Sigaba

Pengy-- Give some thought that maybe you do have a chip on your shoulder. Comparing yourself to your friends in such a manner may not be an issue now, but it could become increasingly problematic for you as you go through graduate school.

FWIW, I changed schools but after earning a MA at the first school and getting the "blessing" (so to speak) of a few professors. The lesson learned is the value of looking before leaping--the second school's program is, in many respects more rigorous but the professor I transferred to work with proved to be, ah, problematic. I recommend taking FL's and G29's guidance to heart and making the best effort to explore all the opportunities that your current program and new community have to offer.

A suggestion. When someone points out that your grasp of vibrant trajectories of historical scholarship isn't what it might be, hold off on giving a snarky reply until after you've shown that you're taking corrective steps to get on track and up to speed. While your classmates will typically appreciate the humor, your professors will be taking and comparing notes. (And some professors will get on your case, then and there.) JMP-- As a Europeanist, you might profit from taking a look at chapter seven of J.H. Elliott's memoir.

IMO, whether analog or digital, always buy the book if it is related to your fields and/or it is important to the profession at large. As a senior historian told me, it isn't about reading the books but knowing where to find the information. MOO, it is far easier to find that information at three a.m. if that book is under your bed or on your HDD than if it is in the stacks or the cloud. If you need to economize, don't purchase a book if there are multiple copies in multiple libraries in your area. If you decide to violate Title 17, make sure you copy all of the front matter so that your citation will be accurate.

nehs-- Understood. But please understand that there are ways a POI can screw with a student even after he/she has graduated that go beyond the recommendations and the relationships. That is, he can sand bag you in any number of ways that make your life uncomfortable. (For example, using his posistion as advisor to make you keep working on your thesis for years. Moreover, he can undermine your personal and professional reputation in his networks in very underhanded ways. "Her? She was nothing exceptional...she had time management issues and was often distracted from her work." Were he to make such a comment, his peers might just take it at face value and you would never know. He could still write you good recommendations but would you be getting the kinds of opportunities for advancement? I am not saying that you should report him or not. I am attempting to convince you to expand your assessment of what's at stake before making your decision.

nehs-- Bluntly, get off this path of thinking right away. It is not fair to you. Hypothetically speaking, even if you'd thrown yourself at him, he is responsible and accountable and responsible for his own poor judgement and inappropriate behavior. What you should start doing right away is documenting everything that transpires between the two of you as soon as you possibly can. In your notes, make a point of articulating honestly how you feel and how his behavior is impacting your ability to do your work and the quality of your life. At the same time, start collecting physical copies of all email messages between the two of you while also backing up digital copies off of your school servers. (Ideally, at least one copy on portable storage, another on a cloud account.) Then, figure out if (and how) you want to notify either your department and/your school about this behavior. If your department is an environment where the rules of the old boys' network are still in play, you might want to talk to someone in your school's HR department. To guide you through this process, you might benefit from finding resources, such as BBs centered around work place issues, on how to handle these kinds of situations and what to expect. (If you have the resources, talking to a HR professional or a lawyer who specializes in this type of situation might be very helpful.) If you make the choice to finish your thesis as soon as possible, and get away from him (or if you want to fire him and get another advisor), those choices have consequences you will want to think through very carefully. As you work through your options, you may encounter people who want to help. To the extent possible, hold them accountable to the fact that this is your situation, not theirs. That is, the "right" thing to do is what you decide you want to do and nothing else. I urge you to do all you can now so that when you look back on this situation ten or twenty years from now, you will understand that you picked the best course of action based upon the information you had at the time. Above all else, please keep in mind that this situation is his making. It was his responsibility to monitor his own feelings and expectations and to subordinate them to his responsibilities to you as an advisor.

I am going to stray out of my lane for a moment to offer the following suggestion. Please double check on both the formal policies of your school and your program as well the implicit expectations of your department and your professors. The former may prohibit outside employment during the academic year, especially if you're receiving financial support. (The logic is that your job is your school work.) The latter may indicate that the formal policy is more of a rule than a guideline. Or that regardless of what the policy says, your professors expect you to focus fully on your coursework--at least during your first year. Another possibility is that your professors do not mind you working as long as you don't take certain kinds of jobs because such work is antithetical to your future profession's ethics. (As a specific example, I got offered work doing research for a private company that sold archival documents and items. I double checked with a mentor and he confirmed that doing such work would be a career limiting move.) If you do get the green light to work, make sure that the administrative staff of your department/program knows you're looking for work. Sometimes, departments will get a call saying "I'm looking for someone who can do X, Y, and Z." If you're in the good graces of the staff, the person answering the phone may contact you before anyone else. Now back to my lane.

I had participated in a summer research program between my third and fourth years as an undergraduate. Participants in this program got to hear a lot of comments from graduate students. I also got to work for the professor who probably would have been on my dissertation committee had I stayed at the same institution for graduate school. The latter experience taught me that going somewhere else was probably a good idea. The chalk talk provided an incredible amount of useful information about the application process as well as being a graduate student. (Many of the teaching points did not sink until much later.)

If TXang143 goes this route, I'd recommend first doing some additional research on the audience and the department. I'd specfically look for political activism centered around GWOT. Some history professors are not particularly fond of the American armed forces nor of the men and woman who've served.

The point about extended contracts centers around the potential of a machine going bad at the worst possible moment. For example, the week a major assignment is due. Does a graduate student have the time and resources in that situation to fix the machine?

To be clear, I'm saying something a bit different. Bluntly, the OP reflects a lean back approach to history because it asks for answers that should already be known, it rests in part upon a foundation of misinformation, and it asks for help when additional acts of self reliance and creative thought have clearly not been executed. I understand that some of my posts are controversial, even unpopular, but for the love of Klio. There are members of this BB who say they want to be historians but exhibit a profound unwillingness to do research or to think dynamically. Here's the thing. Graduate school in history is very much a lean forward experience. Asking questions like "What should I do/read/think now?" will get you used as a chew toy.* Conversely, graduate students who say "This is what I'm doing/reading/thinking now ..." will get cut a lot of slack--even when they're screwing up in a big way--and they will be often given hints of the answers to questions they'd not have thought to ask. Yes, this dynamic may not be entirely fair, especially since it is exceeding unlikely that many professors are going to tell you the rules of the road in ways that make sense right away, or even in a couple of years. Moreover, those professors who are inclined towards mentoring are going to play favorites.** Yet, things are what they are. One can use resources like the Grad Cafe to figure out ways to lean forward. Or not. _____________________________________________ * During a meeting of an introductory seminar on historiography, a first year student asked the professor, who was also the DGS, a question that all of us wanted to hear the answer. With one exception, the other students in the class gave their classmate an "I wish I'd asked that" look of approval. The one other student looked down at his notebook because he sensed what was going to happen next. And it did. The professor looked at the student who asked the question and destroyed him. ** When you're sitting in a professor's office and he or she says something that almost sounds like a casual throw-away comment and then smiles somewhat smirkily--as if a joke has been told and you didn't hear the punch line--that's when you will know you're being mentored. Or maybe you're just being toyed with. Often, it is the same thing. So a challenge aspiring history graduate students face at a place like the Grade Cafe is to figure out ways to make the transition from the sensibilities of an undergraduate towards the comportment of a graduate student even though the concerns you have as someone trying to get into a program are more immediate.

Please be advised that while JC's template is a good one, addressing a history professor as "Dr." can be taken as an insult.

Please check your PMs.

How about that. IIRC, it was an edition of the Princeton Review. My situation may have been different than yours. By the time I took the GRE, I had soured on the standardized test taking experience. Consequently, preparing for the exam was not a priority. Make no mistake, as I've said elsewhere on this BB, the GRE was a source of constant concern. I studied with two classmates. It was clear that Oak was going to do very well, and not just because she seemed to know every work in the dictionary. Conversely, I and the third member of the group had a few discussions that were basically "Blindfold or cigarette?" (The back story here was the understanding that I had more to lose by doing badly on the GRE than I had to gain by doing very well on it. Sometimes, one's academic pedigree can matter in a very significant way--even though some of the gaps between reputation and reality can be profoundly wide; there were professors that I never ever saw until I was a graduate student at a school a thousand miles away.) I instead focused on other aspects over which I felt I could make a more meaningful impact: picking schools where I thought I'd be a good fit, taking courses that would improve key skills, managing the GPA, and working.

MOO, do not pack a box of anything of value so that it is heavier than what you can easily lift. If a box is too heavy, the people handling it are going to have added incentive to let gravity help them out by heaving or throwing it or simply dropping it. FWIW, the rule of thumb for packing is two inches of packing material from each edge/side/corner of the items being shipped. This standard can make the cost of shipping higher as you're paying for the packaging materials and larger boxes. That being said, I've never received a damaged book from Oxford University Press while I've done the back and forth with Amazon and others a number of times. Also, see http://pe.usps.com/text/dmm300/601.htm#1203497 I would pay the extra expense and send the item via UPS ground. .GOV does many things well. Delivering packages isn't one of them.

If you have a transcript that shows you've started something that you're not going to finish because you had the funding to do so, that will give some members of admissions committees a reason to ask if you're going to do the same as a graduate student in their program. As for maximizing your GI benefits, have you raised this question at BBs populated by members of the armed forces? It may well be that there's an exception that applies to your situation that is little known here but well known elsewhere.

Sarab-- I would be very careful about accepting the guidance of grad students in a program you want to attend. Relationships between graduate students and faculty members can be profoundly fluid for the least of reasons. Also, a professor can have a terrible reputation among graduate students because everyone is going on hearsay and scuttlebutt rather than what they actually know. And also, the professor that actually cares the most for graduate students could be resented because she pushes students the hardest. Instead, I suggest that you rely more on the research you do on professors themselves. If a professor is a jerk, it will show in her book reviews. If a professor is a rock upon whom others find shelter from an indifferent world, it will show in the acknowledgements. If a professor thinks teaching is more important than publishing, it will show in the trajectory of her career. Circling back to the views of graduate students, if you do continue on that path, do what you can to talk to ABDs. They will have had more time to lick their wounds, figure out what was really going on that semester when Professor Happenstance appeared to go bonkers, and, most of all, they will have had more time to develop relationships in which they're being treated as and behaving like peers of the professors. (If you look around the Grad Cafe, you will find a number of threads in which newer graduate students express alarm/anger/discontent over a professor's actions or attitude. In those same threads, graduate students who have been around the block a couple of times will often shrug and ask "So why is this a problem?")

@ the OP. In addition to thinking about schools you'd like to attend, think about programs in which you'd be a good fit. And by good fit, I don't mean just for yourself but also for the department. Examples of what I mean include: If you're a person who needs professors who are going to be "hands on," then Happyland University may not be the place for you if they make it clear that you're going to be on your own. If you want to develop a professional presence that is highly collegial, SuperDooper State may be a bad fit if its faculty members habitually write combative essays, papers, books, and book reviews. If you want teaching to be the priority in your career, Ray of Sunshine Tech may not be for you if most of the undergraduate teaching is done by TAs and GSIs while the professors focus on getting published. (Getting thrown into the deep end is not the same as getting taught how to teach by professors who love to teach.) When you assess these types of issues, the schools that are #1, #2, and #3 on your list initially may end up as #9, #10, and #screwit. Finally, if you do expand your due dilligence to include these types of considerations, it can really show up in your SoP, campus visit, and interviews. In turn, you could have a competitive advantage over applicants who, by the numbers, look better on paper.

Ask the professors if they will be willing to write LORs for you a couple of years from now. During the interval, stay in touch with them. In your communication, demonstrate that you are spending a reasonable amount time developing your skills and refining your interests in your field of study--and theirs as well. The demonstrations can be very informal/casual or very structured. (IMO, it should be a mix.) The definition of "a reasonable amount of time" is up to you. But keep in mind that the harder you work during your time away, the less rust you'll have to shake off when you start graduate school. (Keep in mind that it is unlikely that anyone is going to cut you any slack that you took time off to work--even though that experience might make you a better grarduate student.)

Can you take the additional courses without declaring that you're going for a second degree?

Is your concern a reflection of waiting it out jitters/paranoia or is there something specific in the email that now has you worried? Also, is the admissions officer a member of the faculty (i.e. a professor) or is he/she a staff member? (I ask because having an admin/staff person pissed off at you can be even more problematic than having a professor upset with you.) In either case, I think your best option is to follow up in a way that provides you peace mind in the here and now. Going forward, consider the utility of asking people directly "What is the best way to get in touch with you?" Some will say "Whatever works for you." Others will give precise guidance that one should follow to the letter ("Call me on Fridays after 1:45 PM" or "I will call you.") If the guidance is "Whatever works for you," keep in mind that the more in person the communication, the better chance you have of sensing the other person's mood/frame of mind and making adjustments on the fly. (That is, a face to face conversation is better than a phone call which is better than a voice mail message which is better than a written communication.)

If your goal is to work outside of the Ivory Tower, I strongly recommend that you think long and hard about not patterning yourself after those who are the Powers That Be in the organizations where you see yourself ultimately working. Based upon working in the private sector at three different vastly firms (a software R&D lab, an engineering consultancy, and a management firm) , it has been my observation that hiring decisions are increasingly driven by apples to apples comparisions, the initial rounds of the hiring process are tasked to HR types who are looking for round pegs to fill round holes, firms, both for profit and not for profit, have a 'just in time' approach to project work so they expect new hires to hit the ground running, companies are less willing to think about the ways different skill sets and experiences could ultimately help, and the bottom line matters to the Powers That Be in ways that do not necessarily make sense to others. In my view, the sensibilities described above were taking root in the early 2000s and have really flourished since the global recession. To be clear, I'm not saying that you should not forge your own path or that you cannot make it work down the line. I am simply saying that there's an increasingly entrenched conventional wisdom that you may encounter once you hit the job market.

This response is geared specifically towards graduate students in history. Keep your text books. All of them. If you don't take them with you to your new school, store them someplace where you can get them easily. At some point down the line, you or a colleague may have a use for your old text books for a historiographical discussion in an essay or a research paper. (For example, you're writing your dissertation, you have an advisor who is either skeptical of the topic or simply likes to ask "So what? / Who cares? / Why is this important?" As part of your answer you go through several editions of college and high school text books to show how generations of collegians have been getting out dated information and then you show how those anachoristic viewpoints ended up having political and policy implications of global significance. For example, the persistent myths that the United States "saved" Europe during World War II and that the America's military effectiveness during that conflict was chiefly due to its superior industrial production. Also, as you go through your coursework and prepare for your qualifying exams, the textbooks will be a useful, reliable resource for basic historical facts. (At times, it can be very daunting to realize that one is reading a monograph that assumes a basic level of knowledge its topic.)

FWIW, I agree with zapter's comments in post #11. I never came across any of the words I memorized for any standardized test. If one is going to improve one's word power, do so within the context of another activity-- reading in one's field, reading writers one wants to emulate, or reading writers who are known for using five dollar words.

I recommend getting the most capable (read: expensive) business-class laptop (read: stable but not very fashionable) one can afford at the best price one can find (e.g. during an online sale or through your school's computer store). If you one configure the machine at an online store, consider the utility of getting a less expensive processor and using the savings to get additional RAM and a bigger, faster hard drive. I also recommend getting an extended warranty that provides on site service and coverage for accidents, a cable lock, an external mouse, and a good laptop bag. My reasoning is that a more capable, more durable machine offers a higher level of peace of mind and productivity. In regards to the latter, one will be able to search through 50k+ PDFs while downloading U.S. census data while crunching numbers with Excel while drafting a paper in Word (while checking in at Facebook). In regards to the former, purchasing a business-class machine, one will have access to a different level of service than one gets with a consumer-oriented device. For a variety of reasons, companies like Dell tend to value the b2b side of things more than the consumer side. What ever choice you make, please do the following. First, when researching options, don't just look at finished products (a Lenovo Thinkpad model xyz) but also research the components therein (motherboad chipset abc, graphics card efg). If graphics card efg is going bad in Apple MBPs, one will have the opportunity to say "Well, I don't want that feature in my Lenovo." Second, do not do any comparison shopping after making a purchase. A better machine at a better price is almost always just around the next corner. Affirming that fact is a good way to drive oneself crazy. An aside. It is ultimately a matter of preference, but in my view, trusting the cloud for storage is bad mojo. When it is three am on the morning an assignment is due, the last thing I want to know is that I can't get something because a server is temporarily down for a scheduled upgrade and/or the network is misbehaving for reasons beyond one's control. YMMV.