ExponentialDecay

I'm not in history or law and I'm not strictly in statistics, but I just want to tell you: please don't pick a degree based on the career prospects alone. Applied math is a fascinating field with indeed very good career prospects, but the problem is that you actually have to be willing and able to do the career in order to get at the prospects. By all means try it out, but if you find yourself struggling to maintain either your grades or interest in what you're learning, I wouldn't continue in it. A degree in math that you don't use is just as good as a degree in basketweaving studies that you don't use. You, like many undergraduates, believe you are constrained to a narrower set of options than is the reality. It's not history professorship, law, statistics, or oblivion. The vast majority of decent-paying jobs that require a bachelor's degree don't care what it's in and have you doing things that you've probably never even heard of: operations, office management, account management, etc. They also don't necessarily amount to cubicle hell. Degrees in non-quantitative subjects do sometimes disqualify you from quantitative jobs, but if you don't want one of those, then not much has been lost. If you maintain a decent GPA and get a good LSAT, you can get into at least a decent regional school with a scholarship. Regarding history, no, there's not much chance of getting an academic career, and especially from non-top schools, but you're worrying too much about your GPA and too little about the stuff that actually matters. Get good relationships with your professors, really engage with the scholarship, produce a competitive writing sample, and you'll stand a chance (though maybe you'll need to do a masters). While you're at it, try interning or working part time in an office to see what your exit opps are. It's not that bleak out there.

wtf no

I don't really understand what you're asking or what you're worried about.

why are you asking your adviser about registration? that's usually handled by the administrative staff. it's possible they're not responding because they don't know the answers to your questions or are annoyed.

I mean it's not strange that different departments have different requirements seeing as they're different departments. If you find it confusing, it's helpful to track them in an excel doc. The takeaway here is that your serious competition will be easily clearing whatever language hurdles. I mean you should write an honors thesis e.g. https://www.honors.umass.edu/capstone-experience . it would be quite bizarre for your university not to offer an honors thesis credit (although it's also bizarre that your department let you take a course twice...). but if you can't do that, an independent study where you complete a substantial research project is also fine. what matters is that you complete a substantial research project, not what it's called. basically PhD admissions isn't about meeting requirements, it's about beating the competition. Your competition will have substantial training in their research languages and substantial research experience (by which I mean an honors thesis) that is relevant to their research interests. if you don't have good language training, you're at a disadvantage. if your department doesn't have faculty (or really, strong faculty) in your area of interest and therefore you didn't have much help developing a good research focus or contemporary expertise in that area, you're at a disadvantage. if you're at a program that doesn't send a lot of students to the programs you're targeting, you're at a disadvantage. that's why a lot of people get master's, which is not a bad thing. it's hard to know how competitive you are when you're an undergrad, so if i were you i'd apply to masters and phds and, if the phd doesn't work out, get a funded masters. you can also try writing something to present at a conference so you can meet scholars who are active in the field and get exposed to professional academia.

A lot of people seem to have this misconception so I might as well address it. When I say that policy programs aren't super employable, I'm not saying that they're useless degrees or that there's no demand for them. I'm saying that employability after an MPP is not a sure thing. It's not like an engineering (or an econ) degree where you basically just need to graduate in order to get some type of job. If you coast through your MPP taking random classes and enjoying yourself without taking a lot of steps towards some sort of concrete and reachable goal, you won't get a job. You can absolutely build an employable profile with an MPP and many people do every year, but you need to know at least somewhat what you're doing. MPPs work for many people because they have a broad curriculum that allows you to tailor the program to the skillset you want to develop (as opposed to shoehorning you into a very narrow track that has everyone studying the same thing, as happens in economics), but that means you're largely on your own when it comes to determining where you're going and how you're going to get there and whether that'll be a successful approach. You trade freedom for security. Them's the breaks. I'm not sure why you're considering economics programs if you're not good at and don't want to do economics, since the economics obviously won't end once you're finished with the program: you'd have to do economics day in and day out in your career for many years. Nobody will cut you checks for not doing the work you were hired to do. Maybe you need to take some time to think about what you want out of life.

So my first question is, if your interest is East Asian and French literatures, why are you spending all this time on German? Knowing languages unrelated to your research, while a frequent hazard of the job, doesn't actually make you more competitive for anything or a better scholar. German isn't bad to know given how much scholarship/criticism is written in it, but unless you plan to engage deeply with Freud, frankly tugging it up to C1 doesn't seem like the best use of your time. I'd extend your undergrad by a year, but not to improve your languages - to write a proper thesis on your area of interest, using original sources. How well you are able to work with those sources is really the only test of proficiency there is. Having a writing sample where you engage substantively with original sources is also a deciding piece of your application. imo a PhD program, with its many conflicting demands, isn't the best place to do a lot of work on your language ability, nor is it a good use of your funded time. You should be fluent in at least one of your research languages before you start; to be safe, it's best if you're at least proficient in all of them. Most programs are also pretty explicit about their language requirements. Here's a quote from the Stanford program: Anyway, all that is to say, A-B level in both your research languages is probably not sufficient. Regarding your interests, I'm not sure why you would be unable to work on them within a national lit context. Edit: entering students at top comp lit programs tend to be native or near-native in at least one of their research languages (it's just hard otherwise) and proficient in the other relevant ones. A lot of people also study related languages so picking them up once you're fluent in one is a lot easier than learning a new language family.

What do you mean, they're no longer reachable due to job changes? Unless they also went into witness protection, I'm pretty sure it's possible for you to find out where they work now (e.g. by asking the department secretary or simply googling their names) and reaching out to them via their new email.

In addition to what's already been said, my advice is to start working with the type of documents you'll be researching bright and early. These programs tend to teach either conversational language skills or the literary language, which are different than the academic or bureaucratic registers. Soviet documents will have a lot of jargon that's not in use today, etc...

I mean if you're okay spending 100k to "satisfy what you couldn't do for undergrad", go right ahead. Otherwise, econ is a useful MA if you're okay with being some form of data analyst at least for the first few years of your career, and unless Australia requires MPPs for government positions, an MPP and an IR degree are the same in terms of employability (that is, not great), and in general the differences between them come down to curriculum, in which case a given MPP program can actually be more similar to a given IR program than some other MPP program.

No. You need to take a graded course for credit. Lots of universities offer it online. The MPAID program website recommends some I believe. Also, the MPAID requires multivariable calculus (usually the third class in the calculus sequence in the US) and linear algebra. It also requires 2 years of relevant work experience. All of this is also made clear on the website. I strongly recommend you read the website.

Contact SIPA's admissions office and they will put you in touch with someone who's done the double degree. They can also explain the process to you.

Everything you've proposed is fine.

give your SOP to someone to edit. this is hard to talk about in generalities.

Seeing as no one on the internet is privy to your fulfillment of graduation requirements and the logistics of fulfilling the outstanding ones, I don't see how anyone on the internet can help with this. You should probably speak to your adviser. then the student group would seem to be a bad idea. look, grad school, especially a master's, isn't really a place you should hang out for a while in. Go in, get the credential, get out. It's nice to try to improve the culture of the department if you have the inclination and time, but I doubt it'll do anything for your employability or whatever you hope to use this credential for, and if you have to take an extra unfunded year just to do it, it seems not worth it. You're going to leave this department as soon as you graduate. (also, if I may butt in, it seems weird that the usually token position of student body president should take up this much emotional energy and time - sounds like your faculty is trying to pawn off their service responsibilities on the grad students). If you're going to do something with the credential, probably not. If you want to marry your boyfriend and aren't going to use the degree, probably yes. Either way, the right answer is logically apparent.

Sure; but is keeping people out of a 5-year-long dead end bad or good? I guess I'm struggling to express my thinking. In my understanding, this all goes back to the question that, if a PhD program consistently cannot graduate employable specialists, why does it exist? It should be a fully-funded master's that prepares people for entry to programs that can, or else gives them 2 years to experience professional scholarship and conclude it's not for them. Given there are major structural issues for why that will never happen, is it still immoral to treat these programs as funded master's? I don't know; but at least it seems to me efficient. My other qualm is that there is a lot of people are spiritedly defending these institutions and The Community, but these institutions are constantly and brutally shafting graduate students and junior faculty, and the more junior you are, the harder you get shafted. The "wasting money that could've gone to qualified applicants who would get the PhD" argument doesn't really work for me, because if all your PhDs end up adjuncting six introductory classes or in the nebulous miasma of "alt-ac" rather than doing what they've trained for the better part of a decade to do, in my understanding that's still wasted money. If the department loses PhD funding because they can't retain enough PhDs - well, maybe they should. Maybe that will push them to offer respectable master's options, which is what is actually needed, rather than having people pledge their lives to the void. I'm not arguing that OP will be shooting themselves in the foot if they get a reputation for being opportunistic. I'm just arguing for clemency towards people who face OP's choices.

Controversial opinion: I'm not sure that what OP is proposing is so reprehensible. Realistically, people need to attend the top programs in order to have a chance at a job, but even becoming competitive for admissions to top programs is logistically difficult and costly for anyone who's changing fields, who comes from a low-ranked undergrad, or who is simply ill-acquainted with how academia works. So what should those people do? Take out student loans for a useless MA in the humanities? Give up and get an office job? One is a stupid financial decision (and one consistently recommended against on this board) and the other is contributing to making academe a club for the wealthy. On the other hand, you have low-ranked programs that graduate their PhDs into no chance of a job, and know that this is the reality, where professors will outright tell you that, if you're getting a PhD here, you shouldn't be getting a PhD. Yeah, agreeing to attend a program for 5 years and quitting once you've found something better can be construed as a breach of trust - but taking 5+ years of people's lives (and exploiting their vastly underpaid TA labor so you don't have to create tenure lines to support your undergraduates) and then pushing them out to a world where they have a better chance of winning at slots than getting TT? When the contract is so broken on the one side, I don't know that people on the other side should be held to pristine standards. I understand that people feel very emotional about the kind of plan OP proposes, because academia is more than just a job, but it's much easier to reflexively shit on the little person than to recognize that they are operating within the confines of a broken system.

You should post on the history forum since this is going to vary by discipline/type of program Generally, when it comes to PhD, you should apply to as many programs as you have good fit with, since applying to programs that are a bad fit and where you therefore wouldn't be able to do the work you're interested in is a waste. For most disciplines, I'd be surprised if you had good fit with more than 5 or so. Given the job market in history, if you want a job you're better off only applying to top programs (since attending a program that won't get you a job is also arguably a waste), so depending on your subfield, that number may need to be further constrained. I'm not sure that "I just want to get in somewhere" is the right attitude when it comes to PhD admissions. You want to get into a program that gives you the resources to gain the kind of expertise you need to be competitive for the job you want out of it, otherwise why do it? Conversely, if you're targeting funded master's programs, it's better to apply widely.

Schools are disallowed from requesting applicant responses before April 15th (this is to benefit you, the applicant). After April 15th, they can actually have any response deadline they please. For some schools that deadline is in May or later. Some schools have rolling admissions that never closes.

If your writing sample is shorter than the required length, yeah, obviously, that's an issue - as are any other requirements you didn't fulfill. If you have 2 letters when they ask for 3, if you didn't submit required GRE scores... follow instructions. You don't give enough information here to provide actionable advice. One idea is to contact the admissions office and ask for feedback on your application. It may very well be, btw, that since you're applying so late in the cycle, they simply don't have spots.

You're wasting your time worrying about things you can't change. Nobody on this forum sits on admissions committees to the schools you're applying to, so nobody can give you any guarantees. GPA isn't the most important part of the process, but you're miles better off putting your energy into improving the things you can change rather than worrying about it.

CPT doesn't have to be required. You just need to receive credits for it. I would also recommend that OP make an independent study of US immigration law/get an immigration lawyer with experience in F1 and H1B in addition to using the services of their school's ISO, because ISO staff vary heavily in quality and I for instance have encountered multiple instances where the ISO gave me or my friends blatantly incorrect information (looking at you, Harvard and MIT). Further, if OP wants to stay in the US after graduation and don't have an employer that will ask for an H1B for them in April of their last year of grad school, they will have to rely on OPT. F1 students receive 60 days grace period after the formal completion of their program of study, after which you must leave the US. And if you think that getting a job that will sponsor H1B is playing on hardmode, finding such a job while out of the country is something extra.

tbh I would not use OPT before graduation. Your school might be okay with arranging CPT with you, which would require them to assign you a credit for the work you're doing, but you wouldn't be using your OPT.

@TakeruK so they milk their OPT and hope for the best? That's what I figured. Thanks for the response!

I mean, I don't know them personally so I'm just asking in general. Do share.