gsc

Ask the DGS what graduate students do for funding after the fifth year because more likely than not you'll need it. If you don't know already, also ask about funding (within the department and also the graduate school) to do preliminary research after your 1st/2nd yrs. Ask your prospective advisor to describe their advising style. Then dig a little deeper and try to get them to describe how that style works in practice. For example, hands off can mean anything from "I don't see myself as having a huge role in guiding my students through the program" to "I don't expect to meet with you every week unless you want or feel you need to." (Speaking to your prospective advisors' current students can also shed light on this.) In order to really evaluate the answers you get to this question, however, you'll also have to give some thought to what you might like in an advisor and more importantly, what you might need— which is itself a whole question of how you work, how you like to receive feedback, etc.

I think everyone has offered excellent advice, but I do want to add onto/ highlight @Dark Paladin's point- you're knee deep in a thesis that's likely your first in-depth experience with historical research and writing, and you haven't heard from any PhD programs, which naturally has made you doubt yourself and what you want to do. I'm not convinced that, if and when you get into a PhD program, your opinion won't change in the light of an acceptance letter. I say this because when I applied, I was trying to write a senior thesis that I found agonizingly hard, and I wanted nothing more than to be done with it. I thought somewhat seriously at one point about withdrawing all my PhD applications and re-applying to MAs. Then, because it was too late to withdraw, I wondered if I should have applied for American history instead. Once I started getting acceptances, however, both those wishes completely left me, and they have never come back. It's hard to know what is an honest change in interests and what is application nerves, but time usually helps sort out one from the other-- so certainly give it thought now, but revisit it later once you know how everything has shaken out. Additionally, studying early modern and medieval history is a different ballgame than studying modern Europe or US. Your archives are different, your sources are different, you piece together evidence differently (as you just don't have the masses of stuff that modernists do), you ask different questions with different stakes. Do you want to address those questions? Do you find them compelling? In my case, I realized that the animating questions of US history by and large weren't the big questions I wanted to think about the most. You may find that you really are drawn to the work of early modern history, in which case, a MA may be a good place for you to make that transition. But you can have a wide variety of interests, and being interested in one thing doesn't mean you've chosen the wrong one for yourself. It means you're well rounded. Finally, regarding readiness for a PhD program. It's very good to be honest and self-aware (truly), but it's also hard to see yourself and your capabilities clearly when you're this close up to it, and under so much application stress. Quite honestly I'm not sure if one ever does feel ready. I can think of a number of times where my advisor suggested that I move onto the next stage of the program, or take a risk on some opportunity that presented itself, but I myself didn't feel ready. I would always protest that I needed more time: more time to study for comps, more time to take another class, more time to revise an article or clarify an argument, more time to figure out what I was trying to say. Then I would do some more Tina Belcher style groaning in the privacy of my apartment and try to do it anyways. And in each case, my advisor was right, and I was wrong. I was ready for it, and I could do it- I was just really nervous. Graduate school is full of moments like these where you feel on the absolute edge of what you're capable of doing. But you have to be on that edge if you want to really push yourself and grow as a scholar/ thinker/ person. So I really would try to sit on your hands for a few more weeks, even though it is incredibly difficult, and see how it all shakes out; schools won't accept students they don't think are ready, and your professors wouldn't have recommended you apply to these schools and helped you throughout the process if they didn't think you could make it.

This may be the case for Berkeley, but I’d hesitate to apply that to all public universities. In my experience at schools w/ two funding streams, the most promising candidates are nominated for fellowships (usually for 1st/ 5th year, etc) from the graduate school, and are accepted first. This is because the graduate school has a deadline for its university-wide fellowships; often it’s very early, like at the end of January, so departments have to quickly identify the most promising candidates, accept them, and forward them on to the graduate school. The remaining candidates receive TAships or internal fellowships from the department. There’s no deadline there, so they’re accepted later on. Having said that, at my program (which is public) all admits receive identical funding, from the same funding stream, and all acceptances go out at the same time. I’m bringing this up only because I think there’s more variance among programs than common GC wisdom would sometimes suggest, and no matter how many general patterns can be drawn from everyone's collective experiences with admissions, funding, admin, finance, etc, it's still going to be a black box. Grad school is unfortunately full of black boxes, so once you've researched what's there to research/ submitted the best that you can submit, you've just got to get comfortable with the fact that some things will remain opaque to you and they have to be waited out.

I agree with TMP; a cohort of 6 seems unlikely. Programs are very sensitive to adjusting cohort sizes. In the short term, if you reduce it too drastically, you won’t be able to fill out a class or seminar, and the life of the department can suffer. In the long term, you’ll have fewer people graduating from the program. Unless you’re an Ivy or an elite public school and your school’s brand is already assured, fewer graduates means fewer people representing the program in the profession. Less representation means less name recognition and its attendant benefits.

Listen, guys, I submitted a writing sample littered with typos. That morning I had been making final, last-minute edits and in retrospect should have waited 24 hours to edit the edits. I misspelled aura as "aurea," forgot an S on a noun that needed to be plural, left in [reference needed] in orange text in the footnotes. It was bad. Luckily, I realized what had happened over Thanksgiving break, so the Monday afterwards, on December 1st, I called up the seven schools I'd submitted that version to and begged them to let me swap out the writing samples. (I did not say that I was an idiot who couldn't proofread even though that was obviously the case; I said I had submitted an older, incomplete version.) Most let me switch out the samples with no trouble, except for one school that said their online application management software didn't have that capability. Takeways: 1) Edit your edits. 2) If you've made a grievous mistake (mine was grievous— it wasn't one mistake, but easily four or five glaring ones) call the departmental administrator and ask. Even if the deadline has passed, administrators may still be lenient if the admissions committees haven't met yet. This should be obvious, but thank them profusely. 3) There were still typos and mistakes on the corrected version, as I discovered later. They're inevitable when you've worked on a piece of writing as much as you have! But I still got into grad school and you can too.

Funny, it was the total opposite for me. No one mentioned my SOP, and everyone mentioned my writing sample.

Right?! It’s so off putting. I’ve always gotten the impression that they think that, because they’ve been admitted to a private/Ivy/top 10 program, they come ahead of actual graduate students in ~less prestigious~ programs, and that entitles them to say or ask whatever they want. That or they figure we’re just grad students and not the faculty they’re trying to impress, so they can say whatever comes to mind and it will all be "off the record." (Word to the wise— when in doubt, it's on the record.)

I have gotten cold emails, emails through here on gradcafe, and emails from people interested in working with my advisor. In theory, I don't mind them. Like most people, I wrote to a lot of grad students myself, including ones here on this forum, so I'm happy to repay the favor. But I would offer a few caveats/ pet peeves/ things I wish people would keep in mind: 1) It takes time to write back to applicants and admitted students. Speaking for myself, I'm happy to answer as many questions as you think I can help you answer— again, I remember what it was like, and these programs are often very opaque when viewed from the outside— but I have written many emails, answering four or five questions at a time, to students who never write back again. I'm not looking for effusive gratitude, that's not why I want to help, but some acknowledgement that you at least got the email is nice. 2) This is more of an issue at the campus visit stage, but I have spoken to many a prospective student for whom my program is their "safety school," and they're not shy about saying so. Or they'll voice their concerns about the program in a way that essentially... shits on it, for lack of a better word. "I heard that your school is really bad for X, what do you think?" or "Well, I think Y just has such better funding but I'm deigning to pay your school a visit," type of comments. My school is also located in a pretty working-class town, and I've had people ask me things like like, "does Amazon deliver to this area?" (we are located smack in the middle of a major commuter line in one of the most densely populated states in the country, so yes, Amazon delivers here) and "I'm not sure the quality of life here is very good, what do you think?" (wellllll, I mean, I think my life is pretty okay) and so on. It's fine to ask questions and to voice concerns because that's what visit days are for. It's also fine to have schools you're more excited about than others. But leading or obviously negative questions like this are pretty difficult to respond to.

If the school is located near an archive that you could see yourself using, or holds a specific collection that’s relevant (e.g., you work on gender and sexuality and Indiana holds the papers of Kinsey Institute) you could mention that resource as something that further draws you to the school/ helps explain why it’s a good fit for you. But I don’t think you need to identify what archives you want to use in your dissertation (e.g., you work on gender and sexuality and you already know you’re going to use the Sophia Smith archives at Smith) - reads a little like putting the cart before the horse. They want to know you have interesting, exciting ideas and have thought through them/ will be able to execute them, but the SOP is not your dissertation proposal and doesn’t need that granular level of detail, IMO.

I agree. Being able to photograph at will has a lot of positives- you can get through material very quickly if you are pushed for time, and with OCR, you essentially come out with a digitized, searchable archive for your own use. But more information doesn't lead to more insight or more analysis. It's just more raw data that you, the researcher, will need to manage and work with. I definitely take more photos than I need to. In part to feel reassured- that if I need to go back and look at this particular set of letters, I can. I try to head off the inevitable avalanche of data by taking careful notes (what I actually see myself using, and what I am photographing for background information and to head off my own anxiety), labeling according to a system, highlighting the most useful documents, creating an internal index so I know what each collection of images contains, etc. The more information you gather, the more robust a system of information management you need.

How you organize your archive is really a personal thing- one person's standby is another person's headache - and there's a lot of trial and error before you come up with something that you like. It's really a topic that should be taught more in grad school, especially as technology makes it possible to acquire ever more documents and images at ever more archives and repositories, physical and digital. 1) IME, you want to do as much of the front-end work in the archives as you can. The more "work" you have to do with your photographs after you take them, the less likely it is that you'll use them. So if you have 500 individual JPEGs, each one will need a label, at a certain point you'll want to combine them into individual PDFs, label the PDFs, label the metadata, and so on. You need to do this work while it's all at least a little fresh in your head, but after you've spent 7 hours in the archives taking the pictures, spending another 7 hours managing the pictures is the literal last thing you want to do. I solve this problem in two ways. First, I take my photos using ScannerPro (works on tablets and phones, although tablet is better) which allows me to combine images into PDF files within the app itself. Instead of having 50 separate images from 1 folder, or even 1 big PDF document with 50 images inside it, I can make 10 PDFs with 3 or 4 images each. Each PDF represents a document- a two page letter, 10 page memo, etc. Second, I label each PDF as I make it; I use a wireless keyboard to type the labels faster. On my first pass through these labels are kind of general: e.g., "1953.09.14 Correspondence btwn Creelman and Tennant." When I'm working with the documents later, I update that into something a little more useful: "1953.09.14 Creelman invites Tennant to nursing committee, Tennant reply pos" which tells me a little bit more. I label all documents with the same date/month/year so that it's easy to organize them chronologically later. So instead of having 150 images at the end of the day, which are useless to me without more work, I have 40 documents that I can play with as soon as I get them off my iPad and onto Dropbox. For more useful suggestions on archive photography: 1, 2 If you aren't doing this already, make sure that every image you take has the citation information in the image. Some archives give you handy citation slips for this; for the others, just take a sheet of paper and label it with the box and folder number, and use it like a running header. 2) I think that life gets a lot easier if you can work with all of your documents within the same application, or, if you are feeling extra organized, a database. I find that putting my documents in folders straight on my hard drive, as suggested above, makes it difficult for me to see everything at once, or to make connections between documents that didn't come from the same archive. This article explains that predicament in more detail. So, software. I put every one of my PDFs into Devonthink Pro Office, which is very powerful database software for Macs only. It comes with OCR already installed, so everything gets converted into searchable PDFs and eventually tagged and annotated. See here for some evangelizing on DTPO, what it can do for you, and strategies for organizing documents within the database: 1, 2, 3, 4. But there are many kinds of software you can use- off the top of my head, there's Evernote, Zotero, Tropy, DTPO, Filemaker Pro, etc. Tropy was designed by historians and it's also free and open source, if you don't want to plunk down money for DTPO or Filemaker. The point is that as you go on more and more research trips, you create an archive about your topic. Software not only helps you organize this archive but also can help you think with and through it. Hope this helps. Happy archiving!

This is really good advice. Academic history is very much its own thing and it's difficult to know what it's like without already being in it. If you're near a university with a history MA program, you might also be able to take a graduate class there as a non-degree student. I was recently in an evening seminar with several lawyers interested in transitioning to PhD programs.

You might give Rutgers a look. We accepted quite a lot of Europeanists in this 2018 cycle so I do think admissions for that field will be slim-to-none in 2019, but if you pitch yourself as either an Americanist or a women's & gender historian first (and an Italianist second) you might have better success. In regards to how you are framing your project & object of study - I'm not sure "agency" is the best word here. It's not particularly specific; it actually doesn't tell me very much about what you want to study beyond the fact that you're interested in Italy and women. So why not just say "the history of Italian women's political participation" or "Italian women's religious organizations" or "Italian women's activities outside the home," or whatever the case may be? Relatedly, Lynn Thomas has a fantastic article on the perils of the term "agency" which is a really worthwhile read for anyone doing gender history. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/1468-0424.12210

I'll second this. I also applied to nine schools - I had a list of seven and added two more at the last minute, which were the two that I got rejected from, most likely because I hadn't had the time to do the research and tailor the application. (And had I taken the time to do the research, I might have realized I wasn't a great fit for those places, and then saved myself the application fees and the sting of the inevitable rejection letter!) I do think that taking classes in other departments is sometimes more trouble than it's worth, unless you really do want to go hardcore on feminist theory (in your case) - but I would make sure that you're only applying to history programs with a robust contingent of women's & gender historians. Trying to do transnational women's history at a department that doesn't care that much about gender history will be very difficult.

This is very wise advice; reading these past couple posts, I'd also lean towards Michigan. Archives availability, consortium resources — all of that's super helpful and those are nice perks if they align right, but you really do need to go where, day-in and day-out, you're going to do the best work. As derphilosoph pointed out, at Michigan you can go in and out of Detroit, which is Delta's hub and can get you a lot of places in just one flight. I often liken these decisions to buying a house. One house is 45 minutes away from your job but it has a spare bedroom for guests. The spare bedroom will be super nice the five days a year you use it, but you're going to have to make the 45 minute commute every single day.

Hi there, nice to meet you. I'm happy to talk more about Rutgers via PM or email. As it happens, Rutgers requires that all students have an outside member on their dissertation committees. It is absolutely an excellent way to grow your job network and your growth as a scholar. It's not impossible, just takes a little bit of planning ahead, and going to a conference or two. And to your question on women's & gender history, I suspect that OP is referring to African American women's history/US women's history, which are traditional strengths for Rutgers. But Rutgers has a long-standing reputation as a good place to think about women's & gender history in the most broad sense, regardless of geographical area. I want to say that we have 20 professors who work on gender in some form or another. You can check the faculty listings by field to learn more.

Yes, please PM me if you like with any questions, @Tnya, I'm always happy to talk about being a Scarlet Knight. If you're able, you should come to the visit day in a couple weeks — prospective students get to meet with a lot of faculty members one on one (IME), and it's very useful in terms of feeling out the program and your interests.

The second. Taking the MA over the PhD basically says to them either 1) "I'm not serious about committing to the PhD yet, so I wasted everyone's time by applying" or 2) "I think I can do better than CUNY, so I'm going to take the MA and then apply to ~better programs later on." And acceptances are important currency, so why hand them out to someone who flaked in the past? Circumstances change and such, but I am just a bit skeptical of how that would play out. I certainly wouldn't bet on it. Yeah, Rutgers is literally a five minute walk from the New Brunswick train station. Half our professors commute in from NYC anyways. I agree, though, the value of the consortium lies less in the classes as it lies in the professional networks. It's much easier to attend different working groups, bring in visiting speakers, etc., when you can just bounce up and down the Northeast Corridor getting what you need. (I say this even though the last time I did anything at a consortium school was two years ago, whoops.)

Relatedly, if you turn down CUNY now, it is very unlikely you would get another acceptance there in two years' time.

Extremely bad. Do not do this.

Your mileage may of course vary, but I wrote pretty extensively about what I think makes a good funding offer here — The no-strings-attached summer & conference funding are nice perks, but how are you getting the tuition and stipend? Fellowship or TA? What do you do after year five? Whether or not you can live on $18.5k is dependent on the city and your budget. Do some research on potential rents, crunch some numbers. It's very likely you'll have to pay student fees. Depending on institution, these charges can be deducted from your paychecks (instead of having to come up with the money up front) but then that's less money in your pocket during the year.

Hey, glad it helped! On the teaching front, I'd still go with the school that has a lesser teaching burden. You can always seek out more teaching opportunities should you desire — you can adjunct, you can teach a summer class (which can also be a source of funding), you can trade in your fellowship for a TAship — but the reverse is harder to come by. That said, definitely ask around about what kinds of TAships are available, what courses students end up teaching, and most importantly, whether you get opportunities to design and teach your own course. Not all TA-ing is created equal.

Obviously a livable stipend for 5 years + health insurance, but that should be your baseline. YMMV for the following points, but I've spent a lot of time crunching numbers and (as a grad student) sitting in town hall meetings and here would be my $0.02. TAship vs fellowship breakdown is the first thing to consider. When you have your 5 years of funding, how many of those are TAships? TAships eat up your time, even if you love it. Fellowship years give you more flexibility — work on developing other skills, time to go to faraway archives. If your departmental funding is mostly through TAships, what fellowships are available through the graduate school? Yes, there are always external fellowships to take time off and go to archives — but those are competitive, and at any rate, you want to assess what resources this program and this school has. Second thing is to consider is funding beyond the 5th year. What do 6th and 7th years do for funding? Are there additional TAships for those students? Assistantships in the school writing center, or in another department? Does the department offer completion fellowships that students can apply for? What about the graduate school, and if so, is the history department competitive in those competitions? You're looking for some sign that those students are being given some support, not that they're adjuncting at 3 different universities to make ends meet. After this point, there's a number of other things to look for — what all fit into the nebulous category of "financial resources." By and large, they won't be enumerated in your offer letter, but they make a material difference on your life in the program regardless. Summer funding. It's unlikely that you'd have a school that always gives you money every summer. So 1) you want to see if the stipend is generous enough to allow you to save money for the months in the summer in which you are not getting paid, and 2) if you get some amount of money, $1000 to $3000, that you can do with as you will, either for maintenance costs (if #1 is a no-go) or (even better) to do some preliminary research. That is important because getting to do preliminary research trips your 1st and 2nd summers will jumpstart your research. So if your offer letter comes with, say, a special $2500 stipend for your first summer — very nice. If there isn't designated summer money (and even if there is), are there travel grants for graduate students? I'm talking small grants, like $500 or $750, but those add up. A $750 grant is 3/4 of the way to an international plane ticket. Conference travel is a similar game. While it's unlikely that a school will bankroll all your conference expenses all the time, is there a travel fund that students can apply for money from? Many schools have these across the graduate school (so look out for those) but if there's a department travel fund, so much the better. Also, your graduate student union. Is there one? Hopefully there is. What concessions has it gotten for grad students recently? A lot of grad school finance is fluid. Money that's available for students one year can disappear the next as funding sources dry up, grant periods end, or a particular pool of money gets distributed in a different way. And alternatively, new funding sources can become available! So looking for specific things (does the program have X, Y, Z) is helpful only to a point. You could talk to a fifth year who says yes, she applied for a departmental travel grant to do summer research, a third year who says she applied for summer money from the graduate school, and a first year who says, I got $1000 from the department free of charge. You could talk to one sixth year who got a TA-ship in the English department, another who won a grad school completion fellowship, and another who got a semester of dept fellowship and a semester TA-ship. It's six of one and half dozen of the other. The commonality here is that most people were able to piece something together and do what they needed to do, which is what you're looking for. Finally, you want to know what resources are available through the department, and which are available through the graduate school (School of Graduate Studies) or other multi-departmental bodies (School of Arts and Sciences, International Programs, etc). It's important that both have opportunities available. A school that cares about its graduate students has resources devoted to them at the level of the graduate school; it's not a bunch of balkanized departments fighting over scraps. These are usually listed online, so you can do your research. This is a list of internal grad school fellowships at my undergrad – https://www.grad.uiowa.edu/internal-fellowships — you can see at the bottom of the page that some fellowships are listed as "discontinued," because the money that supported them either ran out or wasn't renewed. But you can also see how some fellowships are listed as "new." This stuff changes ALL the time.

OSU is seriously hardcore about the "the." I'm friends with a few Buckeyes and it cracks me up. I did my undergrad at another "the" university — The University of Iowa — but I never felt like people at Iowa were such sticklers about the "the" part!

Just give it some time. It can take professors a few days to clear off their schedule enough to follow up with admitted students; consider everything else they're having to juggle, especially when it may only be the 2nd week in the semester. If the professor wants to follow up with you by phone, they may wait until the end of the week when they're free. Finally, they may also be trying to give you space since admissions period is hectic and stressful, and are looking to not bombard you with emails.