New England Nat

I can't tell you about the EAS department, but if you are applying across the two departments I'd try and see if you can talk to any history profs before next week. They will be doing adcom meetings next week and any time after that for history is useless. I would advise you to think about other people besides your PoI you can visit at the same time, try to think about interconnections you can make between different scholars. And take a serious look at the town and campus. Princeton is about as isolated as you can get in New Jersey and some of our prospective students come to visit and just can't imagine spending a couple of years in the town.

It really depends on the adviser and your dynamic. Most advisers will understand that projects evolve and interests change. I know mine did radically in the middle of my masters. I was still within my subfield, but the subjects are night and day. You should realize that most professors would be disturbed if your interests didn't change. Assuming your topic is still within the subfield of the adviser, I would wait until your next available meeting with them and explain how your interest evolved. If they throw a fit... that's their problem not yours.

You have to remember that for any given school... you probably submitted your application in early december, the administrative people had a couple of weeks maybe to go through and pull out any applicant that doesn't meet hard requirements like GRE or missing transcripts or something like that. I was told by one program (not the one I attend) that 20% of their applicants are "not real". C students, people whose academic records contain fraud, foreign applicants that are just trying to get visas. I know of one Science and Technology Studies program that says they get ten chinese engineering student applicants every year. So after the admin people do that kind of sorting they than have holiday breaks. So assume all of that happened in december. Than admissions committees have to meet. So imagine you are a professor at a top program that gets 300-400 applicants a year. You aren't going to read all those applicants because some are outside your area. But say you are a modern americanist or europeanist... It's not unreasonable to suggest that you will have to read 100 or so of those applications. Just thinking about the writing samples, that means 2500 PAGES of material to read. And than you have to meet with your collegues and discuss. All during this time semesters are ending, finals are being given, hiring committees are meeting, the AHA and OAH are going on... and your new semester is starting. it's kind of a miracle any of these schools release results by the end of january.

Oh, I highly recommend it for serious giggles. Cold war submarine "nonfiction" books are so full of weird unbelievable ... stuff. If i'm loosing brain cells i have some to spare.

I've been reading fictional "non-fiction" cold war conspiracy stuff. It's kind of like reading novels except their authors don't know it. Currently by my bedside is Kenneth Sewell's Red Star Rogue which claims that the soviets tried to frame the Chinese for the nuking of Pearl Harber in 1968.

TMP, delete some of your PMs woman. Can't send you a PM.

Wow. That's seriously unprofessional. If you can't write a strong letter you tell the student that. It's one of the ways you save students who shouldn't go to grad school from going through the process. Not that that applies to you. But there is a purpose to saying "No I wont write you a letter."

They take 7ish Americanists in every cohort, with a weight towards the 20th century because of the nature of the faculty. That usually includes 1 or 2 legal historians and does not include the History of Science folks who have their own adcom.

Sio68, They get (and read) 400+ applications each cycle. I can give no inside information because the professors are very good about keeping things confidential. The only thing I can say in general is that the department likes to take people who are thinking in big ideas. I wouldn't assume you have no chance just because you didn't go to Harvard or Yale, because the cohorts they take are surprisingly diverse. If you PM me with your general details I can try to give you a sense of if you would fit into what they're looking for.

During this period in my cycle I threw myself into my masters thesis with... shall we say... unhealthy zeal. I'm not saying I wasn't a basketcase, but I'd suggest trying to find something else to focus on.

I just wanted to give those of you with Princeton apps a heads up. They're going to do adcom meetings the third week in January and I'd expect decisions to be sent out the second week in Feb. A few years ago that was early in the cycle but last year a ton and a half of schools sent notices before Princeton. Anyone who wants to ask specific questions can PM me.

What TMP said. Schools that run interviews do know that they have international applications, as well as americans who are overseas.

Most places will invite perspective students to visit. Once you are admitted the situation will reverse and the departments will be courting you. Most places (in fact nearly all good programs) will pay for you to visit them.

They are not common, but they are not unheard of. There are a few places that do it (NYU, Penn are ones that come to mind), but many many many others that do not. Some places get a lot of visiting students, but visiting is not required. At princeton we see a lot of visiting students but my understanding is that visiting or not does not really give one an upper hand in the application pool. Mostly the purpose is for the applicant to feel like they are applying to the right places. I know I went to visit/interview at a school I was intending to apply to and the place gave off so many red flags I didn't even apply in the end.

First thing you should do is calm down. No one's application is perfect. This time of year brings out all sorts of fears, rational and irrational, try not to get too caught up in them.

include the article with "under review"

I can't give you thoughts on your second post, but on the first... I know of both a south asianist and a Chinese specialist legal historian who are working with Dirk Hartog at Princeton. Essentially they have asianist specialist advisers and Hartog did a generals field and is on their diss. committees. Can't get much more high value in legal history than him. He has a 100% hire rate for getting his students into law school teaching jobs if that's what they want. I took legal history from him with one of them last year and she has nothing but good to say about working with him. The department takes 1 or 2 legal historains a year and the problem is mostly getting into the departmental pool. But I can speak from experiance that the adcom is very friendly to applications that would mix fields logically.

Monk in the Garden, and Pasteurization of France. My mother tried to pick up the latter when I put it down at her house on the holiday. That didn't go so well for her...

Just as a heads up, i don't know how much i will check in over the next few months. I'm hitting full swing in generals prep, but if you have any princeton related questions PM me. I'll try to give people a heads up if hear department gossip but they're pretty good about keeping things quiet. They hit the yield they wanted last year so I suspect they're going to admit the same 36 expecting 22 they've done the last few years.

Graduate school is better than applying to graduate school. But as someone in the middle of preparing for my comprehensive exams... there are still emotional rollercoasters to come.

Rawson's book on Boston is very good. Read it a few weeks ago and might be the best individual book I've read this year.

The history world is small, especially in subfields, professors will talk to each other if there is something fishy about students. And it is dishonesty.

Ah. No. Certainly not the first choice. Yes, that page makes it look promising but those people are spread all over the school and in some cases it's a very big stretch to say they do environmental history. Many of the people listed aren't full time faculty and most of the rest are very junior. It makes figuring out which department to apply to difficult. The people within the history department aren't as well known for being disposed to environmental historians. They hold a great graduate student conference every year but it's a problematic place to apply to as an environmental historian.

Davis is where i'd look to be honest. Wisconsin is always good in environmental history. There are some intersting people at Rutgers, and Houston. Oklahoma may be more traditionally agricultral but they have good folks that do cities as well.

You should mention it. They can read your records and see something happened and without your narrative of what happened they can come up with many others less favorable to you. Show them that you have some self awareness.