The Road to Durham

In October 2008, I begin postgraduate studies in the Department of Archaeology at the University of Durham, England. This post is designed to explain how I came to Durham, what was involved, and why Durham was chosen over many other excellent programs.

Durham University Shield

I was actually a returning academic, choosing to finally attain a university education some 7 years after my high school graduation. During the intervening years, I had started my young family and excelled in a career in technology consulting. I missed deep intellectual stimulation, though, and, during a time of serious soul-searching (aka “looking for a new employer”), determined to return to school. My field of choice was archaeology, and I was lucky enough to have a very supportive wife, who agreed to re-enter the workforce as I quit my job and began undergraduate studies full-time. The details of the next four years are a story themselves, and I’ll try to write about them later.

From the beginning of my renewed academic life, I was intent on pursuing graduate studies in the UK. Of course, my sights were set on the two biggies: Oxford or Cambridge. Committed to this goal, I tackled my undergraduate program with much vigor and a large degree of over-working. This led to many grand achievements for someone at my level (especially for someone at a university like Andrews). These achievements and hard work, I had hoped, would make me a competitive candidate for Oxbridge (a term often used to refer to Oxford and Cambridge together). After the first year, I started to seriously look into the whole grad school process. Surprisingly, I started to feel less interested in Oxford, though Cambridge grew as a primary interest. As I delved deeper into my research on culture change in Rome’s Provincia Arabia, though, I became aware of some very interesting work on Romanization and the Globalization of Roman culture by Dr. Richard Hingley of Durham. This work soon became an important inspiration for my own research and, through a series of email communications, Durham was quickly added to my list of prospects.

In the spring of 2007, I was preparing to serve as Field Supervisor for the archaeological excavations at Tall Hisban in Jordan. It occurred to me that I might increase my chances of acceptance and learn more about the various graduate programs in the UK if I took this travel opportunity to visit a few schools in the UK on my way to or from Jordan. So, I arranged for several meetings at Oxford, Cambridge, Durham, and St. Andrews. My wife joined me for this 10-day period, and we traversed the island from the southern tip all the way to mid-Scotland. The meetings I had at each school were great, and I was surprised to find a warm welcome from all the professors. While we loved the university in Oxford, we didn’t much care for the town. Cambridge, St. Andrews and Durham all provided much more charm and were places where Traci and I could see settling our family. After leaving the UK that summer, I left with a much better feeling about the prospects of making graduate study in the UK a reality, but I was nowhere near having a true favorite among Cambridge, Durham and St. Andrews, all of which have excellent programs in Archaeology, Classics or Ancient History.

After my summer fieldwork, Traci and I had long talks about the future and where we might end up in the coming years. We weighed all the options, considered the academic reputations of each program, tried to remember the receptions we received from each professor, investigated costs of living, and also the comparative possibilities to be most competitive for funding opportunities. While the decision was difficult (and I’m sure one where we couldn’t have gone wrong whatever the choice!), we finally decided upon Durham. We both came to this decision independently, and for somewhat different reasons. Chief among those for me were: the fact that my program of choice at Durham was in an actual department of Archaeology rather than Classics, History or something else, the great communication I had been able to maintain with Dr. Hingley whom I expect to have serve as an advisor for my dissertation(s), the amazing appeal of the town of Durham and its virtual unknown-ness to tourists, the extremely high rating of the Department of Archaeology (#2 in the UK), the existence of the Durham Centre for Roman Cultural Studies, proximity to Hadrian’s Wall, and a real sense that this is a university where I can make my mark, contribute, learn without the undue pressures of being at Oxbridge, and be in the center of new approaches to understanding and uncovering Roman culture throughout the empire.

Now that I think about it, I find it interesting that from my first day as an Archaeology student at Andrews, there has only been one poster advertising a Department of Archaeology on the Department of Behavioral Sciences‘ grad school bulletin board at Andrews. This poster is for the Archaeology department at Durham University. I remember seeing it often and generally giving it little thought. The same was true of Andrews University when I first considered returning to academic life: though the school was literally in my backyard, I never thought of it until very late in the decision-making process. Now, I’d have to say that I could have hardly made a better choice for undergraduate studies. I hope, pray and am thoroughly convinced that the same will be true for my post-graduate years at Durham.

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