MAPSS and living in Chicago

So I skipped blogging for like 6 mos, no big deal. Maybe I'll write like three entries tonight to make up for it/because it is a Monday night and I an eating lime popsicles and drinking. Yeah, super sexy. That's grad school.

So I moved to Chicago last August, and if I were a more entertaining and less lazy person, I would have illustrated that with a .gif of someone dancing in astounded delight. I had a Real Person Job (kind of; you know, the usual sort of job currently being worked by people with BAs in The Social Sciences) and I had started to hate it. So I started a countdown in my day planner and got several friends to help me pack up my belongings, mostly through bribing them with pizza, laser shows, and watching my preordered Hunger Games DVD on my 32-inch tv before I had to sell it rather than move it.

And when I got here, I seriously loved it. (Cue imaginary dancing .gif.) I had several weeks before the school year started, and I got to explore the city and feel like my life was about to begin.

So okay, a note about living in Chicago while studying at the UofC. I have friends who live in other parts of the city. And they fucking hate it. The commute is universally terrible, and I've also had a few people explain to me that they found it really difficult to socialize and make friends for the first few weeks because they were having to steel themselves for the drive back to Wrigleyville or a really, really long spell on a couple of different buses. So unless you really, really like commuting, or have a free/reduced housing offer already in place, I would probably advise you to live somewhere near Hyde Park. Like, in Hyde Park. (But, you know, not too far south or west.)

Of course, the problem with Hyde Park is that when you live here, you very rarely leave Hyde Park. Hyde Park is NOT on the eL, and UofC students don't get public transportation classes like basically every other student in Chicago. (Those assholes. Instead our student IDs allow us to ride three Hyde-Park-area buses for free. The joke is that this is so the university can keep all its serfs in the fiefdom, and even though I'm not a medievalist, that is bitterly true enough to be funny.) So basically if you want to go anywhere cool in Chicago, you either drive (putting up with the price of gas, the thick traffic, and either the cost of a parking permit and registration or car service fees, though most people I know who have zipcar seem to like it) or you ride on the bus forever. And ever. And ever. (There's a .gif for this too somewhere, I know.)

Personally, I live on the very northern edge of Hyde Park. Actually I think my address is technically in Kenwood, but that's a technicality. The moral of the story is that I live very close to the block that is always shut down and guarded by Secret Service SUVs because President Obama lives there. And that is kind of awesome and was especially bitching on election night when it shut down for like three blocks in every direction and I was all "ZOMG several hours after I've gone to bed, the President will be passing by my home!"

And when I walk to classes, especially those south of the Midway, it's a good thirty minutes for me to get there. If the commute was any longer I would probably shoot myself.

Then there's the debate over whether to live in student housing, or not. There are lots of opinions on both sides of that argument. What settled it for me was my tour guide during my Campus Days visit, who said that his friends in university housing were able to do most of their studying at their apartments, which were quiet. Let me tell you, living in a building that's full of other grad students is amazing in that regard. I have never lived in such a relatively distraction-free environment, and when it's 25 degrees outside and there are eight inches of snow on the ground and you have to write a paper, it's really nice not to have to think about fighting your way onto the bus to the library.

I'm also lucky in that I have a single. Being a lady with pets, I wasn't eligible for a roommate in university housing, which is probably a good thing because I am a picky bitch and don't always like people. Most of the people I know here have roommates, and their experiences have been interesting, to say the least.

The downside? You will probably pay more in rent through the university housing. In fact, you will almost CERTAINLY pay more in rent. I pay $831 a month for a one bedroom, and let me tell you, the amenities are not to die for. In my home city, $800 a month would get me an apartment twice this size with a balcony, community swimming pool, and fitness center. This shit is crazy, y'all. But at the same time, my friends and I usually hang out at my place because I have a nice big living area (though without a nice big tv) and no weird roommate who pops in and asks us to take pictures of her for her facebook page.

That being said, two of my friends are roommates who met briefly during Campus Days, decided to live together, and are now really close friends, despite being virtual strangers to begin with. These stories can have happy endings! And we're usually over at their place if we're not at mine, but theirs is University-furnished and mine is furnished with my own eclectic faux-leather futon and other young adult staples, so it's pretty homey.

Living in Hyde Park, you will quickly come to appreciate that things other than the rent are fucking expensive. You will learn to buy your peanut butter at CVS, but your mayonnaise at Hyde Park Produce, unless you can suck it up to walk all the way to Treasure Island, which is itself stylized as "America's Most Expensive Supermarket." But never fear, Hyde Parkssters! Within the next year or so, you will also be getting Whole Foods, or, as the witty are prone to call it, "Whole Paycheck." Enjoy your year of living on student loans, ramen, and tuna fish. But don't buy your tuna fish from Hyde Park Produce, because that shit comes packed in olive oil for $4 a pop. (I'm not saying it's not delicious. I'm saying you need to live within your means.)

So anyway, when I moved here last August, I was like "I LOVE CHICAGO!!!!" And I'm sure I tapdanced down Woodlawn and sang with the butterflies and stuff. And for the past couple of weeks, I've been wandering around campus thinking "On a day like this, how could anyone not be in love with this place?"

But there was an in-between time. That was the period from January to late April, and that, my friends, may have been the most miserable three and a half months of my life. It was freakin' cold, there was a perennial bank of hard-packed, dirty snow everywhere but the streets, there was no such thing as sunshine, and this sunshiney, outdoorsy girl who had never experienced snow that lasted longer than three days... just about died. I think I have a vitamin D deficiency, and I definitely had a dispositional deficiency for a while there.

If you don't know what winters in Chicago or some equally hellacious place are like, I can't really prepare you. The snow if one thing. The seasonal affective disorder is another. The best advice I can have for you is to hold tight to your shred of sanity. For me, this came in the form of being craftsy. I knit. I baked. I painted. And I survived. But it wasn't pretty.

I don't mean to scare you all away, just to prepare you, o potential readers of this blog. If I had to make the choice to do MAPSS again, even knowing what I now know about Chicago winters, I would still do it. But I might have asked for a bright light therapy lamp for Christmas instead of books about the intersection of gender and culture. (This is what academia does to your head.)

Will I be applying for my next degree in places that have winters like this? Well, one. I'll be applying to Chicago again, because I'll stand a good chance of getting in and getting funding, and funding is gonna be very important. But I'm seriously thinking about Florida for the rest of my applications. Kind of seriously. Anyway, you aren't going to catch me dead anywhere colder.

MAPSS in general

So this blog entry by a former MAPSS student sums up my experience so far pretty well, with one exception:

she says you shouldn't expect to like everyone. Okay, that is probably true on the surface. No one likes everyone and gets along with all their classmates and they can all be BFFs forever at that ivy-covered hall in the sky. But I've been astounded by how much I like MAPSS and UChicago people.

Sure, there is one particular person who posts on the MAPSS Facebook page who I am happy not to have encountered, because I think I would not get along with [them] in the slightest. That's one person, out of 180. And because it's a big program and this individual is not in my preceptor group, it has not come up. (And, okay, there is one kid in my preceptor group who makes me feel dumb, but I think that's my own insecurity talking.)

Everyone else I've met has been amazing. I'm really surprised by the fact that I don't tend to stick exclusively to other history students. In fact, my best friends here turned out to be mostly anthropology students (with dabbles of sociology, history and psych.)

Everyone here is driven and intelligent - that's why they're here. Most of them don't rub it in your face, and are happy to explain things that go over your head for whatever reason, commiserate about shortcomings, and unashamedly ask for help in understanding agency and structure in Historical Narrative. My new MAPSS friends already feel like people who will be in my life for the rest of my life. People who will get invited to my wedding, even if we don't stay in close contact after this year. They're good people, they're interesting people, and they're my kind of people.

A lot of the focus of MAPSS is on peer learning and fostering community, which differentiates it from most of your graduate school horror stories and makes a compelling, inclusive environment. I'm not a competitive person by nature - I loathe conflict and actively avoid dramatics - so it's a really wonderful place for me to be. And I haven't met anyone, even the people I know casually from class who might not be positive what my name is, who isn't ready to form an impromptu study group and discuss Marxism and Structural Functionalism out on the lawn.

(Okay, we had snow flurries this week and when a friend and I were drinking juice outside on the quad today, he hastily suggested we move to the library. It's cold now. But you get the idea. We ran into each other outside the MAPSS lounge, and he was willing to take his free hour and a half to talk over a paper we have due Friday, listen to the problems I was having, and make suggestions about relevant readings.)

So no, you shouldn't expect to like everyone in MAPSS. But with the above information, you should bear in mind that I am notoriously independent and super awkward at making friends. Tonight, I'm meeting up with several people at Ida Noyes just because I can. You may not like everyone, but you would have to make a major effort not to like most people you meet, and find some you really get along with.