kotov

Hopefully I'm heading a lot of this off at the pass by having my advisor kind of look stuff over as I get done with it (about halfway through now). Since I'm probably looking at ca. 250 pages for the finished product, I want to have as much of the editing preempted as I can.

I used to walk past Cam Newton every Tuesday/Thursday morning going to English class...

I personally never use parentheticals with Chicago, but it's never really necessary/practical for me. I agree that it looks better to just keep it uniform and use footnotes for all of it.

Times New Roman über Alles, über Alles in der Welt.

The Battle of Kosovo between Serbia and the Turks.

Not close to your area at all, but The Politics of Memory by Raul Hilberg is interesting enough.

I'd love to teach a course on Southeastern Europe from 1389 to the Present, or a History of Socialism/Marxism/Communism type thing. Or something similar to my favorite undergrad class, which was Russia 1861-1939 (from emancipation to right before WWII, mostly focusing on the revolutionary movements and the February/October Revolutions and all the political shenanigans in the 20s). I'd also love to teach something on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. I figure I'll probably end up teaching upper-division courses on Nazi Germany/the Holocaust and Russia/Soviet Union for the most part.

Getting married this summer. Doing a small destination wedding with just a few family members and some mutual friends. It hasn't been too much trouble, although my fiancee has done most of the work/planning.

I turned 21 a couple weeks before I started.

Not to try to sway your decision, but when I was in Bloomington for SWSEEL a couple of summers ago, they put on a great beer-tasting/short film festival at one of the parks in town...

My dissertation topic is pretty much all me. The only aspects that really stem from my advisor's influence are the comparative things, and that's just going to kind of be rolled into one chapter at the end.

I would echo this. It isn't going to hurt to talk to them, but it's not gonna make or break whether or not you get in. If you're applying somewhere specifically to work with one person, it's still a decent idea to contact them; even if you don't get in, you've at least spoken with them and worked on building that relationship a bit. You never know who you're going to need to help you somewhere down the road. In my case, a professor I had spoken to at a school I got rejected by ended up giving me some really useful feedback at a conference later on which helped me kind of narrow down what I wanted to research. I know my current advisor did go in pretty enthusiastically in support of me when the committee was making their decision (he told me as much later), but at the same time, I think that had less to do with the fact that I had emailed/spoken on the phone with him and more to do with the fact that he liked the research that I was proposing and felt that I would be a good student to work with. tl;dr: talking to a professor won't get you accepted/rejected, but making contacts/building relationships with people who share your interests is never a bad thing.

I should mention that the first couple conferences I went to (e.g., ASEEES 2012) I wore a full-on three-piece suit and felt like a complete dork. I went tweed jacket/shirt/sweater vest in the UK a couple weeks ago and looked like literally everyone else going to a professional-ish job on the Tube, so I felt a lot better. At least I fit in or something.

Improve your language skills as much as possible and try to get as good of an idea of what you want to research as you can. The two best things you can demonstrate when you're applying (your GPA, test scores, etc. aside) are that you already have the requisite language skills to do research in your field and that you have a clear idea of the direction in which you want to go with your research. Obviously your research interests may change some once you start grad school (mine did), but the better of an idea you have and the more specifically you can address the level of preparation you have to conduct the research you're proposing to come there to do, the better. Also, obviously, yeah, establish good relationships with as many professors as you can, etc.

Added my info just to make y'all feel better about what you're getting paid.

I typically go with a shirt, tie, khakis and either a blazer or a matching sweater.

Exciting dissertation stuff. Ana Barbulescu, et al. Munca Obligatorie a Evreilor din România: Documente. Bucharest: Editura Polirom, 2013.(The forced labor of the Romanian Jews: Documents) Michael Thad Allen. The Business of Genocide: The SS, Slave Labor, and the Concentration Camps. Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2002. Few articles, mostly from Holocaust: Studii si Cercetari. (Holocaust: Studies and Research)

http://www.historians.org/projects/cge/PhD/AlphaList.cfm

I'll be there for Romanian!

I'm currently working through Corneliu Zelea Codreanu's treatise "For My Legionaries". It's basically the testament of a Romanian fascist leader. Really creepy stuff.

I've submitted class papers to a couple of smaller journals which are a big deal in Romania, but not in the US, just as an exercise in the process. I guess they technically count for something. I have another out for a journal that's one of the bigger ones in Ukrainian studies in North America. One other thing that may be good, especially in the humanities, is contributing a chapter or article to a volume of collected materials. I'm working on a couple of projects like that right now. I would think it'd look pretty good to have your name out there in a book from a major UP or something like that.

I'm poor, so #teamindexcards

Pretty much this. You're demonstrating your ability as a researcher and a writer, not trying to convince them to publish you. Just make sure you've done a good deal of research with primary documents and that you've revised it (preferably several times) so that it sounds polished. It's not as onerous of a requirement as it sounds.

Also, I'm doing a little poking around, since this topic is also interesting to me. I'll just keep a running list of what I can find. Gareth Dale, Popular Protest in East Germany, 1945-1989. Several good books on the Hungarian Revolution, though few of them seem focused on social history Pedro Ramet, Nationalism and Federalism in Yugoslavia, 1962-1991