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Although it's likely a bit outdated now, this reminded me of the SAA's publication that attempted to rank PhD programs in archaeology; click here for link. I believe Michigan (U of), Cal (Berkeley), and Arizona (U of) fell in the top 3 positions, while ASU was 5th; not sure about the 4th spot. Unfortunately, I don't have the full list, but I think that this survey did a good job of finding a way to assess what matters the most. The five most important factors, in order: research opportunities for students, graduate funding, curriculum & quality of university library (tie), success of faculty in competing for funds, & a strong emphasis on method & theory. I interpret that as fit, funding, fit, funding, & not-quite-either-one (closer to fit, though).

Semi-related: any advice on how to dual boot Windows with Mac OS? I can send you a PM, if that's easier.

Nitro stouts (& others) are awesome! I wish I had the vaguest clue about the "beer science" behind Nitro vs. regular carbonation.

First off, I highly doubt you'll have any offers rescinded. Seeing as you've been offered funding, I'm guessing programs will know it's an exception to the rule. As for the rest: you're not alone in those feelings and worries! I'm at the program that was my top choice when applying and loving it, but I still feel anxious sometimes. One thing to understand is that going to grad school is inherently selfish, to at least some degree; you're going to a place that suits your needs in the short and long term to reach your goals. Go with the decision you know is best for you, then take that opportunity and run with it. It will likely be more disappointing if you chose somewhere to please everyone else, then struggled and didn't reach your full potential. Taking your mind off it all is something of a two-part process. The first is to take your mind off of everything as much as possible: exercise, hang out with friends, indulge in a hobby that's not related to your academic work. The second is the more realistic part: acknowledge that your worries exist but are justified, and allow yourself to muddle through them. When I'm nervous, I try to remember why I'm so passionate about what I do, and think of the daunting task ahead as another step on the journey towards my "big picture" goals. I also like to think of the so-called Zone of Proximal Development; it reminds me that small risks and medium jumps are necessary for growth, but I still have to be cognizant of when I'm pushing myself so far that the risks outweigh the benefits. But, that's just my experience; you may have a different approach to rationalizing what you're doing and handling your worries. Hope that helped!

May we all clink pint glasses at AAAs and SAAs some day, graduate degrees in hand! I'll wear a grumpy cat shirt so you can find me.

I would neither be alive nor able to even get out of bed, feed myself, or sleep normally without the anti-depressants (and other medications) I'm taking. It is frustrating to know I have to spend at least $30 or $40 monthly for a cocktail of things I can't stop taking, but after 8 or so years, I've not only accepted that as being necessary, but as something to embrace, being doing so helps me be more at peace with my mental health status. I've learned that who I am as a person isn't dependent on what I'm diagnosed with; I spent too long of a long time seeing my mental health as being incompatible with being happy, healthy, and successful. Now it's a point of pride to see how much I've accomplished, but it is still an uphill battle every day. If you can physically function most days, i.e. complete basic tasks, and – more importantly – if you don't want to take an SSRI or NRI, tell your therapist that. If you neither want nor need to, that's your call. It also takes months of trial and error to find the best possible option, and that process can be as crippling as the reason for the Rx. I've found that I still get in a serious funk once in a while, and as silly as it sounds, things like changing my eating habits and how frequently I exercise always make an enormous difference. Ditto regular therapy, and talking it out with friends. I suggest changing all the above and giving the new routine a few weeks before considering a medication. I can't stress the physiological aspects and truly (frustratingly) all-consuming and chronic nature of mental health problems/MDD enough, and I personally wouldn't wish the financial, emotional, and physical burdens of psychiatric medications on anyone who can function normally without them. But, that's just my personal experience and opinion; I'm no doctor.

Woohoo! Congrats!

It really does exist! It's really like 2 fantasy leagues: one for the riders, one for the bills. As for feeling weird, I remember being 3 or 4, and deciding I wanted to be a "cowboy," even though I was a little girl in an NYC suburb. No idea where it came from, but I've always had a soft spot for all things western. PBR has its season opener at Madison Square Garden, so I got into it that way. My S.O. grew up surrounded by ranches and cowboys, so it's nice to have someone who enjoys it, too. I just love the sport, and all the rowdy, no-frills fun in beautiful (more often than not) places; it balances the grad school intellectualism and seriousness nicely.

ASU has a Native Studies program which offers an MS track focused on "Indigenous Rights & Social Justice," and they a very strong anthropology program - I know the latter really stresses the importance of inter/trandisciplinary research, which would be to your benefit, since you're overlapping anthro & native studies areas of research. I don't know their Native Studies program's reputation or funding situation, though. TAMU has a strong focus on the peopling of the Americas, but it looks like you want something more contemporary... University of Oklahoma had a great program, but sadly, Joe Watkins isn't teaching there at present (NPS Chief Archaeologist, I believe), so I'm not sure if anything's changed there. Cal (Berkeley) has a few faculty members who focus on some of those topics, for sure. I don't know about their departments or course offerings, but the University of Alaska schools & UBC have a good track record as far as collaboration & native concerns go. University of Arizona seems to have many Native Studies related graduate programs, but I don't know anything about it. Hope that helps! Your areas of interest made me recall some papers I've read recently, but I can't remember their authors... brain fart fail. :/

i know that feel, bro. i get carded every time i try to buy a drink, save for the couple of places here & towns i've worked in where i am/was a regular. when i'm home in nyc, once in a blue moon, i'll present my license and other forms of ID, & super anxious bartenders will still refuse to serve me. if i'm anything like my parents, i'll still get carded at 30. anyway, as others have said, i think it's an ongoing trial-&-error process, with situations lacking alternatives & requiring self-responsibility to avoid tangible negative results being the most common catalysts. i had a precocious change in how i saw the world at a very young age. when i was 10 years old, i lost a paternal cousin in the 9/11 attacks, & some of my classmates lost parents. living in the wake of all that when it was just a few miles away really gave me a mental & emotional run for my money, & i didn't really have any support or guidance through my grieving process. in short, it made me decide that i wasn't at all religious in any way anymore, & made me wonder about heavy things like death, politics, forensics, feelings, etc. at a young age. in 20/20 hindsight, it was probably the age that the earliest signs of what would later become crippling depression & anxiety, so that certainly didn't help. i guess my point is that particular experience of mine is an ongoing one from which i still learn, in addition to it having set off all kinds of early growth in emotional maturity. emotional maturity aside, the rest for me is mostly a byproduct of kicking myself for being an idiot, i.e., learning by experience, mostly in my teens. i was terrible with money as an undergrad; now, with loans in hand, my mind is on building good credit & staying financially independent. for academic maturity, i learned a lot as an undergrad (17 to 21). now, i can put the proverbial boot in my own rear end, so to speak; i've matured in the work ethic department by leaps & bounds in my early 20s. also, it's easy to conflate maturity & "knowing what the heck is going on & what you're doing at all times." if there even are people in the world who've mastered the latter concept, they are few & far between. i think learning to strike a happy balance between a foundation of self-reliance & asking for help when you need it is more key than knowing the what-how-why of everything in "adult" life. it requires acute self awareness, & acute social awareness, too, which i think can really only be gained through life experiences. (edited for brevity!)

I agree with zipykido: I would wait until you're received all decisions & know where you're at in terms of funding. I withdrew two of my applications right after being accepted & committing to my top choice program, & they seemed grateful that I let them know sooner rather than later. If there's absolutely no way you're going to UMass, though, regardless of funding etc., I would let them know about that decision (in a gentle/polite way) as soon as you can.

If you have Boston questions, shoot me a PM! I did my undergrad there & I loved it.

I applied to MA programs after spending a year & change working after finishing my undergrad track, & although I'm in a different field, I also ran into this issue. I knew what kind of work I was interested in, but I was vague on the specifics. Honestly, the thesis that I'm slowly ambling towards now is almost nothing like what I proposed in my SOPs & correspondences as examples of possible thesis topics, & it's nothing like what I had envisioned myself doing, but it's shaping up to be a really interesting data set that should offer me a tabula rasa of sorts for research questions. In my case, being honest about not being 100% on a specific topic, but speaking passionately about the general areas worked out just fine for me (you're in a different field, though, so YMMV); I think professors expect changes like that for some — many? — students, especially those fresh out of undergrad, at least in archaeology & anthropology.

As an aside, just because I got all excited about the title: I love Pro Bull Riding PBR. Fan Club member, I go to as many Built Ford Tough Series & Touring Pro events as I can (along with general rodeos), I have a shirt full of signatures from various riders I got to meet on the dirt, & I even participate in fantasy PBR (yes, it's really a thing!). Okay. End fangirling. To be on topic, though: I think Pabst Blue Ribbon PBR is okay. I prefer its taste to green & clear bottle beers (Heineken, Corona, etc.), but there are other cheap beers I like better (Coors, mostly). My S.O. & I usually get cases of PBR or Miller Lite (his drink, not mine!) to keep around the house. As far as reliably cheap beers go, I prefer PBR to other cheap &/or light beers, but if price isn't an issue, I prefer better stuff.

I've had the same experience: Macs seem to last longer (if you take really good care of them.. damn my klutziness & my laptop's water sensitivity!), & I strongly prefer the Mac OS styles to Windows ones, although I can work fine in either. However, I might argue that PCs are a better choice for anthropology — perhaps this is specific to archaeology — because of the greater availability of software for Windows. For example, GIS is pretty much essential to my "on season" work in the summer, yet ESRI (the standard in GIS software, as far as I know) only produces software for Windows. That said, I have no experience running Windows on a Mac, and limited experience with other software on PCs (Koha, Re:Discovery, et al) but not Macs, i.e., I don't know whether they're Windows-only programs. As long as you're in an academic environment or a well-funded professional environment, though, I'm sure there should be some degree of availability of & accessibility to Windows for software use.

Send me a PM - it depends on your research interests & what kind of work you'd like to go into, so I might not be super helpful depending on all that. That said, I only had one person who helped me through the application politics, but nobody to help me with career/work advice, so I'm happy to share what knowledge I have.

I'm starting to prepare abstracts for conferences (papers & posters alike) for the first time, & it's totally nerve-wracking! I've only ever prepared talks for classes or small professional settings where I know most or all of the attendees on a first name basis. The topic I want to look into is a sliiightly touchy one: mortuary archaeology is my area of focus, so I'll be dealing with burials, cemeteries, missionizing & ensuing changes in identity + religiosity... woof. Fortunately, I've read enough about what to do — or, sometimes, what not to do... like. Ever. Seriously. — when dealing with sensitive issues that I hope I'm off to a good start in terms of getting in touch with tribal councils for information, permission, etc. Still, it's unknown territory, so I'm all kinds of worried about doing the right thing morally & ethically by respecting Catholic & Native concerns, and creating high quality research worth sharing with hundreds of seasoned professionals at the same time.

Re: calling & emailing departments & POIs: always! Make face time, too, if you can; conferences are a great way to meet potential collaborators, advisors, professors, et al. I'd also like to echo the sentiments above about asking current professors or other mentors for recommendations. On a similar note: read, read, & read some more! Even though I'm already in a program, I still pay very close attention to all the citations in the papers I read, especially the ones most related to my fields of interest. Try scanning through papers from, say, the last 10-15 years in your areas of interest; you may start to notice names & institutions that come up often. Even if you don't apply to work with every professor or apply to every department that appears frequently, it may offer a nice starting point for program searches, which you can trim down based on factors that are important to you after you have a handle on the general "who" & "where" deal.

I'm assuming you're using eHRAF, tDAR, & similar databases? Either way, I think academic integrity — also, y'know, legal mumbo-jumbo, e.g., plagiarizing — is extremely important in contemporary anthropology, at least in the US (I can't speak to anywhere else in the world's academic M.O.s). You would be hard-pressed to sustain an academic or professional career if you fell short in the honesty department even once. In earlier 20th century literature (pre-1950s or so), academic values were… different, to say the least, so that is problematic. Unfortunately, all you can do may be to make a point of discussing paradigms, political climate, social factors, etc. that may have had an effect on the questions asked & how the research was done. For example, whereas inquiry into craniofacial morphologies to determine "race" was a big field of interest a century ago, we now use craniofacial morphologies to consider different research questions. Really, you should be discussing potential sources of bias or error — from yourself, and the researchers whose work you discuss — no matter how old your sources are; I think post-processual theory really made this the standard in archaeology, so I imagine it's the same in other subfields of anthropology as well. Another means of mitigating problems of bias & academic integrity is to critically analyze the methods used by researchers. Many people produce & publish critiques of "old standards": the validity of the results, problems with the methods used, & so on. So, in addition to citing, say, a Binford piece from the 1970s, you may also want to search critiques of that piece, in order to discuss potential shortcomings. Also, as far as your own work goes, I would advise sharing your field notes with your supervisor. Depending on their supervision/advising style, you may want to ask how much you should share & how often. I've always made my field notes, bibliographies (background/uncited research included), drafts, etc. available to my work supervisors; I find that it helps me stay on top of my work instead of rushing things at the last minute (I'm a terrible procrastinator), &, as my mentors, they may be able to offer me more advice on the best methods I can use, such as a recommendation of a paper, or what chemical or statistical analysis would make the most sense to use. So, for me, the more data shared, the merrier. However, this isn't everyone's learning/teaching/working style; you may want to talk with your supervisor directly about what their expectations & what your goals are. I'm not sure how well I answered your question, but I hope that helps

catsrgods: what are your research interests, & what kind of work are you hoping to get into? I spent some time between undergrad & starting my MA working in California; if you're willing to look outside of LA, I may have some recommendations of places to work. Feel free to shoot me a PM, too!

I may end up doodling it by hand, once my abstract due dates and presentation schedules calm down a bit.

Have you ever tried zucchini pasta? A spiralizer can be on the pricier side, but it's a worthwhile investment if you bring kitchenware with you when you move; a peeler with teeth is a pretty good alternative. Basically, in lieu of regular pasta, you spiralize zucchini, and season + sauce it as you would pasta (example here). You can also treat spaghetti squash like pasta, too (another example). A few zucchinis or one spaghetti squash (M to L size) can yield a lot of food if you're only feeding yourself, and spaghetti squash keeps well in the freezer for the most part.

It depends on what you want to do, I think. For example, I had a friend who's specifically interested in cultural heritage management; they went to Sheffield, which was an ideal program for them. I considered Durham when I was applying to MA/MSc programs last year, as I have an interest in paleopathology, but was worried about being too restricted as far as class choices would go, and wasn't sold on the idea of going abroad for an MA/MSc. I get the impression if you have a very clear idea of not only a subfield, but a specialty within that subfield (such as paleopathology or cultural heritage management, rather than, say, biological anthropology or archaeology), some UK programs are certainly worth looking into.

God, please get an enormous Maine Coon mix and name it Hodor!

Is this the professor's first time teaching (outside of a position held while they were a PhD student/candidate)? If so, I agree that this is good advice: Granted, I'm a first year M.A. student in a totally different field, so take this with a grain of salt: I'd rather pump the brakes on research than eat the "W" and drop to part time status. I had more than one "W" on my undergrad transcript, which was miserable enough; I intend to never have another, no matter what the situation. Also, part time status affects funding sources, access to campus resources, etc., for grad students at my current university, so that's something to consider, too. If the professor is really brand new, they might still be able to empathize as far as juggling workloads/projects goes, so it's worth asking about expectations, due dates, and workload before withdrawing.