StrangeLight

if your publication was academic, a research article that included primary source analysis, include it in your CV. when they don't recognize the name of the publication, they'll realize it wasn't a major paper, but it at least demonstrates that you've spent your time working on research. if you want to avoid "conservative" faculties, you should be very critical of the ivy leagues. yes, there are some progressive and cutting edge profs at the ivy league schools, but the overall departmental culture can be conservative. this isn't to say that all ivy leagues are that way, simply that you should look very carefully at the type of research each faculty member in your field is doing and decide for yourself if it feels conservative. i know a lot of professors at harvard pretend the haitian revolution never happened or, at best, it was a "revolt" or a massacre. that may not bother some people but it drives me nuts and i wouldn't be able to work in that sort of intellectual environment. for cutting-edge/progressive/interdisciplinary places, michigan-ann arbor, wisconsin-madison, and indiana-bloomington are usually pretty high on the list. my recommendation for finding appropriate schools would be to look at your favourite books. where are those authors working and where did they get their PhDs? that's where you should apply.

what qualifies as a "bad" package? less than five years of guaranteed funding? TAing in all five years? while some places offer less than 20K a year to grad students, cost of living in some places (NC?) are also a lot less, meaning you can get by well (sometimes better) there on a smaller stipend than you could in other places. i've heard rumours for years that the students at columbia, for example, are incredibly cutthroat about funding because they get 22K/year, not enough to survive in and around manhattan, so they fight for what few extra fellowships are available.

METAL. a friend of mine takes time off from working on his geodesy PhD to make kick-ass tunes with his band, sollubi. totally. he also takes pleasure in waking up at 6 a.m. on saturdays to go to the farmer's market and pick up gourmet whatsits. i should follow his lead. instead i relieve stress by smoking. a lot.

i also suck at time management. for example, a draft of my thesis (well, half my thesis) is due "some time" today (11:59 p.m.) and i'm "taking a break" from working on it to post here. i have three more sections that i "need" to do, and one big, whopping section that i should do but won't. i work best before noon but can rarely force myself to crawl out of bed before 9, which means i only get 3 really productive hours in the day. the rest of the time i just produce garbage. the worst part of the MA, in my mind, is the fact that they make you take so many courses while you're also expected to move on your research. my seminars give me more than enough work to do each week and yet i've got to cram in grant proposals, conference papers, and *gasp* actual thesis research in there as well.

write the paper as you would have without the problematic data set, but shorten it by 4 or 5 pages. then insert a 4-5 page piece explaining the problem the new data presents near the beginning of the paper. you don't want to totally throw out the argument you had made at the conference but you can't pretend the data didn't happen. just write "more research needs to be done," and "this presents an interesting problem that merits deeper attention" a lot.

hopkinsgirl, aren't you 20? don't bring the boyfriend with you. if the relationship is serious, you can long-distance/commute it (new haven's close to enough major cities that you could spend most weekends together). frankly, you won't have a ton of free time anyway, so dragging him into a city where he can't find employment and then ignoring him most of the time is a bad idea for both of you. also, congratulations, caligula!

1. do you expect your application to differ greatly if you reapply next year? your GPA will be the same, as will your LORs (probably), but is there any way to improve upon your writing sample, GRE scores, or languages? if yes, then it may be worth turning down your offers and reapplying; if no, then take what you've got. 2. do you know that you'll have no funding? it seems from most people's posts here, wisconsin hasn't decided on funding. maybe you'll be offered a package. just wait for them to get back to you. in your position, with an MA already in hand (if i'm not mistaken), it wouldn't be worth it to fund your own PhD, even for one year. if you don't get funding the second year, will you sink more money into it or move on? i see the logic of paying for an MA, but only so it can secure you a funded offer for a PhD. i would probably recommend improving the application and reapplying, or just moving on, rather than paying my own way, but that's a personal decision. 3. people with PhDs in hand have difficulty finding adjunct positions. i seriously doubt you'll get adjunct work with just an MA. if you work for a year, it will probably have to be out of academia. no one knows when these endowments are going to recover. i'm not sure there is anything to "ride out." 4. i'd definitely recommend trying again next year. be very precise about fit. if the fit isn't immediately obvious, then it's not good enough. apply to top 50 programs, don't limit yourself to the top 10/20. especially if you're working on something other than american or european history, many of the best programs for your subfield will probably be out of the top 10, even the top 20. last year, michigan wouldn't even spit on me and miami offered me a prestigious university-wide five-year $30,000/yr fellowship with drastically reduced teaching requirements and full benefits. i'd be ecstatic just to get that sort of pay as a professor, never mind as a graduate student. apply to a range of places. you'll find that the top 100 programs are full of professors who have won book prizes and earned their PhDs from top ten schools. you'll get a good education there, and if getting the degree is really what you want, then incorporate some lower-ranked schools into your list next time around. that's my two cents. edit: also... a colleague of mine, one of the brightest and most insightful that i know, was rejected across the board for PhDs in british history (he had an MA in hand). he changed his regional focus to something understudied and was promptly met with several fully-funded offers. i know people are really emotionally invested in what they study, i sure am, but it may be worth it to change regional fields or temporal concentration. some fields are just too saturated.

they knew. it's a carry-over from last year. last year, # of apps went up (i'm afraid of finding a real job!), number of spots went down (we gambled our endowment on the stock market!). this year, you've got the usual cohort that would be applying in any year plus the usual cohort that was rejected last year due to the decreased number of spots plus even more people applying just to avoid finding a regular job. i don't think the endowments dropped significantly this year, but departments are still lowering their overall number of admits to compensate for the market crash in the fall of 2009. i said it a lot earlier in this thread and got jumped on for it, but i'll reiterate: the rejections aren't a reflection of your potential as an academic. it mostly comes down to money and luck. it really is a lottery, so enjoy any winnings you may get and don't get sweat the rejections. theoretically, we all only applied to programs we'd be happy to attend, so any admission is a win. you only need one.

pitt has a few russian/soviet historians and one particular east europeanist that always has a few graduate students under her wing. for what it's worth, pat manning has his masters degree in economics and he's all about interdisciplinary work, so even though his stuff tends to focus on social/cultural history now, i think he would be capable of advising on economic world history (though it would be best to email him yourself to make sure). and i have no idea what the world-historical dataverse project is. i can ask around next week if you like. i really don't know what goes on in half of my department.

the world history center, and world history in general, is definitely something that pitt is putting money into. you can certainly attend CMU and reap most of the benefits of being at pitt (and vice versa), so it could be worth an application. pitt has a separate department for the history of science and technology. you can take courses outside of the history department (and in fact, you're required to, and you're also required to have an advisor from outside of the department), so you could probably get a lot out of that department as well. i'd advise you to look at the history of science/tech department's graduate course listings and see if that's what you have in mind.

world history is different from comparative history. "comparative" isn't really a field so much as a method. what is it exactly about global economic/technological/political history that you're interested in? what era? are you into empires and imperialism, international relations, transnational corporations? i ask because departments have different strengths. narrowing your interest will help you figure out where you want to apply. regarding those three schools.... i attend the university of pittsburgh. if you have specific questions about the program, feel free to send me a pm. we're home to the world history center, where you'll find a lot of financial and academic/intellectual support. there are constant talks given by world historians, we have a postdoc in residence, and there are a handful of extremely talented graduate students here specializing in world history. the center is probably best known for its director (i think he's the director?), patrick manning. he works on africa in world history and writes marvelously succinct books on the entire world over 4+ centuries. he's also a very nice man. he has a lot of connections with other academics and institutions, so plugging into his network would serve you well. we are also in the midst of hiring another world historian and we have a particularly strong group of candidates to choose from. whoever gets the gig will be an asset to the department. we're also also hiring a british historian that focuses on imperialism, adding to the world-iness of the program. outside of the world history center, transnational/atlantic/global studies are pretty popular amongst professors and students within the department. as for CMU, it's just down the block from pitt. students of either program can take courses at the other school, you can have advisors from either school, it's all very incestuous. i don't know if CMU is particularly well-known for world history. their strengths are african american, labour, and environmental history. it's a really good school but i'm not sure they have what you're after. regarding northeastern, a degree of their reputation as a place to study world history came from the fact that pat manning was there. two or three years ago, pitt offered manning the world history center and he moved over here. i'm not sure who else at northeastern does global/international/world history.

to all of the unfunded acceptees.... 1. congratulations on being admitted. 2. being unfunded will not only hurt your wallet, it will negatively affect your ability to secure fellowships, grants, and tenure-track positions down the line. the people who are admitted with fellowships are the ones that win more fellowships and grants. the people who are submitted with full funding in the form of TAships only have a good shot at departmental grants, but they're poorly positioned for more competitive university-wide and external fellowships. 3. besides worrying about your finances, you should worry about the school's. if they can't afford to pay their grad students, they probably can't afford summer research or conference travel funds for everyone either. if you don't get those summer research fellowships and you can't afford to go to conferences, that's just making your CV look shorter and shorter and that will hurt your employability. if you take the unfunded offers anyway, i wish you all the luck. i have heard a few stories people getting TAship offers for their second semesters, so you may only have to do one unfunded semester. not having the guaranteed package will cause you a lot of stress every 4 months, but it doesn't necessarily mean that you'll never secure funding. it can be done but it isn't easy. if it were me, knowing all the crap i just told you about what a bad idea it is to go unfunded, i'd probably enroll anyway, incur the debt for the MA, then reapply for PhD programs. i wouldn't do the PhD unfunded, but there are plenty of people that pay out of pocket for MAs (good idea or not) and then get fellowships at other schools for the PhD. edit: if you want a job in academia, you need a long CV. UC irvine is a fine school and an 8-page CV full of fellowships, grants, conference presentations, publications, and teaching experience from a top-30 program is probably worth more than a half-page CV with no awards from a top-15 program. a degree from UCLA is no more a guarantee of employment than one from UC irvine. if irvine is funding you, i'd go there, do the MA on their dime and reapply to UCLA for the PhD. if you get funding, move there. if not, stay at irvine. what's more, you can work with professors at UCLA easily and the names attached to your dissertation committee count for more than where the degree is from if your aim is to work in academia.

hey back off. the latin american turf is crowded enough. african history probably has the best jobs to PhDs ratio. just switch to french colonialism in africa and you're good to go. french colonialism anywhere, actually.

1:7. it's almost entirely modernists. the only colonialists here study atlantic history and the caribbean, so it's stuff like piracy, bootlegging, maroons, sailors. while their regional field is still technically "latin america," i think they'd classify themselves more as atlanticists or maritime historians instead. they're scheduled to hold a job search for another latin americanist next year and having a colonialist would definitely be nice. and i decided to actually count it... 16 students (37%) are latin americanists. 3 faculty members (or 9%) are latin americansts.

reid is one of my favourite people, period. had a seminar with him last semester and it was easily the best seminar i've ever had, as an undergraduate or grad student. he can be tough and he has high expectations. i would freak out a little bit before turning in papers because i didn't want to disappoint him. as an academic, i really love his work. i had read "blacks in sao paolo" before coming to pitt and read "afro-latin america" while i was here, and i'm all about what he's trying to do. as a human being, he is just lovely. witty, kind, patient, thoughtful. very humble guy, too, which is not easy to say about an academic as widely read as he is. i don't have a bad word to say about him, truly. the other latin americanists at pitt are great, too (lara putnam and alejandro de la fuente). my advisor, prof. putnam, beyond being a really nice person, definitely puts me through my paces and challenges me to push myself conceptually. in the short time that i have worked with her and with reid, i can easily say it's made me a stronger historian. very rigorous expectations but also very approachable. we've got a strong cohort of latin americanist grad students, too. i'd say at least a third of all the grad students here, possibly more, study latin america or the caribbean.

yeah. hopefully the central american coast doesn't get hit this season. there are worse things than being stranded there, but i'm worried about running out of money if i get stuck. going to bogota sounds exciting. most of my weekends will be spent traveling from one location to another, but since you're only in one city, it seems like you'd get the opportunity to explore a bit. i'm a little jealous.

a friend of mine from undergrad was accepted earlier this month into harvard's program for an international/global history PhD. my guess is they're still waiting to make definitive rejections or sort out the waitlist, but it at least some acceptances have gone out already.

belize, honduras, and nicaragua. more specifically, belize city, belmopan, san pedro sula, la ceiba, tegucigalpa, managua, and bluefields. only seven weeks total, but it's just my MA research. going in june/july. i LOVE being in the caribbean for hurricane season. love it.

i am this year, but i'm already in a program. for what it's worth, i spent my summer last year reading secondary sources and working on my spanish.

if the person rejects then they'll take no one for that subfield. upenn had an over-yield last year. fake numbers for an example, but they offered 20 spots, hoped only 10 would enroll, but 16 or 17 enrolled instead. this year, they're looking to take even fewer, so they're only offering as many spots as they can afford, say 7. if only 4 of those 7 accept, then they'll have a class of 4. the hit their endowment took last year combined with a larger than expected incoming class brought their numbers way down. i'm sure they don't mind if "the chosen one" goes somewhere else. last year was really rough for admissions because schools lost a lot of money, and the first thing to go is always graduate funding. this year, many endowments have recovered a bit but you're also seeing an increase in applications. now, those extra 100 applicants are probably just doing it to avoid the working world and may not have the CV or seriousness to get into a program anyway, but "3 out of 100" or "1 out of 50" still sounds daunting.

i've asked around within my department. none of the professors go anywhere terribly dangerous, my own advisor included. her work takes her to costa rica, which is considerably safer. other students visit haiti (as mentioned) and colombia and jamaica, but that's pretty much the extent of people going to potentially dangerous places. my colleague who spends time in colombia has offered some advice and mentioned pepper spray. she's a native spanish speaker, though, and she doesn't scream "foreigner" the way i do. i will just say that parts of both of these countries can be very safely traveled if you have your wits about you and don't do anything stupid like wave money or electronics around. it's just some particular towns that worry me. and i'd be sure to check any laws concerning bringing any weapon into another country before doing so. it could all be much more trouble than its worth. and thanks for the tips, lantern! you're right, if guns are so easily available then knives won't do me any good. i had only thought of it because a former PA told me one of her students switched his research from el salvador to honduras after he had been mugged at knife-point on a bus in el salvador. even with training, if there's a gun i would just comply and hope for the best.

thenon, are you applying to work with mary roldan? she was lovely over the phone when i spoke with her last year, but she left cornell and i never found out which school she moved to. and for the people working on colonial borderlands or the mapuche, have any of you read "bárbaros" by david weber? really, really brilliant book about the frontierlands of the spanish colonial empire during the bourbon era. he's at southern methodist university, which of course doesn't sound as fancy as yale or nyu, but his book is one of my favourites. highly recommended. i study ethnicity, communal land rights, and radical politics in the anglophone caribbean (including caribbean central america) in the late 20th century. i'm primarily looking at nicaragua and either grenada or honduras (once i stop waffling). applied last year to pittsburgh, NYU, cornell, upenn, texas, michigan, miami, carnegie mellon, and princeton. i should have applied to pittsburgh, indiana, tulane, texas (for anthropology, not history), michigan, carnegie mellon, NYU, and iowa. none of the ivies were even remotely good fits for my interests. it's weird to think how different my list would be this time around, but i think i'd still end up in the same place.

hi all, in history programs, you spend most summers and the research year of your dissertation traveling abroad to wherever your sources may be located. you can find a lot of stuff from around the world in the library of congress in DC, but not everything is there. i'm going to be spending a few months in nicaragua and honduras. i'm not too concerned about staying in major cities, since i know which neighbourhoods are safe and where to avoid (and when). however, i'm also going to be visiting smaller cities that have high crime rates and not a lot of security any time of day. one town i'll be doing archival work in just had two taxi cab drivers assassinated in their cabs last week. another town i'm going to is an increasingly popular spot for drug runners to stop over on their way from colombia to the US. bags of cocaine routinely be on the beach and when they do, violence breaks out because people want to steal the bags and sell the coke themselves. while some of the violence is politically motivated, a lot is also from poverty. i'm going to very poor regions of very poor countries. my spanish isn't perfect, the accent is thick and i'll stick out like a sore thumb. i'm also a young female traveling solo. anyway... my questions... has anyone here had to do research in dodgy areas? what precautions did you take? i already know the typical stuff: dressing down, making sure my backpack looks crappy, not flashing any electronics around, hiding money and ID in my sock or under my shirt with just a few dollars in my pockets, etc. what i'm wondering is, should i bring mace/pepper spray? should i carry a knife? i've had years of training with knife fighting and defense, so i'd know how to handle myself in a given situation, i'm just wondering if it's a good idea to bring the knife in the first place. any experience with bringing these types of weapons into other countries? should i leave my laptop and cell phone at home? i need to bring a digital camera to photograph my sources. should i invest in a cheap laptop for the trip so i can back up the pictures? should i just buy a bunch of memory cards for the camera instead? buy a cheap no-contract cell phone in each country or go without? should i skip the low budget hotels and try to stay in a room in someone's home? connect with NGOs in the region for housing? in one location in particular, most of the hotels in the town are used by local prostitutes and travel guides recommend single women skipping the area all together. that's not exactly an option for me since it's where my sources are. any other experiences you may have had while doing research in potentially dangerous environments would be much appreciated. especially if you feel like i'm overreacting. i've been to poor places before to do my research and nothing terrible went down. a colleague of mine (male) went to haiti on several research trips and thought it was odd that i had mentioned bringing a weapon, but a friend of mine did NGO work in southern uganda, brought a knife and had to use it. i guess i'm just looking for some perspective.

i was a debater in high school. signed up because it was a good way to get away from home and borrow college kids' IDs and go partying. the thrill of parliamentary style was gone when i could get into bars legally in college.

canadian tuition is cheap, even for international students. i can't imagine your yearly tuition being much over $15,000, leaving you with $20,000 for living expenses, which is the size of most stipends/fellowships that schools offer. if the tuition's less than $15K, you're sitting pretty. congratulations.