Riotbeard
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Posts posted by Riotbeard
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I had a similar issue my first set of applications, and turned down the unfunded PhD and waited another year. I found one of those GRE classes really helpful in raising my verbal score from something just ok to 96%. I would say even 80% is not that high for verbal, when a lot of other people will be in the 90s. I got into a bunch of places my second time around, so I would definitely not advise paying for an MA.
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One thing you can learn from these recruitment events is at least a general sense of funding. I went to two, and while I loved both programs, I was hugely influenced by the fact that Tulane paid for my airfare and hotel. While I liked the other school a lot, they only reimbursed to the tune of less than $200. To me it felt indicative of how flush with cash the department was, and later opportunities for funding (like travel, pay increases, etc.). They are important things. Even the best paid grad students aren't paid well, but even a little bit more cash, can be the difference between research travel without getting tons of grants, etc.
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7 hours ago, whir said:
In general, I am interested in late 19th and early 20th century history of the American South. I also want to be involved in digital scholarship. I know that Emory offers a graduate certificate in digital scholarship and have been told that the certificate has helped recent graduates with job placement. However, it looks like there are opportunities at UGA with the DigiLab. It seems like Emory might have more opportunities for interdisciplinary study. I'd really appreciate input on any aspects (faculty strength, research methods, preparation for teaching, atmosphere, connections, job placement, etc.).
What are the differences in funding? At UGA, is most of your funding based on TA'ships? At Emory, is most of your funding non-service based? Non-service based funding can be a huge deal, especially once you are ABD.
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I know Duke has a strong theoretical bent in their history program, but they (and pretty much no history departments) view themselves as training theorists. The history of consciousness program is a decent recommendation, but I have heard they have lost some their theoretical diversity since their peak with Hayden White.
You might want to look more toward Literature departments with strong new historicist faculty. I would imagine these programs would be more sympathetic to a more theory heavy approach to history. A lot of new historicists work primarily with documents that would traditionally be of the purview of historians, but ask very different types of questions. Also, area studies depending on the department could be a great fit.
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I have a couple of tips.
Depending on the type of documents you are using, spreadsheets can be a great device, because they allow for great search-ability and sorting documents in potentially interesting ways. I use word documents and spreadsheets. I personally don't like a lot of the notetaking software, but that is me.
Back up in the cloud and with a harddrive. I lost twenty pages of notes when my hard-drive crashed a week in. Luckily I still had the photos, and was able to go back and retake my notes.
I would suggest behaving/dressing professionally. You have to get archivists on your side, so first impressions do matter. In addition to them helping you find great sources (and sometimes one that you weren't even looking for), archivists can be your introduction into the local academic community, and can be great advocates of your work. You have to be efficient with your time, but I tended to go to the archive when they opened and leave 15 minutes before they close. Start packing up around fifteen minutes before they close. Don't keep the archivists at work late!
View your time in the field like your time at a conference. This is a great opportunity to build your professional network. Go to talks. E-mail professors in the local departments. Ask them for an opportunity to pick their brain, and introduce you to some of their grad students. This is great for professional reasons, but also can help alleviate the inherent loneliness you will have battle moving into a new city every month or two. My research year I went to 8 different cities. When I went back for follow up research, it was so exciting that I got to see all my friends.
If the archive has a sign in sheet, see who else is there doing research. Go up to big name professor x from Yale, and ask them what they are looking at. Ask them if they have time that week for lunch and if you can pick their brain. I did this, and that person continues to give me great advice, and at our big conference, we meet every year for coffee, etc.
- rising_star, AP and maelia8
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2 hours ago, TMP said:
damn... all done??? I remember when you and I were working on PhD applications together years ago! Congrats!
Congrats, and ditto, haha.
That was a quick finish Kotov!
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18 hours ago, displayname said:
Riotbeard and mvlChicago: I'm sorry that you both misunderstood my intentions. I'm not trying to "help myself" (at least in any conscious way) by sharing this information. I think that it is the responsibility of those within the profession to acknowledge that one's performance does not simply correlate to work ethic or talent.
I meant you in the general sense. I think it's easy to be cynical in a field with a lot of negatives, but I am increasingly unconvinced that it's useful to think too much about this information, unless you are advising someone who does not like history all that much. I tend to preach positivity to the first and second years in my department. Not to be deluded about the reality, but ultimately a positive attitude will help someone more in the long run than being angry and cynical. If this is someone's dream job, it's better to fail trying than the alternative of giving up and you might as well enjoy the time you get in the profession even if that is just graduate school.
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33 minutes ago, ashiepoo72 said:
Congrats on the revise and resubmit, @Riotbeard!!
Thanks! It was exciting news, although tempered by of course the one reviewer of four that hated it.
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On January 14, 2016 at 5:11 PM, displayname said:
The meritocratic argument is (mostly) wrong. I am a student in one of the number-one ranked departments in the country. Colleagues who have won nationally prestigious fellowships, published in respected journals, and have glowing recommendations from heavyweights have worked as adjuncts for years. That group includes those who were awarded our department's prize for best dissertation. This is true at peer departments, and is true in many fields.
Of course, if you perform terribly in grad school, you have almost no chance of getting a job. But many superstars adjunct, and many more will apply for jobs for years before even getting a campus visit. If you doubt this, look at the CVs of professors at top departments, or talk to them. Most spent years on the job market while still grad students. Many pieced together postdocs and visiting gigs before getting a job. And those are professors at the most prestigious schools that received PhDs at the most prestigious schools.
The meritocratic argument enables graduate students, professors, and administrators to turn a blind eye to the exploitation of adjunct labor in the academy. Too many believe that they will not end up as an adjunct if they work hard, get into the right department, and publish in the right field. Too many believe that adjuncts are less qualified than full-time faculty—in truth, they are not as lucky.
We all know this! My girlfriend is a professor (at another school), and has been on a bunch of search committees and the reasons for rejection are complicated and from outside seem often outrageous. At one prestigious school, for example, where she was a postdoc, they threw out all candidates who they thought might apply for tenure early, because of money issues. Likewise, where she is now they look for people who they expect to stay so they don't go for top candidates.
All of that being said, this cynicism will not help you. Do you want to be the bitter person at every conference that nobody likes? What's the point of being so doom and gloom? Will focusing on this knowledge ultimately help you get a job? It is better to keep this in the back of your mind as a reality, but there is no need to let it control you consciousness. I am in my sixth year, (defending Spring 2017, what-what!), and I can see the damage this attitude does to people throughout grad school. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and a reason not to try, and to become generally unpleasant. You have to have optimism in order to keep plugging away. For example, I sent in an article this summer to the top journal in my subfield, with the knowledge that it would most likely get rejected, but figured that I already knew the worst could happen. Happy ending, I got a revise and resubmit, and it will hopefully be accepted by the time I am on the market! If you get too negative, you can limit the field of possibilities for yourself, and it will ultimately only hurt you. The job market doesn't care about you, so you should not care so much about it. It's out of our control and unlikely to change.
- ashiepoo72 and thedig13
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On 1/9/2016 at 5:33 PM, mvlchicago said:
"am wondering whether to send an application."
There's a thread on CHE that basically amounts to three or four posters telling everyone feeling concerned to "apply for the damn job." It may be entirely the case that they decide to take someone with two postdocs. Or they might take you. But that feels like a separate question from whether you should "send an application." The answer to that question will always be "yes."I would echo this! Of course, people with post-docs may have some advantages, but people do get TT jobs as ABD students, even though it is rare. I know a couple people who got TT jobs as ABD students. If you don't apply, you don't won't get it. Also every application is practice for the next one.
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I think there are a lot of potential new directions for U.S. History research. In addition to transnational history that was already mentioned, there is a lot of new research and interpretive avenues in the history of the environment, science, and medicine. I think there are sub-fields in U.S. history that are heavily saturated, but there are plenty alternative questions to be asked. Likewise, databases provide for new types of analysis and access that weren't possible even twenty years ago. Key word searches of newspaper databases allow for you consult a breadth of possible sources not possible before. In my own research, I have been able to show that one guy who was considered as a regional figure actually had a large national and even international following (this was intentionally vague...).
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A faculty member at UT Austin had recommended that I look into the Atlantic History field offered by the graduate department there. I'm somewhat interested as it covers some of what I am interested in (Early Modern Europe) while giving me exposure to some early American that I feel like will help on the job market. Does anyone have experience in this field that can give their impressions of it?
That's kind of a loaded question as it's a huge field. Atlantic was my second field in exams, and my project has significant Atlantic dimensions, but the field is pretty old at this point. If you are talking Anglo-Atlantic, the key early works include Jack Greene Pursuits of Happiness, Bernard Bailyn The Peopling of British North America, and Volume 1 of D. W. Meinig's The Shaping of America. I mean really some the earliest Atlanticist are people like Eric Williams, Phillip Curtain, and Alfred Crosby.
A lot of the base ideas that make up the foundation of the field come out of Braudel's The Mediterranian. In terms of the "difficulty" of embarking on an Atlantic project, it really depends. A lot of Atlanticist work on specific areas and show their relations to wider Atlantic communities, these are normal and very doable.
A useful starting point would be Jack Greene and Phillip Morgan's edited reader Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal. This has field essays on the each sub-discipline (i.e. French Atlantic, Spanish Atlantic, Black Atlantic, etc.) by really important scholars.
Atlantic history doesn't have to be writing the history of the "Inland Sea", so much as showing how one place is apart of larger networks of exchange (This is what most of Atlantic history is). Also, recent challenges to Atlantic history have come from Global Historians (There is a notable article by Peter Coclanis from maybe a decade ago), and people who think the Atlantic has overshadowed North American interest in a passage to the Pacific (Paul Mapp).
It's a good field, and being "transnational" is increasingly important, but it's not a huge undertaking or particularly novel at this point. If you are an early Americanist, it's borderline expected that you will engage with the Atlantic World. Almost everybody in my department who works on history before the 20th century does Atlantic history including the Hispanists, Francophones, and Americanists.
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I never took a language exam, as there isn't a second language important to my work. I probably could have passed the German exam, but my adviser advised that even working a little on this would be a waste of time, as it has no relation to my work. That being said most Americanists in my department at least have spanish or french, which usually has some application to their work. I am working on Spanish a little in my spare time for a side project. Short answer is most americanist will have a second language, but a lot of programs do have alternatives if it is not particularly relevant to your work.
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Telkanuru: I am sure that there are, and that they would be more impressive than most of the profs that I am looking at. That said, I do have some self-esteem issues (essentially major-league impostor syndrome) that make it very difficult for me to even consider throwing my stuff at one of the Ivies. It's just a difficult psychological hurdle, and one that I doubt I will overcome by the time September rolls around.
Riotbeard: I am looking heavily into history of medicine. I'll address that issue with the next response.
TMP: I actually have a broad range of interests. As I alluded to in my first post, my thesis relied heavily on a number of distinct methodologies and thematic approaches. I would say that my great love is intellectual history, though I recognize the job market for that is very bad at the moment. The second tier interests would be imperialism, religion, cultural, labor, science, medical, political, and commodity. Geographically I tend to operate best in the Atlantic world, specifically France, UK, and the US - that said, I've also had a growing love affair with Ireland since I started down this path. Chronologically I tend to do Modern, though I dip into Early Modern with France and the UK. If it seems like my interests are too broad, I have absolutely zero interest in military history, ethnic history, or hard economic history.
Thanks for all of your input, guys. It is very much appreciated.
This might be a bit of a cheet, but my dissertation is masked intellectual history, but I am able to couch it as cultural history, because I use a lot of non-traditional sources that takes it out of the realm traditional intellectual history. I have also been advised by people to make sure to refer to my diss. as cultural history when talking to presses. This is the same with microhistory and biography. A lot of microhistory is closer to biography, but it sounds less old fashioned to call it micro-history (not say all micro-history is this, and I love micro-history).
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If you want to pursue History of Medicine, you should also consider history of medicine/science programs. In particular, if you are a U.S. historian, the job market is a blood bath, and history of medicine/science could help you stand out from the rest of the field. We are by no means a history of science oriented program, but of our last two U.S. hires, one was history of medicine and one was environmental history. Moreover, it's a much less crowded arena of U.S. history than general social history or virtually any other subfield. Plus there will be jobs open to you that are not available to a more standard U.S. historian, and you are also applicable to general U.S. history jobs. Your research will stand out from the crowd of say slavery studies, 20th century social movements, or American imperialism, just by nature of the fact that you are in a field general U.S. historians are only just beginning to pay attention to. Just some food for thought, if you are enjoying history of medicine.
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I have a friend who did her PhD there in Global History and loved it.
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I got an R & R as an undergrad, so technically you can do it, but it's definitely not typical
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What some have pointed out, everyone is going to struggle in their first years of grad school. It doesn't matter where you're coming from-- graduate school is meant to bring in people from different places and mold them in similar fashion. This means, one person could be amazing at A but suck at B and has never heard of C, another will excel at B but struggle to conceptualize C and is okay at A, and the third person can somewhat handle A, B, and C and the professors will work to get all three to balance out their strengths and areas of improvement so that by the time they finish, each person can handle A, B, and C with competency.
For me, I struggled A LOT (and still need reminders) to read and engage in others' questions outside of my own. For example, I'm hardly a person interested in the history of religion but my field demands that I get some familiarity with it. When I first read such works, I try to find ways to connect with them (usually through a socio-political perspective). When I meet with the professor, he'd ask, "What's the research question? What is the argument?" I'd blanked out because I never thought to step out of my comfort zone and find that person's research question because I was too busy looking for connections between that work and my research interests. Preparing for my candidacy exams has forced me to resolve this issue so that when I discuss works with other people, I can demonstrate that I (now) have the ability to read other scholars and engage with their research questions outside of my areas of research inquiry.
Meanwhile, my adviser doesn't spend much time polishing my research skills because they're shiny compared to the rough diamond above.
Everyone has an individual journey to the same end. Some need to meander more than others. Some need to take a right turn while others need to take a left. But you all have the same goal: obtaining that degree.
Ultimately you will have to re-learn how to write a couple of times. Seminar papers might be the first draft of an article, but ultimately the research and reading required to get an article published in a solid journal is simply a different level. Likewise, you have to re-learn how to write when you get to the dissertation. Writing a long-cohesive work is a very different mentality from a seminar paper (my first attempt at writing a chapter got rejected from my adviser, and for good reason), it took a lot of deep thinking to figure out how to build a manuscript ( I am still doing it, haha).
The thing is though, you don't have to figure everything out by day one. They don't expect you to come in fully formed. Instead of being afraid of looking like an idiot, be ready to ask a lot of questions and learn. Everyone is roughly at the same spot in the first years. Some of the students who come in with a masters might be a bit ahead, but many are not that far, and within a year, everyone is on the same page roughly. A lot of grad students have confidence issues, but ultimately this can only hurt you. This doesn't mean being an egotistical maniac, but be comfortable in conversation. This sometimes means being wrong, but it also will allow you for course-corrections throughout your career, instead of being afraid to be wrong, and never get to test your ideas.
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Riotbeard offers an excellent example of what I mean above about networking. You have to be willing to put your foot out there. Your adviser isn't always going to help you. Mine never did-- I don't think she meant to do it on purpose. She just knows I'm pretty good at reaching out and talking to people.
I also used outside letter-writers for fellowships in addition to my adviser's from top scholars in my field. My adviser have acknowledged that it's a savvy move as opposed to asking a second faculty member in my program who wouldn't have the same kind of deep knowledge of my project's place in historiography as those outside letter-writers. Those external people are also my mentors and they've done a wonderful job of professionalizing me as a scholar.
Long-term impact remains to be seen
....This is very important. I have a lot of mentors, and as far personal relationships, I am closer with professors at other schools than in my own department. I have also gotten outsiders to write me letters. Didn't really help this year, but I was not completing next Spring and most writing fellowships are completion fellowships, so it was uphill anyways. Still funded though through the department. This years applications will be dire though.
I also have another friend from a mid to even low-tier school who is starting a tenure track job, but he had a major outside fellowship, so that helps.
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As someone at a mid-ranked school, we place people, and you can kind of see early on who that will be. Our record is pretty good, if you finish actually, but it's such a small program.
You do have to be comfortable doing a lot of networking. A) You have to make a name for yourself. In my experience, my school name has not hurt me, but people don't assume off the bat that I am smart or dumb. My adviser and outside readers' names helps me a good bit though.
You have to apply for a ton of grants/fellowships. I have gotten a large national/government grant and another person in my year got a fullbright, but we pound the pavement. These big grants can help make up for school name and put you on an equal playing field or at least bridge the gap. They also enable you to visit other schools and build your network. You have to be a bit of a hustler (although this is more and more true of people at ivies as well as midtier schools). C) Another disadvantage in terms of networking, is the revolving door of major academics that do workshops at Ivies that enable you to meet major people in your field. I have been able to see this, because I ingratiated myself to the Penn History and Sociology of Science program while I was doing research in Philly, and went to their dept. seminars. Every city I did research in for my dissertation, I went to public lectures, became buddies with archivists, and cold-called professors who do similar work. This really helped me build a strong professional network. Hint, it's also more fun than being alone in a new city! I met those professors grad students, who have become close friends in the year(s) since. Primarily through networking, I have gotten a couple of invited lectures (even paid for one) and was asked to be an expert for a major media outlet. I also have a good friend at a lower ranked school, who has written six articles and thus has had pretty good success on the market. You can definitely do it from a mid-tier program, but all things considered, a name brand will definitely help. Academia is not a pure meritocracy by any standard, but good work and personality can get you pretty far.
- rising_star, TMP and Eigen
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Follow your passion because you WILL be married to your dissertation topic. Methodological and theoretical frameworks can evolve over time. Your adviser/committee will want to see intellectual growth in these areas and you do that by continuing to read relevant books/articles to the topic/methodologies you're interested in and going to conferences to hear papers and speak with other scholars.
You can capitalize on the "trend" but demonstrate your understanding of what's going on and what areas you'd like to explore (methodology? theories?). The most important thing in the SOP is demonstration of your familiarity with historiographical debates and how they fit within the field of your study, and what you hope to explore more in graduate school.
This. Also if it's successful (or even just good enough to become a book), you're going to be branded with this for years! Try to find a way to make the topic appealing of course, but from proposal to dissertation to most likely book if you want to get tenure, you are talking about 10 or so years working on this stuff. Don't do something you won't like. I was picking between two topics that I liked equally and went for the one with more professional legs, but I also opted against another project that probably had to most legs, that didn't interest me.
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Yes, it is very likely having an online degree could hurt your chances of acceptance to PhD programs. Whether they're right to or not, many academics have strong negative opinions of online education.
I would also say that I think an online degree in history would be poor training for graduate seminar (the fundimental pedagogical device for every history PhD program). I think online education has a value, but not sure it would be best preparation for a PhD program where you will have to rely on interpersonal communication in your coursework.
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None of the Penn Grad students I know seem to hate the department. My point wasn't that the newspaper didn't know what was going on, but that it's hardly national press or that the article would reflect the penn history dept as a sinking ship in the media.
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Plus Philly vs. Ann Arbor, no contest!
UCLA PhD or Harvard MA?
in History
Posted
The fact that you are even debating this is crazy (I mean this in a nice way:) ). UCLA and Harvard are comparable programs. One is giving you a fellowship to a PhD program and the other is not. Go to the dance with girl or boy who asks you. Living in Cambridge is very expensive so even a tuition waver means considerable debt compared to no debt at UCLA and finishing your PhD at a younger age. There is literally no upside to going to unfunded Harvard over UCLA. Imagine two years from now Harvard and Yale have rejected you and then UCLA rejects you because you already turned them down. There is no real difference between the number 4 and number 1 program in your expertise in terms of prestige. The only person turning down UCLA would benefit is next person on the waitlist.