New England Nat

OSU accepts in waves and I suspect you wont be out of your misery until mid march.

Yes, most departments should have lists of grad students on their website. Pick someone in your field and contact them. My department gives the current grad students a list of email addresses and encourages us to write people.

This is why i highly suggest you talk to grad students in the program and not just professors.

And sometimes places that you don't think need to sell themselves put a high price on it. I know my program does but I had a conversation with one professor about someone in the accepted cohort and she practically looked mortified because she hadn't gotten around to emailing that person.

You aren't being pushy. Contact the PoI and anyone else there you might work with. Tell them you ahve other offers and let them try and sell you on the school. Don't make assumptions, professors are busy people and sometimes "oh i meant to email him/her" can just fall off their radar.

At a place with all the funding for their admits, the dean or the graduate school usually is just checking that the admits meet basic requirements. You have to remember that they are basically issuing an employment contract for 3-5 years. If for example, you look at my yearly tuition, my stipend, my health insurance... it's an expenditure of my institution over the course of my funding of around $500,000. At places where funding is less secure the department is likely to do something like send a ranked list and the gradschool or dean has to determine how many applicants a department gets. Where Number 13 on the history list is compared to Number 13 on the sociology list to determine which department gets the 13th admit.

I highly doubt people making under $20K (which many adjuncts do) a year without benefits are "petit bourgeoisie" by any sane definition.

I don't doubt you. It's just rather bizarre. It's a pretty standard practice in the discipline and professors who don't like it usually just don't answer the emails. Along with the ones that are busy with other things. One has to remember that cold contacting people is part of being professional. Just this morning I wrote an email to someone whose book was on my reading lists and had a very fruitful conversation with them. This is how professional networks are built.

There is a significant difference between trying to circumvent the process and intiating professional contact. Professors know they will be contacted by perspective graduate students. Sometimes they are quasi interviews. Sometimes it's just a case of "I'm not taking anymore students". The key is to let the professor control the narrative of the correspondance. But "hello I am x. I have been working on Y project and I think it intersects with your work in these ways...." is part of a professional conversation.

I would say you email a potential PoI to talk about something to do with their work sometime over the summer. In septemberish you write a second email about being interested in their program. If they respond positively you ask if they would be willing to speak on the phone. Dont' bother talking to anyone after mid november. Don't be offended if they don't reply. Don't write too many emails and don't copy and paste from each email. Might help, might not. They know what you are after from the first email but at least try to make it organic.

I think that just about covers it.

I don't remember the break down but between transcripts, test scores and application fees I spent $1600 on applying to 8 schools.

This is just what one professor told me. She said she started seriously with the writing sample.

It may also be that the economy has (ever so slightly) improved. Grad school applications always go up when the economy is bad. As for looking at the applications, it was described to me this way by a professor. They glance through most of the materials, they start reading the writing sample and at what point they stop is a key factor. As they aren't giving the applicant feedback on the paper they don't have to read through samples that aren't up to snuff. Than they go back and read the rest of the supportive materials closer for the ones they make it to the end of the writing sample. So YMMV.

I am at Princeton, and if you look at the first sentence of my second paragraph in the section you quoted you see i said that. The last sentence refers to the fact that people who have to pass in difficult languages like Chinese, Japanese, Arabic ect also pass in either French or German. All of the history of science people have to pass in French and German.

In the last few years the "cash cow" quality to North American candidates (and it counts for Canadians too) has started to devalue UK doctorates on the job market. So perhaps it's not exactly a rejection in the same way but it carries it's own set of problems for someone who wants to come back to the US to teach.

There is no reason to take an unfunded offer for a history PhD. An unfunded offer is essentially a rejection and the UK schools bank on north american students to pay their bills.

If you have an offer you know you are going to decline you should go ahead and decline it. You aren't really weighing your offers. I even withdrew my applications from some places I knew I wasnt' going to before they could make a decision.

I didn't say no one had ever gotten off, just that it would take a lot to do it. They accepted 38 people (counting one deferrral from last year) and they'd be happy with a cohort as small as 18. The fact of the matter is that Princeton yields better than 50%. I wish I could give you a better answer. I suspect that it's probably subfield dependent. Say if they had a very bad yield in a particular subfield they'd pull someone from that subfield off the wait list.

If you aren't comfortable doing it, don't do it, but the grad students will generally be helpful and they will have a better sense of the strengths and weaknesses of the department than you do. But than again i also notoriously last year told someone not to go to grad school at our visiting days because they were rather obsessed with the job market. If you are that obsessed (and I do think about it) while you are starting grad school you are just going to torture yourself for 6 years.

So as someone who will be talking to people visiting month... You should tell people you have other offers because they'll be able to answer your questions easier. Now i wouldn't say "oh i've already decided against you i'm just wasting your time and money by indulging this visit." But I know i certainly told someone last year they should take offer to go work with Richard White at Stanford and I know people who got told to go to Harvard at our visit. Especially with the current grad students, they don't have a bone in if you come or not. Though I'm liking Lafayette enough that I want her to come

For the curious, Princeton took 37 admits, +1 deferall from last year. They would have to have +20 people turn them down for them to pull from the wait list. That is a couple people more than their last few admitted cohorts.

No, i have generals exams this year. And I do remember him now.

I always seem to remember people more by their affiliation than their names at conferences. Name badges are my friend.

I'm afraid I don't recall. I went to a couple of breakfests and events in Madison.