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Your background sounds absolutely standard for an anthropology PhD student in my program, at least—and I even know one student who won an NSF GRFP that way. That said, you do need to show signs that you're thinking about theory and that you will eventually develop a coherent theoretical approach. I would strongly advise you not to frame your theory in broad terms you don't understand very well ("cultural materialist approach"). Rather, what books or articles of anthropology tackle problems or issues that are interesting to you? Can you tell what approaches they use? If you can figure out that your topic could be usefully approached using analytical frameworks from kinship and bioethics, say that. If you can break it down further and discover that works on some of the topics that interest you use diverging models of kinship, all the better. Are you more sympathetic to one or the other? Are you interested in both until you've learned more? Both of those are fine to say. In general, for students (like myself) who come into another field without much background in it, I advise a more exploratory tone than somebody who has a master's degree in the field. (If you want examples of the ideal master's degree kind of application, check out the Duke anthropology website. They are useful in general, although I did not try to emulate that degree of mastery of theory. I didn't have it!) So you can say, I am interested in the ethics of wildlife management in Japan's southernmost islands, which I am interested in approaching through theories of kinship and bioethics, especially as explored through multi-species ethnography. So-and-so's book is a touchstone for my approach because of this interesting stuff it does, although I would be especially interested in using this different perspective to look at the issue. I have also been interested in the transmission of these ideas at different scales, which I could explore through media theory. Note how all of that is rather broad, and uses "could" more than "will." In theory, you don't have to follow up on any of it at all, although I will say that you'll probably end up at a program with a better fit if you do pursue at least one of the themes you mention. (For a personal example, I threw in media theory at the end of mine and spent all my visit weekend at my current university talking excitedly about its possibilities—turns out it is basically not relevant to any of the problems I want to tackle. Oh well! They still admitted me and now I'm not using media theory.) However, even if it has a bit of a brainstorming quality to it, it shows that you've read enough of the literature to have identified some promising paths you'll investigate. It sounds like this is going to take a lot of reading for you. Is that right? I would advise that you start reading in the anthropology of Japan and see what catches your eye, so you can shove some of the bigger themes in the literature into your brainstorming-type theory paragraph. What made you decide that anthropology was the field you wanted your PhD in? Was it anything you read? If so, it would be smart to return to those books or articles and try to see what approaches they're taking and, especially, who they cite. A key thing to look for is which, of the works they cite, they agree or disagree with. That'll be a clue to current topics of interest and inquiry in the field. If you don't have access to a good research library right now, FYI, you can start cobbling some reading material together using JSTOR's three free articles a month, as much as Google Books' preview feature will let you read, and articles scholars you're interested have posted on their pages on academia.edu.

@FoodDoc If you need somebody to say it, this sounds more than serious enough to go to drop-in hours! If there's a chance you'll fail out of the program (or dig a hole that makes that even moderately possible) before you get to your appointment...that's what drop-in hours are for.

Back when I applied—a season which included a couple history programs—I mentioned about three books in my writing sample. It went something like: My work is inspired by/along the lines of Big Name, sort of like what Emerging Scholar has done, except my own focus would be on this interesting and quite different aspect of the problem. It worked out for me okay. Did you guys really not mention any other scholars' work in your statements of purpose? Based on my experience, I would recommend @Tigla not dwell on the book, but is the standard advice not to mention any books, not even the few that pass the "three most important books for this proposed research" test? That said, historians put a lot more weight on the writing sample than anthropologists, so I'd believe it if you told me history SOPs don't usually have scholars because you rely on your WS to show your chops. (In anthropology, the writing sample is usually optional and I don't think most committee members read much of them, so that would not be as wise a strategy.)

As somebody from a family of Arab Christians, who have been Christian since the days of the Byzantine empire, I'd like to object to the conflation of "Arab" and "Muslim" that "go figure" implies. Are all people with Arabic names biased in favor of Islam? Surely not. I don't want to take away from the more important point here, which is: don't dismiss authors because of their religion! At the same time, I wanted to note that my heritage exists.

Yikes @ USC! UC-Irvine popped to mind for me earlier as a department that might be strong in visual anthropology, but on looking at their faculty page I am not sure that is actually true. Have you looked at the website of the Society for Visual Anthropology? They appear to have a list of "mentors" applicants and students can just email for advice, as well as past conferences whose lists of presenters I would advise you to look over.

It sounds like you should have a great chance. Have you looked at Taussig at Columbia? This isn't my specialty, but he is clearly a visually/aesthetically-oriented scholar, and he's the only one of those I can think of right now who works in a similar region to you.

You sound well qualified to begin an area studies or history master's degree. Your Arabic will help you a lot. My question: have you learned any Turkish yet? Do you know how much you want to focus on "the Ottoman Empire" vs. "the Levant"? Which period are we talking: sixteenth century, nineteenth century, TBD? Focusing on the Ottoman empire requires, I am pretty sure, both modern and Ottoman Turkish. I don't actually have the knowledge to say how different they are—I had a friend in college take a couple years of Turkish and then struggle mightily with her first course in Ottoman Turkish, but I was unable to ascertain whether her difficulties were because Turkish is itself difficult or because Ottoman Turkish was even more difficult/distinct from what she had learned already. Depending on how different they are, you may want to emphasize attending a program where you'll have at least some kind of access to Ottoman Turkish. That may not be formal courses, but maybe there are courses you can cross-register for in a nearby university, or there's an academic on the faculty who could help you out occasionally as you self-study... Anyway, I find myself focusing on what you want from your program, rather than what you should do to get into a program, because I think you should be able to gain admission to several high-quality master's programs. Just make sure to define your research interests well in your SOP, and at one degree more of specificity than "intellectual history of the Levant and the Ottoman Empire." Give a time period: early or late should be plenty specific for this purpose. Pick examples of some concepts you might want to study in intellectual history—are you interested in Ottoman discourses of imperialism...? In the work of a couple Ottoman intellectuals in particular...? "Women and intellectual history"...? You don't have to stick to any of those ideas at all, but throwing them out there shows that you know the kinds of ways in which academic work can narrow as your research progresses. If you write such a description successfully, it will function as a code that says, yes, this applicant may not have a degree in history or whatever, but he (she?) gets what our kind of graduate research is about. Your background in tech/business will only be a liability if your research interests seem wild or unfeasible or otherwise off the mark...but those are application-killers for people who do have the right formal background, too. I am not sure anybody is likely to see the business administration stuff as a very large positive, but if you write a decent SOP I also can't see a way for it to be interpreted negatively. I imagine it should be neutral at worst, and a slight plus at best. People switching fields and learning more intensively about the new one is what master's programs are for!

I know I'm a) old-fashioned about this and b ) just a pre-candidacy graduate student, but I think it's weird when people don't have undergraduate coursework in like, art and oceanography. Where was your curiosity? Didn't your school have distribution requirements? Even if you've always known exactly what you wanted to do, didn't you want to learn a bit about the rest of the world's kinds of knowledge? You have two good master's in your subject, it's clear that you are now committed—and it is not a flaw not to have been committed by the age of 17.

@GreenEyedTrombonist Aha, I thought you were still applying to half anthro and half communications. My advice may not be as relevant as I thought! It seems like you've figured out that your project is not a great fit for anthropology (for finicky but real methodological reasons: you could do exactly your project, but I think you'd have to frame it differently). It sounds like communications is a good fit for the way you want to do your research! Good luck.

On your research interests: one challenge for social scientists (or maybe just for us anthropologists) is trying to analyze events as they are happening. Last semester, I wrote a paper about an ongoing election in the city where I work. It was very difficult to analyze the whole unfolding of the central controversy in my paper when the semester ended before the election did! So when you say you want to focus on the 2020 election: that means you can't really gather your most useful data for several years. I get that people are speculating about the election already, but its most consequential twists and turns aren't going to start for a while yet. (Starting keeping data now sounds like it will probably be valuable for you! I would guess that different parts of your data from 2017 are going to appear consequential in hindsight than seem important now, so I'm not convinced how valuable an analysis you'll be able to create of your [valuable] data until more of the election process has occurred.) What are you going to write about for your papers during coursework? I would suggest you be careful not to frame your project too narrowly around 2020: personally, I would suggest that you consider also looking at the role of Twitter in sooner elections: governors' races? the 2018 midterms? etc. or that you look at the very predictivity that's focused on 2020.. My instincts are methodologically conservative (in the non-political sense)—not that I actually use conservative methodology, but that I tend to be wary of new methods until I have investigated them especially thoroughly—but when I hear you say "Trump's misuse of Twitter....may contribute to his downfall," I wonder how useful that kind of speculation is in anthropology research. Can we predict the future that well? Is it analytically valuable to try? On the other hand, people are absolutely speculating and predicting what's going to happen—especially Trump's downfall, impeachment, etc.—all the time. Rather than trying to add to this genre, would it be interesting for you to analyze this rampant discourse of prediction itself? All your questions sound interesting and I am sure there are lots of productive avenues you could take your research down, but I am concerned that too heavy an analytical focus on "the 2020 election" in your SOP might produce poor results.* *I may be displaying an ideological bias in this post, because I am part of the current wave of community activism that says there's too much focus on the presidency, so we should do more more in local statehouses, on city councils, etc. I bet you are likely to encounter people with this political reflex in your graduate career again, so it's useful to think about how you might frame a nationally-focused project to people like me who are inclined to promote a focus on more "local" stuff.

For anyone reading this in the future, the 3.9 vs. 4.0 question is especially silly. I want to ask that guy, who cares? I'm nearing the end of my PhD coursework, and I can tell you that most of my undergraduate grades had nothing, zero to do with any ability I have to succeed (or not!) in graduate school. Who cares if I got a B in one of my required science courses? What does that have to do with my work in an anthropology PhD? Nothing! Okay, so maybe that guy from the other forum would respond that a lot of applicants have 4.0s in their major. Still!—who cares? Whether I got a few (horror) B+s or A-s when I was adjusting to college has nothing to do with my success or not as a professional researcher. Obviously, the ideal applicant profile is one that has a lot of As in the subject for which they're applying to graduate school, especially in upper-level courses where you will actually do some research. If my experience is any indication, however, 'having a lot of As' is a factor that's kind of independent of whether you got any other (pretty good) grades. ('Pretty good': C+s or below you're probably going to have to explain.) Above that line, though, "having a lot of As and that's it" and "having a lot of As and also some A-s" and "a lot of As and two Bs" seem pretty much totally equivalent to me. Also, if anything, there are 4.0s and 4.0s. Sure, I knew that one guy who, as a psychology or international studies major or something, seemed to also float into advanced poetry classes and the hardest possible neuroscience courses and get all As, because he was just that brainy. Maybe you knew a 'that guy,' too. (On the other hand, I believe my 'that guy' also failed a couple courses in economics or something, because he just couldn't make himself care, so he wouldn't have had a 4.0, either.) On the other hand, it is possible to get a 4.0—even (better: especially) from an Ivy League school—by working hard while never challenging yourself or taking a risk. A 3.7-9 kind of range GPA may sometimes be more competitive for PhDs than the latter type of 4.0, if that risk-aversion is reflected in any of their other application materials, e.g. SOP or LORs.

@EvelynD definitely ask if you can update it...if you can, great! If not, I would just put the year of submission on the first page and assume that anybody who is interested enough to read parts of your thesis will also be able to tell that your research interests and abilities have changed and progressed since you wrote the thesis. If they won't let you update it, they won't let you submit any other writing, and they say it's seriously required—not just "it's university policy that we collect copies of all theses, even if we never read or discuss them" but "this is one of the major criteria by which we as a department judge students' abilities and fit for this program"—then and only then would I be really alarmed. If that's the case, please write back. People apply to anthropology PhDs after ten year gaps since their last degree all the time. Every academic has papers they're not proud of from their early graduate work. As long as you, in your SOP, don't describe your thesis as a masterwork and the ultimate expression of your academic goals, I would trust your readers' ability to see that you've made progress since you wrote it. PS Does this university also require or let you provide an optional writing sample? I would also feel better if it let me do give a more up-to-date snapshot of my work. When I applied, I believe I had to submit my whole undergraduate thesis to one university. Personally, I didn't stress about it particularly because a) it was many multiples of that department's maximum writing length sample: by that point, I didn't care enough to re-read the whole thing, so I assumed the admissions committee wouldn't care enough either. I also didn't stress because b ) at this university, I could submit a writing sample, too, so I knew the committee members would be reading something a lot more current a representation of my abilities. A lot of my undergraduate thesis was pretty silly! I never asked, but I always assumed that the "whole-thesis" requirement was a bureaucratic thing the university (not the department) had instituted, or maybe that department readers asked for it because some of them were often to curious enough to dip into 2-3 pages of it and then compare it to your more current research

You're free to use 'male' and 'female' as an adjective. (Although don't do the thing where there are doctors and female doctors; or on the other hand nurses and male nurses. If gender isn't relevant enough to mention it for the majority category for the noun—e.g. male doctors have a 8% chance of having run a marathon while 5% of female doctors have done so—it isn't relevant enough to mention for the minority gender.) Please don't use 'female(s)' as a noun to mean 'women'. You may mean nothing by it, but some people have taken it up on purpose to be offensive, so gosh, yes, for those of us who've encountered people who use it so that they will offend others, yes, we tend to hear it as offensive. I see this is going to be a cross-post, but I have written it anyway and it was the one aspect I thought the Buzzfeed article left unclear.

1) They're senior enough that they can just do what they want. 2) They have personal connections that might make those three areas easier to handle: imagine a professor from a Spanish-speaking family whose father (or parents) were in the US military and so grew up mostly in Germany. Imagine this professor now studying the US, Mexico, and Germany. 3) They find a more specific group and then follow it around: after doing a dissertation on China, for example, you, Peanut, specifically, might be able to do a follow-up project on Chinese migrants in Latin America and an ensuing conflict about which animals are coded "edible" for the migrants vs. for the Spanish-speaking population the next neighborhood over. 4) Many anthropologists will do their late(r)-career work in their home country, even if they cut their teeth working somewhere else. (This usually involves people whose home country(ies) include an Anglophone country, but hopefully that dynamic will lessen over time.) People do do "multi-site ethnographies" now, but that's awfully hard to pull off a) across very different cultures/regions and b ) for your dissertation, unless you've got some of 2 and/or 3 going on. I have no idea about the Hong Kong programs: I couldn't even commit to knowing they exist! I hope I remembered right and that that might be an option for you, though.

The difficulty, then, is when does your Arabic need to be really good by? I don't doubt your estimate of how fast you'll reach that level. Instead, the difficulty I foresee is that if your Arabic becomes really good by comps, it's awfully challenging to catch up to someone who's been able to spend all of those summers doing research in Arabic. I don't want to tell you "go away and spend three more years learning Arabic before you'll be competitive for programs in this field." My suspicion is that "three" is not the correct number in that sentence. However, I do think your Arabic is going to knock you out of the running in at least a good chunk of any PhD programs to which you might apply this cycle. If you really want to go to a program this year so you're going to apply anyway, that is your prerogative.

Everyone so far has been dancing around the ideological question here, too. With the rise of subaltern studies, post-colonial studies, etc., in history of the past six hundred years or so, it is no longer considered complete to study only the conquerers, only the imperialists, only the invaders, and to speak and work with only their language(s). There are, of course, exceptions: when the less powerful groups' language(s) are dead, especially if they don't have much of a textual tradition; if the less powerful groups' members have all become fluent in the hegemonic language (think many indigenous groups in the US, if you want to study their history e.g. 1945 to present); and sometimes if you're dealing with an extensively multi-lingual group. Some suffrance is also granted to accessibility—because fewer universities offer Nahuatl than Mandarin, more Nahua-specialist graduate students enter with poor Nahuatl than China-specialists with poor Mandarin. None of those apply to your field. Take this: That's not a defense—rather, it throws up an extravaganza of red flags about your research project itself. Thirty years ago, when your professors were getting their PhDs, maybe just studying French colonial officials' reports was considered enough to get the full story. I don't doubt that the language expectations were less intense! Academics' standards for "the full story" have, however, improved. I'm not saying you can't do a cutting-edge, rigorous, award-winning research project on North Africa whose body of primary evidence is written 90% in French. (Although it sounds like access to recent Arabic historiography is still an issue.) When—not really "if"—your research takes you to Arabic-language sources, however, you must be able to handle discovering complexity in them. To respond to your most recent post, like, okay, I think we can be flexible about "excellent" word choice, if that's what's throwing you. Maybe you don't need "excellent" Arabic. Maybe "really good" is sufficient. At this point in academia, though, it seems clear that most places, "just okay" is no longer enough. Maybe it was five years ago, when the older graduate students were applying! It does sound like there's been a broader expectations shift, however. Like @telkanuru said, you may find an exception and find admission to a PhD program in MENA history. You are still likely to have difficulties later, though, whether in completing the dissertation (quickly?) or in competing for jobs—and it's one of those situations that it sounds like the department you originally emailed is responding to. This would make a master's a wise plan, or one of those all-Arabic all-the-time summer courses; if my friends who take Arabic have given me much indication, at all but the most intensive places, two years of Arabic is about equivalent to one, or not quite one, year of French. I'm guesstimating, but it sounded like four years (or equivalent) was about where people got good enough to start a PhD. It may not sound right, but it's quite true that the PhD doesn't leave enough time for language study to count on your abilities improving dramatically.

Let's say that third applications, besides Notre Dame, are right out. Good-bye! I am sure another poster could make a case that one of your other third-rounders is a good enough fit to argue for an exception, but I can see the psychological weight of that and agree that that factor is not to be lightly dismissed. But surely your applications are quite different than they were in 2015, and even 2016, such that doing a few second applications might be worthwhile? Eyeballing your list, I would say you've done a good enough job identifying animal studies programs that throwing all second applications out is going to be throwing too much of a roadblock into your own path. If you brought back, say, two of the schools from 2015 and MSU, that would be a good start to your list. What are your thoughts on trying to find a well-funded master's program, especially an area studies and/or language-learning one (if you want to do work in a language you don't yet know extremely well)? I've heard of master's programs in, say, Hong Kong and Taiwan, where my impression is that you could study in English while taking Chinese. Doing a master's somewhere would give you a chance to work on finding a field continent and identifying a potential project for yourself.

I would also advise at least a thorough refresh on the statement(s). Starting from scratch may be a good tactic, but a renovation of the statement(s) (through whatever method) should be the goal. We know that your SOPs from last year were good enough to get you admitted (with that year's admissions committee, in that year's applicant pool), but admission itself isn't really the point, is it? You want to get admission with adequate funding, which would suggest the wisdom of updating your statement(s) in toto, rather than just adding several sentences about what you did this year.

@AP In the sentence you quoted, I should have written the "pre-contact," especially "classic," Maya—was that the confusion? Of course I know there are historians of the modern and early modern Maya! I had thought the 'pre-Columbian' carried over from the rest of my post, but I see now that the way I wrote it was unclear—and unclear in a way that sounded like the common fallacy that indigenous peoples still don't have history. So I apologize for dropping the key term of that question. What I didn't (and don't) know was whether any scholars of the classic Maya housed in history departments. Are there many? I couldn't find the answer easily from a google search. If there are historians of the classic Maya who have history professorships, that speaks well of the discipline! I've met lots of archaeologists and art historians of the classic Maya—from their descriptions of their work, I have the impression that there's more than enough evidence to do history of the classic Maya. I wasn't sure whether that translated into tenure-track support for scholars who took that approach, however. I haven't yet taken many graduate history courses, although with my interests I'm going to; hopefully I will then be a more informed participant in this forum. That said, when @VAZ says, "The prehistoric era could be, should be and will be as important as the historical era, for (future) historians, I think," my reaction is, well, there's a lot of pre-history. I agree that history can go at least a couple centuries into "pre-history" (as, problematically, defined by the presence or absence of texts); I get the impression that's further back than many historians go, which provides great opportunities for scholars like @Lily9 to contribute to the conversation. That said, once we start talking five hundred or a thousand years "pre-history", I get skeptical that history is the best way to answer a lot of questions. Once you're that far back, my instinct is that most of the most interesting questions would be more usefully answered in/with archaeology. Maybe this is close-minded of me, but when Lily9 says she's interested in the history of chiefdoms and mounds, I think, which ones? If you mostly mean Cahokia etc., just wait a minute while I get out my pom-poms and start doing a cheerleading routine for how great that is. On the other hand, if you really want to do the history of Poverty Point, more than a thousand years earlier, I just don't think the evidence is there yet. I'm willing to be convinced, though: and certainly material culture (both in addition to and in the absence of texts) is an increasingly important part of the historical discipline.

@Lily9 "Pre-Columbian Native American history" is a strange way to put it, I think. I've read works of indigenous ethnohistory that cover events that happened before that particular group encountered any Europeans (or Africans). I can think of many fewer examples of work that includes events that happened exclusively before 1492. So, is "pre-Columbian" really the best term for Hawaii in 1778? That's centuries later than Columbus, but I think it would be included in the definition of history that you mean. I'm wandering outside my specialty and I'm happy to be corrected if I'm wrong, but saying somebody is a specialist on "pre-Columbian history" seems wrong to me, especially for groups that lived north of the modern US-Mexico border. (Would any scholars of the Maya be described as historians? Would any work by Maya archaeologists or art historians count as "history"?) That said, I would think that most people who study indigenous history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries work not only on those groups' interactions with colonialism, but what they had been doing before 'contact.' You may be especially interested in scholars who work with ethnohistory. So I would suggest you just start with as long a list as you can find of scholars of indigenous peoples who study periods as early as you can find—which will vary by region—and seeing if their interests include a major emphasis on pushing the evidence about that group(s) back further than the point at which abundant written records about it begin. When you say "pre-Columbian Native American history," do you mean historians who say I will only work with material that occurred before this indigenous group first started encountering Europeans (and Africans)? I don't know of any. I should think there are lots and lots of historians whose work includes investigating the period before that indigenous group's first 'contact,' however. For example of a place to start, I found this conference for you—I wonder if you would find any of these people interesting: http://www.oah.org/meetings-events/2015/highlights/native-american/

Terrifying - one of my absolute musts for a program was that my potential advisor(s) had to be well-reviewed by senior students. I received that at my department, but one always wonders if other students left without saying anything, or if I could be the first... Do you think one of the problems in the humanities/humanistic social sciences might be over-emphasis on sole authorship? It wouldn't explain any single bad actor, but I do think it provides the backdrop against which a person might develop unhealthy habits and find them minimized or even encouraged. Rather than being checked hard by external constraints, elements of our system might promote toxic behaviors that in cases like this one develop into full-blown intellectual abuse. There is one senior professor in our department (which is absolutely not a co-authoring kind of place) who co-authors with students and post-docs all the time (and almost always gives them first author). Everybody including me thinks it's a very strange habit, but I've also been wondering for a while whether it might be a salutary one.

One time I asked my undergraduate thesis advisor to please kindly review how the introduction was working, and whether he thought I should make THIS change to this situation on the first or whether I should make THAT one. He responded to me only that he was very disappointed in me that I had three whole typos on page four. (I didn't ask you even to read page four!) I went silent for three weeks, six weeks before the deadline, until he asked if I was mad at him. I said yes then he apologized. It was very cathartic. Anyway, I can't help you at all with your co-supervisor, but I just wanted to sympathize that I find the typos-in-drafts thing so annoying!

I haven't paid attention to that many anthropology searches yet, but I believe the specificity of anthropology graduate training vs. anthropology jobs often diverges a lot more than in most fields. For an anthropology PhD, you really do need to work with at least one person who shares your theoretical framework—for @EvelynD that wouldn't be quite as specific as human-horse relationships, but "animal studies" or one of its cousins—but departments hire at the field level. Note: here "field" doesn't mean "discipline." Anthropology has approximately four "fields": (socio)cultural; linguistic, which is sometimes called a subset of sociocultural; biological; archaeology. Some jobs are more specific than "field," like you might see "sociocultural work on race in the Americas." However, I've seen a fair number of job search listings that are for sociocultural (or even sociocultural or linguistic) anthropologists with topical specialization open and regional specialization open. I couldn't say whether that's 60% of ads or 10% of ads that are that broad, but a lot of job searches do advertise within very wide parameters. In sociocultural and linguistic anthropology, you don't need a lot of resources or collaboration to keep doing your work. So once you have the appropriate training, which can only usually be obtained at a somewhat limited number of schools, you can usually apply to more jobs than you could apply to PhDs. Standard caveat about there being very few jobs available at all, but that's a different kind of limit not the than Evelyn having to apply only to work at the same ten universities where she applied for graduate school. Ten is a good number of US anthropology programs, also. Four was too few, but ten sounds about right.

There may be more options for counseling than just at your university—do you have health insurance? Does your location have any free or sliding-scale providers or options? Can you enlist a friend who really does know your location to do some research about this for you? Or, could your psychologist at home make an exception and do like three sessions with you by video as a tune-up, since it's going to be a short-term commitment? Or can she recommend any other professionals from your country that you could afford and who do do video sessions? (Also, that was a bad hotline response—did you maybe call one that has a more specific focus, like the domestic abuse hotline, where the responders might not be broadly trained outside that core issue? I find it hard to imagine a properly trained person on, say, general anxiety would say any such thing. I know people have horror stories about professionals with all the credentials, but that comment is just so egregious for even somebody with only, like, a "three articles on Buzzfeed" level of understanding of anxiety. It doesn't always manifest on "rational" issues!) I am recovering from surgery right now! I literally live, like you, exactly twenty minutes away from where I need to get in the mornings! It's about a five minute drive. Now, I am in a major metropolitan area, but I use one of the apps where I put in my destination before I hit "go" to call the ride—and it's never taken me more than five minutes to get that ride. I don't do it every day any more, but I never had any problems. I do make sure to always tip a dollar on the $6.50-8 fare, but I've never said anything about a tip in advance. Nor has any driver ever complained to me about my destination. I know that's not obvious, but at least in many locations the short rides aren't an issue any more. I do remember having that problem with cabs a while ago, especially this one time I broke my nose and got out of the hospital at 3 a.m.—most of the cabs wouldn't drive me fifteen minutes' walk home. But that was before Uber—I haven't had a problem like that in ages. (For what it's worth, there seem to be plenty of cab/app drivers where I regularly go to school—and it's less than a fifteen minute drive from end to end of the area where undergrads live, so the whole fleet of drivers who come out to ferry people to parties must know that a ton of their rides are going to be like five minutes long.) You'll get there!

Can you get temporary disability accommodations for the weather: a parking space on campus, or disability transportation? Last year I was experiencing symptoms that made it a bit risky and somewhat difficult—nowhere near "impossible," just hard—for me to walk to campus...BUT ONLY if it was less than XX degrees outside. Our university has a rock-star shuttle system so I was able to get rides to campus if I gave them 12 hours notice, without any formal medical paperwork, so I regularly checked the weather and took five classes instead of dropping down to four or three. I am sure you can suffer through keeping walking; I could've kept walking too. But even if you can...if you'd buy a hot pack to help you with shoulder cramps that were distracting you from your work, why not see if you can do something to alleviate this mental pain that sometimes distracts you from your work, a bit? Many universities' movement-related disability services are, I think, not half so good as mine, so this may not be possible for you, but why not find out what your options are? Could you afford being able to take a taxi/Lyft/Uber home every third day it's windy, just to give yourself a bit of a respite from this? Do you have any friends with cars you could have you give the occasional ride home, maybe in return for a similar favor later? I totally get that the windy thing is a symptom of the stress, not the cause. On the other hand, I believe that when you are going through something this stressful, it's important to be nice to yourself to try to alleviate the symptoms. The way you talk about the groceries sounds like it's difficult to cope with, too. I don't actually know where I got this idea, but I must've seen some study about how taking breaks recharges your mental energy. I've now gotten pretty good about being able to put aside research for 20 minutes at a time. I'm definitely not going to suggest that you go to a farther grocery store—but I think it might help you if you can re-frame the time in which you go get groceries as a productive thing to do for your work, as well as just generally a healthy thing for your life. People have new insights, large and small, when they take breaks and think about other things. I wonder if trying to apply that narrative to any breaks you have to take would help? Nobody can work 24/7/365—even besides sleeping, I think there's something in our minds that makes it physically impossible to sustain attention on exactly one thing for more than a certain number of hours. So, as an experiment, maybe you could tell yourself that the groceries are going to provide that reset. If you can find the time and energy, counseling would probably be a really good idea for you right now. I'm sure finding time to go will be hard, but I think it would help—I've heard that counseling often works especially well for discrete challenges, like finishing your thesis—you could learn/practice coping mechanisms for this stress. (I don't know if I heard that anywhere authoritative.) It may feel like you don't have enough time to do that, but especially for somebody in a family with a lot of mental health challenges, it might prove a valuable investment in your long-term well-being.