mudlark

It depends on the sources of funding that you're trying to find. Fellowships, entrance awards, university-awarded scholarships, and some TA and RAships will have already been set based on the ranking decided by the admissions committee. When I applied last year, my funding offer did go up a couple of times after I got accepted, but that was because I was on a wait list for a couple of things. That is to say, my rank was already established and could not be changed. Most of these awards are adjudicated, approved and/or administered by larger university bodies, and they have early deadlines. You might be able to scrape together some informal sources of funding (a prof paying you out of a research grant they hold, last minute replacement teaching) but I doubt that one visit would be enough to secure you that. Those are the kinds of jobs that people get through established networks after the people doing the hiring know them well. And there's never a shortage of people looking for work. So my opinion is pretty much no, it wouldn't help, but you might scrape something together for your second year if you perform well and make connections.

At the risk of sounding like a huge asshole, it doesn't have to be like that. After suffering through the first year of my MA, I made a concerted effort to fix my mood, my time management, and my organization skills. Sure, I still have the occasional rough patch when a major project or application is due, but overall I'm much calmer and happier now. I get everything done. Ahead of time. Without working 16 hour days or pulling all nighters. Every evening, I spend time with my husband and relax, and every night I get 8 hours of sleep. At first, I was super worried that if I wasn't going crazy, I wasn't working hard enough. Now I'm finally getting confident enough to know that if my supervisor is happy and I'm happy, it's enough. I was so in love with the drama of being stressed out all the time that I tortured myself for years. Letting go of the need to feel overwhelmed in order to feel good enough was the best thing I ever did.

As a humanities student, I would add 8. Quality of library holdings. 8B. Relevance of any special collections or archives to my work. as well as 9. Travel funding (for trips to archives and libraries as well as conferences). 10. Professionalization support (mock job talks, help with CV, support on the job market).

Seriously? How do you figure that? Assuming that you make a conservative decision buying a place and don't get stuck with an underwater mortgage.... Mortgages let you accumulate equity; student loans don't. Mortgages can be discharged at any time (by selling the property); student loans can't (unless you win the lottery). Mortgages don't stick with you after you declare bankruptcy; student loans can't. Mortgages replace a necessary cost of living (rent); student loans don't. I bought a condo this year. I pay only slightly more than I used to pay in rent, but I get to keep 3/4 of the money in the form of equity. I make double payments right now, but if I need to, I can drop my monthly payment to less than what most people pay to rent a one-bedroom. It might be different for other disciplines, but my PhD in the humanities isn't going to exponentially increase my earning potential. On the other hand, I'm building up $10,000 of equity a year in my mortgage. My condo might end up being a more reliable source of money for me in the future than my degree. I'll butt out of this thread, since I'm one of the lucky few who are educational debt free, but I'm puzzled by the above statement.

People...... people. Number two is superior not because of Harry Potter, or because it looks less dated, but because it makes you look like your arms are actually on fire. I mean, have some standards!

Number two! Number two!

Snail mailed, I believe? I've never gone the direct route, so I'm not sure. But the people who did so last year knew their scores. I think they were reporting a drop of a few points, BUT it was unpredictable, you never know what point is going to be the funding threshold in a given year, and it all depends on your readers so it's not worth stressing about.

Hi fellow waiting people! This is my fourth round of SSHRC: an MA app that didn't get forwarded, and MA app that won, a PhD app that got forwarded, but not funded, and now a second PhD app forwarded. I consider myself a bit of a SSHRC geek. As far as I know (and I'm pretty sure on these): -E-mail notification: To the poster who was a bit baffled by their e-mail notification from SSHRC, yup, that's how you find out. Some grad faculties and grad chairs also send out notifications, but that seems to vary a lot from school to school. -Alternates Lists: You would absolutely have been told if you are on an alternates list. I've had three friends win SSHRCs who were alternates (two MAs, and one PhD!) so don't lose hope if that's the result you get. When you're looking at the spreadsheets, "A list" means "forwarded", "B list" means "cut at the university level". If you got an e-mail from SSHRC, and nobody has told you that you're an alternate, congratulations! You're A list. -Scores: You would only get a score at this point if you applied directly to Ottawa (because of a gap between degrees). If you applied through your school, you won't get a score until the bitter end, so don't worry about not having one. That being said, the scores are pretty useless. The direct-to-Ottawa applications can get massively different scores in the first and second rounds (they tend to drop a few points). The final scores are given to you in an aggregate, with no other information. Last year I got a 15, and funding started at 17. So I know that I wasn't too far off the mark, but with no idea what to change. Hell, that's the score from three readers, and I don't know if that was three 5s, or a 7, a 6, and a 2. The scores are not given to students in a useful form. -Timelines: last year was hellish, (late May-early June) but SSHRC had two new initiatives to deal with: the business related projects, and the Vanier awards. I'm hoping that this year is closer to 2008's timeline, when I found out in mid April. A girl can dream, can't she? This year, my goal is not to freak out about SSHRC. So far, I've been really good at not letting it take over my life. Hopefully I can keep up the zen attitude while waiting for results!

I was going to post the exact same thing!

My husband has the best grad-student-spouse job EVAR: he works for Ikea. We get discounts on cheap furniture, and he can easily transfer to any major city in the country. We're a bit of an anomaly in a lot of ways. I'm working on my PhD, and he has a high school diploma. There's a 13 year age gap between us, too. And neither of us was even remotely considering a long term relationship when we met. We're coming up on five years together, two of them married, and have a happy home and a great friendship in addition to the mushy stuff. We met when I was in his city during a year off in my undergrad, then did long distance for a year. He moved to the city where I'd decided to do my MA, and we lived there for two years. I was really sick worrying that the move wasn't going to work out for him, and felt guilty for causing upheaval in his life, but it worked out beautifully. He loved it. We got married during my MA. When I applied to PhDs, I did my best to keep him informed about the pros and cons of various options, but really he would have gone wherever was best for me. Having one ambitious partner and one go-with-the-flow partner has worked out brilliantly for us. I used to feel guilty that I was driving a lot of the major decisions, but I've come to see that the changes I bring to his life are good for both of us. I shake him up a bit, and he grounds me. In my cohort this year, there have been.... maybe 6 or 7 break-ups of long-term relationships. It seems like the combination of grad school and distance can be really rough. While they last, though, relationships can be such a strong anchor in a crazy time. I jokingly tell young women I know considering grad school to just get married now, so that they don't have to give all that mental energy to dating and crushes, and so that they'll have someone to do the dishes while they read.

HAH! I was just about to post the exact same thing! I wish I was more relaxed about grad apps. When I applied, I had insomnia for the first time ever in my life, and I broke down crying in a professor's office about how nobody would take me and I could never do this. Then everything turned out fine. Things that will help you not panic: 1. Find someone knowledgeable and reliable who you trust to have a realistic talk about your chances. 2. Take all information with a grain of salt. 3. Take all information posted by strangers on the internet with a pound of salt. 4. Write down a list of good things you have accomplished, or good things about yourself, that have NOTHING to do with school. 5. Hang out with non-academics as much as humanly possible.

Given the schools you've listed in your sig, it would be hilarious to pretend that one was your safety. "Will I attend? Well, I haven't heard from Princeton yet, but they *are* just my safety..."

Hell, my grad school acceptance was probably the most interesting post on my page in ages for a lot of my facebook friends. Otherwise, my page looks like: [picture of cute kitten] [video of cute kitten] mudlark is so excited about working with archive materials in special collections! [link to depressing Chronicle article about the job market] mudlark is [insert joke that only humanities students will get] [link to online database of historical literature] [video of cute kitten]

People who are going crazy trying to sift through all the grad apps and get acceptances out while managing everyone's funding and talking to prospective applicants on the phone and dealing with the people who are persistent and upset about their rejection and trying to link faculty members with incoming PhDs and setting up campus visits..... .....WHILE teaching two courses and serving on committees and keeping up their research and conferencing and working on publications..... ......AND maintaining some semblance of a family and personal life....... .....are really unlikely to take the time to check out what song applicants posted on their myspace. I agree with the "they're just not that interested in you" posted above. Definitely not worth worrying about!

Very nicely stated, Rising_Star. I'm thinking about trying to get pregnant next year for the reasons you mentioned. The realization that things are only going to get more difficult after grad school has been really helpful for me in terms of stress and time management. If I can't be happy with my life now, when I have tons of flexibility, no teaching, and few looming deadlines, how am I going to be happy if I'm lucky enough to get on the tenure track? For me, thinking about my student life as the new normal instead of a tough period to grit my teeth through has made a world of difference. I make sure to spend time with my husband, take breaks, and do non-school things. And just so this isn't going way off the rails, I was 22 when I started my MA and 24 when I started my PhD. My husband is quite a bit older than me, though, so if I waited until I had tenure to have kids, he'd be... um... fifty. I'd like to have time post-kids and pre-old age with him. ETA- not that fifty is old age, of course. But fifty plus the twenty or more years it would take to get two kids out of the house, and we're getting into elderly territory.

I've heard of that happening at other schools before. In a bad budget year, sometimes departments just make one round of offers, and don't go to the waitlist if someone turns them down. So it has nothing to do with the number of offers, Repatriate. It's more like, instead of having 15 spots to fill and going down the waitlist until they have 15 students lined up, they just make one round of 15 offers and however many accept out of that first 15 (10? 8?) are how many students they'll take in that year.

The other posters are right. I got all of my acceptances by phone call. The online app pages weren't updated for a while after that.

With the new privacy settings, you could specifically exclude her from seeing the post. Or set her to permanently restricted access.

A lot of my friends were applying at the same time that I was, and we all posted each acceptance as it came. There was even discussion of awards and fellowships won or lost. We're all in this together, and all interested in how our colleagues are doing. I really don't see why this is even a question.

Why sell yourself short? They may fund you, they may not. No sense in taking yourself out of the pool out of nerves. As I said in another thread, funding is not just about money. It often has components of work or research experience that are invaluable, and helps you build a CV. Having good funding allows you to focus on research (going to conferences, maybe publishing) that you wouldn't have time for if you were trying to hold down an off-campus job. You may not see the importance of funding now, but trust me, you want it. The state economy is imploding and government programs are being gutted, so the universities will have less money to spread around.

This assumes that pay increases with education level, which isn't always the case. As a fresh undergrad, you'll have to get an entry level job and pay some dues, yes, but as a fresh MA grad you may end up in the same position, only a year or two behind everyone else. One of my good friends finished his undergrad on time, and started working right away. Most of the rest of us started grad school, or added another major, or took time off to travel/teach English/etc. He was envious of the others at first, but now that he's been with the company for a few years he has worked his way into a rewarding position with good pay and good perks (regular travel to Europe!) while a lot of his friends are still patching together rent with near-minimum wage retail jobs and daydreaming about grand plans for the future.

I'd say yes, it's too late. Wait to get some offers, and then talk to professors to help you make your decision. At this point, the adcoms have probably either met and done some preliminary sorting, or they're in the frantic process of passing around files and ranking students. Even if you make a great connection, a professor popping his head in to the adcom chair's room and saying "Hey, I've been e-mailing with this student who seems good..." would almost certainly be too late or unwelcome.

Well put, seadub. The question isn't whether unfunded master's degrees are easier to get into, but if they're worth doing. Both of the grad programs I've been in (did an MA in Canada, where they're standard and cheap) were looking to sharply increase their MA cohorts in order to "show growth" and make money for the university. Here are the problems I see. - Funding is not just about money. It's also about work experience (teaching or research assistantships) and building up your CV to increase your odds of getting funding in the future. You can't just replace funding money with personal money and think that it's a wash. You're often losing experience and reputation as well. - Programs that accept self-funded master's students often steer them towards program structures that are not in their best academic interests. For example, humanities programs looking to increase their MA cohorts often simultaneously move away from thesis options towards small capstone papers, or from small capstone papers to purely course-based programs. In cash cow programs, students often do not get the opportunity to do an extended project with direct faculty supervision. That does them a serious disservice when they apply to PhDs. - Overall, this leads to a devaluing of the degree, which results in master's students being seen more as honours undergrads who won't go away than junior colleagues. In cases where master's cohorts are sharply increased, they are often resented by people already in the program because they take up resources. And while it's not necessarily fair, there is often an implicit or explicit assumption that people being brought in as part of a 'cost recovery' program are not as capable as those who won limited, funded spots. Combine this with the program structures described above, and you have people stuck in really unproductive, unhappy situations where they're paying lots of money and not getting the academic or social support they need to succeed in the future. In my opinion, anyone looking at an unfunded master's should make sure they do their homework about the professional development opportunities offered, and the department culture. OP, have you asked *why* the master's option is so unpopular at that school? Maybe nobody applies to it for good reason. I can't imagine a program worth going to that would be so thoroughly ignored by applicants.

For the last couple of weeks, my lovely and extremely bubbly grad secretary has been sealed in her office, dealing with towering mounds of paperwork and looking like she hasn't slept since Christmas. I know she's putting in lots of long hours, and juggling crazy family responsibilities on top. Most likely, the people who you're dealing with are nice, competent folk who are stretched to their limit. The funding crunch hurts staff as much if not more than students. Many are doing enough work for two people. It's always shitty to not hear back quickly, but it's probably a simple question of work levels rather than a sign about your application. Certainly not a sign that they didn't review it at all!

It's called Impostor Syndrome, and it doesn't go away after you get accepted. If it helps, I got a great funding package when I applied last year. I had accepted the offer, and done all the paperwork, but I was convinced that before the first paycheck came through they would realize that I was a moron and not worth nearly that much money, and take it back. A few paychecks later, and there's still a part of me that believes that. Do you have a close friend who you can enlist to say "Snap out of it, of course you're awesome"? Or talk you through the logic of what you're saying? I mean, even if the emotional stress of applications isn't something that you can get rid of right now, maybe you can talk yourself out of a few of your worst case scenarios. Which is more likely? a ) that you met someone who is seriously interested in working with you OR b ) that the whole department gets together each year to pick out a couple of stooges, and watches on hidden cameras giggling about how they're never going to get to sit in that desk? Try making the nightmare scenario as ridiculous as possible. If they were really just out to humiliate you, why not cover the desk chair in pudding and have you sit down? Maybe the professor's not real... just a grad student with a fake beard. Maybe the lab is all cardboard cut-outs and papier mache and they have their undergrads put it together for extra credit every year. If you make what you're scared of seem ridiculous, it can help kill the tension.