New England Nat

If you do good work you could be taken. I have a community college degree among my credentials. And a princeton student ID.

If you are interested in the cold war you should look into Michael Gordin's work at princeton.

Yes.

Don't ask how i know this... The University of MN history department is now making final decisions and will be taking 14 students (down from previous years by half). My source is VERY good.

Roxelana, congradulations. If you have any questions about princeton feel free to PM me.

"Why did you apply to Wisconsin, it snows there?" "Why are you waiting on X school to respond Y school you got into is better!" [not in my field] "You study science?" [ah... not exactly] "Must be hard to study that as a girl...." [Well... no actually, those supposedly backwards people who put their lives on their line to defend your academic freedom have never treated me with anything but respect... and wouldn't call me a girl.] "That Princeton tuition must be an arm and a leg...." "Oh, you must be super rich (or smart) to be at Princeton...." "How many copies of your book will sell?" "How much was your book contract for?" [My mother to my sister when told that she was publishing with Big Name University Press] "Oh, you don't want to work there, it's hot, cold, distant, boring, a red state..." "The service academies aren't like real universities... why do you talk to those people?"

I think it's more historians are not really super comfortable with alternate history fiction. They also tend to be very dismissive of historical re-enacting.

Only Guns of the South and that was ages ago. Weirdly it came up during a Civil War job search and everyone who accidently admitted to having read it was slightly embarrassed.

Not that I know of, I think you would have to ask the kinds of information people got there.

I've also been reading pulpish military fiction I read as a teenager. W.E.B. Griffin... boy those books have a lot more sex than I remembered.

If you are taken off the wait list before the weekend I suspect you get to go. If not... well, you just have to make your decisions without visiting.

You should view it as a casual discussion. Use the time to explore people in the department that might be interesting to you but aren't nessecarily your PoI. THey'll sell you on the program or you can just talk about your work.

Okay, longish description of the Princeton days It's sunday evening, monday, and a good part of tuesday. Prospective students arrive sunday evening, and there is a open bar with current graduate students in their hotel. Monday morning they set up breakfest (fruit, bagels, coffee, orange juice, that sort of thing) and have a group meeting with the department chair, DGSs, and Graduate History Association leaders to discuss general details of the program. Than they have a grad students only group meeting with a handful of grad students carefully selected for their represenativeness (an Americanist, a Medievalist, someone not one of those two, someone who is married, someone who is living off campus, someone who is living in the graduate college and someone who is living in one of the princeton apartments...). They try to find four or five people who fit. After that they go to Prospect House (the faculty dining club) for lunch with professors. After lunch the day becomes unstructured. There are sign ups to meet with basically every faculty member that is not on leave in ten minute blocks, and when not meeting with whoever you want to meet with you can sit in on classes (people walk in and out of them as they go to meetings with professors). There are also opertunities to tour firestone library. That evening they take you out ot a local resteraunt and you have another meal (with alcohol) with professors and a smattering of grad students. After that is over there is another open bar in the prospective students hotel with grad students again. Tuesday there is breakfest again, this time more social with grad students, and a repeat of the library tours, meeting with professors, sit in on classes option. I would suspect most visiting weekends are similar minus the three opertunities to get yourself smashed. Which btw, I'd avoid getting too smashed at dinner on monday but sunday night and monday after dinner you are welcome to get buzzed

I can give a description of the Princeton weekend but I didn't go to any others and Princeton its it's own weird universe.

I wouldn't assume that most places had a holiday yesterday. I've been through several state universities and now an ivy and none of them had presidents day off. I would bet that many departments were working yesterday.

Yeah, that was the point of that particular story. I told it mostly to make people aware that choices about formality that you might use do have the potential to be harmful even if you don't mean it (hense the judge in the case). But we all know that there are different rules for men and women. Although everyone dresses more formally here than they did at any other school I'd ever been to, the female professors almost uniformly dress better than the men.

Oh, absolutely. My department is super formal and I have some professors that are "first name" and some that are sometimes first name and sometimes "Prof. last name". And some people I think I'll be calling "Prof. Last Name" when I am up for retirement. Also very common is "Last Name" when referring to someone but not in their presence. One person specifically told people that she was "Prof. Last Name" until they passed their generals examinations, and than she could be "First Name". I know of someone at Penn who was "Prof. Last Name" until you were hooded. So no, there isn't a rule, and believe me, Princeton loves rules so if one existed we'd be following it.

My parents both have PhDs and my mother very early on taught me that a PhD shouldn't use his or her title in a social setting. But than again neither should an MD and that it's pretentious on both counts. Unless you are in an academic or medical setting it is pretentious. But if you are in a medical setting you may find that even if a doctor wanted to be called by his first name the people around them wont do it. One of my siblings is a MD and tried to get nurses to use her first name and they just wont do it. She's an attending and someone around has to be "Doctor". The med students and the residents she never tried because it's a hiearchy thing. But the one thing that will make her rant a storm is the "MD" license plate. But she's my mother's daughter. When my parents were divorcing my father's lawyer (and the judge) kept calling him "Dr." and her "Mrs". They both had PhDs from the same department in a science. So the long and the short of it. "Dr." in the class room or in an academic setting not pretentious. "Dr." at a party, pretentious.

Yes, some professors signal that they want to be called by their first names and some do not. But I think Stafferz is correct that one should be very clear about those signals before committing to calling a person by their first name. I think the idea that how someone signs their email is a clear signal on this count is ... misguided. I have a professor who signs his email "M", do I think he wants me to call him that like he's got asperations to replace Judy Dench when she gives up the role? No. Email is just different. If you keep calling them "Dr./Prof. Smith" while everyone else is calling them "John" you are making a mistake. As with most things in graduate school do what is common in the culture around you, and as a first year graduate student take the lead from the second years.

No way of knowing that I'm afraid. What was posted was a list of names, fields, previous institutions and email addresses. And the fields thing is natoriously ... vague. For instance "China/Japan" is something that gets joked about a lot.

I didn't count specifically, I think two. Both from Indian universities. There might have been a third but I wouldn't put money on it.

The post only relates to Princeton and is entirely based on the information they released today. Basically they could have more than a third of the people they made offers to decline before I think they'd pull from the wait list.

It is also very possible that they will decide to skip a year for Africanists. One of the major Africanists professors will be on leave next year.

Please see my post in the chat thread about Princeton's wait list.

So I'm going to be brutal here and I'm sorry for that. The department at Princeton today released the list of accepted students by field to the current graduate students. It did not include Stafferz so they had already taken her decline into account. Not including Stafferz they accepted 35 people (last year they accepted 36), so they did not change their rate of acceptence at all. They are aiming for a yield of 22-23 again. With one exception this makes the idea that they will take anyone off the wait list very low. The composition of the cohort, with about 10 Americanists including the early americanists and the legal historians, makes me believe it is nearly impossible that they will take any Americanists off the wait list. In terms of composition relative to last year they took only half as many medievalists (if you include Byzantinists). So my suspicion that they were going to take more Americanists this year was correct. So the one exception. With Stafferz declining of their offer there are no Africanists on the list. In previous years they have taken one or two a year. This leads me to believe that if they take anyone off the wait list at all it will be an Africanist. But there is hardly a guarrentee of that. I'm sorry to be the bringer of bad news.... but there is very little room for interpretation given the list they posted. I just thought it best to make sure those of you on the Princeton wait list have realistic expectations.