In this conversation Catherine Brekus, Chair of the Committee on the Study of Religion, discusses the process and possibilities when applying to doctoral programs in religion.
This event took place on April 14, 2023
Full transcript:
[MUSIC PLAYING]
SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School.
SPEAKER 2: Applying to doctoral programs this fall-- April 13, 2023.
CATHERINE BREKUS: All right, thank you so much, Susan. The first thing I want to say is that Susan has put together these wonderful tip sheets. And so I hope that you will pick up a copy, they are really so well done and so helpful. I'm not going to repeat what's in them, I hope that you will take them and read them carefully.
So I'm here because I am the chair of the committee on the study of religion at Harvard, which is the program that oversees the doctoral program, and the undergraduate program in the faculty of Arts and Sciences. We have just finished or almost finished our doctoral admissions season in the CSR, tomorrow is the last day before students need to notify us of their decisions about whether they're accepting our admissions office offer. So we have been spending a lot of time in the past couple of months trying to assemble an excellent cohort.
So the topic of this session is how to use your summer. And so I thought I'd say a little bit about why it's a good idea to start thinking about this over the summer. And also just to walk you through the process of what an application looks like, and what it looks like from our side. So to pull back the curtain a little bit so that you know what it is that we're looking for and the way that we read these applications.
So the first thing to say is that, if you are seriously considering applying to a doctoral program next fall, I do suggest that you spend some time this summer thinking about it and exploring programs. When you come back in the fall, things are going to be very busy, things are always very busy at Harvard, you're going to be taking classes. And if you haven't done any of this work already, you're really going to feel the time crunch.
So I suggest that you spend some time this summer thinking about your area of focus, what do you want to do in a doctoral program. I'm assuming most of you are thinking about doctoral programs and religion, but some of you might be thinking about doctoral programs in other fields in history, or English, or comparative literature, or a number of other things.
So I think it would be helpful for you over the summer to do some investigation online, in terms of looking at leading programs in the study of religion, and seeing who's there and thinking about whether your area of focus would be well supported at those institutions. You can do this in a number of ways, you can go straight to the websites for Harvard, or Yale, or Princeton.
You can also think about books that have been really influential for you and try to figure out where those scholars are. Now there are a lot of really excellent scholars who are at small liberal arts colleges where you can't do a PhD. But sometimes there will have been someone's work that has just really inspired you and you'll discover, oh, this person is a professor at Duke or another place and this is exactly the kind of work I want to do.
This is another way of saying that fit is really important. So this is part of why you want to do this kind of investigation over the summer. So that you have an idea of what programs are out there, and what their strengths are, and how you might fit or not fit into what they do. We get a lot of applications every year from students who are really outstanding who just don't fit into our profile, where we won't have a faculty mentor who could really help them with their project.
The example I always give, is years ago when I was teaching at the University of Chicago, we had a faculty in the history of Christianity that for various reasons, all of us were focusing on the West. And we got a wonderful application from a student who is very interested in Eastern right Christianity. And we thought the person was very impressive, but there was no one who really knew the sources or the secondary scholarship who could have guided that student in our program.
So we were all a little perplexed about why the student had applied. And I assume it's because they didn't do this kind of investigation ahead of time to figure out whether the institution was a good fit for their interests.
So I would say, look at programs, think about what it is that you want to do. Do you want to work on American religion, or Buddhist studies? If you don't know that at this point, this is something really to spend time thinking about over the summer. Because when you apply, you are going to have to delineate your fields pretty carefully. And there are some institutions that might have wonderful strengths in one of your interests but not in another.
We do allow people, most programs allow people to change their focus after they apply but it's pretty unusual. So it's important for you to think about, what do you want to spend the next six to eight years realistically of your life studying? And then to think about a place that could support you.
So the advantage to starting to think about this over the summer is that in the ideal world, you could come back to Harvard in the fall with a list of institutions that you're interested in applying to. And you can also possibly begin drafting your application essay. I'll say a little bit more about that.
But if you come back in the fall and you haven't decided yet, whether you want to do Hindu studies or medieval Christianity, there's a lot of thinking you're going to have to do between September and December when most of these applications are due. And I'll just say that I see this with students every year. December is a really hard month for people who are applying to doctoral programs.
It happens it comes very quickly, and suddenly you are trying to write final papers. And of course, you want those papers to be good because you want your grades to be good for PhD programs, and you're also trying to finish an essay. So the more work that you can do over the summer, the better.
So let me take a step back, I'm starting with what to do over the summer. But I think that really before you do anything else you should think about whether this is the path that you want to take. I didn't start with this because I never want to sound discouraging, I love what I do. I love being a Professor. But I also want everybody here to be realistic about the difficulty of getting into programs, which are shrinking nationally.
When I first arrived at Harvard in 2014, I think we admitted 14, we are now down to 10. And this is true all over the country. And the reason for that is that the job market is so tight. And so we are reluctant and the institution is reluctant to be training lots of PhDs with the implicit promise that there's work out there for them to do. And in fact, the jobs are scarce.
There are still jobs, of course, and at Harvard we have been fairly successful at placing people. But I think it's really important for you to know that when I say we're successful at placing people, what I'm saying is our graduates will be offered one job. And that job could be at a place that someone has never lived, has no family, never imagined living.
I remember a student who-- was a student when I first arrived who is in the deep South at an institution that she never imagined that she would be a professor at that institution. So it is a rigorous program, it's always advertised as six years, but the truth is nationally, the average is more like seven or eight years. Part of this depends on what kind of work you're doing.
You can imagine that if you have to learn Tamil, it might take you longer than if you're an American religious historian. But it is not uncommon for us to have graduate students who are in their eighth or ninth years. So it is a very long commitment. The job market is bleak, it is not a well paid endeavor as you probably have gathered from reading about unionization at Harvard and elsewhere.
So I do want to be absolutely clear about the difficulties of this path because I don't want anyone to ever say, no one ever told me that this would be a really difficult road to take. So if you are on the fence about whether you actually want to do this, it is very common for students to have taken a year or two yours off before applying. And I don't think there's any stigma attached to that at all.
This is a question that people often ask me, if I don't apply straight, will people think I'm not serious? And the answer is, no. You really shouldn't worry about that. If you get to be five years out, I think admissions committees worry that you're not so up-to-date on the most recent scholarship. But one or two years is really not an impediment to being accepted to a program.
And another thing to know is that once you're admitted to a program, barring a major medical emergency, it is very hard to take time off. So if you're thinking, maybe I want to explore something else for a year, it's better to do it in between your master's degree and applying to a PhD then thinking, oh, maybe after two years in the program, I'll take a year off. It is really hard to get permission to do that, and there's a funding package that has to be adjusted.
So this is just all to keep in mind. The fact that all of you are here, means you've probably been really good at school. And but that isn't a reason alone to go on for a PhD. Getting a PhD involves not only going to classes you do this for two years, but it also involves crafting an independent research project where you're alone a lot of the time, with your sources, with the computer in the archive.
So if you're thinking, oh, I just want to keep going to class forever. There's a little part of me and I'm thinking when I retire, I just want to come back to Harvard and go to classes. But part of the reason I think this is because I can't do that as a professor. So it's good to think about what your work would actually look like.
So let me tell you a little bit about, let's say you've decided you are in fact applying, you've made that decision. What does the process look like? I think it's helpful for you to know how the system works so that you can craft the best application that you can. And the first thing to say is that applying to a doctoral program is different than applying to a college or a master's program.
Many of when you apply to HDS, might have written kind of personal essays about your interests, and your spirit of curiosity, and exploration and things that you wanted to study more here. When you're applying to a PhD program, the expectation is that you have already identified a field of interest, that you have some expertise in it from having taken courses here, and that you can clearly outline your research questions and your particular area of focus.
So people are not successful getting to doctoral programs if they say, I love the study of religion and I'm interested in all these different things. And I could do Hindu studies. I could do American religion. That is not the kind of application that's going to be accepted. That kind of application might do very well at HDS because we don't expect people coming into the master's program to really have a sense of an area of focus.
So what you're doing when you are applying to the doctoral program is you are applying to work with a specific set of faculty on a set of intellectual questions. And this is why I was talking earlier about the importance of fit. Because when you apply, you are applying-- you will be asked to identify the scholars at that institution who would be good mentors for you and who would help nurture your intellectual interests.
So you're applying to work with specific faculty. I recommend that one of the things you do over the summer is to identify some of these faculty, so that when you come back in September, you can send some emails introducing yourself. And asking, if they are continuing to take students. We can talk more about this maybe in the Q&A.
Fashioning these emails is always a little bit tricky because what you don't want to do is say, will you admit me? I get emails like this and I always feel terrible because I don't know, I don't know anything about this student yet. And also, it's not my own decision, it's a committee decision.
So when you're applying, you need to have set out a set of research questions or interests. I'm not suggesting that you have to identify your dissertation topic. We're not expecting that, we wouldn't even want that. Because you're going to have two years of classes in which to explore a lot of different angles. But we do want you to have a set of questions or issues around what you're hoping to organize your study.
So in my own field of American religion, somebody might say I'm very interested in studying 19th century missionaries with these kinds of questions. If somebody sent in an application saying, I might want to do Puritans, I might want to do 19th century missionaries, I might want to do the rise of the Christian right. Again, that would not be a successful application because we wouldn't have a sense of what is it that the student really wants to do here.
So we need to be able to tell what kind of work you're hoping to do. So when you submit your application, you are writing your application for really two audiences. For people in your field at the institution, but also for the entire faculty at the institution. So this is the way the process works.
You submit your application. And I should say from every place I know about, this is the identical process at all schools. This is the way it worked at Chicago, I know it's the way it works at Yale, this is the way we do things at Harvard. This seems to be sort of the common way to do things.
Your application comes in, and the first stage is for it to go to the faculty that you have specified, there's a place on the application where you list faculty that you're interested in working with, and to other people in that subfield. So for example, if someone were applying to American religions and they mentioned me, this file would definitely be put in my queue. Even if they didn't mention David Holland, it would also go in his case because he's also an American religious historian.
So the files are sent to the appropriate faculty in the sort of smaller units. And the files get a first reading there. And we weed out as many as we can. This is always painful, but we try to narrow down the number. And then we send the ones that have made it through the first round to a second round.
And where these files end up finally is in the queues of the members of the central admissions committee, which is usually maybe six faculty drawn from separate areas. We try to get a real diversity of representation on the field so that when we're reading an application in Muslim studies that we have somebody there, who's really well qualified to evaluate it. And so it's at that final stage that the decisions are made by the central admissions committee.
The reason I'm walking you through this process is can see that you are writing for two audiences. You're writing for the people who really know something about your field, who know something about American religion, or Islamic studies, or Hindu studies. But you're also writing to faculty in the study of religion.
And if you're applying to a doctoral program in religion, you need to remember that your work is going to be evaluated as a contribution to the study of religion, and not a contribution more narrowly to Buddhist studies or medieval Christianity. So that means that when you're writing your application, you need to be clear about the stakes of your questions, and you need to be imagining an educated audience but not necessarily an insider audience. So that you do need to explain your terms so that the importance of your work is legible to someone who's not an expert.
Now, the people who can really help you with this are your faculty mentors. And I hope that all of you here have somebody on the faculty who you really trust, who you could bring a draft of your application essay to for feedback, and also just to discuss the process. This is a reason for you to want to put together this application as far in advance as possible.
So if I get somebody's application essay say, a month before the applications are due, I have time to read it and to write back and say, you know, might think about, emphasizing this more, or I'm not sure you've made this clear. If I get an application essay two days before everything is due, I might not have time to do that. And even if I could do it then, the student has to incorporate the comments.
So if you can put together something as long as six weeks in advance, you are going to get more feedback. And these applications are really hard to write. I'll just be honest. They're a very strange breed of thing. And it's hard to, this is why these tip sheets are great.
It's hard to identify necessarily what makes a really strong application essay they can be approached in different ways. But your faculty mentors will help you identify if they see any major weaknesses, but they can only do that if you give them enough time.
So you should think about being in contact with faculty as early as possible once school returns in September. And that's true for both your faculty here, you will want to be soliciting recommendations from faculty. And it's nice to give people a heads up about that in September that you're going to be applying. And that way, they have the time to give you some advice.
It's also September when I would encourage you to be in touch with faculty by email at other institutions. If you write over the summer, it's very unlikely you're going to get a response. And even if you write in the fall, I'll just be frank, you might or might not get a response. And I hear about this so often and it's always a source of anxiety.
I want to assure you that if you don't get a response, it doesn't mean that the faculty is not interested in your work. It means that the faculty is thinking, I don't have time to talk to the student now but I'll read the application when it comes in. It can be difficult, depending on the year and the number of applicants to speak to everybody.
I try to speak to everybody, but honestly, depending on how many people are applying. If you think that if you start doing the math, if you give everybody a half an hour and they're 10 people applying, it starts to get really time-consuming. So I say this so that you will not be upset if you don't get a response back. But hopefully you will.
But I do recommend that you reach out because it reflects well on you to have reached out. And often on applications, there's a box to check that says, have you spoken to anyone or have you contacted anyone. And it's great to be able to check that box and say, at least you tried. It just shows that you're a serious applicant.
So for the application itself, there are a number of different pieces. Some schools have a requirement to submit GREs. We had that requirement until this year, and Hallelujah, we no longer have this requirement, we have just ended it. We've been uneasy about GREs just because there's been so much research on the bias and the test. But there are a number of institutions that do still require the GRE.
And if they say, it's required, it's required. And you can ask for an exemption but I can promise you won't get it. Even at Harvard, we were-- a number of us were uneasy about this but we had told the University that this was our requirement. So above us, when things would come in without a GRE, it just wouldn't get forwarded to us.
So it's a good thing to look and see if the schools that you're interested in have a GRE requirement. So you can make sure to have taken this test in time. You are usually required to submit a CV. On your CV, you really want to highlight your educational qualifications, we love to hear about your summer jobs. But really what you should highlight is, what makes you a good candidate for graduate school.
You are asked to submit a writing sample. And most schools have some rules about how long the writing sample should be. You should follow those rules I'll just say, I've taught it to institutions. And there's always someone who is really annoyed, if somebody doesn't follow the rules. It's like they can't read the directions.
So this can be anxiety producing because it might be 10 or 15 pages and you've written some paper that's 25 pages that you think is fantastic. And what are you going to do? And one option just to keep in mind is that, if you have a longer paper that you're proud of, that you think would be good for applying to grad school, you can take pieces out. So in other words, let's say have a research paper, I'm looking at Lauren because she's writing a research paper for me right now.
You could keep the introduction, and then maybe you would take out the first section and you could just put in brackets saying, I remove the first section, which argues X based on these sources. And then you would have the next section included, and then maybe at the section after again, I have omitted this section, which does this and then to have your conclusion.
And what that would allow someone to see is, OK, we're getting a sense of what this whole paper is about. If you have a 10 to 15 page paper, that's great, use that. But the most important thing is that your writing sample be connected to your research interests. So for me when I'm reading applications, I assume that somebody is going to send me an essay that has something to do with American religious history. And that ideally has something to do with the topic that they're hoping to pursue in the future.
If I get an essay that is about Hindu studies, I don't really know how to connect it to what they're going to do in the future. So you don't have to submit something as is that you've already written, nobody knows what this paper looks like. So if you have in the paper and you've gotten great feedback from a professor, and you think I could polish this up. Go ahead and do it. No one's going to know that this isn't what you submitted.
You want it to be your best possible writing. The other piece another of the application dossier-- this is a lot, isn't it? Our recommendation letters, and so usually they're three of those. People often ask, can I submit one from my undergraduate institution? Absolutely, but I wouldn't do more than one. I think it reflects well on you to have faculty mentors from here, who know your work-- writing on your behalf.
We often get students coming to our doors looking kind of embarrassed to be asking for recommendation letters. And I feel like part of my job here is to say, don't hesitate to ask faculty for recommendation letters, we expect it. We have to do this to our friends, and colleagues, if we're applying for fellowships. And so we understand, and you are not-- it's always nice to say, thank you to people and to be grateful.
But you don't need to be apologetic for asking for something that we understand that you need to have in order to apply to these programs. That said, it is really appreciated if you can give people enough advance notice that they're going to be writing recommendation letters. This past year, it was really extraordinary how many letters I wrote.
And I really had to budget my time to figure out. These are time-consuming. It takes me at least an hour, and sometimes an hour and a half or two hours to craft a letter that I think is-- does what it needs to do to convey who a student is to a committee.
So you can ask in advance, and then you should supply whatever you can. I always ask people to give me a copy of their application essay so I can make sure that my letter is speaking to the person's proposed research interests. An unofficial transcript so someone can see how you've done at Harvard.
And if you're asking someone who taught you in a class, send a paper with their comments back so that they can refresh their memories about what you wrote. Because many of us will write in our letters about papers that you wrote for us. Lauren got an A in the class for this reason, she wrote this wonderful paper on X.
And so giving us this kind of material is going to help us write the most detailed letter instead of a sort of generic letter-- Lawrence, great. Letter in. I'm sorry to be singling you out. So try to make it easy for us is what I'm saying. Make it as easy as possible.
So then the one piece of this I haven't spoken about is really the hardest piece, and that is the statement of purpose. And that's where you're laying out your interests, and explaining your research questions. This is where you really want to solicit help from faculty mentors here, to make sure that your stating your interests in a way that's clear to people. And that is a good fit as far as they understand for various programs.
The tip sheet on the statement of purpose is fantastic so definitely pick that up before you leave. But again, if you want faculty to give you feedback on the statement of purpose, which I would highly suggest, you need to give them enough time to read it.
We also have the writing tutor here who is really helpful with guiding people through this process. I've had students come to me with an early draft where I've said, you really need to work on this and then they come back with this much better draft. And it's because they've into the writing tutor who does this every year for large numbers of students.
So in terms of the weight of these various pieces of the application, I think every faculty member is slightly different. But for me, the two most important things are the statement of purpose and the writing sample. The recommendation letters are also clearly very important, but my experience is that when I read recommendation letters, everybody is brilliant and fabulous and should be admitted tomorrow. Do not pass go, admit them right away.
So there can be gradations, but it's really, really rare to read a recommendation letter that's negative. If you ask someone for a recommendation letter and they say, I think you should ask someone else. You should take that as, for whatever reason, they think they can't write you the best letter to get you into a program. And rather than pursuing and saying, no, please. Find somebody else.
But mostly letters are very strong. It's in the statement of purpose and in the writing sample where we get to see students writing in their own voices about their interests, and where we get a sense of who you are as a burgeoning scholar. So those are pieces that you really do want to spend time on.
So I'm going to stop there. And just answer your questions as best I can. I'll just say again, if you're having some doubts about whether to apply, I would say take your time, there is no immediate rush. If you're sure this is what you want to do, that's wonderful. Talk to faculty, begin searching for programs that fit your interests just by looking around online. And come back in the fall with a list of programs you want to apply to, and the beginnings of a set of research questions for your statement of purpose.
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