I’ve been working as much as I can towards applying to graduate schools. I’ve looked at the websites for dozens of PhD programs, but I’m still having trouble narrowing down the list to four or so schools to apply to. Part of the difficulty is that I won’t know where I stack up as an applicant until I have my GRE scores. Even then, graduate school seems sufficiently subjective that I won’t have a sense of what type of school I can get into until I have the fat (or thin) envelopes in hand.

I try to work on GRE practice problems every night. I’m not sure that there is much that I can do to improve my writing score, but I’m trying to make my verbal score as good as possible. When I practice the verbal questions, Abby sits behind me and guesses at her own answer. She explains the ones that I get wrong to me. In the practice tests I’ve actually done very well on the quantitative section, so I’m only going to brush up on some basic mathematics.

I’ve also done a lot of reading about graduate school applications. The AHA has some helpful materials. I’ve read or will read Beyond the Ivy Wall: 10 Essential Steps to Graduate School Admission, The Real Guide to Grad School: What You Better Know Before You Choose: Humanities & Social Science, Graduate Admissions Essays: Write Your Way Into the Graduate School of Your Choice, Becoming a Historian: A Survival Manual, Getting What You Came For: the Smart Student’s Guide to Earning a Master’s or a Ph.D., and The Chicago Guide to Your Academic Career: A Portable Mentor for Scholars from Graduate School Through Tenure. Each of these books could be distilled to a page or two, but I’ve found the advice they have to be worth the bother of cutting through all the fluff.

In less than two weeks, I’ll take the GRE. In August I’ll write essays, fill out applications, get transcripts, and ask for letters of recommendation. And in September through January, I’ll wait.