vanishingpoint

WUSTL for me! Congratulations, everyone, and thanks for sharing this journey.

Any admitted students want to talk about the program at Brown? They were so long in notifying that I had almost written them off, but now I guess they're flying us out early next week? I'm very interested in the Population Studies Training Center, but I'm a little concerned that the professors whose work interests me the most are pre-tenure junior faculty.

I'm so happy that you got your first acceptance! Indiana is a great program, and Bloomington is utterly charming. Nice work.

To those already mentioned, I would add UC Santa Cruz and the Folklore and Public Culture track of the anthro program at Texas.

Yeses today from Michigan and Rice! Rice sent the decision via snail mail, the first one I've received that way, while my POI at Michigan sent me an e-mail to congratulate me and let me know that the official letter will be coming. He made it sound like Michigan will be offering five-year funding packages to all of its admits this year, at least on the sociocultural side. Which is AMAZING news--I had heard that funding was quite uneven at Michigan, and that this created an awkwardly competitive dynamic within the graduate cohort. Interesting to hear that they're moving away from that model. Very, very happy tonight. Tough decisions ahead. Hang in there, everyone!

3-4 weeks?! Argh! How are they going to coordinate a visit weekend if they don't notify anyone until late March?

Drip. Drip. What's that? Oh, it's just the sound of Alfred Kroeber filling up his inkwell.

As all of us play the waiting game, I've been thinking about the future of higher education and some of the books that have been published on this topic lately: Marc Bousquet's How The University Works: Higher Education and the Low Wage Nation and, more recently, Louis Menand's The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Reaction in the American University. I haven't read either one yet, but I've certainly heard a lot of buzz about them. Anyway, Social Anthropology has just put out a special issue on the theme of "anthropologies of university reform." And, believe it or not, full-text access to it is free, which is exciting for those of us who are currently unaffiliated with a major university library. Here's the link: http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/118488932/home?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0 The issue revolves around four articles examining university settings in New Zealand, Italy, Serbia and South Africa. There's also a debate section (which isn't really much of a debate, per se), with Elizabeth Rata and the brilliant Dominic Boyer, who teaches at Rice. I'll just post an excerpt from Boyer's piece: I'd be curious to hear other aspiring anthropologists weigh in on this, both in terms of your own career and in terms of sustaining the possibility of higher education as a space of liberation.

denim_pocket: Yes, I did. The results board makes it sound like sociology and history applicants received the same message. Gigsed: Yes, I think I'll try to make the trip out to Irvine, although I won't be traveling from anywhere near the distance that you will. My reservations about the program mostly revolve around whether or not I could see myself living in Orange County, California, and so I figure that it makes sense to go out there and see for myself. Would Irvine be one of your first choices?

Mine as well. Gigsed, are you planning on attending the visit weekend?

A yes from UC Irvine! Huzzah!

Texas and Minnesota, so far. And it's SivaramakrishNAN, you imperialist!

Congratulations, far_to_go! You're one of the ones who I've been specifically rooting for. I don't know if Kath Weston's work is up your alley, but she is someone who it will be fun to get to know. I'm disappointed about Yale too, but trying to stay positive about the couple of acceptances that I've landed so far. I'm glad that UVA swooped you up, and I hope that there are other acceptances to follow.

Congratulations on landing the HASTS interview, papayadance! I decided not to apply to the program, because it just seemed so insanely competitive; even their website made me feel inadequate. But they obviously like what you have to say, so go in there and show them what's what.

Hi folks, The UT-Austin acceptance was mine. It's funny, I've been a little cautious about providing additional information, just because my subfield (Folklore and Public Culture) is so tiny and I am a little paranoid about posting information that could identify me. But I suppose that it doesn't matter, and anyway I got the snail mail letter from UT yesterday confirming their offer. So now it feels a little more official than it did. My sense is that public universities admit a handful of applicants early so that they can be nominated for university fellowships. (I am being put up for the Harrington Fellowship at UT, which my POI says I am extremely unlikely to get: they only give out four doctoral ones each year, across the entire university.) And I'm actually not convinced that the people they nominate for these fellowships are even their absolute top picks for the program; the department may just think that these admits have the best chance of attracting extra-departmental funding. Anyway, I hope this helps. Hang in there, everyone.

Let's keep in touch, superhero! Yale and Michigan are my other top two choices, so perhaps our paths will end up crossing after all.

Good for you, Lascaux. Perhaps I'll see you in Minneapolis this fall! I was particularly drawn to Minnesota because of their reputation for the anthropology of science and technology, one of my research interests. Karen-Sue Taussig, Jean Langford, and (these days) David Valentine are all doing work along those lines. Minnesota has an excellent school of public policy, the Humphrey Institute, which is actually housed in the same building as the anthro department. So that's appealing, because I'm interested in both studying science policy from an ethnographic standpoint and in the policy implications of ethnographic research. Finally, and I don't mind saying this, the numbers game also played a part in my decision to apply. In 2008-2009, there were 37 people who applied for admission to the Ph.D. program at Minnesota, and 11 people who were admitted. That's roughly 3:1 odds, compared to 10:1 odds at highly coveted programs like Michigan and Chicago. Admittedly, you could get accepted at Chicago and rejected from Minnesota if your research interests were a good fit for one and not the other, but I guess I saw in Minnesota an up-and-coming, underrated program that happens to be a good fit for my research interests and that isn't quite as insanely competitive as some of the other programs to which I applied. An appealing combination. Superhero, did you look at Rice at all? I know that Dominic Boyer and Cymene Howe are embarking on this big alternative energy project, which seems like it might overlap with your interest in climate change.

The folklorist in me loves this thread, for giving a discursive community of disempowered subjects the opportunity to rehearse counternarratives in which we, who are in the process of being scrutinized, get to scrutinize the scrutinizers. We are the subaltern! And we know crappy coding when we see it.

So happy to hear it, Lascaux!!! Hopefully, our paths will cross at the admitted students weekend later this spring.

Thanks for the kind words, everyone! peanut, I'll PM you.

Just wanted to share some good news, in hopes that it will serve as a harbinger of good news for everyone else on this board. I received an e-mail this morning from a professor at Minnesota, letting me know that I have been admitted to their Ph.D. program and am being nominated for a graduate fellowship. YAY. Minnesota is one of my top two or three schools, so I feel very lucky to have this peace of mind so early in the process. Now I'm crossing my fingers for everyone else...

Great idea for a thread, far_to_go! Here are my thoughts: Finish (ahem, start) this article that I'm supposed to write for a collection of essays, which is due on December 31. Re-engage with my job, which I've definitely pushed to the back burner over the past few months. If I do get accepted to one of the programs where I've applied, then I plan on leaving my current position at the end of June, and there are still a number of things that I'd like to accomplish first. Catch up on my non-SOP-related reading. Maybe we could start a little Anthropology forum book club while we wait? Start saying yes to the invitations that I've had to turn down since this whole process got underway. My friends think I've turned into a hermit. They're not necessarily wrong. What are other people thinking about doing?

Many of you may have seen this already, and there's really nothing in it that goes against CW here in the forums, but I thought it was worth sharing nonetheless: http://tr.im/HKAD The author is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Hawaii, Manoa.

This is wonderfully Kafkaesque. (But I also hope that you find an answer!)