Canis

Check out the Business forum and do a search for "Marketing" - there are some posts there where you might find others applying to similar programs! http://forum.thegradcafe.com/forum/14-business/

A good place to dig around also might be the faculty lists at the 'top' three education graduate programs. I would focus on associate or assistant professors. I've done this in my field and it's very helpful - I go through and download every single CV I can find. If I can't find it there, I look on academia.edu, and elsewhere. Then I look for trends in all of them in terms of organization, topics, etc. http://peabody.vanderbilt.edu/people/index.php http://education.jhu.edu/faculty/SOE_Faculty?p=1&CLEARPAGECACHE=false http://www.gse.harvard.edu/directory/faculty/

My answer would be that if she chooses to submit a resumé, then an objective is a part of that and can be included if she wants. If she chooses a CV then nope. However, there's great variation not only between disciplines but within them. The best way to approach this is using the same tools you would use in your own scientific research. Go out and find the CVs of the faculty (and perhaps advanced standing PhD students) in the M.Ed. program she is applying to. Look at what they do, consult resources like the link I sent, and see what the standard is among successful professionals in her field. The goal in any graduate application is to look like a colleague who is prepared to enter the discipline and play along - so emulating those you hope to work with can help.

Is it a resumé or a CV they ask for? This is a good start for reading about the expectations of an academic CV - including the field specific corrections included in the discussion: http://theprofessorisin.com/2012/01/12/dr-karens-rules-of-the-academic-cv/

Noticed the first 'result' for 2014 was posted today for Emory (PhD) indicating a writing sample was requested. Anyone else heard anything from their programs? It's quite early but there was one result for 2013 as well (for those who didn't follow that thread) for admission in Archaeology at University Of Albany, SUNY.

I assume this means you don't have any experience learning Quechua yet? Otherwise, the FLAS language letter is supposed to be from an instructor of the language in which you are applying.

How funny, about the icon. It is the cover of this book: http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674698437 It depicts performers in Nigeria dressed as "White Men" - with costumes that make them look like anthropologists with pith helmets and notebooks. Those are excellent points about the formatting. I'm taking the approach that articles and books (when published) are single spaced, we read in single spaced text all day, in all disciplines, so I'm presenting the work to them as finished text. Another thing I've done is only applied the page limit to my written text, not to the bibliography, since that's not a 'writing sample.' I do use the AAA style guide for all my work - although my published articles that I submitted as writing samples used their own style guides, so they are in different formats. From my experience seeing a PhD admission process in social science - they actually read the SOP, and if it was NOT good, they would look at the first few pages of the writing sample to see if the SOP was just a 'mistake' hiding a good candidate. They did not look at the writing sample of the good SOPs, but instead sent those to the professors who did work in that area for them to read. It will be interesting to see if I get any feedback about my potentially 2x as long writing samples! Thank you for the details about your discipline, it's very interesting and I've learned a lot from it!

Echoing rising star, I'm actually really curious why your advisor is treating you like a research assistant. Is this for a conference paper that you're co-authoring? If not, and you have a different RA job, why is he giving you lit reviews to write as unpaid assignments, unrelated to your research or your funding responsibilities? If you want to sustain a career, in anything, it's vital to learn how to say no when you can't take on a task. I actually think the above advice about sacrificing more sleep is absurd. Is it possible your advisor is trying to push you to only focus on grad school and drop your job? If you want to survive your program you need to start thinking about the faculty, including your advisor, as colleagues. Life will be full of managing unreasonable expectations from colleagues. Learn now how to handle them and you'll be much better off later.

Just. don't. ever. put your GPA on your CV. Email the CV to the professor and in the body of the (short) email, 'remind' them that you finished your program with a X.XX GPA overall and X.XX GPA in the major and you accomplished XYZ. And/OR include a single page bullet point list of accomplishments they can reference when writing the letter. How you format your CV speaks to your attention to professional standards in the discipline and reflects on you as a candidate.

An update? how're things looking for the new year? any luck finding more help?

Are you a U.S. citizen? Knowing more about your situation in terms of nationality, resources, etc. would help. If you are and you're returning to the US, you can sign up for healthcare using the new exchanges. If you have no income you will qualify for medicaid and have free healthcare. If you have income, you may qualify for a plan with a subsidy. https://www.healthcare.gov How are you living in China? Are you studying there? Is it your home? Are you there with a university program? All of those may affect the answer.

I'm applying to Canadian programs, and they've told me they can admit 1 or maybe 2 international students! So, it's pretty tough to study in Canada actually for a U.S. American! I had one international student in my cohort here, but she left. I suppose with both U.S. and Canada the issue is that it's much more expensive to fund an international student. Good luck though - we both need it!

Have you seen any university web sites that list formatting other than page limits? None of my programs do. Obviously in each field it's different. In mine it's the sort of thing they'll read and check out, but it's not the main deciding factor like it is in, say, Philosophy. Also most of my programs require you have an MA, so they all ask for thesis samples, up to 40 pages in the case of some, and others want the entire thesis...

There are other posts about this, but I wanted to get a fresh perspective and hear from some different fields. How are you formatting your samples? I'm submitting mine single spaced. My reasoning is that I'm not submitting them for editing, grading, or correction (which is what those spaces in double spaced term papers are meant for) - but as completed work. All the articles, books and other completed work that I and my professors read all day is single spaced, and my published work samples are single spaced. So, why would I submit double? I've read the argument that double or 1.5 is easier to read, but my faculty always request that I send them single spaced text when they're reading something over 10-15 pages. How about you?

For future reference, almost every school has a 'mail-in' LOR form for letter writers who want to fill it out and mail it in, it's almost always easy to find on their web site and it gives you a pretty good indication of what the online form asks! Search for those and you'll know for each school. I downloaded all of mine so I made sure to give my letter writers the best information, and they're pretty interesting!

Any luck with this yet? Sounds like your letter writer isn't especially enthusiastic. That's a good sign that you should find someone else. People do write negative references (I've seen it from inside!) so you don't want that. A good approach to this is to reach out to your department advisor, ask them if they would be willing to fill in because your letter writer cancelled at the last minute - it's ok to use some pity here, you've earned it! Alternatively, any professor whose course you had an A in, and who you had good conversations with. Again, it's ok to reach out and say it's a bit of a last minute emergency, ask them for help, and of course be deferential noting that you understand if they can't help with such a last minute request.

I saw you asked this question twice in two different ways. You might not be getting an answer because folks don't have enough information to help you! We don't know what the system is they're using, and perhaps someone with experience with that school could help you - but they would need more information. Any answer I could give would be unhelpful speculation!

A little anecdote, which I'm sure has been experienced by many applicants every season, but still: For years I've had a great relationship with the chair of this department. He has written letters for me in the past, happily, for prestigious scholarships that I was then awarded. He's a great letter writer. For my PhD applications, I needed an extra letter writer, so I asked him. He's not in my department, but a related field. I sent all the required and requested information: CV, classes taken with the professor, SOP, etc. Along with list of deadlines for the schools. I sent regular reminders. And still, the letters were never submitted. I sent more reminders, and still silence. Then a few days ago, on the day one of the letters was due, I wrote the professor an email about a completely different topic, and he suddenly responded right away - and also said "by the way, I'm still waiting for all your materials so I can write your letters." He wasn't avoiding the letters, he hadn't forgotten, he was waiting for the materials I had already sent but which our school's email system had sent to his spam folder because of the large attachments. So, my lesson from this: when you set up your LORs, ask them to reply and let you know that they received the materials - whatever it takes, politely get them to confirm that they have received what they need, including the emails from schools in order to write your letters. I would have thought that after years of having LORs written for me I wouldn't have run into such a simple misunderstanding - but here I was panicking about what I'd done to annoy this professor, and even wondering if he might have died... (admit it, you wonder sometimes too!) when all along, he was waiting for materials I had already sent.

Has anyone else been following this latest heated debate about job searches, PhDs, adjuncts and the job market? To sum up: On Dec. 20, Rebecca Schuman wrote the post “Naming and Shaming: UC Riverside Gives Candidates 5 Days Notice” shaming the UC Riverside English department for notifying candidates only 5 days before they would need to fly to Chicago for job interviews for a Tenure Track position. Then, a blogger who teaches at the New School (Tenured Radical) wrote a critique of Schuman’s complaint called ‘Job Market Rage Redux,” on her Chronicle of Higher Education blog in which she basically says 'stop whining, if you're good enough you'll get a job.' Schuman replied here with a scathing critique: “A Radical Defense of the Status Quo.” Tenured Radical retorted with an update to her post. Then Tenured Radical went on a rant about internet civility in a post called: “Click (Dis)Like: Why Social Media Use is Now a Professional Issue.” "The Professor Is In" blogger and career consultant called out Tenured Radical for being oblivious to the power and privilege of the tenure tracked faculty in a post (unfortunately) titled "How the Tenured are to the Job Market as White People are to Racism." She apologized for the race analogy here. Seems like it was really just link-baiting, and we can move on from that. At any rate the link baiting worked and twitter is ablaze with discussions about how Tenured faculty are also to blame for not changing the broken system - and in cases like UC Riverside, doing absolutely absurd things. Personally I thought it was about time to see a search committee called out for this nonsense. I wonder what everyone else thinks - is it OK for places like UC Riverside to act from such privileged position in job searches? Can they expect that anyone suitable for the job would either be going to MLA anyway, or would have no problem flying across the country last minute? In another gem, the chair of the department at UCR has this incredibly tone deaf bit to say in an interview with Inside Higher Education: "Deborah Willis, chair of English at Riverside, said via email that she was surprised by the concern over the issue. "When I was on the job market years back, I can recall getting an interview invitation on Christmas Eve -- and that's when MLA was on the weekend right after Christmas. (I also recall being thrilled to get the request.) I've heard of other people being contacted a day or two before MLA," she said. Added Willis: "The job search is, especially for entry-level positions, a stressful, challenging, exhausting process, and I can understand why job seekers would be upset about anything that makes it more stressful. We all have a lot of sympathy for our applicants -- especially since we've all been through it ourselves. But the big problems are the things that make the job market so terrible in the first place -- budget cuts, dwindling support for public universities, the increasing reliance on adjunct faculty, etc. The timing of an interview request seems pretty minor in the great scheme of things."

I can't speak to your field at all, so take this for what it's worth - but you might find this interesting. Duke university provides an SOP example from someone who is doing just this, transferring from one PhD program to another. It might provide some inspiration about how to frame the whole thing, and how doing so (at least in this case which is not in your field) for this student meant moving to a program that has a perfect fit with a very specific project. Have a look at the statement by Samuel Shearer: http://culturalanthropology.duke.edu/uploads/assets/2011-2012GradStmts(1).doc

We don't disagree here. As I noted above "In my experience there's a good chance any given professor will be extraordinarily picky, sensitive, quirky, and will apply all of their personal inclinations and pet peeves to their expectations of students." The question is, where do you draw the line? Do you send Dawkins a "happy holiday" card? Or do you send him a Knights of Columbus "Keep Christ in Christmas" card? Or a Hanukkah card? Or a Kwanza card? Clearly not the latter three, and the former is less clearly ok, but probably tolerable. Either way, as noted above by others as well - the appropriate thing is probably to steer clear of such specific cards and send a 'thank you' card, or even a new year's card. You're much less likely to get on a crazy professors bad side by participating in the Hegemony of Gratitude and Gregorian Calendars than such a specific holiday. And as I noted above, in Computer Science it might not matter unless they turn out to be a dogmatic atheist who not only dislikes Christmas but the pre-christian traditions it's based on. Of course, you could do lots of research on the person first and try to guess whether they will react like Dawkins - but probably safer, for future students looking for advice, to avoid the potentially religious holidays with Professors they don't know at all and from whom they're hoping to get an offer of admission.

A PhD in Sociology of Education sounds like exactly what you've been building towards. Maybe ask yourself if you want to work in a university or continue teaching? Are you interested in a research life?

I suppose not being able to see how that might offend someone is itself also an example of a lack of ability to imagine the world from someone else's experience. If Richard Dawkins was your POI, would you send him a Christmas Card without considering the consequences? Point is just that one never knows how someone else feels about religion or politics that might seem 'normal' or without much meaning to you.

No one ever answered these great questions - so here's my advice: 1. The faculty at my school includes a professor of linguistics who is a non-native English speaker. There's no reason this should stop you, but like any graduate work your English skills need to be excellent. 2. Fieldwork can be done anywhere. Each department is going to have their own areas of specialty, but there is no reason beyond that any anthro or socio-cultural linguistics program would expect you to have any particular field site. You could do your fieldwork one block from your school or on the other side of the world. You could do it in France, or anywhere in the US - that is up to your project and research topic. It's very common to anthropologists to train in the US and do fieldwork in their home regions. 3. & 4. These are related questions. In linguistics and anthro generally, your topic could be anything. But to frame that topic in terms of anthropology, you'll need to have a background in it. Some programs will accept credit transfers, some will not. I don't know of any anthropology programs that would accept non-anthropology credit transfers. Most people in your situation would be advised to get an MA in Anthropology prior to applying since you have no previous anthropology coursework (other than audited classes, which don't count). However, someone in your situation could also try to take some courses as a non-matriculated student in order to show that you can excel in anthropology. You could do this in the MA program at a school that has a good PhD program. That's a good way to make a change in discipline. After you've taken some courses and shown that you have no problem in anthro, they are more likely to consider your application.

I totally agree. But, have you met academics? In my experience there's a good chance any given professor will be extraordinarily picky, sensitive, quirky, and will apply all of their personal inclinations and pet peeves to their expectations of students. Prob doesn't matter in Comp Sci, the OPs major, but for social science or other fields an act suggesting such a lack of ability to imagine the world from someone else's experience, and a failure to consider cultural context - that would probably be taken pretty seriously as an indication of whether they're suited for the field or whether you want to work with them for 6 years. Personally, if a student did that I find it very sweet. But I know faculty who wouldn't - especially atheists who are sometimes more dogmatic (and offended by things like that) than the religious faculty!