dr. t

I don't want to out your husband, but he's gaming you ? I'm only now beginning to think about replacing my 2013 Lenovo X1 Carbon.

Even then, there's been a longstanding interest in, say, lepers at least since Formation of a Persecuting Society. And so I don't think it's so much a misstep as it is the need to understand better how our field structures knowledge. That is, you have your very specific area of interest, but what is the next category up to which your very specific area is a member? And the one above that, until you get to "medieval history" and then "history"? This is a very important process, as it will greatly aid you in crafting the right "level" of question in your statement of purpose, in writing your prospectus and dissertation, and will serve as a touchstone at those points in your graduate career where you feel lost. For example, I am very specifically interested in the interactions between Cistercian monks and the incipient kingdoms of western Europe in the 12-13th c. For my project, I work within the frameworks provided by postcolonial studies, frontiers studies, religious studies, political history, and the digital humanities.* The next step from there is to say that this means that I'm interested in socio-political intersections, particularly focused on religious institutions, in the high middle ages. It's this latter criterium that I used to seek out professors with whom I would want to work, and who would be interested in working with me. This gave me a list of about 20 people who did work which interested me, from which I used the various programs' placement rates etc., to whittle down to 6. Happy hunting! * DH is much to young to provide a framework. I'm making it up as I go along.

You're having trouble identifying scholars who work on disability, disfigurement, difference, or monstrosity? I would gently suggest that you haven't looked quite hard enough. You are going to see a bias towards English departments in who's interested in this stuff, but you should be able to come up with a decent list of historians - Princeton (Reimitz), Columbia (Kosto), and UChicago (Lyon) come immediately to mind. Were I you, I'd pull through a couple of the Kzoo/Leeds programs from recent years to find them.

In American culture, too. I wasn't supposed to take 9 years to finish my undergraduate, and I wasn't supposed to devolve from my middle-class family into working at a grocery store. Life's weird.

How and why? Be precise.

Glad someone else took this job this year. Rutgers is moving up a lot, I think. Like NYU, they're chucking some major money around, and I think we'll see the result in the job market shortly if we haven't already.

R1: top-tier research university (Ivies and pseudo-Ivies, state flagship campuses, etc) R2: second-tier research university (still research oriented, but with less money and reputation) SLAC: Small Liberal Art Colleges (primary focus is on undergraduate education, smaller student bodies)

LOL?

You're in an abusive relationship. That it's not a romantic relationship doesn't make it any less an abusive one. Get out. Leaving may be academic suicide. You can take steps to mitigate that, but there's no guarantee, particularly given how you described your adviser - it seems to me like he'd be the vindictive sort. So, make the allies you can, but you should still get out.

Of course they aren't. Why would you bother with more school if you had nothing else to learn. That you were accepted is an endorsement by multiple professors that you are able to learn what you need to. That's all you need for now.

“The only time you look in your neighbor's bowl is to make sure that they have enough."

This varies greatly from institution to institution, but for many programs yes, since PhD students receive their stipends from teaching.

Boston? The market in Boston fucking sucks. Our last apartment there, my wife and I had to be able to hand over a $6,000 check to secure a place. Insanity. If it *is* Boston (or NY), it's just a process of rolling the dice enough times. Keep at it.

My prospectus isn't exactly, uh, what's the word, done? I ended up in Europe three weeks earlier than I had planned on about 3 weeks notice, so some things got dropped. But yeah, really liked a couple pieces. Michael Dietler, Archaeologies of Colonialism: Consumption, Entanglement, and Violence in Ancient Mediterranean France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010) was a particularly good one.

Well the state of the field part of my prospectus treats five distinct historiographies so the other side of the fence isn't great either.

Oh yeah. My field requires summer archival research in Europe, so I have to leave my wife, cats, and home for 2-3 months every year and head to a place where I know nobody. I wish I could say it gets easier, but you really just learn to live with it. At least since you're moving semi-permanently, you can start collecting new friends!

This is not even unique to graduate school. I've said this before; it's still true: You're not good enough to be in graduate school. No one is good enough to be in graduate school. There is no great platonic abstract of "good enough" which, if obtained, opens the path to tenure with a choir of angels. Everyone's a failure. Everyone is faking it. No one knows what they're doing. Usually, we call this "adulthood". Being shit at something is a necessary first step towards being good at something. "Talent" and "natural ability" are bullshit terms that mask the absurd amounts of hard work and/or social conditioning of people assumed to have them.

Eh. Applying right out of high school? Anyone can do that. Getting in is something different ?

I think we get a lot of people coming to the forum like this (it's something of my story, too), so let me give two things. 1) GREs don't really matter, but AW matters the least. I myself had a 4.5 and asked a DGS if that would hurt me. His response: "Uh, is that the thing that's out of 6?" 2) I failed out of my undergraduate... twice. My GPA from that experience was 0.86. Here's how I handled it on my writing sample. Notice how it's a pivot, and how it launches aids rather than disrupts the narrative. "The further I progress in my historical study, the more firmly I hold to the conviction that calling something a `first cause' simply means that one has failed to fully understand the events which preceded it. Still, I can put my finger on the precise moment at which I began to take a professional interest in medieval history. During a survey course on the high and late Middle Ages, I was given a handout with a variety of medieval quotations about women. The second of these read: ``We... recognizing that the wickedness of women is greater than all the other wickedness of the world and that the poison of asps and dragons is more curable and less dangerous to men than the familiarity of women, have unanimously decreed... that we will on no account receive any more sisters... but avoid them like poisonous animals.'' I was struck not only by the misogyny, but also by the practical implications contained within the passage. It painted a portrait of female sexual depravity which was primitive, animalistic, and universal. Yet I knew that the western Church held that every person possessed free will. How did the quote's author reconcile these two seemingly disparate truths to himself or to others? This question became a term paper, the term paper became a senior thesis, and down the rabbit hole I went. Ten years earlier, if someone asked me what I wanted to be, they would have received an unequivocal answer: an engineer. Throughout high school, I had been an active participant in the school's robotics team, and I had advanced through the standard mathematics curriculum and onto subjects such as linear algebra and multivariate calculus. In 2004, I entered the mechanical engineering program at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. I quickly received a rather rude awakening. The courses were esoteric, dealing only in abstract concepts and rote memorization, and we were given no opportunity to explore, tinker, or build. I quickly lost interest and direction. My grades declined rapidly, and I was forced to leave the university in 2007. Returning home, I took a job at the local Trader Joe's and went to work putting myself back in order. I used my job to finance a career as an amateur fencer for several years, competing in national and international tournaments, but eventually, the daily grind of customer service took its toll. I was still unsure precisely what I wanted to do in life, but I was sure that, whatever it was, it did not involve shifts that began at five in the morning. I have always had a passing fascination with what I would now call popular medievalisms---Tolkien, the Arthurian legends, and Disney's Robin Hood, to name a few---so when I saw that the Harvard University Extension School, Harvard's night school, was offering a course on medieval warfare and the crusades, I enrolled, thinking it would be a way to rekindle my academic interest. It did. For the first time, I had fun in a college class. The following semester, I enrolled at the Extension School as a degree-seeking student, signed up for the survey course, and received that decisive handout. The Extension School offered me a second chance at academic success. There, in addition to my history coursework, I was able to improve my Latin and French, finding a new interest in these languages as their utility to my studies became clear. Once I had exhausted the Extension School's medieval course offerings, I applied and was accepted to Harvard's Special Student Program. Through the SSP, I was able to take the regular daytime course offerings at Harvard in subjects such as paleography, German, and historiography. It was through this program that I first took courses with Dr. Beverly Kienzle, Dr. William Stoneman, and Dr. Michael McCormick, all of whom have been my mentors and advisers. Shortly before my graduation in 2013, I presented my undergraduate thesis, advised by Dr. Kienzle, ``Holy Women and Submission to the Divine: Free Will, Gender, and Sanctity in Medieval Europe, ca. 1100--1300,'' to the undergraduate session at the International Congress for Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo, MI. I began my master's degree in the History of Christianity at Harvard Divinity School the following fall. At the Divinity School, I have been able to both refine my academic interests and explore new ground. Through coursework and independent study, I have greatly strengthened my research, linguistic, and paleographic skills. However, my interest in mathematics and computers never entirely went away, leading me to become deeply involved in the digital humanities. I participated in Harvard's first graduate seminar on digital history in which I received hands-on experience in crowd-sourced projects, social network theory, and `popular' history. With Dr. McCormick's encouragement, I first became a research assistant and then the managing editor of his \textit{Digital Atlas of Roman and Medieval Civilization}, a project which seeks to map archaeological, natural, and social data for the late Roman and Medieval periods. These experiences have not only taught me how to manage cooperative research projects, but also how to incorporate diverse methods and sources of information not frequently utilized in historical study, such as spatial and statistical analysis and climate data, into my research. I have used social network theory to examine the political role of a monastery with few surviving documents, and I am writing a paper on the use of quantitative analysis of style in Latin texts as a means of investigating questions of authorship. Other pieces of my work follow more traditional models: my first publication, a codicological examination of a copy of Eadmer's Vita Anselmi, is currently receiving final revisions. However, the majority of my time has been spent studying a collection of thirteenth-century sermons or collationes preached by the monks of the Cistercian monastery of Foigny, which I am translating for publication. It is through my study of Foigny and its sermons that I first began to be suspicious of monastic claims of stability and isolation, the central topic I will address in my doctoral studies."

Many programs will advance you your first month's stipend, if you ask. They usually keep this a secret, so talk to your DGS.

This is interesting, because despite the increase in these sorts of errors, which I would lay almost entirely at the feet of publishers foisting copy-editing duties onto authors (looking at you, CUP), my subfield still cares a lot about them. This is in part because of the particular technical demands of medieval history: if you are working with a medieval manuscript, the failure of attention to detail which missed the double "the" in your article makes me wonder what paleographic details you might have also missed. So even as standards decline, these sorts of errors can still have professional consequences. On the other hand, there's Gaiman's Law: "Picking up your first copy of a book you wrote, if there’s one typo, it will be on the page that your new book falls open to the first time you pick it up."

Let me know if you'd like to be put in touch with some grad students here.

Agree. I was faced with this exact question a few years back (Boston v. Providence) and moved. I don't regret it. Neither does my wife, and she's the one stuck with the 3 hours of commuting each day.

Broadly speaking, yes, just as research is more valued than teaching. But you should make sure your CV has both.

I'm not, but I have a friend in a bench science. Send me a PM.