StrangeLight

first, you are generally mistaken that an oxbridge student will have more connections to potential postdoc positions than someone from a lower-tiered graduate school. the network and reputation of one's primary advisor counts more than that of their graduate program, almost 100% of the time. what's more, your oxbridge profs will likely have most of their connections in the UK and europe. they also tend to attend UK/european conferences more often than american ones. in general, unless your advisor is going out of his or her way to make connections with US-based scholars, you'll have fewer connections to american postdoc positions than students from "lower-tiered" american schools. princeton and NYU don't require their students to teach, but most do at least once or twice. it would be near impossible to find a tenure-track university job (as opposed to a research center with no teaching) without at least one semester of TA experience. without any meaningful teaching experience (meaning contact with the students, rather than being a grader) odds are you'll be looking at postdocs and one-year visiting assistant professorships as your only real option outside of pure research centers right out of grad school. you can later move up to a tenure-track job, but not right away with zero teaching experience. teaching is important, even at R1 schools, and the only way to show employers that you'd be good at it is if you've done it before. your students' teaching evaluations of you are important parts of any job application, even for 1/0 teaching loads. most american schools are actually asking their MA and PhD students to teach even more. they're getting larger class sizes, more discussion sessions, they're asked/get to teach their own stand-alone courses. as faculty retire, they're usually replaced with adjuncts and more graduate student teaching than with new professors, because the precarious nature of contract-workers is a lot more affordable. i believe that columbia has recently required their graduate students on TAs to teach 2 courses a semester rather than 1. if you don't teach, you'll go on the job market against PhDs from top 10 schools who have TAed 3 or 4 different courses and probably taught their own classes that they designed from scratch once or twice. they'll also have famous advisors and fellowships and great research. minimizing your teaching "burden" through fellowships is great, but never teaching at all is a big problem. many students at princeton and NYU "volunteer" for a year of teaching or use a TAship to supplement their income in their relatively expensive locations. as for getting tenure at a liberal arts college, you're not usually asked to produce a book for tenure if you have a 4/4 teaching load. 5-7 articles is considered sufficient (and is, frankly, as much work as a book anyway). but the 4/4 load doesn't go away until you get tenured and/or get another job and are in a position to renegotiate your contract. your teaching responsibilities DO NOT subside as you progress through your career unless you get a job offer at another school and use that to leverage a better deal at your present institution OR you secure a bunch of fellowships that allows you to take a sabbatical without pay for a semester or two.

you guys... the FLAS is a prestigious fellowship. only schools with title VI funding can give them out. if a school wants you to apply for the FLAS, it's because they are trying to build a competitive funding package for you (one that includes fellowships rather than simply 4-5 years of TAships). this is a good sign, not an indication of those schools' financial ruin. fellowships are ALWAYS better than TAships, so being considered for one doesn't mean that the school lacks the ability to fund you. christ.

writing about inequality and social justice in history is not new. not even close. and i always get very nervous when i hear someone claiming that it is possible or desirable to be a dispassionate observer as a historian. that's not actually possible, but to think it is means that the historian is disguising their own biases even to him/herself. the alternative isn't that we all have to write polemical, deeply political arguments, but to recognize that we cannot separate our lived experiences from what we deem is or isn't important to include in our historical narratives.

in my experience with profs moving, you have to reapply but the process is streamlined. you have to take (or re-take) comps at the new school if you want your degree from them, but that doesn't mean you have to "start over." you might have an additional year of coursework to cover the books they demand, or maybe just an additional semester, but you by no means count as a first-year student by making that transition. and in some instances, profs who are being courted by other schools will make it a condition of their acceptance that their grad students can come with them. in those instances, any application the student is asked to create is a mere formality. if you know for certain that your advisor is leaving (rather than just in talks or negotiations) then you should ask him how you should be preparing for his departure. tell him that you would like to continue your working relationship and ask him how it would be best to proceed. if he says he wants you to come with, then figure out what that entails. if he says he's willing to advise you from afar, you can ask about potentially joining him, but take that as a sign that you should stay where you are. if he says he thinks he's leaving you in good hands with your other advisor, i'd leave it at that. also, be sure not to jump the gun. most professors apply for other jobs in order to renegotiate their contracts at their current universities with no intention of actually leaving. they just say "harvard wants me, so you'll need to pay more to keep me." that is, unfortunately, how it works.

of course you should apply for external funding. always. programs love it when a student gets external funding. there are plenty of options other than the fulbright, and any place that will cover your living expenses and your tuition is worth it. while many of the most prestigious fellowships are for the dissertation research or writing phases (the SSRC, the ACLS/mellon, the NSF, etc.), students that have the ability to secure external funding at any point in their graduate career (beginning, middle, or end) are considered rather highly. if you win a fellowship (ANY fellowship) in your first year and gain admission with full funding, you can see if that school will defer your funding for one year, in effect extending your funding package for a year. this is very good. they will almost surely do this. and they'll like that you had the initiative to seek out external funding sources. if you win a fellowship and gain admission to a school without funding, you may still consider going there on that fellowship, but i would prepare yourself psychologically to walk away from grad school after that first year if your department doesn't come up with funds for the rest of your time there. if you win a fellowship and aren't admitted to any school (which does actually happen), you're actually in a pretty good bargaining position. contact your dream school and tell them you can pay your own way through external funding and ask to be admitted. if they're not giving you money, they'll consider it. really. if they say no, work your way down your list. don't be afraid to do this for the entire summer leading up to the fall semester. at some point (probably sooner rather than later) one of those schools will jump at the chance to bring in a student they don't need to pay for. but again, be prepared to walk away if there's no money after the first year (either through the school or through more external funding). bottom line: departments love it when you can get external funding, no matter how small or how obscure. it shows you have initiative. it shows that you can convince a funding agency that your research is worth supporting. it shows that you can work with money. and it shows that you'll be able to secure more fellowships down the line. people are more likely to receive fellowships and grants as professors if they won them as graduate students because these agencies (especially the prestigious ones) don't want to take a risk with their investment. someone with a slew of external fellowships has proven that their work is worth funding. short version: whoever told you not to apply for external fellowships other than fulbright is an idiot. you should always apply for whatever you can because it will only benefit you if you win something.

um. all PhD grads, from any institution, will be applying for postdoc positions. we have no choice. the odds of landing a tenure-track job, even with degrees from "the top schools," are terrible. today, graduating PhDs have two avenues to eventually getting a tenure-track gig with lax-enough teaching requirements to allow them to do research: one is to get a tenure-track 4/4 teaching load job and work your butt off to have enough time to still do enough new research to get yourself out of that job, and the other is to get a postdoc. so, anyone that wants a tenure-track job that focuses at least in part on research will be applying for those postdocs. i mention this only to let you know that postdoc positions are as competitive as any teaching positions and regardless of where you do your degree, you WILL be applying for postdoc jobs. it's true that oxbridge doesn't ask for a lot of teaching, which will almost automatically disqualify you from the 4/4 tenure-track jobs. it's not just oxbridge: anyone coming from a top ten school with little to no teaching experience will probably not be considered. anyone coming from any school with a fellowship package that had them teach for less than 2 years will also have a difficult time getting 4/4 jobs. on the plus side, if your research is about the UK, studying in the UK makes a ton of sense for a host of reasons, the greatest being the proximity to your sources and to the experts in your field. on the down side, the culture of graduate school in the UK is VERY different from the grad school culture in the US, and any time i've heard departments consider hiring someone from oxbridge, they always have the conversation, "can this candidate adapt to the way we do things?" that hasn't stopped those candidates from being hired, but it's something additional you'll have to "prove" to american schools if you want to teach there.

someone thought that going to grad school would help him get laid? el oh el. i have a good number of acquaintances in my department, but i really know only two people in this whole city that i would consider true friends. and it took me a year and a half to meet them and another 6 months of hanging out fairly frequently to feel like we were more than just "friendly acquaintances." in my experience, the faster i've made friends with someone, the faster that friendship breaks down because it was built upon a neediness (mine? theirs? mutual?) for social contact rather than any deep affinity for each other. and while those fast friends are still good acquaintances, they don't have my trust the same way the slow-build friendships in my life do. that might just be me. but this is all to say that you don't need to rush friendships. if you need someone to talk to, though, just to shoot the breeze, take it upon yourself to invite a small group out. for lunch/dinner/a drink/a movie/anything. in my experience, how much people socialize with their work colleagues (which is what your cohort is) depends directly on whether or not there's someone in the group that takes it upon themselves to organize outings, even ones as simple as "lets grab a beer after class."

ugh. the charge of sexism or chauvinism or misogyny or whatever is not about male to female ratios. having an equal number of men and women in a program will not eliminate the sexism that graduate students may face from certain professors. pairing a female student with a female mentor or advisor will also not bypass this. i know of a female historian, huge in her field, who has a real problem working with female graduate students. every single one of them has left her within 3 years, either switching advisors or leaving academia altogether. this prof has often tried to have her own female advisees kicked out of the program when literally every other faculty member that has had contact with those students thinks they're outstanding students and researchers. her entire faculty knows that she has a problem with female grad students. she has never once had one finish their PhD under her, even though 1-3 women arrive every year to work with her. i've also seen this discrimination work against men, although in much narrower circumstances. men (especially those believed to be straight) get a lot of shit when they try to work on gender in the social sciences. i think it was umich (but i could be totally misremembering) that did a study that found that professors (male and female) wrote much weaker LORs for female job applicants than for males. they still praised the prospective applicants if they were female, but said they were "warm" and "helpful" and "good colleagues" and "kind" and whatever other words you'd use to describe a good mother, whereas male applicants' letters said they were "intelligent" and "brilliant" and "capable" and "forward-thinking," etc. the profs writing these letters probably didn't realize what they were doing, and would be ashamed once they did, but they wrote "soft" letters for their female students that gave them a distinct disadvantage on the job market. the same study found that hiring committees were often turned off by LORs that talked of someone's personality or collegiality more than their skill and potential as a researcher, teacher, and service member of a department. all of this rambling is to say... pairing up a female applicant with a female mentor will not circumvent most of these problems, and just because you've never had someone tell you to watch out for them doesn't mean they don't exist.

numerous reasons. the job market isn't good, and that doesn't exempt the ivies. many graduates probably aren't applying for every job available because they think their degrees mean they don't have to work at community colleges or as adjuncts or they don't want 4/4 teaching loads. speaking of 4/4 teaching loads, most entry-level professorships have high teaching loads and they want candidates with actual teaching experience. students at ivies may teach only once during their years, may only serve as a grader, may never teach a stand-alone course, etc. schools want some evidence of teaching ability, and not all ivy grads have that experience. some programs/subfields within programs push their students into very conservative arguments in their research, but a lot of research-oriented professorships are looking for someone with more cutting edge work. so, the lack of teaching experience (from any school, not just princeton or harvard) can kill a job applicant and if the only research you have going for you pursues a very intellectually conservative line, the research-oriented jobs will pass over you as well. there's other stuff, too. many professors (at any school, but especially at the "top" programs) think it isn't their job to mentor graduate students through the job application process. many of them never get the chance to give mock job talks and mock interviews, they're never told how to network, how to redirect interview questions in the best possible way, they're never told explicitly what NOT to say. without that guidance through the job market, students from any school, even "the best," will fail, but a lot of profs at the big programs assume the degree name will be enough so they never really prepare students for the market. also, just because a prof is at an ivy or top program doesn't necessarily mean they're the best or most well-connected scholar in their field. a lot of the top scholars are at state schools, semi-private schools, non-ivy privates, and their networking connections go a long way towards getting students into the job interview stage. so, big name programs' low placement rates are due to a multitude of factors. it doesn't make them terrible. it just means that, right now, they don't seem to be producing the most hirable job candidates. i think it's unfortunate, because it seems like both professor and applicants to their grad schools believe that school name and reputation will carry them onto some sort of tenure-track employment, but it doesn't, and remedying that requires "top" programs to swallow their pride and groom their PhDs for the job market.

in my own program, very few students seem to have any friends in town outside of the department. people who came to the school with partners/spouses who weren't academics have been able to tap into their significant other's circle of friends. as for starting relationships, it seems that at least half the people that start relationships once they're in my program are having them with each other. it's very incestuous. i've built up hobbies for myself so i don't go nuts talking to the same people all day (and consequently, only talking about work all day) but even then i've found it's difficult to turn small talk before yoga class or screaming over the sounds of a live band at a bar into meaningful friendships or relationships. hobbies have really just helped me expand my circle of acquaintances.

different schools pick different things to judge for each round of cuts. some start with LORs, some start with SOPs, some don't pick up your transcript till the end, some use it to cut you at the beginning. best to not worry about it either way, since there's nothing you can do about it.

within my department, there is no set agreement on what constitutes an A, A-, B+, etc. there is also no agreement with the other departments in the school, and probably within those departments individual profs' scales vary as well. this can be confusing for students who see numbers on their assignments and expect a certain grade only to see a 93 interpreted as an A- in one class and an A in another. basically, it's not all that uncommon at schools for there to be no set policy on the number scale. but if a prof tells you on their syllabus that 95-100 is an A and then they tell you that you've received a 93, you should interpret that as an A- even if another prof's scale says 93 is an A. if your transcript shows letter grades rather than numbers, it doesn't really matter if there's discrepancies between profs in their scales. what matters if where that prof puts you in his or her own scale. i'd encourage you not to dispute the grade on this account. the prof realizes what grade they gave you and most of them see students that argue their grades up as having a problematic sense of entitlement. if you're worried about the A- at all, i'd suggest going to the prof and asking them what you could do to improve in your future courses. that tends to sit with them much better and you'll go from seeming like a nuisance to seeming like a motivated student.

you don't apply for assistantships, usually. you're offered them as part of your admissions package.

i'm not going home for the holidays this year, but even if i was, i'd take work with me. i have comps and my overview next semester. i still need to read about 20 of my comps books and re-read/skim another 20 because my notes weren't good enough first time around. my advisor is also going to expect a draft of my overview early next semester, and i haven't touched it since september when she gave me the greenlight on my project. ugh. i'll take this friday and saturday to veg out, then get back to work sunday, albeit at a more leisurely pace than during the semester. my school only gives us two and a half weeks for winter break anyway, we have a quick turnaround.

i'm in a humanities field that resides in the social sciences school at my university. yeah, i know... my advisor guides me through research, grant writing, and the job market. i've also TA'd for her, so she's given me some advice as a teacher as well, but if i hadn't been her TA, i wouldn't have expected us to have conversations about pedagogy. for conferences, i just submit to those on my own and i've never asked her to read the conference paper, although i know some other students in my program have asked their advisors to do so. when i presented at a conference in town, she came to see me (even though i purposefully didn't tell her i was presenting because i didn't want the added pressure). she gave me some really great feedback on my talk that has definitely changed the way i approach presentations. for coursework, we're required to get our advisors to sign off on our schedules before we can actually register for classes, but even then, she leaves that up to me. i know the graduate handbook's course requirements inside and out, so i'm the one that makes sure i'm taking what i need to be taking. i'm the one that checks the course offerings in other departments every semester. i just bring her a list of what i'm thinking of taking and she says "sounds good." many of my colleagues don't do the legwork of finding classes themselves and they miss crucial coursework requirements for their degrees and end up pretty screwed. they lament that my advisor is so much better than theirs at knowing what classes i need, but it's me that knows, not her. as far as i'm concerned, if there's something i could find the answer to myself (like what courses i need, or when the deadline for the fellowship is), i don't ask her, i find out for myself. my advisor is there to provide intellectual and professional guidance, not to make sure i enrolled in the right section of my french class.

tell all of this to your advisor. tell your advisor that you want to finish your degree and he'll need to prioritize your access to the equipment you need (or give you approval to use it yourself). i will say, though, that making you write detailed plans for experiments and spending a lot of time on theory does seem like good training to me. better, certainly, than spending hours on a machine several people need, just sort of winging it with experiments. i'm not in sciences myself, but i know a lot of people who are, and i can't say that your arrangement sounds all that different from theirs, including all the frustrations you're experiencing.

what you call a "shaky" reason to do badly, your struggles with mental health, seems to be the main reason for all of your other struggles. talk to someone. find a counselor or support group or therapist. graduate school is a very stressful environment and anyone who goes should probably see a therapist, to be honest, but if you've had a history of mental health issues, see someone. even if it's just for "maintenance" or "upkeep." do you have an advisor in your department? if so, talk to that person about your struggles first semester and ask what you can do to be more prepared next semester. if you don't, have this conversation with the director of graduate studies. they're there to help you through grad school, not to push you out of it. as for socializing, spend time in the student lounge, if you have one. people will congregate, shoot the shit, and pretty soon you'll be invited to whatever everyone else is doing. you absolutely should NOT sacrifice your social life entirely for graduate school. we are here to meet people, to build relationships, to network, professionally and personally. you're allowed to have fun (no, really! we often forget that, but you really DO get to have fun!). finally, why did you start grad school? if you have clear career goals in mind, find ways to tough out this rough patch and see if you can do better next semester. if you're just in grad school because you felt it was something you "have to" do, then maybe leaving before causing yourself any more anguish is the best way to go.

look at how their program works, based on what you can glean from their website. for example, at my own program, students specialize in one regional field and one thematic field (something transnational like world history or atlantic history). if you can say "having the opportunity to participate in the atlantic history theme in the program would allow me to X, Y, and Z in my work" that would help a lot. also, look at all the professors' pages. yes, all of them. if you do russian history and focus on representations of gender in the labour force and you see that a latin americanist also does/did gender and labour history, mention them in your SOP as someone you would like to work with, to learn the methodology and theory for approaching gender and labour. i can tell you from experience that, in programs where this is a really natural fit, where you don't have to stretch reality too much to make it seem like 4 or 5 profs would be interested in some aspect of your work, you'll have a really good shot at getting in. conversely, any programs where you're really struggling to find commonalities with the faculty beyond "we study the same country in the same century," you will have a much more difficult time getting in. these schools get 10-20 times as many applications as they have spots to offer, so genuinely appealing to the research of as many faculty as possible goes a long way.

i think you'll have a good shot at all of those schools.

lureynol, why on earth would you consider applying to a school that doesn't have a specialist in your field? and taybaxter, yale isn't impossible to get into. you just have to speak their language. it sounds like your LOR writer is more with it than some and that'll help make you a more appealing candidate. it helps to build each application (from the SOP to the writing sample) to sound like X program is perfect for you and you're perfect for them. it may seem disingenuous for schools at the bottom of your list, but if you end up there, it's helpful to have already thought through why it can still be an excellent place to go to do your particular project.

if you've already talked to them, no need to send this email. plus it's rather presumptuous to let them know that you identified them as your potential advisor.

well, humanities students definitely don't begin thinking about their dissertation proposal after writing their exams. they usually start coming up with an idea and doing research trips (if necessary) during their coursework years. most start with the field of literature and look for gaps in it or ask new questions of old debates. perseverance is huge. i have not seen much of a correlation between intelligence and completion of a PhD. many smart people get out early, many less-than-brilliant finish their doctorates. i'm not sure i would say that tenacity determines the ability to get a tenure-track job. i think job applicants need carefully crafted application packages, well-connected letter writers and advisors, and sexy dissertation topics. the tenacity only comes in when someone decides whether to keep applying for TT jobs or not after 3-5 years as an adjunct or out of academia. the ability to communicate is critical for any teacher or researcher. that's pretty simple.

the AHA article was a really interesting read. i think my own school's financial situation is better than many (although not great), because in the 2.5 years i've been in my program, we've hired 8 new faculty and had maybe 2-3 retirements. the average age of profs in my department is in the high 50s easily, with many of them well into their 70s and one or two in their 80s. people said in the mid-1990s that the jobs would come back once these profs reached retirement age. they've reached it and passed it and haven't left, but funding streams will open up when they leave (either through retirement or death). my concern is (and this article doesn't mention it) that many of those retired tenure-track jobs will be replaced with 2-3 cheap adjuncts at schools with more financial difficulties than my own. as for why i went into a PhD program, i ask myself that at least once a month. my desire was never to teach. i wanted to do research and to write about historical processes that i think are important for understanding our world today. i first pursued journalism to this end but found that i wasn't allowed to write about the things i actually thought were important (racism, structural inequality, the social construction of "identity" categories, state violence and the illusion of democracy, etc.). getting a PhD in history would presumably allow me to write about those things. i'd like a tenure-track job at the end of all of this, but i think long-term that research and writing will drive me more than teaching, so if my choices were between an NGO research position or a 4/4 teaching load in the middle of no where, i'd jump at the non-academic job.

historians really don't collaborate. i mean, they'll read drafts of each other's work and offer comments, but that's it. our discipline is, generally speaking, not conducive to collaboration and that has nothing to do with sharing an office with other students. i see people plenty before and after classes, i hang out with them all a lot, but if i don't have to be on campus for class, i never go. i should mention (maybe i already did?) that our department HAS NO WINDOWS. there is absolutely no natural light, we have no idea if it is daylight or dark out, if there's a blizzard or a downpour. it's depressing and it is not a comfortable environment to work in, so most students don't work there. also, yay pens.

i do stay home all the time. i work from home. and when i'm ABD, i'm actually going to move to a different city, because there's no lab or office or computer on campus that i need for my work. i kinda like it. i can do all of my data processing and writing (and some of my research, if it's digitized) from coffee shops or park benches. i dig that.