historyofsloths

I'm a Ph.D. student at Florida State, and I took a seminar this spring called Qualitative Methods in the Humanities with a history professor here, Will Hanley. You might contact him or look into whether the history program here might be a fit for you.

Thank you to everyone who regularly posts on this forum. I think that all of the information I gathered on here over the past year was a fundamental component of my successful applications!
I declined two of my offers and have officially committed to a PhD program! Anyone else heading to UC Davis in the fall??

Well, my season is officially over.  On my way back from classes today, I received my (very nice) rejection from UIC.
I'll be taking some time to decompress and rest, focus on my own writing and research, and survive the last weeks of my second undergraduate degree before I start looking very hard at anything for fall 2022--but I will most likely be applying to programs again for fall 2022.

In my department, advisors are publicly assigned to students upon entry and in practice it is regarded as a sign of a serious problem if you have to change your advisor. In one's first year the advisor plays important roles in shaping the course of study for the student. I recognize that other history programs are more flexible, but I'm not sure what you mean by "no one owes you an explanation." Surely if the program has given this person an "interim advisor" they can ask what this term signifies.

@AP@dr. telkanuru@Sigaba@OHSP@Tigla
As promised, I have returned. I was accepted at four schools, got in off the waitlist at one, and rejected by five. I chose to accept the offer of a school that was not my first choice, because I quickly built strong rapport with the people there and discovered that they might actually fit better in terms of my interests, temperament, and future goals.
Thank you for all the help and support that you have shown me during this application season. 

Please disregard my previous question. Literally 20 minutes after I posted, I got the email with my funding package. ?

Has anyone heard anything about the IU History Masters??  I know PHD offers were already made.  Have not heard anything-- acceptance or rejection.

Just my 2 cents from afar: I don't think it's disrespectful at all to ask about the purpose of the test. If this is a component of what's expected of you as part of the program, they should have no problem telling you about it.

I'm the UIC admit. I can't know this for sure, but from all indications you will get an email from them if you make the waitlist. Incidentally, the email containing my acceptance letter was sent by an HR official, so Google put in my "promotions" inbox and I almost missed it. 
In any case, feel free to DM me if you have questions about the details of the package they offer (hopefully for your consideration this year, but otherwise for when you're selecting schools next cycle). 

Thank you both @historyofslothsand @TMP -- these insights are super helpful.
I'm still waiting to hear back from one school (University of Illinois at Chicago) and my previous communication with the grad director for the department there indicated that their waitlist was extremely active and that they anticipated admitting students as late as mid-April.  I haven't heard anything from them one way or another, though I did spy an acceptance last week there.
Just holding tight, waiting and hoping.  I'd rather not go through another application cycle, but I will if I have to.

I received waitlist emails from U of Michigan and Indiana U at the beginning of March, both emails told me that if I didn't hear anything after a month passed that I should email X person and ask about my status. Once I did that, the DGS at IU let me know the waitlist was ranked and that he was waiting for just one person to reject their offer so he could extend one to me. U of M didn't tell me anything about their waitlist, just that I was on it and I should just hold tight.
As TMP said, it's institution dependent, I can't even guarantee that my experience was the norm, I was emailing as everyone was shutting things down due to COVID-19.

I passed y'all! I'm convinced my success is at least in part due to good vibes from friends and family, so thank you thank you!

I'm taking comps on Monday and had to post here...I can't believe that 4 years ago I was researching grad programs while trawling through GradCafe, and now I'm about to be ABD *fingers crossed*
Thanks for all the support! This is the best community ever.

You gain nothing from such an email and you may annoy someone. Just be patient. 

How often do faculty members at schools that rejected you reach out to compliment your application? I've gotten emails from multiple people in the same department telling me that I had a great application and they were sorry they couldn't offer me a place. I hadn't been in touch with any of them before, so I really never expected to hear anything after I was rejected because I had absolutely no relationship to the department or to any faculty member. 
Has anyone else had any similar interactions with faculty members this year? I kinda don't know what to say because obviously I'm grateful that some academics out there think I have a cool project but I'm also not sure how to respond or what kind of conversation is worth having, though I'd like to keep up the conversation a bit to at least make connections with historians in my field. They've offered to meet with me to discuss further, but what kinds of questions should I be asking? 

On top of what others have said, I hope I had asked more about the institutional support for professional training and development (as opposed to the intellectual training), and you can probably also gauge people's interests in/open-mindedness about those matters through the conversation. 
For instance, what if I want to learn how to do digital humanities (e.g. historical GIS, Python, or statistical analysis)? What if I want to get systematically trained in pedagogy (as in going through a program to get a certificate and create a portfolio that involves multi-year commitment and effort)? What are the opportunities and (funding and other) support if I want to propose and organize a workshop? Are there professional duties/services expected of me, e.g. chairing a graduate studies groups for a year or more, or serving on some committees?
I personally find the experience of performing professional duties/community services, such as organizing events/workshops with invited speakers, very practical and helpful, especially in terms of learning how to navigate the logistics, e.g. "oh gosh all the nitty-gritty that can possibly go wrong! (and the tax exempt forms!)" 
 
 
I heard drastically different descriptions of my advisor's mentoring style before starting my program, and ended up asking mine about it directly. It turns out my advisor is more than happy to adjust their advising style to students' different needs and styles. (I am the type of students who wants to have at least weekly discussions with their advisor; but I know my case isn't necessarily common.) So, if there are no red flags, stay a bit of open-minded until you know your advisor(s) more might not be too bad an idea!

"What question did you not ask at your visit that you wish you had?"
 
Probably best asked over a beer, but pandemic.

I have never personally regretted having gotten my PhD in history; it enabled me to have so many experiences I would never have had otherwise, to live abroad, to make wonderful friends, live the life of the mind, etc. I'd be a very different person if I had stayed in the job I worked in before applying to PhD programs; the experience of the PhD helped me grow so much and I would never take it back.
But, I want to second a lot of what the OP said.
There really are so few jobs. When I was first applying to PhD programs in 2011 I knew that the job market was bad, but like OP said, I didn't really understand how bad and how much worse it was going to get. Everyone should look at this:
 
It could well be that there will be far fewer jobs in the next few years than there have been this last decade.
In recent years history has lost more majors than any other discipline. See here https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/11/27/new-analysis-history-major-data-says-field-new-low-can-it-be-saved Admins seeing fewer majors and lower enrollments require fewer history classes, which means they need fewer history profs, so retirees are not replaced and job adverts are rare.
The situation is worse than a "bad" job market. There have been more than 1,000 History PhDs awarded per year every year for the last decade even though the number of TT jobs for assistant professors is far, far lower. The numbers are just horrible. In popular fields (American and European) you do literally compete against hundreds of other people - including frequently, nearly all of your professional friends unless they are significantly older or younger than you. The experience of applying for these jobs is extremely time-consuming, brutally stressful and heartbreaking.
When I was applying I had this idea that I would come to the end of my PhD and there would be this sort of, referendum moment - either I would get a job or I would not and if I did not, I would move on and do something else with my life. But this is not how it works in reality. One of my advisors told me it often takes people three years on the market to get a job, if they do at all, and frequently in those three years they have to hustle to find temporary positions year to year, whether its extending their PhD, a postdoc, a VAP, adjuncting, "self-funding" (if you're rich), or one of those paper positions where you get affiliation but no salary (again, if you're rich). The reality is that in the final years of this process you often have to continuously make decisions about how much you are willing to sacrifice in pursuit of the dream of a TT job. You may have to weigh whether it's better to work on more publications or take a side job, if you should take an onerous adjucting teaching load that may leave you no time for research or writing good job applications, if it is worth it to uproot your life and move (at your own expense) across the country for a one year position (a bigger challenge for anyone with a partner or spouse). Living with not knowing what you will be doing the next year, and having to weigh these decisions can be very stressful. And, you may feel when you begin a PhD that you would be willing to move anywhere, take any job, do anything, sacrifice anything, in pursuit of the dream, but you cannot necessarily anticipate how those sacrifices will feel when you are older (especially if you have a partner or children).
I want to echo what the OP said about how a PhD comes as a enormous cost, even if it's fully funded, because the true cost is time. Yes, if you get into a good program you may be making a guaranteed 30k (though, to be honest, in many cases less) with health insurance for five to seven years. There is something to that, yes. But being a grad student freezes you at entry level, both financially and socially (as you are always in a junior, subordinate position in the career) for somewhere between 5-10 years. Your salary will likely not increase over your time in the PhD, or if it does, it will do so only minimally. Often, it will not keep up with inflation or rising cost of living, especially if your program is in an expensive city so you will actually be able to live less well in your final PhD years than at the beginning. What seems to you like a generous, comfortable salary when you are 22 or 24 may feel frustratingly or embarrassingly low when you are 30 and your friends from college are starting to make good salaries, get married, have children, and buy houses. You will still be making the same money you made when you entered your PhD.
You need to consider the opportunity cost. The true cost is everything else you could have been doing and earning during the time you were getting your PhD if you weren't doing the PhD. In all that time you spent being a grad student and making what is a 22-years-olds entry-level wage you lose all the time you could have been investing into another career path, in which you could have been moving up, getting raises and promotions, saving for retirement and getting that sweet compounding interest. If you do go on to get a TT job, your time spent in your fully-funded PhD will have been an investment, but if in the end you transition into another field you may be starting over at square one and you will have lost the opportunity for all those other gains forever. 
There are enormous benefits to getting a PhD in history. The work of a history grad student is fun, intellectually stimulating, fulfilling, and prestigious. You usually get a flexible schedule, meet interesting amazing people, travel, etc. But you pay an enormous price - financially in lost time and opportunity, and too often with damage to your mental health. Things worked out very well for me personally and I don't regret my PhD at all. But I know for sure that even though I thought I knew all about how the job market was bad, I did not really understand what the true costs would be when I signed up for this path.
 
 
 
 

I really need to pitch my TV show Merovingians: LOL you thought GoT was Bloody and Confusing

I'll wade carefully here as an old-timer. 
When I started my PhD in 2012, I was already ambivalent about being a professor or entering academia. I wanted to get my PhD and work as a historian in a very large museum, which was viable then.
I didn't know what academia was really about. 
I had never run a classroom.  I was told that to be a TA meant running discussion sections and grading but I had no idea that there were positions that involved only grading.  Due to declining student enrollments, my department dropped discussion sections and added more grading positions. Opportunities for teaching sessions before candidacy were quite limited. I didn't get to do it until after I passed my candidacy (partially due to fellowships in my first 2 years). I fell in love with teaching and interacting with students but stopped short at "quality over quantity" approach, unlike so many graduate students who focused on "more classes I teach, the better my CV will look for teaching jobs!"
Throughout my time, I was truly bogged down by heavy coursework load (due to fellowship requirements), research (including writing funding applications and trip and budget planning), conference papers, a journal article, and mental health issues that nearly took over my life. I simply had no time to develop and hone skills that employers valued such as computer programming, organizing and executing events and conferences, etc., etc. However, I did immensely improve my written and oral communication with the incredible support of professors, mentors, and colleagues. I did get to travel the world (literally) which I would have not been able to do until... maybe retirement, much thanks to the fund-raising that I did.  I never imagined that I would have an overall satisfactory experience compared to many horror stories that I had heard.
The pandemic hit when I was interviewing for postdocs. When the campus shut down and hiring freeze went into effect everywhere, I realized that there would be no second wave of postdocs and visiting assistant professor positions that came between March-May. I took advantage of one semester of funding that remaining to postpone my dissertation defense.  I realized that a December graduation meant that I wouldn't be able to secure an academic job to start in January. I started getting used to the idea that I would have to apply for non-academic jobs in this situation and I gradually became OK with that because I've been there before. 
Now, i am applying for a combination of academic and non-academic jobs to see what will bite. When it comes to non-academic jobs, my topic or historical content knowledge does not matter and it is important to separate myself from those and focus on the skills that I have to bring to those jobs. The PhD is simply another degree on your resume, nothing more, but you will have a section under "Work/Grant-Writing/Teachingetc. Experience" which you can tout the skills you have used to complete the degree.
Do I regret going for my PhD? Nope. I was so hungry for an opportunity to dive deep and become an expert in specific historical fields. I went through a MA program (2008-2010) and studied a new language abroad for several months (2010-2011) just to be sure that the PhD was what I wanted, even though I decided in 2006. The key to survival, I think for me, was knowing that I had prior work experience and was developing valuable skills (especially fund-raising if you're great at it) which to highlight while applying for non-academic jobs. And perhaps the comfort of knowing that I may never need to work to become fluent in all of my reading languages again.
And I'm a risk-adverse person. Really know yourself before you apply. Are you the type of person who can complete a big job which you've devoted hours and hours and breathed your life and walk away within weeks?  Do you have the grit and resiliency to overcome obstacles that come your way? The PhD journey is much more suited to street-smart people than book-smart people. If you're the latter type, go for the MA which is less intense in the way of non-coursework stuff.

Even though I was told by a professor that I might have gotten a job had I been born a decade earlier--"maybe"--I would never advise someone not to pursue a personal or professional goal. (The day I passed quals, the committee member who represented my outside field said Think of yourself as a teacher. By which he meant that it was my responsibility to give people information that enabled them to achieve their goals--my opinion of those goals notwithstanding.)
I would (and have) recommended doing a herculean amount of due diligence--including reading the OP again and again. There may be "nothing new" to some readers who are aware of some of the patterns that have been developing since the early 1990s. To many others, the post adds crucial nuance.
 I also recommend setting up job alerts in Linkedin and elsewhere so one understands how graduate degrees may or may not translate into requirements for job qualifications and professional experience. Some consultancies and government agencies require the kind of research experience that cannot quite be satisfied by a master's degree.
FWIW/Neither here nor there, I do take slight exception to the lumping together of the academic job market for professional academic historians as the most important key performance indicator of the profession's vitality or sustainability. 

For a long time, this paralleled my thoughts on the matter. But, as an adviser pointed out, a guaranteed 5-7 years making $30k with excellent health insurance coverage isn't nothing in this prepostapocalyptic hellscape. So I'm not so sure anymore.

Years ago I frequented Gradcafe while applying for a PhD in history. Not all of the advice I received here was good, but much of it was. Partly as a result of that advice, I was admitted to a good PhD program where I had excellent mentors, made some dear friends, and learned a great deal about the craft of writing history. Everyone battles depression at some point while doing a PhD, but on the whole I remember my PhD with fondness. So hear I am with my PhD in hand, ready to pay it forward. This is the best advice I can give you: don't do a PhD in history. Don't do it.
I know that you have heard about how bad the job market is, but "bad" is misleading. It suggests that it is highly competitive, in a slump, leaving some good people behind, or something like that. The reality is that the historical profession is dying. There are no jobs and there won't be any for a long time. By that I don't mean that there are few jobs. I mean that there are none. My field is a large one. Every big history department in America has at least one scholar in my area. And this year there is not a single job that I'm eligible to apply for. If you complete a PhD, you need to realize that there is a good chance that you'll be in the same boat. And if there are two or three jobs when you finish, you'll be competing against hundreds of other scholars desperate for work. Many of your competitors will be 5-7 years out of their own PhDs, have books with good presses, and years of teaching experience. Even if you show enormous promise, why would risk-averse departments hire you instead of someone who has been doing the job well for years?
I attended a top-five PhD program (overall and in my field). I wrote an award-winning dissertation. I graduated with multiple good publications. I received excellent course evaluations for the courses I TA'ed and taught as instructor of record. My mentors wrote fulsome letters of recommendation. I produced polished job application materials. I did a postdoc at another top-five university. I am a friendly person who interviews well. None of those things altered the brute fact that there were no jobs. My profile isn't that of a superstar, but it is the profile of someone who did everything you're supposed to do. 
I'm not bitter about my experience. I have an academic adjacent job that is in some ways better than a tenure-track job. I don't really regret doing a PhD, but I am keenly aware that it came at an enormous cost. If you're on this board, you've heard the rule now that you should never pay for a graduate degree in history. That's true, but the real cost of doing a PhD is time. Everyone pays for their PhD. Even if you are among the vanishingly small number of prospective historians who get a tenure-track job, it will probably take seven years of a PhD work and then several years of struggling in temporary employment. That's probably a decade of your life receiving highly specialized training for a job that doesn't really exist anymore. You will pour most of your youth into a discipline that almost certainly won't have a place for you. 
What should you do? If you are thinking about applying for a PhD in history, don't. If you can't imagine doing something else, work on strengthening your imagination. There are lots of ways to engage in the life of the mind outside of the university. If you are in the first few years of a PhD program, I would recommend getting an M.A. and getting out. If you are close to the end of your program, it might make sense to hang on and finish. But you should write a good-enough dissertation and spend most of your time figuring out how to build a path toward a non-academic future.
Again, I'm not angry or bitter. I had a good experience in my PhD experience and will continue to publish some. But the historical profession is dying. History enrollments have fallen more than enrollments in any other discipline. Administrators are cutting lines or even eliminating departments. It probably won't get better for a generation, if ever.