Yay! I'm glad you're going to stay here.

Have you tried negotiating with the Berkeley SIMS program? It seems like they might be willing to accept you as a PhD student now that you have the NSF and will be fully funded for the next 3 years. Ask! You have nothing to lose (and they have nothing to lose either...)

I did mention it to the admissions guy and one of the profs, and the latter candidly said that they were concerned about my grades and want to get to know me for a year before committing to me. It also sounds like many potential Ph.D. students who are coming in without a master's degree take this route through the master's program. But it sounds like one professor is trying to get me accepted into the Ph.D. program right off, so at least I have someone on my side.

yay! Glad to have you around and good luck with your education. This will be great!

Congratulations on making the decision! Positive faculty response is definitely a good reason to stay. Also, what she said about asking about the PhD program, especially now that you're free. :)

TAing isn't so bad. (It's amazing how many people I know now because of TAing 170!) Also, I don't know about SIMS, but EECS requires at least one semester of TAing, so you can get any such requirement out of the way.

Yay!!!! :) :)

Sounds like a good decision to me!

Yay! I'm happy that the best choice from our perspective (i.e. having you stay in the Bay Area) turned out to also be the best choice from your perspective. :)

Hooray! I'm glad you feel good about your decision, and i'm thrilled that you're staying nearby.

Yea!!!! Ditto above comments, esp. rebbyribs and hukuma. Glad it worked out and see if you can negotiate a better deal. The negotiation store is often still open, especially if you have the extra cool NSF trading stamps!

Yay!

Congrats on choosing !UCI and !The South.

=)

It would have been sad to see a good person leave the Bay Area. Glad to see you're sticking around!

I decided not to reply to your grad school poll because it was a rather important choice and I don't know you well enough to make an informed decision, but I thoroughly approve of your choice of school.

And if all you want out of TAing is money, I would advise against it. From the GSIs I know in EECS, about half have horror stories or complaints (particularly the time it takes up) and the other half just don't talk about it. About the only good thing I have heard is that you get to know the material backward and forward. So unless you really want to get a grip on some fundamental concepts or you want to get in good with a certain professor, I would think you're better off using one year's worth of NSF and using the time you would otherwise be teaching (and preparing for teaching) to do research or take more classes.

Of course, if you really want to take those sabbaticals and do some of your Ph.D. work in other schools, saving your NSF for those is not a bad idea.

True dat. I was a reader for 170 (Efficient Algorithms) and 184 (Graphics) last semester, which I really enjoyed, but at the end of the semester EECS paid me only about 2/3 of what they had said they were going to pay me - they based the figure on the final enrollment figures, despite the fact that I had been grading more assignments for most of the semester. Not only that, but that they did NOT tell me that they were going to do this. Thus, I'm rather bitter about working for EECS.

I definitely would only TA a class that I like and that I feel super-competent in (160 is an obvious choice; 170 would be fun but the "math types" would tear me apart), but I think I would rather just use NSF for a year, as you said. SIMS guarantees their Ph.D. students four years of funding from the department, anyway, so then I can save NSF for summers or visits.