rising_star

stand proud

You definitely do not need to have a research question. In fact, I think a lot of schools would be turned off by that since you're supposed to take the knowledge gained from your courses and apply it to whatever area you end up doing research in. I do think 2-3 areas might be too many to talk about, if for no other reason than that you'll quickly run out of space. I guess what I'm saying is that for a master's, you should be somewhat focused but no one will hold you to exactly what you've written. You should give them an idea of what you want to study, why you want to study it, and why that department is the right place for you to study it. Good luck!

Having Amazon Prime, which is just an addition onto an Amazon account that you use to buy things, gives you free 2-day shipping on anything you purchase, regardless of the purchase amount. As for buying lots of books online, yes, I've done it multiple times. I often take social science courses where we read anywhere from 6 to 14 books over the course of the semester and where many of the books can be found in "like new" condition on line for 25-50% less than they are being sold for in the bookstore. 1) This is why you buy "like new" copies. You can easily save 25% and get a book that has absolutely no writing in it. I also don't like to read stuff with other people's notes and/or highlights in it so I look for "like new" and "very good" copies online and read the seller's description carefully. I haven't had any problems with this, and often get things in slightly better condition than the seller described. 2) You can do the same thing in the library. (And, actually, this wouldn't work in our bookstore since the course texts are organized by course number...) Or by updating Amazon with additional preferences. I find that most of the books it recommends to me when I'm already on the page of a book I want are very relevant and potentially useful, though this probably varies by discipline and even subdiscipline.

I don't mean to be a jerk but, if the only thing you can change is having face-to-face visits, you may want to take another year before applying to actually change something about your credentials for graduate school, otherwise you're likely to get the same outcome. This could mean taking graduate courses in your discipline or subfield and doing well in them, working in a relevant lab and gaining additional research experience, volunteering in a related position, doing a MA, etc. I'd be hesitant about resubmitting the exact same materials but with the only change being you spent 30 minutes trying to convince that person to admit you several months before the application materials were actually read. Have any of the PIs you're interested in told you that a visit before you resubmit will make the difference between acceptance and rejection? Because i find that visiting is something that's thrown around a lot but may not make a huge difference in the end, especially if that prof isn't on the admissions committee.

In general, there's really no reason to visit schools before applying, especially not when you have to take off from work, pay for hotels and travel, etc. all out of your own pocket. Once admitted, most schools offer applicants a chance to visit and will often line up meetings, tours, dinner with grad students, etc as part of their effort to recruit you. And really, it's a lot of money on top of the application fee without really doing much to improve your chances of getting in. If you really want to meet with your potential advisors, it would be better to go to a conference that they will all be at and just schedule coffee/lunch meetings with each of them. The logistics you're encountering in trying to schedule meetings are one of the reasons that many applicants but off visits until after they get accepted. That way, you could meet 3-4 in a day. But, I digress... If you're looking for ways to save time on your visits, I'd recommend skipping the campus tour. Those tours are designed for undergraduates so they'll do things like show you the dorms, which you probably aren't all that interested in. It might be better to just get a map and walk around or see if you can arrange a meeting with a graduate student that will show you around campus for half an hour or so. If you really must, you could probably see the lab in the morning, have lunch with a grad student, and then perhaps see another lab in the afternoon. But that will be pushing it and not give you a lot of time to really explore and see if things are right for you. Post-acceptance visits are typically 2-3 days, which gives you time to see the city/town, tour the campus and the department, meet the current grad students, etc. You won't be able to replicate that in a one day visit. P.S. To be perfectly candid, I have to say that I pay less attention to prospective students visiting in the fall and early spring than I do to those visiting after our department has sent out acceptance letters. In the fall/winter, those visits are about convincing people that they want to apply but, honestly, if they are already paying out of pocket to visit, then they're going to apply. In the spring, I pay more attention because I'm meeting someone that is actively trying to decide whether or not to be part of the next cohort of students and who I may be seeing around the hallways for years to come. So, don't take it personally if grad students seem too busy or distracted or whatever when you're trying to meet with them. And, I'm sure there are plenty that are nothing like me and detest my approach to it. I'm just sharing my own attitude.

Okay, this YouTube video definitely made me laugh:

I actually don't think we mean the same thing by "fits research interests", which may be because I didn't fully explain myself. What I mean is that I went with an advisor that's a bigger name in my subfield but knows less about the actual substantive, narrow area of my research than a few other potential advisors. And there are several reasons why I made that choice that had very little to do with research interests and much more to do with where I wanted to live, the advisor's style, and the advisor's placement record. Just as you are aware of people who have overcome their lack of teaching experience, I can remember the graduate students in my former department overwhelming voting against a particular job candidate because of his lack of teaching experience. Yes, leading discussions is good experience but it's nowhere near the same as developing and implementing a syllabus, giving lectures 2-3 times a week, etc. And, I think you have two similarly qualified candidates for a position, it really can come down to the teaching experience and the quality of that experience. Three of my department's most recent tenure-track hires (out of 4 or 5) got their jobs in part because of the new department's confidence in their ability to teach intro courses of 200-300 students right off the bat. And those hiring departments had that confidence because all of the students had already done that in the latter stages of their graduate career. (And, for the record, all of those t-t hires were at Research I institutions that you wouldn't normally think of as "teaching-oriented".) Also, teaching requires talent, or a particular skill set, but that can be developed over time. That's exactly why universities offer teaching certificates to graduate students, provide pedagogical training, etc. The research says that your teaching can improve if you want it to, even if you suck the first time in the classroom. But, it takes work to improve. So to say that you can't do anything if you seemingly lack the talent as a grad student is a bit of a copout in my eyes. Books like Tools for Teaching can offer lots of help, as can visiting your university's teaching center and soliciting a classroom review from faculty or your advisor. Or you could look up journal articles on classroom teaching behaviors and incorporate the best strategies into your behavior. Just because someone isn't a natural-born math talent doesn't mean they can't learn algebra. The same, more or less, is true of teaching. This isn't just discipline-specific but advisor-specific. My advisor clearly has his favorites among his 10ish students but, at the same time, he'll try to get each and every one of us a job that we want, whether that's at a Research I institution or a community college. There are subtle ways in which you may notice it over time, like an easier time scheduling appointments, faster feedback on drafts, quicker response on recommendation letters, etc. Or at least, that's how it is here.

I'm attending the school that's less prestigious among a slew of schools that fit my research interests and provided funding. Why? Because I went with the PI that I felt was most passionate about helping me as a scholar, has an excellent track record of placing his graduate students, and where I felt I would be comfortable socially. So yes, there are other reasons to attend a school that's less prestigious, but these reasons are personal. I'm sure the conventional wisdom here, if someone actually knew enough about my discipline to offer an opinion, would be that I should have gone elsewhere. But, if someone knew my discipline and subfield, they would understand why I picked the PI over the university name. Another reason for picking the less prestigious university might be the extent and quality of the teaching experiences that you will get offered. At several of the Ivy Leagues, graduate students never teach their own courses, which certainly doesn't really prepare one to do 2-4 course preps and teach 2-4 courses independently in his or her first semester as an assistant professor (which is what pretty much any job will require). If you really want hands-on experience as an instructor, you wouldn't want to go to Princeton, just as an example. If you're trying to prepare for a teaching career at a teaching-oriented college or university, they are going to value your teaching experience and want to be assured through your application materials and in your interview(s) that you can handle the course preparation, teaching, and grading without floundering or performing poorly as an instructor. The best way to ensure this, in the minds of many, is to look at the teaching evaluations the applicant has accrued as a graduate student. If you haven't accrued any, what will you put in your teaching portfolio? Graduate school isn't all about having a prestigious university name on your diploma. It's also about the connections you make, the letters of recommendation you get, the experience and training you get, and the work you produce. What matters is figuring out where you can get the best combination of those things to help you achieve your career goals. For some people that may mean attending Harvard or University of Chicago, while for others that could mean Vanderbilt, or University of Michigan. I hope that answers your question, timuralp.

I'm not in history, but the social sciences so take this as you will. Yes, it helps decide where not to apply as already mentioned. Professors may also suggest other profs you might consider looking at and/or programs worth applying to. I would say that it's definitely worth it. It also helps you learn more about how the professor works with his or her graduate students, whether you would fit into that culture, and whether that professor's research interests have shifted since his or hers most recent publications. You don't annoy them by not sending anything they don't ask for. Don't ask questions that can be answered by checking the department's or the university's website or that are more appropriate for the director of graduate studies. Email him and try to set up a meeting. The same for any other profs too. Hope this helps!

The Classic Center isn't really a civic center, at least not like the one in my hometown. It only has about 1000 seats and is most commonly used to host musicals and some concerts with rather pricey tickets. BTW, dacey, you should really PM me. I'm totally convinced we know some of the same people...

If you're female, I'd go with dark jeans or skirt and a tailored shirt. For a guy, khakis and a polo shirt. But, this really varies tremendously by department. Mine would never hold a wine and cheese event (we're too broke for that). People wear whatever they're comfortable in to our department orientation (which is held on a Friday morning) and the same applies to our Welcome Back social, held on a Saturday night. I never fuss much with what I'm going to wear to a department event. I just make sure that I'm comfortable in the clothes and shoes, since I'll likely spend hours on my feet talking to people.

It seems like what you're saying is that getting a PhD and focusing on teaching in a college/university setting places a person on a career path where they can't do any good. I strongly disagree with this and I certainly hope this isn't what you're saying. Have you actually tried to get a full-time position at a community college? In my discipline and several others I know of, you *must* have a PhD in order to be hired full-time (generally a 4-4 or sometimes a 5-5 teaching load) and these positions can be tenure-track. On rare occasions, and I say this because it happened to a good friend, you can be currently working on a PhD and still get such a tenure-track position at a community college. And, at these colleges, the emphasis is on teaching, not on research. I should also point out that I see 4-4 teaching jobs advertised at smaller state universities all the time, including Cal States, and these jobs all require that someone either by ABD or have a PhD in hand at the time of appointment. And, many of these universities would give a professor an outstanding opportunity to work with traditionally underserved populations. I'm totally unclear on what your point is here. I think the problems and injustices are enormous and progress slow to non-existent regardless of where you intervene in the American educational system. It's in shambles from the top (higher education) to the bottom (preschool/pre-K) and riddled with problems throughout. For example, I think high school education is incredibly flawed so it seems to mainstream students into a pre-college track, without letting them consider other options. While I find this unjust and think working in such a system would be frustrating, so is working at a state university that's more concerned with dollars and the number of butts in chairs in a classroom than they are with providing their students a quality education. But, we all have to work somewhere, right? I sincerely doubt anyone can find a career where they aren't faced with problems and injustices. But, if it is possible, can someone tell me how? It'd be nice just to *know* what the easy way out is, even if I never take it. You obviously don't spend enough time doing research on non-academic careers for humanities graduate students. Despite what you say, there are plenty and several websites devoted to making such options more clearly available to graduate and former graduate students. Two examples are The Versatile PhD and Beyond Academe. As far as actual careers for humanities PhDs, there are consulting jobs (with cultural preservation companies and in other areas), government jobs (for example, the federal government hires historians and archivists to work in a number of areas), and nonprofit jobs (museums, arts foundations and organizations, etc.). Saying that in the humanities the only option is to become a professor is incredibly naive. You might want to either check out the websites I've mentioned, make a trip to your Career Services office on campus, or both.

I actually disagree with this. Teaching in a high school is *very* different from teaching in a college/university setting and it is definitely possible to teach underserved college students without having to go to China. There are quite a few minority-serving institutions, community colleges, and tribal colleges where faculty can focus primarily on teaching and work with underserved students. I think a lot of people here don't realize that there are tenure-track positions at community colleges where faculty teach a 4-4 load and have little to no research/publication expectations. Have you ever actually met with those candidates? The over-qualified applicant sticks out like a sore thumb. Why? Often it's clear to those meeting with the candidate that he or she intends to use the job as a stepping stone, doesn't actually want to live in the area, thinks the place is beneath them, etc. And before you say this doesn't actually happen, let me assure you that it does because I've been in the room with more than one job candidate like that. Needless to say, those candidates were not offered the job. As someone else has already said, it's never too early to start thinking about what kind of career you want to have after you've earned your degree. If not, it's easy to lose sight of one's goal while in graduate school. Keep your eye on the prize (which may change) and do what you need to do to get there.

This is really a question that needs to be asked of your professors and not of an online forum. The nuances of something like this are very particular.

I've found that though the university gym may be packed in the afternoon and evenings, it's often pretty empty in the early morning hours (about 6-9:30am) so that's when I go if I need to get a workout in. I also signed up for some activity classes through the rec center last year (yoga; capoeira) that were fun, got me moving, and that had others in the class that would send me a text or email or facebook message if I missed class to ask if everything was ok. The trick to making a routine is scheduling it, just like you schedule the classes you have to go to and the meetings you have to attend. For me, this means having email reminders that tell me I have 30 minutes to be there so I can wrap up what I'm working on, change clothes, and get to class on time. Good luck!

Those are actually really broad interests that almost any geography department can serve. For example, University of Arizona, University of Kentucky (Cincinnati isn't that far from Lexington), Ohio State University, University of Wisconsin-Madison, University of Minnesota, University of Kansas (Kansas City, MO is close and many students commute from there anyway) and the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City are the places that came to mind for me when I read your post, but that's probably because I have at least some familiarity with their programs. I recommend just getting a list of the graduate-degree granting geography programs and going through them all. But, if you're hoping to do your English lit PhD at one of the Ivy League schools, you're going to have to do without a PhD minor in geography since those universities (with the exception of Dartmouth) do not have geography programs.

I take notes on loose-leaf college-rule notebook paper, which I keep in manila file folders with printed-out readings and the course syllabus. Sometimes I organize these into 3-ring binders but lately it's been a whole lot of manila folders in my 2-drawer filing cabinet. My system works well for me, but it is a bit on the disorganized side.

day break

1) Instead of reading PDFs, try to read those (non-academic) books that have been on your Amazon wishlist forever since your time to read them will almost exclusively be down to just winter break. (Unless you do what I did for a while which is keep it on your nightstand and read a chapter before bed each night. But this is hard and requires not being ready to collapse as soon as your head hits the pillow.) 2) Packing always takes longer than you think, in part because it's always more stuff than you think you own. Trust me on this one., +1 to all of this.

Lillian, I was with your whole post until I got here: Maybe this is a disciplinary or university culture kind of variation. I would never assume that someone didn't get a fellowship because of what they wear. Are you saying that what you wear is somehow noted in the LOR or keeps you from writing a solid research statement? I'm not the snazziest dresser (I wear what I want) and I honestly don't think it has had any effect on the grants I have won, the TA/RA assignments I have had, etc. And maybe that's because, as a whole, my discipline tends to dress fairly casually since people are often out in the field collecting data. Or it could be because they realize we are all responsible adults that will look put together at a conference/workshop/presentation, but not necessarily just to sit in our offices.

The best people to ask about whether this is an overload are other graduate students in your department. For additional information/advice, see the following:

Okay, it wouldn't be an LOR. What it would be is someone agreeing to be your advisor. Ask the person via email if they might be interested and, if s/he says yes, include a sentence saying this in your SOP.

I've been in two different grad programs at two different universities and neither has provided students with business cards, even if you are a TA/RA/fellowship student. They do, however, offer students the option of ordering them through the university's printing service just like faculty and staff can/do. Right, but why wouldn't you want to give your peers are card that reminds them of your name and contact information? I'm in the social sciences and I get business cards from other graduate students (and faculty) all the time at conferences. I also got them when I was visiting programs and trying to decide where to go. Most of the grad students that had them were PhD students and I appreciated them because it made it much easier to follow up with questions, a thank you note, etc. Way easier than trying to figure out which of the department's four Matthews was the one that took me out for dinner and showed me around campus, for example. Also, I have no idea how/why handing out a business card would "break the polite fiction that we're all equals". Can you explain this? Because it seems to imply that professors, who are presumably equals, don't give business cards to one another when I can say with certainty that they do. In case you can't tell, I'm pro-business card. It keeps me from getting emails with my first name misspelled, reminds people of which university I'm at, etc. And I always appreciate getting them after talking to someone at a conference because it makes it easier for me to email them later and continue our conversation. None of that "oh, it was a university in Canada right? I wonder which one... And the name started with a N or was it M... hmmm..." crap that eventually gets so annoying that you don't actually follow up with the person. Just my $0.02, of course. YMMV as fuzzylogician says.

Note: not in English lit, in the social sciences. Yes, I've completed a MA thesis. I wrote mine in a five chapter format with an introduction, three body chapters (or maybe it was 4?), and a conclusion. Each of the middle chapters addressed one of the key arguments I wanted to make. I wrote the middle chapters as research papers (each was 20-25 pages) and used the common links of my case study to tie the chapters together. It read as a cohesive thesis because I intentionally linked the chapters together and the argument in ch. 3 built on the one in ch. 2, etc. As for the specific formatting, your department and/or university will mandate some of this. My BA thesis had 1.5" margins on the left because it had to be bound while my MA thesis was 1" margins all around. My department used Turabian, so I bought the book and followed it for formatting. I'm not much of an outliner, though I did draft a table of contents before I sat down and really started writing. I also wrote my thesis primarily in 5.5 weeks, but that's just how I work best. You have to find your voice when writing. Draft and revise until you get there. Your department should have sample theses available either in their office/files or they'll be available via the university library. Read a few because each one takes a different format/style/approach. You have to decide on the approach that works best for your topic, not pick one just because that's what most people do. (For example, after I finished the first full draft of my thesis, someone told me a traditional social science MA thesis has 5 chapters [intro, lit review, methods, analysis, conclusion] but that format wouldn't have worked well for my project and I'm glad I didn't use it.) First, don't get overwhelmed and give up. I recommend breaking it up into several decent-sized research papers, then making it a goal to write a rough draft of each of those every week or two. Give yourself firm deadlines at the end of which you'll submit something to your advisor, a friend, etc. I didn't sit in a library to write. I did something that I don't recommend. I worked primarily from home, but also did some rereading of journal articles and other sources while at my part-time off-campus second job. I also took in two foster dogs that needed to be housebroken, trained, and taught to climb stairs (this is really what I don't recommend). I took one grad seminar for credit that was fun and light on reading. But otherwise, I used the dogs' potty schedule, the shifts at the part-time job, and my so's work schedule to determine when I could work. So I mostly worked in chunks of time that were 2-3.5 hours long, rarely worked on the weekends (s.o. would come see me then from out of town), and tried to be as focused as possible when I was working (no tv, no internet, etc.). It helped that I basically started from a proposal and a seminar paper, then spent most of a month (January) building on those until I had a thesis draft to turn in to my advisor on Feb 1 (that was the deadline we agreed to). It made my final semester in my MA program much less stressful and gave me the time/freedom to travel to visit prospective PhD programs because I wasn't still slaving over my thesis draft like others were. I hope some of this helps. Good luck!

YAY! For once, I'm not the only moderator on this list. Keep up the good work!