Sigaba

Guessing blindly... Less inclined, fewer posts, people waiting for next season or deciding not to pursue a doctorate in history at all. IRT fewer posts, it's my hunch that over the last several years, each application season brings more lurking and searching and less posting. Intuitively, I think that among this season's applicants will come a handful of graduate students who will go on to achieve great things as professional academics. Maybe not Klio's answer to the USMA class of 1915, but one for the ages nonetheless.

Is your objective to receive positive feedback or to receive information on how to develop skills as an academic historian? I started in one program to work with a specific historian. He provided positive feedback and little else in terms of skill development. I changed programs and ended up with a couple of professors (X, who has a reputation for being hard to please, and Y) who were more than happy to bounce me off the walls, give me the grades I'd earned, and to stand on my head when necessary. They did not offer much praise, but they did enable me to learn the craft. (X and Y have also written letters on my behalf for jobs in the private sector.) Here's a slightly different mindset to consider. Your professors have something that belongs to you -- knowledge on how to be a historian. What are you willing to do to go and get it?

It seems to me that the professor is treating you like a doctoral student and expecting you to lean into your work much more. Making the transition from having an undergraduate's mindset to a graduate student's seems to be an ongoing challenge that's complicated by her distant approach. The B+ you received was meant to be a kick in the head. (An unwritten rule of graduate history programs is that anything but an A is a F.) Your "lessons learned" appear to have been more tactical than strategic. So when you got her comments on your draft it is possible that you took her compliments to be an endorsement of your adjustments when, from her point of view, she was encouraging you to work harder from a strategic perspective. This is to say that while you're trying to figure out how to write to make her happy, she's urging you to produce work that enables you to create new knowledge. If you follow @killerbunny's outstanding guidance, I recommend that you be prepared to talk about either your understanding of the historiography or your analysis of primary source materials in that order. Your objective is to understand how you can understand / practice history better, not how you might have gotten a better grade. (You will, I suspect, benefit greatly if you understand and truly believe that the former is more important than the latter.)

I recommend that you avoid the risk of receiving a FTFSI by cutting the thirty page paper to twenty pages when the limit is twenty pages.

FWIW/IME, in California, many municipalities are disinterested in economic / financial analysis that may help them to hit the ground running post COVID-19. Re-staffing and restoring positions will need to occur before additional positions are added. It may well turn out that municipal institutions will turn to consultants and/or seek to bypass the need for complex analysis of current conditions by implementing technology upgrades. IRT no relevant skills, if you're a historian, you can read, research, think critically, navigate environments that are fluid and ambiguous, and write. IME, these are relevant skills. At my job, I'm the only one in my department who does not have a degree in our core area of expertise nor more than ten years' experience. Do faculty members at community colleges have masters degrees or doctorates? I recommend that you set up a search notification on your Linkedin account. Cast a very broad net -- "historian" is going to get hits for architectural historian. "Analyst" will also get a wide range of hits. However, if you habitually study the results, you may start to see patterns.

It's not all on the pols and bureaucrats. Not in California, anyways. In the 1990s, voters kicked a can down the road. The resulting sinkhole is being filled with crumbling infrastructure and fading dreams. It's worth pointing out that while budget management is ultimately pragmatic and political in nature. If you were to have 100% budget transparency, "concerned citizens" could sandbag approved policies and projects by sharpshooting costs through the mistaken belief that running a public organization is just like running a business which is just like balancing a household checkbook. ("Why $x.xx for a Z? I can get it for less at Target.")

The comparison is my experiences and observations in the private sector to the scenario laid out by @remenis . My point is simply that sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel is another train or a gorilla with a flashlight. IRT public sector work, my department does a fair amount of project work for public clients. I would not want to have a public sector job right now. The needs of the here and now are outpacing other considerations. Strategic plans are being shelved, day to day operations are in constant flux, budgets are getting slashed to the bone. Positions are being eliminated to save money even though qualified to have those jobs could help put out fires right now.

How many careers are envisioned in the scenario above? https://www.kornferry.com/content/dam/kornferry/docs/article-migration/Briefings38_Nomad-Economy.pdf https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/nlsoy.pdf https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED582350.pdf IME, working in the private sector (three industries) is not without challenges and risks. No one has tenure. No one. I'm currently in an industry that had two firms that bear the name of one of its founders. He is with neither. In a different industry, founders --and many others-- were tossed aside when corporate decided to change strategy. At will employees can be terminated with zero warning. Turn over your keys, sign this document, here's a live check. GTFO. "Exempt" employees can be required to work more than eight hours a day for weeks at a stretch without additional compensation. Non compete agreements can limit future opportunities. (Even if your pockets are deep enough to get you through the litigation.) Firms that practice "just in time" hiring will expect you to do the job with minimal to no training. Your plans for a career path centered around areas of practice and types of clients make you the ideal candidate to on board the strategic hire. Raises, salary adjustment, and bonuses are not guaranteed. Sometimes, bosses want to get your attention. Other benefits can be offered on a use it or lose it basis and can be discontinued from one year to the next. Not every employer offers 401(k)s nor matches employee contributions. KPIs are generally centered around numerical metrics that don't always add up and sometimes work at cross purposes. The "grand strategy" of the Powers That Be can be unknown and ultimately at cross purposes of what bosses, middle managers, and worker bees are told. The pace of work can be bone crushing. Imagine your busiest weeks as a teacher the slowest weeks of a year. Or two. The paper you write days before it is due -- imagine it being worth tens thousands of dollars to your firm and hundreds, if not millions to a client, even though the client has gone for months without giving you information it said it would provide during the project kick off meeting. Undergraduates unhappy with your work? Try managing Teamsters. Uncooperative colleagues? Try getting members of private and public sector unions to see it your way when they know they damn well don't. "Toxic" work environments/coworkers/supervisors? Unless you get to HR first with clear and convincing documentation, STFU and get back to work. "Scope creep"==> project budget exhausted? Do the work on your own time. "One set of integrated comments" from the client? Here are ten sets of comments, some contradict others. Disagree with how the work should be done on a project? That's nice. STFU and get back to work. Intellectual freedom? Ah, well, now that you've learned of the existence of that NDA, you may never again talk about it nor the project nor the client. Risk management is everyone's responsibility even if you've never been trained on how to manage risk. Free and open exchange of information ==> email blast from the bosses after a project manager's POV is printed in a newspaper. Templates Time cards Morale check?

Hi, @history45 Welcome to the grad cafe. Please give some thought to searching for "graduate history programs extend deadlines" on Google. You may find results that are helpful.

I recommend concision.

Please clarify. Did you get the book's title wrong or the book's author wrong? (Either / or, I don't think it is an unrecoverable error if your SOP is solidly written otherwise--especially if you're applying to an educational psychology department.) If doing so will ease your state of mind, please do contact the appropriate person by telephone and see if you can swap in the corrected document. I do not recommend going into detail--just say that you belatedly caught a typo. Try to think of the request as "it's no big deal one way or another" even though you may be dying inside. If the answer is "no," (which I would expect), do what you can to accept the decision, honor the way you feel about the whole thing, learn what you can, and then go on with your life. Please make sure that you understand that you made a mistake. You are not a moron. You are a person competing for admission to a graduate program during multiple overlapping global crises that are having destructive cascading impacts upon the fabric of society.

Even though I was told by a professor that I might have gotten a job had I been born a decade earlier--"maybe"--I would never advise someone not to pursue a personal or professional goal. (The day I passed quals, the committee member who represented my outside field said Think of yourself as a teacher. By which he meant that it was my responsibility to give people information that enabled them to achieve their goals--my opinion of those goals notwithstanding.) I would (and have) recommended doing a herculean amount of due diligence--including reading the OP again and again. There may be "nothing new" to some readers who are aware of some of the patterns that have been developing since the early 1990s. To many others, the post adds crucial nuance. I also recommend setting up job alerts in Linkedin and elsewhere so one understands how graduate degrees may or may not translate into requirements for job qualifications and professional experience. Some consultancies and government agencies require the kind of research experience that cannot quite be satisfied by a master's degree. FWIW/Neither here nor there, I do take slight exception to the lumping together of the academic job market for professional academic historians as the most important key performance indicator of the profession's vitality or sustainability.

The professor who knows your work best has given you helpful but challenging guidance. You can do it!

Something is missing from the narrative. By my reading, the first time you were unwilling to make adjustments to your work based upon the recommendations of multiple professors. The second time, despite your previous experience with an "extremely specific" project area, a similar dynamic played out but in a shorter time span, and you got PNGed "by someone senior." Now, you're doubling down by consulting a lawyer using money you need to get back home. Something is missing from the narrative. Recommendations I suggest that you use your remaining time in the UK figuring what you need to do to get home as soon as possible, attempting to salvage a couple of relationships so professors will write letters of recommendation for jobs (if not also future applications), but most of all, figuring out as honestly and gently as possible how your choices influenced events at both schools. Did you do as well as you might have managing relationships with professors and managing your expectations for your project? Did you receive actionable (and pretty good guidance) both times about your project being too complex and did not handle the information well? Did you bring with you a chip on your shoulder that may have helped you as an undergraduate but might have weighed you down in the UK?

In order, yes, submit at least one more application, and focus your efforts on your SOP and limit work on your writing sample to making adjustments for clarity. The peril of your plan is that you are not merely competing against applicants who are dedicated to the study of history. You are also competing against applicants who are committed to the study of history. Committed applicants believe that COVID-19 does not materially impact their "chances" because they are competing against themselves; their potential, their hopes to contribute to the profession, and their doubts that they will be outstanding scholars. They know (somehow) that they're going to get into a program of their choice. IMO, a clear and convincing demonstration of commitment to the craft will give applicants a competitive advantage that will transcend the "stats" of an applicant who throws a hat in the ring thinking, "Well, I threw my hat in the ring but because of COVID..." My specific recommendation to you is to focus on your SOP more than your writing sample. I urge you to do what you need to do so that your SOP reflects accurately the best version of yourself now and lays out a vision of your personal professional development. Figure out how to craft a SOP that you know is the best writing and thinking about history you can do right now. At this point, the amount of effort it will take to improve your writing sample significantly (in terms of historical analysis) may be better spent on quality control. Make sure that your writing is clear, that your references are accurate, and that you've hunted and killed all the gremlins. Grammatical mistakes and typos can become harder to find the more you look at your own writing. Try to budget time so you can leave your writing sample untouched for a day or two and then circle back to a printed copy that you can mark up with a blue pencil.

And also... https://www.legacy.com/obituaries/sanantonio/obituary.aspx?n=michael-william-rollin&pid=194224408&fhid=5701 https://scholarworks.umt.edu/etd/5202/ Keep in mind that you've got the nucleus of a strong statement of purpose. You've identified the needle you want to move (at least provisionally). Overstating the "newness" of the needle may not be as beneficial as you indicating that you have a sense of where that needle fits on a branch on a tree in a forest.

Be careful. Unless your German is excellent and you know the historiography like the back of your hand, using a word like "never" can be a costly mistake, all the more since it is an avoidable one.

BLUF: I would not recommend discussing this specific work as you propose unless you are confident enough to center your "chances" of acceptance around your understanding of the book's value to ongoing historiographical debates. Based upon a cursory glance, Export Empire seems like an enviable work of scholarship that moves the needle. However, what's fashionably called "soft power" has a concept often explored and hotly debated among historians studying diplomatic, military, and naval history for decades--particularly (but far from exclusively) Americanists. If you're going to mention this work, I recommend that you make clear that it raises questions that are new to you and, maybe, a contingent of scholars studying modern German history. (I would be especially careful if your intention is to work with Ogle or Connelly at Cal. I would also recommend that you extend the breadth of your research on "soft power" so that you have a working understanding of ongoing historiographical debates on both sides of the Atlantic and their relationship to contemporaneous discourse on policy, especially if "soft power" broadly conceived is not the forest you want to roam. As an alternative, your discussion of Export Empire could be very constrained: the book caught your attention and, for the moment, offers a provisional roadmap of the territory you want to explore and how you want to travel and, in the right program, you may be able to move the needle in a debate of enduring importance in modern history. Which ever course of action you select, I think it is imperative that you absolutely nail your summary of the Export Empire by providing no more than two sentences that answer the questions: what is the book about? and why is it important? $0.02.

@Dogukan93 Welcome to the Grad Cafe. Your question may generate bespoke guidance were you to ask it in the current season's application thread in the History forum. https://forum.thegradcafe.com/forum/38-history/

Were I in your situation, I'd make an effort to write an efficient introduction that contextualizes the writing sample both within the relevant historiography as well as the larger thesis/article. For examples on how this task has been done in the past, I would grab one or two very influential works by historians and see how they went from doctoral dissertation to featured article in a journal to published work. (J.C.A. Stagg's Mr. Madison's War (1983), may be worth a look if you're an Americanist.)

Unfortunately, uncommunicative professors is a recurring theme, season after season. You may find field/discipline specific guidance in the SLP forum but if you're willing to dig in this forum, you may find guidance that is useful, if not exactly comforting. FWIW, I recommend that you follow your instinct to "calm down and wait longer."

Hi, @jujubean, welcome to the Grad Cafe. You may receive more timely feedback were you to ask your questions in the anthropology forum https://forum.thegradcafe.com/forum/45-anthropology/

Your recommendation that I stay in my lane is both telling and ill considered. My recommendation that readers consider your other posts is not centered around Pitt, nor SW. At no time do I claim to have knowledge of either. For you to imply that I am writing from that perspective suggests that your attention to detail is lacking. My recommendation is simply that readers consider your "guidance" within the context of your conduct on this BB. Based upon your posts, readers can decide for themselves if you're attempting to urge aspiring graduate students to look before they leap or offering guidance on how to do their due diligence or if you're grinding an ax and settling scores. Had you shared information on how you've diligently addressed your concerns with the program face to face with professors, staff, and administration at Pitt, which you doubtlessly have done many times, I would find your assertion that you're trying to help less controversial.

IMO, it's not great form to offer guidance without at least reading what the person asking for guidance has written.

I am the person who gives the jar the final tap that allows it to open after the strong have been working at it for a while.