New England Nat

It is in no way rude to check such boxes, assuming you are applying for a PhD.  The lifetime earning for a humanities and social sciences PhD do not merit paying for the degree. 
 
Repeat the mantra, "An unfunded history PhD is a preventable mistake."

It is in no way rude to check such boxes, assuming you are applying for a PhD.  The lifetime earning for a humanities and social sciences PhD do not merit paying for the degree. 
 
Repeat the mantra, "An unfunded history PhD is a preventable mistake."

It is in no way rude to check such boxes, assuming you are applying for a PhD.  The lifetime earning for a humanities and social sciences PhD do not merit paying for the degree. 
 
Repeat the mantra, "An unfunded history PhD is a preventable mistake."

If you need funding and that's the only way you will be able to attend Graduate school, then it's not rude to check boxes - it's being honest about your case so that they will know how to treat your application in the fairest possible manner.
 
If you get funding, you attend otherwise you don't attend because you don't have funding. If they like your application, they will find funding if they can, otherwise they will tell you they don't have funding and then you don't attend, period.
 
Although it is usually more difficult to get funding for Masters, I know several cases where Masters students got funding because their applications were highly appreciated by the faculty. Besides, usually it's possible to find out in advance before applying if a Masters program has funding.
 
A PhD without funding is not worth getting into.

I just wanted to let people know i'm back for the season.  I have not been reading for a few months.  For those of you who don't know me I'm a third year at Princeton and I field a fair number of PMs but I have to apologize to the person who was trying to contact me last month when Life Happened .

So I'm about to give more information about myself than I would normally.

I failed out of college when I was 19, a GPA so bad you would be shocked that it could be that low. I worked out "in the real world" for eight years taking a course at a time at the local community college as I could pay for it. Roughly six years in I got motivation and started going through classes like gang busters.

I transferred into my state's flagship state university where I graduated with a double major, but when I applied for PhD programs I didn't get in. It was 2009 and the bottom of the world had fallen out. It was beyond a bad year to apply to graduate school and I didn't get in anywhere. It was probably for the best because I didn't really understand where I should be going anyway. I went out of state to get a masters specific to my studying interests at a state school, and applied to PhD programs after my masters. I got into more than I didn't, including a couple of Ivys.

My GPAs were

First college .7
Community College 3.9
Second college 3.5 (language and 400 level sciences are killers).
masters 4.0

The adcoms will see a change over time, and understand that people can change. You may have to get a masters first just to put a point on it. My other friends who have similar fail out -> success -> PhD program stories also had to do masters. You sound like you are making sound decisions and are motivated. Apply to the programs that are best for you. The ones that are more likely to give you a second chance in life are going to be the schools that don't feel like they have to prove themselves. I didn't get into schools with History departments ranked in the 30-40 range, and got into ones in the 1-20 range. It is what it is.

My advice: Be prepared to explain your history in no more than 1 paragraph in your statement of purpose. Own responsiblity for your failures, say what you learned and that you are no longer that person.

I highly doubt a PhD program would take someone with a consolation masters from another PhD program. They are usually granted to people who are considered unsuitable for a PhD. Many underfunded PhD programs only fund students through their course work, so when they have finished comps and are writing their dissertation they have to work as adjuncts. It's a sure way to delay your dissertation because teaching and writing a dissertation is difficult.

ETA: I should add, I know someone with a consolation masters and a PhD. Their consolation masters is in a hard science and their PhD is in a humanities subject. So if you are planning on a radical change of field that is different than what I think you are describing.

I'm also seriously skeptical in this environment that you could get into any serious PhD program with a below 3.0 GPA. Or many of the fine masters programs that are used as a launching pad to a good PhD program. I know of places that take just about anyone who applies who would reject that GPA.

Nothing about your post suggests to me that you would have any chance of getting a PhD in history. Perhaps another life choice is in order.

Benefits: usually cheaper than a US MA, closer to research materials and ability to learn the local language, if they relate to your interests (assuming so, if you're doing medieval/classical).
 
Drawbacks: might not be as well-recognized by US admissions committees, or they might feel that their standards are lower if they're not, say, a prestigious UK school.

I have a JD and applied for PhDs this last cycle. Not much to add here that others haven't said, but maybe I can contribute some nuggets from my own experience:
 
- Part of me wonders whether applying for a PhD after being a lawyer for some time made me stand out in the application process in a less than helpful way. I may not have seemed as serious about history as someone coming in with a masters and a job in the archive. Doing so while still in law school might be a different experience, but may still raise similar questions. Even formal joint JD/PhDs are still a relatively rare and novel thing in history academia, I think. And it seems from experience that law schools are more receptive to receiving people who have begun their PhDs than vice versa.
 
- Professors have asked me why I didn't pursue a JD/PhD concurrently, and this question might come up if you begin attending law school and then apply for a PhD later.
 
- Your chances of admission are much higher if there is a legal historian working in the department you're applying to (and on the same region/topic/issue/time period), even if you say you want to study policy and politics instead. These people will be the most excited to have a JD with formal training as a student.
 
- Almost nowhere is a university's law school well integrated with its arts and sciences departments, so you will probably need to seek support from your law school and the other school's history department, and will rarely be able to cross disciplinary lines on any one campus.
 
- You will probably need a recommendation from a law professor if you've started classes in law school, since it will have been your most recent academic experience, but this could also hurt you, since law professors won't know how to write recommendation letters targeted at history departments.
 
- Definitely try and figure out which teaching market you want to apply in early. Legal academia places emphasis on published papers, the more the better, and the papers will ideally be in legal journals and in a very disciplinarily unique format. Law students frequently publish. History PhDs, however, rarely publish papers, and tend to focus on publishing their dissertations as books. I've encountered history academics who actually discourage publishing before finishing a dissertation so as not to have to include "embarrassing" early works on a CV. Trying to adhere to both publishing cultures seems to be very challenging.

YMMV.  I think it's relatively meaningless.  It's a line on your CV yes, but it's going to carry very little weight in an application relative to the SoP and writing sample. 

DO participate in PAT because it has the potential to be personally rewarding and could aid in your professionalization as an historian.
 
DO NOT participate in PAT because you think it will help you get into grad school. It really won't help you in any meaningful way. 

Also try The Spitting Image by Jerry Lembcke.

What about Ron Kovic's Born of the Fourth of July? He is probably the most famous anti-Vietnam veteran. It is a memoir so I don't know if that is what you wanted. 

I'd look at Nicosia's Home to War. Can't remember if there's anything in Christian Appy's Working-Class War about protest, specifically. But maybe.

I think you also need to understand that some of this is personality that you wouldn't be able to figure out until you work with someone.  I have one adviser rather than another because the second one intimidates me to inaction despite that not being his/her intension. 

http://www.etsy.com/shop/sharpwriter?page=1
 
I mostly liked Teddy when he was machine gunning big foot

Though interdisciplinary might be out of the basement and in the streets it isn't quite into the parlors yet.  People say they are interested in it in theory but often get confused and hostile when presented with it in reality.

The whole idea of a safety school in this process is sort of silly, anyway

Not sure about that. The UK newspapers go all-out ranking in their "leagues tables". Germany is increasingly concerned with this kind of thing. There are plenty of Asian rankings systems, too. Call it another unfortunate American cultural export or symptom of runamok globalization, but it's slowly making headway in the rest of the world, for sure.

I think it depends on the field if memory is hot or not.  Fields that have been doing memory for a while are rather tired of it but there are sections of the profession that haven't used the tools before.

Now the fun part is watching professors grill their grad students to find out who they think they've got.  Mine were very happy about lafayette. 

Take it from me.  I graduated with a MA from a top public and had 2 LORs from solid scholars (including a superstar).  I had a fabulous, ground-breaking (in ways) thesis and converted a chapter of it for an article that went under review by a well-respected journal in my subfield (and used it as a writing sample).  I had 3 working languages.  Of course, my GRE wasn't great but I was told not to worry too much about it.
 
I went (accepted-declined-waistlied)
2010: 0-3-2
2011: 1-6-1 (unfunded acceptance)
2012: 2-2-0 (one additional withdrawn)
 
My list varied each year with only one school that I applied to for 3 years in a row.  I applied to 2 other places twice.   Also, the application improved dramatically over the years.
 
Why didn't I get in?  Part of it, I learned, was that my application got caught in departmental politics.  One school said that my statement wasn't strong enough.  One said that my specialized language wasn't advanced enough.  Nonetheless, many of the professors were interested and I've kept in touch or caught up with them at conferences.  Also, my subfield sometimes didn't make it to the final cut.
 
Too many variables and there's not much you can do except just put your best foot forward, apply, and make sure you're already doing something else so that you already have something to do in the fall should nothing pan out in your favor.  I spent a lot of time scrambling to keep my life pieced together and the 10% unemployment rate at the time hardly helped at all.
 
It does happen to the best of us.  Certainly I've become much more thankful for being in a PhD progam and the opportunities that come along in my way.  The process was very, very trying emotionally but it's a good professionalization experience.  Learn how to accept rejections gracefully and understand that it's not always about you.
 
There is a reason why academia is considered to be soul-sucking.   You have to try and divest yourself from the process emotionally.

The only thing I argued in my post was that the rank of a program matters, not because 2 is greater than 65, but because of what those ranks tend to represent in terms of the relative social position of a program’s faculty vis-à-vis the academy and the amount of resources the program has at its disposal relieve faculty and graduate students from teaching responsibilities so that they can dedicate their time to their work. I even tried to be a bit nuanced about it with statements like “To the extent institutional rank maps onto institutional resources and support,” which if you read it properly clearly acknowledges the existence of programs like Tulane, where apparently institutional rank does not map onto institutional resources and support.
 
That fact of the matter is that I was specifically talking about “the graduate admissions process and the current state of the academic job market” and the need to have those discussions in terms of broad trends rather than exceptions. I was not casting any dispersion about programs in general or individuals specifically. There are any number of reasons why you could have read into my post the argument “that someone like me should probably have just not attended grad school,” but none of them came from the actual content of the post.
 
So just to be specific for a bit, let’s look at Tulane’s statistics. According to the website there are 40 graduate students in the program. Assuming the time to completion is between 6 and 7 years, which is often the case for programs that offer five years of funding, that’s an average cohort size of about 6 students. According to the department’s site, 2 students got TT jobs in 2007, 4 in 2008, and 2 in 2009, for a very rough average of 3 per cohort. So, it seems to me there are two versions of the Tulane story. A) Don’t worry about the ranking because we have examples of students getting TT jobs, or B ) 50% of our graduate students don’t get TT jobs. The entire point of my post was that in terms of discussions about admission and the job market, story A is disingenuous and, I would argue, unethical to promote (despite the very true and real success stories of those students). The only story that we should be talking about is story B.
 
To the extent there is a problem, it isn’t with you. Like I said in my post, the difference between the student in Program 2 and the one in Program 65 isn’t that the former is smarter than the latter. The problem is with Tulane. A program that can only point to a 50% success rate in attaining for its students the type of job they spend six to seven years training for probably shouldn’t have a doctoral program. This is a problem shared by most programs, all the way up into the top ten. The move on the part of programs to relying on under paid and over worked adjunct and part-time faculty is in part facilitated by the over production of PhDs. In order to inflate their own desired sense of prestige, programs invite too many perfectly adequate and entirely sincere students into their doctoral programs, to feed off their hope and dreams in order to harvest cheap labor and maybe a bump of one or two notches on some ranking.

Exactly. Who knows, and it doesn't help to compare yourself too much to another, especially since you don't know exactly what was going on in her application/at the institutions to which she applied. I remember when I was in my MA program and lurking around here, I became terrified that I had neither conference presentations nor published work under my belt. I thought for sure compared to others I would be doomed in these categories, but it didn't matter much in the end, as far as I know. Which isn't to say that having experience in these areas wouldn't help boost someone else's application. But nothing is ensured, and trying to measure if it is via someone else is only going to drive you nuts and offer you little. (Instead, perhaps focus that energy on a research project or improving your writing -- little things that can only help you).

Also, as I think I've mentioned here before, I went to a public institution for my MA in History after playing around in an interdisciplinary program in undergrad. My MA program has no reputation whatsoever -- although I found out after enrolling though that it did have some rocking faculty, since that's the nature of the job market at this point, and their recommendations were definitely key. I think it was getting a little better bit by bit, but no one that I knew of from the Master's program went on to any top PhD program (there was a better track record for undergrads). Mostly its existence was premised on providing additional education to social studies teachers (our classes were all at night). My coursework was amazing and challenging, but really, it was not a program whose name one would brag about. ALL this said, I just want to encourage one NOT to ever dismiss one's chances totally on the supposed prestige of a school. Granted, you're really going to want to try to stand out in such a program, but don't panic too much over what you can't change. And by the way -- the schools I got into seemed particularly interested in gathering cohorts from a diverse range of educational institutions, and I'm grateful for that.

Now the fun part is watching professors grill their grad students to find out who they think they've got.  Mine were very happy about lafayette.