mvlchicago

You really should not be using US News Rankings for PhD decisions.

Reminder to separate "Modern US Historians" from "every other field" and recognize that Modern US has a 3:1 ratio, where every other field is close enough to 1:1

That's because for Internationals there isn't much. There are those fellowships, a few other ones in that caliber (Marshall etc.) and then there's being lucky in terms of negotiating politics. I have heard that if you do a two year program, they won't offer much for year one, but if you do well and people like you, they'll find a way to establish residency for you and therefore be able to offer you partial or full scholarships for the second year. If you're looking to go abroad for cheap quality education, I cannot recommend German schools and programs highly enough.

We should aim to land jobs in the same city, then get the long-awaited "Star Wars and the Social Sciences" Conference up and running. And it's certainly a data point to use! Like, if a school was particularly bad with harassment, I doubt you'd get that from the admitted students directly. I just wanted to assure you that many minor problems in the department (particularly rivalries, the DGS being a jerk and unaccessible, or the structure of exams being unmanageable) are things that will be detectable at the weekends. They will try to cover things up but they will never succeed perfectly .

RE: Star Wars love, I spend part of my time these days building a syllabus to teach upper level undergrads historical methods through the Star Wars universe.

I think the admitted students visits will answer most of these questions for you in a qualitatively better way than a bunch of semi-anonymous posters talking about their individual experiences. Be sure to ask questions about how professors work together and whether or not the grad students feel supported, and more often than not you'll be able to read between the lines as to the quality of the experience. Congrats on your admissions .

"THIS JUST IN: HARVARD YALE AND PRINCETON ARE GREAT NAMES FOR [FIELD]!" ––every US News ranking list ever.

Ranking is one of many elements in a package: if you have it, it will be helpful. If you don't, it won't break your application. It doesn't hurt to be realistic about your chances, but at the same time, if you are certain you are taking an offer from a non top-10 school, the best you can do going forward is making the case why you'll be the best applicant on the job market. Don't dwell on what you can't control.

~~~Bumpity Bump Bump~~~ If your season is (mostly) over for 2016, feel free to post about your experiences, what you would do differently, what you would do the same, and generally offer a reflection on the process that perhaps other prospective applicants can read and evaluate as they move forward.

I don't know how many times you've tried going for grad school, but it's really not uncommon to be rejected the first time. Once your season is wrapped up, I wouldn't hesitate to contact POIs and ask them what they thought about your potential//whether certain red flags killed your application, then decide whether you want to do an MA based on those red flags (language work hardly requires an MA; a year-long thesis might). As other people have mentioned, your alma mater rejecting you is really not a personal thing: my advisor explicitly told me not to apply to mine, even if the fit was there, because it slows the development of your networks and most institutions are aware of that. Sometimes people go from undergrad to grad school at the same place but that's usually an exception than it is an expectation.

As someone who is also very interested in theorizing history more than is commonly accepted, I sympathize with your concerns. On some level, the reason why so much of the work on historiography is dated, I think, is because theorizing has always been perceived as lesser in historical fields. That is to say, I think why we still read Carr, Collingwood, Butterfield, or Novick is because books of those quality about historiography are far and few between. What's more, because they often reflect the speciality of the author, it is nigh-impossible to find a historiographical treatment of the field from your area of interest. If you want to go into historiography, you've just got to be crafty about how you're doing it. In planning out my dissertation project, I want to force my readers to shift their understanding of periodization because what's commonly taught won't work if you want to understand the problem I'm approaching. That makes them theorize a little bit (ie: what counts as "Medieval"?) I also think this is a less risky way of dealing with theoretical problems because a story about your colleagues (which, inevitably all historiography ends up being) can hurt you regardless of how brilliant the work is.

Basically the issue is that most historians don't take theory specialists seriously unless they've published/worked in more practical elements of the discipline for some time. As an older advisor once told me, "your theory book is your second or third book." This isn't /that/ different from what I understand to be the case in most of the social sciences; unlike, for example, physics where you could be a theorist from the getgo. And I have a feeling that even if you study with the most theoretical leaning historians, they will tell you much the same deal. My advice to you would be either figure out a historical field you could do happily (for 5-7 years), or perhaps apply to philosophy or critical theory programs.

I went through one rejection from Brown before I ended up here. It probably sucks right now, but I promise it probably had more to do with the political discussions on the admissions committee than your value as a potential student here. Feel free to reach out as you think about next year .

Downvote the haters into oblivion, Chicago is awesome.

#1OfUs #1OfUs

That is exactly how Brown lets us know about admissions, congrats! Welcome aboard the Providence train .

Just a heads-up Brown applicants: all administrative and academic functions have been cancelled tomorrow. So I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for an email from Brown proper tomorrow.

The Euro + Russian Studies program has way more funding available than the Yale history masters program. I would take that as a "soft" no (as in, they want to keep you around and want to give you as much money as they can to do such.) I would expect these to come out next week. I was talking to faculty today and someone mentioned not having the time to make phone calls, so I think it'll just be the email once the Grad School finalizes/officiates the history department's offers.

This is the cutest admit story I've read in awhile. Congrats!

If I've misunderstood your intentions, it's because of the few posts you've had on this section of the forums. I think most people who've been around history departments and reading the posts that have come up all agree on one point: there are far more "qualified" candidates for jobs than jobs, which itself becomes even worse for over-saturated fields like "Modern US history." We get it. You can't be in history and not get it. The question in my head isn't so much whether or not we need daily reminders of this, but whether we can create advice and space to think through what the next best possible steps are. It's laudable to be realistic about the process, but are you doing this within your department (if you're in one)? If you have students, are you informing them of this reality? The very first piece of advice I give to the undergrads I have thinking about grad school is "the job market is abysmal." Once we're past that step, I'm unsure how helpful it is to harp on the point. Finally, we're making it sound as though academia is the only job market suffering. Far from it, unless you plan on going into 1) the financial industry or 2) software, devops, or tech, the job market will be pretty bad. Given the context of the economy, I remain unconvinced that five years of fully funded grad school is really the worst path in a set of pretty bad options. On this road, you can at least be certain you aren't paying for the graduate degrees you will inevitably need, that you will have time to build the networks required because of course this isn't a meritocracy, and that you're a little happy doing what you're doing.

This is something I worried about a lot last year. It's basically correlation: because so many more applicants have Masters degrees, the applicant pools from which AdComs evaluate for safe investments have become amazingly more specialized: who would you take, a person just finishing undergrad, or a 27 year old with two years in "the real world" and a masters degree coming back from archival research in their region of interest? That is to say, if you're coming from a reasonable pedigree of school, and have done archival work on your own, don't worry too much about the Masters students. Most of them needed the masters degree to figure out what they wanted to do, or show that they knew enough to carry out the project. If you're getting interviews, it's fairly safe to say you're qualified for your work.

@ Brown apps don't stress though! I'm sure many of you will have solid offers if not from our school. If and when you receive admission, feel free to PM me about the program!

^^^ While I agree with you, I have less-than-optimistic suspicions about the goals of such cynicism from throwaway accounts on this site. This goes both for the post to whom you respond, and the original poster of this thread. We're all aware the job market is bad; I'm assuming that by you're being here with <50 posts, you have agreed to that term and are now figuring out ways to up the likelihood of getting a job inside (or outside!) academia. Otherwise, I have a sense that these posts are about jarring very qualified students more than it is about a reality check.

I would basically agree but also say that sometimes pennies can matter at a point when adcoms are debating between two equally qualified candidates. And of course this is also extremely context dependent; I was working with a couple lefty periodicals and my POI at Penn was very interested in the work I was doing there, hence those articles became things I sent to him and not my POI at Yale, for example.

If it's getting published by a reasonable (read: Peer review) academic place or a fairly well respected periodical (Paris Review of Books) I wouldn't hesitate to let your POIs know about it ("Hey just FYI I did this Thing that shows you I am a solid investment and am capable of projects [LINK].") If it's a review on a blog (unless a substantial one), I'd be less inclined to do so.