qbtacoma

Welcome! Your screen name is amazing. Honestly? For myself, I'm not worried about my numbers so much as my age. I don't feel like I've done very much at all yet and I feel at a disadvantage to people who have had longer to do everything.

kitchen range

Let's say...brutal brutal. As in some students have their graduation delayed because A is a nitpicker for whom no work is good enough. A believes in negative feedback alone. On the other hand, A really goes to bat for A's grad students, and will aggressively promote them at conferences, etc. Is enduring hell with A worth it?

What space-cat said. Also, schools are looking to train the most promising scholars in their fields. The vast majority of innovative students cannot pay to go to graduate school. So, to prevent grad schools from being filled with the rich yet potentially mediocre, funding for graduate study is secured. And you wanna talk about privilege? Privilege is paying for graduate school from your estate, or from Mommy and Daddy. You think that getting paid to go to class is privilege? How about this: I would never be able to afford grad school, not if I worked for the rest of my life. My job prospects are in the nonprofit sector or the service sector. I don't have any innovative (read: product) ideas, business training, or high-income skills. I will never own my own house. However, my economic situation says little about the viability of my ideas, my research skills, or my teaching ability. So any school that wants to hone those has to support me when I go there, period. It isn't privilege on my part (any more than a college education is to begin with) - it is the reality that my excellent academic skills are not useful to the private sector.

Post-docs are pure researchers. They apply for a position with one supervising professor with the goal that at the end of a 1 or 2 year period they will produce a substantial publishable result (like, a book, or a paper in a high impact journal). Post-docs, as you may imagine from the name, are post-dissertation researchers. I'm not sure of the origin of the position, but right now they function as a bit of a safety valve for the overglut of academic job seekers on the market. Instead of quitting entirely when you don't find a job, you hang out and do research until you can. In fact, I hear that in some fields candidates without a post-doc or two aren't even considered - it is that competitive. They are also paid slightly more than grad students, but it's nothing to write home about. ETA: Okay, now I have a question. Say I have two schools with all things equal except for the reputation of my POI in the field. Professor A is quite famous and influential but brutal on grad students (in a bad way, in that former grad students advise me not to work with A). Professor B is less well known but is a very supportive advisor - but placement may be an issue later. Which should I pick?

blue whale

The governor is pretty adamant about passing it - we'll see if the Republican party falls in line. But if it does, I think it's going to shut down the state for a bit as people protest until legislators finally repeal it with their tails between their legs. So I don't predict long term direct effects from the bill, though this is clearly a seminal moment in national labor history. I am very interested to watch it play out! With that said, I don't think UW schools are going to be timely about getting all their grad school notices out.

Getting drunk at an interview - talk about self-sabotage!

uncharted waters

Over 10,000 people have protested (and schools have shut down) a recent move by the governor/Republican-controlled legislature to end collective bargaining for public sector employees, require unions to re-certify annually, allow state workers to opt out of paying union dues, require employees to double their health insurance premiums, mandated a higher percentage of employee salaries to retirement, and, finally, the right to fire employees who organize in an effort to stop work or who strike for three days or more. And he has repeatedly threatened to call the National Guard on people who protest.

ethics reform

Congratulations! What wonderful news! And congratulations to historyhopeful too! Does anyone else think that the recent turmoil in Wisconsin will hold up further results? Because I really doubt they are done, and I'm sure plenty of staff/faculty/students are protesting like whoa and damn.

Would you link to that, please?

A point very well made. You are right in that no one needs a Ph.D (or even a high school diploma) to create meaningful, incisive art or commentary. The highest social value of a humanities Ph.D resides, I feel, mostly in the teaching of one's subject, with research as a necessary activity to support this on every level (e.g. research is needed to teach content, but also to teach others how to research). The secondary value is the research produced (though research-oriented folks should chime in). The research is important, though, because it contributes to overall social knowledge. Even a Ph.D who cannot find a job in the market later is still a net benefit to society because of the dissertation and the other articles likely produced during the study period. I don't necessarily see the sharp focus of a humanities Ph.D student as a drawback. The original research is a tool for other teachers and students to utilize in their studies, so even if a particular work is not very well known I think the overall social benefit is still high - the people who most need to know about something now have access to analysis which they did not before. Few reports produced by, say, institutional research in a firm are read by many people, but the value of the research is still high because the people making company policy need to know about it. Now, whether obscure research in the humanities provides as much of a benefit as obscure research in the sciences - that's really up for debate! I can't say I know - it depends. So, to answer your question: no, a Ph.D isn't necessary to the creation of art or interpretation of culture. What a Ph.D brings to the table is excellent teachers in charge of critical thinking (which you mention above) and also the creation of research which better helps those teachers and others even if not highly cited. Is that, at the end of the day, the same benefit as that produced by funding science Ph.Ds? I honestly don't know. Here's where I go on a tangent! The biggest problem in the academic job market right now is that the oversupply of humanities Ph.Ds, while creating the aforementioned net benefit from research, is highly costly for individuals. I do not think that struggling with financial and professional insecurity for years and years is an acceptable outcome for humanities Ph.Ds, but there's only two solutions: dampen the supply by admitting fewer people to grad schools/making grad schools too difficult to bear for most (inhumane!), OR create more university jobs. The second option is too big to discuss here (but it is...expensive), and the first privileges adcomms too much I think in shaping the future of fields - after all, we don't really want to eliminate reasonable competition. Getting into grad school shouldn't guarantee jobs. A third option to reduce oversupply is also quite difficult due to the nature of people who apply. We're A students. We know we're good, we work hard, and we try harder when confronted with our own failure. That mentality doesn't allow us to quit, especially when a good chunk of us have this perception of academia as the one and only place we are qualified to work. We, as a group, look at grad school as a means to an end - the end being a TT job. Given how painful the end result is, we should probably view grad school as an end in itself and develop other life experiences/skills before going (I'm 23, so clearly I haven't followed my own advice). Basically, people need to both know when to quit and have options in places other than academia. Hopefully the net benefit to society of a group of well-trained thinkers and researchers isn't also detrimental to individuals within the group. We're not there, though.

Whoa. Let's not reach too high here. Icarus and all.

Staggering acceptances is likely. Actually I'm surprised that some schools are done so early this year.

beagle eagle

I grew up in Fort Collins, so I'll give this a shot. I don't know that you're going to get furnished places in any apartment complexes - that's not really standard in Fort Collins. However, don't worry about parking - it will be highly irregular to get a place without your own parking space, garage space, or lots of street parking around. The city accommodates cars very well. While there are paid parking garages, there is free parking in Old Town for the first two hours and no parking meters anywhere in the city. Campus has notoriously scrupulous parking police, so you just shouldn't park there unless you have a permit. I think you are going to have lots of trouble finding a place to live in that price range. The trouble is that the campus is near Old Town, where there are cute houses which have been kept up. You're only going to get under a thousand if you have roommates and/or don't mind living in dumpy/unstylish/dark/etc places. The Campus West area (which isn't really on campus - it's west of Shields, around W Elizabeth St) has a lot of housing that the university owns (bad quality) for families and foreign grad students. You might be able to find something around there, but that's where the undergrads go as well. My sister lives in an apartment complex which is new-ish around Lemay, near the hospital. You would definitely have better luck if you looked in the area between College and Lemay. Fort Collins is really sprawling these days to the south - growth has been slower to the east, so you'll find newer, better kept up places which are still closer to campus than places south of Horsetooth. Does this help?

I've been rejected from Wisconsin, too. However, that just means that BadgerHopeful has even more of a chance! I'm rooting for you!

Indeed. Did you hear the Michelle Bachmann scandal recently where she claimed that the Founding Fathers had "solved," which I think she meant "abolished," slavery? Ick.

I've always assumed that people can identify me - I mean, how many people from Tacoma are applying to history programs right now? (Two, including me, unless In Town Rival School had some.) I doubt that silly posts will turn anyone off. The ones to worry about are posts ranking programs or talking down to programs/people.

erratic errata (ETA: damn it can I type it right the first time just once!?)

Dang it I missed it!

Here is one adcomm member's opinion on childhood stories. Check out the comments too for a diversity of professional opinion. The SOP is meant for you to describe/demonstrate why you would fit the program specifically as far as interests, qualifications. Absolutely tell this story in the personal statement, but the SOP is more nuts and bolts. It doesn't have to be the most enjoyable piece of writing ever. When I had my friend (who is in grad school now) look over my SOP, she told me to lose the fancy hook - it ate up my word count and didn't say anything about my goals in history. Besides, your story is extremely charming and is best saved for an in-person interview.

Hm. Nothing yet for me.