ThisGreatFolly

Feel free to DM me about Emory – I may be able to give some insight.

This is a great question to ask current graduate students either over a visit or email. They can (usually) give you a good idea of neighborhoods/complexes you can afford on your stipend and if anyone in the department is subletting/looking for a roommate/knows of openings at their place.

Accepted into U-Mich! The wait is finally over!

Everyone has you covered on what to wear, so here are some tips on what to ask. Time with current grad students is huge – conversations with grad students helped me immensely in making my decision. It's a great opportunity to hear how a department really works. I'd ask about the quality of the course offerings, the department culture, how well the stipend stretches in the area, what non-stipend supports look like including travel funds, professional development funds, etc. I believe you are also an Americanist, correct? If you are talking to other Americanists ask how well the university supports American based archives trips. I've found that sometimes people can write off American trips as being cheap (and they are compared to international research!), but I still have to hole up somewhere for weeks/months at a time and that costs money. Feel free to DM me if you want to talk more!

With the proviso that --- I applied to around 7 schools, emailed POIs at all of the schools, and the only people who didn't reply to my emails are my two current advisors, both of whom are great and who I'm really lucky to have. They both get bombarded with emails around this time of year and just didn't have time to reply that semester, but their lack of a reply really didn't mean anything. 
On this: "One thing this process has done (and I am not sure this is a good thing) is cut out many programs that are great but just don't feel like a perfect "fit."" -- it's hard/impossible to know whether a school might be a good fit until you've been accepted and go to the visit weekend/talk to your potential advisor when they're thinking about themselves as your potential advisor. Be careful about ruling out schools that seem good but not perfect--they might secretly be perfect. I applied to my school on a bit of a whim, thinking it was the school I was least likely to go to, and then I ended up choosing to go there over schools that are "higher ranked" blah blah etc, (seriously that shit means very little if you can't do the work you want to do at the higher ranked school), basically because of a gut feeling. 

Better metaphor for academia: getting mean, personal and defensive when you someone says something you don't want to hear, rather than responding calmly with evidence. As it happens, I have a good, tenure-track job, thank you very much. And, yes, I probably have better things to do than post on this forum. But I do feel strongly that this advice should be out there for prospective PhD students. There are many reasons to get a PhD, but it is indeed serious, and it involves a lot of sacrifices. If you decide after you're finished that you want to pursue another line of work, that's great, but it's hard to start from scratch in a new profession, at 30+, with no other work experience, and, unless you have other sources of income, no savings. PhD programs do not, as a rule, prepare you for jobs outside academia or the museum (though they should!).  So I for one don't think a PhD, especially one from a mid-tier program, should be entered into lightly.  People certainly can do well coming out of mid-tier programs. I don't dispute that. Your odds are quite a bit better, though, coming out of a top program. This is a matter of statistics. There will always be people who beat the odds, but the problem is, everyone thinks they'll beat the odds, and not everyone can. So all I'm saying is that people looking to get a PhD should take an honest look at the job situation and make an informed decision based on their situation and goals. I'm so glad that @mrssalad's friends have gotten great jobs, and I sincerely wish the best for everyone out there, regardless of whether they're at Yale or Iowa. 

Fellows at Cal's IES are secondary positions that require permanent status at the scholar's home institution. However, this doesn't necessarily mean that Senior Fellows are teaching/advising at their home institutions. I would reach out to Sheffer via email to see if she's currently taking on students at Stanford.

If working with high students is something you are considering, also make sure you have a plan for acquiring the necessary experience to make yourself qualified/competitive for those jobs. It's a bit easier if you can get licensed, but I know of people in my program and others that wanted to go into high school teaching and realized at the end of their studies that they didn't have the necessary experience working with high school aged students. While programs are making strides in terms of professionalization, a history PhD program primarily prepares and trains you for traditional university teaching work. There are ways to supplement and push back on this, but you have to really plan that out from the beginning of your program. 

I would be careful of how you present this kind of work. Having "hobby topics" is fine, but describing those as silly, unrefined, or not serious could rub people the wrong way. Important work has been done in US History and American Studies departments re: baseball, urbanity, race, and class. The scholars who do that work take it seriously and for good reason. 

I would be careful of how you present this kind of work. Having "hobby topics" is fine, but describing those as silly, unrefined, or not serious could rub people the wrong way. Important work has been done in US History and American Studies departments re: baseball, urbanity, race, and class. The scholars who do that work take it seriously and for good reason. 

This is Oh So Not the way to decide on where to obtain your graduate education. Talk to your advisors, consider fit, funding, location, placement records of your potential schools, and go from there. Rankings on this piece of paper aren't worth the electronic ink that's spilled on them as far as graduate education is concerned. 

Emory!

Emory!

EXCELLENT! Super happy and excited for you!

On the topic of when to start looking for an apartment, I think it really depends on where you are moving. A medium to big city probably means leases coming available no more than 2 months out of when you want to move it. But a college town and/or properties overwhelmingly housing college students likely are renting now for the fall. When I was at UCLA, you would be hard pressed to find anything in Westwood much later than April/early May, although you would be fine finding something outside the neighborhood much closer to the fall. When I visited UVA two weeks ago they were having their off-campus housing fair and people were already snapping up apartments for the fall. I'd reach out to grad students to see what the rental timeline looks like where you are going. 

That their GPA listed is from their Master's program and not undergrad. 

I'm in the exact same boat - down to the same number of History programs to choose from. Since I only interviewed with one of the programs beforehand, I've been using my calls to ask some general questions like:
1) Where do you see me and my research fitting in with the rest of the program? It's been a nice opportunity to talk about my research interests in a slightly more expanded format than the SOP. Some discussions have centered around potential dissertation ideas. Some have talked more in depth about projects potential advisors are working on. It's just a nice way to get a feel for the department.
2) What can you tell me about completion rates, time to degree, and placement? Lots of this information is available, but I've found it nice to talk to people in the department about it.
3) Since my work touches heavily on other disciplines and departments, I've been asking about how those interdepartmental relationships are and if there are POIs in those departments that they think fit well with my work. I have my own POIs in mind, but it's nice to hear what the department thinks.
4) The availability of research and travel funding, along with teaching and research assistantships.
5) Anything new happening with the department - new professors, new initiatives, etc.
6) Any logistical questions I have about the department, i.e. clearing up foreign language requirements for Americanists, etc.
7) Just their general impressions of the town, campus, program.

Word of warning: the CNCS, the agency that runs AmeriCorps programs, is one of the agencies targeted to be cut in the first look at the new administration's budget. There's no clear indication yet if such a cut will be approved by Congress, but I would be VERY careful about making plans to do AmeriCorps before the matter is decided.

No interview/contact with faculty before my acceptance.