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czesc

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Everything posted by czesc

  1. Got a rejection as well, with a notification that I will get reviewer comments in May. Apparently with the IDRF only the top 10-15% of applications receive reviewer comments...is this true with this award as well or does everyone get them? Trying to find a silver lining here.
  2. I haven't really heard of this happening so I wonder if it's really common...though I can see how it would happen if someone wanted to pursue it as a strategy. I wouldn't advise anyone to go into a PhD thinking they might do this, though; s/he is looking at a lot of wasted time given that not all the coursework (if any) will count toward the second school's requirements.
  3. This is not at all true. Transferring is next to impossible. It can be done in exceptional circumstances, but those are circumstances like your chair moving to another university and happening to care enough to negotiate a spot for you (in which case you have no say in where you might go) or your chair dying and no one in the department possessing the expertise to train you anymore. Very possibly there are also circumstances in which professors facilitate a transfer because of a change of interest, but those are far from easy to arrange.
  4. I'm going to contradict some of the advice given here and say this doesn't matter as much as it may seem. Grad students are a transient population. By the time you get there, half the people you met may either be gone in the field or on their way out as postdocs. And within a year of your being there, a group of new recruits will flood the scene and change the nature of the grad student community. Plus, your closest colleagues may not even turn out to be the ones in your specific department, but formally study different fields. So it's very hard to predict what your social/collegial circumstances will be like, especially on the basis of a visiting weekend when everyone's trying hard to recruit you.
  5. Hey guys - I'm always sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but downvoting it is not a way to incentivize people in programs already to keep you informed either way.
  6. I've heard that there's no waiting list per Graduate School policy, so it's possible (unless there's some unofficial means by which they kept some people in reserve) that if you haven't heard yet, you know.
  7. Not sure if it helps anyone to know, but I heard that around 21 people were admitted to Cornell this year.
  8. czesc

    Ithaca, NY

    No one I know here lives in the graduate housing, and the most convenient bus route in Ithaca (every 10 minutes) runs from downtown to campus. In winter, you don't want to be waiting more than 10 minutes for a bus here. That said, there are places where multiple bus routes run and may actually take you to your destination more frequently depending on where you are and where you're going. As for living expenses - in Ithaca they're relatively low (at least relative to NYC - compared to anywhere else, I'm not so sure) especially if you live with roommates and don't have a car (a bus pass is only $200 a year compared to $100+/month for transit in NYC and carshare can help with trips for which buses aren't convenient). But be prepared for rents to be more than you'd expect for a small town in the middle of nowhere; all the student renters (including undergrads, for whom there aren't nearly enough dorms) create enormous pressure on the small housing stock. Whatever you do, don't live somewhere you have to depend on cabs; they're notoriously slow, overcharge crazily and you will wind up sharing with a boggling number of people who will all ask to pay separate fares even if they're taking the same trip.
  9. Update on Cornell: I heard that, as of Monday, final decisions still hadn't been made yet. Sorry to all for the waits.
  10. This is all very true, but I think you could broaden your selection even among the top schools (or those with good / desirable placement rates).
  11. This is going to depend entirely on the school and whether they do interviews regularly. As will the question of whether waitlisting implies rejection in general. At Princeton, for example, a waitlisting is rarely more than a consolation prize, with little chance of actual admission possible. At other schools, waitlisting implies a realistic shot.
  12. These people do tend to move around if they're not in the optimal location. Make sure you're not going after a big fish in a small pond who's craving a shot at the open sea. You may find yourself left behind.
  13. Heartwarming stories aside, historigradhopeful, I would go with what you seem to have surmised in your second post and applied to more than five programs in the next cycle if this one doesn't work out, with a couple at least that weren't top ranked. That is, unless you don't think it's worth it to go get a PhD unless you go to one of those five schools.
  14. Wow. Seven. And several may not even go. That's going to be a really tiny cohort for NYU.
  15. Just to add to this - FLAS scholarships that are available are tied in some way to the designation of a school's regional studies centers as NRCs (National Resource Centers). For example, Cornell is currently an NRC for South and Southeast Asia. It lost NRC designation for Europe (and, I think, East Asia) this cycle. Since either FLAS or Cornell considered some Middle Eastern languages within the "Europe" category, you can no longer get a FLAS grant at Cornell (at least until the next grant cycle begins, in 2018) for Arabic or Turkish, even though those are theoretically eligible "critical languages". tl;dr, it's very important to know which languages a school offers, specifically. Also, funding cycles are every four years, and the languages funded by a given school can change at the end of that period. Annoyingly, if you apply the year a cycle shifts, and the school does not receive funding for your language, you may be accepted by the school but wind up with no funding because their expected successful application was denied by the federal government. One more thing - on top of language classes, FLAS also requires you to do a certain amount of coursework related to the culture of the region/language you're studying. There seems to be quite a bit of flexibility to negotiate this with the school disbursing FLAS funding to you, though.
  16. For those of you waiting on Cornell, the committees met late last week and I'd be expecting an update soon (though I didn't see anything pertinent to applicants hoping to study the Americas...)
  17. You could also email the registrar and ask if they can send some sort of unofficial version of the transcript by email or some other electronic delivery method if there's not one obviously available.
  18. I'm not exactly at dissertation stage yet so I can't really help you with my own focus, but information about dissertations in progress is often available on department websites. See, e.g., http://history.arts.cornell.edu/graduate-students-dissinprogress.php
  19. There's definitely at least one historian I know with way more, but he only meets with them for very short intervals of time on rare occasions, so you probably would want to reconsider working with such an overloaded person anyway.
  20. czesc

    Methods

    JD - just to add to what others have said, you should definitely be thinking about what you will be doing with your PhD that would add to your ability to analyze case law. As my advisor puts it, "you need to be going beyond what you would write in an opinion/brief/memo for your work to be a work of history". Think about the intellectual contexts of cases and of the contexts of contexts (the background behind the legislative histories of statutes, for example). As such, you're not going to be able to directly analogize all of what you're doing in law school to what you'd be doing in a PhD, but you can state in your application that you do want to get beyond the limits of pure legal analysis.
  21. You can always mention the connection between your law courses and history in your statement of purpose / personal statement. You would be well advised to take regular history department courses when you have the opportunity, though, and to point these out as well. These courses can also serve as a source of recommendations from historians (someone with a JD/PhD in history who works in a law school could be okay for a second law school recommender...but it would really help if that person was plugged into a network of historians as opposed solely to other law professors). Institutional prestige is not important to the same degree for historians, but it is still much more important than it arguably should be, and much more important than it is for other disciplines (say, in the sciences). There's also a different hierarchy involved - Wisconsin is considered a strong university for history, for example, whereas no one would say it ranks nearly so high in the legal world.
  22. Hi there. I did what you're doing (sort of. Got a JD, worked at a law firm for several years and then went for my PhD) so I may be in some position to answer your questions. The fact you didn't major in history may be an issue. You're going to want to show some commitment to / knowledge of the discipline. Are you at least taking legal history courses in law school? Do you have the ability to take history courses outside the law school at your university? Have you produced historical writing? (this will be important when it comes to the writing sample) Your language skills sound okay - Americanists are generally only expected to learn one, although it'd be better if you at least had that one down at more than elementary level. Publications may help you somewhat but many historians aren't going to put as much weight on law journal publications as peer-reviewed journal ones. As for your numbered questions: 1. The caliber of school you can expect to get into? It's hard to say. You should really be thinking harder about your interests and where you'd be a better fit. PhD admissions aren't like law school admissions at all. Your GPA will be a lot less important than it was during law school admissions. And while you're at an advantage later on the job market going to a more highly-ranked school, and you should be thinking of that your ability to gain admission will hinge a lot on whether or not the faculty see you as someone who's a fit with their specific research interests - and often that means fitting with the research interests of a whole potential committee of faculty members at a given school rather than just one. That consideration might mean you may need to widen the number of schools you're applying to beyond those with marquee names. By the way, if you're aiming for the stars with your list of schools anyway, you should really be considering Princeton; Hendrik Hartog works with people who have your profile. 2. Your JD may help you, may be immaterial, or may be harmful. Some (probably older) historians will think it's strange you're applying to a history program (JDs picking up PhDs in another discipline to go into legal academia is a relatively recent trend) and think they won't be able to train you to the same extent as their younger, more impressionable students. Some historians will just not see you as part of the same intellectual trajectory. And you will also be competing against students with undergraduate and masters degrees in history, which will have given them connections to historians writing their LORs who may know faculty at other schools personally. That said, none of these things are an absolute bar to admission and I'm sure many will find your JD impressive as well. I pin my greatest hope on schools which have a record of producing JD/PhDs in history. 3. The era you've identified is specific enough (be careful with your terminology though; a US legal historian who reads your application might know what you mean by "incorporation," but other people in the department will also be reading your application and will not). That said, you should identify some more specific potential areas of inquiry that you might want to look at and potentially develop research projects from, 4. Beyond the things you're already doing, I'd say right now you should be invested in tying yourself to the historical discipline in some way. Taking history seminars, meeting people in the discipline, beginning scholarship tied to history if you haven't already. 5. The prestige of your recommenders' degrees is almost immaterial compared to their connections with the people who will be reading their recommendations. I would use at maximum one recommender from your law school, ideally supplemented with at least two and ideally three historians' recommendations (where you're allowed to submit more than three recommendations total). Just to warn you - you're entering a very competitive arena. US legal historians aren't in deep demand in law schools, particularly those studying the 19th century. And you're even more disadvantaged by your degrees; the majority of US legal academics come from the top 3-5 law schools - the profession is even more hierarchical than history. Combined with the recent downturn in law school hiring, you're more likely to be employed as a historian than a legal scholar after this training, I'd say. In contrast to law school hiring, your JD would be a much greater asset on the history job market, which is (I know this will be unbelievable to some forumers who are used to hearing nothing but sturm und drang about humanities jobs) doing somewhat better right now.
  23. Would it help some of you leave California if I reminded you that the extra cost of a flight to a European archive (or even one on the East Coast) won't be pleasant when living on a PhD stipend?
  24. I was advised not to do this as well. I wonder if it has less to do with subfield than where you're applying. Scholars at large, prestigious schools like Harvard and Stanford are swamped with email and may not appreciate the extra burden. People at smaller institutions with less in demand expertise might be more receptive. The few people I did contact (out of concern that I wasn't doing so, because I'd heard I should on places like this forum) were courteous and wished me good luck but we didn't have any sort of helpful exchange. For the record, I did not get into any school where I did contact professors, and did get into a school that said I should on its website. And I was waitlisted at a school where I contacted no one, although one potential advisor there said he would never admit a student who didn't get in touch with him first.
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