Into Penn's Woods

It looks as if the Waiting Game is slowly but surely coming to an end.

This evening, I came home from teaching Gulia and took a look in my in-box, asI do every evening when I come home. In it I found an e-mail marked "Financial Aid Award". As I had spoken to someone at American Jewish University (U Jew) earlier this week about when I might expect to receive my aid award, I assumed this was it and immediately opened it, only to find it was not from U Jew.

It was from the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania.

Attached to the e-mail were PDFs indicating that I had been awarded $18,500 in outright scholarships from Penn for the program to which I had applied. From this I naturally inferred that I had been admitted to the program, but given some problems I have had dealing with Penn bureaucracy, I felt it was best to find out for certain, so I called Penn to see if this was in fact the case. Indeed it was, and so I am proud to announce that I have been admitted to the Master of Arts in Intercultural Communication program at the University of Pennsylvania.

I have had some difficulty determining whether my aid award will be enough to enable me to attend Penn, however, because I have not yet gotten any information about loans or work-study, and because I am unsure what the actual tuition for a year at Penn is. Penn's website gives this information in terms of "course credits", and I am unsure how many course credits constitute one year of study. The person I would need to speak to in the financial aid office is, unfortunately, out of the office until Monday, so I will not be able to resolve this issue until then.

With this information in hand, I called the Admissions Office at NYU to find out when I might expect to hear anything regarding my application there. Penn needs a decision within 45 days (not an unreasonable amount of time), so I needed to know whether NYU would have an answer for me by then. The woman to whom I spoke at NYU said admissions letters should go out next week.

So I now have options on both coasts--in the Jewish world and outside of it. The Far East Side Minyan may become the West Coast Minyan. Or it may return to the West Side Minyan.

Or, then again, it may venture into Penn's woods.