Randall Stephens

The July 11-17 issue of Times Higher Education includes a must-read article for the grad school bound.  In "10 truths a PhD supervisor will never tell you" (11 July 2013) Tara
Brabazon writes: "As a prospective PhD student, you are precious. Institutions want you – they gain funding, credibility and profile through your presence. Do not let them treat you like an inconvenient, incompetent fool. Do your research. Ask questions." Some of her ten tips apply more to the UK setting, but most are right on target for students in the US as well.

Prospective PhD students in history should think long and hard about who they want to work with. Ask around.  Get to know something about the scholar you'd like to be your mentor.  Has this individual shepherded other PhDs?  Do his/her students land good jobs? What is your prospective mentor's publishing record like?  Is he/she a good fit for your project? What will it be like to work with him/her?  Will he/she lend a hand or remain aloof and passive reclusive? 

Brabazon offers some dos and don't and, most of all, warns, "don't let the supervisors grind you down."  Here's one of her particularly helpful pieces of advice:
Read more here.

Heather Cox Richardson

Well, first you need a good household staff.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA….

OK, now that we’ve got the hilarity out of the way, how really can mothers take on teaching, research and writing, and children—three incredibly labor-intensive jobs—at the same time?

Let’s start with teaching. Here are a few things I picked up along the way, largely by the seat of my pants as I jumped into a job when my first child (of three) was just shy of three months old. Nothing I learned was intentional, but some of it has stood me in good stead.

The key concept for enabling mothers to survive in the academy is efficiency. And here are some things that helped me to achieve it:

Teach big courses with a wide scope. That sounds counterintuitive, I know. Most people think it takes less energy for junior scholars—and most people with small children will be junior scholars—to teach smaller classes in their specialty. The problem with such specific classes is that they tend to be under enrolled, which means you will constantly have to come up with new courses to keep your numbers up. Repeatedly writing courses from scratch is a huge time-sink.

The initial time investment for writing a survey course is undoubtedly large, but it’s a one-time thing. From there, if you need to, you can pivot that material into a number of other classes. (My History of the American West stands alone, but has also spawned Race, Riots, and Rodeos, as well as The Plains Indians.) But the chances are good you won’t need to. Surveys tend to fill every semester. So do other sweeping courses that cover large periods, major events, important themes, and so on. Yearly tweaking will be enough to keep the courses up-to-date and interesting until you have the time to invest in creating new ones.

Another way to teach efficiently is to use grading rubrics. Instead of writing line-by-line comments on essays and exams—which takes forever—develop your own set of categories that you will evaluate. I grade essays with six categories: thesis, argument, style, evidence, grammar, errors, and overall. Under those categories, I write anything from a line to a paragraph about what worked and what didn’t.

You could, of course, break down your rubrics even further.

This takes about a third as long as my old style of line-by-line comments, and students love it. I started it not to save time, but because I read an education study showing that students were overwhelmed by unorganized comments and learned very little from them. So I gritted my teeth and tried a rubric. The first time I did it, grading took so much less time than usual I felt like I was cheating, but that year I got the best student reviews I’d ever gotten for my essay comments. In this case, it appears that less really is more.

I did both of these things for reasons that had nothing to do with mothering, but they ended up being very helpful ways to organize my teaching time most efficiently. They also were great for my own research, but that will be a different post.
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*I’m writing another post on the theoretical argument behind this series of posts. Until then, once again, I am defining “mothers” as a different mindset, not as a biological identification.

Craig Gallagher*

It's likely that if you have already applied and been accepted to graduate school to study history, you’ve heard it at least once. You’ll hear it plenty more times before you get that masters or Ph.D. in history you’re putting aside a lot of time and/or money to acquire.

In fact, if your decision to continue your education isn’t just about putting off the working world for a few years and is driven by a desire to change direction and start a new career, you’ll hear it so often that it will feel as though everyone thinks you’re running away to join the circus instead of pursuing another professional qualification.

I’m talking, of course, about that constant refrain that hangs over graduate school like a surly cloud at the moment: “There are no jobs!” Now, I don’t wish to debunk this statement with a much rosier picture of the job market than has hitherto been offered, because I can’t do that.

Not when respected publications like the Atlantic and the Chronicle of Higher Education have lined up to inform us that even seeking a degree in the sciences offers little economic advantage anymore in these straitened times, adding as an afterthought that the outlook for those who hold humanities degrees is downright bleak.

What I suggest, however, is that staying positive in the face of such bleak prospects is essential.

The fact remains that universities and colleges are still admitting graduate students to study history and are still training them to read, research, and write to a very high standard. Graduate students still get teaching experience, we still learn how to organize our time effectively, how to argue cogently and coherently and to condense vast amounts of information into digestible bites fit for any palate. We also learn to speak foreign languages.

It needs to be kept in mind that these are transferable skills applicable to a variety of jobs. Sure, we can’t change overnight the fact that some potential employers will see “M.A. in History” and immediately move on to the next CV. But we can embrace the abilities we develop in such a way as to help ourselves, first and foremost, compete in a fallow economy.

And, let’s not forget, these are just the classic skills any apprentice historian will develop. As the discipline broadens and deepens to accommodate technological changes, new opportunities arise in the burgeoning subfield known as the Digital Humanities.

My point is, when you hear “There are no jobs!” don’t translate this as “I am hopelessly unemployable.” Hear instead, “What can I do, say, and work on to make sure I get one of those ‘no jobs’?"

*Craig Gallagher is a PhD Candidate in History at Boston College. His dissertation project focuses on transnational Scottish Presbyterian merchants, ministers, settlers and soldiers in the late-17th century Atlantic World. In spring 2013 he received a research grant from the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland.

Eric Schultz

Spring 1976. Wilson Hall, Brown University. The late, great Professor William McLoughlin has just informed his 85 students in “American Social and Intellectual History” that they are to write their first paper. All he has given us is the title: “The Age of Jefferson and Adams.” We groan. Then he adds: “Keep it to three pages or less. Double-spaced.” We smile. Three pages? How hard can that be?

“If you make the margins too wide,” McLoughlin adds, “I’ll mark you down a grade.”

Needless to say, nobody got an A on that paper, or so the good professor informed us. There may have been a B or two. Not me. It was all I could do to contain my flowery opening paragraph to a single page. Some of us recovered slightly in round two, wherein we committed “The Age of Lincoln and Calhoun” to three, double-spaced pages. Some retreated to organic chemistry and other more reasonable challenges.

Little did I know, but I had just been introduced to Big Data—though it would take 35 years to earn that name. Take an endless, insurmountable, seemingly disconnected pile of information, separate the grain from the chaff (or, as my engineering buddies would say, the signal from the noise), and tell a concise, compelling story about what it all means.

For the last year, you may have noticed, it’s been hard to escape stories about “Big Data.” In a world where everything can be measured—from your location to how well you sleep to how long you brush your teeth to all of your “Likes” on Facebook, Big Data is upon us with avengeance. Or, as it were, like a Cloud.

Some of you will be lifelong historians and wrestle with Big Historical Data for your careers. I happened to take a left turn into business school and ended up working at and running companies. In the process, I spent an awful lot of time pondering questions about marketing and strategy.

This is how strategy works: Take an endless, insurmountable, seemingly disconnected pile of information, separate the grain from the chaff, and tell a concise, compelling story about what it all means. Sound familiar? I’ve had to do that kind of work in everything from baby products to pet food to Red Sox baseball to the global perishable supply chain. I thank my lucky stars every day for Professor McLoughlin.

Now, we’re being told, in the emerging world of Big Data there will be more and more piles of the stuff lying around. Is there any group in the world better trained to make sense of it all—to wade confidentially into the sea of Big Data—than historians? It’s not just about monitoring, data gathering, and quantitative analysis. (Though a course or two in statistics is a good replacement for the Greek most of us got to skip, and get yourself over to the Computer Science building and spend a semester or two doing some simple coding, just so you can see how the other half will live their lives.)

But in the end, conventional data analysis falls short. When Chris Anderson (of “long tail” and “information wants to be free” fame) wrote that “[w]ith enough data, the numbers speak for themselves,” he was dead wrong. Causal analysis is an extraordinarily deceptive and nuanced thing. Data sets on their own are neutral and largely useless. Cobbled into relational information they begin to sing. But only when a storyteller comes along and provides context and human insight does Big Data really give up the goods.

Tom Friedman, author of The World Is Flat, believes that integration is the new specialty—that someone with a renaissance view of the world is more likely to spark an innovation than a pure engineer. If you are learning the craft of history, that could very well be you.

I do not know exactly what Big Data jobs will look like over the next generation, but I couldn’t predict a decade ago that there would be thousands of “app developers” or positions called “Chief Evangelist” or professional bloggers. I certainly didn’t know to put “Pope” and “tweet ‘in the same sentence. But I stand firm in the belief that God blesses the storyteller; it is he or she who makes data human, and our only real chance to use it like a tool instead of a club.