Assotto

My take is somewhat similar to @OHSP's. You seem to be focused on metrics at the expense of defining yourself as the historian you are now and the historian you seek to be.
The way you describe your work as a master's student is, IMO, problematic. It seems to me that you're checking items off a list rather than demonstrating how you've developed as a historian. Your reluctance to disclose even generally your proposed project is also problematic. It speaks to a state of mind more focused on one's individual goals at the expense of the needs of the profession. If you're as familiar with the historiography as you suggest, you should be able to present a thumbnail of your topic without disclosing methods and sources that are ground breaking. But then that raises another issue given how often historians share source materials and ideas with others working on similar projects.
I've been trying to phrase the following for three days, let's see if I get it right. From your posts on this BB, you strike me as a person who is not as giving as others. It seems to me that you're much more focused on what people and programs can do for you rather than what you can contribute to the profession of academic history.
Case in point, the value you place on two POIs based upon how well they're known. Name recognition can help, but the way you phrase it is controversial. As written, you are suggesting that your masters thesis is more worthy of notice than your undergraduate thesis because of your advisor's name recognition. IME, this kind of valuation of established academics simply does not work.

@whatkilledthedinosaurs, while you can certainly take what ever tone you please to express your dissatisfaction, it is more than "just venting on a grad school forum," not the least because you've provided identifying information about yourself on a BB that does not allow for the deletion of posts.
What you are doing is developing a habit that may not work as well for you as a "this is only a temporary set back / the good of the profession is good enough for me" take it all in stride comportment.
ICYMI, @AP has a Ph.D. in history and is a faculty member. A part of the big picture that you may be missing is that a critical mass of professional academic historians are not particularly fond of interacting with undergraduates. (Which is why the history fora are among the busiest at the Grad Cafe, season after season.) When you bring snark to the table, "mostly tongue in cheek" or not, are you helping to build a dynamic that encourages experienced members to stay and continue to help? Or are you sending a message that you're going to argue when you're given guidance you don't like?
To be clear, no one is asking you to be inauthentic or to genuflect. But there's something to be said about giving respect to BTDTs to get respect.
Returning to @AP's comment. You most certainly can argue what you "obviously know" or you can dial it down and understand the information you're being given.
 The path of an academic historian is strewn with obstacles and rejections. Between now and the time you are presented with a Festschrift , you're gong to experience people telling you "no, not what we're looking for/not good enough" even when you're damn sure that the answer should be "hell, yeah!" Feelings of frustration,  disappointment, sadness, depression, anger, bitterness (not me, never), are understandable.
However, the choices one makes when dealing with feelings are pivotal in the personal professional development of an aspiring academic historian. You have spent valuable minutes and intellectual energy "venting" and then defending your venting. You have sent a clear message to experienced members of this BB that you would rather be right than to receive information that will help you make choices that will get you where you want to go.

sorry but why do you feel the need to be such an asshole about this? the poster didn't get into a program they really wanted to and are upset about the way the rejection was dealt with. sounds perfectly reasonable on their part. 
pretty mean of you to turn this into a broader thing about how "professional academic historians are not particularly fond of interacting with undergraduates"! 

That's very much the case.
I used to be on the f- Sigaba crowd due to the sheer brutality of some of their comments. I will say, though, that their comments are not far off from reality and actually hinge on polite. Maybe some ancedotal evidence will help. (probs not) Anyways, I'm currently a union rep for my department and have frayed a ton of relationships with faculty due to my role as a labor organizer. In fact, my secondary advisor has all but stopped talking to me and begun spreading rumors about me to other faculty. Now, I receive all kinds of looks from faculty and have a general sense of mistrust, which is fair since I had to drop a couple of hammers last semester. Anywho...Sigaba can and often does verge on the polite-asshole line, but my advice would be to learn to hear the advice out of those type of comments. You are not going to be treated well in grad school and you need to learn how to handle that reality while still holding true to yourself and advancing in your degree.
I wish you all the best in the coming weeks. If anyone needs to vent (good or bad) over the next couple of weeks, feel free to PM me.
TLDR: telling a professor to pound rocks might feel good, but will not be worth it in the end. Keep trucking along!

A person made a mistake. It happens. Lessons should be learned and corrective actions should be taken.  Does focusing on the mistake get one closer to one's goal?
(Has the aggrieved applicant taken any action? If the aggrieved had been accepted been among those cc-ed in an email would the applicant have the same concerns?)
The comments I've offered may sting some, but they're not unkind. They're based upon experience in the Ivory Tower and in the private sector working on projects for private and public universities, as well as on this BB.
Graduate school is a competitive environment. There are going to be set backs. Sometimes your fellow graduate students will come at you. Sometimes professors will use you as chew toys. When you work as a T.A., some undergraduates will pounce on any mistake you make to question your qualifications to evaluate your work. When you are at your lowest point during your qualifying exams, your professors will offer comments that are especially cutting.
The skills and habits you are developing now, the words you choose to express yourself, will be crucial in determining how much help is offered and how much support is withheld. Arguably the most intelligent classmate I have ever had earned his Ph.D. and PNG in record time. What did he do wrong? He complained about the professional competence of members of the department. He could not take set backs in stride. He argued when he got beneficial guidance from faculty members.
Hey, @histofsci, I would very much prefer not to get into a spat of name calling. If you feel the need to travel that route, send a PM and we'll work it out. 
 
 
 

quite a lot to unpack here. you assume that I’m not using this as a way to put a better application forward next year which is quite a big assumption to make. I’d like to recontextualize: I said I was a bit put off by a rejection not being BCC’d. For you to take that and then imply that I’m not listening to advice, am more concerned with being “right” than growing and many of the other things you have implied in your response is quite the assumption.
The people on this forum are humans. We have reactions in the heat of the moment. Not everything human beings do is always about “helping to build a dynamic that encourages experienced members to stay and continue to help”. For this to then be applied on a bigger scale to “this is why academic historians don’t like speaking with undergraduates” is again a big assumption to make and if anything just highlights the issues with gate keeping in academia as an institution and the way it treats the human beings who make it up, something that I have consistently had to deal with as a marginalized person.
I’m relatively new to this website and I’ve learned a lot of things about the grad school process. People have been very kind to me. The way a small comment has been blown out of proportion and the way I’ve been mischaracterized and told I have an attitude because of it is very disheartening and doesn’t make me want to reach out and in the future.
That’s all I have to say about this. Have a good weekend and I hope we all can be kinder to those on the other side of the keyboard. 

I reiterate the example I gave earlier: Columbia's English Department did not place any of their graduating cohort in 2019 a TT job. (see the Chronicle's article. This is a follow up of the original which is behind a paywall). The TT job market is bad regardless of the program you attend and no one can predict what it is going to be like in six years. Thinking that attending a Top 20 program (based on an arbitrary ranking system) will land you a job is naive and misinformed.

Strong disagree. It's very straightforward: it is not at all worth it.
Ranking of programs isn't some arbitrary thing. The reason why Harvard etc. always top the list is not simply because everyone's heard of them. They also have a lot more money to throw around, give their students a more reasonable teaching load, and can bring in important professors every week to socialize. The advantages are manifold.
That said, ranking for grad progams isn't exactly a science. I definitely wouldn't go as far down the list as the 50s though. 10s at best.

Foucalt has had a pretty large impact on both the humanities and social sciences. Every professor trained after ca. 1980 fits this description.

Here are a few tactics that I didn't realize were fair game until very late in the process of preparing for my quals.
Arrange check in meetings with members of your committee (in some programs, graduate students are allowed to flounder). Go into these meetings with the intent of listening much more than you talk. knowing how to talk about historiography, and  knowing how to ask "is this going to be on the test" without actually asking "Is this going to be on the test?" Some professors will look at you like you're a wounded seal and they're white sharks. Others will offer remarks that can be easily missed because of the stress surrounding the exams These remarks can range from head scratchingly subtle to telling you the questions. Again, because of your stress level, this type of support may hit a wall, so listen carefully and reflect upon what you heard in the following days. Reach out to ABDs who rarely come to campus. The insights they share can be helpful especially since they've had time to recover from the ordeal of the exams. If you've taken classes or worked as a teaching assistant for a professor on your committee, review every exam question you've encounters. Look for themes and patterns. If a professor has put on file her midterm questions for undergraduate classes in a school library, spend time reading through those exams. Other tactics that may help.
If you have the opportunity to attend job talks, go. Pay close attention to how faculty members in attendance turn up the heat on the candidate. The better the candidate does, the more fuel will be poured on the flames. If you find yourself taking more and more heat during your oral exam, it may very well be that you're doing GREAT and your examiners are raising the bar just to see how high you can jump. Start conditioning your mind and body for the experience of writing the exams as soon as possible. If you're an insomniac and night and day have switched places, start looking for ways to realign your body clock. Simulate taking an exam by sitting down and writing coherently for several hours. Figure out, practice, and tweak your pre exam ablutions and meals. Get your GI tract synchronized with the stress levels so you won't have any avoidable distractions/disturbances on the nights before and days of. Figure out what you're going to wear each day of the week of and get your outfit "just so".  The last thing you need to deal with is laundry day. If you have the option to do so, consider the advantages of scheduling your exams so you can get through them as fast as possible. I had a classmate who wrote his four exams on consecutive days. I somewhat followed his lead and took them over a couple of weeks. For me, the advantage was that my windows for freaking the F out were much smaller. Make peace with the likelihood that you'll never be ready for your qualifying exams, and that you'll likely feel much less ready than you actually are. Please note that acceptance isn't the same as resignation. You will probably feel better about things if you prepare as hard as you can so that when you're waiting for the results after the oral phase that you've done the best that you can. Understand that in addition to being a form of professional development, quals are also a ritual. For some (many) academic historians, a part of the ritual is giving graduate students hard stares, smirks, and remarks about how much standards have slipped and how much harder things were back in the time when graduate students read by candlelight and had nothing for nourishment but their own tears. When you're taking your exams, expect no quarter. Qualifying exams are hard and stressful and ferocious.As a kid, I witnessed my mom try to run my dad over with a car.  In college, I had a loaded gun pointed at my head. . Individually, those and other experiences were less stressful than qualifying exams. (Collectively, it's a close call.) Understand that the ordeal may get the better of you and that you may have one or more freak outs. Do what you can so that the freak outs aren't CLMs and/or occur while you're taking your quals. Understand that after you finish your exams that you are going to need time to heal. Do what you can to not schedule anything especially important or stressful in the weeks (if not months) after your exams. Keep your sense of humor at all times. The ability to laugh at your self throughout the process and after will help to counter the feelings of despair, failure, and contempt that may come. One last recommendation that dovetail's with @AP's guidance.
Every work of history by a professional academic historian is going to fit into at least three historiographical contexts. The importance of those contexts is going to be in the eye of the committee member reading your exams. Some will be satisfied with the big themes. Others will want to make sure you understand the intermediate themes. And a few will want to make sure you know the details chapter and verse. It is incumbent upon a graduate student to figure out the expectations of the readers and then strive to meet and/or manage those expectations.
 

This is directly from their website: "In 2011, the Ford Fellowship program will award approximately 40 predoctoral fellowships..."

I was told on the phone that of the approximately 1000 applications they received, about 800 of them made it through to the review process (I think the bulk of the other ones were disqualified mainly for being incomplete). So ~40/~800 is ~5% odds... Yay!! However, I'm not sure whether those numbers were across all fellowships or strictly predoctoral... So there might still be hope... (0.5%... 1 or even 2% more hope?). Haha, does anyone have anything pleasant to contribute so as to lift everyone's spirits a little bit?

My prelims were also a bit shaky. I had ~2.5 months to digest a 230 book reading list (with a 1-course TA load), which often meant grinding through 5-10 books in a day. Needless to say, while my exam committee found my synthetic work very interesting, they had severe concerns about my degree of precision with regard to the texts. 
It doesn't matter. I passed. I got what I needed out of the exam, which is a broad overview of the fields I need to work in, and when I need to talk about a specific subject, I know where to look. I have publications coming up. My prospectus is looking very strong. My summer research trips are planned and funded. 
They were traumatic, they're over, move on.

From an outside perspective: you had the whole summer to prep, plus the whole fall + half of spring semester, and there is no way you spent the whole time writing. You could have (and perhaps should have) prioritized studying for your exam more. To me, the story you're telling sounds like an excuse. You're always going to have more than one thing on your plate as an academic, and if you can't handle that, you won't succeed in academia. Now, beyond that, there's a question of whether you prepared correctly, which it sounds like you may not have. You say that there were concerns about your ability to recall your readings and express yourself orally, which isn't so much a problem of having time to do the reading but of doing the extra work to digest, integrate, and actually speak about these topics out loud. I don't know if you did that, but that would be something I would think about. Short version: I don't see anything unfair here. 
Now when it comes to the letter, not knowing your program it's a little hard to know what to say. For one, no one outside your program ever needs to know it exists. These "files" students have won't follow you around after you graduate. So I guess the question is what it does program-internally, and that is something you'd know better than us. The good news is you passed! A pass is a pass. A high pass or a low pass are both just the same a pass, meaning you've been approved to move on to the next level in your program. It sounds like your program isn't shy about letting you know what they think, so if they thought you should leave, they would tell you. Nonetheless, I think it's wise to have a frank conversation with your advisor about this question and get their opinion. If they say you could/should stay, you should ask explicitly how to fix whatever was lacking in your exam. But assuming you stay, you will need to put this unpleasant experience behind you. As I said, a pass is a pass. Impress your committee with your next steps, and they will assume that you've taken their advice in the letter to heart and improved. They won't hold older offenses against you if you're doing well later on. And again, the letter is internal (as is the exam for that matter) and doesn't matter to anyone but your program. You'll be successful in academia on independent grounds that have nothing to do with this exam or letter, so all is most definitely not lost, and you still have a path to success directly ahead of you. 

One of the secrets of academia I found out around my third year is that very few people actually read journal articles for the "fine details". Most researchers quickly scan articles - they read the abstract, and then if they decide to read further, they skim the methods and results with a quick glance at the discussion. The volume of research papers that come out every month in an area is just too great to devote time to close reading of each article.
When I studied for comps I didn't set reading goals. Instead, I set goals of being able to answer certain questions that would mirror what I'd be asked on the exams. For my written exams, there were past exams that I could access with examples of questions that had been asked going back 10 years or so, so I spent some time looking at those questions, then determining what I needed to know to answer the question. Early in comps study, I worked backwards from there and worked through my reading list in a rough priortization order - starting off by reading the material that I most needed to answer the questions, but had new concepts that I didn't already know from prior classes/readings. Then I went and filled in the gaps, and lastly I read the sort of supplemental/extraneous material that really just fleshed out the answer. All along, I practiced answering questions by outlining and then writing full responses. You want the truth? I think I read maybe 10-15% of what was on the 12-page reading list for my program (which including full-length books!!), and a lot of that I skimmed really well.
Honestly, you don't really need fine details for comps (well, most comps, in my experience). You should be able to cite big/seminal works in the field, but nobody expects you to remember all the little details of the results and design and xyz for your comps papers.

So your objection to my statement is to bring up a totally obscure example of 2/3s of your committee were on sabbatical + being dicks about your comps? I can tell why you're not in a nomothetic-driven field (I'm kidding, btw). 

It's ok, even if your profile hadn't said, I would have guessed polisci or econ from the way you extracted general conclusions from a highly limited case study and were willing to fight to the death to defend them 

I disagree. The phrase "you should be focused on publications and research from day one" is perhaps the most universal statement (outside of totally irrelevant or trite things) one can make with regards to grad school.
1) I don't see a large difference between comps or preliminaries. Either way, the advice still stands: do what you need to do to pass and not much more. Sure, preliminaries may take more time and resources (given that you have to produce your own reading list), but that doesn't really change the parameters of what I said. What you are differentiating is how to approach preliminaries, not of their overall usefulness in the grand scheme of things (and, once again, their utility is very marginal compared to your research).
2) You are kind of strawmanning here. I never said you need to be pumping out publications from day 1. I said you need to be working towards those goals. That means developing working papers, running experiments, collecting data, ect ect. 
3) "My field doesn't expect students to publish until their third year." These kind of statements are complete hogwash. Expectations are meant to be broken. There are countless PhD students who break expectations, and surprise, they are the ones that get the offers when they hit the market. Once again, I didn't say you need to publish from day one; but that doesn't preclude you from working towards those goals. Whether that is developing a solo working paper, or getting involved in a collaborative project (in some capacity) from the get go is irrelevant. 
4) "A lot of anthropology students don't have enough evidence to write a publishable article until fourth or fifth year." Well, get that evidence. Get grants/spend your own stipend savings and get out and do fieldwork your first two summers.
5) A medium-quality publication is a medium-quality publication, which is better than no publication. I disagree that it's a mild to moderate positive effect. Publications are not a finite resource -> one publication doesn't reduce your ability to publish other high quality work.
6) I don't agree with the tradeoffs argument. You have a research agenda. You then take a pick axe to it and break it down into smaller projects that you go out and do from day 1. You are always working towards a bigger agenda/project (your dissertation). Granted, people could get involved in a lot of really disparate projects that overburden them and bog them down, but that's not a necessary corollary to what I proposed. 

I also think it is, but it's a dangerous thing to do on a public forum, particularly if there isn't a clear line between asking for help and simply venting.
For what it's worth, I read @Chanandler's post as being made in good faith as a call to self-evaluation. It's hard to phrase that in a way that doesn't come across as extremely harsh. For example, when @Sigaba tried to offer effectively the same critique, their advice was accepted, but it was not clear to me that their message was fully received. Chanandler's message, by contrast, was indeed fully received but not accepted. Neither managed to thread the needle.
@Adelaide9216, you're totally correct that any criticism here is coming from a place of relative ignorance. But by posting here, you are explicitly inviting criticism from relative strangers. I know you know this because I have myself reminded you in the past that we on this forum are not as helpful as sources of advice and guidance when compared to those who know you directly, and you told me that you understood, but valued the outside perspective. That's what you were offered here, although on terms that would be hard for anyone to swallow, and it seems unfair to now use the fact that the perspective you have been offered is from the outside to dismiss it.
As academics, it's incumbent upon us to remember that all readings of things we've written made in good faith are valid readings. That is, if someone reads you as arguing, saying, or doing something other than you think you've argued, said, or done, their interpretation is as valid - and possibly more valid - than yours as to what you've actually done. An adviser's description of your paper, for example, is almost certainly closer to what you're arguing than what you think you've argued. Any time you spot a disconnect between your and another's interpretation of your work, that should be a clear and evident warning sign that you haven't done what you intended. 

Have you considered the possibility that your fail is deserved?
Obviously we only know what you've told us and none of us have read your thesis, but you seem desperate to blame everyone except for yourself and cry about how unfairly you've been treated.  Perhaps your work wasn't good enough to pass. I'm saying this because you've shown no indication that you consider this a possibility. If it is the case that your work wasn't good enough then you're wasting time blaming other people - time that could be spent improving your work.
When professors fail a piece of work I'm sure they're used to having students throw it back at them and complain and say it's not fair. Do you really want to be one of those people, or do you want to pick yourself up and think about why your work wasn't good enough to pass? Then you can go back, fix it, and have a valuable learning and development experience. Self-reflection and accepting responsibility should be an important part of learning and growth.
Saying this to help. Most posts here have been incredibly supportive, I feel that it's important to bring this other point up. I'm not saying it's impossible that you were unfairly failed because that sort of thing does indeed happen. However, it's rare that I've spoken with a failed student who was able to admit it was their fault.

¡Pa' lante! (I hope you understand Spanish?) --- keep going forward! We at the BME/BIOE chat are SO proud of you!! And besides, this is just the first attempt - you'll get them next year or the next one. I also didn't have a mentor/faculty to help/review, but sometimes we have to work with what we have at the moment. And you know what? It makes you grow, in all aspects. Don't be hard on yourself. After all, you are on an awesome fellowship and have plenty of time to come up with a stronger application for NSF (and I can help if you'd like!).

Update: I won a Ford Fellowship!!!

Y'all have very different experiences from me, in my departments it's very common for all grad students to address faculty directly by their first name 

Received an email from Ford a couple minutes ago. 
Third time applying and I am so grateful to to be an award recipient this year.
Sending everyone positive vibes!

I accidentally went to the 2017 thread instead of this one and saw posts (from what would have been a few days ago) from people saying that they got the fellowship. The 20 minutes between then and now were not the greatest. It's when I have moments like this one that I worry for the future of educational research.

Are you just going to insult everyone that tells you something you don't want to hear? Because that attitude won't serve you well in academia or in life as a whole. Being passed over for funding sucks, and you have a right to be upset. But you're not entitled to funding, or an explanation, or mournful wailing from Internet strangers.
Whether you appreciate it or not, everyone in this thread took time out of their day in an attempt to help you. Sometimes helping means telling you hard truths instead of licking your boots and saying you deserve the world. You don't need to take anyone's advice, but you could at least skip the rudeness.