hats

Read the directions carefully. I don't know how much FLAS application criteria differ between universities, but two that might be easy to overlook are: 1) demonstrating your general 'language aptitude', which they care about if you're applying for a beginning- or intermediate-level FLAS—e.g. "as a native Japanese speaker I am now pursuing graduate education in English, I have shown that I have the motivation and ability to learn new languages quickly and well. Even though I have never taken Chinese before, I expect to apply those same work habits." 2) making the connection between your research interests and needing this language explicit. Don't hand-wave that oh, of course Arabic is useful for your work on Turkey! Yeah, well, probably, but show it. I have also seen some that have questions about your commitment to doing work in that world region or broader impact stuff in the NSF kind of vein; if your solicitation has that, address it. Recall that some FLASes at some places are extremely competitive...while some other FLASes, for less popular languages, may have more awards to give out than they have applicants. This is not necessarily something that should determine which language you apply for in your first year of graduate school, but it may be something to keep in mind if you're, say, a Russia specialist looking for a secondary language and deciding whether to apply for Chinese (extremely popular) and Uighur (likely to be less so).

Apparently you can trace one line of my family back to the Speedwell—that's the one right after the Mayflower, right? But pish, that's nothing! I haven't done it myself, but my Syrian-American parent did a project tracing their ancestry back to at least the 1400s, and possibly several hundred years earlier than that. (My parent knows more precisely, but I forget.) You gotta have those thorough church records, which the Christian community in Damascus absolutely did. The family story is that our last name appears rather suddenly because that group had been collaborating with some political power that was not popular with some other group of new invaders, which led to a name change, somehow. That part is a bit unclear and perhaps illogical to me, but I haven't really investigated myself. In this political era, I am (weirdly? or justifiably?) proud that the part of my ancestry you can follow far the farthest back is Arab.

Remember: literally everyone who has ever applied to graduate school has had a typo in one of their materials somewhere. I'm sure there are errors bad enough to take people out of the running! That said, if departments only took students who never omitted a word somewhere, every graduate classroom everywhere would be empty. At about this point in the application process, I recommend this website: https://calmingmanatee.com/

@FreakyFoucault

@not_really_cool My favorite pair of Oxfords ever were Steve Madden, but I am more of a devotee of DSW/Nordstrom Rack than of any brand in particular. If there is a good deal, I will try it! (Plus my feet are a bit weirdly shaped, so I like being able to try on a lot of shoes fairly quickly.) I wish I could be more specific!

Oh neat! I'm always looking for more recommendations...;) I make it a point to read speculative fiction from all people of color, on the premise that it is about The Future (or, alternatively, People), and both of those things are mostly made up of people of color, so it would be awfully nice to reflect that reality in fiction, too. To some degree this extends to writing by/about people with disabilities as well (although it's harder to find authors disclosing that) and queer fiction (which has the challenge that I prefer the romance part to max out at 20% of the story, and I feel like novels on 'queer fantasy' lists or whatever tend towards being 'romance in a fantasy setting.') The best book I've read lately is Raven Strategem by Yoon Ha Lee; the first ten or twenty pages are a steep, steep uphill climb in terms of world-building but it so pays off! It is so good! I don't know anything about the author's identities beyond being Korean, but the story is a queer one and there's some disability stuff I can't tell you about that is downright stellar. (Unfortunately, I found the sequel kind of takes some of the awesomeness back; it's a mystery-box novel where anyone who read Raven Strategem knows what's inside the mystery box the whole time. It was well done, I guess, but profoundly frustrating.) I don't really have any friends right now who like to read speculative fiction, so I have all these bottled up opinions! I will not just download my thoughts on everything I've read in the last two years here, though, as a good forum participant ;). My roommate is reading Annihilation right now, though, so that's something!

If you don't mind me banging in here, English was my second choice. It never really coalesced into a viable avenue for graduate school for me, but I have imagined plausible scholarly tracks based on the English Renaissance or Afrofuturism. For the former, I really like Milton. I was especially interested in Orientalism and (maritime) trade in his works. That's well-trodden ground, of course; my inclination would have been to expand the project through comparison with some of his contemporaries (TBD). As a long-time fantasy and science-fiction reader, I have felt like there has (finally) been another upswing in Black speculative fiction authors recently, especially women, but the extent of the intellectual development for that idea is "NK Jemisin and Nnedi Okorafor are just, like, so good!" How to relate that to the first wave of Afrofuturism, or whether 'Afrofuturism' is even an appropriate category for all the books I'm thinking of (I would guess no), also got a big fat TBD. I only wish I had as much energy for follow-through on my current project as I do for coming up with new ones!

In my opinion, the more "formal" versions of Vans are loafers or Oxfords. (I like boots, too, but everyone else has that covered.) I don't love wearing sneakers, but my basic outfit right now is jeans + t-shirt or sweatshirt + loafers or Oxfords, which made me think those shoes might be your style. At the same time, both styles go naturally with more formal pants outfits, and some people can pull them off with dresses/skirts. Neither loafers or Oxfords are as wet weather-appropriate as boots, so depending on where you live/are going, boots might be a better suggestion (although I find Oxfords workable up to 2" snow if I've waterproofed them). An example of the kind of loafers I mean. These are a bit expensive, but I don't like the cut that leaves the top half of your foot exposed, so these are the first example I found of the style I mean. When I want to wear loafers, I am wearing them as more formal sneakers, not as slightly more structured flats, so they still need to cover most of the top of my foot. And look at how cute these Oxfords are! I feel like Oxfords look stiffer and less comfortable than loafers, but I usually find them more comfortable, personally. (I have never bought shoes from either company I linked to.)

This is something like my third handle on this forum, because the first couple—when I was an applicant—involved some embarrassing posts. I think one of my more embarrassing threads from when I applied, years ago, involved me getting jumped all over by a couple people, possibly including @telkanuru. If I put myself into those shoes again, @khigh, I think what you're going through is structural. You've only gotten advice from basically the one professor for years and years; he's extremely respected, but he hasn't worked with very many students. Even if he has, a LOT of senior professors don't keep up with what gets students hired these days. (The second link is, although harsh, true for graduate school; don't take this as an attack on your undergraduate advisor's background or style.) Then you come here. You post. Suddenly, a firehose of new information explodes in your direction, from too many sources to possibly handle right now! So many people are talking, and nobody is defending you! Everybody shares a very different consensus than you had been getting from the comforting graybeard who says, "there's always good jobs for good people"! So you get defensive and push back on the advice, on the one hand, and you also go around giving too much advice, because after the ego drubbing you just received, you want to feel like the authority and like you know something. Maybe I'm projecting onto you, and that's not what you're doing, but I know I have done literally exactly that. None of us want to dampen your enthusiasm. But this is a moment when the advice you give is going to be structurally limited by your position: your advice on "obviously" German first is one example. As telkanuru says, this may be annoying for Germanists, but American Europeanists studying Italy or Portugal probably just aren't that good at German. There are fields where German comes first, but all of Europe, in all time periods, is painting with too broad a brush. I advise you to sit with the advice you've gotten for a while and recognize that you just won't be able to give informed advice about some of these choices until after you've started seeing their consequences in practice, i.e., after you get to graduate school. You're obviously very capable, but some of your priors are wrong, in the way that many of our priors, including mine, were wrong when we started applying to graduate school. I get that it feels like you're one person being ganged up on—that's what led to my defensive flame-outs in my first couple tries on this forum—because a lot of people are correcting a lot of things you're saying. That's the result of coming to a forum where there are a lot of experienced graduate students who want to help you. Maybe try imagining that you're having each of these conversations one on one. I get that it's too much to take in at once, but that doesn't mean anyone is being snarky, or mean, or dismissive. We want you to succeed. PS On the museum thing: I've worked in a special collections library/museum kind of place. If you need money and the museum job pays as much as the cafeteria job, @historynerd97, that kind of thing may be great experience for graduate school. It's not really helpful getting in, though (unless you want to do public history, a separate field), it's that it might expose you to a collection or idea that will inform your project, which is what decides whether you get in or not. If tutoring pays better or whatever, don't worry about it.

One of my favorite articles in the "how did I stumble into reading this?" category is John Wills Jr's "Author, Publisher, Patron, World: A Case Study of Old Books and Global Consciousness." He's a scholar of China who's worked on the Dutch East India Company; the article considers how some early modern Dutch travel literature imagined the rest of the world. It's a stellar example of the sort of thing people are asking you about when they ask you to consider a) how the Dutch Republic existed in the wider world and b ) what was going on in the early modern world beyond Europe. One prevailing emphasis in humanities-and-anthropology academia these days is that Europe didn't exist, and has never existed, in isolation. So it's difficult for many Europeanists to succeed in those fields without considering emerging forces/processes of globalization. Being a scholar of the Netherlands today doesn't mean you'll have to know a lot about Dutch colonialism in all of early New York, South Africa, Indonesia, etc., or, for the Mediterranean, about the interactions the Dutch may have had with all of the Ottomans, the Berber states, and/or Egypt. It will help you on the job market and in the process of promoting Dutch historiography, however, if you have a serious interest in at least one of those topics. Not necessarily a publishing interest, but a reading and keeping up with the scholarship so you can ask intelligent questions at conferences interest. You mention Afrikaans, so I wonder if you have a solid foundation for such a minor field already. (In the sense of college majors and minors.) In the context of the trading wars between the Portuguese, Dutch, and British in the 1660s and 1670s: Meanwhile the adversary of God and man, Satan with thoughts inflamed of highest design, Puts on swift wings, and toward the gates of hell Explores his solitary flight; sometimes He scours the right hand coast, sometimes the left, Now shaves with level wing the deep, then soars Up to the fiery concave towering high. As when far off at sea a fleet descried Hangs in the clouds, by equinoctial winds Close sailing from Bengala, or the isles Of Ternate and Tidore, whence merchants bring Their spicy drugs: they on the trading flood Through the wide Ethiopian to the Cape Ply stemming nightly toward the pole. So seemed Far off the flying fiend. —Paradise Lost, 2.629–43

Good job hearing these comments! To some degree, I think this volume of information is necessarily overwhelming. You shouldn't expect to absorb everything in this thread immediately. At the same time, wow, you have gotten a lot of rich advice. I hope you keep taking advantage of it! As others have said, "concise" can't and shouldn't be opposed to "good." "Concise" can't even be opposed to "musing"! It does, I think, require more effort to muse concisely, to "muse" within a scheme where each paragraph should have its own topic sentence, but I have seen it done (frequently!). What it means is that you should devote a whole section, or at the very least a whole paragraph, to each quasi-philosophical tangent you think worth raising with your readers. Sentence-level asides within paragraphs with a different point are, it's true, mostly out. But modern history articles have questioning tones or sections all the time. Although article and dissertation word limits will come knocking in your future, if concision feels like "giving up a part of your soul," I think you should focus for now on making your writing better. Since you have been taking this all so well so far, let me be straightforward and say that this is not just an academia problem: the style in the paragraphs you posted would not work well in fiction, either. I'm not surprised that the paper was well-received at the conference! Conference attendees are well used to a little throat-clearing, especially for participants who have not yet begun graduate study. But it was throat-clearing. The problem isn't that you took too long to get to the point, though: it's that the path you took to get there wasn't particularly interesting or insightful. So why don't you work on getting better, and forget about concision. If the "better" you reach involves making each one of your sentences mean something, contribute something useful or new to the reader's life, I bet you will find yourself having fewer style difficulties. You may still prefer to submit to journals with longer rather than shorter wordcounts, but the style half of this problem should be diminished. It sounds like your history reading has been esoteric and perhaps on the old-fashioned side. What history reading would you recommend, history posters, to help with the style question? The first thing that pops to mind in the philosophical vein, for me, is Joan Scott, especially "The Evidence of Experience." It's not my exact cup of tea, but it has that musing, fiction-and-philosophy-minded quality that might appeal to OP. Boy, are some of her sentences long (probably infinite on the readability metric, but I never found one actually unreadable)...but some of her sentences are short! On fiction: it's a suggestion I'm dubious of, because I have only read half of one of his books, but what about Kazuo Ishiguro? (I stopped halfway through The Buried Giant because it was too scary! Absolutely nothing bad had happened or was imminently threatening to happen...but gah) Or The Left Hand of Darkness? (Le Guin is Our People for us anthropologists.) Nothing happens. Two people go on a walk when it's cold outside. When I read it, though, I loved it immensely. Tana French, especially the second one? I don't read a lot of long, musing fiction, so there must be more out there.

On writing clearly, reading your own words out loud is key. Some people prefer to have a text-to-speech read their paper to them. I prefer to read them to myself. Either way, it should help you hear how smoothly you've written it. Although the "readability" metric is a fun number to play with, it doesn't mean anything for academics. First, it maxes out at a level below what's useful for us to talk about. I would guess that both Bill Cronon and Derrida would get the same score on this metric, which is a sign that it is not designed for us. It might affect how much I would be willing to assign a certain paper to 14 year olds, 18 year olds, and senior students in the major, but it doesn't capture distinctions in difficulty among professional arguments. Second, I don't think it actually measures clarity, either at the sentence or the argumentative level. If I understand it correctly, it measures how many big or obscure words you use — if you use them in their proper place, that is no detriment to a high-level argument! — and how long your sentences are. It's possible to have either clear or convoluted long sentences, and as long as you err on the side of the latter, you should be fine. I will say that the one big "readability" thing that or a similar piece of advice has taught me is to vary sentence length, and especially to make sure to have some short sentences. As an academic, this is sometimes easy to forget! Tending to have long sentences is a sign that you're writing professionally, because many of our thoughts can't be conveyed in a five-word phrase. Having exclusively long sentences is a sign that you are not being very generous to your readers, so you should watch out for that.

My position tends to be that for places with inane requirements, like a ten page writing sample, a few norms can be bent which would be courteous and wise to observe elsewhere. For example: endnotes. I think Penn expects this, too, or they wouldn't have explicitly included the note about how you can have your references at the end.

Don't try to be broad, try to show you're flexible. If you don't give specifics, professors may not think you can propose an actually feasible project to tackle an aspect of your broad questions. The advice you received not to seem like you are committed to one, and exactly one, project, and are uninterested in considering any other ways to investigate these issues is correct. The solution is not, however, to say "I'm interested in the rise of social inequality in the North American woodlands" and then stop. You have to continue. Say, here's one way I imagine taking it! That shows you actually have the skills to visualize all the steps you need to complete a dissertation. Maybe you can say two or three kinds of data or two or three kinds of sites that might speak to your work. There's a middle ground between over-rigid commitment to a narrow project and a hand-wavey breadth of interest that doesn't give committees a sense of how you work as a thinker. (I'm interested in 'the rise of social inequality in the woodlands civilizations', too, but I've never been on a dig or analyzed any archaeological data, so you shouldn't admit me to an archaeology program based on my ability to state a broad archaeological theme that interests me!) Can I direct your attention to these two threads? Of the recent discussions in this subforum, I think these both had good discussion about how to balance this issue.

It sounds like the former, but I would ask the relevant administrative staff member at the program.

Are you close with any of your classmates, especially ones who say "To echo @Sapphire120" more or less frequently? Can you check in with them about what they think is happening? Some possible answers: Yeah, I've noticed that, too! I think it's because I'm a man and you're a woman. I keep trying to draw the professor's attention to it—that's why I'm always emphasizing your contribution, but I'm frustrated that Professor seems not to be picking up on it and giving you the credit. You take a long time to get to your points, and you do so in a rambling way. I think the substance of your comments is really smart, which is why I echo them, but you're right that Professor doesn't seem to follow your train of thought in the same way. I sometimes write down an outline of my comments before I make them to make sure they're structured—have you tried that? What? I thought it was obvious that Professor likes your ideas! Professor takes a while to process things, though, have you noticed? It's not just you, Professor reacts a bit slowly to turns in the discussion. (It's possible it's a combination of all three.) After checking in with your friendliest and most socially aware classmates, there may be proactive steps you can take to refine your discussion style. Everyone has something they could improve, so that might be worthwhile. Whether or not the intervention 'takes,' on the other hand, I would definitely have a note about this professor's listening skills—especially if they are demographically selective listening skills—in my mental file about them.

As far as upholding academic standards, nobody is arguing that he shouldn't fix the CV. He should fix it. He should be thorough about fixing it, including as much public notice as you want. After he's fixed it, if you argue that he needs to face consequences to show this kind of error isn't "tolerated," sure, that's fine, we can add consequences. Let's brainstorm: what kinds of consequences might be fair and proportionate to an offense of this magnitude? a small fine? mandatory training? assignment to less desirable committees? Any of those would seem appropriate for small errors about his undergraduate (!) research. You keep asking questions of us, but I have a couple questions for you: Has anyone ever cited the articles you object to? If you find many citations, my understanding of how serious this misstep is goes from about 2 to about 4.* If you just haven't been clear, and these were in fact field-defining articles or even in that general tier of importance, you should have led with that. If these articles he was taking credit for became that influential, that would be where this misrepresentation could shoot up to an 8 or 9. I doubt that level of influence is even possible with these articles, however, because, as you keep pointing out, there are no full PDFs for people to read. *On my scale, '7' would be about the level of a firing offense; '10' is reserved for things that might involve jail time. Let's say you convince us and we all say "YES! He should be fired!", like you seem to want. You've identified us as "less mature" academics; we're early career, and we don't know anything. Sure, fine, we're immature and have bad judgment. So why are you appealing to us? What do you think we can do about it? Are you trying to convince us to write a letter-writing campaign to this department, or...? As to your post on the previous page, obviously this man has standing to request that his students not plagiarize. If I got a speeding ticket ten years ago and now I'm teaching my teenage daughter to drive, do I have the "moral basis" to tell her that she should obey traffic laws, too?

As a graduate student advised by this person? 1) Wow this is not my business. 2) I do not have anywhere near the level of institutional power, influence, or support, to do anything about this. 3) Gee I will wait with my head down for my professor's colleagues to sort this out. When I say "with my head down," I especially mean that I will not gossip. 4) I trust they will sort this out fairly, even if this means severe consequences for my advisor, like firing them. 5) This seems like a good time to strengthen my relationships with other faculty members in my department, to see what I can do about making a Plan B for if they do fire the guy.

I agree with @kittyball. Personally, I failed to apply to one program for what is, objectively, a stupid reason: there was some bureaucratic nightmare with my pre-reqs/eligibility for something or other, and the administrative staff with whom I was trying to resolve it were brusque with me in like two emails. Dumb! But I think I crossed it off my list because it was a huge stretch for fit anyway, so I was willing to cross it off for more trivial reasons.* So, if a POI not responding is your sign that you weren't that into that program anyway...go ahead and cross it off. But if it's a really good program for you, every single cell in my body screams, no, don't take it off your list just for that! People have health crises! People have babies! People have policies about not emailing students back! If you get in and you find out the POI is in fact like that—i.e., non-responsive and detached even from their current students—feel free not to say yes to their offer. The better juncture for that decision is after admission, however, not before. *I then got access to an academic library again and actually read this POI's book, a POI who was the main-to-only reason I was considering the program. His research matches mine thematically, like, exactly, but OH BOY do I ever have (angry) thoughts about how he actually approached his subject. In the end, that application fee was well avoided.

@Sigaba You seem to have taken the first sentence of her post out of context; I think the rest of the post makes it clear what she means something different than you've responded to. When she says "people of color are underrepresented in history," she meant "people of color are underrepresented in history" as its practitioners. I don't see anywhere in her post that she claims that race is "under-represented" as an object of study in history. Rather, the statistics she cites show that she is talking about diversity in the demographics of professional academics, not in the distribution of the topics they study.

If you don't mind, let me just direct you to this other post on this subject I wrote: This idea seems quite specific to anthropology (my field of comparison includes sociology, linguistics, and many humanities: other disciplines I can't say)—that your SOP should be a mini dissertation proposal. I think this idea is a) pernicious and b ) incorrect. I suspect it's fed mostly by the fact that the best/only anthropology sample SOPs available on the internet are the ones from Duke, which shared only essays from applicants with master's degrees. Those essays are really good! It's great that Duke made them available! But that they're only from applicants with master's seems to distort how other applicants picture what they should be aiming for. Your interests as listed above are somewhat too broad, yes; you'll want to make them more specific for your SOP, as I'm sure you know. 'Miniature dissertation proposal' is, however, not the correct standard. (It's not even the correct standard for the NSF GRFP research statement, which asks for a longer and more detailed attempt at defining your research project than do regular applications; there are a lot of winners who acknowledge uncertainty about their projects, even while they propose a compelling, narrow-ish set of questions to investigate.)

My advice would be to contact the departmental administrator at, respectively, your institution and at SAR. "Do you know how best to get in touch with so-and-so?" you ask each of them. Do try to send this message to one of the more appropriate administrators—i.e., not the coordinator for undergraduate affairs or similar. If they don't know, that's when I'd start looking at backups like Facebook or less relevant letter-writers. Side note: what kind of retirement did the one who promised you an LOR take? I might not ask her again if I knew she had retired for serious reasons. Otherwise, it should be fair to seek a yes or no on whether she can still commit to doing it. It does sound like email isn't the way to go, though, so good luck finding a different medium.

@Quant_Psych_2018 I think it's generally fine to mention a previous research interest, specifically. "I just didn't know what I wanted to do" is a bad way to frame it, though. My usual advice would be to say, "I was interested (or perhaps say, tentatively interested) in pursuing clinical psychology, during which period I explored x, y, and z. Now I have come to be more interested in quantitative psychology, where I want to pursue topics a and b." The whole decision-making process is still omitted, but with more specificity on the 'before' and 'after' halves of the timeline. However, it often sounds like clinical psychology is this whole thing, to which general advice does not always apply, so I think it would be better to go back to your professors and rephrase a few things and ask again how they think you should play it. Can you ask them more specific questions about this problem? I see now why you wrote the paragraph in the first post the way you did, but I think you split the baby. You were trying to address it, following one professor's advice, but vaguely enough not to offend the other professor. Even though it's a controversial topic, it might be better to follow one professor's advice a bit more than the other—whichever you find more compelling, based on the content of their advice and their position to be giving it (e.g. track record of placing students in PhD programs)—rather than trying to split your approach exactly down the middle.

I'm not sure about your professor's exact advice, but this is all too long. Couldn't you shorten all the relevant information to something like: After graduating from University, I was interested in psychology research. While exploring the field during my master's at Other University, I started to focus on Current Topic. (Topic switch to more about your proposed research.) If you don't mind a play-by-play on your paragraph, I have more thoughts below: First, regarding the bolded sections: narrate your thought process less. There's no need! You don't have to make any kind of evaluative comment on whether the master's degree was a positive or negative for you: describe the skills you've gained and let the reader exercise their own judgment. I think this answers the actual question you asked: you don't need the sentence you asked about, and you don't need to write the professor's sentence if it feels dishonest to your experience, either. Just skip that part. You got a master's. You learned skills. You now have a research topic you're proposing to graduate schools. That's really all they need to know; the process that led to those steps isn't really relevant. Second, about the underlined parts: in my first paragraph, I totally cut out any discussion of your research experiences prior to your current project. I don't think that's wise, actually; mentioning what you learned from each of them is a better way to go. But don't do it like this, not in the way I've underlined! What "variety" did you have? Technically, "variety" doesn't mean that much. Were you in charge of something very trivial and mindless for every lab on campus, like some paperwork thing? I assume not, but to make sure your readers know what you mean, be more specific. Rather than saying "a variety," if you really have a lot, pick a couple to emphasize. In this project (that you are no longer pursuing), you became familiar with this computer program that will help you in your current research. In your next project (which you have also left behind), you used some quantitative techniques that you plan to use in part of your PhD work. I hope that helps.

I would be a lot more inclined to avoid a department that had been embroiled in scandal than a university as a whole. If I studied public policy, the Chelsea Manning thing would quite possibly stay my application to Harvard's Kennedy School. If I studied chemistry, though? I don't see that leading me to avoid the Harvard chemistry department. Universities are too big to find one that's entirely "pure." On the other hand, departments are small enough that you should probably be able to avoid one nationally known for its toxic atmosphere! Purity is a tough ask, but avoiding the most scandal-ridden programs in your field should be feasible.