greekdaph

Seconding all those who say that fit matters more: on the job market, who your advisors are can be just as important as what program you come from, and a good fit means you're working with people who are recognized in the subfield in which you're looking to be hired. Another way to think of all of this is the question, "Where will I do my best work?" What program will provide the environment--strong advisors, fellow students who help you improve your work, time and space needed to research and write--most conducive to you placing that article in a good journal and writing that awesome dissertation? Sometimes, the programs that look the best on paper won't have the atmosphere *you* need to produce *your* strongest work. Good luck!

This is interesting because it points to the idiosyncrasies in how schools evaluate applications. Some places (like Duke, it seems) admit a certain number of applicants per field and ask professors in that field to rank applications; some places admit what they consider to be the top candidates regardless of field; some admit by field by have the adcomm read all the applications; some do a combination of these things or do entirely different things. The permutations are infinite, but I'm mentioning this all as a way of saying that the out-of-field-but-best-work writing sample seems to work better with some programs' admissions approaches than with others. Hang in there, then, and good luck as you wait to hear from other programs!

Agreed with everything intextrovert said, especially the paragraph quoted below. I spent the 3 years between undergrad and grad school as a high school English teacher and spent one of my summers at the Vermont campus of the Bread Loaf School of English, so what I'm saying here comes from my perspective as both a teacher and, currently, a student in a full-time PhD program. Bread Loaf is really, really wonderful: the setting is stunning, the food is amazing, and the people--the faculty, staff, and fellow students--are so friendly and so smart. I had a really fabulous time, and I learned a great deal. The faculty is very talented, made up of teachers who love teaching for its own sake, who enjoy the setting, and who have a chance to get out of the bureaucracies and departmental politics of their individual schools and hang out with colleagues they respect. They seem really relaxed and happy to be there, though of course they work hard and are very available to their students. Most students there are, indeed, English teachers (most, but not all, at the high school level), and few of them intend to go into PhD programs. As for how classes compare to grad seminars: given the constraints of the six-week timeframe for reading and writing, Bread Loaf is mostly a close-reading program. The library is small and well-stocked with relevant materials for individual classes, there's access to all sorts of online databases, and you can request books from the Middlebury library, but there isn't the time to write research papers that draw on a wide array of secondary sources. Most classes focus on primary texts; some engage with criticism, but few engage with theory. Given that so many Bread Loaf students are teachers, courses are sometimes organized as a supplement to high school curriculums--for instance, Shakespeare and the American canon are popular--and often take up pedagogical questions (how have you taught this? how would you teach this?) as part of their discussions. The level of discussion is often very high--the students are smart and motivated, and the faculty are real experts in their fields, people who teach at highly regarded programs and publish widely (it's not an easy job to get as a prof). But, those discussions don't always revolve around current debates in the field, nor is your written work expected to participate in the kind of scholarly conversation that takes place in journals and monographs. It's not a competitive environment, and Bread Loaf classes feel, often refreshingly, different from grad seminars--discussions are driven by student interests, texts are privileged over theory, etc. I loved that about the program, but though my time there sharpened my skills, it didn't always prepare me for the kind of work I'm now expected to do. In short, then, Bread Loaf is wonderful in every way, but it may not be quite what you're looking for. As other posters, including intextrovert, have mentioned, most PhD programs really don't care where your MA comes from--or even if you have one at all. They want you to have a good SOP and a great writing sample, and good recommendations can help draw attention to your strengths. So, if you're using Bread Loaf as a way to get a leg up on PhD admissions, you'd have to be a little strategic about it. For instance, you could ask your professors to help you design a final paper that could be a good writing sample (most courses require 1 or 2 10-page papers, or 1 long paper and one short paper; you could ask to write one longer paper). And/or you could take classes with a professor who comes from a program you're interested in attending or is a well-respected scholar in your field. For me, my Bread Loaf summer was the most useful in convincing me that I wanted to go back to school--I left hungry for a full-time program and feeling like those six weeks had gone by too quickly. I also took a class in my field and used the papers I wrote there as my writing sample--it was great to produce something that felt stronger than my undergraduate work and to do so with feedback and guidance and deadlines. In other words, then, I think--as tends to be the case with all MA programs--that the work you do there would ultimately be far more important in admissions than the pedigree of your degree. Let me know if you have any other questions, and feel free to PM me.

Thanks for the quick reply and the tip! I appreciate it!

Hi everyone! Good luck to those of you waiting to hear back from programs! In the meantime, I hope this question might be a useful procrastinatory outlet. A friend of mine is a high school teacher looking to enroll in a summer graduate course in English--ultimately, the goal is to earn an MA. I know of programs like Bread Loaf and the Masters in Liberal Studies at Wesleyan and Dartmouth. Are any of you aware of: 1. Summer Masters programs in English or the humanities aside from the three I've just listed? 2. English departments that offer graduate-level English courses during the summer (i.e., June-August)? Thanks so much for your help! I'm hoping that some of you, in researching MA or PhD programs, may have come across some leads.

Woolfie's given some great advice above! I just wanted to throw in another point, one which you'll find repeated again and again on this forum: it's all about fit. Your chances will vary a great deal depending on the program, and it sounds like you've already given some thought to finding schools that support your interests and allow you to do interdisciplinary work. As is true of every applicant, no matter how conventional his/her background or interests, not every "top" program will be a good program for you. Your GPA is great, and the honors thesis is a good asset. As long as your test scores are decent, you'll get past the first round at most programs, which means that committees will have a chance to focus on your SOP and writing sample. In those, you'll have to make sure to highlight how conversant you are in the language of literary criticism--show that your understanding of the discipline goes beyond the close reading skills that undergraduate classes emphasize. You can also use your background in film to explain how you're uniquely positioned to engage critically with the subject. As for doing additional coursework, I don't think it's necessary for its own sake. The summer before applying, though, I took a couple classes that gave me an opportunity to produce a writing sample that was better in line with my current interests and more polished--and that convinced me that I really wanted to go to grad school. The classes were helpful for me, but tuition was expensive. It's worth taking classes, I think, if they'll help you produce a great writing sample, but you could do that without a class as well.

Second-year grad student here. Short response: it sounds like you know exactly what you're doing, and I don't think you should be worried about it at all! As for me, I made my list of schools to apply to based on the (false) assumption that if a program has a good reputation, it would be a fit. So when I wrote the traditional fit paragraph at the end of every application, what I found most useful was the way it forced me to go through and actually think about whether a school would be able to support the work I wanted to do. In some cases, I had a really hard time filling that paragraph. You've already done the research, though, so you're set. When I visited programs to which I'd been admitted, no one mentioned my fit paragraph--not even as a comment on the research I'd done about their school. If you present your interests engagingly and have a strong writing sample, a school's going to snatch you up whether or not you make a case for fit (and I realize both that this is exactly what you said in your post and that you ARE making a case for fit in your SOP). When professors introduced me to their colleagues, they did it on the basis of, "Your interests would be a good match for this person," not "you mentioned this person in your SOP."

I wouldn't attach the assignment disclaimer because it draws attention to what you perceive as a deficiency in your paper: it's basically saying that you recognize that there's a flaw in your paper but that you chose not to address it (we all know that it's because you didn't have time, but a school might not see it that way). Especially when the expectation is that your writing sample will be your best work and will be heavily revised if necessary, that doesn't seem like a strong way to market yourself. I also don't think that not using many secondary sources equates automatically to a flaw: schools extend a kind of generosity to students applying only with a BA and coming from close-reading-heavy undergraduate curriculums--they can train you to use theory, after all, but it's much harder to train you to be a good reader. For what it's worth, I did well in admissions when I applied a couple years ago, and both papers I submitted as writing samples didn't engage with theory at all--when they used secondary sources, they used them for biographical or bibliographical information. What I would suggest, then, is that you think of paper #2 as "focused" rather than as assignment-y. In other words, your project in that paper is to use a theoretical frame to illuminate an important element of the text, to offer a close reading that also situates that reading within a scholarly context. Instead of going back to your SOP, you might consider writing a paragraph-long heading for the paper (when I did this, I italicized it and put it at the top of the page, even before the title). There, you can define what the paper does in ways that don't relate it back to an undergrad class but that show, instead, why this kind of reading is appropriate for a short scholarly paper or even where this could fit in a larger project. You could also use a paragraph like that to draw out the connections between this paper and your longer sample.

When I applied a couple years ago, I submitted two 10-12 page papers to the schools that wanted a 20-25 page sample, and I did well in admissions. The papers were on related topics, and in my SOP I explained the connections between them and showed how they explored facets of my broader interests. It was a gamble, but it was the best work I had, so I went for it. As a consequence, though, I spent a big chunk of my SOP talking about my senior honors thesis (and asked my recommenders to focus on it as well)--my samples weren't from that project, but I tried to show that I was capable of coming up with and sustaining a longer, more complex argument than my writing samples presented.

Check out Indiana-Bloomington. Great Victorian program, and the library has a big collection of children's books: http://www.indiana.edu/~liblilly/overview/lit_child.shtml

You might want to check out Jessica Rosenfeld at WUSTL. She leans more towards looking at medieval and interpretations, I think, but maybe her work will have some leads you can follow: https://english.artsci.wustl.edu/Jessica_Rosenfeld Alternatively, Joe Loewenstein or Julia Walker might be good fits for you. Joe Loewenstein teaches courses on Shakespeare, Milton, and Spenser; on literature and skepticism; on the cultural poetics of the book; and on the ways writers read. (https://english.wustl.edu/people/joe-loewenstein) Julia Walker focuses on modern drama, performance theory, dramatic literature, English and American drama and performance, adaptation/adaptability and Theater Cultural Studies. (https://english.wustl.edu/people/julia-walker)

Agreed with foppery about scouring departmental websites--it takes a lot of time, but it can also lead to some unexpected revelations about the kind of work that's out there. Here's another lead: the Society of Early Americanists website, located here: http://www.mnstate.edu/sea/ They have a directory of members, including their institutional affiliation; another thing to do is scour the call for papers for their 2011 conference (and hey, maybe even submit an abstract!). Seeing which faculty member is proposing which panel is a great way to get a sense of what people's more specific interests are.

I, too, have heard both positive and negative stories about contacting professors before applying and about mentioning professors in your SOP. It's the latter I'll address here (for the record: I named professors in my SOP but didn't contact any during the process). My feeling--and granted, this is entirely subjective, but I found it useful during the application process--is that the SOP matters far less as a promise of what you'll study and whom you'll work with and far more as a demonstration that: --you are applying because you have a set of specific interests you want to pursue, not just because you have always loved literature and can't imagine having any other career besides being a professor --you have begun to draw from those interests a set of questions, and you can sketch out, in a very preliminary way, what work you would do to further explore those questions and what contribution that work will make (and here, again, no one expects applicants entering with a BA to get to grad school and do exactly what they said they would in their SOPs--schools want your coursework to help you take your work in new and interesting directions. While articulating your interests faithfully is helpful to adcomms in determining fit and helpful to your efforts to end up at the place that would best support your work, I think what matters most is showing that you can (begin to) think like a grad student.) --you know how to (begin to) fit your work into existing scholarship in the field. It's that last part that naming professors in your SOP can help you address. here's a template for what that paragraph looked like in my SOPs: Professor's So-and-So's work on Field is directly in line with the research I have proposed, as is Professor Other Person's work on Blahblah. Though Professor Whosywhatsit's work does not concern the same era as my own, his work on the intersection of Thing and Other Thing will be helpful to me as I think through Interest I Mentioned Above. By framing it this way this way, the paragraph became less about specific people and more about putting my interests in conversation with the work already out there. For what it's worth, at the programs where i was admitted, the DGSs seemed to have their own ideas of whose work would be a good fit for me--they suggested people I hadn't thought to name, and they implicitly called me on my bluff when I included people whose work I probably wouldn't actually end up engaging with. That's why I think the paragraph is more important as an exercise than it is as an indication of your real, true fit.

Just briefly, piggybacking on on strokeofmidnight and paddington5's comments: I think there may be a distinction worth making between programs that discourage (either explicitly or implicitly) MA-holders from applying vs. programs that won't allow you to count any credits from your MA towards your PhD. Some programs--Yale comes to mind--prefer to train their own and so seem biased towards admitting applicants with only a BA, while some--such as NYU and UNC--are happy to count at least some courses from your MA towards PhD coursework requirements. In the middle, though, are programs that make you start from scratch when you arrive, no matter your previous experience, but that are more focused on the quality of your SOP and writing sample than on what that previous experience looks like. At those programs, MA training can help by allowing you to produce more focused and refined work but otherwise doesn't factor in (and the tradeoff, as paddington5 mentions, is the increased time to completion).

A brief response, because I'm not going to get placed anywhere unless I write these papers! Anyway: 1. A caveat: I'm fortunate enough to be in a program that has historically placed at institutions I'd be happy to work at, that has a well-structured pre-professionalization program in place, and that has professors who are knowledgeable about and, through their work, help shape, the current state of the field. As a result, I don't feel the need to think about placement all the time. Instead, I feel safe trusting that if I do what counts as quality work, I'll be well-positioned for the job market. That's a confidence I didn't have about every school, so it affected my decision. 2. Overall placement rates seem less important or valuable than specific placement rates. How do the people working in a particular field do? How do the people who've had a particular advisor or committee member do? Some schools are known for having strengths in particular time periods--such as, say, IU-Bloomington for Victorian studies--and some for having strong programs in particular methodologies--like, say, UC-Davis in ecocriticism. (And let's see if I can use "particular" a couple more times in this paragraph, shall we?) Those strengths certainly aren't reflected in the US News rankings--which are, as you point out, dubious for a whole host of other reasons. 2a. In considering schools last year, I realized that some take more of an "it takes a village to raise a graduate student" model while others are more advisor-centric. When talking to mentors about some places, the question I was asked was, "How do Professor Whosywhatsit's students do on the market?" whereas the question for other schools was, "How do people in your field at the University of Whatever do on the market?" Obviously, the committee matters at every program, both because of how they influence your work and because of the cachet that having a certain chair can bring. But it can be revealing to see which camp a school falls into--and it can help you figure out the relationship of that field-specific or advisor-specific placement rate to the overall rate. 3. The placement numbers you see aren't always trustworthy. At one of the schools I considered last year, for instance, I realized upon seeing a department document (one publicly available on the website, but only if you know exactly where to look) that they counted as placed students who went on to law school or high school teaching. I'd argue that seeing what types of institutions students get placed at matters more than the overall percentage--but perhaps that's because we all want to believe that we're the one person who will rise above the odds and land that hard-to-get job. It is true, though, that there can be certain trends: for instance, my program does better placing at R1 schools in our region of the country than in other geographical areas. 4. Keep in mind the role of post-docs. I've heard anecdotally that more people are seeking out these opportunities before trying to land a professorship, but I don't know enough to confirm that. Placement for post-docs, and placement post post-docs, is another wrinkle, though. 5. It can be hard to think about placement rates in the abstract. I spent a lot of time looking at them before I went on school visits, but once I met with faculty and students, I realized that other criteria--would I be comfortable here? Do I think I would produce good work? etc.--mattered far more to me than a number tied to a market and economy that might, for better or worse, look different six years down the line.