StrangeLight

heh. i was busy for most of the summer, taking may off for some much needed decompression, but then i got back to work. i've found that these spurts of 8 months of "grinding" are bad for my mental and physical health. i've taken a few approaches to dealing with work so that i feel less stressed. 1) make a weekly to-do list at the beginning of your week that contains everything work-related that you'll need to do that week (coursework and research and TA/RA responsibilities) 2) at night, make a daily to-do list for the next day only. work until you complete that to-do list and then stop, even if it's only 3 or 4 in the afternoon. you'll know that you're progressing towards completing the week's tasks so you won't feel so guilty when you decide to grab a beer at 6 pm one evening. lots of people recommend time management skills, saying "work from 8 am to 7 pm every day and just stop at 7 whether you're done or not. treat it like a regular job." this is generally good advice and works for a lot of people, but a regular 9-5 job feels like a grind too, and you're adding on 3 more hours of it and taking it into the weekend. i tried that for two years and it wasn't sustainable for me. now i'm switching to "energy management" rather than "time management." i set daily tasks and when i complete them, that's it. it's usually "read one book, write a short summary, and start an outline of my overview." if i tell myself, i have this day to read this 400 page book, and that's it, i'll find a way to do it more efficiently. if i tell myself, "i'm going to read for 9 hours today" then i often don't finish the book in a day because i read too slowly or too carefully and everything starts to pile up by the end of the week.

unfortunately, my history profs tell us to "read every word of every page carefully" and they go deep into the minutiae. we'll spend 15 minutes discussing how an argument fell apart in two pages in the middle of a chapter that i probably skimmed. when i have time, i read every page. when i don't, i skim as described, but then i go into these particular classes that demand attention to small details and i miss things.

read the entirety of the introduction and conclusion to books carefully. read the entire introduction and conclusion to each chapter. then skim the meat of the chapter, reading the first and last sentence of every paragraph. that'll usually be enough. if it's an article, you should read all of it.

it's been fine. i'll get an A or A- instead of an A or A+. i'll take a lot of notes in the discussion because there are chunks or ideas i miss. a prof will ask a very pointed question and i won't have the answer (when i usually would have), but someone else might, or we all look like idiots together. there haven't been major consequences, but the overall level of my participation and written work drops when i skim. nothing below an A-, and still usually an A, so it isn't an issue academically. it's just not as good as it could be.

that's a great advisor. mine would see me with dark bags under my eyes, grey skin, disheveled, and she would say to me, "go home and get some rest." and then when i got home, i'd see an email that said, "i'll need that 20 page report on your research progress by the end of the week." uhhhh... i learned to say no. i learned to be okay with not finishing my readings. i learned to be okay with being late on anything with a soft deadline. last year was very busy and very stressful for me. i had a cold for 4 or 5 months. i had intense back pain that nearly crippled me. i would have restless, interrupted sleep but i'd be out for 9 or 10 hours. i think, more than anything, you need to make time for your health, physical and mental. you're not doing good work on the edge of a burn-out anyway. and if your advisor has to wait an extra week for that paper from you, s/he'll wait. heck, s/he'll probably forget s/he even asked for it.

that's actually not a terrible amount of work. in my history program, we take 3 courses a semester. those are usually seminars (although some people lighten their loads to 2 seminars and a language course, they end up adding a semester or a year to their coursework to meet their requirements). 3 seminars, 14-15 books each (one a week), sometimes a book and two articles a week. all mandatory reading. so in 3 1/2 months, we'd read over 45 books. the writing assignments varied for each seminar, but they all added up to around 30 pages of written work per class (sometimes a big final paper, sometimes multiple small papers, etc.). i read slowly when i don't skim: 20 pages/hour. 3 books a week, roughly 400 pages each, is 1200 pages, which is 60 hours of work a week just to complete my readings and notes. this doesn't take into account the time spent in the classroom, the time spent on my research, the time spent writing assignments, the time spent teaching (if applicable), the time spent commuting to school. you get the idea. it's a lot of effing work. so now i just don't read things as carefully. i skim. i skip chapters that don't seem interesting or relevant to my work. many people will tell you that you should do this, and i do it, but i don't like it. i don't feel like i have command over the books. but at some point, i need to sleep and to leave my apartment and all that other stuff. if you're taking the number of classes required, actually reading most of what you're assigned, and working on your research along the way, you'll put in 60-70 hours a week. i know a lot of people that start work at 8 am and work hard until 7 pm and then have the rest of the evening to themselves. it's rough, but it can be managed. you just need to be disciplined. but, unless you're just not getting your work done, in a history program you will have a lot of hours of work ahead of you.

hahahahahaha. i laugh because i used to think like you before i started a grad program. grad school and undergrad are two different worlds. i took full course loads in undergrad and worked two part time jobs at once and still had time to hang out with friends a few nights a week and to have relationships and to see concerts and to play guitar. and i never felt like i didn't have enough time in the day to get my work done. in grad school, it has been a real challenge even getting out and having dinner with a friend or SO because it's much easier to throw something in the oven and then shovel it into my face while i keep reading. i definitely have colleagues who do less work than me. i also definitely have colleagues who do more. despite taking 5 classes instead of the "maximum" of 3 next semester, i have committed myself to having some free time every day. i've scheduled in yoga classes 4 days a week, phone calls with friends back home 1 day a week, and i plan to leave my evenings after 8 pm free, whether i'm finished my work or not. the sad reality is that you'll have to schedule most hours of your day. work time, free time, all of it needs to wind up in your schedule. i even schedule cleaning and laundry, because otherwise i'll just never get to it. if you want to do photography, then schedule time for it. it is possible. you will be incredibly busy in grad school, but that's no reason to suspend your life or the things you enjoy. you'll have to remind yourself of that frequently.

a notebook and a pencil. if i was allowed to take pictures, i'd still write the file/box # into my notebook with the date and a note that i had photographed it. then i'd take a picture of the outside of the box/package/folder with the # on it so i could tell easily where one file begins and the other ends. i would always make small notes about the content of the photos in my notebook so that i wouldn't always have to open the jpg files to remember what this or that document actually had in it. i use iphoto to organize all of the pictures. it's not perfect, but it works well enough for me. anything that i couldn't photocopy or take pictures of, i wrote out by hand. this sucked, i probably should have typed it, but i was working under some odd conditions. i didn't feel safe carrying around my laptop in the city i was working in and i also couldn't afford to pay the half-hourly fee for using electricity at the archive. but those are particulars to the circumstances of my own research.

do: reapply to programs that waitlisted you. contact your potential advisors and let them know you're applying again. do: recontact profs at programs you didn't end up applying to. don't: reapply to programs that rejected you without making substantial changes to your SOP and your writing sample. also, consider getting different LOR writers or coaching your previous LOR writers to include certain information in their letters (about your thesis project, your languages, etc.). don't: reuse your writing sample without making substantial revisions that you ask one or more professors to look over. good luck!

<p>1. look into more schools than columbia, brown, harvard, and princeton. you might get into those schools. you might not. and you won't be able to bump your stats or write a great SOP or get a perfect GRE score to get in. getting into &quot;the top&quot; programs is a roll of the dice, based in large part on what quotas the program is looking to fill (do they want more africanists this year? are they moving away from a modern US emphasis? etc.) and if your potential advisor is excited to work with you. apply much more broadly and revise what a &quot;top program&quot; means to you. i don't think brown is considered a top program in many subfields, despite being an ivy league school. the university michigan is almost always an excellent option. redefine your thinking a bit.</p> <p> </p> <p>2. your GPA is lackluster and you know it. that's okay. especially as someone who plans to start the PhD at 29, programs will be less interested in your GPA and more interested in your life experience, your potential research project, and your writing sample. (by the way, finishing in your mid-30s will definitely NOT make you slightly older than normal... the time-to-degree for history PhDs is an average of 8 years, so even people that start at 23 or 24 are in their 30s when they finish.) terminal masters programs are actually perfect for students like you. an unrelated and low undergrad GPA, life experience that isn't in the field of history. you are who those programs are meant for. you dip your toe into the water, learn what doing history at the graduate level is like (vastly different from journalism and from undergrad history classes), and prove through your GPA and masters thesis that you can do it. you will not need a history-related BA to get into a history MA program. you won't need conference presentations or publications. you will need to produce a research essay based on primary sources to use as a writing sample for the apps, which will in all likelihood be done on your own time. i'd strongly suggest doing the terminal history MA rather than history BA. strongly.</p> <p> </p> <p>3. in order for you to get published, you need to write a research paper. until you do an honours thesis or masters thesis in history, you just don't know how to do this. for your application writing sample, i'd suggest getting in contact with a history prof and asking them very, very nicely if they'd informally review your paper and offer suggestions. many will say no. perhaps try to email it to UCI profs? once you have the sample, DO NOT try to get it published unless history professors tell you that you should. simply submit your research paper with your applications. once you complete an MA and write a thesis, then you can try to get that published. odds are it won't be accepted for publication before you apply for PhD programs, but that's okay. most applicants get into PhD programs without any publications. it's much easier to submit those papers (and maybe even your writing sample paper) to conferences. i've submitted absolute junk to regional, national, and international conferences and every single paper has been accepted. the bar's lower, but it'll be good experience for you, good networking, and a line on your CV.</p> <p> </p> <p>4. i was learning spanish and french at the same time and often mixed them up because they're so similar. in some respects, the similar structure helps, because you can guess at words or conjugations. in other respects, it hurts, because you start speaking french when you mean to be speaking spanish. it happens. it's not the end of the world. definitely brush up on your languages. all that history programs require of you (unless you plan to do oral history) is that you have reading proficiency in the language. if you can already read spanish, feel free to strengthen it, but consider working on your weaker language first, especially since you plan to use both of them in your research project. believe it or not, language proficiencies look much better on applications than publications in graduate journals or undergraduate journals, which are probably all you can get into without formal training in history.</p> <p> </p> <p>5. i don't know what &quot;horrible&quot; means for the GRE. you don't want to embarrass yourself with something below 550 on either the math or the verbal. cracking 600 on both scores should be fine, and if you get around the 650 mark on the verbal score, i wouldn't bother taking it again. cracking 700 on the verbal is great. the thing is, most programs don't give a rat's ass about the GREs. some may use it as a cut-off to toss out applications (i.e. anyone lower than 4xx or 5xx goes in the bin) but most just use it to determine university-wide fellowships. so you may miss out on certain types of funding (you'd TA instead of getting the fellowship, for example), but a 700 verbal score will never guarantee you admission over a 600 verbal score. never. study for them, prepare, do your best, and if you crack 600 leave it at that. especially for older students, they figure that you haven't written a standardized test in a while, so they put much less emphasis on the score.</p> <p> </p> <p>regarding the terminal masters, there are some programs out there that will fund you. if your other option is to do a BA, it is WAY better to pay for your masters than to pay for another BA. but there are some options out there where you can get an MA and they'll pay you. after that, you can move onto the PhD at another school. i will say that most of your target programs either won't offer a terminal MA at all or won't offer a funded terminal MA, so you'll have to look around a bit for them.</p> <p> </p> <p>also, think of what type of historian you want to be. unfortunately, our field still very much defines itself geographically. do you want to be an americanist? a europeanist? an atlanticist? your project sounds like it would fit well into world/international history, but not that many programs offer this concentration. you may find yourself applying to columbia or princeton as an americanist or western europeanist.</p> <p> </p> <p>good luck with all this.</p> <div id="myEventWatcherDiv" style="display:none;"> </div>

right, the SSHRC pays me directly. sent a giant $10,000 cheque to my mailbox. i am fighting every temptation to go to the casino...

if you're TAing or adjuncting or doing lab work, that's okay. lots of people do those things as they finish their dissertation. but, i'd discourage taking on any other type of work. it'll take you longer to finish your dissertation, and the amount of time and effort that goes into preparing job applications is a full-time job in itself. i'd say you'd be better served to focus on the dissertation and start your job hunt now (so that if you get a position, you'll finish your dissertation in the summer before you start working) than to work a regular gig, chip away at your dissertation, and add 6-12 months to your time to completion.

do you know who evaluates the analytical writing section? masters students that get paid a couple bucks per exam. they don't spend more than 2 or 3 minutes, literally, on each essay. don't worry about the AWA at all. you're submitting an SOP and a writing sample. that will tell adcoms what your writing is actually like. i promise they won't give a rat's ass about the AWA.

to anyone awaiting their cheques from outside of canada, mine arrived in the US (pennsylvania) this morning. i had requested a september start date.

<p>heh. my honours program sounded way different from the others described here.</p> <p> </p> <p>at the end of your second year, you could apply to the honours program if you wished. you needed two letters of recommendation, at least one from a history professor. for a school with probably a thousand history majors, they took 8-10 students into the honours program each year. for the next two years, we took three seminars a semester, some of them research seminars, some reading seminars. we also did a year-long historiography seminar. in our final year of the program, we wrote an honours thesis based on original research, guided by an advisor, that had to be defended in a 90-minute 3-examiner defense. we also had to complete a language translation exam in order to graduate with honours.</p> <p> </p> <p>i am under the impression that this honours system was fairly unique. none of the other majors at my institution (which had 40,000 students) had honours programs that worked this way. they seemed more in line with what others described (a research paper and two seminars). it was good prep for grad school.</p> <div id="myEventWatcherDiv" style="display:none;"> </div>

your GPA is fine. each program will evaluate cumulative vs last two years differently. there's no stock answer to this. plus, you can't do anything about it anyway, so don't sweat it. a 3.58 is good enough for top universities. seriously. and seeing an upward trajectory by year, ending with a 3.9, is also great. just focus on the rest of your application and you'll be fine.

i think it's totally reasonable to include eating out and entertainment expenses in your budget, as long as your budget balances. i eat out a lot (although rarely for more than $10 a meal) and i go to concerts a lot (anywhere from $10 to $80 per ticket, sometimes driving hours to get there and using a tank of gas). but this stuff is important for my mental health. grad school should not feel like boot camp or a prison. the average grad student puts in 60-70 hours a week of work if they're staying on top of everything. the average professor puts in 65 hours of work a week. so this level of intensity and stress is going to be with us for many years to come. it's best to build habits now that allow us to be as happy as possible while juggling this workload. the goal is to finish and get the degree, right? so let yourself eat out or drink a beer, as long as your budget works for you. if you really value having nice clothes or eating at gourmet restaurants, then consider having roommates. plural. if you live with 2 or 3 other people, you can really cut down on your rent and then enjoy those other luxuries. if privacy is more important to you, then you'll have to sacrifice the clothes or food. just don't build a budget that cuts out all of your de-stressing time. if grabbing a beer with friends helps you relax after a hard week, put it in your budget. if going dancing or catching a movie or taking a yoga class helps you unwind, then make room for it.

it's not unethical to leave a program that doesn't fund you. if anything, it's unethical for a program to admit you without funding. no one will hold it against you if you move on to a different school that will actually pay you. you can tell your MS advisors that you want to change programs in order to secure funding. if they're decent people, they will genuinely help you do this. you can state explicitly in your SOP that the reason you're leaving your old program is not because of ill will or the inability to finish projects but because you want full funding for your PhD studies. they will understand this and not hold anything against you. promise.

it really depends on how much the grad student committee does. in my own school, the university-wide grad student organization meets once a month. that's it. if the meetings drag on more than two hours, people just start leaving. if you want to join sub-committees that meet much more frequently and do much more work, you can, but you're not obligated to. our university GSO had probably 30 members, and yet the same 8 people served on all the sub-committees. no biggie, really. if it's your department grad student committee, you'll have to ask them and previous reps how often they meet. once a month is manageable. once a week with take-home responsibilities is not. my program's grad committee determines fellowships and admissions, and the grad students aren't allowed to sit on those meetings, so they're only at 3 or 4 meetings all year. being the president of one of these committees is a lot more work, though. it is not worth the time or the effort unless you're actually interested in the job. that said, it can be almost fun. you will get to know more of the professors in your program since you'll be the go-between for your department and the grad students. i will say that having service on your CV is never a bad thing. when job committees are looking over CVs, if they see absolutely no service contributions, it can be seen as a negative. they want to hire a colleague that will contribute to the department and, frankly, will do some of the grunt work they don't want to do anymore. never let yourself be their workhorse, but do demonstrate at least a willingness to participate in your department outside of research and teaching. none of these service obligations should ever deter from your research or coursework, however. being the rep on a million committees will never get you hired, but great research and good teaching will.

i think going in person to talk to the DGS is a good move, but write out some bullet points of what you want to say and bring it with you. my DGS is wonderful and he's talked many people off the edge of quitting or taking a leave of absence. if taking a break is what you need for your mental and physical wellbeing (and it sounds like it is), you don't want your DGS to talk you out of it, so plan what you're going to say. say basically what you said here. mention that it is not simply your physical health that is taking its toll, but the stress of this work coupled with your family's health and your personal responsibilities. if you ask for a year's leave of absence, they will almost certainly be accommodating. in that year, keep in touch with your advisor if your intention is to eventually return to the program (and send an email once a semester even if it's not). by the time the year is up, see how you're doing and if your goals are the same. i know a number of grad students in history programs that took a year off. some never came back (and they're almost always much happier), some returned with renewed vigor and drive. taking a break does not mean it's the end of your graduate career. you'll be fine.

i've seen people's dissertations and books scooped. the short-term fix was to read the new work, integrate it into the lit review, and criticize it (even if it was exactly what the person was going to do themselves). they come out harder against this work because they need to separate their project from the one that was just published. the long-term fix is to recalibrate the entire project. either take a different slant, ask slightly different questions, or make it your mission to destroy the work that beat you to the press. the last approach rarely results in good scholarship, but it's difficult to walk away from a book-length project just because someone else wrote a very similar argument on the exact same subject. sucks, though.

i had really good research questions. so good, in fact, that i got a multiyear national fellowship to work on them. and then, after doing my exploratory fieldwork, i discover that my sources are not there. or, rather, that one half of my project is now not doable, and the other half will not point to any particularly surprising or field-changing findings. they'd be fine in an article at a mid-tier journal, but not in a dissertation. so i get to start over. i've always struggled with research designs. asked questions that my sources can't completely answer, let the framework get a little unwieldy or unclear. now i've got this set of data and i have to look through it and ask... "what does this tell me?" then reverse-engineer the research question from there. in some ways, it feels like cheating, but this is actually how most of the projects in my field (history) are created. find the data, then ask the question. and, somehow, it still has to be original, the answers have to be unexpected, otherwise what's the point in doing the project if it simply confirms what you already know? and it can't be a negative finding (i.e. "this didn't happen, even though i thought it would"). that's where i think the sciences get off a lot easier. if the result of your research is "this didn't work," that's still okay. that's still publishable. and, depending on your field, you can create new data sets, run new tests. all i've got is what archivists thought would be useful to save.

for recording lectures, you definitely need to ask permission and you won't always get it. you really, really shouldn't record seminars. really. there's no reason you can't jot down discussion notes. it's also an invasion of your classmates' privacy. you can ask to record seminars, but expect to get a "no" almost every time.

i know people that have got dogs as soon as they moved to the city to start grad school, and while they can manage, i don't think it's fair for the dog. leaving it home alone for 8-9 hours, in its kennel, with too much energy to burn, just doesn't seem like a good life for a dog. especially if you're in an apartment and not a house, you probably won't have yard space for the dog. i found, when i was watching a friend's dog for a week, that going up 3 flights of stairs several times a day just so the dog can piss was exhausting. my world would have been vastly different if i had a ground-floor place and a fenced yard for the dog. i have a cat and he's very little work. i feed him, scoop his poop, and play with him. pretty simple. i'd love to get a dog, but i don't have the time or the space right now. when i'm done coursework and my research year, then i hope to get a dog if i live in the right kind of home for one. you can make it work with a dog now, but it will take up a ton of time and energy in what is already an exhausting process of starting grad school. i'd also recommend waiting until you're done coursework to get a pup.

yes, you apply to the MA program if you don't currently hold an MA, and yes, it is fully funded. they will admit you to the MA, but they'll admit you with 5 years of funding and will (likely, but not definitely) keep you on for a 3 year PhD once you finish the 2 year MA.