dr. t

I have a 1/1 TA load (~30 students per semester), with years 1 and 4 being on fellowship. OSU offered me a 4 year deal with no fellowship years. For placements, I have some internal data - most schools do, and don't post it. If you're applying, you should ask for it, and don't take "no" for an answer. Approximately 90% of grads from 2006-2016 are in, as you said, "academic jobs". That's a pretty nebulous grouping, though: 17% are TT, 15% are on postdocs, 47% are contingent faculty, and 8% are in administration. I understand the reasons why OSU offers what it does, wrt cohort sizes and the need to shoulder the teaching load of a state institution. I don't think that makes it any more appealing.

I wasn't trying to beat you up, but I'm unclear what corrections you offered. What you've given here sounds to me like a high teaching load and not the best placement rate.

This is likely to be dependent on subfield. I would hesitate to speak about particular programs, but I have direct experience with OSU, and know that they have a pretty high teaching load (including being Instructor of Record) and not the best placement rate. Last year, I went into how to evaluate a program here. To quote the most relevant bit here: "These are the criteria that make a good program, in no particular order: Well-regarded professors to sit on your committee who are close enough to your interests to be able to provide competent guidance. A livable stipend, granted for at least 5 years, including health care. Bonus points if there are easy mechanisms to acquire 6-7yr funding. Reliable, regular, and easily identified internal avenues for research, conference, and travel funding. I can wrangle ~$3k a year from internal grants, which means I get at least one conference per year and two weeks in Europe (for archival work) in the summer. Manageable teaching load. Preferably TA ships, but opportunities to be IOR as you're finishing up are good. My university has a program through which you are made a VAP in your final semester (if you finish your diss the semester before). Good programs will also give you fellowship years (for me, years 1 and 4) to concentrate on your research. Solid placement rate. Though really, this follows from all the other points. It's not that the top schools have the brightest students, it's that they have the resources to provide the structure with the best guarantee of success. The list of schools that fit this criteria is very short. Depending on field, it can be as few as 3 and as many as 20, many of which are obvious (Ivies), but not necessarily so. If you do not get into one of them, it is very much my advice that you should not go for your PhD elsewhere."

I received 4/5ths tuition at Harvard Divinity School for my MTS, and I didn't have the best package. I know others who got full tuition and a stipend for a MA at Yale. The MAPS (but not the MAPH) at UChicago seems well-regarded and well-funded. So yes.

I am sure this is not the last time I will give this advice to this year's applicants: apply to the top tier (roughly, top 20 programs). In fact, you should only apply to the top tier, and don't go if you don't get in.

Of course not, but we were talking about people dropping dead at 40. And again, I don't think this contributes much to the initial point, which is that even if a professor is still taking students at 70 and refuses to retire, it would be unwise to become their student.

While true, it's still important to distinguish possibility and probability for this conversation.

This is all good advice, but remember also that, on a very practical level, you need them to be alive in ~7-9 years at the least - a PhD plus one postdoc - to write job letters.

That there are few behaviors in which a student can engage which concern an administrator more than the loss of their potential alumni donations is an unerring truth of the neoliberal university.

It depends, of course! But the idea that you're a doormat because you're jr faculty is false. For the student you mentioned, who's frequently 30m late to a 1h appointment - I would begin to schedule them for 30m appointments, and make sure I had something else to do at the end of their appointments. I would also have a conversation with them about timeliness, as you're doing them no favors by normalizing behavior that will get them fired once they leave school. Everyone's late every now and again. That doesn't make habitual lateness any more professional.

That's... kind of the key isn't it? It's great (maybe?) that you're so accommodating, but it wouldn't be wrong if you weren't.

Note that certain programs, particularly state schools, look at GREs for university-level funding packages, which are often significantly better than department funding. There are still reasons to stress over your quant score.

I disagree. This is not a matter of personal taste. You are right; others are wrong. Timeliness and remembering to be at the meetings you agreed to is part of being a professional. To the original post - yes, this would be a very worrying red flag.

It is indeed, and that sort of a paper sounds like a decent sample. There are a bunch of ways to do SOPs. Some people do actually draft a custom one for each institution, but I modified the final 2 paragraphs based on the school. But your argument for your fit, along with your demonstration of ability, are the most important components.

Your stats are enough to avoid having your application binned immediately at any institution. But if I were you, I would disabuse myself of the notion that a PhD app is like a BA or MA one. Stats have very little relevance beyond a hurdle you have to clear, and the rankings of programs are mostly bullshit.

I find appropriate activities in this regard vary a great deal with the instructor's age, gender presentation, and race. For example, as a straight white dude in my 30s, I can afford to take some self-deprecating potshots at my own authority to relax my sections; the Latina woman in her mid-20s in my cohort cannot.

Gitta Sereny's Into That Darkness and Primo Levi's The Drowned and the Saved, while excellent and must-reads, convinced me that I would be a much happier person studying medieval France.

I have no positive advice, but the Grad House is horrid and not worth the money. It's 2017; you can't charge people for university housing that doesn't have WiFi.

Did... you post this to Dear Prudence?

Have you said pretty much exactly this to her?

These things don't matter. A GPA that low will be hard to overcome, but I would look at MA programs as a stepping stone. But the most important question: why do you want a PhD?

Just a datapoint - I stayed in the Grad Center last summer for a 6 week program, and it was, at best, unpleasant. I've seen more hospitable prison cells.

Yes, this is usually why PhD programs have associated MA programs.

Just to add: like everything else, it's important to establish the boundaries you need to be successful. It was perfectly appropriate to say "I'm sorry, that won't work with my schedule. I won't be able to grade the papers before [original date]." And then stick to your guns. In the future, there will be a lot of little moments like this. Sometimes, it will be about grading. Other times, someone might drop in a request to help edit a volume or write an article. In all cases, graduate students need to learn to be really, really clear and direct in their responses. Failure to do so will simply result in madness.

Yeah, I have a lot of questions/concerns here. To be blunt, taking a hard sciences PhD into a 9th year is... not good. And the fact that it's taken you two years to figure out that your adviser is a problem that you needed to address, when coupled with this long time to completion, suggests issues that go far deeper than your adviser's mental decline. I think more than past time to reevaluate where you are and where you're going, and that the particulars of this adviser is only a small (if important) portion of the conversation.