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hats

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Everything posted by hats

  1. How is a linguistics MA not background in linguistics? It sounds like one to me! People with linguistics BAs, or MAs, or training in ESL, are probably the single biggest source for linguistic anthropology PhDs—although BAs no more than people who pick up some linguistics post college—so you've got a relatively normal background already. UCLA and Penn are both obviously strong places for that combination of language and anthropology. I also think of Miyako Inoue and Barbra Meek, and that joint program in Anthropology and Linguistics at Arizona. I also want to note that anthropology sure seems to be the field that's hands-down most comfortable with applicants falling backwards into it once they graduate and realize it answers their questions better than anything else. Sorry I can't give you any more names—that's about the extent of my Intro to Linguistic Anthropology knowledge. You sound like you're on track to me, though!
  2. This is a person who already asked you something ethically dubious....is that the first person you want to put your trust in right now? I can see scenarios where this would make sense—they hinge on him not knowing this norm and now being sorry—but also, you know, are there any other warm bodies in your general vicinity you could collaborate with?
  3. Hi everybody, thanks in advance for any advice you have to offer. When I started graduate school, one of my two primary advisors seemed like a very warm and caring person. Unfortunately, the more we go on, the more I feel like every conversation with him shreds my soul a little more. Specifically, I cannot stand the style he uses to give me criticism. Now, I've seen threads like this devolve into people telling OP that criticism is part of academia and makes your work better, so I'd like to note at the outset that I have a lot of savoir faire with regard to criticism in general. I am, however, having trouble adjusting to Advisor A's style. I'm a brash, big city girl, to use some shorthand. Blunt criticism does not phase me, even when it's really harsh. A, however, is midwestern nice. By his own account, he has a lot of trouble expressing his preferences directly. That doesn't mean A doesn't have strong preferences; they just sneak out backwards in remarks I find to be catty and hurtful. It's hard to give examples, because honestly, it's relatively subtle. If I wrote an unclear paragraph, Advisor B might say, "This paragraph is a mess; fix it," and that would be fine. Advisor A might say something like "Written in haste...? I am left wondering what, if any, point was meant to be communicated..." Even as I write this, I feel like that comment fails to function as supporting evidence for the word 'soul-shredding.' It doesn't sound that bad. While no one example is all that problematic, though, the pattern has been bothering me more and more over time. For an example that actually happened—and that makes me think some of A's apparent frustration is specific to me—one time in my first year I misinterpreted a small class assignment. After this, he spent the next three months remarking "Ah, it's nice to finally see some evidence you're serious about professionalization." At least once a week. I probably deserved the first instance—I thought his remark was kind of funny—but boy did I get sick of hearing that he still thought I wasn't 'serious' after I made one small mistake and then did three more months of work correctly. I suppose I've written my way to the conclusion that it's not actually the style, but the fact that I suspect he either doesn't like me, doesn't like my work, or doesn't think I should be in graduate school, or perhaps all three. That attitude then finds its expression in this (annoying but not per se problematic) style. That said, the sort of passive implication that all of your work might be garbage does bother me more than direct criticism, so if you've adjusted from a more direct style to a less direct one, I would also appreciate advice separate from my working relationship with A. Some answers I'd want if I were reading this: no, A isn't like this with everyone. Almost all the other students think he's the nicest and most caring member of the faculty, so when I tell them some of the things he's said to me—direct quotations, without editorializing from me—they invariably suggest I'm exaggerating or misheard. (On the other hand, I once saw him ream out a classroom of students in such a 'nice' way that I don't think more than 2 out of 20 actually noticed what was happening.) No, I don't know what I could be doing better. I work really hard and my CV looks fantastic. Unfortunately, asking A about areas where I have room for improvement seems to offend him, so he doesn't answer. Yes, I could work only with B and ditch A and still graduate...given A's status in our peculiar subfield, I'm pretty sure this would 100% consign me to finding a career outside of academia. (Which is, you know, fine, but I don't want that to be a certainty before I've even turned in a dissertation chapter.)
  4. Can you tell us anything about why they didn't think you'd be a strong candidate? Just looking at your resume, it looks like you'd do great, so I'm wondering if there are any remediable red flags.
  5. Honestly, I wish my undergraduate GPA was a bit lower. I had about a 3.8, which I tried really hard to get because I wanted a certain level of honors. I didn't get it anyway, so I wish I had taken those couple courses in science and art I was always eyeing, the ones I avoided because I thought I was likely to get Bs. You do want to keep your GPA in a high range, and your philosophy grades very high (although finding a few courses more challenging is fine), but focusing too much on GPA rather than learning is something some people—like me—can regret.
  6. I would prioritize getting more evidence about Alabama. I know Alabama has a reputation, but it's also a university (which can distinguish itself from its surrounding political/cultural environment to greater or lesser degrees, depending) in a state with a large African-American population (although I would believe you if you told me UA is in an exclusively white part of the state). You should make it a priority to speak to POC students in the department to see what their experience is like there. It's a longer shot, but I would also ask Alabama if there's funds for you to visit, yourself. If you go to Case, I would treat it as just a plain old master's (mph) degree. A PhD in anthropology without funding is absurd, exploitative, and unethical. (I know some places still do it...!) How much would the MPH run you for two years? If it's on the low side, I think that might be a reasonable decision: to go, pay minimal or low tuition, and plan to apply to PhD programs when your MPH finishes. One of those PhD applications could be Case, but for it to be a serious option at that point, they had better pay you a reasonable stipend. If you have to pay a lot of tuition at Case—I can't tell whether 'no funding' means 'tuition waiver but no stipend' or 'thirty thousand dollars a year of tuition'—and Alabama embodies all its worst stereotypes, your best option for the upcoming year may be neither of them, unfortunately.
  7. @Adelaide9216 I read that thread, and I thought that comment to you was somewhere between microaggression and straight-up aggression. No matter the identity of the person saying it, I think "you should just study your own [not straight-white-cis-male] community"* is wrong and essentializing to scholars of color, female scholars, etc. *I have heard of communities that cannot be ethically studied by outsiders, or certain kinds of outsiders. Sure. However, that only requires saying, "you can't study us, I would suggest you find some other topic." And that is a VERY different statement than, "you can't study us, you should just go study other black people because you're black." Although I am white, this 'mining your trauma' is something I have been very angry about as it pertains to me as a queer, disabled woman. Most of the time, I would prefer my work just stood on its own, you know? I don't want to have to talk about just the degree of trauma being queer caused in my family relationships or whatever to get into graduate school. It often feels like, or is actually, required, however.
  8. Really? I've met people who travel back and forth between San Francisco and New York every week. Now, I realize that's only possible for the economically privileged, but if you're a lobbyist, I would have thought you'd be in the class of folks to whom travel is available. Plus, academia has long breaks. Even if you only see each other three times a year, at Christmas, and before and after she does her summer research, those visits could easily last four weeks each. I'm also not quite sure what to do with this framing, "Should she have chosen Yale or Princeton because it’s closer to DC?!" If I said "yes," what would you do then?
  9. I think it's time to start experimenting on yourself. Beyond the good answers already given—and that continuing counseling is a must—I would try a lot of different hacks from the internet/self help circles. Yoga. Exercise. Meditation. Journaling (this one makes things worse for me, personally). I haven't liked plain old meditation, but staring at/near a candle does the trick. Good scents: essential oils, scented candles, etc., near your bed. A nice bath before bedtime? It might take a while for you to find some combination of things that help at all, and maybe there isn't any shortcut to feeling more peaceful, but hopefully a couple of these will help.
  10. @lm3481 Your current advisor has threatened you with retaliation after you asked him his opinion about this. This is especially obscene for him to do because school B really does have benefits that school A does not offer. For example, at School B, you could form a functional committee, something School A actively prohibits you from doing. (Which is ASTONISHING.) That leads me to the question: if you choose to stay with this advisor for your PhD, are you really confident, given his behavior so far, that you can get through four or five years of working with him without doing anything that offends him so much that he cuts you off?
  11. @Kaitlynjoy Can you tell us some more information about yourself? How to improve depends crucially on what you've done already. For example, if you applied in your senior year of undergrad, at a traditional age, the advice that would help you is probably pretty different than the people who've been living in Japan for ten years with a sociology bachelor's degree, who are now looking to switch fields.
  12. School B is a problem; Chinese is better than Japanese for you. B should be right out. School C might be okay, but I'm not sure what school C gets you that A does not. Do any of the professors who are offering to do independent studies with you at A study anything that's at all connected with Buddhism or China? (I feel like you would've mentioned it if one of them had experience with Tibetan studies.) Real talk, though: do you know any Tibetan? Can you find a way to start learning Tibetan on your own? Are there internet resources that are good enough for you to start with, or can you take summer classes at another university? For example, you DO NOT need to attend an institution to be able to access their summer language-learning FLAS scholarship funds. I never did it as an undergraduate, but I believe you would be eligible to apply for tuition and a stipend (do undergrads get the stipends?) to learn Tibetan over the summer at e.g. University of Wisconsin, no matter where you study during the school year. The deadline has passed for that scholarship for this year, and this is the year that FLAS centers might change universities (so in 2019, it's possible that the University of Michigan, not UW, would be offering those Tibetan scholarships and/or classes, for example). Unless the federal government closes the FLAS program, you should apply to every funded Tibetan language opportunity you can find for summer 2019. I feel uneasy even mentioning this, but if you stay with school A and have that little debt, it might be worth saving up from a job for and/or taking out a very limited amount of loans to pay for a Tibetan summer program yourself, once and only once. I'd advise against worrying about that this summer if you have anything else going on in your life that makes you money, gives you experience, or just generally doesn't require LOANS, but it might help you enough to be worth it at some point....once. When @NTAC321 talks about language experience, there are ways.
  13. @Leenaluna If it comes up, you say: "I know, right? It's so funny the things you get stressed about sometimes!" Treat it like it's funny (it's kind of funny) and everybody else will treat it that way, too. I really don't think it will come up, but if it does, now you're prepared to handle it. People say sillier things than this to their advisors fairly regularly, and nobody ever remembers for more than like three weeks.
  14. I agree with @jrockford27 think you should come clean, but I also would not stress about timeline on when to come clean. The more sense of humor your advisor shows about their own human foibles, the sooner I would be inclined to tell them.
  15. So, it seems like there might be different ideas of "tiers" in this conversation. R1/R2 is usually used by professor types to designate PhD-granting/research-intensive institutions (R1) and master's-granting/some-focus-on-research institutions (R2). Hearing about a competitive PhD program at an R2 is therefore surprising by definition, because most R2's don't grant PhDs. (An R2 PhD isn't an oxymoron—an R2 can have PhD programs in like two departments without becoming R1—it's just relatively rare.) If what you meant was, I've found a "tier 2" PhD program by that article's definition, i.e., it's ranked 15th among programs in my field, that has good placement, that's not surprising. A "tier 2" that's fifteenth in the field is still going to be pretty good! Even for programs ranked like 30-50, it's relatively common for them to be really quite good in one specialty, like how it's well-known that Michigan State has one of the top five programs in African history. If what you meant is that you found a "tier 2" PhD that places graduates well, I'm not surprised...although that level of placement numbers still sound shockingly high. If you did mean R2 i.e. not generally PhD-granting except for your department, well, that is a surprise, but there's more things in heaven and earth Horatio etc.
  16. School B, unless "less money" is something less than $12-13,000. The funding is an important reason for this recommendation, but so is the fact that school B sounds likely to set you up much better for a job.
  17. @Comparativist Yeah, I'm still talking about a graduate career that's focused on publishing from day one. In many fields, taking two or three months to do your prelims properly is part of focusing on publishing. I hesitate to drag this even further on topic, but re: 4) I have never seen a good article based on only two summers worth of ethnographic research. Being in the field every possible moment will still set you up to publish starting in year three. I had already built your argument into my assumptions. @janaca I hope your advisor is able to be reassuring. I'm sure it was upsetting to read your review, but they did pass you: that's the result they give to tell you to continue in the program. That said, having a conversation with your advisor is a reasonable response. Try not to exaggerate how badly you did—they did pass you—but it's valid to want, and I hope you get, a more reassuring conversation about next steps from here.
  18. @Comparativist This is one of those things that varies not only between institutions and departments, but within departments, but there can sometimes be a major difference between 'comps,' which seems to be what you're experienced with, and 'prelims,' which the OP mentions. Although the words are often used interchangeably, my prototype of 'comps' is a set reading list that all the students in a program (or subset of a program) have to get through to pass to candidacy. I can see how this would seem antiquated, and worth doing the minimum possible. My prototype of 'prelims' are written exams based on a reading list the student has designed. It's possible to design prelims that are over-broad and end up being a waste of time. On the other hand, it is also possible to design prelims that, although they don't directly lead to publications, set you up with a strong foundation to publish quickly and well once you've reached candidacy. In the latter case, they still shouldn't be a "to-the-exclusion-of-all-else" priority, but to throw out an unscientific estimate, might be worth doing 15% more than the minimum possible. I don't really know what the OP is talking about, but it's possible people have been talking about different kinds of exams. It's not really that important to the discussion here, but I'd like to note that publishing from 'day one' is both field and background-specific. Although I don't know the layouts of other disciplines very well, over on the GRFP thread I see a lot of people even in the hard sciences saying things like, "my field doesn't expect students to publish until their third year!" But to take my field as an example, a lot of anthropology PhDs do not have access to enough evidence to write a publishable article until they are in their fourth or fifth year. The most likely effect of a medium-quality publication from your first two years is either 1) mild to moderate positive effect (for people with master's degrees and 5+ years of previous experience in the community they study) or 2) to distract you from your preparations for those ABD years, making it more, rather than less, difficult for you to achieve the necessary pace to get a job later (for the other students). This obviously benefits the people with decade(s) of previous experience, but the most important part of their publication record is the period that follows their dissertation research period (years 3-4), just like it is for the less experienced PhD students. I don't know whether OP is in a field more like yours or more like mine, but your experience with publication timelines is not universal.
  19. It almost always does, because not many R2s have competitive PhD programs. (Note: many R1s will have un-competitive PhD programs in any given field.) But if you've found an R2 where the department gets TT placements for 95% of graduates (??! I think Harvard, Yale, UChicago etc. can't be batting better than .60, and I would have guessed more like .45), you have found a major exception.
  20. @Frenchlady I'm glad I could help! One clarification: when the four years "run out," the department may still be able to support you, so you wouldn't necessarily have to work off campus. I think your visa should still allow for that. At programs I'm familiar with, it's the difference between tuition waiver + TA one class per semester, during your guaranteed funding package, and maybe no tuition waiver + TA three classes (if they have them available! or maybe two and some debt if they don't) in years 5+. This does vary a lot between universities, and between departments in universities, so I'm sure you'll be able to find more accurate answers than I can provide, but I think the way I had described the post-guarantee situation had the potential to be misleading.
  21. You're already covered on the usual advice, which is to read things out loud. I'm not sure what your 'reading aloud' process looks like, but any sentence you stumble over in speaking is a candidate for revision. You may already know this, but I thought I'd say it just in case. Leaving a section for 3+ days helps, too. Once you've slept on it, you'll be less habituated to what you want your writing to mean, so you'll be able to hear what you've actually written on the page more clearly. Sometimes I print things out and re-write whole pages by hand. I am not that quick at penmanship, so that is nice incentive to reduce my writing to the essential points! Obviously this isn't workable for an entire thesis, but the trick is not so much learning general tips, as learning your general writing habits. For example, I tend to bury the lede, so my re-writing process almost always involves fishing up topic sentences from wherever they've hidden in the body of my text, and placing them on top of each paragraph instead. Writing by hand gives me a sense of what sub-optimal writing habits have been expressing themselves lately, which I can then use as a guide for going back through the entire text on the computer. It's also a good way to power through any particularly knotty passages. For example, it looks like one of your tics is unnecessary lists. Do you really need to say "Streamline, condense, and reduce redundancy when editing your writing"? What if you just said, "Reducing redundancy in your writing"? You could start by picking out a random page—say, page 15—and seeing if you use any pairs (or triplets) of synonyms where only one would do.
  22. Are there any financial issues that are likely to gut your institution? If private, is enrollment/the endowment moderately stable? If public, is a state-wide budget crisis roiling your university system, leading your university administrators to ask to put tuition waivers on the chopping block? If public, is the governing political party in your state on a crusade to filet their university system? (Note: this isn't a warning against every university system in a state with a Republican administration; compared to the upper midwest, frankly, most of the south is feeling relatively tranquil right now.) Is there a graduate student union? If so, how established and/or powerful are they? What kinds of concessions have they won from the university recently? This answer will be awfully similar to 'what kinds of benefits are there': I've asked it as a separate question, however, because if you have the kind of administration to really jerk the graduate students around, a strong union will reduce how much of that actually ends up applying to the grad students.
  23. @Frenchlady So Austin pays you an extra thousand dollars a month...and the downside is that they require one extra semester of coursework? I get wanting to go fast, so if you were choosing between a program that had candidacy at the end of the third term vs. at the end of the sixth term, I could see the argument for taking the three-term one. But three versus four terms? Unless exams take a really, really long time at Austin, that does not sound like a trade-off worth making. Plus better, more secure financial support often lets you go much, MUCH faster than otherwise. You don't have to use all of Austin's six years of funding if you don't want to. Generally, the number of terms a department funds its students for can have little to zero relationship with how many terms it expects it to take its students to graduate. At my department, the number of guaranteed funded terms is about half the number that it usually takes people to graduate. After our equivalent of LSU's four years to graduate, your funding "runs out"...which doesn't mean anybody graduates then—nobody graduates then—it's just that the next years are a madcap scramble for funding while doing a whole bunch of TA/adjunct work, often at many different area universities. I do know that there are some universities that have been really pushing their students through as fast as possible (Notre Dame, in my field). If LSU is giving you four years of funding as part of a deep, sustained, university-wide commitment to graduating its students in four years, I take much of this back, and it could be worthwhile. However, just from the information given here, and that I've heard elsewhere, I would guess that students at Austin actually graduate in fewer terms than at LSU, even though LSU's funding package covers less time. I don't have firsthand knowledge, so I could be totally wrong, but I really want to warn you not to take "terms funded" as a commitment to having students actually graduate in that number of terms.
  24. History is the department here, in the US, that I work with second-most closely. I would say that one thing history and anthropology have in common is that a tremendous number of their PhD students have BAs in area studies and its many permutations. (In my department, we have also tended to attract students with BAs in philosophy and education, while the history department seems to like BAs in English/literature or economics.) Unlike in philosophy or psychology, there's not much of a premium on undergraduate training in the subject. I can't speak to Britain, but I doubt that your BA subject would be a red flag for a PhD in the US, and thus would be even less so for an MA. Your year-off job sounds fine, even great; a history research position might be better if you're still struggling to define your research interests, but if the economic one pays better, don't worry about it. Most jobs don't directly pertain to PhD applicants' research interests, and it's common to be able to refine your interests in your time off anyway.
  25. I believe UVA has already had their finalist visit weekend—sometime between 1 and 3 weeks ago—where they bring about 8 people and from whom they accept about 6. I do not know whether they waitlist anybody they don't invite to the finalists' weekend. I think they may, but I don't know for sure.
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