sabrinamichelle

This is cross posted from the LoR forum, I wanted to get anthro peoples perspectives. I have two professors that I am sure will be happy to write me letters. I am having trouble deciding who to choose for my third. 1) My school and department was very small. There were only three anthropology professors. Two are the ones I already asked, one has recently resigned from his contract at my university and is pursuing other interests. So I am wondering if I should ask him. He was increasingly unstable toward the end of my studies, and I wonder if he wants anything to do with academia right now. That seems like a huge risk to me as he is jaded and might not write something helpful, even though we were very close and I know he believes in me. 2) I took a field research course through a better known school (Wake Forest). For 3 weeks in Honduras. But this was two years ago and the professor is Emeritus. So he does not know me very well. He offered to write me recommendations, but I am not sure how reliable he would seem to an adcomm. 3) I took one undergrad course from a phd candidate (she now is a phd) and I still keep in touch with her. She now has a teaching position at another university. But again, it was only one class. 4) I have a potential great recommendation from a professor who is not in my major. He knows me well character wise and academically but not in terms of anthropology. Which of these four options do you all think is the most promising???

I have two professors that I am sure will be happy to write me letters. I am having trouble deciding who to choose for my third. 1) My school and department was very small. There were only three anthropology professors. Two are the ones I already asked, one has recently resigned from his contract at my university and is pursuing other interests. So I am wondering if I should ask him. He was increasingly unstable toward the end of my studies, and I wonder if he wants anything to do with academia right now. That seems like a huge risk to me as he is jaded and might not write something helpful, even though we were very close and I know he believes in me. 2) I took a field research course through a better known school (Wake Forest). For 3 weeks in Honduras. But this was two years ago and the professor is Emeritus. So he does not know me very well. He offered to write me recommendations, but I am not sure how reliable he would seem to an adcomm. 3) I took one undergrad course from a phd candidate (she now is a phd) and I still keep in touch with her. She now has a teaching position at another university. But again, it was only one class. 4) I have a potential great recommendation from a professor who is not in my major. He knows me well character wise and academically but not in terms of anthropology. Which of these four options do you all think is the most promising???

Me too!!!

I am applying to ten... I don't know if that's crazy. I decided because I wanted to get myself out there as much as possible to raise my chances of getting in somewhere, and didn't want to just apply to my 3 dream schools. I don't really mind how much it costs because I saved up just for it. I don't know how many is normal, but I suspect it will be a lot of work and I might end up dropping 2 or 3 in the end as I hear back from potential advisors and gather more info on the programs. But those ten truthfully have my interest so it's not like I am just applying at random. How many are you going to apply to? I have a couple without a distinct med anth concentration too, but I am definitely more reluctant about those because I fear they wouldn't train me as well?

i know i should be contacting potential advisors right about now, but i am so nervous! i feel like i would just bother them and i'm afraid everything i say will just sound annoying and desperate. how did you get around this? how do you frame the email? do you just basically say "this is what i want to research, do you like it?" ???

i am applying to medical anthropology

I just found a link to some helpful examples of successful SOPs from the Duke anthropology website. Not sure if anyone has posted this before so my apologies if I overlooked it. http://culturalanthropology.duke.edu/uploads/assets/2011-2012GradStmts.doc It's hard to know where to start writing my statement. It helped give me an idea of how to be direct with my research project upfront!

i found the manhattan prep the most accurate.

i expected the quantitative section to be a lot harder than it was. but that doesn't mean there were no hard questions. there were some that i looked at and said i have absolutely no idea how to solve this and just guessed and moved on to save time. but i was surprised at how easy some were... like just asking the mean and such.

I scored 580-680 V, 590-690 Q. I was a little disappointed but overall I was more calm than I expected to be. For some reason I kept coming close to running out of time and having to rush toward the end, which I did not experience in timed practice tests. The test was a balance between really easy questions and very difficult questions. I found Manhattan GRE to be the most accurate practice test. Hope that helps! I myself am confused about the 100 point range. Are you supposed to guess conservatively and go for the bottom numbers or shoot toward the middle?

there are books that are for 1 week of prep time. grab one of those and you should be good. take another couple of computer practice tests, too.

thank you for sharing! i am in a prep class now and everyone was wondering how we would see our scores

thanks all. i know that all programs are competitive. but i guess i need to find a way to find some obscure schools and see if my interests match. just because they are all competitive doesn't mean they will all only accept 4 new students out of 600 applicants

I am applying for f12 and am pretty new to this whole process. I am taking the GRE next month so I don't have that score to share... but practice tests I am scoring around 1300. 3.8 GPA... 3.9 in the Anthropology major. I was in one field school, presented my thesis at an undergrad conference and will have good recs from close professors... but no publications or RA ships or anything. My focus is medical anthropology, my thesis was on cultural ideas of disease and misinformation about diabetes in the Garifuna people in Roatan Island, Honduras. I am looking to enter somewhere that has a good focus on nutritional and medical anthropology, and funding is very important to me, as I already accumulated a lot of debt from my undergrad. It's obvious which top-tier schools I should/want to apply to, but I was wondering if anyone has suggestions about some safer, less "big name" schools to which I can apply. Going to an Ivy is not essential to me. I am willing to go to any school that is a good fit and has good funding but I am having trouble knowing which schools would be more realistic for me to be accepted to. Thanks for the input!