goldielocks

I have to agree with StrangeLight. Grow a thick skin, try to be as mellow as you can. Stay busy so you're not checking your phones/e-mails/etc. While the situations she described are real, there are more stressful milestones in the graduate program. Right now I'm consoling a friend who has no relationship with her adviser (they just don't talk to each other) and is procrastinating on her dissertation prospectus. Imagine trying to write a dissertation when your committee isn't helping you at all. Imagine receiving a scathing feedback on your journal article and you just wonder if it's worth publishing it at all. Suddenly graduate admissions seem like a cakewalk and a little better for your ego and sanity.

As I've suggested, focus on your Plan B. If you have a job already, focus your energies on excelling it.

you guys are nuts. you're all panicking about what is the easiest part of grad school: getting in. not to say that getting in is easy (it isn't), but the rest is harder.

one girl in my program broke down sobbing and stopped eating for days when she thought she wasn't going to get a summer fellowship to do research abroad because other people in our department heard they had won the fellowships before she did. her parents were on the verge of flying out here to take care of her because, literally, she had stopped eating. and only maybe 2 days after others had learned they won fellowships, she found out that she had won 2 or 3 and would have more money than anyone to do summer research.

another colleague in my program was having panic attacks because, after being held up for a full year by her dissertation committee who wouldn't approve her dissertation proposal because some of the formatting in her footnotes was wrong (i shit you not), her advisor quit her and no one else would work with her. they believed that these delays to be her fault rather than her committee's (in truth: it was a little of both, but 75% committee politics and maybe 25% of a weak proposal). eventually, she scraped together a committee, and will finally be leaving to do her dissertation research after an 18-month delay.

yet another colleague has just had a baby and has no fellowship for his research year, which should be happening next year. he can't even make progress on his fellowship applications because his advisor will not certify that he has proficiency in his research language, despite taking several certification tests (and passing all of them) in that language. because she is the only person in our city that has the credentials to approve his language training, he's stuck until she's satisfied he can translate the language (he's damn near fluent in it, by the way, coming from other grad students who are native in that language). so, next year, he's faced with no fellowship, potentially being thrown out of the program for failing to meet the language requirement on time, AND he has a newborn to care for.

yet another new daddy is on the job market this year. he was on it last year and got a lot of interest but no campus visit invitations, so he added a chapter to his dissertation just so he'd have employment as a TA this year. it's better to spend 1 more year in grad school than 1 year outside of academia all together if you're looking for a job. getting that TAship was dependent on new students turning our school's offer down, so just getting that funding was a nightmare for him. now, his second year on the job market, he had only 2 top 10 interviews (less interest than his first year, when he had fewer publications and a less clear project). only one resulted in a campus visit, which he just completed today. last week he did a mock job talk in our department and was ripped apart by the faculty because it just... wasn't good. if he doesn't get this job, he will be unemployed next year, because there is no way to squeeze one last year of funding from our school. he will have his PhD in hand but have no job. and a baby. and a self-employed wife whose income ebbs and flows.


these are all the problems you'll face once you're actually IN graduate school. so... build your coping skills now by still having your life and your sanity as you wait until february for these acceptances to come in. professors and departments are very busy and adcoms don't meet as often as you all think they do. just because schools may be talking to people in january doesn't mean they won't actually meet and decide on admissions until mid-february. calm the eff down, people.

Owls, thanks so much for the info! I'm taking it you're an Americanist then? If you'd rather me PM you, please just let me know. I'm a Europeanist, and trying to figure out if I should count myself out yet.

I suspect the same thing. And it's giving me mixed emotions — a combination of excitement and dread. Sometimes I chicken out and think it'd have been better if I didn't apply to work with some of these people whose work I've been married to for the past two years, during my research. Because then I wouldn't feel that awful sting if/when they (or the adcom) say(s) "no."

I think every professional or apprenticing historian can agree that intentional manipulating of facts is bad history, but that is a different issue from objectivity vs. subjectivity. Objectivity implies being able to shut off one's ideology which is pretty much impossible, because subconscious narrative formation and arrangments of "fact" will inevitably intrude. Likewise, showing "both" sides of the argument implies as does mainstream american political discourse, that political ideologies can be simplistically reduced to left and right, republican and democrat, the list goes on. Moreover true "objectivity" is impossible due to the various constraints on historians based on choices outside of their control. What sources are still extant, to what degree was a society literate, who read the sources that do exist, which sources do I consult or are the sources compelling? The sheer amount of voices lost due illiteracy, destruction of sources by either natural or human agents, means that every historians start with a reletively random array of facts or a group of facts that derive from one specific group. Therefore, narrative creation is an essential part of history, and historical narratives are inevitably inventions of historians, even if we attempt to be unbiased. My view is that the best way is to attempt to state one's own ideoligical concerns and methodoligical influences from the outset and then right the story. As far as Occupy Wall st. is concerned, I will paraphrase E. P. Thompson in the Making of the English Working Class, they have confused democracy as an end instead of a means. Sorry for any typos, missing words, etc. but I don't have time to proofread

Congrats! I second Safferz's questions too.

owls, I have a quick question as well which I think might be helpful for some people - had you been in contact with any professors at Yale before you applied or was this the first you were able to speak with your POI there?

Congrats as well by the way!

Hey everyone,

Long-time lurker of these forums, and upon reading some of y'alls wonder at the Yale interviews, thought I'd help. I'm one of the posters for the interviews and had a phone conversation today with my POI after receiving an email from him last week. I was told that I'm on a short-list and the interviews are now part of the official process (for the first time, this year). If anyone wants more information, feel free to ask.

cheers!

Congrats owls, and thanks for sharing the info! Like goldielocks, I'm also a bit unclear about what this means for the rest of us -- is it fair to assume that all shortlisted applicants have already been contacted? Is the role of the adcomm then to whittle down the interviewed applicants to a final list for offers?

Congrats Tay!

In an effort to be less neurotic, I am supposed to be taking today (my day off) to do something fun and relaxing. I am also going to attempt to stay away from TGC until at least this evening. Baby steps.

I keep thinking I'm not too stressed out, but then I'll jump each time I hear my email alert go off. I'd follow the advice to stay away from the boards, but I know that 1. I would be more stressed out not keeping in touch with other people going through the process and 2. I wouldn't be able to "just forget about it" until notifications come.

I vacillate between stress and genuine curiosity. I just want the next month to fly by. I'm sure we all do.

Relax, guys! I think it's a bit silly to think Yale is done this early, when most schools have only been open for two weeks since the holidays. The application was due on December 15th, and it appears the graduate school closed for the holidays on the 23rd. We all got the email when the graduate school made applications available to departments for review (Jan. 11th), so I think it's highly unlikely the history department has gone through all the applications in a week. My guess is that next week and the week after is when successful applicants will be contacted for interviews - assuming that Yale is sticking to the same timeline as previous years, rather than pushing back decisions later in the month to accommodate interviews.

I remember thinking last year, when early acceptances started rolling it, "Dammit, why didn't I apply to any of these schools!?"

I still feel the same way, and it does a good job to make me smile! Today will be a good day.

I myself would prefer to be a Slytherin grad student just to show everyone that not all amoral scumbags are pure evil ... either that or go beauxbatons ... I saw the veela girls ... can't go wrong there

Just imagine if Hogwarts or other magical schools had graduate school. Would you get a rejection letter that screams at you?

That would be the real nightmare.

I've read the history forum recently, but refrained from commenting (per StrangeLight's views on the matter) since things will arrive when they arrive, the Penn one seems a bit odd considering that it says the person got an interview offer on Dec 15. Not saying it's made up, but just that applications to Penn were due on that day, so seems a bit unlikely...

time for my annual "turn off the internet" post:

most of you won't hear anything, positive or negative, until mid-february. right now, it's mid-january. with a few exceptions (which seem to be genuine surprises, so there's no way to predict them) you won't get any news for the next 3-4 weeks. so do yourself a favour and don't visit this website in that time. if you get an email from a school, it will arrive regardless of whether or not you check this website. if you get a letter in the mail, that will also arrive regardless of the power of the internet. if february 15 comes and goes with no word, log back on and see if others have heard from the same school yet. but do yourself a favour and wait until february 15 to start haunting this place in the hope that you'll get some inside info. otherwise, the next month will crawl.

This is pretty much how the waiting process is making me feel.

I'm not exactly trying to be serious.

One big difference between grad students and OWS protesters is that most historians I know manage to find a shower more than once a week.

As someone looking to study the history of working class movements, I am very interested in this thread and would like to throw in my two cents. First, I agree with some of the other posters that historians can never achieve complete objectivity, nor do I think it would be desirable to do so. Our own beliefs can lend us passion in pursuing history and our own experiences can give us deeper insight, empathy, and understanding with our subjects. I am proud to have participated in the Occupation and hope I will become a better and wiser historian for it. Second, this beneficial subjectivity must be recognized by historians and continuously presented as a disclaimer to themselves and others. History conducted with specifically ideological ends in mind is little more than vulgar propaganda. Third, it is too early to either lionize or dismiss the movement as an item of historical interest. Historians (unlike many social sciences) have the luxury of time; the Chartists started small and took a decade to achieve their aims, while the Bolsheviks were a joke at the turn of the century but by the end of 1917 nobody was laughing. There is simply no way to tell right now whether this will be an insignificant blip on the historical radar or the beginning of global revolution. In short, hindsight may be 20/20, but foresight is legally blind. Finally, I fully believe that historians have a role to play in the Occupation. That is not to say that we should, as others have expressed fears of, conduct historical studies for the purpose of justifying our present political positions. However, we should use our knowledge of what has (or more importantly has not) worked for social and political movements in the past to help inform and guide OWS. We must use our expertise to help explain how the present system came to be and why. We have a duty to give back to the society that has trained us as historians by taking our scholarship out of academia and to the people who fund our studies in a relevant way.

I fail to see how OWS will end up as anything but an amusing anecdote in the history books. What exactly have they accomplished other than showing they are more than willing to wallow in their own excrement because, "They're mad, damnit!"

My position here is heavily influenced by my background in African history, postcolonial theory and gender studies, so I struggle to see how the question is up for debate! I think history writing, like all forms of knowledge production, has a political dimension. African history itself only emerged as an academic field some 50 years ago to write *against* European historical production that for centuries represented the continent as primitive, timeless and outside of History (re-phrasing Hegel here), which then in turn became the dominant discourse used to justify the imperial project. So I really don't agree with the idea that the academic historian somehow possesses some objective 'view from nowhere,' because like all people, historians are subjective actors shaped by their social, cultural (and I should note, institutional) contexts. And I think history shows that

This was forwarded to one of the listservs I'm on, and I thought I'd share. What do you guys think? What is the role of historical production in contemporary movements like OWS?

"Inspired by the creativity and strength of Occupy Wall Street and the Occupy movement around the world, Occupy History adds its voice in support of those speaking out against and demanding solutions to growing injustice and inequality, both economic and social.

We encourage historians to work to build the discussion beyond inequality and injustice to include the history of the struggle for equality and justice and the changes needed in our countries’ governments."

http://occupyhistoryna.wordpress.com/