dr. t

Program prestige is moderately dependent on your subfield. The general prestige of the institution always comes into it. After some thought, I would phrase my point thus: We want to spend our lives in the study of a small part of history. This is our goal, and a PhD is the means to it, and not the final achievement. When applying to and choosing programs, keep yourself centered on the actual target and be sure you do not substitute the intermediate step for it.

Brown, OSU. Both for history.

How long a commute would you be looking for?

FWIW, this scientific paper suggests that the top 30 or so schools satisfy the "prestige requirement" in history. According to the study, they are (in order): Harvard, Yale, Berkeley, Princeton, Stanford, UChicago, Columbia, Brandeis, JHU, UPenn, UWis-Mad, UMich, UCLA, Northwestern, Cornell, Brown, UCDavis, URochester, NYU, UCSD, Duke, UMinn-Minn, Rutgers, UNC-CH, UVirginia, USC, UWashington, MIT, UT-Austin, Emory. Some adjusting for your specific subfield is, of course, appropriate. Such a list is not proscriptive, but it serves as a useful guide. If you find yourself reaching outside it, that should trigger a self-examination at the very least.

Rant or not, this is probably not a healthy or productive way to approach a SoP. I have to disagree with this, even if it is advice I received from one of my professors; he has not been on the market for three decades. Find the professors who interest you, whose work excites and inspires you, and who are close to your interests either in methodology or subject (or both). I would be surprised if this number is higher than 5. At the same time, recognize that prestige does matter. Do not tell yourself the lie that if you go is more important than where you go. If you find yourself saying, "It's OK, this is not for the job, this is because I want to do this," stop and evaluate that impulse. For some people, it might be true. For the majority, I suspect, it's a way to internally justify a bad decision. And if you "just want to teach" then you don't need or want a PhD. Have a stopping point. Set it early, and stick to it. When I first started, I allowed myself three cycles, and then I would try to do something else. Do not become so focused on this one goal that you lose sight of everything else. As I'm sure I don't need to tell you, to do graduate work you need a critical and analytic mind. If you've found this forum, I assume you have one. Don't forget to use it on yourself every once in a while.

I am about to finish my MTS at HDS. The degree is very solid for students interested in academic pursuits, and holds its weight very well, if my PhD acceptances are anything to go by. I have never had a class with more than 15-20 people. Most have had 6-8.

The utterly pedantic Latinist in me is compelled to correct this to post partum. Unless, of course, you really do mean "after the panther."

...That's expensive? He asks from his 400 sq. ft. apartment without a dishwasher which costs over $1500

Undergraduate GPA (2 schools): 3.06 Fully failed (GPA 0.0) semesters expunged from record: 2 Years to complete undergraduate degree: 9 MA GPA: 3.96. Acceptances: Brown, Ohio State

I mean, history often has a sort of a love-hate relationship with theory, and some people do prefer to assign Butterfield and then pretend everything else does not exist. I have some sympathy for this approach, but I think it often works to the detriment of students understanding where the frameworks they're using actually come from. That is, I think it's somewhat bad history to say "I am going to approach this subject from a Foucaultian perspective," but it's important to know that when you're discussing power dynamics, a lot of the people you've read were aware of and inspired by Foucault.

I dunno. As I said, shit's random. My last cycle, Harvard rejects came out first week of March. With the snow, who knows.

One of the professors here likes to refer to Foucault as "Fuckhead".

I can think of exactly one black medievalist. He's the senior faculty member in medieval history at Princeton, but still, only one.

I want to reiterate ashiepoo72's emphasis on clean citations. Several professors have told me they view the quality of a person's footnotes - including their adherence to the style guide - as an accurate reflection on that person's attention to detail and thus the overall quality and reliability of their scholarship.

How easy it is to take on more side projects than you can actually handle.

As one of my friends said on my FB, "You just wait for the job market"

Eeh, these things shake out in the faculty negotiations every year. I am sure when you first talked to your POI, they had every intention of making an offer in the subfield, but others won out at the Council of Doom. I don't know how it works at Penn, but here, the faculty in each sub-field select a handful of candidates to forward on to a small committee which makes the final decision. My POI (and supervisor) here encouraged me to apply, but the department ended up not making an offer to a medievalist after the dust settled.

So I was just googling aimlessly and found this. Hitler, that perky little scamp.

Depends on who's paying. I've heard of a British prof who won't fly to the US to lecture etc. on a coach ticket. He's well-regarded enough that people are willing to shell out. The easy alternative is to rack up enough miles to get it as a perk.

Kotov, I was worried you'd say Goldhagen rather than Browning Good choice My favorite medieval author is Ernst Kantorowicz, and I tend to be interested in socio-intellectual history. However, I'm really interested in digital approaches to questions and can't really think of someone that I'm really methodologically similar to at the moment. I'm sure that will change in the next 10 years.

If I end up at Brown, one of his students will be on my diss committee, so I'll get there

Shit, I'm respectable? Gotta fix that right quick. But yeah, flattery will definitely get you what you want from me! I have no idea what (if any) of what follows actually got me in, but I'll put it all down here any way. Caveat emptor. Not only can I talk about what I'd do differently, but I can talk about what I've done differently. This is the end of my second cycle. I currently hold offers from Ohio State and Brown. I have received a rejection from UCBerkeley, and presume rejections from Harvard and UChicago. My application to UToronto is still outstanding. In my first cycle, I applied to Harvard, Harvard Divinity (MTS & ThD), Yale, UChicago, Notre Dame, UMinn, BC, and BU, all for history. I was rejected from all PhD programs, but accepted to the MTS at HDS with a 3/4 scholarship and the MAPSS at Chicago with a 1/2 scholarship. There are two major reasons why I was forced to take an MA, I think. First, I was a problematic undergraduate. It took me 9 years to finish my BA, a process which started in the mechanical engineering program at UMass Amherst, involved failing out of that school twice and then working in a grocery store for 6 years, and finished at Harvard Extension (i.e. Night) School. Taking a PhD student is a risk, and the MA constituted penance for my previous sins. Second, although I very clearly knew that I wanted to study medieval history, focusing on gender and monasticism, I hadn't moved much beyond that idea. That is, I had energy, but I lacked intellectual maturity. Looking back over my old writing sample and SoP, I was a disorganized but enthusiastic mess. This is made particularly clear in my choice of schools in my first round. Yale, BC, BU, and the HDS ThD had more or less nothing to do with my areas of interest. They had strong programs, but were not strong matches. I took the MTS offer from HDS. It meant that I didn't have to leave my wife for 9 months just 2 months after our wedding. This has, of course, vastly strengthened my application. If you spend two years at Harvard doing graduate work and don't have a radically stronger application at the end, something clearly went very wrong. More than that, though, when it came time to apply again, I didn't have to just page through programs hoping to find a professor who had somewhat similar interests. I knew who they were already. For my second round I cut the four programs above immediately because I knew they didn't work. I also decided to only aim at the top tier of programs because I felt (and still feel) that where I get my PhD is much more important than if I get a PhD. I wasn't willing to settle just to make sure I got in somewhere, and in this job market I think that is fantastically good sense (if I do say so myself). I cut Notre Dame because I'd visited South Bend. Also, they were really slow sending out rejections in my first cycle and I'm pretty petty. UMinn got cut as well, since my interests had shifted away from gender studies (which was their strength) to monastic history more generally. Harvard and Chicago I kept, although neither was a good fit, to be perfectly honest. But I knew and liked the professors at Harvard and their interest in digital projects (which I share), and I was moderately in love with UChicago after my MAPSS campus visit. To these two, I added Berkeley and Brown as clear matches within my area of interest. Toronto went on the list after one of my LoR writers suggested it, and a professor at OSU convinced me to apply when I met her at a conference. As I said, my application was stronger just by the fact that I had been at Harvard for 2 years. All my LoR writers knew me well, and each had supervised aspects of my research. Plus, one of them was a Big Name - that doesn't hurt. This isn't really useful to anyone else, though, so I want to focus on my writing sample and SoP. My writing sample was very short, about 2500 words, with as much again in footnotes. However, it was not some long, meandering senior thesis, a document only seen by the author and the grader, as my first had been. Instead, it was a paper I had written for a seminar, presented at a conference, submitted for publication, and received a revise & resubmit with substantial feedback. So, it was short, but really, really solid. Well, it's at the reviewers again, so I hope it's really solid. The paper itself was highly technical, a codicological study of a 12 c. manuscript, which showed off my paleographic and Latin skills. I also made sure that my footnotes were (somewhat unnecessarily) filled with German and French sources, to demonstrate that I could read and incorporate scholarship in those languages. Thus, I tried to ensure that my sample was not only a good example of my intellect and writing, but also of my technical skills, demonstrating that I could put what I claimed on paper to practical use. With my SoP, I made sure that I not only outlined what my interests were and why, as I had done in my first season, but also where I thought these interests might lead and how I thought I might get there. I found a what (monastic communication) and a how (social network theory) which addressed what I felt to be a gap in the scholarship, but left the other details vague because they should be vague. The result was an essay which showed where I'd been, what I am (reinforced by the writing sample), where I wanted to go and how I wanted to get there, and, most importantly, why I thought the program would get me to that goal. Apparently it worked. If I were forced back for a third try, what would I do differently? I would be more brutal with my school selections (sorry, Harvard and UChicago). I would continue to revise and hone my writing sample, throwing it at as many critics as would read it. I would acquire new technical skills and ensure that I demonstrated those skills practically in my application materials. I would revisit my writing samples to draw even clearer lines between my academic path and the institution to which I was applying. Hope this helps.

Who updated Sigaba.exe to run with cheerful.dat

Nah, he's not advising my diss. Strict membership rules, that club.

Oh, man, I would love to meet DHF. So many questions! Like, "Why is the final part of Historians' Fallacies so weirdly racist and why haven't you revised it?"