hdunlop

I know you were kidding, but people do it. Actually I used to work in local news and one of our anchors wore shorts with his suit all summer. You can do it, but you need to be used to it or it will take you out of your game.

I just did my first and hopefully last Skype interview before Christmas and my advice would be that you should try and make it absolutely no different. Dress the same, prepare the same, consider even leaving your house and coming back for the interview to get in the right mindset. The technological hassles (lag if you're lucky; worse if you're not) are enough that you shouldn't also be wondering why it feels weird sitting on your chair with no pants.

My fiance actually works at an NGO for a PhD (English) who either didn't make tenure track or hated the school where she did so, I can't remember which. She did not do Peace Corps I don't believe, but tons of management there did. It's definitely a strong idea.

I was being somewhat facetious but did get into HLS, which makes one more law program than PhD program so far. We'll see what comes. My backup backup plan is practicing law.

I also don't think backup plans necessarily need to be easier.

Depends on where you get in, I suppose.

Professor of law.

What a helpful remark, especially coming as it does from someone who posts four times a day.

Yeah, I had been beaten down enough that I actually took this as good news. The numbers for 06-09 PHDs, which seem best to use since theyre the folks who are looking most recently, seem not much worse than a coinflip. This is much more promising than the mantra of most professors I spoke with, that a tenure-track gig is like winning the lottery. Probably what they mean is getting a good tenure-track gig in a place you want to live is like winning the lottery. But still.

https://twitter.com/dick_nixon

Congratulations!

Yeah. I did about 1,200 except for Princeton. We'll see.

Hm. Well, we'll see if I screwed it up. Princeton is 1,000 words. Chicago says 2500 words. Stanford and Northwestern say two pages single spaced. UVA and Cornell say 1-2 pages but don't specify spacing.

Is it? Most of the schools I am applying to say 1-2 pages and I made the most of that space.

Writing a SOP has been the hardest part of this from me and it's absolutely amazing to see the iterations from what I did last year in my failed attempt to what I did this summer when I thought I had my stuff together a bit more to what I came up with after meeting with POIs this fall to what I came up with after talking to another professor in the field I want to study with who doesn't take students yet that was able to put the whole thing together. It's really come a long way. Who knows if it's enough, but it's night and day. The reason I share this is because I think you should take as many cracks at this as you can. Write from scratch a couple times rather than starting one document and editing it. Then cobble together the most interesting story, people you've read, questions you ask and ways to try to answer them, and of course all the stuff about each individual school regarding professors and institutes and whatever else (this last one is really minimal in law statements for instance but really important in grad school statements). Hopefully you'll have something when you're done that you can then edit together into a decent document. I've been told that you should have a hook at the start and it's OK if it's biographical but if so it needs to be very, very short -- have a personality and identity but don't spend more than literally two or three sentences with stuff about high school or whatever.

This is at the heart of what I wish I understood -- not just heard or knew but understood -- last admissions cycle.

I don't know how much of that you should use or not (I think in law school it would be killer; I'm less sure for PhD). And, as a private person myself, I get your reticence. But for what it's worth, I don't think that's a pitiful story, it's a success story. I don't think professors would pity you for it unless you wrote it quite differently.

We worked together on the same projects in our office. In a sense, I was his supervisor. Which is weird. To the second question: yes. You make some really good points. I think, or at least naively hope, I'm clean of most of those issues, all of which I'm painfully aware given my professional work. I'd love to engage about this in PM.

How about this one. Am I better with two history professors (one full who I took a nondegree grad class from, one associate from my middle-ranked liberal arts college who I did my undergrad thesis with) and a history PHD who works as a military command historian that I worked with, or three history professors (the third an emeritus I took a bunch of classes from in undergrad). The undergrad experience was 8 years ago.

Unlike some, I'm here because I don't have all the answers already, so I appreciate your response to me. But I did want to clarify something. Me: "According to the professors I'd been in contact with," You: "Also, guess who's part of the admission committee? The professor whom you're seeking to work with. [...] In response to hdunlop, no one, besides the admission committee, understands fully what holds weight and what doesn't in applications." Perhaps I should have made more clear that the professors I've been in contact with were the professors with whom I seek to work.

LeventeL, I had a 3.9 UG GPA, a 170/161/5.5 GRE, a Master's in a related field, and six years of professional experience in a field related to my field of study. Yet I went 0 for 3 last cycle. According to the professors I'd been in contact with, my biggest problem was that I hadn't fully thought through and researched what I wanted to do as a graduate student. I haven't applied successfully yet so take it with a grain of salt, but I don't think you have much to lose being a bit more specific.

Fair point Prof Plum, no doubt that academia is more restrictive than many professions, and if you're heart-set on a certain attribute in particular like the examples you noted I can see how it would lead to real problems. That said, it seems less restrictive than others, because at least you roll the dice on a huge range of places rather than something like finance that's pretty much lower Manhattan or politics that's pretty much DC or whatever. That's something I'm comfortable with: there are obviously places I'd prefer over others, but I'm pretty open with the idea of seeing what happens after I graduate (and, with the exception of where I'm at now, even with school itself). I just wanted to put out a voice in defense of small towns!

I know you're speaking to an audience that is not me, but man I hate it when people knock two stoplight towns. I'm not applying to a school in the exact town I live in because I've lived here seven years and I'm tired of it, and while I'm applying to several in the region I'm hoping ones outside of it accept me because I'd prefer to do something new for a while. But if I pull this off, I *want* to live in a two stoplight town, because I'm from one and they're the perfect places to be a family. It's possible to have regional preferences for school in your late twenties without refusing to live in the "middle of nowhere" when you're done.

I'm more of an era or movement guy but it's hard not to find compelling Johnson and Nixon and their counterpart Khrushchev, essentially self-made individuals who through bitterness and drive propelled themselves to the highest office -- and went down in flames. If the atomic bomb counts as a historical figure it's up there too -- an engineering marvel that proceeded to hold hostage its own creators. I'm into history because real life can be more Shakespearean than Shakespeare.