qbtacoma

That's a really interesting path for your interests to develop! Utah State is great, and that's too bad about the hiring freeze.

Pizzamaker, chef, maid, intern: wannabe academe!

That is terrible! Very sorry to hear it.

Is dropping out the only option here, or is it possible to take a break? Taking a semesterlong or yearlong break might be a better choice, one that's probably easier to make after completing your Master's. I second the proposal to talk to an advisor about this. This is the sort of thing they can really help you with. Also, are you feeling burned out already or just intensely enthused about this other artsy option? If taking a break will help cure burnout then you should definitely do it. What does S think about all this? Since your "pros" list is very much about S and your quality of life then S will be able to help you weigh the pros and cons.

I look forward to interacting with older students in graduate school.

The last sentiment doesn't sound bad, it just sounds like you have different preferences than many other folks, which is fine. One thing to consider is whether the Ph.D is really, truly going to give you options outside of academia since you haven't decided on that path yet. Maybe considering kids would be easier if you made that decision first. Plus, the financial costs of children are quite high, so you may want to work outside academia just to build a nest egg/deal with your debt. If having kids is really important to your husband he should be willing to step up and agree to be the primary caregiver. That means that he should commit to being the one who stays home from work when the kids are sick, the one who feeds the kids, the one who gets up in the night most of the time. If you eventually resent him/the kids for taking up so much of your time you feel sabotaged in your career, that's not good for anyone. If having kids matters so much to him then he should back it up, especially since it matters slightly less for you. I'm not saying your husband hasn't already offered to do this or that he wouldn't do it, but knowing that you won't always be the one solving the family's problems and taking care of things may make having children more doable for you.

For the GRE, Princeton Review is the only way to go. I found Kaplan's advice less than helpful ("attack the reading" is not specific!) while PR broke it down for you. However, I did buy Kaplan for the extra practice tests. One of the best ways to study is to simply take the test a lot, especially particular sections that you have trouble on.

Here's mine! Actually, after struggling for a bit, I have given up inserting the image. Here's the link. Wordle

Oh, yeah, laminated and everything. The next time you go to the DMV to get your license renewed there's a box on the form you can check to renew your atheist card too. It's so convenient these days!

I'm not in your field, but my two cents: the economy is so bad and the prospects in academia are also so bad that I would take the job. It's only for a year or two (and a year can go fast!), you already suspect that you would enjoy the job, and it would build your resume for non-academic work as well as establish a network in case academia doesn't pan out. People in your field can better speak to the risks of losing touch and whatnot, but I'd say go for it! Plus, if just a year or two outside the academy was enough to disqualify people, none of the non-traditional or gap year applicants would ever make it.

Wow. That is a great idea.

I don't like beer myself, but I had a friend who grew up in Park City, Utah, where the Polygamy Porter brew is apparently quite nice.

I agree with BadgerHopeful that there's been a lot of hostility happening, but I don't think that it is from the stress of applying or people making comments about rating each others' chances. Rather I think it is coming from the rather intense conversations on the future of history thread and others where basically people seem to be dismissive or aggressive with no provocation. We should all be capable of disagreeing about theoretical things without getting derisive with each other or voting down others for opinions we disagree with (rather than bad forum behavior). Just because people do hold grudges or are nasty in real life doesn't mean we have to create that environment here. Making our own positive discussion environment isn't "lying about the way the field is." To start the positive interaction process: thumbs up for all! Edited to add: Also, if in any way what I've said anywhere on the forum has felt like a personal attack, I'm sorry. It is difficult sometimes to correctly convey meaning over the internet, and I have been at times careless with my language.

Laos is certainly an extremely diverse nation - even the national language, Lao, has something like five or six dialects which are almost other languages, and linguists apparently can't even agree if Lao has five or six tones(!). There are also a large number of ethnic groups, especially impressive for the small land area. Estimates have ranged as high as 132 (the country's post office's estimate as it wants to make stamps commemorating all of them), depending on who is counting. We don't hear too much about it, though, because Laos is almost a case study of multicultural harmony - the big exceptions are persecution of the Hmong by the government which is just leftover consequences of Hmong aid for the US during the Vietnam War, and some tension surrounding Thai people in Laos which is often spillover from the formal relations between Thailand and Laos. If you ever visit, I highly recommend picking up a book published by Lao Insight Books called Laos...an indicative fact-book. It contains information about many aspects of Laotian life from a number of sources and is meant to document the country in flux. I am quite jazzed about it since very rarely are small countries documented like this. I recall, for example, a discussion on the Economist website a while back about good histories of Thailand and less than ten English books could even be named.

Ah. I see where the difficulty comes in. I should make more use of the smily thingys! I do agree with your advice in general.

Uh, yeah. That's why I have not one, but several Plan Bs, and this thread is about Plan Bs. So clearly what I described above was not delusion but rather hope. I think having hope is important for sticking out grad school as long as it is tempered with some common sense. Also I don't see grad school so much as a means to an end as an end in itself (doing what I love) with a decent chance to continue doing it for the rest of my life.

As all other methods of ranking have come under sharp criticism, I'd like to get the ball rolling. While number of publications may be tempting as a solid standard of comparison, I would caution that it could privilege male over female academics since women are the ones who not only physically create the children (and rightly need time off for that) but also have their time drained in order to take care of children. Generally even men who value parenthood devote less time to their children, because they aren't expected to give more and so they can. So, with that in mind, here are a few ways to "measure" professors: Number of publications (with caveat above) -Especially number of publications in high-impact journals Number of years in the field (which will hopefully translate to grad students as more networking opportunities) Books produced vs. articles Number of accolades (named chairs, teaching awards, etc) For the sciences, number of NSF or other important grants earned Number of existing grad students Number of former grad students who went on to find jobs in academia (or wherever you want to work) Honestly, except for the two metrics I'm not taking any of these into account. I'm choosing a lot of younger academics and academics whose work I like and publication productivity isn't terribly important to me as a grad student. I'm going to be looking at are what existing grad students say about a professor's personality (in order to weed out the dysfunctional ones).

I suppose the basic issue is that I don't agree that multilingual/multicultural nations are not nation-states. I think nation-states can have even vibrant sub-cultures and still be nation-states, though perhaps that's because I'm American. Though I suppose I would draw the line at people killing each other over politics, which would take Russia out of the nation-state category (but not the USSR if it effectively suppressed separatist opposition, like Tito did in Yugoslavia). So the US, then, would not have been a nation-state before 1865. But it may have been after the post-Revolutionary scuffles died down and before people started killing each other over extending slavery - I don't know, because that's not really my era.

I define a nation-state broadly as a discrete area in which the most legitimate actor is the formal government. Almost all people who live in the discrete area are citizens (except those who the formal government explicitly, consistently exclude) who are bound together by shared, overlapping imagined communities. The two main points are the formal government which interacts with people/governments outside national borders (and, less importantly, with its own citizens), and that generally most people feel like part of the national community. So the US conquering new territory up until the 20th century doesn't negate my definition because gaining new territory which may not fit the criteria above doesn't erase the existing nation-state. Having qualified actors other than the national government (such as local government or informal authority figures) doesn't negate my definition as long as the national government has the final say. Also having some people in the national boundaries who are not citizens doesn't negate it, because most people are. And even if many people disagree about a certain national policy/cultural value doesn't mean the nation-state doesn't exist, because as long as a majority of people agree with a given group of ideas that define their nation then it exists. For example, most Americans would agree that the US is exceptional, that independence is a good value, that hard work brings rewards, that Jesus Christ is the Lord, that the military should serve at the pleasure of the President with certain checks from the legislative branch, etc. Having other cultural ideas floating around doesn't undermine this either because the US explicitly values multiculturalism (unlike Germany, in which people whose great-grandparents who emigrated from Turkey are still called "Turkish" rather than German). I don't think saying that just because it didn't happen just like it did in [insert favored test country here] then it must not be true. There are many paths to the same end. Also: the American west was in no way empty and Anglos moving out there were not "migrating" but conquering. Get thee to some Patricia Limerick.

That makes a lot of sense. In a way you're already living a Plan B so it's not such a big deal to delay thinking about it.

How were the US and USSR not nation-states?

But doesn't the great expense, certain stress and heartache of grad school make you nervous? What if it's all for nothing? Not thinking about it at all seems like a dangerous plan to me.

Go check out the city guides section for the places where your programs are. I'd bet that most have some discussion of this. Personally my goal is to not own a car, not only in grad school but afterward as well (though that will only work if a place has good public transit/bike lanes/is not LA). I see it as my contribution to stopping global warming. I'm pretty sure that all of the cities I might end up in have decent bus systems, but I might have to commute pretty far to places that I can afford to live.

You can potentially get them excited about having you, as well as advice about how to best tailor your application. I've had replies from some very gracious professors who told me what the admissions committee looks for. In one case I actually had a professor tell me that his department was looking for people with x interest (which was one of the many research directions that I could be happy with), and that allowed me to write a really specific SOP. However, you can also make an unprofessional impression. I did because I copy-pasted my "about me" blurb between emails and accidentally double posted the text of the first two sentences in one email. Not particularly bad, but...yeesh. I did feel stupid.

Thinking about history through the nation-state perspective has obscured the fact that many people don't practically live under that structure (tribal leadership in Afghanistan, for instance). I think we'll see some modification of the nation-state era to include discussions of why societies didn't jump on the nation-state train. I've seen a lot of discussion of this in political science but not in history (but that may just mean I'm uninformed).