Sigaba

@ed2112 Congratulations on your engagement! MOO, wait until you get to your program and you've had a chance to assess the department's environment. Learn what you can from the department's administrative staff and a couple of ABDs. You might find out that faculty, staff, and even a couple of graduate students had just buried the skeletons of life-changing events that went off the rails. In such a situation, what might be cause for celebration could stir up mixed emotions and behaviors. While the latter could be inappropriate, and also illegal, you, as a new student, might never know what was going on. Here's an example of what I mean. A professor received a busload of congratulations when she announced that she was expecting her second child. During the pregnancy there were some complications. As the due date neared, she learned that she wasn't going to get tenure. So while the department was genuinely happy for her, not the least because she was well liked by all, the Powers That Be didn't let affection and sentiment get in the way from enforcing the prime directive of the Ivory Tower: publish or perish.

Have you gone there yet?

By that same measure, if, as an undergraduate, you attend an institution where the lion's share of the teaching is done by graduate students, admissions committees will not automatically discount your LoRs if they're written by GSIs.

IME, professors are so burdened with committee work on top of their regular responsibilities and their everyday lives that they're going to cut corners when they can. They recycle lectures and exams, they pre-sort applications they have to read, they have graduate students carry projectors to lecture halls. [Edit: I'm not bitter.] I respectfully disagree. One can do something about the prominence of one's LoR writers by applying successfully to institutions that have sterling reputations throughout one's pre-graduate school career. For better and worse, academic pedigree still matters. FWIW, I fell into that category. Part probably had to do with the length of my primary writing sample. However, based upon how some professors reacted upon hearing what school I attended as an undergraduate, my pedigree played a role.

If you're seeing your LORs, the persons writing them may be doing you a profound disservice, however well-intentioned (and confidential) their disclosure may be.

Is there a "go to" professor in your department that has a well-deserved reputation for being the department's rock to whom you can speak about this issue? If so, please talk to this person first. She or he may offer insights and suggestions that may ease your burden. Also, please consider the possibility of scrambling your committee--ask someone who is already on it to become your advisor or develop an understanding that this person will use her/his "good offices" to deal with the professor who is problematic. If such a scramble is not possible, you might consider just out right firing her. If you take this course of action, you need to have a replacement in mind, and that professor has to be ready to sign off on the paper work and you need to take care of the transition in a way that your department will see as professional.

FWIW...

Yes. Not with standing David Silbey's 2009 reply to pieces offered by Patricia Cohen that same year and John Miller in 2006, some "traditional" fields of history (naval/military/diplomatic) continue to feel a squeeze. While some like Miller want to make the squeeze mostly about political ideology , I'm of the view that the lean times are due to two horrific miscalculations on the part of those traditionalists and an overdue course correction for the profession, that has become a bit of an extended over correction. I sound philosophical now because I've got a decent job in the private sector, I've had the right amount of caffeine today, and I am never ever bitter. Not even a little.

If you can afford to drive the car you say you drive, then you can afford to pay to take the GRE.

As TMP indicates, you may be over analyzing things here. If you're confident in your German, demonstrate it in your master's thesis/report. For example, do a close reading of a war plan, and compare your interpretation of it to ones offered in previous works. If such a tactic doesn't do the trick, just arrange to take an exam as soon as possible after your arrival at your next program. A caveat: I would recommend that you be mindful of the fact that your proficiency will be determined by the professors with whom you work. Some professors may have a different vision of what skill level you should have given your preferred area of specialization.

A Keurig K75, a Starbucks rewards card, a jar of Nescafe.

Also keep in mind that some fields of history are out of fashion and are likely to remain so for the time being.

IMO, surefire's guidance is profoundly useful, especially if one takes the time to do research on the faculty and see how its members fit together.

@YoungR3b3l -- Your issue isn't the or or rules that to be broken to stop "oppression". Your issue is your attitude.

Your SOP might go over better if you're going to get a master's at your current school. Then, you could center your comments around why you want to go to the next school and less on why you want to leave your present one.

Ask yourself the tough questions. Are you, in fact, "hoity toity or pushy"? There's nothing wrong with being either, but not accepting oneself for being who one is can cause issues. Manage your expectations. If your ideas and innovations don't take root, you might have to let them go or look for another place to live. Communicate clearly and positively. Phrase things in terms of what outcome you want, not what you see as being "wrong" in your new place. To get booty, (sometimes) you must give booty. In the event your room mates say "Okay, we'll do it your way" then expect a tit for tat request down the line. Ideally, this probably should not happen among adults living together -- one does something because one wants to do that thing, not because one wants to trade horses down the line -- yet, still. Come back and let everyone know what happened. There are too many threads on this BB in which members solicit advice/guidance, but never share the outcome.

Are you going to earn a master's degree at your current institution?

Yes. Specifically, to the extent possible your fields should relate to the research you're interested in doing for your dissertation. Yes. Doing a field on an area/topic/method/subject that is central to your discipline will help you understand where you and your work fit into the bigger picture of the profession. IMO, no. Your fields of interest in and of themselves don't send signals. What you do with those fields and how you do it will send signals. That being said, you can leverage the time you spend preparing for your exam so you can later send signals. (As an example, as an undergraduate, I was mentored by a graduate student who prepared for his quals by writing the lectures he intended to use later as a professor.) My selection of fields were determined solely by my interests. However, as my interests were and are out of fashion, my choices mean that I will never be hired as a professional academic historian. But I'm not bitter. Bear in mind that the selection and definition of a field is an iterative process that includes a significant amount of negotiation with the professor administering the exam.

@Dedi-- No disrespect, but I think you should go easy with framing these kinds of value judgments at least until you've had some time in graduate school. Once there, you may find yourself going on rants on a regular basis, if not also having full blown meltdowns. The OP is confronting the dilemma that every graduate student will face at least once: determining if it is time to say "no" to a PI/POI/or other authority figure. While I agree with FL and JM that now may not be the time for such a response, being in a situation where one has to think in that direction can be remarkably stressful.

You read my post incorrectly. I think your reading may have been filtered through some of the disappointing experiences you've shared in some of your previous posts.

@CageFree, for the benefit of those who are new to this BB, could you please share your thoughts on to what extent did your background as a "non traditional" student gave you the experience to assess the awkwardness of the exchanges with that POI?

You are trying to have it both ways. You started this exchange by parsing a post of mine in this thread. Yet when I engage you in kind, you don't have the time to answer direct questions with honest answers. You say what you want to say, expect others to take you seriously, but when someone does just that, you want to shut down the conversation. Bluntly, the timing of your "I've been in this environment for five years" rings more like an attempt to dodge the direct questions I've posed to you, especially given your post on 28 May 2014 << That is, in the space of about sixty days, you have gone from not having your shoulders over your knees IRT taking the next step in your graduate career to being a person who has things so figured out that, on your say so alone, people should follow your guidance. Here's the thing. Today, you want readers to believe that you're wired in, that your experiences and insights trump, among other things, those of John Morton Blum and Robin W. Winks. (It is a good thing, I suppose, that I didn't mention Natalie Davis.) Yet, this past spring, you flat out admitted that you weren't wired in--not just by asking the question you posed, but also by posing it here, among faceless strangers on the internet rather than asking your peers and professors at Harvard. Make no mistake, when you asked the question during the spring, the considerable respect I had for you at that time grew significantly. The earnestness of your question seemed to reflect a level of humility and generosity of spirit that you'd brought to many of your posts. Now, in light of your recent posts in this thread and elsewhere on this BB, in particular the thread about writing one's own LoRs, I'm wondering what is going on with you. What has sparked this apparent reversal? Then again, in retrospect, your post of 23 March 2013 << is instructive, all the more when taken in the context of the discussion of an article posted on The Atlantic's website last September <<LINK>>. An additional point. You continue the unfortunate practice of putting words in my posts. Machiavellian is your word, not mine. You are the one who wrote "However, your professors are guaranteed to be very good at playing The Game, as it were, and you would not be where they were if they would not." On the contrary, the works I recommended stress the extent to which institutions such as Yale and Harvard stress values. A persistent theme of those works is how students and alumni sought to square what they learned with the demands of their careers and the trajectories of their lives. That is, the works I mentioned, among other things, explore how alumni of elite academic institutions use the knowledge and character they developed to have confidence in how they deliberated and executed the choices they made. You, based upon your experiences, see this dynamic in a different light. That's your choice. But then why are you attempting to make that choice for others by discouraging them from consulting other sources and other people?

My replies are below, highlighted in blue.

In the event you have a discussion about your desire to not be photographed and you follow the guidance outlined by TakeruK or rising_star, I strongly suggest you avoid saying anything along the lines of the two sentences above.