hats

@wonderfulday I do think it's wise to let money be, if not "the biggest," quite a significant factor. If the difference is small, sure, go wherever will set you up for your career. If the difference is larger—funding vs. no funding, for example—I think you should seriously weigh that. At least in the US, teaching IR and teaching anthropology are going to have you working with extremely different student populations, with colleagues with very different kinds of attitudes. Perhaps that doesn't matter to you, but I wanted to flag it for your attention. I would also look at where Oxford MPhil students go for their PhDs (and then where students from those institutions find employment, if they do).

Three new languages, difficult ones, is an extremely heavy lift. I'm kind of surprised you're asking this, if you have as much experience learning languages as an adult as you wrote in your first post. Surely you've been able to tell that real fluency is not something you can achieve in six months? I can't tell from your post, however, whether any of these three languages are the two languages you've been studying already. If they are, that makes a big difference. If you're starting from zero, as I'm sure you know, this is going to be a multi-year commitment. As an anthropologist who works with languages foreign to me, my rule of thumb is that it takes me about three years to learn a really difficult language pretty well (i.e., to 50% of the capacity I would need to do non-basic interviews), given limited opportunities for immersion. If I had done the full Peace Corps/Fulbright thing, I expect I could get to that in, oh, a year and a half, if I had done "a year's worth" of introductory language prep beforehand. (University language classes, especially academic-year ones, often move really slowly, so "a year's worth" can often be accomplished in six weeks or less, either of self-study or an intensive course.) Maybe that could be condensed into less time, but I'm being conservative. Also, my estimate assumes the kind of writing system you can pick up in a couple weeks or less. Of course, standards do differ based on which languages you're talking about. If your project is comparing Buryat experiences in Russia with the experiences of Uyghur and Mongolian speakers in China, intermediate levels of Buryat, Uyghur, and Mongolian are probably fine, if you already know Russian and Chinese. (Although good luck with the political permissions for that project.) If you want to compare pop culture in Mandarin, Japanese, and Korean, you will be expected to speak at least two of those three really well, as I'm sure you know. Going from zero to fluent in any one of those languages requires more than a year of work, so I hope you've started on at least one of the languages you're hoping to work with.

This is so not my field that I can't even name 10 programs in medical anthropology and STS-inclined anthropology (can't those be quite different?). I think I've heard Berkeley and UCSD come up a lot, with Berkeley more associated with the former and UCSD with the latter. Yale used to be a place I would've named for you, but then Berkeley successfully nabbed Karen Nakamura.

Like @timetobegin says, I have an extremely good relationship with my chair. Socially, especially among the other students in my subfield, the situation is a bit "sad trombone." I find this to be a sustainable negative—think, students often find our location a bummer, not 'swamp of toxic drama and dysfunction'—especially because this was by far and away the best academic fit for me. If I could have the plusses without the negatives, though, I would absolutely do so. So my point is to agree that for PhDs, your chair shouldn't be so much your highest priority that it drowns out the student environment and less relevant faculty fit, because those are important, too. In a master's program, though, funding should be pretty key, followed by vision of where you're going to take your degree. If the advisor at University A thinks you should be applying to PhDs in economic anthropology and the one at University B is more excited about your research in environmental anthropology, try to pick the one that supports the specialization you'll carry on into your PhD program. If you get it wrong, though, it's not that big a deal, since you'll have a chance to find a better fit soon enough. Another funding consideration is, if you can get FLAS or research/lab assistant funding rather than TA funding, if one or both of those are relevant for your topic, that will likely leave you more research/academic time than TAing.

Are you interested in working in academia or industry? As far as I can tell, you're interested in the latter. In which case, you need to look at what kinds of jobs graduates from each program get, and where they get them. Universities that have good placement in this country can have two kinds of good placement. Some universities place nationally, especially in the bigger cities. Imagine the MIT alumni network. Other universities, that may have really strong alumni networks and job placement records, will only have those networks within a specific region. The University of Florida connection gets you a fair way in Florida, but not so much in Kansas or Oregon. How do these universities do? If Iowa State places people in regions you want to live, I would seriously consider it (especially if you're applying for MAs, I can't tell: the extra time to PhD might shift the calculus). If it has really great placement....but only in Iowa and maybe Ohio, that's a really big negative for you.

Other people have covered the academic part really well, so I am going to put in a serious plea for counseling. The first thing that concerns me is the catastrophizing: you doubt your reputation could recover from changing fields or programs? people do this all the time, and still become respected professors or top-flight curators. I hear you that you've gotten yourself into a sub-optimal situation, but the degree to which you're beating yourself up about it worries me: everybody makes mistakes, even major ones, and usually a whole lot more than once. So, entering your PhD program now seems to have been a mistake. But you didn't know it was a mistake when you started, so please be kinder to yourself about it. Nobody has enough 'foresight' that they can avoid ever making a mistake: it's part of being human. You're only human, too, so I hope you can forgive yourself for this one. From your post, it sounds like you're doing that thing, where you've gotten yourself trapped in a tangle of emotional thorns, or a pit of life-circumstances quicksand—because your PhD program as it stands is, in fact, not right for you—and now you're thrashing about because you're in pain and you just want to be out of the circumstances that are hurting you. As with the thorns or the quicksand metaphor, that's either dragging you down further or, at best, keeping you stuck in the quagmire of suck. As I think the other posters have made clear, you have tunnel vision about the options available to you. You have many more, much better options than you acknowledged in your first post, and you can start taking steps towards a happier, more positive life today. To recap, some of these are: to investigate switching topics within your PhD program. To take a semester or a year off and work or woof (when I had a couple friends sound like you do right now, they did the thing where you work for room and board on an organic farm or Zen retreat type place, and it helped them a lot) before you decide whether to continue with this program or to apply to different ones. To get a master's in African art history and then to apply to different PhD programs in medieval European art (which, even if you never do any research in Africa again, will still make your teaching profile more competitive than the average medievalist art historian). The lack of energy, motivation, and joy at things you used to like are textbook red flags for depression. A single post is very much not enough to suggest a diagnosis, since it might not be representative of how you feel day to day...but this post is suggestive enough that I really suggest you get screened. As a PhD student, you should have access to the campus counseling center. Please go ASAP! You do not sound like you are happy or doing well, and you deserve and can get help to do better.

@Banzailizard Either in your first email or in a follow-up if you get a positive response, you could also ask whether they think the Rutgers MA, specifically, would be useful for any applications you submit in the future. It sounds from your post on this page like you have minimal languages and are applying to a field where you really do need languages, so I would guess the answer is going to be yes, it will be helpful. But if it feels useful for you to have a more specific query, that sounds like an acceptable one.

Are these not both plusses?? Don't get me wrong, I love teaching, but—with a possible exception for people who are aiming first and foremost at being community college professors (or high school teachers or certain state branch campus jobs? none of these are my own goal so I'm not so familiar)—maximizing teaching is not a goal for your first three years or so of graduate school. If you have low to minimal teaching in those first couple years, you can still easily (and may have to) teach A LOT later, but you'll be set up for a much more competitive research profile.

@lylark I never applied to Chicago, so I didn't know they did interviews, but they are competitive as [cursing] to get into. I know it doesn't help a lot right now, but it's a great sign that they wanted to talk to you!

I am pro-union and pro-collective action as anything, but the UIUC administration's demands seem particularly nasty. I wouldn't shy away from a school because of a strike. For me, strikes generally are neutral to positive. However, I might shy away from this school because of the concessions the administration is demanding that have led to this strike.

@tamaloo "We are only giving you half (or three-quarters) the stipend we normally give our PhD students" is one of those factors that are significant enough that I would really suggest that you not choose that school. Is it really that great a working culture, if they don't value your work? I hope you love the Ivy after you visit, but even more so, I hope you get accepted somewhere else so you have more choices!

It just seems like you're aiming for an extremely narrow audience, if it's true that @TakeruK knows too little about linguistics and I know too much. I've only taken two linguistics courses! Did you make this because you're teaching a linguistics 101 course? I could imagine it as an assignment the week before you start the comparative reconstruction unit, but after you've done phonology.

I am sensing a confusion in terms here, in what is understood by graduate insurance "not covering" vision and dental. If your school doesn't offer vision or dental insurance at all, yes, that's bad, get your check-ups now. But many schools will offer vision or dental insurance as an add-on to your health insurance policy. This is not fine if the add-on fee is $100/month, but for me it's far less, and I've found it totally manageable.

@Mitchell1 I haven't heard of this offer being extended in our field; my initial reaction is yikes, no—that it's basically a soft waitlist/rejection. I can't say for sure that it hasn't been done recently, so perhaps somebody who has done it recently will appear and can speak more knowledgeably. (Beware the elder professor who says, "well, I got through my PhD in the 70s by delivering pizzas and I'm fine." Expectations have changed.) But what do you want a PhD for? Most to all of your competitors for jobs at the end of this will have been funded, which will mean a major competitive disadvantage for you. If you're living off trust fund income or have a small business that can support all of your living expenses, with little or no debt, in only two days a week, it might not be a financial disaster. It isn't a sign of faith from the department that admitted you, however. If this is the amount of support they are offering you now, I don't trust them to offer you the support you need to get a job. So, if you would like a job at the end (I ask because there are always a few posters on this board who don't), I would still not take this offer. I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news. Do you have a master's degree? A tuition-only master's may be workable; a PhD won't be.

This is the first I have heard of such a policy, but I can see the sense in it. If professors encourage students to limit their discussion of personal experience, that seems sensible. Like you said, your program has seen a history of personal experiences derailing class from the readings! At least in my program, about a third of the first years and about one second year will usually not have done serious ethnography yet. Holding space for those students to contribute is important. But while limits on the monopolization make sense, a ban totally does not. Does this apply to every class? My first year core social theory class never really got into people's ethnographic experiences, which was fine and appropriate, but for some of the more topical classes, talking about your own research is part of the point. If it's across many classes, the difference between ethnography and anecdotes may be what they want to get at. If it really is a ban on ethnography (not anecdotes) in the majority of your classes...I can only say, 'yikes.' But perhaps there could still be a rationale I haven't considered. Have you asked your professors or older students about this?

As others have mentioned, "Ivy" is a poor proxy for "stress-y and pressure cooker." Go visit all the departments! I think "too stress-y" is a good reason to turn down a good school, if you have more relaxed options that still graduate most of their students into the kinds of jobs you would like to do. I have been associated with both Ivy/near-Ivy and big state schools (albeit sometimes as an employee or undergraduate)...and the environment I found by far the most negative was at a big state school. At the problem place, I didn't like how only some people got all-fellowships packages, while others had to teach a tremendous amount for their funding. It added this really unpleasant competition gradient; even if all the fellowships were external, the differential results produced nasty results for camaraderie. When you feel yourself saying, "Wow, I miss that stressful New England University that has a (not unfair) reputation for having mean students and faculty, because people were so much nicer there," something is wrong. Don't underestimate the ability of departments to build their own cultures, which may be way better or way worse than the result you would get if you averaged the climate of every department at that university. Of course, know your field. The two schools you listed as pseudonyms for your non-Ivy choices don't fill me with confidence, especially as compared to Princeton, rather than a "lower" Ivy...I've never heard of a graduate field in which Temple is really the best. That said, I don't know the comparative rankings of any sciences, or most of the humanities or social sciences, either, so I hope that's not too much of a dig against the school. (If your example was, say, Cornell vs. UCSD, I would be much more enthusiastic because I can name academic fields in which they are exactly equivalent.) Try not to pick a school that doesn't graduate its students into good jobs—academic or not—over one that does, but the one that is best for your graduate field of study may very well not be the one with the lowest undergraduate acceptance rate. That said, I have turned down Ivy—in part because that department was so weird, demographically ($$$ people!)—so just like, go on your visits, try not to pre-judge, and see what you can figure out once you have more evidence about how much you like each place.

Can I ask what your goal is? Do you have any linguistics background? This is more coding than I could do, but I do have notes about its contents. First, your framing is misleading. It doesn't work to show only one potential word pair at a time. Remember, linguistics determines whether two words are actually cognate by identifying 1) corresponding meanings and 2) recurring phonetic correspondences. One instance of an apparent phonetic match (especially without considering meaning) cannot show that two words are cognate. It can't even show that when every letter is the same! For example, Malagasy and Russian are not related just because Malagasy has vorona 'bird' and Russian has vorona 'crow'. You'd need more examples of v:v in both languages to show that that sound generally corresponds. My simplest suggestion for re-framing would be to say something like, 'I have a set of cognates that have been shown through independent linguistic analysis to be cognates. This is a game to see how well your intuition matches those conclusions.' That seems like a harmless thing. If anyone walks away from this game thinking that's how cognates are established, you're feeding people an inaccurate sense of what linguistics can do, which I can't advise. Doing a kind of matching thing could be fun for people, if you're clear that they're guessing, not following a real method of analysis. Even better, although it sounds like a complicated coding project, would be to have people pick out recurring correspondences in a set of words. Like: cook (English) : kook (Dutch) and milk (E) : melk (D) shows a k : k match between those languages. If you did that—perhaps using data from some of the historical linguistics problem set type books, if they're in the public domain or this qualifies as fair use—this could be a good resource for linguistics 101 classes.

What's the ranking split? As others said, you should probably not turn down Yale in favor of a university that doesn't place students in the kinds of jobs you want. If the difference is relatively minor, what kind of difference in "level of support" are you feeling? I know some students who put a really high priority on "nice," like, does this advisor buy chocolate for their students every Halloween. Personal warm-fuzziness above the minimum level of politeness is orthogonal to talent as an advisor, though. Do you think the person from whom you feel less support is a good advisor in general? What do their other students say about working with them—are they easy to work with, do they treat their students well, do they challenge their students appropriately, do they advocate for them on the job market? If the person does all those things and seems noticeably less invested in you than in other students...does this professor take a long time to warm up to people? If they usually warm up quickly and you're noticing a distinct lack of enthusiasm, that's a red flag. Even if everyone else gives them a wonderful review and assures you that all of their behavior is normal for them, their style may still be bothering you right now. It is possible that you two will just never have compatible styles, even if both of you are perfectly nice people. First impressions are so inaccurate, so often, however, that I advise you not to go with your gut instinct immediately. Interrogate the instinct, and if it's really persistent, I would consider listening. But also, sometimes major faculty really don't work out for people...in my program, I have seen both incompatible styles where nobody is at fault, and situations where one of the parties was maybe kind of being a jerk. For either department, you can't just work with one POI. If your main POI at each department decided to move to Hawaii to start a surf shack on the beach—or turns out to be a surprise jerk—who is your second choice as main advisor? How 'deep' is the roster of faculty whom you'd consider to ask to join your committee? Academia is still based, to a very weird degree, on the apprenticeship model...but even so, you're not working with just the one person. Can you Skype both advisors? Are you going to visit weekends? In sum: Get a lot more data before you make your final decisions. You have time on your side for a little bit here, so I advise you to use it. And who knows—maybe you'll get admitted at a third school that blows the other two out of the water in prestige and support ;)—stranger things have happened!

This is very common. There have been times when I cried about something trivial; I have much reduced that as I've gotten further into adulthood, and if I could get them to zero, that would be nice. (It would be nice for me; how other people take my emotions is not my first priority.) On the other hand, sometimes something hard really does happen, and I don't think I'll ever totally stop crying when it does—nor do I think I that's something to be ashamed about! I've cried in front of, oh, five? seven? professors since the start of undergrad. I wish I could tell you all of them were cool about it. Most of them have been: "cool about it" does have a range, from the tissues and cookies to the more 'well this is awkward, but also a normal part of human fallibility, so let's get past it and you'll be okay" kind of thing. Unfortunately, I think I am currently dealing with my first professor who is not cool about it, which only adds to the stress level around them. I hope I'm wrong!

Is this venting, or looking for advice? This doesn't sound fixable, but it sounds like it could be better. I wonder if the very good workplace advice at "Ask a Manager," which has a whole specialty in difficult bosses, might be helpful for you. For instance, when faced with an advisor from whom it is often difficult to get a straight answer, I switched to doing absolutely everything we needed to communicate about in writing. Questionnaire-style emails have been sent: 1) If I understand you correctly, we should proceed with task X. Is that correct? Yes/no. 2) If we proceed with task X, should we do it in way A or B? A or B. etc. It sounds like you may be more focused on exit strategies, but there are ameliorative things you could try in the meantime. (For example: can you get the science education contact's phone number?) Which year are you in? Is it worth leaving before you pay any more tuition, or are all your payments up until you graduate paid? How much is your funding, if you're still accruing $60k in debt?

Look, friend, nobody would have a problem if you said: "The dating pool in my town tends to skew young, and I like dating women who like exploring and trying new things—which has tended to correlate with women being in their early or mid twenties. That structural availability plus my personality preference has influenced my dating history in a younger direction. I don't drink, too, which reduces the sense of the social age gap. As I age, I may always like having high-energy partners—which again correlates with 'women younger than me'—but I expect that when I am 35 I will be interested in women 20-30, at 40, maybe 25-35, that kind of thing." I don't think it's a great dynamic to be as prevalent in our society as it is, but it's not something I'm going to criticize at an individual level. I don't have a problem with you thinking to yourself, "Younger women are especially fit and attractive!" In the privacy of your head, that's your business. (I advise you not to say that to an actual woman. It is unlikely to be well received.) But you keep saying 18-26 is your preferred range. From what you've said about your age—over 30?—we're arguing that you should move your minimum expected age to, like, 20. We're not arguing that you can't make an exception, that a relationship between an 18 year old and a 32 year old can't be cool, but as a former teenage woman, I would feel a lot better if that would be an exception, rather than part of the age range you say you're still looking for.

When will you be old enough that the age difference between you and a teenager bothers you? If you haven't found a life partner by the time you're 40, will you still prefer to date 18 year olds? What about when you're 50? 60? What's your line? Is there one?

Yes, I'm just a pre-field student, but as far as I've read I can second the idea that Duke University Press is, in fact, where it is at. What's your academic research library access like? If you're not currently affiliated with one, that adds constraints to your search that in a way make it easier, because there's fewer available options to comb through. I am a noted fan of JSTOR's three free articles a month policy...they hadn't adopted started doing that when I applied, but I'm happy to see the change anyway.

Oy @Yanaka, ask the administrator(s) if you can still apply. I'm sorry I didn't see this sooner, because if you didn't press the 'submit' button on your part, it may be too late (you won't lose anything by asking bright and early tomorrow morning, though - send it before business hours open.) For the future, though, One Of Those Things in academia is that letters of recommendation can almost always come in by a later date than your own application. Sometimes it's a flexible kind of later ("oh, within a week or so after the applicants' deadline"); sometimes it's later but really, really not flexible (certain national fellowships will say, applicants September 20, letters September 30, after that it's straight in the garbage). But if it's a funding program through your school, they're more likely to be flexible, since it looks good for them to have their students funded.

@35mm_ If you are wondering what it takes to get yourself rejected (more precisely, non-accepted) in an interest-gauging interview like that, I can tell you! I've been there! Some context: for my current project, with my background, there was one university in the country, 'Western University,' that could train me. (I am here now.) My project's thematic relevance is broad, but I need specialized training in Skill X right now. If I'd wanted to use/learn Skill Y, however, Other State University (heh heh at the acronym) would have been a better fit. 'OSU' also has a professor (a Y specialist) whose book I want to emulate, so I applied to both Western and OSU. Now, I came into anthropology from studying literature and I was applying without access to a research library (which was awful), so I hadn't read a lot of anthropology. Rather early—before Western responded—OSU asked me for an interview. Whoopie! They asked me some basic questions, like how I could learn Skill X at OSU (it seemed unlikely), and where else I had applied (Western). Then we had this exchange: OSU anthropology: So, hats, we see you don't have a lot of background in anthropology, but you do have some. To get a sense of your interests, what works of anthropology—beyond the ones named in your research statement—do you like? hats: Uh—well—the first one that comes to mind is Oh No This Book Was Written By A Scholar at Western University [mental klaxons] [too late to retrieve foot from mouth] and also uh um here are some other names. Yeah, the first book I named as a 'favorite,' that wasn't going to be relevant for my research, also worked at the place I was clearly going to choose over them for research reasons anyway. OSU just kind of never gave me a decision, until I withdrew from consideration: I don't know whether it was a soft waitlist or a slow rejection or what. It all worked out, but that is the level of thing you need to do to yourself to get yourself taken off of consideration for 'this applicant is definitely going to go somewhere else' reasons. Don't do what I did! It doesn't sound like you did, though; it would be unfair if they asked you to commit-commit, rather than just express serious interest, so far before April 15, so your answer sounds like it was well within the bounds of acceptable.