jmhc

Night Train express. If you can find it. May have to venture over the tracks to find a liquor store that sells it. 17.5% tastes like straight sugar. Bum juice. Gets you done in a hurry. $5/bottle. "The Night Train is all business when it pulls into the station. All aboard to nowhere - woo wooo! The night train runs only one route: sober to stupid with no roundtrip tickets available, and a strong liklihood of a train wreck along the way... Some suspect that Night Train is really just Thunderbird with some Kool-Aid-like substance added to try to mask the Clorox flavor." Otherwise, I recommend Ten High whiskey. Just mix a shot with your favorite cheap bear. Take your advice from an experienced bum.

Hey, who is the BU admit? What field and was the e-mail from a potential advisor and if so who? Just wondering, I go to BU undergrad and applied for grad. I know most of the profs here so really just curious. Thanks and congrats!

I applied to Wisconsin to work with James Sweet, Florida because my sister is in the grad program there, JHU to work with Ben Vinson, Columbia to work with Christopher Brown, BU to work with John Thornton, and Harvard because I wanted a second school in the Boston area and Bernard Bailyn encouraged me to (though having not been admitted, I am questioning my judgment on that $105 application). If you're familiar with any of those names, then you know them probably as people just as qualified in African History as in Latin American History. Thornton has been my undergraduate adviser here since I was a freshman. He put me in contact with all of the professors I wanted to work with at grad school. I also contacted Jane Landers at Vanderbilt, but for some reason that now escapes me decided against applying there despite the fact that it is much closer to home than anywhere else I applied. For some reason, I got a number 6 in my head and that was all the grad schools I wanted to apply to. If I had it to do over, I would drop the Harvard application and add Vanderbilt, Texas-Austin, and Berkeley and possibly Tulane or UCLA. As it was, I only applied to schools where Prof. Thornton specifically told me someone to contact (minus Florida, which was entirely to be near my sister).

If you have a good relationship with your professors in class, just focus on your work for class. Try to keep the application separate. Just be yourself. For me, I haven't even really thought about the fact that I'm seeing the people who are reviewing my application. To me, the admissions committee is a shadowy, faceless entity. My professors are the people I know in class. Also, I think it can only be a good sign if someone wants to talk to you about a paper from last semester.

Just got an e-mail from Johns Hopkins that I was wait listed. That doesn't bode well for the rest of my applications, since I thought JHU was the best fit, but who can say. I keep thinking back to what my brother was going through last year when he was a high school senior waiting for a Div. I baseball program to offer him a scholarship. He only got low-division I offers until February when a top 50 program came calling. Never expected it. Guess you just never know. Oh well! JHU is a nice place and the faculty and grad students I met there were top-notch. Best of luck to everyone else! After sending my potential adviser an e-mail thanking him for his help, he replied that he is still holding on to hope that I will be admitted off the wait list. This is encouraging.

For the Sconis out there, what are your fields and what outside funding are you applying to?

Yeah, that was my assumption as well. For me, it just kind of worked out the way it did. My adviser here is an Africanist who is probably best known for his work on diaspora (Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World). He basically gave me a big list of schools to think of applying to and I picked about half of them. I don't know where you applied, but the list he gave me includes the ones I applied to and: Berkeley, UCLA, Arizona, Texas-Austin, Vanderbilt, and Tulane. (Most of these he stressed for their Latin American focus). I also thought about NYU and Duke (Duke mostly for Laurent DuBois, but I heard that JHU is trying to poach him). Well, I'm glad that there are others of us around and I'm also glad that I'm not competing against you. Best of luck in acceptance and in your career!

My friend who applied for Linguistics turned me on to this site today. I really wish he hadn't because now I'm getting worried, whereas before I was living with the ignorance is bliss motto. The thing that is making me most nervous is that as I read these threads, I realize how little I actually know or understand about the admissions process. I always just assumed that I fill out the application, and a while later they'll send me a letter saying either yes or no. When I saw three people in the results search reporting that they had been accepted to JHU a week ago via e-mail, I got a little concerned. JHU isn't exactly my top choice (depending on my mood, any of my 6 schools could be a top choice), but I consider it a bellwether for the rest of my applications. If I had been accepted at JHU, would I have known by now? Rather, is it wrong to assume that because others have heard positively and I have not that I will be rejected? My field is African Diaspora/Caribbean. If I am rejected, it would be a shame because I sincerely felt the school was a good fit and that I was a good fit for their program. I've had extended contact with a professor there for two years now and though I never assumed I would get in, I always felt I had a better chance there than perhaps any of my other schools (except my undergrad institution, BU). Oh well. Whatever happens, I have one attractive offer anyway, and that should be more than enough to make a person happy. Thanks to anyone who responds, and good luck to all. Joe