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YSheo

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  1. Upvote
    YSheo reacted to TMP in DAAD Short-term Research Grants for historical research   
    Are you sure you don't need to be in an enrolled PhD program to receive this kind of short-term grant?
    I was rejected (and that was after printing 30 pages and paying $30 postage to NY!).  I found a "sponsor" by writing to him and telling him what I was interested in doing in Germany and if he would write a sponsor letter.  German academics do this all the time.  It's just a formality. You are not actually expected to participate in the host institution's life or whatever.
    Finally, it sounds like unless you use a transnational approach to your proposal, you are not within the targeted area of research.  While I have not read DAAD's new initiatives, there is a strong push within German studies to explore Germans' and Germany's interactions with Asia, Latin America, and Africa. If you are coming from an Asian country, you could write a topic about interactions between your country and Germany, perhaps during the decolonization period? Or the development of  trade partnerships?
  2. Upvote
    YSheo reacted to Tigla in DAAD Short-term Research Grants for historical research   
    TMP's answer hits most of your questions. I want to stress the transnational approach that TMP mentioned, though. Follow your research plan, but the unfortunate reality is that academics need to always adjust to funding schemes and initiatives. I suggest trying to find a way to include your home country in your research, in a very broad manner that makes sense to your work. Don't force a transnational approach if one does not exist. 
  3. Like
    YSheo reacted to TsarandProphet in DAAD Short-term Research Grants for historical research   
    In my experiences in Europe (but not in Germany), you would need to contact a professor there who would "sponsor" your application. In my case, the head of the section of modern history at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences just wrote a letter for me.
  4. Like
    YSheo reacted to Tigla in DAAD Short-term Research Grants for historical research   
    Doktorvater/mutter is actually a Ph.D. advisor, not merely an academic advisor. That would be my first question to the DAAD: what exactly are the requirements to apply for the grant? Next, I would start reaching out to universities, or affiliated universities, near your desired archives, and begin talking about possibly sponsoring your trip as a host university, not financially. German bureaucracy is very picky with few exceptions, especially the DAAD. If you do not receive a sponsor, then you need to talk to the DAAD about their possible exceptions. It might be possible to use your home university as a sponsor, but I'm not entirely sure. My last comment revolves around your research itself. The DAAD recently switched its funding targets to better represent 'Third World' scholars and research topics. I had to change my statement to reflect the DAAD's new target, but not every researcher can do that. In short, talk to the DAAD as they will be able to answer your questions on their requirements.
  5. Upvote
    YSheo reacted to fenderpete in The 'Am I competitive' thread - READ ME BEFORE POSTING   
    There seem to be a lot of threads asking the same thing popping up lately and I figured it might make sense to make an overall guide thread and then those who feel their answers still haven’t been adequately answered can post below for an idea of what their chances are. Here is a brief rundown of factors affecting your likelihood of getting into top-tier and well respected programs. If you fall below par in any one of these factors you can bump it up by being stellar in one of the others. I'll add to this if others point out other things I've left out.

    School requirements:
    Your first stop should be the school admissions website – this will tell you what prerequisites you need, give you an idea of GRE and GPA requirements and what work experience is expected (if any)

    GPA:
    From what I’ve seen/read over the years any GPA over 3.4 and you should be competitive. That’s not to say if your GPA is lower than 3.4 you’ll have no chance, but if you have a GPA above 3.4 you should be in good shape.

    GRE score:
    GRE scores seem to be most important for schools with demanding quantitative programs and for securing the top financial aid. Most schools will state the average GRE scores for their incoming classes on their website – use these to see how competitive you are. By and large you should be competitive if you score over 650 on verbal and quantitative and over 4.0 on the AWA. For the top schools over 700 seems to be closer to the mark.

    Work experience:
    For most programs it will be expected that you have at least 1-2 years of relevant experience in your field. This can be lowered a little if you have other pseudo-relevant work experience (management in the for-profit sector etc.) but you should have shown some level of professional interest in the area you hope to study at grad school. Applicants coming straight out of undergrad may find it very hard to get into the programs aimed more at junior/mid-career professionals such as Johns Hopkins SAIS and Princeton’s WWS.

    Language skills:
    For a lot of programs being able to speak a second language is a must, while for others it is just a very good selling point. If you can show experience working in a foreign language this will show adaptability and will endear schools looking to enrol a diverse group of applicants.

    Quantitative requirements:
    A lot of schools will want you to show experience in micro/macroeconomics and some maths/statistics courses. You can fullfil these through undergrad classes or by taking courses at a community college/diploma program.

    Overseas experience (work, study and teaching):
    Work overseas and study abroad are also viewed extremely favourably by admissions committees and if you have taught English abroad, worked in the Peace Corps or otherwise gained experience living in a developing country this will really strengthen your application. It also shows you to be a go-getter, and that you can bring this outside experience to grad school study.

    Statement of Purpose:
    This is where it all comes together. This is your chance to impress the admission committee and show how your personal 'arc' has brought you to this point - being the perfect addition to their grad school. This more than any other part of your application will determine how admit committees view you as an applicant and it's also one of the only application variables that's completely under your control. Having a cohesive narrative that brings together life experience, past academic history and professional experience is a must. It also gives you a great chance to showcase your writing style - so make sure no grammar/spelling mistakes make it into your final revision.

    Great list of SOP pitfalls

    If your profile matches at least 3 or 4 of the criteria listed above then you are competitive to apply to an MPA/MPP/IR program.

    What is most important about any grad school application is showing fit – that is how your profile matches the speciality of that school and its program. If you can’t articulate compelling reasons why you are a good match for them and vice versa, question whether you should be applying to that program.


    A note on applying to top schools:

    It is worth noting that nobody here can tell you what your chances of getting into a top program (Harvard, Princeton, Georgetown etc.) because getting into a top program requires a certain amount of luck as well as a great profile. Some people get offers from Harvard with a 2.9 GPA, but also happen to have singlehandedly retaken an allied command post in the Korengal valley. It’s down to who reads your application and what they happen to be looking for with the current application cycle.

    Spend time improving the elements of your application that you can (GRE, work experience, languages) and don’t waste time freaking out about the things you can’t change (GPA).

    If you’ve read all of the above and really still can’t tell if your application is competitive, post your profile below.
  6. Upvote
    YSheo reacted to ThisGreatFolly in POI Question in history   
    Fellows at Cal's IES are secondary positions that require permanent status at the scholar's home institution. However, this doesn't necessarily mean that Senior Fellows are teaching/advising at their home institutions. I would reach out to Sheffer via email to see if she's currently taking on students at Stanford.
  7. Upvote
    YSheo reacted to Tigla in Applications 2019   
    It is time to throw my hat back into the ring. Last year, I was accepted into two UK universities (one of which I deferred for a year) and was waitlisted on my three US applications. Hopefully, this round will be the one!
    In a broad sense, I focus on global development programs during the Cold War. A lot of work has been done on American and Soviet programs, the role of international organizations, and the effects of 'development' on the 'Third World.' Following the literature from the Global Cold War, my plan is to attempt to look at how European countries, specifically the Germanys, justified their programs and the decision-making process once the decision was made to aid a country. Through my work, I hope to be able to combine the growing political and international histories of the Global Cold War with the economic and intellectual histories of development aid programs. Then, apply these frameworks back into Europe to figure out why European countries actively engaged in these programs.
    UNC-Chapel Hill: Klaus Larres and Karen Hagemann (Need to go through the faculty again) Princeton: Harold James, Christina Davis, Helen Miller, Andrew Moravcsik Northwestern: Daniel Immerwahr, Lauren Stokes, Kyle Burke Brandeis: David Engermann and Shameel Ahmad Columbia: Matthew Connelly, Anders Stephanson, Adam Tooze, and Paul Thomas Chamberlin NYU: Stephen Gross and Mary Nolan (still a maybe) TAM: Hoi-eun Kim, Jason Parker, and Adam Seipp Stony Brook: Young-Sun Hong, Larry Fordham, Michael Barnhart (another maybe) Harvard: Erez Manela, Charles S Maier, Arne Westad Indiana: Nick Cullather and Stephen Macekura I'm still expanding my list and trying to cast my net fairly wide before starting to cut universities. The rest of my application will be mostly edited from last year's one. My writing sample, however, will be a chapter from my MA thesis which used exclusively German sources. As for my recommendations, they will change because 2 of my writers are leaving academia for the private sector.
  8. Like
    YSheo reacted to fopdandyhomo in Lessons Learned: Application Season Debriefings   
    Though my POI have mentioned some of the things they liked in my application, I find it difficult to conduct a post-mortem on my season. For privacy's sake, I'm hesitant to specify the programs I applied to, but I was accepted at three of the five schools I applied to (and every program I applied to was in the top 15, regardless of what ranking you use). I'm inclined to think that this fortune is the result of sheer dumb luck or the inane superstitious things I did to get me through February (I started seeing signs in the crossword puzzles I did to relax). But here are the things I think helped my case:
     
    1) I started the process by skimming every essay I wrote for my history classes in college. I took some time off after college, so this helped remind me of who I am as a historian and my academic trajectory. I know that being able to articulate the evolution of my academic interests (both within history and without) was key to one of my acceptances. For those of us with manifold and divergent interests, knowing who you are and being able to tie this interests together to construct an image of yourself as a complex and dynamic scholar is very important. I suspect one of my rejections was in part a result of waffling about where I fell temporally. (I also used this as a chance to reflect on my potential as a scholar. With one eye on my grades, undergrad institution, and GRE score,  I asked myself honestly how competitive I would be. I guessed that I'd pass the first raw numbers cut, and took my chance applying to only top programs.) Furthermore, returning to your own essays allows you to systematically create a list of scholars you want to work with.
     
    2) To create my initial list of programs, I went back through all of the important readings I did in college, compiling names from footnotes. I thought about whose work was important in my field, who was everyone talking about/citing. I looked at journals in my field. All of this legwork was helpful when contextualizing my own work in the field as it stand right now. Especially for people with only a BA, like me, you have less of an opportunity to think about trends in history and historiography so you have to do that legwork on your own. With those 25-30 names I found out what schools they worked at. I also looked at various rankings and added those schools for good measure. Most importantly, I talked to my advisors, one of whom was a relatively recent graduate in my exact area of interest. Their suggestions ultimately proved the most useful. After eliminating schools without graduate programs and schools in Europe, my list was about 20-25 school long.
     
    3) I don't think I really understood fit until I started anticipating rejections and acceptances. The schools I was most nervous/excited about were not necessarily the schools with the highest ranked program or biggest name, but schools were there were a plethora of people working on projects I found very interesting. I made the mistake of not underestimating how narrow fit can be, especially in a well-established subfield. The way I see it is that there are four types of fit: temporal (do you study the same time period?), geographic (are you focused on the same country/region?), type of history (social, cultural, political, military, religious, intellectual, etc), and their individual interests/perspective (the topics they find interesting and they way they think about those topics). You need to find a POI who fits at least three of these forms of fit. There also have to be two or more POI at that school who satisfy at least two other categories of fit each (including the missing category from the primary POI). Determining fit is the hardest part of this process and the area where we're most in the dark. I poured over professors' webpages, I skimmed multiple articles and introductions to their books (if not the entire book), and I looked at the classes they teach. Sometimes a professor's interests develop or are not explored in their published work. I ended up only applying to places where I thought professors there in my field were asking similar questions to those I want to ask and where there were 2+ professors I was eager to work with. My two rejections were schools that were a good fit on paper (with two of the biggest names in my field), but my POIs there only satisfied 2-2.5 forms of fit. The programs I got accepted to were the schools I was most excited about. 
     
    4) I'm a procrastinator so I didn't get nearly as much feedback on my essays as I would have liked to. I've come up with probably about 10 different ways to write my SOP over the past four years, all of which perfectly encapsulated my intellectual interests and trajectory at that time and which I forgot when it came time to write my essay. Thus, I was quite blocked with trying to write my SOP. All of the perfectly crafted sentences I wrote in my head while walking to class had vanished. Consequently, I wrote and wrote. Most of it was crap. I wrote whole essays that never made it into anything I submitted. (Plan ahead for this!) But all of that intellectual work was key to getting my brain in the place where it needed to be to write my SOP. Every iteration of my SOP started with an image of me engaging in historical inquiry. It felt forced and hokey, but I guess it worked. I jumped straight into the action and maintained a sustained focus on the types of questions I ask, how I read sources, and the research I've done in the past. When I mentioned my post-collegiate work, I folded it into an intellectual narrative. I let me CV and GPA speak for themselves and used the SOP as an opportunity to let them peak inside my head and see what ideas and questions get me excited. FWIW, one of my POI commented that my application stood out for it's excitement, curiosity, and energy. I struggled to be specific and concrete in earlier iterations of my SOP. Actually, I thought I was plenty specific, but my professors told me to suggest possible avenues for exploring the ideas and questions that interested me. I hinted at possible projects and ways I would research those projects. (I had one interview and in that interview I was asked what sources I might use. I didn't talk about my future project at length in my SOP, but I had given it a lot of thought. I knew what kind of debates it would speak to and what my basic game plan would be for approaching it. Of course, all of this will shift and mature as I learn more, but I did the best I could based on where I was.)
     
    5) I got really obsessive and strategic when tailoring my SOP to fit each school. I googled the f*ck out of this website, the chronicle's forums, and the rest of the internet to glean any insight into how programs make their decisions. I don't know if any of it helped, but it calmed my nerves. I did my best to figure out who was on the admissions committees at each school, and when I couldn't really figure that out, I wrote my SOP in a way that would appeal to as many professors as possible while still maintaining my focus in my field. In the end, my SOP had to convince me that I should definitely go to that school. If you can't convince yourself it's a perfect fit, how will you be able to convince the professors who read it?
     
    6) In terms of writing POIs and other forms of contact, I didn't do it for every school but I did it for every school I was accepted to (but not all my POIs). I stressed over these emails and sent them later than I should have (October, November, and in some cases December), but they didn't really help me either way, I think. Everyone I spoke to was super encouraging, but they hadn't seen my credentials at that point and their encouragement shouldn't be taken as a sign that you're a viable candidate or that you should even apply. I got some useful info about fellowship funding from one school, but otherwise, I don't think these emails made a difference either way. That said, one the professors writing me a recommendation knows two of the professors at one of the schools where I was accepted and another professor at a second school were I was accepted well. He's not a big name (yet), but he's a wonderful guy and I think those connections did benefit my application. Applicants can't do anything about this, but academia is a small community and I'm convinced that these networks make an impact in this process. Nevertheless, I also got into a school where I had no connections.
     
    7) If you have an interview, reread your application and the work you've done that influences your thinking. Otherwise, DO NOT REREAD YOUR SOP. I forgot a period at the end of a paragraph amongst the various errors I made (including mistaking the location of one of my programs). Somehow, I still got in but rereading my SOP added greatly to my stress level.
     
    YMMV.
     
    Here's some of the insight I've gotten from professors at specific programs during this process:
    1) USE PRIMARY SOURCES IN YOUR WRITING SAMPLE. This really should just be a baseline, but apparently, not all applicants do it.
    2) Taking time off from school is a good thing, especially if you can use it to reflect thoughtfully on why you want to go back to school.
    3) Princeton's PhD is very quick and they are looking for applicants who can "hit the ground running."
     
     
    Ultimately, you do all you can do but a lot of the results come down to chance. This process requires you to both be obsessive in your research and learn to let go. Remember that neither acceptances nor rejections are referendum on your value as a human being. And most importantly, get some lucky shampoo.
     
    Just my two cents.
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