yung_comparatist

Hi all, friendly lurker here—I'll be at Cornell in the fall as well! Actually in the Comp Lit department, but I'm sure I'll be spending a fair amount of time down the hall in English

Hardcore lurker coming out of the woodwork here because of how intensely I feel this thread. @piers_plowman, the guilt, the anxiety, the FOMO when thinking about committing to one program over another; it's all there. And this is all just coming from me, internally—I actually haven't even told all of my recommenders the final list of places I've been accepted, so all the angst right now is only fueled by my own anxiety, and I'm sure it'll only get more intense when I finally tell them and learn their thoughts (I'm out of school, so I only communicate with them occasionally via email). Like you said, @SophieHatter, I feel bad even complaining about having to make a decision from multiple offers, and I swear, I am THE MOST GRATEFUL to have even gotten one, but my god I never thought it would be so difficult to decide. My difficulty comes from the fact that I'm mainly deciding between three related but quite different programs (English, Comp Lit, and an interdisciplinary humanities program), all of which have faculty and resources related to my fields, solid stipend offers, and generally just good reputations. Where they differ is the way that their programs are structured and the degree of freedom there is in the coursework to pursue one's own varying interests vs. follow a clear (but not constricting) path. I did my undergrad at a college with an open curriculum and zero required classes, which was fantastic for me and played a huge role in shaping my rather odd (but I think fascinating) interdisciplinary interests within literary studies, but I'm unsure if I want to continue with that for the next six years, or have maybe a tiny bit more guidance in my training. People always talk about how the most important thing is "fit," and that's really what I think this question comes down to, but my fear is that maybe I don't know myself well enough/can't trust what I think I know about myself well enough to make the best decision in that area. I think/hope talking to my recommenders will help with that, also maybe just sitting down and doing some hardcore, focused self-examination (lol, because who has time for that). In the meantime, I'll just keep adding info to my massive Google Sheet as a means of trying to compare them