Sigaba

Schools and programs sometimes request information so that they can bench mark themselves against "peer" schools.

Based upon the information provided in the OP,you might be foxing yourself into a hole unnecessarily; the question is which, not why. When you decide between School B and School C, reply to School A's query with a concise answer: I am going to attend School [b or C].

FYI. http://yaledailynews.com/blog/2015/03/24/yls-deletes-data-following-ferpa-requests/ http://www.browndailyherald.com/2015/04/22/ferpa-requests-yield-limited-access-files/ Also, http://bbrown.spsu.edu/recommendations/recommend_advice.html

https://youtu.be/7BaXPg_2FJ4?t=1m18s

It is bad form to go against the explicit and implicit preferences of those who have a say over one's continued funding and participation in a graduate program.

This is bad advice. Not the least because graduate students need the good will of the Powers That Be and not the other way around. Misleading professors is not a good way to gain favor or access. Even if policy allows for a graduate student to have outside employment, I recommend that one get the blessings of one's professors and the DGS. If one gets a whiff of push back, think long and hard before taking a job.

Hey, R7T-- Take a look at the link for starters. Maybe TMP will throw in two cents as well.

@maelia8-- Could you take one of the graduate seminars as a directed reading course? Is your TA assignment for a lower division lecture course? If so, you might be able to convince your boss that you're familiar enough with the subject matter that you don't need to attend every lecture. You could sweeten the proposal by making it clear that you will know the course materials very well by August. IRT the graduate course you might need to miss, explore the possibility of talking a directed reading version of class. More generally, I recommend that you develop options before talking to an administrator. You might help your own cause if you know that a professor is going to accept plan B or C before you ask for the department's blessing. Given where you are at, don't be too surprised if you are told "tough luck" and/or "yes" then "no." B is also for bureaucracy.

FWIW, I did my outside field in educational cognitive psychology. I studied under a professor who focused on how experts acquire their cutting edge knowledge. A key finding in the field is that "directed practice" is crucial to skill development. That is, of the 10+ hours a day a world class gymnast spends practicing, it's the two to three hours of "perfect practice" a day that make the difference in her development. Geo dude has a process in place where he knows when to be especially focused and he does it a time when he's most effective. My point here is that while benchmarking one's schedule has its merits, it also has limits given the range of individual differences that can shape learning styles. IRT history, I recommend that the emphasis be placed on objectives and processes with the day to day schedule a matter of tertiary importance. (Granted, this is easy for me to say. I am an insomniac.)

Part of what made your previous post incredibly controversial is that men have used (and continue to use) various sorts of psychological "arguments" to say what is and isn't normal in interpersonal relationships. These efforts are part of a larger, centuries' old project of controlling women. These efforts continue despite the ever growing body of literature produced by professional clinicians that ultimately affirm braindump's thumbnail. Every relationship is different and if a relationship works for the people in it, there is no problem. IRT your discussion of your "projecting", I do think there may be something to your self assessment that you're viewing the OP's experiences through the prism of what seems to be some challenging experiences. I also think that if you'd led your previous post with that type of disclosure, it still would have been controversial but it would have come across as less hostile to the OP. There are members of this BB who clearly show that they have little regard for others when it comes to romantic relationships. IMO maelia8 is not among them. @maelia8, given your academic discipline, your specific fields of interest, the school you're attending, and phase of your training, my concern for you is that the time you are investing in your present relationship may impinge upon your preparation for qualifying exams, especially if things go in directions contrary to your preferences. I am not suggesting that you take a specific course of action. I am recommending that you pay very close attention to how you feel, how you manage your time, and that you understand, however incompletely (at least until you go through the process yourself), that preparing for qualifying exams in history can be one hell of an emotional rollercoaster. The valley of "I'm not ready for quals" is deep and cold enough without also jumping into the river of "Where did things go wrong in that relationship?" (Or so I've heard.)

At best your post is a collection of over generalizations about love and relationships. At worst, your statements about what constitutes "desperate" behavior reflect a poor grasp of the OP's comments in this thread, the OP herself, and what others have already said.

Here's a way to approach the task. Pick a topic/subject of great importance to your field of study/the profession you want to join. Briefly sketch out how you felt about each before you started graduate school. This is point A. Briefly sketch out how you feel about each now, after almost a year in graduate school. This is point B. Now tease out the steps (coursework, reading, thinking, talking) by which you got from A to B. Your intellectual identify should still be "under construction" but you can align yourself provisionally with those steps that were most significant in getting you to B.

Were I in your position, I would pick Harvard. As an undergraduate, a number of us were told in very subtle ways that we would most likely have the opportunity to return as graduate students. IRT to positioning one's self for the job market and remaining in a familiar environment, staying made a lot of sense. My UG school was/is the University of Bees Knees at Buzzland. However, one professor whom I trusted told me that getting multiple degrees from the same school could send the wrong message to hiring committees (he used the word "incestuous"). (You could check on the validity of this professor's POV. Take a look at the top twenty or thirty schools you'd love to be as a tenured professor and take a look at the top historians in your field by generation. Do you see patterns in double and triple dipping?)

IMO, the article is a planted story by one or more professors who want to get the department back on track. The fact that there are different POVs IRT what constitutes the best path is a good thing. I think the article is circling around two or three elephants in the House of Klio, and those elephants will be waiting for you wherever you end up as a graduate student or, down the road, as a faculty member. Going to Penn during this period of adjustment affords you additional training opportunities. You may get to attend numerous job talks and to be a fly on the wall when professors talk about the factors that come into play when hiring additional faculty. You may even have the opportunity of being a "glue guy/woman" by helping to build trust and chemistry. The challenges you will face include not getting caught up in the gossip among graduate students or the harping among professors who may want you to see things their way. You will need to be especially keen when it comes to the intentions of your advisers IRT staying at Penn. Were I in your shoes, I would talk to the reporter who wrote the piece (off the record), and then have an honest conversation with the DGS and your potential advisers. Pick your words carefully when talking to professors. Sound concerned but calm. Convey a sense of confidence in your ability to handle a turbulent situation for your entire time at Penn. You don't want to come across as someone who is looking for reasons to go elsewhere. Yes, it may come to that, but how you comport yourself is vital to getting the best information you can.

What are your options? Have you already accepted Penn's offer?

@Court128 Please point Google at the following: "personal essay grad cafe" "sop grad cafe"

I'm going to throw in two cents' worth of MOO/IMO in response/reply to some of the contributions to this conversation. First, while military, naval, diplomatic, and other forms of "traditional" history may not be as prominent in the Ivory Tower as they once were, that does not mean those fields have come and gone. For better and for worse, practitioners of these fields reach broad audiences, sell significant numbers of books, and influence contemporaneous debates over politics and policies. (By worse, I mean specifically Victor Davis Hanson.) Second, the traditional approach to military history centers around topics such as operations (saying "battles" may get you an odd look), the operational art, strategy, the politics of conflict termination, command relations, and (sometimes) logistics because of the utilitarian nature of the discipline. Broadly speaking, the assumption among professional armed forces is that the study of warfare allows one to learn the lessons of history. The application of those lessons can potentially increase an armed force's military effectiveness. This is to say that to many stakeholders, military, naval, and diplomatic history is "applied" history. (FWIW, I do not agree. History is not a social science.) This utilitarian approach goes hand in hand with the widespread belief that the training / regimentation / acculturation of a professional armed force trumps notions of race, ethnicity, class, religion, and culture. Winning and losing is about commanders matching means to ends, combatants having sufficient material and doing as they were trained while living up to the ethos of their units. If soldiers massacre civilians, it isn't because they brought to a village civilian conceptions of ethnic difference, but because there was a catastrophic failure of training and leadership somewhere along the line. (An irony here is that politically conservative members of the American armed services frequently blame society for the perceived shortcomings and inadequacies of their respective services.) This utilitarian approach is, IMO, a firebreak between military/naval/diplomatic historians and their peers in the Ivory Tower. Overall, members of the former group, with a handful of exceptions including Jeremy Black, Peter Paret, and Michael Howard, have not invested enough time and effort to bridge the firebreak and to embrace the issues of concern to professional academic historians. In retrospect, this choice appears more and more to have been a mistake. However, from a contemporaneous perspective the choice may have been easier to make. Arguably the most globally significant policy debates since the late eighteenth century have centered around military and naval affairs. Many of these debates have developed over decades; the American armed services took to Iraq and Afghanistan notions of a "revolution in military affairs" that had been heatedly debated since the 1970s. (Unfortunately, a critical mass of policy makers did not sufficiently heed the concurrent historiographical debates over "military revolutions.") Given the choice between participating in highly refined debates among a handful of academic historians or potentially shaping how a global war might be lost or won, which would you choose as the more important task?

FYI...

@jujubea You have earned admission to the programs of your choice. That achievement makes you intellectually respectable. However, your elation over your very successful application season may be getting the better of you. If you're going to chastise others for being "self righteous or entitled" you should think twice before jumping into a conversation geared towards historians, especially if you're going to admit that your POV is centered around matters of opinion ("I think the general belief is..." "That'd be my guess, in the absence of other info.") Your success and your time on this BB do not make you a SME on the processes used by professional academic historians to hire other professional academic historians.

What does the contract/agreement/scope of services between your friend and your friend's boss say about ownership of the work product?

@DCGuy, with respect, the fact that you felt the need to come here to ask this type of question should be a cause of (considerable) concern to you--if not also your adviser. Are the two of you on different pages (e.g., you want to get published, he/she wants you to prepare for qualifying exams)?

IMO, more than anything else, you need to define your fields/areas/intervals of interest. It doesn't have to be as refined as, say, American naval policy during Eisenhower's second administration, but you should be able to say at least American twentieth century history. You also need to figure out if you are committed or dedicated to the craft of history before you apply to graduate school. (When one sits down to a breakfast of bacon and eggs, the pig is committed while the chicken is dedicated.)

Pick the environment that is going to enable you to create knew knowledge more effectively.

Bottom line, it is your body and it is their time and their money and their decision if they're comfortable with your appearance as a reflection of the profession you seek to enter. Given the overall competitiveness of the Ivory Tower, is an artistic statement of one's individuality a worthy distraction from an intellectual statement?

@missmend, Please remember that as an aspiring graduate student in history, you will be evaluated for your ability to do research.