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galateaencore

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galateaencore last won the day on October 21 2018

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    ugh idk

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  1. Articulating your interest in literature like this smacks of amateurism. It's something I'd expect to find in a college application essay (or in the flavor text any English department website ever). It's very trite. Your statement of research interests (which I am assuming this is, otherwise why'd you put it in) is vague and meaningless. It's inadvisable to put these kinds of neither here nor there statements in your SOP because it just makes people go wtf. The main problem with this is is that it is contextless. Okay, so you want to work on empathy and isolation in modernism... What texts? What critical lenses? How are you contributing to the existing literature on empathy and isolation in modernism? Why should anyone care? The last question is the most important. You should answer it in any text you write, from letters to mom to essays on isolation in modernism. It is the second necessary element of any thesis. The rest of the statement reads like you're applying for MA in Education programs, not PhDs. What classes you took, your extracurriculars, what your students read is irrelevant to a PhD adcom. They care about your statement of research interests and who you want to work with on their faculty, which right now together make up about 10% of your statement. Just from the statement (obviously I don't know you personally), you come off as someone who is not ready for PhD-level work and who, if they were, would be more enthusiastic about the non-research component of the degree. Research shouldn't be an afterthought in an application to a research degree. That said, can I make a suggestion? As I said, I don't know you, but you do seem like a great candidate for education programs. If you really are more excited about the teaching and service components of academia, it may be worth at least considering reorienting yourself in that direction. PhD programs don't value those things and for someone who already knows that they enjoy those things more than research, they can be a bit of a waste of time. We need more people who are passionate about teaching and service in the academy, rather than constantly worrying about publications. A more applied degree won't take ~8 years to finish and will get you teaching and committee-ing sooner, if that's what you want.
  2. You won't get in. Everyone else has already hit on the substantive points why, but I'll put it in more direct language. You don't need 18 credits in English necessarily, but you need substantial upper-level humanities coursework to be considered and to write a decent SOP and WS. 3 gen eds is not enough. You also need specific research interests (specific: Turkish women's poetry in the 20th century) as well as apparent understanding of how they fit into the context of the relevant subfield and why anyone should care about them, which requires knowledge of the field (what was written about Turkish women's poetry in the past? What is being written now? Who are main scholars working on this thematic? What are the theoretical lenses used? What are the questions people are interested in?) as well as of the content. You need to be fluent in the language(s) of your primary sources and proficient or close to proficient in other relevant languages. You need to have grounding in critical theory, ideally demonstrated through advanced theory classes and in your writing sample. Finally, you need a 15-20 pp writing sample on your topic of interest that demonstrates extensive use of primary and secondary sources, and 3 letters from professors who can speak to your potential as a literature scholar (they don't have to be comparative literature professors, but they can't be engineering professors). All of the above is what you need just to be a viable candidate for admission at any PhD program. Getting admitted to a top program like Yale is another story. Would it make sense for the admissions team to factor in a metric which has no impact on your likelihood of excelling in their program? Because, irrespectively of any grade inflation, your ability to, say, integrate a function over a 3D plane has no application in humanities scholarship, and contrary to what you are implying, your ability in the former may have little or no relationship to your ability in the latter. So really your irrelevant GPA would tell the admissions committee almost nothing. GPA and GRE also aren't very important. I think you are misunderstanding what a PhD is: it is helpful to think of it as a job rather than as school. The reason you are funded in a PhD program is because the department expects you to be a professional who is doing a job. And whereas good departments won't saddle you with teaching duties in your first semester, they very much will expect you to hit the ground running: to be able to participate in graduate theory seminars, to immediately start working with primary sources without needing 2 years of language classes, to start producing publishable work soon after comps. Just as an engineering firm wouldn't hire you for an engineering position without an engineering degree, a PhD program wouldn't hire you for a grad student position when you can present no evidence that you know what you're doing. I think @itslit is right on with telling you that literary scholarship is not a book club. Lots of people declare a literature major because they enjoy reading and writing and then discover that a) literary scholarship is very unlike the casual reading and writing they like to do, b) therefore they're bad at it. The other reason you shouldn't apply for PhDs right now, besides the fact that you won't get in, is that you really have no idea what literary scholarship entails. Right now you see this as an escape from the grueling coursework that I'm sure you're being put through and the scary job market, but it's also, you know, a bonafide occupation with its bad sides and long days. It seems like you think that because it's not engineering, it won't be hard - and it will be very hard, just in a different way. You really should give this project a lot more thought and work than you have. That said, if you're still curious about transitioning, I'd try it out - but I'd try a more cautious approach. Especially since you have student debt, I'd finish the MS and get a job, then audit some literature electives at a local college. It's a cheap and efficient way to get introduced to the field, and sometimes, if you do well, the professor may be able to write you a letter of recommendation for your master's application. I don't think this transition is possible for you without a relevant master's. You certainly shouldn't pay for a master's in the humanities, by the way, but if you put in a strong enough application, you may be able to get in fully funded (which will entail TA or RA work). A master's is also a good way to taste the academic life without committing to it. Good luck!
  3. this is a particularly stupid troll, trying to pull of an oblivious essay question. in how way is the "global age" correlated with ideology?
  4. thank you, thank you for a range of responses! #deliciousdrama 1. It goes without saying that one should aspire to work with the best specialist in one's area. However, if that specialist is at Schmuckville U, is that saying something about the prestige/reputation/hireability of one's chosen subfield? 2. I have always been hesitant about pursuing the humanities because there's this caveat, like in Hollywood and the professional sports circuit, that you're brilliant or mediocre (which schematically would look like Harvard and then Appalachian State with nothing in between). I think that this obsession with the T20 stems from people trying to convince themselves that they're not mediocre - when in fact, the difference between brilliant and really, really, really good is equivalent to the difference between brilliant and average. And so we end up with Ivy programmes that are mostly full of really, really good scholars who are nonetheless not quite It. Rockstar problem except exacerbated to ridiculousness by the job market. 3. re CV surfing: would that be a structural problem? Cos faculty seem to never leave (I mean, the average at my school is like an 80s PhD graduate, with the oldest faculty going back before the 50s). Given how the academic landscape has changed since the 80s, how many great programmes have risen and fallen but faculty have been kept in place by tenure, is the CV trend reflecting a 30-year-old reality? I am very ready to believe that the Ivies were indeed the research powerhouses in most humanities disciplines back in the day - but is that so today? That's one of the big problems with tenure. It creates a market with egregiously imperfect information.
  5. just as a side note from a curious bystander, unless one has a very specific subfield, wouldn't the T20 or bust advice be quite sound?
  6. or it might be because that comic is stupid
  7. you're lucky, davidm, that cogpsych approaches to literature are really hot right now:) unfortunately, my social-science colleagues would probably burn all humanities professors at the stake. glad to see that an interdisciplinary approach has helped you, though - I was considering sticking it out for this reason, but idk. @blakeblake my school requires everyone to graduate in four years, so no dice. I'll keep taking extra classes each semester, and if everything works out, I'll be really tired, but I'll have one semester where (thesis permitting) I will be able to take non-major classes.
  8. Thank you for your input, you've answered my question. I was wondering whether there were options, rather than the optimum path to a goal which I don't yet have. No, I'm not sure about humanities grad school, and my other major is a backup, yes.
  9. I'm a sophomore double majoring in literature and a social science. I'm doing well in both. My true passion (and, to be real, my real aptitude) lies in literary analysis, though I ended up majoring in it accidentally. I took a couple literary theory/graduate classes in literature, and I'm liking it more and more, to the extent that I've considered grad school (lay your Pannapacker article link aside, please). However, I'm loathe to drop my social science major because I'm quite good at that too (just not breathtakingly good), plus I have very real employment prospects in it through family connections/it being a highly employable major. And lately I've been thinking whether I need the humanities major at all. You see, my literature department's major requirements are more strenuous than any other department's at the school in terms of number of credits, plus you can't include your thesis towards the credit requirement (which my advisor and I have been discussing since my freshman year; for which I am even doing this major). I'm overloading every semester already, and I've counted that double-majoring in this combination with leave me with two classes that I can take that don't count towards either of my majors. I don't want to take that compromise, especially since doing grad school in the social science is likely to provide me with well-salaried employment. My question is, given that I have coursework at the advanced undergraduate/graduate level in the humanities, strong relationships with professors, and provided that I can take another literature class or two to generate a writing sample, will grad schools look unfavourably upon my lack of a relevant major?
  10. So, to alleviate the stress. I think that George Eliot should have been one of those women who never learned to read, and instead had 12 children. Then she would have been of a neutral benefit to humanity, rather than a negative one. I mean, Gogol burned the second tome of Dead Souls - and Dead Souls was like x9000 better than anything I ever read by Eliot. And by sheer circumstance, I have been cursed with reading a lot of hers. On the other hand, I just read a blog that counts good novels before and after the advent of George Eliot. Like, BGE and AGE. What is UP with that? I don't get it. I wholly accept that this may indeed be the case, but I just don't get it. Could a budding scholar perhaps explain why her writing is so valuable?
  11. this is actually better than the average internet debate. godwin's law has not yet been activated, for instance. I'm not being a dick towards vegetarians. I'm being a dick towards people who are being dicks towards non-vegetarians. ....you just did. I happen to be paleo, and I believe that meat and dairy do indeed have a lot to do with good diet. But I don't go around denigrating people for eating processed carbs. I'm not even gonna say that humans have a natural propensity for eating meat, because some might not - and who am I to tell people how to eat? Especially since paleo is just something that works for me and my body, and I'm not gonna pretend like I have anything but personal experience and a good measure of hubris to recommend it. Also, since when is radicalism and engagement a criterion for weight or health? This is basically the issue in fat studies. Please stop conflating diet and body size with personal characteristics, emotions, social roles, talents, politics, and your mom's chest hair.
  12. thank god this country has prestigious private schools. that way, people can still go to grad school in a subject they like and not have to subsist on refried beans when their funding is cut in half by experimental fiscal policy.
  13. 1. When you let humanities people weigh in on medical topics, they invariably come up with nonsequiturs like "[meat and dairy] are completely irrelevant to a good diet" and then mislead themselves and others into considering this bullshit even for a second because they have a PhD attached to their name. 2. A large (HAHAHAHA) part of fat studies, like a large part of fat acceptance, deals with STIGMA. It does not normalize the health defects and athletic performance dampeners of fatness - it normalizes the BODY TYPE. It says that a fat person, regardless of whatever made them fat, deserves to be treated with dignity and respect. Given how many people in this society are considered, or consider themselves, to be fat, this field of study will prove to provide many cultural benefits to society and many pecuniary benefits for its harbingers. In light of 1, I don't think fat studies should deal with the medical side of the issue - none of this expounding on "fat is a lifestyle choice" and "[meat and dairy] are completely irrelevant to a good diet", because we have no scientific data to back up these claims. However, in light of 2, it will and should inform the rhetoric that defines the medical field's perceptions of obesity, and certainly the widespread cultural rhetoric that informs our society. The fact (just proven in this topic) that people who are presumably applying to Harvard PhDs have the audacity to fart out opinions based on nonexistent evidence, Special K commercials, and the experience of their mom's boyfriend's sister's childhood best friend points to a glaring gap in the market.
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