Fianna

That's been added to the list. Thanks so much for the recommendation.

I love Margaret Jacobs's book. If you haven't yet, read Antoinette Burton's Burdens of History, too. It's another interesting take on the gendered spaces of imperialism. Sadly, right now I'm reading undergraduate essays. I really hate failing people for plagiarism.

Thankfully, my exams are behind me. I've been spending spring break dutifully coding Virginia manumission court cases for my thesis, which really should be done by now. I feel like the last semester of my senior year in high school - I already know where I'm going in the fall, can I please to be done with the rest of this stuff now?

Right now, I'm reading a bunch of cases for my thesis on testamentary manumission in Virginia. Yay, source coding! I'm also reading several books for a paper on legal pluralism for a comparative empire seminar I'm taking. Hooker's Legal Pluralism: An Introduction to Colonial and Neo-Colonial Laws is really awesome.

Illinois is really good at communication. Right after I electronically accepted my offer, I got a bunch of email to set up all my new system access. I've been in touch with my adviser to discuss fall classes. We're still working on that, since I'm shifting my area of focus from Atlantic world to more world world. The last two semesters, I've been doing a lot of work on legal plurality and empire and I'm drifting towards the Pacific. Anyone here speak Dutch?

The union issue heavily influenced my decision too. As did the ability to very happily solve the two body problem. My husband and I both had a really positive visit at Illinois, we were both offered excellent funding packages from our programs, and we both feel like we'd be really happy in U-C for the next six or so years, so my decision is made. Congrats to everyone who has made their decision. Good thoughts to everyone who is still wrestling with where to choose. I'd love to keep in touch with everyone who's starting at the same time. A virtual cohort would be really awesome. If anyone wants to be FB friends, pm me and I'll send you my contact info. Also, I could set up a web forurm for our virtual cohort, similar to this, but less public, if anyone would be interested in that sort of thing. Also PM me with that, and we could discuss what we'd want out of that, it could be either an e-list like H-net, or a group blog, or a full site with individual blogs. I do IT for a living, and wouldn't mind maintaining it, if there's interest.

I'm still waiting for word back from one more program. This is an amusing distraction. It's like a car wreck. I know that I should just look away, but I just can't. Thank you, amusing troll, you've been a good distraction when I should be grading papers. A toast to you!

No idea why I'm bothering with this, but no. Just no. Every time you open your mouth, you're further betraying ignorance about what, exactly, quant research is. Computers can produce the numbers, but you still need a human mind that can create the model, acquire and defend the underlying dataset, and then analyze and explain what it means and what the applications/results/weaknesses/etc. are. I don't know where you're getting the idea of the "dreaded humanities". I've admitted that I'm (*gasp*) an historian, and no one's thrown rocks at me. I've also pointed out that you're absolutely wrong about not being able to model mass behavior (political or otherwise) using quant tools. I've also pointed out that they're used in the humanities frequently, and they always have been. Demographic research has _always_ been part of history. Economic history is, was, and always will be a perfectly valid application of the discipline. Political/institutional histories are a sibling to political science, except the questions and answers tend to differ based on the interests and theories of each field. I've read a bucketload of theorists as an historian that are also read in political science. I can cite them, if you'd like. It's clear from what you're saying that you DO NOT UNDERSTAND at all what quantitative research is, what its applications are, what the tools you use are and what answers they can drive.

Congrats to Heimat on the Penn State waitlist. Sorry about UNC, JTE. I still haven't heard from them. No change in my admissions portal, either.

Teaching experience is really helpful. I've been told, by pretty much everyone I've asked, to get as much experience, preferably not just as a TA, as I can. It may not be make or break, but on the margins, it's uniformly helpful. It will not make you a top candidate on its own, but if they're choosing between 2 or 3 good candidates for a position, the one who is most ready to develop a syllabus and teach their portion of the course load, is going to have a huge edge. I think it depends heavily on the department and on how they value teaching as part of their mission and evaluation system. I was at a conference this weekend, and was talking to a professor at a very well-regarded LAC about this question, and he flat out told me that teaching is the main mission of the department at his school and candidates with no teaching experience rarely get job talks at his institution.

There are some interesting applications in History. I have a quant background from my professional and previous academic lives (my MA is my second degree. I also have an MS in management information systems and have worked in IT for years before doing my grad work), so I use some quant in my own research. I do legal history, and it does help to look for patterns in cases and decisions. I also work a lot with estates and wills, and it helps a lot for looking for patterns in estate sizes and valuations. There are also some really cool mapping and network analysis projects going on now. If you don't want to go in to academia, I'm going to argue against getting the PhD, unless it's something that you'd find personally meaningful. It's a long time, a lot of money and a lot of work and, most importantly, it's 6+ years out of the job market. BAs are definitely required at this point for just about anything that isn't a blue-collar job, but my experience in the job market in IT doesn't bear out the idea that you need an MA to get a job, especially not an early-career job. (So why, you may ask, did I get one... two reasons - I thought I wanted to do my post-grad work in IS/MIS, and realized after 6 months in the program that I did not, first. And second, my undergrad was a BA in History and Lit. There are applications, but once the market tightened, it was a useful screening device that filtered me out when I was competing against people with engineering degrees.) History doesn't yet require quant courses at any of the programs I looked at. I do it because I have the background and because I find that it does generate some interesting lines of research and analysis for my project. The program I'm currently at allows you to use stats for one of your language requirements at both the MA and PhD levels, but it's not a curricula class. I do have some sympathy for you wanting to have control over your education and to get what you want out of it, but my experience is that grad school does't work that way as much as you'd think it does. You have some pretty specific requirements to complete before you can work on research and those are driven by the program requirements, what's being offered and who is teaching that semester. I can't speak for poly sci, but history graduate work is much more a professionalization program geared to put you on the academic job market than it is about history. I don't study much history as a grad student. I study a lot of historiography, theory and methods. It's much less a degree in history than it is a degree in being an historian.

It's not about like. Political science is a quantitative field and you seem upset that this discipline is not what you thought it is. Poly sci without stats is a humanity, which one depends on what your research questions are. My husband is applying for poli sci PhDs this cycle, while I apply to history programs. We talk a lot about the differences and approaches of our disciplines, because we have many overlapping interest areas. However, we generate questions and interrogate them extremely differently. One of the large differences in the fields are qual/quant. And frankly, as a historian, I can also tell you that quant analysis is very prevalent in history right now, too. Big data is a trend that everyone is interested in because it creates new research questions and new lines of inquiry. It's a tool, and a very valuable one, in academia right now, in just about every discipline that has things you can count, measure, map or extrapolate from. Take a giant step backward and re-evaluate where you are at. Start, first of all, by looking at recent issues of the big journals. What's being published in journals is where the research in the field is moving. Even better, try going to a conference, or at least finding CFPs for conferences in the discipline. See what's getting accepted. You'll find that it's likely to be mostly quant-heavy. Second, take your faculty's advice seriously. If they don't want to supervise your work, that signals a big problem, either with the work itself or with you. If they won't supervise you, chances are they won't feel comfortable writing for you, nor will they write good letters even if they do. Third, realize that departments are set up in specific ways, and those ways are slow to change. You've noted that programs that don't have quant-heavy training are few and far between. That means that those faculty positions are fewer and further between. Fourth, the job market in academic political science is not much better than that for history. We're all slightly crazy to be pursuing this as a field, because we are all smart enough to find easier to get and better paying jobs. Think why you want to do this, and if you really need a PhD to achieve your goals. For the government-based jobs, you likely don't. But also bear in mind that many of those jobs are analytic jobs, and not theory jobs. Fifth, you're very, very early in your career to have such strong opinions about the discipline. How much theory and methods have you read? Professors and application readers are going to be very put off by someone at your level dismissing 80%+ of the work done in the field. It shows, among other things, a lack of understanding about the state of the discipline. It also probably relates very much to the second problem above. Academia is a hierarchy and it's often a very traditional one. You don't usually have a lot of flexibility in the training done at whatever institution you attend. You take the classes you need to take, in the sequence you need to take them in. You then write a dissertation that gets approved by a committee both as a proposal and as a finished work. If being told how to approach your education is a problem for you, a PhD may not be an enjoyable experience, no matter which discipline you choose to pursue.

I heard three ways of handling that (I have a really spotty undergrad record). First one is let your recommenders handle it. The second one, (which applied for me) is to just let it go if it was a long time ago and you have a degree in between (I have an MS in MIS and I'm working on an MA in history and those grades are fine). The third one, which is what I chose, was to briefly acknowledge it because there's a positive reason - I helped build a start-up company that I've worked at for 10 years. I have a few sentences in my opening paragraph that explains the gaps in my transcript, the unrelated MS and my desire to pursue a PhD in history on a full-time basis.

I was advised to contact people only if I had a substantive question about the program or about the professor's work. All of my committee said that random emails to introduce yourself were ineffective at best and annoying at worst. I did contact one POI prior to the cycle and also met them at a conference (which I think helped more than the email.) I was waitlisted at that program. For the programs I was accepted to, I did not contact anyone prior to applying, but I was familiar with their work and tailored my SOP's project description to pique their interest. I also second listing multiple POIs and highlighting points in your research that map to things they're working on. It may not be specific geographic area or time period. I also looked at methodology or theory and talked about how that professor (or that program in general) would give me a good general background to approach my project. My project proposal section of my SOP was fairly detailed, not just on topic, but also on methodology and historiography, which I think helped me hit a little above my weight when applying. Looking at the SOPs I sent, in almost every one of them, my research discussion (both proposed and background) is around half the word count of most of them. It is greater than half of the word count for every successful application. The shortest research description was submitted to one of my rejections. The description of my research that I like least, and, looking back now, reads as most vague, accounts for another. Comparing it to my other SOPs, I can now clearly see that that program was the one I had the least fit with. I got a lot of feedback from my thesis committee on my research direction, where I see my thesis going and where I see myself evolving over the course of my PhD. I think that really helped me in two ways. First, I was able to clearly articulate a proposed project that was interesting, relevant and executable. Second, I was able to situate the project in the discourse and say clearly why I was interested in working with each scholar and within each program.

I'm also accepted to UIUC. Are you going to be there the 16th? Congrats on two really awesome admissions offers. I haven't read down, so apologies if you've already answered, but what's your area?