dr. t

No, I don't think we have to do that. Once again, this is a letter for an internal grant. Specifically, it is a type of grant which is usually not very competitive and frequently approved very quickly. The letter in this case is essentially a formal professorial nil obstat for the application. A professor's time is limited, and having the graduate student draft up a a letter for him or her to check is a perfectly legitimate way to save time.Similarly, if I need a formal letter of introduction to do work at, say, the Bibliothèque Nationale (a real-life example for me), I will draft the appropriate letter which my adviser will then sign. If the professor decides this is also a perfectly valid way to send letters of recommendation to job search committees or external grant applications, then that is a significant problem. However, the issue still isn't "plagiarism" or similar nonsense, but rather an adviser who clearly does not care very much about his or her students' success.

This may be of interest: https://www.ilr.cornell.edu/cheri/workingpapers/upload/cheri_wp94.pdf

IDK man ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Can we stop with the histrionics? Writing a letter for an internal grant is a minor piece of clerical work, not a publication.

Cherry-picked voices of dissent aside, this is a fairly common practice in many fields. Professorial time is at a premium, and while I wouldn't endorse the practice outright - it will almost certainly result in a lower-quality letter - I don't see any reason to get hysterical about it. With respect to the question at hand, I suspect one of the reasons the professor asked the student to write it is because a travel grant isn't exactly a high-stakes endeavor, and a fairly standard letter will do just fine. Just hit the high notes - why this is important, why you're qualified - and the letter should be fine. On the other hand, if you know your adviser tells his students to write their own letters when they're on the job market...

Everything about this is spot on, except there is no theory and method course for an MTS and your language proficiency can be in either a research or an ancient language. The degree requirements are: 8 courses within your area of focus, 4 outside of it, and language proficiency at an intermediate level in one language.

I'm not sure what the other posters are talking about, but it seems pretty clear to me that your professor wants to make sure you didn't plagiarize the other assignments. You could probably refuse the request, but the professor might simply drag you before the ad board instead.

What do you mean by "published article"? I don't know many professors who would encourage undergraduates to publish in a peer reviewed journal, nor many journals which would accept such an article - never mind two. If you don't actually mean a full peer reviewed journal, I would suggest that you are more precise with your phrasing so people do not think you are deliberately misleading them. Your raw chances of getting into a top-tier program are, generally, 5-7%.

When blogs start counting for tenure, then I will start publishing my work on my blog.

Can anyone give me their impressions about the history program at the Ohio State? It was suggested to me, but as of now I know nothing about it and my impression of the undergraduate life there is fairly negative.

I mean, don't get me wrong, rent in Boston sucks. You're looking at ca. $1.3-1.5k per month for a 1BR in Cambridge or Somerville. Having a spouse, however, makes paying for that a lot easier. I paid my wife's rent while she did her MA, now she's returning the favor. My general advice is to look for an apartment which is convenient for the one making the money!

That's the price of living in Arlington. I generally recommend a bicycle. It's faster and more convenient than the T, and you never have to worry about parking it.

Mike McCormick et al. at Harvard do this sort of thing very well. I would also check out Kyle Harper at the University of Oklahoma (a Harvard grad). There have been two recent papers on the Black Death: S. Haensch et al., “Distinct Clones of Yersinia Pestis Caused the Black Death,” Public Library of Science Pathogens 6, no. 10 (2010). David M Wagner et al., “Yersinia Pestis and the Plague of Justinian 541–543 AD: A Genomic Analysis,” The Lancet Infectious Diseases 14, no. 4 (April 2014): 319–26, doi:10.1016/S1473-3099(13)70323-2. I would check the professors involved with both of them to see if they point you in the direction of interesting departments.

They said they usually get 300-400 applications and take about 10% of their applicant pool (from which I derived the above numbers), but based on your comment I did some more digging and found that elsewhere they say they're looking for ca. 25 students. This is much more comforting, though still on the larger side, I think. Thanks!

So, after doing more in-depth research, my list has shrunk a bit to Harvard, Brown, UCBerk, UChicago, and UToronto. I'm... moderately intimidated by this list. I've gone only for professors who were very near my area of interest, but I've ended up with a short list of heavy hitters. Two questions: 1) Does anyone have any tips on how to not freak out about this? 2) The UCB program says it takes a history cohort of 32-40. This seems absurdly large. Is this perception accurate, and can anyone here comment on how the cohort size influences the internal department dynamic?

Apartments for September only really start coming on the market in quantity in late May.

I am still not sure that is what happened. Right, but there are actual, you know, written sources that you can show other academics that would be believed, like, for example, the chapter on paleography in: Powell, James M., ed. Medieval Studies: An Introduction. 2nd ed. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1992.

For the first point, it certainly makes sense for you to have to track down an original language critical edition of a primary source text you want to use. A critical edition is in fact superior to having a single manuscript. If your teacher has ruled these out, there is something wrong. I suspect that's not the case. It also makes sense to require you to study that text in the primary language. Not to be super harsh, but if you can't read your primary sources in an MA program, you're going to have huge issues doing any other work in Ancient or Medieval History, so that's not so much a requirement as it is a basic test of competence. Not that your languages won't improve, but you should already be in the process of acquiring them. If you don't think they're necessary, you are deeply mistaken. The second point seems to either be a misunderstanding on your part or ignorance over the particularities of pre-modern manuscript transmission on hers. For the former, you certainly can't use Tacitus to talk about Augustinian Rome, for example.

Hooray & welcome! I'd say I'd see you around, but I study medieval Christianity and spend a lot of time down at the Yard, so that might not actually happen. An interesting theory, particularly since something like a third of HDS is drawn from UChicago in one way or another.

Yup. I've got to lecture some Cistercians.

No, it was pretty decent. $600 dollars a year for top-tier health insurance was even better. Unfortunately, it involves working retail Huh. Apparently my middle school curriculum was better than I thought.

Again, I'm not really complaining - there are plenty of other things to do if you like money - but we are expected to teach, right? And how many of those people making under 39k (and let's be clear, that's a $14,000 gap to the most generous stipends you'll find out there) a year don't have a college education? The median for those with a BA is $43,143 and with an MA, $52,390. Once more, we're obviously in this for the heart and soul, not the wallet, but let's not pretend that stipends aren't just enough for it to be slightly uncomfortable to live.

That is entirely incorrect. This is pretty much stats 101. No, scratch that, this is 7th grade math. I understand not everyone in history is fully aboard the quant train, but really. A decent stipend of $25k would be about $5000 dollars less than I made working 30 hours a week at Trader Joe's, before we start to factor in the additional benefits, etc. That's fine - I honestly don't have a problem with it - but it's patently ridiculous to pretend that it is not a paltry sum.

I mean, that comes out to 1 in any particular field every other year, at best. That doesn't seem absurd to me, at least.

Are there really elite programs still doing this? Most cohort sizes I see are no greater than 20.