rising_star

Many liberal arts colleges offer undergraduates the opportunity to do research because the TT profs there are conducting research and need help since there aren't any graduate assistants or postdocs in the lab. So, I wouldn't simply eliminate all liberal arts colleges from the start, @bctnln1059. In addition, many have begun to offer similar research programs to what UT Austin offers. This is especially true of liberal arts colleges with an honors program or larger universities with an honors college.

Definitely send an email to say thank you. You don't want to be rude! I wouldn't wear a suit for a Skype interview but I'd definitely make sure I had on a nice/presentable top.

I tried coming up with an unbiased weighting system but really couldn't do it. Instead, I went by what I deemed the most important, which ended up being advisor and funding. I also factored in things like the price of a flight home for winter break (which to me is separate from cost of living), opportunities to collaborate outside the department, summer funding availability and options, and potential committee members. I ended up attending a program I didn't visit but where I'd already met the PI I'd be working for. It was not the program that offered me the most money and ended up being the one farthest from my friends and family. It all worked out though.

I would recommend Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World by Linda Hogan. Duke University Press publishes lots of anthropology books so maybe browse their website and choose a few? Of the ones I've read recently, I really liked Where the River Ends and Roots of Our Renewal.

My partner and I aren't exactly alike by any means. A better description would be that we're opposites who in many ways complement one another. That works really well for us. Also, my sister met her partner when they were volunteering for the same cause. My mom met her partner when they were both volunteering for the same political campaign. There's definitely something to be said for volunteering as a way to meet likeminded people, whether that's for friendship or something more.

@lemma, some of this is field-specific. My biggest piece of advice is to make sure you're aware of all the of relevant funding deadlines for any funding you'd need to do your research, particularly if you'll be doing international work. The lead time required to apply for and obtain funding (which might require applying more than once!) is something that I often see people not planning for, especially in the social sciences where your advisor isn't expected to fund your dissertation. In addition, there are some pre-dissertation proposal workshops and opportunities in the social sciences which could help with preparing a good proposal for funding.

My favorite "work" to do at home is reading books that are tangentially related to my interests (aka, things I might teach one day but don't need for my research). I also do research involving media so I can do that at home. Coding data sometimes relaxes me so I'll do that sometimes in the evening. IDK. I prefer to separate work and home but will totally bridge that if it means I can spend the weekend not doing work...

This is 100% true, though I'd frame it differently than TMP did. The dean/provost has lots of requests for new positions each year and only so much money. That means that some disciplines/areas get prioritized while others do not. If you don't, then you can get a huge imbalance in workload if one isn't paying attention to that. For better or worse, many history departments and areas aren't experiencing growth in the number of majors/minors or the number of students trying to get into classes. If you're the provost and your choice is to fund a history hire that will teach ~70 students and a hire in something like environmental science that will teach ~250 students, there is a somewhat obvious choice. And, this is more specific to smaller schools, there's some serious consideration given and value to being able to teach outside a narrow specialization. As someone with an interdisciplinary background who very rarely (aka, once every 4-5 years!) gets to teach a course that's on the things I did my PhD on, I look askance at history and English where people sometimes claim they can only teach within a 30-50 year time period about one country and that anything else requires a new hire. If we want students to be trained broadly and be able to use their knowledge to address things they weren't directly trained about, we damn well ought to do it ourselves too. Sorry if that's a rant. But it is a serious issue at (S)LACs where the History and English departments might have a combined 12% of total students (majors and minors) but represent ~25% of the TT/tenured faculty. I've seen this firsthand and... well, it doesn't feel good to constantly be teaching full classes, have twice as many advisees, and more theses to supervise because your department is growing and theirs is shrinking. I feel like it's becoming increasingly rare for departments to get to make these decisions. In part because they all think that each hire is so damn important that they refuse to acknowledge that other departments might have a legitimate interest in a hire too. The long-term strategic needs of the university are often not a priority for departments concerned about protecting their turf/niche/battlefield.

(Admittedly I teach small-ish classes capped at 25 but...) I always let students introduce themselves to the class. This is extremely valuable because, for any number of reasons, someone's legal name may not match the name they go by. While this is sometimes the case for international students, I've found it most common with queer and trans students. This keeps me from outing someone who may have transitioned in appearance but not legally, for example. Because of my class size, I only rarely have to circle back with students to figure out their last name for grade/attendance purposes. Same goes for pronouns., I have students share theirs and try to use "they" more often than not, especially when talking about the author(s) of our readings. For international students, I will usually ask if they have a strong preference about name. Some want to use an English or Anglicized name. Others have taken the time to teach (and correct!) me on the pronunciation of their name so that I get it right. I have a super common English/American name that is frequently mispronounced, so much so that I have largely given up on correcting people. But it irks me still. When students ask why I'm not one of those "cool" profs that goes by their first name, I tell them it's because basically no one ever pronounces it correctly so I try to limit how often I hear it mispronounced (aka, use my last name instead).

It's going to depend in part on your test scores and in part on what you write in your statement of purpose about why you want to pursue this degree. You'll need to be more specific about what you want to study and why, as well as what you want to take away from the program (in terms of knowledge, skills, and abilities) than you were in this post. Also, I don't know that any of these programs offer funding so that might mean they accept more people.

To echo @fuzzylogician, I'd urge you to submit your strongest paper regardless of whether you still have the prompt. (Also, have you tried going online to access previous course websites? You may find that you have access to the prompt that way. Alternately, you could always email the professor, explain the situation, and ask if they'll send it to you. I definitely wouldn't have a problem doing that for one of my former students.)

I know it's just another anecdote but I had two admissions cycles (MA and PhD). For the first, I applied to six programs. I can't remember the out of pocket expenses (it was 10 years ago!) but I do remember working extra hours at my part-time job to help cover the expenses. For the second cycle, I worked a part-time job off-campus in addition to holding a 18 hour a week graduate assistantship on campus. There just wasn't quite enough money from the GA to pay for app fees, sending transcripts, etc. (I didn't retake the GRE, which helped). Now my rent during my MA was really cheap (~$350/month) and I applied to either 7 or 8 programs, so the app fees alone would've been a few months of rent. Had I not taken on a second job that paid a bit above minimum wage, I would've been choosing between food or doing an application. (I also did other things to cut expenses, like taking advantage of the free bus service with my student ID instead of driving to save on fuel, only going out with folks during happy hour and drinking the $1 specials almost exclusively, etc.). It kinda sucked but it was what had to be done. Also, in hindsight, I applied to too many programs both times. There's at least two MA programs I shouldn't have applied to. For PhD, I'd say there were three I probably shouldn't have applied to. That became crystal clear after I'd applied, either through further talking to current grad students or through in person visits. Oh well. Sometimes you have to live and learn, I guess. My point was that it puts me at the number of apps you actually did @nushi.

You do realize that many American and Canadian students also struggle to pay for the GRE and to pay application fees, right? If not, you may want to check out some of the literature on poverty in America and/or on low-income college students. It is flat wrong to say "an American or Canadian student doesn't have much of a problem paying for GRE exam in US dollars". There are plenty of posts on this website to the contrary.

Yes. And you can't know. It's entirely possible that the professor who liked you got outvoted or that their funding didn't come through. It's also possible that you committed some gaffe in your interviews. But, like I said, you can't know. And that's how interviews go sometimes. Sometimes you do your best and you still don't get picked.

Talk to your professors.

Wait until you're there.

Are you getting any sort of degree from your program? Could you get a master's on your way out of the PhD program? Do you need to list the program at all? My answer would depend on your answers to these questions...

Honestly, I'd be irked if someone was pestering about something like this. Why? Because you changed the deadline for me (even if it wasn't you, the applicant's fault), then expected me to rearrange my workload/priorities/plans in order to meet your changed circumstances. And especially for a LOR since those frequently arrive after the deadline anyway.

Focus on what you're trying to do and go to the best place to do that (assuming that best place also leaves you with the least amount of debt). Don't get distracted by notoriety.

Check the "Interviews and Visits" subforum where there's lots of info on preparing for Skype chats. In general, be prepared to talk about your research interests, the archives/data sources you plan to use, and your preparation to do that research.

I've sent out a bunch of rec letters this year. What I enjoy about doing is highlighting things that the student themselves hasn't/can't in their SoP due to space limitations. So, I'll write in greater detail about a project they did or a time they handled a difficult situation well or something they did that pushed themselves outside their comfort zone and how they succeeded. Alternately, I'll explain someone's grades (e.g., why a student failed a course and what they learned from it, or how that failure changed their path) or personal life circumstances if necessary (e.g., taking an overload to graduate early for financial reasons, which of course inhabits one's extra and co-curricular opportunities). All of that is valuable for the admissions committee and not something the applicant is likely to share in their own materials or in a 15-30 min Skype interview where everyone is being asked the same questions. As someone who has been on the job market, I've done a number of Skype interviews. Trust me when I say that they don't always give you the chance to shine in the way you might want as an applicant, in part because there are 3-7 people asking questions, you can't know the questions in advance, and they want everyone to answer the same questions in the same order. And, having been on a search committee, I can say that doing 4 straight hours of 15 minute interviews is exhausting and all the candidates start to blur together, which you hate but also can't entirely avoid. There's no world in which I'd do Skype interviews with 50+ people unless it was specifically for a research project and there was no other way to collect those data.

Read some literature reviews in your areas of interest and look for the areas that they say are understudied. Read recently published research papers and pay special attention to the discussion where they talk about future research needs. If you need help finding these, meet with a reference/research librarian at your institution.

I'm in the social sciences and it's pretty standard now to see pronouns in people's email signature. I have it in mine and I am neither trans nor nonbinary. I would definitely correct them and use that as an opportunity to assess their openness to it and thus the kind of environment you'd be walking into. I would definitely do so in advance if they're using gender as a basis for housing assignments (e.g., trying to have people room with someone of the same gender) as you wouldn't want to make a fellow interviewing applicant uncomfortable. Otherwise, I'd wait and make corrections in person so that you can read body language.

It's a bummer that there isn't something out there for social science/humanities postdocs...

You should check the results survey: https://thegradcafe.com/survey/