keila

I was wondering about Columbia housing as well (I've narrowed my choices to Columbia and one other school). Does anyone know enough about the area to comment on the safety of the graduate apartments? Are they all near campus, or are some closer to Harlem? While this is more specific, I was also wondering if anyone around here knew if it would be possible to get a single apartment through Columbia housing. I keep kosher, and so I would need to share a kitchen with either someone else who keeps kosher or a vegetarian who didn't mind living with a meat eater. As far as I can tell from the housing website, single apartments are only available for married students, and while I know there are no shortage of observant Jews at Columbia, I'm doubting that the process would be refined enough for me to request to be placed with one. Alternatively, I'm still close enough to my college days not to mind being on a meal plan and living in a graduate dorm for a year (presumably, I would be able to find a roommate on my own by year two), but I don't know if this is an option either. Thanks for any information!

I know that the past month has been a disappointing one for a number of people on this board, and I just wanted to offer some hope for those of you who haven't been accepted into a program for this year. Last year, I was rejected from all six schools to which I applied. At the time, I had a near 4.0 GPA at a top school, great GRE scores, and a writing sample that had been runner-up in an English Department essay competition. This year, I was accepted to a number of top ten and top twenty programs, including four of the six that had rejected my first application. While there is a degree of randomness about this process, in my case, I believe I have identified a number of factors that made the difference. 1) Recommendations. At the time of my first application, I was still a senior in college, and had been abroad for half of junior year. I had also - foolishly, in retrospect - worked to fulfill all of my distribution requirements before senior year. Consequently, I hadn't had courses with many of the top professors in my field. My recommendations came from one full English professor, one lecturer who knew me very well, and a big-name professor from another humanities department. This year, having taken four upper-level English seminars (including two graduate seminars) during my senior year, I was able to apply with the backing of three (and for some schools four) full English professors. I also suspect that the professors who wrote for me this year, knowing that I had been unsuccessful the previous year, were particularly anxious to be good advocates for me this time around. 2) Writing Sample - I fully believe that the essay I submitted this year was considerably better than the one I submitted last year. I am positive, however, that while last year's submission may have been a good essay, it was a terrible choice for a writing sample. It was well-written and showed off my analytical skills, but it didn't indicate a potential scholar. This year's writing sample wasn't just a good close reading; it demonstrated my particular command of the works of the author in question and gave evidence of real engagement with some broader critical issues. I want to emphasize, however, that my writing sample did NOT focus heavily on the works of other critics or on a specific school of literary criticism. 3) Focus. Last year, I mentioned two potential subfields in my personal statement rather than focusing on one. I think this led to an incoherent application: my writing sample fit within one of the subfields, but I also mentioned the senior thesis I was working on, which fit within the other. This year, I had a clearly delineated primary focus; while I mentioned the second interest, it was obvious that I was applying in subfield A. Even though graduate programs know that a lot of students change interests in the first few years of grad school, enough of them still divide applicants by sub-field that focus matters. I also want to mention some thing that I did not do, just to give some indication of what proved less important. I did not enter an MA program or do anything related to literature during my year off. I did not get in touch with faculty members at the schools I applied to. I did not do a lot of in-depth research into my "fit" with various programs - my personal statements had one or two lines mentioning a couple of professors I might like working with and identifying one or two attributes of the department that I liked, but nothing terribly specific. I did not publish. I understand that my experience may not be relevant to everyone. If you think a low undergrad GPA might have been a factor, for instance, it might take a one year MA program to make up for it. But I don't think that my mistakes were unique, and hope that this proves helpful to some. I'm more or less the same student this year that I was last year, but I presented myself much, much better, and that made an enormous difference.