Apparently some people have arrived at my blog by searching for the answer to that question. If you were debating whether or not to attend MAPSS, it's too late for this post to affect your decision this year, but you have my best wishes whatever your path, and hopefully this can be of some help in the future.
So okay, those of you familiar with English-language axioms will probably know that the pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple. Such is the case regarding MAPSS, but I'll give it my best - hah! - perspective.
The short form answer is that if you are looking at MAPSS as a bridge to a Ph.D. program in history, YES. It will almost certainly make your application look better by virtue of having a graduate degree from the University of Chicago, which is a big flippin' deal, and MAPSS also has a lot of resources and support for those of you going forward with Ph.D. applications to make the process easier and, 90% of the time, a guarantee of funding at a top program.
In that respect, yes, MAPSS is definitely good for history [programs.] But as for your ability to get a head start on research that interests you and really develop your skills as a historian... that's kind of a crap shoot, if I'm being honest.
What you have to remember is that this is a one-year program. In my case, that "one year" will have taken eight and a half months from the first day of class (1 October) to graduation (15 June.) At most, you will be taking 9 classes in MAPSS. One to two of them, the required "Perspectives in the Social Sciences" and a methods course, will already not be related to your area of interest. (You might be able to find a methods course that is related to your area of interest, as there are supposedly dozens of eligible courses. I didn't.) That leaves a maximum of seven (eight if you're REALLY lucky) classes that will be related to the kind of research you want to do. And that's not a lot.
Time moves fast on the quarter system even if you're here for more than a year, but in a year-long program, your education is highly dependent on which professors are currently teaching, and which classes they may be offering. And it's never that many.
UChicago's strength in history is in Asia. That's not a big secret. It's something they're proud of and it's something they are amazing in. But I personally am not an Asia scholar. I took one course in Japanese history as an undergrad to fulfill a geographical distribution requirement, and it was the only history course in which I received less than a full A. My area of interest is postwar America, and unfortunately for me, those classes really weren't abundant this year.
I'm told this happens every year. Some years are great for the things you want to study: postwar America, early modern France, imperialism and the alliance system in the First World War. (Okay, that one's probably done to death, but bear with me. I'm an Americanist.) And some years f-ing suck. I'm told that in years past, all the European history professors have gone on leave en masse, leaving a MAPSS cohort pretty disappointed. And I'm sure it's true for other disciplines too.
I have a friend in the program whose specialty is Southeast Asia. His year has been a dream come true. A professor he had early on introduced him to a Bigwig who subsequently became his thesis advisor, while the original professor served as a secondary advisor of sorts. My friend has been able to take a class with the Bigwig, network, and pursue his research interests on his way to his Ph.D.
Another friend studying early modern France hasn't found classes that are DIRECTLY what she wants to study, but they are near enough that she has been engaged and interested. During the winter quarter (Jan-Mar) she was able to take a seminar with her thesis advisor, and by the end of it, she had written 25+ pages that were essentially the rough draft of her thesis, as her grade for that class as well. (I was happy for her, even as I was eaten alive by jealousy.)
In contrast, I only took one class that could accurately be considered "postwar America." (Part of this may be due to the fact that I do not intend to go on to the Ph.D., and took only professional courses this quarter, outside the social sciences. But the first two quarters, I was only able to take one class remotely resembling my subject area.)
My "postwar America" class was actually a Chicago Studies class, first and foremost, and not even taught by an Americanist. Don't get me wrong, it was still my favorite class of the quarter. But in addition to not really being America-focused (it was a diaspora class) it involved populations and issues that I had never studied before, and will never study again. Interesting, informative, important, fun... but not at all related to my research.
And that's where the lack of available professors really hit home. It wasn't an entirely new experience for me: my undergrad thesis advisor agreed to supervise my research out of pity, I think, as his focus was two hundred years earlier and a continent away. But while my undergrad advisor was fairly knowledgeable anyway and extremely involved, I didn't have that experience this time around.
Given the dearth of professors in the history department, I looked in the English department too. As it turned out, the two professors in that department most suited to my research were ALSO on leave. The third-most-relevant professor remarked wistfully "If only [Scholar] were here this year" when we met; [Scholar] is spending the year as a visiting professor elsewhere. Then, this professor kindly told me that she had already over-committed in supervising MAPH students, our companions in the humanities who have a considerably earlier deadline to find an advisor. So I went with an unrelated history professor after all.
The result was that my preceptor and advisor really knew nothing about the subject, my research was entirely self-directed, and I don't feel that MAPSS was responsible in any way for the final product. I feel like everything successful about my thesis came from my undergrad advisor. For me, MAPSS was great for getting a degree, great for figuring out I was getting the wrong degree for me (professional school, here I come!) and not great for history.
But that's not the typical experience, as illustrated by my two friends above. Like most graduate programs and other exercises in proving adulthood, MAPSS is pretty much going to be what you make of it. If I had been knocking on my advisor's door asking for help twice a week, I probably would have gotten it. The fact that I wasn't was my own stubborn choice.
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