StrangeLight

i don't see the problem. it sounds like you've met people that you like. so hang out with them and have fun. your own cohort will stop inviting you to things if you always say no to them, but that doesn't seem to be the problem. you just haven't bonded with them as well as your SO's cohort. so fine. don't worry about it. this isn't high school, you don't need to worry about which cliques you're in. just be friendly and cordial with everyone, and hang out with whoever you want to hang out with. it's actually a good thing to have friendships outside of your department so you can get out of work-mode when you need to.

no. a SSHRC recipient (or SSRC, or ACLS mellon, etc.) is NOT an equivalent position to a post-doctoral fellow. when a university gives you their own internal fellowship, you are also called a fellow. and you still list that under "awards, grants, AND FELLOWSHIPS." "education" is for degrees conferred or in progress. "employment" is for TAships, post-docs, and any sort of position where you are paid a salary to do something IN ADDITION TO working on your own research. but you can go ahead and put it under education if you want to. that's not where it should go and anyone that sees your CV and knows what the SSHRC is will think it's odd, but if that's where you want to list it... go for it.

the SSHRC is a fellowship, not a degree. you list it under awards, grants, and fellowships, not under education. it would be over the top. no fellowships, no matter how prestigious (and while the SSHRC is an awesome deal, it's given out to so many people that i'd not necessarily call it that prestigious), should go under the education heading of your CV.

i'd second most of this. your GPA is absolutely fine. do not explain any of it, really. focus your SOP on what you want to study, concretely. you can always change your mind, but your SOP should convince the adcom that you can conceptualize an executable research project. so talk about american intellectual history, but propose a concrete topic. maybe even two, if they're interrelated. talk about how you would answer your research question and how your interests line up with profs in the department, the school's area studies centers (if applicable), the school's library collection (if applicable). they really like it when you say some of your sources are in their library. UK masters are not funded. sometimes a school will have a fellowship or two to offer, but most people go in unfunded. also, UK programs tend to unfund or underfund PhD students as well (at least in comparison to US programs that *should* fully fund all PhD students). for one thing, you'd be far away from the experts in your field. for another, you'd be far away from your sources. and for another, you'd be paying out of pocket. look into american-based FUNDED masters programs. these exist and are much better stepping stones into top PhD programs. not that the UK programs you listed are bad at all, but they come with real financial costs that may not be worth the name attached. also, 1 year masters programs are not always seen as sufficient or equivalent to an american masters program, which is 2 years. so you may have to do the masters AGAIN at a US program, even with a UK masters. this will vary by field.

your GPA is fine. having a few community college credits, especially if they're only for gen-ed requirements, is fine. this will hold you back at exactly zero programs, so don't worry about it. some insight on how the admissions committee works in my program: the adcom reads your SOP first. the adcom puts your application in a file, with a front page that lists your GPA, GRE scores, TOEFL scores. no one pays any attention to these at this point in the process. you could have a 2.0 GPA and they'd still at least read your SOP. some people forget to send transcripts and they'll still evaluate the application and put it in the "admit" file pending the transcripts actually arrive. the adcom then gives your application to faculty members that you may be working with (regional or thematic "fits"). those faculty members read the SOP, the writing sample, and the LORs, and rank the candidate on a scale of 1 to 5. each file is evaluated by 5 professors OUTSIDE OF the adcom this way. there was at least one instance where a student's TOEFL score was too low to be admitted, and the faculty member asked, "what should i do with this? the score's too low." the response was, "read it and rank it and just ignore the scores. if you want the student, then we'll ask them for another english language test before they arrive in the fall." then the adcom gets the files back and goes through the top-ranked students in detail. keep in mind that these rankings occur based only on the SOP, LORs, and writing sample. they know the GPA, GRE, TOEFL, but they're told not to factor that into their decision. language proficiency matters to the degree that you remember to mention your language proficiency in your SOP (which you should always do, including for grant applications). so the adcom evaluates the top-ranked candidates with a fine-tooth comb and fill in the available spaces based largely on departmental politics. so and so wants to beef up his advisees and get a new cohort. this big subfield is pretty content with their current crop so they're going to be incredibly picky with any new students. that subfield hasn't had a student in years, so they want to fill out their cohort. this guy's retiring, that lady's on sabbatical, this prof is already on 9 or 10 dissertation committees, etc. GRE scores will never discount your application (at least in my program). if they're shitty, that's a knock against you, but that alone will never keep you out of the program. if you're an international student, they literally throw your GRE scores away. american students have been taking standardized tests since kindergarten. not the case for almost everywhere else in the world, so US students already have an unfair advantage. then the fact that so much of the GRE is culture-specific.... they just toss the scores. i'd be surprised if most programs don't do this for international students, actually. so... study for the GRE, try hard, and then don't sweat the score. your GPA is fine as is. no one will care that you did a few credits at a community college. put ALL of your energy into your SOP and writing sample. prepare your LOR writers with materials so they can write a detailed, specific letter about your ability as a researcher. not that you're a good person, not that you're a good student, not that you wrote a great term paper. you want someone to say "this person has worked in archives before, created a strong research paper, assisted me in my own research." let your LOR writers know about your language proficiency so they can include it in your letter. if you really want to go overboard, ask them if they think it would be good idea to share their letters with each other, so they can each highlight different aspects of your abilities and cover all the bases. that's going above and beyond, but i'd say that's a better use of your time than prepping GRE math or worrying about community college credits. good luck!

we are at the end of the cultural turn. and sports history/the history of sport is an incredibly well developed field. CLR james' book about cricket said more about the caribbean than almost any other, and it was written decades ago.

i'd second tickle's question: why history? history, as a discipline, is more than just the past stories of a subject or person. you're constructing analytical arguments about change over time, the intricacies of historical processes, the relationship between local, national, and transnational structures, the interplay of human agency and societal structures, etc. as you said, MMA is a relatively new sport. it would be difficult to write an academic history of the sport. if you still wanted to go the academia route, an anthropology of the culture of MMA could be a feasible approach. but it really sounds like you don't want to do academic writing. and that's fine, because frankly, no one reads academic writing anyway. i'd suggest pursuing sports journalism more broadly and seeing if you can get an MMA or boxing "beat." i'm sure there's been great historical work done on different martial arts, anything from karate to capoeira. starting with "MMA" may not be the route to go if you're really insistent on wanting to write ACADEMIC history rather than pop/popular/pop culture history. if you're leaning more towards the pop culture history, then go for it. but you don't need (and won't get) a history PhD for that. and the history MA will increase your marketability in nothing. i say that as someone with a history MA. it does nothing for your job prospects.

i would recommend doing your best to get 3 academic LORs. what you really want is an LOR that can attest to your research ability. your principal cannot do that, regardless of how well he knows your professional work as a teacher. the adcoms don't want to know that you'd be a good adjunct or lecturer. they want to know that you'd be capable of writing a thesis or dissertation. people who get letters from professionals usually get ones that still attest to their research ability. lawyers and journalists do plenty of research (albeit of a different type) so these can be decent substitutes for academic LORs. ideally, if you need to get a letter from your professional life, the letter writer should have a PhD or advanced graduate degree. adcoms want an assessment of your potential as a grad student coming from someone that is at least familiar with the rigors of grad school. it doesn't sound like you've actually been out of school that long. you were doing a masters (or at least the coursework?) while teaching. a colleague of mine did that exact same thing before getting admitted to my program, and he got letters from his MA professors. it may be awkward but i really recommend trying to get your LORs from grad and undergrad professors. as i said, professional LORs can often be acceptable, but they still need to attest to your research skills. if i were you, i'd drop the principal from your list. i'd also drop the volunteer LOR writer, since you've read something somewhere (it was unclear) that say not to. get in touch with old masters profs and your old undergrad prof. don't ask for letters now, but say you're thinking of grad school and want their advice. do it NOW. remind them of your work, ask to show them your SOP or writing sample, ask them where you should apply. then, in september/october, ask for the letter. this way you'll have built up a good 4-5 months of contact with them.

yes, i know people who have been kicked out for low grades. i also know people who have been kicked out for "unsatisfactory progress" through the program. that can mean taking 4 years to complete a 2 year MA, stalling on writing a dissertation overview, that sort of thing. also, it's not unheard of in my combined MA/PhD program for people to be awarded the MA, largely as a recognition of the work that went into it, but then not asked to stay for the PhD. far more common is for people to simply choose to leave. i've seen people leave as soon as they get their MA, even though they knew a year prior that they didn't want to do this anymore. i also know people that leave after the first year because they discover this is just not something that they want. and, a little more disturbing to me, i've seen people leave, or take extended leaves of absence, once they're ABD (all but dissertation). these people have finished their MAs, their coursework, their comps, their overviews, their language tools. all that's left is researching and writing the dissertation. sometimes they've even finished the research! and they quit. take a look at how many students are accepted to a program in a given year. then look at how many finish the PhD in a given year. even though some take longer than others, the back-up of graduates should even out. my program yields 8-10 new students a year, but we have 2-4 people finishing their PhDs. the other 6 people are going somewhere, right?

what you are going through is not at all uncommon. for one thing, you should never feel badly about taking a few hours for yourself, whether it's for therapy or swimming or napping or seeing a movie. contrary to popular opinion, you don't need to spend every waking hour working or ready to work. it's entirely up to you how much you tell your advisor. if s/he is specifically asking why you can't make a certain time for meetings or labs or whatever, then you know s/he has noticed. if s/he hasn't brought up your absences yet, then don't worry about it. there's no need to explain why you're unavailable at thursdays at 4 (or whatever).

i see that you're a europeanist. makes sense. UNC is also really well known for latin american history. one of the absolute top programs anywhere.

i know a lot of people with spouses and children in my school and none of them received bumped up packages. in fact, the health insurance automatically included in our packages only covers the student, and if they wish to cover their families they need to pay out of pocket. so never mind bumped up stipends, they don't even get bumped up/adequate benefits. different schools might work differently on this, but i've never heard of it as a policy before.

NNNOOOOOOOOOOO. *darth vader style* teaching is definitely important for your CV. even at R1 universities. my R1 university turned down a great candidate with ground-breaking scholarship because his teaching experience was so thin, we worried he wouldn't even be able to advise or lead a grad seminar. it was still a close vote, but grad students' concerns over his teaching inexperience ultimately cost him the job. another candidate for a different job search was really put over the top when (in addition to a great job talk) we found out that he had won teaching awards and had advised undergraduate honours' theses. he went to harvard, so it's not like he was teaching because his school couldn't afford to support him with fellowships. THAT SAID, teaching for 3 of your 5 years in grad school is excessive. 1 or 2 years of teaching are more manageable in terms of getting you through your coursework and research in a timely fashion and in terms of building some real teaching experience. when you're in your 6th or 7th year (because NO ONE finishes an MA/PhD in 5 years), then you can teach again.

really? because i'd say you have at least another month. ugh. again, the letter i got from SSHRC dated february 22 said we'd hear news on the "next stage" (didn't say final stage, but what else is left?) in april. which probably means may.

the SSHRC committees that select the winners are doing this for free. they're busy academics. THAT'S why they can't give you a concrete date.

i found this blog to be very accurate. we had a student that was extremely talented. all As in her graduate work, an exciting research project, professors loved her. she found doing research abroad to be unbearably isolating and her particular advisor intimidated the fecal matter out of her. and he didn't even seem to notice, although everyone else did, because she had a near panic attack every time she had to meet with him. she quit post-comps, moved to los angeles, and started working in an animal shelter. she LOVES her life now. people didn't even know she could smile when she was in grad school, she seemed sarcastic and bitter but that was just (what people assumed was) her natural personality. now they see how happy she is and they all remark that she seems like a totally different person. and yet, behind her back, all anyone talks about is what a shame it is she quit, how horrible they feel for her now, how pathetic her life has become. she's HAPPY! she's doing work she loves that, shock, actually matters. to her, to other people. there's a point to it. she lives in a place she loves doing a thing she loves and she gets to have a life and she feels fulfilled. and grad students and professors sit around and talk about how disappointing that is, as though being happy outside of academia implies some sort of hidden weakness they should have detected in her long ago.

so just ask other grad students what they use and buy that. or consider getting international traveler's health insurance. it's sort of "cheating" but it's much cheaper. or just save all your doctors' visits for when you visit your home country and pray you don't get really sick in the meantime. that's what i do. i just can't rationalize paying $250/month for insurance and THEN having to give copayments any time i actually want to go to the doctor or get a prescription. what the hell is the $250/month for if i still need to pay whenever i actually go to the doctor? i'll be honest, the american health care system scares the shit out of me. i avoid it entirely and just get all my doctoring done when i visit family once a year. there HAVE been times where, if i had been in my home country, i would've gone to my doctor, but i just try to ignore the chronic this and 6-month-long bout of that...

the letter i got said they would notify me on the results in april.

it can be difficult to even win outside funding without being part of a program already. if you have a funded offer, even if it's a TAship, then i'd say to take it and apply for external funding while you're in the program. if it's an unfunded offer, but your program is usually unfunded, i'd defer (if possible) rather than just reject outright because next year you may not get external funding or admission to programs.

holy crap. just my opinion but i would not recommend reading every book that way. your grasp of argument will be shallow at best. in a pinch, i've done that with a few books (a couple reviews, intro, conclusion, table of contents, skim a chapter or two) but i find that i can only get away with that in certain weeks because i've clearly read the books carefully in other weeks. professors can tell when all you do is read a review. seminars are 2-3 hours long, with sometimes as few as 5 or 6 people in them. you need more than 10 minutes of things to say. you need a good poker face too, so when the prof brings up an argument or example you have no recollection of (but was the basis for an entire chapter) you don't look clueless. i mean... you can definitely get away with reading a book like that. but they know.

no wonder i'm always tired, sick, and getting grey hairs. i read 20 pages an hour. i could go faster (30-35 pages) if i took notes right in the margins and underlined stuff, but i found that method of note-taking to be absolutely useful in terms of prepping for comps. so now i type all of my notes, which has slowed me down to 20 pages. it'll be way more useful in the long run, but with 3 books (300-400 pages) to read a week, ugh. i've also been told by a few of my professors to "read every word on every page, and read it carefully." and they're not joking. they will ask incredibly specific, precise questions, so skimming means you miss a lot. i find that i still can't finish the books in this time frame, though, so i make sure to at least read the intro and conclusion, the first body chapter and the last body chapter. after all, we're historians, looking for change over time, so knowing at least the beginning and ending can give you a decent guess at the middle. on the rare occasion that an author writes an explicit conclusion to each chapter... money!! i really don't like skimming or speed-reading. i find that i don't fully grasp the arguments without reading a book thoroughly. there just isn't time, however, and you can generally survive a seminar without knowing what's in chapter 3 or 6.

the time crunch is less stressful once you're ABD (all but dissertation, so finished coursework, comps, overviews, etc.). in the MA, or even the coursework portion of a PhD, you'll frequently wish there were 28 hours in a day. the extra 4 would just make life so much easier. when you're done with all of those courses and defenses, i've been told that a weight lifts off your shoulders. all you have to do is everything you went there to do in the first place.

my program used to have readings seminars and research seminars, but now we only do the readings seminars and the research is done individually with your advisor, formally or informally. readings seminars will have you read a book a week, plus one or two articles, usually so that the reading load falls somewhere between 300 and 500 pages. some profs will ask for 400-word weekly summaries/responses, others won't. all told, each class assigns about 20-30 pages of writing, but that's broken down in different ways. three 5 page papers and one 10 page paper; three 10 page papers; six 3-4 page papers; one 25 page paper. they're all historiographical papers, based on the course readings only, which make up your comps lists. then we have a writing seminar once a year where people work on their masters thesis or dissertation overviews. you have students from every subfield working in the same room, and no one really has a common pool of reading or theory to draw from, so the format's not terribly useful. this has been communicated to the department and DGS on an annual basis but, because we're a very small program, i doubt it'll ever change. if they went to regional/thematic research seminars, some subfields would only have 1 or 2 students in them. i know that michigan, for example, does (or did, a few years ago) research seminars with the idea that one of the research papers would be expanded into an MA thesis.

i do know that professors from different schools will talk to each other about prospective candidates, but as far as i know, this is only between friends. i have never heard of any systematic sort of negotiation process for students between schools. it actually sounds like far too much work given the number of applications, and there's already enough bickering within the departments over how many africanists or americanists they're going to take on, never mind between schools. also, if this was the case (negotiating between schools), then these "top programs" would be able to offer admission all around the same time. but as we see every year, some top programs give out offers of admission as early as the first week of february and others wait until the very end of february or the first week of march. if anything, this sounds like an ivory tower myth of years' past, where students at "top 10" programs try to rationalize their rejection from other top 10 and "lower ranked" programs.

i was working as a journalist. i didn't like that i couldn't pick my own stories or topics. i didn't like that i couldn't write about things the way i wanted to write about them, like poverty or race or violence. there's no room for structure or power in journalism. i didn't like that someone was always fucking with my copy and always would be. after lengthy conversations with journalists, professors, and journalists-turned-professors, i decided that i would only really be able to say what i wanted to say in a dissertation or a book. with a PhD in hand, people would seek me out for features and op-eds on my region of expertise rather than toiling away on a beat that has nothing to do with what i really want to talk about. after being in a program for two years, i sometimes lose sight of this. i spend so much of my time doing coursework that i rarely get to really enjoy working on my own project. with general mounting stress and pressure, even when i do work on my research it's not always enjoyable. i can't wait until i'm ABD and can just do my own thing. that's the dream right now.