Sparky

Do not go into debt for a PhD in the humanities. If you are so lucky/blessed as to get a teaching job, the salary will almost certainly not be enough to pay it off without major sacrifices. (This loan repayment calculator is depressing but handy). My experience is different from coffeekid's--at the school where I did my MA (in theology), quite a few of the PhD students came in with an MA in philosophy. I think, as long as you've had at least *some* exposure to religion as an academic field, a philo degree counts quite nicely. As far as going to Georgia State versus just taking a year off to do language...you are the only one who can judge whether it will be worth the move/LDR with a newborn. But keep in mind that if you're in school, you can defer loan payments. That might be helpful. Also, admissions committees tend to be *very* skeptical of independent language learning. If you do decide to try that on your own, be sure you do it through a university class or find some way to prove that you really do know the language (SAT II subject test, Toronto's Latin exam, LOR writer's attestation, etc). Also, if you want your PhD from a religion/theology department, an M* degree of some sort is almost essential. (I know what the websites say, but if you call the schools, you usually get a different story). It's by no means a guarantee of admission--even an MTS from Harvard does is no guarantee--but it's pretty important. It is not unusual, I think, for people to come in to PhD programs with *multiple* master's, albeit in different subjects or subfields. And congratulations to you and your husband!

How much experience do you have with this particular bus route? Are you *sure* it will be "undivided study time"? Consider both *your* ability, based on past experience and not future optimism, to work in moving vehicles amidst distraction, *and* how crowded the route is. Will you be able to get a seat every time? (Reading while standing is not necessarily a problem, but taking notes might be). My personal experience is that bus/train "study time" is approximately half as productive as sitting at a desk or even in front of the TV. But that's me. Also, how much of your work is going to be in the library? Will you be able to take home all the sources you need? What is your paper writing style? Do you accumulate sources as you write, and thus need quick(er) access to the library, or are you someone who gathers far more sources than you'll need before you start writing, and then don't go the library again until it's time to return them? Also, you've already decided not to seek out new friends during your MA? (Please don't take that as harsh judgment. If you're intending to do the program and then jet off to parts not in flyoverville for a PhD, I totally get you. I keep rewording that question and nothing is working ). Are your current friends/current lifestyle supportive of a grad student who works all the time? (Okay, yes, I'm biased by what I've heard about UChicago grad; apologies). Just some things to think about, either way.

That's lovely for you. Some of us have cohort-mates whose inferiority complex (it's grad school--we've all got one) manifests itself through putting down other people. I miss the people at my MA school.

1. I suspect that as soon as you get your e-mail address for your new school, which *should* happen sometime this spring, you will have online access to journal databases. (Actually, you'll probably get your e-mail address as soon as you officially accept the offer. That was how it worked for me, anyway.) 2. I took my first class in my MA program the summer before I technically started. My RAship paid for the tuition, even though I wasn't doing any RA work yet. (I did not, however, earn an additional stipend). 3. I didn't take a class last summer, i.e. between MA and PhD, but my current school *also* allows students to start early. The way summer funding here works is, the standard aid package covers 2 summers' worth of tuition remission + additional stipend (TA-free), and you can use those in any two summers. 4. Yes, contact your DGS, and also talk to the summer session people at the registrar's office, as they'll know what's up with the process for getting your aid to kick in early.

Well, first of all I'm going to assume whoever suggested Left Behind (i.e. LeHaye and Jenkins) was joking. Unless you "read" them via the slacktivist blog. (Which, incidentally, is my first recommendation for "theology by other means," even if it's not actually fiction). As far as Christian stuff goes, Lewis and Chesterton are the two major authors besides O'Connor. If you like medieval lit, there is a lot of "fiction" that deals heavily in theology (not just, ahem, "religious themes"). The B version of Piers Plowman, maybe? If you are into sci-fi--James Blish, A Case of Conscience is the classic. You might also want to pick up The Gospel According to Science Fiction, which looks at religious themes in various SF books, short stories and movies. It's interesting and in and of itself, but more importantly, it serves as a great way to get exposure to lots of 'new' authors. I think there's also a case to be made for Les Miserables as a religious-philosophical novel, and then on the atheist existentialist front Beauvoir has some good stuff.

I think it depends on what you want to get out of your graduate education. Are you there to get in, do your dissertation, get out, as fast as possible? Or are you there because you love history and actually want to learn something? More practically (if we are in the business of being "practical" rather than "Oh my gosh I can take a class with [groundbreaking historian not in your field]?!?!?! THAT WOMAN IS A GODDESS AMONG MORTALS!") : 1. It will help your teaching a lot. People fall in love with history because of the little, totally random bits of knowledge a professor can pop out. It's so much better when that can happen throughout the year or semester, instead of clustered around one chapter and then the rest of the lectures straight from the textbook. 2. Comps. Yeah, I study late medieval religious movements, but I don't think my comps committee is going to be happy if my proposed exam fields are {a} Franciscans {b} beguines [c] devotio moderna. Especially if you are at a program that requires you to come up with your own reading list for comps, coursework is invaluable. 3. I have made some really awesome connections in my own topic by studying totally random things. I *guess* YMMV a little (I mean, I do study medieval Christianity, and let's talk about how much Middle Ages stuff can't be related to religion in at least *some* way), but I think this is paramount. 4. Exposure to different methodologies. Vital. If you've only read the work that has been done on your particularly subject, you will end up a historian muddled in your field. Sure, you can do a grudge work dissertation. But the most interesting historical scholarship tends to be the innovative stuff, and that usually means new methodologies, not just new subjects. 5. Dude. It's graduate school. This is our chance to have access to top scholars. 90% of us will be teaching high school or community college or at small colleges in the middle of nowhere. (I'm not knocking those jobs, y'all--in fact, I want and intend to teach high school). 99% of us are in a program at a school better than we will ever teach at. WHY would you turn your nose up at the chance?! All of that said, I do think it's important to keep your telos in mind throughout the seminar, especially when picking a paper topic. I probably do twice as much reading for each paper as I do for the class itself. I've found that a lot of professors are willing to work with you to find a way to formulate a paper topic that fits with your own general research interests, even if they seem totally divergent at first.

I applied for MA programs intending to study 20th century Africa. Within two weeks of my medieval church history class, even the professors were saying to me, "You're doing medieval, right?" In other words: it's totally not a problem. In fact, it's probably expected. I also think it's pretty common to be more attached to a thematic type of history (e.g. cultural-intellectual) rather than era-area. We pick a regional and temporal specialization for dissertation/hiring purposes, of course, but you find a decent number of people who publish across those boundaries but within their 'flavor' of scholarship.

Ohhhhh. You meant that, the fact that she is racist can't be argued against, NOT that one can't make a solid case she is racist. That makes a lot more sense, lol. I'm sorry; I'll edit my first post accordingly. My point about why everyone is suddenly so concerned about the crying white girl, however, remains.

Whether death threats are warranted is a completely different matter than whether what she says is offensive! Which, in all seriousness, SHOULD NOT BE UP FOR DEBATE. ETA: The OP's wording confused me, and I read the above line backwards and inside out. We agree on this point--the girl who made the original video is insensitive and offensive. My bad. But sure--let's all rush to worry about the crying little white girl and how she's been hurt by everyone calling her a racist. Sure. Because that's not racist at all. What about the Asian and Asian-American students at UCLA who received yet another reminder of the vitriol with which some people hate them?

(Background: As an undergrad, I strongly considered studying ancient Mesopotamia on the grad level, and had even started to nose around possible programs) My understanding is that when ancient and modern try to coexist, it's not that people in the different eras compete. More like, the department has Egyptology, Sumerology, and Assyriology--but only has one slot per year for ancient. It is, from what I've heard, fairly common for a university to rotate by year which subfield within ancient they're looking for a person. But it's not all that uncommon for a school to break their rule and take, say, an Egyptologist two years running. As for why modern and ancient are together--it probably has more to do with ancient not being a sufficient size to form its own department. If it were up to me, I'd put ANE studies in the "classics" department, but I'm not sure academia/Western culture's Eurocentrism has faded enough to realize that Greece and Rome are not the end-all be-all of "classics."

There SO needs to be a gematria section on the GRE. (Seriously: it's the perfect union of qualitative, quantitative, and bullsh*t. Gematria *is* the GRE).

It's accurate. $17,500 is the standard stipend, regardless of whether or not you are TAing that year. Most programs offer additional money if you stay and take a class (in South Bend) in the summer. Health insurance...the school pays for about 75% of the premium as part of the basic package. The last 25% is not that much. (My health insurance funding situation is...complicated, so I don't have an exact number, sorry). Tuition is entirely covered. And South Bend/Mishawaka is really, really cheap to live in. About the only thing with eye-gouging prices here is, oddly, the movie theater (Laudete Netflix...).

I don't know anything about HDS admissions choices and I'm not going to speculate. But, assuming (which is a big assumption) you're right that HDS made their decisions based on whatever kind(s) of affirmative action: Why do you assume that seeking out "nontraditional" (of whatever flavor) students is opposed to advancing the theological conversation? Theology is one of the whitest, East Coast, most male, most bourgeois-heavy disciplines in academia, at least as far as humanities/social sciences go (and that's saying something, because Academia *is* the bourgeoisie). Maybe HDS wants Midwestern farm kids and divorced mothers and people whose families lost everything in Hurricane Katrina not because HDS needs another rags-to-riches story to get donations (oh please) but because the faculty are aware that theological conversation around social justice issues--heck, all issues--is overfilled with well-intentioned middle class white men* pontificating on why god lets Those People suffer. In other words: Consider the possibility that the HDS faculty believe different life experiences are an important part of advancing the theological conversation. * This is not to imply that all people who were denied admission are upper/middle class, white, and male, nor that no such applicants were accepted. Obviously.

Not being paternalistic and condescending, especially when you have no idea what you're talking about, is an even better first step.

Grades no longer matter! Well, I guess technically they do, and it's grad school so pretty much everyone does A-caliber work anyway, but the lack of stress about it is nice. I was one of only a couple of MA students at my old program, so it was a little awkward socially--I was taking all the same classes as the first and second year PhD students, but it felt a little odd. And *totally* on my end, BTW; the faculty and PhD people treated me exactly like everyone else. Now, I'm in a program where everyone is a PhD student. I feel much more like I belong. My own work or research has not gotten magically better or more advanced or anything. I'm still using the same piecemeal, half-history/half-theology methodology I used in my MA and find myself drawn to the same sorts of paper topics (probably the second is the result of the first) as I was before, so in the sense of the actual work I am doing, there is quite a bit of continuity. It feels, however, much better.

My classes tend to be: 1. Loads of reading 2. Lots of mini, informal presentations (10-15 min) -- usually as a way of cramming *more* readings down the class's throats without everyone having to read all the books. So, one person will be assigned to read B book or P primary source and basically summarize and critique it to the class. Expect this particularly if language is a factor. If half the class knows German and half knows French, and very little of the scholarship is in English...guess what. Not all of my classes have involved these, but probably something like 75% (over multiple departments at 2 different schools, so I'm figuring this is fairly standard). 3. Seminar paper or historiography paper(s). In my program, at least, these are always coupled with a full-blown class. None of this "all you do for this class is research and write a paper" business here. 4. We have exams in my language classes, but they are mainly translation-based.

I believe this qualifies as, "Yo mama so old, she wrote her thesis on a typewriter."

As others have said, it really depends on the program, and occasionally on the university (like if it's school policy that the Grad School sends out official letters to everyone at the same time, but the department calls or e-mails the accepted/waitlisted people) The best way to get an idea of what is going on is to look at the results search from previous years for the specific programs to which you applied. Departments aren't *always* the same from year to year (two of mine were rather drastically not, haha) But dude--it's still February. There's a lot of calendar between now and April 15th.

An MA (or Mwhatever) from one of the UK schools is not uncommon for medievalists who end up doing their PhD in the US, especially historians. Be *sure* you take advantage of the increased opportunities for paleography/archive experience. On one hand, it looks great on a PhD app. On the other, because they are THERE and you CAN. Well, now, *there's* a contentious issue. Early medieval history seems to be diving towards material culture--did you consider straight-up history programs as well as art history? (I know you're still waiting to hear back--I'm just curious whether you actually did look at history depts, but decided they weren't a good fit for you).

Uhh...because the only type of hard alcohol we can afford is more properly used to disinfect surgical instruments?

If it is your unequivocal top choice, get your butt to the social. You'll value the time for questions. Also, it will give you an opportunity to get your bearings a little before the interviews. Your current profs will understand. As for telling them it's your top choice? I did. I was *very* clear at the interview that this was where I want(ed) to be. It worked. In *any* case, assuming it's true, it will not hurt you. So go for it! And hey, congratulations!

My life last December, January and February: Everyone: I'm sure you'll get in somewhere. Me: Actually, admissions suck. Please tell me that even if I don't get in, it doesn't make me a bad person and it doesn't mean I'm stupid. Everyone: I'm sure you'll get in! Me: No! Listen! What I need to hear is, even if I don't get in, that doesn't mean I'm stupid and a complete failure at life! Please! I'm begging you! That's all I need to hear! Everyone: But surely you'll get in.

Happy Holidays to all this year's applicants! XOXO, Sparky

You're upset because your grades were average? Keep in mind that "average" here is the average of the people who were admitted to graduate school. Remember all the worrying and crying we did last year over how everyone else who is applying knows more and is smarter and has better experience than us? Yeah. THOSE are the people among whom you are "only" average. That's a waaaaay different average than the general population, or even general undergraduate population. Furthermore: you may very well have done your best. "Best" does not mean getting 100% every time. Best means putting in as much effort as you can while still surviving. But hey ~ you could be me. I had a prof tell me I am the most incompetent student he has ever had. Ever. At that point, average starts to look pretty damn perfect.

I think it's just as much the "research part time over break" as the "visiting Mom and Pops" (or for all I know, Pops and Pops) part that we're reacting to. Break is for...breaking. Revitalize yourself!