OHSP

One of the things I really like about NYU is that fields are very flexible--like, very, very, especially in the early years, and transnational work is very much encouraged. The Middle Easternists, Latin Americanists, Africanists, Americanists, and Atlantic worlds people all overlap often, and I know French studies people who take a lot of classes in MEIS, so that's a thing to keep in mind if you do apply there down the road!

I know this is a little beside the point but ARGH US News ratings. NYU is something like 23rd on that list, meanwhile one recent graduate just accepted a TT position at Cornell and another accepted a TT position at UI-Chicago (these are just announcements from the past week, there's been other job news this season), and NYUs Latin Americanists and Middle Eastern studies/history graduates are placed all over US schools, etc etc. In other words: placement, placement, placement. I was so deterred by rankings this time last year: NYU was by far the lowest ranked school I got into (by US News rankings) but it was also by far the best fit! Minnesota's not Yale but their program is good--you need to be asking professors and current students questions about how they place people who are in your field and who've worked with your advisor(s). I totally understand the anxiety and the what ifs and if you can do a funded MA and feel better about your future prospects then that might be a good choice, but I really, really, really want to deter you from letting the US News ranking influence you at all.

Hey @JaneZ1118, sorry you haven't had the best luck this round--if you haven't heard either way, you can't rule out the possibility that you're on an internal waitlisting so there's still hope. I think your post raises a few other questions though--do you mean to say that women's history is a dead end...? It might be worth thinking about whether your interests fit into the broader category of gender and sexuality. And what rough fields/regions/time periods are you interested in? I think it's often the case that people have trouble articulating their interests with the necessary degree of specificity, especially the first time they apply, so (not knowing your application materials) it might help to work on articulating the research questions etc that are behind your impulse to apply to PhD programs.

I second this advice. My primary advisor is "young" but also close to tenure with a book project that is great and likely to get a lot of attention. Beyond name recognition, their junior status in the department/the fact that they're in the early stages of a TT career means they're super busy, which is kind of fine because it's meant that I've developed close relationships with well-known faculty who are also happy to read my work, write letters for me etc etc. Your primary advisor could change after a year (or a semester) anyway, so it's important to have at least a handful of people you could imagine working with.

With the enormous proviso that when you're asking about placements you need to know how the school places people who have graduated from your field and/or under your advisor.

Feel free to message me about NYU. Both schools have great people in your fields--I'd try to email some current students before your visit to see if they have time to get a coffee etc while you're here--I can't speak for Columbia but at NYU's school visit you're most likely to meet people 3rd year and above, and I think it can also be useful to know how things are going for current 1st/2nd years with your potential advisor.

It's difficult to give any super useful/accurate tax advice because it's dependent on the country that you come from, the US state you live in, etc etc, but I can tell you my situation in NY, which is that my taxes are deducted from my stipend every pay round and I can claim back some expenses but ultimately not a lot, so my stipend (in terms of what I actually take home) is less than the stipend most of my colleagues receive but still completely liveable. I can't remember details, exactly, but when I was choosing between UPenn and NYU last year I know that the tax situation was somewhat better at UPenn. As an international student you should be able to live very comfortably on the UPenn stipend especially given prices in West Philly, or wherever you choose to live in Philly, are very reasonable (in my opinion). Re UPenn v Cambridge, it depends on your field but Penn's the better choice for the US job market--I'd also say that just being connected to the network of schools on the east coast is really valuable. I'm happy to talk more about international student stuff etc via PM

Ditto to this--I was not expecting to end up in NYC and parts of living here are difficult (I can't pretend that it was easy to find an apartment, and I moved a few times in my first semester), but once you work out where to buy groceries/which bars have good happy hours etc it's not the hyper-expensive metropolis that people imagine it to be!

I'm living on less than that (I'm at NYU and I'm an international student, so taxes are taken out of my stipend every fortnight) and it is more than liveable --- when I was considering moving to NYC so many people gave me the impression that I would be struggling to get by and unless you're addicted to online shopping or caviar or something, I really don't think you will be. You won't be living in Chelsea but that's plenty of money to live on in Washington Heights. And I'm not speaking as someone who's super thrifty.

Echoing others, very few people in history departments are for the GRE and it's not taken particularly seriously. A lack of desire to learn a foreign language kind of sets off warning bells for me, to be honest, even if you're an Americanist (perhaps especially if you're Americanist, given the number of languages that people speak as a first or only language in the US). What field are you interested in--? Edit: I just noticed that you've asked this before, a few years ago, and most of the the advice in that thread still stands.

Congrats! It’s a great program. What field are you in? I was extremely close to going there (didn’t turn down the offer until the last moment because I was almost certain I’d be accepting) and am still in touch with my POI so have some thoughts/a lot of random information about the program.

Duke sends out all of its acceptances at the same time and so it's probably not good news given that someone else was waitlisted. I know that NYU has sent out its acceptances but if you haven't been rejected then you might be on the unofficial waitlist (that they don't announce). At least 2 people in my cohort heard from NYU on 15 April.

@rex-sidereus, very important, in my opinion. I thought I had made up my mind last year and then the school visits changed everything. Amongst other things, they're important in terms of getting a feel for the cohort. At one school I visited I was surrounded by people quite a bit younger than me who were all in their final year of college, usually at ivy league schools, and I felt extremely out of place. At my current school people were my age or older, had taken time to do other things, etc--it depends on your preferences/situation but I'm super happy with my cohort and it makes a huge difference. Re practicalities I stayed with current grad students at all of my visits last year and it's worth seeing if that's an option at UVA. Unless you've been officially rejected from the other schools you applied to, you can't be 100% sure of what will happen (two people in my current cohort received offers on 15 April), and if you're in a spot where you need to make that kind of last minute decision it'll help to have visited.

I'm a current student at NYU (and am happy to talk via PM if you have other questions. I'm not entirely sure where the "few teaching opportunities" thing comes from (I've heard it before), but I was offered teaching in the second semester of my first year along with everyone else who applied/asked for teaching and plenty of upper year students have taught their own courses over the summer, etc. I think the confusion might come from the fact that we don't have to teach in order to receive a stipend--teaching's paid on top of the stipend. So it's true that you won't be "guaranteed" a heavy teaching load but that's, for the most part, a good thing. At least in the first three years, teaching here means taking one or two classes a week or being a course assistant/grader. Would you be in the joint French/history program at NYU? One thing to keep in mind with that program is that it does seem like people are pretty split between the two departments, like you'll take a history methods class in first semester and a French studies methods class in the second and therefore basically have two cohorts--I'm only in the history department but from what I can tell having both the French institute and the history department to draw on seems like a positive thing. Another thing to keep in mind with NYU is that the summer funding isn't great (it's only $3000 or so [I know that might seem generous but it'll barely cover your rent here]) which means that you kind of need to put away money throughout the school year and/or be able to get summer grants and fellowships, but I've found that very do-able. Even if you find a school where a potential advisor is doing exactly what you're doing you can't guarantee that you'll get along with them, etc--I think it's more important here to make sure that you find someone who has a good record as an advisor. If that's your CUNY POI then CUNY might have an edge, but if you feel comfortable, ask that person whether there would be opportunities to work with them if you attended a consortium school--people understand that you need to make the best academic and financial decisions for your circumstances. It's very easy to take classes at CUNY (and vice versa) from NYU.

Seriously just let those rankings go. The US News rankings threw me last year until I spoke to professors who told me to stop. You don't need to find graduates studying exactly what you study, just look at fields. It seems like you're in European intellectual history so where have other BU graduates in that field been getting post-PhD positions? Who are you thinking of advisor-wise and where have they placed students? Etc. You're completely right to be concerned about BU but to answer your questions you need to basically take TMP's advice and ask current and recent students and professors.

I guess TMP's point is that placement will tell you about the school's actual reputation as relevant to the job market. Try to stay away from essentially worthless rankings (i.e. US news). Also when you're asking whether/where people at BU get jobs etc make sure that it's relevant to people in your field--I'd get in touch with some 5th+ year students in your field.

I agree but I also think Princeton's uniquely frustrating to get to and it's only one school in the eight school consortium. Going to Rutgers once a week isn't quite as bad. What I've found more useful than attending classes elsewhere is just being close enough to other schools that you can have an actual relationship with faculty and grad students who aren't at your school.

Personally I'm extremely grateful for the consortium--not just because I can take classes elsewhere but because it means that I meet people from other grad schools who have shared interests, I end up attending talks etc in other departments, and I have a broader range of scholars I can go to for advice. The latter's been super, super helpful so far. Faculty from other schools have led me to grants etc that my own advisors didn't know about, and suggested other grad students to work with on side projects. Not everyone draws on the consortium, and it's probably easier to make use of it from NYU than from Stony Brook (at least in the early years) but, for @Guest1101 as well, I have friends at Stony Brook (in their upper years) who live in Brooklyn and regularly attend talks at NYU and CUNY and work with NYC archivists. I think all of this is especially useful if you're at all interested in public history (defined very, very broadly) and/or community collaborations.

I second @anon1234567--being in nyc means having access to vast resources/networks and that's invaluable. The faculty at CUNY grad centre (across departments) is also impressive--I'm at NYU but go to grad centre events/workshops etc pretty frequently and work with someone in the history department. People will warn you about the money and the cost of NYC etc, but I'm an international student (so my stipend is taxed upfront), so week to week I'm living on just under the CUNY fellowship and it's completely liveable. Obviously you won't be living in the village but I'm 30 minutes from school on the subway. There are difficult things about living in nyc but it's not as super expensive as people (usually people who've never lived in NYC) led me to believe before I moved here. Feel free to PM me if you have any questions about the consortium, CUNY, NYU, nyc archives etc

This is just a very strange statement. I think if you're going into a history PhD with the primary goal of ending up as a professor at an ivy league school, you're probably going in with the wrong priorities--history's not just about climbing prestige ladders and the ability to go "straight to teaching ivy TT" isn't an indicator of the quality of someone's PhD... So I'm not sure what the point is of making this kind of comment on a history forum. Also though, see Margot Canaday (Minnesota PhD, tenure at Princeton), and Genevieve Clutario (UIUC PhD and currently TT at Harvard).

Not quite in your area but Amanda Littauer at NIU is one of the nicest people and professors I've ever met, and she's doing really interesting work, so if you end up there definitely keep her classes etc in mind.

I'm not sure that's typical in history departments--it certainly wasn't the case at any of the schools I considered or at my current school, and I don't know anyone who loses part of their stipend to course and/or university fees. **Are you in history @Sandmaster? I don't mean to go on about this on the basis of my own experiences, and perhaps there are schools where you'll end up paying fees, but when I was deciding where to go I came across a lot of misinformation about how much of my stipend would be "lost" to "hidden fees" and none of it turned out to be true. It's stating the obvious to say this, but, of course, it's worth checking all of this with your school(s).

I may be wrong, because I don't know every school, but I think that's pretty rare in history departments--I don't know of anyone who's paying for tuition out of their stipend.

I'm currently at NYU so just a FYI about decisions--if results are coming out then it's likely the case that decisions have been made and now it's basically up to the POI to let you know (it's pretty unlikely the the DGS will send out a mass email at any point). My POI called me at late on a Friday night last year after I'd spent a week watching people post their acceptances, and it was basically because she was super busy at the time.

I'm not entirely sure what you are seeing in the above posts that's irrelevant to the topic of "fall 2018 applicants"--? As people continue to receive admissions/rejections/waitlist notifications you're going to see a lot more "do I even want to commit to this" style posts, and that seems entirely appropriate.