Sigaba

Congratulations on your successful application season. You can start one aspect of the transition immediately--the change in mindset from undergraduate to graduate student. For a start, you could take a look at your previous posts on this BB and read very carefully the replies that you've received from very experienced members and then read more and more of their posts.

No disrespect, but even if she is The Give the Funky Drummer Some Professor of Peace Love and Soul at Happyland University, what she's doing isn't nice. It will take some digging, and if you do, there are some threads in which members talk about relationships with difficult parents. The conversations may help.

My recommendation is somewhat similar to @AP 's.As your current advisor has given her blessing for you to take courses in American history, start taking courses in American history. Put your head down and work your tail off to build rapport and to earn trust among the Americanists. Be a very active participant in seminar, write essays and papers as well as you can, then rewrite them. Be a frequent visitor to office hours. Here's where I differ with AP. Do what you can to figure out everything else on your own. While you might check in with DGS and your current advisor, do not enlist their aid in ironing out issues unless it becomes absolutely necessary. Along the way, do what you can to get a better read on the apparent reluctance. To what extent are professors really intimidated by your current advisor and to what extent are they just blowing smoke so they don't have to work with another graduate student? Try to get a better sense of precisely why are the Americanists intimidated. Is she that ferocious intellectually or is she a determined political infighter? To what extent is gender an issue? Were she a man, would her peers be addressing their trust issues the same? (She says it's okay for you to leave, her colleagues, through their reluctance are indicating that they don't believe her. That's them calling her a liar. Moreover, her colleagues seem to think that she views graduate students as property they believe that she'll accuse them of "stealing" you. Behind it all, there's a lurking suspicion that she'll screw them over when it comes to tenure. There's something weird going on here and you may benefit from knowing the straight dope. (Is she being blamed for someone not getting tenure when, in fact, the professor who didn't get tenure was well liked but just didn't work hard enough?) One other thing you may want to find out but you may not like the answer. Does the Americanists' reluctance to work with you reflect their first impression of you? Don't drive yourself nuts thinking about this question. If there's a possibility that you got off on the wrong foot with someone, figure out what you need to tweak, figure out if it is an adjustment worth making, and go from there. FWIW, my hunch is that the way you explain your desire to change fields may be the issue. You may have inadvertently earned a reputation for being dedicated, not committed. If such is the case, finding ways to elaborate upon your explanation may be in order. If such is the case, and you need support elaborating/rephrasing your explanation try to find an ABD in your department who has traveled a similar path. #HTH

Let your son do his own research. Let him make his own choices. Let him deal with the consequences of his decisions. If it hasn't happened already, you're concern that he'll fail and your desire to protect him are going to cost him opportunities to succeed.

You would have been better served by checking your temper and/or taking this conversation to PM. You are going to be eaten alive because of your shoot from the hip approach. Your continued refusal to use the search function to find information on someone you're attempting to insult does not speak well of your skills or your motivation. At what point are you going to show some self respect and get your facts right? Your inability to understand that you're being offered free but potentially valuable advice, combined with your thin skin is going to result in those with experience saying less and less to you. Your unwillingness to seize opportunities to deescalate confrontations that you cannot afford to have is going to cost you peace of mind and clarity of thought. As for your situational awareness, you do understand that graduate programs and academic departments know about the Gradcafe? You do know that, from time to time, traffic patterns shift when registered members have melt downs? You do recall that you've provided enough information about yourself for someone with your application to figure out exactly who you are? With this information in mind, are you providing additional information about yourself that invites the conclusion that you'd not only be a good fit in a program, but a sound financial investment? Insofar as you calling anyone a "snowflake," do you even know what that term means? (Who is the one complaining about the phrasing/tone of a rejection email? Who is the one not telling an admin how she should have written an email?) Please, @NCAtlanticist stop digging and change the subject to one that is beneficial to your best interests.

Although I don't have anything useful to offer when it comes to you dealing with social anxiety, I do know something about parking. When you enter a parking facility serving an academic institution, and it is so full that cars are hunting for spots, leave it immediately. Then, do one of two things. Think about where you don't want to park (in terms of facility and parking stall), drive there, and there will (almost always) be open spaces. The general rule of thumb at play here is this: everyone wants to park where you want to park and (almost) no one wants to park where you don't want to park. Your walk time to your destination will be the same as the time you spend hunting for a parking space, which may not available if demand is unusually high. As an alternative, go to a parking facility that costs more, ideally one that has a paid valet service. Bite the bullet and resign yourself to paying. (Make sure that you ask for a machine-printed receipt.) The rule of thumb at play here is this: a well managed facility that charges for parking will almost always have available parking spaces because the transient parking rates will be high enough to turn over spaces.

Have you considered searching for photos of the DGS and other members of the department either at mixers or at academic conferences? (Examples of the latter are often found in newsletters for professional associations.) If such photos are available, that could form a baseline and then you could decide to dial it up or down as you see fit. I would recommend that you wear shoes you already know well unless you're good at managing your facial expressions. One never knows when the interviewer is going to change things up ("Let's walk and talk," "I'll show you around the department," "How about a tour of the library system?"). All of sudden, the shoes that looked and felt great at NORDSTROM'S (obligatory jab at POTUS), have a hot spot or two which you discover at the exact same moment someone turns to hear your reply to a pivotal question. Here's the first of two pivots. Please do your best to leave what ever concerns or doubts you have about your skills and potential behind. You are a historian having a conversation about the craft. You have worked very hard to earn an opportunity that you absolutely deserve. You have done important work and you're going to do more as the decades unfold. While you're looking for someone to support, to teach, and to mentor you, do not lose sight of the fact that YOU are going to bring additional prestige and honor to the historians who figure this out. Here's the second pivot. Please do come back and provide a debriefing of the interview.

If you cannot make the visit, keep in mind the alternatives: phone conversations with ABDs, Skyping with other graduate students in the department, communications with international students, chats over beer/coffee with alumni in your area. Also, please keep in mind that one of the most important questions--is the professor who is going to supervise your quals and dissertation committees going to mentor you--cannot be answered in advance. Those who know the answer (the professor's colleagues) are not going to tell you the answer until you figure it out for yourself and you have earned their trust.

Since you went this route, I'll play. You want to be a graduate student in history. Yet you decided not to do any research on this BB to gather accurate information about where I currently work. Instead, you made an assumption that is not supported by evidence that is readily available. You also failed to read my post correctly. The use of bold face in first quote was to indicate that the email in question came from an admin--something that you should have noticed before popping off on how "shitty" Columbia is. Yet you insist your situational awareness isn't an issue. I disagree. By the bye, as you say you're not an ass and as you're clearly a person who doesn't say anything on line that you'd not say in person, here's a question. Since you feel so strongly about this matter, how did the conversation go when you shared this view with the admin in question and told her how she should do her job? Before you respond to this post, I recommend that you check your temper and read this post. If you still want to stay on this path, I suggest that you take it to PM --especially if you're not going to reconsider your tone. Or, if you prefer, the discussion can shift to the ups and downs graduate students' relationships with departmental staff or dealing with the disappointment of rejection in sustainable ways. It is your call.

The admins are the ones who field calls from individuals looking to hire graduate students, who pass along important, actionable information about the department, and forward messages to professors who are ignoring their email queue. If you don't find it in yourself to dial down your attitude and increase your situational awareness, the staff will figure you out and extend to you none of these courtesies.

$1.5k will get you a single room/bathroom in a shared space (a room in a house, condo, or apartment). If you're willing to read through a lot of weird ads, you may be able to find a gem via craigslist. There are people who want to share space with people who pay rent on time, are mostly quiet, but friendly (but not too friendly). As for the 30 minute commute during "traffic times," unless you have a rotor winged aircraft or a time machine, that's not going to happen. To understand traffic patterns, you can use sigalert for the freeways or the traffic option on Google maps/earth. Unless you're going to be doing oodles of fieldwork, you may not need a car in L.A. if you pick where you want to live by mass transit service. Don't necessarily go by what the apps tell you. A line can be packed in both directions during peak times but a few blocks away can be a line that provides a more comfortable ride. A rapid line may have fewer stops and run more frequently than a local line, but you may be sharing a bus with Pee Pee people and members of Team Bat Shit Crazy. Do what you can to stay off the Blue line. If you find a place in NoHo, check out the housing a block in each direction. You may be in a nice place on a nice street and a block over you will hear felony traffic stops often.

Then why are you telling people how to interpret letters they may receive from Brown?

MOO, you two should kick around the following questions. Will you be let go upon disclosing your decision? How difficult will it be for your coworkers (if not also your bosses) to replace you? Are clients/customers going to get jammed up? Will you be burning any personal/professional bridges by delaying your disclosure to just the standard two weeks? (This ranges from people who might write letters of recommendation for you for what ever reason down the line to people you'll never see again.) Were you in the position of your bosses and coworkers, how would you like a team mate to disclose a decision to leave? Here's the thing. As a graduate student, you're going to get screwed over several times in the coming years. Sometimes it will be a person deliberately fucking you over for the fun of it. Sometimes it will be a mistake. Sometimes it will be someone not giving a shit. Pie in the sky, most of these moments will roll off like water on a duck's back. Sometimes these moments are, in fact, going to amount to betrayals and they are going to impact your sense of self in fundamental ways. (There are many threads on this BB narrating such betrayals.) During these moments when you're going to need stand-up people who know you to stand up for you, especially professors, if not also administrators/staff members, and fellow graduate students. This support can range from a hand up, to a talk over a cup of coffee, to a professor going to bat for you in a very big way. If you have a habit of putting yourself before others and/or of viewing interpersonal relationships as a means to an end, the kind of people you need to support you may not be around to help you even if you're the most promising grad student a department has seen in a generation. To be clear, I am suggesting that you do what you need to protect yourself. If you work for a bunch of dillholes who will show you the door the moment you say you're leaving and you need the money, then say nothing until it's time to go. But otherwise... the best decision for you may not be the easiest to figure out.

SBS-- As you and @nhhistorynut have already earned admission to at least one graduate program apiece and as each of you are applying to doctorate programs with M.A.'s, how you communicate what you know and what you want to learn are going to put you over the top. That message is something you can control. Your metrics and your academic pedigree to this point are largely beyond your control now. Also, compare the following two thumbnails. Which thumbnail says I get good grades and test well? Which says I have some familiarity with the historiographical debates of my areas of specialization as well as the the broader debates among professional academic historians? My GPA is 4.00, my GRE score is 170 verbal and 6 writing. I am an Americanist specializing in diplomatic history. My research interests center around President Eisnehower's views of ethnic and racial differences and how those views informed his administration's grand strategy, specifically the use of clandestine paramilitary operations.

You are thinking like an undergraduate rather than a graduate student earning a MA. You are a historian. I urge you to start immediately the habit of defining yourself by your fields/subjects/methods/interests, not your metrics.

There's a tension between wanting to be among like minded people and wanting to be in a diverse environment. I recommend that you prioritize the two based upon what you want and what you need and then go from there. IRT the comment "so many white people" I recommend that you substitute other cohorts for white. Give some thought why it is all right for you to say "so many white people" .. "not necessarily a bad thing" but it might not be okay for you (or someone else) to say "so many x people"..."not necessarily a bad thing."

For packs, I recommend the GORUCK GR 1 (26 l), the Arcteryx Sebring 25, the Arcteryx LEAF Khard 30, and the Patagonia Petrolia. You can find other recommendations at Carryology. While the Tom Bihn Synapse 25 has a legion of admirers, I don't recommend that backpack. Its brilliant design is compromised by the lack of a frame sheet and a back panel that simply doesn't breath. For packing tips, I recommend the blog Pack Light. Go Fast. Perhaps the single best piece of advice I would offer is underwear by Duluth Trading Company or ExOfficio and socks by Darn Tough. HTH

I am not saying that you shouldn't say thank you. I'm recommending that you say thank you in a way that indicates that you're respectful of other peoples' time in ways that they'll appreciate. Two email messages, no matter how well-written, heartfelt, thoughtful or thankful, are still two email messages to read among a stack of periodicals, books, essays, thesis and dissertation drafts, manuscripts, blue books, committee reports, and departmental memos. Moreover, given your desire not to give an indication of your decision in a thank you note, you're running a risk, no matter how well intended your note, of sending a different message than you intend. Thank you for your offer...I'll let you know when I make a decision. IME, historians don't exactly appreciate that message when they get it from established professors following an offer of an endowed chair. The prospect of rejection doesn't always become easier to endure. YMMV.

You want a diverse environment with people who think like you but not too many whites?

I recommend that you save your thanks until you send a definitive reply.

Either you aced the interview and they were raising the bar a little bit at a time to see how high you could jump or it was a bad interview. Unfortunately, there'll be no way to know until you hear back from Penn. That is, unless you recorded the interview and know someone who could "decode" the sidebar between the POI's for you. (If you end up at Penn, you're going to need to understand that dynamic very well before you pick your committees. The next to last place you want to be as you prepare for and take your quals is in the contested space between two historians who expect a grad student to pick a side.) Either way, treat it as a learning experience. You got a good taste of the kinds of conversations you'll have with professors and other students in graduate school. If you don't have a line on how to answer the questions that stymied you, you should develop one within the next couple of days. It's not the last time you're going to get those kinds of questions.

ALCON-- It is easier said than done, but do try not to worry about the stuff you cannot control. It's going to be what it's going to be. Instead, I urge you to give thought to the possibility that you're going to be admitted somewhere. There's no time like the present to start preparing yourself for being at that somewhere. In your fields, there are books that "one ignores at one's peril," cutting edge monographs and dissertations, and state of the art historiographical essays galore in relevant journals. Do you know what those books are? Do you have copies of those books and essays? Do you have that short list of scholars/topics that you'd like to write that extended essay in the introduction to historiography seminar you'll take your first term? What about the primary source materials you're going to need for that first research project in graduate school? How are you coming on doing deep back ground research on the faculty members you want on your committees? Take it from one who learned the hard way -- look before you leap. And then look again. (But I am not bitter.) Find ways to get refocused and do your best to stay focused. Try not to let your angst draw you into the shit show surrounding POTUS elect 45. While you're in competition against your own current limitations as you stride towards becoming professional academic historians, down the line you're going to be competing for jobs against true believers who are focused, focused, focused.

Try shooting @natsteel a PM.

@Karou while departments set the requirements and one's research interests establish priorities/needs, please keep in mind that professors often decide if a graduate student has satisfied a requirement. You can ace classes/programs and you can speak/read a language like a native...and the professor who you want to be your dissertation committee chair can set the bar in another place and at a different height than you expected. So when you look at departments, your areas of interest, and your aptitude for learning some languages more efficiently than others, please also do research on the specific historians who might test your proficiency, up to calling their ABDs and asking point blank What was the language exam like? In these conversations, skirt around the assessments of the level of difficulty. Hard/easy have different meanings to different graduate students at different times. Instead, try to get a sense of how the exam was administered and evaluated. HTH.