NorthernLights

Hey everyone, Like other people here I am heading off to graduate school in the Fall. As my final undergraduate semester winds down, I'm trying to mentally gear up for the more advanced study to come, and I had a question about reading effectively in graduate school. In a couple of other (older, too old to respond to without serious thread-necro) threads, I saw a bunch of prospective and current graduate students discussing the reading workload in graduate school, and how they coped with it. The gist of what I got from those posts was that at the graduate level I should expect between: one book per week, per class, and probably about 100-200 pages of articles per week, per class, as well. and one monograph's worth of reading a day, either in the form of a book or a collection of articles. The first suggestion echoes what a student at my future program told me I could maybe expect based on his experiences, but the second one is a bit closer to my actual expectation. Does this seem to hold true for most of you, falling somewhere in between the first and the second? Now, it seemed that everyone in the threads I was looking at was of the agreement that it was simply not possible to remain sane and also read every word of every page of every assigned reading in graduate school. Strategies for getting through the reading (some of which seemed to come secondhand from undergraduate and graduate instructors themselves) included some combination of strategic reading (targetting key sections such as prefaces, intros, the introductions to chapters/sections, first lines of paragraphs, conclusions), but absoluetly no one advocated reading every word. I'm not unfamiliar to skimming. As an undergraduate I've come across plenty of books during research projects and independent studies that were of dubious value to my research, and which I evaluated before committing to further reading or discarding. But I've never regularly skimmed the assigned class readings, and thinking about doing that in graduate school brought up some questions for me: Do you ever worry that while skimming you're missing out on some key, crucial detail buried in the middle of a chapter that refers to some source you've never heard of or makes an inference that would completely change the way you think about a topic if only you had read the book more completely? How do you handle that? Do you ever go back and re-read later on the books that seemed most interesting? Once you reach the dissertation stage, do you cut back on the skimming (after determining that a text is relevant to you) or does it never end? I really love reading books cover to cover, especially ~most~ of the academic texts in my field that I've come across. There's always a few that are unutterably dry, uninteresting, repetitive, or poorly composed and which I do just skim to get through, but I've treasured the experience of gutting monographs for perspectives, insights, inferences, and just raw data that I didn't have before, and while I'm sure I could skim all the assignments in graduate school, I'm concerned about all the things I will miss doing so, and I'd love to know how other students handle that. I mean, I'm in grad school to LEARN, not just to pass, right?

Hey guys, I applied to seven programs this year and so far I've gotten in to two of them, been rejected by two, and have not heard from three, which means likely either waitlisting or rejection. But since both of the programs I got into were great matches for me, that's okay with me. One of the programs I got into offered me a full ride for five years (Stipend, Tuition Remission, etc.), but is on the other side of the country. I'm a very poor undergraduate who is basically living on two and a half thousand dollars to last me until August. I'm looking for a job, but on-campus jobs don't want to hire students in their last semester (which seems backwards to me), and I don't have the transportation to get a job off campus. So this is what I'm wondering: is it appropriate to ask a school that has accepted me (irregardless of the financial package they offered) whether or not they can assist with my relocation expenses? If so, does anyone know what that would even look like?

I believe I did as well. Perhaps we're just not in the first pick round. Certainly a number of the people (like the person who got 6/6 acceptances) are likely to choose something else.

Santa Barbara update: Their office told me 'no final decisions yet, but letters should start going out next week.'

Thank you Professor Plum, that is a most reassuring statement. It's good to have an idea of the process, or at least the kinds of different processes various schools may be going through. I was afraid that with this last week, it was all over, said and done.

So can someone explain this to me a little better? I applied to programs at Santa Barbara, Berkeley, UoM, and a few others, and I see that some people have already posted results (Accepted and Declined) for those schools, but I'm reading in this thread that there are a number of people (like myself) who have not heard anything yet. Does this mean we've all collectively been waitlisted, or is there something else at work here? I'm seeing comments about 'waves' - how do those work? Why would they accept/decline certain people outright, early on, and leave what seems like the majority hovering?

Languages: Latin, Greek, French, German. Working on Italian. No one I've read or talked to on the subject who has been published and or is researching recently has suggested to me that Roman History and Late Antique are divergent fields. In fact, most of the professors and scholars I've talked to have encouraged me to understand and explore continuities and persistant trends between Imperial Roman and Late Antique history, to - to the best of my ability - ignore artificial boundaries between them, and not to fail to recognize the effect that 6th, 7th, and 8th century Imperial Rome in the East had on the still-Roman civilizations in the West. This is the most consistent direction I've recieved from correspondants and unofficial advisors in terms of my scholarly pursuits on the subject. Also, if having interests in more than one field is really a problem then why do so many of the programs require you to pick 3-4 specialization fields, such as Roman History, Greek History, Byzantine, and some subfield? Like, in what way is studying GREEK HISTORY more relevant for me than Late Antiquity? Also, I may be a returning student, but I'm still getting a traditional degree: I went back to school in 2010 in LA at a Community College to raise my GPA high enough so that I could get into a 4 year state university, and since I've returned I've only gotten 4.0s in every class, and I've taken (and will take next year) 2 extra years worth of upper division and independent study classes in order to not only raise my GPA but to get a substantial academic background in the field I want to study. All that said, I am very cautious about my prospects of getting in, which is why I'm trying to find more schools in the areas I feel safe living in to apply to. I've considered the possibility of applying to MA programs, but in my case that does not seem feasible, as I do not believe I have the credit rating required to get Plus loans and cannot afford an MA program only just Staffords. It is Ph.D program or bust. And I will continue to apply year after year until I get into one if that's nessecary. I also have university contacts at schools like Minnesota-Twin Cities who are interested in helping me get in. There's a big difference between telling an informal group of my peers "I can't go to school in the south, midwest, or mid-atlantic states because they're run by crazy people who hate hate hate people like me" and applying to grad school and telling them all of the crazy things I've done so far just to get to where I am and how willing I am to do anything --at one of their schools-- to get a Ph.D, how it's the one thing I do anymore: prep for grad school, practice my language forms from dawn to dusk 7 days a week, intern at academic journals, write academic book reviews and have them published, publish my own research, look for conferences to attend, network network network, etc. Thank you! This is very helpful. They must have just updated that list, the last one I looked at was from like 2007.

So does that multiquote option allow me to respond to several posts simultaneously? Sorry, my first time trying to use this forum. Regarding the 'elite'ness of the schools I'm listing, I know. It's sort of difficult becase A) I can't afford to go to any school that doesn't offer enough financial aid to sustain me until I can start teaching undergrads, They have the programs with the best matchups in terms of academic fields taught and interdisciplinary options. Brown is one of the ones I find most exciting - their program seems to be truly unique and amazing, and I would be thrilled to go there. I didn't pick ANY of the schools on my list because they were prestigious - and in fact I cut Princeton and Yale because I figured I was applying to enough top-tier programs as it was and I wanted more room (on a list of 8, at the time) for less prestigious programs. Is UC Santa Barbara a very prestigious school? Oh, and I will give Cornell another look, thank you.

"Get rejected from half or over half of all the schools they applied to" -- I know. I originally started out with a list of 13 schools. I cut ones that were iffy because A) my spouse is unlikely to get a job there because of the remoteness, Their program did not offer anything to me, C) the commute from a major metropolitan area (where my wife would likely get a job adjuncting/working in writing centers/interning with poetry journals) is too high - over 2 hours. Santa Barbara is just under a 2 hour commute from Los Angeles, but knowing Los Angeles traffic as I do, I'm not sure if it's worth trying. We could try to live in Sun Valley and make it work, but neither of us really want to do that. Anyway, I narrowed down to 8, with a possible 9th. The experience of all my grad-school friends has suggested that given that number, I will probably get into at least ONE of them, and all of them are schools I have researched extensively and am more than willing to attend. I'm still trying to get information on USC - their website is blindingly unhelpful and I don't know anyone who knows anyone in the program, and for some reason they wont return my e-mails. But ... maybe what I'm asking isn't possible, but given the 8-10 schools I'm applying to, given the geographic limits of my search, is this a fairly comprehensive list, or am I missing anything important?

As someone else noted, I am an older undergrad. I dropped out of college when I was 20, came back when I was 31, with a drive to do what I've ALWAYS wanted to do: teach college students Roman history and do ground breaking historical research. I'm extremely, extremely unlikely to get a job in most of the areas I've written off for same reasons that I don't want to study there, but it's personal and I don't want to go into it. Yes: that may limit my options, but I don't want to live anywhere where there's no employment or housing discrimination laws that cover me - I've done it before, and it's just asking for trouble. And I do have more specific interests (Roman Frontier Relations in the Northwest of the Empire, Development of Roman Civilization in the North West, Transition of the North Western Imperial Provinces from an Imperial to a Post-Imperial Society)- but since most of the grad schools I've encountered say "Pick 3-4 broad areas of study interest", that was what I laid out in my OP. I know that I have picked a number of top schools. I did NOT know, actually, that Michigan was so competitive -- but this is good. Learning this from you helps me to reasses - maybe I need another school, another 'safe' school - maybe I should work harder on finding a way to make Santa Barbara a possibility? I do have faculty inside Minnesota who are encouraging me to go there, so I do consider that to be as safe as anything on my list - it's a known quantity, and if they turn me down, then I probably need to reasses my approach. What about Seattle? It's higher on my desired list because it has both program AND geographic locale, but it does not appear to be nearly as prestigious. Does anyone know of easier-to-get-into schools in the regions I mentioned that I can use as more 'safety' schools?

Hey everyone, I just signed up for this website, and I'm hoping it'll be a big help to me as I get ready to apply to graduate school Ph.D programs this coming fall (for admission into the Fall 2014 cohorts). I'm graduating from a school where there is no faculty member for my field of graduate study interest, so I've been kinda shooting in the dark as far as what to look for in a school, where to find conferences, etc. I'm graduating in the spring of 2014 with a B.A. in history. What I would like to study at the graduate level is the history and civilization of the Imperial and post-Imperial histories of the Roman Mediterranean World: not just the people and leaders of the city of Rome, but the wider Roman world, from Germania to Britain to Hispania, North Africa, Syria, Egypt, Palestine -- all around the empire and beyond its frontiers wherever its influence could be felt. The eras/regions I am most interested in are the Roman World's Imperial period (from 50s BCE-470s CE) first and foremost, the Western post-Imperial period (to 800s CE) second most, the Eastern Imperial period (to 800s or so) third most, and then some tertiary fields like Republican Rome, Anglo-Saxon Britain, and the Vikings more distantly. I'm more interested in the waning of "Roman" civilization than I am in the birth of Medieval Europe, and so I've been told my interests are more in line with Roman-Era and Late Antiquity than Early Medieval and Byzantine Studies. (Does this sound about right?) I've been going through and assembling a list of schools to apply to based on my interests, and I've got either 8 or 9, but I could use a little help: I'm trying to figure out whether these schools are all a good fit. Whenever I contact one of them I am invariably treated to a round of 'Yes! Rome! We like Rome! You come! We study! Rome good!' Rah rah!-ism without any specifics, and I've had very little luck finding faculty that specialize in any form of Late Antiquity studies (if I only wanted to study Roman-Era history I'm fine, but since I want to study both Roman-Era and Late Antiquity, things seem to be more complicated.) These are the schools/programs I've got on my list right now: 1. Stanford's Classics Department has a program in Ancient History which is primarily focused on the history of the Mediterranean World. This works out great for my study of Roman-Era history, but I'm not too sure they have sufficient faculty to guide me in Late Antiquity studies. 2. UC Berkeley has an Ancient History Ph.D which actually offers everything that I am looking for. 3. UCLA also offers an Ancient History Ph.D. that seems to offer everything I am looking for. 4. University of Washington at Seattle offers an MA-> Ph.D program which offers faculty in both Ancient and Late Antique studies. 5. Harvard University -- It's probably the school I am least likely to get into, but I'd like to at least apply to one 'Shoot for the Moon' school. 6. Brown University -- offers a fantastic program. 7. University of Ann Arbor, MI is a safe school 8. University of Twin Cities, MN is another safe school. 9. University of Southern California, at Los Angeles -- their classics department MAY have a Ph.D. program concentration in Ancient History, but I've been unable to get a response from them when I've e-mailed. Does anyone know whether or not this is true? Does anyone have any other possible suggestions for programs that I could look into, or is this a pretty comprehensive list? I want to stay out of the South, the Midwest, or the Mid-Atlantic States, and UC Santa Barbara is just a bit too much of a commute for my spouse to any teaching jobs they might get in Los Angeles to really make it worthwhile. Finally, does anyone know whether attending a Classics or an interdisciplinary History-Classics program would have a negative impact on my ability to get a job post-grad school in terms of teaching history? I'd like the opportunity to pick up enough 'Classics' cred to also teach "Roman Civ" and "Greek Civ" courses, but my primary focus is in history. Thanks for all your help.