dr. t

I'm starting to think you didn't even read what I wrote.

I agree that the point could have been better put. Since we're giving personal stories, I wish one of my professors had given this advice to me after my first semester.

If the plural of anecdote isn't data, the singular sure as hell isn't either. That you've achieved what you have doesn't actually invalidate your professor's advice. It's possible (in fact, likely) that it was the correct advice for many other students in your precise situation. You've managed to rise above it, and that's a credit to you. ED's advice was very blunt, but if you're hitting a wall in the second year of an MA program, the impulse to reevaluate whether or not your academic goals are realistic is a good one. Life is tough.

It's really just Patsy with some coconut halves. I forgot to mention in my previous post that this is the sort of seminar which sees the most crossover from other disciplines, so the proper historians might actually be outnumbered.

I am a historian, and a medievalist, and I have even taken seminars. To the rescue! Your level of difficulty will depend on the structure of the seminar. If the seminar is structured around the creation of a research paper, there will be some significant differences in the type of work you'll be expected to put out. Let me know if this is the case, and we can talk pointers. If it really is a heavy-duty lit review class with maybe a paper on some theme in the secondary literature at the end, then relax. Properly designed, it will go from egg to apple because that's what a lot of the history students in the class will need, too. Even second and third years in the history departments will have pretty substantial historiographic gaps. You may even find yourself more prepared than some of your classmates.

The best of luck in your future endeavors.

I'm going to go full grammar Nazi for a second. I know this is an informal setting. Bear with me. If this short sample is indicative of your general approach towards writing - and I suspect it is* - you're sloppy. Your mistakes are technical and structural; I've highlighted both sorts above. In my experience, the latter tends to stem from not thinking through how you're going to say what you want to say, while the former comes from either laziness or ignorance. Good academic prose is concise, structured, and grammatically sound. It is also the product of a great deal of deliberate practice. That is, in order to write good academic prose, you need to practice writing good academic prose. Fortunately, you don't need to wait for your next paper to start working. We live in an age centered around the written (or at least typed) word. This world offers all sorts of opportunities for practice, and forum posts like this one are one of the many ways you can improve your writing. If you really want to get better, you should do the following whenever you write something, whether for a professor or for WordPress: Stop and think: what am I trying to say and what is the best way to say it? Pay careful attention to grammar, looking up the proper usage of a construction (or a word!) if you're unsure. Re-read what you've written before posting. Proofreading is a pain for a long paper (I'm terrible at it), but it's easy for a paragraph on a forum. Make sure your grammar is good and your train of thought isn't skipping back and forth. This is really tedious, at least at first. You're re-training yourself to think of writing differently. The payoffs are, however, rather large. All of the professors who have supervised me have emphasized the importance of this sort of structure and precision for work done in class and as a method by which they evaluate journal articles. As one bluntly put it, "A disorganized and careless paper is the product of a disorganized and careless mind." *We can go into my own experiences of the overlap between forum writing styles and writing ability some other time. If this is totally off base and OP's problem is argumentative, he or she needs a writing tutor, not an online forum.

Two general observations: 1) It's your time to waste. If you don't mind spending the cash on the tests, do it. 2) It may be more about love, but it's going to be a little about money. Margaret Vojtko was a horror story for a reason. Don't lose your perspective.

Yeah, but he's also hitting nursing and IT, so some of that "focus" is a smokescreen.

It's one of those downsides to well-ranked schools they just don't tell you about in the orientation packet. Also, the tourists. The best I've heard is a modification on the Phantom Time Hypothesis.

I'm out of upvotes, so I want to say that I agree with what 1Q84 said and to add that there are may ways to address and handle criticism, hostile or not. The original poster would do well to study some of them, as he or she will certainly find them professionally useful. The way he or she chose to address others' comments does not inspire confidence in the veracity and reliability of the original account.

I'm not sure you're going to like this advice. You have a bad GPA from a notorious party school, which you have tried to rectify with a "decent effort". Assuming 4 courses a semester, the numbers you've provided means that "decent effort" works out to a B-average (a GPA of 3.0 exactly, actually). This would not suggest to me or to a hypothetical admissions committee that you possess either academic discipline or very good research and presentation skills. So, the question is this: you say you are "very committed" to getting that PhD, but so far your haven't shown it. In concrete terms, what's changed?

Man, there's some retroactive memory modification going on here. That original post was deleted at 11:06pm EST after being posted at 10:18pm. That means you decided to delete the thread after post #7, before anyone brought up Northwestern or anything. The worst you got was people who were unable to see the legal link between the boyfriend's actions (whatever they were) and the professor (whatever she had done).

I mean, if we're talking about the premise of this thread, we're talking about private US education, though.

In the US, maybe, but this is generally untrue and become more untrue as time goes on. And I think this goes to your point with respect to inner city kids - are we really talking about general truths of educational theory, or the steps needed to patch the foundering ship that is US public education?

Interesting. I was forced to take Latin or Greek in high school (chose Latin), and I found the experience invaluable. IM(not very)HO, there is no better way to learn English grammar (and thus provide a very firm grounding for the other 5 IE languages I've learned) than through learning a fully inflected language, and Latin remains the most accessible of these. Accordingly, I do not see the language as "specialized" in the way you and Tak have outlined. Also, I just used the calc I learned in high school to write a history paper

What is the realistic alternative? I haven't seen anyone argue that here. Eyeroll. In my case, at least, I've held my current thoughts - along with the knowledge that academia is certainly not a meritocracy - long before I was accepted to any program. OK. How?

Tak or Eigen - do either of you actually know Latin?

Answers to sundries: 1) The first job market crash was in the mid to late '70s. Before that, you often did not even need a PhD to obtain a TT position, particularly if you came out of certain parts of the English system. 2) I would challenge ExponentialDecay to back up his or her assertion that "most programs in the humanities and social sciences admit 5 +-3 people a cycle". All the top history programs take ~12-18. Most state history programs still take ~20-30. Humanities (specifically history) Perspective: With respect to numbers, I think a yield of ~15 for a discipline with many subfields is sustainable. It means 2-3 students in the pipeline for a subdiscipline per school at any one time. Taking more students is not, I think, sustainable, and in most cases is very clearly done as a way to get more cheap instructors. History as a field has a surprising amount of data available with respect to job search outcomes. First, the American Historical Association did a study which said that, for PhDs who graduated since 2000, 50% were in TT jobs, 25% were in non-TT academic jobs, and 25% has left academia. These numbers are actually really encouraging, which is, in and of itself, sad. Second, there was a study which has been discussed a lot around here on the influence of prestige on academic hires for business, computer science, and history. For history, the study determined that the top ~20 schools disproportionately dominated placements at the 200-odd nationally ranked and accredited universities in the US. To whit, 2856 out of 4538, or 62.9%, of TT positions at these universities were filled by PhDs from top-20 schools. A whopping 877 (19.3%) got their PhDs from Harvard, Yale, or UCBerkeley. 324 (7.1%) are from Harvard. This is all despite the fact that none (AFAIK) of these top-20 programs seek to matriculate more than about ~15 students each year. From this data, I draw several conclusions. First, the field of history produces ~25-35% more PhDs than it needs. Second, not all PhDs are created equal. Third, PhD production needs to be cut, but it needs to be cut in some places more than it needs to be cut in others.

My last comment was indeed what it looks like: a query for more information in order to figure out if the statement was accidentally or deliberately insulting. I believe this is a standard purpose to which "what" is put in English.

...what?

I think the disjuncture here is that I'm talking about (doctoral) seminars in the humanities, and you're talking about something else. Two things with respect to this. First: an A on a paper signals the instructor's satisfaction with your level of work, not that such work cannot be improved upon; my last paper came back with an A- and 4,000 words in comments. Second: what does it say about a doctoral program that its students cannot consistently turn out high quality (i.e. "A") work? Just because everyone in a class gets an A doesn't mean that A was easy to get.

...what?

In humanities seminars at the graduate level, getting a B+ or worse means the professor is wondering how you got into the program in the first place.

This is what the numbers say: may history departments have people who went to low-ranked programs. Few of them are "full" of such PhDs. And you can bust your tail all you want, but it's still going to come down to a lot of luck to land a TT job from outside that top-20. If you're applying for a job against a PhD from a top-20 program, they'll tend to get it, because most of them aren't "coasting" on departmental prestige either. It's just another item on their CV. Yes, if you go to a low-ranked program, you may get that TT job in the end. Odds are you won't.