cooperstreet

Its difficult to judge any applicant's competitiveness without seeing their SOP, writing sample, or LORs. Your numbers are fine. If you want to do history and not poly sci, I would suggest conducting historical, not social science, research in your MA program.

"we all seem to agree that getting my Doctorate in History will be a better fit for my interests." Why?

I stole this from the Interdisciplinary studies thread. Wanna do this? Undergrad Institution: (School or type of school, such as big state, lib arts, ivy, technical, foreign (what country?)... Overall Reputation in your area?) Major(s): Minor(s): GPA in Major: Overall GPA: Position in Class: (No numbers needed, but are you top? near top? average? struggling?) Type of Student: (Domestic/International, male/female, minority?) GRE Scores (revised/old version): Q: V: W: Subject: TOEFL Total: (if applicable, otherwise delete this) Research Experience: (At your school or elsewhere? What field? How much time? Any publications (Mth author out of N?) or conference talks etc...) Awards/Honors/Recognitions: (Within your school or outside?) Pertinent Activities or Jobs: (Such as tutor, TA, SPS officer etc...) Any Miscellaneous Accomplishments that Might Help: Special Bonus Points: (Such as connections, grad classes, famous recommenders, female or minority status etc...) Any Other Info That Shows Up On Your App and Might Matter: Applying to Where: School - Department - Research Interest School - Department - Research Interest School - Department - Research Interest

My thought: probably superfluous.

You're probably right. I'm sure that the final adcom decisions cound't be distilled down to a formula either, when choosing between two quantitatively identical but qualitatively different candidates, there's probably no criteria for choosing one of the other than can be distilled out from that process. In other words, flip a coin.

Yeah I don't think you have anything to worry about really. My question for you is, though, why a history phd and not a middle eastern studies phd? There's always NYU, which has a joint program.

Some of mine stipulated that I should only include this document if it included information that was NOT on my CV.

All done. Phew. Now I have to remember to forget this.

I would say that something is definately the quality of the writing sample, publications and conference presentations. Its all about the research baby. Don't forget language training!

From what I have heard, no one cares about the AW score.

I'm doing US-Middle East, if that helps.

What lustforlife said. On a more personal level, live it up. A phd program is a lot of solitary, intellectual work. Travel if you can. Take a one way ticket to Europe and figure out what you'll do when you get there. You're going to have a lot more life obligations when you get older, so its going to be a lot harder in your future to say, ride a motorcycle across the country.

Kenningsa-- Keep your options open. If you're serious about getting a PhD in History, don't apply right after undergraduate, and spend that time preparing your application. Learn a language or two. Consider a MA program. Since youre a Pennsylvania resident, you can go to Temple (which is well respected in certain fields) and it is relatively cheap. They should let you do a MA thesis there, and if you do that well enough--meaning get it published in a respected journal or present it in conferences--then that would really help you. Plus, a MA at a cheap state school is about the cost of one semester of law school. Look at the job market for lawyers right now. Its atrocious. Law schools have been fudging their employment statistics. Unless you go to Harvard, Stanford, or Yale, you're basically SOL. I think the advice for prospective law students should be the same for prospective history professors: only do it if thats the only thing you could conceive yourself doing. Open up the yellow pages and see how many lawyers there are. Imagine competing against that, plus with 6 figures in debt. Regarding your undergraduate institution, its not the most important part of your application, and you can't change it, so don't worry about it too much.

orient, The assessment of language levels are pretty slippery. A year of arabic training isn't the same across universities, so you could get away with it, but I don't think it matters what your self-assessment is. They're going to assess your language training by the courses you took and any study abroad programs you completed, or if you demostrated knowledge of the language--say, translating something for a publication or conducted research in foreign language sources. Or at least that is what I have been told.

Hrm... I have an H-Diplo book review on a book in my field. Is there any harm in using that for the Yale Book Review?

If it makes you feel any better, I know someone who had a publication accepted in one of the top three diplomatic history journals, and didn't get in to a lot of programs. My point is that it is a crapshoot, so keep your hopes up--there are no guarantees.

I should add that rewriting from stratch is a preferred method of mine for drafting the SOP, you can then take the best of both drafts and merge them together. YMMV.

>That is, an applicant, although brilliant, motivated, and committed, may not "play well with others" and may have managed to alienate too many people in a very short period of time. This seems to be an odd assumption given that funding is distributed based on merit as it appears on transcripts and GRE scores, and not any personal interaction with the prospective student.

Sigaba, I think my statement that you quoted is a sentiment that many people would share. Obviously a post on a internet forum is going to be different from an SOP.

Yeah I think briefly mentioning it is a good idea. And frankly, if someone interprets the fact that I supported myself and my family while going to graduate school to be a knock against me, then I really don't want to work with them or attend their program.

Rewrite this. Start from scratch. "Although journalists are known to make good public relations people, I don’t want to simply rely on my career. I want to study the fundamentals because I know there is much more to the industry that I must explore." Be more specific. Do you speak Japanese? If so mention that.

The reason I want to bring it up is because I think it shows character when someone can work full time and complete a graduate degree. My work was unrelated to my academic interests and did not adversely affect my grades, but I think it says something when someone works to go to school rather than have their parents foot the bill.

Does anyone have any suggestions/examples about how to address the fact that I worked part time, then full time when I was earning my MA?

yup. pm me