thepoorstockinger

My advice is to: a) Start developing relationships with professors so that you can get advice from them about where you apply, and (perhaps more importantly) to make sure you get god reference letters. Don't go to their offices just to take up time, but make the most out of what your professors can provide and take lots of smalls seminars. Read up on the secondary literature in the field and write down the names of people whose articles/books you particularly like so that you know who you want to apply to work with later. c) Enjoy your undergrad and don't sweat the future too much.

Without getting into the majority of what was posted above I will say this: a) Your writing sample sounds like a potential Kiss of Death. Going back and diagnosing historical figures with modern mental illnesses is not accepted in most historical circles. Based on some of the other stuff you've said in this thread (I've just skimmed it) you seem to have an interest in "history from below" (it's an antiquated phrase by now, but it still works), and the sort of paper you do this is not an effective way of doing it. There are stories to be told about people who have faced oppression and struggled for better things: calling long dead generals crazy is a not a good way of telling those stories. If most of your courses are correspondence you may want to consider going for an MA first or take some senior undergraduate courses. The leap from not being in class to the sort of close interaction which is part of graduate school could be pretty jarring. I also wonder about the quality of the reference letters you can get from people marking your papers via correspondence (particularly if they don't have PhDs or reputations). c) I am not as willing to dismiss the issue of asking what exactly you want to be doing in ten years. Unless you want to be doing something which absolutely requires a PhD then there is no reason what-so-ever to go down that path. Publishing popular histories can be done with your current education and lots of practice or a creative writing degree (concentrating in creative non-fiction ideally), a journalism degree or something similar. A PhD is not a liberal arts degree: you don't do it to learn a lot about a lot of different things and become a more rounded person. It's a slog to specialize in a narrow area where you can produce original research. Unless you want to publish scholarly works and teach at the university level, you are better served getting another degree. What you describe as your interests don't seem to require a PhD. How do you feel about teaching at the high school level?

Your name somehow found its way on the Advancement/Alumni Relations/Fundraising/Supporters list. That is crazy tactless.

It's not pretension, it's mocking for-profit degree mills which rip their students off. (admittedly I know relatively little about Strayer, but DeVry is certainly in that category and should be shut down. Mocking an school like DeVry should be encouraged.) But yes, it is a terrible topic.

The mighty triumvirate of PDS puts the ivies to shame. The OP would be a fool not to pursue a degree from one (or all three) of those institutions. (For the totally ignorant and acronym-phobic that standards for Phoenix-Devry-Strayer)

University of Phoenix obviously.

Most schools seem to reduce most of the funding package except for the TA position. My offer from SFU was $23.5k in year one without a sshrc (including a $10.5k TAship) but they would have taken $9k of that away if I got a SSHRC. Trent take $4k away ($15k becomes $11k). So it really depends on the department and the individual offer. The way the funding offer changes was one of the things I made sure to ask before deciding what offer to accept. I gave my parent's address as my mailing address on the SSHRC application since I thought I'd be moving, so now I will have to call them twice a day to see if a letter arrived. Fantastic.

Canadian Girl, did you apply directly or through your school?

Well this will make for a stressful weekend...

I was told to contact potential supervisors for a few reasons: 1) Check to see if folks will still be around (i.e. sabbatical) 2) Check to see if folks would actually want to supervise my project/think it's a good place for me to do my research 3) See if I even sort of like people before going to work with them 4) To try to have my name ring a bell when files are circulating. I went 3/3, but who knows if my e-mails made a difference? I will say that it made me more comfortable when it came to actually picking a program.

I will be attending: Trent University (Canada) (Masters) Urban/Modern US/Working Class History

to the OP: I assume it's easier to do visual culture/architectural type criticism with a Comp Lit degree then it is to do the opposite. Santa Cruz also seems to have a pretty good name in theory circles due to the history of Consciousness program, from what little I know. If you did go to MIT, where/in what field would you get your PhD?

Have you ever been to Calgary? It's probably my least favourite Canadian town/city (and once spent a weekend in Stephenville, Newfoundland). I really, really dislike just about everything about it: it's socially very, very conservative by Canadian standards (which could also be a plus, depending on your own politics); is very new with tons of chain stores/restaurants, big box stores, and parking lots; mostly very new construction; and it kind of sprawling. The cost of living is also very high due to the oil boom. I am sure people have very different views on that city, but I would not want to live there under any circumstance. God, I just hate that place.

It depends on what the rules are about when people need to give notice that they're not renewing a lease. If you have to give one months notice then there's no point in looking two months before you need a place since most landlords won't know what they'll have available.

What cities are you considering? School A must be located somewhere absolutely hellish if they're less vibrant than Ottawa (I kid.... sort of. I don't hate Ottawa but I find it to be sort of a dead city that feels like exactly what it is: the seat of this country's bureaucratic machinery). Some cities with bad reputations are in fact great places to live (particularly if you're basing that reputation on what someone from Toronto said). I turned down the option to live in Vancouver to move to Peterborough, so I didn't make the decision based on the most exciting place to live, but geography did have something to do with it: I wanted to be close to NYC where my archives are. Sometimes talking about location seems to be reduced to lifestyle/culture/weather when in reality location means a lot more. Proximity to libraries and archives, neighboring schools/scholars access to transportation to get to other cities (i.e. does it have an airport nearby? Is it an airport that doesn't have excruciatingly high flight prices?), proximity to conferences you'll want to attend, etc. are all academic reasons to make a decision based on location. That said: it's only an MA so it's one or two years in a given location.

I guess I should have clarified: I am also a Canadian student who applied to Canadian grad schools. So maybe us Canucks just have less time for biography and the like...

SFU?

Similar advice to what I was given (and it sort of seemed to work). This might be history-centric, but the main thing for academic SOPs is that the ad coms use it to try to judge how good you are at identifying a research problem: are you too broad? To precise? Do you recognize the limits of resources/sources? Do you seem to grasp the existing secondary literature? Is what you're proposing interesting? Can faculty/resources in the program support your research? Is it original? Is it significant? As a history student I thought two things that I mentioned were crucial in retrospect: 1) I identified the larger importance of my research 2) Identify where my research fits into the broader historiography and why it fills a gap in that existing literature These seem super obvious, but I've read a lot of SOPs that seem to miss this and get caught up in lots of small things that don't matter. Mine tended to break down as: Description of my research: 60% Description of my research training: 15% Fit paragraph: 25% I didn't include any biographical information, and I certainly didn't open with a cliche. This might be a strange way to look at it, but while I wrote all my SOPs I thought of it in these terms: I am not trying to explain why they should pick me, I am trying to explain to someone why I am considering picking them. I found it to be a useful way to try to think about it and helped me avoid the feeling of trying to sell myself.

I am basing my comments on my own experience dealing with plagarism accusations through the university's senate. One other thing did occur to me: while the cases we see have a much higher number of international students from China and South Korea, they tend to be almost exclusively engineering and business students (probably 70% in business). It may be a result of the way those disciplines are taught in certain countries rather than a wider trend in PSE there.

I'd also suggest OISE at the University of Toronto. Aside from the city being welcoming to alternative lifestyles OISE (Ontario Institute for Studies in Education) has a very good reputation, at least in Canada, and wide ranging faculty. I will offer this word of caution: despite high test scores, good GPA and good rec letters I would be careful about assuming you can pick and choose your school. Education programs are even greater crap shoots than other graduate schools since different programs (and committee members for that matter) seem to hold wildly different opinions on things like what sort of teaching experience is needed and the like. The current financial crisis/funding crunch certainly won't help on this front.

Because when you get a teaching position you're often too busy to do as much research as you like. A post-doc allows you to spend pretty much all your time researching/writing before you It also can offer you geographic opportunities you might not have if you're trying to do research at a place where you can get a teaching gig (i.e. access to certain apparatus or places to do field study in the sciences, archives in the humanities).

This is a useless question unless you tell us the city/what part of the city.

My experience (I sit on the senate discipline committee at my undergrad instituition) is that international students from South Korea and China are often not told anything about plagiarism until they arrive at a North American university. The way it's been explained to me (and this could be totally wrong) is that there is just a different idea of what education is in some education systems: it's just assumed that someone else has already made that argument, so why bother pointing that out. Of course you're not making an original argument! You're an undergrad! Suggesting you can make an original argument is a crazy, narcissistic thing to say! I have no doubt in my mind that there are cultural differences, and I think first (and probably second) year undergraduate students should be cut a bit of slack on this. But if you applied to a US graduate school, accepted a job as a TA, and spent a semester as a graduate student then I think you really should make the effort to learn what's going on and what's expected of you.

It's totally possible to get a full ride for an MA in Canada without a SSHRC- SFU offered me $23.5k for the first year before any external funding ($9k would have been clawed back if - it just tends to be the exception. But SSHRC really is the primary way to get MA funding in Canada, or at least to get any significant amount of funding (sometimes I wonder if it'd be better to just give that money directly to departments to disperse). Most TA/stipend combination in Canada are in the $10k-$15k range which is not bad if you're paying domestic fees, but the international differential will kill your funding package. There are only a handful of grad programs in Canada that offer funding PLUS paying for students' tuition fees, Calgary is one of those places (but I don't know if they do it for every MA student). At most places you're deducting tuition fees from your funding. Again, I think Canada is a good MA option for people from the US but the funding situation, particularly given the likelyhood of paying differential fees, means people should be careful about where they're applying if money is a major concern. The one good thing about Canada is that with the exception of Toronto and York, the better programs actually tend to offer better funding. I got in at SFU and Queens but I'm going to Trent (MA history). I'm also a Canadian who did my BA in Canada.

I'm starting a Canadian MA program next year and while I agree with everything said above I will qualify it with this: 1) If you're doing US history this might not be the best idea. Even the programs with the most US historians tend to have a very small number of them, and you will likely be cobbling coursework/committees together with people who are thematic fits, rather than region (which isn't the worst thing possible, I guess). I'm in this boat. 2) Some of the smaller programs cross list MA courses with senior undergrad courses. Avoid these programs like the plague. 3) Canadian schools do not provide tuition waivers, so funding packages here are not worth the same as they are in the US. It's assumed that top candidates are topping up funding packages with external funding (SSHRC, OGS, etc.). So if you get $15k from a school and have to pay international tuition fees you may only get $3k after fees. (A lot of places are starting to waive the international differential, but you're still looking at around $5k in fees). It's certainly a viable option, particularly for people who are looking at European, Russian, middle east, ancient or a comparative field like gender or labour (labour history seems to still have much more traction here then it does in the US). As an added bonus there's no GRE requirement.