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I Have No Idea

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Everything posted by I Have No Idea

  1. Honestly I think your ease has something to do with your quality as a candidate. You're from one of the best universities in the discipline, most likely would good marks and references. As for Ox I'll PM you. Don't get me wrong, love it! But...
  2. I can't quite recommend Ox for Archaeology. God I feel like a traitor but...they're so disorganised I have hated. every. single. course. I've ever had the displeasure of taking there. Moreover while those in other areas make good efforts to keep themselves acquainted with other fields, this is not the case in Arch. Moreover the graduate component seems to be made up of internationals who just can't read Latin and Greek with anything like facility, making working with inscriptions and suchlike so god damn awful in class. So if anyone wanted to do, say, Bronze Age Aegean at Ox, I would absolutely warn them off it. From the bottom of my heart. Conversely I've been impressed with the Cambs peeps I've met. I don't quite agree with Marcus' assessment: I've known quite a few people who studied at Oxford for both BA (MA after a while) and M.St/M.Phil fail to get offers here for the DPhil. Saying that I've also seen absolute retards on the doctoral programme with heavy funding packages so I'll not pretend I know what the criteria are. But there aren't any sure bets! I got offers from Ox, Cambs, the London ones etc but failed to secure anything from Nottingham (supervisor too busy, so rejection, which sucks). Likewise teaching depends on the person. My partner has a pretty full teaching schedule. I myself can't imagine possessing such patience. I agree that UCL is great btw for Arch and other areas. Plus you get to be in London. Conversely you get to be in London so good luck there.
  3. Bolded that. I think that's rather...I don't wish to say naive, but at the very least certainly not the case. Look, you come from the exact same intellectual background as me just across the river. I'm pretty sure you must have seen awesome students/early career people go away and idiots promoted based on things other than academic merit. My own professors have been quite open about it. Even as undergrads, we were hardly stupid and it was quite obvious. I dare say there have been several excellent people drop out over the years, but we just didn't realise it. Often I see some name on an amazing published thesis only to be unable to find said author anywhere in academia. There aren't enough positions, the positions that exist are hardly given solely on merit, even those positions are rarely long term nowadays. I was told to think of it thus: Go in for love of the subject and try your abject best but don't be too shocked if it doesn't work out. Such thinking seems to have the right of it as far as I'm concerned. The alternative is to believe that the only good Classicists come from a handful of departments working under a small group of people who happen to know one another with a few outliers here and there.
  4. It's useful from several P.O.V's... See, I love Obbink and he's a good teacher. But a) he's always finding cool stuff, his office is a treasure trove but I can't help but feel envious that when I look at papyri I just find retarded letters or scraps from a rhetorical treatise or a badly transcribed historian or something in scraps. I just....I really hate papyrology. What a waste of my time and I hope I don't have to look at another scrap.
  5. I think the fact that you've tied username and profile pic like this is truly something great. I wish I had done the same now.
  6. Can I just say that we're probably the only two people in the best part of a millennium to have such a conversation without asking about college affiliation?
  7. Oh you're ethnically (nationally? what's the term here?) Canadian? Fair enough, a friend of mine was saying something similar about Toronto and though she got an offer in the end I think she works in finance now. Good luck. I had no idea excavation experience is important, I've got some but...obviously for philology it matters not and a lot of it just luck/connections anyway so dw, I'm sure they know that. Wow you're certainly...extensive in your applications! I'm applying to Cambridge to on this end...but well I'm sure my app is already in the bin. If I get in anywhere I'll laugh uproariously at the poor mistaken committee who made that oversight. Best of luck!
  8. Another Briton? I'm from Oxford though rather than Cambridge. Bronze Age? Cool. I've worked with the language/tablets from a philological aspect and wrote a few tute essays on various aspects - Dickinson gave a talk at Oxford a while ago actually and it was amazing, but I've never really got into it. Its cool though and I guess Cambridge has the strongest traditional the field...so I'm guessing you're deffo applying to Texas for T. Palaima right? Also don't worry too much about the languages, there seems to be a slightly different emphasis over there. I was told by a prospective POI that having German, French and Italian didn't mean too much in my favour, simply because they've graduate reading courses and so on. Besides, French is easily the best European language. ;P
  9. I've still got 2/3 UK apps. Oxford in a handful of days.
  10. The worst part is despite being huge, bulky and male. He's also scantily dressed and twerks mockingly while you decide.
  11. No guys you're playing the game wrong: A genie appears and tells you he will show (and allow you to read) an accurate text of any lost work. But if you tell anyone or any part of your future work alludes to having this knowledge you get shot or something even worse. What do you say? do you give into temptation?
  12. I am so sick of the god damn novel and everyone writing on it. Get over it people ffs. The problem with the Classics is exactly this, its turned into near gormless faddism.
  13. Lead me not into temptation. For I will write it.
  14. Hellenist also, largely archaic major areas are: music and the development of musicology, cross cultural interactions and cheese. Ok not cheese but you get it.
  15. I went cavalier and skipped it. Everything in my degree is relevant.
  16. Is anybody else getting this? for the past several hours now. I can't log in. I can make a new account but can't log in with that. Anybody?
  17. What do I do about these Harvard summary of course things? Do you sit there and fill out every detail even if its extensively covered in a) references and transcriptum? Mary's son, will they even read it?
  18. Sorry, what does YMMV mean? I see it everywhere :S. Is it like....fistbump?
  19. I'm not from the US so I can't cf to the SATS but I've sat the GRE and I'd basically say that it was...idiosyncratic. Generally I'm surprised at multiple choice questions beyond the age of 12 but, ok. The content itself wasn't bad, I feel that the quant section was fairer since some of the wording in the written stuff was a bit ambiguous. Overall the content wasn't very difficult, definitely sub GCSE. In addition getting a good book, like the Princeton one, will help immensely. The difficulty is the test itself...its lengthy and boring and you need discipline. At uni you might be taking 3/4 hour exams but (since you're applying to grad school) I'm guessing you found them very fun and engaging. The GRE is mind numbing bro.
  20. No, the languages that have been updated aren't either the classical ones (Greek and Latin) or research languages (French, German, Italian) but auxiliary ones they probably won't care about - near Eastern ones, certain old PIE ones. I get the impression that no one cares so...
  21. Haa king that's oddly similar to what I'm after though I stupidly ruined my first sop by not talking about the archaic world enough and my language CV is woefully out of date (I accidentally sent my masters one...so..yeah).
  22. Do you have to resend GRE scores if you're reapplying to the same place?
  23. Does it matter what language? Erm one of the pitfalls/great things about Classical pedagogy is that people go directly into the highest register of awesome as hell literature. Like...learning English and then given anything from Beowulf to Shakespeare to read. I find it hard to gauge difficulty now, I don't really have trouble besides contested passages and I already spoke Greek before learning ancient Greek, but I have some observations from teaching. Firstly, the traditional starters are tradition for a reason. Caesar for Latin, Xenophon or Plato for Greek. These make sense and working through these will give you a solid grounding in either language, that being said there is a case for certain non standard choices: Chariton's Callirhoe is an excellent choice, its very manageable Greek and repeats a lot of vocabulary. Very simple syntax and not too many varied forms or idioms. However it's not strictly classical Greek and a decent proportion of the vocab you learn will be useless due to the emphasis on piracy, tomb robbing and so on. In fact, as long as you keep in mind it's not quite classical, any of the novels will be fine and these are all accessible without too many genre conventions affecting language. Latin, well a lot of people seem to vary from omg I want to start with Ciceronian Latin to I'll read the Res Gestae Romanorum. The latter is an increasingly popular choice but...its too simple, to non Roman in Latin usage...too...its just not a very sensible choice and if you want something late some section of Ammianus Marcellinus re very, very, manageable indeed but there are certain genre conventions (history) which do have an effect on the difficulty of the language. Its much easier than Tacitus, Cicero etc though. Eutropius is also somewhat easy. He was actually used as a sort of textbook in late Roman schools too. What it comes down too though, is that it doesn't matter. There are so many graded readers, commentaries etc out there to help. Just pick something. Whatever you choice you can triumph via hard work.
  24. Well I guess I can give up working on my app and just sacrifice to Zeus Melichios at this point. The problem is finding a snake as a stand in xoanon :Z
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