 I just wanted to go through the basic components of the PhD program and then talk about the application process and after that to answer questions that any of you might have. And I encourage questions, often a question that might seem simple, in fact, on everybody's mind and something that I have forgotten to convey. First, I've been in email exchange with some of you first just to underscore that the PhD program in architecture is a program that is focused on architectural history and theory. We present ourselves as operating within the scope of histories of modernity, so from the 18th century to the present. So anyone that might want to be working on medieval renaissance or pre-18th century work should really be thinking about an art history program. That's not something that we we tend to support. The program, as most programs in North America are, has a couple of years of coursework and I'll detail that in a second and it's only really after the coursework is completed and the requirements are completed and students undertake a generals or qualifying exam, which I'll explain that people turn to work on the dissertation proper. And I just mentioned that because I know in Europe and some other parts of the world that people are applying directly into a program to work with an individual and begin their dissertation and that's not how it tends to work at Columbia and actually most North American programs and this is important for the application process because it means you don't need to find an advisor in advance, which is again very distinct from many other programs. We tend to understand that people are applying with a general sense of their field of interest and their anticipated contribution to the field of occupancy. But that field of interest often changes or is refined in all sorts of significant ways in the first two or three years of being in a PhD program. And I'll come back to this but it means the application statement is a little bit different to something like a dissertation proposal, which is what it would have to be if you're going straight into a dissertation writing phase. So I'll just talk through the mechanics of the program. I mentioned two years of coursework and this is a mixture of more methodologically oriented courses and courses fulfilling different historical areas and geographical areas of knowledge, both in architectural history and in a sort of interdisciplinary framework. And I'll go through the sort of technicalities just to begin to explain this. We run what we call the PhD colloquium each fall for the first and second years, which means that you would be in dialogue with colleagues from the above in your first year and below in your second year. And in the spring semester we offer either one or two PhD seminars and these are courses which are exclusive to doctoral students in the program. The rest of the coursework that students undertake largely seminars are broken up into a series of what we call distribution requirements. And those distribution requirements are structured or organized by historical periods. So you're required to take one course that addresses a period before 1750, yeah, before the mid 18th century, to 18th and 19th century classes. And then there's a requirement that you take a class that's explicitly not in architectural history or art history. And you know this is in an era of increasingly interdisciplinary scholarship. This is a little bit of an archaism, people do that without even thinking, take classes in, whether it be in anthropology or in area studies discipline or in political theory. But these are requirements that you need to fulfill. And the rest of the classes are electives and elective classes can of course be used to fill out your knowledge of a field or subfield within architectural history or they could be used to strengthen interdisciplinary frameworks. And I'll come back to that later, but just to I remember to say one way that that maybe relates to the application process is that if there is somebody elsewhere in the university, whether it's in African American and African diaspora studies or in East Asian languages and literatures or anywhere else that you can recognize to be an important resource for your own research where you're to be admitted, then that's an important thing to maybe mention in your application statement. It shows that you've recognized that there are resources at the university beyond the PhD program and architecture that can help frame the most sort of robust coursework opportunities for you. So yes, two years of coursework students tend to take you have to take 13 classes across those two years and so basically it's something like three classes a semester. Not all of those have to be taken for what we call a letter grade, which means you write a research paper. Some of them can be taken for what we call an art credit, which is like an auditing grade. And so effectively you'd be writing two research papers a semester, developing a field of expertise, but also using that coursework to encounter things you might never have studied. And this is where often students might come in thinking they're going to work on the 1920s and end up working on the 1850s or come in thinking they're going to work in the North American context and end up working in a very different geographical area. And there's many other versions of those sort of transformations in people's fields of interest. So two years of coursework that the third year is dedicated to the qualifying exams and the formulation of a dissertation prospectus. And it's really at this point that students begin to secure the person that will become their dissertation advisor and the other members of their committee the exams at Columbia take the form of developing two bibliographies, a major and a minor field of study which you undertake with faculty, largely faculty from the PhD committee, although there is the scope to have one of those members from an outside department, should it be critical to your field of interest. And there it's really an opportunity to undertake an extensive period of reading, reading to become a sort of expert in the field that you're through which you're going to frame the dissertation topic. And so currently people distribute those bibliographies in January for a February exam. And the nature of the exam, very simple, students send the bibliographies to the faculty who are working on their committee, the faculty have a week to write questions, the student has two weeks to respond in a short essay, and then we meet and convene and talk through their responses and the bibliographies and we also read three papers that the student has written during their coursework period. So it's really an occasion to convene, talk about where the person is at, what their interests are, are speaking to, and to have a sort of more informal discussion about the dissertation research. And then there's a separate meeting to defend the dissertation prospectus that happens at the end of the third year. So this is the sort of framework and after that students are involved in the dissertation research and writing. The other parts, you know, we require two foreign languages. By the time you get your MFIL, which means in your third year, and they are proficiency level language requirements, they're not fluency in terms of spoken language, because we encourage extensive language acquisition, it's not actually mandatory, but you might need it depending on the work that you're trying to do. Columbia offers most of those classes. If you're needing to acquire a language that we don't support, then we find ways of making sure you get access to that somewhere else. So the other things, we have a teaching requirement which we standardized a number of years ago and in the second and third year of the program, the PhD students are teaching fellows in the core history theory sequence of the Masters of Architecture program. And the way that works is that the incoming MFIL, the first year Masters of Architecture students are divided into three groups, each of which have a professor and two teaching fellows, like two doctoral teaching fellows affiliated with them and the teaching fellows are of course part of the larger collective conversation each week and then they also run individual sections with half of that class. So let's say there's 30 people in the larger sort of lecture seminar format, then the teaching fellows would have 15 people in their own section which would meet separately for an hour and really develop the students' reading and writing. So this is something that this teacher training is how Columbia frames it is considered a very important part of PhD training. This is the only required teaching. In addition to that, our students often teach for additional compensation in the summer session for what's called the advanced architectural design like a post-professional design program that's entirely optional. Some of our students want to be out in the world doing research, archival research or other forms of research or taking internships in the library, developing skills as archivists. So that teaching you know get paid extra, it's entirely optional. Many students do it, there's also teaching opportunities at Barnard College which is where the undergraduate architecture degree is hosted at Columbia, again for additional compensation. So these are those are sort of optional frameworks that the core required teaching takes place in the in the core history sequence of the MRC program. So that's the sort of general framework of our requirements and the sort of way it would unfold, should you be admitted. And then also just to say, and this is also different in many other countries, we admit three students a year and we admit students as an entire faculty. In other words, we all vote. It's not like I get to choose a student and Mabel Wilson gets to choose a student. We don't make decisions that way. We make decisions collectively around who we think the strongest applicants might be, who will contribute most to the field in the future. And again, this means that you don't need to find an advisor in advance. That's absolutely critical. Maybe this is not related, but we admit three people a year and we offer them equivalent funding packages. And and again, this is quite standard in North American schools. I mean, I know sometimes in Europe PhD students are only admitted on the basis of faculty that have grants. We don't do that. We fund the program. You come in, you get actually it's five, you know, five. It's a little bit complicated right now because there's a six year of funding, but the core of the program is five years of funding, which includes the funding when you're when you're teaching. And that that you get tuition covered for seven years, but you get five years of a honorarium, summer funding, research and travel funding, these sorts of things comes also with healthcare. And anyway, I don't need to go through the package, but it's fully funded for five years. There's a six year of optional funding after that tuition is paid for the seventh year. But you would have to teach your find external funding and students do start applying for grants once they have their dissertation prospectus defended external grants would extend, you know, the fully funded part of the program. Other people start teaching elsewhere in the sixth or seventh year if they've not finished. The idea is that you finish the dissertation before the seventh year. Some students because of more extended primary research or language acquisition, you know, might take seven years. But the idea is that you finish in five or six years. Let's see what else do I need to say. So maybe I'll turn and talk a little bit about the application process. I've alluded to some aspects of that. You know, the key components are the statement, the statement, the letters of recommendation, I'll come back to those, your transcripts, that sort of easy. And the statement, you know, it's a short state and the writing samples. And the statement, as I said, it's not, it's not a statement that takes the form of my dissertation, we'll look at, you know, X, Y and Z and it will have four chapters. It does need to, you know, specify the type of research that you that you imagine it will undertake. So it needs some specificity. But we don't read it as if it's a dissertation prospectus. We read it as evidence that you know how to go from a larger field of interest to a very precise historical research topic. And so you should be thinking about a statement that frames your broader field of interest and that details the type of work that you might, I mean, you can you can put that in the framework of, or in the language of, you know, I intend to look at this, there's no problem there, but you know, you don't need to offer the level of specificity of five chapters or the exact names of all the protagonists or institutions or sites that that might be worked on. But you should nevertheless go from a sort of larger framing of how you situate yourself in a field, what your contribution will be to the field of architectural history, what background you have in this, into a statement of the type of research that you plan to undertake, because that will be another way of describing what type of voice you intend to have as a scholar. And the writing samples are in a funny way to many people, a little bit separate. We really read them as writing samples. We evaluate them to understand how somebody approaches translating research into arguments into narrative. So you should be thinking about those documents, not as demonstrating that you've already done extensive work in the intended plan of research, but as evidence that you are, you know, a solid scholar that you know how to write a research essay. And yes, so this is really what we read them for. How does this person write? Do they make a compelling argument? Do they know how to mobilize primary source documents? Yep, this is how we read those parts of the application. There's no problem if they also, if they also have a detailed account of of material related to your field of interest. That's entirely fine. But we don't necessarily, we don't read them as evidence that you've already done work in the area that you're proposing to work in. Yes, so they're two slightly different channels. The resume is also another mode of describing yourself and your achievements as are the transcripts. You know, they give us an indication of what background you have in architectural history. And I should say people come from many different backgrounds. Some people come directly from a professional master's degree. I think it's come from a more humanities oriented master's degree. Other people come from other fields, but have developed a significant enough interest and focus on architecture and the built environment to be able to successfully transition into becoming a historian of architecture. What do I mean? You know, we've had people coming from actually from Middle Eastern studies or from visual studies or from our history and or from ethnomusicology. So people have come from other fields, but have developed a robust way of working in our field to be able to apply. I'd say the majority of people come from a background in architecture, but not everybody does. And we do require, you've probably all seen this, we don't take students directly from undergraduate degrees. You're required to have a master's degree to be admitted to the program. This is because all of our students come with what we call advanced standing, you know, and this means you come in with an MA, you know, this is technicality, you probably don't need to know, but anyway, you have to have a master's degree before you start the program. So you could be finishing that in the spring. That's fine. But you would need it before you began studying with us. What else can I say? Maybe I'll just, I'm sure I've missed lots of things. I see, what else can I say? Oh, a student just other maybe things that might be of interest. As students regularly organize collective workshops or in symposia, they're actually just about to put out a call for papers for, for conference in the spring. They run a series of inviting people they're interested in being in dialogue with, into actually a collective conversation. There are also other, other opportunities for you know, professional development and scholarly development outside the, the core curriculum. There are, I mean, maybe around that core curriculum, I mentioned taking classes in other parts of the university. Not everybody needs to do that. But in addition, in addition to doing that on an individualized basis, you know, deciding who might be offering a seminar that, that is important for you to, you know, to gain expertise in, there are a couple of certificate programs that students participate in. One is through the Center for Comparative Media. And this is a initiative, you know, we've been working on this for a number of years. And as it suggests, Comparative Media is comparative both across media films, sorry, media forums, yeah, whether, you know, cinema, video, art, architecture, infrastructure, but also across geographies and times. And, and that, that involves taking core classes or required classes in the certificate program, but otherwise many of the electives are technically overlapping, you know, you navigate the elective expectations by taking classes that are offered in both programs. And, you know, you work with the director of those certificate programs to make sure you fulfill their requirements. The other option is the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society program started years ago, decades ago, by Gayatri Spivak and Andreas Hoysen. And, and that, you know, has similar sort of core classes, methods classes that, that are interdisciplinary and comparative in their scope more across the divide of languages and the human and social sciences with the humanities. This is more the framework for those. So you should look at those programs on their website if you're interested. These are not important for all students. Some students need a little bit more flexibility in terms of how they choose courses outside the school, or if they choose courses outside the school. But those things are offered. They make sense for some people, not for others. You take the box when you apply if you want to be considered upfront. But there's also the opportunity to once you're admitted to reach out to those certificate programs and add them to your, you have to use a course of study a little bit later. So you don't need to do that in advance. I also just to underscore, you know, I know I find myself saying this many times that this is why I began here where a program founded in the humanities. We teach people to become professors of history and theory. We so we don't do more professionally oriented. We don't sponsor more professionally oriented research that might be something more appropriate for the planning program or for many like European programs or so we don't do PhDs in architectural technology or yeah, these these things do not fall within within the rubric of how we train people. Okay, okay. Well, I look forward to reading your applications. In the spring, nice to see some familiar faces and and meet some unfamiliar faces. And I wish you all the best.