rising_star

Does your school use VPN (virtual private network)?

Well, what do you mean by "critical cartography"? There are lots of people using cartography in lots of different ways. And, at any rate, critical cartography is more of a tool than anything else, meaning that you could use it at any of those programs if you wanted to.

My school uses Google for email so, again, it's highly searchable. That said, I love labels. So, my school inbox has labels for each class I've taught/TA'd (makes it easy to find student emails and also to ignore them until I want to answer them*), department listserv, other campus listservs, Fellowships/Grants, Official Campus email, job adverts, Committee (for things committee members send me), reading groups, research, conferences, friends, teaching (for workshop announcements and the handouts they email us), housing (for my lease and house hunting searches), capoeira, and classes. I realize that's a lot of labels but, it works for me. My primary, personal email is where I am subscribed to listservs (largely because I knew I would be moving to another university for my PhD and didn't want to have to deal with unsubscribing/resubscribing). Those get the label "Academic Lists" and I search through them as needed. Also, a great deal of my labeling is automated by using filters in Gmail. It's not as if I individually label every email that's sent to me. I've also color-coded most of the labels so that I can easily tell what's in my inbox and how urgently I need to look at it. hedjuk, I have a few recommendations for you. First, I would split out classes so that there's one for those you are in and another for those that you are TAing. I find it useful to keep each class I TA for separate so that when a student comes after the semester, it's easy for me to figure out what happened and where the email is (because searching "Mike" isn't all that useful sometimes). Second, I would have a folder for research. That's where my journal ToC alerts, links people send me, and emails about research all get filed. Third, I'm not sure what the difference is between "Staff" and "Faculty" but I keep all emails sent out by my department on the department listserv together and separate from all the other listservs that I'm on. *For reference, I only reply to students during business hours so if I see their email at night, I will label it, hit "Archive", and then answer it in the morning.

You may want to look into Arizona, Arizona State, UCONN, UNC-Charlotte, UGA, UT-Austin, UC-Berkeley, USC, Oregon, Washington, Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Simon Fraser, UBC, and Toronto to your list. If you just want to do a master's, you could also look at Miami (OH), University of Miami, Ohio University, and University of Miami (FL). I realize that's a lot of places but your interests are pretty vague and are covered by quite a few geography programs. You're going to have to narrow your interests down, for sure. The funding situation may be better at some of the MA-only programs.

Your LORs don't have to be from EE. They just need to speak about what you have done and your ability to do and excel at graduate level coursework and research.

It's also worth noting that many more people view and/or post to the Results Survey than use the forums. The forums definitely do *not* represent all of the applicants applying, but I doubt any online community does.

I had 2-3 basic SOP templates that I used. As everyone has said, I customized each SOP to the particular program, referring to faculty and how they could help with my project and to resources on campus that would help me. So why multiple templates? Because, the exact emphasis of my SOP varied depending on where I was applying. You should definitely customize your SOP. I don't think my department admits anybody that doesn't clearly explain why they want to be in our program rather than some other program.

Most public universities have computers in the library that anyone can use without having a login. These computers are, in turn, on the campus network and thus allow you to have access to journal articles, which you could download to a flash drive to read and print out later. Also, community colleges should have access to journal databases.

Where did you get that from? That's not what I said. I said they generally transfer if they are relevant to your PhD focus. I transferred in courses that have no equivalent at my current university without any problems.

I don't think you understand what people are telling you in this thread. You may want to re-read it. In general, a program will only let you transfer in courses that are relevant to what you are studying as a PhD student. My department let me transfer in as many courses as I wanted up to the maximum of 30 credits. Obviously, this varies from one department to the next. If you want to make sure you aren't "starting from scratch in a PhD program, in the same position as a new student fresh out of undergrad"* then you contact programs in advance and ask how they deal with transferring credits. *Also, you won't be the same as a student fresh out of undergrad because you will have experience doing graduate level work and research, have more refined research interests, and be able to progress at a faster rate.

30 credits accepted is pretty much the norm. It's also about the number of credits you'll earn from coursework during a two year masters program. So, it's definitely not a bad sign that they'll accept a maximum 30 credits. Given that you're doing the MPA, I would make sure any PhD programs you are applying to will accept transfer at least 9 transfer credits.

My MA program was very much a book a week program. My PhD program is not quite like that. They assign fewer pages because they expect us to carefully read all of them. That said, a few profs in my PhD program still assign a book a week *and* expect it to be read in detail. That really sucks. I did my comps during my third year. Because I took extra courses during my first year, I was able to have a reduced course load during my comps semester though I was still TAing for a huge course. I know lots of people say you just read in the summer but, as others have mentioned, that implies that you aren't in the field. I spent my summers in the field, prepping for summer fieldwork and applying for grants to pay for it during the spring semesters. At any rate, for those of you skimming books, I'd like to point out the usefulness of reading book reviews. They can give you a clear picture of what the main arguments in the book are and the criticisms other scholars have of the book. You can read 2-3 of those and then use those to guide your skimming and help you figure out where you should pay more attention when reading.

This is what I do. It works well because I just go through them when I have time. And, yes, this is what I meant by setting up alerts. Staying on top of new articles published related to one's research is very important, especially in the sciences and social sciences. Not sure about the humanities though.

I can't really say since I don't remember when the deadlines were. I just looked at a bunch of my old SOPs. One was 492 words, one 610, one 1,019 words... Wait, actually. The 492 word was for a Jan 1 deadline and the 610 word one and another with 969 words were for Jan 15 deadlines (based on the file edit dates). There's another Jan 15 deadline that I submitted a 1200 word SOP to. So, no pattern to that at all. I think the length varied because I was more into some schools than others. In the longer SOPs, I outlined a project or two that I would work on. That said, I got into all of the schools so I can't say whether the word count had an effect on that. (As an aside, I listed 5 faculty in the SOP for the program I'm now in. Of those, three are currently on my committee and one is someone that I sometimes turn to for advice. The fifth person and I have severe personality conflicts and don't interact at all.)

My first year in my MA program was actually easier, for me, than my senior year of college in a lot of ways. First year of my MA, I took 4 classes a semester (3 of which were seminars) and wrote a thesis proposal while on fellowship. Senior year I took seven course (5 of those were seminars) and wrote a senior thesis with basically no guidance or help from my advisor. My undergrad courses required 200-250 pages of reading per week. In my MA program, only 2 or 3 courses (over the course of the year!) required that much reading. Some would say that adding research into the mix is the complicating factor but, guess what? There's research in a senior thesis too! At any rate, how hard graduate school is depends a lot on your time management skills, department, and research. I probably could have spent a lot more time on readings for class but, I didn't put as much effort into reading things that wouldn't be on my comps and weren't relevant for my research. You also have to find ways to work smarter, like automating alerts to new journal articles so that you don't have to run searches all the time.

Really, that depends. How prepared are you to meet the language requirements ("3. Demonstration of a high degree of proficiency in a language other than English; 4. Demonstration of a reading knowledge of a second language other than English")? Are those language proficiencies going to help you or just be an obnoxious hurdle on your way to the dissertation?

Here's some advice from a publication I just read: He goes on to add the following: Note: This article appeared in the most recent issue of American Anthropologist and was written by the journal's editior-in-chief. While he points out this his advice is most useful to anthropologists, I'm quoting it here because I think it has relevance beyond that specific discipline. Specifically, I chose these two sections because I think they address your (OP's) questions about how long to wait and who to contact. Anyway, the whole thing is worth a read, as are some of the publications he references that offer more information on the publishing process. Boellstorff, T. (2011), Submission and Acceptance: Where, Why, and How to Publish Your Article. American Anthropologist, 113: 383–388. doi: 10.1111/j.1548-1433.2011.01348.x

My experience was similar to fuzzylogician's. After having to write a 500 word version, I realized that my longer SOP (which was ~1000 words) was excessively long and that it needed to be trimmed. To answer your question, I'd say the 10% rule sounds good to me.

I don't allow laptops. It's difficult to discuss things when several people have their eyes glued to the computer screen. I find that it fosters discussion NOT to allow them. Our teaching center has a bunch of information that we can reference that explains how the students aren't multitasking as effectively as they think and about how laptops allow them to sort of disengage from what's going on around them.

To the person in charge of graduate admissions in the department. Often this is the DGS.

How prepared are you to do graduate-level work in a language besides Spanish? That will affect whether or not it makes sense for you to apply to comp lit programs. At a glance, it seems like your interests will be well served in a Spanish & Portuguese department.

One way to decide (that someone I know used) is this: when you look at the core courses in each type of department, which are most appealing to you to teach? Would you be happier teaching SOC 101 or ANTHRO 101? That sort of thing matters since all faculty teach introductory courses at some point.

I just saw this blog post that has information on learning a foreign language quickly. While it's intended for leisure travelers, the advice will definitely help you get started learning another language. I'm planning to use some of the resources I learned about through it to start studying another language or two on my own this fall.

Pinecone, Rosetta Stone courses are expensive, just so you know. If you're just auditing the undergrad course, you might as well go ahead and give it a shot. I just looked again and, I think what you're doing is pretty manageable. I'm pretty sure other students in your program have done that as well, though you might want to double-check with them to be sure.

Based on your interests, I think you'd fit in pretty well in a geography department. It's sort of a happy mix of anthropology, sociology, and so much more. There are a number of social movement scholars in geography, using methods you list and sharing some of your interests in things like urban space. Take a look at Wendy Wolford (UNC), as one example.