marXian

I know not many on the forum applied to Northwestern, but admitted students were contacted last week. 6 admitted, 3 in American Religions, 3 in Buddhism.

I think the Harvard MTS program is comparatively less competitive than the other three. I'm not sure how the Yale MARc stacks up against ND or FSU, but as you probably know, ND's program tends to be quite competitive. I think the main concern regarding stats would be GRE scores. You said your verbal score was "significantly" lower than 161. 161 is probably not good enough for some PhD programs (although, I had a 161 and I attend an elite school). But it is, I would think, good enough for most M* programs. By significantly lower, do you mean like a 155-158? Or do you mean a 140? If you're not in at least the 80th percentile (guessing), then a program might run into problems regarding any funding they could offer you since universities tend to have hard numbers on GRE scores and GPAs for that sort of thing. I don't know what the exact number would be (I imagine it varies school to school) so take my stab at the 80th percentile with a grain of salt. The GRE sucks, but keep in mind that if you have your sights set on a PhD, you'll need to be, at the very least, in the 90th percentile and probably higher to be competitive at schools that take the GRE seriously. I wouldn't worry too much about the Fs or undergrad GPA. A 3.6 is good enough for consideration. Overall, your profs are right that your letters and SOP carry a lot of weight. Grad school is not like getting into undergrad where stats and extracurriculars matter a lot. Those things matter, but a really stunning SOP and excellent letters can outweigh other areas that might be lacking.

You'll be a competitive MDiv applicant at all of those schools.

The thing is that divinity schools and seminaries are unlike other humanities grad school programs. You mentioned acceptance rates being much higher than other programs; that's typically because you do not need any academic background in religion/theology to be admitted (this tends to be more true of MDiv/ministry than MTS students, and varies from school to school). Compelling reasons for wanting to pursue study at a div school/seminary coupled with an "interesting" background are what get people admitted (along with a decent GPA, etc.) As far as Coursera goes, I wouldn't waste a dime on it. Even the free courses provide very little background knowledge. I took a few courses when it first launched just to see what it was like, and I was unimpressed. Granted, that was 2012, and things have likely changed since then, but I really doubt that the content is going to be worth your time. You'd be better off reading some survey books on your own.

Tbh, I don't know if you can assume that. The current DGS is relatively new (in her second year), which means some changes could have been made to the admissions process. The grad committee isn't transparent with current students about that process unless asked (understandable since it's not really info that affects us directly.) I know that four students will be extended offers this year. That's up from last year when only one student was extended an offer. Four is about normal for us. The admissions committee has never made decisions by subfield--it's always a general pool, and they look at how well potential students fit together in an incoming cohort.

Since the 2014-15 cycle, Northwestern has typically done a Skype interview. Not sure if that has changed. The visiting weekend, however, has always been for admitted students. I know that the RS faculty is meeting next week to make final admissions decisions.

That's why more than 50% of NU grad students live in Chicago. ? Rogers Park is significantly cheaper than Evanston and significantly more awesome. Though I have no idea how it compares to Atlanta. I'd guess your dollar still goes further there.

They may care about the GRE, but I would be surprised if a lower than average Q score outweighed perfect V and AW scores. Not surprised--shocked. If the GRE is that important, then perfect V and AW scores have to matter a lot.

It's been pretty widespread for a while I think. I remember people saying the same thing on this forum back in the 2012 application cycle.

Yeah, you're going to be totally fine on the GRE front. I wouldn't worry about that quant score at all.

Based on what you've said, you don't fall into this class. I mean people applying with just a BA, a below 3.0 GPA, and bad GREs. Or maybe someone who just slapped an application together from scratch days before a deadline with no editing at all let alone polishing. Maybe someone who only has a BA and an MDiv from a school like Liberty but is applying to TT PhD programs. It really depends on the subfield too, especially for language preparation as others have already said. In Biblical Studies, if I had a BA from Harvard with a high GPA and good GRE scores but absolutely no formal language training, I would have no business applying to top Biblical Studies programs. There's just no way I would get in. In my field (theology/phil of religion, broadly speaking) things are different. I had very little language training before being admitted (1 semester of German from 4 years before my application, 1 semester of Italian from almost 10 years before.) But I was admitted, and the department just expected me to figure it out (I passed the German and French language exams in my second year.) It's less of a concern the more modern your period of study. If I'd wanted to work on any figure from the 18th century or earlier, I would've needed Latin--but again, my advisor was willing to let me pick that up as I was doing my other coursework. So when you say "liturgical studies," it really depends on both the period and the methodology. A colleague of mine from my department wrote her dissertation on the history of the change in the Mass liturgy from Latin to English in the U.S. during the 20th century, focused mostly on working class communities. She did not learn Latin to write that dissertation let alone need it to be admitted to the program. But she's also a historian, not a text scholar. Two modern research languages was enough to satisfy her advisor.

Again, this really depends on the faculty member, but for a lot of programs, if they think your project sounds really interesting and promising and they think that there is at least a combination of faculty who can support it, you have a shot. There are, of course, advisors out there who want to produce clones. But by and large I think many faculty are happy to supervise projects they think are really interesting even if those projects are only adjacent to their own interests. Fit can also depend on who else an adcom is considering for your cohort. I remember being told in my second or third year that part of the reason I was admitted along with two other students in my cohort is because the three of us were all roughly interested in similar periods of German philosophy/theology, but they do Jewish philosophy/theology, and I do Protestant and social theory. The adcom, I guess, thought we could benefit each other by coming in together and going through the program together. (And they were right!) That's a really specific and somewhat arbitrary way to judge fit--but it speaks to the arbitrariness of this process. There's no magic bullet. Sometimes you just have to be applying to the right place at the right time. And I know that the job market is likely the furthest thing from your mind right now (it was for me when I was applying) but the level of arbitrariness just gets worse. At this level (both Ph.D and job applications) nearly everyone has merited enough to deserve a place in a program. All the things people are suggesting in this thread? More applicants than there are spaces in programs have done those things and more. Sure, there are people who have absolutely no business applying to top Ph.D programs. But the majority who are have done enough to earn a spot on merit alone. This is even more true for the job market. I would say 99.9% of job applicants have merited enough to deserve a job. If you've been admitted to a program, gone through the whole thing, and are on the verge of defending your dissertation, you have done enough to earn a job. But there's more! Publications? Yep. Conference presentations? Probably more than the applicant can remember. Grant wins? Yes. But everyone who is up for the same jobs likely has all of that too. And there really is no way to know for sure what it is that puts one over the top for a given job. You send an application out into the void and just hope that something clicks with at least one hiring committee because, usually, everyone applying has revised their letters dozens of times, refined writing samples, research and teaching statements, diversity statements, statements of faith in some cases, etc. and usually in such a way that they've hit all the buzzwords, all the eye-catching turns of phrase, all the things that are supposed to get the attention of a hiring committee. But whether or not they do really is almost completely arbitrary. I know that's depressing. But it's the reality of the academe at just about every stage of one's career (since the same arbitrariness applies to the grants and fellowships one tries to win as a faculty member.)

@dkhp124 I'm sending you a PM.

The undergrad GPA will be somewhat concerning, but it can be addressed in your SOP (briefly) and your graduate work so far clearly demonstrates that you're not that student anymore. I honestly wouldn't be too concerned about one low mark in a graduate program. My two MA GPAs were 3.89 and 3.7, my BA was 3.17, and I got into an elite school. Thankfully with Ph.D applications, numbers usually tend to count a lot less than more subjective measurements like fit determined by your writing sample and SOP. Your M* GPAs are good enough I think. Regarding the GRE, I'll say my experience was that I routinely scored slightly higher on my Princeton Review practice tests than the actual GRE. Not sure why that was, and I don't know if that's a common experience. If you were to score exactly what you got on the practice test, you'd be in pretty good shape. A verbal score of 163, while not out of this world, is high enough to be competitive I think, and a 5.5 on AW is definitely good enough. Aside from those factors, strong letters will definitely go a long way as will a strong writing sample and SOP. It's hard to gauge chances for individual programs without knowing your more specific areas of interest and who you want to work with, but generally, your chances of getting into Fuller will be higher than Duke or Chicago. That said, I'd strongly caution against going to a program that you'll have to pay for (Fuller.) I did my second MA at Fuller and knew many Ph.D students who struggled financially and went into enormous debt for their degree. With job prospects being what they are, that is, in my view, a huge mistake.

I agree with both of you: People are all over the place under "Religion and Modernity." But I think I can try and categorize the kinds of approaches to this subfield that I think are out there. 1. Religion and Modernity as Philosophy of Religion, 1650-1950 People like Mark Cladis and Thomas Lewis at Brown or Tom Carlson at UCSB would fall under this heading. They're interested in the ways that "religion" gets deployed and developed as a concept in concert with emerging "modern" ideas about knowledge, "spirit," liberalism, etc. Carlson is a Heidegger scholar primarily. Lewis is a Hegel scholar. Cladis is more interested in the emergence of "the academic study of religion" at the turn of the 20th century (he wrote the forward to the Oxford edition of Durkheims Elementary Forms of Religious Life.) In any case, the focus in these kinds of tracks tends to be on philosophy. 2. Religion and Modernity as Secular Studies or Anti-Secularization Thesis Studies This is itself a really broad category, so I'll break it down a little further. There is significant overlap between the two sub points, which is why I'm including them together under this larger heading. 2.a Modernity and State Power I took a course at my institution titled "Religion and Modernity" that was co-taught by a religious studies prof and poli sci prof that I think captures this trend really well. It was focused completely on the ways in which "religion" is deployed as a category for disciplining colonized "savages" into liberal subjects of the democratic state. For example, part this disciplining could be defining religion in such a way that it excludes those groups that threaten the state's power as "superstition" or "cult" and, therefore, those groups are not protected under liberal democracy's "freedom of religion." An analysis of this necessarily includes a critique of "the secular" as a concept, i.e. as ultimately a product of Protestant Christianity, a critique that's been in fashion in religious studies for the last 25 years or so but is probably waning a bit. I think Jason Josephson-Storm's work on this is really interesting (though he doesn't advise doctoral students). The Invention of Religion in Japan takes the critique of secularism in some different directions. Winnie Sullivan at Indiana is another person who comes to mind doing this sort of work. Robert Orsi and Elizabeth Shakman Hurd at Northwestern also have interests here. 2.b. The Myth of the Secular I seperated this from the previous category because here I think the focus is less on states and sovereignty and more on the discourses of academia and the emergence of academic disciplines as "secular." Cladis at Brown could probably also fit here. Josephson-Storm also belongs here with his second book The Myth of Disenchantment. The main argument in this line of thought is that contemporary academics tell themselves a story about the Enlightenment being the moment where we were emancipated from the chains of religion and became free to pursue purely secular lines of inquiry but that this story is actually false when you examine the lives and interests of the major champions of this narrative. Josephson-Storm's book, for example, is an intellectual history from about Francis Bacon to the mid-20th century that shows the deep ties to magical thinking, occult practices, etc. that engulfed these figures. People working here are sort of doing a mix of philosophy and intellectual history, discourse analysis, etc. Of course within any of these you'll find people who are doing all kinds of different projects methodologically speaking. I have many friends in my program who would consider themselves historians or Americanists who are definitely doing projects that would fit in 2a. My program doesn't have a "religion and modernity" track--their presence in the department is a product of the faculty that we have or had when they were applying. Hope that helps.

The problem with trying to improve the AWA is that it's completely subjective. The very first time I took the GRE, prior to any graduate school and with no studying, I scored a 5.5 on the AWA. The next two times I took it, including after two MA programs and teaching argumentative writing for two years, I could never get higher than a 5. Now, clearly I didn't have to worry with that score. But your verbal score is relatively high and because of that, I'd think that a 4.5 AWA score--at worst--puts you on the fence for some adcoms. Plus the AWA is naturally supplemented by your writing sample. The adcoms will be able to see for themselves whether you can write or not. I agree with sacklunch; don't worry about retaking it. Put your time and energy into your SOP and writing sample.

Chandler is probably the most well-known in that region, but it's in Atlanta (on Emory's campus.)

Divinity schools and seminaries are not like traditional grad programs in that they are nowhere nearly as competitive to get into. YDS is, from my understanding more competitive than others, but still not as competitive as an MA program in classics, religion, etc. The latter usually only have, maybe say 10-40 students depending on the program, some maybe fewer than that. So even if a small number apply, they're filling a very small number of slots usually. That's not the case for seminaries and div schools who admit hundreds of students a year. The other thing is that seminaries and div schools don't generally assume a background in religion, especially for the MDiv. Now, if you're considering a concentrated MAR from YDS, you'd be in trouble probably. But you would definitely have a shot at MDiv programs at, say, Harvard, PTS, Duke, etc. At most of these schools, once you're in, it's possible to switch degree programs if you decide the MDiv isn't for you.

This is well said.

Yes, I think this is exactly right. My colleagues who engage "the field" itself, try to situate themselves as a "scholar of religion," etc. have tended to do well both for fellowships/grants and jobs.

I'd echo sacklunch by saying that this is really subfield dependent and that having an ongoing conversation with your advisor(s) is really important. I'll say it is generally true that religious studies departments are more friendly to people who have a PhD in a different field, but the reverse is rarely true. Philosophy and history departments are especially "title protective" in this regard--they really only hire people with PhDs in their field. It's also true though that those departments tend to care very little about religion qua religion (whatever that really means). Ironically, perhaps, these disciplines tend to simply assume they know what religion is when and if it is engaged, which is usually not an assumption made in religious studies. To me, that's the primary difference. Broadly speaking, religious studies scholars are interested in the construction of religion as a category (to varying degrees, to be sure), whereas other disciplines tend not to interrogate the concept in this way. I have a colleague in the history department at NU who started in my cohort in religious studies and transferred after his first year to history. He also does American Religious History. He kept his advisor (Bob Orsi) but was spared having to engage the theoretical aspects of religious studies in coursework and exams. He probably sits somewhere between history and RS disciplinarily. Orsi is a good example actually of an American religious historian with a PhD in history who fits much better in a religious studies department and has spent most of his career in RS departments rather than history. Not all history PhDs could exist in a religious studies department, even if they study "religion" primarily. They'd have to be conversant with the history of the field (both RS and ARH in the context of RS) and at least familiar with some of the theoretical stakes in RS. Many of the more well-known American religious historians, as I'm sure you know, have PhDs in religious studies, not history. John Modern, Katie Lofton, Curtis Evans, John Corrigan, Jason Bivins, Sylvester Johnson (his is actually in theology), etc. All PhDs in religious studies. So to answer your second question, it's hard to say there's a real practical advantage. Practicality and a humanities PhD don't exactly go hand in hand, which is to say that a PhD in religious studies may improve your ability to be hired in an RS department, but that's not really saying much since the job market is so bad across the board. Whether your PhD is in history, religious studies, philosophy, etc., your chances of getting a tenure track job are pretty much all equally bad. From a disciplinary/scholarship perspective, an RS department should (at least ostensibly) familiarize you with the kinds of general theoretical conversations I mention above--you're not likely to get that at all in a history department.

Honestly the thing that put the administration over the edge was outgoing Dean Zoloth's very public fight with the Div School coffee shop, Grounds of Being, over their lease agreement with the university. In short, she wanted to charge them exponentially more in rent than they could have reasonably paid as a means of moving toward closing the deficit that xypathos describes. She chose the wrong hill to die on. Alumni got involved. It was unnecessarily ugly. I will say though that the change in leadership for the Div School is very very good news for students ultimately. PM me if you want to hear more.

Thanks, theory. Are students required to teach their own courses, or is that just something that most generally do? Outside of the teaching committee, is there any institutional support for people new to teaching their own courses? (e.g. a university-wide teaching certificate program, etc.)

Thanks, sacklunch! Just to clarify--it sounds like the teaching certificate is something offered graduate school-wide but that the requirements for it are specific to the department. Is that correct? I.e. is the pedagogy course part of the certificate requirements? (I'd be curious to know why people think it's a waste of time, but you don't have to tell me!)

Hi all, This is slightly different from our usual advice fare. I'm a "Graduate Teaching Fellow" this year at Northwestern's teaching/pedagogy center. Part of my role throughout the year has been to develop a project to improve pedagogical practices within my department. My goal has been to provide evidence to the chair, DGS, and DUS that formal opportunities for pedagogical training within the department are lacking (they're non-existent) outside of TA assignments and that we need such opportunities as part of grad student professional development. I'm building on work of past GTFs who have pushed the department for the development of a course in pedagogy--that's the dream. In the meantime, I would settle for an ongoing workshop series or a faculty-student teaching committee or something like that. In developing my case, I'm trying to gather some qualitative evidence to present the faculty. I've put on my own workshop series on writing a syllabus for Theory & Method, I have survey responses from past GTFs about their workshops, I've surveyed recent grads from my department who are currently teaching, etc. I don't have any information about other RS departments, however, and I think that would be a good piece to include. If any current PhD students on the forum are comfortable sharing either in this thread or as a PM, I would be interested to hear about the following: - In your department, is there opportunity to teach your own course(s), i.e. teach outside of TAing? - What kinds of pedagogical support/training does your department provide? The only major programs that I'm familiar with in this regard are FSU, since we've had some alumni in our department, and UCSB since I have some friends there, but I welcome responses from anyone! If you reply, I don't need your name, but please let me know what school you attend. Thanks!