Lemminkainen

The reason why I just started taking Arabic is that for a lot of my undergraduate career, I was planning to enter a PhD program in mathematics. I only fully acknowledged to myself how powerful my need to go for history was last year, and, unfortunately, my school only offers starting Arabic courses in the fall semester, so I could only start in the fall. I gave this explanation in my SOP or in some supporting document for every school that I applied to.

Thanks for your compassionate and thoughtful advice! I guess that at this point, all I can do is wait. I forgot to mention this in my first post, but my biggest anxiety was about languages-- I was a bit worried that my Arabic isn't good enough to satisfy the programs I'm applying to.

So, I've plunged headlong into the graduate admissions process in History, and I'm realizing that terrifyingly, unlike in undergrad, I have almost no clue about my prospects for admission, apart from the assurances of my recommendation-writers (one of whom, who has a PhD from Princeton, runs my school's graduate admissions, and taught me in a grad-level research seminar, told me that he thought I would thrive at a top program and that my background gave me an interesting hook). So I figured I might seek some commentary from the more knowledgeable folk here. I'm a senior at a top-20 undergrad institution in the South. I'll be graduating with Bachelor's degrees in history and mathematics. My GPA in the former is above 4.0 (my school gives an A+), and my overall GPA is around 3.95. On the GRE, I scored 99th percentile in Verbal, 96th in Quantitative, and 92nd in Writing. I've taken five research seminars, one at the graduate level, and plan to take two more my last semester. I speak French and Spanish quite well, and can basically read them fluently. I've just begun to learn Arabic. I have three letters of recommendation from accomplished professors who love me and are enthusiastic about my candidacy and taught me in research seminars. I want to do a comparative, post-Orientalist imperial history of the US and Britain with a focus on their involvement in the Middle East. My personal statement discussed both this and the extra assets that I would bring to history research because of my mathematics background-- and my writing sample (which is a seminar research paper thoroughly grounded in primary sources, and makes use of secondary sources) is outside my planned field of study, but intended to be demonstrative of my special intellectual virtues. I've already applied to Ohio State, Harvard, Vanderbilt, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, and UT-Austin. I'm also planning to apply to Cornell and Oxford. Should I be concerned about the prospect of not getting in anywhere/find some lower-tier schools to drop a line to/think about picking up a master's/work harder to look for a job? Or am I probably okay? Thank you for your guidance.