AfricanusCrowther

I would ask the person who you wanted to work with what's going on. The "interim" modifier makes it sound like your POI is going on leave next year. It is useful to get your advisor-advisee relationship set in writing before the start of your program. You can change advisors, but you will want to know who you report to in your first year. (In my first year, the person with whom I wanted to work gradually became more distant and eventually ceded ceded responsibility for me altogether to his colleague. All of this was unbeknownst to me until much later.)

If your entire sense of self-worth is dictated by the opinions of history professors, get ready for a lifetime of psychological torment. Take it from me: that's no way to live. Constant rejection is an inherent part of grad student/academic life. There's a reason so many graduate students struggle with mental health problems.

You will also want to conduct your own research. What books or articles have inspired you, and were any of them written by faculty based in the southeast who could advise your dissertation? Also, what are your professional goals?

I'm not in your field, but the first ones that come to mind are Duke, UNC, Vanderbilt, Emory, University of Virginia, the University of South Carolina, and the University of Florida.

What are your research interests/questions? What period of US history do you want to work on?

Bear in mind too that even those schools that do hire a lot of PHDs will still desire applicants who appreciate that college teaching and high school teaching are not the same (or so I've heard). When you get to graduate school, talk to the people (faculty or grad students, as the case may be) running the professionalization program in your department to see if you can organize a panel or two on high school teaching featuring those who have made the transition.

I agree with what psstein said about funding. On paper, you sound like a fine candidate, but PhD admissions in history mostly come down to the quality of your written work, especially the strength of your statement of purpose, and how well a department would serve your research interests ("the fit"). In terms of finding programs, think about the important books and articles published on the topics that you want to research and find out where those people are teaching. Then get a sense of how many successful PhD candidates those programs produce. If in doubt, consult Google Scholar. It's great that you might want to teach high school, but make sure to plan for this potential career path while in grad school. There are steps you can take that will make the transition to high school teaching much smoother.

If you have multiple strong recommenders at your MA program that can speak to your abilities as a professional historian in training, I don't think your undergrad experience will matter much, if at all. If you are applying to a school that asks for a personal statement, talk about your growth in that essay. If the school calls for only a statement of purpose, you might mention it, but briefly. The SOP is mainly about your research plans and intellectual orientation. In terms of your work experience, I would mention it only if it helps you tell a story about yourself as a future historian (in which case the same guidance about personal statements and statements of purpose applies -- the former is much more about storytelling than the latter). PhD programs don't really care about "credentials" unless they are extremely prestigious or have some bearing on your funding.

You can work with a great advisor at a great school and still not get a single academic job interview in today's market.

In a way that explains your interests and abilities fully but concisely?

@scarletwitchthe Oxbridge to PhD route is a time-honored one, for better or for worse. It will definitely be a huge boon to your applications next time around.

Many have/will.

Leaving aside the languages that are central to doing work in your field, the important thing is not how many languages you know, but what you want to do with them. If you can show the historiographical value of using novel sources in a language that most people in your field don't know, that's a strong asset.

No -- just send a thank you email.

I would suggest that these comparisons do not capture the scale of the problem. My question: hasn't almost everyone going into PhD programs since at least the early 2010s received these sorts of warnings? And then why did we go, just to reiterate them to others (albeit with much greater urgency given the current crisis)? In my case, I was assured that history as a whole might be screwed but that there were plenty of jobs in my sub-field. Ha ha.

Some department of the federal government (State Department, National Park Service) hire historians. They produce archival reports or research historic places.

The absence of good alternatives is doubtless why so many of us wish to enter academe. Alas, there are no jobs.

What are you comparing this to? Public-sector work outside academia?

Federal government: yes, either as historians (an official hiring category of the feds) or as regional specialists. Consulting: yes. PhDs in the humanities show that you can successfully analyze lots of information and present that information coherently. Management consulting firms like this sort of thing. Advising media productions: no idea. Other fields (leaving out the obvious): secondary school teaching, non-profit management, scholarly publishing

Thank you for sharing this. You will likely face criticism from a couple of the old timers. I hope everyone who reads this post takes it extremely seriously. I'll add this article (perhaps a tad too alarmist) for some broader details that reflect the current crisis. I am grateful that my PhD (still in the making) has led me to spend many months conducting research in a country I never would have visited otherwise, and allowed me to live the life of the mind. But I fear that at the end of this process I will come to see that these benefits will have come at a great professional and personal cost.

You should also pose this question to people who understand the law faculty job market, which is very different from that of history. And obviously a JD opens up job opportunities beyond academia.

The quality of a research question depends on how well you motivate it historiographically. So, here's a question you'll get a lot in grad school: why should anyone care about how public health discourse represented the Midwest?

I'm glad you made this concession (in your similarly thoughtful post). For those of us who have based their proposed dissertations on rare manuscripts held in resource-poor institutions abroad or on extensive international fieldwork, our projects cannot be adapted to digital sources in an honest way. Those projects are over, and my friends who are in this position are looking for ways out. (I fortunately gathered enough archival materials in the months before the travel restrictions were put in place to write...something.)

Good to have a collection of public statements, but please, applicants: don’t get your hopes up about any other top programs not listed here.

Being fluent in Chinese is a major asset, but most PhD admissions come down to the applicant's written materials. If your statement of purpose and writing sample are effective, you will be in a strong position for admission to a top program. But to perfect these things requires strong writing and research skills and a highly developed historical sensibility. For international applicants, that last item is particularly important; you will encounter skepticism that non-American academic cultures are invested in the same historical problems and ideas that history departments here specialize in. To that end, if money is truly no object, any of these MA programs will allow you to develop your budding historian's sense of taste and refine the specific topics that you're interested in.