History PhD and reputation (tiers)

StrangeLight
Sun, 01 Mar 2009 17:48:28 +0000

my stats are similar to yours and i applied this cycle for a PhD in history (latin american/caribbean), so maybe this will help a bit.

your GPA is borderline competitive. it’s high enough to merit consideration from the top schools but may not be high enough to get you admitted. you’ll need to find a really good fit with a faculty member and the department itself. if there’s only one person at the school interested in you, you’ll lose out to someone with a more competitive application. if you apply somewhere with a few german historians or people that share your thematic interests, you’ll stand a better chance.

apply to about 10 schools. all the ones you listed sound good, and from there, you should look into mid-level state schools (ohio state, michigan state, things like that) and apply to two or three of those. then you want to really research smaller/less prominent schools and throw an application or two their way. better to do a PhD with full funding at a small school than not get in anywhere at all or put yourself in debt for $300,000.

i don’t do german history so i don’t really know of what schools would be safeties for you, but for me as an example… i study latin america/caribbean, and my safeties were the university of miami (great for latin american) and carnegie mellon (great for african diaspora and labour history). i got into both of these schools, luckily, in a year where students with stats similar to mine have received rejections from every school they applied to. it’s been rough. neither of these schools are really known for anything else. you’ll need to research grad programs and find one or two similar places. a school that does a lot of modern european (or better, a lot of modern german) history and not much else.

the AHA website, [American Historical Association](http://www.historians.org) has a searchable database of history grad programs. that’ll be a good place to start trying to find 2-3 safety schools.

don’t rule any place out simply because you think they sound too prestigious, but don’t expect to get into most of the schools you listed. georgetown, michigan, chicago, and berkeley are all really competitive. to have a shot at any of those, you’ll need to impress potential advisers quite a bit when you contact them over the summer or in the early fall. you’ll also need to be a strong fit with the department itself, not just one or two faculty members. it’s possible but it’ll be tough, especially in this economy. applications to history programs increased by 50% over this last year, and the number of spaces available decreased by 40-50%. what was attainable last year is not attainable this year, and probably won’t be attainable next year either. play it safe.