New England Nat

In nearly all places except Harvard and Hopkins, Assistant Professors do not have tenure and Associate Professors do. In some of the top programs it is absolutely acceptable to ask when the last time they tenured an assistant professor was. Some of them do not, though many say they are changing. Yale and Harvard traditionally didn't. Princeton didn't until the last few years (there was a scandal about junior female faculty and there is still a fair bit of angst about junior female faculty here).

So there is a contract that will come in the paperwork for your admission if you haven't received it yet, the couple I got came a few days to a few weeks after the email saying I'd been accepted. The American Association of University Professors (or something like that I can't remember the name exactly) basically says that the schools should give you until April 1st to make decisions, but much to some of the schools annoyance, other schools will pressure you to make a decision before that point. I had a conversation about this with my Graduate Program Administrator and that's part of what is pushing this process earlier and earlier every year. Once a school has extended you a funded offer with paperwork it is a binding contract, it can only be revoked in the case of fraud on your part. If they've accepted you they want you. Some of them will woo you to a greater or lesser extent. I have a sibling with a PhD in history and the amount of wooing that went on from one school after they made an offer really surprised her. But either way, after you have an offer in hand the "don't contact them you can only do harm" rule is out the window. You should feel free to email anyone within the department that you believe can answer any questions that will help you make decisions.

That's a really good thing to do. I would encourage people who have an offer they know they aren't going to take that it should be declined quickly. Same goes for applications pending decisions at schools lower on your list than the offer or offers you have in hand. It's not just about being fair to the people on the waiting lists, it's about making sure your relationships with the PoIs at those institutions remains professional.

But you look like a Really Nice Guy

So maybe here is the time to tell a story... I have a masters from an institution with a program in a very specific set of related subfields. The department in general largely existed to give masters degrees to teachers, but had for at least twenty five years been trying to turn itself into a place that also was a stepping stone between undergrads and top level PhD programs. It was not Miami of Ohio but that is a good example of such a place. They did this by hiring a bunch of young interesting historians as professors and hoping they hit big. In fact they did and than they would get poached away to somewhere better. Harvard is very pleased to take credit for employing someone with big impressive prizes for her work and letting people think she did that work for them when she did it in my corner of the woods. As the most prominant example. They'd been getting people into very respectable very good PhD programs here and there during that time but they'd never gotten anyone into an Ivy. There were eight or so students in the department on the PhD market last year which was more than they normally had but I don't think the professors had thought about the idea that nearly all of them would get accepted somewhere. It was a case of we all had different mentors and so the shear number wasn't obvious to the entire department until about this time. I was the first one to get an acceptence. I got into an Ivy. I got into an Ivy not far from them geographically. The faculty basically lost their shit on the department list serve. They said really lovely things about me that I wish they had said to my face or to each other but not to a list serve that included those 7 other people. It was unseemly. Two days later before my next class I get an email from one of the people who had done this, asking me to "play it cool" because there were other people waiting. As if I had been the one to loose my shit on the list serve. I bought the grad students a round of beer and privately apologized. Almost all of them had acceptences within a week or two. Those that didn't had waitlists. Many schools have not said anything yet. It will come in time. I know it's hard. But i don't know that the people with acceptences have been gloating from what I've seen. Most advise for those of you with choices between good places is going on in PM. At least i know I've been talking over some with people who aren't asking me what living in Princeton is like. I'm perfectly happy to talk over Princeton specific things with people. But there is more going on in the PM universer above this thread than I think people realize. There is a lot of consideration going on to appear not to be gloating. YMMV

UNC and Duke run a miltiary history program togeather that has a lot of faculty but frankly military history can kind of ghettoize you in the historical profession, both because of the bias of academics and because there is so much poorly written military history.

Of an unconventional sort, yes. It's often the second or third field I use to describe myself.

Bingo. On the other hand it is trying to engage the larger intellectual movements of the turn of the 18th/19th century. One of my complaints about a lot of miltiary historiography is that it's often so isolated from general history scholarship. At least I find the Society for Military History to be kind of ... I'm not sure how to put my finger on it but it's nothing like what my other professional associations are like.

Wow Y, you really are punchy this week

Or the resources for putting togeather a good application are becoming more democractized by the information revolution. When my sibling applied for graduate school other than being mentored through the process there was just no way for her to know even how to put togeather an application.

It's a fairly good, war and society school military history. He's stretching it I think in some of his effort to drive home points of currency (war on terror, iraq references, things that I don't think will age well). But that's the project. Essentially that the Napoleonic wars were the first modern wars with total mobelization and vast societal changes driven by the enlightenment. As military history trying to be intellectual history it succeeds better than most books.

At the moment, Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Brewer, By Birth or Consent, Balogh, Government out of Sight: THe Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth Century America, and Bell, The First Total War: Napoleon's Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It. Something different next week of course

One of the hardest things for me to adjust to last year after I had spent so much time thinking about selling myself is that as soon as the acceptence letters go out things reverse. Now it's time for the programs to try and sell themselves to you. The professors can get REALLY attached. To this day I feel a bit bad because I know I was "the one that got away" for one PoI at a very good school last year. I still see him/her at conferences and we have awkward conversations.

I was thinking "We were so sure X was going to come to us last year but she went to Berkley so you owe me Y this year because I lost out on my favorite last year."

There is just a lot of play in the mix of the cohort and how many students which subfields get, which ones didn't get their favorite choices from the previous year...

I don't have an absolute answer, but I think it's more likely that it's based on your field rather than rack and stack at princeton. Especially given the schools policy of giving professors leave ever three years.

That's a complicated question that changes university to university and I've seen finance people take an hour to answer in big sessions. Don't expect one here.

Just a heads up, i'm perfectly happy to answer questions about the Princeton history department, unofficially, but i'm just me not a departmental representative, don't rely on me for specific answers re funding and I may choose to answer your question in PM if its a departmental gossipy sort of territory.

So I can only make a few educated guesses... but I suspect that they are trying very hard to hit the yield they want this year. Last year they hover yielded, and the year before they under yielded by a lot in both directions. Princeton isn't a money thing as the department is pretty wealthy even by princeton standards, but there is a question of how managable the cohort is. How big does History 500 get as a course, how big is the disertation perspect group going to be... there are administrative things that mean that a over large cohort is not a trivia problem even beyond money. Answered other details in PM.

UC Davis is a great school. And your top 2 is a great outcome. Congrats.

They didn't inform last year until very late in March.

That's really shocking. I've seen people shuttling between their offices with the packets and discussing them in the hall ways but whenever a current grad student or undergrad comes within earshot they stop talking about it.

The administrations of most schools are crazy. Learning how to work with the crazy is an important skill because it doesn't go away when you become faculty. However... this one of those classic very large highly respected history departments that relied heavily on graduate students to teach who were really mouth gapingly obvious that they saw me as a revenue generator (not because I'd pay tuition but because of how much ta service they could get out of me). I cross a couple of traditionally unrelated fields and the interviewer said "oh but I don't think we have anyone who ..." The person they had that did it had the office next to him. He hadn't even bothered to find out what s/he wrote about beyond geographic region. It went on like that for three or four other red flags.

They were crazy in ways that didn't really touch their undergrads, and I had sort of been aware of the department's strange qualities before I went down there for an interview. But it was like moving away and coming back to realize your home town friends are all crazypants.

I didn't get rejected by my undergrad, only because I ended up having a very weird interview there where I decided to back away from the crazy, but It's realy frustrating when you are in a relatively specialized field and your undergrad really is a legitimate place to look. They didn't discourage me for the record, because I had gone elsewhere for a masters degree... but the crazy was strong in them.