khigh

I didn't either. Here's to better writing samples next time!

They're in NYC ;). You aren't going to go from a T20 outside NYC or DC to biglaw in NYC or DC. If you do, it's rare. That's like saying someone with a UW-Madison History PhD is going to go straight to teaching Ivy TT. It's possible, everything is, but it's not going to happen in any reasonable world. BigLaw at those schools are also still less than 10% and most are less than 2%. LSAT is required by the ABA unless specific conditions are met (less than 10% of entering class is admitted without LSAT, GRE higher than 85%, and SAT/ACT scores higher than 85%, etc). The ABA is where the LSAT bias comes in. https://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/administrative/legal_education_and_admissions_to_the_bar/governancedocuments/2015_s503_guidance_final.authcheckdam.pdf

I'm in the same boat as you- history PhD or Law School. Honestly, law school is it. 3 years, a little more debt, and a much better job placement rating? Sounds good to me. Start a pro-con list. Write down what you would miss by going the LS route. Take the June LSAT (apply for a fee waiver if you can, it also waives a lot of applications). Law Schools will reply within days or weeks instead of months. You don't have to go biglaw (I don't want to) and there are a lot more opportunities if you speak a foreign language (international, international business, UN, NGOs, immigration). I'm a sports fanatic and speak/read several European based languages, so I've been looking at labor and contract law and hope to get on with a baseball team or a sports firm to recruit foreign players for MLB. There are, however, cons to the law school route. It's more expensive unless your numbers are good (pretty much all law schools look at is GPA and LSAT). Biglaw is almost impossible to break into unless you are HYS (Harvard, Yale, Stanford). Law is a regional field. If you don't go HYS, you will likely stay in the place where you go to LS. Networking is key- if you are an introvert, it's not going to work too well. It's competitive. Your grades aren't based on what you do on your own, but are curved with your class. If you are out of the top 10%, you won't get into a big firm. Outside the top 25% and you likely won't get a good summer internship (some I have seen will pay $40-$60k for the summer!). Non-profits and government work means you likely won't be able to pay off your loans.

Got accepted, but I am going to decline and reapply in September because of funding. They had already given out their big scholarships and I should get a full waiver for the next cycle. It seems to be all about the numbers. They don't really care about anything other than your LSAT score.

Just an FYI if any of y’all are thinking about Law School as a backup, I turned in my application on Friday and got a response today. They don’t mess around!

Thank you for clarifying your position, but others in this thread have taken it to PM to tell me exactly how they feel. I have no cross. I am upset and angry. I’m dropping this now too.

Aaaand, I’m done. You could have taken this to PM like others have to vent their frustrations on me. I thought I could find support here, but I guess not. Very few of you actually know what this is like, so I was wrong in assuming that any of you know what it’s like to get rejected from everywhere. Thank you to those that have offered support. Your PMs have helped immensely and the same within this thread. At least I could feel happy for a day before having to deal with all this. We will see what next cycle brings.

The game makes me bitter. My team came so close and now all we get up here is traffic. Lol!

And then there are those of us that get frustrated with this line of talk. People here UNDERSTAND all sides of it- the anxiety and planning and admissions and rejections and alternate plans. You may come from a family of people who have gone through the process or have friends that have, so they understand. Some of us have no one outside this forum that actually gets it. This thread saved me from many breakdowns the past few days. So, I would honestly suggest starting another impersonal thread where you just talk numbers and stats or maybe, just maybe, appreciate that there are real people on the other side of the keyboard.

Thank you so much. I realize now that my SOP was wrong in explaining what I exactly wanted to do. I wasn’t clear enough in it to convince them that it is something I could do at the U. I had written about wanting to study grassroots political movements of the Dutch Republic in het rampjaar, but I found other documents that are better and more interesting and do fit with the fields that the U has. I want to do a phenomenological study of travel accounts in the Mediterranean. They have others doing Mediterranean that focus on people that came from outside the geographical regions that the profs study (Russians, Turks, and Moroccans). I am going to take this as a hard and expensive lesson and reapply next year and apply to the law school. Some, even you, may disagree with it, but location is more important to me than anything else I finally have roots I’ve never had roots anywhere, even my hometown of 29 years. Here is where I want to raise my family and sit by the lake as an old retiree. I have only felt home here and two other places- Groningen and Rome. I truly do thank all of y’all for your help and support this cycle and I will be sticking around.

I’m rooting for y’all!

i transported three rabbits from Oklahoma to Minnesota. They are horribly mean and destructive, but they're keeping me sane.

I love, love, love Cersei, but Littlefinger in the books was my hero. "Knowledge is Power"

I live in Minne, but I'm from Oklahoma, so I mix my y'alls with my dontcha knows, ya know? I can say "ain't that just fer cute." I love it here, so I'm going to polish my app and try again next cycle. The worst thing in the world would be to get discouraged and end up some place like Sconi.

What field? 3000 words is only about 12 pages, double spaced Times New Roman. For the humanities, that's not even close enough, but for some sciences it may be good.

Before I look further, which I can, I would like to know if your first language is English. That will make a difference in how people look at these.

I would love that! I absolutely adore Victorians. The ones in my neighborhood go for around $500k for a two bedroom and they are usually on the market for less than a week at that price.

Got a phone call this morning from the prof I've been talking to about my app. It wasn't bad. it was one of those "it's not you, it's us" calls. They just don't have a Dutch person right now and they wouldn't want me to switch my focus. I told them about wanting to look at the Dutch in the Mediterranean, which it seems will be a much better approach for next cycle. I am going to the consortium meeting on the 21st to listen to a talk on poetry in the EM Med. I am going to take a break from looking at anything to do with apps and then spend part of the summer redoing all of it. I was told that they were impressed with the original translations in the writing sample and asked if I had more translations or if i had only done them for that paper. I'm 250 pages into translating a 750 page travel memoir. Soooo, was told to use a spot in the extra materials section to put about 10 pages of translation next time- there is no one there that does Dutch language, so showing I can do that on my own helps. Oh, and add a translation of EM Italian because no one there does Italian. They are VERY heavy on the French side for EM except for one and they do Central Europe. I feel a lot better today and thought some of you may find that translation information to be helpful in the future.

I looked up what my undergrad pays for Assoc. Prof....$35k a year. It's a regional in Oklahoma, so that makes a difference, but the number is a little scary.

$60k is what a high school teacher with alternative certification makes here. $70k with a masters and five years of experience.

I have them. I wrote a paper about revolutionary women at one point. Her diaries were stored in a church in London that caught on fire during the Blitz. Her diaries are supposed to contradict what she actually wrote to people. Emma Goldman had some second or third hand knowledge about the private Jenny, but even that might have been a facade. She didn’t seem to really like falling down the social ladder, but we won’t ever know how she really felt now.

If I go down the Magda road, I will for sure let you know. The home videos were really hard to watch with the girls playing with Blondie. I have the diary, home videos, speeches, and Michael. I’d love to do something on Jenny Marx, but her diaries got destroyed in the Blitz.

I'd love to reinvigorate the phenomenological approach, which seems to be happening elsewhere, but I don't know about around here. I've done a few phenomenological investigations of "great men," but I don't think they are anything I would ever submit as a writing sample. The boyfriend loved the one I submitted for his class. I looked at Goebbels "as he was" and applied Nietzsche and Kant's concepts of humanity to show how he approached the world. I watched all of his home videos, listened to all of his speeches, read everything he wrote (from Michael to his journal) to get inside his head to see how he experienced the world around him without presentism or personal bias. My advisor was disturbed by my phenomenological approach to Robespierre. That was for a simulation and I may have defended the guillotine a little too much, but it was what it was. Boyfriend and I are talking about writing a phenomenological paper on women in Berlin in 1945. I would love to do one on Magda Goebbels or Jenny Marx, but both of those would be difficult. We, the boyfriend and I, say that history can be one of the most depressing fields to study because you are forgotten. You may be a data point in a paper or you may not really have existed unless you can tell your own story through a researcher. One act may overshadow everything else you did or everything you did might not matter. Just thought I would include a short passage from my defense of the guillotine. This was a simulation arguing for or against the formation of the Committee of Public Safety, so we each played a part and were supposed to view it through the eyes of a Revolutionary. I was the only one to actually defend the Committee. Everyone else in the class either looked at it as we would today or took it out of context and couldn't forget what actually happened to the followers of Robespierre. "I beg of you, my fellow revolutionaries, to support this law. I wish it had not come to this, but this revolution will not progress if the rabble is not cleared from our ranks in a timely manner. Forgive me and this committee if these words do not ring true, that this great revolution will bring peace by the sword and liberty by the jury. Denounce your neighbor and spurn your friend if he cuts the heel of the revolution. Accuse your child and bring forth your wife if they cannot agree to the values of this great revolution. As the king betrayed us and was sentenced as an enemy of this revolution, so too must your friend, neighbor, child, and wife. We are a lawful and obedient people and through this law, we will bring about a great and lasting peace. Viva la révolution! "

My undergrad advisor just sent me this quote. Those of you that were also rejected today might also like it. It's from Field of Dreams. "The one constant through all the years has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It's been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game, is a part of our past. It reminds us of all that was once good and what could be again."

I love the Dutch. They are more concise than the French and less bureaucratic than the Germans. They also streamline citizenship for people that go to universities there and get degrees in "something Dutch" (history, literature, culture, language, etc) because they don't have enough people, even Dutchies, that want to continue the culture. The government thinks they are becoming too English.