dr. t

Well I for one hope you're right and I'm wrong ?

I don't think this is unfortunate, I think this is quite wise! I know that, coming straight from undergraduate, there is an sense of immediacy with respect to every part of your life. As someone who started his MA at 27 before continuing to the PhD, please believe me when I say this is not the case with grad school. This is even more true if you look at the current horrible no good very bad state of the academic job market. Something that's not precisely on topic, but which I should state at some point: were I considering doing a PhD now, I would under no circumstances do it, regardless of the quality of the program that accepted me or my enthusiasm and interests. And I am not burned out on graduate school. I love graduate school; it is the best experience of my life. There is just no hope on the job market. It is worse than it was in 2009-2011. In a decade, SLCs, which formed the overwhelming majority of job listings, will almost certainly cease to exist as a concept. R1s will persist, but academia is going to be unrecognizable. That's not a thing to dive into.

This will get you into a graduate program. It will not get you into a top graduate program. An MA is a bad place to pick up a new language. Ah, so later and Insular history. All three are quality scholars, but have you looked at where they currently have students placed?

Who, specifically, do you want to work with? It's definitely possible if you have a great deal of strength in other unusual or hard to learn languages (e.g. Arabic, Greek, fluent in German, etc.). But with just middling French, yes, I'd say impossible. Most of your competitors will be fluent in French and have a full 4 years of Latin, using both in their undergraduate thesis.

Most likely, you have to learn to process written information faster. Reading for argument is a skill, and no book should really take you more than 2-3 hours.

Not that shocking. You'd have to look outside the department, most likely. I don't disagree, but there are other types of support here, one of which is just not being in this alone. I think this is... very optimistic. There are other ways for similar structures to happen even if you're instructor of record.

What allies do you have at the school? Is there a supportive (usually POC) professor to whom you can talk? This is not something you have to go through alone, nor should you, and if you try it will burn you out faster than anything. Whether or not this particular case has a good and satisfying resolution (spoilers: it probably does not), use this as an opportunity to explore the kind of support structure you need to deal with this sort of bullshit, and make sure it's in place for the next time.

We have the same problem, but only because so many of us got external fellowships *flex*.

*shrug* State schools gotta teach those classes. At some point we also have to start shouldering some of the blame for going.

Prioritize the summary. Grad students in general get pretty good at tearing something apart very quickly, but the ability to read and report on an argument you find distasteful with soft eyes is vital to academic success. The best final product will have no line between summary and critique - when you've really mastered the technique, you can even critique via the structure of your summary.

This is a wise interpretation. Be the change you want to see in the world.

E. Natalie Rothman, Brokering Empire: Trans-Imperial Subjects between Venice and Istanbul (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012). David A. Frick, Kith, Kin, and Neighbors : Communities and Confessions in Seventeenth-Century Wilno (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013). Michael Dietler, Archaeologies of Colonialism: Consumption, Entanglement, and Violence in Ancient Mediterranean France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010). Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages, 2018. Roni Ellenblum, Crusader Castles and Modern Histories (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Gillian Lee Weiss, Captives and Corsairs: France and Slavery in the Early Modern Mediterranean (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011). Joyce E. Chaplin, Subject Matter : Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, 1500-1676 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001). Martin Gravel, Distances, rencontres, communications: réaliser l’empire sous Charlemagne et Louis le Pieux, 2012. Warren Brown et al., eds., Documentary Culture and the Laity in the Early Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Seems a pretty good list to be getting on with.

One of the many joys the Ivies have to offer, alas. But it's true for some Ivies (and some departments) more than others.

Get out, even if it means leaving the program.

And also intentional irony ?

Why?

Yeah, but it's summer. Academic deadlines are always more like guidelines than rules, and it's worse in the summer.

It won't do your app any favors. Not reporting it will do your app fewer favors. The fact that some actions you've made in the past will limit your future options is a good lesson to learn.

I am inclined to agree.

A couple reasons come to mind immediately: 1) Schools with more prestige have more money and can support their graduate students better. Better-supported graduate students do better scholarship. 2) Students at prestigious schools encounter a greater number of prestigious professors, and therefor have better models of how to perform academic intelligence. 3) Name recognition matters on applications - prestigious schools offer a way to winnow a 100 person application file because the people they produce are, within reason, known quantities.

For me, a large aspect of my mental health is proactively identifying and addressing the things I can control, even if they're uncomfortable. Graduate school is, at its core, self directed. A lot of what you've said here sounds like you need to acknowledge your own agency in this situation. Your PI gave you a smaller project to work on as a learning experience before assigning you a larger one, a project which you did not complete because you were unwilling to follow her advice and confront the student monopolizing the lab. You haven't done what she asked, and therefore she has not trusted you with the larger project. Once it became clear you were unable to help yourself in the way she expected of you, she stepped in. That's a reasonable sequence of events. Similarly, submitting an article with data from someone else's lab without their consent is a fairly large faux pas in many fields, and I would not be surprised if this angered the PI. If you want to get something out of this experience, and if you want to finish the degree, I would suggest that you set get a grasp of the tasks you have in front of you and the precise steps you need to take to complete them. This is not usually an adviser's responsibility, though they may help with the process. Good luck.

My net GPA when I was accepted to the MTS with a 4/5ths scholarship was 3.06. I had only got a 0.86 from my first undergraduate institution, then a 3.8 from the second one.

Studii fuit apud ueteribus et eruditissimis uiris ut eorum quorum miracula sanctis actibus pollere cernebant sagaci studio Christo auspice sine quo nihil boni agitur stilo promulgarent quatinus de praecedentium meritis imitando uel memoriae commendando uentura sobolis gloriaretur (It was a thing of passion among old and most learned men, that they should make known by the pen those among them, the miracles of whom they discerned with keen insight and by Christ’s help (without whom nothing good may come to pass) to be strong in holiness, since future generations might win themselves glory by imitating the good works of their ancestors and by being entrusted with their memory.) Just FYI.

I don't. There's no point to them. There aren't any exams except quals, and those are their own separate thing (for these, I did 500-1000 word precis of each item), and in-class notes have no utility for any papers. I did have a notebook I'd write in for class, but that's because it's a way I think through a problem, not for later reference.

Until you try Merovingian Latin, you are yet still a sweet summer child ☠️