Last Programs

OK, everyone, I now have spoken to all the programs I applied to.

Yesterday I got a call from a professor at Less Favored University's psychology program and because I was not expecting it to be such a person (R answered the phone) and because I was both distracted with getting ready to walk out the door and a little brain-fuzzed with medication, I was more abrupt with telling the person I am accepting an offer from another program than I would normally have been. I will email the department and re-iterate my status but also, I hope, I will be a little nicer. It's not that I sounded exactly like I was telling a telemarketer that I wasn't interested in his product, but it was definitely more like that than I would have wished.

Then today I got a call from Dreamy marketing program with a tuition waiver and research assistanceship offer. There are so many things I love about this program - including the "almost scary" (according to the program director) match between my interests and the focus of the faculty and the fact that they have a crop of newish junior faculty from seriously top programs (think: Wharton, Duke) who are "hungry" (she says) to work on publications, with which I could help and be a co-author. This might be the very best program for my purposes. Unfortunately the university is located in an area that, when I referred to it as "isolated" in our conversation, made the program director laugh. The university is the primary employer in the area, and though in a typical year, they hire a lot of instructors to teach classes, the downturn in the economy means that they won't be doing so much of that. She said, laughing, "It's too bad you love your husband and want him around." But yeah, I do.

Final update:

1 acceptance, no funding
1 acceptance, inadequate funding
3 acceptances, tuition waiver and assistantship
1 acceptance, funding unknown (because I didn't let him tell me the whole story)

I really did NOT expect that I would be looking at 3 fully funded masters degree offers. I love that I have so many good options that it's not a total no-brainer to choose.

At a minimum, I will send in my polite regrets to the three non-funded schools in the morning. I feel almost ready to make the final decision and accept the program that has been #1 on my list all along. We'll see if I'm ready to do that by tomorrow.

Oh yeah, have I mentioned that the way the timeline works, I will be applying to PhD programs about 18 months from now? That seems so soon!