qbtacoma

One way to get specific is to identify a particular event, especially in the probably understudied local history of your area, and then place it in the wider historical context. McCarthyism is very well studied, but you can assess the extent to which local conditions in your area reflected national trends by looking at crises during that time and place. Did someone get fired for communist sympathies? Did businesses fail? Or perhaps people survived accusations, and what did that look like? I strongly suggest looking into local history and keeping your eyes open for events that make you pay attention. There's a lot of possibilities there, and your thematic focus will be helpful insofar as it will help you narrow your time period. Good luck!

Thanks so, so much to everyone for sharing. This thread is now bookmarked.

It has been almost exactly a year since I graduated, and my life in that year has fairly closely resembled the slacker paragon of tv and ho hos (except that it's video games and Pirate's Booty for me). I do think that I have made less of this time than I might have, and that is almost certainly due to the fact that my friends gave me a job after three months of fruitless anxiety on that front, so I really have not had to deal with looking for a job for too long or enduring a crappy retail/corporate position. I haven't been a total slacker - I've been reading in my field and I have a research assistantship which has whetted my appetite for grad school - but I lack a lot of the experiences that contribute to increased maturity. (I don't think I'm immature, per se, but I have yet to endure 9 to 5.)

fly larvae

Taking a glass half full approach, grad school is (hopefully) a cost-free chance to pursue research and one's intellectual passions for a few years with a small chance of getting a career in academia at the end. That small chance, however, is greater than the zero chance of getting into academia if you don't go to grad school at all. This is the reality these days, and it will create painful situations for people only if they don't cultivate alternative visions for themselves, and/or who expect their hard work will reward them as it always has before. So much of getting a stable academic job will have to do with luck. I think keeping in mind that grad school is a privilege in itself is the best way to deal with the poor job market, even though there are people around now who remember when it was different. We, however, do not, and we should adjust our expectations of grad school to what it is rather than what it should be. I still think it is worth it to go, for myself, even if I end up doing something completely different.

I'm living with a grad student now and she's complaining about making a syllabus and grading midterms. And I'm so jealous of her.

I, too, have a strong desire to advise switch to just let it all out. In fact, you should interrupt your seminar to let this professor know in no uncertain terms what you think. I'm pretty sure that will deeply impress everyone around you with your moral uprightness. Don't forget to come back and tell us how it went!

My desire to visit Grad Cafe dropped off quite a bit after I got in! But I really do like the conversations and people here, so I'm sure I'll stick around. I don't feel like I have anything special to add at the moment, since I haven't actually experienced grad school yet. I would like to offer some good advice to others next year!

Though the Grad Cafe is quite US-centric, not everybody here comes from the same culture and therefore not everyone knows the same slang. But I suppose you were ignorant of that - bless your heart.

Yay! Thanks MoJingly!

Also check out book reviews in journals. Not only will they discuss the book in question, but sometimes the book review will say something like, "This book is a great supplement to [some other book on the same topic]," and you can find the really key texts in a field this way.

Compared to most fields of work, where 40 hours a week is the norm, I don't think academia is very family friendly because the work never stops for us. A bunch of blogging professors recently recorded how many hours they worked in a week (here's one who worked more than sixty hours, with links to the others buried in it somewhere: http://www.philnel.com/2011/02/21/busytown3/), and from what I've read elsewhere that's typical. So, there's no way, even with flexibility at some schools, that academia overall could be considered "family friendly" in my opinion. People seem to be making it work, though, and I perhaps one of the unintended consequences of the long-term restructuring of tenure is that more accommodation for two working parents will be built into the system. Right now in order to get tenure you have to compete with all these other people putting in so many hours of work that to get the one and only path to job security you too have to work as much as possible. But if there are more options for secure-ish employment then maybe that will take the pressure off in some way. One of the reasons I feel compatible with my current partner is that his career goals are of the type that are, shall we say, extra flexible. His ambitions are more freelance/artistic than anything, which means that he's not necessarily going to hold traditional or corporate jobs. That's important because if we have children, he's going to be the primary parent, and I'm prepared to be the primary breadwinner. I'm female, but this is a very traditional family structure which academia has demanded of its faculty for as long as it has been around (stay at home parent, working professor who shunts off all/most parenting duties). If I didn't have a partner willing to subsume his or her career to mine then I just wouldn't have children. So at the moment my choices, if I want to work in academia, are 1) find a partner who will be "the" parent, 2) find whatever partner I like, but if that person wants an outside career too then not have children, 3) have a partner who has an outside career, have children with them, and then feel about as much stress as a single parent might due to no time to myself/sleep. So at the moment I'm on track to take option 1. However, who knows if I'll still be either with this person in fifteen years OR in academia? But this is my thought at the moment.

"It's a free country"? How could bloggers, by giving their opinions, possibly force anyone not to go to grad school in such a way that this statement would be relevant? I am befuddled that some people equate the expression of opinions with forcing other people to do things. What a lazy response to an idea you don't like!

As magisterludi said, your post-PhD goals do come into play when considering this question. I'll throw out there that getting any acceptances at all is a good thing, and given your assessment of yourself as a candidate at this moment you may want to take the offer. Do you think you will accomplish a lot with the research in your area of interest, like perhaps a publishable paper? In that case waiting might be good, but you're going to have to start in the application pool from square one - no one knows what your competition will be like in any given year, or if money for grad students will dry up. If you take the offer, it IS possible to transfer. Just a few things to mull over.

Well, now's the time to consider which program you really want to be in. Presumably (since you don't mention it) taking the offer with less money wouldn't actually put you in a bad place with lots of loans, so the issue is ease of living. While many people have stated before on the forum that money IS an important factor, I will argue that you should pick the program you most want to be with. You could certainly ask about the financial difference, especially if your chosen program is the one with less money. Say something like, "Look, I really want to do X program, but I have this higher offer from another department and I want to make sure I can support myself." See what your profs say. They may surprise you and offer more, or tell you to take the better offer. How closely will you be working across departments? Will you just pass people in the hall or will you actually be taking classes and such from them?

Chaospaladin, I've seen you ask a number of people for the names of their schools, and there's a reason people try to more or less keep things anonymous. If they don't share the schools, that's fine, and it doesn't necessarily help us answer a poster's question to know what the schools are.

Anytime! Seems I inadvertently do that to you often. ETA: Also, I just spent the morning researching nineteenth century treatments for cholera, so my ability to get squicked out over, er, the digestive system is not that high.

I predict a fallow season for Wisconsin on all levels of education for about the next decade, K-12 and up, unless the unions successfully lash back in the next year or so. There's just going to be an outflux of many, many teachers, a corresponding shortage and then a rise in salaries/benefits for them after that. The universities are going to have a hard time attracting really informed students who will consider their working conditions without a union. Of course this analysis is all wrapped up with assumptions that employers will refrain from improving pay/working conditions without the presence of unions, so perhaps I will be pleasantly surprised and Wisconsin will do fine. I'll definitely agree with paint on the importance of the overall department environment as well. The advisor is extremely important for introducing someone to the historiography, but let me illustrate my own case (as I perceive it now; when I get to school in the fall perhaps I'll be surprised!). I'm going to be advised by a political historian who has only recently started in on medical history. However, two other professors have expressed interest in guiding me as well with my secondary interests, and there may be a strong history of medicine cohort in my year. So I don't feel as though I'm going to be limited even though my advisor and I won't match exactly; the department as a whole is a great fit. That said, I'm doing the MA first. Maybe this will be fine for the MA, but for the PhD it would really be more appropriate to have closer fit options with my advisor.

Asshole is a delightfully universal insult. Everyone has one (well, except for some clams, which periodically "vomit" out waste products. They must have had some parasite or something getting access to them through the anus). I am also partial to asshat, douche, douchenozzle, or any insult based on mythological creatures ("God, that dude is such a time vampire." "What a fucking Rumpelstiltskin.") And as to the main discussion - it sounds like the OP's choice of schools was apples to apples as far as academic quality, so taking location into account is an appropriate choice. After all, you have to live there for a long time.

Because you have the option of working in industry, are the financial limitations of the 2nd school really that bad? If you have a reasonable chance of paying off your loans it might be worth it. Of course this is contingent on your goals - if you want to stay in academia and not work in industry ever again that might be a bad choice. Why do you feel sick that you won't be going to grad school until after your peers? You are in a different place than they are. Grad school, for everyone, is really about competing with ourselves and living up to our own potential rather than competing with others. At the end of the day it is our own satisfaction that matters. If you feel that you *must* do this because going to grad school is an important part of your self-conception as a successful person (rather than a way to pursue your own research goals), then I'll say this: You are not a failure if you don't go to grad school this year, or next year, or ever. It is okay to work for a few years to get enough money so you can go wherever you choose. It is okay to work and never go to grad school, if that makes the most sense for your life. I apologize if I presume too much about what's going through your head, but I worry when I read that you are literally feeling sick and depressed and in hell over this. Do you have a good friend you can talk to in person about your feelings? Things will be okay!

Has anyone used Zotero? I played with it briefly but I didn't find it all that helpful. However, I didn't use it for any heavy-duty projects either.

Do you have a state school nearby? I was able to get a library card from the local state university for a very small yearly fee, and if you feel it would be worth it for the sixty dollars or whatever then you should do that. I don't have access to some things like ILL, but I have access to journals, can check out up to 50 books, etc.

Sounds like option B is more limited in the supplementary but still extremely important areas of language opportunities and library resources. You really should have easy access to the vast majority of secondary sources, and you shouldn't have to rely on ILL - it will just make things so much more difficult/expensive for you in the long term. I've often had to go back months later and double check citations and if the book isn't in the library or Google Books, you are going to waste a lot of time for little things. I'm confused a bit on the language opportunity bit - is it just that there's no money for intensive study, or is it that no one teaches the languages you nee? Is there another university or CC in option B's town where you can find language opportunities?

Keep in mind, also, that many, many people have jobs that no one's ever heard of. A friend of mine, for instance, works at a company which creates bar codes to scan things at the store. Who knew? Knowing what you are generally interested in is helpful, but some opportunity could come along and you could end up in a niche you never expected.

Wow. That was incredibly catchy. This is the first time I've really checked out the YouTube thing where people post videos and then have conversations with other videos. I kind of like it. It's like having cool conversations with random strangers.