Any insight into these departments?

[Ilikekitties]

Here's my list!

Columbia, anthro

UC Santa Barbara, anthro

Urbana-Champaign, anthro

Notre Dame, anthro

Toronto, anthro

McGill, anthro (the only MA)

UC Davis, anthro

UC Santa Cruz, anthro

UVA, anthro

WUSTL, anthro

Maryland, anthro

Yale, anthro

MSU – Graduate Specialization in Animal Studies Social Science and Humanities Perspectives (this is a maybe)

[Ilikekitties]

Sorry it's messed up! I copied it from a spreadsheet. I don't have time to fix it right now...

[fuzzylogician]

CostaRita, I tried to edit it for you but whatever formatting you carried over from the spreadsheet can't be undone. (At least, I haven't figured out how to do it.) I'd recommend starting a new thread so it's easier for people to read. Let me know when you have, and I'll delete this one. 

[Ilikekitties]

Hi, I just retyped everything

[fuzzylogician]

Excellent, I hope you get lots of helpful comments

[Bschaefer]

Which subfield of anthro?-I may or may not be able to help haha

[Ilikekitties]

Cultural/environmental.

[farflung]

I know a bit about some of those departments. What kind of information are you looking for? Can you be more specific about your potential research topic? And perhaps professors that you're interested in working with at those schools? 

Perhaps a good place to start would be e-mailing current graduate students at those departments and asking what they think of your fit for the school-- keeping in mind that they are EXTREMELY busy, and thanking them profusely if or when they respond. 

[Ilikekitties]

I just want to know their general reputation in the field of cultural anthro. I'm interested in human-animal relationships. Prof at UIUC has offered to put me in contact with some of her students if I'm admitted.

[farflung]

Literally all of those schools have good reputations in cultural anthro, many of them have stellar reputations (Toronto, Yale, Columbia, UI Urbana-Champaign especially). I don't know much about Notre Dame. The UC schools give me pause because I've heard that funding is super super tight, and PhD programs should ideally be fully-funded for multiple years. I say apply for the programs that interest you, but in the spring when it comes time to decide you'll want to prioritize who gives you funding. Money is so so important for quality of life & quality of research down the road -- trust me!

Many graduate programs list their current students, with e-mail addresses and descriptions of their research interests, on their department website. So go digging on those department sites for grad student e-mails, and don't be shy about e-mailing them with application advice and such. Good luck!

[Ilikekitties]

Yup - I can't go unless I get full funding. My parents are low income and they cannot help me. I'm not there yet: first I have to get in lol. I have my doubts of whether I'll get into any of these programs. Thanks!

I just know that faculty at my undergrad institution don't recommend Chicago or Harvard for anthro. Chicago is too cutthroat and Harvard is too "old school," apparently.

Edited October 4, 2015 by CostaRita

[farflung]

Yup - I can't go unless I get full funding. My parents are low income and they cannot help me. I'm not there yet: first I have to get in lol. I have my doubts of whether I'll get into any of these programs. Thanks!

I just know that faculty at my undergrad institution don't recommend Chicago or Harvard for anthro. Chicago is too cutthroat and Harvard is too "old school," apparently.

Ha! I would have to agree on those points about Chicago and Harvard, but that's just Anthro gossip (no direct experience with either, I'm sure they have lovely people). If this is your first application cycle, keep in mind that you should definitely have a plan B in case you don't gain admission this time around -- hopefully working in something that is related to your field of study or interest. I had to apply to graduate school two years in a row, and I learned a lot from year 1 to year 2. Fortunately, now I'm in a great program that is a great fit for me. 

On the topic of funding, you're not alone! Applicants to humanities and social science PhD programs -- except for the exceptionally wealthy -- should really avoid programs that come with a price tag. Being an anthropologist is not a lucrative profession, and there is no guarantee of academic employment even with a PhD and a stellar record. So if anyone else is reading this, please do not take on debt to get a PhD in Anthropology. 

[Ilikekitties]

Yup! Sad but true.

[smg]

UCSB has terrible funding

 

[Ilikekitties]

Then I probably won't end up going there lol. I can't go anywhere unless I'm fully-funded, which....won't be very likely.

Edited October 11, 2015 by CostaRita

[birchleaf]

Have you looked into applying for any grants or any outside sources of funding? Even if it's not for very much, even bringing something in with you not only decreases the amount of money the institution needs to give you, but demonstrates to them that you're capable of winning grants and funding in the first place. 

[knp]

If you are applying to schools in the top 50—as judged by pretty much any ranking of prestige you choose, whether by the university overall or anthropology-specific—most of them should offer full funding. "Full funding" means "full tuition reimbursement and a stipend for your work." Nobody (who wants an academic career) should ever go to a US PhD that expects you to help pay tuition, or that does not offer a stipend. This is not unique to you, trust me! We are all looking for this, and if you get admitted to a top 50 program, it is likely that you will be "fully funded." Just glancing over one list of top 50 universities, there are only three that I know do not offer full funding to their entire admitted cohort. (Indiana at Bloomington, for example, does not fund all their admits, although it probably varies by department). That said, I don't know about the funding in about 20 of these universities, but there are about 27 of them that I do know fully fund all of their admitted students.

But! There is another, related issue, that I think may be the concern you're trying to express. "Fully funded" sometimes still doesn't provide very much stipend money; UNC pays like $12,500. (Although I will note that that is an exceptionally low stipend. They do also have opportunities to win university-wide fellowships that pay more.) When you say that you need full funding, do you mean that you can't go anywhere unless they offer a stipend over X thousand dollars, because you have living expenses that can't be met with less? That should be more or less easy to figure out from the university websites, or the various "grad school funding spreadsheets" floating around this website. If you need $16,000 to be happy and $18,000 in higher cost-of-living areas, you can certainly figure that out before you apply, and save yourself the application fees!

PS Please excuse the bolding and italics, I've been writing my NSF essays and their over-formatting bug has bitten me. (And good suggestion about the outside funding!)

Edited October 11, 2015 by knp

[Ilikekitties]

Thanks for the info about the funding! As for the stipend, I have no idea what I could live off of.

[knp]

Honestly, I would prioritize researching that, along with everything else you're doing. What would you do if you accepted a PhD offer and then found out that the stipend was too low? You can usually figure out whether any given university will pay enough to live on, in broad strokes, using theoretical knowledge you can glean from the internet. You'd do this by looking up average cost-of-living in the area (utilities, food prices, rent, etc.) will you have to have a car, what the stipend is, how many fees there are, whether other students at the school tend to pick up debt for their living expenses, calculating how much you'll need to pay each month for any previous debt you have (if you don't decide to defer payment while in school), etc. If you're thorough, researching those things will give you a pretty decent foundation in whether the university will pay enough to live on. (Find a "budgeting your expenses" worksheet if you're afraid of leaving off a big category.) At the same time, though, that's another argument for the gap year idea. Doing Americorps or getting a job would also get you a much more "real" sense of how far a dollar can go. Americorps doesn't pay a lot, but that's almost a plus for this, because it's in the realm of many graduate stipends.

[Ilikekitties]

Thanks for the tips!!! I know that one of my profs had to borrow like 35k for her fully-funded PhD at SMU because the stipend was too low. :/

[knp]

Right, and, especially because financial independence is emotionally important to you, it's both possible and a good idea to research how to minimize the risk of having to take that path. Your professor came out OK, because she managed to get a good job! But many PhD graduates end up trapped in adjuncting cycles that pay, if anything, less than their graduate stipend did. Then you might never be able to pay off the debt! (Has anybody given you the DON'T GO TO GRAD SCHOOL, THERE ARE NO JOBS, IT'S RIDICULOUSLY COMPETITIVE TO GET EVEN THE WORST JOBS, AND THE PAY IS TERRIBLE speech yet? Have you heard the words "adjunct crisis"?) So while eliminating the possibility of acquiring living expense debt in graduate school is impossible—people do have sudden, unexpected costs, e.g. medical bills, or having to take unpaid time off for family reasons while still having to pay your rent—you for sure want to avoid going to programs where it's normal to graduate with tens of thousands of dollars in debt for normal living expenses. If you go to a program where you acquire $30k of debt for living expenses and you find yourself with a $20k medical bill, then you're doubly screwed. Do your research, both about the school's academics and the financial ramifications of its stipend; apply broadly; do really consider taking that gap year; and that should give you about as much insurance as possible against bad situations.

[Ilikekitties]

This prof is actually a visiting assistant prof, so she doesn't know how many more semesters she'll be here. It's her first job post-PhD.

[rising_star]

This prof is actually a visiting assistant prof, so she doesn't know how many more semesters she'll be here. It's her first job post-PhD.

Which is exactly what knp's point is. If you don't know how many semesters of employment you have, it's really hard to plan for making student loan payments, among other things. 

I second everything knp said to you about figuring out how much money you need to live on, if only because I basically said the same thing to you a few days ago in response to another post of yours.

[knp]

Thanks, r_s! 

OP, I am still interested in the answers to these two questions: 

Has anybody given you the DON'T GO TO GRAD SCHOOL, THERE ARE NO JOBS, IT'S RIDICULOUSLY COMPETITIVE TO GET EVEN THE WORST JOBS, AND THE PAY IS TERRIBLE speech yet? Have you heard the words "adjunct crisis"?

[Ilikekitties]

I've heard this regarding jobs in academia and (maybe) going to school for anthro. My advisors urged me to apply for public policy programs/non-anthro programs. But they didn't bash grad school as a whole. I have not heard "adjunct crisis" but I bet that I can guess what it is.