johndiligent

I'd say at this point that 70% of my dreams have involved grad school applications in some way. It's a sad thing.

Commonwealth spellings, ftw!

I believe that hope is never completely lost but you may have to work hard to make up for a very low GPA (sub 2.0) and it may take time. Since it's part of your academic record, no matter how many years from now you apply, the committee is always going to see it. THAT SAID, they judge you by your most recent work so if you do something else very well, it's not going to matter. My suggestions are these: 1. Apply for Master's programs. Do everything you can to improve your application beyond the transcript. Ace the GRE. Get excellent letters of recommendation. Build your CV through opportunities, organisations and achievements. Get work in a related field (easier in international relations than in many other fields.) Write an excellent SOP and present a brilliant writing sample. Approach the professors about working with you and visit if possible. a. If you get in, then focus on doing the best possible work you can while there since it's your Master's work that will make the most difference in getting into a PhD program. b. Depending on how low your GPA really is, all this may not work to gain you admission. If not then your mission is to inquire with all of the departments to find out why you got turned down and what you can do to make yourself a better candidate. Take their advice. 2. Do further undergraduate work or (preferably) take graduate classes as a non-matriculating student. Even better if you can do these graduate classes at a school you want to attend or with a professor whose interests intersect with yours. Ace the class. Be upfront about why you're there (to improve your level of preparation for graduate school). Spend time in the department. Get to know the right people. Once you have some final grades to show off, approach someone with power about changing your status from non-matriculating to matriculating. Sometimes that works. 3. Get a job, internship or volunteer opportunity related to your interests. Are you interested in American influence in former Soviet republics? Go teach English in Slovakia. Interested in the role of NGO's in stopping the spread of the AIDS virus in Africa? Find an NGO. You get the idea. In international relations, real world experience can be as persuasive to a committee as a strong academic record. 4. Join professional organisations and attend conferences. Get to know people in your field. Networking really does work. Name recognition counts for a lot. 5. Get older, put some time between you and your bad grades and don't give up. Seriously. Keep applying at a broad mix of schools, while you keep trying to build your competitiveness, and eventually you'll be successful. Here's a brief article on applying to grad with a low GPA: http://gradschool.about.com/od/admissionsadvice/f/lowgpa.htm

Negligence

You're in good company if you can't define Judaism or Jewish identity. Some of the most prominent scholars of Judaism fall on their own swords while trying to do so (thinking especially of Jacob Neusner, but it's true of everyone). But if you're in Israel/Palestine, then you already have a concrete example of Jewishness as heritage in aliyah and the right of return. You don't need to wear kippot to make aliyah, you need one Jewish grandparent. (Hitler used the same criterion.) I'm North American. In my family and in other Jewish families, there is certainly a common distinction between being Jewish and practicing Judaism. And scholarly definitions seem to migrate toward this distinction as well.

I'm curious about the make-up of people on this board. Are you applying to theology programmes or religious studies programmes? Also, would you consider yourself a theologian or a scholar of religion?

This.

A few on my application playlist (and, yup, I totally have a dedicated one on iTunes): Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want - The Smiths I've Got My Mind Set on You - George Harrison (but it's going to take money, a whole lot of spending money, to do it right, child!) I'm On My Way - The Proclaimers You Make My Dreams Come True - Hall and Oates Always Look on the Bright Side of Life - Monty Python Be Yourself - Audioslave Carry on Wayward Son - Kansas Don't Stop Believing - Journey Don't Stop Me Now - Queen Live and Let Die - Paul McCartney & Wings Mr. Blue Sky - Electric Light Orchestra Til I Hear It From You - Gin Blossoms I don't want to take advice from fools, I just figure everything is cool, until I hear it from the graduate school. Seriously.

At this point, I'm just happy there are no rejections yet. I've successfully convinced myself that no news is going to remain good news.

If I get accepted this year, I'll be starting a 2-year MA, and if I get accepted on time the next round, I'll be starting my PhD in Fall 2012. I'll be 27.

the archaeology of early Christian social identity I just combined all of the great loves of my life: ancient history, archaeology, religious studies and identity theory.

SOLD!

I'm a secular Jewish woman, best described as indifferently agnostic. I'd call myself an atheist but I don't care enough about God's existence or lack thereof to assert a belief one way or the other. I'm Jewish by descent and by family tradition: we don't attend temple and we barely acknowledge holy days. I, however, intend to make a career studying and teaching Christianity. Maybe I'm the weird exception, but I doubt it. There are lots of scholars of Religious Studies who are fascinated and stimulated by the constructs and impact of a tradition but feel no need to participate in it. My cousin studies Satanism, not because he's a Satanist, but because he wants to analyse Satanism and Satanists. My undergrad thesis focused on Roman slaves. I wanted to work on slavery because there's lots to discover about slavery. I study Christianity for the same reasons. Be careful of broad generalisations. In a divinity programme, yes, it goes without saying that your professors are likely to be among the faithful. But in Religious Studies programmes, I've met more agnostics than I've met comitted Christians.

You're right that humanities make this a much different game. For some fields, there's relatively nowhere you can go to get work experience that will significantly improve your application and you can only find work that's tangentially related, in the sense that it may provide you with sellable skills, like teaching or project management. Chances are you wouldn't work with anyone that you could ask for recs, so that leaves you with the same people, unless you return to school. And publications in humanities are difficult. We don't publish like they do in the social sciences and sciences since we don't publish the results of experiments or studies so much. Instead, humanities publications are usually the product of years of solitary research, reading and contemplation. They are very rarely co-authored and since the potential impact of a humanities pub is often difficult to discern, 90% of whether you get published is decided based on your name, where you got your highest degree, and where you're teaching now. If you don't have a name, don't have a higher degree, and aren't teaching, you're probably not going to get many publications. That's not to say that a humanities student should leap at safety schools just for the sake of the acceptance, since the law of descending prestige is just going to compound the problem once the student graduates. It's just that the student has to improve hir competitiveness in a different way: - signing up for graduate classes as a non-matriculating student, if possible - completing a post-baccalaureate or summer study programme - doing more undergraduate coursework directly related to your intended graduate study - completing a master's before applying for the PhD - getting a job that involves transferable, CV-building skills or opportunities - getting older (seriously! For some people, getting a year or two older is all they needed to do to take their application out of the reject pile.) The crap part is that most of these are going to require yet another financial investment.

Just finished Why This New Race: Ethnic Reasoning in Early Christianity. It wasn't all I was hoping, but worth a gander. Tomorrow morning, I should be unwrapping some curatorial reports by the Israel Antiquities Authority! Thanks, Santa!

I wasn't very specific, but I'm applying for MA programmes so the need to be very specific is lessened a bit. I basically told them the area I'm interested in, the time period, the geographical area, the focus within all of that and what methodological approaches I'd be coming at the topic with. Apart from that, I offered a few specific questions and areas of investigation that I'd been considering but didn't zero in one on any one. Maybe that is what you mean by specific. I don't know. If I were too specific (for instance, said that I was interested in looking at the iconography of lithic artefacts found in the Dead Sea region from 60-70 CE), I think I'd come off as already dedicated to one project, and who knows if it's one that's going to fly. But if I tell them who I am as a scholar - that is, what larger questions about the sub-field are particularly appealing to me, then I think it gives the prof a bit more room to see whether we'd jive.

I couldn't afford it while I was a student, that's why I took a year off. I tried last year and when it became a question of whether I was going to have a place to live or application fees, I realised that I'd have to wait a year.

Yeah, Canadian schools get fewer applicants so I suppose it all evens out in the end.

Seriously. Adding it all up is an unpleasant experience.

Yeah, I'm thankful I don't have to pay for the GRE (yeah, Canada!) but it also seems to me that application fees at Canadian schools are higher than their US counterparts (boo-urns, Canada!).

For the six schools I've done so far... Application fees: $634 Postal fees (Tracked and guaranteed applications, stamps for recs): $92 Transcript fees: $99 (Curse the schools that want two sets!) Paper, envelopes and ink cartridges: $62 Case file to keep it all organised: $7 Countless hours of effort and worry: my sanity Getting an acceptance letter in the mail: (hopefully) priceless. Or $894. Depending on how you slice it.

Same here. The early deadline (and the deadline for funding consideration) was Dec 1. Two of my writers got theirs in the day before the deadline. One of them didn't get his in at all. I've e-mailed him three times now and not a word in reply. I'm going to call but I just wish he'd respond and just say that it's late. Instead of just pretending - what? - that the e-mail didn't go through?

I'm Canadian, too, and from what I've seen and what I've been told by profs across Canada is that it's rough. Check out the CCSR job postings: http://www.ccsr.ca/openings2.cfm. The problem isn't the volume of postings, it's the specialisation of the postings in Religious Studies. They're not looking for any scholar who did a PhD in Religious Studies, they're looking for someone who did a PhD in Religious Studies on a certain topic. So, taking the CCSR job postings as an example, there were 11 job postings in 2009. Most aren't permanent or TT. I don't have to tell you that there were more than 11 people who graduated with a PhD in Religious Studies last year. But the specialisations break down thus: 3 Theology, 1 Eastern Religions, 1 Judaism, 1 Catholic Studies, 2 Sociology/Modernity, 2 Ethics, 1 Western Religions. That means depending on what your specialisation is, you had a grand total of 0 to 3 jobs in all of Canada that you could apply for in the last year. My specialisation is a socio-historical approach to early Christianity. I could probably apply for the Western Religions gig. I could make a go for some others, but probably wouldn't be apt to get them since it's not my specialisation. So it's not a super job market, not because RS jobs aren't being created, but because RS is by its very nature a diverse discipline and you're simply not going to be eligible for most jobs that come up.

I like that attitude and I've tried to adopt it for my own, but the prospects of an academic job (let alone a TT job) are of concern to me. Since my BA is in Classics, I've had several RELG profs tell me to keep studying what I want to study, i.e. social identity in early Christianity, but to do it under the umbrella of Classics, since there are better job prospects in Classics than there are in Religion (which says a lot about the pitiful state of the Religion job market, since the Classics job market has been painful to watch over the past few years). Ultimately, it's Religious Studies that I'd rather teach, so I'm sticking with Religion for my MA. After a few years of observing the job market, I'll then have to decide which path I'll take for my PhD. I admire the fact that your own edification takes precedence!

Between the two of those, isn't what you want to do afterwards really going to push you one way or the other? If you want to teach Classics, it's my understanding that you'll have a much easier time getting a Classics position with a PhD from Duke in Classics.