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What you want to be googling is "med school post bacc"—these are collections of courses for students considering going back to medical school who don't have all of their prerequisites down. I have a couple friends who were humanities majors and did these and are now doing well in medical school. I think all of them are expensive, but I assume some medical salaries could make it worth it, depending, and of course having them only be a year or two saves you both money and time compared to an undergraduate college. I have no idea what requirements for admission, international status, variation among them, or anything else relevant about them might be, but that's the name of the category you're searching for. Good luck!

+1 to farflung's questions about time-to-degree, but I hope you manage to answer those questions to your satisfaction and work it out! I'm a little surprised how few schools you've been able to find with people who work on animal studies, actually! It's true that it's a really new, emerging field, so there aren't as many established scholars as in some older fields, but it's definitely on an upward trajectory right now. One of its great strengths, I think, though, is its interdisciplinarity, which also seems to have the consequence that its scholars are scattered in all sorts of departments: I've seen some sociology and anthropology, but also a lot of English, or regional studies/literature, or women's and gender, or STS. Can you make that work for you? If there is a professor of Spanish or sociology, e.g., who works on animal studies at a university whose anthropology department otherwise interests you, I would think that's a strong combination and one that would be definitely worth an application from you. Wesleyan has some good resources for looking at who's working on the field more thoroughly, but some names I might throw out there for you to look at are NYU, Notre Dame, UCSD, and the University of Washington. (Sorry for institutions, rather than scholars! I know of some of these through PhD students working on animal studies there, but I'm not familiar enough with their institutional contexts to know exactly which of their committee members are strong on animal studies.) Have you mentioned McGill yet? It may have some intricacies of which I'm unaware (I only applied to US PhDs, nothing in Canada) but I would have thought that How Forests Think would put it pretty close to the top of your list!

I'm rather negative on classics, so I hope my tone doesn't come across too harsh, but: the majority of classicists, including ancient historians, will have gone to high schools that had enough educational capital to offer significant Latin, or even Greek. It's one of my big problems with the field, which I have left. Exceptional high schools aside, the other common path for people entering PhD programs in ancient history is to have done an undergrad in classics itself, with a focus on either history or literature, and then to have switched over/switched back to history. At my undergrad, for example, if you did a classics major in a history or literature track (I'm not sure whether we had archaeology or art history classics tracks), that required three years of your major language and two of the other one, so that got you pretty close to the required PhD level. What year are you in undergrad? Can you try to switch over to get a joint major in classics, or a minor? The requirements go down a lot easier if they're helping you graduate, not holding you back. If you're close to done or end up finishing in a place where you need a master's degree, I would recommend seeing if you can find a classics or joint history/classics master's, not one in just history. You want a good chunk of your master's time, should you choose to go that route, to be devoted to taking classical language classes. For master's programs, funding comes above all, but a history master's degree with a classical focus will not help you get a competitive classics or classical history PhD admission if you graduate still doing all your research from works in translation.

It can be hard to respond to emails that only have one yes/no question without seeming brusque. Like, "Yes! I'm accepting students." Okay, now what do you fill the rest of the email with? They're not going to come back praising how great your email is—that would feel icky to me, personally—so sometimes the 'filler' gets awkward. (I think the first professor noticed the awkward as they were writing and then tried to compensate with more enthusiasm at the end.) But although I think I know what causes it, getting the weird filler also annoyed me, so I always asked two questions to make it easier for potential faculty to respond in a way that helped me out: 1) Are you accepting students? 2) Given my combination of interests, where else might you suggest I apply? (I would list those interests—strengths in colonial US and gender history, for example—and/or list a couple of other obvious suspects to show you've done your homework, although be careful with the latter lest you email a POI at the University of Hawaii that the other schools you're considering are Harvard and Yale: try to good, peer-type matches within the subfield.) Then they could respond with three happy, content-filled sentences and it was easier for both of us.

This is still a particularly chaotic time of year! Anytime from next week to the last week of October is probably the sweet spot. If you emailed more than a week ago particularly, a lot of professors, including many who are normally good at email, seem to drop the majority of their emails between getting back from the field and the third or fourth week of school. It's a slightly annoying patch but not necessarily a global problem with those faculty. I have heard tales, too, of faculty who won't respond to any emails before applications come in lest they bias the process against those who don't know that the convention is to email. I don't know of any faculty by name who do that, but I'm also in a super obscure field where my POIs were fielding maybe 5 prospective student emails a year. If you're interested in, like, med anth at Berkeley—phew! I wouldn't have committed anywhere without talking to my POIs, but emailing now isn't the only way to do it: there are many more and better chances to talk to the faculty of anywhere you get into between now and when you have to make a decision. If you're admitted, the program will pay (usually all, but sometimes just 'most') of your costs to come to the visit weekend, for example; if you're too far to come, Skype seems to be the way those conversations happen.

Hey, yeah, it sounds like your GRE scores will be fine, but I wanted to flag that you should not pose these as mutually exclusive categories. Yes, absolutely, apply to schools that will mesh best with your research interests: but don't figure out those schools by first eliminating the top 10 or 20 anthropology programs in the country and then figure out where fits you best among the rest. People do do that, but it's starting the race by shooting yourself in the foot. I would advise that you avoid that pitfall, especially given the randomness of the application process and the depth of your research experience. I am very much not convinced that any of the applicants who get into Berkeley, e.g., are automatic admits at any other program in the country: fit really is that important. If the best program in for your interests really is ranked a little lower generally, that's obviously fine, but don't do the thing where you eliminate all the programs with the best placements and then choose from among the rest.

Yep! That's how relationships work. I am, at this point, very friendly, very social, love people. (At least on the academic scale: on the population-of-the-United-States scale, I'm a mild introvert.) I have more in common with you biographically than you might think, although I do not and will not disclose the specifics on this website, whether publicly or over PM. But I'm now at the very friendly and comfortable with basic social interactions stage. I have also never had a relationship, whether a passing friendship, a dating thing, or one of my best friends, where all of those things aligned. People have too many needs and wants! I never expect to find a relationship like that, either. But my human relationships are based on having a lot of things in common, or sometimes just one thing in common. Like, I have a friend whom I don't like all that much, and who I don't think particularly likes me either (we're solidly neutral on the 'how great is this person' evaluations), but we have very compatible habits of how to check in while working on something else. Not a core friendship, but it is a friendship. So, anyway, yeah. You're trying to skip too many steps in your relationships. You gotta start with casual friendships—which not that bad, so far as these projects go. (I had to start with 'you and the guy working at the coffee shop exchange a single pleasant sentence each about the song on the radio' as something that initially seemed impossible.) I've never been in love. Maybe two-thirds of the people in first-year graduate school haven't, either. I also wouldn't be surprised if I graduate from here in my 30s without having been in love. But even if I don't go on a single date in the next decade, I'll construct a full life anyway. Also, on your whole extremely specific checklist, this is not how to go about this. Unfortunately, a word I use because many of these will be boring, you have to start with casual dates: you do not want to go into a coffee expecting "life partner" or even "brief, life-altering experience on the model of 500 Days of Summer." (Do not model your life on that movie.) You gotta go in hoping for a nice half hour with an interesting human. From this you figure out what types of people are actually compatible with you.

Yes, basically this. I would encourage you to meet a lot of people, and I think you're smart to want to be meeting people from a wider range of ages and contexts than your cohort in graduate school might offer. I think the whole categorizing impulse—of stacking everybody into a single 'social maturity' slot on a linear scale—is probably not going to serve you well. People can be naive or mature about different things, you know? Like you say that people's professional maturity and social maturity are different, I'd break down social maturity into a lot of different things. Not just, "romantic" and "friends," either, but regarding finances, or grieving, or ability to not take impersonal things personally, or news, or realizing that people have different sides, or articulating what your own emotional needs, or, or, or. (I'm afraid you may not agree with this example, but I bet if one of your friends developed a chronic illness, you'd have the social maturity not to freak out and in that panic never speak to them again. You might be surprised, based on my reading of your experiences, at how many people—ranging in age from high school freshman to bona fide grown adults past middle age—will do the latter!) Keep up with therapy. (Maybe try to find a therapist who pushes back on the black-and-white thinking? I'm not sure affirming "yes, you have a certain emotional age that is exactly analogous to all people of a different chronological age, despite the fact that people that age certainly also have a range of maturity" is helpful for you.) Join lots of meetups. Hang out with people of all ages, certainly including the younger ones, but don't ignore the older ones. (I feel like the average age of "will I ever find love? I've never had a boyfriend or kissed anybody" letter writers to the advice columns I read is [anecdotally], like, at least 30.) Try two new things a semester, or whatever number feels right to you. Are there support groups for your illness, or young people who've faced similar challenges, on your campus? That could also be a helpful outlet.

I never had to 'catch up' in this particular way, but when I had my project of 'catch-up' in a couple other social dimensions, here's what I did. Read a lot of advice columns, e.g. Savage Love. It helps you realize other people are having the same issue...or are having other issues that you now might understand a little better! I don't know how it is in computational biology, but my field requires a couple really hard (from an English background) languages. So I've spent a lot of time in language classes. One thing that everybody always talks about in language class is how it is much better to be the worst speaker of the language in the class than it is to be the best student. The way learning works, as long as you start out able to keep up at all, you will progress much more rapidly than the others. Usually at the end of the class, all the speakers are about the same level, so the more advanced ones were occasionally bored, but the lowest-level student will have rocketed up to match them. I wonder if this might be a helpful way to think about your social relationships, per St Andrews Lynx. You will likely do better to find people who are bringing something cool to the relationship, even if sometimes you're out of your depth, than somebody whose only positive traits for you are that they're about at your "social level." If that's all you needed to have in common, you might have been friends with the other kindergarteners in kindergarten. But relationships need more than that, so find the meetups suggestions and work on finding the 'more than that.' Because this seems to be a source of anxiety for you, I'd try to find a biweekly or monthly therapist, because you're embarking on a big project and it will make the project nicer if you can check in occasionally with somebody about how it's going. Try not to have sexual relations with people you actively look down on. Getting physical with someone you not just don't respect, but who 'repulses' you, is both a shitty thing to do and, if you keep doing it, will make developing a healthy attitude about sex and/or romance much harder in the long run.

On writing samples, a summary of my own experiences and wisdom gleaned from the crowds here: You shouldn't be able to use your exact writing sample as a finished chapter of your dissertation. If you're that sure of your research project, you're cutting yourself off from room to grow. (You might then benefit from the UK PhD system where you enter and then start research pretty much right away. Not my area of expertise, though.) But allowing room to grow, the closer it is to your proposed topic, the better (especially in the literature fields: I have gotten an impression it's a bit more flexible in most fields of history and art history). It is never necessary that your writing sample be in line with your proposed project. Sometimes you might just not have anything in line with the proposed project, so you do your best with what you've got. This is not an automatic disqualification, and sometimes people get in with applications like this. However, in the ideal case, especially in the literature fields, you want your writing sample to be located on a clear trajectory that it shares with your proposed project. If it's a couple steps earlier in your scholarly evolution, that's fine. But if it represents a different offshoot of your work, where you tried out a different direction entirely before coming to your project idea, that's not so good. It might not be an exact match, but it should help give a sense of where you're interested in going. Specificity*: You should be specific about what you will do in your PhD, and you should expect it to be subject to change. PhDs and research academia more generally are very friendly to people changing projects. This is how one could describe the career of most research professors. When they finish one book (or journal) project, they find a new one. It is in this way that you can publish enough to be hired and make tenure and afterwards just keep participating in the norms of the career. One can never have a career that has a research component with only one idea that never changes. (Even social theorists who really do just get stuck on One Thing will generally apply it to different cases over the course of their careers.) However, research academia is not friendly to people who don't have projects. The way I conceptualize the SoP, then, is not as a contract locking you into a project. I am personally expecting to evolve through 4-5 ways of framing my project and shifting its subject (although I think I am pretty locked onto its 3-4 central issues) over the course of the next 7-8 years. (Hello from anthropology, where PhDs take forever!) I'm three weeks into my PhD and I've already gone through one conceptual shift since applying. So what are you doing instead, if not proposing your eventual dissertation? You're drafting the project you are interested in pursuing at this point in time. That project will most likely fade and fall away and get overtaken by your next project, and the one after that, and the one after that—whether that transition happens in the course of working on it, or just after you publish the thing and you need something else to do. But you're not floating still while you wait to find a direction; you're following a path in one direction until you find another direction to take. *This is assuming you are considering a career with some research expectations, i.e., a job in the more selective three-quarters (or so) of all four-year American institutions; although I've loved teaching community-college-type pools of students and used to work with a lot of alt-ac professionals in my museum job, right now, just starting my own PhD, they aren't my primary orientation. So I can't speak with any sense on how to use a PhD primarily to train yourself for either of those careers.

Yes, this does happen. I don't really have a sense of how common it is—I come to this through doing studies of a world region that was once colonized by the French, and thus having some anecdotes from friends in French PhD programs, so I'm not the most authoritative source—but I know that both all-French PhDs and mostly-English "French" PhDs are cultures that exist in French departments in the United States. Who are the people who are reverting to the translations? Are they the comp lit students, or are the PhD students doing this? What do the other French PhDs think of this? If you can find allies in a small class, maybe you can pull some of your coursework back more towards French. On the other hand, if this continues, that seems like a very good reason to transfer. I am sorry.

Why do they have to 'match'? I thought the writing sample was supposed to be just that: a sample of your writing...I don't think it's supposed to be understood as a sample chapter of your eventual thesis/dissertation. Obviously, if your best work is also on the topics of your future work, that's great! But I got into my PhD program based, like you say, largely on the strength of the questions in my SOP. Having never written a paper on those questions, though, I just used a chapter of my college senior thesis from several years ago, as sort of a "here's the level of the work I can do, even though my interests have evolved away from this methodological direction entirely." So perhaps that's what my advice would boil down to? Don't "explain" your choice of writing sample—that phrasing seems to portray it as a detriment you have to overcome, which could produce a defensive and/or distracting tone—but do frame it the way you want. For me that was, "two years ago, my research on this topic was at x place, as you can see in the writing sample. since then, I have done all this additional work and now my questions have evolved to y place, which I am now going to spend the next two paragraphs enumerating." Would something like that work for you?

I should probably get a plaque of that for my desk somewhere. Just wondering, does it also apply to the particularly interrupty kind of senior professor? I can't recall ever getting toothful at a student, to tell the truth—I like teaching—but, uh, I can't guarantee anything about the latter.

I'm likely to mention it at some point, but I haven't had to worry too much about shoring up my authority to be wherever. I am a very friendly young female person, but I also have a sharky, toothy side to my personality that tends to shut down such questions toot sweet. So since I (usually) have capital to spare on that front, I figure I might as well do my bit to normalize "graduate school" as a thing for both instructors and female people to say.

Right, but that is a bad assumption. Within my little speciality, I had a best-in-the-nation kind of research resume: I still only got into three of seven PhD programs. Apply to all of them, try your luck, and then concentrate on finding your favorite after you've been admitted. Or, if you don't want to wait that long, try looking at the work coming out of each of the four: which one do you think produces the most compelling research in machine learning? Whether or not a program is "best" in information processing doesn't matter if the next one is the best in the facets of machine learning you want to pursue. Moreover, being able to answer this preference question well is itself a criterion for admission. The two PhD programs by which I was rejected were the two schools at which I did the worst job of explaining why that program would be the best fit for my research. Your statement of purpose is a persuasive document: you're trying to convince the professors reading it both that your research is amazing and that that school is the best place for you to do it at the next level. I suggest that you learn a lot more about the professors with whom you'd be working at each institution, because if you can't convince yourself of the specific strengths of a place, you won't convince them to admit you.

Oh, I think I was unclear! I got lost between the two cycles mentioned in the original post, which was my bad entirely. I'm not an applicant this time—I got in last year to a social anthropology PhD. Currently, I've moved into my apartment, none of my cohort is here just yet, and I do not want to finish unpacking! But to feel better about my laziness, I'd like to feel productive. As a writing tutor type, therefore, I'd enjoy reading any outlines or statements of purpose that you guys might like another set of eyes on. (I'll note that I didn't start writing until about two months before my first deadline, so I hope I don't make anybody feel weird or panicky if they haven't started. I hadn't either at the equivalent time!) My background is not in anthropology, so I do have some limits with my ability to advise on theory, but last year I got into my first-choice PhD program and have edited a lot. So, if any of you want me to send me anything by the middle of this week, I'll send back some notes. Want to help me avoid unpacking these boxes?

Very cool! I love Gothic fiction. Not so much to read for fun, but I also find it intellectually interesting. It sounds like you were on the right track, then, and sorry if my speculation was off base. For me, I found that a good rule of thumb was that, if I read the thing out loud, was I sort of excited by the ideas I was reading? If yes, then it was persuasive. If I was like "eh," I had some revision or more brainstorming to do. But I am an excited talker, so that's an easy metric for me. It was also a subtle difference, but I preferred to think about "potential," rather than commitment, for the project I pitched in my SOP. As I am hoping to have a career that requires publication of at least a few articles beyond the dissertation, thinking of potential research projects (not all of which I'll be able to actualize) will hopefully be a skill I end up using. So I was able to reduce the cognitive dissonance by thinking about it on a level of plausibility, or as a kind of brainstorming practice. In the fields I've dabbled in more seriously, it is just called "Atlantic studies" (with 'Pacific' and 'Indian Ocean' studies as other popular framings, hence 'ocean studies'), but yes! That's the thing. I think there is a line, though, between things that are newly popular as an angle for research, and things that have (newly) entered the foundation of the discipline, such that you can take them for granted. If you wanted to work in something vaguely New Historicist ten years ago, for an example of the latter, you wouldn't have to argue, "New Historicism is a useful angle for my project because it says this and this helps answer my original question in the following way": by 2006, it had entered the discipline long enough ago that you could just assume people knew it was valuable sometimes, and skip from answering whether it could be valuable straight to why. I am unsure whether or not transantlanticism would need that "this is valuable and it is valuable because" kind of justification. (Did I do that chronology right on new historicism? I moved my example back in time in case it is now passé, but I don't know: my English dual-major has gotten rusty.) Good luck! I think English sounds like a rather harder field to get into graduate school for than I faced, just for the record: in anthropology there is actually a lot more differentiation based on field experience and language/research skills. In English, without those things...yikes! I hope you end up doing very well.

I agree with all of that, but I don't think anyone's saying don't even apply to UWM. Right, @poliscar? By any criteria for which you shouldn't apply there, there's a whole lot of other universities, especially public ones, to which you shouldn't apply. I am in favor of giving places the benefit of the doubt during the application phase, and then making decisions based on more detailed research conducted after admittance. But things at UWM seem serious enough—and maybe not now, but likely to become serious by the time new students might graduate, eight or nine years after this all started going down—that it seems worth flagging so that prospective students know to weight it as a decision-making factor. Personally, unless UWM had a) my perfect POI and b ) I had had the awkward conversation with my POI about whether they were job searching, the institutional considerations would mean I'd lean pretty heavily toward my other options, if I had them. @betsy303 I wish it were only rural universities that were separated from their communities because their communities see them as elitist snobs, and that some other category of university had figured it out! Cf. Yale's community relations. But I absolutely agree it's an important challenge.

Well, the whole question is how much they don't align with your interests. If you want to study Hinduism and the in-state MA doesn't have a single faculty member of South Asian religion...that is probably a problem. But if you focus on ideas of gender in the Greek Fathers and their only early Christianity faculty member works on ideas of the will in the Latin fathers, that's fine. You say you could get the languages you need, so if there's even a couple courses that are tangentially related to your interests or there are faculty members who could give you extra reading, it sounds like a good idea to me.

Are these schools not all competitive enough that you should apply to all of them, rather than trying to pick your favorite first?

Can you narrow down from Topics, like cancer and ALS, to problems or questions you might ask about them? You can likely still stay very broad, but grounding your interests in a facet of those topics, like "I'm interested in targeted therapies for cancer, especially cancers of the internal organs," or "I'm interested in problems of the aging brain, whether brain cancer or neurodegenerative diseases," will help professors help you better. Even if you haven't narrowed your interests down between six or seven options of that level, and even if you say that, the specifics will still help the conversation be more productive than if you go in saying 'cancer': surely there are aspects of cancer you are less interested in, so not focusing on those will save time.

To expand on the socks point, you might also spend some time in the pro-failure section of the TED Talk internet—a lot of Silicon Valley successes have found value in failures much much bigger than using a protocol that didn't work. I also recommend doing some reading on the "growth" mindset, rather than a "fixed" one, to see if you can nudge yourself into the former. Although all self-help sorts of material need a grain of salt, I think, it could help you a lot to try re-framing your mental narrative to account for a fact that you are a student and learning requires practice. Practice means you're working on mastering skills; it by definition means you haven't mastered all of them yet.

I bought these socks.

I am also here, in social anthropology, and occasionally like to procrastinate by reading statements of purpose.

Hi Caien, I think you may be underestimating the amount of difference that can be found in writing samples and statements of purposes. "Excellent" is not a binary yes/no category. (Actually, it may be near-binary for CVs—where excellent gives you a tiny bump, but everything in the vast middle between "excellent" and "has a pattern of getting arrested" will have no effect on your application. It is not binary for pieces of writing.) I've never served on admissions committee, but if I had to guess, at every humanities department, chucking every other piece of information and lining up files in order of how compelling the writing sample is would predict about 75% of admittances. If you chucked letters of recommendation, and especially CVs and grades, and you kept only writing samples and statements of purpose, perhaps you could predict 90%. Of course, that'll never hit 100%: sometimes even a stellar writing sample is accompanied by a weak or untailored statement of purpose, or where an amazing statement of purpose isn't backed up by a demonstration of sufficient research skills, or four excellent Joyce specialists applied and the department only had space for two. I think the original sense of the strong/weak metaphor for writing might be worth recalling here, for this 'no but it is WS and SoP that are most important, not CV' thing I'm off about. In academia, we often use strong and weak as synonyms for good and bad writing. But statements of purpose aren't an explanatory genre: they're a persuasive one. So no matter how well-written, or "good," a statement of purpose can be "weak" if it doesn't make a forceful case for the worth of your research (and, borrowing the Kelsky paradigm, you as the "hero" who are best equipped to do that research). Now if I may be entirely blunt, I don't know if it was "good," but it sounds like your statement of purpose was weak. I mean, I'm definitely curious now about what kinds of nineteenth century Irish literature you study, but if your ambivalence about your direction came through, and there was even a hint of a "this project is interesting, I guess" tone to your materials, it may not have been very convincing as an argument. There was an application cycle I sat out, a couple years ago, but where I hadn't quite settled on my project yet: all of my drafted essays sounded like this. They didn't convince me, so I figured they wouldn't convince a committee. I'm not sure, but it sounds like that might have been a factor in what's going on with you. However, I think that leaves us with a fairly simple way forward. You say you're not committed entirely to Irish literature, but are interested in maybe branching out? Unless regionalism in English is stronger than I expect, I think you can lean into that and show you're committed to the process of research itself. What themes have interested you? If you structured your SoP perhaps more around a theme, and spent most of the "my qualifications" bit on your background with Irish research, I think you have perfect leeway to say, "I've also become interested in extending this project across the Atlantic to examine this theme in James Fenimore Cooper, because of xyz factors that make it interesting for my questions." Don't say that you're interested in "American" literature from the period! But if you can point to some specific works for specific reasons to be interested in both, I think that might be OK. In the versions of my SoP that had a "sources" paragraph—I had some weird interdisciplinary things going on with my applications—half the paragraph was, "I might use these sources, and I would be interested in taking a feminist angle on them! Or I could use this whole other collection of material, which might be interesting because x. Lastly I have considered comparison with some other materials from a region somewhat to the north of mine, which could possibly contribute because y. Anyway I have no idea at this juncture which of those, if any, my dissertation might focus on, but having spent so much of my statement of purpose on the questions I want to answer I figured I should sketch some of the approaches I might take." (Obviously the actual paragraph was not quite so meta as that last sentence, but that's the work that part of my text was doing.) I definitely want to run this by the English people on this board, because I know that in your field if you did the same thing with period, rather than region, that would be a problem, but I'm not sure about region. I do know that Atlantic/ocean studies are getting increasingly more popular in most of the humanities, as a lens for research, but I don't know if they have penetrated English to the degree that you could rely on it in application materials. Anyway, this was a rather longer post than I expected, but no matter how many publications you have—I don't have any, and I'm a rising first-year—you will likely be well-served by an extremely polished WS and an SoP that excites your readers to want to see more of your work.