Teh Grad Skoolinz

Since several people have asked me about the grad school situation, I figure I should offer a bit of an update. As you may or may not have read in this post, I applied to 7 universities to pursue a master's degree in civil/geotechnical engineering. At this point I have made no final decision on where I will be attending school in the fall. I am still waiting on admissions decisions from two schools and, to date, no school has offered me funding. This will probably happen sometime in March or April, so I don't expect to make my decision before the ides of April (the 15th for you non-Shakespearean types.) Here are updates for each of the schools to which I applied:

• Virginia Tech - I got an admission letter to VT about a month and a half after I finished the application. I also found out that there is indeed a single's ward in Blacksburg, though it would most likely be the next in a long series of unfortunate dudefests. The Virginia Tech geotechnical group is also having a graduate open house next week on the 25th and 26th. They offered to reimburse me for travel costs up to $600, thus I will be in Virginia at the end of the month.
• CU Boulder - I haven't yet gotten a physical letter from the university, but the geotechnical group and the civil engineering department have recommended me for admission, which means that it's coming any day now. They're also having an open house for admitted civil engineering grad students on March 4th to which I have already RSVP'd. The university hasn't offered to reimburse for anything, but the professor who sent me the admissions email offered to pay out of his own pocket for my parking because he was excited to meet me.
  
• Oregon State - I received an admissions letter from Oregon State a couple of weeks ago. As unfortunate as it is, the graduate open house for OSU's civil engineering department is on March 4th, the exact same day as CU Boulder's. I found this out from the department's prospective grad student website and not from a formal invitation, which is one of the reasons that I'll be attending CU Boulder's. The other reason is that CU is 20 miles from my house and I will have just gotten back from Virginia 4 days earlier. Under the circumstances, a 20-mile trek sounds much more inviting than a 1300 mile one. I will still probably visit OSU/ Corvallis, but not for the civil engineering grad open house.
  
• Washington - UW has found a little favor in my sight since I made the last grad school post. This is mostly because they confirmed with me that they had received everything they needed for my application, which at least partially made up for their previous ridiculousness. However, my impression so far is that the university as a whole is massively bureaucratic and runs like molasses in a Minnesota winter. I think I'd still like to go there, but it seems that other universities want me a whole lot more than UW does. I haven't heard anything about my admission or a graduate open house, but they have received my FAFSA, which is a good sign.
  
• BYU - All of the components to my application were received by the university on the 11th of this month (4 days before the deadline.) I expect to hear back from them in the affirmative sometime soon. The problem with BYU is that I'm pretty certain that I won't have funding for the first two semesters that I'm there. Dr. Rollins has the funding for earthquake drain research all lined up. The problem is that the proposal detailed using the shake table at the University of Buffalo, which is booked until the spring of '12, thus I cannot take advantage of funding until after Winter semester '12.
• Purdue - I didn't get into Purdue.
• UCLA - After dealing with all the bull detailed in the last post, I've decided to strike UCLA from the record. I'm also thinking, at this point, that I didn't get 3 signed letters of rec to the civil engineering department at all, much less before the dealine. I'm also pretty sure that no one has even looked at my application, or any of the others, since they were submitted, even though UCLA had the earliest deadline of all the schools to which I applied.

I'm excited about the prospect of going to grad school for a master's degree in the fall. However, at this point, I'm even more excited about the prospect of the waiting game being over.