AfricanusCrowther

I briefly discussed an anecdote, the story of what led me to my research question. I think this is a good strategy if it gets you to your research questions quickly (the “why I became a historian” story is better for a personal statement.) As to your third question, my department will, at the least, be admitting fewer students.

For a long time, anthropology has been an extremely reflexive discipline, and the ethics of fieldwork are a major topic of scholarship. It would surprise me if this applicant aroused any suspicion for discussing this.

Statement of purpose = how do I want to advance the field, what will I do to get there, and why is this university the best place for me to do it Personal statement = What about my background/life story led me to apply to your PhD program Personal statements are mainly intended to boost the diversity of life experiences in the graduate cohort.

Is classical history relevant* to your research interests and the historical questions that interest you? If so, mention it; if not, you could restrict your work on Rome to a sentence that illustrates your prior engagement with food studies themes, or not mention it at all. Ditto language skills. Having your language skills might help you pass the department language competency exam even if you aren’t going to use Latin or Greek in your research, but if that will be the extent of your use of them, just list your language abilities in your CV. *That is, do you imagine it playing a key role in your intellectual project/research agenda?

Did you explicitly ask if he's accepting students? It's possible he does this with all prospective graduate student queries -- there are some (particularly older) professors who believe that communicating with applicants before acceptance is inappropriate (but others think it's not only appropriate, but necessary -- go figure!). Or it's possible that your email was unclear, and sounded like a general question about the admissions process.

The sad fact is that even when faculty want to support you, the structure of the graduate program is not flexible enough to handle students who want to take time to develop non-academic career skills and pursue internships in their field. Faculty may sincerely want to help you achieve your professional goals outside of academia, but they probably will not be able to help you, and, in my experience, even dedicated "alt-ac" career officers (for those lucky enough to have them) will be unable to help you with many specific non-academic career interests. So if you're planning on taking six years out of your life to pursue a career outside of academia, I would do so feeling relatively confident about what you need to do to get there, and knowing that you will be allowed to take those steps, and when you will be allowed to take them. I would imagine that contacting alumni who recently did this is a must. And all of this is assuming these jobs will be available in the medium term.

Having found mixed advice online mainly targeted toward scientists, I was wondering how people approach writing cover letters to journals. In the past, I've written out full-length, four-paragraph documents that take me several days to perfect. Is this necessary? How do you structure your cover letters?

The main benefits of doing a funded MA would be to convince the faculty you want to work with that you are comfortable in American academia, to conduct additional research and read more historiography that might help you form a persuasive research agenda, and to meet scholars who can write letters of recommendation for you. Does completing a prestigious MA help you get into prestigious PhD programs? Maybe. There do seem to be a lot of people who get into top PhD programs after paying for degrees at Oxford or Columbia, although this may be selection bias, because those who are willing to spend that kind of money are driven enough to get into graduate school. But it's a ton of money to spend on tuition and living expenses for an uncertain benefit. As I said earlier, you may be ready to apply for PhD programs directly.

If you're going to go for an MA, make sure you do a funded degree; there's a stickied thread listing some programs. Even for the best PhD programs, your GPA probably won't be a problem if you can write a convincing statement of purpose, a writing sample that demonstrates awareness of historical methodology and disciplinary orientation, and you can secure strong letters of recommendation from faculty in the social sciences and humanities. Don't go to a bad PhD program because you can't get into a good one. Having an article in a major history of science or history of medicine journal like the ones I listed is definitely impressive, especially if you can tie it into a coherent research agenda in your statement of purpose.

Because you are a history of science applicant, they will definitely be intrigued by your substantial scientific publications and your experience working in healthcare. Your challenge now is to write an effective writing sample and statement of purpose that demonstrate your ability to cross disciplinary and epistemological boundaries and communicate convincingly as a future historian of science. I would read as many classic texts as you can get your hands on, as well as the latest journals in Isis/Osiris/BJHS plus leading history of medicine journals like the Bulletin of the History of Medicine and Social History of Medicine. What, specifically, are you interested in?

1. Think about what historical questions you want to answer. 2. Think about what period of time and geographical area would best allow you to answer these questions. 3. Think about what sources allow you to answer these questions. 4. Think about the historiographical import of these questions. 5. Consider your language abilities and the availability of sources as potential limitations. Do you know Latin and Greek? Have the archives permanently closed?

A completely unreported aspect of this, by the way, is that courts have steadily chipped away at the legal scaffolding for adjunct faculty unions. It's just a matter of time until they're taken out of the NLRA completely.

Unfortunately, like many aspects of the job market, nobody knows and it’s likely highly variable.

Northwestern has a strong PhD program and is a fine university. One perhaps mercenary way of locating programs is to start with a list of the best universities in terms of recent job outcomes for 20th century US history, then look at the Americanists on the faculty and see if any share your historiographical interests and inclinations. You can also look at databases like the AHA Dissertation Database to track the fortunes of a professor's students.

I would suggest you go to department websites and look for American medical historians and/or Gilded Age and Progressive Era, eyeing potential advisers with a broad view toward thematic similarity (for example, my department has an excellent historian of the American state with a doctoral student who works on food history; my partner's department has a leading medical historian whose student wrote a dissertation on meat regulation. Neither faculty member works on food.). You might also look at recent articles published in journals like the Bulletin of the History of Medicine, the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, or Global Food History, which might be authored by people you could work with. The scholarly literature on food and medicine is truly vast, ranging from studies on food and healing in the ancient world to contemporary accounts of neutriceuticals and NGOs. As to your second point, conveying an understanding of a potential advisor's main intellectual projects is indeed a very important task to accomplish in your statement of purpose, but that has little to do with your research interests. As @telkanurusaid, advisers vary on the degree to which they want their students to do similar work, and I would also add that many professors think that they can mold their students into smaller versions of themselves over time, regardless of what they say they're interested in at the beginning of the program (but we won't get into that).

You really don’t need to find a specialist of food history — just a good historian of medicine, the American state, or both, and there are plenty of those, supplemented by someone else on the faculty (in history or other social science departments, as NoirFemme said). Food history might raise some important, novel questions, but it’s nothing you can’t easily pick up on your own while working with a medical historian, and given the intertwined histories of food and medicinal regulation they may actually know quite a bit of this literature.

Academia is a ticking time bomb, and COVID-19 erased most of the time left on the clock. If you have any ambitions to work in academe, go with the cheapest option. Or don’t go at all.

Unless you're independently wealthy, there is nothing that anyone with a master's degree from NYU or anywhere else can tell you that would make spending this amount of money worth it (well, I suppose they could say that there's a secret lair full of treasure and gold...)

What specific career path are you envisioning? It’s hard to justify going in debt for a terminal master’s degree, particularly given the present state of the world.

Even historical sociology and anthropology are closer to the narrative form and thematic interests of contemporary historiography than political science is (or at least that was my experience taking interdisciplinary grad seminars and attending regional/thematic workshops).

If you use the search function, you might find an old list that someone compiled years ago. Hey Mods, could this be updated and pinned?

WTF!?

Can you clarify what you mean by this? In general, teaching your own course is worth much more than TA-ing.

But don't do it half-assed. Nothing annoys regional specialists more than Europeanists who don't know what they're talking about pretending to be experts.