Sigaba

What's your back up plan if the iPad breaks or disappears? Is your institution/department Mac or PC?

Consulting. Has the person looked at working for a consultancy?

Why does this question come up almost every season? What is the perceived benefit to calling Professor Jones by her first name? Is she less likely to stand on your head in seminar or bleed all over your essay because you call her Janet and have coffee now and then?

IMO, being happy is not the only component of self-efficacy. And, as pointed out above, it isn't an either/or choice between short term happiness and long term fulfillment. And what makes one happy today may be what makes someone miserable down the line. The following is out of curiosity. You use the phrase "little debt". What is that amount to you as in percentage (Y%) of every paycheck for the next X years?

You have no idea what kind of life events have proven to be "disruptive" to the order of things (real or imagined) in a graduate program. A department could have gotten burned by a graduate student or a professor or a staff member punting on his/her responsibilities by getting hitched, having an affair, having kids, going through a divorce, managing an illness, or hiding an addiction. (Or so I have heard.) I recommend saying nothing about your plans to any of the programs to which you're applying or admitted. I would also recommend not disclosing the information to classmates, administrators, or faculty that doesn't sit on the graduate admissions committee. It is ultimately no one's business. Just make sure that you're preparations for your wedding don't get in the way with your responsibilities as a graduate student. And if they do, it will be a reason but not an excuse for under performing. You can politely deflect questions about your private life in a way that is consistent with your values and your right to privacy. If you have an engagement ring that you wish to wear, think of (and practice) an answer to the question "When's the big day?" that works. Somehow. At your discretion, after you've gotten married, you could disclose the happy occasion to classmates and members of the faculty. If you need to mend fences, you can just say that you were focused on your studies and didn't want your pending ceremony to be a distraction to anyone. If you take this course, please understand that telling no one means telling no one. Graduate students gossip. Professors are generally better at keeping secrets but...

@Reaglejuice89, the only one calling anyone names here is you. Point blank, @telkanuru has worked hard to get where he is. He offers solid guidance, especially when one doesn't like what he has to say. He doesn't have to be here. Each season, fewer experienced graduate students return to share what they've learned through hard won experience. Each season, there are more newer members like you who treat disagreement as an invitation to show their asses. If your belligerence convinces him that this place isn't worth it, are you going to pick up the slack next season? Is the guidance that you'd offer better than his? You have made it quite clear your POV that happiness in the near term is worth what ever the economic consequences may be in the future. What is your other points? That anyone who disagrees with you is an elitist Republican asshole? That you're an otherwise even tempered, nice guy who has been unjustly provoked? That you're so happy with the choices that you've made that you keep returning to tell strangers about it? That you can accept an opposing viewpoint gracefully and give a measured, thoughtful response? If those are your points, I do not agree. (Well...there is a Republican elitist in this thread, but it isn't @telkanuru.) And if you still think you're being "professional" then let everyone know when you've sent screenshots of your posts to your advisor at your present school, and the DGS at Georgia State with your name signed to the email. Put down the shovel.

Some things become a big deal despite one's efforts not to make it a big deal. IMO, it is about the SO understanding that a graduate student is attempting to achieve an exceptionally advanced level of expertise in a complex domain of knowledge in a very compressed time frame. It is also about the SO's insecurities/anxieties not being activated by having a very limited understanding of this process unless he/she has done / is doing something similar. These two tasks are a lot to ask of someone who has not BTDT in his/her area of expertise. (Metaphorically, if you were dating an Olympic-caliber athlete who had the potential to win a medal in Tokyo, and he/she put on some sneakers and said "Hey, let's go for a run," would you be at all nervous even though you'd received every assurance that your athleticism wasn't a deal breaker? Hey, no worries, Sugarsmacks. Everyone I know can run up the side of a building. Backwards. While doing pushups. I like you because you take the elevator.) @Adelaide9216, yes, it is true that men are intimidated by women. Men's fear of women is the history of the world (and the president of the United States). However, is that fear the only reason why you're not getting dates. By your own admission, you don't have time or space for a b/f. Should a guy be any more willing to do the majority of the compromising in a relationship than a woman should be? You say you want a "deep thinker," but have you asked deep thinking guys out on dates and pressed them for answers when they don't want another?

This dynamic could change very quickly given the political climate. One of the (many) lessons of the 2016 presidential election is that the identify politics of the American political right have a different momentum (and greater power) than the identify politics of the American political left and center. The ongoing challenge is how does one integrate the advances of the past sixty years or so into the "traditional" approach to American history (top down narratives centering around institutions and "great" individuals)? Will the political pressure for a return to "traditional" execeptionalist narratives impact public universities sooner/more than private institutions Are academic historians, especially Americanists, too specialized to make the pivot in time to redeem the profession?

Bluntly, one of your weaknesses is evident in your OP; you don't take ownership of what went wrong for you. You couldn't study enough for the GRE because of your job. You had a problem in the U.S. that impacted getting a LoR but it is not your problem. You asked someone to write a LoR but his English language skills aren't up to the task. And your emotional state is unclear. You are depressed and angry for your results but you're "not mad at all." I recommend that before you ask for guidance on how to be a more competitive applicant in the future, you should work on your mindset. It's entirely on you to put yourself in the best position possible to do as well as you can on the GRE (if you take it again), to get the paperwork to go where you need to go, to develop relationships with people who can write you good LoRs, and to develop relationships with professors who might want to work with you.

You need to stop digging yourself into this hole you've foxed. I know you're angry. But you need to stop digging.

If you were to step outside of your anger (which calls into question your claim that you're happy) and use the search button you'd find that @telkanuru is, in fact, quite humble given the ground he's covered to get to where he is. If you think that you're being professional, how about you print out the post and put it on your advisor's desk and ask for that person's opinion? And while you're at it, send it to the DGS of Georgia State.

@brittanyandrea is the question which program will produce the best job or which program will make you the most competitive applicant you can be for the jobs you'd like? Either/Or Find on Linkedin the incumbents of positions you'd like to have. Look at where they've earned their degrees. Get a list of recent graduates (ten years or so) from Syracuse and Brown and see how they're doing in their careers. When you're preforming this research, keep in mind that graduates of Ivies may be hard to find because parts of their networks are accessible only to its members. (You might ask Brown to put you in touch with an alumna.)

Are you also reading the advertisements by publishers and the "books received" section of those journals? Also, some journals compile a list of dissertations and published works each year and print it in the final issue of a volume. Additionally, in your field's journals, the articles will mention/list works worth knowing in the discussion of a topic's historiography. One last question. Is the objective to keep abreast of everything that's produced in one's fields or is the objective to develop the skills to identify which works are historiographically significant?

While the skills you acquire earning a MA at School A will be valuable, most, if not all, of the course work you complete won't matter at School B. School B will want to make sure that you meet its standards even if School A's department is more highly regarded than School B's.

You have obviously failed to do your due diligence by doing background research on @telkanuru . And you can't tell someone to be professional while attempting to insult a person offering a POV .

I recommend following @BSB825's guidance on going to your school's HR website. Make sure you understand if policies applying to employees also apply to TA/GA/GSIs Additionally, I recommend that read the fine print of the document you sign (digitally or otherwise) authorizing the background check. Look for language that define the scope of subsequent background checks. You want to know if you're authorizing future background checks as well as the current one.

Did you start here? http://www.asha.org/Code-of-Ethics/

Give some thought to the possibility that you weren't your new school's first choice either.

@MikeTheFronterizo I think that you would greatly benefit from rephrasing your question. How common is it that aspiring graduate students get offered a stipend to attend their top choice? IRT programming your budget, I think you should divide $14,5k by 12, not 10. $500/month for rent will go farther if you find a roommate/house mate. $708/month for everything else will be enough if you buy a rice cooker, a good fry pan, a coffee machine, and familiarize yourself with all the benefits you get as a graduate student. Also, I again recommend that you start working on how you phrase things. Most of the communicating you will do as a graduate student will through the written word. I believe you meant to say that the cost of living is low, not that the standard of living is low.

You should start by defining what version(s) of American history you want to study. Americanists tend to be very (some would say overly) specialized. Which century? Which period? Which fields? If you really have no idea, then perhaps start with the list of Bancroft prize winners http://library.columbia.edu/about/awards/bancroft/previous_awards.html As you have a job, you may able to afford membership to the Organization of American Historians and/or the American Historical Association. You can use your membership to start reading from each body's respective periodical. And an AHA membership provides a 50% discount for a subscription to Jstor, where you will find tens of thousands of articles. (If you don't have a job, use your food money, and eat on five dollars a day until your budget is back on track.) If you want to get a sense of the pace of graduate school, work through/read one book a day,* read all of the significant book reviews of that work available through Jstor, and read one or two historiographical articles on the same topic over the past thirty years or so. Do this every day for at least six days a week. After reading for two weeks, identify three journals that are most important to your emerging areas of interest. Spend time with each issue of each journal that has been published over the past ten years. Write a six to ten page essay on how the journals have changed and why. After reading for four weeks, pick two or three books that interest you and give yourself a little less than a month to write a five to seven page essay on each book. Use essays in Reviews in American History for a basic template. Give yourself deadlines so that, as often as not, the essays need to be finished within one or two days of each other. If you're prone to procrastination, don't start writing until the night before the essay is due. (While you're writing the essays, you are still on the hook for the book a day pace.) Throughout this exercise, keep a list of the historians (dead and living) who appeal to you, that challenge you, and that frustrate you. In two to three months, pick a historian on the list. Within four months, produce a twenty to thirty page essay on that historian's life and contributions to the craft. (While you're preparing this essay, you're still on the hook for the book a day pace as well as the shorter essays. And no double dipping on the books.) After completing an essay, put it aside for about one week. Then, circle back to it and reread it from the most critical perspective you can imagine. Then rewrite the essay to incorporate the comments you've made. If you think anything along the lines of "I can't phrase this any better," you are doing it wrong. Give yourself one day to review and one day to rewrite each essay. While you're doing your reviews and rewrites, you're still on the hook for a book a day pace and all other written tasks. If you blow an essay deadline, donate $100 to the political cause most antithetical to your political sensibilities. (You still have to write the essay. There are no indulgences in graduate school.) The project sketched above emulates the reading and writing component of one class of three that you'd take during your first semester of graduate school with full funding. (It does not include the discussions in seminar with a professor who may find everything you say boring and poorly thought out.) To executive it properly, you will need to give up two or three activities that bring you the most comfort and satisfaction and peace of mind. #HTH _________________________________________________________ * If you end up reading every page in every book, you are doing it wrong.

In my experience, history departments don't let you transfer credits for required fields of knowledge, even the "outside field." At one school, this practice bothered greatly a classmate who had a J.D. When I "transferred" to another program (after earning a M.A. at the first), the practice didn't bother me at all. As an Americanist, I did have a language requirement waived by providing the course materials I used for a statistics class to a professor. Personally, I wouldn't push on this issue especially since there doesn't seem to be a well defined policy in place. The conversation runs the risk of taking an unfortunate turn in tone if the Powers That Be decide that the answer is "no."

Agreed. If one thinks that one's persistence may be annoying people, it's likely that others have had the same thought, if not actually reached that conclusion.

That isn't passive aggressive behavior. It is bad communication and ineffective teaching.

In the strongest possible terms, I urge you not to take this approach for your dissertation topic. If you go where no established expert has gone before, you may find yourself without enough tethering points to ground your research and to help phrase your findings. (Or so I've heard...) Instead, I recommend that you pick a topic that advances an ongoing debate in a slightly different direction that may lead to a new area of research down the line when your skills are more developed. Compare taking temperature readings of a large body of water on a different part of the shoreline during a different time of the day than others have used versus taking temperature readings at the bottom of the deepest part of the large body of water during the coldest days of the year. (Glub, glub, glub. Or so I've heard.)

FWIW, the following document was created in February, 2013. http://www.umass.edu/history/sites/default/files/assets/graduateapplicationfaq_feb_13.docx When can I expect to hear if I’ve been accepted to the Graduate Program? Review of applications begins after the January deadline passes; in the first weeks, members of the admissions committee begin reviewing and evaluating materials. The committee typically meets for the first time during the first week of classes--that is, the last week of January. Deliberations usually take about a month. So the earliest people should expect to hear any result is the end of February or early March. PhD students are guaranteed funding packages with admissions, but for MA candidates, admission and funding decisions are made separately. Top applicants may be offered a funding package simultaneously with admission, but more often, Master's applicants are offered admission earlier in the Spring semester, and hear about funding packages later in the Spring semester. While we try to make funding offers in advance of the April 15th notification deadline, the department often obtains additional funding after that date; some students learn that they will be offered funding later in the Spring and even into the summer. Boston College http://www.bc.edu/schools/gsas/admissions/faq.html#expect to receive decision