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^ That sounds about right. There was a storm that shut down Ithaca's city government a week ago. Cornell's response? Push back 9am classes to 9:30.

You should really consider living off campus, preferably in Fall Creek/downtown. Most grad students don't live in on-campus housing; it's really isolated from everything. I would only maybe consider it if I had both a family and a car.

Not quite everything: no amount of snow could ever delay things at Cornell!

I applied to at least 10 schools last year. True, not all of them were "perfect" fits, but I don't think I really realized at the time to what extent a school needed to be a fit -- I basically just went with wherever had people working in my general areas of interest, and/or places that various faculty I knew recommended based on my interests (which wound up adding up to quite a list). I had a better sense of what a true fit was after I got my results and heard what some others at other schools had thought about where my complete application would have really belonged. To be honest, though, I'm still not sure fit matters to such an extent at all times and everywhere. Some programs in some years seem just fine taking "good" applicants that don't fit extremely well; others seem more preoccupied with the details of your interests. As for the money aspect -- well, I had a good enough paying job and saved enough with this goal in mind that it wasn't impossible. From what I recall there are programs that reduce or eliminate the fee in cases of financial hardship as well.

^ I would just add that Fall Creek is actually a fairly large neighborhood and while areas that could be considered Fall Creek are a five minute walk to downtown/the Commons, there are also areas that are more like a 30 minute walk there (a pleasant stroll on a lazy summer day but not on a busy winter one) and have very bad bus service.

Don't give up yet if history is what you really want. Both statistically and in terms of motivating admissions committees (law schools know you will pay them, while many PhD programs have to justify paying you; law school admissions are more based on grades and standardized tests than subjective PhD admissions) it's easier to get into law school, so this result doesn't mean your life path has been chosen by divine revelation or anything like that.

That's a hugely varied set of places. I haven't lived in any of them so can only really comment on location/transportation. I don't have a car and live downtown (near Center Ithaca, but there are a ton of other places in the vicinity to which all of this applies). I couldn't really imagine living anywhere else in town without one (except maybe Collegetown, but that's far too undergrady for me). The #10 bus departs downtown for the center of Cornell every ten minutes -- a 7-10 minute ride (with nice lake and waterfall views, to boot). Even if I had a car, I would probably still opt to live in this part of town. Everywhere else is a much more annoying commute, including even the far-flung North Campus apartments you mentioned (a long walk from anywhere, and/or often requiring a bus connection of some kind rather than a one-seat ride), because parking is really scarce, limited, scattered and expensive for grad students on the Cornell campus, making your car basically superfluous most of the time, and other bus routes are much, much less frequent than those servicing the line between Cornell and downtown. Now, do you want to live in Center Ithaca specifically? The actual Commons can get noisy, especially on weekend nights, with Ithaca College revelers. Center Ithaca's apartments may be high enough up to avoid that noise, but I know that mine (third floor, just off the Commons) is still within earshot. My ideal would be to live within very short walking distance of one of the main downtown bus stops, but still on a quiet street a little removed from the Commons itself.

What I meant is this: A lot of offers for "guaranteed" funding are technically contingent on you making sure you at least apply for outside funding that could cover you when you are eligible. So if you go to Argentina or whatever for research in your fourth year and don't apply for a Fulbright and hope the university covers you when it wasn't a year they'd earmarked to pay you with a fellowship, but expected you to teach, you might not get automatic funding for your yearlong adventure. Likewise they might be pissed at you if you come looking for teaching jobs when you're taking Turkish and could very well get your whole year covered with a FLAS grant. Enforcement varies on this kind of thing and so might the terms of an offer (it will be clear in your offer letter whether or not this is an issue), but you should expect that they'll want you to relieve the department of the obligation to pay you in situations when you're highly eligible for an outside grant -- again, even during that five year "guarantee" period. (After five years, unis often still have some way to pay grad students, but things get iffier and there will be far more pressure to get outside funding.) I wouldn't worry about it at all -- forcing grant applications without consequences for not winning them is actually win/win. People often still get some kind of extra funding "on top" from the university as an incentive even if they win a grant, or are at least exempt from teaching if it's a year they'd have to do that. If nothing else, these grants look really good on your CV. And if you don't win one, you at least tried -- and under these conditions, that's all departments are looking for.

Columbia has actually been notorious (at least in the recent past) for not having enough TAships to go around for all the grad students who need them at any given time. I'm not sure what that meant insofar as their offers (the surplus grad students might be outside the five-year window, or judged to have failed to live up to their concurrent obligation to seek outside funding to offset departmental costs or something), but this may in fact signal a change, or a particularly desirable applicant.

Encouraged. Even if it's just a consolation prize for UNC-G, it's better than a rejection and means you've got a shot at getting in somewhere, if you haven't already.

Much more likely they have a quota on area of study than on the place their students are coming from, given it's a private school. So, probably Europe as an area of specialization.

I will say that one stereotype about Berkeley that rings true in this thread is horrifying disorganization at the administrative level. Of course, every large university has elements of this problem, but not to the same extent I'd heard about there. I know people there (in various other subjects) who fled with terminal MAs or wish they had simply because they couldn't take the bureaucracy. That didn't stop me from applying, given the fantastic academic reputation of the program, but the fact I wouldn't be dealing with that mess did help console me when I didn't get in.

Very interesting. I definitely followed up when I thought anything could have been incomplete but it sounds like there could have been all kinds of undetectable errors nonetheless. I mean, if schools are getting GRE scores wrong, there could be fantastic applicants not even reaching the cutoff!

angelayar, I feel you. I was really upset when I got my Berkeley response back last year, because I had profs pump me up about doing well in the admissions process, and it was my first result: a rejection. Not only a rejection, but a very impersonal form letter I had to sign in to access. I'm going to join in the chorus of other in warning you about contacting the department about this, which can only hurt you in the long run. One thing that piques my interest though is how you discovered they'd mismatched your GRE scores. I hadn't even thought to confirm them at every school I applied to and now kind of wonder if any of the rejections I received could be chalked up to admin errors.

You could try counting it under a heading for "non-scholarly publications" on your CV (although this is usually for articles in much more public, higher circulation venues), but it's definitely not the same as a publication in a scholarly journal and I wouldn't count it in the same category as those, for sure.

JLRC, I think this is one of the most important reasons why joint-degree people help the field. They make it possible to demonstrate, in the span of a single career, how historical work can be put to use to benefit professions people often consider more "practical" -- well, if they write for trade journals and otherwise stay active in their other field, at least. They're also probably importing way more "pure" historical scholarship into their fields than people interested in history in those fields would. Many legal historians, for example, either try to reinvent the wheel in terms of their historical claims or only cite big name books or articles by really well-known history scholars (i.e. those you might hear about whether or not you had ever set foot in a history department). Of course that still doesn't necessarily solve the problem of how to tell people what you're doing for the world when you're working on a historical text that could be used for a multitude of purposes. Maybe it would help to just pick and choose one possibility. I had a biochemist friend whose work was esoteric but could have had endless applications. She was frustrated that her family couldn't understand what she was doing, but one day just started telling them she was doing research that could lead to the cure of cancer, and they've deeply respected her work ever since.

Up to you whether you relax and wait for more info, but from the moment you're given an offer the program is usually gunning to have you accept, so you shouldn't feel bad about contacting them. Usually the DGS will know the most about funding in a given year but I'm sure you could also ask your POI if you're more comfortable reaching out to him or her (though s/he may just wind up directing you back to the DGS, or asking the DGS him/herself).

I'm not incredibly familiar with Middle East historians' criteria in particular for admits but I would be surprised, ldoone, if your current language load was really too low for acceptance, unless you planned to focus specifically on, say, Ottoman history from the outset, in which case it would be crazy to apply without Turkish. Most of the people in my program (and others I know doing even transregional PhDs) didn't start out master linguists and everyone seems to enter with maybe one really good foreign language, knowing they will need to work on others. I would imagine good Arabic plus a European language or two would be sufficient for Middle East, with the promise that you could pick up other Middle Eastern languages during the program itself. That said, I'd be interested to know if you've heard differently. As for MAs - it is becoming increasingly popular only to accept students who have them. Everyone in my cohort already has a graduate degree of some kind. But I don't see evidence that not having one is preclusive at the majority of institutions; although everyone who accepted an offer to my school has one, not everyone who was accepted did, and the cohort above us has students who were admitted with mere BAs; if you look at the most recently admitted cohort at Princeton you can see that this is the case there as well.

I got a JD before starting my PhD. Let's get a few things straight: 1. I may have some more options on the academic job market, but I won't be as comprehensively employable as people might think. Going back to a legal career could be tough after demonstrating that I wanted to go off and do something most lawyers see as irrelevant and unrelated (academic history). Even more sympathetic lawyers might assume I wouldn't be committed to a legal career and would jump for a professorship if given the chance. Other practical/law related careers might also be barred because of the perceived "fluffiness" of a graduate degree in history and because of my seeming lack of dedication to a single field. And even on the history or law teaching job markets, the perception that I'm not fully on board with a given discipline could hurt. There are going to be similar structural problems for anyone starting a PhD in history and trying to combine it with knowledge from another graduate degree or profession. 2. That said, academic historians who see people combining history degrees with knowledge of other fields are living in the past, and not in the way historians should be. Enrollments in history courses are dropping right now, and their own budgets, positions, and salaries are threatened if they can't figure out how to make history courses more appealing to kids who think the only jobs are going with those who have degrees in engineering, business, and computer science. Some of the most popular undergraduate courses in my department (or in related departments) have to do with legal history or the history of science. Giving kids who know they're going to have to go down another career path and/or have interests they want to combine with history the chance to learn about them from someone who's more of an expert than a "pure" historian who's dilletantishly dabbled in a complex subject like, say, physics only strengthens the discipline, it doesn't hurt it. 3. I don't think the nature of the discipline suffers because of any of this. I mean, there's really no such thing as "pure history" that couldn't conceivably involve another discipline. History is always about the past of some other thing, about which it can't possibly hurt to have some expertise, and even the study of historiography has traces of philosophy and other disciplines in it. As for online courses? It's really a separate problem altogether from interdisciplinarity, but what's so hilarious about the hoopla they caused recently (until it was proven that they couldn't retain enrollments and the enthusiasm died down) is that -- for all the yelps about history's increasing irrelevance -- a little history would have shown that the same hype developed around radio and television courses at different periods over the course of the 20th century. Those didn't exactly undermine the academy, and there are good reasons to believe that MOOCs and other online course formats won't, either.

My sense is that applicants sometimes stand a better chance if their POI is on the adcom in a given year (and potentially if their POI is chair or DGS, depending on how department structures work). That said, many departments also have set quotas for specific fields based on rotating priorities, funding, who accepted offers the previous year, etc., which vastly constrain the power of any individual professor's advocacy. tl;dr it's a very different process across schools and across cycles. Not many hard and fast rules to go by in this game.

Sorry for the late reply, but if this round doesn't work out and you come back with a better combination next year, consider applications to Harvard and Cornell. David Armitage/Sugata Bose (Harvard) or Robert Travers/Durba Ghosh/Eric Tagliacozzo (Cornell) might be good combinations for your interest in the British Empire/Indian Ocean. Cambridge (with a combo of, say, Chris Bayly and Tim Harper) would be fantastic as well.

Welcome, bombilfry! I'm curious to know where you applied.

I'm hoping some of you with more experience in your programs can give me some advice. I received my first PhD semester grades and they're very good for the most part (i.e. for all the graduate level history classes). That said, I was obliged to take one difficult difficult foreign language class for a grade. The class was primarily an undergraduate one and graded on a curved scale. I got a B. The conventional wisdom out there seems to be that Bs are a kiss of death in (humanities) grad school, but I wanted to know if any of you had experience with grades in primarily-undergrad classes in outside subjects and whether they'd be considered in the same way. Obviously it will affect my GPA - does this slaughter my chances of competing with history students in other programs for outside funding? Is it likely I'll be taken to the woodshed by my department? The language isn't a crucial one for my field so I'm mostly worried about the fact that the grade makes me look stupid/less competitive, rather than lacking the skills to research in my area. Thanks in advance for your replies.

No one in my program really identifies as a transntional historian; even the most "international history" types have one or two home regions that serve as bases around which they affiliate with members of the department who were trained in a more area studies mindset or with regards to which they seek funding. That said, this may be different in other schools. I think you could definitely pull off being a historian of both East Asia and Russia, and would maybe focus on this strength rather than defining yourself more blandly as a "transnationalist". Throwing the US into the mix makes things more complicated - and frankly, more competitive and less fruitful with potential for original research, too.

Unfortunately, the discipline is still very heavily area studies focused and even great transnational historians like Ken Pomeranz and Sanjay Subrahmanyam have regional bases that they inevitably emphasize even in works about "world history". This may change in the future but for now it'd be smart to position yourself in such a way that you can go on the market either as a transnationalist or as a traditional regionalist depending on what's available. I think, maybe, at this stage, focus on your language skills. Not only is it best to get these out of the way asap - languages will dictate your research to a significant extent and may limit you in the future - or provide you with a potential niche. You may find that it's too hard or you don't like studying a given language and this might help you narrow your regional concentrations down.