Sigaba

Kevin1990-- I recommend that instead of stressing out about the grades you've earned, sit down with a copy of your transcript and your course materials and spend a few hours figuring out how/why you got the grades you received. The objectives of this exercise are two fold. First, you want to make sure that you understand the core themes and lessons of a given class. If you do understand a course's main points, that B+ is going to serve you a lot better than you now realize. Second, you want to identify your strengths and weaknesses as a student and to identify ways to improve the former while shoring up the latter. During this exercise, see where you might have missed opportunities to do better and give yourself credit for exceeding expectations. In some cases, you might decide that you are who you are as a student For example, you might not do as well in lecture courses where the professor talks to the whiteboard and expects undergraduates to write down everything he says and then do a memory dump in blue books. Or you might just prefer to wait to the next to last instant to write an essay. In other situations, you might decide to adjust the way you approach certain types of tasks. You might conclude that listening to music while reading decreases your focus more than you previously thought. You might determine that you benefit from making flash cards for the identification portion of exams. You might find yourself benefiting from spending more time with professors during their office hours. (You might decide to trust your instinct and drop a class if you realize you won't develop good rapport with your professor.) More generally, I think that if you are going to walk the path of a historian, one of the best ways to advance your candidacy to graduate programs is to develop answers to questions like "Why should professional academic historians study war?" and "Why should military historians study professional academic history?" To be clear, you do not have to develop an argument that military history is the most important field of history. (IMO, it isn't--at least not in the study of American history.) But prepare yourself to participate intensely in conversations with, for example, social historians so that they may reconsider long held views on the relevance of war to their research interests. From there, start developing your views on which aspect of warfare is the most vital. From your posts on this BB, I think your answer is "strategy." But why? Why not grand strategy or operations or tactics or logistics or C3I or civil-military relations or technology or special operations or any of the other many sub fields. This exercise will start you on the road of figuring out how your tree fits into the thicket and how that thicket fits into the larger forest (of military history) and where that forest is on the broader historiographic landscape (i.e. the impact of warfare on the history of region X during interval Y).

IME, even the most generously funded fellowships an institution has to offer require reviews at the end of each academic year. That is, the 'free ride' must be earned each and every year.

IK-- Why do you start new threads to ask questions that have been addressed in previous threads that you also started?

MOO, if the request cannot be made in person, it should be sent in a physical letter, not an email message.

What are the intervals between [A] finishing your course work, getting married, [C] the additional semester of classes, [D] the marriage capsizing, and [E] now? (Is the sequence of events correct?) MOO, if you've got a reasonable amount of time between C/D and E (call it 2.5± years) you could use your SoP to make briefly the case that C represents an aberration, and that you've had enough time to get yourself back on track in an academic/intellectual sense. Above and beyond this issue, I urge you to make doubly sure that your head is in a good place before you go to graduate school. The stress of the application process pales when compared to the anxieties and insecurities that your coursework will activate. My $0.02.

I think your lingering doubts provide an opportunity for intense self-examination. At best, your anxieties are sparking behavior and thoughts that may not serve your interests.

"Maybe"? Having worked at a consultancy that specializes in civil and structural engineering, I worked with engineers who often had to do a lot of work in a short period of time. IME, not one ever pointed to time constraints as a reason--and certainly not as an excuse--for the quality of their work.

Lex4158-- Were I in your position, I would grab four or five published influential works by political scientists on topics of interest and then read works by historians on those same topics. I would also use jstor.org to see how historians and political scientists review each others' works. Once I'd gotten my feet wet with the historical works, I'd start culling the footnotes/endnotes and bibliography for additional readings in the historiography of the topic.

There's a well known essay by Peter Lowenberg that discusses the infantalizing dynamics of graduate school. MOO, when one goes directly from being an undergraduate to doing graduate work, one is staying in a similar mindset for a variety of reasons. By contrast, if one has done work in the private sector, a program's emphasis on process can be jarring. The four graduate students I had in mine when I wrote the post were a lawyer, a businessman, an investor, and an officer in the USAF. Neither appreciated what they took to be unnecessary hoop jumping. The lawyer felt that his coursework in law school should count as his outside field. The business guy chaffed about his dissertation not getting rubber stamped by his committee. The investor had little positive to say about any aspect of the Ivory Tower. The officer was going through the motions to get his ticket punched and invested very little of himself in discussions.

lex4158-- To add on to TMP's guidance, I strongly urge you to develop an understanding of how the craft of history differs from political science. Down the line, you may take an interdisciplinary approach to your areas of interest but you can count on academic historians holding the line between the two disciplines.

Agreed. IMO, you'd better serve your interests if you were to focus on the elements of the application process that you can impact positively.

Today's buzz over PPP reminds me of the fanfare surrounding Dollar Diplomacy. YMMV.

I like this idea. However, as I'm in L.A., I must say "I have notes!" MOO, the template would benefit from information about: the applicant's areas of emphasis if her UG history department required a senior thesis, and if she participated in that department's honors program with details about that program. Additionally, specific data about an applicant's LoRs might be useful. That is, she get letters from:The biggest names in her department Those who know her and her work the best (to include graduate students who were her T.A.s) Professors/graduate students in other departments Individuals outside of the Ivory Tower Moreover, for non Americanists, data on language skills might be beneficial. Penultimately, detailed information on SoPs and writing samples might help future applicants. [*]Did an applicant mention specific POIs or point more broadly to a specific program's areas of emphasis? [*]Did an applicant tailor SoPs for each program? [*]Did an applicant edit or rewrite significantly a longer writing sample to get it within proscribed limits? Finally, a discussion of communication with POIs might help. No, wait! A list of "lessons learned" might also help.

IME, the splendid agony of the application process is nothing compared to the exquisite suffering of preparing for qualifying exams. Please do consider the potential advantages of believing that you're both going to get in somewhere and of getting a running start.

I have profound doubts about professors and graduate students who appoint themselves gate keepers under the notion of an applicant's best interests. My $0.02.

@nasteel Have you shared this view with any of your professors, advisors, or mentors? Have you disclosed this sensibility in front of those undergraduates you've supported as a teaching assistant?

I understand the "either/or" aspect of your interests. I'm attempting to suggest that you to discuss, however briefly, the possibility that you'd end up working in an environment that requires one foot in each sector. (Or maybe you think PPP is just a fad?)

To supplement ecritdansleau's post, above, I would point out that another risk of mentioning "rockstars" in one's SOP is that one may not know how a particular department feels about that academic. If, for example, a department emphasizes its collegiality but one or two prominent faculty members deviate from that concept, the debate could spill over into the admissions process. Applicants who stress they'd fit in because of a department's areas of emphasis might fair better than those who seek to hitch their wagons specific individuals.

How does your SoP discuss the re-emergence of public private partnerships?

I think this analysis is mixing apples and oranges. Acceptance rates are not the same as probability of acceptance because not all candidates are equal. That is, a top flight candidate who has a decent probability of acceptance at a top program will be a bigger fish at programs that are not as well regarded. Also, an acceptance rate is not the same as enrollment rate. A school accepts X applicants knowing that some will not attend.

@Normal AFIAK, no academic institution would punish you for applying to more than one program.

FWIW, a recent thread in this forum discusses a similar issue <<