dr. t

I'm really happy you've done well! I've just heard too many horror stories, personally.

I missed this a while back: you should absolutely not expect it. Academia - really, any professional arena - is very often a mediocre to shitty space. Never expect your colleagues to be a functional support network unless they have manifestly demonstrated otherwise.

The more seasoned posters here are probably tired of me banging on about languages for medievalists, but let's start there. Any PhD program of quality - and there's no reason to attend a PhD program which is not quality - will be looking for two modern research languages, typically French and German, in addition to Latin. They will have an abundance of candidates who meet this criteria. Exceptions to this rule usually come if an applicant has very good Latin but no French (everyone thinks French is very easy to acquire quickly), or if they have mastery of an unusual language (Greek, Arabic, Old Church Slavonic, whatever). These requirements exist for a very good reason: they are a starting place, and you will usually find you need to learn more languages as you continue your studies. Since my admission, I've picked up reading fluency in Spanish, Dutch, and Italian, for example. Without these skills, you can't get your head around the literature you need or do good work, nor can you work with primary sources. And that's why the requirements mark a program of quality - those who do not have the requirement are taking students who are not well-prepared to succeed. I say all this to highlight the point that language acquisition must be your primary goal before you apply to PhD programs, and that you should feel that you need to acquire not only Latin, but also German. Further, Latin is hard for most people to master. Even with 2 years of Latin in your MA, you will probably have to continue working on it as you go for your PhD. Finally, if you're still in the early stages of acquiring Latin, you can't really use it to work with primary sources, meaning you will have a weak writing sample. Consequently, I would advise that you take a year (or even two!) before you apply to MA programs working in the world and picking up the skills you need. To your specific question on which MA programs, UCBoulder, Fordham, UChicago MAPSS, and St. Andrews are good programs, and I know a lot of people who have graduated from them to continue on to PhD programs. I don't have a fantastic opinion of WMU's program, but it's not the worst. Avoid Columbia. I would add the following programs: UCLA (I think this still exists), Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard Divinity, Yale/Yale Div.

You have an adviser. They're better at this than you are, for no other reason than the fact they've done it before. They've given you advice. How you treat their advice will determine both their opinion of you and the kind and quality of advice they will give you in the future. Choose your course wisely.

Unnecessary, even to prove the point. First warning.

Different programs do different things, but I will say this: academics can only be rigorous if they're funded, and a dumb student with lots of financial support will almost certainly write a better dissertation than a smart student with no support. If a program does not offer a livable stipend, cover tuition, provide affordable health care, and provide access to pots of money for travel and research, it is not worth applying to, never mind attending. My process was to identify the professors with whom I wished to work, and then to narrow down the list by excluding programs that offered insufficient resources. Aim for a final list of 4-6.

Yeeeeeah, that's too far on a lot a levels. Don't try to be a psychologist on the internet or try to explain to someone why they don't work as a person. It diminishes the rest of what you're saying.

@TGCA is the administrator you need to contact for an account deletion. However, be aware that deleting an account will not delete your posts.

I also think it is, but it's a dangerous thing to do on a public forum, particularly if there isn't a clear line between asking for help and simply venting. For what it's worth, I read @Chanandler's post as being made in good faith as a call to self-evaluation. It's hard to phrase that in a way that doesn't come across as extremely harsh. For example, when @Sigaba tried to offer effectively the same critique, their advice was accepted, but it was not clear to me that their message was fully received. Chanandler's message, by contrast, was indeed fully received but not accepted. Neither managed to thread the needle. @Adelaide9216, you're totally correct that any criticism here is coming from a place of relative ignorance. But by posting here, you are explicitly inviting criticism from relative strangers. I know you know this because I have myself reminded you in the past that we on this forum are not as helpful as sources of advice and guidance when compared to those who know you directly, and you told me that you understood, but valued the outside perspective. That's what you were offered here, although on terms that would be hard for anyone to swallow, and it seems unfair to now use the fact that the perspective you have been offered is from the outside to dismiss it. As academics, it's incumbent upon us to remember that all readings of things we've written made in good faith are valid readings. That is, if someone reads you as arguing, saying, or doing something other than you think you've argued, said, or done, their interpretation is as valid - and possibly more valid - than yours as to what you've actually done. An adviser's description of your paper, for example, is almost certainly closer to what you're arguing than what you think you've argued. Any time you spot a disconnect between your and another's interpretation of your work, that should be a clear and evident warning sign that you haven't done what you intended.

The first thing I would do is look up the rules in the archives you're going to be using. For example, for my work, French libraries have very variable photography policies, while the local archives are require by the state to allow photographs and often have a photography rig for you to use if you want. Other archives allow photographs, but don't allow tripods. And a DSLR is clunky and hard to deal with if you don't have a tripod. I work on medieval diplomatic instrumenta - 12th to 13th c. legal documents - and I have found that for 95% of what I want to do, my cell phone or tablet camera is more than sufficient. I do have a DSLR with macro lens (a substantial investment) if I really need it, but I honestly haven't even brought it on my past to archival trips.

Budget? Do you need to just read the documents or is color important?

I currently use a Surface and it's great for travel and work! I really like the stylus for being able to annotate things I'm reading without printing them. But I also have a desktop at home for movies and internet browsing.

Yes, that's patently ridiculous, but also the opposite of the discussion we're actually having and the advice actually given. I want to be clear: I think this advice should, when properly interpreted, discourage people from applying and pursuing their dreams, albeit not in the way you specify. Coming out of undergraduate and into adulthood is the first time many people have to come face to face with the fact that the decisions they have made in the past have closed doors for them that they would rather still be open, that they, practically speaking, can no longer pursue their dream. And that's a hard reality to face. It's a reality many can't face. When it comes to PhD education, low tier schools offer the illusion that the door has not in fact closed, and they exploit that illusion for their own benefit and cheap teaching labor. These schools are, without a doubt, aware of and deliberately exploiting the fact that they are selling students a dream they have little possibility of actually obtaining in order to teach their classes cheaply. They manipulate your love of learning for their bottom line. Don't let them.

Ok, but you realize that here you've given a real human advice on a life-altering decision based on that desire for an alternate reality? That's... not great.

This may have been almost true - or at least you could plausibly argue it - 10 years ago; it is no longer. That middle tier of "undergrad" institution is rapidly collapsing, and what jobs do exist are being hotly contested by grads from Harvard, Yale, Chicago, and the like. I know plenty of Ivy graduates, and they are universally thrilled if they manage to land a permanent position at a branch campus or community college. That's the brutal reality of the current market. Sure. If you're at a prestigious institution, you get Important Scholars swinging by weekly to give a talk, because prestige and money go hand in hand. Guess who has the advantage there. Me too, and mostly they are. It doesn't mean that they're unimportant, though, and school rank corresponds to many structural advantages such as (as I have already said) increased visibility to important scholars, extra funding, and lighter teaching loads, all of which enable higher-quality research. Alas that the world is the way it is, and not the way you want it to be. Again, this may have been true when that professor was on the market however many decades ago, but this is absolute nonsense today. I can give you lists of absolutely brilliant friends from really good institutions who simply have been unlucky in the preferences of the hiring committee or have only had 3 (!!) job listings in their subfields, and are now adjuncting to make ends meet. Don't trust anyone who's gotten their job before 2014 when it comes to the job market. If you go into academia thinking it will all work out if you try hard enough, or that you're smarter and are going to do it better than everyone else, you will end up broken, poor, and disappointed. Optimism in this regard is, quite frankly, self-delusion. That's not an opinion. That's simply an observation of reality.

If you want to be a professor, the perceived quality of your program (which we'll call rank) matters a great deal. I definitely understand the desire to go to a graduate school that you enjoy, but depending on the tier of school you're attending, achieving that end goal may be very difficult indeed.

You're all adults. If you aren't sure how someone wants to be addressed... ask them.

This is so far removed from reality that you should have laughed in his face. Not a red flag; a May Day parade in Moscow.

I see. You should have until 5pm on 4/15 to accept or reject an offer.

I would ask this of the school which accepted you, and get an answer in writing.

I don't think anyone in this thread would disagree with this, and you phrase it excellently. What several of us have been saying is that, even in your formulation, focus comes first, and then flexibility. A flexible program gives you the freedom to narrow the focus you already have.

Splitting the difference between "what professors say" and "what professors think" is an important skill. Most professors will, if given a specific choice to make (program X or program Y), will give a straightforward answer, but express concerns with the binary in a more subtle way. Remember when one of your professors told you to "expect disappointment"? That was one of those ways. That would seem to be something you've determined, at best, over the course of this very thread, and even then it's still incredibly vague. For example, are you going in a Mary Perry and Sharon Farmer direction, a Barbara Rosenwein direction, a Barbara Newman direction, or trying for a HoS push? Articulate why this is. I didn't say you were. I said that's how you present yourself (and not incompetent - unfocused). Based on your application season, that's how you came across to the programs to which you applied, as well. You should work on how you ask questions.

As everyone, from your professors to the adcoms to the posters on this board, has been telling you over and over again, you don't need flexibility. You need focus. If you were actually ready for this next step, you wouldn't be asking us which languages to take. You would know. An MA on the way to a PhD is a time to refine your area of study, not discover it. You have extremely limited time and need to hit the ground running; many of the people you will be competing against started their language training in middle school. At the very least, at this point you need to be able to articulate a time period, a geographic region, and a structural approach (e.g. I want to study the south of France during the central middle ages through the lens of postcolonial theory). How else are you supposed to pick what to take? You come across as interested in the idea of having a PhD rather than any particular subject of study. Nothing you've said instills confidence that you've even begun to plan to fix this. Unless you do, your next application cycle will go no better than your last. I would strongly suggest you take @TMP's advice, look into your deferral options, and spend some time meditating on your own motivations and desires..

No, I think all three are strictly necessary, the first for research and the latter two for secondary sources. I know some subfields think there isn't any important German scholarship for them to read, but boy are they wrong.

In that case, Latin, French, and German if you want consideration from any decent program.