dr. t

I think fewer financial aid packages are a bad thing, but to be fair it's kind of bullshit that endowments are tax free.

I understand this is scary, but I strongly, strongly urge you to resist this impulse. You know what the job market is, you know how school rank affects hiring on the other end (particularly in small fields like Byzantine History), and you've heard all the horror stories of adjunct life. Set yourself a lower end of the schools you're willing to apply to, which should be approximately "top 3-6 programs", and set yourself a surrender point. For me, it was six schools (probably should have been 4) and three application cycles; I got in to a PhD program on my second time through. Don't fall into the trap of thinking that you could never do anything else, that the journey is worth it, or any of the other lies people tell themselves to convince themselves that they're not actually making a bad decision.

...mine would go from $8k to $17k (married filing jointly). That did not make my day better.

That's the Catch-22. Either you're stressed because you're overwhelmed, or you're stressed because you're not and so clearly aren't doing enough work.

Sorry to not have seen this when it was first posted, but I was too overwhelmed.

Huh. I wonder who suggested that course of action. You can call it trolling if you want, but I've been pretty gentle with you here. I really do hope that this is the only place where you've expressed yourself as you have here, or you've done yourself pretty significant harm which you need to start trying to fix. People do not generally try to read between the lines to stretch out some absurd favorable interpretation, as @buttercup8d did; they'll take you at face value and respond in kind.

So, some good news and some bad news. The good news is that you're not asking for pregnancy leave, you're telling. He doesn't get to say no, and if he tries to penalize you for taking it professionally, there are administrative and legal means to make him stop. If he's not someone you need to sign off on your dissertation, etc., then he isn't really a roadblock to your completion. The bad news is that, if you're looking for a career in academia and this professor is in your field, he can almost certainly end that (or make it incredibly difficult) regardless of the above, and from your description, he sounds like the kind of asshole who would. So: if the professor is in a tangential or unrelated field, fuck it, burn the bridge. If he's someone who needs to at least not actively hate you, I would talk to your adviser or mentor, someone who knows him and how he likes to play ball, and see what they have to say. In the future, I would suggest not signing any contract with anyone who uses the phrase "I own you".

Ah, not only are you way too smart for your school, the other programs just wouldn't recognize your genius. Of course. lol. I assume that, since you're just so smart, you actually had a purpose in attending your program despite the caveats given by @ExponentialDecay above. Obviously you're too intelligent to have gone in without having fully researched the consequences of taking an interdisciplinary degree. So clearly there's still some point in getting it, and that point hasn't changed. My advice thus remains the same: first semester tends to try to bring people up to speed, and may be easier since you have an MA. See if you still feel that way in the spring. Oh, and try not to cause yourself irreparable social harm by talking about how you're too smart for your program.

Can you talk more about which professors interest you at Brown, UoC, and Harvard? Yale definitely makes sense, and probably Stanford and Michigan too, but I don't think the program support is there to justify an app to Fordham or Bard.

Ah, yes, the good old first year "I'm too smart for this." Spoilers: you're not. And if you don't think your program is well regarded, why did you not consider that before accepting? Did you not get into anyplace better? How do you mesh that with your perceived intellectual superiority? Classes are interesting but not where you should be spending most of your effort; easy classes mean there's more time for you to focus on other work. This is particularly true if you have an MA, as first-semester PhD work is often designed to get everyone on the same page. Get over yourself, buckle down, and work to make your time productive.

You could probably rush your application through, but I certainly wouldn't apply to MA programs just to apply to MA programs. The MAPSS program is indeed good, for example, but it's also absurdly expensive, and if you already have solid language skills and a good idea what you want to research, it's unnecessary. There's nothing wrong (or abnormal) with taking a year off to present the best candidate you can. Right now, taking a year to work and prepare might seem like an unconscionable delay, but I don't think you'll regret it in the long run.

If this does pass, is there anything about this that can be done at the institutional level? What sorts of reasons would institutions have to resist responding to the change, ie. why wouldn't they drop tuition to $1 or something?

Not so much overkill as culturally irrelevant

It's more normal at state schools than it is at private ones.

Sorry to have neglected this thread for a bit, but this is a particularly relevant article to @rising_star's point: http://gawker.com/my-vassar-college-faculty-id-makes-everything-ok-1664133077

You say the research you're doing at your current school is important to you, so I need to ask: what do you want out of a PhD? Because if you want to become a professor, you have to recognize the infuriating fact that you are not going to be able to find employment with a school's diversity as a make or break criterium. This is a problem that moving schools will delay, rather than address.

I think your application would be a lot stronger if you waited a year so that you could claim the language skills you're developing by putting them to use in your writing sample. But I would also bring this up with Amy directly as she is sure to have good insights. Or if you're still in Providence, come by my office in Sharpe some Thursday to talk And you should definitely apply to work with Dan Smail, given your interests.

Eeeeh. It helps, but teaching experience isn't a component of most European PhDs. Hiring committees tend to understand this, as far as I've been told.

Tim Harris at Brown is worth a look.

(For the purposes of this discussion, it's worth noting that OP's undergraduate is *also* online, a combination that is sure to throw up even more of @Professor Plum's red flags.)

And, to be even more blunt, are you in a top-tier program? @James D. The short answer to your question is "no." The long answer is "fuck no."

Can you edit it in a way that gives sections of both, e.g. delete a middle bit and replace it with a short summary?

Honestly? I try to. I remember quite a few kerfuffles on this very forum from me doing so, as well. It didn't seem to me like any of the advice here wasn't well meant.

Ah, but what if you think the book is OK but [senior scholar] thinks its absolute garbage? What if you're in a field with clearly drawn battle lines? There are lots of ways a review can go bad, and the benefit to your own career is minimal at best.

...There's a pretty clear thread of conversation going on here which is neither convoluted to follow nor tangential to the initial post. Everyone should question whether a PhD is actually the right vehicle to achieve their goals, and the process of nailing down precisely why it is so (which we see above) can only serve to strengthen any eventual application.