TMP

Just do what the DGS says. They'd like to accept you but you just weren't chosen for the departmental funding. But do what he says and see where else you get in. Ultimately, unless this school is your dream school, think about picking another program that actually can admit you for the PhD and fund you to make a point that you should've gotten the funding from the department and not have go through the hassle of looking for funding during the MA and thereafter. And do call. Just like any job seeker, call the employer to confirm your strong interest in the program, and who knows, you might get moved up on the funding waitlist. Actually, ask if there is even one.

Follow the directions. Mention when and where you served.

I'm in my mid-20s but did my MA straight out of undergrad. I was the youngest in my class the whole time. I seriously appreciated older students' perspectives and my professors' as well, if they had experience outside of academia. When people are young and they have so much ahead of them and they've been nothing but a student, your experiences can possibly arouse curiosity of those students as well as encourage them to take a little time off after the MA degree. Although I was very unhappy about not starting PhD this past fall, I am so happy that I am taking the year off to get a little more life experience and having this chance (And I know that one of my professors is secretly happy that I am in this position because she wanted me to get some more life experience before starting the PhD). Without exposure to more adults (remember professors often have little life experience outside of academia in general), young students don't "get" why it's worth taking time off because they don't really know what's out there. They are also all nervous about falling off the track with "distractions." So, I think, it's important that when you draw from your life experiences in the seminar and your responses, you make your life experience seem worthwhile and be inspiring to others to do the same if they can.

You all can do it! Writing the thesis/preparing for the exams are not that horrible as you'd like to think. If anything, writing the thesis was my favorite part of the MA program. Yeah, I'm a research/writing junkie. Get as much feedback as you can with whatever is it you're preparing for but remember to pause and consider how the given advice fits with your learning/writing style. If you can set up a workshop with other graduate students in your department, it'll be great. You could be in for a surprise if you have a very diverse group but they will certainly help you think about other perspectives and possible counterarguments. Also, if you have a "soft" adviser, try to find a more critical reader so you can really learn. My adviser was ready to pass me but my second reader said "not yet." My adviser said, fine, you'll learn a lot from him, I'm ready whenever the final copy is. I also had a third reader was even more critical but she was quite busy and went along with whatever my adviser said. But I had a lot of time for revisions...

In terms of historians and identity politics, I can think of some intriguing examples. Right now, we're only experiencing the fallout of the 20th century, as in terms of the consequences of the major wars in raising awareness of other places and communities as we ll as technology. Before the Pacific War, Americans knew very, very little about East Asia. After the Korean War, one of my professors decided to study Japanese, from scratch, and eventually earned his PhD in Japanese Literature. He knew a number of people who did the same thing. I wouldn't be surprised if we see veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan wars eager to come back and study the Middle East. Also we are beginning to "recover" from tragedies and genocides that this generation could potentially examine them from more objective views. There's also a need to fill in the void left by genocides such as that of Eastern Europeans looking to study Jews and learning Yiddish. I think that the 20th century has done a lot to break down barriers so that people could learn from one and another and pursue their interest in any field they want. And don't tell me that the Exploration Age in the 16th and 17th centuries trumps the wars and technology in 20th century. IMHO.

There is some hostility, yes, due to stress. Internet forums, much like real life, encourages a lot of feeding off. When one person can't stop being anxious and goes on a ramble looking for sympathy, others can feel it and show it as well. Just take a look at History 2010 thread. Don't delude yourselves that you won't make History 2011 look like that. It's the warning I can give you right now. If you're super sensitive to others' feelings, get off the forum now, as StrangeLight suggested a few weeks ago in a thread. You may be looking for a place where people can share feelings about this process but this forum isn't a good place to be if you're sensitive to others' feelings and reactions. It can be counterproductive at times. There were times that I actually wished that I never found this place, simply for this reason. But after two tough cycles (and another while a first year MA student), I'm basically broken to the point where I'm just happy to be accepted somewhere, anywhere, and know the realities of history admissions. There is so much in there that's totally out of your control. It's far more subjective than you can expect and there are those department politics that applicants don't know about. I think that's what hit me the hardest about last year's cycle. No matter how good I looked or highly qualified I was, department politics just got in the way and every professor whom I've talked to, at my university and programs I applied to, knew it. We all come from very diverse backgrounds and it's quite difficult to rate anyone's chances or put everything to perspective. It doesn't matter whether you go to a top 10 university or LAC, or have been out working in the real world for a while or went to law school. What adcoms really care about is whether or not you fit in the department with the experiences you have. And we all have very unique experiences so how are we supposed to rate each other? I never, ever rate anyone because I'm not the one who's making the final decision. All I do is just make sure that the applicant has enough language background. I apologize if I sound snarky at times but what I've said is really the truth. I've become quite pessimistic to the point where I had e-mailed two professors at a top choice school from last year a few months ago for program suggestions to expand my list this year because I had figured that they must be thinking about retirement already and weren't planning on taking new students. To my surprise, they insisted that I apply and one said that he felt that I would be more successful this year. My thought when I read that e-mail? "I'll believe it when I see it." I haven't even thought about that school for most part of the application process except when its application was concerned. If you don't like what I say on this forums, then you can apologize and thank me later. But just don't put a negative on it just because you don't want to believe what I said. And now you're probably asking, "Then why are you even applying if you don't seem to care?" My answer? I care very deeply but am just a realist, not an idealist, when it comes to this. I want to spend 7 years of my life doing something that I love to do and get paid for that. I may not get a lot of money but I sure will be able to do things that I love: research, reading, writing, talking shop with other people, and travel all over the world for research and conferences. I don't care about what happens to me after the PhD. And there are other things that I want to do with my PhD beyond academia. And those are the reasons that convinced my professors to write those letters. They never had to talk me out of doing the PhD.

How do you define nation-states? I would certainly agree with kotov. I would argue that the US and USSR were never nation-states when you think deeply about how they were formed. Both had to acquire land, although by different means. The United States bought a lot of vast, empty land (with some exceptions to the Mexican Cession and Texas) and people had to migrate to these lands from the East Coast, carrying the American culture with them. These lands were eventually formed into states with similar government framework as existing states. The way the United States became a country was very much unlike Germany or Italy. I'm sore kotov can explain USSR a bit better than I can articulate.

Yipes! I am sure that you are on the top of the pile for this! marica- I did e-mail the department and got the answer within 2-3 hours. The department does actually have all of my application materials. Interestingly, the secretary couldn't print out one of my LORs and tried to e-mail her but the e-mail bounced, so she asked if I could e-mail my LOR writer... so nice! I checked the applyyourself site again to make sure I had typed in the right e-mail address and everything, as if by magic, said "submitted." Panic attack over.

Okay, I may actually have to eat my words about leaving things alone. Although I DID get confirmation e-mails for the submission of my applications and ALL of the LOR writers, the applyyourself site tells me that it's not submitted and 2 of my LOR writers have yet to submit their letters. What gives?! Anyone applying to Northwestern? Um, yes, I e-mailed Northwestern. *shame-faced*

Fine, be a worrywort if you want to be. Since I am abroad, I cannot possibly worry about every single thing that I have little control of in the United States and have a good time outside of the United States. Depends on your attitude towards the whole thing anyway.

This. This is exactly what happened with my waitlists and one of the rejections last year. History, I think, is changing slowly the way it handles admissions process. It seems important to contact professors. Professors are usually happy to learn a bit about the potential applicant and look at these contacts as interviews. If you can manage to talk on the phone or meet in person, it's pretty easy for both of you to determine if you can stand each other for as long as it takes you to finish your PhD, which could be more than 6 years. Given the volume of applications, it can make the professor's job easier in determining whose application he wants (or not) to read. History has become a lot more collaborative than it used to be than other humanities fields, which actually discourage contacts.

HAHA. My mother was less-than-thrilled about my Midwest schools. "It's in middle of nowhere!" I said, "Mom, the NFL stadium is within an hour's drive and the team is actually GOOD." That usually gets her to be quiet. But it doesn't stop her from praying that I'll get into one of the East Coast schools. My grandmother wanted me to apply to California schools, where she is, but the recent budget collapse convinced her to let her dreams go. The parents and grandparents are now in total understanding of how the whole PhD thing works (after 2 cycles... gosh...) and are supportive of wherever I get in, just as long as I get accepted with funding. Dang, I wished I had looked more into CMU. A year in Germany as part of the academic program? Awesome. Yes, your Romanian would certainly be an advantage but know enough German to navigate your way around the library and the archives to find the documents you need (and then you can give them to someone who actually knows German to translate).

Holocaust is one of my interests. I am actually puzzled by your list for PhD and MA. I did look up the PhD programs and I applaud you for finding those people. I looked up at least 20-25 schools, mainly finding names through library catalogues and the Journal of Holocaust and Genocide Studies. Why didn't you look at UCLA, American, or Northwestern? They each have someone who specializes in the Holocaust and another person or two in Eastern Europe. I know that Romania isn't widely studied here in the US but anyone doing Eastern Europe should be interested in advising you in general. Also you can always get a Romanian historian from another school for your diss committee if you need to. American's deadline is January 15th so you can still apply. One of the posters last year was a Romanian interested in Romanian history and was accepted off a waitlist at Indiana. You might want to search through the posts for the person's profile. Although super-competitive, look into applying to the US Holocaust Museum for a summer internship. The people are just fabulous. They'll certainly take a serious interest in you because of your languages (Romanian, Ukrainian). It's the biggest factor there. I was accepted because of my Russian, even though I had only just one year of it at the time! I found out only because, on the first day, the guy said to me, "Here are the Russian stuff that you need to read through and tell me what's in this. So you know, the fact that you have Russian is the reason why I hired you over everyone else." I think my dictionary almost broke from all the flipping through for translations. How's your Deutsch?

If anything you should learn in this process is to have faith in the whole system. You need to learn to trust the departments, the professors, and the schools to get everything together in order to make an appropriate decision. If a professor notices that a transcript is missing after reading a terrific SOP and several outstanding recommendations, you will be notified, because, obviously, they cannot make a decision without it. It's tough. I can relate, really, but I've just learned to accept this and let things take their course. As my professors say, the only way to get through everything (in the admissions process and the rest of academia) is just to keep your faith. If you can't, then you are indeed going to worry endlessly.

What we are trying to show you here is that this is all a very, very long process that can only be taken a few steps at a time rather than doing long-term planning and expect most of the steps to be completed successfully. This is why, on another thread, I'm basically focusing on the present, not worrying about admissions decisions and thinking about which one is my *top* choice. You will be more sane as you will have better control over what's going on RIGHT NOW. So, right now, I am thinking about what to do when I return to the States from abroad in April and for the summer and just keep it to that. Small steps will allow to take better control of your direction. I agree about Ivy teaching. One of the worst teachers I've had was a recent Columbia graduate (I was a junior in college and he just received his PhD). He was clearly brilliant but he absolutely had no idea how to relate to students. He could talk but just not in the right language that students could understand. While I visited a different Ivy, two professors were very open to admit that they feel that they haven't done a great job of preparing their PhD students for teaching and they are working on that. You get better at teaching by learning and watching other professors and lecturers. Search committees, especially at liberal arts colleges and teaching-focused schools, will put a lot of weight on your teaching experiences. You will be ask to do a demo, describe your teaching philosophy, and show some sample syllabi for survey and upper-level courses. So as you are thinking about the PhD, ask yourself if you are truly interested in teaching or not. Ivy doesn't always guarantee jobs either. I have a contact at Miami University (in middle of nowhere Ohio) and she told me how excited the faculty was to get a PhD from Yale. This is a respectable LAC in its own region but not well-known nation-wide. Who knows how that Yale PhD felt about moving to rural, red Ohio? Another story- I currently have a friend who is in her final year at Harvard, in Classics (!), and is on the job market. She has to be open to all job listings and just apply to every single job, even though she would really prefer to have less complicated flight itinerary to Germany, where her family lives. If she ever gets a job in Wyoming or Manitoba, she'll have to make 2-3 connections at least. Fun times, after being able to take a direct flight out of Logan for 6 years. So what I'd really like to say is that you are going to be in this for a very, very long time and you will need lots and lots of patience, as well as have the ability to say, "I am in this because I truly love what I am doing and I don't care what happens at the end." If nothing else, I tell people, it will be worthwhile to spend 6-8 years of my life getting "paid" to do what I love to do.

Not to be snarky, but you do realize that Columbia gets over 500 applications that it needs to process and the staff was on a holiday break for the last 3 weeks?

Agreed with StrangeLight. Two of my waitlists last year were actually at much better USNWR ranked than the other programs that I was rejected from. Surprise, surprise. I was just so thrilled. Also it's true that a lot of places of pre-determined financial packages. Especially now when budgets are cut and schools may not be able to afford to increase their packages just to lure a student away from another program. Remember, you've been living China for a long time now and you really *don't* know what's going on in this country. It's really, really bad right now with the economy. I'm just saying this from a perspective of two returning Peace Corps volunteers who returned this past summer after serving for 27 months. They knew that things in this country were bad but not as bad as when they actually came home. Best you can do is just be the best you can be and hope for the best... I think I've said this already but just can't emphasize this enough.

Frankly, as a veteran of this site, I'm not even concerned at all that there's "one more month!". On Sunday, I thought, "oh my god, 8 weeks!" Honestly, I would think further than that. Most programs actually notify in late February and early March. There are no rolling admissions. If there were, then I'd imagine that the department's just accepting students who are willing find their own funding as in UK universities. Luckily, that's right around the time my 8 week intensive German course ends and I'll need something to look forward to!

You'll be surprised to learn that there are a good, good number of people who are applying for history here on Grad Cafe who have zero interest in the Ivy League. I certainly don't even though one of my schools is an Ivy League. Does it make a difference? No. I don't even pay much attention to the name, just what the program has to offer. I've heard more horrible stories from Columbia and more wonderful stories from Ohio State. my advice, really, is just to keep up with your languages, have some kind of questions you'd like to explore, and just do your best. The admissions process is so subjective that no one can guess your chances. Read up your favorite historians and see where they are teaching and where they got their PhDs from.

History department is the place to call.

Don't worry about it. They forward things on. It's only if half of the application is missing that they'll throw it out.

If they are on your college transcript, they are "transfer" courses. They'll want the official transcript. If those courses had nothing to do with your intended field of study, I wouldn't sweat over it. I've always sent my transcripts to cover my bases, although they were all relevant to my intended field of study.

I don't know whether there are lurkers here giving thumbs up or down to some of these posts or regular posters doing it or not, but I am curious to know why some of the posts got "thumbs down" times several times. De-lurk, people, and discuss why you don't like some of my responses or other people's. This is a discussion thread, after all.

Two years ago, in the last seminar, my professor announced to my class, "I think it's wonderful that some of you are looking at 1980s for your analytical papers. I think it's finally time to study the 1980's." I asked her afterward, "Why? You taught this course in mid-1980s and now you think we should study 1980's?" She responded, "Sure, I think it's time. Back then it was obviously too soon." I asked, "But, wait, how long are we *supposed* to wait before studying the next decade?" She responded, "Historians generally accept about 30 years, so it makes sense to study 1980s now." Blargh, I really don't want to study my childhood just yet! Although the long-term effects of the Fall of the Wall are just too fascinating...