1) I hate that I have to do this, but I'm turning on captchas for blog comments. I've been getting a lot of spam lately. So for those of you who actually want to leave comments, you can deal with it because I'm tired of deleting stuff.
2) I recently received an (all but formal) acceptance email from SDSU/UCSD's MSED program. This is awesome. The more I think about it, the less I'm convinced I should wait for the other schools to send me an offer. The MSED program is pretty cool, and the offer is rather attractive - tuition, fee waiver, they try to cover major medical, and a stipend of $19,500 the first year.
So I called the San Diego institute today, and the lady said that housing on their housing board generally goes for between $400 and $700 a month. This is a lot less than I was seeing on Craigslist, so I'm thinking $19,500 (which, if you don't want to do the math yourself, is $1625/mo) is pretty feasible to live on, even in SoCal where cost of living is higher.
To sum: Probably, really soon, I will be an Aztec and a Triton. Woo!
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6 comments:
I'm not so sure about that, but it's your decision...
What is it that you're not so sure about?
SoCal on $19.5k a year. I would suggest you plan in anticipation of having to get a job as well as study - that way, if you have to get a job, you've planned for it, and if you don't, hey, bonus study time!
This is rather infeasible, granted the volume of the work required by the program.
My rationale (and please point out any gaps in my thinking here): I'm anticipating housing will be about $500 or $600 a month (according to the lady I talked to from my church out there). This leaves me $1000-1100-ish to play with. I doubt that utilities costs will be added on the top of that. I will probably still be on my parents' car insurance policy (it's a family friend thing), and I'm anticipating gas is maybe another $100 a month. (I currently fill up about two or three times a month, at $35-40 a pop, with gas around $2.70. However, the car I currently drive is larger and less fuel-efficient than any car I would project to take to the land of higher gas prices.) So, by my (admittedly ad-hoc) calculations, I'm looking at between $800 and $900 for such important things as food and so forth.
Am I missing something?
Expect gas to be about a buck per gallon more than where you are now. Budget worst-case; this means budgeting based on craigslist housing prices, with utilities NOT included, and remembering that the higher gas prices mean higher food prices. If you still think it's feasible, then go for it, but don't budget based on the best case. That's a sure way of getting into a deep hole.
Hello! :)
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