StrangeLight

first, as a historian, you should know that the job market is super-shitty and if you hope to work in academia as a professor, you'll have almost no control over where you get a job. if you get a job. so moving to the denver area when you're done your PhD is only a realistic objective if you don't plan to be a professor. if you're okay with that, cool. if not, then you need to do a little reading up on the state of the job market and have some serious conversations with your boyfriend. but the good news is, once you're done your coursework (3 years or so, usually), you're ABD (all but dissertation) and onto the researching and writing phase. if you can secure a few fellowships during those years, you can easily move to the denver area and live with your boyfriend while you write. so you don't have to see the separation as 5-6 years, more like 3-4.

i hope i won't be posting here next year. dear god.

"what does PhD stand for? oh, i know, 'papa has dough!'"

my program gives additional funding for the summer, but it is specifically earmarked for research. you need to submit receipts and the whole deal, and they only pay you as much as you prove that you spent. at my school, we can choose whether we're paid our stipend over an 8 month or a 12 month period. it's the same yearly amount, but some students ask for it in 8 installments and then find part-time retail work in the summer. it means their budget is bigger, but it also means that they're spending summers doing non-academic work instead of researching, processing data, writing (grants, theses, etc.), presenting at conferences, and the list goes on. there's a whole bunch of stuff grad students are expected to do, and the ones that short-change that so they can work in the gap for some extra money... well... they risk falling behind on their work.

i had a funded masters. that's the only way i could afford to do it. they paid my tuition and they paid me a stipend. that was it. and while living on a stipend is tight, and you need to budget well and cut out a lot of "entertainment" spending, it's totally possible to live on the stipend that grad programs give you.** you won't have a place with fancy kitchen cabinets or laundry in your apartment, but you also won't be living off of ramen noodles for 2 weeks every month. **unless you're in manhattan. while the columbia/nyu/etc. schools do what they can, i know a lot of students that supplement their stipend with adjunct work or small student loans.

you should join the terrace club eating club at princeton. they're open membership and "back in the day" they had all the best concerts. they usually get live acts instead of DJs at their events. quadrangle club is pretty cool too.

3 grad courses a semester (or 2 grad courses and 1 language course) is considered full time, not part time. few history programs want or ask students to take more than 3 courses. if you're really going to do the MA part time, then it would be more like 1 grad course and 1 language course a semester. remember, the MA is more than just classes. you have to write a thesis and it's very time consuming. when i started my MA i thought i'd be able to pick up some menial part time work and have whole days free. it just isn't possible unless you work VERY efficiently.

my program allows a bilingual dictionary for our translation exams. it will depend on how your program does it. if you already know where you're headed, you should look at the department's graduate handbook to see if it details how the translation exams occur. you could also consider contacting the DGS of your program and asking outright because you'd like to prepare for the exam over the summer.

1. comparing yourself to other students is a great way to make yourself feel like shit. guess what, as awesome as you were in the small pond of your undergrad years, you will NEVER be the best in your field. you'll NEVER be the best in your department, either. that's not me being pessimistic, that's reality. and the faster you can stop comparing yourself, the happier you'll be in grad school. because it isn't about being THE best, it's about being YOUR best. for real. stop comparing. 2. definitely don't compare yourself to people you love. that's a good way to stop loving them. quit it. 3. education programs are a VERY different animal from PhD programs. the field of education has a very different reputation and is perceived (right or wrong) to have a very different level of rigor. i mean, if you gotta start comparing yourself, at least do it with someone in your field. but even then, quit it.

you should look into schools that have MAs in middle eastern studies. "history" as a field isn't necessarily politically oriented anymore. you may find that the "best" programs in middle eastern history talk more about gender, race, and religion or texts and cultural production or transnational linkages... in an interdisciplinary middle eastern studies program, you can take history courses alongside languages (which will be HUGE if you want to get a PhD in middle eastern history... you'll need to be able to read the languages of the countries you wish to study). you'll also be able to grab some sociology, poli sci, anthropology, geography, literature, etc. if that's where your interests take you. history at the graduate level is very different from history at the undergraduate level, so you may not necessarily know what you're getting yourself into with a history MA or PhD program. since you don't seem to have any reading background in middle eastern history (as you say, the authors on your shelf are policy professionals), you should contact professors from your old school and ask them to recommend you three or four good books on middle eastern history. read them and decide if that's the type of work you want to write. also... a history PhD (mostly) prepares students to become history professors and teachers. the job market for professorships is terrible so a lot of PhD graduates end up doing the kind of work you want to do (in policy, government, etc.), but their PhD doesn't necessarily train them for it. basically.... before you start researching programs, you need to dig into the field of history a little more and decide if this is the type of work you want to do. it's not just reading and writing about the past. for what it's worth, every time i take a literature or poli sci class, i'm reminded of why i DON'T study those fields. the questions they ask and the ways they answer them are very different from the kind of work i want to do. until you're a little more familiar with historical monographs, you can't really know if history is the right discipline for you. good luck! don't let this seem too daunting.

that's awesome. i think chicago's MAPSS program gets a bum rap as a cash-cow program, because i know a lot of people that have left it for really great PhD programs elsewhere and it seems like they end up in chicago's PhD programs as well. and oseirus, i have a bridge you might want to buy. it's pretty awesome.

oh make no mistake, getting a terminal MA sets you up VERY well for admissions at other schools, including "the top programs." a lot of schools prefer to accept applicants who already hold MAs because they have already proven themselves capable of doing graduate-level work. it's just that, from what i've seen, usually students have not been able to successfully move from terminal MAs to PhDs at the same institution. it's actually nice to know that not all programs make that part of their practice, but i know that NYU, chicago, and yale (usually) do.

it's actually an unwritten rule of academia that schools won't admit terminal MA students to their PhD programs, even if you're going from an interdisciplinary "studies" MA to a single discipline PhD. on rare occasions, exceptions have been made for sure, but i've lost track of how many times i've heard people told by POIs at their terminal MA that they'll "definitely" get into the PhD at that same school and then they don't. i myself was discouraged from attending an interdisciplinary MA at the school i wanted to get my PhD from. my POI told me outright that their department didn't accept students from the X studies program into the history PhD program because, in their minds, when you accept a terminal MA at their institution, that is as far as you can go at that school. my suggestion, however, is to go with the best funded offer open to you. if that's a funded terminal MA at your dream school, then do it. your "dream" may shift and your MA will open doors to many other (better?) institutions. if you're considering an unfunded terminal MA at your dream school, know that you will have less chance of doing your PhD there than if you take a year off to work on languages and rewrite your application. the general rule of thumb is, if they won't fund you for an MA, they won't fund you for a PhD either, regardless of how much you prove yourself to the profs you have contact with. i think the exceptions to this rule have happened when the terminal MA POIs have had a lot of sway in the admissions process in a given year (i.e. they're "owed" a student or they're on the adcom, etc.).

drink a lot at the airport bar before you get on the plane.

jay z's flow is indisputable. rhyming is overrated, try rapping on the downbeat.

these are all the good ones! although el-p, das racist, killer mike, danny brown, and despot are the real greats right now.

ja rule is great and you hate on jay z? i just can't anymore. nothing touches hova. except el-p.

sample? diddy SANG over kashmir.

uh. yeah. huh. cuhhhhm with me. *kashmir riff* i close my eyeeeees aaannnnd iii seeeeeeee yooooouuuuuu stahhhhhhndiiing theeeere i cryyyyy teeeeeeeears of sorrroooooow iii diiiiiiiiiiieeee *kashmir riff* diddy is the worst.

love affair over. the who is the greatest. (is? are?) favourite album: no code favourite song: i got id

dammit, you should've come to pitt. i've seen pearl jam live over 30 times.

how the list is built varies at each school. sometimes "the list" even varies by advisor within the same program. some schools may allow you to select (in concert with your advisor) a percentage of the books yourself, maybe even build the whole list yourselves. other programs will have set full lists that you have very limited flexibility with. in general, it's not really possible to work on your comps list until you know which institution you'll be attending.

he also takes his shirt off in part 6 of 6. rowr.

my school only received 10% of its total budget from the state and proposals to cut that to 5% have opened discussions of firing staff, increasing teaching loads for tenured professors, combining departments, cutting smaller departments altogether, reducing admissions, and canceling future internal fellowships. schools, like countries, can often run a deficit in their yearly budget. awesome, huh? so i'd say that even a 5% cut in funding (which can be equated to $5 million to $10 million) can really cripple some programs.

i know a prof that did his PhD at stony brook, worked at yale for a bit (i think as a postdoc?), and now teaches at an R1 school in vancouver (tenured, light teaching load, grad student advisees). so he managed to "get out" of the regional pull a few times. not that being stuck in the new york area forever is a bad thing. i usually think it's a good idea to only apply to schools you'd be happy to attend. my sense is that rutgers is on par with stony brook, although there may be some particular subfield strengths that rutgers has over stony brook in your case. stony brook is the SUNY, at least for the fields of history i'm familiar with, so i don't think it's fair to compare it to all other SUNY campuses. i'd strongly consider going. but if you're convinced that your next application would be that much better, then by all means try again. before you do so, see if stony brook will allow you to defer your admission for one year. consider being a bit mercenary about it and invoking some of those family emergencies you described to explain why you'd like a year off before enrolling. they may say no, but it's worth a shot.