amanda1655

I heard from UIUC today. It was a rejection, which was expected. Somehow it hurts less than the last one I received.

Minnesotan: If it makes you feel better, I got a rejection from Johns Hopkins today. That, coupled with Yale's offer of a MA instead of a PhD, makes me feel like maybe Yale is right and I am not quite right ready for a top program. I know it's silly but I even find myself questioning if maybe the program I have been admitted to made a mistake, and I'll end up dropping out because I cut it. I'm sure that there are good things in the mail for all of us (especially you, Minnesotan), but every rejection tears out your heart a bit.

I just received an e-mail from a Yale professor saying that it was unlikely that I would be offered admission for the Ph.D. program this year but that several history faculty were very interested in my application and they would like permission to move it to the European Studies MA Program. In their e-mail, they gave me around 6 or 7 reasons why I should accept their offer, including that I would be much more likely to be accepted to a top program with an MA from Yale and that I would probably receive much more attention on the job market. I smiled a bit because I already have a PhD offer from a top 10 program, but I would probably accept their offer if the MA offered me funding and the PhD program didn't. I guess I'll count this as being 1 1/2 for 2. (Only 7 more to go!)

Maybe it's the city. I had a similar problem with Boston College.

I really wish that Michigan would reply soon.... they keep make little changes to my information on their grad admission page like changing my information to read History Doc instead of History PhD, fixing the name of my undergraduate school, and taking away the information about when prospective students can check for financial information. Now, all I have is information about continuing students. I know they have looked at my application. They e-mailed me about a month ago to let me know that my Master's Degree Transcripts had never arrived and that they could start reviewing my application with an unofficial one as long as I sent them an official one if I was accepted. Can't they just accept or reject me instead of playing with my information? Although all of my interactions with Michigan have been positive so far, I keep imagining that someone on the adcom has a kid who has hacked into the system and is sadistically playing with my information. Is it psychotic that I notice these small changes?

DMH: Could let us know when you receive the actual letter? I find myself wondering how long it will take for the letters to make it off the professor's desk, especially if their desk looks anything like mine.

Well... I guess I ought to prepare myself. It's probably a rejection. There's a small possibility that I might be a waitlist but that would only postpone my agony. I guess I will just have to console myself with Wisconsin, which is higher ranked and has faculty who are closer to my interests. I find it odd that they are rejecting people so early. Last year, there was a slew of admits to UIUC around Feb. 23. The only question now is what about Johns Hopkins. They have sent out rejections and acceptances, and I have received neither! I would e-mail them but its so early in the game. *Sigh*

I agree... If I wasn't going to be a historian, I would be an English professor with an emphasis in Irish literature. For some reason, I find the social sciences slightly disquieting and well, icky. Maybe it's all of those numbers.

I graduated in 2005 and just applied for graduate school this year. I spent the time learning foreign languages, teaching in an elementary school, and earning a master's degree. When I spoke to a professor at Yale (also a classmate of my undergraduate advisor), he said that he found that students were more mature after taking a few years off and generally wrote better statements of purpose than those who applied as seniors in college. The only reservation I would have is that if you take too much time off you may have difficulty finding faculty who can write fantastic letters of rec for you, although you should be able to find people to write ones that are at least good.

I think I may have a desire to only live in extreme temperatures. For the last three years, I have been living in the Southwest where it is over 105 degrees from June to October. In July, it is routinely 115 degrees. When I went home for Christmas, my mom asked if I wanted to borrow the car. I took one look at the snow on road, realized that I hadn't driven in snow in three years, and said no. And yet here I am... considering moving to a place where the ground doesn't even thaw until April.

Sorry... I just assumed from the squabble/snafu/brawl (I'm not sure what to call it) in the posts about the Ford Fellowship that you were. Good luck, though, especially with your schools in the NW. I so badly wanted to go somewhere in Portland or Seattle but there were no schools with matching profs. Oh well, I walked through 4 ft. snow drifts before and I can do it again whether it be in Madison, WI or Ann Arbor, MI.

Hmm... I wonder how many white male people from Minnesota who have over a 700 on the Verbal and a Master's Degree apply for Rhetoric programs in the Northwest. No matter how hard we try, the adcomms could always find out who we were if they had a mind to. Especially if we had a few more pieces of information gleaned from your posts. MA from halfway across the country. SOP focuses on research interests. Research could be achieved in either a history or English department.

Minnesotan: Thanks! I'm sure you are going to get in somewhere amazing. I'm a bit jealous of your stats every time that I see 'em. I really wanted to break the 700 mark but was too lazy to study for the GRE. Where did you apply? I have a hard time keeping your profile straight since you applied to English and History schools in a wide geographic area and seem to post in every forum.

My subfield is British history, getting any more specific that than will give me away. I had a 3.94 GPA. I haven't read my Letters of Recommendation but... I assuming that they were good. My undergraduate advisor promised me a fantastic letter, and another professor told me that my graduate advisor had told her that I was one of her favorite students and that she would be surprised if I didn't get in some amazing places. The letter was dated January 28. My status was still pending when I was received the letter but changed this morning to read Congratulations.

I received my acceptance for Wisconsin History in the mail yesterday, and they are having an admitted students weekend on April 5th. My fiance pointed out that I may want to wait to respond to them until I have heard from a few more schools and can feel out possible scheduling conflicts. When should I RSVP for the admitted students weekend, especially as it is over two months away? Also, should I e-mail my prospective advisor in the meantime to express my excitement and interest in the program, perhaps with a few questions? I want them to know that I am really interested in the program, especially since they haven't made funding decisions yet.

I heard from Wisconsin, and I'm IN, but my stomach still sinks every time I see a response from a school I applied to. I still haven't heard from Illinois or received an interview invitation from Yale. :| At least I'm in at one of my top choices. Now hopefully, a few more acceptances will follow. P.S. I thought I would give my GRE scores to give hope to those people who have been lamenting their situation on the GRE Score/GPA Cutoff thread. I received a 670 Verbal, 680 Quantitative, and a 6.0 AWA. Those scores are good (the Verbal is in the 93%), but there are nowhere near the magic 700 posited on the board as the magic number for top history and English programs, and Wisconsin is number 11 overall, number 1 for women's studies, and number 4 for European history.

That was my question, exactly. I have heard of individual professors contacting students in which they are interested and arranging phone interviews so that they can have more information about the candidate. One of my friends was contacted last year by a program for a phone interview, and he was asked about his interests and if there was anything that he thought the committee should know (funny, I thought that was what your statement of purpose was for.) Yale could be interviewing everyone, or it could be just one professor who wants more information.

So.... DMH in another forum you said that Illinois is deciding next week. Did they mention whether they would just be contacting people eligible for the language fellowship or whether they would be contacting everyone? As someone interested in British history, I am certainly not eligible for a FLAS. On a side note, the website says that all top candidates will be notified by February 15th. People admitted but with significant funds will be notified after that date. If everyone from this forum stormed Urbana-Champaign, we would probably double the size of the town.

I am not worried, hence the eye roll and the Vh1 comment instead of a long rant. However, I do think it is an odd conversation for someone to engage in who is applying to women's studies programs. Maybe I am just too worried about what I say on the forums somehow coming back to haunt me.

As a woman who is interested in women's studies but not applying to them, my only response to the direction this thread has taken is to roll my eyes. Could we please leave the talk about cougars to Vh1? And, if you are going to insist on talking about dating cougars, please at least watch their hour-long special on Hollywood Cougars. At least then you would know that a young rich woman is called a "kitten."

I occasionally read the forums on the Chronicle's web page because the questions are often answered by actual professors. Someone started a thread about how admissions committees consider applications that I found profoundly helpful. Here is a link: http://chronicle.com/forums/index.php/t ... 917.0.html The process is very similar to the one described above, except that the students at this particular school are ranked in their individual subfields for admission. Some schools also pre-screen applications before they go to the committee so that the committee is only looking at 40 applications rather than the full 300 who applied. Anyone with a low GPA or a low GRE score might not even have their application reviewed by the department. Ouch! To Myheartsapounding - I know 23 year old white males who were admitted to graduate programs in science at Johns Hopkins University and law schools at Northwestern and Yale. If you are qualified for admission, your gender, minority status, or age may give you an edge over another candidate but that does not mean that white males are not being admitted to graduate school.

I have learned that I will never satisfy my inner perfectionist. I just worked my SOP over and over again until I was exhausted. Eventually, I realized there was nothing more I could do. On a side note, I too was advised to focus on the specifics of what I wanted to study in graduate school, but when I wrote it, I ended up putting in a bit of background information. The professor who read the section said that he loved it and felt that I should keep that section and just edit it down, despite his original counsel. What followed was over a month of trying to balance the two sections so that I had enough personal background information to make my SOP interesting AND enough information about my interests and potential topics. I just hope it was good enough to get me in somewhere with funding.

The early notification would be fantastic. The actual process of interviewing would SUCK. I can't even fathom trying to schedule flights to different cities. My employer would be very unlikely to give me more than 1 or 2 days off, and I would still have to finish the work I missed. Add to that the language classes I am taking to help me fulfill the language requirements for a history Ph.D., and I'd likely suffer a mental breakdown.

Oooo.... This makes me feel a little bit better about my application. I have always imagined the other applicants as people slightly smarter than I am. I could just imagine the committee discussion... "Well, this one has 3.96 GPA and 1430 GRE while this one has a 3.94 and a 1390 GRE. Their recommendations are all fantastic and their writing samples suggest they could both do well in our program. I guess we'll accept the former and reject the latter." I know that the admissions game isn't THAT numbers based, but still...

One area that people always suggest is teaching history in a public or private high school. I would caution you that obtaining a job in secondary education isn't nearly as easy as people think. No Child Left Behind requires that every teacher complete a certification program and take a wide variety of courses, including some that weren't included in my undergraduate history degree like geography. Also, there is a glut of history teachers on the market. Last year, my school district began the school year short 300 teachers, not one of those openings was in history or social studies (I work for one of the five largest school districts in the country.) On a more positive note, H-Net and the AHA list careers for historians outside of academia. Their lists include: archival careers, editing, publishing,and local history. One other area with which I am familiar as a K-12 educator is writing textbooks for major publishing companies like Scott Foresman and Houghton Mifflin. A lot of the work is committee work, meaning that you would just be responsible for your area of expertise.