It depends on your preferences, but if you can afford it, my recommendation would be to live in Manhattan (below 100th St) somewhere close-ish to where you work when you first move here, even if that means compromising with a smaller/less nice apartment than you could get in Jersey City or the outer boroughs.

It's hard to find a great apartment if you don't already live in NYC and know what you're looking for, so you'll probably only be in your first apartment for 1 year anyway. Living in Manhattan will give you a central base to explore the city, get to know your transportation options, and make trips to other neighborhoods around the city that you might be interested in moving to. You will also avoid locking yourself into a commute that might be longer/more variable/more miserable than you might originally understand.

At the end of your year in Manhattan, you'll be able to make a more informed choice about whether to stay, or to "upgrade" to a nicer place in Brooklyn, Queens, uptown Manhattan, Jersey City, or even the suburbs.

This is great advice, thank you! Not something that's in the works for the next year or two but long term I think it's a good career move. And I'm close enough (~3-3.5 hour drive) that it's not as huge of a change as moving across the country to SF or something.

Deep Bushwick ( Mytrle-Wycoff to Bushwick Ave ) if you are not doing it next year - the L will be down.

Queens off the M line.

Anywhere off the F line.

In general you want to use something like StreetEasy search that lets you specify search areas based on commute and subway lines.

Brooklyn (non-Williamsburg) while getting pricier is still afordable. Without kids I'd recommend Clinton Hill area (schools suck there). If with kids, South Slope is a recently gentrified version of pricey Park Slope (where the Mayor lives) which hasn't quite caught up with Park Slope prices yet. There's also a bunch of commuter towns all around NYC in NJ that can guarantee sub-1hour commutes to Midtown where 1 bedroom can be had for 1200 or so with all of the aforementioned amenities.

> There's also a bunch of commuter towns all around NYC in NJ that can guarantee sub-1-hour commutes to Midtown

On days when NJTransit wakes up on the right side of the bed...

Yeah, if you're not living next to a PATH train stop or the Secaucus train station, I would assume +30min of travel time to any day's commute. That kind of variance basically means your weekdays are spent going to work, coming home, eating, and going to sleep. Terrible. And you get to pay ever increasing NJ Transit fares and property taxes for it.

I take a private bus that costs the same as NJT buses so there's no +30. They are very consistent.

So obviously everyone's situation is different. I agree that NJT is a cluster$#% of epic proportions. In my case I'm in Montclair, around 12 minutes from an NJT station but around 1 minute from Decamp Buses which is what I take every day. I take the downtown Wall Street bus a block from my house at 6:50 AM and it drops me off near the bull at 7:50. The bus takes around 25-30 minutes to get to Port Authority and around around 20-30 minutes to traverse to downtown (people request stops). This year it's only been late (i.e. 8:10-8:20) to Downtown twice. One of those times was when major roads in TriBeCa were closed because of mailbomnbs. That's how rare of an occasion that is. Of course that's an early bus, later ones are subject to traffic variations.

There are neighborhoods in Queens to consider: Forest Hills, Astoria, Kew Gardens, Long Island City.

I visited a friend of mine when he lived in Astoria ca. 2012-14 or so probably 3 or 4 times, it seemed like a good area and the rent seemed reasonable at the time. He commuted to Columbus Circle and while I never made the trip during rush hour it was not bad at all.

Newport NJ is a pretty nice area right next to a train that takes you into Manhattan.