Go Weast Young Man

Regarding waitlists - do people who have been watching this process for a couple cycles have a general idea about how the likelihood of getting called up from a waitlist changes as we get closer to the mid April decision deadline? My intuition would be that the odds go down a little each day as the pool of uncommitted accepted students dwindles, but not sure if is offset by a last minute rush of late deciders or anything like that. I know that at any particular schools it's really just dependent on what a handful of accepted students decide, but just curious about the overall trend

Mine was US

For the kind of people who are interested in history grad school, would particularly recommend looking at legal jobs. A lot of people think you need to go to law school and become a lawyer to make money there, but lots of paralegal and even legal assistant jobs (which hire tons of people with humanities\social sciences BAs and no direct experience) pay perfectly good money with health insurance\benefits and room for advancement to be making in your late 20s way more than you would make as a tenured professor

For SOPs does anyone have advice for how they should start? Not how to start writing them, but what's an appropriate kind of opening line. I'm pretty much done drafting but keep going back and forth on the organization.

Thank you! This is very helpful

Looking to next year's application cycle there are two areas I'm not entirely sure how to deal with in my application on which I'd appreciate some input if anyone else has dealt with similar issues before. 1 - My undergrad performance wasn't very good. Not absolutely catastrophic but a B+ average definitely isn't what phd programs are looking for. There's not a sympathetic reason I didn't do well and I didn't particularly overperform in history courses. My work habits were just bad and they got much better in the years afterwards when I had a job. I did much much better in my MA a few years later (both in terms of GPA, research, and building relationships with professors) and put in a lot of prep work in the years in between (mostly reading 200+ books in my field). I know there's not really anything to be done about it now but (1) how much damage should I expect that bad undergrad performance to do to my application in light of more successful graduate work later? and (2) is it generally better to let that later performance speak for itself or to acknowledge the bad undergrad and talk about what I did to improve? 2 - I had several years out of school between undergrad and my MA and will have a couple between my MA and hopeful phd. How much do programs care about your work experience in that time if it's not hyper relevant? I've had some university TAing positions, did some community college teaching, and have had a couple brief contract research projects, but have mostly worked law jobs because I've gotten accustomed to a certain lifestyle (being able to pay my student loans). Is the teaching\research work worth highlighting at all or should I just stick it on the cv and focus on my academic work? Thanks in advance!

Feel free to message me if you have any questions about the program at Brandeis!

Thanks to everyone for the advice! More specifically, my area of interest is in the role of black Americans in shaping US foreign policy, primarily in the Progressive Era, and the intersection of black foreign policy influence with the politics of international emigration. I don't know if that specificity effects anybody's advice here but if so I'd love to hear it, as well as if anyone has recommendations for other programs I should be looking at for my research area (also looking at Duke\UNC\UVA but probably wound't be applying to them this cycle either way) And my MA program is only one year so even if I applied to doctoral programs this fall and got accepted I'd graduate before beginning

Hi everyone, my question is actually more about whether it's a good idea for me to apply this cycle I didn't get into a phd program last cycle, likely because of a weak but not terrible undergrad GPA and fairly thin primary research experience, and knew that applying to top programs was a long shot going in. I'm now in a one year MA program and very unsure about whether one semester of grad school experience will meaningfully improve my application or if it's best to just wait for next year after my thesis is done and I have my degree. I If I applied this cycle my application would be strengthened by a semester of strong grad school grades, rec letters from some professors who are more prominent in my field than my undergrad letter writers, and (hopefully) enough of my thesis done to use it as a writing sample based in real archival work. By next cycle I'll have grades from the full masters program, more experience working with the professors who are writing letters, my completed thesis, and the degree itself. My area of interest is African American history relating to foreign history and empire and my top programs would be NYU, Columbia, and Emory If anyone's had a similar experience or thoughts about how one semester of MA experience would be likely to effect or not effect the strength of my application I'd love to hear about it!

So I've gotten into a couple masters programs in the UK, with the intention of then applying to US phd programs afterwards. I've been talking to undergrad advisers, faculty at these schools, and friends in doctoral programs, but thought it would be a good idea to see if anyone here has additional insights that would be useful in the decision making process. I'm interested in studying the role of race in American foreign policy ~1870-1930, especially as that relates to interaction with expanding European empires of the time, and I had relatively lackluster undergrad grades if that's relevant to how different masters programs would be viewed by admissions committees The schools are Birmingham, Exeter, Kings College London, and University College London. I know that the London schools are generally seen as more prestigious (I don't really care about this but have heard that it holds some weight with admissions committees), that UCL has a lot of faculty in imperial and foreign policy history, and that Birmingham has several Americanists specializing in race in the gilded age I'd greatly appreciate any advice that anyone has about any of these schools or about moving from a UK masters to a US phd program in general!