<p>How did you decide which program/field to pursue for graduate school?</p>
<p>by reading a lot of material refereed to in class readings of classes i was particularly interested in and asking questions to relevant professors</p>
<p>As dobby - by reading more and more specialized material but also by going to the national conferences and showing up at local colloquia and other social/scholarly activities. </p>
<p>The trick I found with reading current literature is to watch for phrases like "would reward further study" and "unfairly neglected area". Those are big shiny sign posts pointing to things that current scholars think need to be looked into. Once you start noticing those phrases you can hardly open a journal without having half a dozen projects fall out. And obviously they also point you to professors who think doing that research is important.</p>
<p>That's how I found what became an independent study project (financed by my uni) and will, eventually I hope, be the basis for my dissertation. Ultimately that also meant I could write a highly focused SOP (virtually the abstract for my indended diss. proposal) and cut my list of programs down to the half dozen that had professors working in that general field.</p>
<p>I enjoyed the undergrad classes in that field and I did well in them.</p>
<p>I was interested in the jobs that I could reasonably expect to get after finishing grad school.</p>
<p>I knew I was interested in a social science, and did an interdisciplinary MA to figure out which one would be most relevant to my questions of interest. Of course my choice was shaped by the nature of the various social science departments where I did my MA - I might have ended up with a PhD in a different field altogether had I done my MA somewhere different...</p>
<p>Strange but true.... when I was studying for my AP Euro history in 10th grade :) Now really, that's when I know that I wanted to major in history... but the love just continued throughout college and I wanted to keep going. So where else could I go? Grad school! :)</p>
<p>But yeah, the more I read, the more ideas and questions I had and I couldn't see myself doing the same thing for any other fields.</p>