Sigaba

Ah, irony.

FWIW, a couple of older discussions of e readers are here there While the technology has improved and, in some cases, the prices have gone down, these earlier threads have some good "chalk talk" that may still inform the decision-making process. HTH.

I understand your quandary. However, as written, your letter is an admission that you cannot be trusted to keep your word if more money is involved.

Have you looked for their apartment, or rather, where there apartment should be based upon their view?

I understand the point that you're making. However, my work experience suggests otherwise. Depending upon how things are budgeted and the org chart is set up, certain categories of workers, from entry level to old hands, are considered overhead and even if their contributions make a company more efficient or profitable or sustainable, they are not considered money makers. At one point this statement may have been true and, at some point in the future it may be true again. However, in today's job market this statement is inaccurate. For example, I work for a firm that, before the recession, hired for internships undergraduates. Now, many of this year's crop of interns have master's degrees. This is to say that it is an employers' job market. I urge every member of this BB to keep this point in mind if you're thinking about leaving the Ivory Tower for greener pastures--for the present, many of those pastures remain blasted lunar landscapes.

IMO, you should not leave your master's program to start the doctoral program before earning your master's. Doing so leaves you vulnerable to the charge that you're a climber who cares more about your own career than anything else. Keep in mind that by admitting you, your current department may have told someone else who really wanted to be there "no." (And the halls and courtyards of the Ivory Tower are often smaller than one realizes. Unless you're completely changing fields, professors at your current school may well run into professors of your first choice and do what professors do: compare notes.)

MS32-- I think that what is going on is neither greed on your part nor jealousy on theirs but rather an ongoing erosion of rapport due to a lack of mutual respect for differing lifestyle choices. As you're the older person in the group, you may be better equipped (because of your life experiences and the way the human brain develops) to take a step back and to put yourself in their shoes. That is, from their perspective, are you measuring your success against your own aspirations alone or are you also keeping a scorecard of sorts over who is making more money than whom, who is getting support from whom and who is more "independent"?

Have you taken a look at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill?

Did the terms of your fellowship allow you to work on the side?

MOO, you should go especially since you're going to be a part time master's student. In addition to the excellent guidance provided in post #2, consider the following. Down the line, you're going to need the support of your classmates, many of whom are "all in." You will most likely benefit from seizing every opportunity to show your level of dedication to the program and the field.

I strongly recommend that you do not participate in this type of back and forth with undergraduates no matter how much they may merit such a reply nor how satisfying it would be to provide one. IME, interacting with argumentative undergraduates is almost as difficult as managing malingering Teamsters. Rolling around in the mud with either makes matters worse, not better.

I went that route on my current laptop and I'm regretting it. The deal is that Lenovo has been refreshing many of its Thinkpad models and the growing pains are tremendous. To be clear, I got a very good deal on a Thinkpad T430s BUT every fourth or fifth time I power it up, it will crash and two thirds of the time, the touch pad simply doesn't work. I may have found a work around for the latter issue but the former evades resolution.

Will UCLA let you fulfill the language requirement with languages that are not pertinent to your area? Will the language exams test your proficiency in speaking said languages or will they focus upon your ability to read said languages while you're doing archival research abroad? Will your work at the Acorn center around writing? If so, you could focus on refining/improving your writing/editorial skills. The bottom line is that many historians do not write especially well, in particular when they're undergraduates applying to graduate school.

What if the people it bothers are the ones you will need to serve as references when you apply for a job? Even if you end up applying for a job in a field light years away from English, someone may wonder why you don't have English professors as references. If they ask, how would you answer and would that answer square with the information they gathered during a background check? Worse, what if they don't ask? They may simply conclude that you're a person who is going to focus on being "marketable" (as opposed to someone who is a team player) and who is going to walk the margins of the rules to do it. If that happens, you may not get the benefit of the doubt and have the opportunity to explain yourself in an interview. They may just move on to the next candidate.

If you're going to go this path, I think you might be better served sending her a letter and/or arranging an appointment so you can talk to her face to face. While you should mention that you're applying to UCLA, I don't think you should disclose at this time that you want to study under her. Instead, communicate your research interests in a way that she understands that you're an aspiring historian who is serious about the craft and would benefit from her teaching and mentoring. By keeping your preferences under your hat, you will put both of you in a position to get to know each other better before anyone has to make a decision about anything. (What follows is MOO.) I don't know if auditing graduate level courses is the best option. If she lets you take the class, you're not going to get the same level of support as an enrolled student, you're not going to have the same type of "skin in the game" (i.e. the graded assignments), and you're not necessarily going to have the access to resources you may need to maximize the opportunity to learn. Also, assuming that you do earn admission to UCLA, would you need to take the class anyways? Instead of auditing her class, is it possible for you to take care of other items on your to do list that will definitely strengthen your application? For example, you could improve your language skills, do archival research, and/or read up on the historiography of your areas of interest.

Ultimately, your comfort level should determine how much of your personal experiences you disclose. However, I think your story is absolutely worth telling. It indicates that you have the type of character that can motivate others to think outside of themselves and to try harder to maximize their potential.

Have confidence in your academic pedigree. Right or wrong, the fact that you're presently at Harvard will work to your advantage when some professors read your application materials.

Does your current department allow grad students to work with academics at other schools?

The following is based upon my experiences working at the R&D lab of a multinational consumer/business electronics company and at a structural engineering consultancy. Graduate school can count as experience when those doing the hiring go through resumes and make the first or second cut. Graduate school can also count as experience when an applicant gets hired and those making the offer are trying to figure out an adequate level of compensation. Graduate school can also count as experience when management is figuring out potential career paths for a new hire. However, as has been noted, graduate school will probably not count as actual work experience when it comes to delegating a new hire authority to manage people, projects, and resources. Your experiences as a graduate student has the potential to work against you. Your employees and colleagues may well conclude that you have limited "real world" experience and take you less seriously than they otherwise might/should/could. On the other hand, they may assume that since you're very well educated, you should be able to do your job with a minimal amount of training. A way you could potentially square the circle is to take courses that will help you in the workplace. For example, if your program requires you to do an outside field and UW has a business school, you might take classes in project management or technical writing. IRT your goal of earning a Ph.D., I recommend patience. Wait until you have some work experience (gained during your time in your master's program or after) in your chosen field before making the decision. You may find that your industry has a counter-intuitive bias against people with doctorates, and the issues may be beyond your control once you have the doctorate in hand. You may find that there's a greater need in your industry for individuals with skills learned in a business school. You may find that you're simply exhausted and that you want to do some work and earn some money while taking a break from the Ivory Tower.

Avoid the practice of either not reading/listening to questions that are being asked and/or offering guidance or opinions that are beyond your expertise and experience. Else, you may end up digging yourself ever deeper in a hole that never should have been excavated. For example. Yet (emphasis added)

ALCON-- For those concerned with issues of crime and safety, start here <<LINK>>. Try craigslist for apartments, sublets, and rooms/baths for rent. I currently work in DTLA. For many of you, the experience here may be a lot different from what you may want. DTLA has come a long way but we've still got a long way to go. Moreover, a number of development / re-development projects are firing back up so you're going to be in competition with people your age who may have more money to spend on rent. If you're looking for a walkable lifestyle, I recommend that you look at areas that are close to Metrorail stations or MTA red line stops in NoHo, West Hollywood, Glendale or Pasadena. Burbank is also very nice IMO but not quite as walkable. Please keep in mind that NoHo, Burbank, Glendale, and especially Pasadena are furnaces during the warmer months. (And it is almost always warm in the L.A. area.) If you find a place in those areas to your liking, you could have a relatively painless transit ride to Union Station and then use the shuttle service from there to the USC campus. I personally would not recommend Culver City nor Venice. Both have a "vibe" that does not appeal to me (YMMV) but also the ongoing expansion of the Metro Expo line is playing havoc with traffic in Culver City. Also, if mass transit is going to be a central component of a walkable life style, please know that MTA service gets tweaked twice a year. Of late, these tweaks are translating to significantly longer headways during off-peak hours. For this reason (and others) I would be very leery of the ratings you see on walkscore dot com. HTH.

Before switching your email address, I recommend that you find out what options you will have at Yale. For example, the Yale alumni association may have a solution that minimizes your need to do the change of email address dance. If a professor wants you to have her personal/cell phone number, she will give it to you. As for the ongoing conversation, I would point out that maintaining a degree of personal distance from history professors can work to your advantage. In my experience, professional academic historians can have ungainly skeletons in their closets. Sometimes, if they feel especially close, they may, out of no where, tell you something you cannot unhear. Also, because the craft of history is subjective, it is entirely possible that, if you zig intellectually when a professor who thinks you're a friend expects you to zag, you're not just having a difference of POVs, you're "betraying" said professor.

The OP was posted in the history forum. My recommendation is from one historian to another. Do you have experience in maintaining/developing relationships with historians? To clarify, the purpose of keeping two copies of each piece of correspondence is not about CYA or being cold. It is related to the suggestion that the OP do what established historians do: hold on to materials that may end up donated to a school under the heading of "Letters and Personal Papers..."

I recommend that you write the professors letters and that you initially comport yourself as a professional academic historian. That is, for the first sequence of exchanges, devote the majority of your comments to what you're studying and how your skills are developing (or not--sometimes it is three steps back to take half a step forward). Write the letters with the belief that you are doing important work and that one day you'll be a historian others take seriously. Save copies of everything you mail (as in via USPS) and you receive. Over time and if doing so seems appropriate to the relationship, you can test the waters with more personal comments / insights / opinions. As you are likely to have intervals of very tough sledding and crises of confidence in the coming years, I very strongly recommend that you refrain from venting, gossiping, expressing your angst, or being loopy. I also suggest that you think very carefully before expressing POVs on historical and historiographical topics. Passion and intellectual intensity are one thing, stridency is another. In the event you have opportunities to socialize with these professors in person, I would discourage you from getting too comfortable, especially if alcohol is involved, at least at first. You are building a professional identity in a very dynamic environment. Until you really figure out what is going on in the House of Klio, you may benefit from maintaining a clear line between the personal and the professional. My $0.02.

Please keep in mind that as a graduate student, you will spend much more time studying historiography than you have as an undergraduate. Do what you can to frame your writing samples within the context of ongoing historiographical debates. It depends. Is your intent to patch things up with a professor because it is the right thing for an aspiring historian to do? Or do you want to patch things up because you want this professor to write a LoR on your behalf? If it is the latter, I suggest that you give long and careful thought about how you intend to comport yourself as a graduate student in history. IME, the word quickly gets around among the Powers That Be when a grad student approaches relationships with established academics as resources to be leveraged to advance his/her ambition. If your intent is the former, initiate a conversation with the professor in question so that you can find out how/where/why things went off track. Take all remarks that seem like criticism on the chin but do not tolerate abuse. Acknowledge and accept responsibility for the role you played in the relationship going off kilter but think very carefully before you offer an apology. The following recommendation is offered as a respectful counterpoint to thedig13's suggestion in post 39. Spend a significant part of your summer reading up on the historiography of your three areas of interest. I recommend that you start by identifying the three most important, if not prominent, journals for each of the three fields. (That is, nine journals total.) Once you've identified the journals, read selectively from cover to cover each journal's run over the last ten years (or longer). Give yourself one week for each of the three fields to complete this task. Attempt to develop a reading list of works in which your areas of interest closely intersect and/or of works that really grab your attention (as in, you slamming your hand on the table at a coffee house and saying "That's the kind of book I want to write one day!") Spend the balance of your summer working through your reading list, adding and removing works as you become familiar with the historiographical landscape of each field. Maintain a reasonably comfortable pace in your reading, say, three books a week. Along the way, take a stab at writing a couple of review essays in which you establish a dialog among the books you're reading.