thepoorstockinger

When I was trying to decide where I was going I just straight up asked one of my potential supervisors about the politics of the place. It's important to me because: a) I think politics decide what academic questions one will ask and how one will approach those questions. I have every intention of being politically active on whatever campus I go to. I am not expecting to walk onto a campus with my exact political beliefs (if anyone finds such a campus I would love to hear about it) but I do want to go somewhere where there is space for me to be open and active in my politics and where I can do the sort of scholarship I want to do without having to worry that when I piss someone off I won't have people who have my back. I certainly expect to have people challenge my ideas and I expected to be exposed to things political and academic which I had not experienced or thought of before. But I do want to be somewhere where my politics won't be a huge problem for me (even though I know I'm swimming against the current either way).

Obviously it varies according to schools but I have been offered RA positions at the program I am entering next year because I told the grad director I needed more money and she contacted faculty to ask if anyone had them, as well as my supervisor having work he needs done. That technique may work for you, but I think my case is probably the exception, not the rule. A suggestion on TAships: if you're at a bigger school target departments without their own grad program. Also look at other schools in the area (preferably ones without lots of grad students).

Your initial post suggested that you were talking about all MA programs and PhD programs (since y'know... that's sort of what you wrote). Even if you're only talking about MAs in IR, I still find it hard to believe that no program cares about recruiting their top choice candidates and are willing to spend money to do so. There is absolutely no harm in the OP asking "Hey I am interested in your program but have a larger offer elsewhere. Is there any chance that addition funding is available?"

This is certainly not true, or at least not true in every field at every school. I played all the MA programs I was accepted to off of each other in order to get more money from them. If schools want you at their school some of them will match or exceed offers from other schools. I say ask politely, but only if you have a larger offer from another program.

Not to be a jerk, but you failed both exams in this case. First of all, you plagiarized (bye bye honesty) which is bad enough, but the fact that you didn't realize that it was the wrong answer (bye bye knowledge) makes it more funny than anything else.

It seems to me that "economic" history also means different things to different people. I've heard professors talk about economic history as if it is the same thing as business history or labour history. I gather that the very quantitative type of economic history is not nearly as popular as it once was, but there are a fair number of neat people doing "History of Capitalism" right now, and I am sure a lot of quantitative work that would have fallen under economic history a decade ago is still being done but happening in other subfields - I've seen some environmental history that really looks a lot like economic history to me and I am sure agricultural history and various regional subfields have economic historians doing neat work. If you're into the super quantitative brand of economic history you might want to look at economics department.

I buy this as an excuse for international students in the early years of undergrad, but if you're a graduate student (and a friggin' TA!) you should have known what the expectations were before applying for the program, and certainly after at least a full semester in it. I assume this was covered in TA training and it is definitely in most style guide, and based on your latest post you seem to have a solid grasp of what the expectations were and chose to willfully ignore them. I don't feel all that sorry for you. If you didn't know what you did was wrong then quite frankly you shouldn't be in grad school.

The original poster seems like a scumbag. I hope things go very poorly for you.

Isn't the Draper Program just a cash grab by the university that they use to provide funding for the PhD program?

I wouldn't, but my undergrad school is not a good place to do the sort of work I want to do. Even if it wasn't a terrible place for my research areas I don't think I would do it. Aside from all of the worries about what other people think I also think that no matter how good the faculty are at a school you need to get challenged by new people, and unless a department is absolutely massive that won't happen. You need to find new professors who can ask you new questions and throw you new curveballs and push you in new and different ways. Eight to twelve years with the same folks (particularly if it's under the same supervisor) wouldn't push me in the ways I personally need to be pushed.

I definitely feel this way. I am fortunate enough to be working with a high profile supervisor whose work is fantastic (I think the first history book I really loved was written by him, and I am looking forward to his book coming out later this month almost as much I was looking forward to the Watchmen movie) and due to his being friends/the former supervisor for one of my current professors he seems to have a super inflated sense of my abilities and potential and has been very, very keen to have me come to the program. He's helped me secure additional funding, is already offering me research work for next summer, and has offered to let me and my partner stay in his and his partner's home when we come up to look for our own place. (His partner is also an intimidating, big name academic) All of this translates into terrifying pressure. It's also compounded by a) the fact that I am sort of changing fields within history and shifting over to American history despite having limited formal experience with it and the fact that I will be TAing next year for the first time. Part of me is okay with being a failure on my own time, but I'd feel terrible being a failure when people are paying way too much money to have me explain stuff to them. I'm concerned that my research has really already been done, that my ideas aren't original, that I've gotten by on reading a tiny bit more than everyone else and selling my ideas with naive conviction in discussion, and that my original research is impressive only because I lucked out on finding something that no one had bothered to study before. (and this research is something I am moving away from) That said: Other people, who are much smarter than I, at the very least see some potential in me, so I guess all I can do is continue recklessly crashing forward like I have for the last few years and hope not to disappoint them. And at least if I am an impostor as an academic the stakes are relatively low: if I was an imposter electrician I'd burn down a house, an imposter bus driver and I kill a bus load of people, an impostor chef and I give people salmonella, etc. As an aspiring academic one dies if I do turn out to be a fake, and that takes a bit of the pressure off. p.s. flit: I am also heading to Trent next year... small world.

The one major disadvantage I can see about going to a community college is that you only have 2 years (realistically one year and a half a semester) to develop relationships with faculty members which is crucial both to get advices/help in the application process and to get good letters of reference. But that is a problem that can certainly be overcome if you're a good student and willing to make the effort. Just be a good student and don't be shy and you shouldn't be at any major disadvantage.

I can't for the life of me understand what your grand-mom and your partner being professors has to do with anything.... or the fact that you're Jewish. That said, your GREs and overall GPA are fine but not outstanding. The other thing I've realized from talking to friends doing English Lit is that tons and tons of applicants have 4.0+ gpas in English and that alone is not enough to get you noticed. That seems like a giant mistake. Did you not contact anyone in two years? I'd suggest that is step one to improving your chances. You make it sound like your friends are all english professors - haven't they introduced you to potential advisers? That network of friends is only helpful to you if you're actually meeting people. Go to some conferences and start having conversations with people.

Most Canadian schools have sent out acceptances for the history MA programs. I don't know about UBC but someone I know heard back from them last year before the first March. What other programs are you wondering about specifically?

The other thing that people are looking for is your ability to identify a historical problem and what you would need to answer said problem. If you can't formulate and articulate a research project clearly (even if you end up changing it later) then it's a red flag. For example, if you wrote that you're "interested in writing a thesis which describes the history of Spanish colonization of Latin America from first contact to 1956" it shows that you have no comprehension of how narrow or broad a precise a PhD thesis needs to be.

Awesome. Thanks for all the help. It turns out I am not way off track with my reading as I've covered some of that stuff on my own but it's good to have a better idea of what is currently being read. There is some stuff on those lists I'd never heard of that looks pretty awesome.

Call someone and ask about additional funding. You're certainly not the first international student at UBC in this sort of position and they may be able to help you out with additional funding, waiving the international differential, etc. I know the frustration re: Vancouver. I had an offer of $33k first year and $15k second year for a two year MA and I simply couldn't make it work after I worked out the moving expenses and the cost of traveling for my research which helped me decide to go elsewhere. Vancouver is crazy pricey.

Canadian schools almost never waive tuition fees. Some programs will waive the international differential for international students (so you pay the same fees as Canadian students) but you are expected to pay your fees out of whatever funding package you are offered. In Canada most funding for top candidates is not supplied directly from schools but from the external granting councils (NSERC, SSHRC, and CIHR). I don't know what eligibility is like for international students with NSERC, but you are eligible to apply for the Vanier Scholarship after your first year in the program. Is it UBC or SFU? I know SFU's dean of grad studies has a fund specifically set up to match offers from competing programs for top candidates so if you have a larger offer elsewhere they will kick in extra cash if the department really wants you.

This is what I wrote to try to leverage more money out of an MA program... it worked: ("sshrc" is a large external funding award for one year offered by the federal gov in Canada) Hello Dr. X, *Some other stuff unrelated for a few paragraphs* Is the financial offer flexible at all? I have an offer from another program that I am considering that is about $8k (if I get a shrrc) or $12k (If I do not) higher over two years than School U's. While I do understand that the cost of living in SMALL TOWN is lower than in many other areas, School U's graduate tuition fees are also higher than many other schools ($2000 a year higher than the aforementioned program). I understand that the history program at School U is new and that money is tight at every university at this point but is there a possibility for an even slightly larger financial offer? I certainly don't expect an offer of the same size as the one I mentioned above but even a bit more (either the option to to still hold the Graduate Fellowship in year 1 if I am awarded a SSHRC or a slightly larger Entrance Award) to close the gap between the two offers would be ideal of something like that is possible. I am very interested in School U's program but it is hard to walk away from that amount of money. If there is anything that can be done to close the gap I would greatly appreciate it. They ended up giving me more money. School U was my top choice but I would have been happy at the other place I mention as well. Just be honest and polite, but maybe not mention the other program by name.

Also keep in mind that school cohort sizes/the quality of schools change over time so any school with a PhD program founded 30 years ago will have produced more grads (and more during times when there was less competition for positions) than programs which started or expanded in the last 15 years. The problems regarding cohort size could probably be dealt with fairly easily by someone with a really solid statistics background (i.e. someone that isn't me) - go make friends with some economics students. Particularly if you plan on selling it (and doing a secure website isn't really cheap and there are a limited number of people willing to pay for something that specific in a single discipline - so your best bet is to sell ad space on a free website and to probably find people in other fields willing to do the same thing for schools in their field to increase the content/appeal of it) you probably want someone to do statistical analysis on it to make it even more useful to people who are paying for content. It's an interesting thing to put together because I am sure we all look at that sort of thing when choosing programs even if we don't explicitly think about it and to have hard numbers on it is super helpful. Placement in top 40 programs is probably a better, or at least more useful, metric than a lot of the arbitrary things including in rankings. Anyway, best of luck deciding what to do with your data. Have you considered trying to turn it into a paper for a journal that specializes in education policy/PSE? Again you'd probably need to find a co-author who can help with statistical stuff, but in the long run the benefit of the publication is probably more valuable to you then the small amount of money you'd be able to generate selling the data.

Is this new, though? I know history faculty members who got PhDs in the '70s who are total idiots to the point where I know more about the 1960s historiography in their field then they do (and I don't know much). A lot of older faculty members got TT jobs and tenure based on a few terrible articles decades ago and to get into type flight PhD programs in the U.S. now you sometimes need the kind of presenting/publishing record that used to get people jobs at some schools. Not so bright people have always managed to get plenty of letters after their names, now schools are just churning out more students of both the bright and dim variety. Of course I am talking about Canadian schools where a lot of the PhD programs were only established in the 60s and 70s so that could skew things compared to older US schools.

Really? There hasn't been real news since 1960? For real? I can see where you're coming from but I am not sure if people being taught "tolerance" is really to blame here. I'd kind of prefer if kids are taught tolerance. Hardwork too... but I see nothing wrong with tolerance. I don't see a problem with the Times reporting on this. It's not like they ran it front cover. Grade inflation is a fact and they're reporting on one of the potential causes of it. They're not supporting it in the same way as they don't support murder when they report that someone got shoved in front of a subway car.

I think the main thing from talking to people I know applying to programs (including English PhDs) is that a lot of people have heard all the talk about how bad the job market in the humanities is and how important having a top flight PhD is to landing a tenure track position that they're not even bothering to apply to programs they don't think will land them a TT position. A lot of people would rather go through the application process again next year or not get in at all rather than going to a program that they think will give them poor job options after they're done their degree.

Maybe the book was referencing the difference between types of degrees. i.e. a taught MA program (where you have coursework plus a major paper) vs. some programs which are purely research (i.e. periodic meetings with an advisor, optional lectures and seminars but mostly self directed research).

Ask them about: Their own research (past, present and future) What their other students are working on If they're planning on being on sabbatical in the near future and if so how you see that affecting your supervision If they're planning on teaching any graduate courses in the near future If you're not a perfect match with their listed research interests ask if they see that as a problem I found that all of these questions taken as a whole made it pretty apparent if the person was interested in my work or not. For example, the supervisor at the school I ended up choosing for my MA is on sabbatical next year (my first year) and I asked if he saw that as being a problem, his response was "No not at all. I'll be around campus since *his partner* is not on sabbatical and I have most of the archival research done for my next book. And for a student like you who I actually want to work with and whose research I am interested in it won't be a problem in the least." He's more honest than most people, but that response made me more comfortable than if I had just asked if he wanted to supervise me and he said "Yes, you seem like a very good student." I just talked to supervisors over the phone but I found that if you just have a conversation a lot of subtle stuff slips out/you can pick up on bullshit. Most professors are pretty honest, though. They don't want to take on students who they don't like or encourage people to go to situations which aren't good for the student.