StrangeLight

paying for the masters yourself is not good, especially in a social science discipline like anthropology. you'll never recoup the costs. i'd also recommend asking for a deferral of admission while you look for fellowships in the coming year. i'd also recommend asking the director of grad studies at the department what the likelihood of securing a TAship for your MA would be. TA slots can open up as other students already in the program either secure fellowships themselves or leave the program before they're finished.

yes, but it depends on how you ask it. if you say, "this is the stipend they offered me, does that seem to be enough to live off of in X city/town?" then you'll get some idea if you're on par with the other students. this is a totally appropriate question to ask. however, saying something like, "i was offered a TAship for 5 years, is this what they offered you?" would not be appropriate. you can offer up information about your own package and ask for their opinion, but asking them about their own funding package is generally considered bad form. at many programs, incoming students are not all offered the same financial package. some will get fellowships mixed with TAships, some will get more or fewer years of funding, and all of this is based on (the perception of) your merit. asking someone else what funding they have should only be done after you've gotten to know the person a bit. if the difference between one student's funding and another's is substantial, it can create some jealousy or tension. if you want to know if your stipend is livable, check a cost-of-living calculator online. if you want to know if your package is comparable to the other students', you'll have to wait until you're there and ask very, very gently. if you've already asked them what their packages are, assume they're a little miffed already and try to talk about anything but money once you get there in the fall. edited to add: asking them if your package seems "standard" for the program is fair too. that way, they don't have to reveal if their own funding is above or below standard. i would just really advise not asking what their own funding looks like. people will answer you, but they'll probably also complain to their colleagues that they were even asked. that's been my experience in my own program, at any rate.

it's odd not to count GPA at all. we do it in my program and use it (and fellowships/awards) to rank the grad students in the department. that said, the GPA is pretty meaningless in grad school. with such ridiculous grade inflation, what's the point? in my own program, As are "excellent," A-s are "adequate" (which are totally fine if you're an MA student and not-so-fine if you're a PhD student), B+s are indicators that you didn't really get it, and Bs are warnings that you need to do better to avoid academic probation. anything below a B is the real equivalent of an F. what's the point of having a 3.5 GPA (which used to be pretty decent) if in grad school that means you're on the edge of failing out? MAs should have 3.8-4.0 and PhDs should have 4.0. it becomes almost useless to keep track of GPAs if everyone in your cohort has a 3.9 or 4.0. that might be why your own program doesn't bother to keep track of them.

of course cultural history is academic history. and the history of popular culture is academic history. but what i mean by "pop history" is history books that are written for non-academics, the NYT best-sellers that our parents and our cousins read, not the monographs that we read in seminars. also, i questioned the usefulness of writing a HISTORY of MMA because it hasn't been around that long. it would be difficult to get change over time. i agree that anthropological or sociological investigations of MMA could be very academic and very fruitful. and of course there are academic histories of martial arts. but "mixed martial arts" is a relatively new phenomenon, and would lend itself better to disciplines that aren't focused on the past.

- memorize your graduate handbook. it will have all the timelines you need to meet, the courses you need to take, the requirements you need to fulfill. your advisor, believe it or not, will not actually know this stuff. s/he will know that there are certain things you need to do to meet your requirements, but s/he won't actually know what those things are. it's up to you to be on top of it. sometimes, the director of grad studies won't even know what it is you need to do. frustrating, but as long as you have the department handbook to back you up, you'll be okay. - learn to value yourself for something other than being smart. everyone in your program is smart. everyone is used to getting the top grades in their class. you will no longer be the best and the brightest. you will also frequently be told that your work isn't good. the grades themselves don't matter anymore, it's the comments in the margins that let you know your work was inadequate. you will have weeks or months of self-doubting, you will read your advisor's every twitch and tick as evidence of his/her contempt for your mediocrity. like yourself because you're funny, because you're creative, because you can run a marathon, because you can fix things with your hands, because you actually had the "wild years" (or "tumultuous years") that your colleagues heard so much about when they were in the library/lab. but do NOT like yourself only for your intelligence, because within a year, you won't feel smart anymore. i've given this pep talk to colleagues of mine that were having panic attacks when they thought they wouldn't get research funding or that their advisor hated their work, and it rarely sinks in for most of them, because they've always been "the smart one" and can't yet see themselves as anything else. it's time to let that go. even the students with 4.0 GPAs, who breeze through their thesis/comps/overview, who hold big-time national fellowships have days/weeks/months of feeling stupid. - know the department politics. if there's a universally-hated faculty member, you should know that before you start bringing that person onto various committees. if that universally-hated faculty member is your advisor, you need to know that too, because it will be up to you to cultivate strong relationships with other faculty. they'll need to like you because they don't like your prof. - don't date within your department. seriously. it's too incestuous and breeds competition within a relationship or between couples. grad school isn't on the buddy-system. you don't need to pair up with someone the first month you get here.

there's a few too many abbreviations in your post to have any real idea of what program you're doing and where, but... once you have amassed all of the data you need, you can write from pretty much anywhere. if you're on a fellowship that doesn't require you to be "in residence" at a university, you can truly live and work from anywhere you want to. if your fellowship requires that you actually be at the university you're attending, or if you're being paid with TA or RA work, then you'll actually still have to stay in the location of your school. not to make this thread about me, but i recently won a multi-year fellowship that will allow me to live anywhere i want to (on a tight salary) for two years of dissertation writing. i was thrilled and relieved to win the fellowship not necessarily because of the money (my own school had promised me TA positions for those years) but for the freedom to move, travel, and focus on nothing other than the dissertation. it's pretty sweet.

there is some concern with coming from a top program. the article people keep citing notes that top 20 programs hire people from other top 20 programs. and? so? if your goal is to be TT at a top 20 program, then you definitely need to go to one. but if your goal is to be TT somewhere, maybe near a city you'd even want to live in, then you don't need to come from harvard/princeton/yale. and as natsteel rightly pointed out, the name alone does not carry you. if your work isn't top notch, then you can take your yale degree to a community college, if you're lucky. at the same time, many top 20 programs are rather conservative with the methodology/historiography/argumentation that they teach. this is especially true of (some of) the ivies. conservative is fine, people still make important contributions to scholarship, and sometimes jumping on every theoretical trend can backfire if those new approaches go out of favour too quickly. but if you want to be doing cutting-edge research, odds are you'll be looking at programs that aren't in the top 10 or top 20. and other schools know this. programs that want to hire someone who is cutting edge will often pass over top 20 candidates in favour of someone from a well-known but not "well-ranked" school. many of my colleagues have "always" wanted to be professors. i know a lot of people who have left programs over the years, and a lot of them end up teaching high school. one of my profs, who received her degree from michigan, knows a couple of her grad school colleagues who teach at a boarding school for really motivated high school students. they say it's more fulfilling than teaching for really unmotivated grad students. i can see the appeal in that. so if your fall back plan is to teach high school, then there's no reason not to pursue a PhD. it can come in handy, especially at elite or experimental high schools. teaching has never really been my goal. all i've wanted to do is research and write. whether that ends up in books or journals versus newspapers versus NGO reports doesn't matter that much to me, as long as i get to write about things that are important to me as a global citizen. i've maintained some of my activist ties, i'm developing some others, i've made connections and done work with museums, and i've stayed in touch with my journalism contacts. if the academia job market is still horrendous in 4 years, i plan to have enough ties to other fields that i can take my researching skills elsewhere. the reality is a lot of PhDs won't get academic jobs. but if you're okay with that (i am) and you plan for it during grad school, you'll find work using the skills you've developed over 6-7 years. sadly, almost no PhD programs actually help prepare their students for this, but that doesn't mean you can't be thinking seriously about plan B while working diligently with great dedication towards plan A. also... borderlands is absolutely right. network early in your graduate career. go to conferences. even if you have nothing to present, just go. odds are there will only be 6 people watching your panel anyway. sit in on other panels, introduce yourself to other scholars, chat about work. they'll start seeing you over and over (we travel all over the world to present our work to the same X number of people). you'll get asked to write book chapters, to contribute to special editions of journals, to present on panels. all good stuff. if you don't start this until your third or fourth year in a program, you'll be 3-4 years behind the other people that started this on day one. apply for every award and fellowship that is even remotely relevant for what you do. it takes a long time, but it pays off. you get money, you add lines to your CV, but mostly you communicate to people that you know how to put that money to good use, to make good research, and to convince many, many scholars that your research is worth paying for. i've seen people with perfect GPAs and LORs get turned down year after year for fellowships because the committee didn't think their project was worth the investment. the more people you can get to give you financial or institutional support for your work, the more you convince hiring committees that your work actually matters to your field.

ubc doesn't have anyone that does africa. in the history department or any other department. they can't even manage an african studies minor. sometimes they hire lecturers to teach a southern african history survey course to undergrads, but that's it. they won't accept you because they don't have a program for you. also, if you're looking to get a history PhD and becoming a professor, getting a degree in vancouver won't get you hired in seattle. academia doesn't have the same sort of regional feeder program thing that business schools do, for example. and if you're not looking to get a PhD and become a prof, then why do you want the history MA? if you really want the chance at living in or near vancouver, check out simon fraser university. i think they have africanists? and u victoria has africanists too, if i'm not mistaken. it's been a few years since i checked their department page.

thanks. i emailed them again this morning. i'll call them tomorrow if i still hear nothing.

is anyone else still waiting on confirmation that they accepted their award?

ask your department. these vary with every program.

it depends on your field. in sciences or engineering, Cs can be common (although still far from ideal). in the social sciences or humanities, Cs are very bad.

i won a SSHRC!! i am attending an american school for my PhD. i was given an award in the C class, which means you choose A (the CGS) or B (the SSHRC) depending upon which one you're eligible for. since i'm ineligible to hold the CGS, i'll be taking the SSHRC, four years of funding. so, i guess that means that someone with the SSHRC will get a CGS and someone on the waitlist will get a SSHRC. my score was 22.4/30. i applied to the history/religious studies/dead languages (??) group. my letter was dated april 21, 2011. it arrived in the US (in pittsburgh, to be exact) this morning. i was completing my masters in history at a US school at the time of my application. i had three conference presentations (one big international conference, one [canadian] national conference, and one small international [central american] conference) and no publications. i had a first year fellowship from my MA institution, one year of TAing, and the promise of a fourth year fellowship from my (now) PhD institution (same school but technically different programs). close to a 4.0 GPA but not quite (3.9 something) for grad classes, a 3.5ish GPA for undergrad. i had already done research abroad for my MA, and i would be using some of the same sources/archives for my dissertation, but it was/is going to be a different project than my MA. so, first-hand experience with the materials i need, but not an expansion/rehash of my current work. hope this info helps, and congratulations to everyone else receiving good news! .... yay!!

no news yet in amurrika.

oh yeah, seminar etiquette. this may vary by discipline, so i'm speaking primarily of history (and this can extend maybe to most of the humanities/social sciences). 1) don't talk about your personal stories, as someone else mentioned. we're trying to discuss a book, not hear your life story. 2) don't talk about your research in seminar, unless you are specifically asked about your research or unless the reading is precisely on your topic. there are few things more irritating to your colleagues than hearing, "this really reminds me of my own work on _________," especially when your own work actually has zero connection to the reading. talking about your research doesn't further the conversation for anyone else. after seminar, when you're hanging with your cohort, then talk about your work and how the books relate and all that. but in the 2-3 hours you have to really discuss this stuff in seminar, use it wisely. 3) find something good to say about the stuff you're reading. grad students' favourite hobby seems to be ripping apart the scholarship they themselves cannot (yet) produce. it's important to see a work's limitations or missteps, but try to engage with the reading by asking, "what is this author trying to do? what was their aim? did they achieve it? am i convinced?" rather than, "he really should have talked about X and Y instead of A and B." you can't criticize a book for not answering the questions it doesn't even ask, but that doesn't stop many grad students from trying.

dear self, 1) i don't see how ChanEcon shat on your posts. i read em back... i don't see it. 2) sounds like, if anyone, you're the one that is overly sensitive. this is a very stressful time of year for any of us, regardless of where we are in the process of graduate school, but... take a couple deep breaths or something.

1) definitely budget well for first few months. moving, getting an apartment, buying textbooks, and waiting until the end of the month for your first paycheck sucks. hard. 2) you will have less time than you think. even though you've been warned that it's a lot of work, it's still more work than you think it is. get used to 60+ hours of work a week. 3) you'll have to schedule your fun time. i hate planning my fun, but without doing that, it turns out i never have time for fun. at a certain point, you need to accept that you're not going to finish X tonight and just go grab a beer. 4) get 8 hours of sleep. every night. just do it. you can't do everything, and if you try to, you'll get sluggish and won't do anything well. sleep.

Yes, from my own experience watching job searches at two R1 universities, teaching experience DOES matter. They are concerned with whether or not you can teach undergraduates or advise graduate students. So, 6+ years of fellowship with zero teaching experience will ultimately hurt you on the job market. That said, that doesn't mean fellowships are a bad thing. Far from it. As others have already stated, money follows money. In the microcosm of my own department, students that come in with 2 years fellowship/3 years TAship (our best admissions package) are the ones most likely to receive dissertation-research and writing fellowships from within the department, within the university, and on the (inter)national level. Conversely, students that enter with 5 years of TAship (our "worst" fully funded package) struggle to get the necessary fellowship support to conduct archival research for their dissertation. Not only are they teaching more than everyone else (and therefore being more distracted from focusing on their own work), they have tremendous difficulty securing funding that is absolutely crucial to completing the dissertation. This isn't because these underfunded students are less capable or intelligent. The CVs of students with fellowships are more impressive. Why? Well, the fellowships themselves. They've also had more time to refine their research, write grant proposals, and focus on coursework (GPA does actually matter for fellowships). When you apply for a SSRC or an ACLS-Mellon, if the "fellowships and awards" line of your CV is blank, that is not good. At all. I'd be interested to see the studies that say people who DON'T teach are less productive and have greater time to degree. All I have ever seen/heard/read has indicated the exact opposite. People on fellowships get more work done and people forced to teach every single year dramatically increase their time to degree. Which... is only logical. When I applied for grad school many moons ago, my undergraduate advisor told me to not go to ANY school that didn't offer me a fellowship. Never mind getting funded or not, she said to absolutely not go anywhere that didn't offer a fellowship for at least one year. Her reasoning was that, in order to secure the more prestigious fellowships at the national level, you need to already have fellowships on your CV. If your department didn't think you were good enough for a fellowship, the SSRC won't either. These fellowships matter now because they'll help us get post-docs, fellowships, and major grants when we're professors. Yes, it's possible to be a good academic and find a tenure-track job without all of this stuff. But the fellowships help, now and 10-20 years from now.

i'm fairly certain it doesn't matter if you change your topic. the SSHRC wants to make sure you're still registered in your program, but they know that these ideas change and evolve, especially for people that get the 4-year or 3-year awards. as far as i know, there's no oversight to ensure that you actually write what you said you would. you should be fine.

our grad courses always fill up before the first-year students are even allowed to register. they just get forced into the class. it's simple bureaucratic procedure. this time of year, your advisor is probably trying to court the remaining hold-outs for admission, sitting on thesis/comps/overview/dissertation committees, and wading through end-of-the-year grading. when you're actually IN grad school, it can take your advisor a week to get back to you by email if they're busy enough. calm the eff down.

a colleague of mine just had his first child, and he's still finishing his dissertation. he does a lot of reading and writing with the baby sleeping on his chest. here's the deal: lots of people told him not to have a kid yet. when another grad student had his second child a year ago, professors grumbled, wondering how this would affect his progress. most assumed he would quit (he didn't, but he did spend 4 painful months in a different country from the rest of his family). and these were men, in a climate where most of our (65+ year old) professors assume the bulk of child-rearing falls upon females. they had one student in the past who had all three of her children while she was in graduate school. every time she got pregnant, people said, "what are you doing? you'll never finish!" not only did she finish, she has a tenure-track job and her dissertation-cum-book has won a few prizes. her (former) advisor commented that she was a very determined student and required little to no guidance. she knew what she was going to do and she went and did it. my sense is, to pull this sort of thing off, you need a lot of determination and you need to prioritize. i would recommend 1) not planning your life out by the year. the world never works that way. and 2) don't wait on starting a family or doing the other things that are important to you. grad school is not a time to put your life on hold. the coursework portion of grad school definitely is time to put your life on hold. but once you're through the 2-3 years of classes, comps, and overviews, have a life.

i've had classes that require one book a week, so 14 books per seminar, 3 seminars a semester. you could easily spend $600-900 if you buy those books new from the university bookstore. look on amazon for cheapo copies and get the books through interlibrary loans. if you decide you'll need the book for future work, THEN buy it, but until then, just get it for free from the library. that method reduced my book costs from $800 in my first year to $200 in the second.

a 90 minute drive is not close when you DON'T want to see someone. it's not like you'll run into each other at the supermarket. learn to cope with the break-up but don't convince yourself that you'll see him/her everywhere. you won't.

school B. you do not need someone who does exactly what you do in order to advise you. what you need is a critical eye, someone that will push you in your work and keep you on schedule and challenge you. YOU can figure out the historiography yourself. and frankly, you should. as professors, we will have to learn entire subfields on our own if our work takes us that way. given your current background, you should already know some of the major texts in your subject. look at their footnotes, see which books they ALL cite, move from there. school B sounds in every way better than school A. the prestige, the money, the library, the appearance/image on the job market. the only shortcomings are not getting to meet your advisor and not having a strong enough supporting cast. and does this lack of a supporting cast mean there aren't others who study modern mexico (for example) or aren't others who study latin america? if it's the former, i'd say this is a non-issue. if it's the latter, then it would be a legitimate concern. even then, in the pros and cons list, this aren't enough reasons to pick school A over school B. that said, the fact that this seems to be a difficult decision AT ALL for you means that, really, you'd rather be at school A. don't feel bad for making a "bad decision" on paper (picking school A) if it's where your heart really is, but recognize that this is more a decision of the heart than a dispassionate weighing of pros and cons. if school A wasn't your undergrad school, but some other institution, would the choice between A and B be this difficult?

.... that's not ironic. the title of the article it links to is called "japjapjapjapjapjapjap." talking about the pejorative "jap." i... i think that it was intentional. so, um... not ironic.