2021 Application Thread

[thisisnew]

39 minutes ago, Boolakanaka said:

To clarify: is the PhD also in law (only a handful of schools have a PhD in law) or in a separate topic? 
 

PhD in history

[OHSP]

18 hours ago, thisisnew said:

I've seen conflicting advice about this-- so throwing it over here for some additional insight: Would someone with a JD-PhD have a significant hiring advantage in academia (history/political science/law school -- though, i get it, the market is dismal) over someone with just a PhD; or put differently, would it be worth getting the JD along with the PhD (time, cost etc.) if the hope was to teach in academia?  [interested in early US territorial development/conlaw/administrative law in re: natural resource/land appropriation]

--BoNuS QuEsTiOn: would applying to a joint degree JD-PhD program have the potential to hurt an application in an "all or nothing" type of way (if someone were to only get into the PhD program but the JD doesn't want them, the PhD committee consequently decides not to offer admission)? [if helpful, thinking Yale, Stanford, Penn]

 

Thanks for any advice--y'all are the best.

Ditto everyone else saying no. But -- I have a law degree and my diss is partly legal (and involves legal ethnography). I can't say for certain but I strongly believe this has given me an advantage in terms of getting grants (reviewers frequently mention it as a +). If at the end of a phd you want to apply for legal history jobs (of which there are approx. zero [kind of joking, kind of not]), then I bet it would help. I wouldn't call it a significant hiring advantage at least in history depts. One thing I like about having a law degree = the knowledge that when I tank on the job market I have another option. 

[Strider_2931]

On 10/31/2020 at 2:19 PM, HardyBoy said:

Have you considered applying to HSTM (History of Science, Technology, and Medicine) programs? I can think of advising combos at Princeton that might be cool for your project.

Which professors at Princeton are you thinking of? Last year, I considered reaching out to Keith Wailoo but I cannot recall anyone else I was considering at Princeton. I was somewhat interested in applying to HSTM programs. In the end, I did not believe I had the background knowledge or deep interest in the subject. However, I loved reading The Cure Within by Anne Harrington and I have great respect for scholars working in HSTM and in programs like MIT’s HASTS program. These types of scholars (though they're not the only ones) help to make history an interdisciplinary subject, which I believe is essential to History's survival in US higher education.

 

[HardyBoy]

@Strider_2931 definitely Wailoo, but I'm also thinking of Barnes as a cultural historian, as well as Wirzbicki and Wilentz.

The history and HOS programs at Princeton have separate application processes, but they are pretty tightly connected, so you can work with people on both sides. If that interests you, you might consider reaching out to Wailoo and see if he seems interested.

FWIW, I sort of fell into HOS, without a deep background. That's definitely the less common path, as far as I can tell, but it does happen.

[DisplayNameGoesHere]

On 11/3/2020 at 9:22 AM, AP said:

AdComms are usually diverse in terms of fields so, even though I probably do not share your field, I can say this with confidence: the wording, to me, is off not in terms of grammar but in terms of how you portray the idea of modernity historically. As I would say to my graduate students, countries are not assimilated into nothing. It's not that there is a "Western world order" and countries are either "in" or "out" depending on how well they do (per your words). Further, the assumption that "Western world order" = modernity apparently underpins your project without a clear layout of how these two are connected and/or why this assumption is valid. For instance, I can contest your claim that the separation of religious institutions and state necessarily signify a valid form of assessing modernity in any country (here is not the place to do that). 

I would urge you to de-escalate the grandiose claims and replace them with clear arguments you will be able to defend in a project. For example: "In X country, the governing elites of the early 19th century assumed that Western values such as the separation of church and state would facilitate the modernization of the infrastructure network, education, and economic institutions. Yet, not all political authorities agreed on Y. For instance, [person] argued..." and so on. Like this, you are not making claims that you cannot defend in a SOP (maybe in your dissertation) nor that anyone would be expecting in a SOP. 

This brings me to my second point. The SOP is not a prospectus. You need to show that you are here to learn, that in the first two years that you take coursework, you will collaborate in conversations, you will incorporate comments, and you will expand your academic horizon. In other words, you will not be more likely admitted because you can pinpoint archives than if you show you can ask interesting, doable, historical questions.

 

Thank you for your detailed comments and criticism. I've since then dramatically overhauled my SoP, but I fear that I have moved so far in the other direction that my readers will get the impression that I have no clear idea of what I would like to do. My most recent draft is as follows:

 

I am a student of the intellectual history of [country1] and [country2] from the early nineteenth century until the latter half of the twentieth. I am open to a variety of topics and approaches, both theoretical and methodological, but have until now taken particular interest in conservative, right-wing, and nationalist thought, [country] Revolution, [country's participation in WWII], history writing, and debates on modernization and modernity, among others. Much comparative scholarship on these regions focuses on [metropole of empire of which country was a part] and is devoted to individual thinkers, e.g. [book]; the place of one in the imaginary of the other, e.g. [book]; or parallel diachronic study of one or a few phenomena in each, e.g. [book]. By combining these methods and focusing on [country] periphery instead of [country] center, I hope to explore the ways in which ideas and practices have flowed, not just from the West to the non-West, but also between non-Western regions during and after the transition to modernity, as well as the influence that the institutional forms and modes of thought particular to each have influenced these processes in elite and non-elite discourse. 

I then discuss my senior thesis, touch on the fact that I used only original-language primary sources in writing it, and then discuss my argument. I would like to carry forward the questions asked and observations made in my thesis and use them to help inform whatever future dissertation project my advisors and I decide on. 

I then discuss the work I did across departments at Cal in historiography, theory, and languages, the awareness of theoretical and methodological approaches and also the consciousness of the variety of intellectual and religious traditions in my countries that I have thereby gained. Although I have yet to settle on any single approach or set of subjects, I am interested in furthering my knowledge of theory and incorporating such topics as [understudied religion in country] and such themes as race into my future work.

I then discuss fit in the same terms outlined in my previous post.

 

What do you guys think? I fear that my failure to pinpoint any single specific project that I would like to do implies that I am lacking in focus. How do things look from the perspective of someone who has actually read applications and taken students, though?

[Sigaba]

6 hours ago, Cal2020 said:

What do you guys think? 

I must say that your revised statement is more confusing now than it was before. 

FWIW, the terms you are using "modernization" "modernity" "conservative" "right wing" "nationalist" make me wonder if you are putting your words into the mouths of those you study. (It might help were you to disclose the two countries that you seek to compare.) I also wonder if you're implicitly or inadvertently arguing that one country got it right and the other got it wrong based upon criteria you've established rather than goals that were determined at the time.  

Here's what I'm taking away from your two versions. A contemporaneous debate in two countries over the same topic during the same interval played out the same but different. One can understand the debate in each country better through a comparative approach because...? The use of x, y, and z methods of historical analysis enhances the understanding because ... ?

I wonder if comparing two countries is a sustainable approach at this time? Might you be served better by focusing on telling the story for one country and giving the comparison a go down the line?

[DisplayNameGoesHere]

14 minutes ago, Sigaba said:

I must say that your revised statement is more confusing now than it was before. 

FWIW, the terms you are using "modernization" "modernity" "conservative" "right wing" "nationalist" make me wonder if you are putting your words into the mouths of those you study. (It might help were you to disclose the two countries that you seek to compare.) I also wonder if you're implicitly or inadvertently arguing that one country got it right and the other got it wrong based upon criteria you've established rather than goals that were determined at the time.  

Here's what I'm taking away from your two versions. A contemporaneous debate in two countries over the same topic during the same interval played out the same but different. One can understand the debate in each country better through a comparative approach because...? The use of x, y, and z methods of historical analysis enhances the understanding because ... ?

I wonder if comparing two countries is a sustainable approach at this time? Might you be served better by focusing on telling the story for one country and giving the comparison a go down the line?

I'm sorry if my wording is confusing. I completely revised my SoP such that I avoid advancing any specific argument. The second version is, essentially, unrelated to the first. I mention a few topics and themes that I am interested in and attempt to situate myself in prior literature dealing with my two countries. Perhaps I did not do a good job of situating myself in this literature. I wanted to say that the literature deals with [country1] and the center of the empire of which [country2] was a part, which in fact spoke a different language from [country2], in three main ways. I intend to compare [country1] and [country2], which was in fact the periphery of the aforementioned larger empire, and utilize all three of these methods to illustrate the ways in which ideas have flowed between my two regions as well as between them and the West. Perhaps that's neither clear nor particularly interesting, in which case I will have to do some rethinking.

 

Regarding the sustainability of the comparison, I would honestly prefer if I could work on both topics simultaneously without trying to force comparisons for now. Trying to find something to say that a professor would find interesting is difficult enough as it is without trying to force every single topic I would like to do into the comparative and transnational mold. The problem is that I am trying to indicate my openness to a variety of topics and approaches, but I am not sure if I should focus exclusively on comparative topics, e.g. the construction of race in both regions, regimes of sovereignty in both regions, reactionary movements in both regions, or, as I do, name the few isolated topics I am interested in and explain what sort of comparative work I hope to do. I'm also receiving different messages from the people around me, so I am getting confused.

Edited November 8, 2020 by Cal2020

[AP]

16 hours ago, Cal2020 said:

Thank you for your detailed comments and criticism. I've since then dramatically overhauled my SoP, but I fear that I have moved so far in the other direction that my readers will get the impression that I have no clear idea of what I would like to do. My most recent draft is as follows:

 

I am a student of the intellectual history of [country1] and [country2] from the early nineteenth century until the latter half of the twentieth centuries (or simply say "in the last two hundred years" or "in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries" or "since 1800"). I am open to a variety of topics and approaches, both theoretical and methodological, but have until now taken particular interest in conservative, right-wing, and nationalist thought, [country] Revolution, [country's participation in WWII], history writing, and debates on modernization and modernity, among others [this is a sentences full of words but without any usable information. One way of checking this is: notice all the "and"? Karen Kelsky (someone I disagree on many aspects but who has good points about writing) says that when we list so much it's because we don't really know what we want to say. What do you want to say?). Much comparative scholarship on these regions focuses on [metropole of empire of which country was a part] and is devoted to individual thinkers, e.g. [book]; the place of one in the imaginary of the other, e.g. [book]; or parallel diachronic study of one or a few phenomena in each, e.g. [book]. By combining these methods and focusing on [country] periphery instead of [country] center, I hope to explore the ways in which ideas and practices have flowed, not just from the West to the non-West, but also between non-Western regions during and after the transition to modernity [this was my original comment. To my knowledge, there is no clear-cut period that we can call modernity in the global sense that you imply. Stop looking at history as if it was a clear, progressive timeline], as well as the influence that the institutional forms and modes of thought particular to each have influenced these processes in elite and non-elite discourse. [Are you discussing this SOP with your advisor? I'm very curious what they have to say about this list of scholars. My advisor would say: you have very little room in a SOP, why are you talking about others and not about yourself?]

 

16 hours ago, Cal2020 said:

What do you guys think? I fear that my failure to pinpoint any single specific project that I would like to do implies that I am lacking in focus. How do things look from the perspective of someone who has actually read applications and taken students, though?

I am not sure why you (and other applicants) are so obsessed in having a clear project. You are applying for a program, not defending a prospectus. In the SOP, you need to show that you have interesting questions, that you have a strong base to begin thinking about them (such as language skills), and that you want to grow as a scholar. What questions move you? 

Disclaimer: I haven't written a SOP in a while and I've only seen those that students shared with me when they want to apply to our program. 

9 hours ago, Cal2020 said:

Regarding the sustainability of the comparison, I would honestly prefer if I could work on both topics simultaneously without trying to force comparisons for now. Trying to find something to say that a professor would find interesting is difficult enough as it is without trying to force every single topic I would like to do into the comparative and transnational mold. The problem is that I am trying to indicate my openness to a variety of topics and approaches, but I am not sure if I should focus exclusively on comparative topics, e.g. the construction of race in both regions, regimes of sovereignty in both regions, reactionary movements in both regions, or, as I do, name the few isolated topics I am interested in and explain what sort of comparative work I hope to do. I'm also receiving different messages from the people around me, so I am getting confused.

I also thought you were doing a comparison. So, you need to clarify the questions that you have. Do not say you are open to any topic (there is such thing as being too honest, I'm one of those so I can understand!). Walk us through what intrigues you. Remember that, as historians, we are fascinated by the stories, by the specifics. What makes these two countries so cool to study side by side? and then you bring us back to the big question and your contribution to that conversation (what would a historian from another field learn from you?)

Finally, I want to appreciate your openness. It's not easy sharing your work, especially with strangers and taking criticisms as professionally as you have. This is a good example of us critiquing your work (not you) and you knowing the difference. This is a great examples for others, and a great skill for graduate school. 

[OHSP]

20 hours ago, Cal2020 said:

I am a student of the intellectual history of [country1] and [country2] from the early nineteenth century until the latter half of the twentieth. I am open to a variety of topics and approaches, both theoretical and methodological, but have until now taken particular interest in conservative, right-wing, and nationalist thought, [country] Revolution, [country's participation in WWII], history writing, and debates on modernization and modernity, among others. 

Don't start your SoP this way -- decenter yourself. I do not know how many times ppl have to stress that an SoP is about demonstrating that you can ask robust, interesting, historical questions. Do that. Start with the questions. Do NOT begin with a bunch of vague stuff about how you identify, what you might be interested in working on, even what your senior thesis was -- professors are not going to read "I am open to a variety of topics" and think "well that's the kind of exciting work I want to be involved with". Sorry to be blunt but it needs to be said. In order to get into a program you need to write a very clear, very strong SoP. It might help to just write down (in very clear, plain English, without any frills) exactly what it is that you are hoping to ask in grad school (in coursework, research, and maybe, eventually your dissertation). A quasi-prospectus is not going to impress professors -- your project will change (and needs to) and that's the point of coursework and early years spent in conversations with profs. 

**If you DM me I will send you my SoP from 2017. I'm not sure you've seen enough examples and that might help. 

Edited November 8, 2020 by OHSP

[AP]

23 minutes ago, OHSP said:

Don't start your SoP this way -- decenter yourself. I do not know how many times ppl have to stress that an SoP is about demonstrating that you can ask robust, interesting, historical questions. Do that. Start with the questions. Do NOT begin with a bunch of vague stuff about how you identify, what you might be interested in working on, even what your senior thesis was -- professors are not going to read "I am open to a variety of topics" and think "well that's the kind of exciting work I want to be involved with". Sorry to be blunt but it needs to be said. In order to get into a program you need to write a very clear, very strong SoP. It might help to just write down (in very clear, plain English, without any frills) exactly what it is that you are hoping to ask in grad school (in coursework, research, and maybe, eventually your dissertation). A quasi-prospectus is not going to impress professors -- your project will change (and needs to) and that's the point of coursework and early years spent in conversations with profs. 

**If you DM me I will send you my SoP from 2017. I'm not sure you've seen enough examples and that might help. 

Re: Reading sample SOPs, here's my all-time suggestion with a link to a good, annotated sample SOP: 

 

[Sigaba]

19 hours ago, Cal2020 said:

I'm sorry if my wording is confusing. I completely revised my SoP such that I avoid advancing any specific argument. The second version is, essentially, unrelated to the first. I mention a few topics and themes that I am interested in and attempt to situate myself in prior literature dealing with my two countries. Perhaps I did not do a good job of situating myself in this literature. I wanted to say that the literature deals with [country1] and the center of the empire of which [country2] was a part, which in fact spoke a different language from [country2], in three main ways. I intend to compare [country1] and [country2], which was in fact the periphery of the aforementioned larger empire, and utilize all three of these methods to illustrate the ways in which ideas have flowed between my two regions as well as between them and the West. Perhaps that's neither clear nor particularly interesting, in which case I will have to do some rethinking.

 

Regarding the sustainability of the comparison, I would honestly prefer if I could work on both topics simultaneously without trying to force comparisons for now. Trying to find something to say that a professor would find interesting is difficult enough as it is without trying to force every single topic I would like to do into the comparative and transnational mold. The problem is that I am trying to indicate my openness to a variety of topics and approaches, but I am not sure if I should focus exclusively on comparative topics, e.g. the construction of race in both regions, regimes of sovereignty in both regions, reactionary movements in both regions, or, as I do, name the few isolated topics I am interested in and explain what sort of comparative work I hope to do. I'm also receiving different messages from the people around me, so I am getting confused.

I think that what's concerning to me is that so far it is hard to understand the tree you want to study and how that tree helps all historians understand a larger part of the forest.  By studying X, Y, and Z, historians can understand better larger issues of A, B, and C.

Insofar as a comparative approach, I urge you to determine a sustainable balance between your long term aspirations and your current abilities within the context of the task at hand -- writing a statement of purpose that will convince readers that you will fit into a department (not the other way around). 

FWIW, I'm not sure how I feel about @AP and @OHSP's recommendations on how well defined a provisional research topic needs to be--maybe identifying the exact fish one wants to swim after isn't necessary but I would think that knowing the school and where it generally swims would make one a more competitive applicant. YMMV.
 

[OHSP]

47 minutes ago, Sigaba said:

FWIW, I'm not sure how I feel about @AP and @OHSP's recommendations on how well defined a provisional research topic needs to be--maybe identifying the exact fish one wants to swim after isn't necessary but I would think that knowing the school and where it generally swims would make one a more competitive applicant. YMMV.
 

Yeah, I might have overstated the "put your specific project plan aside" line because it's SO concerning to see SoP drafts that do not foreground the questions. Have a project, sure. But make sure the plan you lay out is an enquiry into something -- some SoP drafts are borderline telling us what the author intends to find, and that's a mistake. Tell profs what you want to ASK not what you plan to illustrate. 

[Sigaba]

14 minutes ago, OHSP said:

Yeah, I might have overstated the "put your specific project plan aside" line because it's SO concerning to see SoP drafts that do not foreground the questions. Have a project, sure. But make sure the plan you lay out is an enquiry into something -- some SoP drafts are borderline telling us what the author intends to find, and that's a mistake. Tell profs what you want to ASK not what you plan to illustrate. 

I think a challenge many aspiring graduate students is that it can be difficult getting a handle on how important historiography is to the craft. While upper division courses on American foreign relations were centered around specific debates, the "big big picture" was not really a focus. IIRC two theses as an undergraduate had next to zero discussion of existing scholarly debates -- just a set up of the question, immediate issues, and a plunge into the primary source materials. 

I remember one upper division lecture class ending with a discussion of historiography. One student said to a buddy with a degree of consternation, "That would have been a great first lecture."

[Tigla]

On 11/8/2020 at 12:24 AM, Sigaba said:

I wonder if comparing two countries is a sustainable approach at this time? Might you be served better by focusing on telling the story for one country and giving the comparison a go down the line?

 

I want to second this comment for you, @Cal2020. I applied with a project discussing German development ideas in Cambodia and the application of these ideas in the genocide museum in Phnom Penh. The project was meant to historicize while also highlight a very specific museum and its relation to the broader debate of development and human rights in Southeast Asia. Since I started my program, I transitioned into a more global/comparative analysis of European development, mainly focusing on West German ideas and programs. According to my current advisors who agreed to take me on, it was important to show that I could tie something very specific to broader trends within the field, than to carefully lay out a complicated project proposal. As people laid out above me, an SOP is not your prospectus and you are not wed to it in the program. See it as a document to show that you are a budding historian with interesting questions that are related to the current state of the field.

[dr. t]

6 hours ago, Tigla said:

As people laid out above me, an SOP is not your prospectus and you are not wed to it in the program.

NB: you're not wed to your prospectus either. Hell, my understanding of my own dissertation changed substantially by just writing my introduction - which is the last part you write.

[AP]

22 hours ago, telkanuru said:

NB: you're not wed to your prospectus either. Hell, my understanding of my own dissertation changed substantially by just writing my introduction - which is the last part you write.

Precisely my point. 

The SOP should not be a prospectus. Yes, having a project absolutely helps but not so much as the project itself but because it is the easiest (but not the only) way to show what questions you are interested in. 

[Sigaba]

7 hours ago, AP said:

The SOP should not be a prospectus.

FWIW, the SOPs I was most confident / least anxious about laid my progression from my work as an undergraduate to the work I thought/wanted to do as a graduate student and then as a professional academic historian. My idea for a dissertation was presented as a thumbnail -- detailed but still a thumbnail. From there, I moved on to the works I would write as my career progressed.

The purpose of each section of my better SOPs was --

[a] to show that I my work as an undergraduate demonstrated that I had been developing the skills to do work in a graduate program.

[b] to show how I fit into a department and was cognizant of a bigger picture

[c] to show how was familiar with the contours of current historiographical debates in my primary field both broadly and narrowly conceived.

[d] to show that I was abreast of ongoing historiographical debates and that I could imagine how I could move the needle decades down the line.

To the points emphasized above, my SOPs had very little jargon  (IIRC the only terms I used were "civil military relations" and "grand strategy"). I dropped exactly zero names of professors in the departments I wanted to join.  Instead, I indicated that I knew the kind of work they were doing. I emphasized that my mindset was "What can I do for the profession" (and absolutely not "what can the profession do for me"). I endeavored to show that I thought a lot about history. Throughout, I sought to demonstrate that I was a proficient and considerate writer who "took readers by the hand." 

 

 

 

 

 

Or rather, that I thought that I was.

 

 

[AP]

I really like how @Sigaba turns my short, clumsy comments into what I actually meant. 

(Maybe you should be my book editor?) ?

[Sigaba]

13 hours ago, AP said:

I really like how @Sigaba turns my short, clumsy comments into what I actually meant. 

I am the person who gives the jar the final tap that allows it to open after the strong have been working at it for a while.

 

[Afro Aniyunwiya]

On 11/4/2020 at 10:10 PM, Strider_2931 said:

Which professors at Princeton are you thinking of? Last year, I considered reaching out to Keith Wailoo but I cannot recall anyone else I was considering at Princeton. I was somewhat interested in applying to HSTM programs. In the end, I did not believe I had the background knowledge or deep interest in the subject. However, I loved reading The Cure Within by Anne Harrington and I have great respect for scholars working in HSTM and in programs like MIT’s HASTS program. These types of scholars (though they're not the only ones) help to make history an interdisciplinary subject, which I believe is essential to History's survival in US higher education.

 

Not sure the specifics of your research, but you should also consider Ruha Benjamin (my senior thesis advisor). She also writes and teaches at the intersection of (biological/medical) science, technology, and society. João Biehl too if your work takes a more anthropological approach.

[psstein]

On 10/28/2020 at 9:02 PM, Strider_2931 said:

I'll gladly share a set of my research questions: 

How did US public health journals and missionary writings about public health over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth century define and imagine the Midwest? How did these publications imagine the development of healthy populations in the Midwest compared to overseas territories, the West, and the South? In contrast, how did local sites in the Midwest consider their history, their place in the nation, and their future, in the development of their sanitation and public health programs?

These are some very interesting questions. I don't think Wisconsin's faculty would be the worst match for those interests, but one of them is likely to retire shortly and the options outside of her may not be the best for your interests. I also believe the program there has some structural problems that I'd caution thinking carefully about before applying.

There's an excellent essay in Francisco Scarano (ed.) Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State discussing the US South's role as a "tropical other." Natalie Ring's The Problem South and Todd Savitt and James Harvey Young (eds.) Disease and Distinctiveness in the American South. Finally, William Coleman's Yellow Fever in the North: The Methods of Early Epidemiology.

 

 

[Sigaba]

20 hours ago, Afro Aniyunwiya said:

Not sure the specifics of your research

 IMO, it's not great form to offer guidance without at least reading what the person asking for guidance has written.

[KenzieUT]

Anyone getting little-to-no response from POIs? Should I be worried? Only one prof responded by saying they will respond at the end of Nov.

[crunchyfallleaves]

5 hours ago, KenzieUT said:

Anyone getting little-to-no response from POIs? Should I be worried? Only one prof responded by saying they will respond at the end of Nov.

I'm in a different field (but humanities) so not sure if there is a stricter standard in History, but I wouldn't lose sleep over it. It's an incredibly hectic time for faculty with many schools preparing to go online after Thanksgiving, recommendation season, and general pandemic craziness. The vast majority of programs don't seem to require faculty contact, and I don't see a world where it would ever hurt you that you reached out but didn't hear back. Maybe your name rings some deep-seated bell when the adcom sits down to review, maybe it doesn't, but I don't think you should worry.

[Tigla]

9 hours ago, KenzieUT said:

Anyone getting little-to-no response from POIs? Should I be worried? Only one prof responded by saying they will respond at the end of Nov.

Profs and grad students are scrambling at the moment to move classes entirely online as universities failed to plan ahead for the third wave in the US. It took me a month to respond to a prospective student, not because I didn't want to talk, rather because I have been swamped sorting out the mess my university created with last minute adjustments to only then back away from those guidelines, but then to reimplement them a week later. *deep sigh* A friendly reminder email is probably your best bet, but don't expect immediate responses.