maelia8

On my old application, I turned it in double-spaced and it was accepted, so we'll see what happens this time. My Fulbright statement (campus deadline was two weeks ag0o) was only 2 pages single-spaced, so I'm going to try to expand on it for DAAD.

@Horb I have one one in the past (as an undergraduate) and I remember it being a huge production at all levels. They send you paperwork to sign as well, dozens of thin and densely-printed sheets, and if you lose any of them, that's it, no more copies. I still have a hugely fat file filled with everything i got from them last time ...

@pup they didn't happen to say double or single spaced, or anything about formatting (font, size), did they? I didn't see anything about this on the website either.

@pup thanks for sharing the email! I just wrote them asking the same question earlier today and hope they aren't annoyed at getting the same query

@Polemic, I just wanted to jump in and give you the perspective of someone who took a bit of time off between undergrad and grad and what that experience was like. Like you, I wrote a long history honors thesis my senior year that took me two semesters (and at my school, we even had to defend it in front of a faculty committee at the end!). Frankly, my thesis wasn't far enough along in November/December to serve as a writing sample, as yours will be, but I was still super burned-out by the process and wasn't ready to go on to grad school directly. Instead, I applied for Fulbright ETA and the Peace Corps since I knew I wanted to both get the hell out of Dodge and do something different from academia. I ended up working as a Fulbright ETA for two years (my grant was extended for a second year by the government of the country I was working in), and during the second year, I was able to spend a lot of time honing my statement and showing personal development since I'd graduated. I generally suggest that folks who are planning on applying directly put in a plan B application to another organization, preferably some sort of prestigious exchange, so that if you don't get in on your first try, or decide you'd rather take a break after all, you still have options for the next year.

@rhiannonsdreams It's totally normal and fine to be a bit nervous at the start of your first term in a graduate seminar, especially if some of the seminar participants are more experienced than you. However, think of this as an opportunity to blossom and grow in both your historical and communication skills! Speaking from experience, it seems to be much easier for shy/intimidated folks to get their feet and start contributing aloud than for folks who like the sound of their own voice and make brash but meaningless contributions to get the message that they need to tone it down and yield the floor once in a while (someone in my cohort was called into office hours to discuss the latter - and that was an awkward conversation with a professor, let me tell you!). Think of it as a continuum where you're trying to find the sweet spot of talking just the right amount.

@MathCat In this particular case, about 80% of students are using laptops during lecture, so pretty much the only way that this person could avoid looking at any changing screens would be to sit in the front row. I sit in the front row because that is where TAs were invited to sit at the beginning of the course - I'd switch to the back row, but I have extremely poor vision, even corrected, and would then be unable to see any text on the slides I will try to cut down on the number of times that I switch windows, though, as I'm aware that that flicker is the most annoying part for people who are bothered by screen distractions.

Update: I asked the other TA about the "student," and they didn't know the name either - either it's a student using a fake name and an anonymous yahoo account, or a "community member" sitting in on the lecture. Either way, the fact that the person wasn't willing to use their own identity indicates to me that this isn't about their learning experience, it's pure pettiness. Considering this development, I think I'm just going to ignore the email. Someone who won't use their real name or contact you directly isn't trying to inform you of a concern, they are just trying to make you feel bad.

Thought I'd start a new thread for this year. Is anybody else applying? My campus internal deadline is October 19th, so I'm already hard at work on the application. I may have found a discrepancy in the instructions ... for the research grant, the daad.de scholarship database states that the research proposal should be maximum 10 pages, while the daad.org checklist states that it should be maximum 5 pages. I'm not sure which is correct. Does anybody know?

@pup, I may have found the same discrepancy .. for the research grant, the daad.de scholarship database states that the research proposal should be maximum 10 pages, while the daad.org checklist states that it should be maximum 5 pages. I'm not sure which is correct. Does anybody know?

After the lecture today for the course I'm TAing this semester, I received the following email from a student: "Hi! Could you please not surf the web while sitting in the front row? Your screen is extremely distracting. I mean, come on. You're a grad student. You should know better." (No other salutation or closing) Laptop use is allowed during this large lecture (it's co-taught and the professor who isn't lecturing sits to the side and uses his laptop as well). I am not this student's TA (his section is taught by a different TA), so I don't know him personally. The sites I was "surfing" were for for time-sensitive grant submission, fact-checking during lecture, and work-related email - not social media or video streaming. I would never use my laptop for such purposes during a grad seminar, but this is an undergrad lecture in which I am already very familiar with the material and only take minimal notes. I found the email to be extremely rude in form, and as to the content, I don't see any reason to stop using the internet during lecture when such use is allowed by the professor lecturing. How should I write the student back? I want to politely inform him that it's 1) none of his business what I do on my computer, 2) he should check his tone when writing to instructors, and 3) if motion on screens bothers him, then maybe he should sit in the first row to avoid the experience.

I'm applying for this now in 2016, anybody else? Deadline is tomorrow and I wanted to commiserate about the difficulty of writing about your leadership qualities without feeling like a pompous ass.

My institution has a separate union for graduate students and it's absolutely amazing. We do a new contract negotiation every four years and have lobbied for a lot of things successfully, including input on our health insurance coverage, that have been instrumental in improving grad quality of life. The union is pretty respected here and has been around for several generations of graduate students. The biggest issue we face is that STEM students don't really care about it as much because most of them don't receive funding that's contingent on them getting a teaching position, as it is for those of us in the humanities, so our bargaining group is a bit lopsided and someone homogeneous.

If I marry my partner some day, I plan on taking their name, but unlike many here who fear negative professional repercussions for changing their names, I anticipate positive results to come of it: 1) The fact is, I am an historian of a specific region, and frankly, many of the people within the US who write about this country either come from this region, or have ancestors from this region, meaning that more than half of all historians of X that I know have last names from the language of this region and it seems to strengthen their credibility (marginally, but nonetheless somewhat). Since my ancestry from this region is maternal, I don't have the "right" last name, but marrying my partner, who DOES have a proper X region name, would solve this problem and probably improve my credibility as an historian of X. 2) My mother has changed back to her maiden name since my father divorced her, and frankly, I'm not on such great terms with him either, and sharing his name isn't something I'm particularly proud of. If it were free, I would change my name to her "right" maternal name as well, and my sister too, but it's too expensive. Thus, I look forward to a free change if I marry my partner! 3) My last name (and my father's) is a very fluffy-sounding French name that, combined with my first name, makes me sound like a romance novelist. Not the best name to publish under academically, in my opinion (think along the lines of "Angeline Devereaux").

@megk86 I think it is certainly possible for you to continue your relationship and your Ph.D., but doing so will require some compromises. You don't mention in your post exactly how far away your boyfriend is, but if he's within an 8-hour drive and/or flights are cheap between the two cities, it would be possible for you to stick it out until you advance to candidacy officially and then move to where he's living and commute in once in a while, as @rising_star and @TakeruK suggest. Of course, doing so would require you to start sending out feelers to your advisor(s) and committee members now to see if this is something that they would be amenable to, but I know several people in my program who started doing this starting in the 4th or 5th year of their program and have made it work. One woman that I know lives about 3 or 4 hours away and comes in about twice a month for a day or two to meet with her mentor. I myself am considering moving an hour away from my school to live with my partner after I get my proposal approved after quals, and then commuting in as infrequently as I can afterwards. In sum, unless you're seriously feeling that completing the Ph.D. is not as important to you as being with your partner now, then I would stick the course and work to get closer together as soon as it's convenient if I were you. Transferring programs can be difficult or impossible depending on a variety of factors, and is best done earlier than proposal submission time if it is to be done at all. You risk losing the equivalent of three years' work if you are able to start over somewhere closer to your partner, and there's no guarantee that the advisor/institutional fit would be as good.

Most popular questions: 1) So what do you do with X degree after you get your Ph.D.? (tempting answer: become a shamaness and guide the world after the apocalypse annihilates civilization) 2) Wow, why does X degree take so long? (tempting answer: I don't know, how long should it take to become familiar with everything written about the history of European Civilization in the past 50 years or so?) 3) Can you answer X random question about the Nazis? (tempting answer: #notallgermanhistorians) Please pardon the saltiness.

@Butterfly_effect thanks for posting this. Like you, I come from a humble background: my parents don't have college degrees, my grandparents were immigrants, and we often struggled financially while growing up. When I first started grad school, my mom was living in a trailer, and with my grad stipend, I was making significantly more money than her annually. I recently got my first car at 26, and it was a 20-year-old hand-me-down from my father after HE was able to get a slightly newer hand-me-down car from relatives. What surprised me most about grad school was that most of the other grad students frequently complain about how little we make - to me, the stipend is a fortune! Because of the way I grew up, I am extremely careful now about savings, paying off debts, and filling my retirement IRA each year, so I was flabbergasted to hear from other students last year that they had "run out" of money by the first of June and had nothing to live on over the summer! This year I actually held a workshop for other grad students in the department to show them how to file their own taxes - many of them had never had a job of any kind before (at an average age of 24-26 years old) and had no idea how to fill out the forms. When I told other grad students who grew up with parents who were doctors, lawyers, and teachers that I was raised in a house where we didn't have books, and I saved all of my pocket money to buy them for myself, they were shocked. I've never experienced any condescension or rudeness from other grad students who grew up in families that were better off, but I think it's important both for them and for myself to see that there's something more than we experienced growing up. I hope that my presence in our grad program is able to better remind others how lucky they are to be there (as I myself feel every day), so perhaps they won't take things as much for granted.

@PizzaCat93, I have a similar situation (except that only my father's name is listed on the deed of the car, not my own). I take the car to state A at least every six months and make sure that the registration tags are up to date, get the smog checked there, etc., but I simply didn't list a car on my residency application at my university in state B at all (as I'm technically just "borrowing" it from my father for the long term). Any chance you could remove yourself from the deed?

Good for you! Best of luck in the Fall!

@Danger_Zone I found out about the new edition yesterday!! I was so excited. I just downloaded it on my kindle and look forward to reading the two novellas.

At a certain point, especially for the research grant, most of the people have already been to the place they'd like to perform research in for an extended period at least once, either for study abroad (to improve language skills) or for previous research. In my field, I don't know anyone who hasn't either studied abroad or done an language intensive in their country or region of historical focus, as we usually apply for Fulbrights during the 4th or 5th year of Ph.D. research, after qualifying exams. When I apply for a research grant this Fall, I will have already lived in my country of focus for three years in the past, one as an exchange student and two on another grant-based program, and I don't think that will count against me (it didn't when I got the ETA).

@ctg7w6 oops, thanks for catching my typo! Of course those of you applying this winter hope to be attending in the Fall of 2017, not 18

I can second @Horb and @ZeChocMoose as that's exactly what I've been doing - I put all of my loans in deferment when I started grad school, put at least 10% of my monthly stipend earnings into a savings account, and once I have a good enough buffer and am sure I can afford it, make a lump sum payment against the loans (about $2000 at a time), which happens every six to nine months. Since my loans are mostly subsidized, I'm working on the unsubsidized ones first and will then moved on to the sub ones once I'm done with those. It's a slow road, but I'm doing all right so far. I agree that it's far better not to be on a payment plan in grad school - sometimes you'll be rolling right after stipend disbursement, and other times you'll be barely getting by, so it's better to pay when you can rather than trying to make regular payments and risk hurting your credit.

Good luck and welcome, future Fall '17 cohort (fingers crossed)!

@Danger_Zone I love that book! I've read everything by Murakami except for his first two books, which aren't widely available in English. Man, I'd love to get my hands on copies of "Pinball, 1973" and "Hear the Wind Sing."