psstein

Congratulations! Hopkins is a great place to do HoM and the place where the discipline developed its professional identity!

Many programs have begun to react to the somewhat self-caused crisis of the humanities, and are accepting fewer students. For some, especially state universities, having lower history enrollments makes it difficult to justify more graduate students than you can reasonably have TA.

Many programs have begun to react to the somewhat self-caused crisis of the humanities, and are accepting fewer students. For some, especially state universities, having lower history enrollments makes it difficult to justify more graduate students than you can reasonably have TA.

Good clarification, thanks for highlighting this question. I did take this approach, deliberately choosing not to apply at programs in areas where I wouldn't want to live and work for 5+ years. Granted, that was also a factor that pushed me to apply to programs that weren't right. If I were going through this process again, my list would look fairly different. 
It's always going to be a challenge to balance the many, many factors in play. Cost of living, for instance. Bigger cities offer myriad cultural and intellectual resources, major airports for easier travel, a better chance that you'll find the cultural/religious/social community that fuels you.... and rents that will make your eyeballs bleed. 

This is an excellent post overall. I'd like to just highlight a little bit about your last sentence. The nature of the job market right now means you should absolutely dictate where you want to go to graduate school and live. That is practically the only choice you'll get about where you live over the next 30+ years, if you manage to win a TT job. The vast majority of faculty in tenured jobs will spend their entire careers at one institution. With department contraction and declining enrollments, there's little incentive to bring in new, more senior faculty, who will demand more pay, when you can just as easily get a Harvard or Yale PhD who's thrilled to have any academic job.
If you don't want to live in Southern CA, you don't have to apply to programs there.
Otherwise, though, I agree with your comments, especially in this point. As I and other posters have said in the past, many sub-fields have no more than 5-8 programs worth attending if you look at outcomes/faculty support/financial support/time to degree.  Anyone even vaguely considering graduate school in history, or the humanities more generally, needs to know those programs for his/her sub-field and then make an advised decision. Choosing not to go to grad school can prove a boon to your future ambitions.

Thank you! It's one of my top choices, yes

Ahh hi! Congrats! Mary Fissell's a force of nature! I'm currently working on early modern reproductive system cancer, but I'm moving into the modern world because I'm interested in the relationships among cancer, immunity, and genetics. I've had a couple POIs because Hopkins is such a good fit for me (including Nathaniel Comfort, Elizabeth O'Brien, and Fissell), but I got the call from Jeremy Greene, the department chair and another POI.
The call was very kind: congratulations, brief info about funding, invitation to accepted student days, a little bit of conversation about the status of my other applications, etc. 
For context, I visited the department in the fall for a prospective student visit. If you haven't done that with Hopkins, I highly recommend it in the next application cycle. I was told by the grad students that usually they usually only accept 2 students a year, but that there were rumors among the department that they might be accepting more this year. 

That was me! I'm early modern Europe/gender & sexuality, so (perhaps obviously, lol) my POI is Mary Fissell. She just gave me the good news and told me that the official offer, funding info, etc. would be forthcoming, as well as some details about the recruitment visit.
 
Hello!! Yes, I'll message you!  

Who is the other Hopkins History of Medicine admit? I was accepted, too! Let's connect! 

Congratulations to the accepted! Please feel free to reach out to me if you have questions.
For those of you who haven't yet heard, I'm sorry. The program has, at least in my experience, informed everyone accepted or waitlisted at the same time. If you weren't so lucky, please also feel free to reach out to me.

Congratulations to the accepted! Please feel free to reach out to me if you have questions.
For those of you who haven't yet heard, I'm sorry. The program has, at least in my experience, informed everyone accepted or waitlisted at the same time. If you weren't so lucky, please also feel free to reach out to me.

Hello! I am the Penn interview. I've only just discovered this website (and it's done pretty nightmarish things for my acceptance anxiety--yikes!), otherwise I would've contributed/let you know sooner! Although, I think I've seen one other Penn interview in the history of science floating around here, too. 
Hope you've all been receiving some good news, although it's certainly a bit early for a lot of programs. Regardless, glad to see some other history of science/medicine folks! I feel like there isn't much of an online presence for our field.

This is an excellent post overall. I'd like to just highlight a little bit about your last sentence. The nature of the job market right now means you should absolutely dictate where you want to go to graduate school and live. That is practically the only choice you'll get about where you live over the next 30+ years, if you manage to win a TT job. The vast majority of faculty in tenured jobs will spend their entire careers at one institution. With department contraction and declining enrollments, there's little incentive to bring in new, more senior faculty, who will demand more pay, when you can just as easily get a Harvard or Yale PhD who's thrilled to have any academic job.
If you don't want to live in Southern CA, you don't have to apply to programs there.
Otherwise, though, I agree with your comments, especially in this point. As I and other posters have said in the past, many sub-fields have no more than 5-8 programs worth attending if you look at outcomes/faculty support/financial support/time to degree.  Anyone even vaguely considering graduate school in history, or the humanities more generally, needs to know those programs for his/her sub-field and then make an advised decision. Choosing not to go to grad school can prove a boon to your future ambitions.

Wisconsin applicants: I'm starting to get emails about visit weekends and the number of accepted students. You'll likely know by the end of the week, if not early next week.

This is an excellent post overall. I'd like to just highlight a little bit about your last sentence. The nature of the job market right now means you should absolutely dictate where you want to go to graduate school and live. That is practically the only choice you'll get about where you live over the next 30+ years, if you manage to win a TT job. The vast majority of faculty in tenured jobs will spend their entire careers at one institution. With department contraction and declining enrollments, there's little incentive to bring in new, more senior faculty, who will demand more pay, when you can just as easily get a Harvard or Yale PhD who's thrilled to have any academic job.
If you don't want to live in Southern CA, you don't have to apply to programs there.
Otherwise, though, I agree with your comments, especially in this point. As I and other posters have said in the past, many sub-fields have no more than 5-8 programs worth attending if you look at outcomes/faculty support/financial support/time to degree.  Anyone even vaguely considering graduate school in history, or the humanities more generally, needs to know those programs for his/her sub-field and then make an advised decision. Choosing not to go to grad school can prove a boon to your future ambitions.

I applied in the Fall 2019 cycle to 5 schools and ended up with 4 rejections and 1 admit. My general background: 2 years at a SLAC/Ivy right out of high school (3 strong semesters followed by one disaster semester, withdrew with a 3.33 GPA), worked throughout my 20s, finished my BA in History during those years at an R2 state school (completed a thesis through the school's honors college, graduated with a 4.0), applied for PhD programs in my early 30s a few years after finishing the BA. My approach to the process and lessons learned:
1. Understand your research questions and why they are significant. Before you do anything else, you need a rock-solid understanding of your research questions, how you'll answer them, and why they matter. What has the existing scholarship said about your proposed topic and why do you think that historiography needs to be challenged/expanded? What methodological and theoretical approaches inform your work? This is the foundation of a successful SoP; it's the difference between passion for history and preparedness for historical work. Students in my program write an article-length research work by the end of their first year; you need to show you will arrive on campus already able to formulate and investigate historical research questions.
2. Do your research on programs and professors. Once I felt confident on point 1 above, I launched into research on programs and professors. Who are the big names in your subfield and methodology? Where do they teach? What are their former students doing now? Who are the early career historians whose work you admire and where did they train? Who else in a department aside from Dr. Big Name could be part of your training? If you are proposing interdisciplinary, transnational, or comparative work, look at other relevant departments' offerings AND make sure the History department will support that approach. I made a spreadsheet as I went, with information on the structure of the program (coursework, language requirements, when do students take comps, coursework outside of history, etc.), potential faculty mentors, and practical information (application deadline and requirements, funding package, teaching expectations, etc.). 
3. Choose quality over quantity. Once you have a list of programs you're considering, start narrowing it down. All available evidence says that where you get your PhD matters much more than simply getting one. On the advice of my faculty mentors, I decided at the outset that I would either go to a top-tier school with five guaranteed years of funding or I wouldn't go at all. That meant there were many schools that never made it onto my spreadsheet. For those that did, I emailed potential advisers a version of the following: "I'm a prospective grad student planning to research X. I am contacting you because of your work on X and the department's strengths in Y. Will you be taking on new graduate students in the upcoming year?" Some never wrote back, some responded that their department wouldn't be the right fit for my work and suggested others I should explore, some wrote back enthusiastically and we spoke via email or phone as I was preparing my applications. I applied to 5 programs and in retrospect only 1 or 2 of those were actually solid choices. My rejections make perfect sense in hindsight because my work didn't fit those departments' approach, faculty strengths, etc. There were several places I didn't apply that I should have (some out of oversight, some out of stubbornness about not living in Southern California).
4. Show them you can accomplish what you say you can. Your SoP is where you tell them what you plan to do; your writing sample is where you show them that you can accomplish it. Submit original primary source research, ideally showcasing the language and methodology skills you'll use for your graduate research. I considered submitting a section of my undergraduate thesis, but decided to revise and condense the whole work into a 20 page sample. I went through paragraph by paragraph and included only the sections most crucial to my argument. Once I had it cut down to sample length, I asked faculty mentors to read it and offer feedback. 
5. Behave as if you're already their colleague. You are applying for a paid apprenticeship on the path to guild membership. Do your best to show that you will be a professional, teachable, and motivated colleague. Although not focused on academia, the archives at Ask A Manager have excellent information on general professional norms in a US context. Some specifics from my process: sending thank you emails after in-person or phone meetings, asking thoughtful questions (i.e. not questions that are answered on the department's website), and being prepared to talk about my professional goals. That last point can feel especially fraught, because everyone knows the miserable state of the job market. But this is the time to talk about why you're doing this and what kind of professional academic historian you're training to be.  

I'd like to add that if you have an offer from a "top 10" program and are upset that you got "rejected" from "lesser" programs, it says so much about how you control your ego.  Such a "rejection" actually signify that your application is so strong that the committee is actually afraid that you won't come if you have a "better" offer.  Without actually reassuring the POI in the early stages of application that this so-called "lesser" program is a top choice (i.e. you would actually go to this program over Berkeley), the committee can't be sure, especially if it's a public school.  In these days when Graduate Schools are looking to encourage cuts in a program, it is in the department's best interests to choose applicants who it strong believes will 98% accept the offer.  The more offers accepted, the better chance of preserving the cohort numbers for the next cycle.

Thank them for their time, their support thus far in a competitive application process, and you will let them know as soon as possible if your circumstances change (i.e. you accept another offer or otherwise don't wish to remain on the waitlist).

I am bumping this dormant thread. What follows is a slightly edited version of the OP. Please note the bolded portion.
The purpose of this thread is for those who applied to graduate programs in history to do some chalk talk. What would you do differently and why? What parts of the process did you nail? Did you take any risks and how did they pay off? Were you surprised by any hidden fees? What role did campus visits play in making decisions on where to apply or where to go? Did you apply to too many programs, too few, or just the right amount?   Because many are still learning where they've been accepted, if you post in this thread, please provide a "snap shot" of your current status. Perhaps the easiest way for many to provide this snap shot is to copy and paste the biographical information from your signature. Or, you could employ a short hand to indicate the number of schools to which you applied, the yesses, the nos, and the wait and sees. Here's the deal. Year after year, many aspiring graduate students come to the history forum of the GradCafe and ask a lot of questions and provide a lot of blow by blow details of the process. Year after year, many aspiring graduate students stop posting soon after getting offers of admission and/or letters of rejection. When they leave, they take a treasure trove of useful information and invaluable experiences. The aim of this thread is to provide an opportunity for a cathartic "exit interview" of sorts so that future members of this BB can use it to build tool kits to use when they apply.
Please keep in mind that the reasons why applicants do get into their preferred programs will remain largely unknown. History departments are complex collections of interconnected black boxes and some of those black boxes are inside other black boxes. So please do what you can to differentiate between the reasons you got in (or didn't) and the reasons you think you got in (or did not).
For those of you who have not had as much success as you would like, it may be especially difficult to share your experiences. But I say if you did the best that you could under the circumstances, you should be proud of the hard work you've done. Hold your heads high and tell us what you have learned.
[....]
A caveat. Many of you may be emotionally raw right now after years of very hard work, months of highs and lows, and weeks of checking your email every five minutes. Please do what you can to manage those emotions if you post in this thread. Do not betray any confidences. Do not do too much venting. Do not post anything that you would not be willing to say to a DGS or any of the other Powers That Be at any institution you would like to attend as a graduate student. 
Lastly, do not, under any circumstances, reach out to a department that declined to offer you admissions with anything resembling a chip on your shoulder. In addition to the skills you are building and the knowledge you're acquiring, you also need to focus on your personal professional reputation and your temperament. Your reputation will play a pivotal role in all of the decisions made about you between now and the time you get tenure, if not beyond.
 

I think the meeting is coming up either this week or next. I haven't seen anything yet. 

Additionally, it is important to understand the importance of how some individuals fit better into groups than others. As I've mentioned earlier, the meaning of "fit" as used on this BB has shift over the years. I think that this shift works to the detriment of those who think fit is about how established professors and departments suit the interests and needs of individual applicants.
One of the hardest parts of this process and what comes after is understanding that as much as one is competing against others, one is also in an unending contest against one's own limitations. Saying anything along the lines of "screw those guys..." is, IMO (and IME in the private sector), is ultimately self limiting.  

I agree with @Sigaba's advice. Rather than treating rejection dismissively, even at this stage, critically evaluate your applications and materials and try to pin down which of the items you control were the weakest. Perhaps your historiography section in your writing sample was poor? Maybe the project you outlined in your SoP has already been abundantly addressed?
IMO, it is worth being very critical of your own work, without considering a rejection as a personal failing. You will hear "no" much more often than "yes" in this field, and in any professional field you choose to work in.

I got one for Ancient History!

Try Reddit, seriously. They're much more active on STEM than the fora here seem.

Try Reddit, seriously. They're much more active on STEM than the fora here seem.