This document should be around 500 words long and should explain to us why you would like to study in our department. We use the document primarily to determine whether you are a good fit for what we have to offer, though the Statement of Purpose also gives us a sense of your writing, research, and reasoning skills.

You should also decide what you might want to submit for a writing sample. This should be at least 12 pages long, should have a thesis, and should draw on both primary and secondary sourcing. Usually, this is a history research paper. This paper should demonstrate that you can write clearly and well, that you can develop an interesting thesis, and that you can defend it with a combination of well-selected primary and secondary research. You can feel free to improve on a paper that you have already submitted for another purpose before using it as your writing sample.

Before you plan to apply, you should reach out to potential writers of letters of recommendation and ask if they would be willing to write you a letter for our program. Letter writers should be people who are familiar with your academic work, and who are capable of judging whether you would be likely to succeed in a graduate program in history. Usually, these letters are written by history faculty members with whom you have taken classes. Occasionally they are written by faculty members from other disciplines, or by people who have supervised you in history-related jobs or internships.

Once you have ideas of a person or people you may want to work with in our program, you should reach out to our program. It is customary to contact our graduate coordinator first, though you can also reach out to a potential supervisor directly if you have questions that you think they could best answer. 

Review our History Department faculty. Any faculty member on the Kent campus can serve as your advisor. You will work with many faculty members during your time at Kent and you may choose to work with faculty in other departments at Kent State if you have an interdisciplinary focus, but your primary faculty advisor must be a History Department faculty member.

Decide why you want to attend graduate school, and what you hope to do with your degree. If you are thinking of pursuing an MA, do you hope to continue on to a PhD? Do you hope to work in a museum or archive, or teach at the High School level?

Our deadlines for admission are November 15 for Spring Admission, and Feb 1 for Fall Admission and for graduate funding.  

Your process should begin about a year before you plan to begin graduate school.  First, look though our department’s admissions guidelines to be sure you meet requirements. To apply to our MA program, you must have 12 undergraduate hours in the discipline of History with at least a 3.3 GPA in these courses. This cannot include classes in adjacent fields such as Art History, or classes about history taught by faculty members in other disciplines (A History of Jazz class taught by a music school faculty member would not count, for instance).  

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