natsteel

I have an Academia.edu page, an About.me profile page, and my own website, which I made with Tumblr. Oh yeah, I also have a one-page, static thing on my department's website. If you just need something quick and easy, you can create a profile page at Academia.edu and upload your CV. Then create a profile page at About.me and and put in a link to the CV on your Academia.edu page (this is because the docs you upload to Scribd via Academia.edu are not opened to public searches on Scribd).

This. If someone doesn't know what an academic CV should look like or what should be included, they should ask their professors if they can see their CVs. Or find the CVs of scholars in your field on their department profile webpage. Generally, for grad students in the Humanities, it is enough to have headings for Education, (academically-related) Employment/Teaching, Publications (if any), Presentations (if any), Honors, Research Interests, References. For those in fields where there are significant foreign language requirements, some add a "Languages" heading. Even for all that, no grad student's CV should be more than 2 pages.

I find that people are taking ticklemepink's statement literally somewhat "goofy." She obviously meant that people don't become historians as a way to get rich, not that we shouldn't be expected to be paid for our efforts (except journal publishing, of course). After all, when you consider that those lucky enough to finish a PhD after 6-8 years of the hardest work of their life (about half) AND find a full-time job (no more than 1/3 of that half) can expect to make around $45,000 per year, I think her comment is quite accurate and prescient.

While preparing from word lists is useful, I think it's even more beneficial to study roots, prefixes, and suffixes, which can actually help you when you get a word you are not sure about. After all, you could quite conceivably spend dozens of hours studying a list of 1,000 (or even 5,000) words and have one (or none) of them come up on the test. Similarly, pay attention to the strategies given in the prep books for the antonym questions.

Not everyone can do a whole MA thesis or dissertation on a topic about which they themselves are not excited. However, I think the moral of ticklemepink's story is: You shouldn't pick a topic solely based on job prospects, but you should drop topics based on job prospects. That is to say, don't work on some trendy topic just because it's trendy (after all, it may not be six or seven years later when you finish it). But, also keep in mind that the more obscure a topic is the harder it might be to find a job.

It is in a sense because it's adaptive. If you get a a word or two early on which the test considers easy but you don't happen to know, it can account for a wide range of scores. I scored anywhere from 590 to 720 on the 4 practice test I took to prepare. I ended up with a 660. Besides, even your lowest score is very high so it's not something worth spending any real time worrying about it.

I'm with rising_star. I think being able to give a post a "-1" or "dislike" is just as important, if not more so, than "liking" a post. Other than that, the new look is great. Good work!!!

This. If you put your former institution, it will look as though you are still there. In most history journals, you list your current school even if the research was begun somewhere else and then you could mention something like "This article is derived from research begun at xxxxx University." In my field, your current affiliation is always the primary affiliation listed for a publication.

I would agree. GREs are used by some schools as the first way to narrow down the pool. It's easy for a place like Princeton to throw out any apps with GRE-V scores under 550 (I am just arbitrarily picking that school and score). However, I was in contact with a PA at a state school in the Midwest I was considering applying to and when I told him my combined score was 1220 (660V), he "worried" out loud that it wouldn't be high enough to get me the full University Fellowship. Meanwhile, I did get a full University Fellowship from a much more prominent private school. State schools rely more on numbers like "Average GRE score of admitted students" to a) improve their reputations in relation to the private schools who don't sweat over those numbers as much and pander to their state legislatures to either keep their current funding or minimize funding cuts. It is my suspicion this is the case even more at big, well-known state schools with national reputations who are under assault by their state legislatures' missions to make sure the taxpayers' money is used wisely (i.e., OSU, UW-M, etc...). That is just an assumption on my part however.

Always go where the money is.

I read that wrong. My apologies. Sorry if that mistakenly came off as harsh. 540V isn't really "abysmal." It certainly shouldn't preclude you outright from consideration at most schools. Did you use one of the prep books? Are you sure you can't improve the score by working on some GRE-specific test-taking skills or are you just discouraged at the moment? Also, don't worry about how well known your undergrad institution is. I come from a large public university system that is not regarded well at all and I still got into my top choice. And my case is not exactly unique. Your work and application materials will matter far more than where your degree is from. I had many of the same concerns as you the summer before I applied. Don't let the GRE get you discouraged to the point where it affects the rest of your application. If 540V is the best you can do... so be it. Then just put that much more effort on the rest of your application. In reality, that is all you can do. But be aware that the whole admissions process is highly subjective and I've heard many people describe it, fairly accurately in my estimation as well, as a "crap shoot." There are so many factors that are out of the applicants' control that it's impossible to predict anything. Just do all you possibly can.

Like someone said, how can we possibly tell you anything without knowing your scores or the "very well known college" to which you are applying. I would also hope that you're not only applying to one school. Finally, keep in mind that even if you gave us that info, the GRE and GPA alone would tell us almost nothing about your qualifications or how an adcomm would perceive them since your LORs, SOP, and writing sample are each more important than the GRE and GPA combined for graduate programs in English. That said, I imagine something like a 400V on the GRE for a native speaker would rule you out in the initial rounds at many schools.

I got an email from Apple today saying that Lion will be out this month. As for when to expect new MBPs... Since 2008, they've come out around every 10 months (6/09, 4/10, 2/11) so I would expect another around the end of the year.

I thought the same thing when I first read the post. However, it's not entirely true that you don't get "paid." Of course, there is no cash payment, but, if you consider that publishing those articles is a required part of your tenure-track job, then, in a sense, you are getting paid to publish articles just like you are for being in the classroom or advising students in your office or doing committee work in the department conference room. And, if publishing those articles leads to getting tenure, then there certainly is a "pay-off" if not a direct "payment." Sad but true, tmp.

I began contacting them around the second week of September and continued on throughout the rest of the month. After receiving their responses, I ended up scrubbing 2-3 from the list and contacted 2-3 more at different schools in the first week of October. I exchanged a few emails with some of them through October and then sent them all an email after the deadlines in December to tell them I had submitted my application and thank them for their assistance.

I use Papers on my Mac to manage my PDFs. When I have an article or book chapter I photocopied, I scan it to PDF and put it in. With Papers, I can search the full-text (or just the title and abstracts) of all my PDFs and I have over 1600. It's also a citation manager so I have basically given up on EndNote, except when I need to share libraries with someone.

I understand this kind of reaction to the OP, but I think it stems more from a lack of knowledge regarding the competition for places in a top 10 or top 20 program. I think a lot of people coming from non-name brand undergraduate schools wonder how they might possibly stack up against strong candidates who did their undergrad at top schools. That said, the OP did say he was at an undergrad school ranked in the low 50s. I had the same kind of questions when applying and I was coming from a regional university system. I think some of it stems from the notion of "If I did this at a less-than-stellar undergraduate school, what have the kids at Harvard, Princeton, and Yale done and what will their applications look like?"

It's misleading to overgeneralize, at least in regards to History. Nevertheless, some schools, even ones that have full PhD programs, offer terminal MAs in History, but those programs are often either looked at as cash cows (i.e., no funding) or largely as an afterthought. Then there are tons of regional colleges and universities which do not have PhD programs, which offer terminal MAs in History. In History it seems that some (though of course not all) students do an MA to improve on a less-than-stellar undergraduate record or if they are unsure if graduate school is the right decision. I don't think having an MA makes a big difference when applying to top 50 programs in History. Or I should say that it doesn't appear that MA-holders are considered to have a distinct advantage in the admissions process. But these are just my own perceptions...

You should try BusyCal. It syncs multiple calendars effortlessly with Google Calendar, thus giving you a cloud backup. Things syncs with your iPhone/iPod Touch on its own (i.e., you have to have both on the same wireless conncection), not in the cloud.

I tried multiple ways to do this and what I've settled on is: BusyCal - I use this instead of iCal because it does an instant 2-way sync with all my calendars (Personal, School, Financial, etc...) to Google Calendars more easily. Like newms, I don't feel safe unless I have multiple copies of stuff like this but the extra copies are useless if they're not up-to-date. This way if my computer died, I have all my up-to-date calendars on Google. Things - My favorite task manager. Besides the GUI, which is both nice and effective, it syncs my tasks with BusyCal and the iPhone app, which I also have. I create a project for each research paper or project I am working on and break them down into the smallest tasks possible. All of my tasks from Things show up in BusyCal as well. So basically I use BusyCal and Things with Google Calendar as my cloud backup.

ticklemepink offers good advice (as usual). However, language expectations (at least for Americanists) are somewhat more lax than other fields. I got accepted at very highly-ranked program as an early Americanist and I've only had 3 semesters of Latin and nothing else. So, I would agree with pudewen. At least for strict Americanists, languages won't be the thing that keeps you out. I also struggle with foreign languages. However, while it may not hurt for the application process, you don't want to be stuck like me having to expend significant amounts of time on languages while also coping with coursework.

http://db.tt/gUu4vPs

I used EndNote for a long time but never the CWYW feature. I like to type out all my footnotes (Chicago-style) myself, but I would use EndNote for doing the bibliography. Now that Papers2 has incorporated a citation manager in it even easier than EndNote, I have given up on EndNote for personal use. Though, sometimes I have to use it when collaborating with others and keeping a shared ENL on Dropbox. I've tried them all: Mendeley, Sente, Bookends, Zotero, and Refworks. And, for me, Papers is the most intuitive yet. If I had stayed with Windows, I would likely still be using EndNote, however.

FWIW, I upgraded the RAM in my MBP from 2GB to 8GB for $80. Bought Kingston RAM off Amazon and installed it myself in 10 minutes instead of paying $200 for Apple to do it.

Really? I bought my MacBook Pro 19 months ago and it says my "battery loadcycles" are 393 but that I still have 88% (4846 mAh) of my original battery capacity (5450 mAh). Instead of a little over the 6 hours I got in the beginning, I now still get over 5 hours 15 minutes.