<p>I'm doing my BA in music history at the University of Chicago. I'm starting graduate courses next year (in my 2nd year of my BA), and I'm not sure whether I'll be staying at Chicago to finish my graduate degree, or go elsewhere. </p>
<p>Here is my list of potential graduate schools. Tell me what other schools I should add: </p>
<p>Columbia, Princeton, UC Berkeley, Harvard, Rice, Oxford, Cambridge, Stanford, Yale, Penn, UCLA, New England Conservatory, Wesleyan, Duke, USC, Cornell, Northwestern, Chicago, UVA, Peabody Institute, NYU, Brown, King's College London, Institute of Musical Research at the University of London. </p>
<p>I know it's a long list, and I probably won't apply to all of them... Is there anywhere else I should be thinking of?</p>
<p>I may be leaving some off, but for music history (as opposed to Ethno), the best programs are probably:
Harvard, Berkeley, Columbia, Princeton, Penn, Yale, Stanford, NYU, Chicago; also look at UCLA, CUNY, and Michigan (which was not on your list). Also good, are backup schools, from which you might transfer (many programs routinely take transfer students, including Harvard and Columbia) with Brandeis as one.
Royal Holway in England is also good; Merton College, Oxford.</p>
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<p>Also good, are backup schools, from which you might transfer (many programs routinely take transfer students, including Harvard and Columbia) with Brandeis as one.>></p>
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<p>I asked because this post discussed transferring, and I've never really thought of that as something one should plan on doing for grad school.</p>
<p>Truth is, it makes a big difference where you finish your PhD in terms of getting postdocs and jobs; if you don't get into one of the top schools, and wind up at a place like Brandeis, which is well respected, and you do well, you have a good chance to transfer to somewhere like Columbia or Harvard, from which your prospects would be greatly enhanced. This may be, in part, a function of the fact that the departments accept only two or three music history students a year; it is highly competitive. And keep in mind you need good fellowships; not all the schools are equally generous. Harvard is particularly generous, though, as is Columbia -- offering 5 year fellowships to their students (then the possibility of a 6th year dissertation fellowship); Chicago and Penn, by contrast, have not been so generous in the past, though funding may have improved at Chicago.<br>
For the UK schools, funding is trickier. Take a look at the Gates Fellowship opportunities (this is Bill Gates) for Cambridge -- very prestigious, but hard to get in the humanities. Also look at Mellon opportunities.</p>
<p>Hey Cosmos
I may be biased but take a look at Wash U in St Louis.D is there doing a PhD in Musicology.They are a small dep't..take 2 students a year but they have excellent faculty and great financial support for their students.They are unique in funding their students for a longer time period than other places(7 years)</p>
<p>.D found the school b/c of a faculty member she wanted to work with.St Louis is also an inexpensive place to live and she's proud to say shes able to live within the amount of her assistanceship without needing any loans! Its pretty hard to do that in say New York or LA.
You do know that your research interests matching the interests of the intended schools faculty is of prime importance? You will have to hone down your list based on where there is faculty available to match your needs.You will need to contact the Grad Faculty Coordinator in each place to see what "works" at each institution,for you.They'll let you know if its worth your while to apply there.
I've only heard of students transferring while persuing the PhD after they complete theirMasters or to follow a professor (this happened at D's program this past year,a faculty member brought one of his grad students along).Is it at all common to start a PhD in one place and then transfer to another?Cosmos,will you be coming out of your undergrad college with a Masters as well?</p>
<p>Just about any of the top schools will have a faculty member who will suit your needs -- you want to work with a well-established and well-connected professor for your dissertation, but that is years down the road and you may well change your interests before then, during your coursework and preparation for comps. You may also find out that the person you thought you would work with is a jerk. If the person has a reputation of being hard to work with, avoid him/her. Unlike performance, students generally look to get into a school, not so much to work with a particular professor -- and the heavy competition makes it unrealistic to set your sights so precisely anyway. (There are exceptions, of course: Taruskin at Cal is a specialist in Russian music and has many students writing about Bartok, diaspora studies, postcolonialism; Susan McClary at UCLA does feminist stuff, Elaine Sisman at Columbia specializes in Haydn, Bohlmann at Chicago does a lot of interesting stuff with Jewish music, etc. But they all direct a range of dissertations, and really it is going to be up to you to find the topic and do the research -- professors are less helpful for the most part than you might imagine or hope when it comes to directing dissertations.) The UK programs are quite different: there, you specialize immediately and can finish in far less time -- the masters is usually a year and then you get the PhD in 3 more years after that. There is some prejudice in the US academia that UK degrees are less prestigious because of that specialization (I know of musicology profs who have said this), but it would depend on how good your dissertation was, who you worked with, if you were able to publish articles while in graduate school, etc.
As to transfers (after the MA), I know of students who transfered to Harvard and
Columbia from places like Brandeis, Stony Brook, and Royal Holway.</p>
<p>what I was thinking of,Mamenyu, was that contacting the schools Grad Coordinator might be of use to Cosmos in getting the proper advice.Its not clear whether he/she would be coming out with a Masters along with their BA.
It might save him/her some application money and angst over the process to get proper advice.
I know students change their direction and faculty direct a range of dissertation topics but it seems like the statement of purpose part of the application process is so important that it must influence a dep'ts choice of students to admit.
Are you a Musicologist as well? The names in the dep'ts are very familiar to you.
Strangely enough,D and I were talking about the guy from Berekely today who just wrote the big tome on musicology and is the "star" of the AMS meetings. She was saying she will probably come up against him in the next year or two when she presents..she says he's always turned to first to comment on a presentation.She says everyone cowers in the conference hallways when he walks by (the grad students ,that is) and theres actually a Facebook group about him entitled "what would ......his name...say". Is that Taruskin?</p>
<p>Thanks for all the words of advice. As an undergrad, I don't know a lot about what goes into applying for grad degrees... </p>
<p>I won't be finishing with an MA as well as a BA, but I will finish having taken three years' worth of of grad classes in the Music dept, and I would probably be interested in staying at Chicago and continuing to study until I get the MA. </p>
<p>I'm mostly interested in studying opera - More specifically, Puccini and Verdi.</p>
<p>Talk to your professors at Chicago. Some graduate programs don't like to (i.e. and will not) admit their own undergraduates; also, these top schools are all really PhD programs -- it would not make much sense to go to Chicago and then transfer. It makes sense only to transfer from a lesser school. You usually lose time, and the possibility of transfering is always iffy.
Mary Ann Smart at UC Berkeley specializes in Opera -- Kate Van Orden does earlier opera in France -- and she is a Chicago Phd; Karen Hensen at Columbia also does French opera, 19th century; you should also check out the resumes of faculty members at the other schools you are considering. </p>
<p>Yes, that is probably Richard Taruskin -- his Oxford History of Western Music is an amazing accomplishment; he is quite brilliant, influential, and can be difficult (there is a recent exchange in the TLS letters section involving him and a review of a book about Elgar).</p>