mudlark

Yes, that's right.

Congrats, student4life! Hopefully this is the first of an avalanche of good news.

I really hope you hear soon. Partly because you all seem like nice people and I want you to get money, and partly so I can stop checking this frickin thread! I can't leave until it gets resolved!

Have you heard the saying, "Don't explain, don't complain"? You don't need to burst into your adviser's office and blurt out the whole thing, complete with underlying personal issues. Just go in with a script in your head that has the necessary information, no more. "Hi Adviser, I wanted to check in with you about something. I've recently realized that there are problems with the data from my master's thesis, and since I'm too far away to re-run the numbers, it's not feasible for me to complete the project without interrupting my studies here. If I don't finish my thesis, will that have any impact on my current program?" Then answer any questions s/he asks as directly as possible. Good luck!

Actually, I wouldn't ask a lecturer or sessional instructor/adjunct for letters. My grad chair specifically advises against it. When they ask for letters from "professors", they mean people who are on the tenure track: either assistant, associate, or full professors. The reasoning is that these people should be actively engaged in research, and are therefore able to speak to your potential as a researcher. People with teaching positions aren't seen as reliable assessors of research potential. Not saying I agree with the logic, just saying what I've been told.

As long as a) your admission to your PhD was not conditional upon you completing your master's and b ) you have never presented yourself as having finished it, on paper or in person, you should be ok. But still best to check, I think. Maybe the DGS, so it's not your advisor?

Here's my take. Sure! As long as it doesn't interfere with your grad work.

This happened to a friend of mine. Five people at my university got late SSHRC offers in January of last year. If you accept the first offer, they pull you from the second competition and give your spot in the Ottawa pool to the next person on the waitlist. Obviously, it can be a really hard decision. The person I know in this situation had come up with a completely new project that she was very excited about and hoped to win a CGS with. Then she got a late offer of an SDF for her old, less sexy proposal. She took the SDF--it'd take a lot of balls and a little insanity to give up on sure money for a chance at better--but I think she'll always wonder if that second proposal would have hit the jackpot. The good news is that if you pick up a SSHRC in January, you get retroactive money to your start date (either May or September). So you could get a nice pile all at once. Of course, you could also lose your internal funding depending on your school, so it could all be moot. With the person I know, she had to PAY BACK an internal award in order to pick up retroactive SSHRC money, and it all came out in the wash.

One thing you can be sure of: there will always be someone around willing to take on the work that you give up. That's the least of your worries. Just give them some warning (like, a couple of months?) so that they can fill the spot.

Don't put too much stock in what the lists say. They're mostly up to show off what kind of research is getting funded. No official importance. Somewhat-embarrassing-example: being apparently a raging egotist, I searched for myself on that link you posted. I'm not on the CGS list. I show up on the fellowship list, despite having received my new offer of award many, many weeks ago. Just like I'm on the small list but getting the big award, I bet the folks studying in the states are on the big list, but receiving the small award.

Don't feel like a douchebag! That sounds very reasonable. You don't need to be available 24/7, especially if you're making an effort to accomodate others within the limits you've set.

Awwww, so sorry to check in and find everyone still waiting! I hope good news comes soon. I mean, it's almost time to start a SSHRC 2011 thread. My school breaks it up into monthly payments, so I won't get my first payment until the very end of September.

I've given the deposit before signing a lease before, but that was in an incredibly crowded rental market where you showed up to see the place with your cheque book or you didn't get it. It wasn't long distance, though, and the landlord seemed super trustworthy. I've never had a credit check run on me at any of the five places I rented over the years. Is this an American/Canadian thing?

Only people entering their first year and people entering their second are eligible for CGS.

ChanEcon is totally right on this one, I think.

I have a Sony eBook reader, and love it to bits and pieces. I chose it because it's cheaper than the kindle ($250), and can handle various formats more easily (ePub, PDF. .txt, .doc) so you're not tied to Amazon as a source. It doesn't have wireless or any big bells and whistles, but I really wanted a single-function device to prevent distraction. You can pull books off of Project Gutenberg and Google Books with no trouble at all, which is a plus if you're into public domain material. I find it helps my reading speed and focus. You can change the font size, so as I get tired, I bump it up. That way there's less info on the screen, preventing that "my eyes are floating two inches above a giant block of text but I'm not actually reading" thing. Not having a big physical book in front of me also helps. I don't constantly flip ahead to see when the chapter ends, or what happens next (bad habits, yes). I've read a handful of 600+ page novels on it, and find it very usable. The battery lasts for a week, with 6 hours a day of use. Plus, it's very shiny and pretty and my friends all ooh and ahh over it.

That's awesome, Phalene! Even if nothing monetary comes of it, you know that you impressed the socks off your committee. I hope the big money comes through for you.

Can I attempt to do some devil's advocating here, without sounding like I'm siding with JerkProf? I know that when I think back on the few times a prof had me spitting bullets, s/he usually had some good points that I can only see in retrospect once the rage dies down. You won't sic a dragon on me or anything? Here, I think you likely have different definitions of 'original'. As your post progresses, you talk a lot about fresh angles or applications of theorists as your definition of originality. It's quite possible that he heard 'original' in its stronger sense, meaning an argument that brings new information to light, rather than re-mixing existing material. I assume that finding something truly new in medieval studies would involve serious language knowledge and time digging through archives, in which case he's right to think that it's not possible for an undergraduate to achieve in the context of a distance learning course. Of course, re-mixing existing material and finding new angles and applications are exactly what you should be doing at this point in your academic career. It's possible that he interpreted you as wanting to do high level primary research, when you really want support to do highly sophisticated readings. Yes, annoying. But you may well end up with someone who is dismissive of your particular critical outlook on an adcom. You need to make sure that you have a solid rationale for why the project requires a specific critical frame. This could be a great challenge to really think through your critical allegiances and figure out logical justifications for why you work with the ideas that you do. My sense is that new historicist work is no longer written with the urgency that it once was. The basic principles have been accepted pretty broadly, and a lot of work incorporates some level of historicism. It was a necessary corrective to a-historical high theory, and it was a largely successful one, in my opinion. It has been folded into a lot of other approaches now. It's a useful, good frame, but it's no longer the cutting edge. You have to ask yourself whether the arguments that someone like Greenblatt uses to justify his work are still relevant and necessary to your specific project. I've heard the same thing from a handful of profs. Student writing will be utterly transformed by graduate coursework, so they just need to see that you have the foundation established. I think it's probably more important than JerkProf is saying (like, they probably get read, and a good one can probably help you), but I think there's a grain of truth in there. He clearly hasn't bought into your goal. And frankly, I'm not sure he has to. You seem very driven, and sure of yourself. If this is what you belong doing, you'll get there regardless of his help (or lack thereof). But imagine that you're a prof (what's his rank? what else is going on with his career right now? where are his priorities?) dealing with hundreds of students that you don't know, and will not meet, as a distance learning instructor. Your intention to apply to top programs is very real to you, but it's just an intention to him. Similarly, a BA he wasn't involved in and an honors thesis that he has never read aren't going to be compelling evidence to someone who isn't invested in your path. Lots of people write an honours thesis and remain horrible candidates for grad school. You know that you're not one of those people, but he doesn't. He doesn't have evidence of your talent. All I'm trying to say here is that you can't expect someone with such a tangential relationship to you and so little opportunity to see you showcase your abilities to be as invested in your career as you are. You see an important opportunity and a chance to do serious work; he sees a nearly anonymous request that will result in extra work for him. Awesome, especially the library part. It's not, but it's an extremely useful tool that you can use as a section of another paper. Why not take a subject that you've already written on, and do a parallel scholarship review? It could go a long way to transforming a strong reading into a paper that participates in ongoing critical discussions. This is where you can start working out the rationale for your methodology. Instead of saying, "Here's a topic and I'm going to use Greenblatt to produce a reading", you'll be able to say, "Here's what other people have said about a topic, where they've succeeded, and where they've failed. It's clear that in order to fill the research gap left by other criticism, and to reach this incredibly important and vital element, an approach like Greenblatt's is needed, and here's why." That's one of the big differences between undergraduate and graduate writing. Apologies if I'm telling you something you already know. But I think you'll get more out of the class if you see the final assignment as a useful exercise that will help you in the long run, rather than a make-work project. When I applied for my MA, I just used the only lengthy paper I had in the sub-field I wanted to study. Pretty random, frankly. When I applied for my PhD, I wanted to look like I had more scholarly focus, so I chose two papers that used the methodology I was proposing to continue working with in my PhD. This is a great way to link your writing sample to the SOP. If you're proposing to do archival stuff, have some print culture in your sample. If you're proposing postcolonial study, make sure your sample isn't totally Brit-centric. Etc. I'm a firm believer that methodology is secondary, and that the approach you choose should grow out of the requirements of the materials you're working with. Does the work you want to do require a certain frame? Then convince an adcom of that. Tell them in the SOP what approach you plan to take, and show them in the sample that you're already working with the required tools. Little of column A, little of column B. It's hard to run into someone who doesn't care about your goal, after getting used to profs who encourage you and support you and are strongly personally invested in you. But hey, it happens. Not everyone will like you, or think you deserve special attention. Sucks that you've run into this situation now, when you have so much riding on the course. But you'll push through it. Convincing indifferent people that your scholarship is worthwhile, even if they think the methodology is bullshit, is part of the game. You'll be convincing indifferent people to accept you to conferences, award you grants, and publish your work for the rest of your life, if you're lucky. Think of this as good practice.

Youch! And of course I should remember that MBAs are even more expensive, as are some other programs. Sorry, I spoke too soon.

And just in case anyone cares, tuition waivers are relatively rare in Canada. You pay your tuition out of your stipend. Of course, tuition is like, $3000-$5000 a year up here, which helps.

I can see the logic of business cards, but having them would still be a serious social faux pas in the humanities. Yes, but it's a different kind of work, with a different style. Other academics are your peers, not customers you're trying to solicit work from. Being a grad student involves a lot of networking and scrambling, yes, but the calculating stuff is mixed in with collegial social interactions. Handing out business cards breaks the polite fiction that we're all equals, and all there for the company and the intellectual content. Maybe the fiction is bad. Maybe we should be more open about treating this like a business. It doesn't matter. Given the current culture, it's just not done. The only people I can think of who have business cards are high level administrators and deans. The OP risks either coming across as pretending to a much, much, much higher rank than he has, or coming across as being over-professionalized and calculating. But hey, I tend to react strongly to things. Feel free to ignore.

That would be so intensely weird to me. Seriously, if another grad student gave me a business card, that would be just stunning and bizarre, and something to laugh over at happy hour. I think that's a horrible idea, frankly. I've never seen anyone do it, or heard anyone talk about it, or seen it raised on any website or forum. I think it would get you the wrong kind of attention, and for what? to save 15 seconds of writing your name down. Just strange, don't do it.

Most importantly, if you use both names or hyphenate them, your old work should still show up on google or database searches for your new name. Bottom line, it's your name, your career, and you're already making a huge change for him. He'll adapt to whatever you choose.

I found that when I started TAing, I automatically started dressing more nicely on campus every day. You just feel more 'visible' as an instructor, and I didn't want to run into one of my students while wearing a bandanna and a schlubby shirt. My current school is much dressier than my MA school. Here, there are lots of women who wear dresses every day, and have very distinct personal styles. Even so, the baseline seems to be the same: clean, grown-up clothes, no shorts, no t-shirts with writing on them. People wear dark jeans or dress pants with basic tops--solid colour ts, button ups, long sleeves--and frequently a sweater, blazer, or cardigan. I think it's a good idea to dress more formally than your students on teaching days. I knew a few people who TAed in super casual clothes, and it definitely hurt their ability to control the room.

Congrats, LogicBomb!