dr. t

The thread in question. I advise you read. It is full of deep and profound wisdom, mainly about not opening your mouth.

Nothing here is fatal, but it's not encouraging.

I also would not bring it up, or at least not directly. There's no need to waste words saying what everyone knows - that money for language study is helpful. That's why they provide it. In any case, I would stick with a higher-order analysis of why a program fits you, with ideas and how the POI's work has influenced your own, more than the particulars of the departmental funding structure.

I would definitely say this is good news. It's in no way a sure thing, but it's good news! Generally speaking (and definitely at Harvard), the professors in the particular subfield (broadly construed, e.g. American, Medieval) pull through the applications relevant to them and pick out anywhere between 0-5. This reduced list is then sent on to a committee for final winnowing, which is often called the "black box". This committee makes the final selection, and is under no obligation to take any of the students handed to it. Given the unusual enthusiasm your POI has displayed, it's likely you'll make their short list, which will in turn mean you have a good chance of being forwarded on to the committee. What happens at the committee is anyone's guess, and the process is political. In short, cautious optimism, and good luck!

I mean, yes, but politics aren't inherently toxic. It can be, of course, but at the core it's simply the art of getting what you want. And I would say that those who create toxic political environments are generally bad at politics.

I took over management of technical operations and left dealing with the undergraduates to another colleague ? In my teaching, a lot of this has proven helpful, although some have expressed a frustration at the lack of a direct answer.

Even more basic: recognize when a battle is being fought, and make a proactive decision as to if you are going to be a participant.

It would be generally appreciated if you kept personal invective to a minimum. Sigaba has made what seems to me to be a fair critique to your original posting. That's not to say I agree with it, but it's not out of left field.

Tell the professor and ask them what they want you to do.

I mean, for the task at hand I wouldn't write one if it weren't. A caution: you can not like departmental politics all you want, but this is no excuse for not engaging in them. There is not, in point of fact, any means by which you can avoid engaging in them; either you participate actively or you participate badly.

I would disagree. Writing samples are meant to be pieces of academic writing, and part of the process of academic writing is the solicitation of outside feedback. My writing sample had been through two rounds of peer review when I applied, for example.

I'm going to take a different tack, and say that if you can find more than ~5 programs you would want to attend - having taken into consideration fit, placements, and funding - you're either in an insanely popular field or aren't being nearly as critical as you should.

There's nothing to be gained by rushing into this.

Why I don't like that subreddit in a nutshell, actually.

I'm not the biggest fan of that subreddit for, well, a lot of reasons, but this one's right on the money.

Yes, that's more or less how I did mine. It flows pretty naturally - Where you're from, where you want to go, and why you think that's a good idea.

There's no such thing as wasting your own time, because there's no sort of objective arbiter of what you should be doing at any given moment. You have the answer in front of you. For the purposes of an SOP, these are all parts of who you now are, and you're right that an adcom may wonder why you took fifteen courses on Chaucer (ugh) if you're applying to work on ecocriticism in postwar Vietnam or something. Frame the narrative as progress, e.g. in my investigation of X, I became curious about Y. It doesn't really have to be true, so long as it isn't false. I started as a mechanical engineer before I did history. In my SOP, I handled this by talking about how my first history courses fired my interest, but also noted that my earlier coursework has helped me as I became interested in quantitative and digital history.

As an old adviser says, the defining characteristic of a historian is that they are congenitally immune to boredom.

I would recommend two things: First, that you spend some time thinking through why very few faculty members focus on this particular topic and the impact of that fact on your job prospects at the other end of your degree. Second, that you broaden your horizons; the scholars who study the intersection of sexuality and power, in Insular contexts and elsewhere, are manifold.

Agreed. Your lack of Latin would be catastrophic for your application to any worthwhile program. I would recommend not applying until you've sorted that out.

By reading what's written on the page and transcribing the important pieces of it. In this digital age, we come to the idea that because it's easy to create vast amounts of digital information, particularly images, when visiting an archive, we should. Really, images should either be 1) a last resort because you've got two days left or 2) capturing a document of greater than average utility for deeper later study. But in either case, you should have a sense of what is in the document before you decide to photograph it. By reading your documents, you gain a better grasp on what you need to transcribe, and to be honest the first 3-4 days of your archival dig will be more establishing this baseline than necessarily collecting all the information you want. You need to balance your desire to transcribe less with the fact that you don't actually know if what you're omitting might be useful in the future. So, for example, my archive notes look like this: Arch. de la Haute-Marne 5 H 8, unlabeled folder, piece 5 - Hugo comes mettensis confirms whatever La Crête has apud medium vicum and concedes any rights he might have there, testes Cono de Malbere, Robertus de Wirrise, Coruynus de uualemen, Symon de Lonwit, Arardus de risne, Garnerius iuuvens de sampinei, Ricardus de parnei, N.D. Note how I'm switching between the Latin whenever I want to preserve particular terms, and back to English for summary. The result is an accurate summary of the material, but not an accurate transcription (I have a notation to mark literal transcriptions).

Oh? You don't think telling people that you went in blind and it came out ok serves as an encouragement to go in blind? Yeah, but that's not what's going on here. @WhaleshipEssex gave some pretty good advice. It wasn't the advice the OP wanted, and they justified themselves with a critique of their framework. Oh dear god. Really? Even if I were to concede that such an inane statement had any sort of utility, to quote the inestimable wisdom of El Paso Tacos, ¿Por que no los dos?

Correct only in so far as there are other things you should ALSO probably know to be ready for a PhD.

I'm not sure why your plain dumb luck is a model others should seek to emulate. It's not "if you have to ask, go away." It's "show that you've done the bare minimum level of work to be part of the conversation." That's not a lot to ask, and it's considered polite when asking strangers for help. This is not a particularly helpful list.