dr. t

I've said it before and I'll say it again: going through January permanently sloshed is a great plan.

Not a forum for homework help. Locking the thread.

Not that common at most institutions. Sometimes at public colleges.

Again, this is going to vary by institution. Some have pretty strict cut-offs mandated by the university. For state schools, it may not affect your admissions, but in may cases whether or not you get awarded university vs. departmental funding (usually a $10,000+ difference) is purely dependent on your quantifiable metrics.

The distinction has some meaning, but it's also a lot easier to find a ranking list than it is to find a comparative list of placement rates for the past 5 years. I don't think a single metric is a good evaluation tool for anything, whether it's my program's rank or my GRE scores, but it counts as a warning sign.

It's pretty easy to call this sort of answer "facile" if you haven't watched friend after brilliant friend struggle to make ends meet after graduating, or if you yourself have never had to live on poverty wages. Those of us who have tend to find any other answer shockingly privileged and naive. For the record: I attend an Ivy. I love my program and doing what I do. I have an incredibly supportive department in all ways that matter. I would not do it again.

Absolutely - these aren't contradictory points. They've always been the places where the most jobs are. That there are way fewer now is why we're in a tailspin.

Ish.

The problem is that these are exactly the places that supported the teetering job market for so long, but they're also precisely the institutions that are the most threatened. These are the schools that are going under, merging, closing. I think the market has gotten much worse in the past 3 years.

Strong disagree. It's very straightforward: it is not at all worth it. Ranking of programs isn't some arbitrary thing. The reason why Harvard etc. always top the list is not simply because everyone's heard of them. They also have a lot more money to throw around, give their students a more reasonable teaching load, and can bring in important professors every week to socialize. The advantages are manifold. That said, ranking for grad progams isn't exactly a science. I definitely wouldn't go as far down the list as the 50s though. 10s at best.

Eeeh, those grades and GRE would be a pretty immediate desk reject at most places. Grades are one of those things that don't matter except if you don't have them.

Foucalt has had a pretty large impact on both the humanities and social sciences. Every professor trained after ca. 1980 fits this description.

Would that actually be such a bad thing? What are you getting that is worth this sort of stress, expense, and anxiety?

There are some points in life - and oh dear God do I feel old saying this - where the only point of the issue that matters is "did you do the thing." Changes of medication, mental health support, and professors who are bad at using online grading systems can all garner sympathy for you if you did not do the thing, but sometimes that's not enough to outweigh the fact that you didn't do the thing. When you don't do the thing, there can often be unavoidable consequences with life-changing impact. That's adulthood. And this is a case of you not doing the thing. There were many places for you to take agency here. Whether it was at the point of your final GPA or not, getting a B/B- on assignments in graduate school is a severe point of concern. You earned those grades. Despite your perception of stigma, you nevertheless had health issues you didn't report, so you did not get the accommodations you might have - or at least an avenue of legal recourse. And whether or not you knew specifically you had a B- on the class, you must have at least been aware your presentation, a large portion of your grade, was nowhere near the standards expected of you. The program administration could still show some mercy, but they were under no particular obligation to do so, nor, in an accelerated M* program (which usually having high non-complete rates), were they ever even likely to do so, whatever they have told you. And I have to disagree with @Bird Vision - you have not proven to them that you are capable of doing the work. I don't say all this to be mean, or to beat up on you after you've obviously had such a difficult and trying time. Moves are hard, new cities are hard, and grad school ain't exactly easy. But this wasn't unfair, and you can't stew on the treatment you've received because if you do, you can't move forward. Learn lessons from this as to what sort of support network you need to have in place to move to a new town, to start a new life, whether you go back to graduate school or not. You've already paid too high a price not to get something out of the experience.

You can't make them do work they're not willing to do. Some of them will be perfectly happy with a B or C, or are taking the course S/NC. Do your best, don't stress it, and don't go above and beyond - there's no reward for it.

Or look at a 2 year MA, or a Fullbright app. There's nothing particularly notable about taking more undergraduate courses, especially if you can be doing instead of just sitting in class. A couple semesters of, say, Arabic looks good, but a year in Marrakesh (or Seville) looks better, for example - and it would probably actually give you more useful skills. Going in straight from undergraduate is very rare these days, in any case.

McCormick is an old adviser and Conant is on my diss committee, and of course the latter was the former's student. McC is fairly absolutist when it comes to languages (as befits a trained and ardent philologist), but Jonathan just took a student with German and little Latin, so there's possibly a bit of hope for you there? You should also consider learning Arabic. The list of professors is solid! Others, like Kyle Harper, are not at institutions I can recommend attending in this job market - even PSU is a bit touch and go there. Just looking at recent acceptances, I don't see you having a good shot at any of these programs without a good MA or a Fullbright year, for what that's worth.

This is super important. Often when this happens, funding is awarded on a performance basis. This makes the cohort dynamic... bad.

But to the initial question, yes of course. If they cause you problems over the question, it's not a place you'd want to be, anyway.

Yes! And while I don't know the historiography, it sounds like an interesting project.

If you want to look at how the theology or religious praxis formed in tandem with identity, then you can comfortably find a place in a religion department, either at a full divinity school or something like the Committee of the Study of Religion at Harvard. However, as it stands, you're posing the interest as a historical question. For an M*, the same division stands. If you want to go more into the theology, do an MTS or a ThM. If you want to go more into social/cultural history, do an MA.

You'd be aiming more towards Tara than Hal? Feel free to ping me if you have any questions.

There's not much purpose to it these days, unless you're trying to figure out what you want to do with history. A vestigial appendage from when you didn't necessarily need the PhD to go into academia.

It depends. A master's thesis is kind of a camel - too long for an article, too short (and too early in your career) for a book. That's a lot of work for little purpose. A thesis may help you focus, which seems to be something of a constant refrain, but if you decide not to do it, I would try to have an article under review instead by the time you apply to PhD programs. This is what I did.

What do you mean, a dead end? Terminal in the program? That's fine. It would be very strange if a thesis was not seen as a stepping stone to a PhD. Do you want to do a PhD?