Sigaba

Your point regarding professors dispensing bad advice is fair enough. However, I don't think that asking strangers who are unfamiliar with most of the particulars for second thoughts/guidance is a good way to vet for quality.

Asking strangers to help second guess a professor's guidance is an odd choice.

In addition to the reasons provided by @gsc and @ltr317, there's also a dynamic that sees many academic historians in the Ivory Tower seeking to recreate themselves in their graduate students. Indicating in one's SOP the intention to step outside of that path may provide a disincentive to professors to invest in the applicant. I'm cranky this morning so the following may come across as harsh. If one is competing for admission against applicants who are no less skilled or qualified, why differentiate oneself by showing a lack of determination to find answers to questions that have been asked and answered many times? The reasoning may be that it's "a quick question," or "time is of the essence," or that this is an anonymous BB, or any of a number of other sensible considerations. However, if one aspires to be a graduate student in history, why not conduct oneself as a historian? Why not forgo asking questions until after one has done some (re)searching? There's a huge difference between asking a "quick question" and advancing a discussion by asking a question that's clearly informed by research and thought.

Then by all means, go ahead and act according to the dictates of your conscience.

But the grades could be an issue in other places in the department and graduate school where decisions about funding are made. @Hopeh2017, I recommend that you have conversations with your advisor, the DGS, and other interested parties to make sure that your concerns are noted and that you understand theirs as well (if any).

I disagree with the portion in bold face type. A historiographical review would get torn to pieces if it used the conventions acceptable in other disciplines. And vice versa. Or so I've heard. MOO, I think that one should search as close to the forests of one's own discipline to find examples of lit reviews.

Compare the above to the below... ...And ask how members of your cohort are achieving their goals. Are they doing exactly what you're doing or are they doing something more / less / different? Are your circumstances specific to your field of interest? Are your expectations of graduate school in general and your program in particular realistic? My broader point is that it can be easy to assume that The Way Things Should Be is better than The Way Things Are. Similarly, it can be easy to hold to one's assumptions than to step outside one's comfort zone to make the adjustments, big and small, that will get one where one wants to go.

Could you disclose the specific topic you have in mind? How would you phrase your topic in four keywords? In general, perhaps for a running start, take a look at: http://www.jstor.org/subject/womensstudies (maybe pick journal titles that seem promising and do broad searches, or just start looking at tables of contents). http://www.jstor.org/stable/40388740 http://www.jstor.org/stable/23720210 http://www.jstor.org/stable/40071255 A challenge you may encounter writing a literature review on a topic that is new to you is efficiency, especially if there are terms that are both complex and contested. To help with this challenge, I recommend that you keep an eye open for writers who are especially good at taking difficult concepts into more easily digested pieces. Their works may only be tangentially related to your interests and that would be all right because the aim is to focus on how they structure their arguments, turn phrases, and make transitions from subtopic to subtopic. You might also benefit from establishing a "budget" for how much space you're going to devote to defining a term--a sentence, maybe two, and the rest of it would go in your footnotes. Something else you might try is to have a running conversation with someone whom you consider smart in which you talk through what you want to say in your essay. IMO an ideal candidate would be someone who is interested in your development as a scholar but perhaps disinterested (not uninterested) in feminism. You get the phrasing down in a conversational sense and then you write it like you said it.

I recommend that you talk to the person's ABDs off the record. I recommend that you put aside your aspirations to be a gate keeper to the profession you want to join and leave that task to the established professionals who have been there and done that.

You have an office? I strongly recommend against mentioning "culture" and "'fit' for me." Such phrasing will send a message. If possible, give thought to earning a master's degree where you are now and then "transferring." That way, you'll show that you're able to do the work. If you have options (thesis, report, exams) find the balance between which is the least painful for you versus which will look best on your applications to a different program. What is your plan if, after transferring, you find out that you still can't do what you want, when you want, how you want?

Can you clarify if dinner is one of the two events or is that a third activity?

@Adelaide9216 are you using the method @fuzzylogician recommended or the one I recommend or another method? (Either/or/or display the ruler and the display paragraph marks so you can see if you have some different tabs / margins.) Eventually, @TakeruK or another tech savvy hand is going to show up and repeat FL's advice to use more sophisticated software ending in Tex. I will chime in and say something like "What about Microsoft Visio?" and a coworker will laugh at me when I mention my recommendation on Monday.

It's my opinion that you should stay focused on the task at hand and not focus on the feelings of resentment that you may be experiencing. Right now, the definition of success that matters the most to your personal professional development is passing your oral exam. WHEN you pass that exam, you'll have time to process your emotions.

Did they say they'd be understanding if you took both internships? I recommend taking only one of the two. If you decide to take only one, weigh the cons (e.g. has anything to do with the current presidential administration) as well as the pluses.

In this particular case, no. http://tinyurl.com/y8ux9kzq

Without knowing more about your writing sample, the following guidance is spit balling. Shift the focus of the paper so that it centers around the contemporaneous debate(s)/initial historiography in English. Beginning Event A happened in 18xx in Egypt. Summary of historiography. Pivot to earliest discussion of Event A in English and how that discussion shaped subsequent views. Summarize why understanding earliest discussion is important. Middle Primary source-based discussion of Event A (it sounds like you have this already.) Primary source-based discussion of initial interpreters of Event A (letters and papers of English-language interpreters) In depth discussion of influence of initial interpretation over time. Some secondary works are now primary sources End Tie in your piece with broader conversations of the lasting influence of initial interpretations upon historiography and history. Historiography as knowledge, knowledge as power. You can go big here. 30K, 60K 100K views. Avoid jargon. Avoid getting too wrapped up in various theories unless you really know the theories and you believe in those theories enough to not get an offer. A disinterested Joe Friday "just the facts" approach will do. If possible, make an elegant pivot to your current research interests. A cluster of well phrased questions. Speculation on how you would use your new interests to address the broadest of the questions. The linkage between this revised piece and your SOP should be clear to anyone who reads both. #HTH.

Are you currently in a graduate history program?

The name calling was inappropriate and having a quick chat with your advisor about your miscue would not be too terrible an idea. As a graduate student in the U.S., you'll have plenty of opportunities to make mistakes. A mistake that you should avoid is using the tone of a correction/criticism as a reason not to learn what may be learned. In this case, a momentary lapse of attention to detail may have created extra work for others and cost the on-line publication, if not also another reviewer, opportunities.

However, Not everyone reading an application is going to be a specialist in the same field as a scholar named in a SOP (an application can be forwarded to the graduate school for consideration for university-wide fellowships), ideas/innovations in history don't always spring forth from one scholar alone, and, in certain fields of history, certain names can antagonize a professor reading a SOP. That is, having an approach to the craft influenced or informed by a work is less proactive than wanting to be like a specific professor. My $0.02.

Same here. Moreover I mentioned the title of a series that I envisioned contributing to down the line.

This response is for you in particular. Accept the promotion. You have earned it. You owe it to yourself to put yourself in the best position to succeed. Do the job to the best of your abilities and in such a manner where you can train your successor and hand off your work when it is time to go to graduate school. In the event you earn admission to a graduate program, then you can start to figure out how to handle your departure knowing that you've already done your level best to put your organization and your team in a position to succeed. Above and beyond all else, do not feel badly about opportunities that you've earned.

Please tell me that this is code for adding even more butter to Nescafe. I've been doing it for a couple of weeks now and it's awesome! IRT outlines, when I outline (which is rare), I only write out 7±2 main points that I want to make, with one of those points being my central argument. (The range of 5-9 is related to theories of working memory in educational cognitive psychology.)

I recommend the following. Find a few secondary works that are important to your fields of interest by a mix of established and up and coming historians. Find previously published works, delivered papers and speeches that served as earlier versions of chapters of the published works. If the path backwards leads you to a historians' dissertation, consider obtaining a copy. If an established historian has published a memoir or autobiography, check it out from the library. Spend time with the books and their earlier iterations. You will see historians making the kinds of tough decisions you're attempting to make now. You will see how they refine bigger arguments to more efficient, heavily nuanced cores. You may also see how supporting examples and narrative passages are made ever tauter. You will also see how footnotes or end notes are used to show what they know but don't have the space to say now. You'll also find turns of phrases that allow for full speed pivots, hop-skip changes of pace, and off tempo jump cuts that leave readers feeling smart and doing some of the heavy lifting for the writer. After doing the above, take a day or two off. After your break, sit down with a physical copy of your 50-pager close by, turn on your computer and then write a new essay that's about fifteen to seventeen pages long. (It's absolutely imperative to hold yourself to this limit.) This effort is going to sting at times. That sting will be the pride. And rightly so, a 50-page paper takes a lot of hard work to produce. Yet, to paraphrase Marcellus Wallace, FUCK PRIDE. This is about getting into graduate school. (Where, if you're lucky, pride will be beaten out of you.) Use what you've studied by other historians to write a new work--one that's leaner and meaner than what you've started with. When you're done, you'll have a twenty-page writing sample. (Because seventeen is such an odd number, and if you went to fifteen that would be too short, so, yeah, twenty.) Then, at your discretion, develop five more pages worth of material. If the previous suggestion isn't to your tastes, ignore it. (I'm used to it. It happens at work. All the time. And I get to say "Gee.." from time to time.) But what ever you do, make sure that the most polished section of your WS is your discussion of X becomes Y and how it relates to the existing historiography of X to Y as well as the broader implications for your field--if not the profession more generally. And do all you can to keep it under five pages. #HTH

Unfortunately, aspiring graduate students in history do not get to determine what is and isn't off limits when talking about the craft of history, where it is learned, or how it is taught. It is equally unfortunate that over the past sixty years or so, it's become the received wisdom of the profession that contemporaneous ideological and political views are intertwined with, if not inseparable from, the way institutions and individuals practice the craft. So, to answer your question, you might benefit from a masters program that challenges your views. When it's time to apply to a doctoral program, you're going to be competing against applicants who have the demonstrated ability to step outside their comfort zones, don't ask questions so they'll only get answers they want to hear, and have the situational awareness not to take a dismissive tone when addressing emotionally charged issues of the time.

I recommend the instructions offered here. https://wordribbon.tips.net/T008698_Adding_Borders_to_Paragraphs.html And then the liberal use of the format painter for additional paragraphs. If you use text boxes, I recommend that you draw them over your paragraphs and then set the boxes to have no fill. I do not recommend pasting type into the text boxes. (I work with Microsoft Office almost exclusively for my job and text boxes can end up being an incredible headache. YMMV.)