natsteel
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Posts posted by natsteel
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When you quote a line of jabs back and forth and ask "Seriously?", it leaves me confused
As in "Are you all seriously arguing about something so trivial?" Then again, my post was trivial as well. So... nevermind, then.
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the 70s was 40 years ago.
Technically, the 70s was from 32-41 years ago. Gotta count the s in there
I mean, so long as we're nitpicking
Love.
i noted the s on 70s. did you note the "20" in "20-30 years ago"?
Seriously?
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I hate to be a parrot, but I echo all of this. "Managing" your internet presence is a must. I comment at a few academic-oriented blogs, and often use my full name, so this mindset makes sure that I alway say something respectable and that won't come back to bite me.
Also, do register an academia profile. It is a great way to make yourself look professional and spread your interests/achievements/etc. Academia has a great tracker that allows you to see when your name is googled, what words they used when searching, and what country of origin the search came from. I'm very confident in saying that adcoms google applicants, because I always see a spike in searches during the weeks that admissions committees begin meeting.
Biggest downfall for me: some idiot who shares my name broke into an apartment in the same town I live in, and photographs of said idiot are near the top of the results whenever my name is googled. Even somewhat looks like me, too. Luckily it says that it happened long before I moved here, but you actually have to click on the website to find that out. I really hope searchers don't think it's me.
Emerson, a guy with the same name as you broke into an apartment in the same town?? Talk about bad luck... The Google info from Academia.edu is an added bonus. No matter what you think of the functionality of these sites, they do show up high in Google searches and therefore makes them an important part and easy way to help manage your online presence especially in Google searches.
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Yep they google you so its always a good idea to make sure your public image out there (eg your Facebook/Twitter etc) is sanitized.
This is very good advice. Last year, I read a number of horror stories of adcoms and job search committees checking candidates out online. So I started trying to "manage" my online profile/presence. While it may seem self-obsessed to Google yourself regularly, surely you want to know what adcoms will see when they Google your name, and they WILL Google your name. A couple of tips I've found:
1) Use high settings of privacy on Facebook and use a respectable/professional looking profile pic.
2) All social websites (including your profiles on sites like Amazon, Goodreads, LibraryThing, and Ning) show up fairly high in Google results so if a Google search of your name doesn't turn up stuff of yours or, even worse, turns up stuff you'd rather not be seen by adcoms:
a. Register for personal social sites like Facebook and Twitter and give them a modestly professional appearance.
b. Register for professional networking sites, especially Academia.edu and LinkedIn. They'll all show up on the first page of Google search results and are professional by nature.
c. Do a & b even if you're not going to use them regularly. People that do Google searches rarely look beyond the first page and so you want to do your best to control what shows up
on that first page.
3) If you have a Google account, create your Google profile which will also show up on the first page usually.
Basically, treat every website where you are registered under your real name as if adcoms were the only people that would be looking at it.
- Strangefox and katerific
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I would've joined by now, but haven't mostly because of funds. I do subscribe to 2 journals, but I will be joining a number of organizations next fall including the AHA, OAH, Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, Society of Early Americanists, and American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.
Lack of funds also made a trip to Boston impossible and I even missed it when it was here in NYC. My mentor told me to just go without paying the fee, but I don't have that kind of nerve.
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I got a 4.0 on the AW as well and have won a couple of writing awards and am having a paper published in a national undergrad journal. Like many of you, I suspect, I have my own style that I have developed over many years of writing that works well everywhere else but on the GRE AW section. I actually considered retaking it to try to raise it. But a number of my professors said it wasn't worth it to retake just for the AW score. My Verbal score is fairly respectable at 94th percentile. I did talk to a prominent professor at Columbia who told me that in his department they don't even look at AW scores, I quote, "Why would I look at that when I have someone's writing sample in front of me?" So I decided to leave it.
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You mean, would adcoms prefer them only because of the age? I don't think so.
Absolutely not. But, I should qualify that by adding "within reason." At least in the Humanities, candidates that are in their 50s or older may be at a slight disadvantage because of their age, because they are highly unlikely to ever get a TT job. But, even if that is so, I think it would be program/department-specific. But I know a number of professors that went to top history programs like Stanford, N'western, Penn, and Columbia when they were in their 30s. I certainly don't think a 21-year old has any inherent advantage over a 35-year old.
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I just 1-upped your crazy: reading the undergraduate admissions office's student blogs for each school.
(In my defense, it's actually quite interesting to read about the different types of undergraduate cultures out there.... especially since their cultures all seem so drastically different from my school's!)
Well. I'm glad I've found a place where this kinda stuff doesn't sound completely whacko.
That did 1-up me...
until I watched the undergraduate videos from TheU.com for my schools. Though, it did prove helpful a little bit in getting an idea of the atmosphere of some of the campuses.
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Guys, please don't take my previous rant seriously. Though some of what I said was based in fact, obviously I drew the bleakest scenario possible. I was not in any way trying to discourage anyone. All we can do as budding history grad students is: a) get into the best program with the best advisor fit possible and
work as hard as we possibly can for the entire time we are there. One of my mentors says not to worry too much about all the job market doom-and-gloom because "they've been saying all this stuff since [she] started" which was in the early 1970s. -
This. This is exactly what happened with my waitlists and one of the rejections last year.
History, I think, is changing slowly the way it handles admissions process. It seems important to contact professors. Professors are usually happy to learn a bit about the potential applicant and look at these contacts as interviews. If you can manage to talk on the phone or meet in person, it's pretty easy for both of you to determine if you can stand each other for as long as it takes you to finish your PhD, which could be more than 6 years. Given the volume of applications, it can make the professor's job easier in determining whose application he wants (or not) to read. History has become a lot more collaborative than it used to be than other humanities fields, which actually discourage contacts.
Very true. I've read on the CHE forums where English professors discourage making any kind of contact with prospective advisors. 20-30 years ago fit was not a major consideration as my 2 older mentors said that faculty/fit had nothing to do with grad admissions in the 70s. But now, when fit is one of the most important considerations on the part of adcoms and departments, it seems like it only makes sense that you would want to explore the possible fit by contacting professors during the application process. It seemed like it was a common thing for all the profs that I emailed.
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Take it again.
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I am a highly-qualified but very non-traditional student who has applied for admission to several doctoral programs. I wonder what are your thoughts about the idea of having a 50-ish woman in your cohort?
Im in my 30s and took 2 grad classes, one at the CUNY Grad Center, this past semester. Both of the classes had students even less traditional than myself including 1-2 women in their 50s in each class. In both classes, these women brought all kinds of experiences to bear on their comments and critiques of works and generally added a great deal to the discussion. Coming from a very large public university, I've learned how valuable diversity can be in the classroom.
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Did you send your e-mail to the regular 'gsas-admit' e-mail (the one they provide online)? Thanks.
Yes, I did. However, the replies were from the respondent's individual address. I must amend my statement above. I sent an initial inquiry on Dec. 17th and received a reply on the evening of Sunday, the 19th. However, I then sent a follow-up question which, as I said, was responded to in an hour. On an individual level for us, things seem to be moving at an incredibly slow pace, but the bigger programs are processing hundreds and hundreds of applications. I imagine that even the smaller schools that receive less applications have a smaller staff. It may feel to us like the Admissions offices aren't doing as much as they should, but they are.
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I don't have an actual Plan B... but if, for some reason, it doesn't work out, I'd probably take a year off and apply to law school next year. If that didn't work either, I'd probably just go back to music supplemented by clerical work.
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Back from the dead for PhD.
Always tired with not enough done.
Not mine, but:
The waiting is the hardest part.
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I'm pretty sure this is the way the *lazy* admission office updates status. As long as it shows "COMPLETE," no worries, or I was so told.
I don't think I'd call the Admissions Office at Columbia lazy. I emailed them once on a Sunday evening not expecting a response for a couple of days and a woman emailed me back within in an hour. I wrote back to thank her for responding during "what I hope are not regular office hours," and she replied, "In an effort to process the applications and answer email in a timely fashion, our staff works 7 days a week and at all hours. Thanks, for noticing."
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Look, if you want to email them then go for it. It's your application and your situation, right?
The email I was speaking of was sent at the end of October, not after the application had been submitted. I met one professor face to face, had wonderful email exchanges, a lot in common, met with a couple other faculty at the school via their recommendation. I still wouldn't have contacted them again. That's me. It just kind of wreaks of those students in undergrad who show up at every office hour in hopes of trying to wiggle their A- to an A. But I'm just one person.
I think it's a completely different dynamic and shouldn't be compared to undergrad situations. The grad school admissions process is highly competitive and professors know that. I think they also want to know that you're genuinely interested in their program, especially those not at top 10 programs. Obviously, if you lack tact than, like a previous poster said, extended communication could be disadvantageous. But I don't think most professors are turned off by a student showing real interest in their program, especially one with whom they have traded multiple emails and/or met in person.
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My greatest fear is being admitted into a PhD program and not having the financial resources to relocate to the school. 2010 was a very hard year for me.
I think about this all the time especially considering I will be moving myself, my wife, and 2 young boys.
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Not to disappoint you but it's probably not. My materials were sent in for review by Christmas. You may wanna bug them.
When I check my status at Columbia, it says that it's "COMPLETE" and "at the department," but doesn't show my uploaded transcripts nor GRE scores as having been received.
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I find that I oscillate between feeling pretty confident about my chances to feeling ridiculously insecure. A lot.
Same here. It's like living one day in the positives thread and another day in the rest of the fora.
The subjective nature of the whole process makes it so that what most of us are experiencing in terms of alternating between self-doubt and self-confidence, constantly speculating about uncertainties, etc... has become nothing less than a rite of passage on the way to doctoral studies.
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I think you're missing the point--do not contact them after you have submitted your application. But it seems like you really want to and you probably will anyway.
Is that "the point?" I think the jury seems a bit mixed. Again, if you received only one terse reply from a professor than you probably shouldn't even bother emailing them one more time. However, if you exchanged a couple of messages both ways with a professor, who definitely showed interest in you and/or your work, then I don't see anything wrong with emailing one more time to say something very brief like:
Prof. xxxx,
I just wanted to let you know that I have submitted my application to your program and thank you for your assistance. I look forward to a decision on my application.
Regards,
Xxxx Xxxxx
Of course, others do not agree with me, but, again, I think it depends largely on the number and nature of your previous communications with each professor. However, I should also add that I am in History and it appears that different fields, even within the Humanities, have different expectations and protocol on these kinds of matters.
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I made and received contact with all my potential advisors, had a few phone conversations, am meeting one in person next week, and had a prof. from a top program ask to see my SOP and sent it back with comments on how to better tailor it for that school's admissions committee. I don't know how much of a difference any of it will make, but, the way I see it, it can't hurt.
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My undergrad university is huge but not the kind of huge where we have big lecture sections in which you don't get any face time with the professor. So, here it was just a matter of going to office hours and talking with professors. You don't necessarily have to be in a professor's class to use their office hours. After a little while, I just mentioned to them that if they were working on anything and needed some "grunt work" done that I was available.
That approach helped get me RA positions for all three of my mentors, one of them a recurring gig, and I'm one of the most socially inept persons you will ever meet. I just sucked it up because I knew it was something I had to do. The more comfortable I got talking with them also helped me deal with other faculty, administrators, etc. in an academic setting. If you want to go to graduate school, you cannot get out of learning how to deal with people like this. I'm still very reticent when meeting or talking to people that I don't know, but it's better than it was and it's getting better.
I am now getting ready for the ultimate test... an informal interview with a prospective advisor from a top 5 program in less than a week. I got an introduction from one of my mentors but I still have to go meet the prof. and not look like a totally inept, incoherent idiot. <fingers crossed>
Believe me, if I can do it, so can you...
What's unique about you?
in Waiting it Out
Posted
These things may not be unique to me, but...
I'm a songwriter that taught myself to play six musical instruments.
I also taught myself audio engineering and record albums at home.
I used to coach Little League when I was in my late-teens/early 20s.