It's Official

I’m beginning a Ph.D. program in Ecology & Evolution at the University of Illinois at Chicago! I know that many of you have already celebrated our future move to Chicago, but you can celebrate again because it’s official now.

It sounds like I’ll have a student office (desk) at UIC and at the Field Museum. I’m super excited about working in the Field Museum again. It is such a cool place! I’d love to give all of you behind-the-scenes tours.

I didn’t received the NSF fellowship I applied for, although the comments I received from reviewers were ‘very good.’ I’m proud of myself since I only really decided to do it about 3 weeks before it was due and they recommend you spend several months on it. I also had extremely limited access to scientific literature since I applied from Tokoroa. I think I’ll be in a great position to apply again next year. Without the fellowship, I’ll be a TA and get a stipend for that. The UIC grad students I’ve queried said that it’s enough to get by “not even starving” but you can’t save much. At least I’m used to living frugally.

Somewhat unexpectedly, it turns out I wasn’t accepted anywhere except UIC. The Berkeley lab didn’t have enough space or funding, the UT lab isn’t taking any new students this year, the U of M lab could only take one and she had a 4.0 GPA and the fellowship I didn’t get, UConn is only taking 6 new students as TAs (i.e. without independent funding), and UMass is only admitted a few and I didn’t make it on the ‘must admit’ list. I was told I would’ve gotten into U of M no problem last year but this year they had tons of great applicants. So, grad school is kind of a crap shoot. I wish that someone had really emphasized to me that I might not be accepted to grad school the first year I apply even with a great record. It came pretty close to that!

I’m really excited to be going to UIC. I definitely had the most correspondence with people from UIC compared to the other schools and that was probably a factor in my admission there. It probably helped that Hank, my future co-advisor, also went to Earlham. Strangely enough, I met Bruce, my other co-advisor, in 2002 when he lectured about lions to my group in Kenya. I hadn’t the faintest idea at the time that he might co-advise my graduate education.

We plan to move to Chicago in August.

Carrie