tingdeh

Anyone waiting to do a Fulbright fellowship to the United States? I'm a Canadian applicant who made it past the national level, and the final results should be coming in soon...I hope...

Hi everyone! It's nice to be back on The Grad Café, which I haven't checked out since applying for graduate school. Anyway, I found out yesterday that the adjudication committee for Fulbright Canada recommended my application forward to research in a couple of U.S. institutions! So I wait for the decisions to be made in DC...it will be a gruelling couple of months ahead. Good luck to all of us!

Disagree, of course, with the city-love (I love it), but I absolutely agree with the bureaucracy. The University is a mongrel between some "British" and "American" system, and so you get a centralized de-centralized administrative model. Very Canadian. Blegh. Hope you're enjoying France!

To my fellow 2015 Fall admits: I notice that our thread for the "lessons learned" in our application season is pretty much stickied (and bumped). So it's been one heck of a year. I'd love to hear about everyone's experiences. Did Freshman Fifteen rear its ugly head again? Did you find yourself more dependent on your bike (as many colleagues in the University of Michigan can attest)? Tell all! I'll start. It's been one heck of a productive year, finishing digital projects, and getting my first book review and peer-reviewed article published. On top of that, getting to manage a journal and organize a conference. It was a great time to have done my first year in my particular institution. But then the crash-and-burns. Truly, until three weeks ago, I haven't taken a proper break for six months straight. Probably work-a-holic'd myself to pure exhaustion, that one day my girlfriend came home to me having fallen asleep behind the front door, in the process of taking off my shoes. And just when you think life was done with that slap in the face, the archives singe away at every ounce of scholarly ego you've got left. I remember coming in with these fresh, bright ideas into the month-long trip, and then coming out being swept away by the messiness of the past, and being taken into rabbit holes I never knew existed. But that was the best part. I never was a history major in undergrad (and I never did a masters), so even this second archival trip (the first one was last summer) was a completely novel experience, discovering stories and directions I never knew existed, despite being rather familiar with the relevant literature. Tl;dr: did dope sh*it, got exhausted from doing too much of it, then discovered the wonderful ebbs and flows of being a historian.

Oh no! Do tell. It looks like we tag-teamed (I left Toronto a couple of weeks ago to do research around the Northeast and the Midwest). What's going on in my home base?

Oh boy, summer's a busy one, but fulfilling I hope. Panels to prep for at a big field conference, finishing a big digital humanities product, and comps prep while I'm at it. I'll be travelling for July to Cornell, Michigan, and the Newberry at Chicago for some archival work. On the bright side: it's only been my first year and I've got a book review in press, an article in press in a top field journal, another article in peer review, and a co-authored article submitted! What a productive year. I'm happy to be back here checking in on you folks.

Yes please! Are you all putting your abstracts and panels together?

A year since the mutual freak-outs already?! Damn. And look at us go. I've got an accepted article I've gotta edit for February and some conferences coming up! Eat well and have a great second semester everyone.

So happy seeing y'all get settled! I'm so excited to get started, and so is my advisor--so much so that he's decided to send me abroad to do a preliminary archival trip already before the year starts. Ahhhhhhhh, this is so great.

A BuzzFeed community post listicle is in order(?) That's exactly what I pictured in my head with this post! With nice, relevant gifs for each hot field. It's less "hot topics" than it is "contemporary scholarly debates and conversations." Things get published because journals exist for all those things. It's the modes of debate that are relevant.

Agreeing wholeheartedly with above--don't use programs and GPAs (and even GREs) as be-all and end-all crutches. I'm going into a great program (great fit, great rankings if that matters to you) with no relevant undergraduate degree, so my GPA would all have been but useless except for as a minimum gauge of scholarly aptitude. Let your research statement, letters, and writing sample speak the loudest and have the most thought and show the most promise. Read your relevant subfields' journals. Look at the schools where they were from, or people they've worked with, to give you a sense of the community. Get into the conversation with your application.

Really good point! My advisor calls the dissertation "the rough draft of a rough draft of a book." That's what I'm trying to figure out right now. But alas, I also must remind myself to let the archives fertilize my topic more (my field is history). I'm headed out again in a couple of months, so we'll see what it turns into by then, but I'm also wary of just getting washed up in the flurry of material I'll find. It's a pretty focused archive, and the only one of its kind outside of the United States, so...

Just checked back into this thread. Eeeeee I'm so excited for everyone!

Wanted to generate some thoughts on this, since it's been a thing that's floating around at my home base. There's the dissertation that makes you bubble with excitement, and then there's one that takes the job market and the cutting-edge hot topics in mind. Where/how do you strike the balance?

Indeed, and the Digital Humanities unit is the fancy feather in America's Hat!