StrangeLight

yeah, i think i just saw that vincent brown is somewhere else now. and yeah, for sure, harvard's latin americanists did really well before the retirement. but it doesn't make sense for people to apply there now, and the rankings don't reflect that. berkeley and UCLA have also lost important people from recent retirement. yale's youngest latin americanist moved to florida and the two who are left, while still actively working and taking on graduate students, are getting close to retirement age. i guess my only point is that the "top 10" rankings are really problematic because they're outdated. so, depending on your subfield, it wouldn't necessarily make sense to apply to half the schools in the top 10.

if there's no match at yale why is it one of your top 6?

don't worry about yale. they're just a PhD mill and you don't really want to go there anyway.

i don't think it's important to have an advisor whose interests totally match your own. i DO think it's important to have an advisor who says "i can advise you on this." some individuals are more flexible than others with regards to advising outside of their expertise. when i applied to PhD programs two years ago (or three? i don't even know anymore), several potential advisors i contacted told me that they wouldn't be able to advise my sub-region. and they were right. it was like asking a british historian to advise on hungary just because it was a "top 10" program. as for the top 10... harvard is ranked 9th for latin american history. THEY DON'T HAVE A LATIN AMERICANIST HISTORIAN. they have someone that does the US southwest and occasionally talks about borderlands and they have someone that works on the colonial (anglophone) caribbean. that's it. according to some latin americanists, the borderlands and the english caribbean don't even count as part of latin america. a colleague of mine got into harvard to study the caribbean and they classified her as a US historian, told her that her coursework and comps field would be US history, so she turned them down. and that's the 9th best program in the country? harvard has a history of producing great latin americanist historians, but those students graduated 10-15 years ago and their potential advisor (someone willing to work far outside his region, time period, and thematic interest, which is rare) retired. there are a lot of programs surviving in the top 10 based on their past laurels.

certain LACs actually do want their faculty to do research. a student in my program took a job at an LAC last year and he has a huge research budget and a comparatively light teaching load (either 2/2 or 2/3, i don't recall). i'd like to reiterate that i think it's critical to go to the best possible program that you can. but "best possible program" or even "most prestigious program" doesn't always line up with "ivy league." i know a handful of students at ivy league schools who have no one to function as their primary advisor, so they work with profs from other schools, sometimes hundreds of miles away, and do all their advising through skype. and these aren't "co-advisors" or secondary advisors. these are their primary people. to me, that's sort of cheating the system... getting the ivy league degree AND getting the best possible professor to advise you, because i see it as a trade-off. unless you're lucky enough (or your work is broad enough) to have someone at an ivy with relevant interests to your own, you have to choose between the best professor and the "best" or most prestigious program. maybe other people in larger subfields don't run into that problem as much.

i'm aware of it but haven't read it yet. i've read some of his articles and they're great. for this book, my understanding is that, in his commodity history, he focuses more on production than consumption. most commodity histories do that, actually. the bulk of his discussion stops around 1975, too, so (i think?) he misses crack. it's on my summer reading list for sure. i'll be interested to see how much of it is economic or political history and how much is social, cultural, or environmental.

at this point, i'd just like to finish my MA thesis. never mind my dissertation, never mind my first book, never mind any other book. but... since i don't want to read EP thompson anymore... the dissertation will be looking at land and resource access in two caribbean central american cities and their surrounding rural areas from the 1930s to 2010. it will be a structural political/social/legal history that examines the construction and employment of culture to navigate access to land and resources (and in a very material sense, to power). i won't say more 'cause... i'm actually gonna write this. by the time i (try to) turn this into a book, i might even add a third or fourth city. vanity project #1 is a social and environmental history of cocaine. from its growth to refinement to transportation to usage. no idea on the parameters of this one, but i'd probably start in the late 19th century. and i'd like to extend it beyond the manufacture and trafficking to do a social history of drug use and abuse. as long as we're assuming we'll be big shots with vanity projects and not lowly adjuncts or drop-outs (see the "officially grads" subforum for the litany of "i want to quit" threads), i'd like to write the sweetness and power of cocaine. lots of people talk about bits and pieces (andean coca usage, colombian cocaine-trafficking and violence, cocaine and crack usage in american cities, etc.) but as far as i know, no one has tried to put it all together. someone will probably beat me to this. vanity project #2: history of nicaraguan boxing. look at how it unified the country, functioned under a discourse of mestizaje, connected nicaragua transnationally, served as an opiate for the masses under the somoza regime, blah blah. most of the stuff i really want to do combines environmental history, cultural history, and social history, with a bit of transnational/atlantic/migration theory thrown in. this project on boxing doesn't really do that at all, so at best it'll probably end up as an out of place journal article some day. vanity project #3: a project on water privatization in latin america. this is a big'un. good work has already been done on cochabamba, not sure what i'd add to it, but i have a couple decades to figure that out.

you did not misunderstand me. while the UK MA is undoubtedly more specialized than the final year of a US BA, there are many graduate programs and professional programs (law, medicine, journalism) that equate the UK MA with the US BA. the difference, i believe, stems more from whether the UK BA was a 3 or 4 year program than the quality of the UK MA itself.

out of the usual 100, or the current 66, any idea of how many of those wisconsin admits come with guaranteed funding?

i am... - awaiting feedback on my masters thesis from my advisor. the plan is to defend the thesis in late february or early march, but if the latest draft requires significant revision, i probably won't defend until late march. once this is done, i'll work on getting it published. - talking with a professor from another university about participating in one or two book collections. the details still need to be hammered out but, for now, my involvement could fall anywhere from a chapter contribution to co-editing. - writing a conference paper for my school's latin american social and public policy conference. based on the present and future potential policy applications of my historical research. - writing another conference paper that will essentially present the findings of my masters thesis. i've already been accepted to present this at the mid-atlantic council for latin american studies (MACLAS), held in pittsburgh this year. - preparing summer research travel grants for pre-dissertation research. most of these are within my school. i ran out of time for the SSRC's dissertaton development workshop/research thing. - serving as the history representative for my school's arts and sciences graduate student organization. a pretty low-key appointment so far, since i'm not serving on any subcommittees at the moment. - some researching and writing for the warhol museum. that's it. i just realized i don't have any non-academic activities.

not that tickle requires any defense, i'm gonna give it anyway. in her three rounds of applying, the first resulted in an MA, and the second in "consolation" MA offers due to lack of funding, something you will all become familiar with in just a few months. your "really, I hope you get in somewhere" implies that you think tickle has had two previous rounds without success, which is very bitchy of you, as well as inaccurate. i admire your courage to use the word "bitch" without actually typing out all the letters. that takes guts to remove a few letters so you can somehow justify your usage of a pejorative term without having to take any personal responsibility for it. you get to put the word in our head without feeling like an asshole in the process. either use the term and own it, in all its ugliness, or don't. this is not the place to blow off steam. this is the place to build up pressure. no one in your real life knows what you're going through, i understand that. but you don't even realize how stressful this process is until you can cross-check your neuroses with other applicants and realize, oh my god, we applied for the same program and he received an email and i didn't. if you didn't log on here, you'd never have that information, and so you wouldn't have that source of stress. for example, the rejection from indiana... everyone that applied to indiana will now compulsively check their emails and, if they don't find a rejection in the next day or two, will assume that they will receive an offer. if and when a rejection comes 4 weeks from now, they will be even more unprepared for it because they saw that the "first round rejections" (or however we choose to interpret this information) happened ages ago. also, a lot of solidarity you're finding here. you've come for advice on how to deal with the application process and remove some of the stress and when you're given that advice from people with firsthand experience, you decide it's not worth taking because we haven't "take[n] into account the possibility that [you] need to be here." really? the people that have lived this experience already haven't taken into account what this experience is like for you? really. now that doesn't make any sense. tickle is right. weeks ago, first-time applicants were on here encouraging each other to bombard graduate secretaries with emails saying "did you get all my stuff? did you get it? do you have it yet? do you have everything?" and tickle said, based on past experience, programs will notify you when something is missing. everyone shot her down. everyone. "no one will look out for you but you!!" and then, once the departments finally started sorting applications in the new year, many people received emails or phone calls explaining that some materials were missing. tickle was right. and when she politely pointed out that she was right, and that people should just relax and try to let go of the stress, she was jumped on for it. "no, the fact that these departments emailed me to tell me stuff was missing just proves how important it is for me to ask them in early january if they have all my stuff yet." no, that is not what that proves. not even a little bit. every single response to an email of "do you have all my stuff?" has been "if we're missing something, we'll let you know." and those departments would let you know whether or not you emailed them once a week saying "is all my stuff there?" so, after some really negative reactions to tickle's polite and CORRECT advice, she decides to say "i told you so." and then you call her a bitch. oh, i'm sorry, a b**ch. but if i feel this way, why bother coming here anymore? well, for one thing, there are other forums on this site that are still useful to me. for another, it's an excellent source of procrastination. and initially, i thought giving some advice or insight would be helpful on this forum, since i found it helpful when i applied two years ago. but now i'm just sticking around to watch the rejections roll in from some of the more pompous, self-righteous, and delusional among you.

hey man. i told you guys to log off. trust me. you'll get emails when you get 'em. and even if it's posted on a website 3 days before you get the email that it's been posted on a website, who cares? you don't need to say yes or no to anyone until april 15. the next three months will crawl if you do this to yourselves. and they'll be really, really unproductive, too. i know it's difficult, but just log off the grad cafe.

i'm in a 2-year program and my thesis is, for now, 55 pages with footnotes. i was aiming for 35 pages or so, so that when i try to get it published it won't be impossible to cut it down to 25. my advisor liked the outline, liked the paper but wanted additions, then hated the paper, and after a full rewrite, hopefully she likes it again. in the tracking changes in my word doc, i can see that she did three separate edits of my last draft, and they go from "this is okay, but..." to "oh, wait, not really okay" to "this is how to fix the mess you've made" over the course of one week.

just finished the 3rd draft of my thesis. hopefully all that's left is some line edits and formatting. i'm not sure i could handle any more major revisions right now.

spoken like someone who isn't in graduate school. i know many promising, intelligent people that have dropped out of grad school pretty deep into the process. its not that they don't want to finish. it's that they can't (physically, emotionally, mentally) do the work required to finish. nervous breakdowns are pretty common in graduate school and they don't always come in the first year or two. a colleague of mine was ABD, off doing research in europe. all he had to do was read and write, not worry about teaching or coursework or comps, and he quit. he drives a cab now. he's way happier than i am. another promising student who left before i ever got here was apparently miserable in the program. lots of people thought she was actually rude, mean, negative. she quit and now all anyone says is how happy she seems. all the time. genuinely, thoroughly happy, like a totally different person. also, you can't just decide to sit your dissertation defense. your committee decides that, and if they think the OP's work is not ready, they won't let him or her sit. unless the OP is running out of funding, in which case he or she would just be removed from the program. some schools do have upper limits on time spent at the PhD level (8 years, 10 years, etc.). to the OP... i have no real advice. just hang in there, or quit and be happy. either/or.

that's not both. you don't know that just because you contacted them earlier they wouldn't have contacted you now. A follows B but A does not lead to B.

that joint looks better than reading. spend my life on the toilet.

they care about A vs. B when you apply for fellowships, internally and externally. especially for competitive awards, where so many great research projects are pitched, who does or does not get funding can sometimes come down to things as small as "he went outside the margin limit," or "she has two typos," or "he has a few Bs on his transcript."

hope is good. the LORs are such an essential part of the application, on an equal level to your SOP and, if the letters come from well-known academics, probably more important than the SOP or writing sample, so adcoms can't really make a decision on an applicant without the LORs. the fact that he's reminding you that they need your letters could definitely mean that he's interested in your work and your ideas, but i wouldn't get ahead of yourself and assume that he's asking for the letters because there's a strong feeling on the adcom about you one way or the other. there's likely no feeling about your application yet since key pieces are still missing. just take a deep breath, it's still january.

NYU takes forever. while most admits will find out some time in late march, the rejects won't find out until april, and there are usually one or two people a year that mention that they receive offers of admission on april 13 or 14 without ever being notified that they were on a waitlist. NYU does have a prospective applicants week where they fly out candidates they're interested in, but many students invited to this week are not offered spots and a handful are usually admitted without ever being asked to attend the prospectives week. so really, NYU just tortures you with hope until april 16, and then you move on and realize you should've been happy about your other acceptances instead of hoping and praying that you'd get to live in manhattan in the fall.

in my experience, it varies by professor, not school or department. some profs in my program give everyone A or A- and call it a day and others have reputations for being notoriously difficult graders. i'm getting an interdisciplinary certificate in addition to my PhD and the advisor of the certificate program always comments to me that one particular professor is extremely difficult, and do i really want to take his class? i point out that i've taken courses with him before and received As in them, so i'm not afraid of him, but it's interesting to see someone in the advisor's position recommend that students avoid the guy that gives Bs or even Cs.

i would imagine that professors are more concerned with whether their students and colleagues can write grammatically correct coherent sentences than if they have visible tattoos.

i second a vote for environotes. some of their notebooks have internal pockets to hang onto syllabi or assignments, so they remain preferable to binders for me. and even though this thread is about notebooks and not computers, if i'm being honest, i use the computer far more than my notebook. so far, the notebook is only pulled out for an undergrad language class i'm taking and the undergrad lecture i TA for. i use a laptop for all of my grad coursework. i type notes for every book i read and then type in notes from seminar discussions into the same file. it is time-consuming, it is tedious, it slows my reading-rate way down, but it still works for me. in seminar i can scroll or do a keyword search if i'm trying to find a certain note quickly. when i'm writing a paper, particularly end of semester historiography papers that require a synthesis of 14 books, the keyword search function is an absolute life-saver. when the time comes to write my comps, printing out all of my typed notes will be much easier than digging through six semesters' worth of notebooks and trying to decipher my chicken scrawl. just thought i'd put it out there. it's definitely a slower process at the moment. i can only read 20 pages/hour instead of 30 pages because i constantly stop to type my notes, but the extra time now will save me having to re-read 150 books for comps because half my notes are scribbled in the margins.

food for thought on your two-body problem which you've probably already considered: if you ultimately stay in florida for your PhD because of the risk of moving your husband, the breadwinner, to a new region, then he will always be the breadwinner. turning history into a career is difficult enough without any geographical constraints.

not to hijack the OP's thread, but weirdly enough, i actually really wanted to move FROM the west coast back to the northeast. i applied all over (midwest, south, southeast, northeast) based solely on the fit of the programs, but since leaving the west coast all i've thought about is when i can go back. i don't miss the 5 years of SAD i had when i lived in the northwest, but i really, really miss the mountains. a lot. and the ocean. oh well.