Hey CC! New here, please forgive any rookie mistakes.
I’m graduating with a BS in polymer chemistry this May, looking at PhD programs in synthetic organic chem starting Fall 2019. UT Austin has a great program, and my undergrad advisor went there for one of his postdocs, so I’m strongly considering it. Was wondering if anyone had any experience with the campus/city/state? I’m a gay woman, and while I’m not super flamboyant about it and not really the most politically active, it is kind of part of me, for all it’s worth. I grew up in Boston and go to school in NY, so I have no experience at all with Texas. Is Austin going to be a problem? A prof in my dept has warned against it, saying the city is fine, but once I’m outside it I’ll run into a lot of issues. I don’t need everyone to think like me, but it would also be nice to have a girlfriend someday without getting heckled every time we go out.
Austin is a pretty liberal city. Autostraddle, one of my favorite queer girl/lady blogs, consistently ranks it on the top 20 cities in their not-infrequent listings of top lesbianish cities; a 2012-2014 Gallup poll put it at #3 (after SF and Portland). I’m LGBTQ myself and I’ve always heard good things from my queer sistren about Austin. (I’ve only ever visited, and found it relatively meh myself - but just in general, not in terms of queer-ness.)
I would venture that if you attend a PhD program at UT, you’re unlikely to venture very far into the rest of the state unless you just like road-tripping or something. I went to graduate school in New York and I didn’t often venture into the rest of the state - I only did twice, both on trips with friends who lived or went to college upstate to visit their college towns. Where you’d need to worry about Texas would come with state laws and such regarding marriage, in the event that you met a lady and wanted to get married while in graduate school.
But you should ask some experts. Most universities have LGBTQ student groups and centers, and UT is no exception. Here (http://diversity.utexas.edu/genderandsexuality/student-groups/) is a list of student groups on UT’s campus and in the surrounding; I’m sure if you shot one or more of them a friendly mail with your question they’d be happy to answer it for you. You specifically might want to reach out to the Queer Graduate Student Association, listed down the page a bit. There’s also this (https://recruit.utexas.edu/students-alumni/lgbtq-longhorns/) list of LGBTQ resources at UT-Austin.