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ChibaCityBlues

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  1. This is a useful thread. My sense is that most prospective and new graduate students have a good sense of what's hot now. That said, what really sets some apart from others is a sense of what will be hot in another seven to ten years. Projects that exude that type of foresight really stand out. I just don't know how you develop a good enough sense of a given field in order to have a better sense of what's next without actually going through a few years of course work and reading for your exams. In terms of interdisciplinarity, I think that boat has mostly sailed. I think the biggest indication of institutional support for interdisciplinarity was the development of Anthro-History departments, but my sense is that, in History especially, those fields have mostly absorbed the insights of the other. I've even heard rumors of universities thinking about shutting down their Anthro-History programs for budgetary reasons, but justifying the act by saying that the departments don't really serve a purpose any more. When interdisciplinarity gestures towards History and Economics, for instance, that sounds interesting for reasons I'll mention in a bit. I also think transnationalism as a methodology and global history as a frame are gonna have limited shelf lives. First, because I think it's pretty hard for graduate students to gain an authoritative knowledge of just one field, let alone the many fields required to do a good transnational project. Second, I think the "intervention" is a bit overblown. People migrate. Ideas circulate. Those processes are as ubiquitous to history as history itself. Others will probably disagree. As for the digital humanities, this one I think mostly has purchase only in the teaching side of the equation. And for that reason alone we should all pay attention to it. But in terms of scholarship, I have seen very few projects where "digital" brings anything new to what we know and how we know it. Most digital humanities discussions are about presentation, the benefits and pitfalls of visualizations, and the changing world of publishing. But unless you're working with databases and doing some interesting statistical analyses or algorithmic data mining, I haven't seen much to indicate that "digital" will bring anything new to scholarship. Blogs don't count. And online and digitized archives are probably going to degrade the quality of scholarship in the long run, though I think it's an inevitable long run. I guess I don't have much to say about borderlands, race, culture, etc. In terms of what the hot new thing will be, my sense, and the sense that I think a lot of people share, is that politics is going to come back as the primary arena within which we think about history. Social history was supposed to make up for the deficiencies of political history, and then cultural history was supposed to do the same for social history. I think we've learned a lot and the time is ripe to get back to politics in order to redirect scholarship towards new, substantive, and critically rigorous critiques of liberal capitalism.
  2. The only thing I argued in my post was that the rank of a program matters, not because 2 is greater than 65, but because of what those ranks tend to represent in terms of the relative social position of a program’s faculty vis-à-vis the academy and the amount of resources the program has at its disposal relieve faculty and graduate students from teaching responsibilities so that they can dedicate their time to their work. I even tried to be a bit nuanced about it with statements like “To the extent institutional rank maps onto institutional resources and support,” which if you read it properly clearly acknowledges the existence of programs like Tulane, where apparently institutional rank does not map onto institutional resources and support. That fact of the matter is that I was specifically talking about “the graduate admissions process and the current state of the academic job market” and the need to have those discussions in terms of broad trends rather than exceptions. I was not casting any dispersion about programs in general or individuals specifically. There are any number of reasons why you could have read into my post the argument “that someone like me should probably have just not attended grad school,” but none of them came from the actual content of the post. So just to be specific for a bit, let’s look at Tulane’s statistics. According to the website there are 40 graduate students in the program. Assuming the time to completion is between 6 and 7 years, which is often the case for programs that offer five years of funding, that’s an average cohort size of about 6 students. According to the department’s site, 2 students got TT jobs in 2007, 4 in 2008, and 2 in 2009, for a very rough average of 3 per cohort. So, it seems to me there are two versions of the Tulane story. A) Don’t worry about the ranking because we have examples of students getting TT jobs, or B ) 50% of our graduate students don’t get TT jobs. The entire point of my post was that in terms of discussions about admission and the job market, story A is disingenuous and, I would argue, unethical to promote (despite the very true and real success stories of those students). The only story that we should be talking about is story B. To the extent there is a problem, it isn’t with you. Like I said in my post, the difference between the student in Program 2 and the one in Program 65 isn’t that the former is smarter than the latter. The problem is with Tulane. A program that can only point to a 50% success rate in attaining for its students the type of job they spend six to seven years training for probably shouldn’t have a doctoral program. This is a problem shared by most programs, all the way up into the top ten. The move on the part of programs to relying on under paid and over worked adjunct and part-time faculty is in part facilitated by the over production of PhDs. In order to inflate their own desired sense of prestige, programs invite too many perfectly adequate and entirely sincere students into their doctoral programs, to feed off their hope and dreams in order to harvest cheap labor and maybe a bump of one or two notches on some ranking.
  3. While I understand the desire not to discuss the graduate admissions process and the current state of the academic job market in ways that marginalize those in lower-ranked programs, I think any serious discussion has to be framed in terms of aggregate numbers and broad trends rather than in terms of exceptional experiences and anecdotes. If we were discussing the current state of race in the United States, for instance, wouldn't it be ridiculous to frame the discussion in terms of the success of Barack Obama, rather than in terms of the broad ranging and persistent inequalities and exclusions that are structurally part of American society? Any discussion framed in terms of exceptional experiences only serves to cast what should be a serious discussion in unrealistic terms. In terms of this question of program rank, it sounds like many people are focusing on the number and not what the number represents. Academia is a giant social network in which relationships built on personal friendship and scholarly respect are the main currency. A job applicant isn't more competitive merely because they went to Program #2 instead of Program #65. They are more competitive, among other reasons, because the opinions of the faculty members who wrote letters for them are well regarded and trusted by the adcom at the institution they are applying to. Even more important that the position of faculty members in the social network of academia is the institutional support Program #2 can give to graduate students that Program #65 can't. Basically I'm talking about time and money. It takes time, a lot of time, to learn a sub-field well, to craft a well-positioned project, to do the research, to write up, and to learn all the networking and performance skills required in order to do well in the social network of academia. The difference between the graduate student from Program #2 and the one from Program #65 isn't that the former is smarter than the latter. It's that the former only had to teach one or two years during the six or seven year degree while the latter had to teach all of those years. The former got to spend two years researching in the field, whereas the latter was lucky to string together two summers of research. The former got department money to attend conferences and the latter didn't. The former went to a program that could afford to host a plethora of workshops, speakers, and reading groups, and the latter was lucky is once a year someone interesting came and give a talk. To the extent institutional rank maps onto institutional resources and support, then it absolutely makes a difference to the type of scholar the program produces and the quality of their dissertation. Maybe not in every case, but in most cases. And it doesn't make any sense to have this discussion with current or prospective graduate students in ways that attend to those exceptional experiences.
  4. After checking in for the last bunch of years to see if TMP got in anywhere, I'm glad to see she has some great options. Congrats! I have to say all this talk of the job market is a bit disheartening. These have been the most intellectually stimulating and rewarding years of my life and I'd hate to think what they would have been like if at every step along the way I constantly worried about positioning and crafting myself for the job market. My research interests have evolved as I've evolved and not only are they not what I came into my current program thinking I would work on, but as they are now they reflect an ongoing and developing dialog I've had with myself over these passed two years of course work. My research is not my pitch for a job, but rather a reflection of my self. It may sound cheesy, but it sounds a heck of a lot better than all this talk about positioning one's research according to the trends in the job market and intellectual vogues. If you think global history and transnationalism is where it's at now, you've already missed the boat. By the time your dissertation comes out it'll be a tired trope and by the time you publish your book... Well, anyway, don't waste what promise to be some awesome years worrying about the job market. Do your work, think meaningfully about what you're studying and researching, keep an open mind, and enjoy yourselves. That way, if at the end you don't land a TT job, then at least you spent a bunch of years doing something that was meaningful to you. Otherwise all this time and effort will be nothing but a waste and that would be a shame.
  5. Anyone attending UMich in the fall who wants to spend the summer looking for a good place, I'm subletting my 1br apartment. http://annarbor.craigslist.org/sub/2860090070.html
  6. Take several years off. There is a lot more to the world than what you'll experience in graduate school. Don't be a student for a while, earn a living, travel, do something interesting, and get your ass kicked a couple times (as in experience what it's like to fail). Then apply. You'll be a better candidate and a better student for it.
  7. It was fine. I did a language class for six weeks. Got one of my language requirements out of the way. Met a bunch of people. Hung out in Ann Arbor during the summer. Moved into a sublet at first and had the whole summer to find a great apartment. If they offered it to you and you have nothing else going on, not a bad way to spend the summer.
  8. The $6000 is funding to participate in the Rackham Summer Institute. Only students who get their funding through the Rackham Graduate School get that. You're probably getting your funding through the department, so no Summer Institute.
  9. Location really should be the last thing anybody worries about when deciding where to go. First of all, if you properly attend to your work, I don't know where you're going to get the time to acquaint yourself with where ever it is you live. I mean, if location really matters to you, visit the libraries at the various schools you visit and check out how comfortable their chairs are, because that where you'll spend most of your time. Second, you're training to enter a profession where most likely you'll have absolutely no say where you get to live. Better get used to that now. Third, your location isn't going to write letters for you as you apply for fellowships, grants, positions, etc.
  10. You probably made the right choice. I haven't heard anything contrary to the notion that the University of Chicago is just awful place to be a graduate student. For whatever reason they just got the whole department culture thing wrong.
  11. I go to UMich and the stipend is around $16K. The department fellowships and the graduate school fellowships are both tied to the TA/RA salary which is $16K, although the university just offered to increase that by 1.5%. In fact, just the other day a professor of mine who was talking about applications this season was complaining about how low the stipend is here because it makes the department less competitive. So, take that as you will.
  12. Just to add another dimension to this discussion about fit... I received my MA at a relatively small middle-ranking program with a great faculty. Though I learned a lot from them and benefited from their direction, I felt as though I learned the most through my discussions and interactions with the other graduate students. That said, as the program was small, most of the students were mostly middle-ranking (i have no idea how to put that in proper terms), and the program was weighted towards sub-fields other than mine, I always had a sense that those discussions and interactions were not all that they could be. Also, we didn't get a lot of visiting lecturers and there weren't that many extra-curricular avenues to really engage academically with other graduate students. So, when I applied to PhD programs, a large part of how I defined "fit" was in terms of the graduate student body. I wanted to be around a lot of graduate students and I wanted a lot of them to be in my sub-field. Also, I wanted to go to a program where the department and the university actively promoted opportunities for graduate students to discuss and interact through funded working groups, an active schedule of visiting lecturers, etc.. Those "fit" requirements meant that I ended up at a pretty big program. I got most of what I wanted and it's been great to be part of a really big, active, and vibrant intellectual community. The only thing that didn't pan out is that there aren't as many graduate students in my sub-field as I would have thought, which when you consider the faculty here in that sub-field is kind of ridiculous. Anyway, that's just another angle.
  13. If the two years of funding coincide with the years you'll be doing course work, it's still not great, but it could be worse. For most programs, once you're done with your coursework your official tuition decreases considerably. Others might know more about this than I, but you have a maintenance fee that you pay every year and that's it. But it doesn't compare to full tuition.
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