AP
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Posts posted by AP
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On 9/27/2022 at 8:58 PM, cladthecrab said:
I see that it's come up in this thread to an extent, but is the landscape any less bleak for those applying for things like public sector, non-profit, or consulting jobs, or does the PhD just make one over-qualified in those fields? I'm finishing my MA this year and it has occurred to me that I'd love another several years to dig deeper into my thesis topic, and the stipend income hasn't been bad living for me (mostly), but my fear (particularly as someone who has no interest in being a professor) is whether there will be enough jobs at the end of that tunnel.
This is a great question.
My PhD friends who are in the federal government are very happy. They work good hours and make good money. I have some friends in academic-adjacent jobs (librarians, etc), some because the professoriate didn't pan out for them, others out of choice.
In all cases, they all made the PhD work for them. Eg: federal jobs pay more. However, I doubt that you would need a PhD for those positions, if you have other skills.
My suggestion would be to contact those folks and ask them. They are better equipped to talk about the qualifications for their jobs. Maybe @dr. telkanuru can help too.
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On 9/25/2022 at 8:40 PM, beee said:
hi! i hope everyone’s applications are going well! i’ve been reaching out to potential advisors but I keep getting the same response that they don’t meet with students before acceptances. my friend who applied last season (albeit in a different field) had multiple zoom meetings with POIs before even applying and said it was really crucial to her deciding where to apply/her eventual acceptance to her current program. I was just wondering if anyone else is having the same experience as me?
In addition to all responses, this is the first semester all faculty are fully in-person, which means we cannot meet so much on zoom because we have literally less time from commuting/walking across campus. Don't take it personally.
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If you already know you won't be able to attend, contact your POI and CC the DGS explaining the situation (without giving too many details) and thanking them for the opportunity (and hoping to collaborate in the future). Then, you need to officially withdraw so that they can admit other students.
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On 9/18/2022 at 1:17 AM, OHSP said:
I wouldn't read too much into it -- she might just be a nice person/she might remember some big holes in your app and be trying to help you get into a different program/any program. I wouldn't take it as an "in" or even an opportunity beyond a professional relationship with this professor (which is different from an acceptance into the school's program).
Change your writing sample--it didn't get you into the programs you applied to and it is a really important document. You don't need to start again from scratch or do new research, but you likely need to re-write the sample -- re-think your argument, your analysis, the structure of your chapter/essay etc.Second this, don't read into it. There are a million reasons why someone might remember your application, it might be because it was good, it might be because it reminded them of someone else. You don't have enough information right now to assume one thing or the other. Also improve your WS if you can, this is a crucial document.
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8 hours ago, Question Asker said:
I specified in my question that I'm deciding between MA programs, not PhD programs.
Agh, my bad. I glided through that sentence. Sorry.
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On 8/6/2022 at 5:03 PM, Question Asker said:
I’m also curious if either History or Art History is more nurturing to aspiring literary nonfiction writers. I’m excited to do scholarly writing and research in the program, but some support for my later career goals would be wonderful.
Thank you!
Based on your post, it seems you haven't dived into what entails to do a PhD in History. Doing a PhD with a focus in medieval/early modern cities would require you come in with specific language proficiency. Additionally, a doctoral dissertation demands extensive archival research, broadly construed. While I applaud PhDs who write nonfiction (and I know many), the PhD doesn't train to do that. Do you want to spend 6+ years training for something you don't want to do?
May I suggest:
- Looking into Liberal Arts/Interdisciplinary programs?
- A master's?
- Thinking what the PhD (in whatever discipline) will add to your career goals?
- Reading historians that have written nonfiction, "popular" books?
My two cents.
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On 8/1/2022 at 9:32 PM, kingcartier said:
I'm going to be starting as a PhD student this fall, and this may seem like a silly question, but I am not sure how to dress/present myself. In undergraduate I usually wore whatever I felt like to class, sometimes (most of the time) looking pretty bummy because it didn't matter. Obviously for TA'ing there are some appearance expectations, but for class and lab, what is typical attire like? I live in the south so it's going to be very hot.
I'm going to be the youngest in my program and have a very casual/streetwear type style, so I really want to make sure I present myself correctly!
It depends a lot on discipline/dept culture.
To me, the PhD was a job, so I was comfortable (jeans, shirts) but not in gym clothes. You never know when your advisor will introduce to the dean, take you to lunch with a visiting scholar, etc.
- ashwel11 and serpentstone
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20 hours ago, sciencehistorian said:
What level of detail would you all suggest should be included on a CV?
My minimal-detail CV currently includes:
- Education (Institution, degrees, and date).
- Research Experiences (Affiliation, position, and date).
- Publications and Scholarship (Citations).
- Conference Presentations (Name(s), title, venue, format).
- Awards and Funding (Title, source, amount, and date).
- Extracurricular Activities (Group, positions, date).
- Service (Role, event/group, date).
- Teaching Experience (Group, position, date).
This puts me at slightly over 2 pages, and seems commensurate with the level of detail CVs normally contain at the faculty level.
According to my perusal of the forums, some people suggest including resume-esque information that contains more specific details on the activities and tasks completed during certain experiences.
I could add more detail to the research, extracurricular, and teaching sections, although for the extracurricular section I'd likely restrict detail-addition to the roles with skills relevant for a graduate student. I would estimate that addition of such details would be push me to 3 or 3.5 pages. Would such information be helpful to an admissions committee or be viewed as extraneous?
This looks pretty academic-ly to me. Always, ALWAYS put the most relevant pieces of information first. Hence, I'd put teaching experience before service or extracurricular. "Publications & Scholarship" sounds redundant. Either "publications" or "scholarly work."
The only portion you might to add some resume-style detail is for research experience, if this experience was not the norm or if it includes very different experiences. For instance, maybe you were an RA for a professor and that meant scanning books, maybe for another prof you went into the archive.
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Friendly reminder from a faculty: August-September is the best time to contact POIs.
- TheWitWitch and ladydobz
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On 7/19/2022 at 3:45 PM, AfricanusCrowther said:
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.
Ditto.
I do think that it certainly makes your research more interesting if you eventually include historians of other regions in your committee, but for application purposes, given the number of historians of medicine in North America, you should definitely apply to a place where there is one.
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11 hours ago, Prophecies said:
I can agree with that. For Russia, I'm luckier than I thought for archives and primary sources. Many universities in the UK and USA invested in Eurasian programs / research thanks to the Cold War and World Wars, so some options include: Ohio State, School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies (UCL), the medieval collections at the University of Leeds. Harvard is excellent for Byzantinum. Of course, Russia is the premier place: the libraries in Moscow and St Petersburg are truly excellent, with documents dating from the Rus as well as trade / liturgical documents relating to Constantinople diplomacy.
A potential problem is that it's against Australian law to use government or university funding towards individuals / organisations under Sanctioned countries. So yep, must get creative for those really hard to find sources. I'm sure post-Soviet countries like Georgia have archives but I must check.
I have some colleagues that work on the Soviet Union that had to re-calibrate their projects. Sometimes it's just not the right time...
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My rule of thumb is to take the example of your mentors.
Signatures are not CVs. They should reflect who you are and provide information that it would help your addressees respond better to your inquiry. Unless your fellowship come with an appointment, I wouldn't list them.
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I'll add some comments/points of clarification in bold to complement this exhaustive post:
On 2/11/2022 at 4:58 AM, Submarina said:Going to share what I know in case other people are interested. Don't take my word 100% - rules keep changing, I might have misinterpreted something. All this information is based on what I've learnt from the State Department's website.
For the entirety of your PhD or graduate program, you will have a guaranteed student visa provided you abide by the conditions of the visa, eg. do not take full time employment, be enrolled full time in the program that sponsors your visa, etc. As far as I know (AP), F1 visas are for 5 years so you will need to renew if you stay longer in the program (I did). After graduation is where this gets dicey (yes!). To stay in the US, you need to get a H1B visa. You'll have one year of "free stay" called Optional Practical Training (note: you have to pay for applying for OPT, like any of your visas or visa renewals). You get three years if you're in a STEM field. Ideally, this year should be spent trying to get a job which will sponsor your visa. The good news is that if you're working at a research institution - pretty much any big university - it's easier to get the H1B visa. That's because research institutions are considered "cap-exempt" - usually, H1B applicants have to go through a lottery process, where there's a 30-80% chance of getting a visa depending on your country of citizenship and your qualifications. At research institutions though anyone can get a H1B visa without going through the lottery. (My understanding was that if you go to work on an academic institution, not if you came from one).
Now, the bad news is that getting you the visa is still a pain in the ass for the university. It costs them a substantial amount of money (about $6,000 minimum just in application fees) and could take many months to process. They're unlikely to do this, imo, for someone who they don't see as a long-term employee. So if you're working as an adjunct or such it will be very difficult to get them to sponsor you Actually, you have to be a full time employee, so adjuncts wouldn't qualify for H1B visas. Ideally you want to land a TT position ASAP because they will sponsor you.
There's also a visa called the J-1 visa, which some universities might give you instead of the H1B for shorter academic fellowships and postdocs. This visa really isn't ideal because in some scenarios you may have to go and live in your home country for two years after the visa ends. (The requirements for this vary per country). Yes!
In terms of longer-term immigration, if you land a TT job, it becomes very easy to get a green card (permanent residency). As long as your employer is willing to sponsor you, you can apply for a green card under what is called the "EB-1" category, which is used for specialized academic researchers. If you are from a country with a lot of green card applicants like China or India, getting a green card under the regular work category is practically impossible nowadays as there is a per-country cap on the number of green cards given out each year, which means the wait time for a green card for those citizens is around 50-60 years. The EB-1 (professor) green card is not included under that cap, so you can get the green card in as soon as 2-6 years after you apply for it. This doesn't confer an advantage to you if you're from a country with less green card applicants, because it would be easy for you even if you were doing a non-academic job. All of this!
Finally, on Canada: I'm not an expert but I believe you can get permanent residency super easily while you're still a student. If your primary goal is to immigrate to NA, I'd pick Canada over the US for sure.
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On 6/20/2022 at 8:32 AM, Prophecies said:
Welp, change of plans. I'm no longer interested in non-Australian universities for my Masters (mostly due to funding, Australia is pretty good in this regard). I'm applying to the University of Melbourne for a Master of Arts (thesis only) with a focus in Modern Russian History, specifically on the Orthodox faith. There's alot I need to arrange: references, a writing sample, research proposal and CV. As my research has a Byzantine angle, I need a secondary supervisor from a different university - my alma mater has good ones.
A question: I've been learning Russian these past 18 months, and have reached a Beginner to Immediate level. I am self-taught. What's the best way to convey this in my application?
1 hour ago, ladydobz said:On mine I spelled it out in my SOP as well as on my CV, plus, when I've reached out to the professors that I'm interested in working with, I've asked them about languages, and expressed what I've learned. I have taken several years of formal French study, but I'm self-learning Spanish and Dutch via Duolingo. Honestly, the professors and Directors of Graduate education that I've spoken with say that formal versus self-taught don't really matter, as long as you're able to efficiently demonstrate that you have the knowledge on the translation test, or you take the formal courses to meet your requirement. I haven't been accepted yet, however, so, I can't say for sure if what they told me is accurate.
Allow to provide a different angle.
While your level of Russian might be enough for the program requirement, not all POIs admit based off that. The whole point of languages is that you use them for your research, either reading sources or reading scholars. So, in your CV you can add a line on "known languages" (no need to include they are self taught, if they are not in your transcript, people will add up). But in your WS you can show that you've used the language. Or in you SOP you can point at language training as part of your career development. Eg, you found sources that you are unable to read yet, but are confident that a summer program in X university will get you to the finish line. Or Eg 2, You plan to take three semesters of Russian at the institutions well-renowned Language Center.
In other words, admissions are not a list of boxes that you check. Those boxes are a starting point, but you need to show how you will grow as a scholar in that specific program.
- Prophecies and ladydobz
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Withdraw your article right now.
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In the humanities, where research plays the most important part of your degree, coursework is that moment to build your fields. This is the moment to read things you won't read in the years doing research and writing the dissertation because your focus will be very narrow. Coursework reminds you of the big picture as you dive into your research and as you come out of it. It reminds you of your interlocutors.
However, PhD programs vary from program to program and courses vary enormously even within the department. So your courses should be useful to you. How can you tell if they are useful? Well, you asked about employers. That's one way of thinking about it although I have never heard of anyone asking for courses taken in a PhD for employment purposes (it may vary in your field).
Courses at the graduate level can provide:
- Mentorship. Sometimes we take courses to work with a professor that we want to include in our committee and who might eventually write a LoR. I took courses with specialists outside my department to bolster potential letter writers for the job market.
- Diversity of assignments. In my program, several courses had non-traditional assignments which really helped me down the line. Eg, a course midterm was an annotated syllabus and in addition to the final project we had to write a grant application. It was the first draft I ever wrote and helped get started.
- Networking. Depending where you are taking courses, you can encounter students from fields that you wouldn't have found otherwise. Interdisciplinarity helped me better hone my project for audiences outside my discipline. I've also known people that because they took specific courses, they found out about internal grants that eventually funded their dissertation writing years.
- Methods. Some courses offer good exposure to methods that maybe you won't use in your project but it is worth knowing they exist. In my case, this is more methods in textual analysis.
YMMV
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On 4/6/2022 at 4:42 AM, flowersandcoffee said:
For anyone on UC Berkeley's waitlist, apparently 50% of admitted students have not accepted or declined their offer
This doesn't necessarily mean that people will come off the waitlist.
Programs make offers knowing there will be a yield. For instance, if they have ten spots and they anticipate a 50% yield, they will make twenty offers, which means they will have their spots filled and no one will come from the waitlist.
(Sometimes it happens that programs get a higher yield than they anticipated too and they have to shrink the next cohort).
Of course, YMMV.
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On 3/8/2022 at 7:51 PM, flowersandcoffee said:
An admin officer from Harvard told me that most students (even if they've made up their mind months ago) tend to wait until the April deadline to reject their offers. This seems to be the general trend and it must be a psychological thing. Even my friends who had numerous offers last cycle and KNEW which school they wanted to go to, waited until April to reject their other offers (even though they had accepted their main school ASAP). Anyway, that's just what I've heard/observed. Other people may have a different experience/understanding.
And in my experience is just the opposite, probably because most of the people I know are international so there are other considerations to take into account when accepting an offer (ie visas).
Bottom line: waitlists and responses to offers do not have one trend. Personally, I would treat being waitlisted as a rejection until you hear otherwise. This is because you don't know many of the forces that work in the waitlist. Eg: you don't know how big the cohort is this year, you don't know if someone declines others would be admitted (typically, programs accept more people than they enroll), you don't know where you are in the waitlist or if there is ONE waitlist (eg: there could be one for US history but not for African). So, for one's own mental health, treat it as a rejection.
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On 2/21/2022 at 12:28 PM, ghfjk1568 said:
Is anyone else a college senior right now/dealt with this when they applied? I only applied to two T10 schools (bc people told me only to apply to schools with money & everyone else around me was applying to grad school..) because I assumed I would get rejected from both and get a masters/a job and figure out what I wanted to do later/apply to more schools the second time around... But I got accepted to A and rejected from B. It's a great offer with six years of funding + summer research stipends, but I just really don't like the location and I applied to school B even tho it wasn't a good fit bc I wanted to live in that city (really stupid I know)... All my professors seem really happy for me and told me to be proud & celebrate, but I can't tell if it's just anxiety and overthinking or if I'm just too young and I should just take some time off and figure it out.
No no no no no. You should never, EVER go into anything to please others, least of all your professors. You can talk to your program where you were admitted and ask for a deferral or simply decline. IT IS OK TO DECLINE AN OFFER. Trust me. A good professor will always be proud of you, no matter what you choose, so long it's your choice. And if anyone gets offended, well, it's their problem.
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On 2/11/2022 at 4:35 PM, aurelie426 said:
I'm setting up some Zoom calls with POIs at programs I've been accepted to (!!) Would love some advice about the sorts of questions to ask and things to pay attention to when assessing offers!
This is a good moment to inquire about the hidden curriculum of your program. For example, you can ask about the typical time of completion, the expectations in each year (including service/TAing/RAing expectations), any new developments that the program is thinking about (maybe they will start offering a certificate or maybe the grad studies committee is changing comps format). You can also ask about library resources, digital scholarship, conferences that faculty usually attend (and might bring you with), research funds available in and outside the department, etc.
For example, in my program, students working under a prof were more or less expected to get a major research grant. For US Americanists it was a given that they will do another language even if it wasn't required. In another program that I know, grad students often worked at the rare books library or the museum. And so on.
There are many things that faculty won't know (and it's not their job). Eg: health insurance, visa stuff, student fees, etc.
Congratulations!
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32 minutes ago, Sigaba said:
Why? I don't know.
Neither do I! ?
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I'm not sure at what point the discussion broke out. But no, under no circumstances will I ever stop honoring prospective students with the truth about the reality of our profession.
Let me clear on something. No one, absolutely no one is saying do not get a PhD in History (well, actually that other thread discusses that). Here, I believe the discussion is please know what you are getting yourself into.
I understand that many people want to get a PhD to do research and teach, not to go into tech or law or alt-ac. That's OK. Nobody is saying that your goals are misplaced or unrealistic. In fact, they are realistic because yes, you need a PhD to do research and teach at the college level.
In this thread people like to theorize on things they have absolutely no clue ("this email probably means you are in!" "It means you are still on the run!" "They decide based on fit") to which I do not respond because yeah, that's partly of the purpose of this thread, theorizing together and not harming anyone. More than once I have been tempted to interject but did not because, honestly, those wonderments mean nothing and help ease anxiety about admissions. So I stay in my lane.
But I will never stop warning anyone who wants to pursue a PhD in History of the situation in the profession and the job market. It is my professional responsibility as a participant of this forum. I agree with @psstein @TMP @dr. telkanuru that you should think it through. If you have received this advice before, great. If you are tired of hearing it, well, it tells you how serious the situation is. If you haven't heard this advice before and are upset, I am really sorry, but this advice is not out of lack of support or gatekeeping; quite the opposite. Unfortunately, this is not a "make me happy" forum. Don't want the advice? Don't take it. You can decide to dismiss or ignore me, which is fine of course (this is why I didn't quote any of the comments that protested that the thread weren't cuddling enough).
But let me tell you that if you land good advisors (as many of you are on track to do, congratulations admits!), just bear in mind you will receive advice that you will not like, as sometimes happens with good advice. The fact that you don't like it does not mean (as someone implied) that your decision is wrong. It means, as someone else said, that you are being honest with yourself about the risks and the benefits, and that you are ready for this.
Good luck!
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This is unsolicited advise for those who received an offer.
First, I want to reiterate and heavily insist on what several of us veterans here try to convey periodically: there is more to a program than the imagined prestige of the university. Not all programs are fit for everyone, so as you get acceptances, research everything that tilts your needle: research funds, summer stipends, healthcare, teaching responsibilities, living costs, etc.
Secondly, I'm sure you are aware of the Harvard Anthropology Dept issue taking up much of Twitter this week (tl;dr: A prof in the dept was put from paid to unpaid leave because of the findings of a sexual harassment complaint. The problem is that big names in Anthro and outside of Anthro (especially historians) from Harvard and off-Harvard have closed ranks in two open letters, protecting their colleague). [I'm not characterizing Harvard or any department here, but I personally find it troublesome how tenured folks quickly closed ranks without having all the information, which neither have I].
To this end, I share a resource you might find useful, a database of sexual harassment complaints and their status: https://academic-sexual-misconduct-database.org/
I hope you find it useful.
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Is it pushy to ask an editor for an update about a journal submission after 4 months of silence?
in History
Posted
Sometimes it takes editors that much time to find a reviewer. You can ask, but I doubt you will have any updates.