How to Apply to Classics PhD Programs
So you want to be a classicist.
I will not treat the question of whether aiming to work in classics professionally is a smart move that is likely to end in gainful employment and/or a wise expenditure of life. In the spirit of accepting you at your word, the purpose of the following is to give you, Dear Reader, the advice that I would deliver if you were my own student, sitting on the couch in my office, and you had just told me that you’d decided to apply to PhD programs in classics. You have come to ask for advice on how to do this well.
Since you would be my student I would already know whether your Greek and Latin are strong. I would expect that at least one of them, presumably the one in which you are more interested, would be at an advanced level, with at least three years and a decent amount of reading under your belt, and that the other language would be at a securely intermediate level. If your languages are not at this level, I would advise you to pursue a post baccalaureate or a (much pricier) masters degree before moving into a PhD program.
If I knew your languages to be sufficiently strong for you to be a viable applicant, we would still not have progressed to the part of the conversation where I dole out learned counsel. Rather, I would now interrogate you as to why you want to be a classicist. I would be pleased to learn that you love the ancient world or that you think you’d enjoy teaching, but I would hope also to hear that you’ve had a chance to write about the ancient world (or ancient philosophy, literature, law, religion) and that you had been delighted or excited or enlivened by this experience. I would ask you to articulate as lucidly as you could the precise coordinates and contours of the question underlying your writing.
Here I should mention that I’m using the word “writing” as a stand in for what other academics are likely to call research. But whichever word you prefer, the activity to which I’m referring is the one where you work at unraveling what it is about an ancient poem or historical shift or religious rite or linguistic turn or fragment of papyrus that has entangled you. This activity of questioning should be at the heart of your pursuit of doctoral degree in classics and so your shaping of an application to do this should also start here: what question, or constellation of questions, motivates you?
Somewhere in this conversation, we would find that the process of interrogation has drifted into the conferral of advice, because your decisions on which programs to apply to, how to find them, and how to mold your application to gain admittance to them should be rooted in that question of your questions.
There are maybe fifteen to twenty strong programs where you can get a PhD in classics in North America, but you should apply to the ones — perhaps five to eight of them — where you can imagine being happy. How will you decide? You will start with research online. You’ll go to departmental websites and learn who the faculty are and what they work on. You could usefully follow up by reading the work of the people you find, either by searching for their articles and books online or making your way to your nearest academic brick-and-mortar library.
In reading the work of the faculty, you’re seeking the ones whose work really seem to speak to your interests. If you’re bored silly while reading through a scholar’s work, move on. If you’re captivated, take note; this author may be a person from whom you can learn. Look for two or three people who interest you this way. Trust your own judgment and taste, but also persevere long enough to get a good sample of an author’s perspective, if you think you’re getting close to finding a good one. And perhaps you already know of a scholar (or several) because her work has influenced your thinking. If you’re lucky enough to find that this person is alive and working at a research institution with a graduate program in classics, that could be a great place to start your inquiries.
As you have seen already, your own interests and tastes should be your guide in deciding what (or whom) you’re looking for and if you like what (or whom) you find. To be sure, your interests will change and develop over the course of graduate school; it’d be a shame if they didn’t. Nonetheless you will need to know your present interests well enough to create an intellectual profile of yourself and to find a place that has the people with whom that profile will fit.
Note that I’m talking about people here, not program requirements or funding opportunities; these things will matter too, but finding the right people to work with and learn from is really the game you’re playing at this point.
But back to that profile of yourself. When you’ve decided where to apply, you will need to pull your materials together. Of primary importance is your statement of purpose, which might be called something else, like a personal statement. No matter the title, there will be a version of it in the application and its point is to provide you with a space to explain your motivating questions. Start by stating clearly and strongly what questions compel you and then continue by talking about the intellectual trajectory that got you here and that you are following now. The trajectory you draw should lead suggestively to the doorstep of the department to which you are applying. That is, chart a narrative that ends with the logical arrival at program a to study subject b with scholars c, d, and e and to take advantage of aspects f or g of the program (e.g. its archaeological program or interdisciplinary nature). Do your homework so that you get this information right.
A few don’ts:
Don’t — or at least think twice about — starting your narrative from your fifth-grade love of D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths and its ilk. You want admission committees to be able to imagine you as a graduate student and even as a professor, so don’t fall back into past-you; aim toward future-you.
Don’t just fill in the blanks for each school with professors’ names, mad-lib style, which is easy for admission committees to see! They want to know that you’re a good fit for their program, but also that you really want to attend their program and that an offer of admission won’t be wasted if it goes your way. From the perspective of departments, offers are precious: the shape of their graduate program depends upon their choosing a very small number of people who will (a) accept their offers and (b) thrive in their program. So make an effort to show that you’ve really spent time getting to know them and that your fit to their particular program is strong.
Don’t email the faculty just to show your interest in the program, unless (a) you have a specific question of research about which you’d like to engage, (b) you have a specific question about the program or professor you’d like to ask, the answer to which you cannot find on the program’s or professor’s website, or (c) you want to visit the department and would like to set up meetings. Vague emails with open-ended questions (“why should I apply to your program?”) are not especially appreciated and will not boost your chances of admission.
A final piece that matters a great deal is your writing sample. Most programs will cap this at twenty-five or so pages. Honor that cap. Committees are reading a lot of applications. The matter of having a good writing sample is tricky, because this will be a piece of writing that (ideally) took several months to produce and that hopefully consists of research in primary and secondary sources. If you do not have something like this on hand by the time you sit down to draw an application together, this may be a sign that you need to spend time in a short-term degree program, or out of school for a year or two, to get one into shape.
Ideally, your statement of purpose and writing sample will match up enough to form a coherent picture of who you are: you’ll say you want to work on Greek religion and have written a paper about it to boot. This makes you easy for committees to pigeon-hole, which at this juncture is a plus, because it helps committees to form a clear sense of who you are and if you’re a good fit. But committees can persist through some dissonance, so if your writing and central interests don’t match up, this is not a disaster. Ultimately you want to submit your best and most lucid work.
If you’re reading this now at an earlier stage of college and you think you will want to apply to grad school in your senior year, it would be wise for you to take steps to be sure that you will have a piece of writing like this ready to go by the end of that autumn. If your college doesn’t offer the chance to write a thesis in time for application season, you can consider choosing a shorter essay that you’ve already written and asking a professor to help you to expand it independently. This kind of one-on-one activity and collaboration would be a nice act of modeling for what you will ultimately be doing in graduate school, so it’s not a bad idea to start now.
Some odds and ends:
You will have to take the GREs, but don’t sweat these too much; most admission committees will just glance at them, unless they see a verbal or analytical score that is shockingly low. (The quantitative score is mostly ignored.) Let me stress here, though, that admission committees are diverse and so are their modes of selection. They tend to consist of a handful of classics professors and, as you may know, classicists are an idiosyncratic group of people. I’m writing to you about the perspective that I find most prevalent among my colleagues here and there, but judgments will vary.
You will need letters of reference, usually three of them: ask professors to write for you who know you and your work well and for whom you have written papers. (Ask graciously! Give them plenty of lead time: six weeks is ideal.) Choose at least one or, preferably, two classicists, but it is fine to go outside the field for at least one letter.
You will need to submit an official transcript as well and, in many cases, a list of the Greek and Latin texts you have read, as well as a résumé or curriculum vitae. As always, as ever, be honest and straightforward about yourself and your experiences in these sections.
Don’t forget to proofread. And have a friend, professor, parent, or otherwise helpful and supportive human read over your materials and offer frank feedback. When you enter the world of graduate study, you will find that asking for advice is important and following the good advice you receive is key.
So follow this advice and good luck.
Sarah Nooter is Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Chicago and Chair of the Classics Committee on Graduate Admission and Recruitment. She is the author of When Heroes Sing: Sophocles and the Shifting Soundscape of Tragedy (Cambridge University Press, 2012) and The Mortal Voice in the Tragedies of Aeschylus (Cambridge University Press, 2017), and co-editor, with Shane Butler, of Sound and the Ancient Senses (Routledge, 2018). She is the editor of the journal Classical Philology.
