StrangeLight

i agree, i think it serves as a good introduction to the major trends in historiography before the cultural turn. but... i think it's usefulness begins and ends as an introduction. the last 20 years has led to some real changes in the profession's method. maybe novick will write a second edition. (or has he? i've seen reprints but not a new edition). P.S. canada's the best. totally. i'm gonna go get married to someone of the same sex while we get free health care and smoke our decriminalized weed.

weird. my institution spared us all of that stuff. our historiography course actually contains very few actual historians. barth, butler, bourdieu... maybe "spared" was the wrong word.

that could make sense, except that berkeley and northwestern ARE top places. those are the types of schools that would be competing for top candidates, not admitting that they wouldn't be able to hold onto them. not to take anything away from safferz's acceptances, but i seriously doubt berkeley thought it wouldn't be able to compete with ivy league schools.

i did my undergrad in canada, my MA/PhD in the states. i think tickle is referring to a college football rivalry. also, i will be the first to grab a gun and join the resistance if the US tries to revive the manifest destiny shit in canada. we ain't that polite. just passive agressive.

they gave gil scott-heron his own mini-tribute, which i think was more meaningful than being wedged into a middle of a montage like facundo cabral. he was the argentine bob dylan and was gunned down inside of his car by men on motorbikes in guatemala city last summer, only a few blocks from where i was staying at the time. it sucked. i was pleasantly surprised to see him in the in memoriam at all, but i think they did scott-heron a little more justice. although ending with, "and he showed that the revolution is being televised" was painful. really? it's being televised? the news is talking about the disproportionate number of blacks and latinos in US jails? the stark residential racial segregation that still marks most US cities? i'm disgusted that chris brown has been warmly welcomed back into the mainstream musical community. remember kids: you don't just have to beat women to win a grammy. you also need to dance and lip sync. rihanna's dress was amazing. her decision to start seeing chris brown again on a not-so-down-low down-low is amazingly idiotic. every performance was a fucking embarrassment except for adele's. paul mccartney continues his transformation into an old lesbian. nicki minaj was embarrassing. i actually feel bad for her. it seemed like the amount of talent was inversely correlated with the amount of fuckery on stage.

also, all that stuff i wrote up there is a sort of paint-by-numbers for giving a GREAT interview, gleaned from people on the job market (mostly about what adcoms wanted to hear, rather than what the job candidates actually gave them). so if you don't have the time to learn the POI's work well or memorize the department website (or if you didn't do that for an interview you already had), never fear. what i wrote there is really the basics of how to ACE the interview, not how to survive it. you can survive it without doing all that and still get an acceptance.

1. DO NOT ASK ANY QUESTIONS THAT COULD BE ANSWERED BY READING THE WEBSITE. 2. read the department's website very carefully. be able to talk about the program in a way that shows you already know how it functions (what the major and minor fields are, what kind of summer research funding opportunities the department provides, any affiliated area studies centers that have title VI funding, how the work of a prof who studies a different regional field is related to your interests thematically, etc.) 3. ideally, you should know about your POI's published research. i'd really, sincerely hope that no one applied to a school when they didn't already know (AND LOVE) their POI's work. but, most of us are so wooed by "top 20" lists that we apply to programs with high "rankings" (that are meaningless, btw) instead of the places where our favourite historians work (i was incredibly guilty of this myself, so no judgment there, just calling it like i now see it). so... if you don't know the POI's published research front and back yet, learn it now and make sure you DON'T ask about it. instead, ask about what their NEXT project is. 4. you can (BRIEFLY!) highlight some of the good parts of your CV, but this actually isn't that necessary. odds are the prof is looking at your CV as he/she is talking to you. instead, you should take this as an opportunity to elaborate on what kind of research you want to do. all the things you wanted to say, but didn't have space to say in your word-limit SOP, should be said now. and with clarity. practice a 1-sentence version and a 3-minute version of your proposed research. and do your best to know when the POI is asking for the 1-sentence version or the 3-minute version. 5. ask about the city/town. don't make this your first question. save it for the wind-down. if you ask it up front, they won't think you're all that serious. but ending with a question like this (after a good long conversation of talking about work) will make you seem like a human being. and these places like to accept human beings they think they'll like instead of reese witherspoon in "election" crazies. good luck. if you're on skype, please dress appropriately. he/she can see you. business casual.

you should contact your POIs at all of the schools you've been admitted to. copy the DGS on each of these emails, but no need to address them directly. thank the POI for the acceptance, tell him/her that you're extremely excited about beginning a PhD program in the fall, but mention that you have other offers and are still waiting on a few decisions, so you'll keep in touch with them as the process moves forward. ideally, you should do this with each school after receiving your acceptance, even/especially if you are notified by clicking through some website and seeing a form letter of congratulations. you want to make contact with the human beings you'll possibly be dealing with. in cases where you're certain you won't be going to a certain school, thank them kindly and decline the offer as quickly as you can. almost all schools have (informal) waitlists, and even if they don't, they've set aside a funding stream for you. if you don't use the funding, it can potentially go to a student in their 6th or 7th year (when they're out of guaranteed funding**). say you have 3 acceptances and are waiting on 2 more schools. if you absolutely know you won't be going to 1 of the 3 schools, thank them very kindly for their offer of admission and decline it ASAP. if you've been accepted to your top school with full funding, you can also consider withdrawing your application from some schools that haven't notified you yet but that you definitely won't be attending. in situations where schools have accepted you but no funding offer has been made yet, just sit tight. wait it out. still contact the POIs and thank them for the admission, but don't accept or reject those offers yet. **given that the average "to completion" times for PhDs is somewhere between 6 and 8 years, almost all of us will be confronted with at least one year over our guaranteed funding packages. sometimes these extra years come through prestigious fellowships like the ACLS mellon or the SSRC IDRF, but more often, they come through an extra year of TAing because a fellow student at an earlier stage secured an external fellowship and has therefore freed up a TA "slot" for a given year.

1. "cherry-picking" does not mean what you think it does. 2. in graduate programs, you want your professors to know you. when they write you letters for grants or the job market, they need to be able to speak to your ability as a student, future professor, and researcher. graduate school is like an apprenticeship for becoming a professor. not only would it be nearly impossible to make that an anonymous situation, it's also highly undesirable. guess what? these professors form their opinions about you based on your work. they don't give a rat's ass about what you look like. whatever opinion they form about you, they do it through your writing, your participation in seminars, your lab work, as their TA. 3. if you feel as though a professor is judging your work negatively for something other than your academic merit, take the paper to the prof in his or her office hours and ask how you can improve in the future. just being proactive about seeking extra help, instead of assuming your grades are based on personal problems rather than the quality of your work, will go a long way to changing that professor's personal opinion about you. then, if you're right about them grading on who they like instead of academic merit, your grades will improve. my guess, however, is that if you're a really good student, any prof will see that. conversely, if you're an average student, they may grade a little more kindly to the students they like over those that they don't. easiest way to avoid this is to elevate your own work from average to good or great. then there won't be any question.

i wrote a super-longwinded post about the best times to publish this or that and realized that it's all information you guys don't need yet. but i will third (fourth?) the recommendation to only publish in the best journals in your subfield and to make sure (as much as it is possible at this stage in your career) that the questions you're asking and the arguments you're making are true reflections of your long-term trajectory as a scholar. more than once i've seen job candidates' suitability questioned based on an early article that wasn't very good (but that the adcom managed to track down on JSTOR). in those instances, not publishing it at all would've been better than putting out a weak piece of work that made professors question the skill and scope of the researcher. the rule of thumb for me is, don't consider publishing it unless research-oriented professors tell you that you should. don't try to publish it just because you worked on it a long time, or because other people you know published their MAs, or because your super-nice professor that hasn't read a journal in 2 decades said it was great. ask someone who currently publishes work in your field to read the piece and only move forward with journal submissions if they say you should.

yes they will. language classes at research universities are often taught my graduate students in language departments. at least at the community college, you'd be receiving education from someone who already holds an MA and (more likely in this job market) a PhD. further, i've heard the members of my program's adcom lament that they can't really trust what students claim regarding their language training because, more than once, they've admitted students with 3+ years of language training from 4 year universities and those students can't read, write, or speak the language they were "trained" in. the only thing that really proves to a program that you know the language, other than it being a native language or the primary language of your educational instruction, is to use it in your writing sample. most programs are aware of all of these factors. so, most programs WILL see community college language training as an equivalent to university language training. and the only time they'll really believe you is when your writing sample has sources in that foreign language.

to anyone publicly fretting about which big-name school they should pick or making up wild fantasies about having their offers revoked, that's a super shitty thing to do in front of a bunch of people with no acceptances at all. just... keep that in mind. by all means, celebrate your acceptances, but try not to publicly lament the "difficult" choice you have between 2 or 3 or 10 acceptances. can the stress of not knowing when schools will give news affect your health and well-being? sure. any stressful situation can. but one of the good things about this place is that you can go back to older threads and deduce when, roughly, you should be receiving info. if your school didn't notify people until the last week of february last year, don't call them until you've received no news by the first week of march. take the information available to you through this (wonderful/terrible) website and make rational decisions. and to think, once you're on the job market, some of those job searches NEVER notify you that you didn't get the position. even if you end up being in the top 10 selected for phone interviews or the top 3 invited to campus interviews, they just never bother to tell you that you didn't get it. ugh.

this particular POI is not one to confirm to department procedures or display any sort of tact. normally, no, professors don't discuss applicants in front of graduate students. and there are rarely any undergraduates in the department, period.

it was paura. she was accepted to my school (i was surprised she applied, since we're not very good at her subfield), and i remember her POI saying by the copier that she knows she can convince that girl away from harvard and berkeley because the POI works on [insert marginally interesting archaic topic here]. i wuz like bitch plz. the whole department was raving about how amazing she was and how they'd do anything to get her here, and they don't usually talk out loud about the in-progress admission cycle. congrats, safferz, on being this year's superstar.

him asking you out is definitely unethical, but it isn't illegal at every school. it's worth finding out whether it's illegal at your institution before the date. in my second hand experience, this will NOT adversely affect him, even if the relationship ends terribly, and WILL adversely affect you even if the relationship ends up great. if things go great and you get married, you will always be the advisee that he married. your colleagues will not take your work seriously, they'll assume you received your jobs and grants because of him, your career will never match his let alone surpass it. in your professional life, you will (at best!) be nothing more than his wife. if the relationship doesn't go well and it ends, the best case scenario then is switching advisors and not needing him on your dissertation committee. more likely is that one of you will think the work relationship is still fine and keep being his advisee, but he'll hold you up, actively sabotage your progress, ignore you altogether, or derail your dissertation. listen... a few years ago, at my undergraduate institution, a female graduate student started dating her advisor. he dumped her, harshly, and then she killed herself. her suicide note said it was because of him. if he breaks up with you, you don't just lose your relationship. you risk losing your career, everything you've work for over these years. i hope the dick was worth it. also... the power dynamics between an advisor and an advisee dating are so incredibly unbalanced. he is in a position of power over you, there is NO WAY you could EVER have a truly equal relationship, as awesome as he may treat you. whether or not it's illegal it's hugely unethical and you should question the character of any man that thinks it's okay to date one of his subordinates. don't shit where you eat.

damn, you guys are doing good. congratulations to all the acceptances today! to anyone getting rejections, don't worry: the job market is shitty, far worse than the chances of getting into a PhD program, so ultimately these programs are doing you a favour. plus, while you may think grad school is "the life," and while the work you do there is incredibly enjoyable and rewarding in and of itself, the pace of the work is soul-crushing. you won't even have free time to clean your apartment or wipe your butt properly because there's too much to do. you will never have a free day again, let alone a whole weekend. you won't be able to go have a beer with friends (friends? what friends?) or watch a stupid tv show because you'll feel so guilty about not doing all the work you should be doing instead of having fun. your non-grad student friends and partners will no longer be able to understand you, your grad student friends and partners will only ever talk about work, creating absolutely zero mental downtime. yes, getting paid to read books is awesome, but not when you find out that they superglue your eyelids open and make you read cultural studies gobbledygook. (please read the above with the levity with which it is intended ).

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yeah, but i was just addressing cupoftea's situation, not the UW funding situation....

maybe you were destined for the waitlist again this year and rather than put you through that torture for a third time, they decided to just give you a clear answer. sort of like someone saying "i don't think we should see each other again" instead of "i'll call you," "i was going to call you," "i think i lost your number," "we should totally hang out some time." at least there's closure, even if it's not the kind you were hoping for. also, fuck 'em.

cupoftea: the gist of it is, the most competitive candidates are nominated for fellowships. if they don't win those, they're usually given TAships (still full funding). but departments (especially small ones and public ones) have limited TAships to hand out. say they nominate 10 people for fellowships and have 8 TAships to give out. if most of the fellowship nominees win the fellowships, then 8 others can get TAships. if all of the 10 fellowship nominees lose them, then 8 will get the TAships and 2 will likely be rejected or waitlisted. that's my understanding of the process having served on a graduate committee before. but every school is probably different, and some programs may have an easier time getting an extra stream of funding from the dean's office than others. in general, being nominated for a fellowship means you're at the top of the pack. a lot would have to go wrong for that to eventually turn into a rejection.

if the response requires thought, then put thought into them. if that takes a day or two, fine. but if the response is "yes, we can move the meeting to 11 am" or "i am free on X day to take the exam" or "Y is a student in my lab and i can answer his/her questions" then just do it right away. in grad school, most of your emails are about scheduling and clarification anyway. no sense in delaying those responses.

congratulations, tickle!!! awesome. that is so awesome. :D go do a happy dance, lady. as far as which places don't ask you to TA, princeton and NYU are the only two i know of off hand, and i can confirm what others have said: the university fellowships pay decently ($22K a few years back, not sure now) for anywhere but NYC. students then TA or (if they're post-comps) adjunct to supplement their income so they can afford groceries and an apartment where you're not sleeping next to your minifridge and hot plate. a lot of assistant professor-level job postings (the stuff we'd be competing for as grad students) are 4/4 teaching loads. 4 courses each semester. not only will job candidates have to teach these 4 classes, they'll have to prove they can teach them by creating model syllabi and giving student lectures during their campus interviews/visits. if a job applicant's CV does not demonstrate that they could actually do all this teaching, they're not really considered for the job. that's good and bad. bad because the job market is so horrendous that we all need any job prospects we can get, and losing out on a big chunk of the tenure-track jobs open to someone of our rank is not good. but it IS good because you don't want a 4/4 teaching load anyway. even if you LOOOOOOVE teaching and don't care about research or mentoring or service to the department, you still don't want a 4/4 teaching load. at schools with lighter teaching loads, the quantity of teaching experience matters less, but the quality of your teaching ability is still crucial and has sunk many a candidate with brilliant research going for an R1 job with 1/1 or 2/2 teaching. and the only way to be good at teaching is to work on it. hard to work on it if you never do it. the tl;dr version: if you're in a situation where you don't HAVE to teach but you can, you should choose to teach for at least one year, possibly two. you will disqualify yourself from many of the tenure-track jobs open to us right out of a PhD program if you don't have some teaching experience.

it seems way too soon to begin that conversation. what do you mean by negotiate? if they are only offering partial funding and you need full funding to attend, wait until you have another fully funded offer from a comparable institution and then contact the director of grad studies in the history department at the partially-funded school. they may be able to scrape full funding for you together. but i should warn you: if a school is offering you 5 years of TAship or fellowship or a combination of TAship and fellowship years, then that is likely the best they can do for you. it will be difficult to get an increase in the number of fellowship years, although this may be possible when other students with better funding offers reject the school's offer, but that won't start happening until march. if you're looking for an increase in the dollar amount they're promising, don't bother. the department doesn't control that, the planning and budget committee of the entire university sets the pay rates for TAships and internal fellowships, and there's nothing you can do about that. trying to negotiate for a few extra thousand dollars a year will not only not work, it risks seriously offending the professors and the dean's office. it is not unheard of for fully funded offers of admission to be rescinded when a student tries to play hardball with funding negotiations. in fact, if you were given 5 years of funding (without an MA already in hand) or 4 years (with an MA in hand), then i STRONGLY urge you not to negotiate funding at all.

don't thank the dean. thank the PI and copy the director of grad studies on the email. then tell all the profs who wrote LORs for you that you got in. and congratulations.

this chronicle of higher ed article may be of interest. http://chronicle.com/blognetwork/researchcentered/2012/02/01/how-to-appear-competent-in-one-easy-step/ the one easy step to appearing competent? answering your emails quickly.