Professor Plum

Not that it will mean much from a Random Internet Stranger, but I'm sorry you didn't get in. I've been dropping by this thread every so often and I was really rooting for you. My gut was telling me that you were going to be accepted, and I'm sorry you weren't. I'm sure you're feeling a lot of disappointment. To me, this is the single best reason not to pursue a PhD in the humanities. There are many wonderful things about a life in the academy, but one baseline is you don't get to choose where you live. It sounds like you have an unusually deep connection to Minneapolis, and that's fantastic. Hold on to it. But let it inform your career choices now, rather than start you down a road that is without question going to take you away from a place that you love. I think you've said someplace else that you'd be willing to leave Minneapolis to start an academic career. But it's worth thinking about now exactly what that academic career looks like: You'd be graduating with a degree in a highly-specialized field from a good but hardly elite program. The chances of landing a tenure-track appointment are pretty low. And many of the tenure-track jobs that do exist are at smaller, regional schools, many in the south. It's not like you'd be leaving the Minneapolis you love for Ithaca; odds are, you'd be leaving for a small, two-stoplight town a hundred miles from an airport. You wouldn't be teaching your specialty to highly-motivated, younger versions of yourself; you'd be teaching a 4-4 load of World History to a bunch of indifferent undergrads. Your boyfriend also has a PhD; there may not be much in the way of work for him in that town. And some of these towns have a massive gap between the college and the rest of the residents; many of my friends are now getting concerned about the quality of the public schools in the places they've wound up. That's the best-case scenario. The other scenarios are a lot worse. Don't get me wrong: Teaching history is a wonderful job, and I feel very grateful to have it. (I'm at an R1 in a major city, by the way--I moved out of the two-stoplight town, lovely as it was, to take this position.) I had all the things that I dreamed of as an undergraduate--tenure, a book, doctoral students of my own--all on the friendly side of my 40th birthday. Overall it's been very fulfilling, and I've had opportunities that would have made my twenty-year-old brain explode right out of the back of my head. But like a lot of people, I got the advice "Only pursue a PhD in history if you cannot imagine doing anything else." And I took it. And it's worked out fine. But with a few extra years I realize that my inability to imagine any other life for myself was, more than anything, just a failure of imagination. I like being a historian a lot, but there are a dozen other things I can easily envision myself doing now with a similar kind of satisfaction. I'm sure the rejection stings, but I hope the sting fades quickly. from my perspective, the law school plan has a lot to recommend it. You've got some time now while you put together new applications. Can you do some brainstorming about what else you might pursue? It's not as if law school and a history PhD are the only two options. Are there any jobs with MLB or with the Twins organization that you can pursue now, without a JD? People who are smart and can write are rare, and valuable; there may be ways to get a foot in the door without the commitment of additional schooling and additional debt. Just something to think about. Good luck. Here's to bouncing back quickly--to you, and to anyone else who is facing the difficulty of suddenly altered plans.

A quick piece of advice I dispense a lot this time of year: Spend some time researching people who currently hold the positions you'd like to hold in five to 8 years, and see what you can learn about their career trajectories. How many hold advanced degrees? How many hold PhDs? What fields are their degrees in? How competitive are the programs? What does an entry-level position look like in the organization? How did people gain entry into the field? What else besides advanced study do they have on their CVs? A lot of this information is available online, so if you set aside a few hours each week you can learn quite a bit. If you're very serious about a particular kind of organization, there's no harm in e-mailing people who are at the 5-8 year mark asking if they have any insight to share with someone who is hoping to get a foot in the door. Not everyone will have time to respond, but people rarely respond badly to a message like Hey, I'm really impressed with the career you're putting together and would like to have one like it myself someday. Other advice: Going to graduate school simply because it seems like the next logical step is, in my experience, almost always a bad idea. Your apps are in, so you have a nice window here while you wait on replies. Use it to clarify your goals and how the degree will get you closer to them. That way you'll be better prepared with the right answer in the spring as answers come back. People who go because it seemed like the next logical thing frequently drop out, so if you can determine that a PhD is not for you (or is not for you right now) before you enroll, so much the better.

I've noticed that Oxford and Cambridge graduates do not tend to do as well on the academic job market. That's obviously not because of the schools' lack of prestige but rather an awareness that the D.Phil is just a different degree that does not necessarily prepare graduates as well for the kind of work they need to do to succeed on the tenure track at an American university. The last few searches I've been on did not short-list anyone from Oxford or Cambridge--not because of any bias against the university but simply because their work was not as promising as other candidates' at a similar stage. As far as the Graduate Institute Geneva: I've never heard of it, and I've never met anyone who received their terminal degree there. That doesn't mean that it's a lesser place or that it provides a weaker education. But it's worthwhile to spend some time looking at the professors who currently occupy the jobs you hope to interview for in 5-8 years. Have any of them graduated from this place? If not, I would consider veeeeeeeery carefully whether a degree from that institution is likely to get you where you want to be. (Free bonus advice: Scrutinizing the CVs of tenured faculty at places like the ones you might want to work at someday is an excellent habit to cultivate now, in the application process. There's a common saying floating around these boards to the effect that Hey, it only takes one acceptance! Which is a very supportive thing to say, and also potentially catastrophic. There are some programs that will simply not grant graduates much of a chance on the hypercompetitive job market, and closing your eyes to that data is a recipe for a lot of heartbreak down the road.)

There is no way to determine whether a specific scholar is taking new students except to e-mail the person directly. And if you are making serious applications to PhD programs, you should be doing that anyway. Most departments allow all tenured faculty to advise PhD students, and many departments (including mine) allow tenure-line faculty to advise doctoral students. (I'm still not sure whether having assistant profs advise doctoral students is a good idea or not, but it didn't seem to leave any permanent marks on my first PhDs) Just because someone is allowed to advise PhDs, however, does not meant that the person is taking new students. Reasons that someone on the tenure line might not be accepting new students include, but are not limited to: planning to retire; planning to leave; planning to take a sabbatical; too many students already in the pipeline; doesn't enjoy working with PhD students. And there's always the possibility that someone is open to working with new PhD students but isn't interested in you. Better to find that out before spending the time and money applying. Short answer: There is no way to determine whether a specific scholar is taking new students except to e-mail the person directly. And if you are making serious applications to PhD programs, you should be doing that anyway.

Another data point, if you want it: Before you invest the effort and money, it's worth doing a bit of research in the particular districts you're interested in to see if they make any distinctions between MA degrees depending on accreditation, online v. in-person, and so forth. Most public systems I'm familiar with do not make these distinctions, but it doesn't hurt to double-check before you enroll. If your ultimate goal is to apply to a PhD program, an online degree from Liberty is likely to be useless, or worse than useless. I'm on the admissions committee at a slightly-better than average R1, and over the years I've learned to be very, very skeptical of online graduate programs. So much of the intellectual growth in an MA program comes as a result of face-to-face seminar discussion, and that can only be approximated in an online program. I've seen very smart applicants with online degrees (due to life circumstances, deployment, and so forth), and there is something absent from their work that I've concluded is the result of missing out on the give-and-take of discussions with the faculty and on the academic debate that unfolds in seminar settings. I've also begun to suspect that many online graduate degrees are not always using their best faculty members to lead the online classes, and based on my admittedly small sample of graduates, I have some questions about the overall rigor of the online programs I've seen. In the case of Liberty, those concerns are doubled. I don't hold the politics or worldview against the applicant (some faculty members might, I suppose, though I think only to a small degree.) A greater concern is the quality of the faculty, very few of whom appear to have published significantly and some of whom don't hold the PhD. A recommendation letter from a tenure-line faculty member who doesn't have a doctorate means nothing to me: How can someone accurately gauge an applicant's readiness for doctoral work when they haven't done it themselves? At best, we're likely to take an applicant with an online degree from Liberty and invite them to join our MA program and to reapply to the PhD program in two years' time. Most of them take this invitation (to put it nicely) very, very badly. At worst, listing an online Liberty MA on your PhD application is like waving a large flag to the admissions committee that reads I do not understand this process very well.

Can you arrange to refund me the 90 minutes I spent reviewing your application? How about the other 72 apps in my pile this year?

Citations for publications that the committee cannot view will not outweigh a weak writing sample (particularly one riddled with typos) that they can read themselves.

My own experience: When I'm reviewing files and I find an applicant with an MA who had the option to do a thesis but chose some other track, it sends up a medium-sized red flag for me. At every program I've been involved with, the thesis track is the most difficult, and the other tracks are slightly less demanding. I'm a little skeptical of a prospective PhD student who did not choose the most rigorous option available in the MA program. (If you were reading the files, and had a choice between two students who were otherwise very closely matched, who would you choose--the student who had opted for the most challenging track, or the one who had elected to do something somewhat less difficult? Accepting a new student is like placing a big and costly bet, so most advisors will take many factors into account in trying to ascertain who's likely to finish and to do good work.) This isn't a complete deal-breaker, and if the student is coming from an MA program that doesn't offer a thesis I don't treat it in the same way. But if you're fairly serious about applying for the PhD sometime down the road, a thesis strikes me as an important step. Doctoral admissions are incredibly competitive; why not give yourself every edge?

I don't know of any program where the admin assistant is actually in the room during the committee's discussion, and the written record of those deliberations--the file the admin assistant would look at--is very bare-bones. That's by design: at a public university, the written record, as well as any e-mails exchanged between professors about admissions, can in theory be requested by an applicant making a discrimination claim. Since written notes can theoretically become public, professors are very careful about what they put in writing. That's also why we do admissions meetings face-to-face. In this case, I'm guessing the admin assistant opened the folder and tried to explain its content. (Bad idea, admin assistant! Bad idea!) Someone who wasn't in the meeting might look at the file and try to divine the reasoning behind the decision based on very modest information. In my department, we rate applicants across four different categories (including recommendations) on a 1-5 scale. An outside person looking at those numbers might notice that you got a 3 for recommendations while admitted applicants averaged a 4.4, and conclude that your recommendations were weaker on average. That doesn't meant the letters were bad; it means they weren't good enough. In general, I agree with the poster above: What is the point of asking for this information? Academe is certainly not a perfect meritocracy, but it is closer than most other lines of work. As one of my mentors remarked early in my career, the question "Why didn't I get that fellowship/grant/interview/job/book contract?" usually has just one answer: your work was not good enough. Brutal but generally true. There are of course a few exceptions, but over time the system does seem to give pretty consistent results. Many of you can see that from your admissions results: If you were accepted to nearly every program below, say, no. 26, but didn't receive any acceptances from programs ranked above that, you've got a useful data point about how you stack up against other historians nationally who share your general interests. It's not perfect, but if four separate committees at top-ranked programs all concluded independently that your application wasn't among the best they received, that strikes me as a pretty reliable piece of feedback. And it's an important bit of information to use when you're deciding whether to commit six years to graduate school, since the people above you, the ones who were accepted to those programs, are the same ones you'll be competing with on the job market.

I've never heard of anything like this and I'm a little stunned. I can't imagine any program communicating anything like this--especially not this bluntly--because there is just no upside. The only thing I can imagine is a student who e-mailed repeatedly demanding an explanation and someone in the program wanted that student to go away. Even then it's hard for me to imagine anyone responsible saying anything besides a vague "The committee felt that your letters of recommendation were not as strong as some of the more competitive applicants." There are usually some threads over at the Chronicle boards regarding the ethics of notifying someone that there is a bad recommendation letter in the file. This is usually in regards to job applications, where the stakes are incalculably higher and where a poor letter will torpedo a candidate. In that case, most faculty members seem to think that it is ethical to pull someone aside and suggest "Perhaps you ought to consider replacing your letter from Prof. X with someone who can speak more effectively about your research," which is assumed to signal the candidate that there is something really negative about a particular letter. A few professors think that even this vague level of disclosure gets into some murky ethical territory, but not many. Frankly, the majority believe that it's unethical to agree to write a letter of recommendation in the first place if you plan to put a ticking bomb in the file.

I'm guessing that you had a standout writing sample and a very focused statement of purpose, and that you got in on the strength of those items without needing particularly strong recommendations. The writing sample and personal statement are really the heart of an application, anyway. It takes an unusually strong letter of recommendation from a known quantity to move the needle significantly in an admissions decision, which is why a TA recommendation doesn't carry much weight either way. It's not like anyone sits in committee and says, Well, he doesn't write particularly well, and his statement of purpose is all over the place... but hey wait! Ryan Murphy, the third-year grad student at the University of Maryland, says the applicant has "great potential" based on his work in the World History survey. Maybe we'd better give this aspiring historian another look.

In the vast majority of cases, a letter from a TA carries very little weight with the admissions committee. There are some schools in which TAs do most of the grading and run sections in intro courses, but many of those schools have systems in place to deal with the issue of recommendations. (For example, in my PhD program, a professor who taught large, 150-person undergrad courses with multiple TAs had the teaching assistant draft the letter of recommendation with specific details about the student, which the professor then rewrote. That way the student got the benefit of input from someone who worked with them closely and could speak directly to their strengths, as well as the professor's name and letter-writing experience.) That is why it is vitally important if you attend a university with large sections to visit office hours and connect with someone beyond your TA during the semester you're in the class. Upper-level courses are usually much smaller; those classes, in which you presumably showed off your skills as a thinker better than in introductory courses, are an excellent place to ask for recommendations from professors. Recommendations from TAs carry very little weight with the committee not only because of the writer's modest reputation but because teaching assistants--who have never served on selection committees--have little way of knowing what a strong academic recommendation actually letter looks like. It wasn't until I got to the other side of the desk, and read dozens of applications, that I began to learn the format (and particularly the specialized language) well enough to help students who asked me for letters. Having one letter from a TA in your file certainly won't torpedo your application. Having three letters from TAs, or from work supervisors, would raise a huge red flag for me. My first question would be, What's wrong with this applicant that no professors were willing to write letters of support? Even pretty marginal applicants can usually find three professors to say that the applicant is a decent prospect.

Teaching experience won't trump reputation on the job market. The only thing that will trump reputation is the quality of your research, and that too is likely to be higher if you attend the top-3 program. The state of the job market is so dismal that you need to do everything to maximize your chances, starting now. If you harbor dreams of teaching at a certain kind of school or in a particular geographic location--that is, having any sort of choice in the job market--attending a top-rated program is even more critical. You may have a chance to pick up a class as an adjunct or an instructor while you're working on your degree; given the state of hiring these days, there is an excellent chance you will have at least one temporary VAP position before you are considered for tenure-track jobs. The teaching experience you'll get there will more than make up for the few semesters you missed out on being a TA. "All of the professors in my department have said go to the top tier program regardless." If this is the case, what insight do you expect to get by asking a group of freshly-admitted PhD students? Even if half the people here said, Yeah! I bet a lot of liberal-arts college search committees would prefer someone who TAed a lot at the University of Washington over a Harvard PhD! would it be wise to give those anonymous guesses any weight against the unanimous recommendation of your professors, who have all landed at least one job and presumably have participated in the hiring process in their own departments?

Top tier.

I certainly understand the value of venting--this profession certainly has more than its share of its frustration. Remember that this is a public forum, however. Slate ran a piece on the GradCafe a few years ago, and I imagine that a lot of faculty members got curious just as I did and starting dropping by, even if they don't post. Until someone decides to gate the forum (possibly not a bad idea), the standard rules of posting should apply: Don't write anything you wouldn't be comfortable seeing written above your name in a national newspaper. Some posters have probably given enough information that identities could be worked out by someone who felt like it. Two pieces of advice I wish I'd had when I was starting. First, if you think you're beginning a program next year, use the ups and downs of this admissions cycle as a reminder that your interests and the interests of your program are not always in perfect alignment. That's not to say that your program will actively try to screw you (almost never the case) or that you should ever act in any sort of adversarial manner. Most of the time your interests and theirs will be pretty closely aligned. But it is not always the case that what makes life easiest for you is the same as what works best for the program as a whole. (This goes tenfold for journal editors, fellowship opportunities, and hiring committees, who are usually completely indifferent.) It's very easy to wonder Why won't they just give me what I want? The answer is that they don't necessarily care about the same things. If you take things personally you'll make yourself crazy. It's understandable that you're in a hurry to know where you'll be next year so you can make moving and family arrangements. It's unrealistic to think that prospective departments share your concern. It's just not on their radar--and when you're on an admissions committee sometime in the future, it probably won't be on yours, either. Second, use the application cycle to practice a healthy sense of detachment from the things that are beyond your control. Admission to a doctoral program seems monumental now, but it is the least consequential of the steps that make up a successful career. You will spend weeks and months waiting for the results of comprehensive exams, grant applications, journal submissions, job searches, book referees, and tenure committees. Believe it or not, the significance of those decisions (particularly the last three) will dwarf the admissions process because there's so much more at stake. If you are the kind of person who needs to check your e-mail ten times an hour, work now to break that habit. It will pay big dividends along the way; you can be much more productive with the time you don't spend obsessively hitting F5. (Oh, and put yourself on a budget. Learning to live slightly beneath your means, even if you're on a stipend, is one of the great adaptive behaviors for an academic.)