L13

Yes, I second this. I think communicating with potential doctoral advisors plays a different role in the application process in the UK than it does in the US. From what I remember, at Cambridge at least it's pretty much impossible to get admitted without speaking to your potential advisor and securing their support for your proposed project first. That's not the case in America, where PhD programs are longer and include coursework. Most POIs pretty much assume the topic of your dissertation won't be the same as what you put down in your statement of purpose, unless you have two master's degrees or are transferring from another PhD program or something. So emailing your potential advisor is entirely optional, and not a method of establishing a shared understanding of what your research will be about. All the information they need from you is in the application, so if they like your materials, they'll push for your acceptance regardless of whether there's been prior communication or not. I hadn't said/written a single word to my advisor before I got my acceptance email. Anyway. I don't know how well this advice will go over in this thread, where seemingly everyone is in constant communication with multiple POIs throughout the entire application cycle, but unless you have a good reason for emailing someone, like wanting to know whether they're too old/junior to accept grad students, well, don't email them before you've been accepted. It has no bearing on the outcome of your application and it's frankly a waste of their time.

Yawn. Call me when cutting down cohort sizes in response to job market contraction is accompanied by redirecting that money to either creating new TT faculty lines (which would improve the job market!) or even just funding and training for existing grad students, instead of cutting the department's budget. It's easy to say programs that admit more students than they can place are irresponsible given the current market conditions, but simply admitting fewer students without investing in improving the dire state of academic hiring is not some principled decision; it's laying the groundwork for further cuts down the line. Undergraduate history enrollments keep trending downward and administrators are finding history departments increasingly costly relative to how many majors they support. Reducing grad student enrollment is the first step to reducing the size of the faculty. Why do you need so many professors when you only have so few grad students? You don't. You're not gonna catch me applauding provosts, trustees and chancellors for pretending to be concerned about a crisis they have personally created. If they cared so much, they could just hire more TT historians.

What’s likely is that after some initial discussion within their departments some profs have learned they’re not going to be able to accept students this year even though the list of accepted students has not been finalised yet, so they’re starting to send early rejection notices to those applicants they’ve been in touch with/hoping to push for as a courtesy. It doesn’t mean official acceptance emails are imminent.

Hopkins acceptances have gone out. There's a waitlist too, but IDK if waitlisted applicants have been notified yet. (This is for the history department only. History of science and history of medicine have their own timelines and procedures.)

Ugh, tell me about it. The university’s response to the crisis facing its own grad students has been incredibly disappointing.

No, my program at least is aiming for a smaller cohort this year. I think they're doing this because they want to redirect funding for incoming grad students to dissertation completion fellowships and other forms of financial relief for current grad students, but they've been very tight-lipped about the specifics.

Well, that's not entirely true. Anecdotally, I know of a person who did a terminal master's in classics there and enrolled in their PhD program immediately afterwards. From what I understand, the faculty got to know them as a master's student and that gave them a (potentially unfair?) advantage in admissions. Not sure if their rec letters were from the faculty there, but they might have been. I imagine there are other cases like this across the humanities. That said, I agree you shouldn't do a master's if you can't afford it comfortably, and second the observation that top graduate programs that offer terminal master's degrees tend to assign them secondary importance, which puts the students in a strange position in terms of social and professional networks. But, as I said above, that can be overcome.

First and second years are always overflowing with advice and information but tend to know way less about the department and academia than they think they do. People in their fifth year and above tend to be extremely cynical about the department, academia and the world, which may be warranted but often results in unhelpful/inaccessible advice. In conclusion, ask third and fourth years.

If you can afford the application fees and have a strong ~20-page section of your thesis/past paper you could use as a writing sample, apply to a few well-chosen programs now. There's no reason to wait if you have everything lined up already.

Some older monographs that virtually every medievalist will read in grad school include Holy Feast and Holy Fast by Caroline Walker Bynum, From Memory to Written Record by Michael Clanchy, and The Formation of a Persecuting Society by R. I. Moore. These have all been superseded for one reason or another by now, but they’re still considered foundational texts. Same goes for The King’s Two Bodies by Ernst Kantorowicz, I guess. Re. more recent scholarship, telkanuru has given some good suggestions.

Publication record is a proxy for research quality, but since the committee (or at least your POIs, hopefully) will be evaluating the quality of your research directly via your writing sample, having one publication won't really matter. If your writing sample is taken from your published work, they'll form their own opinions about it. If it's not, it will simply determine their interpretation of your publication record because they'll assume your writing sample represents your best work. In other words, the best it can do for you is reinforce a positive impression. Re. your GPA, it's fine.

Big yikes, but in the interest of fairness, who said this? Was it a random faculty member/panelist/grad student or someone you would expect to mentor you or support your career directly?

I second Sigaba's comment. I know of a couple of star scholars who can place students well but are borderline emotionally abusive in different ways and make their advisees' grad school experience a living hell. It's important to know if that's the situation you're walking into so you can make an informed decision about the environment you'll be in for the next several years of your life. That's one thing you need to know. The other is, as others have said, your potential advisor's placement record. I would include their dropout record here as well and ask for the reasons their former students who didn't graduate left the program. Often that happens because the student didn't feel grad school was for them, which is fine, but sometimes the advisor or department could play a role in pushing someone out of academia. You want to know if your advisor has a track record of turning administrative formalities like renewal forms or evaluations that no one else in the department takes seriously into massive trials, if they refuse to let students defend for years on end, if they frequently clash with students over conceptual questions pertaining to their dissertations, if they are inaccessible or indifferent, if they are liable to forget who you are in between meetings, if they have ever messed up handling a student's medical/mental health/pregnancy/parenthood/family/academic issues, etc. Frankly, it sounds like School B is a better fit, has more money for you and would make you happier, plus the warning that having a second advisor would be a good idea is a massive red flag re. School A. So I will give you different advice from some others and tell you that it's reasonable to lean toward School B at this point. If you were choosing between a mediocre advisor at a top-10 department and a great advisor at a top-30 department, assuming they were ranked by placement and not just by the USNWR's weird criteria, the latter would be harder to justify because of the massive placement advantage the former would be likely to have. But, frankly, both of your choices probably have a hard time competing for plum jobs/postdocs with top departments, so the difference in ranking is less significant. Again, as everyone else has said, do look at your advisors' placement record first, in particular in recent years.

No, don't do it.

The fact that professors are nice to master's students doesn't make the program something other than a cash cow.

When doing an Oxbridge doctorate, it’s harder to get teaching experience, especially in a group setting. People have mentioned this to me specifically when lamenting their chances on the US job market.

UK universities will barely understand your transcript, let alone count the courses you took each semester, and neither UK nor US universities will care.

As a counterpoint to some of the responses you've gotten... there's a person at my department who passed their dissertation defence while high and the whole department knows it. And people smoke marijuana occasionally at departmental parties (and, I'm sure, more regularly in smaller groups). It's not a big deal. Grad students are pretty open with each other about drug use.

No one would tell that to an applicant just to fuck with them. If they said it, it's true. Hope it works out for you!

You can DEFINITELY get rejected from a program even if you’re a ‘perfect match’ for a number of reasons. That doesn’t mean professors assess applications randomly or without care; it just means it’s a complicated process with many factors determining the outcome.

This is certainly not the case in my department, and the information I was given when I was applying suggests it's not the case elsewhere either. Departments finalise their lists together. The only exception I can think of is when a certain subfield represents its own administrative unit, which is essentially what history of science departments are (no offence). In medieval history, I imagine schools with medieval studies programmes like Notre Dame and Fordham might have a more convoluted acceptance cycle, but that's it.

Re. the alt-ac resources stuff mentioned on the previous page, I wouldn't ask this particular question in an interview, especially if my interviewer is a senior academic at a department that considers itself 'elite.' Some older academics may view any mention of careers outside academia at such an early stage as a red flag; younger historians tend to have a more sympathetic and realistic attitude. Departments are working hard to destigmatise this conversation, and most faculty are fundamentally caring and decent, so they're trying to get with the times, but just in case I wouldn't bring it up in my first interaction with a potential advisor.

No. Your tuition and fees are covered and you get 28K in addition to that. This is a standard funding package at the schools Berkeley competes for admits with.

My advice is to prepare some questions about the department (after looking through their website to make sure the questions aren't too basic and won't make you look like you didn't do any research). Also look through your interviewer(s)' CV(s) and make sure you know what kind of work they're doing right now and, if that info is publicly available, what dissertations they're supervising and what classes they're teaching. (If you can't find this info on the internet, it could be a good question to ask.) You don't need to actually read their work, but you may feel underprepared if you have no idea what they're up to, which is how I felt in one of my Skype interviews.

I did not propose a model for others to emulate. I said nothing about my application process; what I mentioned were my circumstances at its outset, to illustrate the point that being clueless about the state of the field can change pretty quickly (unlike being ready for grad school, which I consider a different matter). As to the criticism you and others are making, what I tried to say is that if you don’t see enough evidence that someone on the internet deseves your advice, you’re free to disregard their request for it. Preaching about the importance of due diligence is performative, not constructive.