rising_star

Please do NOT say what you just said here. R1s are full of (perhaps invisible to you) diversity. There are LGBTQIA+ students, first generation students, veterans, students with children, etc. in amongst the students in your R1 classroom whether you realize it or not. Addressing what you've done to ensure those students are welcomed and included in your classroom is something you can and should be able to address, even if there wasn't visible racial diversity in your classroom.

@cowgirlsdontcry, yep! It's one thing to prepare for your own defense. But another to chair a handful and be a reader for another handful. The amount of work definitely increases when you're a faculty member.

On the one hand, I understand what you're saying and you could even add urban planning to that list. BUT, on the other hand, there are real differences in how an ecologist, an anthropologist, and a geographer will approach the study of land use and conservation. I think one obstacle you're facing might be just that, especially if you're applying at the PhD level. Are you interested in how humans approach land use (policy or practices)? Because, if so, that's more appropriate in anthro or geography than in ecology. If you're more interested in thinking about landscape scale conservation and ecological impacts of various choices, then ecology makes more sense. I recommend reading some key journals in the field (Land Use Planning comes to mind, but also Environment and Planning [of which there are multiple], The Annals of the AAG, Geoforum, and Ecology and Society) to see how scholars are approaching the subject and from what departments.

Yea, I don't get anywhere close to 125 books a year. Granted, in the social sciences, I end up reading lots of books (monographs) as part of my research or teaching, but I also don't really count those toward my reading goals. My goal is 24 books per year (so two per month on average) for pleasure. I'm already behind on that for this year (April with its thesis defenses always gets me!). Here's a great thread of people (mostly in history but not all) talking about what they've been reading:

I read for pleasure during the semester and did throughout my PhD. I typically just read a chapter (or a short story) before bed 3-5 nights a week as a way to relax. It's also a good way to keep from using one's laptop or smartphone in bed.

So here's what I've come up with (this took me years by the way). There are six things needed to survive in a location you don't love and/or in a position you don't love but you actually only need half of them at any time. They are (in no particular order) alcohol/drinking, therapy, church/religion, sex, travel, working out. It can also be some combo of these things. Some of it is about endorphins, some about getting out there and doing things, and some about actually working through issues. If you're lonely, look for meetup groups or become a regular at a coffee shop or bar. Take up an activity you've always wanted to pursue (lately, for me, that's been group fitness classes). It's all survivable if you want it to be, though I know it can be hard to remember that sometimes. Good luck!

If you "Save as" PDF in Word, hyperlinks work just fine. I've done this in multiple versions of Word (2010, 2016) as well as OpenOffice type programs with no issues. I post all my assignments as PDFs and many of them have hyperlinks to additional resources. I've never had a problem with the links working, nor have students.

In general, no, professors won't expect you to just "get it" when reading dense theoretical texts. There are still in-class discussions plus you're encouraged to discuss readings with your classmates informally outside the classroom. A few potentially relevant threads: Good luck!

This looks like a request for help with a homework assignment, which is not what this board is set up for. Please go to office hours for assistance.

I would look at renting from private property owners rather than a company and/or subleasing or joining a lease with roommates. All of those options are likely to be more flexible about the proof of income. In grad school, I rented a room from someone who owned the house and wasn't even required to do a formal application so there was definitely no proof of income required. I also rented an apartment from a couple where they did a credit check but otherwise let me move in with first and last month's rent plus deposit. Can you look for options like that? (Also, I've heard of people using their loan amount as proof of income though I've never tried this myself.)

I pretty much agree with @Eigen and @fuzzylogician. Like Eigen, I have way too many meetings sometimes. It's easy for me to remember the ones that occur every week or every other week but much harder to remember when I schedule a meeting with a student outside of my office hours. As a result, I'm frequently late to those (even though I have a reminder set up on my phone for every single freaking meeting), which often results in me sending an apology email to let the student know I'm on my way. I'll be honest and say that I wish this weren't the case but, it is. If the reminder goes off when I'm in the middle of writing a paragraph or coding data, I'm going to finish that before heading to the meeting. Does this annoy students? Probably. But that's part of the price they pay when we can't do something during my regularly scheduled office hours. It's definitely worth asking other grad students if this is a pattern or not. It could be that the professor has other things going on (it's summer; family issues; health issues; etc.) that are affecting their ability to show up for meetings or even to remember them. While one should never force a professor to disclose issues of a personal nature (I have a story I can tell about students doing that to me which just goes to show why you shouldn't), it's worth being accommodating at least initially because you really don't know what's going on in the other person's life. If other students say it's a pattern, then you'll have to decide whether the benefits of working with the person outweigh attributes that annoy you. That's something none of us can tell you. My PhD advisor could be a bit of a flake but, when needed, they were absolutely there for me, backing up my research, reading drafts, etc. I was willing to put up with some of the flakiness and forgetfulness because ultimately it was worth it to me to work with that particular person (in terms of long-term career outcomes). YMMV obviously.

Given your interests, you may want to look into conservation biology, conservation psychology, and geography, in addition to anthropology. It may be difficult to get into an anthro PhD experience without any direct coursework in anthro, though you can definitely spin your background in biology, ecology, and history to fit into anthro programs. Have you read the key texts in ecological anthropology (google for a grad syllabus; there are dozens online)? If so, start thinking about how your interests fit into this field so that you can write a compelling statement of purpose. Re #3: I would contact professors to see if they're taking on students. Re #4: Have you worked on any papers as a field tech?

FWIW, I would not rely on this or do it frequently. If students know that you'll give them time to do the reading once they get to class, then why would they even bother skimming it before coming? I guess if you always want a shorter discussion period then that's a good idea but, otherwise, if you do this once or twice you may end up always having to do it. As for icebreakers, I highly recommend google. There are literally thousands of icebreakers posted online and you can choose among them for those that might work. This is also something to ask about during whatever TA training you do have as there may be some standards used or avoided at your institution. Also, if you actually want students to get to know each other, you can't only do an icebreaker on day one of class. You have to have students regularly interacting with one another (e.g., icebreakers every class for the first few weeks, small group work) if you want to build a strong discussion dynamic in the classroom. The one caution I like to give is to remind people not to engage in microaggressions or things that denote privilege in setting up their icebreakers. One that I frequently do is have students come up with questions they'd like to have others answer and then we put all the questions in a basket to be drawn from. There's a second basket with names. So, one student draws a name and another student draws a question. Typically after the first day of class, I'll go through all the questions and remove all the duplicates (e.g., favorite movie, favorite superhero, and favorite color). Students think it's fun and it helps us all learn names and a bit about others. But really, Student Engagement Techniques by Barkley is well worth your time and money. It was a required text in my University Teaching course and I still regularly use it 6 years later.

Always apply for major fellowships. Always.

The south tends to be more formal, especially for teaching. I would say it's pretty rare for younger female TAs or faculty to teach in jeans (unless they're trouser jeans) in the south, which is definitely different than the southwest. It's also pretty uncommon to teach with one's shoulders bare (in fact, in my MA program in the south, we were specifically told not to do this). Hope this helps!

If you've been in contact with current grads, you might ask them if they have any tips about what you might want to read before beginning the program. Otherwise, enjoy your summer, read for fun, and spend some time with friends and loved ones without a lot of stress hanging over your head.

If you can't get a good LOR from someone, then you can't. Just accept it and assemble the strongest application package you can.

@spunky, my experience has been that the HR forms about disability and diversity aren't actually accessible to the hiring committee (at least not in the USA). Personally, I'd say fill out the forms honestly. Also, in all honesty, there are many other ways for people to learn about your background and see whether or not you're diverse (e.g., have you ever won a diversity award? Are you active in organizations for women in science, first gen students, etc.?) by looking at your CV and experiences. Tenure-track job ads in one of my fields for next year have started trickling out. I'm looking forward to largely being able to ignore them for once.

I think your undergrad experience is pretty common. Discussing texts is how people learn about them. I sincerely doubt that your characterization about participation points vs "someone deeply learned in the field" is true of your classes. Professors have specific goals in mind when leading a discussion and typically guide students toward reaching those, even when you (or the other students) may not see it. If you truly wanted to spend time learning from the faculty and hearing them pontificate about a particular text, you can and should have gone to office hours to engage in a more nuanced discussion. More broadly, there's a clear sense in your post that despite your statement that you don't want to complain, that's exactly what you're doing. You obviously don't trust the faculty you've learned from, even as you praise them as "some fantastic scholars", because you don't trust their judgment about where you should apply or their ability to evaluate your senior thesis. In that case, I guess I wonder why you think they're fantastic and want their LoRs if you also don't think they know anything about your potential or grad school options.

You've never heard of a review paper? This is a site full of them, though there may not be any for your specific area. Journals often publish review papers though, so do some searches for them. Some databases will even let you search for reviews specifically. For more on historiography, see here. Ultimately, if you're doing a historical topic, you're going to be asked to write one of these at some point. Here's some other sources that may help (source 1; source 2). As for your other question, if it's in everyone's citations, then yes, you should include it. That's what I meant about the including the pieces that everyone is citing. It doesn't matter whether that piece is controversial because it's important. It's up to you to make sure that you understand how and why it's controversial and what others have written about it.

Here's how I'd look at it: Essential = those that everyone always cites. The go-tos. They may not be the oldest piece but, they are the starting point for dozens of other pieces of scholarship. Does that help? Alternately, find a review paper or historiography of your area and see which texts they identify as most important and go from there. A lot of building a comps list is following the bibliography from one piece to the next, then looking at who has cited the new piece and doing that again.

Even if they aren't in the department's office (which I doubt they are), most universities have a library (or several!) full of books that are on one's reading list...

I feel like that's the answer, provided you're getting interest from the places you think you'd want to be at.

Field dependent, for sure. I have used newspaper articles as the dataset for some of the work that I've done. If you're interested in knowing how something is being represented or what the current discourse on a topic is, newspaper articles are a great place to start.

Pick up a copy of Elizabeth Barkley's Student Engagement Techniques if you want some ideas about how to prompt discussion. Or use google. There's lots of info online.