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outside_person

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  1. Dear future Art History GradCafe lurkers, I lurked this forum pretty hard over the past year, so now that the application process is coming to a close, I feel that I should post something in the hope that it might be of help to you. I guess it should be obvious that there is not much blanket advice for this process, given that, at the end of the day, pretty much everyone is dealing with circumstances (field of interest, academic background, financial situation) specific to themselves. In my case, I applied to programs a number of years removed from a humanities undergraduate degree from a well-respected non-Ivy. Although I had not taken any Art History classes in school, I had a strong undergrad thesis, and a number of years of practical experience working/hanging around my field (a geographical area). I decided from the start to consider only PhD programs at places without terminal MAs. In the first place, I decided that I was not going to go into debt for an MA. I also heard from a friend (in a PhD program without a terminal MA) that classes with mixed PhD/MA students were to be avoided because the MA students bogged down the discussion. And yes, this friend came to that conclusion after sitting in on a class at Chicago *ducks* I’ll say this for sure: if I had the time and money, I could have saved myself some trouble (and maybe improved my chances of getting in to some places) if I could have visited programs and met with professors before I applied. In the end, I did things backwards--I visited after I'd been accepted. On the one hand, this meant that the schools were able to pay for some of my travel expenses, but it also meant that the dynamic of the visits was somewhat awkward from the beginning: simply put, the stakes were a lot higher than they would have been if I had visited 7 months earlier. As it was, I did furious research online to find professors who seemed like they might have an interest in my project, which could have fallen under either an "area studies" or a "medium-specific" rubric. I emailed a lot of people, and heard back from a fair number of them. Of course is definitely worth doing this, and doing so as early as possible; sometimes, professors will sometimes point you to other colleagues who may be of help. Still, I think it would also be a mistake to read too much into these responses (or lack thereof). In other words, it would be a mistake to decide against applying to a program just because a professor there either ignored your email, or wrote back something curt. Apart from this professor/field specific research, though, which basically just involved looking through every department’s faculty page, I got important information about the process from people ahead of me. When I started applying I canvassed a lot of people to see if they had any insights about Art History programs. There were a couple of people who could give me a lot of useful information about the process. There is some really good information buried in the GradCafe archives, but it can take a lot of effort to drudge up, and most of the time it's only incidental to what you actually need to know. Getting the ear of someone who is currently in an Art History program is invaluable; they will save you, I swear. I guess really want to say is this: the whole process is a crapshoot, and you should treat it as such. There is no “right” way to do it. Apply to a bunch of programs, see what happens, and try not to stress out too much--that's probably the best advice I can give. Good luck!
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