Do your research about the program
Pros
A nice little town with friendly people, smart and highly skilled professors, and plentiful resources for you to get support for your professional development, statistics-related questions, and things like literature search and so on. Also, Grad School Ombudsperson is an amazing person and will genuinely try to resolve your issues. My GA contract was 9 months, and my department paid me during the summers for some research and administrative work, which is something I appreciate.
Cons
The entire school: Low pay, lack of housing support for graduate students, and on top of these, they cut $350 (monthly) from the stipend which is already low. My department: Toxic work environment, judgemental professors (even one or two can easily ruin the workplace climate), lack of emotional support, not enough grad courses for the subject matter they are expecting us to be experts on. Extreme publication pressure and no "actionable" support. In fact, they are currently forcing some tenured faculty to retire. These toxic professors are dropping an immense workload on Ph.D. students and still expecting them to publish in elite journals in the span of the Ph.D. (quick note: in my field, it takes 7 years on average to publish, and you get 4 or 5 years of funding for Ph.D. so you do the math).
