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[papergreen]

I'm in the beginning stages of thinking about going to grad school, and I'm trying to figure out how to do research into graduate programs. My academic interests, so far, are in art, film, and popular culture, post-WWII. Which I know is incredibly vague. Specifically I'm interested in the way that art movements shape (and are shaped by) their

Comments

[muse_10]

First, I agree with all of what fullofpink says. With your background, I'd say that you may be comfortable with philosophy, but your interests seem to call for a more historical/cultural approach, so I still recommend art history. Like has been said, today's art history isn't the art history of Vasari, focusing the lives of artists. You'll find the kind of research you want to do will be very welcome in the right departments. Keep searching for the right faculty; it'll be well worth the effort. I don't think you will feel restricted by the field, but then again I may have personal bias. ;)

As for your SOP, I would exhibit that you can think in specifics. This will not only show that you *have* thought about it, but that you have the depth of knowledge that you can pursue it as graduate work. Approach them as possible avenues of exploration; you won't married to anything you say in your SOP. You can say something to the effect of, "I am specifically drawn to concepts/phenomena A, B, and C as a part of the broader political and artistic/cultural structures of post-war society."

[papergreen]

thank you, this is the kind of help i was looing for.

[endxgame]

Cultural studies or Theory and Criticism type programs sound like they might be a good fit as well. History of Consciousness and UCSC and similar programs would probably be worth looking into. Also try French Language departments.

I don't know if you'll find a lot of history programs will meet your exact needs but there are surely some.

[greekdaph]

This--and fullofpink's thoughts above--is really great advice. Papergreen, none of your grad advisors are going to force you to hew closely to the interests you express in your SOP; on the contrary, they're going to want you to take a variety of different courses and to see how your interests develop. You may end up pursuing something close to what you articulate in your SOP, or you may end up doing something radically different. The SOP is a bit like playing dress-up, like trying on for size the kind of work you'll do in grad school. Everyone knows it's artificial, and perhaps precocious in its ambition, but it's a useful exercise nonetheless.

To elaborate on muse_10's advice, then, SOP needs to do a couple things:
1) it needs, yes, to express "possible avenues of exploration" that you're currently interested in pursuing--you want to be honest with yourself and with programs because "fit" is going to have a lot to do with whether you get admitted. Are there faculty in each program who can support work on those interests? Having a specific SOP will help you figure that out. In mine, for instance, I wrote about my interests, then named professors and wrote a few words about how a professor's expertise will help me explore such-and-such element of my interest in topic X.
2) It needs, yes, to "exhibit that you can think in specifics." Think of it as a mini, very rudimentary dissertation prospectus. Propose a project--not a thesis, necessarily, but a set of questions--and list a couple avenues you could go down if you dedicated yourself to pursuing those questions. Show that you can conceive of a project larger than a term paper or seminar paper, and show how the work you've already done--work you'll use as your writing sample--prepares you for and anticipates your graduate studies. To use my SOP as an example again, I transitioned from describing my senior honors thesis to saying that I realized that the ideas I'd begun to explore in my work on a particular poet (I'm in English) apply more widely to a historical period, then I talked about how I wanted to explore the big idea in relation to additional authors X, Y, and Z. You could do the same thing and write about the other 1968 uprisings--you wouldn't be committed to that idea in grad school, but you'd show, through your use of specifics, that you're thinking about the bigger picture and making useful intellectual connections.

Let me say, too, from my own experience, that drafting my SOP and then tailoring the fit paragraph to each school was a very large part of my research process--putting my interests down on paper helped me figure out which programs meshed with them and which didn't (and, unsurprisingly, I didn't get into the programs that weren't good fits. Had I started my research before giving my list of schools to my recommenders, I wouldn't have applied to those programs in the first place and would've saved some money!). Since the SOP can be so intimidating, a lot of us tend to leave it to the end of the application process. But especially because there are several disciplines in which your work could fit, you might want to hold that SOP up to the offerings at various schools and see what department it best meshes with. At school A, it be art history, but at school B it might be film studies, etc.