psstein

The job market in multiple European countries is arguably worse than it is in the US. I know of a German history PhD who works at a Christmas market.

I agree with your overall point, but there's been a downward trend in cohort sizes the last few years, even at massive universities. My cohort has 11 and it looks like next year's is going to be smaller. HoS has really fallen off here in the last few years and the merger may not help. The last two years in HoS have yielded a grand total of three people, of whom one is on leave.

This really isn't a good way to look at hiring. My larger department hired someone from Duke this year. She had previously had a TT job at another university. She adjuncted for several years in between finishing the PhD and moving here. Bluntly, the majority of people who graduate with history PhDs do not have realistic opportunities at TT jobs.

Take a look at the AHA's number of PhDs granted vs. positions advertised chart. There are problems with it (some positions are never advertised via AHA), but it'll help put your professors' hiring in its own context.

When were these professors hired? Teaching universities also often have different requirements for their professors. I went to a well-known small state university. Almost all of my professors were from the top 15-20 history PhD programs. The one who wasn't was a Western specialist.

Chicago is able to admit 30 a year because it funds about half of them, from what I'm told. I think UCLA does something similar, but they may have stopped. This is not a good mindset to have. Maybe that's true for undergrad, but it's not true for graduate programs. A mid-tier PhD will close doors further down the road.

The institutional factors are incredibly important. From what my colleagues have told me, Princeton's department has, recently at least, started to shove their students out the door after five years. That's a problem for any non-Americanist. It's not solely based on who does good work , it's also based on things like niche fields. Princeton hasn't had a medieval historian of science in God knows how long. Harvard was a hub for medieval history of science for generations (Murdoch, Gingerich, Park, Sarton, Cohen all taught there). There's also the reality that hiring committees may not know the shape of your field as well as you do. If I'm hiring for a history of science position and I don't know anything about the field, I'm more likely to interview someone from Harvard than I am someone from Indiana, despite the fact that a historian of alchemy from Indiana may be very well qualified.

I don't know if Wisconsin has colloquia on the History side of the History Department. HSMT was merged, but we've had visiting scholars coming every month or so for decades. Networking is much easier when your university is well-funded.

Ann Blair has done some very good work. Janet Browne in Harvard HoS is one of the leading American Darwin specialists. Hannah Marcus was just hired in HoS, but she has a bright future. Michael McCormick has been very influential in rewriting Byzantine historiography.

I should be clear, I don't think it's a mediocre program. I'm talking about people who think about PhD admissions as "safety" and "reach."

I absolutely agree with you. There are limitations to the study, but overall, it's not a bad thing to be aware of. I was advised that I shouldn't go on to graduate school if I couldn't get into an elite program. I wish that advice were handed out more often. As my undergrad advisor put it, a huge number of PhDs graduate each year with no realistic chance of obtaining a tenure track job. It's certainly food for thought when someone comes on here and says he's applying to USF, ASU, OSU (Oregon State), UT-Austin, and some other mid range PhD programs. Come to think of it, I know of one scholar hired out of ASU, and he was an American West specialist.

You're dead on here. I'm curious as to the temporal scope of the study, though I may have missed it. Sub-fields play way more of a role than I think this study lets on. There's also the importance of your advisor. I've referred to Indiana, so I'll stick with their HPS program. Newman and Meli (Newman especially) are outstanding scholars. Anyone who works with either one of them has a damn good shot at a job. Now, compare that with somewhere like Berkeley or Brandeis, who either don't have HoS or have mediocre HoS programs.

Unless you have some glaring flaws in your application, then you shouldn't bother with a MA before you apply to PhDs. Many MA/PhD programs require that you complete a certain number of credits within their program and others insist that you start over. It depends what you mean by a "small state school." I went to a very well-known "small state school" for my undergrad and doubt having a MA from that institution would hurt. Having a MA from a third-rate university would not be a good idea, though.

Which is why I think this whole thing of "what are the top 10 programs" is a waste of time. If you want to be competitive for jobs, it's basically some of the Ivies (exclude Dartmouth and Cornell) and comparable public institutions (UCLA, Michigan, Wisconsin, etc.). There are weird outliers like Brandeis and Jewish history or Indiana and HoS, but those are few and far between.

The study that @telkanuru quotes is oddly set up. It puts Brandeis as the #7 American History program, which indicates that it slants towards Americanists. The issue is that PhD program rankings are often difficult to figure out and vary by sub-field. NYU, Brandeis, and Berkeley are not top-tier history of science programs, but they're all very good American history programs.

I don't know if you want an academic job, but if you do, you need to keep this kind of thing in mind. European jobs are even more competitive than American ones.

I chose a program that was about as awful during the winter, so the cold weather doesn't scare too many people. I have people in my cohort from Louisiana and California, so it's not too much of a stretch.

If you're explaining complex ideas, you're going to have a lower "readability" score. We're not writing fiction, we're writing history.

I would say that my experience was likely atypical. Minnesota's HoS (as you well know, I'm sure) is a separate, small department that's more attached to the science side of things than the humanities one. This was also last year, for the record, which was a strange year for them (so I"m told).

Thank you, but I meant last year. Their HoS is in a different department, which led to some issues causing me to reject their offer.

All three of them work at Minnesota.

I was accepted by Minnesota's HoS in mid-December, so they met very early/don't have a ton of applicants. Generally speaking, you'll find out Feb./Mar.

Who are you interested in working with at Wisconsin?

I was given this advice and I'll pass it on: you should ONLY pursue a history PhD in the event that you cannot possibly see yourself doing anything else. For me, it was grad school, the Navy, or Canadian oil fields. I'm being totally serious, by the way.

Don't use endnotes. Endnotes are frequently used in publishing to reduce the space each page takes up.