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AP

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Everything posted by AP

  1. Sometimes it takes editors that much time to find a reviewer. You can ask, but I doubt you will have any updates.
  2. This is a great question. My PhD friends who are in the federal government are very happy. They work good hours and make good money. I have some friends in academic-adjacent jobs (librarians, etc), some because the professoriate didn't pan out for them, others out of choice. In all cases, they all made the PhD work for them. Eg: federal jobs pay more. However, I doubt that you would need a PhD for those positions, if you have other skills. My suggestion would be to contact those folks and ask them. They are better equipped to talk about the qualifications for their jobs. Maybe @dr. telkanuru can help too.
  3. In addition to all responses, this is the first semester all faculty are fully in-person, which means we cannot meet so much on zoom because we have literally less time from commuting/walking across campus. Don't take it personally.
  4. If you already know you won't be able to attend, contact your POI and CC the DGS explaining the situation (without giving too many details) and thanking them for the opportunity (and hoping to collaborate in the future). Then, you need to officially withdraw so that they can admit other students.
  5. Second this, don't read into it. There are a million reasons why someone might remember your application, it might be because it was good, it might be because it reminded them of someone else. You don't have enough information right now to assume one thing or the other. Also improve your WS if you can, this is a crucial document.
  6. Agh, my bad. I glided through that sentence. Sorry.
  7. Based on your post, it seems you haven't dived into what entails to do a PhD in History. Doing a PhD with a focus in medieval/early modern cities would require you come in with specific language proficiency. Additionally, a doctoral dissertation demands extensive archival research, broadly construed. While I applaud PhDs who write nonfiction (and I know many), the PhD doesn't train to do that. Do you want to spend 6+ years training for something you don't want to do? May I suggest: Looking into Liberal Arts/Interdisciplinary programs? A master's? Thinking what the PhD (in whatever discipline) will add to your career goals? Reading historians that have written nonfiction, "popular" books? My two cents.
  8. It depends a lot on discipline/dept culture. To me, the PhD was a job, so I was comfortable (jeans, shirts) but not in gym clothes. You never know when your advisor will introduce to the dean, take you to lunch with a visiting scholar, etc.
  9. This looks pretty academic-ly to me. Always, ALWAYS put the most relevant pieces of information first. Hence, I'd put teaching experience before service or extracurricular. "Publications & Scholarship" sounds redundant. Either "publications" or "scholarly work." The only portion you might to add some resume-style detail is for research experience, if this experience was not the norm or if it includes very different experiences. For instance, maybe you were an RA for a professor and that meant scanning books, maybe for another prof you went into the archive.
  10. Friendly reminder from a faculty: August-September is the best time to contact POIs.
  11. Ditto. I do think that it certainly makes your research more interesting if you eventually include historians of other regions in your committee, but for application purposes, given the number of historians of medicine in North America, you should definitely apply to a place where there is one.
  12. I have some colleagues that work on the Soviet Union that had to re-calibrate their projects. Sometimes it's just not the right time...
  13. My rule of thumb is to take the example of your mentors. Signatures are not CVs. They should reflect who you are and provide information that it would help your addressees respond better to your inquiry. Unless your fellowship come with an appointment, I wouldn't list them.
  14. I'll add some comments/points of clarification in bold to complement this exhaustive post:
  15. Allow to provide a different angle. While your level of Russian might be enough for the program requirement, not all POIs admit based off that. The whole point of languages is that you use them for your research, either reading sources or reading scholars. So, in your CV you can add a line on "known languages" (no need to include they are self taught, if they are not in your transcript, people will add up). But in your WS you can show that you've used the language. Or in you SOP you can point at language training as part of your career development. Eg, you found sources that you are unable to read yet, but are confident that a summer program in X university will get you to the finish line. Or Eg 2, You plan to take three semesters of Russian at the institutions well-renowned Language Center. In other words, admissions are not a list of boxes that you check. Those boxes are a starting point, but you need to show how you will grow as a scholar in that specific program.
  16. In the humanities, where research plays the most important part of your degree, coursework is that moment to build your fields. This is the moment to read things you won't read in the years doing research and writing the dissertation because your focus will be very narrow. Coursework reminds you of the big picture as you dive into your research and as you come out of it. It reminds you of your interlocutors. However, PhD programs vary from program to program and courses vary enormously even within the department. So your courses should be useful to you. How can you tell if they are useful? Well, you asked about employers. That's one way of thinking about it although I have never heard of anyone asking for courses taken in a PhD for employment purposes (it may vary in your field). Courses at the graduate level can provide: Mentorship. Sometimes we take courses to work with a professor that we want to include in our committee and who might eventually write a LoR. I took courses with specialists outside my department to bolster potential letter writers for the job market. Diversity of assignments. In my program, several courses had non-traditional assignments which really helped me down the line. Eg, a course midterm was an annotated syllabus and in addition to the final project we had to write a grant application. It was the first draft I ever wrote and helped get started. Networking. Depending where you are taking courses, you can encounter students from fields that you wouldn't have found otherwise. Interdisciplinarity helped me better hone my project for audiences outside my discipline. I've also known people that because they took specific courses, they found out about internal grants that eventually funded their dissertation writing years. Methods. Some courses offer good exposure to methods that maybe you won't use in your project but it is worth knowing they exist. In my case, this is more methods in textual analysis. YMMV
  17. This doesn't necessarily mean that people will come off the waitlist. Programs make offers knowing there will be a yield. For instance, if they have ten spots and they anticipate a 50% yield, they will make twenty offers, which means they will have their spots filled and no one will come from the waitlist. (Sometimes it happens that programs get a higher yield than they anticipated too and they have to shrink the next cohort). Of course, YMMV.
  18. And in my experience is just the opposite, probably because most of the people I know are international so there are other considerations to take into account when accepting an offer (ie visas). Bottom line: waitlists and responses to offers do not have one trend. Personally, I would treat being waitlisted as a rejection until you hear otherwise. This is because you don't know many of the forces that work in the waitlist. Eg: you don't know how big the cohort is this year, you don't know if someone declines others would be admitted (typically, programs accept more people than they enroll), you don't know where you are in the waitlist or if there is ONE waitlist (eg: there could be one for US history but not for African). So, for one's own mental health, treat it as a rejection.
  19. No no no no no. You should never, EVER go into anything to please others, least of all your professors. You can talk to your program where you were admitted and ask for a deferral or simply decline. IT IS OK TO DECLINE AN OFFER. Trust me. A good professor will always be proud of you, no matter what you choose, so long it's your choice. And if anyone gets offended, well, it's their problem.
  20. This is a good moment to inquire about the hidden curriculum of your program. For example, you can ask about the typical time of completion, the expectations in each year (including service/TAing/RAing expectations), any new developments that the program is thinking about (maybe they will start offering a certificate or maybe the grad studies committee is changing comps format). You can also ask about library resources, digital scholarship, conferences that faculty usually attend (and might bring you with), research funds available in and outside the department, etc. For example, in my program, students working under a prof were more or less expected to get a major research grant. For US Americanists it was a given that they will do another language even if it wasn't required. In another program that I know, grad students often worked at the rare books library or the museum. And so on. There are many things that faculty won't know (and it's not their job). Eg: health insurance, visa stuff, student fees, etc. Congratulations!
  21. I'm not sure at what point the discussion broke out. But no, under no circumstances will I ever stop honoring prospective students with the truth about the reality of our profession. Let me clear on something. No one, absolutely no one is saying do not get a PhD in History (well, actually that other thread discusses that). Here, I believe the discussion is please know what you are getting yourself into. I understand that many people want to get a PhD to do research and teach, not to go into tech or law or alt-ac. That's OK. Nobody is saying that your goals are misplaced or unrealistic. In fact, they are realistic because yes, you need a PhD to do research and teach at the college level. In this thread people like to theorize on things they have absolutely no clue ("this email probably means you are in!" "It means you are still on the run!" "They decide based on fit") to which I do not respond because yeah, that's partly of the purpose of this thread, theorizing together and not harming anyone. More than once I have been tempted to interject but did not because, honestly, those wonderments mean nothing and help ease anxiety about admissions. So I stay in my lane. But I will never stop warning anyone who wants to pursue a PhD in History of the situation in the profession and the job market. It is my professional responsibility as a participant of this forum. I agree with @psstein @TMP @dr. telkanuru that you should think it through. If you have received this advice before, great. If you are tired of hearing it, well, it tells you how serious the situation is. If you haven't heard this advice before and are upset, I am really sorry, but this advice is not out of lack of support or gatekeeping; quite the opposite. Unfortunately, this is not a "make me happy" forum. Don't want the advice? Don't take it. You can decide to dismiss or ignore me, which is fine of course (this is why I didn't quote any of the comments that protested that the thread weren't cuddling enough). But let me tell you that if you land good advisors (as many of you are on track to do, congratulations admits!), just bear in mind you will receive advice that you will not like, as sometimes happens with good advice. The fact that you don't like it does not mean (as someone implied) that your decision is wrong. It means, as someone else said, that you are being honest with yourself about the risks and the benefits, and that you are ready for this. Good luck!
  22. This is unsolicited advise for those who received an offer. First, I want to reiterate and heavily insist on what several of us veterans here try to convey periodically: there is more to a program than the imagined prestige of the university. Not all programs are fit for everyone, so as you get acceptances, research everything that tilts your needle: research funds, summer stipends, healthcare, teaching responsibilities, living costs, etc. Secondly, I'm sure you are aware of the Harvard Anthropology Dept issue taking up much of Twitter this week (tl;dr: A prof in the dept was put from paid to unpaid leave because of the findings of a sexual harassment complaint. The problem is that big names in Anthro and outside of Anthro (especially historians) from Harvard and off-Harvard have closed ranks in two open letters, protecting their colleague). [I'm not characterizing Harvard or any department here, but I personally find it troublesome how tenured folks quickly closed ranks without having all the information, which neither have I]. To this end, I share a resource you might find useful, a database of sexual harassment complaints and their status: https://academic-sexual-misconduct-database.org/ I hope you find it useful.
  23. Of course! I hope DC is treating your well.
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