Choosing a school based on faculty (how to start?)

[ForlornHope]

Greetings to all,

 

I have been actively investigating the best directions to go with entering graduate studies for history, and nearly every source shares a very critical point in common: choose your school based not on the prestige of the program alone, but also by the interests of the faculty and how they align to you own.

This seems intuitive enough, but also sounds like the beginning of an incredibly tedious and protracted search through website listings of the faculty of one randomly picked school after another. In selecting schools for my application ordeal, it has already proven difficult enough to find out which programs are as good as their optimistic self-descriptions claim that they are. So, are there any tips that current or past applicants could share on an efficient manner to go about this? If it helps with responses, my primary interests lie in medieval studies and I feel that my experiences are mostly oriented towards post-Carolingian era English and French history.

 

Thanks in advance

[Whatishistoryanyway]

What recent books have you read (in the time period you mentioned) that you like? That's a good place to start. Find out where they work, check out their profiles, etc. Look around in the bibliography to see if you can find anything else in there you like, find out where they are. Browse the websites of some of the 'top' schools in medieval history, see what they have to offer. I'm assuming one of your advisers/mentors may have worked on a similar time period. Have a sit down with them and listen to their advice regarding starting points. 

 

I just noticed you are also in Knoxville! Perhaps you should have a sit-down with Rubenstein, Burman, or Bast (I think he may actually work on the middle ages, so I may be wrong on that one).

[ForlornHope]

Thank you for your response. I have spoken with Dr. Burman and have actually found Dr. Bast to be a bit aloof since last I had a class with him, but I suppose it wouldn't hurt to inquire. And Dr. Rubenstein certainly will be my primary stop but I am waiting for him to return from England in the fall! I am using this summer to pick up on reading, because I got my BA a few years ago and am brushing up on things and taking a few classes before serious applications are sent out. Unfortunately, most of the literature under my belt is either primary sources or written by professors in England, but I will certainly take your suggestion on authors should I come across someone on this side of the Atlantic, with bibliographies being the first clues.

[bsharpe269]

I found conferences to be a great tool for identifying faculty. Find out the big conferences in your particular subfield and then look at who is speaking at them, they are probably the big names in your subfield. Once you identify a couple big people in your area, look at who advised them, look at who they have advised, look at any listed collaborators. These are some great starting points. Also, I assume that you are reading relevent publications to learn about your research area. Look at who is writing these and also the publications listed in the references.

 

In addition, the VERY tedius search through faculty listings ends up happening at some point. You can pull up the rankings and then go through like the top 50-100 schools and look through faculty. This is very time consuming but I spread it out over 6ish months and have a great list of schools and professors now.

[Whatishistoryanyway]

Thank you for your response. I have spoken with Dr. Burman and have actually found Dr. Bast to be a bit aloof since last I had a class with him, but I suppose it wouldn't hurt to inquire. And Dr. Rubenstein certainly will be my primary stop but I am waiting for him to return from England in the fall! I am using this summer to pick up on reading, because I got my BA a few years ago and am brushing up on things and taking a few classes before serious applications are sent out. Unfortunately, most of the literature under my belt is either primary sources or written by professors in England, but I will certainly take your suggestion on authors should I come across someone on this side of the Atlantic, with bibliographies being the first clues.

 

I'm glad you've already made progress. I'm sure they will be able to guide you when it comes to selecting schools to put on your list. And as bsharpe said, eventually you will have to go through the tedious process of reviewing faculty. But I think you can narrow that process down quite a bit. In other words, not all the 125 or so ranked programs will have people for you to work with. So you don't actually have to look at every program's faculty.

[rising_star]

You could take a look at conferences like Kalamazoo or AHA and search for keywords in the abstracts/papers and use that to narrow your search. Even if you're finding graduate students, you're still identifying programs where your research interests would be supported.

[maelia8]

My process was something like this (I am not claiming that it was the most thorough, but it worked for me): I went on the AHA website and looked at their interactive map of history Ph.D. programs by state. I went through it state by state in all of the states that had Ph.D. programs (in locations I could imagine myself living) and marked off the ones that had "European" listed under their specialty concentrations (the AHA website provides a concise list under each university profile). I cross-referenced this list with a rankings list of the top 25 schools in European History (based on reputation and publication rate), and came out with a list of about 12 schools. For each of these, I went onto the school's website and read through the faculty profiles of all of their Europeanists (in my case, more specifically Germanists) to see what they have worked on and find out who has interests that overlap with my own. At 6 out of 12 schools there was either no professor researching in my interest area, or that professor was retiring/going on sabbatical, so I crossed those off my list and ended up applying to the other 6, which was about how many I'd been expecting to apply to in the first place. 

Edited May 27, 2014 by maelia8

[C&C]

How I found my schools:

 

1. Google, google, google! (It feels as if I did this for months on end in the beginning, but it was well worth it.)

 

2. Talk to current/past professors.

 

3. Based on those findings, narrow it down by research interest/reputation/geography.

Ex: If one program has faculty you like, but you couldn't stand living there...consider ruling it out.

 

4. Talk to your friends at thegradcafe 

 

Best of luck!

[ForlornHope]

All of these comments should be very useful and certainly are a decent boost to morale knowing what I should have already realized: that everyone has had the same experience to some degree. At the very least, I do have about 6 months and should be fine I think since I'm starting now and certainly plan to make this an ongoing effort. I think the toughest part will be learning German basic German while sharpening my French and Latin! Time to get searching, then.

 

My thanks to all.

[TMP]

"This seems intuitive enough, but also sounds like the beginning of an incredibly tedious and protracted search through website listings of the faculty of one randomly picked school after another. In selecting schools for my application ordeal, it has already proven difficult enough to find out which programs are as good as their optimistic self-descriptions claim that they are. "

 

Welcome to research This will make up most of your time in the graduate program.  Research.  Research.  Research.  You're always going to be looking for needles in the haystack.

[CageFree]

Another suggestion would be to look through the last few issues of the top journal for your field (for example, for me one might be the Latin American Research Review), and see what kind of work is being done that interests you. Then look at where those people (faculty, grad students) are. It will tell give you an idea of what type of research is being done in what programs. 

 

I say this because faculty interests change... if you fell in love with a book published in 1994, that faculty member is likely to be working on something completely different. Recent books are a much better gauge.

Edited May 27, 2014 by CageFree

[m-ttl]

For Art History, I just grabbed the CAA guide to graduate programs, but for History itself I'd just use the NCPH database for Public History and the AHA's by specialization search. 

 

I made a spread sheet of all the schools and a list of general areas I was interested in meeting - theoretically, geographically, specialty-wise, whatever, and chose to apply to the schools that had the most "matches" to me and my interests. When I had a long list of places that met basic areas of interest, I went back and looked for specific professors at each school. If none of them interested me, they went off the list. It shouldn't take six months?

[Sigaba]

IMO, if one finds the process of looking through faculty listings as "tedious," being a graduate student in history may not be one's cup of tea in the long run. As many of you will find as you begin graduate school in history, knowing who is who and where they sit and how they came to sit there can play a vital role in learning about the profession.

 

I developed my list of schools by looking through the hard-copy of the AHA's Guide to Departments of History. I looked at the roster of every department listed that has a graduate program. If a department appeared strong in my areas of interest, I did some background research on the historians with whom I'd probably end up working. Concurrently, I focused on where potential POIs had earned their MA's and Ph.Ds. For me, the process was useful because it taught me that the top schools programs overall may be nearly as good as the top schools within one's primary and secondary fields of interest.

[sacklunch]

^ Kinda agree. I really enjoyed digging through departmental websites....hehe. 

 

I'm not sure how popular it is in your field, but academia.edu is a good place to look, too. Once you set up your profile you can add specific areas of interest and the site will recommend scholars. Plus you can find a ton of graduate student CV's to dig through and get a good idea of what sort of prep/students they like!

[DCguy]

My process was something like this (I am not claiming that it was the most thorough, but it worked for me): I went on the AHA website and looked at their interactive map of history Ph.D. programs by state. I went through it state by state in all of the states that had Ph.D. programs (in locations I could imagine myself living) and marked off the ones that had "European" listed under their specialty concentrations (the AHA website provides a concise list under each university profile). I cross-referenced this list with a rankings list of the top 25 schools in European History (based on reputation and publication rate), and came out with a list of about 12 schools. For each of these, I went onto the school's website and read through the faculty profiles of all of their Europeanists (in my case, more specifically Germanists) to see what they have worked on and find out who has interests that overlap with my own. At 6 out of 12 schools there was either no professor researching in my interest area, or that professor was retiring/going on sabbatical, so I crossed those off my list and ended up applying to the other 6, which was about how many I'd been expecting to apply to in the first place. 

This is exactly what I did. I would've been lost without the AHA website and the PhD by state directory.