AfricanusCrowther

Yes, four months is a reasonable amount of time to wait before following up, especially if you do so politely. In fact, I would recommend you do so -- sometimes journals lose track of submissions.

Asking faculty to ignore the GRE score might draw unwanted attention to it. I agree with psstein that it's typically a negligible aspect of a PhD application, and I would lean toward letting your record speak for itself.

It is very difficult to get alt-ac jobs in the public sector. Most employers are skeptical of applicants with no concrete experience. If you go down this path, I would strongly suggest trying to 1. secure a part-time internship (or several) during your PhD in the desired industry, if allowed to do so; 2. find a way to take courses in or teach yourself "hard skills" 3. make time for informational interviews and networking Some consulting firms have internships designed for PhDs, so that route may hold more promise.

The incessant doom and gloom is unhelpful, but IMHO universities could make alt ac careers viable by, for one thing, actually hiring their PhDs (as this essay points out). At my program alternative career programming is handled entirely by the students, which doesn't help.

Thanks for this helpful if disturbing report. Is there any plan to produce an updated version of this chart?

For a big field like modern US, I would advise against it -- not for any intellectual reasons, but because you'll be lacking a connection to a scholar in this sub-field (US medicine) with more active professional networks.

Even these jobs are not easily gotten anymore.

That’s silly. It’s an analogy. Of course I don’t presume to know your views on consumer product regulation. You are the one who is arguing in bad faith — by suggesting that I only criticize your claim because I’m somehow seeking to damage your reputation.

In my view, it's desirable for institutions to limit the range of bad decisions that people can make. Your logic appears to me to be the same as those who argue, e.g., for limiting the regulation of consumer products, or allowing retirement plan managers to offer bad investment plans so long as they also offer good ones. I would prefer unsafe products to be taken off the market than to rely on consumers to make informed decisions about whether they want to buy a death trap of a car or baby toy.

No. In fact it probably won’t be considered much at all.

I wonder if how much it matters that Kruse works in a huge field at a huge department. In my field, where there are great programs that have only two professors who can train students, reaching out before applying seems more valuable. I certainly would not advise anyone to try to schedule a Zoom call in their first email.

I don't see a problem if you specify that you're fully vaccinated and indicate that you completely understand if the person you're emailing is uncomfortable with meeting in person for whatever reason that they will not have to disclose. Why email the DGS, though? Why not a relevant faculty member or current graduate student?

It's possible to publish a journal article as an independent scholar, but it's much harder. Your novel contribution to scholarship has to be much more readily apparent than if you're a senior scholar who is considered a reliable authority on the subject. It's even more challenging to get a book contract with a university press. Book publishers see themselves as investing as much in the scholar as in the book.

You might also look at faculty pages to see if the people who identify as social or economic historians have published books or articles that use advanced statistical methods/cliometrics. My department has produced a couple of quantitative historians whose primary advisor is an economist with a courtesy appointment in history. So I would make sure to look at "Associate Faculty" or "Affiliated Faculty" pages.

You may want to look through recent issues Social Science History -- an important journal for quantitative historical approaches -- to see if there's someone you could work with. You may find that your historical interests are best served by professors whose "home" department are not history, such as sociology or economics. If that's so, you might be able work within a history department supervised by a co-advisor from outside history. Doing so would allow you to refine your understanding of both quantitative and qualitative methods.

To add to this, there's been some important work done on the public health activities of radical groups like the Young Lords. Spanish could be useful here.

For the two programs on your list that I am familiar with, those numbers have been pretty consistent for the past 7 years or so. The pandemic caused these programs to limit the number of graduate students they accepted, but that's only because they wanted to redirect some of the pool of money that the university gives them to advanced graduate students. I don't expect these departments to change their practices in light of the lasting consequences of the job market unless told to do so by their universities. Who knows -- maybe there will be some enterprising DGS or Chair who convinces the faculty otherwise.

The two programs (one small, the other large) whose admissions policies I know well accept as many talented students as they can find and the university allows them to take without regard for the job market. I don't think maintaining a pool of cheap labor is the main motivation for this practice (although the ability to teach large lecture courses does matter in an era of declining enrollment). Professors just like having graduate students. Edit: I should clarify that I also know faculty who look carefully at the market in their field and use that to inform their decisions about admitting their own students (of course, using present information to predict the state of the market 6-7 years from now is somewhat flawed reasoning).

This is a frequent topic of consternation among white scholars of Africa. In American academe, these issues tend to be filtered through the lens of race rather than national origin or upbringing, which is to say that a person who identifies as a POC is understood to be entitled to study a predominantly non-white region regardless of their specific ties to that place. This state of affairs is in part a reaction to the fact that African history has been dominated by white American and European scholars from its very beginnings in the 1960s, and especially so after the decimation of African universities in the 1980s. I believe the perspectives of both "insiders" and "outsiders" are necessary for critically engaging a region's history. I don't think it's problematically essentialistic to say that someone who grows up in a place understands its cultural logics better than a scholar learning about it for the first time in college. At the same time, such people can sometimes take certain things for granted that newcomers will not. The way to start to overcome these differences is to do our work with a genuine spirit of collaboration, which unfortunately ideal of the individual genius in American academic history inhibits.

FYI, in almost all universities history of science is one of the fields of study offered by the history department, not a separate department. PhD programs don't care whether your BA or MA is from a history or history of science department. You could easily pursue an MA and work with a historian of science.

Once I got to intermediate proficiency, reading newspapers in my research languages first thing in the morning was very helpful.

What are your research questions? And why did these professors find your approach un-historical? I wouldn't say the contemporary discipline is necessarily antagonistic to textualist methods (although studies of representation have fallen somewhat out of fashion), but historians do care about how texts inform our understanding of the society that produced them. Making meaning out of texts for its own sake is generally not what historians do, and even intellectual historians balance text and context to enrich our understanding of both.

Sounds like a great opportunity -- but one research paper might not cut it. I would take any chance you can get in your last quarter to take on additional research projects.

Can you provide additional information about what this "summer research institute" will entail? You have your work cut out for you. Most people will think that the ship has sailed. IMHO, the most important thing you can do right now is figure out what sorts of questions historians answer, what kinds of claims they make, and how they use evidence to support their claims. Being an academic means contributing to the production of historical knowledge and pushing debates within the field. Read academic history journals (I'd start with the American Historical Review, the Hispanic American Historical Review, and maybe other journals related to your interests in economics and film). Read The Craft of Research. Read an introduction to contemporary historical thought, like Sara Maza's Thinking About History. Then try to write research papers that replicate what you see in a smaller scale. If none of your classes assigns a research paper, ask one of your professors if you can write one as an optional assignment. Part of this work will be learning that history is a massive field that comprises an overwhelming number of methodologies and theoretical approaches. If you wish to pursue history on the graduate level, you will need to identify which methods and theories inspire you the most and are most helpful for answering your burning questions about history and historiography. Only when you really understand what academic history is about -- the language that it speaks, the knowledge that it creates, its terms of argumentation -- should you consider master's programs. And you should look for a program where tuition is free. Don't take on debt. The problem with academic history as a profession is not the "pay," but the scarce supply of good jobs.

In my department, advisors are publicly assigned to students upon entry and in practice it is regarded as a sign of a serious problem if you have to change your advisor. In one's first year the advisor plays important roles in shaping the course of study for the student. I recognize that other history programs are more flexible, but I'm not sure what you mean by "no one owes you an explanation." Surely if the program has given this person an "interim advisor" they can ask what this term signifies.