eyeso

Thank you everyone for your very helpful advice and suggestions! Now yet another complicating factor... Just when I was about to decide on Y, the adviser I applied to work with there informed me that s/he has received a job offer elsewhere this fall and is seriously considering it. So does it even make sense to attend a school with potentially no adviser in hand?

I would like to ask y'all's opinion on the adviser vs. school name dilemma for getting a PhD in art history. Although there are some specifics to my story, I think this issue is something people across the board can sympathize with or have given some thought to, so I would really appreciate any and all opinions you guys have! Here's my situation: I intend to get a PhD in modern/contemporary art history of a rather obscure non-Western geographic region. I am choosing between two programs: 1. School X, one of the so-called "Public Ivies" School X is where there are two professors working on art of the region I'm interested in--one doing pre-modern and the other doing modern/contemporary. The former is an established full professor well known in the field, while the latter (who would be my adviser) was recently tenured and considered an up-and-coming scholar in the field. There are also several graduate students working in closely related areas to my research interests; many of these students said that they turned down other brand name schools to work with specific professors at school X. Being a state school, the annual stipend at school X is considerably lower than at school Y (the difference is more than $5,000). 2. School Y, one of the most highly regarded universities in the Ivy League School Y has a strong modern/contemporary art program heavily concentrated on Euro-America, but no one working on pre-modern/modern/contemporary art of the region I want to study. Students working on non-Western modern/contemporary at school Y have warned me of the challenges I might face, but also note that school Y--being much more well endowed--will be able to support me in whatever line of research I would like to persue, although I will have to be resourceful and striking out my own path. I understand that the quality of the dissertation and my development as a scholar are some of the most important factors to consider when picking a graduate school, and with these criteria, there is no doubt that school X is a better match. But the issue is that ultimately I intend to return home (the geographic region I am studying) to work as an arts administrator, and there, everyone knows of school Y but very few people have heard of school X. Name recognition would not be as much of an issue if I were thinking of staying in academia, but with my hopes to get into national arts administration and policy work, a lot of the people I will be dealing with (including the people hiring me) will not necessarily be familiar with scholarship in art history or how awesome professors at school X are, and this is where the brand name factor kicks in (as superficial as that sound, it is the reality). My intellectual side tells me that knowledge is power, and the success of a scholar lies in his/her work. But outside academia and outside the US, prestige and networks are still the things that get people jobs. Investing in becoming a stellar scholar can carry me far on the long haul, but so will investing in a stellar brand name. For the people on GradCafe who had to make a decision similar to this in the past, what did you end up choosing and are you ultimately happy with that decision? Or anyone else out there currently facing the same issue?

I would like to ask y'all's opinion on the adviser vs. school prestige dilemma. Here's my situation: I intend to work in modern/contemporary art of a rather obscure non-Western geographic region. I am choosing between two PhD programs: 1. School X, a top-20 state school (to go by this generic ranking http://arthistorynewsletter.com/blog/?p=3013) School X is where there are two professors working on art of the region I'm interested in--one doing pre-modern and the other doing modern/contemporary. The former is an established full professor well known in the field, while the latter (who would be my adviser) was recently tenured and considered an up-and-coming scholar in the field. There are also several graduate students working in closely related areas to my research interests; many of these students said that they turned down other brand name schools to work with specific professors at school X. Being a state school, the annual stipend at school X is considerably lower than at school Y (the difference is more than $5,000). 2. School Y, a very highly regarded Ivy League school School Y has a strong modern/contemporary art program heavily concentrated on Euro-America, but no one working on pre-modern/modern/contemporary art of the region I want to study. Students working on non-Western modern/contemporary at school Y have warned me of the challenges I might face, but also note that school Y--being much more well endowed--will be able to support me in whatever line of research I would like to persue, although I will have to be resourceful and striking out my own path. I understand that the quality of the dissertation and my development as a scholar are some of the most important factors to consider when picking a graduate school, and with these criteria, there is no doubt that school X is a better match. But the issue is that ultimately I intend to return home (the geographic region I am studying) to work as an arts administrator, and there, everyone knows of school Y but very few people have heard of school X. Name recognition would not be as much of an issue if I were thinking of staying in academia or curating, but with my hopes to get into national arts administration and policy work, a lot of the people I will be dealing with (including the people hiring me) will not necessarily be familiar with scholarship in art history, and this is where the brand name factor kicks in (as superficial as that sound, it is the reality). For the people on GradCafe who had to make a decision similar to this in the past, what did you end up choosing and are you ultimately happy with that decision? Or anyone else out there currently facing the same issue?