My Grad School Options

and my mom got her masters in social studies education at Miami. Miami has a strong colonial history program, but is a little shoddy for other things. I visited U.C. but I just didn’t really feel it, maybe U.C. is too close to home. I think overall U.C. has a better program though, because they are a bigger school and have more resources than Miami. My adviser has nothing but good things to say about U.C. If U.C. gives you full funding, I would recommend U.C., but the difference between the quality of the programs isn’t so great that you should dig yourself in a financial hole to attend U.C.

There is no shame in being rejected by OSU. They are a top flight program and hard to get into, I can’t even count the number of books I’ve read written by OSU faculty members.

What field are you interested in?

I have applied to Loyola Chicago, George Mason, Seton Hall, Roosevelt and if I start to get rejection letters I will send an application to Kent, or ask my parents to buy a house with a basement and start to take a more serious interest in sabrameterics.

have about the same academic rep and are placing PhD’s at roughly the same tier of jobs, then take the funding.

I’m not cut out for serious history writing, I’ve learned. I just read about the British Wars of the Three Kingdoms to make my Whigs joke in the Yahoo! thread, and I don’t think I’m gonna be cut out for this. It’s a J.D. for me, homez.

I would certainly agree with taking the funding. I’m pretty pessimistic about the 5-year-trend of the economy, so I think getting yourself out of the financial pit before its dug would be great. At the same time, I think UC really has some interesting opportunities for cross-disciplinary studies. I’m not sure how important that is to you, but I think that its the path of the future, personally, and UC has a lot more programs and resources than Miami in that regard.

But then again, I don’t know enough (read: none) about diplomatic history. I don’t know who the heavy hitters are and who you’re going to have to get in cahoots with.

My advice, as a peer: take the money and run. The difference between the schools doesn’t seem dramatic enough to make a big difference down the road. Get yourself into a position where you won’t have to sell your body when you graduate like SOME of our elder RR’s here.

And for my own curiousity: do you have a regional interest at all? Are you one of us Asia goons (me, Cheshire, Justin)? Or are you going to go the Verka route? Or are you gonna be the poor guy who is The Token African Professor Who Has to Explain that Yes, There is a Huge Difference Between Morroco and Burundi.

And don’t any of you want to move to someplace sufficiently random to move in with me next year? Geez!

So now you gotta choose. Is Brendanukkah a role model, or a cautionary tale?

I attended many schools over the years including Miami – It was and appears to still be a more than adequate institution. My oldest is a UC grad and has done very well – made $63,000 last year running a bar. D #2 is an Antioch grad and is applying to UC for some kind of graduate work in genomes and bio—chemical stuff…she thinks UC is pretty good.

I would never exclude the value of a full ride. At the graduate level a lot of what you get out of the experience has to do with what you put into it. When I was at Miami I was in the anthropology dept. but took a lot of cross discipline courses (including several graduate level courses in Religion and Gerontology) from the soc/religion dept. In those days the graduate school was great. Can’t imagine that a school with the kind of MONEY that Miami has won’t still have a decent graduate school program.

Pretty hilarious that this site has about 75 past and present history majors active on it.

a formation school?

Grad school for me was away to delay participation in the “real world” while I tried to figure out a little bit more about who I was and where I belonged. The University of Toronto is a great school in an awesome place, but something was definitely missing for me there.

What was missing was a community of people that weren’t confined by the walls of academia, but used their knowledge of history, and politics, and sociology, and medicine, and graphic design, and language, and economics, and philosophy to mobilize people to see themselves as actors in a historical process of improving our world together.

A year and a half ago I would have read those words I just typed and scoffed, just as you may be doing now. But I have seen the power of people believing together, thinking together, and acting together, and it is a power that transforms everyone involved.

So I ask again, have you thought about attending a school for socio-political and economic formation? Have you thought about becoming an active participant in the historical process of building a world that works for the majority and not just a small few?

I’ll again extend the invitation to get a peek at what we are doing here in our formation school, Justicia Global in Santo Doming. We are just three weeks away from a huge international even on “Art and Revolution” :

follow the money, follow the money, follow the money.

please be aware of the current economic environment. i would highly recommend starting out in the big wide world with as little debt as possible, ESPECIALLY for a history major. no offense. one day you’re gonna have a missus, some babies and a couple mortgages. it would be a huge benefit to have no other revolving debt or student loans hanging over your head.

Although I can’t speak to the History department or graduate school much, I can tell you about Oxford and what you’d expect from Miami.

If you’d like me give you a little info, you can email me at the address in my profile.

Also a Miami grad (both undergrad & grad), though I’m in a completely different area and I think most of the experience is department related. My years in grad-school were some of the best years of my life, though I spent a goodly portion of them in an 8×8 closet with a blackboard in Bachelor hall (known as my office) with two other grad students or in the grad computer lab.

If you’re going to end up teaching as part of your funding, the undergrad students weren’t quite as bratty as their reputation can lead one to believe, but you do sometimes run into a sense of entitlement from the suburbites.

And can you visit Miami as well? That seems like a very good idea given that you’ll have to pick a place to live for a couple of years. Plus, it’s not like there’s a huge amount of travel involved to get to Oxford, right?

If you can, talk to faculty or at least get a glimpse of those you might want to work with. I bet the programs would let you sit in on classes, and if you can see one or two faculty whose work really interests you (and whose classes you’re planning on taking), that could be really helpful.

Never underestimate the importance of faculty actually being willing to talk to you. That’s the reason I stuck around at this relatively unknown program. Can’t say if it will pay off, but it’s meant a lot to me so far.

And if everything else is really equal, try to take into account what you might want to do with the rest of your time. You can’t work all of the time, after all. I can say that when I came to this crappy town non-single, it wasn’t so bad, but I learned how horrible a place this is to be a single 20something. If you’re already married/not interested in relationships, that could be different, but…just sayin’.

Then Oxford ain’t bad. We lived there for about 5 years and it was an easy, interesting life. Only 50 min. from Cinti.

No surprise on Miami axing their PhD program, they have had a lot of trouble getting it off the ground. It is actually much more taxing on a history department to run a graduate program then people realize. The marginal labor costs of having a grad student teach a course is off-set by the fact that no reputable program will put you out there until you have passed your comps and have had at least two semesters of experience with the course material you will be asked to teach (roughly three plus years of courses and training). Couple this with the fact that for each graduate class you have faculty teaching that is one less undergraduate course you are able to offer (with, if any, few tenure-track professors carrying more than a 2-2 load) and you can see how quickly a small graduate program is a drain on university resources.

As for Miami as a graduate history program, the faculty members are well respected scholars within the field and are truly committed to the kind of student mentoring which is key to any graduate program. You mentioned an interest in America’s role in globalization and Miami happens to have some wonderful faculty making strides in the field of World History, both as a teaching and research field. David Fahey and Judith Zinsser have both active in the development of the field, and Carla Pestana and Andrew Cayton’s involvement with the early modern Atlantic World could also be of use (I think you will find tying the trend of globalization to modern era is not only far too limiting but also quite ahistorical… it makes you sound like one of those worthless Political Scientists!) As for Latin America the department has long relied on D.S. Chandler for providing this service, while he may be marginally insane he is certainly a stimulating instructor. Miami has also been building up their Latin American Studies program, which should bode well for the interdisciplinary aspect of your education. You may have missed the boat on American Foreign Policy/Diplomatic History at Miami, they have not really had much since the great Jeff Kimball called it a career in ’03, although I saw they finally filled their faculty gap by hiring a young historian from UCLA.

I loved my time at Miami, the history faculty are both talented and engaging, and should provide you with the sort of training that will make you a competitive candidate for a more prestigious PhD program down the road. Assuming your thesis is not bunk!

Plus you can join the drama department

sabocork in yellow

Will we have to go through this again when you go for your doctorate ?

im joining the peace corps