Columbia and NYU

I haven't told everyone this yet, but over the weekend Columbia called and offered me a space in their LLM program. Columbia and NYU are very similarly-ranked programs, but Columbia has a somewhat better-known Ivy status. I have until tomorrow to decide what to do and it is a hard decision for me. I was looking forward to NYU and think well of its program. However, I also think very highly of Columbia and have been told particularly good things about their faculty placement efforts. I have been working to process all the information I can find (and reprocess some of the information I was looking at back when I was applying). I will make a decision of some sort very soon.

In other news, Jersey City is so far pretty good. We have some of the (presumably) usual trappings of a city: the roads are terrible, some people are jerks (others are not), and there is a lady living next to us who occassionally screams at the top of her lungs at ... someone. The apartment is much larger than we expected and we are optimistic about it working out, 2R vs. 2L mix-up not withstanding. We are also working on getting our bearings, which has been difficult given the rush of NYU/Columbia decision-making on top of the regular "we just moved" tasks and going to school tasks. In general, it makes me pretty on edge most of the time since there are a lot of balls to keep in the air and we are perpetually spending seemingly-insane amounts of money (truck rental, gas costs, food costs, tuition costs, furniture costs, etc., etc., etc.). And since Han will be doing school differently this year than last since she lives in NJ now, that means more costs there too. I think we will probably spend more money in this year than I made in the last two.

But, at the end of the day, this is all to pursue things important to both of us.