I’m applying for philosophy phds this year, and probably top dog at the moment is NYU. Very competitive, but if you don’t ask you don’t get, right?
NYU is in the Village in NYC, and the standard package is this:
A MacCracken Fellow receives a stipend, a tuition scholarship, remission of registration and service fees, a subsidy of the mandatory NYU health insurance costs, and has an obligation to teach at most six semesters.
(The stipend is around 20k)
My question is - is this comfortably livable? Noone goes to phd school (in philosophy at least) to get rich, but would this mean 5 years of poverty and long commutes?
The reason I ask is that I’m not sure whether applying elsewhere (each school at least 70/80$) would be more sensible.
By far the largest factor affecting your cost of living in NYC is going to be whether you can find somewhere to live for a rent that you can deal with. IIRC there is grad student housing at NYU - are you going to have access to it, and if so, how expensive is it? because market rents in NYC are completely insane, particularly if you want to live anywhere that is both remotely safe, and remotely close to the school.
Even when I was in school there, I had a friend who rented an apartment with 7 other people - it was a 5th-floor walkup over a funeral home on the edge of Alphabet City, which was then not at all a safe neighborhood (it wasn’t uncommon to see used condoms and syringes lying on the sidewalk). He had one room about big enough for a bed and nothing else, no door. He paid IIRC something like $500 a month.
Well, ummm . . . no. Unless you’re willing to live in a paper bag in the middle of the road with twelve other people.
Seriously, you can (just!) get by on $20,000/year if you live in Brooklyn, New Jersey or Queens (with at least one roomie!) and commute. Even then, it will be a stretch.
On the other hand, I don’t want to be all gloom and doom - NYU is a great school, and Manhattan was a great place to be an undergrad. I really don’t know anythng about grad student life there, though.
In Bergen County, New Jersey, you might maybe to able to do it if you can find a two room apartment and share it with someone. That’s two rooms, not two bedrooms.
I was a student at NYU and a few of my friends are on McCracken.
They will emerge from their PhD’s with roughly $30K in debt, which covered everything the fellowship didn’t. They also had a fair amount of family assistance.
In AE roomate can mean either someone you share a bedroom with or simply a housemate. And practically every college in the US that has student housing requires students to share a bedroom (singles are reserved for upperclassmen, RAs, and the disablded if they exist at all).
Thanks for the tips, that’s basically settled it: taking on debt for a philosophy phd is just not a good idea, considering how low salaries are in academia and the difficulty of finding a job anyway.
This is especially true for american loans for foreign students, which tend to be ungenerous in their terms. American loans in general seem pretty onerous compared to my own (from Oxford - about $40kUS, zero real interest rate, repayments autodeducted from salary if/when it passes around $28/29kUS).
Unless there’s another one I don’t know about, I think you have it the wrong way round: the Rhodes generally funds foreigners to come to Oxford, not the other way around.
I’m not too worried about finances - every big program in the States will come with funding, it’s just that $20k in Princeton is a lot more than $20k in Manhattan.
Seems you have gotten some good advice. I will add that taking the train in from a small place in Queens is totally feasible. Look on line for “roomates wanted” and you should be ok. The NYU experience will be totally worth the sacrifice of non important things like food.
I’ve got college-aged family living in Queens; neither one shares a place but their rents are reasonable. One’s in Astoria and one’s in Kew Gardens, both very close to trains to Manhattan. It’s totally doable, as long as you don’t mind subway rides. Subways are good for reading schoolwork anyway. I wrote most of a moot court brief on the F train from Brooklyn to Queens, a ride which required going from Brooklyn through Manhattan and into Queens (even though Brooklyn and Queens are adjacent to one another and across the river from Manhattan). I didn’t care; I usually got a seat for the entire ride.
" Well we had it tough. We used to have to get up out of the shoebox at twelve o’clock at night, and LICK the road clean with our tongues. We had half a handful of freezing cold gravel, worked twenty-four hours a day at the mill for fourpence every six years, and when we got home, our Dad would slice us in two with a bread knife."
And, BritBoy, nobody goes to college to live well. College here is both expensive and crowded, and teaches you much more about inter-personal relations than it does about the Anatomy and History of the Saturn Slug.
More specifically, in the context of ordinary apartments or houses, roommate usually means someone you share the whole place with; in the context of University housing it usually means a single room that you share.
$20,000 is going to be hard to live on in practically any city over here, IMO. Have you asked the folks at NYU how other Ph.D candidates manage it?
