StrangeLight

yeah, a friend of mine from grade school was accepted to UCLA with full funding in 2009 (but for pure math). i know another kid who got in for economics with a good deal of funding, also an international student. my sense is that, ultimately, UCLA will fund anyone if they really, really want 'em, but at the time, my potential advisor AND their website said funding wasn't gonna happen at least for year 1 (and later, for years 2-5), so i never applied. i'm much, much happier with my present program, particularly after a conversation with a recent PhD from UCLA, but i would've liked to stay on the west coast... oh well.

you absolutely CAN visit with a professor now if you like. they're busy, but they were busy in september when all the keeners rolled in. some people show up early and then are forgotten. some people show up after the admissions are in, to make their decision. and some people show up in between, not to influence admission, but just to get a feel for a place before they hear the news. AND only schools that receive 200+ applications a year are beginning the process of sorting through them now. smaller departments haven't even begun, i promise. it's not too late at all.

yep. the UC system is broke. when i was applying to schools, it was 2008, just before the economy went in the shitter. even then, UCLA told me that they weren't going to fund any international students in the history department for year 1, but that i could "probably" get funding for years 2-5. once it was time to submit the application, after the economy blew up, UCLA actually stated on their application website that they couldn't offer funding to international students at all. i ultimately decided not to apply because there was no way i was going to pay for part of my degree, let alone all of it. i applied to many other public schools and none of them denied funding based on international status. they did offer far fewer spots than usual because of the financial meltdown, but who got what wasn't based on national/international status. poor UC... i would've loved to apply to a few california schools. oh well.

the CSA is a great organization and conference. the session in barbados was really incredible. all of the panels offered up such interesting work, either by established scholars or innovative grad students, and people are pretty laid back. i highly recommend making the CSA a stop on your conference list at some point. we had a professor come to our program for a job talk last week. he had a lot of ear piercings, a couple facial piercings (only left the nose ring in, but you could see the holes), and at least a tattoo on his wrist. everything else stayed covered. there was some debate over his appearance, but not for the tats or the piercings. the concern was that, when some profs ran into him at the AHA, he was wearing chuck taylors and jeans, and on his skype/phone interview, he was dressed rather casually. maybe i'm naive, but i tend to think that as long as the stuff you can change (clothing, piercings, hair/make-up) is professional when it needs to be, people don't care about the stuff you can't change (tattoos, the holes where the piercings once were).

OOOHHHH. sorry. i've never applied to the SSHRC from inside canada, so i didn't realize what stage we were talking about. so in canada, you need to make it out of your department, then out of your university, and then once you're in ottawa, it's A class or B class. B class is no funding, A class is consideration for funding. and then some people in the A class get funding. right? jesus. i'm glad i got to skip most of that. congrats to all of you that were sent onto ottawa!

uhhh...

international students do NOT have a more difficult time securing funding from public school departments, with the notable exception of many UC schools, because they have no money. at any other institution, international students are funded as frequently as US citizens. and american schools, more often than not, fund all of their graduate students (places like wisconsin, columbia, and UCLA are the exception). it's not similar to the british system, where many students pay out of pocket. it's rare (though not impossible) to receive an offer to a PhD program without funding (more frequent for MA admissions). the german fluency will definitely work in your favour. i doubt they will take into consideration the fact that this is the first time you've taken a GRE-like standardized test, but they also don't take the GREs very seriously anyway. they're usually used to compare applicants across disciplines for university-wide awards, so that's where the score may hurt you, not in admissions. i'm curious as to whether you plan on studying US history or british history. what period? what types of questions do you hope to answer? i mean, you don't need to list all of that here, but if it was explicit in your statement of purpose, then you should be in decent shape. also, MA programs in the UK are often read as the equivalent of BAs in the US. while you may get accepted to PhD programs, you may be expected to do the coursework for the MA in your program as well.

i don't know, but i'd lean on the side of being incorrect. i received that exact email a week after i submitted my application. i sent my application directly to the SSHRC, not through a university, because i'm at an american school. i don't know what it means for you that you're getting the email now, but i received that back in november.

i'm in a history department. a lot of the ladies have tattoos, myself included. none of the men do, oddly enough. the general practice is to not hide tattoos for class or meetings with advisors. i also don't hide my tattoos when i teach but i know a few of the other females do. absolutely cover the tattoos for conferences, job talks, visiting scholars' talks, defenses, overviews, that sort of thing. i'd also recommend covering the tats for the first month or two in your first semester. let the professors establish their opinion on your intelligence before you give them the opportunity to (unfairly) judge your appearance. regarding conferences, however... when i attended the caribbean studies association conference last year, i'd say that the vast majority of female graduate students were heavily tattooed. not a little thing on their hips or ankles but large back pieces, sleeves, shoulders, chest pieces, etc. all of these were extremely visible because most people were walking around in bathing suits and cover-ups (we were in barbados). so the rigid attitude towards tattoos will have to change eventually, or no one's going to be hiring women for caribbean history, lit, sociology, anthropology, etc. in a few years. a friend of mine, in an engineering program, is heavily tattooed. nothing on his forearms, but above the elbow, he's covered. legs are covered. he just got a chestpiece done that shows above the collar of his shirt if he doesn't do up the top button. when he got to his program, he trimmed his giant beard to a manageable size, put away the horn-rimmed glasses, and wore sweaters and khakis. after a few months, he was back in cargo pants, doom metal shirts, with the long beard and tattoos exposed. people act like they're afraid of him now, apparently. some talk of whether or not he's an ex-con. heh.

congrats! time to start checking the mailbox.

i'm on the h-net listservs for latin american history, caribbean history, atlantic history, and migration studies. really useful for fellowships and for getting on panels at conferences. marginally useful, depending on where you study, for finding academic housing at your research sites. and really great if you just have a question about something. h-net.org also has many of the current (and past) job postings listed by subfield, so you can get a sense of how many positions are open in your field. even though i'm 3-5 years away from the job market, i still like to check the job listings because some of them are quite specific and offer hints of where the field is going. for example, virtually every job listing i see for latin american or caribbean history also wants the professor to demonstrate that he or she can teach surveys of US or world history, so now i fight for the opportunity to TA US or world history courses when classes in my subfield are unavailable. also, a lot of job postings express interest in candidates (again of latin america) that do transnational work or look at ethnicity, race, gender, migration, the environment, etc. i'm sure an amazing dissertation on straight-ahead political history or intellectual history would still attract some interest from search committees, but when a school says they have a preference for a candidate that could contribute to the school's center in women's studies or ethnic studies or urban studies, they mean it. i don't mean to suggest that students should tailor their research interests to the job postings of today, but it helps to know what future employers are looking for or what they deem to be the growth areas of your subfield.

are there different timelines for the MA or PhD awards? my sense from reading the older threads is that MAs were notified in november and PhDs in late january/early february, but i don't really know. it's times like these i wish i was at a canadian university. no one at my school will be able to offer any inside info on this. i'll just have to wait on the snail mail. i better grow my fingernails long so i can chew them off for the next few months.

i know many professors and students of native american/first nations history personally, and none of them are native. it would actually be comforting to know that graduate schools are taking on native americans as graduate students.

wow. ultimately, i think people should choose a school where they'll be happy, and if weather is that important to your happiness, then it should be part of your decision. but a PhD isn't forever. maybe you spend 6 or 7 long years (with 4 months off every year to live wherever you want to) in the same place. but if you can secure fellowship funding once you're finished your coursework, you could be out of that miserable, cold college town in 3-4 years. i think it would be incredibly short-sighted to make a poor professional or academic choice because you can't handle three cold winters. it's really not that long. shit. once you get through a PhD program, IF you get through a PhD program, you'll be desperate to find any job at any university, regardless of how cold or remote the location. and those gigs, if you're lucky, will be tenure-track, which means you could get locked down there for a decade or two before getting the opportunity to work at another school. i'm not trying to dismiss everyone's concern for the weather. i chose my undergrad because i wanted to be on the temperate west coast (after moving from the northeast). then i had 5 rough years of SAD. moving back to the northeast has been cold and bitter, but there's sunlight! and if i play my cards right with a few national or university-wide fellowships, i'll be free to live anywhere i want in 18 months. well worth it.

... i've got nothing. well, getting to do archival work has been great. but my pre-grad school job also had me doing highly rewarding research. the only difference is, now i'm getting to choose my project rather than being asked to execute someone else's vision. that's actually a really nice change and a big positive for me. so yeah, there's that. picking my own project. that's been good. and that's pretty much it. my life was pretty awesome before i came here and it's been pretty not-as-awesome since i've been here. i just hope that once i make it through comps, i can focus on my research and remind myself of why i decided to do this in the first place. only three more semesters...

they went well. both said that they felt they really conveyed who they are and what they do accurately to the committees, so it'll just be a matter of whether or not the school wants them. no major faux pas. my program's really good about prepping students for the job market and both of these guys have been on one or two search committees for new hires in the past, so they've had good training on what not to do.

i noted the s on 70s. did you note the "20" in "20-30 years ago"?

i'm two years into my grad program and haven't joined the AHA. i don't plan on it, either. it's not a very useful conference or organization for me. you don't need to be a member to go to their job interviews, you just need to pay the conference registration fee, so that's probably what i'll do. i don't really see a point in joining organizations unless i plan on presenting at their conferences. everything i need to know i can get from the h-net listserves i subscribe to. it's far more important and useful for me to be in field-specific organizations: CSA, LASA, ACH, MACLAS, CALACS (all variations of latin american/caribbean studies/history). maybe when i'm ready for the job market i'll get an AHA membership for the job postings, but even then i'll probably just use a colleague's membership to access that stuff.

while not knowing exactly what work you'll be doing sounds unusual, the amount of work they're asking of you for your TAship or RAship or gradership sounds on par with my own school. no real choice of what you teach or who you research for until you have enough semesters of teaching under your belt that you get your own pick. and most of the TAs in my program write a syllabus of expectations for the discussion sessions. as far as being a grader goes, that's boring and unfulfilling, because you don't get interaction with the students, but it's low stress. teaching is emotionally exhausting. it can take hours to recover from it before you're ready to do other work. there are worse assignments to get stuck with than RAing and grading.

friends of mine just returned from interviews at the AHA. one of them said he saw the same woman crying, over the course of many days, in the interview pit. another one returned to campus to pick up his "dear candidate" rejection letters. they look just like the grad school rejection letters. small envelopes... :blink:

the 70s was 40 years ago.

nevermind. didn't see the update.

schools are also in the process of hiring new professors this time of year and that keeps staff and faculty pretty busy. keep in mind when you email departments, even the larger ones, that everyone you're talking to is really, really busy with many other important things this time of year.

"nation-state" is undoubtedly a category of practice, since (some) people in everyday life do speak of the nation-state. journalists, policy-makers, etc. as a subject of analysis, the construction (political, social, cultural, economic) of "the nation-state" is fruitful territory, even/especially in places where we're arguing the nation-state is a problematic classification (such as multi-ethnic nations). understanding how minority ethnic groups are silenced/erased from/excluded from/invisible to/outside of "the nation-state" is an important historical process that took place in many (and i'd hazard a bet, most) postcolonial states as they gained independence over the last 250 years. that process is definitely worthy of historical investigation. but using "nation-state" as a category of analysis is really problematic for all the reasons we've already discussed in the thread.

people really ask an anglo-saxon why on earth he or she would study german? i get your point but i still disagree with it. in my experience, many academics assume that a white anglo-saxon's academic interests are either 1) biographically related to them, or 2) cosmopolitan interest. for the non-white non-anglo-saxon non-christian, cosmopolitanism is rarely, if ever, assumed to be the source of one's interests. and while i appreciate the jovial nature of your closing quip as a comeback to people who question why i do what i do, it's a bit presumptuous to associate cosmopolitanism largely with the upper classes and a bit grubby to attack someone's presumed class status.