Pierre de Olivi

Hey, big congratulations on Stanford and Princeton! Did Stanford interview you or did you just get an acceptance e-mail? I also applied there and am unsure of what to be expecting, or if I should just assume I've been rejected at this point.

Okay, so I'm applying to a school with an application deadline of December 1. I submitted my official transcripts a week and a half ago through the ordering system of my undergraduate institution, but the application portal still says they have not received the official transcripts. Should I be worried and if so is there somebody I should try to get in contact with? I don't want to be overbearing, on the other hand.

Thanks Charlie. I talked to the departmental administrative assistant and the HR person; they said I can still switch the format of my hours for the past week and if I send them the hours I worked with professors to contact for confirmation they'll work on paying me for the past few weeks I worked. I'll still have to wait for the next period to see if HR makes good on it, though...

Found out today I haven't been being paid for my research assistant job because the method of logging hours I was told to use by my department is not accepted by HR. To top it off this came to me in the form of a very rude e-mail from the HR department where they insinuated I was trying to embezzle money from the department.

Hey guys, I am only applying to one PhD program this cycle, Brown University in the RAM track. I am particularly interested in Late Antique Christianity, especially Syriac studies. Would anyone be interested in an SOP swap?

You may want to look into Harvard Div's MTS. It's a year shorter and specifically aimed for those who are considering further academic study.

(Disclaimer: I am still an undergraduate and have not applied to any schools yet) On the face of it, it sounds like this should be fine, unless there is somewhere on the departmental website explicitly discouraging applying for both. If you feel that both are truly relevant to what you want to do, you should be able to write strong SOPs for each, and with a good SOP the committees probably won't see applying to both as a sign of uncertainty (if they even notice). May I ask what your proposed area of interest or research topic is? That may affect which one of the programs is a better fit.

I'm in the humanities (specifically history/religious studies) but I'm at the same point in my career and applications as you. I've actually found nearly all of the professors I've written to have time to reply and are often quite grateful to hear from me. Asking about their research is a good move, but what I more often did was write a short e-mail to the effect of "would this department be a good fit for me" and asked 2-3 questions about the resources of the department and how it lines up with my undergraduate background. I made sure to explain why I was emailing that professor in particular and, if it was otherwise feasible, offered to visit or talk over the phone. The advantage of this form is a) it shows you've done research on the department and that you know what you want, (b) it lets you mention some of your credentials, (c) it puts you on the professor's radar and lets you explain why you're interested in their work. This may, of course, be different in engineering so I encourage others to answer, but I don't really think you can go wrong with this method.

Hey guys, Thank you both for your helpful replies. I am sorry for the delayed response; I wrote this post between travel and a research assistantship and didn't find time to reply. I have been looking into sample CVs/resumes and have found a lot of help from them, per @jujubea's suggestion. Wow, thank you very much for your kind offer! Are you still willing to do this? I have an early edition of my CV (it will be updated further over the coming semester) and would really appreciate making sure I'm not padding (or selling myself short). Of course, if you're busy I totally understand too. I realize my statement was a little ambiguous - the archival work was for a relatively small, local art studio; I preserved and digitized selected artworks and related documents on an archive and then used the archive itself and other sources (archives of relevant newspapers and advertisements, museum information, some books) to fill in background on each piece. The studio was for-profit AFAIK but they didn't seem to be flagrantly violating any historical or archival methodologies, and most professors and curators I talked to about the project took it pretty seriously. Does this affect anybody's answer?

I haven't tried these specific courses but I've done my fair share of MOOCs and OpenCourses in High School and the earlier part of summer. I would say their benefit really depends on how you learn, because if you don't get the certificate (and sometimes even if you do) other universities have no way of verifying how much work you've put into them so they count for next to nothing when applying to programs. However, often times they do represent sound scholarship in their readings lists and actual content, which can provide important background that a grad school or similar program may presuppose even if you can't prove you've taken a course on it. For background, then, it comes back to how you learn: personally I found the lectures on the MOOCs I did too easy and ended up treating them like glorified bibliographies for self-study. But if you're driven and you like learning in a lecture/course format, by all means go for it.

Hello all, As some of you know, I am currently a rising senior undergraduate looking into religious studies, theology, and history programs for admission in Fall 2019. I hope to use this summer to bang out a lot of materials related to my applications, but have already come up with a few questions as I've started working on CVs/resumes to submit with my application. I have prepared resumes when applying for summer jobs/internships, but have not yet had to prepare them for applications for further academic study, and therefore had a few questions: 1) I have been told that, when applying to jobs, a resume should be at most one full page. On the other hand, I have seen CVs by senior and even junior scholars that go on for pages. Is there a generally-accepted "maximum length" for CVs/resumes when applying to graduate school? 2) What information should generally be included on a resume when applying for graduate programs in the humanities? Right now, I plan for my resume to include an "Education" section, a section on employment history and work experience (both work related to my prospective field of study and non-academic work/academic work not directly related), a list of academic awards and grants, and a list of skills (including languages) and miscellaneous certifications. I took out a section on volunteer work at the suggestion of my undergraduate adviser, but I still worry it will look like I am padding my application. Is there anything I should cut? My questions have further been compounded because some schools to which I plan to apply do not ask for full resumes/CVs, but only a list of "relevant teaching and research experience." However, there are a few jobs I have worked at which I am not sure I should include, and I was wondering if anybody with more experience than I could tell me if they would look like I was padding my application or not: 1) Should I include work as a TA in a subject unrelated to the field to which I wish to apply? Namely, I worked as a TA in my school's mathematics department for two semesters before I declared a major, but do not know if admission committees in religious studies or history would care. 2) Last summer I worked a non-academic internship on archival work, which included a small research component. If I clarify what sort of research I did in this internship and how it relates to my academic interests and goals, would it be appropriate to consider this research work, or should I only include it on my traditional resume? Thank you all for your help. I wish you all excellent summers and look forward to hearing more.

I haven't applied to graduate programs yet (looking at programs this year), but having faced some issues similar to yours I can give a few recommendations. When you talk about submitting papers, do you mean using them as a writing sample, or submitting them to academic journals? If you are considering the latter, but are worried about how they will "look" on your CV, you may want to discuss these issues with a faculty member at your college. At my school, at least, faculty members very often offer editorial and submission advice when undergrads are considering publication, and are not afraid to tell students that the benefit of their submission would be marginal (or vice versa). They can probably help you see if your publication record (and publications themselves) would look scatter-brained or well developed. Of course, remember that when you publish something, it becomes visible to all of academia. I have heard stories of people publishing things they, in retrospect, did not consider high-caliber scholarship and regretting it when graduate programs gained access to these works. I'm not saying your work is guaranteed to be low quality, but keep these things in mind if you are considering submitting to academic journals. Secondly, if languages are a concern but you want to apply to direct-to-PhD programs (or MA-PhD programs), I recommend finding one or two faculty members at each program whose research interests match yours and e-mailing them, asking if your (perceived) lack of languages would be a problem. I want to go into Syriac studies but attend a college that does not offer Syriac (or Coptic and Classical Arabic, for that matter), so I e-mailed big names in Syriac studies at programs I'm interested in and asked if I would be competitive without having formally studied Syriac/Coptic/Classical Arabic. A good rule of thumb is that the more obscure the language, the less likely the program is to presuppose it from applicants. Finally, you may want to look into funded MA programs. I know that sounds like an oxymoron, but there are a fair number of terminal MA programs that offer fairly generous funding - I recently spoke with a professor at Rutgers who told me they actually plan to add new merit-based scholarships in the next year or two. You can also look into state universities within your home state if you live in America, as they may offer the MA at a reduced rate or as a part-time degree, so you can work (and thus make money) concurrently.

I'm going to apply in the next cycle (Fall 2019) but some of my prospective "safety" Master's Programs are IU Bloomington and Rutgers. Rutgers is particularly appealing because I'd be in-state and able to cheaply commute.

Thank you for the recommendation! I've actually been looking at Notre Dame, both for its MTS and its MA in Early Christian Studies. Glad to hear I'll be able to hone some of my language skills too. Incidentally, does anybody know of American scholars or departments who specialize in studies of the St. Thomas Christians? Even with the upsurge of interest in Syriac Studies, most of the scholars of this tradition seem to be in Europe or India.

Good catch! I took a condensed version of first-year German (speaking/listening and reading/writing) last semester and plan to continue with intermediate German this year, hopefully either taking advanced electives or the "reading for research" course my third year. French I don't have much experience in but hope to learn it later, at least for reading if not also speaking/listening.

Thanks for this tip; it's consistent with what I've heard from Professors too. I guess I should have added that I'm also a Classics major so I'll have 4 years of Latin and 3 years of Greek (both mostly Classical but a bit of Medieval Latin and a fair amount of Koine Greek) by the time I graduate, and I hope to at least start Syriac or Coptic using some combinations of tutoring (several profs at my school know each but there aren't courses in either) and summer intensives before I graduate. I'm also definitely open to Master's or Post-Bacs for the chance to grind out more languages or get extra practice.

Thanks, everybody, for your helpful comments! I will keep the advice and factors in mind as I look at programs, and am of course still open to hearing other perspectives. Haha, my username does indeed reflect some of my interests! I find Olivi one of the most interesting Christian thinkers in the Medieval West. In terms of getting a PhD in history, do history departments usually look unfavorably on Masters from religion or theology departments if the work is heavily historical in scope or methodology? (I assume direct-to-PhDs in history would be rather rare given my interests, but if not, would a Bachelor's in religious studies greatly weaken an application?)

Hello everybody, I'm a long-time lurker and first-time poster. I apologize in advance if my questions seem naïve or overly-ambitious, as I am still an undergraduate, although I have planned on an academic career in religion, specifically the history of Christianity, for a long time. Essentially what I am wondering is how much breadth in terms of different regions/time periods (although not really methodologies) in the history of Christianity one may expect to sustain or cultivate in graduate school, both Master's Programs and PhDs. I know that in general theses/dissertations are highly specialized, but also that one may have areas of research and teaching interest that are much wider than the dissertation. The religious studies department at my college (a well-regarded SLAC) has several faculty members with multiple or very broad areas of interest and from my conversations with them I have gleaned that it is possible, but not always easy, to cultivate a wide breadth of interests in and after graduate school, but it will really depend on the program, the faculty I work with, and my own work ethic and ambition. However, I wanted to hear perspectives on this from current/prospective/recent graduate students, especially those who share my area of interest. Do you find you are able to cultivate broad research/teaching interests, especially if you work on the History of Christianity? How have you been able to do that? What areas do you specifically study or plan to research or teach about? If it helps, here are some of the main areas within the history of Christianity I am interested in studying. I hold no illusions about being able to do all of these, and would honestly be happy focusing on any one of them, but I thought knowing about how much breadth I can expect to sustain or cultivate may help me choose programs to look at and/or apply for. I've listed these roughly from most to least interested, with the caveat that those are relative terms: History of Syriac Christianity (incl. studies on the St. Thomas Christians) Early Christianity (up to ~4th century) History of Coptic Christianity Christianity and Colonialism, especially but not exclusively in India (this kind of dovetails with my interests in St. Thomas Christians) Medieval Christian thought in the Latin West, especially around the 12th century Renaissance I am at present mostly looking at religious studies/theology programs (mostly Master's programs with an eye on a PhD), but am also open to Near Eastern Studies, Medieval Studies, or History programs if they seem sufficiently relevant. Does anybody have some relevant experiences or interests to share? Thanks in advance for your time.