qbtacoma

If you have not yet been accepted to grad school (I wasn't quite sure from your post), you could take a year off to build a nest egg. Real estate, depending on your area, often has a lot of opportunity. I know someone who works with people who have declared bankruptcy and are in danger of losing their houses; he negotiates with their creditors to try to prevent this and while he works 60+ hours a week, he makes a lot of money. Finance and banking could also give you a solid income, and while I know people who weren't trained in those fields and got jobs in them, that was before the recession. But it is something to check out. And let me just say that I hear you on the inconsiderate siblings issue. My sympathies. If you are worried about paying for Master's programs, don't apply to terminal Master's programs unless there is a chance for outside funding. You might try doing a few Americorps jobs - a friend of mine has had some great experiences doing public history and archives work in national parks, and other perks like loan forgiveness are part of those programs. Also consider Canadian programs: the state of funding for higher education is a bit better than for US schools.

I'll bet the Econ department at the University of Houston is giving each other high fives for dodging this bullet.

Well, we do make jokes, but we don't like to hear jokes about things which portray the people to whom you are speaking in an unflattering light - appearance, mannerisms, having our mistakes pointed out etc. - without knowing each other really well or the butt of the joke being prepared for it. There are "roasts" in which people expect that, but otherwise jokes between strangers definitely tend toward the non-personal.

Seconded to Natsteel's advice on applying to a variety of programs, not just terminal MAs. As far as the language goes, do acknowledge in your SOP that it is an area you will work on by doing x, y, and z actions. Take summer classes at your local community college, do intensive self-study, hire a tutor, whatever. Spin it into a positive by saying "see, I'm proactive about this, you won't even know it was a problem when I arrive." So don't feel too limited by your language ability. If it really is a problem like you need to learn Khmer and French and Chinese by the fall, then you might just want to take a year and study language, but barring that, you are probably fine.

Well, what is the argument for hyphens? Myself, I don't use them, because the ethnicity or nationality is the modifier of "American." Just as you might say "a nice American" or "a corpulent American" without a hyphen, so you would say "a Chinese American" or "German American." A hyphen isn't called for in this case, but I don't know the formal linguistic reason.

Thanks for sharing - this is an excellent example of the difficulty of measuring ability in a test.

If it is feasible, take the train. I can get almost all the way up the west coast for less than $150 PLUS five boxes of stuff fifty pounds each, no extra charge. I'm having I don't have any furniture or pets, so that helps. Actually the stuff I have the most trouble purging (since my sentimental things are still with my parents) is random office supplies that I *might* use someday. I feel bad about wasting it.

Here is a real life example of the kind of student mocked in The Onion. I had to share.

If you're going to generalize about half the population of an entire continent, I suggest you do better than that. C'mon - lay out those reasons for us! Pretend we're stupid and we don't understand what you are trying to imply.

Hi there! The advice you get here depends a lot upon the field you plan to go into, as the guidelines for being a good candidate vary widely. For example, historians of the Middle East or medieval Europe need to come fluent in several languages already, while this is less of a concern for Africanists or Americanists. Also the subfields are very important for assessing the quality of a program at the graduate level. UC Berkeley has an excellent reputation as a history program overall, for example, but you should not go there as a Latin Americanist because they do not have enough professors in that subfield to give you full exposure to the field. One thing to keep in mind is that MA programs in the US are rarely fully funded, especially now that the recession has put so many public universities in a difficult position. It is not at all worth it to take out loans for a degree in history - period. If you can pay for it yourself, that is one thing, but loans for a humanities degree are never going to give you a good enough salary to pay back the debt. As far as getting out there and doing history, there are some options: getting hired as a curator for a museum, as you mention, public history (especially in the National Park Service, but there are often fine local history societies who require historians), library work, etc. As you can see, these options are not "pure" history - really nothing is except for academia, and these alternatives usually require other kinds of training and are often as difficult to find work in as regular academia. Though you could always freelance your own documentaries and such. I'm just brainstorming here, so don't take my word as indicative of all the possibilities there are, but sadly our work in history is difficult to do outside of independent wealth and/or academia. And for academia, you need the PhD.

Thanks for this. As Dan Savage so wisely says, there's no such person as "The One," but there are a lot of people who could be rounded up to one.

I'm not forcing my partner to play second fiddle to me, if that's what you're getting at. I meant "movable" in the sense that one doesn't have to be in any particular place to be a teacher, musician, etc. Or a stay-at-home parent, for that matter. And yeah, compatibility of life goals is actually important - I would rather not go through the heartache of being in love with someone whose career ambitions were in competition with mine.

The Onion is a joke newspaper. The particular incident isn't real, but it is funny in part because it closely resembles stuff people actually go through.

I am extremely curious about what this scandalous field may be. Please share if you feel comfortable!

What is confusing? I'm happy to restate.

High five!

I'm dating someone already, but if at any point I'm single in grad school I plan to say the following thing to any alluring fellow grad students: "Now, I think I'm totally worth it, but just so you know that by being in a serious relationship with me you are committing to always choosing my career first." This statement is almost guaranteed to thoroughly douse ardor. In this way I hope to sidestep the two body problem. That's also partly why I'm dating someone with moveable ambitions.

With a small program and the fact that your grade isn't the make-or-break grade of your graduate career, I would say nothing and just avoid the professor in the future. Professors are human too, though, and this may have simply been a one-time mess up (so consider taking a course again). But speaking up at this point will make you seem like a grade grubber and absolutely will reflect badly upon you.

Hi there! You should know that the type of military history you are describing is very unpopular right now. Honestly, the best place in the US to actually study tactics, etc exclusively is in a military college like West Point or Ft. Leavenworth, but obviously you would have to join the military to do that (and they would probably tell you to study something else). There's a new-ish military historian at Wisconsin, John Hall, who studies "ethnohistorical examination of military conflict and cooperation between the Native peoples of North America and European colonial powers", but that doesn't really sound like what you want to study. TheUniversity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill does offer a degree in military history, but I'm not sure what that includes. I would contact some of those faculty and ask them to describe the field, see if their program offers the kind of history you want or if they have suggestions. Best of luck!

I would stay far, far away from Wells Fargo, which has in my experience often tried to pull a bunch of stunts by covertly adding bizarre fees or other bad behavior. If you qualify for a local credit union that might be a good option, simply because credit unions tend to be less unethical in their business than other banks. ING has a great reputation; I'm probably going to get HSBC myself when I move to grad school.

I've said this elsewhere, but the same advice applies here: go local. Unless you are in, like, Philadelphia, it is very likely that your local area will be understudied. Often local libraries or government agencies will have collections of old newspapers, city council meeting minutes, diaries, etc. I think it would be somewhat easier to find scholarship gaps by identifing a group of primary sources or an event, then checking the secondary literature to see how much work has been done, rather than divining the gap by reading secondary literature. For sure take tickle's advice on reading the literature too.

Debbie Downer there is a doomsday troll. Please ignore. I do think that I would have made some different choices if I hadn't gone to college right out of high school, but I am overall satisfied with what my education got me. I chose to go to a private school and am about $28,000 in debt, but I got out of my education exactly what I wanted - small classes, lots of attention from professors, opportunities for research and meaningful activism on campus, staff support, and nice recommendations for grad school. However, I was relatively lucky in that I knew that I would want to pursue further degrees beyond undergrad, and my particular school was good. That's what made it worth it for me, but I recognize that my situation is special. So much about higher education is about reputation and what we are "supposed" to get out of our educations rather than reality, so I don't blame people for getting in over their heads. My sister went to a private college (before dropping out, thankfully!) which cost the same amount as mine but which was a total piece of shit school. And her debt is way too high for it. She was mistreated or ignored in almost every possible way, but how could she have known before she went there? For the folks that have a lot of debt, I would emphasize that it doesn't mean you are in terrible straights, even though it feels like this thing is hanging over you. I think about my debt sort of like a benign health condition: I need to be able to make enough money to pay for my "medication" (loan payments), which does limit the choices I can make (for example, as long as I have my "health condition" I cannot spend money on travel). However, I don't resent or fear my debt; it is a reality of the way I will have to manage my financial life for the next few years, but I will "heal" from my condition at some point.

It seems to me that this problem could be fixed if there wasn't social pressure to immediately go to college at 18. Then people could decide not only if they wanted to go, but also what to major in to maximize their benefits (monetary and intellectual), and a lot of the predatory lending would wither away. The predatory lending is a symptom of a bad social structure rather than something inevitable or [insert pessimistic verb here]. And I don't find the thread helpful at all, since the OP has stated that this is just a "we're all screwed" PSA. Pointing out problems is easy, and indulging in a sense of outrage is unproductive. How about brainstorming some solutions? How about proposing alternative visions for the higher education structure? No? I'm sure that's too optimistic and hard. Let's just revel in our doom instead.

So what, exactly, are you trying to accomplish with this topic? What's the point of the discussion? Or is this just a PSA about how we're all screwed?

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