Concordia

If you're getting half the tuition from Elmhurst, that sounds like a $50K difference, not $100K. Which is still not trivial. Does Elmhurst have such a thing as a placement office, with useful stats? Do you know anyone from, say, NY or LA in your field who can give you a quick and dirty response?

Best of luck! Someone there obviously thinks well of you, so something may break.

A lot of people on this board seem to be doing precisely that. I would assume that it's not atypical of how it's handled in the real world.

Sounds about right. From what I understand, the main difference is that Oxbridge are less fussy about taking self-funded candidates as long as they meet the (not trivial) standard. The best US programs, I gather, just won't accept you if you're not going to get funding. Probably not making everyone fit into two years of classwork and find employment as a TA gives the English schools more room to maneuver. The usefulness of hard currency might not be decisive, but that also can't hurt. People on the board here will-- usefully-- advise never taking on debt to do a humanities degree and have alluded to snobbery in the profession about people who don't get funding. But as to how non-scholarship status affects your life on the ground while studying, I have no real idea. It would seem that about half of the PhD/DPhil candidates enrolled in each place are not getting the full financial package.

There is always the Woodrow Wilson option-- he ran for governor of New Jersey so he could get out of politics.

My question had more to do with differences between the two. The US/Oxbridge divide you covered well.

Thanks, all. No obvious solution yet, but much to think over.

Is there a particularly useful one I could look up? And is there a way to further integrate bibliography/citations and search functions? Sorry to be so ignorant of this, but I've spent the last few decades in an environment that had a completely different relationship to documents.

Has anyone here found reasons to look into the history departments of Oxford & Cambridge for postgrad study? I would be generally interested in US History (or perhaps an Atlanticized version). My reasons for looking there rather than the US are (a) I have a potential easier entry in those programs [given some master's degree work at one that is going well right now, and contact with a supportive potential supervisor at the other], and (b) I am too old to look forward to seven years of indentured servitude in the US programs, irrespective of how much more thorough that training might be. This would be a second career and I don't especially need to worry about hopping on the tenure-track. I have some contacts in each, but not much context to judge them. Cultures, political issues, stars or black holes I might not be aware of, etc.?

Not to back away from the main topic, but what is the best way to organize those notes so they are searchable and useful? I'm doing a part-time master's right now, so I haven't been completely crushed by staying on top of the reading, but even I get bothered by a paleolithic kind of note-taking that I'm stuck in. EasyBib for what I know will be important sources, Word transcripts of the EasyBib file, stored pdfs of articles from JStor on my computer (+ SugarSync backup), and then a chaotic mess of physical notebooks, and various Word documents to capture bits of reading and brilliant ideas of my own I might want to remember. If I had a better system, I'd be more able to just read without worrying about consequences.