Take only offer or try again?

[beckalex]

I applied to many Ph.D. programs in history and I was only accepted to my bottom choice school. At this school I'd be able to work with a professor who researches my interests and I'd be able to design my major focus in pretty much the exact way I want. However, the school does not offer secondary and minor fields in my interests. I was not offered

Comments

[roseofjuly]

1. I would never accept an offer to do a PhD with no funding. That means you would have to borrow for at least your first year of attendance (which, at my school, is easily $65,000+) with no guarantee that you will not have to borrow thereafter. Even if you only have to borrow for 2 years, that's six-figure debt already. The payoff for a life in academia is not great enough to justify such debt. So even if it were an otherwise fantastic program, I would still turn it down/

2. On top of not having funding, you sound unhappy about this program. You'll adjust to the climate - plenty of people move from warm to cold and back (I came from Atlanta to New York, and someone else in my cohort came from central Mexico to New York...she also laments about how it's about 70 degrees at home when it's about 20 degrees in New York.) But you sound like you might be miserable there, and I would not go somewhere I would be miserable. That's no way to complete a degree that can often take 6-8 years.

3. You shouldn't attend and apply again. People will wonder why you are applying for a new program when you haven't even been in the old one for 3 months, and it will look deceitful. Even if you are paying for it yourself, the department still spends resources on you. Not to mention that you could be spending the time improving your record, not going to a program you clearly dislike and getting distracted with work you are just going to have to start over again if you go somewhere else.