StrangeLight

my grad school bible is graduate study for the 21st century: how to build an academic career in the humanities by gregory colón semenza. this is not a book that tells you how to survive grad school or why you should/shouldn't go. it's a book that tells you how to EXCEL in grad school once you're actually there. i've found a lot of these grad school guides that are published in the current climate of a terrible job market and a public attack on the humanities and higher education spend a good chunk of their time telling you everything that's wrong with the grad school as an institution. this book assumes you've read all that and just gets to the meat of knowing how to excel in your program. really great, occasionally counterintuitive, advice. has a great timeline for humanities students, but it's a little less applicable to social sciences degrees that require fieldwork.

i use pur minerals overall and bronzer. i go cheap on the mascara but expensive on the liquid eyeliner. too cheap and it doesn't go on smoothly. my eyeshadow's not the cheapest, but that doesn't matter because i don't actually wear shadow that often. i also go super-expensive on haircare products (i have curly hair that needs a lot of maintenance). but clothes are just whatever. jeans and tshirts and sweater/cardigans pretty much all the time. sometimes leggings. shoes are either toms or converse lately. given that two of my profs showed up to my comps exam yesterday in jeans, sandals, and cotton tshirts (all three of them!), i don't feel much pressure to dress up. there are a lot of things that are fairly formal about my department, but that's not one of them.

eigen, i totally see the value of teaching experience. but on principle, i don't think taking on free labour is a good idea. would it be possible to adjunct at another nearby college? maybe you'd only make $3000 for the semester, but at least you'd get paid to do it.

macbook pro 13" from 2011. it replaced a white macbook 13" from 2007 that was starting to act up, so i gifted it to my parents. for most things, it's fine, but when i'm working with my primary sources, which are all photographs of documents, it would really help to have a bigger screen (or even two separate screens). when i'm writing my dissertation, i'm thinking about getting a few monitors to slave to the laptop. but in general 13" is perfect and i like being able to take my office wherever i go.

look at the historiography already written on the school. check their footnotes for primary sources. then track those down and start reading through them. if they're located in archives that are far from you, see if your school has any sort of research funds for undergrads. you may be able to get a grant to visit those archives during a summer. but, not a lot of schools have those sorts of funding opportunities for undergrads, so what you really want to try and find are primary sources that have been published or microfilmed. check your school's library to see if they have any useful microfilm for you. doing oral interviews with people that ran the program would be absolutely great, but you also want to find some written documents as well. the footnotes in the existing scholarship should point you in the direction of that material.

you should definitely still apply. make sure you apply to terminal MA programs as well as combined MA/PhD programs. you can search the threads on here for more information on the distinction between the two. if there is a prof in your undergrad who is involved in your subfield, latch onto that person now. their connections may not get you into grad school, but you'll want them to read over your statement of purpose and writing sample and ask them to help you refine it so you increase your chances of admission. it is not impossible at all to get into a great PhD program from an unknown public school. you just have to learn the language that admissions committees are speaking. a prof that has their pulse on their field will be able to help you do this.

i understand that. but i think the first point i made still stands: this is the kind of thing we should be able to do on our own. especially if the aim of such a working list is to "just get us started," we should all be able to use the power of the internets to get started on finding grad programs in our fields. doing that sort of work will help each student refine and reevaluate what they see as their specific interests. it's the sort of "thinking" work that is crucial for our own development as scholars. when i was applying to schools a million years ago, the first place i looked was my bookshelf. what were my favourite books, which scholars asked the kinds of questions i wanted to ask in my work, and then i set to google to find out where they teach. i found that, in two instances, 3 profs i loved in my subfield were at the same institution. those two schools became my top 2 choices, and i'm currently approaching ABD-status in one of them. and guess what? neither of them were on the US news world rankings for my subfield. neither of them would make it into the top-10 list of an informal working list such as the one being proposed, despite the profs being pulitzer finalists and AHA book prize winners. the easiest way to know where to start in forming this list is to go to a bookshelf. this is so crucial and it's incredibly personal. this may not hold water for everyone, but i truly believe that no one should apply to a program unless they are familiar with and like their potential advisor's work. i certainly applied to a bunch of "top ranked" programs without knowing the work of my potential advisor, and i didn't get in. and i'm glad, because going there would have led my research down a much different path, one that i probably wouldn't feel fulfilled by. the second step (for me, anyway) was to go to my undergrad advisor and ask for her thoughts on my bookshelf list. she quickly helped me cross off half of the US news world rankings top 10 in our field because 1) all the profs in our subfield there have retired in the last 5 years, or 2) the faculty in our subfield hate each other at that school, or 3) the program is notorious for having the worst student morale, or 4) their approach to our field is really "old school" and they won't want to work with you unless you believe in objectivity. these are very "inside" sort of insights that most of us wouldn't know, even those of us mid-degree. i think only the most advanced PhDs or the ones with a love of gossip would be able to offer most of these insights, and frankly, most of us here are too green to know this sort of stuff. it's important information to have, but the resource to obtain it is our current profs, not junior grad students. i'm sorry i rambled. again: people will do what they do. but i don't think we should form these lists ourselves because we're all highly specialized. i think we should form these lists ourselves because the process of doing it will help us think more critically about the type of work we hope to do. i could share my database of latin americanist programs here, but i think there's something to be said for the personal discovery that building such a database entails.

hmmm... i'm gonna be honest. i don't think this is a good idea. 1) i firmly believe that this sort of program-by-program research is something students need to do themselves. we're supposed to be professional researchers, and while this is time-consuming work to do individually, we should be able to do it. moreover, you'll actually remember that X prof is at Y school working on Z. i built a database of almost every program i could think of in my subfield, who is there, and what they work on. it's been helpful years later while in graduate school more times than i can count. 2) what counts as "good" and "awesome" are really subjective, so i don't know how useful this will be to anyone. plus, a program that is good at medieval political history won't necessarily be one that's good at medieval gender history, so unless these subcategories get insanely specific, they won't be that useful to people and will risk directing applicants to programs that really aren't as "good" or "awesome" for them as they've been led to believe. obviously people are going to do what they want to do with this, but my first instinct upon seeing this was that it's well intentioned but a bad idea.

PhD, 3rd year (the year of comprehensive exams and dissertation prospectus, hopefully ABD by the end of the month). these will mostly be useful to people who work on race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion, nationalism, and class (if you subscribe to the EP thompson version of "class" as relational rather than structural). rogers brubaker and frederick cooper, "beyond 'identity'" (2000). i think this was in the journal of social history? easy enough to track down on J-STOR, and a must-read for anyone that has ever considered putting the word "identity" in their academic writing. charles tilly, durable inequality (1998). his model for tracing "group difference" over time (be it through ethnicity, religion, race, gender, etc.) is one of my favourites, since it's one of the few theoretical models to consider difference both relational and a function of material resources and economic power. peter berger, the sacred canopy (1967). old school. a theoretical text on the internal functioning of religious systems. at times a little opaque, but super useful to anyone interested in how systems of ideology function and persist. those ideologies could be religious, or could be applied to racism, sexism, science, etc. also some bizarrely entertaining forays into sadism and masochism (for real). fredrik barth. ethnic groups and boundaries (1969). foundational. useful for anyone working on any type of "group," not just studies of ethnicity. judith butler. undoing gender (2004). also foundational. the idea of norms are huge for gender analysis and queer theory, but also for pretty much anyone that is studying people who occupy the social margins.

German annieca, kotov, Kelkel, Ganymede18, grlu0701 Spanish annieca, crazedandinfused, Ganymede18, grlu0701 (kind of), CageFree, StrangeLight French theregalrenegade, Ganymede18, CageFree (reading, can speak a bit), StrangeLight Hebrew uhohlemonster, crazedandinfused (ktzat) Italian Latin Kelkel, Ganymede18 Greek Ganymede18 (New Testament) Russian Polish runaway Romanian kotov Japanese kyjin Portuguese CageFree (reading), StrangeLight (reading, swearing) Hungarian StrangeLight (swearing only)

universally, those that have left willingly (rather than being kicked out) have been happy with their decisions. they were happy the moment they decided to leave academia. you don't realize that you've never seen someone be happy or smile until they finally do it. it's been transformative and largely positive for all of the ones i know of (admittedly, my institutional memory is short, since i've only been in grad school for 3 years). successful is another matter, largely left to interpretation. many have gone on to teach high school (or lecturing at local colleges, without a PhD) and they thoroughly enjoy it. since teaching was their favourite part of the graduate school experience, i think this was a successful transition for them. i also know of a few who had always intended to move towards public history fields, and they now work in museums or university presses. their salary is higher than what assistant professors would receive, and they get their evenings and weekends back. the person at the academic press even gets to stay on top of cutting edge research and advocate for projects she believes in. while she lacks the institutional support to do her own research (sabbaticals, internal research funds at her institution), she still engages in research, albeit at a slower pace, without the pressure of the tenure clock. she's definitely happy, working at one of the top university presses, period. i don't think your fears regarding your professors' disinterest in supporting someone who wishes to leave academia are overblown. i think they're pretty well founded. even with the AHA advocating that history programs seriously prepare students for non-academic jobs (and not just as an alternative to professorship, but as their first choice, if that's what they want), a lot of profs are still resistant to investing themselves in students who will leave academia. professors build their own reputations on the success of their advisees as much as on their own work. many will no doubt tell you that they're disappointed by your decision or try to convince you to go on the job market and give being a prof a chance. that will be hard to navigate. i don't know of any people personally that said, while in grad school, "i want to do non-academic work with my PhD." they usually turned in that direction after they came up empty-handed on the job market. there's a website called beyond academe (i don't remember the URL) that had a lot of stories on the happiness and success of students that opted to leave academia but still work in a field related to their PhD. that might be a good place for you to make contact with people who have made the move you wish to. my experience with this board is that it's full of current graduate students and undergrads, but is pretty light on posters who have their PhDs. the chronicle of higher education's forums would be another place to visit for advice on this. good luck!

nope. a fellow cat-lady and grad student did research there and told me about the campus's feral cat problem. they're all over the place.

this is a strange topic. i know a couple graduate students that took summer jobs in retail every single year of our program. they were generally not considered to be among the stronger students, but i don't know which came first, the job or those impressions. i do know that the summer is THE time for most of us to get moving on our own research, especially if those require research trips and fieldwork. it's also the best time to hit conferences and network with people outside of our programs. the students that spend their summers doing this work have, in my experience, set themselves up well for the job market. someone on their hiring committee met them at a conference. someone that nominated them for a postdoc position remembered them from the archives. i don't think working in the summer technically violates the fellowship or TAship contracts that most of us sign, but... this isn't undergrad. if you need extra money, start researching smaller grants and awards you can apply for. it'll put cash in your pocket and look great on your CV. BUT... if you're going to get a job... get them to pay you under the table. you want as much deniability as possible. if one of your profs walks in while you're waiting tables, hide.

the OP is not looking for ways to be less depressed. he/she is looking for ways to leave graduate school. i appreciate the intentions of some of the responders here, but i think it's skirting the issue a little. most of the people that drop out of my program do so after their qualifying exams. they struggle through all of the coursework, the comps, the theses, the dissertation proposals, the grant writing, and once they're finally on their own, focused on the research, they leave. and that is totally fine. there is something that can be very unsatisfying about the intangible nature of academic work, particularly for people with plenty of experience in work environments that bring about concrete, material results. i'd say, before trying to find a way out of the program, think about where else you would like to go. if you want to get into NGO or government consulting, a PhD in a social science field can actually go a long way. dreading the pointlessness of being a professor (perceived or otherwise) does not necessarily mean the PhD won't help you in the long term. working for government agencies, NGOs, archives, libraries, museums, thinktanks, academic or non-academic presses, and a million other things are all possibilities with the PhD. if you can reorient your goals towards something you want to do, and the degree is still part of that, you may find renewed energy to finish. if the actual work of doing the research and writing for the dissertation is too much for you, even with the new career goals, then talk to your school's career counselors, your advisor, and the director of grad studies for your department about your desire to walk away. unfortunately, a lot of people in academia see the desire to leave it as a sign of failure. you may face this, but ignore it. the more ambitious or successful a professor is, the less personally satisfied they seem to be. the academe they so cherish is full of thankless work and minimal free time. it's not a bad thing to not want that. but before you decide to drop out of your program altogether, think about where you'd rather be. you may find that finishing the PhD will still help you get there. as for how to begin the conversation about leaving, just do it. make an appointment with your advisor and tell him/her your concerns. depending on how sympathetic he/she is, then go to your DGS.

feed some of the feral cats on miami's campus for me. they give me the sads.

i have a vera bradley bag i got on sale from zappos. it's not the tote, it's actually a much smaller size, but i can fit a 13" laptop in it relatively easily, along with a few books, notebooks, and all my purse stuff. doesn't look big but it carries a ton of stuff. on days where i'm dragging in 4+ books, i tend to just use a backpack or a weekender bag.

i think your research interests would fit nicely in any history program that offers some sort of concentration in women's history or gender history. what you should do is look at the history books you've loved and see where those professors teach. then read up on those programs. if they have grad programs that train people in women's history (the only way to know may be to look at the americanist grad students and see how many of them list women's history under their research interests), that's a great place to start. also, make sure that the schools you're looking into also have women's studies or gender studies or queer studies departments or concentrations, because you may wish to take some classes outside of history to complement your history classes. for americanists, it can be especially overwhelming to find graduate programs because seemingly every PhD program specializes in US history. while you could certainly stick to the "top ranked" programs in US history, i think you'd have better training and more luck with admissions if you zeroed in on schools known for women and/or gender history. sometimes they also happen to be "top ranked" program, sometimes not.

don't go to the dean. jesus christ. (in general, i recommend that anyone on this forum who asks for advice check whether the person offering it is already in grad school or not. if they aren't, weigh that advice with the knowledge that they don't have actual experience in a grad program yet). as the chair of my department recently told me, tenure is not a license for a professor to be abusive. it is, however, absolutely a license for a professor to be an asshole. if your mentor is just being difficult and unreasonable, then talk to the director of grad studies and see if that person can help facilitate a smoother working relationship between the two of you. that's part of the DGS's job, that's what they're there for. if you see no improvement in the mentoring relationship, then talk to the DGS about switching to another mentor. if no mentor is willing to work on your topic, consider 1) switching topics, or 2) leaving the program for somewhere more suited to your interests. i will say that the few specifics you mentioned (writing emails out loud, sending you on errands, telling you her personal problems, micromanaging your TA duties without clear guidelines or expectations) doesn't sound like abuse to me. it just sounds like someone who's not that good at mentoring a graduate student. this sounds like a good reason for you to work with someone else, but it's not a good-enough reason to land that prof in any trouble. they're allowed to be difficult to work with, just like bosses and managers at office jobs are. also, if your advisor works on your niche field and has explicitly told you that your ideas won't work, trust her!!! she knows your field better than you do and is supposed to be guiding you towards a research project that makes a real contribution to your field. if she's only "quietly" disapproving, stop reading so much into that until she explicitly disapproves of it.

zyzz, the problem is you. congratulations.

look, professors are specialists. just because this prof doesn't specialize in what you do doesn't mean he's inadequate in other areas. every time a professor strays into an area that IS my specialty and IS NOT theirs, i know more than they do. and i should. this is not unusual, this is not a problem, this is not something worth worrying about. i think you're reading too much into your professor and your advisor's attitudes, but even if you're not, you should still back off. professors have huge egos and you don't need to get in the middle of anything. the real question i have is, if this course is your advisor's specialty, why AND how on earth did students get him to stop teaching it because it was too difficult? if you're in grad school, you should be getting exposed to the most difficult and involved theories in your field. what is going on with the students that they didn't want the expert teaching his field of expertise? and what department gives their students that sort of power? it seems to me that there's way more faculty politics behind this issue than you're leading us to believe, and your advisor might not be the shining star you've described if he had this course taken away from him. perhaps your professor's skepticism towards your advisor's research is connected to the reason your advisor doesn't teach it anymore. tread carefully. just do your work in the class, contribute your knowledge and ideas, and leave it at that.

in my undergrad honours program, we had to pass a translation exam as part of obtaining our degree. we could use a dictionary and had to do a direct translation of the material presented. 2 hours. everyone was put in the same room, whether they were doing the same language or not. the kid whose first language was german flew through that translation exam in 5 minutes, while someone else writing the exact same exam barely finished in 2 hours. some had an entire page in their language to translate, but it was fairly standard secondary material. one student doing latin had a one paragraph passage that became 2 exam booklets in translation. me? the professor assigned me a poem in spanish. A FUCKING POEM. i had to translate a goddamn poem in 2 hours. the metaphors were the worst. the double-meaning of words. it was hard. i wish that on no one.

for people waiting on pitt: my little birdies tell me that all the acceptances have gone out. they're a week behind on sending out rejection letters because of some department drama. sorry to be the bearer of bad news.

i think it's possible for people to be true to themselves and to be marketable at the same time. if your heart is in a cutting edge field, then you're set. if your heart is in a 1970s-esque historical project, it's still very marketable if your work aims to reinvent the question rather than take one side in an age-old argument. but look, if we can't get a book published, we aren't gonna get tenure (even if we miraculously land TT jobs). and we can't get a book published without truly making a new contribution to a field, without being marketable. to anyone that ignores these concerns based on principle, that's fine and good now, but when you're shopping around a book manuscript and all the publishers respond with "that's been done," you may wish you'd considered the market more seriously. i don't know about y'all, but i'm not writing my dissertation for me. i'm writing it for my field. i'm studying what i'm studying because i believe it's important to real people's lives right now (and is quite literally a matter of life and death for many) and because i believe it's a necessary intervention in a few debates in my field. i'm not reinventing the wheel but i am working on something that i know is important to the people i study and to the other people who study them. i don't have the audacity to write a book that only means something to me. as long as your ideas will matter to other people in your field, your dissertation/book/research WILL be marketable. if truly no one cares about the topic but you, then there are a bunch of reasons to reconsider, not the least of which is our responsibility to make new contributions to our field. i'm not saying people need to become world historians because it's trendy or to throw in gender just for the sake of it. but damn, being marketable is about a lot more than getting a job. it's about getting published. it's about contributing our knowledge. and (in my opinion), if your research subjects are still alive, it's about giving something back to them, even if it's merely recording their history or raising awareness. we have to love what we do or we're not going to make it through 6+ years of grad school, but it also helps to work on something that someone other than ourselves thinks is important.

regarding the number of applicants for TT jobs, that really varies by subfield. my school, an R1 with a small, specialized graduate program (the profs call it a "boutique" program), recently did an open-rank search for a world historian and it had 200 applicants, which was unusually high. and everyone and their brother tries to convince someone they're a world historian, so that number was full of applications that had nothing to do with world history. now, maybe for a US history search at an R1 in NY or LA there would be 900 applicants, because even well-established professors will be trying to make a move based on location, but i get the sense that for most subfields, the actual number of applicants +/- 200 people. still terrible odds, but not quite as terrible as 900. as for the overproduction of PhDs, when i said it's a myth i didn't mean that there aren't more PhDs than job openings. there are. what i meant is that the reason for the disparity is NOT because we're producing too many PhDs but because the jobs we thought they'd be filling 7-10 years ago when they started grad school aren't there anymore. and they're not there for a bunch of reasons. the economy, the penny-pinching commercialization of the university, the public divestment in higher education (thanks tom corbett!), the fact that profs just aren't retiring when they hit 65/70/75/80/85, the increase in precarious employment (both adjuncts and TAs). the short term solution of reducing the number of PhD admits doesn't actually address any of the problems that got us in this mess. that's why, to me, to blame this job market on too many PhDs is misleading.

the oversupply of PhDs argument is a myth. when universities see a tenured professor retire, they replace that prof with 3 adjuncts rather than another tenure-stream faculty member. it saves them a ton of money and there's always someone desperate enough to take a $2500 per course adjuncting position. sigaba is right; academic institutions are preoccupied with bean counting. administrators have formulae to determine the optimum enrollment in graduate seminars and they will give department chairs the gears for low enrollment, even as they waste money on bloated sports programs that don't break even financially. i fear that until adjuncts unionize (either by institution or on a national scale), there will always be someone willing to teach that course for a little less than the previous person, and schools will continue to replace tenure streams with adjuncts (particularly in american and european history). i wish that more adjuncts had the courage to walk away from academia rather than agree to those contracts. but then, i also wish that aspiring grad students with unfunded offers had the courage to reject them and reapply rather than pay their own way. on the one hand, i am saddened to see that so many programs are buying into the overproduction myth and scaling back their programs. on the other hand, if a school really fails to place students from X subfield in tenure-track positions, then they probably should stop admitting students to that subfield until they retool their faculty. also, i'd like to defend the small programs out there. with a smaller incoming class, students end up stepping outside of the people in "their year" and making friendships and connections with other students further along in the program and/or outside of their subfield. all of this is a good thing. it's actually kind of ridiculous to think that, at larger programs, students confine themselves to spending time with the students in their subfield and/or the same year of the program.