going through the same thing (grad school).

29

And I’ll third it. There were great colleagues, very nice office staff, and supportive professors in both programs I was part of. That did lots to reduce the stress. When you visit the campus, try to meet as many people in the department as possible to get a feel for what the department politics are like. Students who are a year ahead of you can be your best resource for getting oriented to the department, the campus, and Columbus.

Scribble’s point about an October paycheck is a really important one. If you have a TA appointment and there’s training required for it before classes start, find out if you’ll be paid for that time.

30

As a three-time OSU graduate, let me tell you something else - double check that your advisor has the money in place for you to start getting paid in October. That means forms signed, funds in the right account, everything. The problem is not that an adviser will try anything sneaky, the problem is that if anything goes wrong (and you’re dealing with some truly incompetent and apathetic people administering these things, real dead wood) there is nobody on campus except you who will give a frog’s fat a** about fixing it. That’s the way OSU operates. And you don’t want to be running around on November 1 with a rent check and tuition due, and no paycheck or tuition waiver. I learned this the hard way.

Go Bucks!!

31

I can tell you now that you will most probably not be paid for your time in your department’s week-long, or whatever, standard TA orientation. I know this because I talked with people who were in the orientation sessions I ran. Those guys came from a lot of different departments, and they told me about the preparation their departments expected of them. In general, if prospective TAs are required to go through any more prep than a one-week orientation, they have to take a whole course–like, with course credits, and tuition payments, and everything–to get a teaching position. But that’s relatively rare.

OSU is a research university. That means that the main priority of every faculty member is research. The thing that you are rewarded for or penalized for is your research, not your teaching. Grad students are given TAships based not on their ability as teachers but on their potential for significant research. I don’t care how much lip service people at OSU give to the idea of the importance of teaching–the fact is that most departments really don’t give a frog’s fat a** (I love that expression, Hyperelastic–mind if I steal it?) how well you teach, as long as you don’t screw up completely. What most departments want, IME, is a warm body who can show up at least more or less on time and do at least a semi-credible job of teaching. Your first priority in grad school should always, always, always be your research. Even if you come to feel that your really worthwhile work–the stuff that benefits another human being–is your teaching.

Oh, and I second Hyperelastic’s suggestion about making sure that you get paid properly.

32

I believe “frog’s fat a**” is in the public domain :slight_smile:

Regarding TA-ing at OSU: What are these “orientation sessions” you speak of, Scribble? I was a TA in the College of Engineering from 96-98. My entire teaching training consisted of “Here’s the textbook and the syllabus. Good luck.” Unless the orientation is specifically for your department, I’d skip it unless you’re getting paid for it. If it’s run by the Graduate School, it’s going to be a bunch of stuff like the rules for academic misconduct, not to harass or belittle students, remember to keep your zipper zipped, common sense stuff like that.

33

Here is a good source of info on OSU’s university-wide orientation sessions for new TAs. Just in case you wanted to know.

Every department has slightly different requirements for orientation for their TAs. Most departments send their people to some combination of the workshops described in the site linked to above. People who work for the Introductory Biology Program go through IBP’s particular set of orientation sessions and several of the university-wide workshops. Many TAs for the Chem Dept. go through an entire course over the summer before they start to teach in the fall. If your department says that orientation is required, take them at their word. People can indeed get booted out of TA positions because they didn’t go through the orientation.

In the last 4 years or so, there’s been a big push towards more preparation for new TAs. I would doubt that any TA in any department–including people in various engineering fields–could start teaching without attending some kind of seminar, or workshop, or whatever these days.

34

Once again, thank you all for the info and advice. And, Wow! I didn’t expect to get such a response. The Dopers have again shown their excellence in terms of knowledge base and willingness to share. It’s all very much appreciated!

35

akennett,

Double-checked with my colleague at work and she definitely gor her Ph.D. in history. If your interests lie in military history, then you should feel at home in the department. However, she cautions anyone interested in any kind of social history to be aware that one’s stay in the department may be difficult (social research in the department isn’t that well respected). I believe there is only one or two faculty that will take on students in that sub-field.

If you have a particular topic for your research, it might be advisible to find out whether it’s a good “fit” with the department. No sense in trying to to do research and get a Ph.D. from a department where you’ll get little support.