New England Nat

If you were sitting at a table at ASEH with a woman from Princeton that would have been me. Only female environmental historian in the department

Yes.

It is an uncomfortable position to put you in and it's unfair. But it is what it is. Assuming you have 9 other schools on your list ... don't list all of them and don't list ones that are obviously "out of their league". This is almost certainly a tactic about sorting out thier funding.

I'd tell them that you would seriously consider them but that you couldn't possibly make a decision until you saw offers. And give them three or so names on your list maybe the ones roughly around them on your list of considerations. Don't say "well if i get an offer from X place I'm going." Som places don't get to pull off their wait list. THey make X number of offers with funding and if one of those turns them down they're X-1.

as for living in Philly and commuting to Princeton, it's very common and easily done via transit.

So I'm a UNC alum so you can take what I say with a grain of salt. Durham is a very depressed city with a high crime rate and the areas around the university are the worst. It's a lovely campus but it's a bubble. A few years ago a gang murdered both a Duke grad student and the UNC student body president and one of the more unfortunate things was that the media coverage handled the killing of the blond blue eyed undergrad a lot more than the international grad student. You should seriously think about where you want to live. That said, I can say pissy things about the university, the tobacco vanity project, all I want but it's a great department and it sounds like a good fit for you. Just because the city is less than lovely doesn't mean you should turn down a great opportunity.

oh, i'll be blunt for you. Princeton sent out all their admits. They don't do waves. And no one from the last two years came off the wait list. They admit almost 40% more students than they'd be happy taking. They'd have to have an extraordinary large number of people turn them down before they'd pull from the wait list.

It's best not to try and read the entrails of chickens. The letters will come. You guys still have a long time before all the schools finish. And those of you who now have to weigh two or more offers really need to start a decisions thread so as not to rub it in the face of those waiting.

well, it looks like i shouldn't be a betting woman. I'm sorry for getting people's hopes up. The last two years it was the 9th and the 10th so i'll be any day. YMMV.

RE the princeton notification. If it 'hasn't happend by 4:30 it's not happening that day.

I can't guarrentee the princeton admits will be today, it was just an educated guess, it could be tomorrow. But I'd be shocked if they're not done in the next seven days.

It actually is pretty much summed up with what I said. Most people who are admitted to NYU seem to get invites to the perspective thing but a significant number of admits were not invited in previous years. And from my friends who went it was rather ... shall we say... nail biting. Hardly informal, not in the sense of formal manners but it is essentailly a group job interview with a lot of people desperate for a job. Most perspective visits are people who have already been admitted and so there isnt' the wiff of deperation in the air. They also take a significant number of people off their wait lists, inform both the first around and the wait lists as late as possible. It's pretty brutal.

No. NYU works in mysterious ways.

Exactly. And mine wont even accept the language exams administered by the university's own foreign language department.

RNG, I think you really need to understand that language requirements are different in every department and no one is going to be able to answer your question in general. Some would accept it, others wouldn't, some would require a test and the actual training is irrelevent to them.

Just a heads up after listening to grad student gossip. Even if you've decided to write off a place or an application, please don't trash a PoI to their advisee, no matter how good a relationship you think you have with the grad student. The admissions process is the beginning of your professional life as a historian and these are very small worlds in the subfields. Word will get around not just to person you trashed but to others.

Any unfunded offer is a rejection. There is no reason, no matter how good the program, to pay anything for a History PhD. Between 3 and 5 years are reasonable offers, any school that offers three years of funding, ask how their disertation students fund themselves. When the offers come in weigh them against each other with pros and cons, but know that you will be poor. Don't think you can bargin for more money. There are people on this board who have, but it's a very tricky thing and a massive mine field.

Because I don't think they'll do it on Friday for various reasons about the way classes work, and professors will want to email people to woe them as soon as the acceptances go out. They've sent it out thursdays the last few cycles.

I wouldn't be surprised if it's tomorrow but if I was a betting woman I'd say thursday.

They aren't "sitting on them". They have bureaucracy too

I wouldn't gather too much about it other than that your applicatiion is still alive.

I'd be shocked if they ask you dates or facts. It's more likely to ask you about your project, interests, try and figure out your historical reasoning. Oh, and congradulations viggosloof, as a tar heel I'm very happy for you. I have an undergrad degree from that department and their DGS is one of my favorite people in the whole wide world. If you have questions about the town you are welcome to PM me. Be aware though that it's been four years since I was there.

It's just one of those old fashioned things that assumes everyone needs either french or german.

Language requirements for americanists depends on the program. Many schools have eliminated them completely. The modern langauge requirements for Americanists at my program are French, German, or Spanish. Two passages of longer than 500 words, one with and one without a dictionary, 45minutes each passage. Test may be taken as many times as you need to pass, but must pass before your comprehensive exams. No one can remember anyone being sent packing for failing this requirement. The bitch in my program is that everyone needs to pass in either French or German, even those who have to pass in both modern and classical chinese.

I'm not sure how i feel about that. In a big department you wont find the kind of commonalities you are discussing, and many advisers don't want clones of themselves. I went into the process with a project that people were very positive about but was very different than anything anyone was doing. Anyone in the country. It sounds to me like this is a vision of departmental fit that works for some people and not others. As for looking at faculty to determine grad student cohorts, that seems like a particularly useless idea. There aren't that many people with state university degrees on my faculty (yes, we talk about it, no it's not changing anytime soon, no no one is proud of it). The graduate cohorts look nothing like those faculty. Again, because they aren't making mini me. I'm not saying fit doesn't happen, it does and it's important but it's a lot more intuitive than you are describing. As for the used car thing, yes, some departments like to have a ton of applications. Some of them would have a ton of applications no matter what they told applicants in email. And yes it is expensive to apply to graduate school. Nothing about this process is rational or practical. If you aren't applying to schools because you think you have no chance there because they get a ton of applications, you are doing yourself a disservice. Apply to the places you think work for you.