 Okay, hello everyone. I'm Felicity Scott. I'm director of the PhD program at Columbia University and I just wanted to offer this opportunity for people to ask questions but also to outline the sort of core details of the PhD program and some of the key elements of the application process and really treat this like a sort of frequently asked question session in real time. And I also wanted to say that just while I make these opening remarks will be recording and then we'll turn the recording off so you can ask questions without being on camera. So the first thing to say maybe is that the PhD program at Columbia is an architectural history program or an architectural history and theory program and I mentioned that because we are not a PhD in practice program, we don't accept people working in technology or in environmental technology and these things we are a scholarly program, a program in the humanities. And I thought maybe also to be important to walk you through that the core curriculum at the program. The program begins with two years of coursework. And in each of those years students are they take a PhD colloquium in the fall is on the first year you're with your second year cohort cohort. And with the in the second year, you're with your first year colleagues. In addition, and in the spring semester, there are either one or two PhD level seminars offered within Jesus, and you're required to take at least one of them. The curriculum is built around a series of distribution requirements. And there are two 18th, 19th century requirements and a pre 1750 requirement and requirement that you take a class that neither within the Graduate School of Architecture or Archistry and this requirement tends to be particularly easy to fulfill but it's, it's really a legacy of a period when when students would take almost primarily architectural history classes and wouldn't venture into the social sciences or even to history or political theory. And, and so the core curriculum then just made up of required core sort of methods and content at the PhD level, these distribution requirements, and then a series of of electives and, and so the main quite literally the main part of the first year is is coursework, and in which you're exposed to a variety of methods and faculty. The third year of the program is, is when you prepare a series of bibliographies for your general exams or qualifying exams, and begin to work on the dissertation perspective so the third year is really encompassed by by sort of taking responsibility for the secondary literature in your field which is the, the, the sort of ambition of those generals exams and, and then in conjunction with a with an advisor, developing a dissertation prospectus that that is defended at the end of the spring of the third year and, and maybe just to step back I mentioned this right up front. It's important to, to maybe say that we don't require applicants to have secured a dissertation advisor in advance. And, and that's because often people come in believing they'll work on one type of topic and or area and end up working on something quite different at the time they get to their third year and, and so students tend to, to, to work with to decide on their, on their actual advisor in that third year and so this is the reason. I'm sure I've written to many of you to say I don't require we don't require you to have secured an advisor in advance because these things can often often change. And so I think also maybe to say the, just a couple of, I mean we can go through many of the more fine details of the coursework. Oh, I don't know one thing it's important to say is that, you know, I mentioned that there's this requirement to take a course outside of a separate history. Of course we encourage students to work in a strong model of interdisciplinarity which might well mean that you take many of your elective classes and even your distribution classes in, in a field that is at the core of your research interests. So, let's see what to say now I should also mention there's a couple you'll notice on the application site that there is a box that says ICLS Institute for comparative literature and society, and maybe even the program in comparative media. These are two certificate programs that that many of our students choose to, to work with these are not in any way mandatory there are also things you can apply for, once you've been admitted and even started. And these are, these are ways to to have a foot in a sort of another program for some people to entirely unnecessary to use that framework to develop a sort of core of expertise for other people. It actually is an important part of the sort of pedagogical offerings at the at the university. I just wanted to say a number of people have asked me about securing funding outside. We admit three students a year, and we fully fund them for for five years. They often tend to take six or seven years to complete a PhD at Columbia and they seek external funding through grants or sometimes teaching either here, or at other institutions to, to supplement that funding in those final years. So there's no need to secure funding from governments and other sources if you're admitted you will come fully funded. And so it's unlike a European PhD situation where often you might actually have to secure financing in advance this is not something we require at all. Another core part of the, the program are teaching requirements and this is actually a Columbia wide mandate and the, the opportunity to teach in the core program is really seen. It's not a teacher training but it's seen very much also as a core part of the pedagogy. The way we do that. Gisa is to have your teacher in your second and third year of the program, within the core sequence in architectural history within the, the MR program, the architecture program that that core history sequence is now has been restructured a number of years ago it's no longer as a large lecture. We divide the, the first year and art students into into three groups. A pedagogy based in a mostocratic method. The course is called questions in architectural history so it's not a sort of lecture imparting knowledge it's actually conceived as a very engaged conversation with the students and so the three sections each are about 30 students. One faculty member and two teaching fellows and so you're the teaching, the teacher training comes in the form of, of you being with somebody from the second or third year depending on what your year is and being both in the main section of that class but also then running an independent section with half of those students and there's again something you do in the second and third year. There are also often opportunities to teach in years beyond that there's a sort of competitive opportunity let's say where students that have defended their dissertation prospectors are able to have a summer, a graduate seminar for which of course you would receive additional compensation. There's also some fantastic opportunities over the summer teaching in the advanced architectural designs for a summer semester that many of us students take the opportunity to teach that also comes with additional compensation and there are occasionally other forms of teaching for students in their fourth, fifth, sixth and really fourth, fifth and sixth years. So another couple of core requirements beyond the teaching are language requirements. There are two language requirements that that students tend to, if they don't come with languages in advance and you don't have to come with languages in advance. To spend the first and second summer prior to taking the qualifying exams to fulfill these language requirements. They are graduate proficiency based language requirements so if you really need to learn a language to conversational level then we advise you to take the core language classes in the academic year but this is actually not the nature of the requirement. Their requirement is that you develop some proficiency in reading and translation that is rather is something you can fulfill with I think it's like a six week intensive graduate training over the summer. If there are very obscure languages that you need to acquire like things like this things that that Columbia doesn't teach then we work with you to find an available institution that that would teach them. Okay, so it's a program basic to core core classes and distribution requirements, teaching requirements, language requirements and funding, and then I thought it was useful to just work through the basics of the application process and both from sort of your side and let's say from outside as as the faculty. Firstly to say, we, we make admissions decisions as a committee and this is another reason why you know I've been stressing that you don't need to choose an advisor in advance it's not that that I would choose a student that I want to work with, or maybe Wilson would choose a student that she wanted to work with or the clinic a while I would choose as we don't, we don't admit students as individual faculties, we admit them as a committee so we all have equal votings we all work through the applications. And again, make a make a collective decision about the three students that we will admit. And, and I should say we also just we also typically have a waitlist which we don't tend to rank. But the application basics that the really the core document in the application for us and often the first thing we read is the application statement. There is a limit set on the applications website which is, you should take as a, as a guideline if you need another 500 words to, to, to, to really make a claim about what your research interests are of course take them. But don't give us 4000 words you have to you know imagine that there's a lot of applications that we're working through this is a six sync statement, the ambition of which is for you to, to make a claim about what your research interests are what your scholarly interests are what type of contribution to the field, you're hoping to make and, and to outline the sort of dissertation research that you're planning to, to work on and when I say the sort of dissertation research what I'm alluding to is that it's not a dissertation prospectus that you will be outlining certainly it's important to give us some details of you know who what when where and why. You're not expected to be able to say, these are the, the, you know, four chapters of my dissertation, you're not expected to, to know in advance all the details of what you're planning to work on and again to come back to the point I made earlier. Because often people might come in, imagining that they're going to work on a topic in 19th century Ottoman Empire and end up working in 20th century Cairo, you know, and so, so these are, are changes that that you can't anticipate in advance and so we read that statement, really as an indication of how does the student present themselves as a scholar, do they understand what graduate level research projects are, do they understand the sort of, you know, archival and scholarly ways of presenting academic work in the field of architectural history and theory and so I know that's a very generic framework but I put it in generic terms because of course the specifics are going to very widely across your interest but you should think of it as a document that both makes a somewhat broader claim to how you would situate yourself, you know, are you a 20th century scholar of X, Y or Z or, you know, are you a scholar entering the field through a methodological conceit and, you know, decolonial methodologies or in so I want you know we're looking for how you sort of present your core and then how you imagine those interests would translate into a research project. It's entirely up to you whether you, whether you include biographical information for some people, it's actually important to, to account for, you know, changes in your career paths or, or the sort of motivation for entering into a, into a PhD kind of sort of scholarly mode coming out of a, of a more professionally oriented mode but, but we're reading it primarily to understand your scholarly interests, your biographical background may or may not be relevant you know we leave that up to you to decide depending on the specifics of your background and your research interests. While I remember to say it. It's also not mandatory that come from a professional background I would say something like the majority of our students have come through a masters of architecture or a masters of architectural history program in some form. We regularly take students that have come from different disciplines but have been working or intend to work on something very closely related to architecture in the broadest sense architecture urbanism landscape architecture histories of design. And, and so it's more important that you, your current interests relate to architecture than that you come from a background. Again, most of our students do come from a background in architecture, but that is not not universal by any means. You'll note that I mentioned that you might have a master's degree this is actually mandatory unlike degrees in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences like if you're applying to art history, you wouldn't need a master's degree. All of our students come in with a master's degree. They come in with what we call advanced standing. And this is actually what allows for students to only have to take 13 classes in the first two years of their program. So you do need to have a master's degree to apply to the program. You don't need to have finished that by the time you apply what do I mean by that you might be in the final year of that degree now, you'll be applying in early January only get the degree in May. That's fine this is often something that happens you'll have to complete that degree to begin, but you don't have to have completed it before you apply. So this is not not a concern. We trust that you will complete it. I mean, you will have to complete it to begin, but it's not something you need to finish in advance. So the statement, you know, it's, it's, it's a sink that should be clear, obviously, well written, it should make a claim about your scholarly interests. If there are other parts of the university that are relevant to your intended, intended work at Columbia, in other words, if, if you have an interest in, in Latin American history and, and the Institute for Latin American American Studies, if this is something that would, that would make Columbia very clear choice for you. That might be something important to mention. That doesn't mean that you need to have reached out to particular faculty in those departments or in our department. But it means that, that you've, you know, made a made a clear attempt to, to, to, to, to work out that Columbia has the resources for your project in order to pursue them. So yeah, important to think of the program within the School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation but also within a university with other types of scholarly resources. So the second sort of core part of the application is the writing sample. We give you a sort of guideline for numbers of pages. If you have a few, you know, you don't have exactly the number of it's a five pages under 15 pages over that's totally fine. What we don't want is you to give us 200 pages and expect us to read, you know, a vast amount of your work so you need to edit yourself. We don't expect those writing samples to be demonstrations that you've already undertaken extensive research in the field that you're proposing to work on. So we give them as writing samples. So, what does that mean. That means where we're looking to say, you know, how does this candidate make an argument, how do they mobilize resources, you know, are they following an intellectually interesting line of sort of research and argumentation we really read that as another way of you characterizing yourself as a scholar. So you should give us the strongest pieces of writing that you have. They can be short pieces you can have multiple short pieces, you can have one longer piece. I really need to think of presenting the best piece of your work in in that in that context. If you want to give us an excerpt from a larger document you might have a thesis document, which is 200 pages. So that with a cover note saying this is an excerpt from a larger document so we understand what we're reading. But again, it's a occasion also for you to to demonstrate that you know how to edit, edit yourself and present yourself in the most professional light. And, you know, there's also that if there are different types of texts that you want to include. That might be also something you note on a cover note, it might be self evident there's no need to make a cover note but I just suggest that as something that you can think about doing another key piece of the application is the is the CV or resume and I mentioned this for a couple of reasons firstly it's another channel for us to understand where you've been to school you know what type of capacities you've worked in. So it's also a way of taking some of the burden off the statement and we can we have another channel of information to understand where you've come from and and what you've done. And I should say while I remember a lot of people imagine that you have to have had publications like texts in print prior to applying this is this is not something that we require. Again, we're looking for students who we think are going to make the most interesting and significant contributions to the field of architectural history and theories is a program that tries to advance scholarship in the field and to see us students and graduates as as leaders as really thinking the future of the field and its and its pedagogy so so that's what we're looking for we're looking for people. We don't say oh this year we're going to take people working in in this type of project we take students. And according to their strengths but according to to a sort of collective understanding of of of whether whether we think the work is significant or will become significant with with with further training. So, so the CV, you know, is an important document. Occasionally get asked if there's a length limit, you know, I don't really think so it's a, it's a field just again, you know, edit yourself think about what should a CV look like for applying to an academic program, it might look quite different to CV, if you're applying to a professional job as an architect. So again it's a channel of of presenting yourself in the most professional or you know scholarly light. The other key part of of the application process are letters of recommendation. A requirement of three letters sometimes people ask if they have to offer for because sometimes there's a field for a fourth letter no we don't require a fourth letter that's occasionally other departments at the university. You know do encourage that and so the field there is a generic one we require three. So you can choose your, your recommendation, your recommenders, according to their ability to testify to your strengths and your preparedness for scholarly work in an in an academic PhD program. You know, could be that one of the letters is somebody that can testify to you teaching you don't need to have that. We're really looking for people that can speak to your ability to to thrive in a PhD program. So what does that mean that means that you know you might well have worked for a very famous architect, they're probably not the best person to tell us about your scholarly capacities and so you know you don't have to. I won't give an example but sometimes we get famous architects writing to us and they. It's not you know they are not really able to tell us about whether or not you have the the capacity to to write to research to make an argument. The another question that I often ask is can I use a recommender from an undergraduate degree. Yes, of course that's fine if you were very closely with somebody in your undergraduate degree and you feel like they are a good, a good person to write, of course, that's absolutely fine. Can you use three letters from the same institution. Yes, that's fine. I also often have the question. Oh, I went through Columbia, can I use Columbia faculty to recommend. Yes, that's also fine. So we don't have clear restrictions with we, we, you know expect you to think about who can really, you know, again, testify to your ability to thrive within a program like this. So let me think what else I should say. Also say, you know, there is often ask if they should speak to many faculty who are on the PhD committee before applying this is not necessary if there's someone who you have specific questions for that that you really feel you need to of course reach out to them. But this is not in any way necessarily we, we, you know, most of the people we admit we've not necessarily spoken to so. So I know people get very anxious and you know I know there are websites that recommend that you have to speak to actually not necessary. And often we just don't have time to speak to 90 people individually so it's really something you should think carefully about. Likewise with campus visits. So when we visit the campus we, we don't set up sort of organized tours of the of the campus there, the sort of in person open houses that that are run by GSAP tend to be more directed toward the masters programs and these are for the doctoral program we, we don't actually set up and organize in person open houses that being said, of course you can visit. We also ask questions about whether they can come and sit in on a class. If you've been admitted to the program. Yes, you know that's the moment in which it might make more sense to come and do that. We also obviously can't have lots of people coming and sitting in on seminars in the course of the full semester or even the spring. So these are the sorts of things that that tend to be more appropriate for candidates that have been admitted to the program. Likewise we speaking to current students we you know set those beings up once people have been admitted. I think, let me think what else did I want to talk through. Oh, the other, of course, you're required to submit your transcripts. And just to alleviate your concerns we're used to seeing transcripts from many different institutions with different grading structures and they of course all have sort of key to understanding what the norms are in your institution so you don't need to worry too much about our ability to interpret transcripts. We become experts in the broad variety of transcript models in the course of doing these applications so I think that's something that you don't really need to be concerned about. There are language requirements for people who who have not undertaken a number of years of training in an English language institution of his first language isn't English for obvious reasons but I think they are that sort of extent of the requirements that that I need to sort of underscore in this in this in this sense. So maybe I know this a very generic overview but I just wanted to to sort of talk through key aspects of the program we also the students I should say that they're a number of of initiatives with student run initiatives and some school wide initiatives that that are also important to the pedagogy in the program that students have been running a workshop for a number of years where they invite people that they want to be in dialogue with to come and talk to them. In a private session, we are also developing a series of other initiatives getting students and we send alumni to to present aspects of their work the formulation of their work to have a sort of collective conversation about about methods and the formulation of their projects there of course are use a large, our large number of important public programs within the school, and other parts of the university that that are also very important like the Collins Kauffman session that's jointly run between art history and DCEP students often involved with initiatives like that. That's sort of most of the core pieces that I wanted to stress so I know that they're always issues that I forget in outlining these sorts of issues and but also the questions that you might have are often enormously relevant for for your for your colleagues so so maybe stuff and if we can turn off their recording and I can see who has questions and and continue the conversation from there.