HOUSING
Subsidized apartments in Morningside Heights are guaranteed to Columbia Ph.D. students for 6 years of their study and are available in limited quantity for stand alone MA students for up to two full time semesters. Nearly all Classics Ph.D. students live in these apartments, create a sense of community since everyone lives within a 10 minute walk of one other and of the Classics Department and the university library. Students have a choice of sharing a 2-bedroom apartment with a roommate or a studio apartment. Students with partners will get couples’ housing (a 1-bedroom apartment). Precise details of who qualifies for couples housing (it’s very easy to apply) can be found on the University Housing webpage, as well as a general price guide for housing.
FUNDING
Classics Ph.D. students are normally offered 5 years of fellowship support, tuition plus a stipend. Further opportunities exist for graduate students to augment their stipend by teaching intensive Latin and Greek courses over the (six-week) summer session. Students may also apply for internal and external fellowships paying comparable stipends.
Not only are Columbia students eligible for various external fellowships for funding their dissertation research, Columbia University offers its own fellowships. Scholarships like the Thompson Fellowship or the Columbia University Travel Fellowships provide an extra year of funding beyond the fifth year, and are designed to give students the chance to work on their dissertations overseas, most commonly in places like Rome or Athens, though they can be used anywhere.
TEACHING
The normal terms of fellowship funding at Columbia provide support for the first year of courses and the fifth year for working on the dissertation; they require teaching in the second, third and fourth years. Classics students serve as teaching assistants in the second year, either in translation courses or assisting faculty in first and second year language courses. Classics students will then teach their own sections of first or second year Greek or Latin. Beyond the fifth year, students are eligible to teach in the Core Curriculum (Contemporary Civilization, Literature Humanities, and Art Humanities) for up to two years.
The excellent teaching opportunities not only in language courses but those taught in translation have brought our recent graduates success in the job market. For a list of recent placements click here.