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Everything posted by knp
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I assume ashiepoo's covered it for you, anthrostudent, but to cover all our bases for any hugely wealthy readers who may happen upon this in later years, I would still never, ever do a PhD without funding if my goal was an academic job. I know the Oscars were last night, and there are some, especially glamorous/competitive, industries like that where you can just throw your free labor at a wall for years until somebody notices and decides to start paying you for it. (One thinks of the Vogue intern.) Academia is not one; if you don't have funding for a PhD, anyone who knows you paid for it will Make It Weird. I'd guess you'd face a lot of issues getting your professors to take you as seriously as the funded students, and find it three or four times more difficult to find an academic job than even the great difficulty funded PhD graduates face. Whether paying for a PhD would be a huge financial strain or no sweat, I'd guess that the resulting experience would be much worse than for your funded peers. Now, if any billionaires who may ever read this have just gotten bored and want a PhD as a fun amusement before they retire once more to their private island to drink fruity drinks on the beach....(daydreams)
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UW-Madison - are top-notch faculty leaving?
knp replied to marvel2375's topic in Decisions, Decisions
I might be concerned about a PhD, but a master's program is so short that everything should still be fine by the time you've graduated. It takes ages for anything to happen in the academic world, so even if every single tenured professor there starts sending out applications to try to leave for a faculty position elsewhere (which is both extreme and unlikely to the point of impossibility given what compscian pointed out about people's personal ties), the exodus would still take a decade. They'll have more difficulties recruiting new faculty, but no gaping chasm is going to consume the entire university in the next three or four years. -
People who care about this do realize that the norms of politeness are different in different languages, and different grammatical structures may require different solutions. The masculine generic may be fine in Spanish; this is what is polite in English. For an example going the opposite direction: English only has one form of "you"; but that doesn't make it any more polite if I walk into Spanish-speaking classrooms calling all of my professors "tu" rather than "usted."
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@reremoop What I do when I have to send something scary (or read comment...) is have somebody hold my hand (usually virtually). Whenever you're ready to send your first couple "no"s, I'm virtually holding your hand.
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Not so much on emails, but I tell you, I have gotten so many phone calls that begin, "Congratulations! You have won a cruise to Miami..."
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I assure you, the snakes are very real...:D so funny
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How to defend myself to my adviser
knp replied to MonstersU-Terp's topic in Coursework, Advising, and Exams
While you're at it, also ask "What medium would you prefer me to use for these reminders?" If she says email, well, that's a problem. But if she says she likes to hear by phone and gives you her phone number, or that she prefers you mention it when she's in her office in the morning...then you've solved it for next time! -
Hey! I was curious, so I did some digging and I think you're right that there's very little out there about the average GRE scores for anthropology graduate programs. But I found this website with a couple of the universities you're talking about, where I'd argue that you could approximate the range you're talking by looking at history or English scores. Did you already get the GRE fee waiver? If you didn't, you should, because that would reduce the cost the next time! And how much did you study for the test the first time? If you could improve both your V and Q by ~5 points, I think you'd be much less likely to run into any department GRE cutoffs. 150V is just below the national average for test-takers who intend to go to graduate school in the social sciences, most of whom aren't aiming at programs as this competitive, so your score is low. Mid-150s would be much closer. (I'd also recommend spending a little time working on your Q because I think you could pick up 5 points quickly that way—it's usually easier to gain 5 points in each section than 10 in only one, so making even a small improvement there would help you hit the 300-point-combined GRE cutoff @Bschaefer mentioned.) So if you didn't study much, I'd bet you can improve that much in 40-50 hours of studying; if you already studied a huge amount, though, I'm more inclined to agree with you that it's not worth all that more investment of time and money. As an erstwhile GRE tutor who isn't working with any GRE prep clients or teaching any such classes right now because it really is a dumb, dull test, I have to agree with you on that part. But like @fencergirl said, many universities, especially state universities, will have had the legislature or the campus set a minimum GRE score (often GPA, too, although that obviously doesn't apply to you) below which they can't admit applicants or have to use one of very few "waivers" to admit somebody with a lower score, making your pool even more competitive. Your W and GPA are totally great, so I believe you can do it! At the same time, I hope all this GRE stuff turns out to be totally irrelevant. You have a ton of programs left to go, so don't count yourself out just yet! So many people wait and despair of getting in and then it turns out that some of their universities were just really slow this year, and they did get in!
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You know there's no shame in quitting. You've only sunk one year into your PhD. So take a year of academic leave, and see whether that space makes you want to come back or not. My father sunk twenty years into his academic career, and while he enjoys his new career, that's twenty years of being annoyed with all his choices that he won't get back. Often, the better part of valor is knowing when to make a different choice. I believe that, unlike my father, I am going to enjoy my PhD—I mean, do check back with me at this time next year, because I could be wrong, but I think I have the temperament for it. But if you find that any life decision is making you miserable and is "a bad way to be human", look into finding something else to do!
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"What a competition!"
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I mean, I would support you if you decide to chuck it all and choose neither. (Japan does fund such nice teaching-abroad options.) Even without the cushy English-teaching job, I Was Not Ready For Graduate School until this cycle—I ended up taking three years off to make sure I was absolutely certain I was ready. If I'd applied during my senior year and gotten into a program I wasn't thrilled about (possible), that would have been a horrible and wrenching dilemma. I don't know what I would have done. So I'm sympathetic: many people, like me, aren't ready to make such a long commitment without a bit of a break in between to think about it. The UCLA offer is fantastic and probably won't come around again...but if you're not ready, you're not ready. So finding something else to do should be on the table! That said, given the information and options we know about, there is no question to which "take an unfunded MA degree at Harvard" is the correct answer. Have you gotten your official rejection from the Harvard PhD yet? You might try reaching out to that professor you like, although I'd be careful with your wording and approach, because I bet that he'd actually encourage you to take the UCLA PhD offer, too.
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Notre Dame is great for that—you may want to look at schools with strong design schools also, like UPenn (Raffaella Giannetto in Design) and Harvard (Joyce Chaplin in History, but also a strong design school, I think), since architectural research is found in art history maybe 60% of the time and in design departments during the rest. It's farther afield, but the University of Southampton has a couple figures of interest (Stephen Bending, Jonathan Conlin, and Stephen Bygrave–all of whom have at least some interest in architecture, even when it's less than obvious from their webpages). PS Italian is probably the next language you should learn to read, after French—architects in early modern America and France/UK took a lot of cues from Italian designs and theories.
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Here's a thought experiment that might help: let's say that at Harvard right now, there are three East Asianist faculty, named A, B, and C. At UCLA right now there are three East Asianist faculty, named X, Y, and Z. If you switched the departments—such that X, Y, and Z now work at Harvard, and A, B, and C, now work at UCLA—would you still desperately want to go to Harvard instead of UCLA? For undergrad, the Harvard experience is quite different than the UCLA one. At the PhD level, though, the institutions matter far less than the people you're working with. Is there somebody in particular you're fanatic about working with at Harvard? Or is it just the Harvard name? Because let me tell you, the former should be the most important factor in your choice, while the latter should matter very little. PS It sounds like you got an extra special fellowship at UCLA, too? Extra fellowships at top-5 universities in a field come around once in a blue moon—most don't award such fellowships at all; mine offered ~5 such fellowships for graduate students across every department in the university, so each department could expect one student to win that fellowship about once every ten years—so that is an additional strong reason to choose UCLA now.
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@Josh J. That's absurd! I mean, I'm very sorry they decided against accepting you.... But I'm now convinced that they don't deserve you!
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@Josh J. Seriously, they didn't count your degree as a closely related field? I didn't apply because I got the impression that they tended to pull shenanigans, but I remembered this from their website. "Applicants with a BA only, or an MA in a field other than History, must apply for admission into our MA program. Applicants who will have completed an MA in History are eligible to apply for our PhD program. If you will have a completed MA in a closely related field, you may note on your application that you would like to be considered for admission into the PhD program." If I recall your description of your master's correctly, that's shenanigans indeed. Boo Washington! What a senseless reject!
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My father went back to professional school full time when I was 11 and my sister was 14. I remember the food getting less tasty for a while—although no less nutritious—but other than that I thought it was awesome. I can't speak to the parent experience, but as somebody who remembers being the other half of this dynamic, I just wanted to say go you guys!
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@anthrostudentcyn I haven't gotten a call for either of my acceptances, I just got two mass emails from the graduate coordinators for each school. Both of my POIs emailed me within 1-2 days after that. (One of them was like oh hello I see you were accepted, I wanted to write but I hope it's not inconvenient, I'm always nervous about "bothering people." I was like, buddy, no, I'm thrilled, talk to me!)
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That part took a bit of interpreting, but is fine—but quoting emails about "leading force in the department" is Bad Form.
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@Josh J. This dog is cool and accomplished, just like you!
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@nevermind Yay, that's so exciting!!! I am out of upvotes so here's a happy puppy who is smart like you
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@raaawr Hi! This is the thread for prospective history PhDs, so there probably aren't many design applicants here. But good luck! Yeah, co-signing on the unpredictability of this all and how it can be dependent on funding, departmental politics, phases of the moon, etc. The paradigmatic example in my friend group is a woman who applied to Yale Art History three years in a row and got rejected twice and accepted and enthusiastically welcomed the third time—although I will say that I was rather deeply unappreciative of the many people who kept reminding me of the "it can take three cycles" thing before any of my schools had released decisions. On my part, today I finally got my official rejection from the department at my top choice that I thought was my best fit of all the programs to which I applied. This is where being an interdisciplinary little elf works in my favor, though, because I had applied to two departments, they overlap a lot (one is regional studies), and so I still have an offer at my top choice! I don't know how you single-discipline types (or interdisciplinary people in fields that are less likely to have institutional support permitting a department in whatever regional/thematic studies area would apply to you) do it, actually—I was dying of anxiety, and I knew I had paid for two chances at my top choice, not just the one!
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I didn't apply to any place outside of the top twenty-five or so—my strongest fits were all ranked between about ten and about twenty, so there's not enough of a rank differential to notice much there. But I've been doing rather better among the anthropology programs I applied to than the history ones, which as somebody with a weak anthropology background and a strong history one, I was not expecting. Either my project is more anthropological than I had thought when I wrote it up, or random chance strikes again! (Spoiler: it's probably both.)
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http://giphy.com/gifs/gotham-cqf5wzvVMiYDe
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@Feanor I always did prefer Fingolfin (that duel!) but Feanor's not bad either