gsc

The short answer is that it means they like you, a lot. If they were lukewarm about your application, they wouldn't bother with calling you. They really would not. I had a really similar experience to yours — a potential advisor saw my application, turned around and wrote to one of my recommenders (who he knew) and asked if I was a "serious" applicant. Would I actually go if accepted? Etc. It didn't help, in my case, that I hadn't written beforehand, so essentially I came from nowhere with no lead-up, fueling the question of my being "serious." But this is precisely my point. The POI liked my application enough that he was curious about it and about me. So that's the first and very concrete thing. They're trying to feel you out. The longer and more speculative answer is that they are worried you will go somewhere else. Let me be clear that this is truly speculation, based off this experience & others. But one thing that is clear to me is that schools want the best students as much as students want the best schools, and they have a good idea of what schools they can compete with and what ones they can't. So I suspect it is that they want to admit you, only they think you are a strong enough applicant that you will probably have other offers, and they don't want to give up a slot on someone who only thinks of UCLA as their "backup" choice. What makes me think this is that they don't have a waitlist, which means that the pressure is on to admit quality students who will actually come to the program. I'm not remotely familiar with UCLA's program, but I wouldn't be surprised if they continually lost out applicants to the same couple schools and are hoping you're not going to be in that number. FWIW I think your response was fine. The "needing to commit" part is a little strong language, but it's coming from your potential advisor and not the admissions director which lessens it a bit. I remember responding much like you did, trying to give myself room in case I wanted to go somewhere else (but knowing I probably wouldn't because this was my top choice), feeling really nervous in case I was too equivocal and I was accepted — I think so long as you didn't blow them off completely, or made it sound like you had your heart set somewhere else, you're fine.

In my experience, very early admits like these are the result of university-wide fellowship deadlines. Often the 5 years in your 5 year funding package will come from some source internal to the department, such as TA lines or internal department fellowships. However, sometimes there are university-wide funding streams that all graduate departments are eligible for (usually like an excellence fellowship for incoming students, etc) where the money is not from the department directly but from the graduate school. If a history department wants any of its admits to get one of these fellowships, then it has to submit those names to the graduate school by whatever the school's deadline is, and these can be quite early.

If it's a choice between a student who has interesting arguments, but hasn't presented them the most articulately, OR a student who writes beautifully, but has nothing interesting to say, I think most professors will choose the former. You can teach writing. You can't teach originality. On the idea of readability metrics more generally, however, I think it's a red herring — quantifying something that can't really be quantified. Readability has much less to do with how many words are in the sentence, and much more to do with how those words are being used. Things like: does every sentence have a specific actor in it, or are you using passive voice to hide who's actually doing the acting? do you have a bunch of dangling participles? are the sentences so long that the beginning of the sentence and the end of the sentence are discussing different topics? do you have strong declarative sentences, or is every sentence burdened with participial clauses? did you use a more complicated word or phrase when a simpler one would have done better? do you have sentences or paragraphs that signpost your arguments and transitions? Etc.

Fair points. I agree that if you frame it as "the IUDC will let me take classes with Professor X at School Y," you will just raise the question of well, why aren't you just applying to school Y to work with professor X? No school wants to feel that you're using them as a discount version of another school. But I think writing "School Z is part of a broad intellectual community, as evidenced by its partnerships with schools X and Q. Being able to learn from and participate in this community will add to my research on subject M/ my growth as a scholar/ etc" is fairly innocuous. In my experience, inter-doctoral programs have always been held up as positive selling points — "come to our institution and you'll have access to 5x more scholars!"

Related to this point, you might also mention the IUDC — inter-university doctoral consortium. It lets you take doctoral classes at other schools in the Northeast Corridor, including Columbia, CUNY, NYU, & Rutgers. https://gradschool.princeton.edu/academics/partnerships-exchanges-and-cross-registration/iudc

The only thing that will annoy a professor is wasting their time. Be short, sweet, to the point: you're interested in applying to X school, you work on Y project (keep your description of your project to 1 sentence), you thought they might be a good fit for your research, you were wondering if they were taking students to advise next year? That said, I absolutely would not read too much into the tenor of these early exchanges — they're not crystal balls. Just because a prof doesn't reply to you or doesn't reply to you quickly doesn't mean they're a bad professor to work with. Maybe they just got behind on your email when you wrote in. Maybe they figured they wouldn't spend too much time having a long email exchange with someone who may or may not even apply to the program. Maybe you're asking them questions that they don't know the answer to; professors are great about talking about your research and their research but administrative questions about the program or the application process are always better served for the grad director or the department office. Similarly, someone who is brusque to you in an email may turn out to be a great advisor, in person. I know professors who don't even bother to use capital letters in emails, but they're great scholars who will read 10,000 drafts of your dissertation chapter. And just because someone's gushy and nice doesn't necessarily mean they're a great advisor. They might be so gushy that they'll never actually straight out tell you when you're not on the right track, which might actually be worse. The point is, however, that these are all things you can't know until you apply and get in, when people are going to be a lot more forthcoming and a lot more revealing of their true colors. The only reason to not apply to a school based on an email exchange with a professor is if they tell you "I'm not taking students this year, so your application will be rejected if you put one in," or "I don't work on the same thing that you do, so if you came to this school, you wouldn't be working with me," and then you decide there's no one else at the school to work with.

I wouldn't waste the word count. If you say you're looking to be a TT professor, you're not saying anything that couldn't have been intuited by the fact of your applying. If you say you're looking for some kind of non/post/alt- academic job, you risk being read as unambitious or less committed. No, that is not necessarily the case. Yes, people are warming up to the idea of careers outside of the academy. But in my experience, the academy is still seen as the normative plan A, and alt-ac is the necessary but unfortunate plan B. So you risk presenting yourself as someone who's willing to "settle" for plan B right out of the gate.

If you want to be accepted into graduate school, and you wouldn't apply unless you did, it's a nerve-wracking process and it definitely feels interminable, or like some kind of purgatory. But as @psstein says, it does end. You get a break in the anxiety from the time you submit the applications to end of January/mid-February, because you've done everything you could on your end, and the acceptances won't come out anyways, so you can be sort of zen about it. A related confession. I struggled with the application anxiety so badly that I went to my college's counseling center the semester before I applied, the semester I applied, and the semester after. I was actually so ashamed of myself at the time, even after I graduated. I felt pathetic, like I'd failed. But I'm so very glad I did go in spite of myself because it helped me in all kinds of ways. Knowing yourself, knowing your strengths/weaknesses/etc, knowing how to handle anxiety and stress, are invaluable things in the grad school pressure cooker. So as a blanket statement for everyone on this board, if now, or at any point in grad school, you just feel like you're drowning or you think you need some help, you're not pathetic for feeling that way. You're not unfit for grad school. And you're certainly not a failure for taking advantage of resources that are explicitly designed to help students in need. They're there for you, & people who have been there know that this stuff is really hard.

all of TMP's advice is excellent but I especially wanted to highlight this. Raw placement data is a good place to start, but in and of itself it's never going to be the whole story. It's not the "program" in the abstract that places students so much as it is the program (and the institution as a whole) that provides resources crucial to landing jobs. So you want to work backwards from the end point. To land a job, you'll need a good interview, to even get an interview you'll need a good CV, to get a good CV you'll need money/support, to get that money... etc, etc. With this in mind you can ask more targeted questions than just "do students at this program get jobs."** Does the program care about professional development? Do they hold mock job talks for students on the market, or workshops about how to publish or get grants? Some universities have whole offices dedicated to helping graduate students secure external funding opportunities. How much time will you have to focus solely on your research, or will you be splitting your time between research and teaching the whole way through? Will you have to pay your own way to conferences, or is there travel money from either the department or the university? Et cetera. ** That said, in my experience a great time to ask "do students at this program get jobs" is when you're meeting with a prospective advisor — where have their students ended up? That can often be a more useful and specific barometer for your future in the program.

I think there are two separate issues here. 1st, it may be the case that there are not many historians, at institutions where you would want to apply, who are taking students, who are also working on things like the war on drugs — I assume you mean in the 1980s, which is recent enough that historians may not have really turned their attention to it yet, hence why your searches come up empty. But this isn't really a problem. Applicants get hung up about needing an advisor who studies their exact project, but it's not as important as making sure that your broad, overarching interests align, so I would, as you already have, look for departments where there is an established contingent of people, not just one or two, thinking about criminal justice and race and social policy in the US. On this point, have you considered Rutgers? I'm a Europeanist but I know that race in the US is something we're very strong in. 2nd, and this is what @Sigaba is getting at if I understand correctly, is that searching for faculty is not the same thing as searching the literature. Just because there are not many historians at institutions where you want to apply does not mean that there is no work going on in the field, so if you make that statement in an application you'll raise eyebrows, because of course the war on drugs has been studied by people. Law professors and sociologists and anthropologists, yes, but that's all highly relevant for you, and probably what your own work will build on in the future. The value of searching the literature is two fold. First, you might actually find the names of more historians that you can work with. Faculty pages are notorious for not being updated to reflect what people actually do. Second, you'll see, across a variety of fields, who is studying what aspects of your topics, the contributions they have made, where there are still gaps, etc. You don't mention if you have institutional access anywhere, but you are in Des Moines — my hometown, actually! — and Drake has a good library and law library that you can use if you have an afternoon free. See what books are available on your subject there and leaf through them, looking at footnotes and introductions, what people have written about, what people are saying to each other. You may be able to get a guest or community pass that will let you use their computer systems, for the purpose of looking at articles. I don't think at this stage you need to have a huge understanding of the literature; I certainly didn't. But you should have an idea of what's come before you, even if it's not historians per se, and absolutely you ought to have an idea about what you want to say about your topic beyond the fact that you want to study it. Usually, reading the literature helps you clarify this point, because once you see what other people have done, you can articulate what it is you want to do differently. That is valuable not just for your SOP but for yourself as a scholar.

IME, time management in grad school is largely a process of triage. you can't do everything as thoroughly as you will want to do, or believe you should, so you have to prioritize the most important things and figure out where else you can save time. for example, your readings class may have 7 books a week. you don't say if the readings class is directly relevant to your exam field or not, but consider that in class you will not touch on every single article. consider that you will not touch on all the details in all the articles and books you're assigned. consider that you will not even have to speak about every single book in a class discussion. so, triage. can you figure out why your professor assigned these seven books? usually they're there to speak to a particular theme, or highlight a thread of historiography that's been impactful in the field. what books will be most relevant for your research personally, or what books do you see yourself being tested on? focus on those and read them the most carefully. if you sense a book could be on your exam list, write a summary of it so you can refer back to it later. give everything else a skim so that if you're asked about it, you can at least get at the main argument or topic in a sentence and you won't be caught off guard. your professors may have you write summaries, reading responses, or discussion questions, which sound like a lot of extra work, but are actually a really useful way to direct and focus your reading, so don't be afraid of those. writing a 3 page response about the week's readings forces you to look at the big picture and place books in conversations with each other — probably one of the most important skills you can develop — and you'll have something to refer back to later. that's the kind of mindset you need to be in: what is going to be useful going forward, what do I need to do week-to-week to tread water, and what is essentially not worth the time? it's so easy to get bogged down in tiny details, but you have to look at the big picture. on the whole, I live and die by my calendar and my kitchen timer. set clear limits on how long you're going to do a task or how long you're going to work. when you have a lot of readings and tasks, plan them out ahead of time, working backwards from when the things are due. for example, I had a class that met on Thursdays. the professor wanted us to write a 3 page response to the readings each week. that meant Wednesday nights I was writing the response. Tuesdays I read the articles. Monday I read the book. On the weekend I prepared for the classes that met on Tuesday, and so on. sometimes you'll find yourself with only a sliver of time to do something. the trick is to not panic. prioritize, triage, take deep breaths. everyone else is in the same boat as you. and it really does all get done.

I'm about to start my third year, and I'm 22. when I applied to programs, I was 19; when I actually started, I was 20. it's a very personal thing. honestly, what's more important than age is maturity, and the two don't necessarily go hand-in-hand. if you think you can handle the workload and the stress, you have questions to ask and a project in mind, and you want to do it, don't let your age stop you— it's a number, you know? that said you can read a lot into age, far more than you need to. I know people who are young and they get very precious about being the quote-unquote "cohort baby," but it's honestly pretty pointless. older students have an edge on you at first because they've read more and can talk the lingo, but you'll pick that up pretty quickly, and at the end of the day, it's your work that matters. a poorly written paper is a poorly written paper regardless if you're 22 or 32. the thing is that you go to class and get to work and do your best. don't put your name on something you're not proud of, don't turn in crappy work and justify it as "good for a 22 year old," don't assume everyone older than you is automatically smarter than you, and don't let your whole grad school identity coalesce around how old you are, because really it doesn't matter unless you make it matter. I'd ask yourself a couple things: am I, personally, mature enough to cope with all the demands of a PhD program? do I know how to study? (so many grad students, of all ages, actually have no idea how to study.) do I know how to handle stressful workloads and juggle deadlines? am I confident enough in my writing to be able to produce a lot of it, on a deadline? how far away am I willing to go for grad school, and do I have a good support network? etc. these things are all far more important than your age.

I'm at Rutgers, and I find my experience to be very similar to what @TMP describes. Our teaching loads are very low, as are our cohort sizes; everything on @telkanuru's (extremely accurate) list of "what makes a good program" is available to me here. It really is program by program. It's true that in academia you ignore prestige at your peril. But it is equally perilous to tunnel your vision such that you focus only on names, brands, and proximity to the Ivies. Day in and day out, what will make or break your graduate experience is not whether other people think your program is fancy and prestigious, or whether you think your program is fancy and prestigious. It's whether or not you're at a place where you feel you're doing your best work (and where doing your best work will result in an outcome you want post-PhD). That's what keeps you coming into the grad office each day and that's how you finish the program. It's possible to do your best work in the Ivies. It is also possible to do your best work outside of them. You truly cannot know the answer unless you apply widely and see where you get in. So much of the information that will ultimately influence your decision — teaching/fellowship ratio, placement, cohort size, summer funding, personality of your advisor — you won't get until you hear back from schools anyways. Since you haven't, the prestige discussion is a bit of a red herring, and it's too easy to get wrapped up in it when it's still pretty hypothetical. Apply to places where 1) you would be willing to go if you got in, 2) where there is five years of some kind of funding for all students, and 3) the work that the faculty does excites you and is a good fit for you. Consider things like ranking and prestige, but within reason; don't discount a public university just for the sake of it being public, or apply to a university that is obviously not a good fit just because it's an Ivy. Then, when you have applied and heard back and you have concrete numbers and figures to look at, you can go back and think about things like placement, summer funding, cohort size, teaching load, etc.

you should consider Rutgers — specifically, Donna Murch, who is actually finishing up a book on policing/the war on drugs.

1) you've got to get comfortable with silence. at a certain point the students will speak up because they find the silence awkward, even if they don't have very much to say; other students have plenty to say but they need time to formulate their thoughts first. when you pose a question to the students, count backwards from 10/15/30 in your head, depending on how much time you think they need. usually someone will say something before you hit zero. a lot of folks get nervous and just start blabbing to fill the time, or they answer their own discussion questions before the students have a chance to try them out. 2) you also can't control whether or not students do the reading. if you get to class and discover that no one's done the reading, honestly there's nothing wrong with just giving them 15 minutes to do the reading right then — I'm pretty up front with my students, like, "if you didn't do the reading, tell me so we can do it now, and have a shorter but more valuable discussion," etc. I'd just give them the 15 minutes of reading time over shuffling through some zombie-fied discussion over a text no one read. but the main reason why students don't do the reading is that they are busy and pressed for time, and if they think they can get away without doing the reading, then they won't. they have a million demands on their time, and they're going to prioritize what has to get done to get by. so while you can't control what the students do in their spare time, what you can do is make doing the reading a worthwhile exercise. I don't like graded pop quizzes because they seem rather punitive, but I do sometimes ask students to jot down their thoughts at the beginning of class, or come to class with a discussion question prepared. you can then have them turn it in for a check/check plus/check minus grade, where the students can feel like their contributions are being noted but they're not being punished, either. again I like to be up front: our discussions will be less painful and more valuable to you if you at least make an attempt at the reading. my personal ninja trick is to very obviously take attendance and take notes during discussion — makes the students feel like I'm noticing their contributions and "counting" their participation, even though I never calculate participation grades by tallying up "well, you spoke up 2 times on Monday and 3 times on Tuesday." 3) students will hassle you about grades. this is a known fact. where we usually grade starting at 0 and assign points upwards, students look at their grades as starting at 100 and losing points downwards. you give a student an 85 because you think it's a B paper; the student thinks that they lost 15 points and what they will want you to do is account for every single one. they'll do this on dumb assignments, too. I had a student send me 4 paragraphs of vitriol because he got an 8/10 on a reading response paper. don't get pulled into this. do NOT let them put you on the defensive. they'll try to corner you after class; firmly re-direct them to office hours. they'll ask stuff like "but why did I lose 10 points for this"; turn the question around and ask them why they think they could have lost 10 points or what they could have included. if you look at the grade and think that you maybe made a mistake in grading and they deserve more points (it happens) NEVER change the grade on the spot. tell them that you'll consider it and consult with the professor in charge. depending on the professor you may actually want to consult with the professor in charge! the first professor I TA'ed for gave me this advice, and it's exactly right.

Connie Willis also wrote Doomsday Book (1992), which features her time-traveling historians during the Black Death — another good read if you like science fiction in your history.

@MikeTheFronterizo option two. I wouldn't pass up tuition remission unless there was a really, really good reason for it, and quite frankly, you don't have one. you won't be able to "push your research" very far when you're working as a TA every year. TAing eats up research time. five years fellowship gives you the time to focus on your work. and the option to design your own course & act as sole instructor is considerably better job market prep than TAing US History 101 for five semesters. additionally, option two seems to have a lot more institutional support for graduate students (GSA, research centers)— option one isn't even in the top 100, which tells me they don't have a particularly strong graduate school overall. you want a school where graduate students are an important part of the university, not a school where they're an afterthought. not to mention the fact that in academia, you ignore prestige at your peril.

yeah, I don't want to prolong this argument either, but I do feel the need to point out— I'm not hanging around these forums because I love talking about grad school. I don't. but when it was me two years ago, the folks on this forum offered smart, helpful advice, which was invaluable to me in applying and making decisions. so, if there's a way I can pay it forward to new applicants, then I'd like to do that. most people are coming from a place of generosity and kindness. there's no need to complain about it.

Yes! if you have questions, do feel free to drop me a message!

Rutgers has a pretty strong modern Europe contingent, plus at least a couple folks interested in the environment— worth a look at least

I didn't email a single professor. I got into 6 of the 9 programs I applied to. It's an ingratiating process that people spend way too much time thinking about. First, unless the professor is outwardly rude to you, I wouldn't read too much into the tone of your exchanges. Professors can fawn over you now but drop the ball later. Other professors may react a little coolly until they see your application materials. Professors can just be really busy and not reply. Second, everything is up in the air until application season, when your actual application materials get printed off and passed around, and when the DGS has to put together a cohort. A lot can change at that point. You can have a great conversation with a professor in field X, but if the department's strengths are Y and Z, they might not be taking students in field X if they can't place them in TT jobs. Professors do look at the applications of students expecting to work with them, and some of them do expect that you at least touched base with them. Case in point: at my top choice, my POI—and now advisor!—was personal friends with one of my letter-writers, and when he read my application he turned around and asked my letter writer if I was "serious" about the application. He was impressed by my materials, but my radio silence made him wonder. This makes perfect sense given that my advisor is very hands-on and very, very concerned about his graduate students. I didn't know that at the time. I got lucky, because I had a connection through my letter-writer plus a state flagship on my CV (every school I was accepted to was also a state flagship and it is my unsubstantiated belief that like attracts like). At other schools, people obviously didn't care. So the value is that: the professor knows who you are, can put a face to an email, etc. If your application gets to their desk, they'll remember who you are, and for some people that's important. But your application itself makes the biggest difference. It has to, has to, has to, stand on its own two feet. A good application—a good writing sample, specifically—counts the most.

Non-professional degrees = degrees that don't have a specific skill set or career attached to them, so a MA in history/ anthro/ AfAm/ English would be non-professional. A MLIS is a professional degree because it's training for a specific profession (librarianship). Without that degree, you can't get into the profession. Same goes for public health, social work, law, SLP, etc.

I wouldn't recommend Rutgers if you're interested in special collections work. History department's fantastic (current student, feel free to ask questions) but from my experience, the library school here does not have a strong archives/special collections contingent.

@pudewen is right. You're much better trying to get the FIU professor as an outside reader on your committee, and hitting up a program with a bit more institutional heft. Prestige is an awful word and it gets thrown around needlessly sometimes, but it's real and applicants ignore it at their peril. As for the guaranteed funding package— I wouldn't accept an offer that came without one.

If I only applied to programs based on the enthusiasm professors gave my unsolicited emails, I wouldn't have applied anywhere. She sounds like she was writing an email in a hurry, and she probably does get a lot of unsolicited emails asking the same five questions, so she's trying to reduce her email inflow. The more worrisome thing is that the professor will be on leave your first year in the program, which I wouldn't recommend since you'll be without a real point person in your department when you're just starting out— but also at this stage, you haven't gotten in anywhere, so you can't be that picky. Apply anyway.