love calls you by your name

re: the job market, heres my current mentality: i am not 100% set on becoming a professor or a "historian." i am ready to be pragmatic when its time for me to start job hunting, and i can see myself being happy in a host of adjacent fields like museums or archives/public history of some kind (also areas with brutal job markets tbf. but)... more important imo is keeping things in perspective. like, yes the history/humanities job market is basically completely dead, but so is... literally every job market. and currently, i have 5 years of a guaranteed paycheck. and even if nothing comes of this degree i will have had a permanent job for five years, and not a lot of people can say that atm. this mindset has been really helpful for easing my job market anxiety for now, and helps to keep me grounded in what a privilege it is to be in higher education and be PAID to LEARN.

ofc this is mostly applicable to phd programs (NEVER do an unfunded phd!!) and to be completely and brutally honest with you, a big part of the reason i ended up doing a phd instead of an ma is because i couldnt justify the debt, given both my uncertainty about my career goals, and the state of the job market. but even with an ma program, i think as much as it is important to understand these degrees to be credentials of expertise to get you into certain positions, it is also useful to consider how personally fulfilling and valuable they might be for you. even if i dont end up in any history field at the end of all of this, i would like to believe i will have had a really fulfilling experience (so far this has been the case). another thing to consider is that we both will have several years before applying for jobs and (though its unlikely) i dont think its impossible that things might change a little.

re: research interests and apps, its definitely tricky to balance, and it also depends on if youre applying for phds or mas. an ma app is generally going to ask less of you overall and you definitely dont have to be nearly as specific. when i applied i didnt have a a full project idea or anything, but i did have a strong sense of time and place, the specific historical context i am working within (i.e. looking at US cold war imperial culture, versus, say, US cold war manufacturing -- same time and place, different focus), the ways i intended to approach that subject, frameworks, etc.

having these things nailed down is really important esp for working on phd apps, because you need to be able to A) find potential advisors to reach out to and B) convince them that you have vision and direction and something to offer/something they can tangibly advise you on.

this is what i applied with in my statement of purpose at the program i got into:

I aim to research how America’s popular cultural institutions were used to craft dominant narratives of race and nationhood that benefited the US’s imperial aims in the mid-20th century. Specifically, in the midst of global Cold War decolonization, America was paradoxically able to recuperate its territories like Hawai’i and Puerto Rico, while ostensibly supporting decolonization. The focal point of my project would thus be how the American state utilized mass cultural institutions to manufacture consent to these imperial developments despite changing global opinion. This is complicated by the postwar complexities of the entertainment industry, with the dissolution of Hollywood’s studio system – the government’s de facto cultural front – and the rise of television. I am interested in the role (or lack thereof) of prior-restraint censorship in regulating content, and how this may reveal what ideas/images the US considered antithetical to the maintenance of its power.