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@Asperfemme If you like to have the eating kind of sensation, how do you feel about drinking liquids through straws? I wonder if that might be a "hack" at least for a couple hours at a stretch that would scratch the immediate itch (although I have no suggestions for the underlying problem). Personally, I drink a lot of water-with-lemon and iced tea (plain water is too boring and I forget to keep drinking). Both are minimal-calorie, and while they aren't great for your teeth, sure, neither are soda, snacking all the time (I think), coffee, etc. The "cleanse" thing of drinking only water with lemon and pepper (or whatever) is not great for you, but drinking a lot of that stuff between meals/snacks and also eating could be helpful.

Am I a bit late? But: your (written) English is [redacted] phenomenal. You mentioned repeating the process by which you learned English with German. All I can say is that if your language learning process works even almost as well this time, you will be absolutely stone-cold fine. I am a bit surprised by the Latin/German parallel, but after you made the point about your difficulties with grammar, I am inclined to think that they will both be about the same level of difficulty for you, given that they both have case systems and their gender systems are a bit more complicated than the one in French. Given those similarities, however, I would simultaneously whichever one you learn first will help you learn the other one more easily. I do second or third the idea that you should look at what kinds of sources you'd most like to read before you make the commitment to one or the other complete, though. Perhaps looking at the sources in the notes of your several favorite books or articles would be a good idea?

@ExponentialDecay I think that's common in most fields, but I haven't seen it much in history: it and anthropology seem to be the two most lackadaisical about actual credits-in-discipline. I might have seen that requirement in one department, but most of the programs to which I applied did not have a credits-in requirement at all. I still marvel that they let me into my program when I had, depending on how you stretch the definition, either three or six credits in this discipline before I started this PhD. That doesn't mean that you don't have to have a lot of relevant knowledge or work, but that the definition of 'relevant' is a lot broader. For the applicant, this simultaneously provides flexibility and the potential for headaches acquired trying to understand what counts as 'relevant.' The most common move into history I'm aware of, for example, is for people to go from regional (or theme)/literature studies departments: from classics, from American studies, from Chinese language and literature, etc. @RDG1836 The three broad areas in which you'll want to evaluate your preparation, I think, are 1) region/period familiarity, 2) language skills, and 3) background in the discipline. First a bit of background on divisions of study, because I can't tell how familiar with the discipline you are. As far as I understand, history is divided up in professional chunks by region and period. 'Region' may be country or world region; you could say 'Russia' or 'central Asia' depending on the venue and focus, e.g.. I believe that the three divisions of period people talk about most are modern, early modern, and pre-modern (which might be subdivided into 'medieval' and 'ancient' but I may be out of date on that latter one especially). So basically all historians—although history of science jumps to mind as a possible exception—will identify in groups based on those two factors. Over at that table in the cafeteria are the historians of modern Latin America, and over there are modern Europe, and over there are early modern Europe. Of course we are all interdisciplinary and love global perspectives nowadays, but as an applicant you want to describe yourself as somebody who either fits into one of those identities—I study modern central America—or draws connections on one main dimension. (E.g., "I study the early modern Mediterranean and connections between Europe and north Africa" is very cohesive and no problem.) I worry I am over-specifying, but I mostly want to warn you away from "I study all of Asia over five hundred years." So when I talk about the region/period you want to study, this is the scale I'm talking about. 1) So, how can you get adequate familiarity with the region/period combination with which you will initially identify yourself (and probably be encouraged to break out of later)? Lots and lots of ways! Do you have any coursework on that region/period, especially coursework that involved research papers of 5+ and ideally 15+ page papers? If yes, that's great! That's why lots of people come into history from film studies or political science, etc.: if you want to study, say, post-war Europe, a background in studying either Czech resistance cinema or the economic origins of NATO could help you out! Have you gone to any libraries and read books? That's a start! More on that later. How did you decide this interested you? A side note: I don't suppose you've worked on any film or anything with a historical component, and gained some interest that way? I can pretty much guarantee you an acceptance to one or several master's programs if part of your story is, "my interest in the history of the incorporation of immigrant communities in the United States was piqued by having to do some research on 1960s Chinatown for that Bruce Lee movie last year, and I'm looking to come to your master's program to learn more about it professionally." Most accepted students obviously don't have this, but with all the tremendous historical work on mid-century America going on on TV this decade, I thought it was worth a mention on the off-chance. 2) Do you know the languages of the region/period you want to study? If you want to study primarily Anglophone parts of US history, you might want to lazily start doing Duolingo French or something, or brushing up on whatever high school language you had, but you don't really have to worry about it. If you study a region with a higher language barrier from English, but you know many or all of the relevant languages pretty well—whether that background is heritage, academic, or other—you might look up whether there are any other languages all the other scholars in your region/period seem to use, but otherwise don't worry about it. If you want to study China or classical Greece or something else where there are several languages and/or the language(s) are really hard, and you know them poorly or not at all, it's time to hold your own feet to the fire and start learning the relevant languages as intensely as possible. 3) You do need to become familiar with some of the academic conversations to which you'd like to contribute in history. Are you? You'll basically only be already if you have more courses in the discipline or have spent more time in the library reading academic monographs than you seem from your first post. You don't need to be a master of all your questions, but only by reading real history from the last 10, maybe 10-15, years are you going to find out what kind of questions we are all occupied with now. Luckily, this really doesn't need an academic background in it! The library and academia.edu, as well as any alumni online access you may have from college or JSTOR's three free articles are all valuable ways to get started. I am tired and have written a lot tonight, so I will not give any more advice on this, but I just wanted to say that in history's case, familiarity with the relevant history is perhaps most productively conceptualized as a question that follows familiarity with period/region.

It also depends on the conservatism of the field. In accounting, you might have problems. In anthropology, almost definitely not. All of you who've posted so far are in English or literature, right? There might be a greater range based on institution for you all: although at most colleges, you will be fine, a lot of the smaller, more conservative colleges that I don't have to think about because they don't have anthropologists do hire professors in English, and that's just a milieu I don't know enough about to characterize their norms of personal presentation. That's farther down the line, though: I'm pretty sure there doesn't exist an English graduate program in the country where tattoos are per se a problem.

I have no idea about Spanish PhD programs, but for most of the humanities, in most departments, it seems that writing sample is either the most important factor or closely follows the SOP. The program that interviewed you would, I'm pretty sure, be very unusual in having it be the sole consideration, but I heard about at least one application where writing sample was my deciding factor. I think that's a bit unusual, though: although I can't generalize to Spanish for certain, in the humanities I believe the most common model is for SOP to lead, followed by writing sample, rather than the other way around. Letters of recommendation are always a few steps of importance down the scale, and GRE and grades are basically only negative factors. (Places may have bars you need to clear, and the height of those bars varies tremendously, but once you've cleared them, a 3.85 GPA will prove no more helpful than a 3.75.) But although I assume your interview was based on a different writing sample than the one you used for your Spanish applications....isn't it a phenomenal sign about your writing that, in at least one case, you literally did just get an interview based on your writing alone?

@BlackRosePhD, while I agree that level of fit is important to figure out before you accept an offer, I don't think it's critical to have as an applicant. (For me personally, it turns out that although UX has a master of my field whose book is approvingly cited by all the scholars I like, I haaaaate that book, so good thing I didn't go there!) While I applied, I was living somewhere and in a place in my career that I did not have any educational access to books or scholarly articles beyond those that were posted on academia.edu—bless that website—or were on JSTOR. On the latter, unaffiliated scholars can read three articles a month, but frustratingly, most of the journals I needed weren't listed. I don't think my not doing a lot of that work before my apps were submitted made a difference to where I applied or went (I dumped UX with Dr. I Hate Your Book for unrelated reasons before I applied), for which I am happy. I agree that fit calculation is work you pretty much must do to make a wise decision where to go, and I'm sure it gives you a competitive edge if you have done it by now. At the same time, I am glad that for all the stupid, retrogressive barriers academia throws up to PhD program entry (e.g. the fees), selecting only for applicants who have current access to a research library seemed not to be one of them.

I mean, reading books helps! But I hope you don't worry about it too much: I spent more time on webpages and academia.edu profiles. When I applied to my current program, myself, I had in fact read the book of the faculty member with whom I hoped to work. But why had I done so? Because when I showed up to get coffee with this person the August before I applied—they were visiting my town—they asked me, "You've read my book, right?" No, I hadn't, so they loaned me a copy, as long as I finished and returned it by the time they left town two days later. Research interests change, so if you're current on what they've got in progress (to the degree that you can be from publicly available information, mostly their webpage), you should be fine.

@shell Are you looking for a master's or a PhD? All PhD programs in anthropology that are about as good or better as Edinburgh should offer all their students full funding. Or, do you mean, research assistantship rather than teaching assistantship? That will be significantly more idiosyncratic, and I doubt I can help you. More MAs aren't funded, and I have no idea of the lay of the medical anthropology master's programs out there, so I defer to other posters who actually know things. Are you applying for this year? Most PhD deadlines for anthropology are December 15 or were on December 1; I think MAs tend to be later, but span a broader range, too. What are your goals with your degree?

I'm also a first year and I'm very self-conscious about not reading enough. Reading is my least favorite of the main academic tasks: research (various components), writing, reading, and teaching. I do like it under some conditions, but having only reading to do is getting me down. At the same time that I say that I don't like how reading is monopolizing my time right now, I'm weirdly looking forward to exams: when I have periods to learn things by myself, I can structure my reading time so much more efficiently and pleasantly. Moreover, the more I know about an academic topic, the nicer it is to learn more things about it. Right now, being very new to my field, all the books I'm reading are citing, between them, literally thousands of books and articles I've never heard of. Some these are cited lightly, and sometimes surprise Heidegger! So I'm hoping and somewhat expecting it to get easier as I actually find my footing in the scholarship.

Yeah, I'm not sure how much you'd have to change your topic to work with someone else. Is there really nobody else in your department with even mediocre subject knowledge who could serve as your advisor? If you're very, very alone in a small department—working on Old English in department where literally every other faculty member besides your advisor studies the twentieth century, and nobody even did a comps field in medieval literature—I see your point about having to either change your project or drop out. But don't faculty advise dissertations on topics quite far afield from their own research like, all the time? It sounds like your old advisor is bad news, I agree, but I'm not understanding why the new advisor would require starting your research over on something different. Even if you work on something really particular, I would hope you could get a broad base of curious committee members at your school whose research even has a tangential connection to your own, and then seek out an outside committee member on the Particular Thing. (But are outside committee members universal? Here, they're encouraged, but I suppose I don't know if every department allows them.)

Yeah and I'm waffling there now, on two conditions: if you have research reasons to disclose in the application process, go ahead if you have someone wise and smart from your academic past you can talk about your framing with; or in diversity statements, as one of but not the main theme. Otherwise yes, full steam ahead, and I hope you start feeling better soon!

I'm glad I was helpful! One thing, though, is that I would encourage you to register. Unfortunately, I can't guarantee that using accommodations won't create a challenge of some size (whether big or small) for your career—although I would hope that medical anthropology would be understanding, as a field—but I've never heard of a case where having them made things more difficult. Registering should let you activate them more quickly and seamlessly if you decide it would be helpful, so I encourage you to do that. I worry I stated my case for not disclosing your condition too strongly. It's not that you shouldn't disclose at all? It's not DADT. Once you're in your program, I think my emphasis wouldn't be on not disclosing but on not apologizing. I've briefly brought up some personal challenges with some of my professors, because when you have to miss class, you have to miss class: but I have tended to do so rather briefly and with a focus on what I need. They need to know you need advance notice, but I'd just be a little careful about giving all the background of why. (This is my philosophy for life in general, actually: rather than, "Oh, gosh, I don't want to bother you, but I'm feeling chilly, you know I have an odd metabolism and my blood sugar isn't so high right now, could we close the window?" to moving straight to, "would you mind if we closed the window?" Need communicated, backstory omitted.) Moreover, there may be diversity statements where it would be relevant—personally, when asked about that, I did the rhetorical equivalent of flashing a giant neon sign that said "none of your business!", but I have been talked into revealing some more of my challenges in grant applications this year (although it felt like pulling teeth). Additionally, depending on what you're researching, anthropology may actually be one of the few fields in which a careful disclosure of this in a statement of purpose or research proposal would be acceptable—if you're not researching anything about anxiety, don't, but if it involves your research, a brief mention would be increasingly acceptable. I don't have the background to walk you through exactly the line to walk here, but it's possible: e.g. Bipolar Expeditions.

Oh, sweetie! No, you're totally right: you need to be doing the opposite of this. You don't have a whole lot of time and space to experiment, I realize, but can you try reverse outlining your chapters? Write summaries in your own words—I am comfortable enough with my material to allow some quotation, but for really difficult readings, I only let myself paraphrase. There's lots of other tips and tricks you can try, but you want to force that extra step of comprehension, not just remembering. Is there a study skills center you can go to through your university? That sounds about like my attention span, so don't worry about it. If at all possible, try to make those breaks good breaks, though. Go divert your attention into something else—look out the window, do some stretches, make yourself a copy and try to think about other things—for ten or fifteen minutes, so that you can come back a little refreshed. (Getting exhausted and then clicking around the internet for twenty minutes as a 'break' will do much less for your renewed attention span.) I'm sure other posters will have more thorough advice, but you can do this!

I can't tell the roots of my incomprehension here—and I could come up with a lot of hypotheses—but, what? The level at which posters here want to attach explanations for doing poorly (and I don't mean to pick on you, this is a pattern beyond this thread) is way higher than makes sense to me. For many reasons, my calibration on this metric could be way off. But I'm an anthropology PhD who did quite well in my admissions cycle, and the only comments I received on my ~3.75 undergraduate GPA after admission—and my 'major GPA' and my 'final two years' GPA' were both lower than that!—were two tangential remarks that my grades were "really good!" So, for a single B among a sea of As, are you sure you need to attach this extra explanation at all? Maybe it's different in English, but I don't think the difference between "a lot of As" and "all As" will actually make any difference to how anyone reads your application. Some assumptions I applied under were: 1) professors at PhD-granting institutions are viewing applicants as future researchers. 2) To gauge applicants' research projects, SOP and WS become the heart of the application. 3a) Maintaining a 4.0 doesn't actually correlate that well with research ability, so 3b) professors look for academic records that demonstrate that you will do well enough not to have problems getting through coursework, but that 4) its irrelevance to your work as a scholar means that as long as your previous GPA(s) is good enough, you won't see added admissions benefit from slightly higher numbers there. You could contest any of these assumptions, I'm sure, and although I had a second major in English I never looked into graduate school in the field, so maybe it's different here. But if my premises apply, I would not submit an extra statement to any school about the grades you've listed above: your reasons for having the dip are very valid and real, and I'm sure it's frustrating to know that you could have done better at another time. Since one B in a slightly peripheral class is completely respectable, however, even if the only reason you got it was that you didn't get along with the professor, I would worry that attaching any explanation would make it seem like you think the point of graduate school is coursework, rather than research, therefore doing more damage to your chances of admission than you get benefits in return. You really do want to make sure they're envisioning you as a researcher, not a coursework-years student.

@eternallyephemeral Just FYI, most people in PhD programs in cultural studies—history, art history, regional studies, anthropology, sometimes poli sci, English literature of the non-US, etc.—will end up spending a lot of time in the region they study by the time they graduate. This does produce a classist effect for anyone lower class who wants to study a region to which they a) don't have family, regional, or cultural ties, b ) have no work experience in and c) go to unsupportive PhD programs that only provide support for a few months' of work abroad, you're right. There may be ways to ameliorate that further, but because you can't be an armchair researcher of other cultures any more (i.e. studying it without leaving your metaphorical house), somewhere between most and all cultural studies PhD programs support their students getting significant experience in whatever region they're studying. You're right that you do, in almost all cases, need experience working in that region to get an academic job...but it needs to be professional experience, which most PhD programs should be designed to give you. Personal experience often helps, but you can also acquire personal experience with a culture even if you start doing so past age 18.

@UsernamesAreTricky Personally, I happen to think that Duke's selection of essays are a disservice to prospective applicants for other programs. They're all very good essays, and they may give a clear impression of what Duke itself prioritizes. I don't know. But they freaked me out when I was applying, and I suspect that following them as a model too closely may make your applications to other programs more difficult than they need to be. (As a BA-only applicant, I literally couldn't copy the style that closely: my research wasn't developed enough! I did fine in admissions, though.) First, Duke apparently asks for a longer SOP than the usual maximum—they were about 30% longer than the maximum wordcount I had for another program. Second, the impression Duke's selection of essays gives is that they strongly value MAs (all in anthropology, or do some come from MAs in other disciplines? I forget) and several years of previous experience working in the potential dissertation field site. I don't know if that's actually true of their department, but most departments wouldn't require either that much background in anthropology nor years and years working in your field site. Both are obviously plusses, but I'd say that of my cohort, 1/3 had both, 1/3 had one or the other, and 1/3 didn't really have either.

What are you talking about? Frankly, I left the field a while ago, but all of the recent research I liked in classics beforehand was interdisciplinary: mostly I'm thinking about performance studies perspectives, but also some queer theory, theories of built space, and heck, even bioarchaeology of disease and environmental contamination. What are your actual interests? If you think naming them specifically would out you, you will still get much better advice if you name them at the most specific level that doesn't reveal who you are. Otherwise, I am afraid we are at an impasse, because we cannot recommend any programs for you without some more help from you. A departmental commitment to "interdisciplinarity" doesn't help you at all, if every single faculty member has interesting, innovative, interdisciplinary project that does not overlap with your interests.

I've heard of very few graduate programs these days—in the anthropology/classics/history/area studies fields I have some familiarity with—that don't value interdisciplinarity. Some do so more in practice than others, but it tends to be a plus on the job market, so they're all at least moderately supportive of some work in that direction. (I am speaking more to the PhDs you're hoping to end up in rather than the terminal MAs, though, because I know more about the former.) However, this evaluation does depend on the fields you're interested in combining. The spectrum ranges by degree of risk, I think. On one end, most classics graduate programs will have strong support for work in the classics + art history kind of intersection, for example—but that intersection is common enough that it might be net-neutral on the academic job market, not a plus. In the middle, there are fields that everyone recognizes go well together, but aren't that common, like (in anthropology), anthropology + science and technology studies. I think this is how most interdisciplinary work would be described (because the rarity makes people recognize its interdisciplinary nature more than they do for the more common combinations.) Way on the other hand are the "go big or go home" kind of projects, where, depending on the success of your book, you either get hired at Harvard or find a new line of work. (The guy a couple years back who did a strongly cognitivist reading of Homer would be an example of the latter, I think.) The latter would give you the fewest strong program options—my interests lie somewhere between "rare but interesting" and "but what are you doing", myself, and I kind of liked how that simplified my list of applications—and the former would provide the most. This is all a long way of saying, in short, that to answer your question properly, we need to know what fields you'd like to combine.

I've never heard of a graduate department, including in English, that required a 5.5+ on the AW. If your lowest percentile score is a 70th in quant, your scores are completely and utterly safe (especially in anthropology, where we like deconstructing standards and tests). Moreover, the departments that expect significant undergrad or master's coursework in anthropology are few and far between, even in (especially in?) the tippy-top programs. Can you get any sort of testing accommodations, or find out if any of these universities have minimum scores? Some do, I think especially among public universities. This sounds like a great background, though, so if you can figure out some way around any university-wide restrictions, I bet the departments won't hold it against you much, if at all (see: anthropologists).

BENEFICIAL BENEFICIAL BENEFICIAL! However, the diagnosis will lead to two separate parts: treatment and accommodations. As for treatment, I'm not sure there are many people who wouldn't benefit from some counseling, and when they have ongoing life issues, from ongoing counseling. If your doctor suggests a medicine to help you, and it helps you, this will also by definition benefit you! It will do that whether you start now or in thirty years, though—from the very little I know about anxiety, it doesn't get that much harder to treat if you wait a few years. I say this not to discourage you from seeking treatment now, but so that you don't feel like you missed an opportunity by not seeking treatment already. You haven't aged out, and if it helps you, it helps you, no matter the age. I do worry that you are conflating diagnosis and accommodations a bit too much: the concern about these being two things that could hurt/help you in academia seems somewhat misplaced. Diagnosis and treatment cannot possibly hurt your career in academia. They will help you function better, or if you are very unlucky, will have little or no effect. Because of ableism, the worry about accommodations hurting your career is legitimate. One thing that helps is not to view the staff and faculty of your graduate program as part of your treatment team. Accommodations aren't exactly a part of your treatment, so much as something that will help you cope with your condition. So I, personally, tend to the private side, but I would no more disclose the details of an anxiety treatment regimen to any graduate program any more than I would disclose the details of a cancer treatment program—that is to say, I would never. They need to know what you need from them ("two extra allowed absences per class per semester," e.g.), but after you get the policy, you don't need to explain why you took advantage of it. Kind of the point of accommodations is to make sure somebody who actually knows their stuff—the disability services office, not individual faculty who are not trained for this—adjusts the policies to make sure you can try your hardest, and then when you take advantage of those accommodations, the fact that you have them covers you so that everybody, including you, already knows that you're working no less hard than anybody else, just sometimes in different formats. I also don't think your grades are worth apologizing for or explaining. Your major GPA is higher than mine and my GPA was characterized as "high" by one of my professors. If you're getting Bs in your anthropology courses—if any—during your MPh,* that's maybe worth a line explaining, but the format of the graduate essay is such that anything more than a sentence and a half about a couple of Bs will be a "doth protest too much" kind of situation. *You are applying to anthropology PhDs, yes? I ask because occasionally people post on field-specific forums without realizing they have done so. On another note, what do you want to do with your PhD?

See, this is the rhetorical difference here: it's very, very common on internet message boards, especially ones like this that have tons of peripheral members, to talk past each other. ("I haven't read most of the posts in the last two pages, but based on the OP..." being the archetypical signal of this.) So I try to adjust to this as a norm, but it always annoys me: I prefer to have a conversation, which you might notice governs how I tend to refer to more specific parts of other people's arguments. This is not the majority style, I know. But I get frustrated, especially when you, as a professor, seem to make a series of arguments without placing them in conversation with—whether to agree or disagree, or add to or give a different spin on—earlier arguments. So when I ask things like, "am I missing something?", I am being genuine about trying to get at the miscommunication: sure, your earlier string of posts was frustrating, but I can be frustrated with one micro series of behaviors (on the internet, no less!) without—I hope!—making aspersions on somebody's general character.

Forgive me if I'm being rude, but have we not covered this, especially in my posts? Because the situation is bad, OP has made remarks about how they resent some of the one-on-one social interactions the male (master's) student has with (multiple!) professors. Everyone has said, that's a terrible idea, don't conflate those things: you have a legitimate problem, but don't extend it beyond its boundaries. I don't understand what your posts have added to the discussion, and I have a particular issue with a faculty member writing about solutions like this: You and I have agreed with all of the solutions we have posed to the OP so far, and we have made all the same cautions. But implicit in my post is that the best solution is for faculty members to make sure to extend mixed-gender, large-group, or "all of my advisees" invitations to their students, so that the burden of fixing the entire social dynamic of the department is not on the students. (In your case, for example, "happy hour" has become a far more neutral space than sharing a room at a conference, so I wouldn't think it was weird to hear about a [male] professor having a beer with just two or three [female] advisees, if that was who they were advising.) So I am frustrated with your more recent string of posts, because I'm a graduate student, and I recommended all of these things that other graduate students can do to leverage a departmental culture in a more positive direction. But to hear a faculty member saying that it's mainly their responsibility does rub me the wrong way. Have I missed something?

I dunno, @rising_star, the holiday party example seems pretty suggestive of a higher-than-average level of sexism to me. The professors either talk among themselves or with the male, master's student, while the female PhD students only talk among themselves? So although the "inappropriate" reaction doesn't happen to this degree in my department nor in any department with which I have had secondhand contact—although one I used to hang around in a lot had dynamics that suggested this might still have been the pattern only five or so years before I arrived—I find it completely plausible that a department that has somehow managed to fill itself with only male professors, even among the hires it's made this millennium, might be a standard deviation higher on this common problem than the departments I've encountered more closely. That said, I had been assuming that the students in this program had reached the level of frustration described above because they had been trying the methods you've suggested and being rebuffed. If you haven't, do—if you haven't, this problem might resolve much more easily than you've been anticipating! But whether you've been continually trying or if you tried, were rebuffed, and have been in a lull since then, a renewed round of efforts to develop this academic-social kind of relationship will give you fresh evidence for making your case that there's a problem. (Although I continue to think that you should always lead with "how can I get this privilege," rather than "let's get this privilege taken away from this one other guy"; since having this privilege is a norm in PhD programs generally, restricting it by policy may put you all at a professional disadvantage to students from other programs.) I agree with all of r_s's suggestions, if that wasn't clear; I'm expanding the point to say that those are good ideas basically no matter what strategies you've tried to use to cope with this already.

Oh, bummer! Yes, this is totally a real thing that happens. I have not been in exactly this situation, but I've seen rumblings at the edge of it. What follows are a couple sets of ideas, some better than others; I've also included some of the most obvious cons of each idea, and I'm speaking from experience on few of them. I am not sure how much traction you are going to get if these professors aren't comfortable talking to you—any of the female students—at the official holiday party (!). They should be managing this themselves, so I'm cynical about how much things will improve, but hopefully one or two of these ideas will help you shift the dynamic in a positive direction, even if you don't eliminate the problem. The organizing principle is, these are all ways to break up the current (bad) group dynamic in ways that are cheerful, non-threatening (specifically in a way that will reduce your professors' resistance to your interventions), and difficult for them to avoid. First, where is the male student in this? It sounds like he isn't be in your cohort, so this may not be for you to do, but somebody with whom he is on speaking terms and has studied or worked with him for at least half an hour in the past should try to get his help fixing this. He should never ever ever—excuse my emphasis—be standing with a group of male faculty at an academic-social event without any other students in it. If he sees this happening, he should call some of the female students over (1-3), or, if he's too 'shy', he should (outside of such gatherings) encourage female students to interrupt the all male-groups and (in the moment) make sure to welcome the entering students into the conversation. Another good strategy would be for him, next time he gets a beer with one of the professors, to say, "hey, you know it would be really great if Jane and Maria came too," so that a pattern of group happy hour beers starts to emerge. If he is an avowed non-feminist and you know this about him, a couple of his friend students might ask to be invited along to the next beer without mentioning any gender equity reasons for this intervention. If he is sufficiently greedy for attention that even this does not fly....I'm sorry for you, that's very selfish of him. Or, just do it yourselves. "Hey professor so-and-so, are you going to that talk? Do you want to get a beer afterwards with me and Kat?" Or, "Hey my supervisor so-and-so, do you want to come out with me and all your other three advisees?" Another one I've heard of, in more business settings, is for people to bring their partners, and that afterwards, that gesture proves the relationship is on a trustworthy footing even when the partners stop coming. I think this would not apply as well to academia, unless their partner works in a closely related field, or how you could suggest it, but I did hear people saying it had worked for them. A final point: do not lead by fixating on having beers alone with anybody, or trying to deny that to the male student. ("If they won't have beers alone with us, they shouldn't do it with anybody!" No! Danger!) I worry that this is obvious and I'm overreacting to you just venting, but that's a horrible idea. Because you're at the beginning of the more social side of these relationships, the word for the semester is equity, not equality. It takes time to develop the relationship to the point that you're hanging out alone with a faculty member. The male student has that, and you don't, yet—it sounds true that the reason you don't have it yet is sexism, but do not start off with a crusade to get the faculty to refuse to have drinks with anyone alone. First, you have to develop the groundwork out of which hanging out alone might more naturally come. Once you've seen how that goes—if the faculty are generally receptive, but there's a lingering pattern where many of the faculty are still hanging out with the male student, and only the male student, very frequently—it might be a policy worth suggesting. (Or if more male students enter and the pattern extends that way.) In most departments, that would be a cutting off your nose to spite your face kind of situation, but I'm willing to the admit that a few departments exist where maybe this way of achieving a particular facet of equality is the best of a bunch of bad options. If one male student continues to get a one-on-one beer once a month with one faculty member, or twice a semester with maybe two faculty members, write it off as them having clicked particularly. In general, although I have great, supportive relationships with several older male professors, it is disappointing that I don't have any close female mentors in the same way. Some of this disappointment, however, is global for our demographic cohort of young, professional women. I end with this article because your situation is very bad and I didn't want to be interpreted as fatalistic at the beginning: you can absolutely do a lot to make this better. However, I think milder forms of this problem will persist for us as long as we're early career: I liked how this article captured my mix of frustration about this and optimism about changing those dynamics myself someday, so I wonder if you might like it, too. http://nymag.com/thecut/2016/10/cant-find-a-mentor-look-to-your-peers.html

Here's the thing about animal studies, I think: it's definitively, and newly, on trend, in a way that means there may not be a lot of scholars who have already published books on it. It being of the moment, though, means that there are many more scholars who have maybe started to work on it in the last five years—not necessarily in a publications way yet, but in a "I'm going to talks and panels on the subject and, as part of my burgeoning interest in the field, would now be interested in supervising graduate students in it." You might have more luck looking for anthropology graduate students who do animal studies, actually, and then back-analyzing to figure out who their advisors are. (I wouldn't go looking through any general lists of anthropology graduate students by department—that's definitely a needles in a haystack situation—but look for anybody who is helping organize a conference or a panel you find online.) Another thought: some archaeologists are very into human-animal questions, not necessarily in the way that "animal studies" frames the question, but in a way that might increase the strength of a department for your interest. I also found a book series called "The Animal Turn" coming out of Michigan State University Press that you will want to look at, both for the authors in the series as a whole and the authors of chapters in the edited collections. I didn't analyze the disciplinary breakdown of authors, but it's another starting point. Along the lines of my last two suggestions, but more generally, I would continue to google book series, panels, conferences, symposia, website, interdisciplinary consortia, etc. about animal studies as a way of casting a wide net for relevant scholars by seeing who participates (and who's organizing). Once you find good leads, whether professors or, in this case, even graduate students, I am a big fan of asking people who work in the field where else they'd recommend you apply. Under American-Canadian academic cultural norms, it's an acceptable and even good question to ask, and you can find some great schools that way that you might otherwise have overlooked. For the one who hasn't emailed back, for me, it depends on how much you like the school. I dumped one school from my list for having some annoying administrative policies, but it wasn't that great of a match anyway. I would never get rid of a school in the top half of "fits" for anything less than extreme disinterest or rudeness: a general difficulty communicating with that POI might cause me to choose somewhere else if admitted, but right now you're only allowed one medium to try to communicate, really, and plenty of people who are bad at email are good by phone or in person once you are admitted and get license to contact them that way. PS Should you and @Peanut maybe compare notes?