gsc

Does anybody else have any other answers to this question? One of my would-be advisors is very eager to speak with me over the phone this week, but I'm not entirely sure what to expect from these kinds of phone calls.

That's Iowa in a nutshell. Everything in the entire eastern half of the state can be closed (including other colleges) and we'll get some email that tells us to bundle up, we're still going.

I have to admit I'm jealous of all you folks with snow days -- my school never cancels, and it actually snows a lot here. Two weeks ago we had a huge snowstorm and got at least a foot of snow and we still went to class. I don't think we've had a snow day in the four years I've been here!

When was the deadline for the application? If the deadline was back in December and they're making admissions decisions right now, then I'd let it go. If the deadline just passed or is upcoming, then yes, I would call. Sometimes the graduate school itself can't change online applications, but sometimes the departmental administrator can put a note in your file. Don't stress too much! My writing sample was absolutely littered with typos. Once I realized my mistake, I called each department to have them switch out the writing samples, and guess what, I still managed to get into 5 places! (And I kept finding more typos even after I'd switched out the samples, too... there were easily seven or eight altogether.)

I know you're waiting on Iowa -- I'm fairly sure that Iowa sends out all their PhD acceptances at once, not in waves like some other state schools. The way it works (from what I understand) is that the ad-com meets, quickly decides who they want to nominate for funding from the graduate college, and then waits to hear back on that before making any more final decisions. So if you (or anyone else waiting on Iowa) haven't heard, I wouldn't say it means anything one way or the other at this point. Congratulations!!

Yeah, for sure! I don't expect a program to magically give me another fellowship year or anything like that! I realize that if the program had the funds to offer me two years of fellowship or whatever, they would have done so, and it's not really fair to ask. But I'm curious if bouncing programs off each other (as you say) is common/accepted practice, as it seemed to be for law schools.

I've recently taken to staring at all of the books in my apartment and wondering how on earth I'm supposed to move them. I don't even have any kids! Question for y'all: a friend of mine applied to law school, got full rides from schools A and B, and maybe a 1/3 of tuition from school C. He took his offers from A and B and asked C if it was possible to receive more scholarship money, given the full rides from the others; school C came back and offered him a full ride. (He ended up going to school D, a where he received no money whatsoever, but that's another story!) Is it possible to do this for grad schools? Funding seems to work so differently for PhD applications, so I'm not sure if it's even worth my time -- do individual departments even have the power to offer students more funding? Does anyone have any experience with this? Thanks!

So true about the commiserations! I didn't apply to Princeton, but I did apply to Northwestern, which sent out results last week -- knowing that lots of other people also got denied took some some of the sting out of the rejection letter.

Thank you for this! This will be so helpful. My brother is actually a law student and forwarded me some questions to ask potential law firms, but naturally only a few were applicable to grad school, so this is even better. I'm not planning on making any final decisions until the campus visit either, but my top choice (at the moment) doesn't hold their recruitment day until the end of March! It feels like a really long time to wait, especially because I'm super excited about the program.

Amen to that! I also got rejected from Northwestern, but I can cross it off the list and be done thinking about it. I got into Ohio State and Washington, no interview at all. I didn't email anyone at OSU. I had briefly emailed my POI at Washington several months before applying, but I was emailing her about her book + my research, not about graduate school, so I don't know how much that counts.

Question for you guys -- do you think that the size of a department matters? I ask because so far I've gotten two offers -- one from a very large department, and one from a department half that size. As it happens, my undergrad department is smaller than both! (Actually, my undergrad school is one of the smallest in the Big 10, and smaller than these two schools by 15,000 + students, so it makes sense that these departments are larger.) I'm not inherently opposed to going to a large department, but I'm wondering if the size makes a difference in terms of things like funding, advising, etc. Edited -- @rmw, I'm sorry to hear that! But it's still early, so I wouldn't lose hope! (Also, the bonfire is a great idea.)

Though I think getting experience in the field is important, I would disagree with this advice. By just reading on your own, you're liable to get the literature mixed up, whereas when you're doing reading in the context of a class you have the professor and other students to guide your thinking. If you're looking to get experience in the field, something like studying abroad, completing a senior thesis, or doing an internship related to the field can all help shape the questions you want to ask, and you can more clearly show the impacts of those experiences on your research interests in your application. Case in point: I got experience in women's history by working in a women's history archive, which actually gave me a really interesting perspective on writing women's history... and that formed the backbone of my SOP.

Thanks! My best friend and I are going out to dinner tonight to celebrate.

I'm not a medievalist in the slightest, so no worries there! I'm interested in women's history as it intersects with science and medicine. I wrote my senior thesis on race and disease in postwar Britain, but I also work in a women's history archive (archives?), so the two experiences sort of merged to lead me here!

The three I listed in my SOP were Christopher Otter, Alice Conklin, and Susan Lawrence. I'm also interested in working with Birgitte Soland, but I didn't mention her in my essay. Congratulations!!!

The second acceptance was me! Thanks!!! I got an email about it. It was a form acceptance email from the graduate school - not an email from the department chair or anything - and an official letter is apparently coming in the mail.

A couple weeks ago I got an email from one school saying that they didn't have my study abroad transcripts. The next email in my inbox was time-stamped about 20 minutes later from the same school: "oops, we found it!" Also, I'm taking a graduate readings course this semester! (I'm still in undergrad.) I know the professor pretty well and I'm really excited for the class, but for all of you with MAs, is there anything I should know going in or any helpful ways to approach these kinds of courses?

At my undergraduate institution, terminal MA students hear back before MA/PhD or PhD students (they even say so on their website) -- this is because they don't fund terminal MA students, so when there's no need to wait around to see how much funding is available, they can notify people immediately once they've figured out how many MA students they want to take. I suspect that MA applications are due later than PhD applications because many MA programs are self-funded; a lot of those early deadlines are for university funding.

OSU's application is the worst. I had such a headache trying to get my application in there. It wouldn't take my recommenders (you have to re-enter their names on a separate form?), the site constantly crashes, and the link they gave me to check my application status isn't even the right one. Also, the information on the history department website directly contradicts that of the graduate school, so then you had to find out what was actually required and what wasn't. That being said, I had some problems with different parts of my application (one of my recommenders couldn't upload his letter; I submitted the wrong document for my writing sample; my study abroad transcripts got lost in the mail) and the graduate coordinator at OSU was incredibly generous and let me send everything to him directly to save on the hassle.

They are some of my very favorites! The history is also extremely detailed, which is fun (although McCullough totally plays favorites).

When it comes to just pleasure reading, I prefer fiction -- nothing like curling up with a good novel, especially if it's a historical one! I love Colleen McCullough's Masters of Rome series, and I'm in the middle of the gorgeously written Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. I've also picked up a copy of The Night Watch by Sarah Waters, which I think should be a good read.

Ah, thanks for asking this! None of my LORs have put in letters for any of my applications, and the program deadlines are all Dec 1 (except for two Dec 15s and and a Jan 15) -- I'm debating whether or not I should send them all an email, or assume they'll get it done on Monday. (And then if they don't get it done on Monday...?)

I didn't. When I went to fill in the "self report your scores" section on their online application, I got a message that said "this department requests that you not report GRE scores," or something to that effect; not shelling out another $27 for a school that doesn't even want me to self-report the scores.

I'm now biting my tongue, because I accidentally left a citation unfinished in my writing sample -- and I submitted my applications on Saturday! It's right there on the bottom of page 7: "Levine, [reference needed]." Oops. I was able to reupload the writing sample for 2 schools, but as for the rest, I'm hoping that since the rest of the citations are done properly, the admissions committees won't hold it against me (too much). Congratulations!

Well, I think if I read a paper with sloppy citations, it would make me wonder if the analysis were sloppy as well.