StrangeLight

thanks for the detailed response. princeton did some hiring recently, it seems. back when i applied two years ago, adelman and lee were the only professors (lee listed under asian history rather than latin american). candiani was a lecturer then, but they've given her an assistant professor gig now, which is good. their program's a lot more substantial now than it was 2 years ago, and does indeed sound like a good fit for you. but.... if you have the numbers for UNC, princeton, michigan, etc. then you have the numbers for yale. and if you don't have the numbers for yale, you don't have the numbers for UNC, princeton, michigan, etc. i'll again throw out my pitch for NYU (no, i don't go there). barbara weinstein's one of THE brazilianists. greg grandin's a goddamn superstar and while he's known for his work on central america, his most recent work(s) branch out to all of latin america and to brazil/the amazon, particularly relating to US relations and economic development in lat-am (he's currently advising on someone on a 20th century econ development project). ada ferrer works on cuba and haiti, but on issues of independence, which thematically fits with your first topic. it's right on the cusp of the top 20. if you have no aversion to new york city, you might want to check them out. don't let programs with lots of caribbeanists scare you away. colombia and brazil are both part of the circum-caribbean and if your plan is to study regional difference in colombia, being able to talk about caribbean colombia would be part of that. mary roldan used to be at cornell (she works on violence and development in 20th century colombia) but she moved a year or two ago. possibly to one of the SUNYs, i'm not sure if her current school has a lat-am program. ann farnsworth is at upenn but they don't really have anyone else there, so you'd be on your own if they took any latin americanist at all. jason mcgraw's at indiana and he works on independence-era colombia. indiana has a huge lat-am program, including people that work on brazil and venezuela, and they do really well for job placements, so i'd look into them too. at northwestern, you've got brodie fischer who works on poverty and citizenship in urban brazil (her husband is emilio kouri, at chicago, FYI). she led a workshop and participated in one of my seminars a few weeks ago, she's lovely and a great scholar. again, go look at your books on colombia and brazil and see where those guys teach. as for what goes in the SOP... i wish i knew! at the time that i applied, i had 3 possible projects i wanted to work on (not unlike yourself). they all dealt with the same geographical area (central america, so i sympathize with your difficulty in finding colombianists to work with) but my development of the topics was... nebulous at best. i wanted to study struggles for water access. i wanted to study the (lack of) political integration on the caribbean coast of nicaragua during the somoza dynasty. i wanted to study tourism in central america. they all sounded like three different, wide-ranging projects. for some schools, i pitched all three ideas. i didn't get into those schools. for others, their faculty didn't have (so i thought) people that could advise on any of the three topics, so i picked one and developed it at greater length. for every school where i only pitched one project, i got in with the most competitive funding packages they could offer. so... just from my personal experience, giving them a range of interests may not be the way to go. do you want to study the 19th or the 20th century? do you want to study macro-economic development and international relations or regional political/economic divisions and internal wealth inequality? brazil or colombia? if you can read portuguese right now, then feel free to pick brazil. if you can't read portuguese and won't be able to read it by the time you enroll (fall 2011) then don't pick brazil. even if you ultimately decide to study brazil once you're in a program, you'll have a hard time getting accepted to these schools if you can't already demonstrate reading proficiency in portuguese. my suggestion would be to write (slightly) different SOPs for each school. if, at chicago, you want to study with a brazilianist, then pitch your brazil project (just as you did here, but in a little more detail). for the princeton application, pitch your 20th century colombia idea, since karl is a 20th century colombianist. so on and so forth. this will definitely be more work and take up more of your time but i'm fairly certain it'll make you more competitive and yield greater results. no one really expects you to know exactly what you want to study right now, so you can change your ideas or move around a bit once you're in a program, but to get in, i think it's best to be as clear and focused as possible.

mid-feb/early march? okay. i can wait that long. i'll just need to drop all communication with my mother since she'll ask me every single week, "did you hear anything yet?"

i didn't realize michigan had bounced back so nicely. the year before they took 8 students total, and i think one might've been a LAist. and as long as we're talking top 10/20, i'm surprised duke or yale isn't on the OP's list. i'd also highly recommend NYU, they've got four high quality LAists. it would be easier to offer up other schools if we knew your area of interest.

seconded. i ran my proposal through a few lit people to make sure it was comprehensible outside my discipline. it's been mailed. i can now stop worrying about this until january, right?

i'm already in a latin american history program so maybe i can offer a bit of insight. you look like a good applicant. the spanish proficiency is definitely a bonus, and if you're fluent, find some way to mention that in your SOP. sometimes having 3 or 4 years of college-level courses doesn't necessarily translate as full fluency, so play that up. in PhD programs, you'll need 2 foreign languages (at all the schools you mentioned and any others worth their salt), so if you've already started on your portuguese or french or whatever other relevant language, mention it. if not, don't panic, many students don't have their second language underway before they begin their MAs, but if you do it will be a bonus. your numbers are good. they are not mind-blowing. when i applied two years ago, i had a 3.7something GPA overall and a 3.9something history GPA from a canadian school that is top 30 in the world, top 2 in canada. my GRE verbal was either 650 or 670 and, like you, i was consistently testing between 650 and 710 on ETS practice tests. i also had LORs from people very well-known in the field. i only applied to a few of the schools on your list because a lot of those schools don't have anyone in my area of interest, but i applied to 9 schools total, many of them "top 10" or "ivy league" or "public ivies," and i didn't get into a lot of them. why? for one thing, it was the first year in a string of incredibly competitive years, and this year will be no different. some schools are only going to take 1 or 2 latin americanists, if any. others may have the perfect advisor for you, but no other latin americanists on faculty, no other students in your cohort, no courses on your region. you just won't get into those schools regardless of your numbers or your SOP. some of it will come down to luck, and much more of it will come down to your fit with each program. if the fit isn't obvious, you won't get in, even with stellar numbers. your SOP needs to be really good. pitch them a project that you want to work on. you're not held to it, they just want to see that you CAN conceive of a doable (and worth doing) historical project. pick a country, a time period, a topic, and the sort of questions you want to investigate. mention particular professors at each school, how their work would inform your own (so if you don't know their work, read up!), even mention the school's library collection if they have stuff that you could use in your research. the clearer and the more specific you can be on your potential project, the better you will do. my honest advice to you is to add 1-3 schools outside of the top 20 that have strong latin american history programs and good potential advisors for your work. get your favourite books off your bookshelf and look at where those scholars are teaching. you'll find that most of them aren't at top 20 schools, but they are at places with good lat-am programs. to avoid getting shut out this year, apply to those places. also, about "top 20"... what ranking system are you basing that on? US news world rankings? because their rankings are useless. absolutely f'ing useless. they have 2 or 3 schools in the african history program's top 10 that don't offer african history. they put harvard on the top 10 list for latin america when they've only really got one person there (woback) who is willing to advise on a wide variety of projects but... there isn't really much of a "program" with just one guy. princeton's another one, which (unless they've done some recent hires i'm unaware of) only has jeremy adelman. he's great. he's a really nice guy and a solid scholar and also willing to advise far outside of his area, but... one prof can only have so many advisees at a time. you'll be competing with probably 40 other students for 0-2 spots for lat-am history. at michigan, with a much larger program, they've only taken 8-10 students TOTAL a year in recent years (down from 20-30 before the economy got bad), so you'll again be competing for 0-3 spots lat-am spots. these schools can't tell you now "oh we won't be taking any latin americanists this year, so don't bother" because they don't know themselves yet. there will be long, angry meetings where professors fight for their potential advisees to get that last spot, and department politics will determine who wins and who loses. you have no control over that, so hedge your bets and look to other schools. ignore the ranking system. just completely ignore it. find where your favourite historians are teaching and see if those schools have good programs. look for latin american studies centers at different schools and then check their history departments to see who they have. with any school, check the job placements for recent lat-am grads. not every school publishes these (especially "top 20" schools, because they do much worse than they want you to know), but it doesn't hurt to ask a prof where the last few lat-am grads were hired. you're a solid applicant. your numbers are all high enough that these schools will all have serious talks about whether or not to take you. but the numbers alone don't make it. a strong SOP and a clear fit and a bit of luck are all needed to get into any of these places. i hope some of that rambling helped.

i agree with canuck. list the ones you declined from the school you went to, or list the external fellowships you declined because you got a bigger external fellowship (like declining the OGS for the SSHRC). but don't list the university fellowships that schools you were accepted to, but didn't enroll with, offered you. yeah, i guess so. i think my optimism might bite me in the ass later. but at this point, i don't think there's anything i could change to improve my application. the proposal is as good as it's ever going to get and it does everything a proposal is supposed to do. there are still plenty of reasons they won't fund me, but i imagine those will relate to the rest of the application (transcript, CV... both of which are "good" but not mind-blowing), which i can't change now anyway. i'm also in the really fortunate position to have full funding from my grad program, including a fellowship for my research year. so while the SSHRC would be great (for my wallet, for my CV, and for the ability to live anywhere while i write the dissertation), i don't need it to make ends meet. so if i lose this year, i'll just reapply.

really? that's not terribly helpful. i've had seven professors give detailed feedback to my proposal at least once, five of them have seen multiple drafts. and four other grad students have given me feedback on it too. i feel really fortunate that so many people are taking the time to give me their thoughts, but i figured that would be standard procedure most places. amazingly enough, i know several grad students in my program that never take advantage of any of these opportunities. one of them in particular just said to me, "well, as soon as my advisor likes it, then it'll be done." unsurprising that this gentleman is 2.5 years behind in our program.

oh i can cut three words easily. changing "jurisprudence" to "law" actually got me a whole extra line of text! and more precious white space. i have no internal deadline. i need to mail this to the SSHRC by wednesday since i'm at an american school. i'm not really worried about it. they loved everything else about it. just basically said to really cut down one paragraph and move up another one and i'd be fine. since my bad paragraph was the second one in the whole proposal, that's what killed it. they were hooked in the intro and then they said, "what the eff is she talking about?" and by the end they were re-hooked. so... i just cut the bad stuff. it was all secondary research questions and (apparently) too much detail about the places i study. easy enough fix. considering that i'm in the second year of my program and they told two fourth-year students that they pretty much had to rewrite their whole proposals and rethink their research questions, i felt pretty good about only being told i had one shit paragraph. they're cruel to be kind.

agreed. mentioning it in an LOR is the perfect place. "we expect it to be published, it's a strong contribution to the scholarship," blah blah blah. i just had three of my professors rip into my proposal. they also tore into the mellon applications of two fellow students who are far more advanced in the program than i am and had larger problems to fix in their grants, but... hearing "this second paragraph killed your proposal for me" sucked. better to hear it now than in may, though. i'm still 3 lines over 2 pages. ugh. why can't i put my name inside the 3/4" margins?! goddammit.

an example that might run somewhat counter... a colleague of mine had internal funding, including a fellowship for her research year abroad. then she won a big multi-year award from her home country, something our department hadn't had to deal with yet. they tried to take away her internal fellowship and she basically told them no. so what ended up happening is that she's living off of her external fellowship and then submits receipts of her expenses to her school and they reimburse her with the funds from her internal fellowship. when all is said and done, this'll give her around $35,000 or $40,000 for the year. pretty sweet deal. if the department has a set precedent for your particular award situation, odds are they'll follow it. if you're the first person to win that particular external competition, you might be able to talk them into compensating you a little bit. it depends how flexible your DGS is, i guess.

yeah, the SSHRC specifically says to only list publications under review if they've been accepted, so only list them if they've been accepted. one of my profs is on the review committee for ACLS mellon awards and another spent years working for the SSRC as the first guy to cut proposals before they made it to committee and both have said: follow their instructions exactly. they are looking for any reason to throw out your application so don't give them a reason to cut you by doing exactly what they tell you not to do. don't shrink your margins below the minimum, don't use 11 pt font or arial narrow, all that stuff. as for listing awards you didn't take... i totally get listing the OGS because you got another (better?) fellowship in competition. what i'm not keen on is listing a fellowship granted by a university that you decided not to enroll in. for example, i was accepted to miami and offered $30,000/yr for 5 years in their university-wide fellowship. but i didn't go there. i don't think i should list that award on my CV. most US schools give you some sort of fellowship when they accept you, so listing those on my CV would be the same as just listing every school i got into. if i'm wrong about this, i guess i should just list the award...

i mean, you don't want to pad too much. if i were to only cite the studies that hit the regional, thematic, and temporal elements of my project, i'd have two dissertations from another field in 2006 and nothing else. so i include the major works that hit two of the three (regional + thematic, regional + temporal, temporal + thematic). it's really not silly because you'll need to read those books in the course of writing your dissertation. maybe you won't read some of them that thoroughly, you'll just skim them or use the index to find relevant chunks, but at some point you're going to have to know what's in them. ... i actually wish i had more space in the bibliography. providing the english translations for some of the titles robbed me of 3 or 4 more entries! edited to add: i just had someone return an edit of my proposal, but it's version 4 of 6. man... version 4 wasn't good. and to think without all these intensely helpful maniac professors, i would've turned in version 1.

it's actually fairly common to move on from a PhD program once you fulfill the MA requirements and go somewhere else. and usually that move is made because the student's interests change (or are finally defined) and there's another school that would be an ideal place to do the new work. talk to your advisor and your DGS next semester (save it for now or it'll sound like first semester jitters) about possibly moving on for the PhD because you really want to study X at Y school. they will try to talk you into sticking around, especially if you're a good student, but they won't sabotage you if you ultimately decide you really want to go somewhere else. to make this shift, though, your research interests need to be pretty clear. not only should you (by the fall of next year, when you apply to schools) have a research topic in mind, you should probably also already have your research question. since formulating my own dissertation research question, it's become really clear to me that there are really only 4 schools (and 1 of them is a different field!) where it would make sense to do this project, and i'm already at one of them. my point is, once you figure out your question, it'll be easy to say to auburn "i can't really do this project here, but going to either Y or Z school would just make more sense." if you can build a case for it that way, they'll likely go out of their way to help you get into those schools. if you just say, "well, i want to work on 19th century france," then they'll probably put more energy into convincing you to stay. also, two cents and grain of salt, etc.

hmm, i'm not sure i'd list the OGS if you didn't take it, but i guess it wouldn't hurt too much to write it in and then write DECLINED in capitals next to it. but i mean... i won a 5-year highly competitive university-wide fellowship from a school i didn't go to that would've paid me way more than the SSHRC would, but i'm not listing it because i didn't ultimately go there. hey, i agree, i thought it was weird to re-list the sources from the works cited too, but i'm following the formatting from this winning SSHRC to the letter anyway. if anyone else out there has a past winning proposal on their hands that didn't relist the citations, let me know because i could use the extra space too! and Ziz, i second the recommendation to talk to your advisor and ask them what the relevant books and articles are for your field. put down stuff that relates directly to your regional and thematic topics AND put down stuff that has influenced your theoretical or methodological approach but has nothing to do with your specific topic AND put down any major work whose findings would be altered, contradicted, or reinterpreted by your conclusions. if this doesn't easily fill 5 pages get your advisor to help you pad it.

i've put my citations in the text in APA style. then, on the first page of my 5-page bibliography, i say "works cited" and give the full bibliographical information for everything cited in the proposal. that takes up 1 full page. then on the other 4 pages, i write "bibliography" and then "primary sources" (since i'm a historian). i list all the archives and government institutions i'll be visiting and then a list of all their document collections i'll be using from each archive. this takes up about a page. then i write "secondary sources" and i re-list everything from the works cited page PLUS all the books and works that are relevant to my topic that i didn't cite in my proposal. this easily fills the last 3 pages. this is the format that a colleague of mine used for her winning SSHRC proposal from two years ago, so it's probably safe to go with this method. maybe it works differently for people in other fields, but for a historian, it should be pretty easy to have 5 pages of bibliography. if not, it suggests that your work isn't that relevant to the existing scholarship, so... i'd recommend finding a way to fill those pages without making it an annotated bibliography.

no, don't list fellowships you were offered but never took. you can list fellowships that you've been offered for future years at your current institution. for example, i have a fellowship for my research year that'll go on the list.

i'm on my 6th version of my proposal. next week three faculty members and a few other students are going to sit around and rip it to pieces. i've shown it to 2 professors from my canadian undergrad who are used to seeing SSHRCs. i've also run it through a colleague that won an $80,000 SSHRC a few years ago. i have a database of successful national grants to compare my work to. i've never worked so hard on 2 pages in my life, not even to get into grad school.

YOU ARE WRONG. many schools, the vast majority of them, do not have terminal MSes or MAs. people are admittedly ONLY to the PhD program and are awarded the MS after two years and a thesis, just as you describe. YOUR SITUATION IS NOT UNIQUE. I UNDERSTAND EXACTLY WHAT YOU'RE DESCRIBING AND I AM TELLING YOU THIS IS HOW MOST PROGRAMS WORK. so you can still get your MS in two years and then apply to some other school for their PhD program. it will add 1 total year (maybe 1.5) to your time to degree, but as you're apparently convinced, you will have the opportunity to work on something that truly interests you. okay? okay. lots of us come from working class backgrounds. YOU SHOULD NOT BE SUPPORTING YOUR FAMILY ON YOUR GRADUATE STIPEND. i don't care what your personal circumstances are, you are paid just barely enough to support yourself. you can't provide for them as well. if their financial situation demands that you contribute to their household while also supporting yourself (presumably while not living in their home) then you may need to leave graduate school. that sounds harsh because it is. what you really need to do is decide for yourself what's more important: getting a PhD or supporting your family. you can't do both at the same time, with or without summer funding. you really have 4 options here: 1) drop out and quit academia. 2) reapply for schools right now and start from scratch at a new PhD program. you will lose this year's coursework and you WILL have a harder time getting into schools because you're leaving a great program after one semester. 3) finish your MS at this school with anyone, studying anything, and then apply for PhD programs in the fall of 2011. you'll explain your departure because you want to do a different type of research, which is a common reason for moving on. then you'll spend 4 years at your new school and get your PhD. 4) make things work at your current school for the long term. you seem pretty determined not to do this, so i guess you really only have 3 options.

don't get an MFA. how many of your favourite writers have MFAs? exactly. whether you want to stay in your PhD program or not is another question, but if you want to be a creative writer, then just start writing stuff. read and write and send stuff to publishers. i apologize if this offends any people currently pursuing an MFA. it's just my opinion, but they're not a necessary part of becoming a writer in the way a PhD is a necessary part of becoming a professor.

i may not be reading your subsequent responses wit the correct tone, AC, but i think you're being a bit unreasonable. you need to talk to your graduate advisor. not about working WITH HIM, or HIS research, or any of those things. you just need to tell him your current problems with the program overall. his job AS graduate adviser is to help you with these exact problems. if you want your discussion to remain confidential, then tell him that and it will. also, of course he was one of the people that wanted you to come to school A. the graduate adviser's job is to make contact with accepted students and convince them to enroll in the school. that is what he does. and his function is to talk to you about the program, how you are or aren't fitting into it, and how that can be changed for the better, whether that's switching departments (any thoughts on this?), getting your MS and getting out, or finding something long-term that can work. for another example about funding: i turned down an offer that would have paid me 12K more in my first year and 15K more in my second year to be at my current school, because the program is better and there are professors here who i really want to work with. geographically i lost out too. i could've been living in a condo on the beach in southern florida but instead i'm in the midwest rustbelt. $6000 makes a difference, for sure, but theoretically you can survive without summer funding on what they're paying you now and presumably when you rented an apartment you budgeted for the money you knew you had, not the money you thought you might get. AND if you need an adviser to get summer funding, then get an adviser. again, STOP thinking about this like you have another 6 years at school A. you have another year and a half until you finish a thesis project and they give you an MS. then you can move to school C and you will start IN THE PhD PROGRAM, not from the MS all over again. overall, this may add 1 year to your time to degree (staying at school A would take 6 total years, going to school A for MS and school C for PhD would take 7 total years). in the grand scheme of things, in terms of your entire career, 1 year is nothing. ALSO, you keep saying you don't want to take more time to degree as though there's an alternative. if you applied this fall to school C, finished 1 year at school A and tried to transfer some of those credits to school C (many grad schools don't let you transfer your credits... either you obtained a degree somewhere else or you didn't, and if you didn't, THEN you start over at the MS), you'd still add 1 year to your overall time to degree. and honestly, school C will be suspect of you now if you apply this fall. they'll think you didn't know what grad school actually was (true), and that you may not like their program any more than you like school A (also, frankly, true), and that you may want to jump ship again if school C isn't exactly what you expect it to be (also, frankly, likely). yes, you can email those two profs at school C, but ONLY AFTER you talk to the graduate adviser and let them know you will be doing this. academics talk to each other so be up front about it. they'll hear about it anyway through gossip and you don't want that. i understand you wanted to transfer to school C as quickly as possible, maybe even so you could start there in january, but that won't happen. that's not how grad school works. so quit deciding what your grad adviser (who is the graduate director, it's the same thing) might be able to do for you and go eff'ing talk to him. if this is about the money difference and summer funding, suck it up. you still have a chance at summer funding if you work with that professor who offered to be your adviser. no, he's not well known, but if you move on from that school after your MS, then there's no harm in working with him. he won't be your dissertation adviser. and an unknown adviser is better than no adviser. if you can't demonstrate that you're progressing towards your thesis (i.e. if you have no adviser or topic by may) your program might kick you out anyway. and if this is about not having research options at school A, again, suck it up. pick a project, any project. work on it for 18 months. then reapply to schools and you can spend the next 5 years (and the rest of your career) working on what you really want to be working on. i know from experience some people in science-y degrees that work with an adviser who does exactly what they want to study, and all they ever get to do is prepare cultures and samples. their thesis topic is dictated to them, not organically created from their own curiosity. the topic might be interesting but the research question their stuck with is boring to them. so that can happen too. and, just because at the time of admissions school C said you could do the joint project doesn't mean they'll let you do that once you get there. people say a lot of shit to convince prospective students to choose their school, including pretending their programs are more open and flexible than they actually are. sorry, this felt like a rant. i just feel like, perhaps unfairly, that you're not being realistic about your situation.

an RA does research for a professor. a TA does teaching for a professor. someone with a fellowship (usually) just gets paid to take classes and do their research. they always look better on your CV, and they contribute to your future ability to get post-doc positions and research grants when you're a professor.

i'm usually good in seminars. i manage to read every word on every page for 2-3 books every week, with a few weeks where i skim 2 chapters. i talk a lot (maybe too much) and i usually have the answers the professor is looking for. and i just got a D+ on my undergraduate french midterm. i have lunch with spanish speakers to improve my skills and i never say more than 1 or 2 broken sentences. they all know the reason i'm not talking isn't because i'm shy or have nothing to say, it's because i suck at spanish. this is after 3 years of formal spanish instruction in college and spending two months in central america. i take classes with some readings in spanish and i can understand them easily enough, but i just cannot think or speak in a foreign language. i suck at it, really, really badly. my spanish reading is quite good, my writing is intelligible, and my speaking is non-existent. which is a very bad thing, because my advisor has now determined that my dissertation project will require oral history (conducted in spanish, of course). so over the next year and a half, i need to get really good at this, and it's a nagging problem that will continue to stress me out. a lot. i wish i was as good at languages as you are. and i feel like a moron when i see other people who aren't native speakers but have a near-native command of the language. i guarantee whoever you're sitting next to in your classes sucks at something. maybe they're great in class but their research is uninspired. maybe they can't write very well. maybe they're going to really struggle with their comps. maybe they're going to fail their foreign language translation exams. or maybe they're totally socially inept, which will hurt them in the long run in academia.

i thought it was funny. i guess it needed some emoticons.

the verbal is a little low but you're not aiming too high with your choices. if you think you can improve by 50-100 points on the verbal with two weeks of studying, then go for it. otherwise just make your writing sample and SOP really tight.

i think your assessment of smallwood's work is spot-on. in the course where i read her book, we'd also read mintz (but not mintz and price) and gomez (and rediker and judith carney, and on and on) so we had plenty to sit her in opposition to. her work went against the grain of, well, everything, so it was refreshing to hear in that context. if i recall correctly, she was (implicitly) using a lot of foucault, of power structure stripping people of agency, that sort of thing. i felt like she was trying to reassert the total brutality of the transatlantic slave system, and i do have sympathy for that project philosophically. when we stray a little too far into the agency of enslaved people under these systems, we skirt or minimize or silence precisely how horrendous and dehumanizing the experience (and in smallwood's case, the middle passage in particular) was. but in terms of empirical evidence, to say that africans had been stripped of their culture and infantilized has been proven incorrect by countless studies on the african symbols and practices that were remembered and (re)invented in the americas. i think, taken alone, smallwood's work is highly problematic, but within the context of the larger field, the debates and checks that it generates is a positive thing for atlantic/slavery scholarship. but it doesn't surprise me that, on the basis of the politics of her argument, she had been denied tenure at UCSD. i get what she was trying to say, though, and while i'm not usually a fan of massaging evidence into your preconceived argument, i think the work tempered some trends in the field to some degree.