knp

I'll take all your premises as given, which I should note is a generous gesture on my part. There are probably certain cases where the "core" meanings are enough to do the work. Unfortunately for the idea of doing scholarship on only those cases, however, those cases do not map to any particular area of scholarly inquiry. So it's not like we can say, "Oh, if you're interested in Roman historiography, you don't really need to know Latin, but if you're interested in Roman literature or classical archaeology or non-elite history, you do need to know it." Instead, your cases where the "core" is sufficient—which I already allowed might be up to 20% of cases in my previous post—are about evenly spread across all fields. There is no coherent subset of core-only cases from which you could build a rigorous scholarly career. You could—and many people do—write an okay but not great undergraduate senior thesis that way. Whether you're interested in Roman historiography, literature, classical archaeology, non-elite history, reception studies, or literally any other field of classics/any literature/area studies, though, if you ever want to get past that introductory level, you're rapidly going to see your work run up against either the huge number of questions where style is important or the equally huge (if not even bigger) number of questions that can't be answered without using some of the majority of the literature that has never been translated or has been only sketchily translated into English. So I don't think anyone is saying that it is impossible to contribute to classical scholarship without knowing Latin/Greek; either a scholar wandering in from another field or an undergraduate/master's student could contribute a good article if they found one of these situations where you don't really need to know it to say something interesting. However, there are not enough "peripheral" materials to sustain a PhD, let alone a career, in the classics—and that's even without the fact that most surviving material that has ever been written in Latin has never been translated into English! Again: for scholars of cultures and texts, we are concerned with cultural specifics, the very things you describe as "peripheral" and ideally dispensed with!

Did you read Petros's post? I was being silly, but they made my point again in an actually eloquent way. Just because there is no good English word for numen (or possibly even a good series of words), doesn't make one believe the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis! Or, for example, pius. Leads to "pious." Can be translated "pious." But "pious" now has all sorts of English baggage from having spent centuries in a majority-Christian context that it did not have in (pre-Christian) Latin, and in fact it came with a whole different set of baggage. Because classicists and other humanists like myself are concerned with that baggage, not with the bare minimum proposition, you have to use the original language probably 8-9 times out of 10.

Form has no influence on meaning?! I may faint.

There are many great reasons to do an MA online...I do worry about getting a (liberal arts) PhD online, especially if one's goal is to use that degree to become a professor. I've never served as a faculty member, so I don't really know whether that would be a problem, but with the job market as it is these days, I wanted to check in. On forums like this, where one of its reasons for existing is for peers to share information about graduate school/academia, it's a tricky balance between the "hey you do have your eyes open about this, right?" confirmation thing and the "assume that people are adults who know what is best for them" standard of politeness that always applies in real life. I am sympathetic! My father got his law degree while working as our stay-at-home parent, which I now think was great. My mother's best friend stayed at home long enough to have and raise six children, then went back to get her PhD and is now the happy chair of a small university's department near her. But I've read enough doom and gloom about how hard any faculty position is to get these days, no matter what your credentials, that I thought I should ask.

@Punk28 What? Why does your PhD need to be online? (Or is it that it has to be part time?) What are you hoping to do with it? You do realize that most PhD programs pay you to attend them, right? Also, your scores/GPA are stellar, even if I can't see the rest of your profile!

It really depends on the profiles of the letter writers you've already chosen, no? Number 4 might be best if you have two education letters, but not from people who know you as well. Number 1 might be best if your existing letters have less to do with education already, so you want to make sure that all three letters have at least some connection to the field. Etc.

How are each professor's placement rates in particular? If the Rutgers' one's placement is better than, equal to, or close to equal to the UCLA guy's, I would go there. If the UCLA one's placement is way better...then yes, I'd probably choose UCLA. As to your other concern, has the UCLA one said anything in particular that makes you think he'd stop helping you if you chose to expand your network? It's nice that he wants you to choose UCLA! But that doesn't count. As long as he still supports you, even if he is involved less closely from across the country than he would be if you were his advisee, that's fine. You don't need to be "loyal" to him just because you already got your master's there—and in fact, there's a strong argument that switching would contribute to your intellectual development just because it gives you a different group of people to think with. Most academics really do understand that, so as long as you don't have evidence to the contrary, I think you'll be fine choosing the other. Plus, I do think vibing well with your main advisor—both in terms of intellect and personality—is worth a lot.

FYI, I think OP has already come around to the consensus opinion

I just have two tiers. (NB That I am young, single, and fairly open to living wherever, which means I have more than average freedom in making this choice.) In the first tier, I have four mandatory factors: research fit (1) and placement rate (2), followed by whether or not I can get a bare minimum of funding in relation to COL (3), as well as whether I find the "vibe" of the department, potential advisor, and location, pleasant enough that I can imagine being content there for the duration of my work (4). The goal for 3 and 4 is not to maximize either funding or happiness (that's in the next tier), but I'm willing to rule out any program for which I'd have to go into substantial debt, as well as any program where I think I couldn't be at least medium happy long term. What's the point of doing this for the next 7-9 years if you're just going to be miserable, you know? My second, bonus tier is largely unranked, but includes things like funding beyond the minimum, an extra good "vibe" about an advisor, department or location, weather, track record of students winning grants, interdisciplinary institutes on campus related to my interests, department's willingness to let a student have a scholar from a different field on their committee, etc. These are all nice things, and I hope I have two choices that are both so good on my first tier that the second group comes into play! But there's no combination of excellent bonus factors that could overcome a big weakness in the fundamentals.

Maybe he's going out of town because his mother is having a health crisis and he needs to bring her to her appointments, and he doesn't have room in his bag for a bunch of student work, but he feels responsible for his class and wants to return the papers to his students quickly. Maybe he lost it, because he's a person. Maybe you made a lot of typos, so he wants to use spellcheck to correct it faster. Maybe he was doing research in the local zoo and your paper was gnawed on by rampaging wildebeests, and he would like to review a copy that's free from wildebeest tooth marks. Why do you think that your university has a policy that students need to keep copies of their own work? Give me three reasons that could become useful. Let me tell you, they have that policy for a reason.

Of course rank doesn't always reflect quality! But "it in no way influences the kind of scholar a student becomes" is too strong. I'm not sure it influences quality, but I do think it influences kind. For example, if one program requires three times as much TA experience as another, that program might be more likely to produce teacher-scholars than scholar-teachers, and have the philosophical orientation to academia to go with it. In my own case, I am not going to go to—and really, shouldn't have applied to any of—the eight schools that produce 50% of TT faculty in history in the United States. A few people will argue that you should not go to graduate school if you did not get into one of those! (They will especially argue that for people like me, who want research-intensive tenure-track jobs.) Honestly though, however often they quote those numbers, I think that's silly. For my little subfield, only perhaps four of those have a relevant scholar, and I personally find those scholars' approaches to be rather old-fashioned. I happen to think I'm the snowflake where I will have a much better shot of getting a TT position if I go to one of the two PhD institutions I'm seriously considering right now, which are both ranked 9-25 depending on the source, than I would be if I went to a higher ranked program that was a terrible fit for me. (Although of course I know that "better" still doesn't mean "likely.") Plus, at this point, I do want a TT job. I've worked in libraries and museums, too, though, and I think many of my coworkers (many of whom with lower-ranked PhDs) were impressive models of scholarship. They didn't and didn't want to fit the all-publications-all-the-time model, but man, if that were the only scholarly orientation that existed, the world would be a much poorer place.

Just because he didn't repeat his request doesn't make the request go away.

Oh my god, just scan it and send it to him already!

Well, you know what they say about the luck of the Irish!

I'm pleased with how I've done this cycle—three exciting acceptances, one waitlist, and still waiting for a decision from the most competitive program I applied to, as well as those rejections at Princeton and UNC—but I'm starting to get nervous about starting. I don't have a master's degree, and I just noticed that one of the departments I'm considering has a really, really high average percentage of each incoming class enter with an independent MA. And besides, I haven't ever published, or even presented at a conference beyond my old department's undergrad thesis talk day. Yikes! But I've found this thread very reassuring, actually, because my resume has a ton of the "other experience" type things on there. Yay!

It sounds like you need to ask some of the Harvard faculty you're interested in working with if you can Skype with them, no?

@bioarch_fan OK, where's this bar? I'm booking a flight so I can go sit there every night until I get my last admission notification and all my funding decisions! Plus, Rome!

When I was choosing between three schools for undergrad, I ended up doing something similar. I was torn between these last three, so I made a very extensive spreadsheet with two or three different "weighting" levels that I could attach to each factor. I hoped this effort would clarify my thinking and provide a rational answer for what I should do. So I set to work. At the end of the day, when I'd finished putting in all the factors I could think of, one school had pulled way ahead. I stared at the spreadsheet. Really, that one had pulled ahead? I stared some more. But I liked that one, which had come in second, better. "I could tinker with the weighting to make that one come out ahead," I thought. "Hm. Screw it!" And then I picked the one I actually liked best. And it was great.

Just saying, but I'm totally clear on the history here. Even if it is the same person, they still need advice. This person's situation is still that they got a 4.0 in their master's (very good) without, somehow, being able to get or or even develop the foundation for getting one recommendation (a bizarre level of ungood). The original post that it might have been the same person may have been useful for some people (I got it anyway, but I assume it helped some others) but continuing to insist that she's the same person is just weird and annoying. What if you really are confusing some poor innocent poster who's never been on here before? However we feel about wasting our own time, that's not somebody whose time we should be proud of wasting.

I'm not sure what not loving a school has to do with not being able to get letters from your professors there. One of my stronger letters came from a professor whose class made me miserable, whom I didn't like that much, and who I'm pretty sure didn't like me a whole lot either. But although we sparred a lot at the beginning, we developed a lot of professional respect, so I got a wonderful letter from him. It is possible to get a great letter from a professor whose class you didn't love, so long as you approach doing so as, again, a professional and a future peer. So I agree that you should go take graduate classes elsewhere to form some new relationships...but if you want to salvage at least one letter from your master's program (getting one is probably wise so it doesn't look weird for you to have gone there), I strongly suggest you take a look at the archives of The Professor Is In's blog, with a special emphasis on this column. (Perhaps also some general workplace blogs? I can't recommend any in particular, though.) Academia's professional norms are not necessarily obvious to observers, but TPII does a good job making clear what they are, which is very helpful for both your immediate professionalization concerns and for longer-term ones. Good luck!

Can you give us a longer version of what happened? I'm thinking the 200-300 word version, like we don't know anything else about you, because we don't. Did you just not connect with your professors, and escaped as more or less one face in the class, not somebody with whom they had an individual connection? Or did you have big problems with them? Because this: struck me as a big red flag. That...really shouldn't be how this goes. If your problem is that they don't know or remember you very well, you fix that by corresponding with them more as a fellow professional and future peer, over multiple interactions (whether in person or by phone/Skype/email), not as a supplicant begging for favors. Now, if something really did go very wrong that you think you would really need to beg for their support, why don't you tell us about it? We can't advise without more of a sense of what's going on. Edit: also useful would be to know, if most of your master's classes weren't in English or literature, what field they were in.

Just got my official UNC rejection! Oh well, hey ho, it had been up on the website for a week and I just didn't understand how to dig through all the pages to find it. It's a shame, because I would have been thrilled to work with my POI there, but I suppose it wasn't the best fit university for me more generally.

Great advice, ashiepoo! And I like the way you put them, haha. One of my choices is in a very college town area where a lot of apartments for the academic year start going now. (Now! I've spent my whole adulthood to this point in cities, I'm not used to this cycle.) So I've been making appointments to visit some housing options in the event that I go to that school. Holy goodness it's getting real!

Yes! I thought this would be easier; I didn't get into my #1, and I hadn't realized how closely tied my two second choices are. Whoof!

Sorry about people being weird! But back to business, for a very important question: was your "humanities and social sciences" master's degree in the field in which you want to get your PhD? If no, and in a major way, like you got a psychology master's, apply away to English MAs! I could even argue for this being fine if you studied a really different subgenre of English studies than you'd now like to apply for—like you did modern stuff and now you want to do Old English, or something else that involves substantially different skill sets, not like moving a couple centuries in time period or wanting to now start doing ecocrit rather than Marxist criticism. Only go if you're funded, since you've already paid once—and yes, not being funded means your tuition will help fund the university, up to and including paying for other students' funding packages—but that would be fine. Many universities do offer TAships with small stipends for master's students, and that would be a good path to take. But if your master's was on something even a little bit similar similar to what you want to study for your PhD, then you should work on improving your relationship with your old letter writers now, or even taking a graduate course or two to get a couple new ones. You already have a 4.0 in your subject in graduate school; you don't need another degree to prove you can do graduate work! I would talk to your letter writers to see why they think your application did less well than you wanted last time. They might have good suggestions! Then you can fix them. And starting a new conversation with them is a good way to get new letters. One of my recommenders a) is renowned for his Speech about Don't Go To Graduate School and b ) was particularly harsh on me when we had a chat about potential graduate school ideas senior year. But after I'd gone away, worked for a while, and come back with a somewhat better writing sample and a far, far better sense of what I wanted to study in graduate school and my potential "fit" at different places, he was actually really supportive! And I've gotten into all the places at which I had the best fit, so I think it worked out great. Just because your relationship wasn't great then doesn't mean you can't present new evidence and reasons for them to support you effectively now. If you feel you would like some fresh perspective among your letter writers, though, then other posters are right that taking/auditing one local graduate course each semester next year is a way better idea than spending the time, effort, and redundancy to get a second master's in the same field.