Definitely don’t want to apply to R1 universities, actually! There’s one R1 school that I really like for other reasons so I’ll be applying to it, but I want to avoid the super academic, ambitious schools in general. Thanks for your advice on the difference between applied and traditional, though, that’s interesting… if applied doesn’t necessarily mean marketable, are there specific subfields that are more marketable? If so, what would you say they are?
At the end of the day, I’m doing this because I really want to, and if I just went and got an industry job now, I’d still want to go to grad school when I retire someday… so may as well do it now when there’s at least some small career benefit! So I’m not exactly looking for the most marketable thing ever, but if something I’m interested in happens to be marketable, that would be a nice bonus.