Calgacus

I may be off but my interpretation of the Kruse tweet was that he was specifically commenting on prospective students currently asking for *Zoom meetings.* It doesn't seem like he said don't contact would-be advisers at all -- and it has been a longstanding custom for students to send introductory emails to potential advisers, even if only to find out whether they (or their caucuses) are accepting students in the upcoming cycle. It seems the pandemic has made some folks a little too Zoom-happy though, and I agree there's not much point in soliciting the additional time investment of a video call from a potential adviser before applying. If they preemptively offer to chat then sure, go for it, otherwise I would say stick to email communication until you're accepted.

This sounds like you're trying to excuse a clearly systemic short-coming of both academia broadly and graduate education specifically. The soft skills you outlined (juggling teaching and research responsibilities, being able to synthesize information, etc.) are not developed in the dynamic way you imply they can you used for. The bottom line is that it should not be the responsibility of grad students to find external "side" gigs that will enable them to be employable at the end of the PhD, but that is the reality today. And this reality is what leads @remenis and others to underscore the PhD's immense financial and time cost. The vast majority of programs still insist on running programs geared towards developing students for TT jobs. With TT jobs now being virtually nonexistent, the PhD itself becomes the side gig (or labor of love, or vanity project, or however one wants to frame it based on their level of cynicism). Your framing seems to miss the scale of the problem at multiple levels-- the viability of the careers of individual graduate students that the discipline continues to churn out, *and* the viability of the discipline/"profession" itself. Excusing the deeply problematic ethics of individual faculty, specific programs, or of academia broadly that maintain the current system because it provides grads with life lessons/opportunities to fail/succeed seems misguided and borderline cruel to me.

Do not pay for a graduate degree in history. There is no clearer way for any of us to say it. It has been a common refrain on this board for a decade, and certainly it is just as true now as ever. There are plenty of funded history MA programs out there. Apply to some of those if you feel the MA is necessary. Just to reiterate the point further: there is one job in my field this year. Unfortunately, a lot of programs have been devastatingly slow at starting to pivot towards non-TT professional careers, even now.

You might consider applying to Rutgers if you haven't already.

Great points, @telkanuru. It can be really difficult figuring out how to deliver information that you know is probably unwelcome but you feel is important to share, especially in these online forums, where neither side gets the benefit of body language, voice inflections, etc. And as I mentioned in my response to OP above, I think the question of "why do I want to go to graduate school" is one that is honestly not asked enough. I don't say this to any one individual to force them to prove themselves one way or another, I just think it's an important question to ask ourselves at all stages of this process-- application, decision/acceptance, and especially once in it.

@historynerd97 It would be helpful to tell us a bit about why you think you want to go to graduate school? At this point in your undergraduate career, (1) focus on trying to get a couple of research projects under your belt, either for classes or externally. (2) Talk to as many faculty as you can about your interests in graduate school and think critically about what sort of advice they give you. (3) As others have pointed out, undergrad is an ideal time to start working on languages if you'll need them-- you haven't told us what your area of interest is so we can't give you specifics on that yet.

This is an incredibly well-said and mature reflection on a trend that @Assotto is absolutely right about. New applicants seem to get increasingly defensive and head-strong each year, often lashing out at advice from experienced contributors that is generally frank and perhaps not what they want to hear. @hats I really appreciate your ability to articulate the sentiments behind both sides, and would especially emphasize your point that the experienced grad students are truly here to help, completely voluntarily. Unfortunately, there is so much misinformation about what grad school is/has become/should be, that a substantial component of experienced "help" means pushing eager young applicants to see some of the harsh realities of grad school that they're often unaware of (for various reasons). To those applying each cycle that feel the need to be defensive: nobody is questioning your merits or passion. We're often just trying to warn you that those two things, which carried you through undergrad (and possibly an MA), simply don't mean the same thing in graduate school. They are not always enough to get you that grant you might deserve, and they are certainly not enough to land you a TT job. Nobody is trying to upset or demoralize you, we are simply trying to tell you the things that MIGHT put you in a better position to snag those grants, postdocs, jobs, etc. It's a nice idea to think that wherever you go for your PhD, if you work hard enough you can end up with the same options as someone graduating from Princeton. But that's just simply untrue. It matters what school you go to, what kind of funding package you get. That's not because everyone is brainwashed by the Princeton name and stuck in their academic elitist bubbles, but because Princeton can provide extra resources that will substantially increase your opportunity to succeed, which a #40-ranked school simply can't. It's not necessarily fair, but it is a structural problem that many incoming students just don't realize because they are not in it. Before getting defensive, try to remember that experienced posters are trying to help. Information that goes against your assumptions, while perhaps disorienting, is often the most beneficial. We're not here to be your proud parents or friends who no little about the field, or even your TA who told you you were a great student. Graduate school is a profession, and most of the experienced commenters here treat it that way. It can be tough to transition into that mentality, but as @hats says, it will need to happen sooner or later. @khigh, I wouldn't characterize this as being "ganged up on," and @telkanuru even prefaced his comment by saying there was not really a delicate way to say that the information you provided was inaccurate. It's not a personal attack, he simply does not want other prospective students to come on here and think they will be expected to know German if they want to study American history. Those that choose to come back and offer advice every year are generally trying to either repay a service that this forum provided to us as applicants, or else are trying to give prospective students information that we wish we had known when we applied. Nobody is forcing you to heed the advice provided by experienced grad students, and yet we try to provide it anyway, just in case a small handful of people find it useful. New applicants should remember this before getting defensive about these things. I don't think @telkanuru loses sleep over new applicants calling him snarky or elitist. The only person that sort of dismissive reaction hurts is the applicant. (And I'm speaking broadly here, not singling you out, as he is often the target of prospective students' frustration.) Anyway, that's my two cents.

Just know that while you may want to specialize in early modern Dutch history, you will need to be well-versed in all aspects of early modern Europe in a doctoral program. And you may even want to be aware of what the early modern era looked like in other parts of the world if you want to get an academic job.

I agree with everything @telkanuru, @TMP, and others have said here, and the edits they have generously taken the time to provide. Writing is extremely hard to do, and it is a skill that can always be honed no matter what stage of you're at in your career. It takes an immense amount of patience and practice, whether you're learning it or teaching it. And @TMP is correct that a lot of college faculty simply do not invest the time it would take to make students truly strong writers. This is largely because the American K-12 system places very little emphasis on writing and grammar, so faculty are presented with the task of having to break bad habits and re-teach very basic aspects of writing, which most are unwilling to do. @khigh It's good that you are questioning this issue now, and that you seem to be open to feedback on it. I would urge you to push past your desire to place your writing "style" within any kind of foreign "school." At this point, if you are applying to American phd programs you need to be able to communicate with academic peers writing in English. If you decide to start publishing in Dutch or German then you can look more into how they write. I'm startled by your claim that you need to change the way you write for Americanists vs Europeanists. Europeanists do not prioritize "complex" writing, at least not in English publications. The goal of any writing is to get the point across, and the trend in academia for the last several decades is that's best accomplished with more direct, succinct phrasing. The biggest danger "complex" writing styles is that it's actually just flowery words being crammed together to cover up for a weak (or absent) argument. Your comments about writing being "musings" supports this concern. Academic writing in history should always present an argument, rather than simply a collection of thoughts. The fact that the majority of academic books you own are either philosophy or were published more than a hundred years ago is a huge red flag, for a couple of reasons. It suggests that you are not exposing yourself to the ways contemporary historians are writing about history. This would obviously make a difference in the way you write, especially given many of the fiction books you're reading. It would also mean that you are missing out on the historiographical debates and trends in your fields, which are crucial to anyone interested in pursuing a phd in history. You are placing a lot of emphasis on your undergrad and prospective graduate advisor, but if you choose to pursue a phd in history you will need to communicate with MANY other people. Telling grant committees or publishers that this is how your advisors write will make zero difference in their eyes. Plus, you presumably want people to want to read your work, and making it "complex" just for the sake of style is not the ideal way to spark readers' attention.

Perhaps the difference about the IUDC compared to the Midwest Big 10 equivalent is that all the participating schools are within 60-90 minutes of each other. You don't go elsewhere for a prolonged amount of time, you take the train once a week to whichever institution the class is at and then return to your home institution. I'm a bit surprised by some of the negative/wary remarks about this type of thing. I can't speak to the ones in the Midwest, California, or the UNC-Duke-NC State one, but this particular consortium is often held up as one of the most valuable and marketable aspects of these Northeast programs. I haven't heard of anyone downplaying the utility of it to prospective or current students, whether for departmental political reasons or otherwise. And when we pitch it at recruitment to students who have gotten into one of the other consortium schools, it's clear that those institutions are pushing its value as well (against non-consortium schools). It's a unique and useful program for exploring different intellectual perspectives and cultures, as well as offering a nice starting point when students in the Northeast corridor are looking for outside readers. That said, I second @gsc's comments about how to tactfully highlight the values of something like this in an application without making it sound like you should actually just be applying to the other schools. You want to emphasize the general intellectual opportunities that a consortium provides, rather than going on about specific professors from other institutions you want to work with.

If a Phd in history is truly your goal, then @pudewen is right, given the competition, it's unlikely that any online program will properly prepare you or qualify you for that. There are multiple reasons for this that we could discuss or debate, but it is what it is. If your goal is to get the best education you can from an online program, then any school that grants tenured/tenured-track positions to people without PhDs in their field should be disqualified. I haven't looked myself but it sounds like Liberty falls into that category. If your goal is to get a piece of paper that says MA in History from an online program for the cheapest price, then it sounds like Liberty fits the bill.

There's also the possibility that some people are less responsive in general, or else that it's an implied disinterest in working with you. I never got a response from a place that I thought would be one of my top choices. Because of that I decided to save my money and not apply at all. I recently had a chance to meet him. He was less than kind and I was happy to realize I'd dodged a bullet by not forcing the issue when I was applying. (He didn't remember me or my email, and I didn't remind him). Of course I'm not saying that this is always the case, it's true sometimes you just catch someone at a busy time and they accidentally overlook your email. Just something to keep in mind. Someone's responsiveness to an interested applicant's email might give a tiny bit of insight into their responsiveness as an advisor.

This gets discussed every cycle, but there are actually a substantial number History MA programs that offer full funding (i.e., tuition remission and TAships that provide stipends). There are threads on this site where people have compiled some lists of these, but there are more out there even beyond that. You're right that MA programs are almost exclusively used as cash-cows for departments that also have PhD programs. But there are tons of History departments that only offer terminal MAs and don't have PhD programs, meaning all their funding goes to the Masters students. It's emphasized over and over again each year on these boards that it's not in students best interests to go to un/under-funded graduate programs where they'll need to take on debt with no guaranteed job prospects. I'll never understand why people insist on continuing to apply and pay for cash-cow MA programs when there are so many funded programs out there that sometimes have trouble getting enough applicants to even fill their funding slots. To those looking at MAs for this cycle, take the time to put in the research about all the programs that are out there... your future self will thank you when its not having to pay extra loans, mine sure does!

@miami421, I just wanted to highlight this extremely excellent advice from @Sigaba, which was concise so perhaps runs the risk of being overlooked. The thing about grad programs is that we often look for the answers and advice that we want, even if it's not actually the best or most realistic. Often faculty know that that's the sort of validation we're looking for, so it's likely easier for them to just tell us what we want to hear. I don't know who this POI is and I'm in no way saying that you're unqualified or that you shouldn't apply to PhDs without more Arabic-- I'm not in that field so wouldn't really know how that might affect your progress or marketability in the future. But when you find someone who is willing to take the time to be honest and level with you, those are people I think you want to take a second glance at. In my experience, even though their info is often inconvenient or unfavorable in the short-term, they are often people you end up appreciating down the road. And as Sigaba says, just because another POI doesn't care about your Arabic proficiency, doesn't necessarily mean they have your best interests in mind. Anyway, I know language requirements are frustrating, but that's my two cents. Hope it turns out well!

My two cents: @ExponentialDecay is right, GREs are the smallest part of the application to the adcomm, but is unfortunately a hurdle they have to abide by. From my conversations with faculty, GREs are looked at during the first, quantitative review of applications. If you have decent enough GREs and GPAs to get past that round, then they don't really matter anymore after that. It's all about your writing sample and recommendations, in terms of getting admitted. As @telkanuru said, GREs can come back if you're offered admission and the grad school at your institution awards university-wide funding based on quantitative metrics. I think this is generally only the case at public schools, but it's certainly not the case at all of them. Some schools make the point to offer the same package to all incoming students, others offer different packages to different students based on a variety of things (merit, GRE scores, minority/first generation status, research topic/area, etc.). Some of this you can find out on these boards, but it's also completely fair to ask a DGS these questions ("Does everyone in each cohort receive the same funding, and if not how is it divied up?"). For what it's worth, I got into a fully funded, well-ranked, public R1 history program with a math score in the 50th percentile. But as I said, just ask. If a DGS says "Sorry, the grad school doesn't allow us to take students who get under X score," then at least you know! Side note: if you're interested in Algeria you may want to look into Judith Surkis at Rutgers, Emmanuelle Saada at Columbia, and Todd Shepard at Johns Hopkins.

I didn't contact anyone until the Fall semester started, late September or early October. As you said, most faculty are either off doing research somewhere, attempting to write the book/article they don't have time to work on during the year, or trying to get a few weeks of family time in. By late July/August they're working on syllabi for the following year and are beginning classes by September. This is not to say that you wouldn't get responses if you wrote now, as you probably still will, but it might be a bit easier to slip through the cracks in the summer I think. So I took the advice of my MA advisors and waited until the early semester rush was over in the Fall and things were a bit less hectic (for them). As @laleph said, people who write back are the ones you want to work with. I eliminated two schools that I thought would be really good fits because I never heard back from the faculty I wrote to there (and have since learned through the grape vine that I made the correct choice in doing that). On the flip side, I paid more attention to one or two schools that I got slightly more enthusiastic responses from than I was expecting, and ended up attending one of them. As for content, be professional and be able to succinctly summarize your previous work, why you're interested in working with them, and how you see your work potentially developing. Remember, nothing is written in stone so don't worry about committing yourself to a topic at this point. Ask whether they are accepting students for the term you're applying for-- I had to take one of my top choice schools off my list because the person I wanted to work with told me she'd be on sabbatical and couldn't take any students that year. It was a complete bummer, but knowing ahead of time saved me a lot of time and money that would've been uselessly spent on that application. I hope some of that helps. Best of luck!

@SarahBethSortino I agree with this. No idea what you would remove your name if you are still interested in an offer. A lot of schools go down to the wire dealing with waitlists. Many people make decisions April 14th and 15th, perhaps a few who are just indecisive but also because someone who got in at the school you're waitlisted at may very well be holding out on a waitlist elsewhere. So the last few days can be a domino effect as waitlists finally shake out. One waitlist I was on notified me April 12, and another wasn't until noon on April 15. You did all the application work and paid all the money, why would you remove yourself early rather than seeing the process through?

There is a difference between being optimistic and being realistic. It seems ridiculous to me to try to convince yourself that the job market is not what it is. Telling people to close their eyes and just believe is misleading and unfair to them. More constructive advice would involve facing the reality of the job market head-on and suggesting ways they can maximize their chances at some sort of full-time employment, whether TT or alt-ac or whatever. Decisions about funding packages, which is I think what began this sidebar, is absolutely one of the factors that goes into what those chances look like 5-7 years down the road. Pretending otherwise doesn't change anything but your preparedness.

This seems irresponsible to me, because it sounds like you're painting the worst-case-scenario as a TT job with "a little debt" (which I assume means different amounts to different people) to pay off down the road. Anybody who enters academia these days MUST be aware that TT jobs are the best-case-scenario, even if they're at Western State U in the middle of nowhere. The majority of PhDs who want to stay in academia are forced into the miserable and unstable world of adjunct-hood. @telkanuru is right to say that people should consider the long term implications of their opportunities when making decisions.

NYU is notorious for doing this. They seem to do it every year.

When I was waitlisted at one of my top choices, I exchanged several emails with DGS and POI who reached out to me after first being notified. I was in touch again about two weeks before April 15, and the DGS encouraged me to email again to check in during the final week before making my decisions. If you've been emailing them every week I'm sure they know you're very interested. There's not much to be done either on your part or from their end in waitlist situations. It just depends one when the people who were offered first-round admission make their decisions. I know it's torture waiting, but I'd just sit tight for a few weeks if I were you, perhaps until April 1, unless they've explicitly told you to keep checking in.

If the PhD school is not top 20-30 and the MA is fully funded, my advice would be to do the MA and use it to leverage higher ranked options in two years. Most top 30 PhD programs will not care where you got your MA, they'll look at your writing sample (which will be much better with two years of MA work), statement, and letters.

Be patient. Often the portals are run by graduate schools that have departments operating on different timelines. You have their offer in writing, and in multiple forms it sounds like. If you're concerned, you can write an email to the DGS saying you are waiting for the portal to allow you to confirm officially, but want to notify them that you are formally accepting their offer. Between their offer letter and an email like that, I wouldn't be concerned about anything funky happening. Congrats on making your decision

So if I'm reading you right, you're saying your issue is not that you can't handle rejection (which everyone here is right in saying is a major aspect of academic life), but rather it's how the instability of the application process is impacting your non-academic life that's upsetting you? I'm a bit surprised by this, because like rejection, the application is only the beginning of this sort of instability. It sort of goes with the territory of grad school and academia. None of us know where we're going to be in five years, or where our funding will come from, or what places/archives our research will force us to go to. It's March and I know I have to go abroad for research this summer, but I still don't know (A) exactly where I'll need to be going, and (B) how much funding I'll have to go there. It makes it a bit difficult to plan, and I'm only 3 months out. This is to say nothing of the fact that I have no idea where I'll need to be living two years from now, etc. Of course there are arguments to be made of having Five Year Plans and trying to have some semblance of a trajectory, but this is all fluid and contingent on a hundred things--and that's just professional/academic contingencies, let alone personal ones. I guess my question is, if it's really the not-knowing/not-being-able-to-plan/instability that's you're major stress factor, how do you see that changing once you're in a program? Perhaps other people have different experiences with this, but I have found a lot of academic life entirely un-planable. Of course we can map out ideal plans, but so much of whether those happen or not are out of our control. It's completely nerve-wracking, sure, but it seems to just be baked in the process.

Of course. I don't mean to suggest that 35 is particularly old, and I'm certainly not advocating against admitting "nontraditional students," as you put it. My undergrad advisor went to grad school when she was 35 and has since had a strong career. I took several years off myself, and I think it's probably more productive for programs not to be filled with 22 years olds. I was simply throwing something out that I've heard faculty reference, and wondered whether others had heard the same. Anyway, I'm sorry to hear of your bad luck this cycle. I hope you get good news from the school you're waitlisted at.