ExponentialDecay

Yes and no. To be fair, there is a lot more going on in your story than you writing an honest eval in a one-student class. I'm writing this with your recent advisor/speaking up problem in mind because I'm a creep who creeps people's profiles and sometimes strikes gold. First things first, your MA advisor/professor was highly unprofessional (and maybe is an asshole in general). It was definitely not okay to accuse you of jeopardizing his career, even if you had done that, because a person who is going up for tenure should be able to put his big-boy pants on and deal with the problem instead of uselessly flailing at his underlings. The fact that you hadn't, and he had to have known that, suggests that the guy was just using you to blow off steam, and we don't need to go into how not cool that is. It was not cool of him to act like you weren't welcome in his office and like he didn't want to see you. It was not cool of him to get pissy on your graduation day. At the same time, you seem to have a problem with your communication skills which will ensure that you find yourself in this situation again and again. You seem to bottle up your feelings until they boil over. Nothing in that paragraph displays good conflict resolution skills, but that is what hit it home for me. Okay, you apologized because you were presumably late with your work, which is appropriate - but why profuse? But more importantly, why did you not mention your concerns to your advisor at any point during the entire semester? The email with your final paper, which he asked for out of the blue and gave you 6 hours to produce, would have been a perfect opportunity to mention that you were startled by his request because the requirements for the course had never been discussed and you were confused about what you were supposed to be doing the whole semester (along with apologies for being late, profuse or not). Would that have fixed anything? No. Would your email have irritated him? Yes. But it would have done a very important thing that you failed to do throughout this ordeal: it would have let your advisor know that you are unhappy with the situation, and it would have given you documented proof that he was aware of your status. From this story, it looks like you expect people to read your mind. Not once in your story do you mention having discussed your concerns with your advisor. Then how do you expect him to know that you have concerns? I understand it was policy at your university for the instructor to have a syllabus, but policy is a guideline that's there in the event that the interested sides can't come to an agreement between themselves - such as your own situation, if you had tried to discuss it with your advisor. To add to your advisor's foot-long list of bad behavior, not asking you for input on how you want to be advised was an obvious mistake. However, the responsibility to tell him that you are unhappy with the arrangement lies with you. Yeah, it puts you into an uncomfortable position, but that position would have been miles better than the one you finally found yourself in. Being okay with feeling uncomfortable is an important life skill, but women especially need to be okay with making other people feel uncomfortable when it interferes with work. You'd want your advisor to tell you if you're doing something wrong, right, not least because you probably don't know that you're wrong? Your advisor deserves the same courtesy. From your advisor's perspective, you betrayed him. First (I assume - it's not clear at what point), you went behind his back and complained about him to another professor. We only do that when we can't resolve the issue between us; however, in your situation, he didn't even know there was an issue. Then you wrote him a scathing review full of serious stuff that has never come up in conversation between you! All the while, you seemed perfectly pleasant and content, but apparently dealing with issues so serious that you had to go to his superiors about them. From his perspective, you lied to him for 4 months. On top of that, you apparently knew him and his family outside of class (as friends?). I think he felt pretty vulnerable. Once again, I am not defending your advisor. He fucked up. Teenagers have better coping skills (which is why I'm writing this). But here's the rub. Even if he were maliciously trying to give you a nervous disorder to tickle his own sick sense of humor, he could play the situation like you were in the wrong. That's something you want to avoid like the plague. This is why it is important to address your concerns early and often. If you need to involve the higher powers, you need documented evidence that you tried something and this guy thwarted it. If you come to them and say, my feeling are hurt but I've been keeping a stiff upper lip about it, they're going to congratulate you on your stiff upper lip and tell you that they can't do anything unless there is evidence of misconduct. I've been there before and sure, people make a big show of indignation etc, but nobody does anything until you give them due cause. Sometimes you have to be the bigger person in front of people who are bigger than you. Back to the original topic, I originally assumed that ratings were different from comments. I write thorough comments, but I don't pummel somebody's ratings unless they're really getting on my nerves.

So, just out of interest, wherever you're from, they just hand out paid academic appointments to anybody who asks? In regards to the competitiveness of Slavic programs... The reason the acceptance rates are a little higher is that it's a self-selecting pool, given the difficult language requirement and the fact that it's less mainstream than English Lit. The existence of a hard prerequisite cuts the number of unqualified people who want to apply, but the number of "serious" applicants is commensurate with any other program. There are a lot of applicants with native or near-native Russian and English both, but obviously the more important factor is your research. A lot of the greats are retired or close to it, and many of the competent people are at teaching colleges. Your intuition that Russian is an impacted language in academia today is correct, and given the, ahem, difficult political situation at the moment, that could go either way. You have to be particularly careful with picking a department for your studies, because, aside from the phenomenon of the department that suffered severe cuts following the collapse of the Union, there is also the phenomenon of the department taken over by 80s-90s Russian emigres whose work may or may not have anything to do with contemporary reality. I'd say the main two that do things are Berkeley and Stanford (assuming you're not a US citizen, I would not apply to UW-M, and not just for funding reasons). Harvard isn't a top Russian department (which is not to say it's not a good department for some specialities), but obviously if you're planning to work abroad, the brand name will do more for you than its perceived quality amongst American academics.

Get a mentor among the permanent faculty if you don't have one already and start discussing your options with them now. And be brilliant. People are a lot more on-board with opportunism when they think you've got a chance.

Ah, I see. I agree that if the professor is condoning Nigel's behavior when it is obviously disruptive, then any negotiation has to treat the two as a package deal. My original concern, however, was with the systemic error: if they share an advisor and belong to the same year, and their advisor favors Nigel to this extent, then OP is up shit creek without a paddle. Maybe in the sciences, where you work in a lab moreso than with a person, and where your dissertation matters less than your patents and you can moreover lateral into industry, you can tough it out for a few years, graduate, and forget your advisor like a bad dream (and even so, having a bad advisor creates a lot of serious problems). But in the humanities, it's kind of imperative that your advisor go to bat for you, even when you are not their favorite.

I wouldn't go by what students gossip to each other in the hallways. Like, everyone says those things about their professors, and most of the time it isn't even connected to their real opinion of them or their teaching. These conversations are social markers, like "ugh, if I don't have coffee in the morning, I will die", or "this is awesome!", or "my mom is so annoying I hate her" or "nice to meet you". You won't literally die if you don't have coffee. And you probably don't hate your mother. And meeting them was more like passable-to-mediocre rather than nice. None of it means anything. As for evals, I don't think most people have such a scientific approach to them. It's not like I keep a special notebook where I write down how I evaluate every professor I've ever had so that I can compare future professors fairly. Usually, if I'm happy with this aspect of their teaching, I give them a 5, if they could improve, I give them a 4. I don't agree that the only people that mark professors harshly are people who did poorly in the class (evidently, at least one other category is nerds who take course evals way too seriously), but gosh, you need to relax.

Really? What does it tell? because, given this is god-knows-who on the internet and they have shared only so much, I can think of about 6 possibilities.

It's better if it relates to your research interests than if it doesn't. It's better if it's from your field than if it isn't. It's better if it shows your ability to research, your knowledge of foreign languages, your knowledge of secondary literature, and any other skills you purport to have than if it doesn't. It's also better if it's well written than if it is not. In any case, I would touch up whatever you end up using to the best of your ability. They're not going to check that you handed it in as-is from the time it's been graded.

I mean, what do you mean, you're not keen on long distance? It's not a question of preference. If the inconveniences of being in a long-distance relationship outweigh the benefits of your relationship (or however you choose to identify this equivalence), you break up. The alternative is that one of you gives up on their career and becomes a housewife. It's only going to get harder the longer you stay in academia, because ahead of you y'all have postdocs, VAPs, sabbaticals, maybe a TT appointment that doesn't convert to T and then you have to up and move your entire life after 5-7 years in one place. What happens if your only career-building option is a postdoc in Berlin? A DC-Philly commute is A+ for an academic couple. It can very easily be Singapore - Bumfuck, KS (nearest airport 200 mi away). And this isn't exclusive to academia either. I know people in long-distance marriages because your average professional job will bounce you between random national capitals for months-long projects. Geographic mobility is the name of the game. Both of you have to understand that. There isn't a solution in the sense that you do this one magic thing and all the pain and uncertainty stops. You keep trucking until it doesn't make sense to truck any further (kind of like trying to get tenure). Long-term committed relationships are built on sacrifice, hardship, and inconvenience. If you just want somebody to spend your Sundays with, get an FWB. It's easier. I mail my guy postcards from the places I visit and try to keep a balanced view of our wants vs our abilities. I don't have a life-crisis inducing master plan for my life. If this or the thing after it or any of it never works out and I die alone in my apartment and my cats eat my face off, I'm okay with that.

I usually don't say anything like everyone else, but I do wonder why some people assume that there are chumps out there who will read their long-ass boring essays and give them advice for free.

ciao! It's good to meet a countryman :) You should probably ask this in the philosophy forum, together with what programs you are targeting. The other caveat is that you're an international applicant, so your situation will have more nuance than somebody who got their degree in the States. Your best course of action is to ask people connected to your university: students who have gone on to graduate study in the US or professors who sent them there. In general that score is fine. Judging by how you describe your experience, you could improve on it simply by being more familiar and therefore more comfortable with the situation, but if you don't feel like the time or expense is warranted, it's not something to freak out over.

I find it exceedingly strange that your professor isn't shutting this sophomoric shit down. Given you both belong to the same advisor, I would wonder about your advisor's ability or desire to advocate for you in your career if he doesn't even facilitate an environment where you can get a word in edgewise. Especially as a female.

Ah, I see. Apologies.

I have no answer to this question (except Teodor Shanin), but I wanted to run by and say that I want to read y'all's research. As a dispassionate observer, I'm so glad this is becoming a thing.

The point isn't that internationals are offered less funding. The point is that the department has to spend more on the international student in order to offer them the same net funding as domestic students because they can't get discounted tuition and are not eligible for various national awards, which could offset the cost for the department. This situation creates a disincentive for admitting international students.

In regards to drugazi's stated examples, I did some quick Google research, and here are the interesting facts: outside of random community colleges, almost all of these people teach at Azusa Pacific University. Now, I don't know, maybe that's her alma mater (in which case it's still silly to suggest that it represents the whole of socal), but that's not even the interesting thing. The interesting thing is that they are all expressly affiliated with the Church, in that they are ordained or have MDivs and similar. Now, I know that the Church will contribute money towards your education if it will be in service of it.

It was a risky proposition, but a Glee gif and Darjeeling Ltd? It paid off.

The only perception of mid-level that matters here is OP's, and I don't know what that is. I only know their grades (and even that isn't the full picture).

Taking out $200k for any degree anywhere is insane. The time when the labor market in the States or anywhere in the world for that matter could support the risk premium for that kind of a decision is long past, and ironically, in that time, that degree did not cost $200k. You're going to have to be making $300k starting out to pay down that kind of debt in 10 years - there isn't a profession in the world that pays that kind of money out of the gate. At a $50k professor salary, you're basically indentured for life. You may as well remortgage the house now to pay the tuition in cash because that will be a wiser financial decision. I wonder if drugazi's mother knows that her daughter would take out $200,000 for a humanities PhD. I mean, hello, parenting?

Northeastern... ehhhhh... The rest of those aren't actually that mid-level. Tufts and BC aren't easy to get into if you are worried about your grades.

Damn, it's like a house on fire over here. Just to add another perspective to drugazi's data here, from my own empirical observations of a field I am intimately familiar with, to get a professorship teaching Russian Lit at almost any college, your chances are best if you have immigrated from the former USSR in the 80s.

The campus smells like cheap booze Thu-Sun. The undergrads are dicks and your social status is determined by your boat shoes. Other than that, are you at all familiar with your average inland New England small town? It's exactly like that. Beautiful fall, tight-knit but welcoming community, lots of options for craft beer dive bars and outdoor sporting activities, and ~0 dating options. Rent is impossibly high and it is equally impossible to find a local job. Invest in a good road bike; leave your SO behind because they will get bored unless they work from home. If you're looking to find a job after your masters, I would pass because just the proximity to a big city will mean worlds to your internship experience and general employability (you can intern over the summers, there is obviously a college art museum as well as some shoddy Emily Dickinson house-type thing that they have at Amherst, but there are simply fewer opportunities, including for full-time employment afterwards - going into Boston or NYC for interviews if you don't have a car is a story with a preface and introduction). If you're planning on entering academia, places like Williamstown (Northampton, Amherst, Annandale-on-Hudson, Bryn Mawr, etc...) are in the 99th percentile of attractiveness in terms of where a professor of the humanities could spend his entire life, so you better start getting used to it.

Same is true for the UC system.

The verbal is pretty low for all of those programs. For poli sci, the quant is low. It depends on what you're aiming for and what the rest of your app looks like though.

So, I don't know what it's like coming from a state comprehensive, but at my alma mater we have been told that your grades in irrelevant subjects will not have much impact on your application. Around Boston, the most decent place with funding is UMass. Of course the flagship is 2 hours out from Boston and the funding is ~$16k.

What's an MA/PhD program? All reputable PhD programs are funded for everyone. MA programs tend to be funded through TAships and so on, which you can get since your visa allows you to work on campus.