histori041512

Re: canceled recruitment visits
Many airlines are being more understanding than usual about canceled trips and will at least let you transfer what you paid to another trip. I've received emails from United indicating they'll change tickets booked through March 31st for free for 12 months.

I am pretty set on Michigan but I really did want to see the town and meet the cohort and other grad students. I was planning to try to scope out a potential roommate. I'll have to start looking at Facebook groups so something now.

I don't see the harm in asking to meet one-on-one. The worst they can say is no and if that is the case, you can ask to Skype. 
I am sorry about your plane ticket. You can always try to contact the airline to see if they can refund you or give you credit to use at a later date on another flight.

I don't see the harm in asking to meet one-on-one. The worst they can say is no and if that is the case, you can ask to Skype. 
I am sorry about your plane ticket. You can always try to contact the airline to see if they can refund you or give you credit to use at a later date on another flight.

Same with UF, I had already purchased my plane ticket. Classes have not been cancelled yet, would it be bad form to contact my POIs and see if they’re amenable to meeting if I come anyway?

I just got notified that I've been accepted to Oxford. I am so excited. Fingers crossed for funding... 
I was wondering, is it common practice to email your potential supervisor to thank them for their support and/or let them know whether you plan to accept the offer? 

Just received my first acceptance! I've been offered full tuition plus a TAship at Lehigh for their MA program. I've also just sent emails to my two waitlists to see if it's worth it to take this offer. Relieved I have one offer on the table now. 

The fact that there still exist programs like this in the year of our lord two thousand and twenty...

I want to cosign. I had to replace my laptop in the middle of my first year, but the one I bought (extremely cheap and unreliable, don't be like me) ended up dying early in my third year. I found a laptop that had the specs I wanted at the price I could afford, and it has been good to me (it's an Acer Aspire E5-575 if anyone is interested). However, I recently went through a horror show trying to recover the documents I had on my last laptop because the external drive they were on was lost in my latest move. I HIGHLY recommend you have a reliable laptop at the very start of grad school. It's great if your current laptop does the job, but if you're having any issues, get an upgrade. Also, treat your external drive like a block of gold. And maybe back stuff up on the Cloud, too. 

I second that. With Microsoft Word, you can set it up that the document is automatically saved on OneDrive (you get some amount of storage for free, which should be enough for a lot of text documents).
I don’t know much about MacBooks, but my laptop is pretty old (older than yours) and it’s still reliable. If you do get a new laptop, I recommend one with an SSD drive because it makes it so much faster: it never takes my laptop more than a second to load despite its old age. The ones with SSD (as opposed to HDD only) are more expensive, but when it comes to laptops, when you buy a more expensive one, it may save you money in the long run. Also, if your battery starts losing charge fast, you can always replace just the battery without buying a new laptop.

I went into my program with mindset of a clean slate. New laptop, new schoolbag, blah blah blah. That said, I had an 8 year old MacBook. It was giving me a lot of issues while I was writing my MA thesis, and one day I actually had to open up the back and re-seat the RAM. Not the end of the world, and my thesis was backed up in my google drive, but still a scary moment when everything was formatted and near final submission. Consider it, if you can. PhD programs are long, tech doesn't last forever, and changing computers in the middle can be incredibly inconvenient. 
That said, for most historians, a MacBook is overkill. I got a little HP on Amazon for half of what I would've paid for MacBook air, and it's just fine.

I'm trying to decide if I should start budgeting for a new laptop for the fall. I have a 4 year old Macbook Air and I am wondering if anyone has suggestions on whether or not a new laptop is recommended?

quite a lot to unpack here. you assume that I’m not using this as a way to put a better application forward next year which is quite a big assumption to make. I’d like to recontextualize: I said I was a bit put off by a rejection not being BCC’d. For you to take that and then imply that I’m not listening to advice, am more concerned with being “right” than growing and many of the other things you have implied in your response is quite the assumption.
The people on this forum are humans. We have reactions in the heat of the moment. Not everything human beings do is always about “helping to build a dynamic that encourages experienced members to stay and continue to help”. For this to then be applied on a bigger scale to “this is why academic historians don’t like speaking with undergraduates” is again a big assumption to make and if anything just highlights the issues with gate keeping in academia as an institution and the way it treats the human beings who make it up, something that I have consistently had to deal with as a marginalized person.
I’m relatively new to this website and I’ve learned a lot of things about the grad school process. People have been very kind to me. The way a small comment has been blown out of proportion and the way I’ve been mischaracterized and told I have an attitude because of it is very disheartening and doesn’t make me want to reach out and in the future.
That’s all I have to say about this. Have a good weekend and I hope we all can be kinder to those on the other side of the keyboard. 

Truly shocked I got into Michigan. I had totally lost all hope after my last rejection from Indiana Bloomington. Was late to work from getting sidetracked celebrating. 
Accepted for comparative genocide studies, US Native Americans and German Jews in contemporary society. 

Truly shocked I got into Michigan. I had totally lost all hope after my last rejection from Indiana Bloomington. Was late to work from getting sidetracked celebrating. 
Accepted for comparative genocide studies, US Native Americans and German Jews in contemporary society. 

I am not sure if all acceptances went out today. I got a Merit Fellowship so I am not sure if they sent that out earlier than others.

Truly shocked I got into Michigan. I had totally lost all hope after my last rejection from Indiana Bloomington. Was late to work from getting sidetracked celebrating. 
Accepted for comparative genocide studies, US Native Americans and German Jews in contemporary society. 

Truly shocked I got into Michigan. I had totally lost all hope after my last rejection from Indiana Bloomington. Was late to work from getting sidetracked celebrating. 
Accepted for comparative genocide studies, US Native Americans and German Jews in contemporary society. 

Truly shocked I got into Michigan. I had totally lost all hope after my last rejection from Indiana Bloomington. Was late to work from getting sidetracked celebrating. 
Accepted for comparative genocide studies, US Native Americans and German Jews in contemporary society. 

I second this! I didn't even see the rejection on the Results page until you pointed it out. For what it's worth, my portal hasn't updated, so I'm assuming they received an email.

Same here. I’ve only heard from Columbia so far... I feel like life is on hold until I know if I’m going somewhere!

Being in Limbo makes me want to throw up but also laugh until I can't anymore. Hopefully, we know soon. 

Being in Limbo makes me want to throw up but also laugh until I can't anymore. Hopefully, we know soon. 

I have no email or changes to my BC portal either.

I have no email or changes to my BC portal either.