Sigaba

How many careers are envisioned in the scenario above? 
https://www.kornferry.com/content/dam/kornferry/docs/article-migration/Briefings38_Nomad-Economy.pdf

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/nlsoy.pdf
https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED582350.pdf
IME, working in the private sector (three industries) is not without challenges and risks.
No one has tenure. No one. I'm currently in an industry that had two firms that bear the name of one of its founders. He is with neither. In a different industry, founders --and many others-- were tossed aside when corporate decided to change strategy. At will employees can be terminated with zero warning. Turn over your keys, sign this document, here's a live check. GTFO. "Exempt" employees can be required to work more than eight hours a day for weeks at a stretch without additional compensation. Non compete agreements can limit future opportunities. (Even if your pockets are deep enough to get you through the litigation.) Firms that practice "just in time" hiring will expect you to do the job with minimal to no training.  Your plans for a career path centered around areas of practice and types of clients make you the ideal candidate to on board the strategic hire. Raises, salary adjustment, and bonuses are not guaranteed. Sometimes, bosses want to get your attention. Other benefits can be offered on a use it or lose it basis and can be discontinued from one year to the next. Not every employer offers 401(k)s nor matches employee contributions. KPIs are generally centered around numerical metrics that don't always add up and sometimes work at cross purposes. The "grand strategy" of the Powers That Be can be unknown and ultimately at cross purposes of what bosses, middle managers, and worker bees are told.  The pace of work can be bone crushing. Imagine your busiest weeks as a teacher the slowest weeks of a year. Or two.  The paper you write days before it is due -- imagine it being worth tens thousands of dollars to your firm and hundreds, if not millions to a client, even though the client has gone for months without giving you information it said it would provide during the project kick off meeting. Undergraduates unhappy with your work? Try managing Teamsters. Uncooperative colleagues? Try getting members of private and public sector unions to see it your way when they know they damn well don't. "Toxic" work environments/coworkers/supervisors? Unless you get to HR first with clear and convincing documentation, STFU and get back to work. "Scope creep"==> project budget exhausted? Do the work on your own time. "One set of integrated comments" from the client? Here are ten sets of comments, some contradict others.  Disagree with how the work should be done on a project? That's nice. STFU and get back to work. Intellectual freedom? Ah, well, now that you've learned of the existence of that NDA, you may never again talk about it nor the project nor the client. Risk management is everyone's responsibility even if you've never been trained on how to manage risk.  Free and open exchange of information ==> email blast from the bosses after a project manager's POV is printed in a newspaper. Templates Time cards Morale check?

Even though I was told by a professor that I might have gotten a job had I been born a decade earlier--"maybe"--I would never advise someone not to pursue a personal or professional goal. (The day I passed quals, the committee member who represented my outside field said Think of yourself as a teacher. By which he meant that it was my responsibility to give people information that enabled them to achieve their goals--my opinion of those goals notwithstanding.)
I would (and have) recommended doing a herculean amount of due diligence--including reading the OP again and again. There may be "nothing new" to some readers who are aware of some of the patterns that have been developing since the early 1990s. To many others, the post adds crucial nuance.
 I also recommend setting up job alerts in Linkedin and elsewhere so one understands how graduate degrees may or may not translate into requirements for job qualifications and professional experience. Some consultancies and government agencies require the kind of research experience that cannot quite be satisfied by a master's degree.
FWIW/Neither here nor there, I do take slight exception to the lumping together of the academic job market for professional academic historians as the most important key performance indicator of the profession's vitality or sustainability. 

Hi, @history45 Welcome to the grad cafe. Please give some thought to searching for "graduate history programs extend deadlines" on Google. You may find results that are helpful.

The professor who knows your work best has given you helpful but challenging guidance. You can do it!

How many careers are envisioned in the scenario above? 
https://www.kornferry.com/content/dam/kornferry/docs/article-migration/Briefings38_Nomad-Economy.pdf

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/nlsoy.pdf
https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED582350.pdf
IME, working in the private sector (three industries) is not without challenges and risks.
No one has tenure. No one. I'm currently in an industry that had two firms that bear the name of one of its founders. He is with neither. In a different industry, founders --and many others-- were tossed aside when corporate decided to change strategy. At will employees can be terminated with zero warning. Turn over your keys, sign this document, here's a live check. GTFO. "Exempt" employees can be required to work more than eight hours a day for weeks at a stretch without additional compensation. Non compete agreements can limit future opportunities. (Even if your pockets are deep enough to get you through the litigation.) Firms that practice "just in time" hiring will expect you to do the job with minimal to no training.  Your plans for a career path centered around areas of practice and types of clients make you the ideal candidate to on board the strategic hire. Raises, salary adjustment, and bonuses are not guaranteed. Sometimes, bosses want to get your attention. Other benefits can be offered on a use it or lose it basis and can be discontinued from one year to the next. Not every employer offers 401(k)s nor matches employee contributions. KPIs are generally centered around numerical metrics that don't always add up and sometimes work at cross purposes. The "grand strategy" of the Powers That Be can be unknown and ultimately at cross purposes of what bosses, middle managers, and worker bees are told.  The pace of work can be bone crushing. Imagine your busiest weeks as a teacher the slowest weeks of a year. Or two.  The paper you write days before it is due -- imagine it being worth tens thousands of dollars to your firm and hundreds, if not millions to a client, even though the client has gone for months without giving you information it said it would provide during the project kick off meeting. Undergraduates unhappy with your work? Try managing Teamsters. Uncooperative colleagues? Try getting members of private and public sector unions to see it your way when they know they damn well don't. "Toxic" work environments/coworkers/supervisors? Unless you get to HR first with clear and convincing documentation, STFU and get back to work. "Scope creep"==> project budget exhausted? Do the work on your own time. "One set of integrated comments" from the client? Here are ten sets of comments, some contradict others.  Disagree with how the work should be done on a project? That's nice. STFU and get back to work. Intellectual freedom? Ah, well, now that you've learned of the existence of that NDA, you may never again talk about it nor the project nor the client. Risk management is everyone's responsibility even if you've never been trained on how to manage risk.  Free and open exchange of information ==> email blast from the bosses after a project manager's POV is printed in a newspaper. Templates Time cards Morale check?

It's not all on the pols and bureaucrats. Not in California, anyways. In the 1990s, voters kicked a can down the road. The resulting sinkhole is being filled with crumbling infrastructure and fading dreams.
It's worth pointing out that while budget management is ultimately pragmatic and political in nature. If you were to have 100% budget transparency, "concerned citizens" could sandbag approved policies and projects by sharpshooting costs through the mistaken belief that running a public organization is just like running a business which is just like balancing a household checkbook. ("Why $x.xx for a Z? I can get it for less at Target.")

Hi, @history45 Welcome to the grad cafe. Please give some thought to searching for "graduate history programs extend deadlines" on Google. You may find results that are helpful.

Even though I was told by a professor that I might have gotten a job had I been born a decade earlier--"maybe"--I would never advise someone not to pursue a personal or professional goal. (The day I passed quals, the committee member who represented my outside field said Think of yourself as a teacher. By which he meant that it was my responsibility to give people information that enabled them to achieve their goals--my opinion of those goals notwithstanding.)
I would (and have) recommended doing a herculean amount of due diligence--including reading the OP again and again. There may be "nothing new" to some readers who are aware of some of the patterns that have been developing since the early 1990s. To many others, the post adds crucial nuance.
 I also recommend setting up job alerts in Linkedin and elsewhere so one understands how graduate degrees may or may not translate into requirements for job qualifications and professional experience. Some consultancies and government agencies require the kind of research experience that cannot quite be satisfied by a master's degree.
FWIW/Neither here nor there, I do take slight exception to the lumping together of the academic job market for professional academic historians as the most important key performance indicator of the profession's vitality or sustainability. 

Even though I was told by a professor that I might have gotten a job had I been born a decade earlier--"maybe"--I would never advise someone not to pursue a personal or professional goal. (The day I passed quals, the committee member who represented my outside field said Think of yourself as a teacher. By which he meant that it was my responsibility to give people information that enabled them to achieve their goals--my opinion of those goals notwithstanding.)
I would (and have) recommended doing a herculean amount of due diligence--including reading the OP again and again. There may be "nothing new" to some readers who are aware of some of the patterns that have been developing since the early 1990s. To many others, the post adds crucial nuance.
 I also recommend setting up job alerts in Linkedin and elsewhere so one understands how graduate degrees may or may not translate into requirements for job qualifications and professional experience. Some consultancies and government agencies require the kind of research experience that cannot quite be satisfied by a master's degree.
FWIW/Neither here nor there, I do take slight exception to the lumping together of the academic job market for professional academic historians as the most important key performance indicator of the profession's vitality or sustainability. 

Somewhere on here there are threads about being pregnant in graduate school. Use the search feature to find them.

I'll wade carefully here as an old-timer. 
When I started my PhD in 2012, I was already ambivalent about being a professor or entering academia. I wanted to get my PhD and work as a historian in a very large museum, which was viable then.
I didn't know what academia was really about. 
I had never run a classroom.  I was told that to be a TA meant running discussion sections and grading but I had no idea that there were positions that involved only grading.  Due to declining student enrollments, my department dropped discussion sections and added more grading positions. Opportunities for teaching sessions before candidacy were quite limited. I didn't get to do it until after I passed my candidacy (partially due to fellowships in my first 2 years). I fell in love with teaching and interacting with students but stopped short at "quality over quantity" approach, unlike so many graduate students who focused on "more classes I teach, the better my CV will look for teaching jobs!"
Throughout my time, I was truly bogged down by heavy coursework load (due to fellowship requirements), research (including writing funding applications and trip and budget planning), conference papers, a journal article, and mental health issues that nearly took over my life. I simply had no time to develop and hone skills that employers valued such as computer programming, organizing and executing events and conferences, etc., etc. However, I did immensely improve my written and oral communication with the incredible support of professors, mentors, and colleagues. I did get to travel the world (literally) which I would have not been able to do until... maybe retirement, much thanks to the fund-raising that I did.  I never imagined that I would have an overall satisfactory experience compared to many horror stories that I had heard.
The pandemic hit when I was interviewing for postdocs. When the campus shut down and hiring freeze went into effect everywhere, I realized that there would be no second wave of postdocs and visiting assistant professor positions that came between March-May. I took advantage of one semester of funding that remaining to postpone my dissertation defense.  I realized that a December graduation meant that I wouldn't be able to secure an academic job to start in January. I started getting used to the idea that I would have to apply for non-academic jobs in this situation and I gradually became OK with that because I've been there before. 
Now, i am applying for a combination of academic and non-academic jobs to see what will bite. When it comes to non-academic jobs, my topic or historical content knowledge does not matter and it is important to separate myself from those and focus on the skills that I have to bring to those jobs. The PhD is simply another degree on your resume, nothing more, but you will have a section under "Work/Grant-Writing/Teachingetc. Experience" which you can tout the skills you have used to complete the degree.
Do I regret going for my PhD? Nope. I was so hungry for an opportunity to dive deep and become an expert in specific historical fields. I went through a MA program (2008-2010) and studied a new language abroad for several months (2010-2011) just to be sure that the PhD was what I wanted, even though I decided in 2006. The key to survival, I think for me, was knowing that I had prior work experience and was developing valuable skills (especially fund-raising if you're great at it) which to highlight while applying for non-academic jobs. And perhaps the comfort of knowing that I may never need to work to become fluent in all of my reading languages again.
And I'm a risk-adverse person. Really know yourself before you apply. Are you the type of person who can complete a big job which you've devoted hours and hours and breathed your life and walk away within weeks?  Do you have the grit and resiliency to overcome obstacles that come your way? The PhD journey is much more suited to street-smart people than book-smart people. If you're the latter type, go for the MA which is less intense in the way of non-coursework stuff.

Please clarify. Did you get the book's title wrong or the book's author wrong?

(Either / or, I don't think it is an unrecoverable error if your SOP is solidly written otherwise--especially if you're applying to an educational psychology department.)
If doing so will ease your state of mind, please do contact the appropriate person by telephone and see if you can swap in the corrected document. I do not recommend going into detail--just say that you belatedly caught a typo. Try to think of the request as "it's no big deal one way or another" even though you may be dying inside. If the answer is "no," (which I would expect), do what you can to accept the decision, honor the way you feel about the whole thing, learn what you can, and then go on with your life.
Please make sure that you understand that you made a mistake. You are not a moron. You are a person competing for admission to a graduate program during multiple overlapping global crises that are having destructive cascading impacts upon the fabric of society. 

Hey y'all - long time no see! I haven't been on this site in probably 3 years! 
Between the years of 2015 and 2017, I applied 3 times for grad programs. On my 3rd round, I ended up getting into a funded MA program, which I'm currently writing my thesis for.
I've decided to apply again to PhD programs! I feel crazy for applying 4 times...but maybe 4th time's a charm? 
Over the years, I've submitted 23 grad school applications and got 19 rejections. This year I'm applying to 7 PhD programs. I hope it's not 7 more rejections.

In order, yes, submit at least one more application, and focus your efforts on your SOP and limit work on your writing sample to making adjustments for clarity.
The peril of your plan is that you are not merely competing against applicants who are dedicated to the study of history. You are also competing against applicants who are committed to the study of history. Committed applicants believe that COVID-19 does not materially impact their "chances" because they are competing against themselves; their potential, their hopes to contribute to the profession, and their doubts that they will be outstanding scholars. They know (somehow) that they're going to get into a program of their choice. 
IMO, a clear and convincing demonstration of commitment to the craft will give applicants a competitive advantage that will transcend the "stats" of an applicant who throws a hat in the ring thinking, "Well, I threw my hat in the ring but because of COVID..."
My specific recommendation to you is to focus on your SOP more than your writing sample. I urge you to do what you need to do so that your SOP reflects accurately the best version of yourself now and lays out a vision of your personal professional development. Figure out how to craft a SOP that you know is the best writing and thinking about history you can do right now.
At this point, the amount of effort it will take to improve your writing sample significantly (in terms of historical analysis) may be better spent on quality control. Make sure that your writing is clear, that your references are accurate, and that you've hunted and killed all the gremlins. Grammatical mistakes and typos can become harder to find the more you look at your own writing. Try to budget time so you can leave your writing sample untouched for a day or two and then circle back to a printed copy that you can mark up with a blue pencil.

In order, yes, submit at least one more application, and focus your efforts on your SOP and limit work on your writing sample to making adjustments for clarity.
The peril of your plan is that you are not merely competing against applicants who are dedicated to the study of history. You are also competing against applicants who are committed to the study of history. Committed applicants believe that COVID-19 does not materially impact their "chances" because they are competing against themselves; their potential, their hopes to contribute to the profession, and their doubts that they will be outstanding scholars. They know (somehow) that they're going to get into a program of their choice. 
IMO, a clear and convincing demonstration of commitment to the craft will give applicants a competitive advantage that will transcend the "stats" of an applicant who throws a hat in the ring thinking, "Well, I threw my hat in the ring but because of COVID..."
My specific recommendation to you is to focus on your SOP more than your writing sample. I urge you to do what you need to do so that your SOP reflects accurately the best version of yourself now and lays out a vision of your personal professional development. Figure out how to craft a SOP that you know is the best writing and thinking about history you can do right now.
At this point, the amount of effort it will take to improve your writing sample significantly (in terms of historical analysis) may be better spent on quality control. Make sure that your writing is clear, that your references are accurate, and that you've hunted and killed all the gremlins. Grammatical mistakes and typos can become harder to find the more you look at your own writing. Try to budget time so you can leave your writing sample untouched for a day or two and then circle back to a printed copy that you can mark up with a blue pencil.

Indeed... just because Germany was immediately demilitarized after it collaborated with the Ottomans during the Great War (including witnessing the genocide), Germany had other ways of maintaining ties with Turkey and that's where "soft" power comes in. Make sure you're asking questions that are interesting to you drawing from what you've been learning. No one needs to know more than a sentence or two about a book that was influential to you.  I'd just want one line and if I was particularly interested, I'd look it up myself but in general, readers in your field will *know* about a lot of scholarship that has been published, even if only cursory. They are the ones who are going to make the case for your admissions to the general committee if they want you.

And also... 

https://www.legacy.com/obituaries/sanantonio/obituary.aspx?n=michael-william-rollin&pid=194224408&fhid=5701

https://scholarworks.umt.edu/etd/5202/
 Keep in mind that you've got the nucleus of a strong statement of purpose. You've identified the needle you want to move (at least provisionally). Overstating the "newness" of the needle may not be as beneficial as you indicating that you have a sense of where that needle fits on a branch on a tree in a forest.

Be careful. Unless your German is excellent and you know the historiography like the back of your hand, using a word like "never" can be a costly mistake, all the more since it is an avoidable one.
 

BLUF: I would not recommend discussing this specific work  as you propose unless you are confident enough to center your "chances" of acceptance around your understanding of the book's value to ongoing historiographical debates.

Based upon a cursory glance, Export Empire seems like an enviable work of scholarship that moves the needle. However, what's fashionably called "soft power" has a concept often explored and hotly debated among historians studying diplomatic, military, and naval history for decades--particularly (but far from exclusively) Americanists.
If you're going to mention this work, I recommend that you make clear that it raises questions that are new to you and, maybe, a contingent of scholars studying modern German history. (I would be especially careful if your intention is to work with Ogle or Connelly at Cal. 
I would also recommend that you extend the breadth of your research on "soft power" so that you have a working understanding of ongoing historiographical debates on both sides of the Atlantic and their relationship to contemporaneous discourse on policy, especially if "soft power" broadly conceived is not the forest you want to roam.
As an alternative, your discussion of Export Empire could be very constrained: the book caught your attention and, for the moment, offers a provisional roadmap of the territory you want to explore and how you want to travel and, in the right program, you may be able to move the needle in a debate of enduring importance in modern history.
Which ever course of action you select, I think it is imperative that you absolutely nail your summary of the Export Empire by providing no more than two sentences that answer the questions: what is the book about? and why is it important?
$0.02.
 

Re: adcoms: it's not just about how brilliant you seem to them. If they have a choice between two excellent candidates in an area, they might go with the one who seems more collegial to them, or the one who seems like a better fit with the other members of the new cohort. These adcoms are selecting people they'll be with for the better part of 6 years, and they're trying to create what they think is a well-balanced cohort. You might be a genius, but if you're a genius with an ego and it shows, that will get you rejected at some places. In other cases, adcoms will have decided to introduce different areas of interest into their program, and that might mean they select students with those interests even if they do not already seem like a polished genius. Also, lots of programs look for potential rather than genius or highly developed professional skills (and if you publish early, you're stuck with that publication for the rest of your life, and you might regret it one day).
Basically, the quality of your application and all the accompanying details matter, but whether you get in or not cannot be reduced to how outstanding this or that application is.
Other factors matter to them, too, and you can't guess what those are.

I would make sure to follow each graduate school's application instructions to a tee. If only three letters are requested, then only send three. If the applications allow "up to four," then a fourth one is probably okay.

Were I in your situation, I'd make an effort to write an efficient introduction that contextualizes the writing sample both within the relevant historiography as well as the larger thesis/article.

For examples on how this task has been done in the past, I would grab one or two very influential works by historians and see how they went from doctoral dissertation to featured article in a journal to published work.

(J.C.A. Stagg's Mr. Madison's War (1983), may be worth a look if you're an Americanist.)

Were I in your situation, I'd make an effort to write an efficient introduction that contextualizes the writing sample both within the relevant historiography as well as the larger thesis/article.

For examples on how this task has been done in the past, I would grab one or two very influential works by historians and see how they went from doctoral dissertation to featured article in a journal to published work.

(J.C.A. Stagg's Mr. Madison's War (1983), may be worth a look if you're an Americanist.)

Hello all! My first collective sigh of relief after submitting my applications is here. Now time to hold my breath for the next 4 months as I wait to hear. I wanted to restart this post for this year, and what a strange year it is. Copying the format from last year's thread, for future MURP/MCP/MUP hopefuls where they posted all the info as applicants, and updated as the weeks and months went by. Good luck to all and stay positive!
Age/Gender/Citizenship
27/M/US
Undergraduate degree/School/Year graduated 
BA in Int'l Relations / run of the mill Cal State school / 2015
MA in Public Policy / Central European University / 2017
GIS Certificate / Community College / est. 2021
GPA - GRE  - TOEFL (for Int'l students) 
3.4 BA/3.8 MA - No GRE, part of the reason I applied this year
Work Experience:
3+ years in immigration; 1 recent community development internship (really leaning on strength of references, GIS cert, and SOPs since I don't have the typical background)
Letter of recommendations: (from whom)
Combination of MA Thesis Advisor, Boss at Immigration Firm, GIS professor, Boss at Internship
Schools applied to: SJSU, Cal Poly Pomona, UC Berkeley, UCLA,
In:
Out:
Wait-list:
Awaiting:
Results:

Hi everyone. Glad to have some support through this journey. I'm actually a current MRP applying to PhD programs in planning. I'm happy to talk about both journeys. 
Age/Gender/Citizenship
24/M/US
Undergraduate degree/School/Year graduated 
BA in Public Administration / large southern flagship university / 2019
BS in Environmental Design / same large southern flagship university / 2019
MRP / ivy league / 2021
GPA - GRE  - TOEFL (for Int'l students) 
3.8 BA/3.6 BS/3.5 MRP - Less-than-satisfactory GRE scores in 2019, but good enough for most masters programs I applied to; not submitting this time around
Work Experience:
Internships in urban planning, non-profit, urban design, economic development, and public education
Research Experience:
Transportation planning, community development, education policy
Letter of recommendations: (from whom)
Program chair from undergrad, Program chair from masters, current internship supervisor, former internship supervisor
Schools applied to: Stanford (education policy), USC, UNC, Michigan, TAMU
In:
Out:
Wait-list:
Awaiting: Stanford, USC, UNC, Michigan, TAMU
Results: