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pro Augustis

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Everything posted by pro Augustis

  1. I am relatively new at this myself, but I TAed the last two semesters, and one thing that seemed to work well for me is picking a surprising detail from the readings and trying to get the students to explain it in a way that shed light on larger topics. For instance, I might begin by mentioning how, under Augustus' marriage legislation, a husband who did not divorce his cheating wife could be prosecuted as a pimp—why? To explain that, our discussion could (and hopefully would!) go through topics like Roman ideas of family, Augustus' attempts to reform Roman morals, our sources for Augustus and their thoughts on this (say, an ancient historian versus Ovid's love-poetry take on it), etc, basically trying to cover the key issues from the starting point of a detail weird enough that people would want to jump in and figure it out. The best advice I received from an older student, meanwhile, is that close reading is key and is a skill that students struggle with, especially in lower division classes. Whenever we had a bunch of small bits of text—a series of short laws, say, or inscriptions—I would have a student read one aloud and ask for an explanation of what it meant and how it related to our discussion. The best part for me was that it did not here matter whether the student had done the reading, as all they really needed to know was what they had just read aloud, so people who had not done the reading and were normally hesitant to participate would do so.
  2. I am glad to hear that things worked or so well.
  3. As @TMP said, history is much better than area studies, because in area studies the worry is that you don't have any specific methodology down. The only exception to this is if the area studies department is much higher in rank than the others, which is hard to tell from your post: tier one area studies is probably still worth your time more than tier two anything.
  4. You do not need to have papers published before you begin grad school. The most important things are your research interests and being able to define those, your sample, and your recommendation letters. It is worth stressing, however, that if psychology is oversaturated then history is overflowing. In my family I have a psychology PhD and another relative beginning graduate school in the discipline: the job market in history is incomparably worse than that in psychology. I cannot say "don't pursue a history graduate degree," as I obviously have chosen to, but if you reasoning is that it seems to be the easier path to an academic career, know that it is not.
  5. This definitely varies a lot by field. Our graduate advisor told us that one is not required but very beneficial. After that, you get to diminishing returns, where two is better but not hugely so, and a third will probably not change things much. For the most part, in our book field, an original and book-worthy dissertation appears to count more, once you've demonstrated that articles are a thing you can also do, and so after two it is generally better to focus additional research time on that big project. He told us that he ended up with a third article-worthy paper—and ended up saving it as something to publish during his first job, as it would help him more then.
  6. I don't know much about those programs in particular, but congratulations on the acceptances!
  7. Commiseration is fine and all, but to react with scorn when a more experienced student attempts to give you advice is simply foolish.
  8. Hello, UT student here. Schools vary, but I can give you a bit of an idea about UT. It's true that, as @terraaurea mentioned, admissions will be a bit tighter this year, as the last class was mammoth, but there will be more than three, and the interview is really not as stressful as it sounds (and having done this last year, I know exactly how stressful it feels going in). The professors just want to get a sense of who you are. Don't worry about gotcha questions, much less pop quizzes. We grad students, meanwhile, are simply here to answer any questions you have and give you a feel of what life is like in Austin. That will involve lots of free food and open bar tabs. Looking forward to meeting you! ETA: You do not need a suit.
  9. In my experience it varies by the professor. The simplest thing is to wait for them to introduce themselves. Keep an eye out, also, on how other graduate students refer to them.
  10. Good luck! Let me know if you have any further questions.
  11. I don't mind, but I should mention up front that I am a historian rather than a philosopher and so have not taken any philosophy courses here. The joint program is relatively small. My year has one person in it, who is actually one of my roommates. There are other ancient philosophy persons lodged in the philosophy department, though. For me, the two biggest pluses about UT so far have been the friendliness of the people, both grad students and professors, and the top-notch course selection. On that last point my more philosophically minded roommate agrees, though the specific courses we are taking have thus far had relatively little overlap. If you want to look into those be sure to check both the classics and philosophy listings.
  12. Nothing specific, no. The interview weekend is in mid February. If last year's timeline is any indication, offers will be made shortly thereafter. When those people will get back to UT about the offers, however, does not seem predictable, nor how the reduced proportion of interviewees receiving an offer this time around will affect the timeline.
  13. Last year's cohort (mine) at UT was extremely large. As a result, this year they are being quite selective in admissions.
  14. Last year I got a request for an IPGRH skype interview on 1/7 and an invitation to the campus visit on 1/25.
  15. I am glad to see that you applied to Texas, as I think your interests in provincial archaeology could be very well accommodated here. My interests are generally on the more textual side of things, but I have in the semester that I have been here seen fellow students and faculty doing fascinating things re provincial and frontier archaeology. As for publications, I don't think that you have to worry. I certainly don't have any yet, nor does the average applicant.
  16. For the nitty gritty of the costs, I imagine that nothing we can say here will be more informative than simply contacting someone at UT and inquiring.
  17. With regard to grad courses at UT, there are (so far as I know) no non-degree seeking students presently taking them. I have heard of at least one student doing so in the past, though, so there might be a possibility.
  18. I am glad to see that the sub forum has not perished. Good luck with your apps, everyone! I would be glad to help if anyone has any questions about Columbia, Texas, or just Roman history stuff.
  19. I think this is one of those things that really depends on your temperament and optimal work habits. A lot of people need a break and, if that break is going to be what you need to excel next semester, you should take one, save for any work that truly must get done (my program likes to put our grad exams right after some of the breaks, so even if you aren't doing extra work you are still preparing for those). But that will work differently for different people. Though I certainly don't plan on maintaining the pace of work I have kept up throughout the semester, I plan to do some work and know that I will enjoy doing so. After focusing on class topics it is nice to have free reign as to what you want to read in the field. I have just started on a spectacularly ambitious 2016 monograph by a professor I had last year and will after that probably read one of Roman history's classic monographs from a few decades back. Being in such a language driven area of history, I will also of course have to do some work to keep those skills sharp.
  20. As an ancient historian, I can confirm that there are still questions worth exploring—at least in my opinion. That qualifier matters here, because only you can say whether there are questions out there that you want to dedicate an academic career to. You are on the right track, I think to figure that out. It's not an overnight process. You figure out the state of the field by learning more about it and reading. A lot of reading. Figure out what some recent books are in areas of the field that you might be interested in and think about how those scholars approach the subject matter, what kind of questions they think are still worth asking/answering after all this time. If your interests are in Roman history I might be able to give a few recommendations, but your professors are by far the best place to go for this. Study abroad is indeed a good idea—it is one of my regrets about my undergraduate education that I did not take the chance to do so—but for ancient history the original documents part is not really a concern. There simply are not many original documents left*. Unless you are talking about archaeology, what you need is in your university's library. *Admittedly, this is over-simplified. Inscriptions are a vital source and would benefit from in-person inspection (autopsy), but as an undergraduate the odds of doing serious work with inscriptions are very low. Manuscripts are also if not originals at least more original than what is in the library, but they are not necessarily in the region anymore, and an undergraduate is again unlikely to do very much textual criticism (not to mention that textual criticism of that sort is rarely tied into specifically historical inquiries).
  21. I hadn't seen that. Thanks for sharing it! I am new enough in my program that I think it would be presumptuous for me to offer much advice. One of the professors here did however give us all some advice on getting the most out of seminars. The most interesting portion of her talk (and the one that I struggle most to apply) is that while we are certainly expected to engage with the work at a high level, the expectation is not that you come into class with every bit of the reading mastered. If you don't understand something, figure out why not and raise the issue in class. That is far more productive (to you and probably to everyone else) than if you stayed silent out of embarrassment. The professor teaching Greek Survey (which I am not presently in, but the advice remains applicable) distinguishes between levels of reading a a Latin or Greek text. It is essentially the same distinction we make when deciding whether to study an article in-depth or skim it, but, since my ancient languages are not good enough to fly through a text as I might an English one I am skimming, I had never tried the approach there. Sometimes however it is more important to get the general gist and the way that the author writes than it is to parse every troublesome syntactical issue. That is another change I am trying to make in my habits: until this year I read every Latin text twice and made flashcards. One week in our survey course, however, we had 2,500 lines assigned (a play of Plautus and one of Terence). I got through all the material but only barely, and I certainly did not have time to do the whole thing again and make a mountain of flashcards besides. It was something of a pleasant surprise when I realized that I still had gotten quite a bit out of the texts despite approaching them in a far less methodical manner. (This isn't to say, of course, that the methodical method is not needed at other times.)
  22. I don't know your specific research interests, and I am, from what I do know of them, in a very different part of Classics. It is surely possible that your interests are not well accommodated within the discipline. Nonetheless, the bolded has simply not been my experience. Neither at my undergrad, nor at Columbia, nor at UT where I presently am, nor (so far as I could tell) at the other programs I visited while applying has Classics been reduced to a matter of grammar.
  23. I am posting this with some hesitancy, as I don't want to appear to be disparaging other disciplines. I would think carefully about the job market though. When I was applying, I debated between Classics and History graduate programs. My advisor told me to go for the former because while a History department might hire a Classics graduate, a Classics department would almost certainly assume that such a graduate lacked the proper philological training. Comp Lit may be different, but it's something to keep in mind—if you want to end up in a Classics department for teaching, it won't be easy if you haven't begun there.
  24. I should state up front that I have attended none of these programs—I did a post bac and then was lucky enough to get into a doctoral program. That said, I applied to two on your list, WashU and Notre Dame, along with Minnesota, My undergraduate advisor thinks highly of the WashU faculty. Notre Dame I can't speak for here, as I learned of my acceptance to my current program before the interview and so withdrew my application. Some final notes: I don't think you need to feel bad about not having Latin in high school. More than half of my cohort started Latin in college, me included. Would I like to have had three extra years of the language or whatever? Sure, but not enough high schools offer it for it to be, in my experience, a necessity. As for interdisciplinarity, at most of the Classics programs I have experienced, that would be seen as anything but a hinderance. Lastly, if you end up in any sort of Greek survey course, Thucydides will certainly make an appearance. That would only be for a session or two though, and I doubt you will be forced to take a Thucydides seminar if you would prefer not to.
  25. Data doesn't have to be something from the lab. If I am understanding @bhr correctly, the reference is rather to the evidence on which the conclusions are based. In my field (Classics/Ancient History), that evidence comes from ancient literature and material culture. A scholar's methodology is how they handle that data: do they focus on ancient literature alone or also bring in inscriptions or archaeological finds? Are their interpretations of their data driven by any particular theory? Do they seem to give more credit to source X or source Y and for what reason? and so forth.
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