pumpkinpie

Curb your ressentiment, my friends. Harvard asks strange descent questions b/c it has small specially endowed scholarships for very narrow categories of people and is trying to find who it can dump them on. Some are for people raised in specific New England towns, or who graduated from some handful of New England schools (not particularly illustrious ones). It has nothing to do with your chances of admission.

Yale does not interview as part of the application, but faculty members have in the past called some admitted students before they were notified of admission to discuss the program. If you look through previous years' posts, you'll find some references to this.

Those thinking of getting high-maintenance pets should consider the amount of time you will not be around during the year. Winter and spring breaks, trips, and possible travel abroad during the summer can seriously complicate your pet's life even if having one is not a problem on a daily basis. I have a cat in grad school, and I like him, but he is a serious impediment to my ability to leave town for any extended period of time, especially since people in university towns tend to all leave during the same dates, making care by friends and classmates in my absence difficult to find as well. Professional pet-sitters can do a good job during the annual holiday visits to family for a week or two, but paying someone to take care of your cat/dog while you're in Spain studying Catalan for two months over the summer is a pretty expensive proposition.

You might also want to look at WashU and Emory, depending on your specific interests. UT only funds a handful of theory admits a year, and I've heard CGU doesn't fund well either. I thought St. John's only offered one BA, in liberal arts?

A little late here, but yes, I was admitted to UPenn's program w/ a writing sample from a classics course. They have a 10-pg max for samples, and I just didn't have any good history papers I could squeeze into that limit. The paper I did send did use both primary and secondary sources, but was primarily a literary argument, not a historical one.

PROFILE: Type of Undergrad Institution: top 20 university Major(s)/Minor(s): history Undergrad GPA: 3.8 Type of Grad: N/A Grad GPA: N/A GRE: 700/730/5.0 Any Special Courses: no Letters of Recommendation: one from political science, two from interdisciplinary faculty Research Experience: senior thesis Teaching Experience: none Subfield/Research Interests: political theory, intellectual history SOP: all the usual - interests, academic background, faculty matches Other: some articles in non-peer-reviewed, non-academic publications, some non-academic work experience RESULTS: Acceptances: Yale (history), Penn (history), Texas (polisci), Harvard (polisci), Georgetown (polisci), WashU (polisci) - all funded plus stipend/fellowship Waitlists: none Rejections: Chicago, Northwestern