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@Sigaba wrote in the writing samples thread, "IMO, a very well written piece based upon a foundation of solid research will get you more than a solidly written piece based upon a foundation of excellent research. My $0.02." That retrospectively explained a lot about my attitude toward my applications, with whose results I was pleased. I wanted to save it here for the next round.

Although I have no bones to pick with Agrippina's advice in general, I strongly disagree with this sentence. Maybe that's true if you spend your "gap" year working retail or fast food—personally, I don't think that would make you a less competitive candidate, but if it did, the only reason it could have that effect would be because some academics at some programs are terrible people. If, on the other hand, no matter what you did in your "gap" year, you wrote a stronger statement of purpose than you would have before your research interests were clear in your own mind, I think you'd be far more competitive as a candidate than you would be now, with a higher level of fuzziness in your statement of purpose. (Anecdotally, despite an interesting resume, I have been mostly unemployed since August; I'm still going to my second choice PhD in the fall, to which I was admitted because of the clarity the years of thought since graduation brought to my admissions essays.) Moreover, regardless of the effects working fast food might have on your resume, that's not even what you're talking about—and a research-filled gap year will only make you a stronger candidate, if you decide you want to follow that path. I have no other advice on what you should do, really—don't go to graduate school before you're ready, of course, but "ready" is a pretty subjective benchmark—but if you want to escape your professors' pressure to go to graduate school now, I might try emphasizing the "I don't know what field I want to go to graduate school in" argument. I mean, if they're willing to write your three or four different letters for three or four whole different fields' worth of programs, I suppose you have nothing to lose by applying to all the fields you're interested in now now. But as somebody who applied across two and a half fields (and is getting a PhD in something very different than she expected just after graduation), it is HARD to get professors to support that! It is so much more effort than applying in one field! So I wonder if you pitch it as needing more time to figure out your preferred field of research, if that would get more encouraging results from your professors.

I'm not in your field, and too early in my career to answer your question as well as it should be answered, but it sounds like you might focus your search on more of the bigger and/or public top 20. Some Ivies and other rich private institutions in the fields I know best—the one in New Jersey especially—do such a good job of financially supporting their students' research careers that most students end up pretty isolated from teaching. They might do it for a course or two, but it's not integral to the program. Like you, I didn't want that. I disliked that setup for different reasons than yours, but CHE/TPII describe those programs as making it more difficult for their graduates to find jobs at high-teaching institutions: a program that mostly expects you to be teaching will expect you to have taught more than just once already. On the other hand, in my field, it looks like it really is harder/more risky to get a TT job of ANY kind if you go to a school much outside the top 30. So while it sounds like you should avoid the richest private schools, and for placement reasons you shouldn't under-match the graduate training you're competitive for, there are a lot of well-regarded, big, less wealthy institutions in the top 20. The UNCs and University of Wisconsins of the world are very well regarded in my discipline, but don't pay a lot, and require all of their graduate students to do a lot of teaching to get their stipends. That makes things more difficult for students who do want research careers, but sounds like exactly the sort of environment that would work for you. I don't yet know any PhD student who's chosen an institution like that for your exact reasons, but I know a couple students who want to teach community college and who go to that sort of high-support, high-teaching graduate program.

@hippyscientist Thanks! I got mine from the web shop at getbullish.com—I was internet browsing at 3 in the morning—but it seems like the brand is available on a bunch of websites, including Amazon, if you google "screwing up is part of the program socks". I'm saving wearing them until my classes actually start, but I'm looking forward to them!

@Pink Fuzzy Bunny I bought these for myself in preparation for the fall.

It's fairly normal for it to take a year or three for you to tell if the field you get any new job in will be the field for you. Your experience with graduate school is normal that way! The burnout shouldn't usually be so intense, though, because in most urban labor markets in this country, it's normal to change jobs after a year if it isn't working for you. I.e., unlike in grad school, there's not the pressure to stick with it to the point of exhaustion and then for another year or two afterwards. So don't pressure yourself to find exactly the right job and exactly the right career in your next first try. During that first try, you'll learn some more about what you like and what you dislike; maybe you'll get lucky and you'll have found your dream niche, but even if you don't, you'll meet a lot of people, some of whom might have jobs that are closer to what you'd like to do, and which you can pursue instead. You'll have a lot of chances to get this right.

Like Sigaba, I've gotten good results by floating something innocuous but with a small red flag on top about other programs like, "Oh, yeah, it's nice to see more female professors/professors of color, my undergraduate department/other department I was considering didn't have any/many..." Sometimes the fish does not bite, and the response I get is "Oh huh yeah," but sometimes you hook something interesting and you hear a bit of somebody's perspective on the department culture.

I don't know if you'll be interested in this perspective, but I did wash out of classics because that question, basically. The turning point was when I realized that I wanted to spend my life doing academic research, but I couldn't see myself doing it in classics. I thought I could write a master's thesis, probably, and that would be fun, but the idea of trying to write a classics dissertation filled me with dread. That's not true for everybody, obviously, but it definitely affected how I responded to the field. I should probably note that my tastes ran to literature/the ancient epic, rather than medieval Latin, neo-Latin, Byzantine studies, history of science, reception studies, or some other topic where there was more obviously more to do. Not that there isn't more work to do in all fields of classics! But just because I know that doesn't mean I felt that, you know? So I went off and found a field where I think I'll still be excited about new questions and new research for 80-90 years (the goal being to retire with more left to do!). I still do some classical stuff on the side, which keeps me happy and fulfilled with that interest, and that was a good resolution for me.

Short answer: No. Longer answer: It's very difficult even for graduates of top-ranked, in-person, American PhDs to find positions as philosophy professors at American universities. If you're interested in teaching at a community college, I don't know that those degrees would disqualify you; I haven't ever looked into your idea. But you would be much better served going to a PhD-granting institution that has good ties to the communities where you'd want to teach community college. More generally, you'll want to ask any graduate program you're attending, anywhere, where they have placed recent PhDs (and if you want to get an online graduate degree, you need to ask where they have placed graduates of their online program). If they don't place good numbers in the type(s) of job you want, don't go.

Is it not a generally good idea to avoid working with anybody you already describe as abusive?

Why not ask the DGS why they recommended that? If they've already given you a list of reasons, never mind, but you could thank them for their recommendation, say that you're still torn, and ask them what they see as the benefits of TAing in your first year and saving the fellowship for later. Maybe they'll be convincing, or maybe not, but trying to take into account advice on hard decisions without knowing the reasons behind the advice always gives me hives.

I have language training from here to infinity...sigh. It's fun, but I forget everything. I've also been procrastinating on finding housing, because my program doesn't provide any and there aren't a lot of options in the town.

I don't usually bring it up on this forum, but I do have moderate expertise in this area. Kill the LSAT. Law school admissions is very numbers-driven, and by LSAT perhaps a bit more than GPA, so your plan to spend a lot of time studying for it is a good one. (https://officialguide.lsac.org/release/ugpalsat/ugpalsat.aspx) Keep up with your extracurriculars and job(s?)—I can't tell from your post whether you're still working at anything, or if that was in the past—to a maintenance degree, but I wouldn't look for ways to get more involved at this juncture. But I have to ask—have you researched what the legal job market is like? Have you researched how to minimize your debt on graduation? Some people argue that this is an okay time to go to law school, given how applications have plummeted since 2008, but you have to keep in mind the NO GOOD VERY BAD legal job market waiting for you on graduation. (I have no idea whether family law has better or worse than average employment prospects, though, or whether an average family law salary can easily cover an average amount of law school debt.) I recommend that you read a lot of Above the Law—it's one of the best sources to get fully informed about what's going on in the legal profession right now and, if you decide to proceed, get strategies for succeeding in this market.

For each of my POIs at the three programs where I was admitted, by the time of the visit weekend, I had read: A book, four articles, and a conference paper. Although I hadn't actually read the book until I met him at a local conference last June and he discovered I hadn't actually read it, so he loaned me his copy. First impressions! (don't always matter that much) Half a book and no articles. No books and no articles. There was a discussion on the literature forum a while back where some people argued that it was uninformed to apply to a school if you hadn't read an entire book—and ideally more than one—by each POI at each school you were considering. (I'm not in literature, but I am in a book field.) Honestly, that made me very angry. I'd wanted to find and read some of 3's work before I applied, of course, but as an unaffiliated scholar, I just didn't have the resources to manage it. 3 had absolutely no work accessible online, nor were any of their books or articles in physical journals available in the academic library to which I have occasional access. (Their work isn't on the topic on which the library's collections focus.) In retrospect, I should have asked 3 to send me one of their articles when we emailed in the fall, but it didn't occur to me. I rarely referenced specific works even when I had read them, though. My formula would be something like, "I'm interested in working with you because I noticed you analyzed TYPE OF SOURCE in your work on TOPIC THAT PARALLELS MINE. I think I will also need to analyze TYPE OF SOURCE to fully answer MY TOPIC." Sometimes that information could only have come from my reading (and sometimes it came from book reviews or whatever) but I figured that if they'd written whatever I was referencing, they didn't need me to give them chapter and verse to recognize the reference. Of course, I sometimes also asked a question or two about a more specific piece of work, but I liked generally keeping the focus on our shared research orientation.

It's okay! My working-with-customers experience actually contributed almost nothing to my ability to talk to other adults, because I've almost exclusively worked with children—I find that difficult, but not stressful, so it didn't carry over much. But I was thinking about the other half of the retail equation because it works for other people, because I definitely practiced "on" a lot of coffee shop employees, and most memorably because I read an article last year by a woman who happened to get over her own social anxiousness by working the counter in a sex shop. It was amazing: "you'll never be nervous about small talk again after you've spent a few months answering customer questions about [bleep bleep bleep] or [bleep]." Unfortunately I can't find it again, which I'm sad about because I thought it was laugh-out-loud funny, but googling it was only giving me only some rather, shall we say, sketchy? links.

I'm outgoing now, having made that transition, but I absolutely remember how revolutionary it felt to look up at the radio while ordering coffee and be like, "I like this song, huh?" (I assume you're not already working food service or retail? If you happen to, taking advantage of some of the low-stakes small talk opportunities is great practice.) A particularly helpful step, for me, was learning to be moderately interesting about the weather, which is the sort of thing one (me) pooh-poohed as "boring" and possibly "normie" in one's (my) teenage PITA phase. Really, though, you can go a long way commiserating or celebrating something common like that together. At parties, or other situations where you might have a five minute conversation, not a twenty second one, the more you ask questions, the less you have to talk. People love talking about themselves! "Oh, tell me more!" "What did you think of that?" "What did you do then?" "What was your favorite part of that thing you mentioned?" "Have you seen recent movie, or what do you think of the trailer?" That sort of thing; I find myself more likely to "blank" if I'm talking about myself than if I'm trying to learn more about the other person. The last thing I did that helped—and this is premised on the fact that my basic affect/tone is/was kind of reserved or mean, depending on how generously you interpreted—was make a point of smiling at the end of sentences or questions. I definitely used to get too freaked about talking to do anything with my face, so I'd be talking in this kind of odd tone with a weird affectless expression on my face, which didn't help me come across as friendly. I was the opposite of a nervous smiler! Turning that around and making a point that I should smile at the end of every third question I asked (or whatever) helped a lot, too, I think. And now maintaining a friendly tone (based on American cultural norms) is just habit for me, so I don't have to think about my presentation so much any more.

Why not do both? In your last year in the Peace Corps, if you can afford it, why not apply to both a lot of master's programs and to a few of your top choice PhDs? Then if you get into a PhD, you've saved yourself two years, but you've also done your best to give yourself a variety of master's options. I would be a little wary, by the way, of getting an international development master's on the way to an anthropology PhD. Many international development programs have neoliberal outlooks that relate a little awkwardly to anthropology, which likes to avow an anti-neoliberal perspective for itself. A development master's shouldn't prevent you from getting into anthropology PhD programs or anything—I've already met a couple admitted students with that sort of degree—but I'd guess that applying right out of one would mean that your essays would need even more careful attention than usual.

That sounds very interesting, and I bet your law background will eventually come of great use in anthropology! But, honestly, the MA offers you have this year still sound very expensive. MAPSS costs just so much money, but it only lasts a year. Will it really cost you dramatically less to pay tuition and full living expenses at either of these schools for two years? I want things to work out for you, but I am concerned that either unfunded offer here is still a path to an unsustainable amount of debt. If you think that you can do it, though, I'd make this decision by doing a really detailed analysis of the costs of each program: beyond just tuition, to what an apartment would cost—which will be steep, as New York is the most expensive city in the country and New Brunswick is expensive, too—to whether there are any TA/RA opportunities that would be allowed on your visa and your likelihood/eligibility for getting them, to groceries, transportation, etc. Then I'd pick whichever was cheaper. If you go to whichever master's program is "worse" for your interests right now, it might have a tiny negative effect on your PhD options in your next round of applications. It won't be big. The prestige of your master's degree, if you get one, isn't a big factor in PhD admissions in this field, and especially as somebody coming from outside the field, you'll learn a lot and have a much improved application after attending whichever one you choose. But if you go to whichever master's program is more expensive, that extra debt is likely to place extra long-term constraints on you. and I don't think any tiny marginal advantage in PhD admissions would be worth it.

I'm unsure of how much methodology you share with dry-land archaeology, or if maritime archaeology graduate students really do have to be supervised by maritime archaeologists? If you could work with a non-maritime archaeologist, Laura Wilkie (Berkeley) came to mind, and there are a few people at UNC and William and Mary you should perhaps also investigate. (I wonder if you'd find smaller groups of interesting people in schools throughout the south and mid-Atlantic, beyond bioarch_fan's suggestion for where the largest groups of relevant faculty are hiding?) For maritime archaeology more generally, although I have no idea about its Caribbean strengths, I second that TAMU has a reputation for being tops. Your profile seems competitive enough that I advise you not to refuse to apply anywhere because it's too difficult to get accepted there. Nobody's likely to get into the most competitive "tier" of schools, so be sure to apply to a broad range of places, but I'd bet that you'd have about an average shot at "top" programs. PS Extra advice for somebody early in their admissions research. Spend lots of time on your SOP! In graduate admissions, having good vs. excellent grades is kind of a "who cares." (Although you're doing great, so keep it up.) Instead, the statement of purpose is where it's at. If you can, I also always advise undergraduate students to apply to the NSF GRFP, a fellowship program with a great stipend that lasts for three years, which is due in September of the year you apply to graduate school. My application got handed back with a "trololol" stamped on top (approximately), but it was still an excellent exercise for clarifying my mind and figuring out my research ideas before I wrote my admissions essays.

Oh, I missed this the first time! Nooooooooooooooooo. Do you go around calling your friends a failure every time they get rejected from a job? (Most jobs are hard to get, and they still have higher acceptance rates than most graduate programs!) Personally, I'd pick a huge fight if one of my friends called another friend a "failure." And while I'd pick that fight whatever the reason for the comment, I'd especially do it if the reason was that our other friend had something ambitious. Even if it didn't work this time, you gotta admire the effort! Be as nice to yourself as you would be to your friends. A clarification that it's not that I don't acknowledge when things go poorly...I took three years off myself, one of which could best be described as "a total and utter failure." When I was on my grad school visit days this time, I always made a point in summarizing my biography to say "I tried to do x, and I failed. Then I did y and now I am here." Anybody who was uncomfortable with that could step back; everyone's human! But I failed at that task in particular. I was not a failure. And neither are you.

Part of my undergrad thesis, like many above. It was basically literature-lite, but so far as I know, nobody said boo about the discipline thing. Nor was my WS my most impressive translation ever, but I wanted my writing sample to reflect the regional focus with which I'm going to graduate school, so my thesis did that job best. For some universities, I applied with a thesis chapter (21 pages) and a cover letter. For the cover letter, I shortened my overall introduction to three pages, and ran through all the main scholarship that didn't appear in the chapter itself. Choosing which chapter to use was hard! Originally I was leaning towards one chapter, but then I realized that it was under-sourced, so I used a different one. I was accepted to two of these programs. For one university, I had to submit a ten-page writing sample. I found a chapter that had a solid core, but that was absolutely full of nonsense and fun but extraneous detail. It was long, therefore, but squished easily, and eventually became a tight little ten page paper. I was accepted! I also had a few programs that didn't require writing samples, because applying over three different PhD disciplines has some benefits ;). I didn't send anything to these, and was accepted to one and waitlisted at another. PS I absolutely find it charming how many responses this thread has gotten today.

You realize most people never have a "thing", right? Believing in having a "thing" is something, in my experience, that seems to be peculiar to those of us with major educational aspirations...most people don't actually think about jobs in terms of life-defining career passions. Having an okay job and coming home and investing in your hobbies, family, and/or friends is a perfectly happy and healthy way to live, and that is in fact how most people—those who aren't in poverty—live! If you want that, you are not wrong or unusual for wanting that. And many happy people without a "thing" are married to other people who value hobbies and stability more than rapid career advancement, but some number of those people are also married to high-powered-career-type individuals. Most academics are not married/partnered to somebody from a "comparable" school. They spend their lives with all sorts of people! The "comparable" school thing a very small pool, and with the whole diverse world of human experience, why would you constrain your heart like that? Anyway, I don't mean to discount your doubts: it's definitely possible that you will be unhappy dating your boyfriend while you are still looking for your "thing." I can't answer that for you. But that's only one possibility—I want to affirm for you that that's not universal, so you could also be perfectly happy deciding that your "thing" is having a nice life, a nice job that never follows you home, and all the other perks that follow from stability and free time. It might totally be an awkward year before you get in somewhere! But it could also be totally fine. As somebody who spends a lot of time fighting the your-career-is-your-life thing in Type A circles, even as I somewhat participate in that myself, I have a prescription that I think would help. Find some media where some of the main characters find happiness outside of their career. My first suggestion would be Parks and Rec. I can't think of a lot of other suggestions right now, but basically, you're looking for the opposite of the West Wing. That's because "I feel like so many people have told me (including my bf) that individuals in couples need to be totally individual and have their complete separate lives outside of each other in order for the relationship to flourish" makes me feel like you are getting ONLY the "passion! career! job! work!" messages. If that's so, I think you'd have an easier time deciding what you want if you had media that affirmed that you can be happy without being "rah rah career" every month of your life, to balance out the input you're getting. It's not like "passion! career! whatever!" is bad, at all! But there's many ways to be, you know.

That study focused on eight schools in particular, which together produced fully half of all tenure-track history professors in this country and Canada.* The top five were indeed Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford, but the next three were Columbia, Chicago, and Brandeis. The authors and those who reported on the study tended to chunk them in that order, of being the "top eight". (I'm always a bit surprised to see Brandeis, I admit...I wonder what the department's strengths are?) *I find this just profoundly undemocratic and antithetical to a vibrant scholarly exchange of ideas, but I suppose nobody is asking me. Anyway, I find the study itself hard to read, but the most prominent article about it is this one. Besides those top seven or so, the next couple dozen will have some extremely competitive strengths and some that are less so. E.g. if you're interested in Latin American history, you should seriously consider UT Austin and UCLA, or in colonial North America consider Penn and William and Mary, or in African history consider Michigan and Michigan State. Some of those are tougher rows to hoe than others—going to UCLA, e.g., is still a great name for basically anything, but if you're looking to be hired at a small school without any other Africanists who can serve on your search committee, they might not recognize that Michigan State is one of the best programs out there for that. It's for schools like this where the only advice we can give you is basically, "know your field," which is what talking to your professors should help you accomplish.

Of my offers, I accepted the one that paid me the least. I decided to do this because it still does pay enough, even though I'll have to be frugal, and because I liked them best!

To go along with unraed's lucid explanation, I've annotated a bit of your post to answer your questions directly.