StrangeLight

just wait for cornell. you've already withdrawn your application from a bunch of schools, which i think is going above and beyond in terms of freeing up spots for people potentially on waitlists. just. wait. you don't need to decide until april 15. and since you're only considering 2 schools, feel free to wait until april 15.

princeton publishes their placement record for the last 10 years. just check their website. out of curiosity, i looked up the last 3 years, and was actually a little shocked. in 2008, of the 20 PhDs granted (which sounds like a lot to me, i'm in a tiny program), only 4 students received tenure-track positions. these are at great schools (northwestern, michigan, u of oregon), but still... only 4. some were lecturers or visiting assistant professors, many were on fellowships, 3 or 4 had gone into industry consulting, one is a high school principal, and two or three have nothing listed, which means that at the time the file was created, they didn't have a job related to their academic field. i honestly don't really know what to make of this. some students get TT jobs at the top schools, some leave academia. i'm not sure i'd consider 4 of 20 a good placement record for TT jobs, but i guess many of those postdocs will get TT jobs eventually? they're probably getting more teaching experience at the postdoc positions too. edit: in 2009, 7 of 13 received TT jobs, again at universities you've actually heard of. others are postdocs, lecturers, or no position is given. in 2010, 10 of 19 have tenure track jobs, again most of them at great universities (columbia, cambridge, CUNY, etc.). on the website, you can see who the advisors were, where the students were placed, and what their dissertation was called. this is way more information than many top programs will give out (columbia has had a broken link to a list of their placements for at least 4 years!), which suggests that princeton feels pretty good about their own track record.

i think that, for humanities programs, Bs are generally not good. B/B+ on an assignment is fine as long as you pull an A- in the class. in theory, my own program threatens people with expulsion if you can't maintain a 3.0 average OR you get one C/C+ OR you get "too many" Bs. that said, i've known students whose transcripts were covered in B+s and only occasionally A-s, no As. no one sat down with these people to tell them they were in jeopardy, but they both dropped out of the combined MA/PhD program just after getting their MAs completed. i'd imagine that, if they had planned to stick around for the PhD, then that conversation might have come up. one or two Bs won't end you. more than that, in a humanities program, and you may not get "the talk" but your grades will hurt your chances at fellowships, your ability to apply to other programs, and possibly your relationship with the faculty. this isn't a hard science discipline. there will be plenty of people in your class pulling A- and A, and the more Bs you rack up, the fewer professors you have to turn to for LORs, etc. Bs aren't failing grades but they aren't signs of confidence either.

i also know of some research 1 universities that passed over candidates from "top 10" programs because there was the concern that they would not be able to teach (e.g. only one semester as a TA or one semester as a visiting scholar). the concern was less with the ability to teach undergrads than with the ability to lead graduate seminars or advise grad students. TAing for 3-4 years won't necessarily make you a good advisor or seminar leader, but having no teaching experience will raise a red flag at any school, including the R1s. princeton lets you TA, if you want to. you should. for a semester or two. wait until you're post-comps and post-research year and teach for a year as you process your data and build your arguments for your dissertation. then when you're actually ready to start writing, stop TAing again. some programs will offer students 5 years of funding, all of it as a TA. that's not good and you should not envy them or let them spin 5 years of slave labour into a positive.

during my first week, i had to sit in front of a panel of 6 professors from all subfields and get grilled on my dissertation topic, even though i was just starting my MA. they were nice about it, splitting the 18 hour interrogation (department requirement) into three six-hour sessions, no break. at the end, they told me all my ideas were worthless and i had to go in front of the entire faculty to justify my existence. there, the faculty took turns ripping off a piece of cloth from my body and spitting in my face before commanding me to confine myself to the library microfilms for three weeks until i could emerge with a real thesis project. after that, all i had to do was eat some broken glass and then, by about november, they decided to start actually giving me my fellowship paycheck. no biggie, really. you'll be fine.

my department provides summer fellowships of $3000 to pay for these sorts of summer programs, so if your department does the same, funding won't be a factor. but this program in particular doesn't sound all that rigorous.

results are out for pitt? finally. now alejandro (the DGS) can read my thesis and we can set my defense. congrats, people. if anyone has questions about pitt's program, feel free to pm me.

vancouver/burnaby is way nicer than ann arbor anyway. i miss living there.

if you are a canadian citizen or permanent resident studying in canada OR the US OR another "accredited" country (think UK, australia, japan, etc.), you are eligible for the social sciences and humanities research council of canada (SSHRC) doctoral fellowship. this is worth $20,000/year, for anywhere from 1 to 4 years. the duration depends on how early into your PhD studies you win the award. you are also eligible for the SSHRC doctoral award (and possibly the masters' level awards) if you are NOT canadian but are attending grad school in canada. you can apply for these awards multiple times. if you are an international student studying in the US, you are eligible for mellon ACLS fellowships and SSRC fellowships (social sciences research council). these are highly competitive (as are the SSHRCs in canada) but you're eligible. i'm sure you're probably already aware of these.

ummm... i think his/her point was that this process is a crapshoot. you don't need to do anything differently to have dramatically different results in another year. it depends on the department's internal politics, which subfields they want to expand in a given year, etc. i think the point was that where you do or don't get in has to do with a lot more than just your application.

so you want the fellowship, a TAship, AND another job? unless you keep the other job off the books, it would probably disqualify you from holding the award, because that's dedicating way too much time to things other than your degree. i think they want to cap (unofficially) the number of hours you work, at ANY job, in addition to the fellowship. i can't imagine holding a TAship and another job would keep you under the hypothetical cap. my suggestion would be that if you end up in that hypothetical position, keep the other parttime job under the table. in other news, i just received a letter today saying that my SSHRC was forwarded onto the national competition! i applied directly to the SSHRC for a PhD award. i'm currently in a masters program in the US (in pennsylvania, for anyone wondering about how far the letter had to travel from ottawa) that, if all goes smoothly and according to normal procedure, will admit me to their PhD program in the fall. (technically, the MA and PhD are two distinct programs, but you can't get a terminal MA, so i am and am not already in a PhD program). the letter said that 832 applications were reviewed and 233 were passed onto the national committees. yay! edit: oh and the letter was dated for february 22, 2011.

across the board, not particular to latin americanists. this is all gossip through the grapevine sort of stuff, but as i said, an open secret. the students are extremely competitive, particularly because of the uneven funding. some people get better offers than others, there's only so much money to go around, there aren't that many TAships, people sabotage each other for fellowships. there's a distance between faculty and students, if your advisor is a "big name" there is a decent chance you will rarely see him or her, barely get feedback on your work, etc. even the best funding offers aren't enough to live comfortably in a reasonable commute to campus. you either live far away, with far too many roommates, and/or you take loans. once you see how small your stipend is after "withholding tax," a lot of people end up getting loans. other schools have this problem, too, but from what i've heard (from students inside the department, from faculty outside the department but familiar with it), at columbia it's particularly toxic. but, if anyone is considering going to columbia, talk to current grad students and ask them to be frank and honest about the atmosphere. if possible, ask them over drinks when they've let their guard down a little. maybe the reputation is unwarranted. i know someone there now who is coping pretty well and has made good friendships in the program but she's mentioned a lot of these problems. she's not a latin americanist.

rebecca scott at michigan deals with legal history and the history of thought in the 19th century, in reference to cuba. my undergraduate advisor completed her PhD at princeton with adelman as her advisor. she said he was good to work with and let her do what she wanted, but her project (intellectual discourse on race, citizenship, and equality during the first cuban republic) was pretty disconnected from what he had been doing at the time (in late 1990s, early 2000s). her dissertation committee had more professors from michigan than from princeton on it (including scott and turits). when i applied to programs 3 years ago, she pushed michigan pretty hard (as well as NYU and pitt) and i had to bring up princeton. i don't want to put words in her mouth, because this was a few years ago, but my impression at the time was that she was pretty lukewarm on princeton. "good" and "okay" were used a lot. at the time, adelman was the only professor there. candiani was still a lecturer and karl hadn't been hired, so admittedly, it was a different program then. all that said, my interactions with adelman at the time were great. even though i wasn't familiar with his work (and still haven't read any of it; it's just not what i do), he offered probing questions and challenged my ideas in a really encouraging way. i don't doubt that he's a very capable advisor and princeton is stacked with resources. and it's not in ann arbor, which is a good thing. ultimately, it's your decision. wherever you feel more comfortable is the best place for you to go. i am a bit surprised at what short shrift you're giving michigan, though. it's one of the best places for latin american history. columbia is a strange place. their latin americanists are scattered at different schools. SIPA, barnard, columbia proper, etc. they're not actually in the same building, so there's less communication between them. the grad students are miserable. it's an open secret that columbia has one of the worst atmospheres in any history department in the country. that doesn't diminish the quality of the people who teach there, but it's worth mentioning when you have two other stellar offers (princeton and michigan) on the table already. good luck with whatever you choose.

i see you've also been accepted to michigan. just curious, but is it out of the running for you? when i applied for latin american history programs three years ago, i probably would've put michigan above princeton in my own personal ranking (princeton didn't have karl yet, and candiani was only a lecturer at the time, so it was "just" adelman), but i'm a caribbeanist, and michigan's pretty stacked in that respect.

most students applying to the top programs in the US will not have any conferences or published papers straight out of their BA. there are exceptions, but even most of the ivy league cohort won't have conferences or publications with just a BA. i also think that most places assume you won't have conference presentations until you're finished your masters thesis, presumably because that's what you'd be presenting. i've been to 4 conferences so far (i'm in the second year of my MA) and i have 2 more lined up this year (3 were in my first year), but i'm unusual. i actually like doing these things and i've written very different papers for each. this sort of pace is definitely not expected. you can't, or shouldn't, list any articles you've submitted for publication unless they've been accepted. so, most people won't have any publications, even with a completed MA, because they're just submitting their thesis the summer after they finish writing it. yes, there are undergrads who crank out articles. but forgive me... i have yet to see a case where those articles are in respected mid-tier journals. they're usually in local/regional/university-affiliated journals or in journals specifically aimed for the publication of undergraduate or graduate work. yes, it's a line on a CV. yes, it shows dedication and ability to write a research paper. but it's not the same as producing an article that goes into a "real" journal. it demonstrates a lot of positives about an undergraduate to have this sort of work under their belt, but it is not on par with a "publication" publication. if those students (undergrads or MA students) get into real, mid-level journals, then it definitely counts. but that's exceedingly rare.

i don't know if you intended this, but this response came off as very defensive. no, i don't call vets or dentists "doctors." but i would if they wished me to, because at least their work deals with the body. i have little doubt that, all else being equal, a vet or a dentist would be more useful in a (human) medical emergency than someone with a PhD in physics or religious studies. when i travel in europe, i will continue to refer to physicians as "doctors" and PhD holders as "professors," assuming they hold professorships. but thank you for your concern. if those professors wish to enforce their legal right to be called "doctor" they are welcome to sue me.

but if someone is having a seizure and people yell, "is there a doctor in the house?" they don't mean you. or me. i never call PhDs "doctor," even if they've referred to themselves as doctor to set the precedent.

i already smoke and slut. i'm looking to opt into the charlie sheen philosophy of life. i want to be winning.

i'm looking to start an expensive cocaine-smoking habit that i will subsidize with compulsive gambling. there's a casino in town so i'm halfway there.

i think you'll be competitive at CMU. also consider applying to pitt. we just hired a german/central europe historian who should hopefully be here starting in the fall, provided the tenure review goes quickly. you can PM me for more details if you'd like.

regarding spending time with people in your cohort or department, it's a fine balance. you don't want to say no to everything, because eventually they'll just stop asking you. but i'd caution against saying yes to everything, too, if it's not stuff you actually want to do, and you're just going along to be social. i spent a full year spending my little precious free time going to shitty clubs that played mid-90s r'n'b, cookie parties, overpriced and underfun cocktail bars, shopping, and costume parties. ugh. i liked the people enough but, by the end of the year, i realized that every moment i had to relax, i spent doing things i hate, just to be around others. not worth it. at all. now i take a couple hours a week to talk to my friends 3000 miles away, i go to local (punk, metal, folk, hip hop) concerts and comedy clubs, i go to art galleries and thrift stores and antique shops just to browse around, when it's open i'll spend saturday mornings at the farmer's market or the flea market. i end up doing a lot of this stuff alone, which is a bummer, but it's better than spending that same chunk of time doing stuff i hate with people i see all week anyway.

i applied directly for Phd. someone said earlier in the thread (or in the 2010 thread?) that we wouldn't hear if we're A class or B class until the middle or end of march. so if that's true, don't worry. and if it's not, then i'm no longer hopeful either.

i don't have numbers on this, sorry. but i do know, through anecdotal information, that every year since 2007 they've invited some applicants to the prospectives week and then not extended them an offer of admission.

honestly? yeah. assume it means you're out of it. NYU, for example, is notorious for rejecting students they bring to the prospectives day and for accepting students that they never contact for a visit. when i applied for programs, i hung on hoping i was that one student who doesn't get invited to prospectives week but is still admitted. not only was i ultimately disappointed, because the "no" came so late in the process (late march, i think), i never took the time to really enjoy any of my acceptances. assume that no invite means you're out, and then if you happen to be admitted anyway, think of it as a happy surprise. that's my advice, for what it's worth.

DEFINITELY compare the cost of living with a cost of living calculator (google em) before you approach anyone about negotiating an offer. the worst you'll hear is not "no." the worst is that they'll rescind your offer. you can negotiate, but do so with caution and armed with more facts. you're comparing a top program to a "safety." odds are your top program will ask what school made the offer, they'll see it's a "safety," and they'll risk you choosing a lower-ranked or worse-fit program over their own for the sake of $5000. if you have more funded offers from other "top" schools and even when considering cost-of-living this program would still be paying you way less, then you can try to negotiate. 1) check cost of living. 2) wait for funded offers from other comparable programs before you go angling for more money. 3) realize that "the worst" that can happen is way more than them saying "no."