hats

With something like three POIs—carefully targeted by biography and institution, with a bias towards people working at the more prestigious places—I asked for suggestions of where else to apply. This required presuming good faith from them; to the best of my knowledge, I received it everywhere I asked. The tone of my inquiries was something along the lines of, well obviously I'm interested in your program, since it's such a great fit for me. Since I only have about two other top choices (I don't remember if I named them or explained why—I think maybe I did with the POI with whom I had the single best fit, only?), can you help me expand my list by thinking of dark horse candidate-programs? Now I did put my foot in my mouth during one of my post-submission interviews in a way that harmed my admission chances at that program, but that was a more obvious faux pas.

What can option 2 say about you that isn't covered by option 1, who knows your research and taught you in a class that was just as personal if not more so? Another point: how do their areas of interest compare? If A, B, and 2 are all specialists in contemporary French art, which is what you do, and 1 studies ancient Sumeria, that might be a point in favor of 2.

When I've been in vaguely similar situations (like, is my friend going to transfer to another program or job—I've never done this at the higher end of a power differential), I think people sometimes find me frustratingly agnostic. If my friend wants to transfer out of my college or switch professional fields or whatever, though, sure I'll miss them—but my primary orientation is towards them doing what's best for them. So I don't usually go all in on the "no, you can't leave, please stay at this company where we're working together!!!" thing, because inside I'm hoping that they find the job that makes them more happy than not. If their happiness leads away from me, well, I hope we still keep in touch and I'm happy that they made the right decision for their life as a whole. Even if I really love them as a person, I don't want them to stay at our job together if our job is making them unhappy. I have no idea if this is at all helpful, but earlier we were talking about different ways to frame things so I thought I might mention this one about the new issue.

As others have said about your example: "I just found an old record book from a deserted, dusted shelf in a local archive, and I'm sure no one has touched it for decades. This is what I'm using as my main primary source" – no, and it might even be unwise. You don't want to look inflexible. (Of course, as OP noted, if you're going into your PhD because you're really into a particular primary source, knowing that you want to research that thing is fine.) To answer this, though: "when should you have some knowledge about the primary sources you are gonna work with, i.e. where are they located, what type and what kind, have you accessed before, if they exist at all, and giving a few examples ------ in other words, the feasibility of the project?" I think yes, given an abundantly generous definition of "some knowledge." I think suggesting a type, or several types, of source is a good indicator of the feasibility of your project and that you've done your research. Location and previous access, let alone which specific one you want to use, are too much, but something like: "Since I am interested in the American corporation in the 1870s, my work will involve corporate records. At the moment, I think records from companies doing business on the various canals on the Eastern seaboard sound particularly promising." That doesn't commit you to anything, but it shows you're both open-minded and prepared. Personally, I listed three types of evidence that I wanted to use. One was a huge category that I did indeed end up using—it was the obvious kind of evidence, and other scholars of my topic had used them as well. Think, "government records." I wasn't even sure that the third category of evidence existed, but I listed it because if it did (the jury's still out on that one) that would've been great. I think that's about the level you want to be in a PhD application: you can propose a type or types of evidence, but not the specific one.

I definitely did contact the professors in each department who were second- or third- to fourth- or fifth-most relevant to my interests. (I only got to five at one school where I had three potential dissertation advisors—my rule of thumb was to contact about two potential committee members whom I was not considering as potential POIs.) I never thought twice about it. I'm not sure in retrospect, however, actually, how widely I would recommend others to do this. It was important for me because my interests are rare enough that when I asked the commitee-member-type professor some version of, "could we work together? do you think you could help advise with a student with my interests?", the answer was never a given. A few professors said no, they didn't think the courses they offered (for example) would help me further my research project. Useful information—I think I still applied to every department with such a professor, but I knew not to mention those professors in my SOP. A few said yes, actually, they were working on a new project that harmonized particularly well with my research. I had been waffling about even applying to one department, for example, but the graciousness of a couple of these more tangential but still important professors made me send in the application. That program ended up being a close second choice for me! Perhaps if your other committee member choices are more obvious, these kinds of emails would be superfluous. On the other hand, I liked articulating why I thought I could work with somebody: it was interesting seeing whether they agreed, didn't, or suggested a different shared area of interest. I like @TMP's suggestion of bringing it up first with your POI, since that should provide an assurance you're not going to over-reach somehow, although I never thought of that method back when I applied.

Can you talk to other graduate students in your program about their costs? As far as I understand it, science is expensive! Surely at least one other student—especially the students closer to graduating—has had this happen and can commiserate and advise. You will probably get good advice here, but I bet it will make you feel less alone if you know someone in your actual program has gone through this, too. There's also evidence within your post that costs for this kind of thing can be widely variable and figuring them out is difficult, and that they aren't something everybody always gets right immediately or every time. After all, your other professor, who's been doing this for much longer than you have, got your costs extremely wrong.

@VAZ You may want to PM me. I don't quite understand the spatial metaphor with the population density, but I am also in a weird field such that very few universities could've supported my work, and I have ambitions about improving that whole unsatisfactory situation. On the other hand, maybe you don't need to do that—6-8 options sounds like a pretty good number of schools to apply to? Especially for a weird interest: I applied to 6 programs, but because I was applying to both anthropology programs and some more interdisciplinary things, that was only stretched across 4 actual universities. If those 6-8 programs have enough professors to Venn diagram you adequate support, it sounds like your list of universities to apply to is nearly finished.

I'm in anthropology, not sociology, but the five profiles (students between second and sixth years, but nobody on the market) I just checked in my department each have less than 20 words in them. For example, Berkeley is a little more terse than my department, but look here: http://anthropology.berkeley.edu/graduate/current-graduate-students. My department breaks those down into separate webpages, but nobody has full sentences about their research. They just list themes and areas of interest, at the "Cultural anthropology. China. Rural. Kinship." level of abstraction. My page doesn't even appear in the first page of google search results for my name, either; I can only find it efficiently by going to the actual department's webpage. What are the profiles of other students in your prospective department like, especially of the students in their coursework years? Is the norm to be way more detailed and emphatic than in anthropology? I ask because I don't understand the source of your resistance to having a webpage at all. I don't want to push you into doing something you don't want to—and I don't read your posts as suggesting there's a safety issue—but it sounds like your resistance is coming from a misunderstanding of something about academia. Specifically, you don't need to be committed to your dissertation project yet: people expect (and even value) evolution. As far as specifics go, I think it would be pretty normal to have the entire contents of your page be your name and the words "Sociology of gender," since it's sounded elsewhere like you're committed to that interest. If your department runs towards wordy profiles and you want to emulate their style while leaving room for change, you could just drop the word "currently" a lot: "I am currently working on sociology of gender. At the moment I am exploring issues of gender and race. My interests right now also include immigration and sexuality." It sounds like that might be too much for you right now, so maybe you can save that strategy for later. Personally, I would advise you to list between one and three interests or fields, like "sociology of gender," in your profile, but I don't feel strongly about it. If it feels right to you not to list any interests just yet, I think you should feel completely free to create a profile with your name and nothing else. If there's no safety issue, take confidence in yourself! List yourself publicly as a student in your department; you are smart and you deserve to own it. I think not having a profile at all might feed your impostor syndrome too much, but I think it should be normal to have a blank-except-for-your-name profile for the first couple years and fill it in later. (I am not "diagnosing" "impostor syndrome" from your posts, but rather working under the assumption that this is a condition shared by literally every graduate student.) These things aren't about your final identity as a scholar, after all. It's about what you're doing now. One way somebody might use a profile that says "Name. Sociology of gender," for example, is a visiting graduate student who's living in town this semester to be with their partner emails you and asks about whether the sociology department is having any talks on gender right now. That's a good person to know! Your interests as they mature three years from now don't help that person this semester: they'll be gone by then. Even if your interests have completely changed three years from now, you might have an interesting conversation this year, and interesting conversations are worth something. Perhaps something might help is to use the word "mature" or "progress" more often. You not being sure of your exact project just yet is a sign of your intellectual openness or your curiosity; it's a virtue. If you want to change your research after your first year, it's not true that "it won't look good at all." If your project or interests change, that's not a sign of your inability to stick with it, or something. It's not only normal, it's a sign that you're learning, that your work is maturing, that you're making intellectual progress. Of course this isn't a magic bullet, but it sounds like you have a lot of negative self-talk going on in your head about your work right now. It might help you to have a positive (and, let me emphasize, true) way of thinking about these things on hand, too.

@AP Thanks! I am actually somebody who got into an R1 more or less without a project, so perhaps I can speak a little more about that. It is, however, a lot harder to write an imaginary example of a bunch of good questions that point toward a compelling project than it is to write an imaginary project's thesis statement. That's why the Jehovah's Witness example is as specific as it is, because "interesting questions" are harder to write. Let me see how much I can reveal about my own project while still being unidentifiable: this may be an interesting thought experiment. Hello my name is hats. There is this entire (large) ethnic group that is very important to (issue) in (place). Although there is a fairly large literature on this group (elsewhere and/or elsewhen), less than five scholars have really dug into (particular issue) in (time/place I want to study). I suspect that if I approach this issue through (methodological/theoretical lens), I will make an important contribution to scholarship. I have a strong background related to (region) and I have a strong background in (methodology adjacent to the one I am actually proposing to use). I have applied to your school in part because of its strong opportunities for training in (actual method/theory). I do not know which communities I would work with, or which historical sources I would use, or even whether enough sources for a historical component to my project will exist. Here is my overview of three ways I think my project could turn out to be productive: maybe in this region there are these kinds of evidence, or I could work with this kind of organization, or etc. That final product may or may not be of interest to you, but it was a hard exercise even for my own work (as it existed a couple years ago)! I do wish I had more website links to send you @webbks, but I don't actually know of very many that explain statements of purpose very well. (That's why "oh brother": because I should just be able to answer this normal, FAQ by dropping a few links to primers for people interested in starting this process, but I realized I don't know of any so I was going to have to write same myself.) Are there perhaps greatest-hits posts on the fora that would cover some of this? Does the Professor Is In have one, or is she too, "nobody should go to graduate school so I'm not going to help you write your admissions essay"?

Oh brother. Are you thinking of applying to master's programs, or to PhDs? I don't actually know how master's program admissions work—there were no viable master's options for me (I have weird interests). Some of them may request mostly a personal statement. However, for PhDs and many master's programs, your admission will not be based primarily on a "personal statement." Rather, it will be based on a STATEMENT OF PURPOSE. That may sound equivalent, but it is very different! A statement of purpose is basically a cover letter: the two most important things to get across are why your research project is interesting, and why you are qualified to do it. You're right that it helps for your research project to be interesting and novel (although "unique" is maybe too high a bar). People like reading about interesting approaches to things. I don't think you necessarily have to prove that you personally are this shining beacon of fascination, or that you are unique. Some places do require both a statement of purpose (research focused) and a personal statement (somewhat college-essay-like). Your application will be judged primarily on the former, however. If you're interested in applying to master's programs, I get the impression that you don't have to have a research project per se: an interesting approach or subject matter is often fine. "I'm interested in feminism, religion, and conservatism in the 20th-century United States—I may be interested in how those three intersect, or develop a research project based on just one of them" kind of thing, rather than, "I want to compare how Jehovah's Witnesses and Christian Scientists each reacted to changes medical care in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as the medical field professionalized and became more male-dominated." The latter is more the PhD kind of thesis statement that you want for an SOP. You can be open to change, of course—in mine, after I explained the question I want to answer, I think I said something like, I have no idea what kind of evidence would be best to investigate this, but here are three possibilities I am considering and where I heard each of them might be promising. So I don't think how your study abroad let you grow as a person is very interesting or appropriate to share in an SOP, which is research focused. It would be appropriate for schools that ask for personal statements. But once you've explained your research project—I assume it has something to do with Italian history?—your study abroad would be VERY relevant for proving why you are a great person to carry out this project. What skills did you gain as a historian while you worked on whatever you worked on in Italy? Those skills are something you'll want to highlight. The best sample SOP for the humanities is this one from Berkeley. It is a lot longer than most SOPs will ask for—is one-page single-spaced standard, or is two? (Three isn't.) I hope you find the footnotes from a professor explaining why he likes this essay particularly illuminating. http://ls.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/statement_of_purpose.pdf

Wow, if you have done all that in two weeks it sounds like you two are going to be very prepared for this application season! I was worried from your comment about general graduate program atmosphere that your POI definition was more broad than would help you the most, but it sounds like you are very on top of this.

@punctilious You're welcome! If you don't mind me maybe pushing back a bit, I do believe your husband needs to at least skim every faculty biography in every English department where he has a strong POI. I can't tell whether I'm telling you to do something the two of you are already doing—and if so, I apologize, obviously—but I feel strongly enough about it to try to be sure! You mention him reading all of these webpages in some cases—I think that's great, and that he should extend that consideration to all the departments he's seriously considering. Although your collaboration sounds like it has produced a great list of POIs, I believe that doing this reading will help him write a stronger application. He is a prospective student of English literature. He has available to him 250-word synthetic, autobiographical texts written by faculty: when they wrote them, they meant him and others like him to be their audience. Therefore, he should read them. Now, I don't mean you shouldn't collaborate!—but, for this stage, couldn't collaboration mean that he reads these faculty descriptions himself, and you take notes? It sounds like you've been able to do a lot of the work identifying POIs on his behalf, and that your rundowns are particularly effective there. That sounds great, with the one caveat that POIs aren't the only game in town. This was only implicit in my last post, so having to clarify or over-clarify this may all may be my fault for not being more clear last time, but a strong fit involves faculty who are not the student's POI, but who can still serve as useful interlocutors for the student. They may not even be close enough to their interests to serve on the student's dissertation committee! This was what my Shakespeare example was trying to show—modern Americanists almost never have Shakespeare scholars on their committee, but that course would still be useful for that fictional applicant. The faculty biographies are often carefully written—there were a couple faculty I now work with whom I only thought to write to because of one weird sentence in their self-description that implied an interest in something like what I do. That's why I think your husband should read them to see what catches his eye, even though I'm sure your "rundowns" are very good. Like sure, your husband mostly isn't interested in Anglophone African literature, but maybe some small facet of the professor who works on that subject at Princeton will jump out at him as interesting, even if the ones at Brown and the University of New Hampshire totally didn't.

Thank you! I'm blushing.

@miami421 A quick recap of the importance of different parts of the graduate application in most of the humanities, and also anthropology. Numbers left blank are to provide a sense of scale. 1. SOP - key elements are: how it expresses your research interests, whether you are persuasive about your ability to carry out the research project you propose or one somewhat like it, and whether you demonstrate good fit with the school 2. Writing sample 3. 4. 5. LORs 6. 7. GPA 8. 9. GRE You could include "fit" as a separate item in the top three if you want, but the scale itself is an approximate thing I threw together in ten minutes. The level you set at "decent" is, unfortunately, optimistic. Fellow forum-members: do even Harvard and Princeton place 50% of their students in TT-positions within 5 years (in history)? I don't know this myself, but that part of your post, although well-meant, is probably a significant part of what made me and possibly some other people on here extra cranky. Why? Because it reminded us of how placement records, even at our own school (even if it's a really good one!), are d e p r e s s i n g. I only wish most of the top 50 universities had a 50% TT placement rate!

Although feel free to remove any really small or low-opportunity towns (e.g. State College, maybe?) from your lists at this juncture, I think it would be wise to still apply to some colleges in medium-sized towns, especially the educated or tech-y kinds of places (e.g. Ann Arbor, maybe?). There might be more jobs there than you think. If you get into, say, one university in a major metropolitan area and two universities in college towns, you can then research those two towns in way more detail than you could research twenty potential schools' locations before you apply. If you do this research on a smaller number of campuses, you might be able to discover some major companies with branches in town or a couple towns over that would provide good options. I say this in part because I think you're worried—totally understandably!—in a way that's leading you to be a bit too harsh to some places. There are good jobs outside of major cities. Although maybe things have changed in the past year and a half, I would have thought that the Research Triangle, for example, would actually be a superb place for someone with a chemistry background to try to find work. Probably your partner wouldn't find work in Chapel Hill itself, but the Research Triangle has a reputation for having good, science-related jobs. There's a lot of places in the country I don't know about, so I don't know how common that is. Does State College actually have many good jobs? I have no idea. Some college towns do have, or are close to places that have, good jobs, though, so I hope you and your partner find more options than you think. Good luck!

@punctilious Can I ask what parts of this program research your husband is planning to do? I get that literature students switch fields and topics a lot more often than anthropologists do, so it can make sense to go to a program with generally "good Americanists" for a master's degree (or possibly for a PhD if you want to focus on teaching? I'm not sure, I'm in a different field) but it doesn't sound like that's your husband's situation. It sounds like he really likes literary scholarship, it isn't something he's just okay about while he gets to his dream of teaching college students. And that he would be particularly interested in going to a prestigious PhD. (Although that might sound snobby—your instinct might be to go "oh no no, he's really interested in doing what he loves, not being at some fancy elite institution"—it's wise, actually. Getting a PhD is tough! It's a lot easier if they pay you reasonably and support you doing research. It will also likely make facing the job market, which is very bad, somewhat less horrible.) Is that right? If I understood that correctly, you may be running out the limits on what you can do for him. It sounds like your spreadsheets are very detailed, and I bet they will be great help for the two of you! I suspect that he is going to need to do the next step, however, on his own—and it's the most important step. Finding a research "fit" is something that nobody but the applicant can do for them, so he should start researching the professors he wants to work with pretty soon. The POIs you've picked out might be a great place for him to start reading, but he can't stop there. Prestigious PhDs, especially, require specifically-written applications, with more details rather than less. Harvard gets a lot of applications that say it's great because it's Harvard! Maybe they say the funding is good! They have a lot of faculty who focus on the Victorian era! (Or whatever.) That's not very convincing, if you read hundreds of similar applications: the Ivies know they're fancy. If you say instead that you're interested in this project this professor is working on, and that project that other professor did, the professors on the admissions committee will most likely find that much more persuasive. So if your husband is interested in a research-focused PhD, he needs to sit down and read all of the faculty profiles in all the departments he is interested in. He'll need to pick out the ones that catch his eye. A really strong graduate school application in either of our fields isn't just based on matching faculty by time and region, but on thematic connections. So this strong application wouldn't say something like, I want to work on the American post-war and you have a lot of faculty who do great work on that period. It would rather say something like: I am interested in working on ambivalent constructions of masculinity in post-war novels that focus on the American marriage, and although this part may change I'm currently focused on the works of John Updike. The SOP would then not be as simple as: I am interested in working with faculty X, Y, and Z, because they all work on American literature after WWII. Rather, this fictional applicant might say: I am interested in working with faculty X because they are an Updike scholar (although X herself studies space and the environment as they appear in the books, not gender or marriage); I also look forward to taking Y's class on marriage in literature (where Y herself studies Shakespeare); finally I look forward to working with Z who studies gender theory (even though Z himself applies that theory to the works of Samuel Delaney). After your husband finishes reading about all the English faculty at each college, he should also look at the professors who work in some of the other departments that might have scholars whose work he would like. Interdisciplinary work is big these days, and only getting bigger, so really he should look at way more departments at each college than just the English literature department. This can be a quick overview where he only reads the research statements of the faculty who catch his eye, but he should absolutely look at the website listing the faculty of, say, the department of American Studies at Yale before he applies there. Does he like film? Look at the film studies department at each college. Or feminist studies, or science and technology studies (which is a broader field than it might sound like). Of course he shouldn't push connections if they feel forced, but it's a good research exercise to do anyway. Although my fictional example in the previous paragraph includes only faculty who could be in English, maybe Z is actually in the department of American culture or in African American studies. Poking around other interesting departments would then reveal that new resource for your husband to draw upon, one that he might have missed by just looking in English. For example, when I applied, I read or skimmed the departmental webpages for all the anthropology faculty in all the departments I was considering, and then I looked at all the history faculty who studied the same region where I work, skimmed the entire relevant area studies department, and sometimes looked at the departments of sociology or film studies. Personally, I found doing all that reading kind of fun, since people study such interesting things. Good luck to you both.

On the other hand, OP is someone who's still narrowing down what they want to do at a pretty broad level—the "which country? which era?" level of narrowing, rather than, "the suffrage movement in either northern or southern Ireland"—and that's the kind of student master's programs may help the most. If they can find a funded master's degree, it might make sense for them to do the master's right out of school...and then if a PhD seems like a possibility, to take a year off at that point. The master's-break-PhD trajectory seems to have been successful for several of my friends. There should be several threads on this forum on how to find funded history MAs!

I waited to apply to PhD programs until my health was under control. I decided this in the September before applying. So I was making health decisions for the next year, and the years of PhD stuff after that. So, of course, by the October after I started my program, 13 months after I'd decided to apply, I was solidly within the grasp of the second-to-worst flare-up I've had yet. (At least this one wasn't life-threatening.) It's been a couple years, but I still don't know how thoroughly I'll get my capabilities back, or if my health will be permanently worse, and my limitations lastingly more severe, from now on. Having health issues among a bunch of young, healthy people is isolating. Many bonding activities seem to involve midnight biking or hiking through mountains. I can't do those things. When I try to walk between classes with people, I can ask for people to slow down until I'm blue in the face, but everyone keeps walking so fast that I have to go to the bathroom and do breathing exercises before I can safely go to class. (I'm not even a slow walker, I'm a medium walker! I can't walk fast, but somehow I seem to be in a group where a ten percent reduction in speed is not done.) Of course, there are a couple horrible people around. The worst offender both makes the most microaggressive comments and pats my arm and effusively compliments my bravery every time I raise disability issues when other people have done something harmful. My regional interest group within the department is difficult, too. There's one person, the year below me, who wants to be friends with me. She has an anger problem, which I am sorry for because it clearly results from real emotional pain, but which she manages in ways that I find troubling. Although she tries to be my friend, the way she does so doesn't work for me. There's broader stuff there, but the unfortunate thing is how she sometimes lands on my biggest insecurity about graduate school. To wit, I have this fear that through my laziness possibly exacerbated by my comparatively limited amount of energy, I won't be able to work hard enough to do this. (How lazy I actually am is up for question...but that's the thing about insecurities!) So unfortunately this person pokes that insecurity incessantly. Sometimes I am just in too much pain to sit up in bed, let alone concentrate, you know? But she'll send me texts where she marvels that I was so laid back as to have watched a tv show the week a paper was due, like wow, she could never manage that much time off from her work. I think she thinks she's being complimentary about my time management, but as for how I managed to watch one sit-com episode, well, I managed it because I was in too much pain to do anything else? She is protective of her anger problem—she thinks it's just a style people should adjust to—so "please stop yelling at me about my disability, even when your intentions are good" is likely to be poorly received. I'm sure I will find a way to handle it the next time it comes up—I can usually manage to be both clear and tactful, so that conversation should be a less big deal than I'm making it out to be in my head. But that I have to think about it at all is another way that I feel like just existing with disabilities makes other people think I'm being difficult on purpose. I have a lot of better experiences, too, but I don't think anybody else in the program has a physical disability, so I'm glad to find this thread to share about some of the issues most healthy graduate students don't seem to get. Thanks for starting it!

Would you consider applying to funded master's degrees, too? Perhaps in area studies as well as in anthropology? (E.g. American culture or South Asian studies.) Would you be happy digging into your research some more, even if you don't go to a PhD program? There are master's programs that provide TA or FLAS funding. Me, I'm not going to say boo if you don't want a master's—personally, I couldn't find any MAs that were a good fit for me, so I applied with just a BA directly to PhD programs. Because you listed debt and the job market as your reasons not to go, though, I thought I'd throw out the suggestion, given that a funded program in something adjacent to anthropology might develop new skills (language? digital work?) without going into debt. Many people seem to apply for one or two potentially-funded MAs, along with a bunch of PhDs, which has always seemed like a sensible path to me. Like I said, maybe that's not something you want to consider. I can't tell from here whether you don't want a master's, and those two reasons are a good shortcut for explaining why not, or whether you would consider a master's except for those reasons. Think how people talk about having kids: "I don't want kids. They're expensive." "Awwww, you can make it work if you budget carefully!" I don't want to be the "Awww" person if your mind is made up, but I mention it in case your objections are more specific than that.

Hello, welcome, good luck! As a current student, I'll do my best to pop in every so often and help as I can. @gradanth, did you have anything more specific you could mention? @EvelynD, if you don't mind, I would push back on the notion that "on my diploma it says my degree is in archaeo, so that’s what schools care about." I don't think that is true, at least not the way you've put it. Anthropology, more than many other fields, really doesn't care very much what your past degree(s) are in. A lot of people in my (prestigious) department have previous degrees in philosophy, area studies departments, etc. Of course, I don't want to be pedantic about that specific phrasing—you're right that familiarity with the discipline is incredibly important. What doesn't matter, though, is whether you got that familiarity through a specific degree, or whether you end up picking it up more informally. As you suggest, it sounds like your training lacked some pieces that would have prepared you better for your previous applications. It sounds like you have a great game plan for doing that work now. So I want to be encouraging: however you become familiar with your material, the name printed on your MA diploma shouldn't hold you back.

People on this forum like to help, but your question is too broad (and weird) for us to respond usefully. Are you interested in good answers? If so, try something more like: "When I take notes in OneNote on scientific articles, I often have trouble finding key passages again. What program do you use? Can you suggest ways you make your notes more searchable?" I have a bit of background in linguistics - of course "there are semantics" in your post. My understanding is, you can't write anything that both uses real words and "doesn't have" semantics. That doesn't mean it's comprehensible in this setting. A text message has different requirements to be understood than does a lab report, and this forum is closer to the latter end of the spectrum. By the way, if you're curious, I studied poetry at Harvard. Your posts are not coherent as prose. One or two of your turns of phrase (decontextualized) are nice as modern poetry, actually, but have you ever read a newspaper? When trying to communicate content, rather than write poetry, aim for newspaper prose instead.