StrangeLight

just rented an apartment in the city i'll be moving to. between now and august, i'll be reading books and articles, brushing up on two languages, and digging around in dirt for a bit of extra cash. i'm very excited about the dirt.

it's possible to transition, but the MA in american history will probably carry more weight than an MA in american studies. at one point i was considering enrolling in a latin american studies MA and then applying for a latin american history PhD and i was advised to do my masters level work in history instead. it's definitely not unheard of to make the transition from ___ studies to ___ history, though.

it depends. if you're in an MA/PhD program, i think your best bet would be to wait until you've fulfilled the MA requirements and then apply to other PhD programs. while you may still ruffle some feathers or burn some bridges, leaving a PhD program after the MA requirements to go elsewhere to finish isn't completely unheard of. programs differ, but that generally means you'd spend two years at your safety school, so you'd be reapplying next fall instead of this fall. i haven't done this myself so i can't recommend when or how to tell your adviser, but i would say that you should definitely tell him or her at some point in the application process. your adviser is investing time and effort into you and it would be incredibly uncouth and borderline insulting to say, "hey, so i got into a different school and i'm leaving now." if you can explain to your adviser that you really want to go to a program with an environmental historian in the faculty, he/she won't take it too personally that you're planning to leave. but don't blindside your adviser. also, if you take my advice and wait until you've fulfilled your MA requirements, your current adviser would make an excellent reference to other programs, provided he or she isn't too miffed that you want to leave. if you've already got an MA, i'd probably recommend just staying put. the admissions cycle next year will likely look same as it did this past year. the economy won't magically recover in the next 6 months and there will be plenty of otherwise qualified students reapplying in the fall after getting rejected this past cycle. at least you got into a safety school, some others weren't as fortunate. odds are that your first year of courses and/or your comps at the PhD level will not transfer into another PhD program, making all the work you'll be doing in the coming year somewhat fruitless. instead, try looking for an environmental historian you'd love to work with and start the process of bringing him or her in as an outside adviser on your dissertation. some historians are more willing to do this than others and some departments facilitate this better than others, but it's definitely possible and you'll still get that expertise you're looking for.

above a certain level, GPA truly does not matter that much. i have a 4.0 in my major and a 3.74 overall, and i only got into programs where my interests (which are laughably obscure) matched with the faculty's strengths. places where fit was not immediately obvious said no, and yet many students were accepted to those programs with lower GPAs and GRE scores than mine. if GW has a professor that studies roughly what you study (i.e. 20th century southeast asian cultural history) and the department overall has a strength in your general area of interest (i.e. modern asian history), then a 3.0 overall and a 3.5 history GPA won't hurt you much at all, especially if you have strong LoRs, GRE scores, writing samples, and SoPs.

seventeen? is it a large program or a bumper crop year, or is the attrition rate just really low? also, just something to throw into the "number of applicants vs number of jobs" discussion, these job positions aren't just hiring "historians." they want someone who teaches US history, or asian history, or who could teach a world civilization course, a gender course, an ethnicity course. the AHA's numbers over the past 5 or 6 years have pretty clearly shown that there are far more people with US or european history degrees than job openings, but asian, african, and latin american history tend to have about as many job openings as new applicants. depending on your subfield, competition could be much worse or not too bad. and to just go against the grain of people's anecdotes of applicants from lower-ranked schools getting the top job, my UG school was hiring an african americanist. came down to two candidates, one from michigan and one from CMU. despite the department's other resident african americanist lobbying on behalf of the CMU candidate, in terms of research, quality, and fit with the department, they went with the michigan grad, and a colleague told me the decision was made largely based on ranking/prestige. not that the michigan PhD is poor by any means, but the decisive factor came down to name-recognition. granted, this is a canadian university, and here we don't seem to pay much attention to rankings outside of the top 10/15. if you're top 10, good, if you're not top 10, move along.

http://www.coolpgh.pitt.edu/index.php this site's a pretty good source on the general feel and amenities of different neighbourhoods in pittsburgh where grad students are living. oakland does have a lot of undergraduates, and while it's one of the more populous neighbourhoods, there are plenty other neighbourhoods with a lot to do. most grad students attending pitt or cmu live in shadyside or squirrel hill. most undergrads live in oakland or south side. lots of duquesne students live in south side too. shadyside has a major shopping/boutique/restaurant corridor along walnut st. squirrel hill has less shopping, but it's right next to shadyside should you need anything. both of these areas are two of the more expensive neighbourhoods in the city of pittsburgh. shadyside can be very pricey, and you'll pay as much for a studio there as you would for a two or three bedroom rowhouse in other neighbourhoods. lots of people love it there, though, so if size doesn't matter that much to you, there's nothing really wrong with paying for less space. south side is catching up to shadyside and squirrel hill in price, too. the south side flats are right across the ... i wanna say monongahela river from downtown and oakland (where the schools are). you can walk across the bridge and buses run to oakland frequently (pitt and CMU students ride the bus for free), so its still quite close. it's party-central though. east carson is where most undergrads and frat guys go to bar-hop. now, i love me some barhopping, but i don't necessarily want to live next to the club. then there's the south side slopes, just south of the flats, going up the hill. cheaper, although prices are rising, and still pretty convenient provided that you don't have a car. i've heard that trying to drive down the slope in the winter can be dangerous because of the ice. i'd also say to look into the friendship and bloomfield neighbourhoods. they're right next to shadyside, but they're cheaper. more to the north of campus rather than east-northeast like shadyside and squirrel hill are. friendship's full of lots of old victorian homes that have been converted into multi-unit apartments and they're cheaper than shadyside or squirrel hill. bloomfield's the old italian neighbourhood, with lots of little delis and restaurants, and lots of rowhouses. there's some major shopping and attractions along penn avenue and liberty avenue, walking distance from either place. also close to lawrenceville, which has a good number of new art galleries and boutiques popping up all the time. l-ville's still a bit rough around the edges in some places, though, and if you get into upper lawrenceville it'll be hard to get a direct busline to the universities in oakland. i'd recommend searching craigslist to get an idea of what's out there, but also to realize that a lot of people renting out places in pittsburgh aren't using craigslist, so there's more inventory than what you find online. try to set up appointments to see places for your visit, read the classifieds when you're there, and consider popping into a real estate agency or two in neighbourhoods you like and seeing if they have rental listings.

look at the dissertation titles any department publishes. regardless of their incoming class size, you'll rarely see more than 3 PhDs conferred each year, and occasionally there will be years where no one finishes from a given department. there are also, of course, backlog years where 6 or 7 students finish at once, but that's still no where near 20 per department. i'd say only UCLA and schools with grad programs near that size manage anything close to 20 PhDs a year, and how many of those massive programs are top-10 anyway? i'm headed to a program where people in my subfield who have finished their PhDs have always been placed somewhere within one year. even this year, when most schools called off their hires, the student graduating from my program in my subfield is off to a position at the US naval academy. i think you'll see lackluster yalies struggling to find jobs while students from schools outside the top ten manage to secure tenure-track placements right out the gate.

i had just heard from a few people attending NYU's GSAS, about two or three years ago, that NYU acted as a guarantor for them. that may have been a within-their-department arrangement, and NYU may also have changed its policy since then. sorry that i don't have any more concrete information than that. the journalism department told me that they could assist me with securing off-campus housing as well, but they didn't say specifically that they'd sign as a guarantor and since i decided not to attend, i never inquired further.

if you're looking for a job in academia, your subfield's ranking and your dissertation advisor(s) mean more than the school's overall ranking or the history department's overall ranking. if you're looking for a job outside of academia, harvard is harvard and princeton is princeton. and for what it's worth, harvard and princeton still rank at the top of most subfields, so there is a lot of overlap.

i started off telling them that i was planning to apply to their school's program in the fall. told them where i got my BA and the primary faculty member i worked with on my undergrad thesis. wrote 2 sentences max about my general research interests. one sentence about place and time period and general themes, and maybe one sentence about a dissertation topic. then asked if they were taking on new graduate students in the fall or if they were planning on going on leave any time. ended the email saying if they wished to discuss my research ideas in further detail to email or phone me. the whole exchange wasn't more than 5 sentences. i only had two instances where professors did not reply to my initial email. many wanted to talk to me by phone, and a few forwarded my email to their colleagues in their department who then contacted me themselves. keep the intro brief and let them decide if they want to follow up with you. give them a short idea of your research interests beyond "modern german history" but don't bombard them with a dissertation proposal. that discussion can wait for follow-up emails or phone conversations. good luck! edit: also, don't ask them any questions that you could find the answer to on the department's website. bad form. i wrote to one professor and asked some specific questions about his work, whether or not he was taking on grad students, etc. he told me he was going on leave for a year and a half, which is code for "if you say you want to work with me you won't get in this year," and then he copied and pasted information from the department website about their program, which i hadn't even asked him for. it felt like an auto-response.

yep. one of my professors got her history PhD from MIT. history of science and technology in 20th century US. taught at UCLA, published fairly extensively, and has a pretty prominent position as a research chair in canada now.

NYU will sign as your guarantor if you don't have an in-state or tri-state guarantor available. so that's one hurdle cleared. i don't know if other schools do the same. NYU grad housing is located just north of the east village, in stuyvesant town. you can either get one room in a reno'd two-bed apartment for $1350/month or one room in a non-reno'd two-bed apartment for $1150/month. that includes your utilities, cable, internet. not a terrible deal, but if you're only getting $1800/month from your stipend, before taxes, do you really want to have only $500 left a month to cover books, photocopying, subway fare, and food? that's a tight budget to live on, and i'm not sure how many of the cheaper, non-renovated apartments the school has available. also, you can only live in NYU grad housing for your first year. after that, you've got to leave and find your own place in the city. might be better to just get into the market now, while rents are cheaper than normal, than to take grad housing for a year and have to find a new place 12 months later. you'll have to pay for movers all over again, and perhaps in one year's time the NYC market will bounce back a bit and you won't find the same deals that you do now. i don't work for these companies, but they've got some good, cheap rentals, occasionally no-fee. bestapts.com ardorny.com rgny.com hope that helps. also... bribes still work in manhattan. find a building or neighbourhood you like and ask the landlord/building manager if they accept "key deposits." sometimes paying an extra $1000 off the bat can get you a great apartment in a great area for $500/month under market

just this year there were a few students with MAs from NYU who were applying to the school's doctoral program. their profs assured them they'd be accepted, but they were either waitlisted or outright denied. two years ago i applied for a joint MA there (journalism and latin american studies). was accepted, even offered partial funding, but my advisor asked some of her colleagues in the history department (who are close personal friends of hers) how the school views students trying to get into the history PhD program with an MA from NYU, and the profs said that it's generally not well looked upon. if i were you, i'd go with georgetown. with NYU, it seems to be easier to get into their MA program, possibly because the students are paying for part or all of the degree, and much more difficult to get into their doctoral program, even with an MA degree from their own department.

reallywantcolumbia, since everyone's giving you their two cents, i'll throw mine in with them. i think that a department's atmosphere contributes a lot to the quality of your work. i was scared off from applying to a few schools based on the recommendations of my undergrad advisors who told me that school A "is like poison" or "everyone at school B hates each other" or "yeah, school C is good, but they just want to churn out as many PhDs as possible and they don't really give students any individual attention." there will be plenty of time to live in new york. the fact is that columbia hasn't even accepted you yet. wait to hear their answer before giving michigan the yes or the no, but still... it seems like there are a plethora of negatives about columbia, and the biggest positive attribute is its location to the most distractingly fun city in the world. if the superstars are going to ignore you and the students hate their school and each other, that's not a conducive environment to even finishing your degree, let alone putting out a quality dissertation. as much as i hate ann arbor (and everyone i've known from A2 has hated it), the department and your cohort should matter more than your location.

commercial drive area (on commercial drive, anywhere between 1st ave and 12th ave). mount pleasant neighbourhood (near east broadway, between main street and clark). point grey (the neighbourhood west of kitsilano, closest to ubc without technically being on the endowment lands) also has a lot of grad students and young families. kitsilano is yuppie central, many young professionals with young families and the occasional student living here or there. you'll also find a lot of people who are grad student-age, but not usually grad students, in the west end (downtown, west of burrard). the west end's a great neighbourhood. the neighbourhood is surrounded by 3 great streets (davie, denman, and robson) that feature some of the best restaurants, coffee houses, and boutiques in the city. they're all in walking distance. you're also walking distance to the downtown core. downtown is to the east, and stanley park (a rather large park full of lovely big trees) is on the west. to the north is coal harbor, and a nice beach with a view of north and west vancouver. south is english bay, another nice beach, and a view back onto vancouver quadra. you can see kitsilano and ubc from there. really lovely. mountains, beaches, forest. hard to beat. the rents used to be higher here than in other neighbourhoods, but in recent years the rest of the city caught up to pricing in the west end. i've got a 1 bedroom, pets allowed, d/w, w/d, for $900 month. i steal wifi from neighbours and for some reason a free cable signal comes into the apartment, so i have no utilities whatsoever. there are studio apartments in my building that go for as little as $550/month, though they're considerably smaller than my unit. if you look hard, you can find deals all around this neighbourhood. just takes some patience. a bit of a walk to the major bus lines, though. that's probably the only downside. it can take 40 minutes to get to ubc from here, but it takes that long, longer, to get to ubc from the commercial drive area too.

tell the school that's pressuring you for an answer that you're waiting for another school to notify students of their funding packages and that they'll just have to wait. this is your decision to make and you should make it clear that you're going to wait until all schools have provided you with acceptance/funding information before you make your choice. these decisions basically outline what most of our futures, at least for the next 5 years, usually longer, will look like, and i feel like students are a little too meek when dealing with faculty. they want you as much as you want them, don't be afraid to sound like you're in the driver's seat. always be cordial, but never let a program bully you into giving an answer before you're ready.

at this point i would pick up the phone and call if i were you.

i'm going to the university of pittsburgh for latin american and caribbean history.

it was an email this year. but last year when i was accepted to their journalism/latin american studies dual MA, nothing actually arrived in the mail until the end of april and nothing was sealed. :roll:

NYU's GSAS seems to lack a bit of tact to me. theirs was easily the most expensive application fee and yet they send out generic two-line emails. they invite people to the prospectives weekend and don't even offer them waitlist places, or they don't invite students to the prospectives weekend when they're enrolled in their own MA program! if a student's already attending NYU, they'd know about the weekend and it's not as though the school would have to pay for their airfare or hotel, so why not just invite them? it seems very, very odd. not to take anything away from the individual professors there, because many of them are great academics who publish some truly outstanding work, but i get the sense that prospective students feel more jerked around by NYU than any other school. i know that i do.

congratulations to everyone who received positive news today!

hmm, well, a friend of mine is getting a full ride at calgary, and he doesn't have a SSHRC or any other external funding. but it's entirely possible that he performed sexual favours for that money (kidding). can i ask which school you're going to, tps?

while i agree with your assessment of the job market, i disagree that you need a degree from a top 15 school to land a job. you need a degree from the top 15 in your field. often these overlap, but it opens up a few more viable options for people. and i actually think PhDs need to be prepared for an even worse job market than most of us are talking about. when times are good economically, 1 in 5 PhD students will get a tenure-track position (3 won't finish the degree and the other will hop around as an adjunct until they get sick of being in poverty and do something else for a living). that's when the market was good. now? most schools suspended their searches for new faculty members this year. this will probably happen again next year, and even the year after, causing at least two cohorts of new PhD graduates to apply for jobs at the same time. many schools may cancel their search for new faculty members entirely, and even if the boomer generation retires or schools start firing tenure-track profs to save some money, they won't be replacing those positions by hiring full-timers. just more adjuncts, earning $3000 per course they teach, with no medical benefits and no job security. some in higher education are predicting small colleges to actually close in the coming years. that will mean there are plenty of experienced professors who will be joining the new grads in the search for a job in academia. it's not gonna be pretty. the yale graduate is going to have a hard time finding a job at a community college. seriously. hopefully grad students can tear themselves away from the fantasy of being a tenured professor long enough to secure a well-paying (even high-paying) job outside of academia. http://www.beyondacademe.com is a good resource that offers advice on how to find a job as a historian outside of academia.

thanks! that's really nice of you to say. i'm extremely happy with my decision. it doesn't matter how many rejections you get as long as a program that you really, really want accepts you, and i was lucky enough to have that happen to me. there were two schools in particular that i applied to that i considered to have a "dream faculty" for my subfield, and pitt was one of them. have you made any decisions yet?

if your PhD program provides you with full funding, that is your job. grad school isn't school, it's work. you work very hard for relatively little pay, but the trade off is that you're spending your day doing something you love, in theory. the implicit argument in these articles is that grad school requires you to put yourself in debt (it doesn't) and that you're not earning an income or working for 5-7 years (you are). being a PhD student in a humanities program will be my job for at least the next 5 years, maybe longer. after that, if i get a job in academia, great, and if i don't, that's okay too. now that i have an offer that i've accepted, i'm going to be relatively secure for the next 5 years. not rich, but not worried about losing my job either. can't say the same for professional journalists. edit: but beyond that, i agree wholeheartedly with the sentiments of both of the chronicle pieces. the "i just love it so much" argument for pursuing grad school is a bit silly and speaks to someone that hasn't thoroughly considered what they're doing with their futures or why. really and truly, my goal isn't to be a professor. it's to inform people about issues (relating to latin america) that i think are critical and that not enough people are paying attention to. a PhD will hopefully give me some measure of expertise in that area. if i can spread knowledge in a classroom, good. if i can spread knowledge in a policy advising capacity, good. if i can be in the field, getting my hands dirty, good. if i can report to newspapers, good. talking about poverty and sustainable development and race relations and migration, all of that matters to me. what form that takes matters far less. i hope that this is a good reason to still do a PhD. but again, if i leave after 5 years and need to start over in another career, that's not a big deal. people change careers 3 or 4 times in their lifetime, people start over at much later ages than 30. he's right, though, that entering grad school expecting to end up somewhere, anywhere in academia is the wrong way to go about it. have other plans that will hopefully still make use of the knowledge and skills you gain with a humanities PhD. i appreciate that he's not trying to sugarcoat it.