dr. t

I at least scheduled a brief stop in the Florentine archives before the week I'm spending on a sailboat in the Tyrrhenian Sea

I'm having a bit of difficulty getting excited about grad school because I happen to have a three-week vacation in Italy coming up next month. Woe is me, life is so hard.

You can find the sort of limited lease you're talking about in some of the areas with the highest student population (Brighton/Allston), but mostly, yes, you will have to sign the full lease. Landlords in Boston have renters, particularly student renters, by the balls and they absolutely know it.

Maybe? I don't know if you could quantify the difference. In either case, institutional prestige is the thing that gets you in the door when it otherwise would not, i.e. it gets them to read an application they would otherwise toss. This is certainly true for industry; I've seen it in action with undergraduates. And when it comes to hiring actual PhDs, I suspect institutional prestige plays an even greater role.

The humanities are the same, though summer funding is usually(?) just 1 month's worth of money.

Wisconsin, Louisiana, and North Carolina are all particular shit-shows right now.

This is almost right. The study showed that approximately 20 programs dominated the job market to such a degree that the authors could not find a reasonable explanation for it beyond institutional prestige. This may or may not be right - I can think of one or two other explanations - but in practical effect it provides a valuable resource for us. Effectively, it tells us that rankings like USNews are nonsense. For example, UC Davis, Ashiepoo's school which was ranked 27(or 40th, according to NRC2010), is 17th in the study's ranking, and UMinn is 22. In other words, it's not that non-prestigious programs have good placement rates, it's that the methodological approach taken by ranking sites is not very good. You can read the study here: http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/1/1/e1400005

This may or may not be true, but remember that if you are from a program ranked outside the top tier, you will be competing against top-tier PhD holders for these jobs. Plenty of the "TT or Bust" crowd are having to "settle" for HS, community colleges, SLCs, and jobs outside of academia. Leaving aside the fact that you don't need a PhD for most of those jobs, if you think institutional prestige won't matter for jobs outside the traditional TT route, you're fooling yourself.

A couple things: 1) Everyone has the option not to pay. You just don't go to the program. This is usually the better option. 2) Funded MAs in the sciences are not exactly unicorns, even for someone changing fields. There are also degrees of funding, e.g. partial tuition, tuition, tuition and stipend. 3) You say the program is unranked. Is the institution ranked, and, if so, where? 4) Just because you don't like the advice doesn't mean it's not advice.

Grad school's a job. Treat it like a job.

I would suspect travel money has a correlation to institution, rather than field. I have about $2k available yearly to me ($700 allotment + $1300 available departmental grant).

Use of the passive voice to indirectly address criticism is something one should not do. It is in fact incredibly relevant to the argument, particularly since I'm not accusing anyone of ignorance. I'm accusing them of having their own agenda inspired by faith. In my experience (I have a MA degree from a divinity school) self-described fundamentalists, who are otherwise obsessed with ancient languages (Greek, Hebrew) as they constitute core mechanics for their theology, are extremely negative towards Latin because of its association with that greatest of evils, the Catholic Church.

You could make the case for Greek or Hebrew, but you're not going to convince a fundie that Latin is useful.

Nah, reading's probably not super important for grad school anyway

I repeat this so often it has become a mantra: do not pick schools based on where you think you will get in. First you're probably wrong. Second, there are no safety schools. Third, you're making it way more likely that you never find a job before you even show up on the first day. I don't think any particular thing on your CV would sink you, even at an Ivy. I do think you should worry about the fact that you have only a vague idea of your research questions and no writing sample relevant to the subfield. I would add Michele Sanchez and the Harvard CSR to your list.

I read the welcome email we were both sent by the grad chair

There are 7 attending for the MA at Brown this year, whatever that's worth.

Oh my God. They have shown my apartment at least 25 times. There are 10 showings scheduled for today. Fortunately, my cats have not yet managed to escape.

That thread is here: https://chronicle.com/forums/index.php/topic,183545.0.html My favorite quote so far: "They are going to throw him under the bus? There's no need. He might as well be lying prone in the bus lane of the transit authority lot holding a giant "Here I am! Please come and run over me!" sign that he wrote in his finest caligraphic hand using blood red fountain pen ink that he had custom-mixed for the purpose. Heck, at the rate he's going In trying to clean up after himself he's all but chasing down any bus that misses so he can throw himself on the ground in front of it again."

Well done to Dr. Green for falling on the sword and fairly gracefully taking responsibility for his lapse. However, this is the part that haunts me the most:

Don't go to a PhD program without a full funding package.

AKA "A Dissertation". Broader audience appeal is what the book's for.

For what it's worth, I have never felt depressed. In fact, on my worst days, I felt very little at all, except perhaps annoyance at having to get up and eat food.

To be fair, these sound like symptoms of depression as I have experienced it.