betwixt&between

I sincerely hope not!  @telkanuru mentioned that the short list has already been finalized and that acceptances should be making their way around sometime this or next week. I've checked my application status twice this week just in case. 

We said that last week!

Just thought I'd let you guys know that I passed my dissertation defense on Friday. Committee wanted a couple of revisions but that's about it.

I have an Apple Watch so that the rejections can go right from the school to my wrist, reducing the time I would have spent not crying.....

My plan for the coming weeks: delete all of my passwords from my computer's memory that way I can't constantly check to see if decisions have come in! 
 

To the person who calculated the cost per word of the Berkeley rejection letter--I salute you. 

aaah, thanks for the info! looking forward to a rousing week of nail biting, stress eating, and strong wine......

Your POI should be contacting you very soon, so, patience. 
A general FYI: I was told Brown's selection will be finalized and sent to the graduate school today; final turn-around is about a week.

Oh man, I've had so many hits on my academia.edu page, but from literally all over the country and world. Part of me is thrilled, but I could never directly correlate it, so the other part of me is just...reticent to accept that it could mean anything. The past six weeks, my internal dialogue has rivaled Gollum.
 
 

*takes notes*

I live in Providence, there are so many great restaurants and bars! I'm partial to The Red Fez on Pine St. in the downtown area. There is a bar called The Scurvy Dog, very punk rock bar, but the tap selection is phenomenal. The Dog is located on Westminster St., farther from downtown but located on the outskirts of the 'very hip' West End. I also like The Parlour, located on North Main St., on the East Side. It can be a little more low-key, depending on the night you go. The Parlour does karaoke, and hosts a lot of local music. All three locations offer food, but the Fez has the best food. 

I'm graduating at 32, and I completely understand. Balancing adult life with school is pretty difficult.
I'll be entering programs (hopefully) at 33. I don't necessarily feel like I'm out of element compared to the graduate students around me. I think one of the grad students here is at least in his 40s. Doesn't seem to be much of a issue.

First, "traditional" military history has fallen out of favor for several reasons, but the foremost among these is that the discipline of history has evolved. The type of history which recounts equipment types or the details of battles is much closer to antiquarianism---mere fact collecting---than it is to the modern practice of history. The useful pieces of the military subfield have been rolled into the analytical frameworks of social or cultural historians. To put it bluntly, military history properly speaking (as opposed to history which involves militaries) is dying because it is no longer considered interesting or useful.
 
Second, different disciplines approach the same question in different ways. Let's take the example of bear hunting. A study of bear hunting could indeed by carried out in environmental sciences, but the methodology, approach, and conclusions would be fundamentally different than if the same study was conducted in a history department. If it's a historical study of bear hunting, it falls under the auspices of history. Similarly, a political scientist would write a book about Thomas Aquinas that would be very different from a theologian's, and a historian would write one which was different from both the political scientist's and theologian's.
 
Third, by extension of the first two points, the "non-traditional" subfields in which we look at historical questions through the lenses of gender, sexuality, environment, or race have become popular because they provide useful perspectives on those questions. They improve our understanding of the past, and thus we use them. Military history does not, and thus we don't.

I'm not saying it's related, but my academia.edu profile got way more hits during the interregnum between application deadlines and admissions decisions than any time before.