nerdspeak

Haha TRUTH.

better start saving then. thanks.

Assume a student passes their exams and starts their dissertation. They're at somewhere like UChicago or Harvard where all of the PhD students receive funding for the first five years. After those five years of funding expire, how does one go about getting funding to finish the dissertation? I know that lots of ABDs get adjunct jobs, but I don't think teaching two classes at $3,000 each is enough to support oneself in Cambridge or Chicago. Is failure to get funding for the disseration a common reason for leaving?

I took a year off and planned on applying this year to grad programs in history, but the job market led to me getting cold feet. However, I've realized that this is what I want to do and I need to just suck it up. Anyway, I already have recs from when I applied to the Rhodes and Marshall, so that's not a problem. Ditto with the writing sample, and I feel like a month is enough time to put together a decent statement of purpose--I pretty much know what to say. My GRE scores, however, are another story--I took my first practice test just now and received a 163 verbal and a 130 math (I used to be good at math, so I could improve this score--I forgot the pythagorean theorem, for example). Do you guys think I should just apply? Would getting rejected hurt my chances if I apply again next year? I am shooting for UChicago/Harvard/Penn/Brown/WUSTL so I don't have that much room for error. In a sense it seems silly to rush--I have a job right now and it's probably a good idea to save money. But if I wait I will be turning twenty-five during the fall of my first year. That seems old, given that I will probably take eight years to finish.

I really think the hysteria about the job market is a bit overblown. Unlike law school, graduate training was never a "good" career move--there's no reason why people should feel deceived. Most graduates of top 10 Ph.D. programs, at least in philosophy (the most transparent discipline), get tenure-track jobs or desirable postdocs. Personally, I think being upset that Harvard won't hire you straight out of graduate school is a bit ridiculous. So what if you're at a third-tier institution--you're still part of the discourse, and the school year is only 6 months long, so you don't necessarily have to stay in Nebraska or Mississippi all year long.

Can anyone offer an explanation of the difference between these two fields? I know I want to study an institutionalist approach to economics, similar to that of Ha-Joon Chang, and I know I can't do this through most American economics department.

Can anyone offer an explanation of the difference between these two fields? I know I want to study an institutionalist approach to economics, similar to that of Ha-Joon Chang, and I know I can't do this through most American economics department.

I am interested in political theory, comparative political economy, and economic sociology. I am, however, more inclined to qualitative research than to hardcore statistical analysis. I majored in intellectual history at a top liberal arts college and did well, and am trying to decide whether to apply to grad programs in political science or in intellectual history. My understanding is that the political theory market is absolutely horrible. Look how many political theory candidates are still on the market coming out of UChicago: http://political-science.uchicago.edu/people/phd.shtml. History is less transparent--at least I'm having a harder time getting placement data. Does anyone have any data on placement rates of the top history departments? I know that the market is, in general, bad, but that might not be the case for the top programs--it certainly isn't for philosophy, as Brian Leiter points out in his takedown of Pannapacker. http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2010/03/lying-about-the-academic-job-market.html.

Would I be more marketable if, after being accepted as a political theorist, I developed a secondary specialty in political economy/institutional economics? I am thinking outside of the academy as well--think tanks, consulting, etc. I am already very interested in political economy as a result of outside reading I've done since leaving college. But I didn't do sufficient quantitative coursework to get into a Ph.D. program as a political economist. So, in this circumstance, I would get into school as a pure theorist, but eventually go on the market as a theoretically-sophisticated political economist.

I did well (3.8 overall, 3.9 departmental) in a history department as an undergraduate taking mostly intellectual history courses and wrote a well-received (high honors) thesis. I won various awards, etc. The work I want to do in graduate school could conceivably be done in history, and my professors tell me I would have a shot at any doctoral program in history. However, I anticipate that certain aspects of the historical profession--that I would need to defend the "historicity" of any theoretical work I published to traditional political historians--will prove somewhat limiting. Consequently, I'm entertaining the possibility of doing political theory. How hard would it be to sell myself to a top 15 doctoral program in political science?