Sigaba

FWIW, I'm of the opinion that members of this BB who have strong views about the OWS and/or the TPM who are in the process of applying to graduate school should think very carefully before posting in this thread.

Just because I'm paranoid does not mean that cyberspace is as anonymous than one would like to think.. Or as a citizen of the Republic of Korea with the surname of Kim asked me, "How did you find me?" (It took twenty seconds. )

Er, I should have been clearer (or less parenthetical) when I said:

Why? Are you suggesting that people should change the way they do their work for their peace of mind--or for yours?

I'm not sure why you felt the need to quote the part of my post where I explicitly said that I realize it wasn't possible for everyone to do, and then wrote three more paragraphs on why it wasn't possible for you to do. You have posted your situation before, and you were one of the specific cases I had in mind when I wrote that caveat. I don't, however, think that you are the norm. Hence, with that caveat, my post was targeted at the majority of people who seem to have this problem, not the specific set of outliers I pointedly excluded.

I'm also not sure where you jumped to "secret" requirements... The cases I mentioned were specific and explicit policies, and the professors would respond to e-mail requests asking the requester to meet them in person.

While e-mail is convenient, it's also really easy to have things slip by unnoticed or unremembered. Ideally, that would never happen, but sadly it often does.

And not that I'm saying everyone should do it, but for the record I took time off of work and drove a couple of hundred miles to ask for my recommendations in person, and I'm personally glad I did. Asking in person puts a face and a personal touch to the request, and the immediate response was quite helpful for my personal state of mind.

Personally, I don't get the trend of sending e-mails to professors as a means of asking them to write a letter for you.

I actually think it's much better to set up a time to meet with them and ask them in person- it gets you a fast response, and they have a chance to ask you any questions they have about the program, etc. A lot of the faculty at my undergrad institution actually made it a policy that they would only respond to requests submitted in person (save extenuating circumstances), and I see from the CHE forums that it really isn't an uncommon policy.

I asked for all of my recommendations in person when I was applying for grad school, and made time on a visit home to swing by my old school and ask for letters during my first year of grad school when I was applying for fellowships. We just did the same for my wife so she (first year graduate student) could ask for letters.

I realize it's not always possible, but I don't think everyone I see sending e-mails is doing it because it's not possible to get to their institution/professor.

I've mentioned this in other threads, but e-mails, especially those from students/that don't *need* an immediate reply, can get buried really quickly. As a grad student, I get probably 15-20 e-mails on the average day that I have to respond to. My PI gets somewhere around 75+ per day that he has to respond to. Half the time he can't even find drafts of our manuscripts that he's expecting us to send, much less requests for letters of recommendation. The sad truth is that in the ranking of importance, letters of recommendation from past students are sadly quite far down the pile- requests from senior people in the university, grant reviewers, journal editors, and current graduate and undergraduate students take higher priority.

If you e-mail and don't get a response within a week, follow up. If you don't get a response within a week of the follow up, try calling or going in person. A week gives plenty of response time, but if they didn't respond to the first two e-mails, chances are they aren't going to respond to the third, fourth or fifth. Getting worried when less than a week has passed is expecting a response too quickly, imo.

Have you talked to the professor(s) for these classes?

I'd just be honest, assuming you think they're decent people- ask if you can talk about the midterm, and lay out your worries. Mention that you haven't had a lot of similar material as an undergrad, and it just seems like you're having a hard time playing catch up in addition to learning the new material- and see what they say. They might have some helpful study suggestions for you, additional works that might bridge the gap- or they may say you're not failing according to how they're planning on grading at the end.

If you want to PM me a bit more about the courses you're taking, I might have some suggestions. Some courses are just brutal overall.

Careful with this, though. Make sure your LOR writers know how many letters they'll be writing and that they should have received notifications from N number of schools.

The reason for this is that multiple colleges (of course) use the same general application software. So if the professor's e-mail provider is Gmail-based, like many universities, e-mails sent from the same corporate address even though they have to do with different schools' applications, like rec_letters@applyyourself.com or whatever, they will show up as ONE THREAD in the prof's inbox. Make SURE your profs are aware that this might happen, and to look for ALL the e-mails in the thread, not just the one their browser jumps to when they click on the link.

You really, really don't want to be dealing with the last minute panic when you realize it's a week past the deadline and one of your apps is missing 2 out of 3 LORs, simply because the profs never scrolled up to the first e-mail in the thread!

(ETA: The corollary advice, of course, is don't wait until a week after the deadline to check up on whether the LORs were received.)

I'm not alone! Also a first quarter grad student who applied wanting a PhD, and now really don't want one whatsoever. I've found that profs really only want to consider you for PhD studies, and having an RA/TA/Fellowship already (I won an external fellowship since I wanted a phd originally) means they and the administration expect you to earn a phd.

I've done a lot of soul searching since I applied for the fellowship and chose my school, both from working in an academic research lab for part of the summer and from looking at salary data and hiring statistics....for what I want to do, a PhD is a hindrance. I also just don't have it in me to stay in school for another 5-7 years, especially for a degree that will be ultimately useless and (significantly) reduce my lifetime earnings. I realized that for what I want out of life, I don't need 'Dr' in front of my name to be successful.

However....I'm on a three year full fellowship, and am expected to love eat breathe sleep research. I don't, at all. I also can't afford school without the fellowship, so my plan has been to hide the fact I'm leaving with a masters until absolutely necessary, and to just do research rotations until I find an advisor/project I could stay with for couple years while finishing up the coursework masters(no thesis option offered). I feel somewhat bad about leaving with a masters, but at the same time....a PhD isn't right for me and there's no sense being miserable for 5+ years if I already know that. Unless I find an advisor who is OK with me leaving after the MS, I'm really not sure what to do when the time comes to leave. Family pressure to get the phd is also getting irritating.

My advice would be that if you are funded, don't tell anyone until your last semester or two. When you put in to graduate with the MS 'on the way' to the PhD, just have an honest talk with your advisor and explain that a Phd isn't for you, and that you are absolutely certain, and just hope that he/she will give you a good job recommendation.

Yea...if grad school doesn't work out, I already have a BS degree and can very quickly get a high paying engineering job locally, so...yea. Suicide is the coward's way out.

I think there's two issues here though. Some people are talking about professors being dangerously tardy with completion of the actual letter, while others are complaining about not getting any reply whatsoever. There's no excuse for the latter. Unless the professor is uncomfortable with writing the letter but wants to stew it over for a bit before committing to the job then it takes literally seconds to reply "sure, no problem, I'm a bit busy though so it may take a couple months...". But even if they are uncomfortable it's better for everyone if they are just honest about it.

If I may, I recommend that participants in this spirited conversation define their terms and tease out their assumptions. What do you mean when you say "fair"? What constitutes "financial justice"? Why should a democratic form of government focus on addressing and resolving economic issues?

@The historians. Please do keep in mind that when you get to graduate school, you'll be brawling over these and other issues frequently and at a level of intensity greater anything you've likely witnessed. Consider the rhetorical advantages of keeping a balanced tone and comporting yourself in a way that advances the conversation rather than escalating the discussion into an argument.

My $0.02.

I say wait a year or two and ask yourself again, do I still want a PhD in history?

If I may, I recommend that participants in this spirited conversation define their terms and tease out their assumptions. What do you mean when you say "fair"? What constitutes "financial justice"? Why should a democratic form of government focus on addressing and resolving economic issues?

@The historians. Please do keep in mind that when you get to graduate school, you'll be brawling over these and other issues frequently and at a level of intensity greater anything you've likely witnessed. Consider the rhetorical advantages of keeping a balanced tone and comporting yourself in a way that advances the conversation rather than escalating the discussion into an argument.

My $0.02.

You did not bomb or flunk the GRE.

The conventional wisdom that I've heard is that anyone with a specific, activism-related interest is a flight risk. The standard case is someone who lost a relative to a particular disease and comes in hell-bent to cure it...but I think it would apply here too.

If you're interested in helping a particular group, science is a really round-about way to do that. You could get the MD and do sex reassignment surgeries or open a queer-friendly primary clinic. You could fundraise for charities helping people fund their surgeries, or you could lobby for better laws that would make transitioning easier. All this would benefit real people, directly. Instead you're proposing to park yourself in a lab, where you will spend your days growing the bacteria that express the protein that binds to the other protein that [blah blah, 12 steps later] may or may not have something to do with what's happening in the people you're interested in. In this case, will you get disillusioned and drop out, or are you prepared for the "just another brick in the wall" nature of basic science?

I think it's OK to mention that your experiences got you interested in particular topics, but I'd be careful to situate that in the context of your own broader interests (as well as the broader interests of the faculty you'd be working with at a particular school).

For political science your quant score is pretty low.And the quant score is important. But your verbal score will be very good. Maybe you could ask the same question at the polisci sub forum, some adcoms sometimes chime in there.(also it would be helpful if you would say more about your GPA)
Good luck!

You have a hilarious definition of flunking. You did OK if not stellar on the least important part of your application. If you're worried, work on your SOP.

It's bad enough to warrant concern if you have at least a few of the following:

- a poor to middling GPA
- a poorly written SOP with no clear research goals
- indifferent letters of recommendation
- little to no research experience
- a poor fit with your departments of interest
- applications going out to a small number of highly competitive schools

As it stands, if you don't have any of those, you're worrying about nothing. Your combined score will be over 1200 no matter what, so you'll miss most of the Throw Out Before Reading Cut-Offs.

Also, I'll note that you asked them to "contact you if they had any questions". While it may have been implied by the rest of your e-mail that you wanted a response, you didn't really ask for one- you didn't ask if they had room in your lab, etc.

As to your other questions about their research- answering research questions posed by unknown potential grad students falls pretty low on the priority list for most PIs, and as has been noted it's a very busy time of the semester for most.

Also, it's only been a week. I'd wait another week or so, and then just send a simple follow up e-mail-

Something like "I'm sure you've been busy, I just wanted to make sure my last e-mail didn't get lost in the system."

I think lots of people (from what I've seen here) expect way too snappy of replies from professors in general.

Eisenmann--

Do not freak out!

When you get the exam back, find some place quiet, and read through the comments a few times. Understand why your performance was not what you'd have liked. Develop a plan to do better. Then, if you can, go and talk to the professor.

FWIW, I crashed and burned more times than I care to imagine. By treating those events as learning experiences and not worrying so much about the grades, most of the time my professors and I sought to turn the occasions into "teachable moments" so while there may have been a lot of frustration, exasperation, and anger, there was never any fear of probation/loss of funding, or of expulsion.

HTH.

I bet your program has a Writing Center. Go there. They exist to help you.

Edit: ugh, now it sounds as if I think the WC will write their paper for them. I don't. I think they are experts at getting people to write their own papers

Eisenmann--

Do not freak out!

When you get the exam back, find some place quiet, and read through the comments a few times. Understand why your performance was not what you'd have liked. Develop a plan to do better. Then, if you can, go and talk to the professor.

FWIW, I crashed and burned more times than I care to imagine. By treating those events as learning experiences and not worrying so much about the grades, most of the time my professors and I sought to turn the occasions into "teachable moments" so while there may have been a lot of frustration, exasperation, and anger, there was never any fear of probation/loss of funding, or of expulsion.

HTH.

I got my first assignment back and did really well. Thank god. I need some validation as I've been feeling pretty crappy lately.

I think the disadvantage of hiring a consultant for the application process is that it adds a "layer" between you and what you can learn from going through the process first hand.

As an example, when it came to developing the list of schools I wanted to attend, I learned a lot about other departments and established professors. The specific knowledge proved useful when I was doing coursework because I had a wider understanding of who were the significant players in the field--even if they seemed obscure at first glance. Also, the skill of doing this kind of research is useful to this day.

Moreover, I'm very ambivalent about the privatization of this kind of knowledge. Yes, one has the right to spend one's money as one likes. But what are the long term consequences for one's own field--and the Ivory Tower in general-- if personal wealth becomes an even bigger factor in the admissions process than it already is?

My $0.02.

Know your audience, know how the work fits into the historiography of the subject, know how it addresses the broader concerns of the subfield, field, and the profession, especially if you are applying to Yale. (Based upon my debriefing for why I did not get in, my choice of book played a significant role in the decision.)

If you pick an older work, especially one like The Strange Career of Jim Crow, consider the utility of demonstrating a clear grasp of its impact on the field and the extent to which that impact has remained steady, or has increased, or has diminished. This task can be achieved by spending time with Reviews in American History as well as by finding longer historiographical essays in related journals. This grasp does not need to be detailed to the nth degree but it should reflect an understanding that historiographical debates change over time.

If you pick the work that inspired you to become a professional academic historian, consider the value of being very discreet with your value judgements, especially if your field of interest is political, diplomatic, naval, military, or aerospace history or any other field that remotely sounds like "the great white man" top-down narrative approach to the past. Unless you've been very well schooled and carefully mentored as an undergraduate, you may be unaware of the intense debates among historians over field, subject, and method. Be true to who you are and how you see yourself developing. Yet, do not box yourself in.

If your field falls into the category of contemporary history, keep in mind that you are writing for historians, not politicians or policy makers. Keep firm in your own mind the differences between analyzing and editorializing.

If you pick a work that represents the cutting edge, such as Stephanie McCurry's Confederate Reckoning, consider the utility of curbing your enthusiasm. Regardless of how impressed you are, or think it settles long standing debates, or believe it breaks new ground methodologically, or believe that it raises new questions that will significantly alter a field's trajectory for decades to come, all such judgements--or the opposite--are provisional.

(That being said, the history of the Civil War era will never be the same again. )

If you have in mind a book that invites for any reason the question "Is this really a work of history?" consider picking another book. If you insist on using such a work, nail the answer in a short paragraph. (That is, avoid sounding uncertain or defensive.)

If you want to pick Tango by Professor Foxtrot because you either want to be like Professor Foxtrot or to work with Professor Foxtrot, and either Foxtrot or another SME might read it, consider discussing how Tango fits not only into the relevant historiographical debates but also in the trajectory of Foxtrot's career. Be certain to note if Foxtrot's view in Tango was reformulated, enhanced, revised, or renounced in a subsequent work.

If you pick a work that is actually a collection of essays (such as Society and Culture in Early Modern France, History and Strategy, or Makers of Modern Strategy), identify ways to group the individual essays around themes. These themes should be more than the obvious but not so abstract that you come across as being "too cute".

If you pick a work that has multiple editions, consider the utility of convincing your audience that you are intimately familiar with each previous edition and the relative merits of each compared to the most current iteration.

But above and beyond all else, remember not to freak out and to have fun.