veilside79

Hello all, Im a current PhD student at UNC, so maybe I can offer a little insight to you all. From what I've heard, there is no formal waitlist this year, so if many have been rejected, but you've heard nothing, then you're definitely on a short list for your field but won't be notified (so I believe). We had prospective weekend a week or two ago, and are waiting for reaponses to the 20 or so offers that were made. FYI, whenever a student within a particular field turns down an offer the funding associated with them goes back to a general pool and the faculty assesses who, from all fields, should get that returned offer. So, if they made 5 offers to Americanists, and they all said no, those five offers could, theoretically, end up all going to military historians if the next 5 best candidates happen to be military. Good luck to all!

I'm having some serious problems in narrowing down a dissertation topic. I've come up with close to a dozen proposals but my advisor hasn't been enthusiastic on any of them. In fact, once he flatly said "over my dead body" when I proposed one that I felt, as did my colleagues and other professors, had immense potential. I'm in a top ten PhD program with a leading scholar in the field as my advisor. He's been advising dissertations for decades so I tend to trust his judgement on this, yet can't help but feel defeated before the two years of the dissertation even begins. I've heard of imposter syndrome before, but can't help but feel that I've completely let down my advisor and that sheer luck is the whole reason that I landed a seat in this PhD program. I obsess with trying to impress him and have a great idea for my dissertation but only manage to produce uncomfortable expressions on his face before he tears down my ideas. It's brought me to the point where I feel no confidence in aproachng him with other ideas now. Is this normal? Am I simply experiencing the normal PhD experience or is there something else going on here? Is there any advice that others can impart on me? I feel as if there's nobody I can turn to in this that I know in real life--I have few close friends who are college graduates, let alone PhD students; from family I'd just here a bunch of bloated and empty inspirational lines; from fellow PhD students and other professors I'm too afraid to expose my ineptitude, so the anonymity of GradCafe will have to suffice. Thanks in advance.