Application-ing

October 17, 2008 • Cameron Blevins

2008   ·   Applications   Graduate School   GRE's     ·   History   Scholarship  

Warning: This post is a blatant attempt to justify the imminent decline in my postings over the next month and a half.

I am now officially in the thick of the graduate school application process. Some observations:

  • While not as stressful, per se, as I thought it was going to be, the busywork involved is much, much more time-consuming. As a digital enthusiast, I’m all for online applications. However, even with using the Quicksilver clipboard to copy and paste common fields, if I have to enter “Pomona College” and “History” into one more text box I’m going to lose it. Cough, need for a common app, cough.

  • Many thanks to Jeremy Young for offering up his kind advice for graduate school, and then going ahead and writing a lengthy and quite comprehensive posting at Progressive Historians on the process of applying to graduate schools in history. For a similar, albeit dated, post, see John King and Andrew McMichael’s article at AHA.

  • The more and more time I spend dealing with the GRE (test date: October 30th), the more and more I loathe the test and everything it stands for. It costs $140 for the very privilege of taking the test. From there, ETS will send your scores to the first four schools absolutely free (doesn’t this sound like an infomercial?), and at the low, low cost of only $20 a school after that. In all, I’ll be paying a little less than $300 to this company in order to show schools that I remember have no idea what cosine is, know the meaning of recognize the word “consanguinity,” and can write a coherent series of sentences so that a machine grader can read it. I’m not kidding, they have a machine analyze your writing section and compare it to a human grader to maintain fairness. Which is actually kind of cool, I’d love to see the algorithms behind it…

  • Finally, since this is quite evidently not a serious posting, The Onion’s Historical Archive last week was amazing.

In conclusion, I will be in blogging semi-hibernation for the near future due to writing personal statements, remembering what cosine is, and anxiously following the most historically monumental presidential election of my young lifetime.