Kismine

A friend bought me Bolshoi Confidential as a graduation gift, and it's definitely as scandalous as you might imagine. (If not a little melodramatic - but that's how Russian ballet goes...)

Hi y'all, been lurking for a while and finally made an account of my own to ask a question! Anyways, I'm an undergrad history major graduating this week (and I'm first gen, so double woo!), and staying at my current institution for an unrelated master's (ESL education, accelerated). I'll be working full-time teaching ESL and social studies while I finish my MAT, and I plan on working for a few years to pay off my reasonable undergrad debt. I want to go back for graduate school in history - but I'm not financially, mentally, or emotionally ready for a PhD yet (if ever, but I have time to decide). I have a lot of thinking to do on it, especially on a potential concentration - I ended up finishing my BA with concentrations in modern East Asia and modern Europe, and my second language is Spanish. Most of my research/interest in undergrad focused on 19th and 20th century ballet (also a dance minor), which puts me in a weird scholarly spot between history, dance, and anthropology. Basically, I need to both broaden and narrow my research views, but I also want to explore since my undergrad department was quite small. I should also mention that part of the reason why I want to take time off is because while I'm not a "wundergrad," I am definitely used to being successful and getting a lot of attention from faculty. I'm graduating with a 3.9 (3.95 history GPA, departmental honors and top student) in the top 5% of my class from a women's LAC with a thesis-length project and other independent research (paid summer research! and an authorship credit on an archival biography project! maybe a publishable seminar paper!) under my belt. I know that every other applicant to top programs has a profile similar to mine, but I'm a serious. self-motivated student and I know that I can be a successful doctoral student. I worked in my major's department for nearly all of undergrad and the entire department has more or less adopted me as their child. (Though they've never sheltered me and they've made sure to warn me plenty about academia politics and the reality of being a historian in the 21st century by letting me experience it firsthand.) I'm ambitious but I'm coming from a college background where people don't generally react well to that (outside of my department), and the weird paradox of that is a university culture that seems to encourage mental breakdowns every time something doesn't go your way. (I don't think that's particularly healthy, because failure is good once in a while!) I know that grad school will not be the low-key sorority sleepover of undergrad, so I need some time out in "the real world" to deal with failures without relying as much on my professors/mentors to reassure me. (And if this post doesn't make it clear, I'm a huge extrovert and it seems like history attracts introverts. I get lonely in the archives sometimes, so I need more practice in dealing with that!) Anyways, I've talked to my professors at length about wanting to stay sharp despite the hectic few years ahead of me, and one of my advisors suggested making a regular goal of reading scholarly articles in fields that interest me (which I plan to do). I also thought about joining the AHA because, for some reason, I never got a student membership (they have a good deal for K-12 teachers, though). Short of that, I'm not really sure what else I can do. I loved the graduate seminar that I took for the second half of my senior capstone (end result: seminar paper), and as a teacher I'll need to earn professional development credits so I am interested in taking graduate-level coursework in history. I'm from and live in Boston so fortunately, I have options. I know MA coursework is not financially or logically feasible, but if my current employment situation holds I may have multiple opportunities to take courses at Harvard Extension for free/half-tuition. Hopefully I've given a quick but accurate picture of myself in the brief space allotted (and considering the weirdness of anonymous forums). Thank you in advance for your advice!