StrangeLight

it is very common for first year students to serve as TAs. "standard" funding packages tend to require students to TA either all throughout their first year or in the second semester of their first year. many departments will cobble together particular first-year fellowships so that you don't have to teach until your second year, but there isn't always enough of that to go around, so a few in your cohort will be TAing right off the bat. almost every program requires you to TA in your second year and third year. many also have you TAing in your fourth and fifth year, but there are many dissertation research or dissertation completion fellowships available inside and outside of history departments that would remove this obligation. one exception i know of is princeton, which doesn't require you to TA at all. you can choose to TA if you want to, if you want the experience on your CV. i'm sure there are other universities with massive endowments that free you up from TAing through most of your degree, but i don't know of any public school that doesn't have its grad students as TAs by their second year. oh, and you do have to take 2 to 3 years of classes, depending on your program, and that's on top of your teaching requirements and the work you're doing towards your MA and dissertation proposal and preparing for your comprehensive exams. awesome, isn't it? regardless of how much or how hard you're working right now, you will be working 5 times harder in a year. there aren't enough hours in the day to do everything that you need to do. my first recommendation is, all other things being equal, enroll in the program with the least amount of required teaching responsibility. you want fellowships on your CV, not just TAships. you definitely want to avoid teaching your first year because you're going to be very, very busy as it is. oh, and have a ton of fun now. once you're in a grad program, even if you have time to go do something fun, you'll feel guilty the whole time that you're not working on something instead.

as a student from a non-american university, you will NOT have to calculate your GPA. ever. you will simply submit a transcript (with a notarized translation into english, if the transcript is in another language). all top universities employ people whose sole job is to understand international grading systems and convert your grades for you. in the US, schools hand out As and 4.0s like they're going out of style. *waits to get attacked by american students who insisted they worked really hard for their grades... i'm sure you did, but i've been told by countless professors that have taught at duke, unc, yale, princeton, ucsd, ucla, etc. that a paper that would receive a B at an american school would get a C at a canadian one. i can't attest to the difficulty of grading scales in europe, but i can assure you that each school will have a specialist that knows what a 6 or 5.75 means and how easy or difficult those scores are to obtain. they won't do a straight numeric conversion of your GPA, it will be weighted based on the perceived difficulty of your country and your university's reputation. so don't sweat it. it sounds like your grades for your major are perfect, and your grades overall are near-perfect. keep them as high as you can and that will be fine. as others have said, GRE scores aren't that critical for non-native english speakers. do your best, definitely study, but a score in the 500s won't knock you out of the running at any top school. make sure your grammar in your SOP and writing sample is flawless and you'll be fine. yes, your work with primary sources counts as research. working as a tutor is also good experience that can be added to your CV/resume, but isn't quite what is meant by "research" in history. working with primary sources is the important part. getting something published looks great but very few applicants coming straight out of undergrad will have any publications.

a few unsolicited words of advice to people calling graduate secretaries or professors looking for information: the graduate secretaries are getting bombarded with telephone calls from nervous and jittery students right now. if you call, be exceedingly polite and patient (not that you otherwise wouldn't be). these graduate secretaries will be your lifeline when you're in your program and often they remember who phones them. be really, really nice. admissions time happens to overlap inconveniently with the period when most schools host their job searches, so in addition to adcoms working through your applications, they're also involved in the very time-consuming process of hiring other professors. if your potential advisor is chairing a job search committee, notifying potential advisees of unofficial decisions or keeping in contact with them may not be a priority. on the other hand, another professor in the same department with a little more time on his hands may be willing to let his potential advisees know their fate or start a dialogue with acceptees about their research or funding packages or whatever. this isn't an indication of how interested the professor is in you. it's more than likely just a reflection on the amount of work they have to do this time of year. don't take it personally if one admit to your school has multiple phone conversations with their advisors over the next few weeks and you don't get an email. some people are genuinely busier than others.

first generation college student here. my mom has a high school education and my dad only finished the 10th grade. my dad's sisters did one year of college and failed out. my cousins went to college, my brother went to college, but i'm the first in the family to go to graduate school. i find i'm losing my ability to relate to my parents. i study history in pittsburgh. my dad once told a group of people, in front of me, that i study geodegy (no, i don't think that's an actual discipline) at harvard in new york. i think he likes the idea of me in graduate school because he can show off to his friends and tell them i'm going to be a "doctor." my mother thinks that because i was the best student in my 8th grade class (debatable), i'm the best student in my university. the best student at any university, for that matter. she assumes that everyone else in my courses must be beneath me. and when i say, "no, there are a lot of really bright people here that frequently say things i never would have thought of," she brushes it off and says, "you don't give yourself enough credit." how is recognizing the capability and intelligence of my peers a bad thing? she hasn't read a book in well over a decade (not an exaggeration) and she's never read an academic or theoretical text, but she weirdly insists that what i do should be easy, that it shouldn't take me 60+ hrs a week, that i should be out every weekend having fun and finding a husband (i'm 23). her having no idea what i do wouldn't bother me if she didn't try to micromanage my life from a distance, but she has these insanely unrealistic expectations and she just loads on the pressure instead of helping to relieve it. it's disappointing because we were always very close and she used to be someone i could talk to about anything, and now i talk to her like she's a stranger. "oh, everything's good (lie). yep. work's fine (lie). classes are good (lie). yeah, i went out last week (lie). there's a lot of snow here (true). oh really, ellen's the new judge on american idol? weird choice. yeah, the baby from the e-trade commercial is really cute. i can't believe you won at bingo again. no, i didn't buy a lottery ticket." it sucks. we just can't relate to each other anymore. that probably has to do with a lot more than me being in graduate school. /endtherapysession

and yet it had a typo. "loosing" instead of losing. thanks for the compliment, though. lauren, is it just the one seminar where you're finding the disconnect, or is it within your department in general? i've found that the conceptual reservoir that people pull from differs with each course i take. you may find a more receptive atmosphere to your views in other courses taught by other professors without having to actually switch fields. again, no real solution to offer on how to deal with that class in particular, but i'd suggest asking around your department to see if there are other faculty members whose ideas and perspectives click with yours. one scholar, or one group of scholarship, rarely exemplifies an entire discipline, and you may find some people within your department that are a little more open to your interdisciplinary drive. maybe schedule time with your DGS and say frankly, "this is how i see the world. is there someone in the department whose work lines up well with that?" then go to that person, even if they're outside your subfield or speciality, and bounce your ideas off of him/her. it doesn't sound to me like your ideas are all that wild or controversial, so i'm sure that outside the culture of that class, you can find a few people in your department that are on the same page as you. and, also.... it sounds like your classmates in that seminar just suck.

you may actually hear from UBC before NYU. canadian schools do usually take longer than american ones to get the admissions out, but NYU is notoriously late in notifying people. may i ask, who are you applying to work with at ubc? i went there for my undergrad and still keep in contact with a few professors. i could do some digging for you, or just answer questions you may have about the department.

i'm... i want to put this more delicately than it will probably sound, so forgive me, for i mean no offense, but i'm not sure you're understanding "essentialism" or "biological determinism" the same way that your professors and classmates are. my suggestion is to look for a few journal articles that discuss the epistemology and process of social construction. sounds like you're in a field with a lot of constructivists, and it sounds like your disagreements with their perspective on how the world works may be due more to unfamiliarity with the debates they're engaging in, rather than a disagreement with their ultimate positions. yes, human beings evolve. but there is nothing biological about race, for example. how we define race differs across time and space, the criteria has little to do with anything genetic or biological. usually (though not always) race is somehow related to phenotype (skin colour, hair texture, bone structure), but those rules change over time and place. there's nothing BIOLOGICAL or ESSENTIAL about race. that doesn't mean that race isn't experienced concretely in people's lives; it is. but it's a construction, not biological or essential. does that make sense? do i just sound like the people in your seminars? probably. for what it's worth, social and cultural anthropology at the graduate level also talks about essentialism and biological determinism like it's a bad thing. often, the background that all of us get in our undergraduate surveys lags behind the cutting edge theory work happening at any given time. i'm not sure that you would have many epistemological agreements with your colleagues in an anthropology department either. the entire discipline is in crisis and has been since the culture wars and the linguistic turn. it is very possible that your fellow seminar-goers are speaking in extremes and loosing the subtlety of the arguments they're trying to make. it's also possible that they don't fully grasp the concepts they're employing. some people grab onto jargon, get a grasp on part of the concept, and then run hog wild hoping to impress their profs in seminar. and sometimes the profs are guilty of... problematic interpretations of the theory they're teaching. i don't think any constructivist position actually denies the process of human evolution, but the process by which people form groups (based on ethnicity or race or gender or nationality or whatever else) is not actually biological, even (especially) when the logic behind group formation is based on "science" or "genetics." malaria immunity amongst africans has nothing to do with race or blackness, for example, but with people having a long-term exposure over multiple generations and building up an immunity. now, someone "constructing" race will extrapolate that and declare that black people from africa are genetically more resistant to malaria. people from africa, yes. black, no. blackness has nothing to do with the immunity. being from a certain part of africa does. is that distinction clear? how genetics or human evolution is employed to reify the biological argument for race? sorry, that was long-winded and probably unnecessary. i'm just procrastinating. ANYWAY... i've also found it difficult to talk across disciplines. i can understand a cultural anthropologist or a sociologist just fine, but lit students and poli sci students and "cultural studies" students are speaking another language. even within my own discipline, i find there's a lot of disconnect between regional subfields. it can be frustrating and i don't really have an answer for how to deal with it. sometimes i feel like i'm in the wrong department when i'm exposed to another historian's approach, but my advisor's line of thinking is right in my wheelhouse so i just ignore everyone else and press forward.

funny, that. because my tone was in direct response to the derisive, insulting, short-sighted, arrogant, condescending attitudes a good number of the posters in this thread have had regarding the presumed defects of anyone that gets a rejection letter. so i am glad to hear that my attitude offended you, because it was intended to. i was really, genuinely offended, and while my response comes a few pages/days late, i stand by it. it was also meant to be comical and take the edge off for people. as in, "don't sweat it, we all have plenty of opportunity to fail." i suppose i need to litter my posts with emoticons for that to come across in text.

i did this whole process last year and contacted all PAs at each school i was interested in. some of those conversations were so engaging, lengthy, and encouraging that i thought i'd be swimming in offers. i did all right and ultimately ended up at one of my top choices (depending on my mood it ranked anywhere from #1 to #3 on my list), but there were a lot of rejection letters from schools where my potential advisor had told me i was "extremely competitive." it happens. expect many more form letters of rejection and hope for a few acceptances on the way. don't overanalyze it and don't take it personally either. a lot of schools are getting 200-400 applications for only 10 spots. there are probably another 40 or 50 people they considered competitive that are also getting rejections. editing: [not to the OP specifically, but to people applying this year in general] seriously, don't take it personally when you get rejected. someone telling you that you're competitive, or that they'd like to take on ONE advisee next year, is in no ways a guarantee of your admission to their program. if this is too harsh for you and you want your fee back, then maybe getting out of academia is the way to go. it's competitive and cutthroat, which means there are many qualified people for very few positions. can't take the heat, get out the kitchen and all that.

the NYU week is pretty random. last year, a handful of people were admitted without being invited to the weekend, and more than a handful who had been invited were ultimately rejected. i won't say it means nothing, you're at least on a shortlist, but it is a guarantee of nothing other than increasing your anxiety. ... i'm telling you guys, log off this site until march. your acceptances and rejections will find their way to your (e)mailbox without this site, but you'll stress a little less. i'd also like to take this opportunity to reiterate that people who get shut out completely aren't just poor students from average schools who didn't take the adcom process seriously. you are not guaranteed a spot anywhere, regardless of your pedigree. keep that in mind and maybe you won't get too down on yourself if you get rejected across the board, or only accepted to a safety school you think is beneath you. don't worry, if you're one of the 40% that actually completes your PhD, and then one of the 20% who manages to get a tenure-track job, and then one of the 10% that manages to get that job at a research university with something less than a 4/4 teaching load, you'll be all set.

there may be informal interviews or group interviews (you and 5 other hopefuls with 3 or 4 profs all together) and there will almost definitely be some social gathering for you to mill around and schmooze. some profs and some students will take this process very seriously, others will talk to you about sports. neither type of conversation is an indication of how seriously they are considering you. don't try to overanalyze the conversations you have with anyone. in my experience, it's better to have a dialogue with professors about your interests rather than reciting your CV and SOP. easier said than done, but they know your resume, that's why you're there. this is the opportunity to promote yourself as a serious scholar with an academic curiosity. 1) dress appropriately. not too formal (unless you rock a suit on the regular) but band t-shirts and and neon green pumas aren't first-impression attire, even though they kick ass. 2) think about your own research carefully before heading in. assemble a little bibliography of the relevant stuff you've already read and other stuff you'd like to read moving forward. rehearse a 1-2 sentence idea of what your research is. when someone outside your subfield asks you what you do, you want to sound clear and concise. you don't need to write any of this down, just have it in your mind. odds are once you talk to someone that is in your subfield, they'll ask "have you read ____?" and you at least want to know of the scholar they're talking about. one really useful (but time-consuming) way to do that is to compile a spreadsheet of all profs that do something really close to what you do (i.e. 19th century labour history and immigration in the northeast). where do they teach, what are their research interests, and if you've read any of their work, those titles. you don't need to memorize that, but when someone says "do you know justin wolfe?" you can say, "oh yeah, he's at tulane, studying race and the nation-state in nineteenth century nicaragua." that's all you need but i've found it goes a long way any time you talk with a professor about your work. 3) consider making copies of your CV and SOP and carrying them with you (if you have a purse or a satchel or something). odds are no one will ask to see it, but it's better to have those on hand in case someone does want to take a peak. 4) research penn state. have questions prepared for them. this is really important, although i'm not totally sure why. i just know that a lot of people conducting interviews complain that the interviewee didn't ask any questions. ask about speaker series, where the grad students hang out, what sort of departmental events or workshops they do, that sort of stuff. even if you know the answers to these questions, ask them anyway.

most of the schools won't reply until march. don't spend all of february obsessively checking this website like i did. it's not worth it. honestly, truly, bottom of my heart sincerity: log off this site until march 1. speaking from experience here... wisconsin went out early, yes, but there are no funding offers attached to that, which really means they haven't completed the admissions process. if you get into wisconsin and you're unfunded, you shouldn't go. you won't pay off that sort of debt with a job as a professor. so yes, one big school (and a few trickles from other big schools) has sent out notifications, but that does not guarantee other schools are going to follow suit. so really... take a break from the obsessing.

work on an oil rig. (yes, i realize you're in environmental engineering, but depending on your politics, this may help you either know your industry or know your enemy.) you can clear $100,000 easily in your first year on a rig. there are lots of horrible, dangerous, depressing, soul-crushing, mind-bending, high-paying jobs out there for people willing to put their life and sanity on hold. it's a good way to kill off your debt. i know this may seem like really impractical advice, but if i were the OP i'd consider something this drastic. even one year, cutting that debt in half would make the rest of his/her life a hell of a lot more manageable.

never mind.

i don't think anything less than a perfect 800 would raise eyebrows. 800Q is still only the 88th %ile. it's high school math, easier than the SAT math section, and other than helping with funding, high Qs don't make any real difference for history admissions. anything below 500Q might raise some eyebrows, but probably won't affect admissions. they will affect the funding package you're offered, though. schools award university-wide fellowships based on GPA and GRE scores so they can compare students across disciplines.

probably. last year when i applied, i didn't see any africanists on this site or on college confidential. bodes well for your hiring prospects. african history has the best ratio of job postings to PhD holders of any subfield, so there's a definite upside to being the only one.

the quant scores don't matter unless you're doing quantitative analysis or economic history. so, be careful to steer your SOP clear of mathy things if you're worried about your Q score.

i didn't find the first semester of undergrad difficult. the work and readings weren't hard. but i was taking more than the recommended amount of classes and so the amount of work was pretty high. that was my own fault and my unwillingness to tell my advisor that at some point i'll need to sleep.

really, those aren't exaggerations. a colleague of mine nearly got fired from his tenured position for publicly stating that it was inappropriate for the dean and heads of faculty to handle the matter of the grad student suicide when they had been in relationships with their own graduate students. a false accusation and $10,000 in private detective and legal fees later, the campaign to push this professor out of the school ended. i'm sorry if that makes you uncomfortable, but it all happened and it isn't an exaggeration.

alright, most is an exaggeration, but at my undergrad institution with over 45,000 students, there were a few... issues with students dating professors. one of which resulted in the suicide of one student and some unwanted media attention on the school. and the president of the school, the deans of each faculty, and the head of the department where this all went down were ALL either married to a former prof, married to a former grad student, or had had multiple relationships with grad students that were pretty public. all of them. from talking to professors that have taught at many universities in the US and canada, and most of them rather prestigious (i listed places but thought better of it...), it was extremely rare to find people in positions of power at these schools (either in the department, the faculty, or the school as a whole) that hadn't been in relationships with a graduate student. dating a grad student in general is less controversial than dating your advisee in particular, but both happen. and again... the status quo is that if this is consensual then it's not a big deal. so i'm not saying most of these people are devious monsters or anything. you meet someone new, you work with them all the time, you date them maybe, and if that works out, you get hitched. and that's fine. but that reinforces the culture of normalcy around two people with a very lopsided power relationship dating each other, and when those relationships end poorly, it usually messes up the graduate student.

this happens all the time. you know, there's usually no policy against professors dating their students because most of the people in positions of power at schools dated or married their grad students. just because it happens all the time doesn't mean it's okay all the time. i'd recommend making it obvious that you are dating someone, even if you're not. when he wants to talk to you after class, tell him you've got a date or you're meeting your boyfriend. sending yourself flowers to the department is also a very good idea. find a friend (outside the grad program) to call you on your cell when you know you'll be meeting with this professor. unfortunately, telling him to cut the garbage puts you in a tricky spot. it's not fair to you, but you've got to blow him off gently. making yourself seem taken is the easiest way to do that. to be fair to him, what you described doesn't sound like it's crossed any lines yet since he hasn't explicitly asked you out and you haven't explicitly shut him down. i don't want to make it sound like i think this guy's a monster, because he's only doing what probably 1/3 of his colleagues have done at some point. if you "hang low" or whatever and take no steps to show you're uninterested, he'll keep trying and eventually you'll have to tell him to cut the shit and that could have implications for your education. nip it in the bud.

i didn't have an entire day, weekend or not, holiday or not, where i didn't do at least a few hours of work until my final paper of the semester was turned in. i pulled at least one all-nighter a week and didn't sleep for more than 6 hours a night except on weekends. i had 4 graduate seminars, so i was reading four books a week, and the average length was around 300 pages each. 1200 pages, 20 pages/hr (if i read it carefully, which i tried to), that's an average of 60 hours a week of work. add to that research papers, presentations, and working on my masters research. i'd say that 70 hours a week is a safe estimate. i totally crashed by the end of the semester and spent the past two weeks doing a lot of sleeping and no work. some of my colleagues were cracking at the end of the year the way i had been since the end of september. i'm not saying this as a contest to see who did the most work. even the people with fewer classes had to TA when i didn't, so everyone in my program was busy. i'm just saying that it's really common for graduate students to put in well over 50 hours of work a week. i had this sickening feeling about once a week where i knew that if i did absolutely nothing but read or study from that moment until my class the next day (no eating, no sleeping, not leaving my apartment) i still didn't have enough time to finish my work. according to my fellow students, that's par for the course. i had no time for myself either. it sucked. i spent the last two weeks de-stressing instead of working and i'm probably behind schedule already. this is just kind of how it works until the summer. then you get to have fun for four months before you start all over again. YAY!!! here's my real advice, though: don't do all of the work. do just enough of it that you understand the point of the work assigned. you know the argument in the book, or you know how to do a certain proof, or whatever the work is. but don't obsess with knowing it all cover to cover because you won't need most of that knowledge and it takes up a lot of your time. just figure out what you're supposed to get from the work and then move on. in the last week of classes, i finally discovered that most of the people in my seminar only ever read half of the book, or the intro and conclusion, or the reviews. there i was struggling to drag my eyes over every line on every page, and no one else was putting themselves through that. you can't do everything in a week, you will always feel behind, so you have to manage how you study.

keep your cat. i'm at school 2-3 days a week, and only one day a week am i there for more than 4 hours. the rest of the time, my cat gets a lot of my love. he lies next to/on top of my laptop while i work, rubs his face against whatever book i'm reading, sits on top of my notebooks. constant companion, constant nag, all love. you need your pet there to help you destress, and cats are really easy to care for. you spend a lot of time working, but unless you're in labs, you can do most of it from home. a fellow grad student just got himself a puppy. i don't know how he manages to train his pup and get his work done, but i'm still jealous. traveling is difficult though. i'm not sure what to do about that yet. my fourth year is spent traveling to probably 3 or 4 different countries, so the kitty will likely move in with my parents.

There are probably people in my program who have 4.0s, but I'm sure there are way more with lower GPAs than mine (3.917... I calculated wrong in some other thread). I spent so much of this semester focusing on my classwork that I barely made a dent in my research. Not worth it, in my opinion. I know from professors at a few schools, and grad students who are on the hiring committee at my school, that grades don't matter that much when hiring a professor. 3.0s look a little suspect, but those applications are reviewed like the 4.0 ones and the real difference on who gets invited to interview and who gets the job really comes down to the quality of your research, who is writing your LORs, and how you gel with the departments in terms of personality and filling their research niche. Essentially, how good your masters thesis is (and whether it gets published, and where it gets published) and how good your dissertation is (and if you could potentially turn it into a book, at least in my field) matter FAR more for hiring prospects than the difference between a 3.5 or a 4.0. Don't lose your funding, as others have mentioned, but don't sacrifice your research to turn an A- into an A.

photography is cool. my favourite part was always developing the photos, and i don't have the space or the equipment for that, so i'm less motivated. right now i play guitar, smoke cigarettes, watch sports, play some nerd-games, and go to concerts as much as possible. and play with my cat, an endless source of love and annoyance. i think i'm going to start a yoga class. i'm sick of sitting on my butt all day. in the nicer weather, i plan on going fishing a lot. oh, and starting my vegetable garden. i am very excited to get back to growing my food. i missed this last season because i moved during the summer.