Fall 2018 Applicants

[gsc]

10 minutes ago, astroid88 said:

Is it a sign of anything if our POI hasn’t contacted us despite being admitted to the program? Is it like a “reluctant acceptance”? Should I contact them?

Having a hard time telling myself they really want you.

 

Just give it some time. It can take professors a few days to clear off their schedule enough to follow up with admitted students; consider everything else they're having to juggle, especially when it may only be the 2nd week in the semester. If the professor wants to follow up with you by phone, they may wait until the end of the week when they're free. Finally, they may also be trying to give you space since admissions period is hectic and stressful, and are looking to not bombard you with emails. 

 

[khigh]

53 minutes ago, Dobby'sSocks said:

A few years ago the department at my school made shirts that said “Historians do it Chicago Style.” 

I need one like that! 

[psstein]

3 hours ago, gnossienne n.3 said:

You have stated that you are an international student; your priorities and impressions may be different. What constitutes a top program will be different to different people. There is no single list of top programs that will be unaffected by things such as the actual faculty working in the department at a given moment or the research interests of the student. No institution or department is ironclad. If you want to talk about prestige and hiring practices, there are studies that can be referenced and dissected ad nauseam. Wisconsin's HoS placement record is complicated for reasons that have been expanded on already. As a whole, it is a respected institution that has graduated many successful faculty in History, regardless of what you may think of its general prestige outside of the field.

In general, our history placement is complex, especially in view of previous funding issues/times to degree/etc. The HoS placement is a bit less complex, though a good number of recent graduates have found TT positions or other respected, alt-ac positions (research librarian and archivist respectively). The most important thing about placement is that a large number of students aren't enslaved as adjuncts.

3 hours ago, ashiepoo72 said:

If anyone was wondering, gradcafe has a handy "ignore user" setting if you find yourself confronted by someone who is annoying and refuses to stop talking.

And just in case anyone cares about my 2 cents, Madison has a solid placement record and is, in fact, one of the top 20 programs which disproportionately places its grads in TT jobs. It has an excellent record. It may not be Princeton or Yale, but it isn't a program to scoff at.

Princeton and Yale both have resources that most PhD students can only dream about, as does Harvard. If I had to generalize and ignore important nuance about Wisconsin vs. Harvard, I'd say Harvard is a better program. However, saying "these are the top programs based solely on name" is foolish. Michigan State has a better African History program than many Ivies.

Edited January 23, 2018 by psstein

[dr. t]

9 hours ago, khigh said:

Cook is in history of science, not history proper. 

I promise you, Hal is history and not HOS.

Edited January 24, 2018 by telkanuru

[ltr317]

@Kingsouth good luck with your applications. 

[ltr317]

10 hours ago, Yellow Mellow said:

You are right in that there is no point in debating the issue further. On the other hand, I still cannot see how I failed to respect the people that I have engaged with during the discussion. I simply believe that the placement record does not lie, and that although one should not go to Columbia, Harvard, or Princeton if they are not a good fit, the fact remains that those colleges have much better placement records across different fields than Wisconsin. Of course, there will always be exceptions and extraordinary professors everywhere, but I think that it is important to recognize general trends and not simply to shrug them off by saying that "everything depends on your particular case."

You claimed without justification that Wisconsin is not a top program due to a poor placement record.  Your words: “Simply look at the placement record. It is just dishonest to suggest otherwise.”  @TheHessianHistorian and I both provided our research to refute your claim, while your evidence is just named recognition, which means nothing.  In replying to @gnossienne n.3  you ignored our findings and again made an unfounded opinion about Wisconsin’s placement record: “I simply believe that the placement record does not lie, and that although one should not go to Columbia, Harvard, or Princeton if they are not a good fit, the fact remains that those colleges have much better placement records across different fields than Wisconsin.” 

I welcome a healthy debate, but a value judgment without any evidentiary support is worthless.  Talking to you is like talking to the wall, a useless exercise.  Thanks ashiepoo72 for alerting me to the ignore user feature. 

[michaelgi]

13 hours ago, kyjin said:

I'm a current student at USC, and we do usually have a few people move from waitlist to accepted. Depends on the year, but I think the last few years have had at least one or two? It depends how many from the initial round choose to say yes. Just remember that you may be waiting right up to April 15th; I actually got in on the waitlist for Michigan on decision day my year! 

Thanks a lot, that makes me feel slightly better. I was treating it as a 99% no, but perhaps there's some hope for me yet. Either way, I'm taking it as assurance that my application wasn't just thrown in the bin as soon as they looked at it, so that's nice! 

[Yellow Mellow]

7 hours ago, ltr317 said:

You claimed without justification that Wisconsin is not a top program due to a poor placement record.  Your words: “Simply look at the placement record. It is just dishonest to suggest otherwise.”  @TheHessianHistorian and I both provided our research to refute your claim, while your evidence is just named recognition, which means nothing.  In replying to @gnossienne n.3  you ignored our findings and again made an unfounded opinion about Wisconsin’s placement record: “I simply believe that the placement record does not lie, and that although one should not go to Columbia, Harvard, or Princeton if they are not a good fit, the fact remains that those colleges have much better placement records across different fields than Wisconsin.” 

 

I welcome a healthy debate, but a value judgment without any   is worthless.  Talking to you is like talking to the wall, a useless exercise.  Thanks ashiepoo72 for alerting me to the ignore user feature. 

I might be mistaken, but I do not recall any evidence aside from  this: "I researched about fifty history PhD programs in the past year when I was considering pursuing a doctorate, and the vast majority of the programs had at least one faculty member with a Wisconsin PhD."

I gave the example of Princeton, which is the case I know best. Princeton has only one Wisconsin PhD who happens to be a spousal hire. On the other hand, Princeton has a significant number of professors who got their PhDs at the other institutions to which Wisconsin was compared in a previous post, namely Columbia (Rustow, Divya Cherian, Wheatley, Philip Nord...) or Harvard (He Bian, Hubbard, Goldin, Xin Guen, Guenther, Karl) and there are others, these are just the ones that come from the top of my head. It baffles me that you characterize your anecdotes as "evidentiary support." To say that you have researched "at least fifty programs" and that the vast majority had someone from Wisconsin does not mean anything: which programs? how many people? My argument was about the relative value of Wisconsin vis-a-vis other institutions. I never claimed that the program would disqualify you from a job, obviously. 

I find psstein last comment sensitive and I agree that the conversation is not very productive. Bottom line: you should go to a place with an advisor that fits with your interests, but there is definitively a difference in the status of a program like Wisconsin's and one like Harvard's, which is manifest not only in abstract things such as name recognition but also on hard placement data. 

Edited January 24, 2018 by Yellow Mellow

[pudewen]

55 minutes ago, Yellow Mellow said:

Xin Guen

For the record, his name is Xin Wen.

[drlapidus4]

So one of my top choice programs just asked to move my PhD application to their MA in European Studies program. And another program has started sending out acceptances and I have not heard anything yet. Hoping for better news to come, but this is not the start I wanted to the results process.

[DGrayson]

11 minutes ago, drlapidus4 said:

So one of my top choice programs just asked to move my PhD application to their MA in European Studies program. And another program has started sending out acceptances and I have not heard anything yet. Hoping for better news to come, but this is not the start I wanted to the results process.

Was Yale the European Studies program? If so, we can talk more about it if you'd like. I was in the same boat before and am in the program now. Otherwise I know what you are talking about. According to the results thread, Penn sent out an interview in my field today and I haven't gotten anything yet...I know that it doesn't mean I haven't been accepted but.... 

 

I guess the thing to keep in mind is that it's not over yet, in fact it really hasn't begun yet, and there is still a lot of things that could happen. 

Edited January 24, 2018 by DGrayson

[drlapidus4]

4 minutes ago, DGrayson said:

Was Yale the European Studies program? If so, we can talk more about it if you'd like. I was in the same boat before and am in the program now. Otherwise I know what you are talking about. According to the results thread, Penn sent out an interview in my field today and I haven't gotten anything yet...I know that it doesn't mean I haven't been accepted but.... 

 

I guess the thing to keep in mind is that it's not over yet, in fact it really hasn't begun yet, and there is still a lot of things that could happen. 

Yeah, it was Yale. And I'm an early modern European person too

[DGrayson]

8 minutes ago, drlapidus4 said:

Yeah, it was Yale. And I'm an early modern European person too

PM'd

[35mm_]

Has anyone interviewed with penn HSS? 

[psstein]

38 minutes ago, 35mm_ said:

Has anyone interviewed with penn HSS? 

Yes, someone was called a few weeks ago.

[35mm_]

38 minutes ago, psstein said:

Yes, someone was called a few weeks ago.

Thanks, I am hoping to speak with someone from previous years.

[jos123]

Has anybody heard from Notre Dame?

[TheLearnedPig]

53 minutes ago, jos123 said:

Has anybody heard from Notre Dame?

Nothing from Notre Dame. Their deadline was the 4th January, so I am guessing that final verdicts will be some time yet.

Judging from the results page, interview invites should start to go out late this week or early next.

[khigh]

Campus closed early on Monday for the U and was closed Tuesday due to weather, so I'm hoping something comes in by Friday. If not, looks like I need to start working on a law school application.

[Kingsouth]

18 minutes ago, khigh said:

Campus closed early on Monday for the U and was closed Tuesday due to weather, so I'm hoping something comes in by Friday. If not, looks like I need to start working on a law school application.

What period of Dutch history are you in? There's some great work being done on the VOC and Dutch colonialism at Emory and over in Leiden (as per usual). Have you thought about applying for those programs next season? (which I hope is unnecessary!)

[khigh]

2 minutes ago, Kingsouth said:

What period of Dutch history are you in? There's some great work being done on the VOC and Dutch colonialism at Emory and over in Leiden (as per usual). Have you thought about applying for those programs next season? (which I hope is unnecessary!)

I actually went last summer to do some campus visits (Leiden, Groningen, UvA, VU, and Radboud). I'm an early modernist and have done almost all my work in constitution and contracts (New Netherland, Union of Utrecht, Pacification of Ghent, maritime law) as political dialogue instead of static pieces of legalese. I do the 80 years war to 1672 and would love to work on Dutch political relationships with the Papal States and Venice. I keep watching for projects coming up that profs are working on over there. Groningen might actually be my best bet and I love the province. Boyfriend and I have been talking about making the move next year, but he's been in Berlin the past year and we don't know about another international move and he doesn't know if he can find work as a Germanist (turn of the century German culture/homosexuals and women in the Weimar Republic). 

Our biggest issue is that we both love Minnesota and want to stay here long term. Law school wouldn't be bad. I would enjoy it, but it's the paying for it that would be the issue. I would love to get into sports contracting and work for either a baseball team or a players' rep in the MLB. It's something that I will have to think long and hard about IF I don't get in this year.  I'm also a nontraditional student, so I don't have much time left if I want a long career. 

[DGrayson]

So for any of those that have been through past cycles, does not getting an interview with Penn (regular history, not HOS) usually mean you haven't been accepted? I know that not getting an interview is not always a bad sign, but UPenn seems to be one of the only history programs that interviews consistently. Trying to figure out if I should write it off.  

[AnUglyBoringNerd]

21 hours ago, DGrayson said:

So for any of those that have been through past cycles, does not getting an interview with Penn (regular history, not HOS) usually mean you haven't been accepted? I know that not getting an interview is not always a bad sign, but UPenn seems to be one of the only history programs that interviews consistently. Trying to figure out if I should write it off.  

Hi DGrayson! To my understanding, UPenn interviews consistently, like you said. I got an interview last year but was unfortunately rejected (so you see, this is my second cycle...), not even wait-listed. I believe you can find some useful information in last year's thread about UPenn's interviews. Also, at least last year UPenn did not send out the interview invitations all at once- I think I got mine one week after everyone else on the forum got theirs.  Hope this helps. 

[DGrayson]

2 hours ago, AnUglyBoringNerd said:

Hi DGrayson! To my understanding, UPenn interviews consistently, like you said. I got an interview last year but was unfortunately rejected (so you see, this is my second cycle...), not even wait-listed. I believe you can find some useful information in last year's thread about UPenn's interviews. Also, at least last year UPenn did not send out the interview invitations all at once- I think I got mine one week after everyone else on the forum got theirs.  Hope this helps. 

Thanks to everyone that responded and sent me a PM! I'm still keeping my fingers crossed! 

[TheLearnedPig]

On the subject of interviews, Notre Dame sent out interview invitations yesterday.

I am sure there is discussion of this subject somewhere else on the forum, so I would be thankful to anyone who could direct me to that.

Equally, if anyone has the time to provide some more general comments on the North American / Notre Dame PhD interviewing system, any tips would be most welcome. I am more familiar with the UK system of applying for existing funded projects rather than proposing your own. 

Many thanks for any tips and general comments you can offer, this forum has already been a great help.