antifarecruiter

I applied to only UCSC's History of Consciousness, and I'm officially unofficially in (the dept sent me a letter, but I'm still waiting on Grad Division). Good luck!

I've been considering living in SJ, but I have a car. I might still live in SC. Have only really begun thinking about it.

I say this only as someone who just got provisionally accepted into HistCon (their graduate division sends out letters after the department does) and who's currently taking a graduate class there, and my comment only relates to HistCon. HistCon is a unique program (perhaps even more unique than most unique programs in the US). It's much more Marxist than most programs, much more (continentally) philosophical than most programs, and much more interdisciplinary than most programs. To get accepted, you have to lay out a clear reason why you couldn't do your project just in a literature department or an anthropology department or a political science department, etc. If you think that you definitely want to do something that's theoretically sophisticated, interdisciplinary, and highly political, then HistCon might make sense for you. If you're still considering HistCon, I highly suggest that you look at what their faculty do and that you look at their course offerings for the past few years. You'll get a strong sense of HistCon's commitments to theory and politics. You'd also notice this by looking at the kinds of projects that grad students there are working on. HistCon is a department that expects you to reach out to prospective advisors beforehand. I'm not sure that you couldn't get in without doing that, but if you're interested, you should probably shoot an email to whoever you're thinking of as a potential advisor, if no one else. In my application, I pointed to (legitimate) reasons why I thought everyone there could be helpful to me. I'm not sure that you need to do that, but I also think it's helpful to demonstrate why at least two or three people could be really helpful to what you're planning to do. I realize that this is an old thread, so this might not be valid anymore, but hopefully it helps! Good luck!