StrangeLight

I call my profs "Professor [last name]" until they sign an email with their first name, tell me to call them by their first name, or other graduate students are calling them by their first name. I find it awkward to say "Professor Whathisface" while the person next to me says "Jeff." And I only call medical doctors "Doctor." You know, like, real doctors. In undergrad, I also called a lot of profs by their first name if I was close with them. Or just last name, no title. They didn't mind. They still don't. I start off formally and stay that way until I see others more relaxed, and then I switch it off. I think that in grad school it helps to build relationships with your professors because so much about finding work is really about the networking connections your recommenders have (in addition to the quality of your own research). First name basis, to me, helps to build that relationship and also helps those professors see you as a potential peer. Just my two cents.

3.699 i think. Two As, one A-. I also did an independent seminar (four grad courses in one semester in a humanities program is too much work, just FYI) but I won't receive that grade for a while. I can't imagine it being lower than an A- unless my professor fails the other student that took the seminar with me.

as others have said, "fit" is about getting admitted. it's not about your potential for hiring once you've finished your degree. and it's not really hard to find places that fit. look at your favourite books. track down those professors. see how broadly they're willing to advise you on a topic. if they don't want to leave their particular niche, that may not be the place to go if you envision yourself coming up with something dramatically different. if they seem fairly open to advising a variety of projects (this variety should be expressed over the phone or in emails, but not in your SOP), then you can change your mind when you get there. every single grad student changes their topic or refines their interests or sees their dissertation go in different directions from the SOP. the point of the SOP is to prove that you are capable of writing a proposal for a potential research topic. you're not held to that topic, but some advisors may have limits on how far they will let you stray from it. talk to them during the admissions process and see if they'll advise on something outside of their own specialty. if you really think you might change your interests dramatically between now and the MA or now and the PhD, then don't apply to those schools.

some people have strong academic records, apply to programs with a good fit and a potential advisor interested in working with them, take time on their SOP and writing sample, have strong LORs, and they still don't get in anywhere. people who strike out completely aren't solely the ill-prepared. i hope for both of you that your applications are well received and you have your choice of schools, but having been through this process twice (for a journalism masters and a history PhD), i can tell you that "crapshoot" is a rather fair assessment of the process, especially for last year's admissions cycle. the financial crisis dramatically dropped the number of spaces available in most grad programs. schools that would normally accept 20 new students were only taking on 7 or 8. entire subfields were shut out of the running. some schools only took students who already had masters degrees so they could have an entire cohort that didn't require masters classes. say there are 9 spots total. your potential advisor and another professor are battling over who gets the 9th student. if your potential advisor wins, you're in. if he or she doesn't, because that prof doesn't have the same record of achievement or has a few advisees already, then you're out. that has NOTHING to do with how well you prepare your application or what kind of rapport you establish with your potential advisor ahead of time, and the "it's my turn for an advisee" argument is fairly common in any grad program. so... again. best of luck to you both, but realize that the people who were shut out completely last year weren't necessarily weak applicants applying to the wrong schools without contacting advisors ahead of time.

your GPA is excellent, don't worry. there isn't a great deal of difference between a 3.8 or 4.0, really. if you explained that you attended law school, decided it wasn't for you, and just finished up the semester out of a desire to finish what you start, all in your statement of purpose or in an additional letter, then you're fine. if that law school GPA goes unexplained, it might raise a few eyebrows but won't necessarily exclude you from anywhere.

so what, an intellectual history of the 20th century caribbean would make less sense than one of 19th century europe? .... edit: and i think political and economic history both tend to carry less weight right now than they used to. it's more social and cultural history at the moment, and intellectual history can potentially slide right into that.

how much the GRE matters varies with each adcom at each school, so no one can give you a concrete answer. the score may sink you at some schools and may not matter at all at others. if there is any general trend regarding the GRE, however, it is that the AW section is meaningless. those sections are graded by masters students looking for extra work, and they spend 2.5 minutes reading each essay before assigning a grade. in light of that information, most schools put very little, if any, emphasis on the AW section, especially since (as you mentioned) they get writing samples and an SOP from each applicant. i have heard of some schools that use the GRE verbal score as a cut-off. people below a certain number are automatically chucked out. i think 600V beats that first round cut-off at most schools, who are probably throwing things below 550V out instead. you mentioned you got your score report, so what were your percentiles? that's far more important than the actual number. if you broke the 85%ile, you're in decent shape. if you didn't, then your score will be a concern at some schools, though by no means at all of them. you just need to make sure your sample and SOP are damn near perfect. your GPA is solid. if you have a lot of language preparation, then you should be okay, for the most part. the score may cause you to miss out on some additional funding, however, since many schools do use the GRE to measure applicants across disciplines when awarding university-wide fellowships. so, in short... the AW doesn't matter, and the verbal score won't keep you out of every school, but it might keep you out of some. really, though, in theory we only apply to schools where we would want to get our degrees from, so all you really need is to get into one of them with funding and you'll be fine.

my statement of purpose sucked. i had 3 potential topics for a thesis/dissertation and i wasn't sure which ones to pitch at each school. my professors told me, "well, try and pitch all of them, they're sort of interrelated, and more than anything, talk about the TYPE of history you want to do, not necessarily what your project will be." WRONG. that is WRONG. it sounds good in a one-on-one conversation, but in an SOP, it seems like an unfocused mess. no one holds you to your SOP topic once you actually arrive in grad school. in fact, most assume that your SOP topic was irrelevant and that you're starting fresh. weird, i know. the SOP is essentially an opportunity to prove to grad schools that you know how to write a thesis proposal, plus add in a little bit about your past work and the type of researcher you want to be and how what you do fits with their school. but really... think of a topic, do a bit of research, and write a (informal?) proposal for that topic. it should be something you might want to do, not precisely what you are going to do. there is tons of discouragement and self-doubt and wondering what on earth you're doing. if you don't feel that way then you're not examining your work critically enough. man, my SOP would look so different if i was applying to PhD programs again. i was really clueless, and i still got into one of my top choices with full funding and fellowships, so it's not hopeless!

write your SOP for what you want to do. appeal to all the subfields that will pop up in your work. connect yourself to americanists, latin americansts, europeanists in each department. even talk up their library collections, if possible. if you sound like someone that will interest 4 or 5 faculty members, your odds are good. but... ultimately... you're going to still be thrown under the category of americanist unless you apply to world history programs. you know all of this already.

canada also funds their MA students. not always across the board, but it's a lot more common there than for terminal MA programs in the US.

as a fellow transnational historian i can tell you... you'll probably be considered an americanist. i'd say that almost half the students in my program are doing some sort of transnational/atlantic/world history but they're all "americanist" or "latin americanist" or "europeanist." i'm a latin americanist who studies hispanic central america/anglophone caribbean and will eventually do some transnational west african stuff. if i'm doing latin america AND africa, i damn well better be able to get a job at the end of this.

i would think there'd be a ton of people working on modern american history in the US. too many, even (for the job market, i mean). i'm a canadian and i did fine on the GRE. 650V (95%ile) 690Q (70%ile). i would've liked a higher verbal score but what can you do? i'd never had to take standardized tests before (ever! we just don't do that up here) so i'm sure american students with more familiarity with the format had a leg up on me, but three months of solid preparation was all i really needed. spend time on it and you'll do fine. if you're worried about what your score could potentially be, take practice tests and calculate your score. that's always a good hint of where you're at.

i don't really know how hard it is to get in here. again, it's fit. when i applied to grad schools, my cumulative GPA was 3.7, my major GPA was 4.0, i wrote an honours thesis that i used for my writing sample, i worked for one really well-known professor as his research assistant, my GRE was 650V (95%) 690Q (70%) 5.5 AWA (88%), i had 2.5 years of spanish (5 semesters) and 1 year of french (2 semesters). all three of my LORs came from people who are not only respected in their fields, but also known at pitt specifically. two of the three are actually very good friends with a few of the professors at pitt, and no doubt knowing my recommenders personally as well as professionally helped. you can compare numbers to mine, i guess, but you can get in with lower numbers or get rejected with higher ones depending upon how well you fit with your advisor and with the department overall. i still don't know what your interests are. pitt's strengths are in atlantic history and latin american history. there are certainly grad students here working on europe, particularly on hungary and romania, but i'm not sure pitt has the same reputation for europe as it does for the other two fields. the cohort's great. the students are helpful and inclusive, bright and interesting. it's a good group of people. the professors that i've had contact with so far are easily accessible, quite friendly, and yet hold very high expectations, which i think is what you want out of your profs. for what i do, i couldn't ask for a better group of people to work with. there's a lot of "top of their field" talent in pitt's faculty. i also applied for and got into CMU last year. same profile as above, though the personal relationships between my reference writers and the CMU faculty wasn't as close. i "fit" a little better with their african diaspora strength there, though i would've been working with john soluri, who does bananas in honduras. john's fantastic, as is prof fields (african history). haven't had much contact with anyone at CMU outside of that, though i know they are known mostly for african american/african diaspora and working class/labour history. again, you can get in there without doing either of these fields, but when it comes time to find work at the end of grad school, it would be in your best interest to come from a school that is known for your particular field.

tickle is completely right. the fit matters more than anything. i got into 3 of 9 schools because of fit. in at least 4 of the 6 that rejected me, i spent a lot of time trying to convince my potential advisor why my project could fit with their interests. if it's not obvious to them and to you off the bat, odds are you won't get in there. even if they're willing to work on that project, chances are another student will apply in the same year and their interests will gel more with the faculty and they'll get the spot over you. depending upon what you study, you may find that only 4 or 5 schools can even begin to serve your interests, and then you panic a bit and apply to more places. that's what i did and it turned into a waste of money, and i ended up at one of my top 2 choices anyway (the top 2 constantly switching places depending upon my mood). another thing that's really, really important that i don't see in your profile is language. what languages do you have, and what is your level of fluency in each? you should, ideally, enter grad school with reading knowledge of at least one foreign language and have started on a second. some people will apply with 2 or 3 completely fluent languages under their belt, and others will apply while still needing to do some work on their primary language. you can get into places without the best language profile, but in general a real lack of language proficiency will just give adcoms an excuse to cut you early. and if you have some questions about pitt or cmu, feel free to ask and i may be able to offer some answers.

it varies by professor whether or not they take on someone outside of their own specialty. i think you'll find that a lot of the "big name" professors are resistant to working outside of their specialty, which is fine, because that's certainly their prerogative. they've earned it by becoming that big name. i'd just recommend that you email professors you're thinking of working with and asking them if they're interested or capable of advising your project. i crossed off quite a few schools on my list by doing that, and i think that's a good thing. i saved myself time and money. jeremy adelman at princeton does argentina, economics. not sure about cold war in particular. irene silverblatt at duke does peru, state formation, race. i think she may focus on late colonial/early postcolonial but it's worth looking into. john charles chasteen at UNC does popular and political culture of brazil and the andes. he also wrote a MASSIVE book called contemporary latin america. i'm reading it this week, so we'll see how i feel about him in a bit. ha! nara milanich at columbia does chile. jose moya is there too doing argentina, globalization, migration, and labour. raymond craib at cornell does modern chile. they just lost mary roldan (colombia), so i don't know how big their latin american grad program is anymore. mark healey at berkeley does modern argentina, urban, architecture. florenica mallon at wisconsin does chile, peru, etc. you already know this. barbara weinstein at NYU does brazil but could probably advise you on the andes or the southern cone. she's fantastic. plus, greg grandin's there and he could meet all your "cold war" needs too. reid andrews at pittsburgh does "brazil" but he started with argentina, is currently working on uruguay, and wrapped up a book on all of latin america (well, afro-latin america) a few years ago. nineteenth and twentieth century, race. mark thurner at the university of florida does postcolonial andes. i'm not really familiar with his stuff, but he seems like the best "fit" so far. jeff neddell does modern brazil at U of F too. florida international university's a good place for latin america too. mark szuchman and victor uribe may have the regional interest, not sure about cold war. christine hunefeldt at UC san diego does gender and race in the andes. michael monteon does political and economic history in argentina, chile, and mexico (this is probably another good fit). fordham has hector lindo fuentes who does US-latin american relations and elizabeth penry who does andean ethno-history. james prennan at UC riverside does 20th century argentina, brazil, chile, urban and labour history. nils jacobsen at university of illinois urbana does 20th century peru. UCLA has jose moya listed there too. so i'm not sure which school he's at. william summerhill at UCLA works on the southern cone. elizabeth hutchison at the university of new mexico works on southern cone, gender, labour. temma kaplan at rutgers does gender, sexuality, and revolution in argentina and chile. that's all i know of, but that is by no means everyone. i really only looked at schools that had someone on staff who did central america or the caribbean. i didn't see much in the way of people for you to work with at chicago, michigan, or austin, but have a look for yourself and consider writing to one of the professors to see if they'd be interested in working outside their field with you. good luck! (and yes, i had all this information on a spreadsheet. i don't know any of this off the top of my head).

i went to UBC for my undergrad. who were you looking to work with there, if i may ask?

my cohort cohesion is mixed. by discipline, we're pretty close. latin americanists and atlantic historians all hang out. not a whole lot of time to run around tearing up the town, but i'd say there's something doing once a month that a good number show up for. at the same time, there are people studying US or european history that i've never met and it's a month in already.

i had thought about doing a history of boxing in nicaragua. might still pull that one out some day. history of sports isn't really that uncommon, i think you could make a serious dissertation out of it, not relegating it to one or two chapters. and i will say that you'll probably need to do a paper on it, on your own, or at the very least a lit review paper, to convince most advisors that don't sign up to the idea of sports study right away. a colleague of mine has finished his MA and moved onto his PhD, but he's completely changed his topic so his advisor is making him write the equivalent of another masters first just to make sure it would work. this is before he's writing his prospectus. extra work in the beginning, certainly, but if the paper goes well it becomes a chapter in his dissertation, so it all evens out.

i am here. hopefully i can be of some help. "cold war period" is extremely vague. most latin americanists tend to break down their interests by country/sub-region and either colonial or postcolonial. the only person who immediately comes to mind that does latin american cold war history in particular is greg grandin at NYU (but he, too, began as someone that did postcolonial guatemala more specifically). greg is fantastic, but he's highly sought after and very busy and i certainly wouldn't put him or NYU in the 2nd or 3rd tier. i think you'll find with latin american history programs, the top programs for our subfield are rarely in "the top 10 schools" for history programs more broadly. michigan, wisconsin, indiana, and yale all have great latin american history programs as well as top general history ranking, but this is the exception. i understand you're looking for "safety schools," but as you rightly noted, a lot of the top-ranked schools focus primarily on mexico and brazil (columbia, chicago), so if you want to study outside of the "big three" (mexico, brazil, cuba, in that order), you're going to have to look to schools in the 10-50 range anyway. it's hard to give you too many recommendations without knowing what country or at least what region (andes, southern cone, caribbean, central america, etc) you want to study. i'm at the university of pittsburgh right now and so far, so good. we've got one of the top brazilianists, one of the top cubanists, one of the top central americanists. latin america and atlantic history are particularly strong here and (i hope no one reads this) there is the feeling within the department that while our program does these two things EXTREMELY well (with grad students in these fields getting tenure-track positions at research universities), we're not so strong outside of those two fields. almost anywhere that you look to study something outside of mexico or brazil, you'll likely find yourself in a department that is really good at one or two things but not across the board. the "no brainers" for latin american history are: yale, indiana-bloomington, michigan-ann arbor (though, admittedly, they are stronger on the caribbean than other regions), unc-chapel hill, wisconsin-madison, chicago (again, brazil, mexico, and the english caribbean only), nyu, texas-austin. i'm sure i'm leaving others off. the "good for certain regions" schools: pitt (particularly if you do race/class/gender and brazil or the caribbean), tulane (central america), miami (the caribbean especially... a young/rebuilding program, and so certainly a "safety" from your POV, but still an excellent school to wind up at), iowa, rutgers. i left a lot of UC schools off my list because of california's budget problems. berkeley's another one of those mexico/brazil schools. ucla has a little more variety. stanford is an andes/mexico school too, i think. if you can narrow down your interests to a subregion i can probably help you a little more, but as i said, most professors don't define their work as continent-wide but temporally constrained.

yes, the MA-only/PhD-preferred jobs are saturated with PhDs. it's not impossible to get a position at a community college with just an MA, but it's extremely difficult.

i meant that the OP's quant will be a red flag, not my own. and i'm not saying my GRE score kept me out, but NYU fit my profile better than most schools, so my GRE score wasn't enough to make up some other difference. does that make sense?

it's not a hard-and-fast requirement, and people who have language proficiency from sources other than educational courses are completely set. what i am referring to is a situation where a student is obtaining both languages from coursework only and doesn't have two years of instruction in their primary language at the time of applying. if students can demonstrate proficiency on their own, from personal study or life experience or whatever, then they're fine. if they're listing off "beginner" or "fair" on the language proficiency part of the application and saying, "but i'm taking second year french this year," that's not sufficient if that's your primary language. if you have near-fluency without any coursework, that's not a problem. better, even. but i have heard from professors on ad-coms that students who are relying completely on university courses for their languages will not be considered proficient if their primary research language only has 100-level courses on the student's transcript at the time of their application. i didn't mean to (and don't think i did) equate coursework with proficiency. i merely said that students relying on coursework to demonstrate their proficiency will need one language to have a 200-level course (or second year/intermediate level) on their transcripts or ad-coms will treat them as being beginners in the language, even if they're taking the 200-level class at the time of applying.

i'll be different!! i'll be the one that stands out! sure, the odds are tough, but i'm a go-getter and i have real talent and i work extremely hard, and i was one of the top students at my undergrad university, which is by no means a small institution, and my professors loved me, and i presented at a student-organized undergrad conference, and, and, and, and.... c'mon, people. we sound like those wide-eyed 18 year olds that move to hollywood thinking they'll be actors because they were just SO GOOD in their community theatre production of the little orphan annie and within a year they're doing porn and smoking PCP. and not even good porn, either. they're the extra girl in a threesome who lies there awkwardly and moans words of encouragement or licks butt. a lot of those retiring tenured profs are going to be replaced with more adjuncts, not new tenure appointments. if the economy recovers 5-7 years from now, the job market for professorships will still be wretched for most subfields. students at my undergrad protest (with a good deal of media attention) every year because we have over 40,000 students and no one who can teach african studies in any discipline. for one thing, that's a really clear demand from the student body about what they do and don't want to see from the school's new hires. it's hard to justify hiring yet another americanist when a school so large has such a glaring educational deficit, and i doubt my undergrad institution is the only school in this position. yeah, it might seem unfair that latin americanists and africanists feel courted by schools compared to americanists and europeanists, but i think it's even more unfair for entire student bodies to never have the option to take an african history or latin american history course even once during their degrees. american and western european history are oversaturated and [everything else] history is underrepresented. the world's a lot bigger than the industrialized west and i think it's petty and selfish for americanists to complain that no one will hire yet another 20th century US political historian. you'd have a hard time finding a department without a 20th century US historian, and you'd have a hard time finding a department with one latin americanist AND one africanist on staff.

while they mean that you need two years of training at the time of entering the program, for the sake of your application you would be better off having two years at the time of applying. that way, those two years' worth of language classes actually show up on your transcript. anyone can say they're taking a second year of french or greek or latin, but if the course isn't on the transcript then the ad-coms will most likely consider you as not having that year of the language. if we're talking about your primary language having less than two years on your transcript at the time you apply, this will be a problem. your application probably won't make the first round of cuts at most top 50 history departments. if it's your second research language, then this will likely still hurt you with top 20 programs, but 21-50 will take you if you have 2+ years of your primary language and 1 year of your secondary language (with one year in progress).

i got 670 verbal on the GRE (and 690 quant) and NYU rejected me. wasn't invited to their student weekend, wasn't put on a waiting list. it was odd, considering the previous year i had been accepted to and funded for their joint journalism/latin american studies program. research-wise, NYU was one of the best fits for me, too. my GPA was 3.7 major, 4.0 overall. i'd say the things that probably killed my app were my languages (3 years of spanish at the time of applying, but in the middle of my first year of french), and a 670 verbal score might not have been high enough for them either. the quant definitely is a red flag. 690 Q was only 70th percentile, and while 670 V is good (95th percentile for the year i took the test), it didn't seem to be good enough for NYU. granted, there were likely other things they didn't like about my application, but i don't think 670 V impressed them much.