<p>Congratulations to your son–as others have said, Berkeley is truly one of the world-class institutions for graduate study! It’s also good of you to really hammer home to him the importance of asking “practical” questions about stuff like the in-state residency, insurance, etc. Professors provide a lot of other important advice about program selection, but are not so good with those sorts of things! </p>
<p>I probably relied too much on other academics and not enough on my parents when I went through this process. I called my parents after I had accepted a Ph.D. spot and after I had passed my comps; did not tell them when I received job interviews or that I even had a job until a month after I signed my contract; and they didn’t even know I was thinking about defending my dissertation until I called them two hours after the successful defense! While it was important for me to do this–though I was a bit extreme–to assert my independence against parents who more or less gave me the impression that they didn’t think I could look after my own affairs, I wish I had been more open with them because I did make some mistakes on those practical matters due to a lack of experience!</p>
<p>Yes, of course, but why should the math department “pay” OOS rates out of its budget when it can pay instate rates? The math department budget goes farther that way. Requesting that grad students obtain instate residency – which is a slam dunk in California – has been UC’s practice for a long time.</p>
<p>If everyone went by your guidelines ($25k stipend, haha), there would be very few grad students at Berkeley, period. Berkeley gives rather poor stipends compared to peer schools (made even worse by the COL in the area), requires a fair amount of teaching even before one is ABD, and can’t guarantee funding every year in most cases (or past a certain year as well). You need to annually renew funding and may be receiving funding from different sources each year, if at all.</p>
<p>Not to mention, it’s easy enough to have a student declare in-state residency. Might as well save $30k while you’re at it. What would suck, however, is if CA denied a student residency for whatever reason, and the student’s stuck paying $30k out of his own pocket the next year, because Berkeley won’t cover the difference.</p>
<p>A lot of these concerns are rumors which have been passed down through the decades about graduate programs in general.</p>
<p>Some of them don’t even really make sense except for lab-based disciplines. </p>
<p>I’ve never heard of a technical PhD program that wasn’t fully-funded, let alone a program like Berkeley. You have nothing to worry about in that regard. </p>
<p>Accepting more students they can handle–I am not sure what that means exactly. You don’t need lab equipment, so it’s just professors guiding grad students. Though technically possible, it’s just not realistic. </p>
<p>In terms of school forcing students to “fatten their thesis,” this tends to be true at most high-level schools, but it is most often advisor-dependent (i.e., the prof guiding you.) This is the most important choice. Don’t choose someone as a mentor whose guiding philosophy is “sink-or-swim.” If someone has a negative reputation among the grad students, I would trust their judgement. Never having been in grad school, it may be hard to evaluate the criticisms and whether they would apply to you. </p>
<p>The most important thing is that the program and/or mentor will tell you as early as possible whether you are on track to finishing the PhD. I’ve known people who were threatened into their 5th year that they might be fired, in spite of making significant progress. However, I think this is a bigger problem in lab-based disciplines, where profs depend on the grad students to be the "hands’ that do their research and, as a result, can sometimes be abusive. I doubt this sort of thing happens in the theory world. After one to two years of the research phase of the PhD, they should be able to tell you whether you are doing well that you will definitely finish. Obviously, you can’t slack off, but the point is you don’t want to be in a PhD program for 5 years and then have them give you a masters. I suppose since there are a lot of classes to take, it takes longer to start the research phase, so you may be there awhile before you can know whether you are viable in terms of finishing the PhD research.</p>
<p>Since math is so different from my discipline, science, it’s hard to give more advice. I did know someone who got a math PhD from Berkeley, and he didn’t have any complaints about it.</p>
<p>Congrats. It is a great honor to be accepted. Any top 20 program is going to be very competitive regardless of where. The competition will be in gaining favor of the professors seen as hot shots in the same areas of interest. </p>
<p>Three different approaches in elite PHD programs. The following is a rule of thumb. Perhaps it is different in math?
Super Selective with wine & dine: These schools acceot fewer and invest more in due diligence and fit. Once in the program, you are seen as the future torch bearers of the brand. Experience is difficult but aside from personalities not cut throat. Think Harvard.</p>
<p>2) Super Competitive by Design. The idea is Darwinian. Accept more but guarantee funding from 2nd year and beyond via competition. Think U of C. Brutal. Those who survive get something like the Harvard treatment afterwards. However, the psychological effects of the first year remain.</p>
<p>3) Competitive by Austerity. Departments are underfunded and oversubscribed. Leads to situations such as pencils being locked up behind cabinets and large teaching loads (or even teaching outside of departments) to fulfill obligations. Chaotic and unkempt with fraying around the edges. Think UCs under budget crunches.</p>
<p>Residency? Surely irrelevant, no? Or is the acceptance without full funding? If the latter, such an environment requires confidence and blinders manyfold more than at Ivy League programs, where much of the logistical angst is removed.</p>
<p>Thanks all–lots to digest, especially given this is a different world than my DH and I inhabit! For example, I hadn’t heard about the fattening the thesis prospect that 4th floor mentioned. We will definitely have him ask about how long the average grad student takes to complete the PhD and about the successful completion rate.</p>
<p>The offer is funded for 5 years, given one establishes CA residency, with a $22,000 stipend. I note with interest your point, mom2collegekids, that a larger offer could come later. That would be great, but we won’t hold our breath on that.</p>
<p>TigerFree–yes, it’s the #2 competition I was thinking of. </p>
<p>He is also considering offers from UCLA, CalTech, Yale, and Michigan, so lots to think about, especially given his decision has to be made in about a month! I think Berkeley intrigues him the most, given it’s great reputation for it’s math grad program and it’s location.</p>
<p>I appreciative all of your insights very much!</p>
<p>Well, they all have good overall math reputations; he may want to check the faculty rosters at each school to see what areas of research interest are strongest and best represented at each school and how they match up with his interests.</p>
<p>If everyone went by your guidelines ($25k stipend, haha), there would be very few grad students at Berkeley, period. Berkeley gives rather poor stipends compared to peer schools (made even worse by the COL in the area),</p>
<p>Not “grad students”…PhD students. I’m not including the MS/MA students. And as the OP mentions with her son’s $22k stipend offer, my stiipend suggestion wasn’t a “ha ha” at all. </p>
<p>And, if the school gets wind of his other offers, I wouldn’t be surprised if Cal matches. All of my son’s math PhD acceptances matched the top offer…even his “safety” schools that had less money than Cal has. </p>
<p>It does sound like the request to get residency is just a way to save the school money. It doesn’t sound like they’re expecting the student to pay OOS rates. They must know of an easy process that allows residency to be rather easily processed. However, what about the first year? Residency wouldn’t be established at that point.</p>
<p>The department’s own web site indicates that it expects to pay OOS tuition for the first year, but that residency-eligible PhD students should try to gain residency the second and later years. Unlike undergraduates, PhD students can more easily gain residency since they are not tightly tethered to their parents’ residency (which is what prevents most OOS undergraduates from having any chance of gaining residency in California for state university tuition purposes).</p>
<p>Sorry, I meant PhD students. And I fail to see how “as OP mentions with her son’s $22k stipend offer” proves your point? It’s still a “hah” moment for me, because that’s still not $25k+, and many programs will make an offer falling in the neighborhood of $21k-$22k. Certainly not $25k+. (Maybe one program out of five will make that good an offer, e.g. Yale.)</p>
<p>Thanks for the nod that Berkeley might actually match funding, though. Do you know if they will factor in cost of living? Perhaps that might actually put Berkeley back on the table for me. But my department is underfunded, so perhaps not.</p>
<p>They will cover OOS tuition the first year but not in the successive years.</p>
<p>Apologies if I sound a little bitter. I got roughly the same offer as OP’s son ($21k for five years, with the fifth year not truly guaranteed though they try to make it sound like it with the phrase “practically everyone,” GSI or equivalent necessary for Years 2-4), but that offer pales in comparison to other schools’ offers, especially after you factor in cost of living.</p>
<p>Excluding tuition and fees, nominally $21,572 for a 9-month academic year if you have other health insurance, $23,878 if you buy the one through the school. That would be a tight budget on a $22,000 stipend.</p>
<p>Included is $16,602 of room and board. University owned graduate student housing costs about as much as the financial aid estimate, with some variation. BSC co-ops are considerably less expensive.</p>
<p>COL issues are definitely something that a lot of prospective grad students need to take into account when comparing offers, especially since Universities don’t (in my limited experience) always offer larger stipends in high COL areas ( as my friends living on 18k a year in the DC metro area can attest).</p>
<p>Yes, this process exists for all UC schools, for graduate students. The criteria for being classified as a California resident (for UC tuition purposes) is that all links to other states are severed for at least 1 year. </p>
<p>All students need to do is to get a CA drivers licence, live in CA for the entire year, register to vote/vote in CA, file state income tax in CA, pay bills in CA, and a couple of other things. It’s pretty trivial. </p>
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<p>Things have changed. There are plenty of top technical programs that have limited funding. I’m in engineering, so those are the programs I’m mostly familiar with. So, for example, Stanford’s EE department does not fund most of their students until they pass their preliminary exams. This includes Ph.D. students. Other public universities I know of only guarantee funding for the first year, and require the student to find an advisor to fund them afterwards.</p>
<p>Undergraduates face the same process but with the additional requirement of their parents having to be or become residents of California, if they are dependent for financial aid purposes. This is what makes it extremely difficult for most UC non-resident undergraduates to become California residents, while making it relatively easy for US citizen or permanent resident graduates to become California residents.</p>