auvers-sur-oise

In other words, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ieUEHtzVUgs. Best of luck at H, ProspectStu8735. I can only assume you mean Harvard.

Agreed, but undergraduate text books aren't art - they are books. Go to museums as often as you are able, and engage with actual art objects. You'll have 5+ years to be weighed down by the canon, the counter-canon and the counter-counter-canon. Beef up on the basics, like runaway suggested, if you feel so compelled, but insufficient familiarity with Saussure will not be a deal breaker. Read what interests you, and read what has been published by the scholars and potential mentors/advisors that interest you. Don't be swayed or guilted by anonymes who might describe a list like that one posted above as "coming to mind immediately." Look at art, think about objects, practice your languages, and read what interests you. Žižek? That's like recommending Neil deGrasse Tyson to an aspiring astrophysicist... except the book recommended above is outdated, largely useless and wholly unenjoyable.

Don't worry ProsStu - you didn't offend me. While I disagree with two of your three "controversy" points, I think they're fair. They're just inconsistent with your relentlessly positive outlook, as quoted above. Re: the original topic, I think that once adcomms have sorted out the best students, fit and departmental need are the strongest factors.

This is total garbage and reads like sour grapes about your own undergraduate transcript. It's also presumptuous and offensive, but God knows you didn't hurt my feelings, so I won't belabor that particular point. An undergraduate GPA above a 3.5, particularly within the major, shouldn't be to difficult for any prospective graduate student. While there are obviously exceptions, it's a good baseline, and graduate programs agree - that's why programs recommend or require applicants to meet certain cutoffs. I think that once you cross that threshold, the difference between a 3.7 and a 3.9 is negligible, but to suggest that a higher GPA necessarily means a duller candidate is petty and inaccurate. Reputable graduate programs also require their students to maintain a high average, and while coasting through undergrad Art History coursework on a string of B's before making the jump to A-quality graduate work is not impossible, adcomms tend to place their bets on students who already have a proven track record of academic success. They want innovative, evocative research, but they also want their students to finish. While I agree that "Being an interesting scholar with challenging ideas is much, much harder to fake," I am certain that the top programs have no shortage of candidates with perfect or near-perfect GPAs, and who bring insightful and challenging ideas. A lot of big talk about statistics and a "normalized sampling of students" for a Monday morning, ProspectStu8735 - let's see those stats.

"Yes, this all looks great. But how's your German?"

A suggestion for the group: if/when the results start to come in, can we agree to list our field in the comments section of each acceptance/rejection post? This will offer a better data set for future applicants, and might be helpful for current applicants, too!

I saw the Degas show at Boston, and it was to die for... I can only imagine at Orsay! The Manet: Portraying Life show was great - it's at the Royal Academy now, so if anyone's in London...!

I'll take it! Thanks!

This might be an obvious question, but how can you tell that eventual admits didn't go to the symposium through the results search?

I really doubt adcomms are checking in on us.

Just jumped on chat, but no one over there understood my art feelings! We should set up art history pow wow times.

Yeah, I've been in touch with the app coordinator, who writes: Unfortunately all applications have not yet been updated. Thank you for your patience! That was as of about a week ago. Hope this helps quell any anxiety.

I remember reading that, too! I have to admit - it was a huge help. Not that it gave me free reign to be sloppy, but it gave me the dose of good sense that I needed to let go of my applications, and to send them off without too much obsessing. I have since gone back and read over my statements, and I haven't found a mistake... but that doesn't mean there isn't one, and hey, what are you going to do.

What I've heard from adcomm members at my program, and at a few others (although none that I've applied to) is that decisions are made before profs go out of town for CAA. Whether they inform before or after CAA seems to be random... or is it? Let's look at the numbers! Culled from the GC results, I looked at earliest acceptance date to PhD programs. If the acceptance came a month or more after rejections, I noted WL for likely wait list admit. Those wait list admits as n/a when I looked at how many schools notify before CAA vs. after. I picked the 10 schools at the top of the "rankings" posted in the thread below as a sample group. 2007 - CAA Feb. 14-17th. Berkeley: 3/5 Chicago: n/a Columbia: 2/9 Yale: n/a Princeton: 4/4 WL NYU: 3/12 Harvard: 2/27 UCLA: 2/16 Northwestern: 4/4 WL UNC: n/a Notify before CAA: 1 Notify during CAA: 1 Notify after CAA: 3 2008 - CAA Feb. 20-23rd. Berkeley: 4/6 WL Chicago: 1/30 Columbia: 3/6 Yale: 2/28 Princeton: 3/4 NYU: 3/1 Harvard: 3/4 UCLA: n/a Northwestern: 3/3 UNC: 3/10 Notify before CAA: 1 Notify during CAA: 0 Notify after CAA: 7 2009 - CAA Feb. 25-28th. Berkeley: 2/11 Chicago: 3/3 Columbia: 2/14 Yale: 2/23 Princeton: 2/18 NYU: 3/12 Harvard: 3/2 UCLA: n/a Northwestern: 2/18 UNC: 3/17 Notify before CAA: 5 Notify during CAA: 0 Notify after CAA: 4 2010 - CAA Feb. 10-13th. Berkeley: n/a Chicago: 1/31 Columbia: 2/14 Yale: 2/23 Princeton: 3/2 NYU: 4/10 WL Harvard: 3/8 UCLA: n/a Northwestern: 2/18 UNC: 3/3 Notify before CAA: 1 Notify during CAA: 0 Notify after CAA: 6 (2 within a week) 2011 - CAA Feb. 9-12th. Berkeley: 2/23 Chicago: 3/23 WL Columbia: 3/4 Yale: 2/15 Princeton: 3/4 NYU: n/a Harvard: n/a UCLA: 2/18 Northwestern: 2/16 UNC: 3/1 Notify before CAA: 0 Notify during CAA: 0 Notify after CAA: 7 (3 within a week) 2012 - CAA Feb. 22-25th. Berkeley: 2/14 Chicago: 2/4 Columbia: 2/24 Yale: 2/20 Princeton: 2/2 (unofficially by call from POI - 2/8 was the more common acceptance) NYU: 3/9 Harvard: 3/2 UCLA: 2/9 Northwestern: n/a UNC: 3/14 Notify before CAA: 5 Notify during CAA: 1 Notify after CAA: 3 Range of first notification: Berkeley: Feb. 11th - March 5th; mid Feb. most common. Chicago: Jan. 30th - March 3rd; late Jan./early Feb. most common. Columbia: Feb. 9th - March 6th; mid Feb. most common Yale: Feb. 15th - Feb. 28th; mid - late Feb. most common. Princeton: Feb. 8th - March 4th; early March most common. NYU: March 1st - March 12th; early March most common. Harvard: Feb. 27th - March 8th; early March most common. UCLA: Feb. 9th - Feb. 18th; mid Feb. most common. Northwestern: Feb. 16th - March 3rd; mid Feb. most common. UNC: March 1st - March 17th; early - mid March most common. Conclusions: This was not a useful exercise. Programs tend to notify within a established date range <1 month, regardless of CAA. The years closest to 2013 regarding CAA timing are 2007 and 2011, and for both, decisions tended to come after the conference. Other conclusions: This was a welcome distraction. The most popular notification date was February 14th. Admissions committees are so romantic.

A potentially comforting thought: CAA is relatively early this year (Feb. 13-16), so decisions should roll in earlier, too, in keeping with the recent CAA bump from mid/late February to early, and the corresponding nudge in admissions results!

These replies... yikes. that might be helpful for the MA vs. PhD question. Anecdotally, the best advice I got from my undergrad advisor was to avoid MA programs where staying on for a PhD wasn't an option. I wish I had taken his advice. Otherwise, I second the above - I looked at the authors of recent books and articles that I admired in my field. I also asked my undergraduate advisor and professors for their suggestions. And I did what everyone does, but few will admit because it sounds too much like shoddy "research": I made a list of cities I wanted to live in, of dream schools based on name/reputation, and then I looked at the faculty in my field at those schools. You're a junior, and so you've got lots of time. The replies above make fair points - research is an important part of graduate school, and it is important to be proactive.You're also... a junior, so you don't need to worry about perfectly executing the Major Parts of Being an Art Historian just yet. You asked a bad question, big deal. Best of luck! I hope you're not scared off for good, and that you come back for more specific advice once you've narrowed down your list.

From the application: "Do Not include images since doing so will limit the amount of text you can upload." I doubt they're picky about that point if you can get it in under 500 kbs. Didn't mean to cause alarm!

I was surprised to see that some schools, including UPenn, ask for a document with no images - definitely read the specifications carefully.

I would cut images entirely before cutting too deep into bibliography, particularly if you are dealing with major works that your POI is going to know inside and out. I left the [fig. #] in text, provided a one page list of illustrations, and then explained in a footnote that images were omitted for length, please see attached illustration list, PDF with images available upon request. This is how we get around strict page limits for book proposals at work, so I co-opted that strategy. You've got options! It helped, though, that I was dealing with canonical works in my field. I kept one image tucked in the illustration list - a comparison, only because I spent a lot of time on the IR overlay.

I took a screenshot of the whole thing and then promptly forgot about it because TGIF etc. I just tracked it down - thank you! I'm incomplete, too. No official GRE scores, but they're in - just need to be matched to my app. Safety in incomplete numbers.

Where are you logging in? When I try to get back to application, which I submitted on Friday, it says: Access Denied You may submit only one application for admission to graduate study per academic year.

http://i.imgur.com/W2keG.gif

"We seem to have achieved consensus that a disproportionate amount of attention is allotted to graduates of particularly flashy name brand institution." I don't think that's necessarily true, and that's where I disagree with losemygrip. S/he claims, "You went to Yale. They're not going to care about the GPA," but that's overly reductive. Adcomms care about GPA, and if you had a steady 3.4 average for all four years, Yale or not, that would be a red flag. Adcomms care about where you went to school, but look at the current graduate students at the top schools you mentioned, and look at their undergraduate backgrounds. You're going to find as many strong mid-level UG institutions as Ivies. I don't have 20+ years experience in ARTH. I worked in the private sector for years before circling back to Art History, and I will tell you that outside of academia, the list of name brand institutions runs much deeper - Duke, WashU, Rice, Notre Dame, Georgetown, USC, UCLA, UNC... all major draws for employers. Are you on an adcomm, losemygrip? It would be good to know what program to avoid, although I suppose I will be able to tell from my "'Tis thee who art ..." decision letter. Also, "faculty hires at state or lower ranked institutions frequently hail from same 5 art history PhDs: Harvard, Berkeley, Yale, Columbia and, with greater variation, Princeton/NYU/Chicago" - is exactly why users on this board who want to become professors and are weighing one mid-level PhD program against another should pack it up and try something else.

Adcomms get grade inflation better than anyone, and you're talking about a school where the median GPA is 3.6+, including the hard sciences. 3.4 in ARTH is going to be a red flag. That said, I still think you're a very strong candidate! Just picking on losemygrip cause s/he's wrong.