anoraklibrarian

Howdy. I hope everyone's waiting ends soon with positive results. I just heard back from my first school today and it was positive news at the University of Washington. The offer was pretty darn generous and they are my top choice. Good luck, fellow history students!

Howdy Henry! I am finishing up my masters at the City College of New York, study appalachian industrial slave leasing so I'm Karen Ferguson and Mark Leier. My work kind of combines environmental history, labor history, and African diasporic history and I'm really looking for a program that is keen on interdisciplinary studies. It seems like that is one of SFU's specialties, so I'm highly interested.

I'm in the Canadian pool too; I applied to Simon Fraser and BCU. I just heard from the BCU Director of Studies because there was a mix-up in uploading my essay and they were compiling my file last week. So we should hear from them soonish, I bet...

I'll plug my own work; I'm deep into the world of federal government social media, and I put out tons of stuff as the African Burial Ground National Monument (http://www.twitter.com/afburialgrndnps) and Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Monument (http://www.twitter.com/harrietubmannps) That said, there is the official list of hundreds of historians on twitter which can be found here: http://www.activehistory.co.uk/historians-on-twitter/index.php?page=1

Glad to hear some concurrence. I sort of did some of that sussing out in terms of 'who is available,' by talking to a relative who is a prof at U Colorado, where I nearly applied but decided not to on his advice. I learned from him that it just wasn't worth applying to his program, because all the people who work with anything even tangentially related to my topic of interest (I work with Appalachian industrial slavery) are/have retired. This was really useful knowledge, since I'm interested in going to school in the mountain west/northwest, and only a few schools in the area have strong faculties in terms of American slavery. I just didn't see the point of the letters as it seemed rather unctuous and forced from my point of view and less valuable than the time I spent reading the books and articles that profs I wanted to work with had written so that I could write a really dynamic statement of purpose that showed full comprehension of their work...

Hey all! I've just been reading this forum and its really helping me with my anxiety over graduate admissions. One thing that I've certainly not done that it seems everybody has been doing here is sending these emails to Professors of Interest. I am slightly older than most PhD applicants (32) and have extensive graduate experience (two MAs) and public history experience (museum ed at a historical society, interpretive ranger for the national park service) and it just seems sort-of disingenuous for me to write an e-mail to ask questions I don't particularly really want to ask and that I'm pretty aware of the answer to in order to make an impression. Will this hurt me? Should I try and send messages to these profs right now, as evaluation is going on? Or does it really matter at all?