Concordia

After waiting for a week after acceptances began to dribble out, I caved. A phone call with my prospective advisor says that I'm on the list to get a positive e-mail from Oxford.

If it's better than the last one (and shows progress where you need it), why not?

In a pinch, there can be such things as co-supervisors from outside the walls, but that discussion depends on a ton of other things going right. Thanks for the thoughts. I am still rather short of facts that will take this problem beyond the hypothetical, but those may become more evident as winter wears on.

I'm also thinking about this problem-- which will be a real first-world problem if I get into enough places to worry about it. I just finished a master's with a very good grade in the thesis, with feet potentially in the door at two world-famous places for doctoral work. (One gave me the degree and will give me a bye on some of the admission filters b/c of the grades they have already given me. My adviser is at the other.) Each place, in addition to having a fearsome reputation, would be an excellent place to (a) get to know people not just in my area, but in a lot of other disciplines, and (b) study comfortably without getting too distracted. There are a number of prospective supervisors in each place who are somewhat interested in my specific area (of History). And the world at large will know exactly where I went when I'm done. To weigh against these opportunities, unsolicited comments from a few people have suggested that the guy who is neck-deep not just in my general area, but in my decade and the specific problem I want to look at for my dissertation is not at these two places, but in a good but not drop-dead-famous university in a large metro area. He is young and inexperienced as a supervisor, but well-liked and willing to be helpful to me. The university he's in was best-known for a completely unrelated field, but has been working hard to make their history department well-staffed. So here's the question: consensus on this board has it that the adviser means more than anything else. That, however, seems to be most true in the sciences, where you really do need specific research grant pipelines, laboratories with particular hardware, etc. In the humanities, where scholars do a certain amount of intellectual skipping around as their interest changes over time, is it necessarily better to find someone who could co-author your next paper (but might not be in a preferred learning environment), or be happy with excellent teaching in a well-funded, stimulating place that will put you more or less on track to do what you want to do today, while giving you the flexibility to migrate away from your interest in 2017? Giving one a fishing license, and not just a map of today's fishing hole, in other words? Put another way, I've seen a few comments here on the order of "yeah-- Princeton's OK and they have a post-Marxist feminist gender scholar who's working on the late 1670s, but if you really want a post-Marxist feminist gender scholar analyzing the early 1670s who's left-handed, you really need to look at East Armpit State." I exaggerate, of course, but I am wondering how people would decide when they're cutting it too fine on any of these issues. [If it matters, age and a few other factors may make me a little too unconventional for many of the tenure-track gigs that people are justifiably worried about getting. I think at this point that I am better off not stressing out about joining that queue, but instead looking for a flexible Plan B right off the bat.]

If you did history, perhaps you had a course with Prof A? Also ALB, who then went on to the Big House for his PhD. Great professor-- and he wrote me a rec after a night class that got me into a master's at Cambridge, so I'm feeling the love there.

I know someone who was a TA at UCLA-- huge, huge classes and massive annual turnover. She would always tell her students that if they wanted a recommendation, to ask for it by the end of the semester. If they waited, she would have forgotten all about them no matter how well they did. I'd ask your most likely targets if they'd be willing to write a LOR, with the understanding that it might be on ice for a while. See what they suggest.

Perhaps there are Canadian scholars in that field. Glenn Gould once did a radio program on "The Idea of North."

Can you sort those into two or three columns? Or a list with course numbers and abbreviations/relevant highlights? "TA for English 101, 102, 113, 114, 231, 240, 331, 332. Assisted Prof. William Faulkner proofread new fiction for publication."

@Wyatt's Terps, you could certainly condense that-- show maybe "Twelve poems published 2011-2015 in New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, and Reader's Digest" rather than "Published 'A Man from Nantucket' (five lines verse) in Christian Science Monitor, 15 May, 2012, evening edition, p. 12. Republished on-line (www.christianscienceisfabulous.com) and read by panelists on CNBC, CNN, ad Good Morning America." "Published 'A Young Maid from Aberystwyth' (five lines verse) in Rolling Stone, 1 April, 2013.... Etc.

Possibly the first time that the professor had something worth handing off to students, he had two available. You were one.

MBA or PhD?

Earlier this year I submitted a master's thesis to Cambridge, and came up against a pretty ruthless style guide. Size of paper was mandatory, and while there was room to maneuver on margins and fonts, they didn't give you much. But the main thing was that they were using word counts, with appropriate adjustments for tables and illustrations as necessary. I think I was able to get mine in at three words under the maximum.

Normally, for professional degrees, you'll want a letter from your employer. The client letter would be non-standard. Also, in this case, there's the possibility that the writer owes you something, or at least can't compare your work with anyone else's. Not the best place to make a credible recommendation.

Get it in writing not just for your lawyer's amusement, but so you can sit down and really figure it out.

Thanks. I'll see if I can figure out their website.

You're interpreting evidence and putting it into some kind of framework. I don't have a PhD or serve on an admissions committee, but that sounds like a decent start-- as long as you're not billing yourself as a quant-oriented Marxian or something quite different. Maybe look at some essays on microhistory for inspiration. I just completed a master's thesis based on an under-discovered journal, and needed to dig up a fair bit of biographical data to have a lot of it make sense. In order to convince a method-oriented department that I wasn't "just writing biography," I stressed that I was undertaking a microhistorical approach that would allow a slower and deeper look at an event that normally gets glossed over. Enables one to re-examine facts that might be over-emphasized or misunderstood in some accounts, think about questions of causation/agency, the broader nature of political affiliation in that period, etc.

Do you use Adobe or some other add-on for the OCR function? (This is totally new to me, but I have a potential project involving comparing two large documents side-by-side and this could be a useful tool.)

The joys of low tuition at public universities.

Yup. Focus on what you want to do, not where you will do it.

Ruin the joke. Start with the punch line.

What kind of music have you studied in your undergraduate program?

Looking on the bright side, is it possible that 3 weeks isn't enough to definitively set the mold? Perhaps asking open-ended questions of the PI might be a decent way to get some motion. Not "how do I get out of here?", but, "is it normal that 1st-years feel so isolated? Are there things I should be doing to forge better ties with (colleagues, Project Z people, etc.)" If the PI sees that there is a fixable problem at hand, something might get done.

Also prepare a CV for them, so they can state confidently that after x years of successful consulting with Firm M, and volunteer service with non-profit R...

Others who know more about terminal MA programs can give their own perspective, but my impression is that a BA's purpose is to get enough skills that you can handle post-grad work-- not qualify you immediately for post-docs or Pulitzer Prizes. Find a reason to go back, and tell a good story about some research you want to do, and someone will probably bite. That being said, I was asked for a writing sample with my application, and I ended up using one from a night class I'd taken at Harvard because I couldn't think of any specific undergrad papers that were long enough, or that I'd feel happy using as an example of my current work.

3.9 GPA in your department isn't too unimpressive. I got worse than that and managed to skip a thesis by doing a seminar in intellectual history with a long paper. (They've changed their requirements since then to make that impossible.) And now, 30 years later, I just finished a master's thesis at Cambridge.