CommPhD20

leblebleb7, it is time you go to Annenberg's page where they show how many of their recent grads are on tenure track. Just look at that page and continually pat yourself on the back. That is your future - tenure track!

Congrats! Penn really has no peer, especially in terms of amount of applicants. I was a really good fit there, but I always knew I had a few warts on my application, particularly coming from a PoliSci background and lacking an MA. Blessing in disguise as it was the one school I really couldn't turn down, but also would have left me with no ability to live with my fiance.

I would suggest you not read the tarot cards too deeply -- this thread has become exceedingly negative for reasons that aren't quite bulletproof. You're all great, you'll do fine. If not, you can either try again with what you have learned or you can thank your lucky stars you aren't digging yourself down the rabbit hole that is higher ed hiring.

I think people are saying they have good LoR based on assumptions. My recommenders were in large part in dialogue with me about what insights they could share that would benefit me and things like that. One professor talked at length with me about the faculty at each school and how I felt like I fit with them so that she could talk about that in each letter. I feel safe that my LoR are good for this reason and would probably say that in the results.

Care to share? Noticed we have three in common, depending on individual programs at those schools.

Rather than getting hung up on rankings, look at something more useful when it comes to deciding whether a program is worth going to. What you want to know is where their graduates are. How long did it take them to degree? What exactly is their position at School X (tenure track, part-time, full-time adjunct, VAP)? What is the attrition rate? The last question matters since you can have great looking statistics by not including all the people who quit because they realized your program is a sham. Don't rely on anecdotes. As you are evaluating your options, press the DGS for hard data. They should have it and be quite proud of it. Part of the reason for this supposed great crisis in the lit. job market is that there are schools pooping out PhDs with no hope of getting them decent academic jobs. This is a substantial portion of those frightening statistics about "x% of grads are getting TT positions!" There are some schools, at the top, that are getting the vast majority of their students into great jobs. There are some where it is more mixed, some do well and others do not. Then you have schools where it is practically rare for one of their graduates to teach literature in a tenure track position. Now, you shouldn't just pick the school with the best "tenure rate," so to speak. If you fit much better at a school you know is fully capable of getting you the job you desire, plus gives you other things that are important (location, stipend, departmental culture, etc.), then that makes sense for you. Also, you don't have to get a tenure track position after you get your literature PhD. Maybe you have a marital situation that doesn't require that you make a ton of money. Perhaps you realize at the end (or now) that the rat race isn't for you. So long as you aren't committing financial suicide in your unique circumstances by spending the next seven years either saving nothing or incurring bits of debt, then it is your prerogative to pursue knowledge how you see fit. TT jobs aren't for everyone and there are both intrinsic and real world merits of doing the PhD beyond getting the very elusive TT job. With that said, many of us hope to come out the other side with a chance at earning a comfortable living doing the thing we love. Make sure you feel comfortable that the program you choose will give you that opportunity. Don't rely on inference or anecdote when trying to figure this out. I would bet there is a school ranked around 50 that is a complete waste of time, a school around 75 that is doing a great job, and a top 15 school that is surprisingly mediocre. You just have to do some homework to figure it all out.

Awesome! Strange that I haven't heard anything.

My school's grad advisor - "no news is always good news"

Thanks for the info! I've applied there.

You can see throughout past results that people often misattribute the Annenberg name to various schools, not to mention the more frequent mixing up of UPenn vs USC

Results page says that if you are accepted to UPenn Annenberg, then you've received an email...

History, in my opinion, is one of the most important disciplines in the academy. It is going to be difficult to find another discipline who doesn't build on the comprehensive work done by historians that nobody else would do. How often are extremely compelling arguments made that really catch on...only to be proved utterly ridiculous by the first person with an understanding of the historical context of the claims made? I'm in a discipline that is very much dependent on history, but we can't do history. Not most of us. Communication is very much a historical process and one that is influenced by many historical developments. There are just a few communications researchers that dedicate themselves to substantive work on history like a historian does. I wonder if the trouble in convincing people of the relevancy of history is the often indirect benefits of having history done well. The products of well-studied history benefit all kinds of disciplines, but those benefits aren't apparent in the end-product of my research. It just looks like I'm clever.

Soon...it will be February. February is when things get real. Until March...which is when things get real again. But then there's April...when things get really real and you actually have to pick, if you are so lucky as to have choices -- of course, there are choices to be made even if you only get into one program or even zero programs.

Also -- noticed two rejections posted from UWashington (Seattle). One was MA applicant, other was PhD. I applied to MA/PhD program and haven't heard anything. Just checked the online app and it's unchanged. Seems strange that a few stray rejections would come out before anything else.

Are you referring to Comm. department? I applied to School of Journalism and Mass Comm. and haven't received anything.

I know that their Comm Arts programs do interviews, but be aware those are completely independent departments. Comm Arts doesn't accept terminal MAs FWIW. Somewhere out there you can find Dr. Jonathan Gray discussing their interview process and why they do it -- its on his blog...I think it's called "The Intertextuals." It's a great resource.

1) Are you the first in your family to pursue graduate education? Are you the first to pursue higher education in general? I suppose it depends on our definition of family. Mom graduated valedictorian in a class of 12 students in the 1960s and ducked out of a dental hygienist program right before it started due to a family crisis. Her parents are first-generation Americans and neither attended high school -- my grandpa had to quit because he didn't have any shoes. He became a salesman and raised them on meager circumstances, her four siblings and her. Grandpa made a better life for them. None of her siblings attended college either. Mom worked for a while in customer service, did a nice job for herself, but ended up quitting after her boss was unsupportive following my birth (her second child). Dad moved around a lot as a child, never had much money. His dad, at times, had a decent amount of money but frequently lost it through aggressive investing. He was a salesman trying to be a businessman and eventually left the family. Dad didn't finish high school, but now has a GED and after many years of working a few different jobs was able to purchase a small business from his step-dad. It has grown meagerly and given us a very nice, middle-class living. Dad has two sisters with degrees: one went to a state school in her 30s to become a schoolteacher. The other, who is a real ball of fire, went back to undergrad in early 40s, got her MSW afterwards, and is now getting a PhD. My two eldest brothers spent some time at tech schools. My next oldest came of age when my parents were doing quite a bit better and was able to get an athletic scholarship and graduated from a 4-year, regional public school. I'll be the first from my immediate family to pursue graduate education and they aren't really sure what the deal is. They are, reasonably, a little apprehensive about the whole "going to school to learn non-industry skills" bit. So far, it is basically, "we will support you so long as the PhD program is really going to pay for it." This of course means that every couple weeks they ask, "do they really pay for everything? They pay for you to live? Why?" They've been great though and I haven't had to truly struggle financially to get to this point because my parents and their parents took on that burden. I'm very thankful even if I don't have a family full of college professors. 2) What struggles have you faced as a first-generation applicant? I suppose, as I mentioned, there is a great deal of skepticism. As I've explained and this makes me much more fortunate than many other first-gen applicants, my parents have provided a wonderful safety net financially. It's truly not something I've had to sweat about. Now, they won't be buying me any more degrees, but I haven't had to scrape for money throughout school or for this process. I was also lucky to get a near-full scholarship to my undergrad or else I probably would have needed to work my way through. I've been able to take my RA job and just have that as spending money for this and that. The main thing is just know-how. I had no clue how a person became a college professor, what the real difference between undergrad and grad school was or MA vs PhD, that kind of stuff. Any substantive idea of what grad school was came to me in my junior year of college as I started to nail out what I wanted to do with my life with the advising of trusted professors. On that note, it's a part of society I'm unfamiliar with. We aren't high class people. I'm constantly surrounded by people that are "of money" you might say, and it shows. There isn't always something wrong with that and I don't necessarily have a low-income sensibility, if that exists, but there's just something different. Hard to describe, I suppose. The way you look at the world. Knowing that you might be a step away from financial calamity just makes you different. If my dad's business had a bad year? Sorry, the dream's over. Something important like a computer breaking? That's a big problem to my family to replace it -- we can do it -- but it's a problem and unacceptable. The thing that surprised me the most when beginning undergrad, even, was just how much people eat out. How do you afford this stuff? Anyway, this is trifling. I'm fine. 3) What have you accomplished as a first-generation applicant? An acceptance! It's great to see my parents seeing it all become real -- I think there was this lingering doubt. They, and even I, wondered if I had made some kind of grand miscalculation in thinking I could do this and it would work the way I thought. So far, so good. 4) What has helped you reach your educational goals? All about my parents. Despite their complete lack of college background, they knew I was a smart kid and made it an expectation that I would go to college. I wasn't forced into it, I was raised in such a way that it was something I always wanted to do and felt like I was allowed to do. They have always bestowed me with the confidence to do what I want to. Before I could have known any different, they always insisted that I was a smart kid who could achieve whatever he wanted. Now here we are! They kept me safe, happy, confident, and managed to give me a really comfortable life without resorting to spoiling me -- if I had been spoiled, college wouldn't have worked.

A lot of variables here. If you want it just for browsing and research/writing, you don't have to drop a grand to get something that works for you. MB Air will be substantial enough, so don't worry about flimsiness. Small, yes, but the aluminum unibody will be plenty sturdy. You don't necessarily need a computer that expensive, though, so it's up to you. It will work very well and last a while. Something else you might think about, which you can do with Mac or Windows, is get a laptop with a decent graphics card and then connect it to a monitor when you are working at home. You can essentially have a desktop and laptop all in one. You'll need a laptop that has good enough internals to power a larger screen, though, so this is where a more expensive product will come in handy. You'll have some more expensive parts to get this to work on a Mac, but it shouldn't be a big deal.

Main reasons I applied to MA programs: -were at a school where I hope to get a PhD, but cannot apply to PhD program w/o MA -wanted to have options if I cannot get into any PhD program

Congrats! Great program and IIRC you'll be getting a nice, long-term guarantee funding-wise.

I haven't heard back from UIUC - I believe they have written somewhere that the AdComm meets in the first week of February. I should clarify that I applied UW-Madison's Mass Comm. program, BTW

Hmm...well I'm applying for MA at UIUC, UW-Madison, Syracuse (Media Studies), and Delaware. Washington-Seattle is technically MA, but acceptance would be through PhD. I applied MA to OSU but was asked to switch my application to PhD during an implicit offer of admission.

Hi Elvan, I have also applied to Northwestern, UIUC, and UW-Madison. I have not heard anything from any of those schools, but you would do well to clarify which programs you chose. UW-Madison has Comm Arts which itself has four divisions as well as Mass Comm, which is where I applied there. Northwestern has Rhetoric and Public Culture (my choice), Media, Technology, and Society, Information Systems (name might be a little off there), as well as Radio-Television-Film. University of Illinois has a Department of Communication as well as a Department of Communication & Media. UIUC's setup is particularly puzzling to me, but I applied to the former. Now one of my recommenders sending me screenshots of her submission confirmations doesn't sound so crazy. FWIW, Colorado does require official transcripts beforehand as I had some confusion about that too. It's written down somewhere, but isn't as obvious as it probably should be.

A key error is to look at "the statistics." While there is a slippery slope towards survivorship bias, there is a difference between a Lit PhD from Southwest Central Regional Tech A&M and [insert elite program here]. It is useful to know about the job market and the issues with it, but it will be most constructive to look at your potential schools and how its graduates are faring on the job market. Another thing to think about is whether your expertise is desired - for instance, I know that the political science job market is doing okay, but political theory is doing terrible while international relations is exploding. You'll have to try to assess whether your research interests will be desired. Of course, the author of OP's article is a German Lit PhD and if you read her blog, the nicest I can say is that she isn't necessarily a perfectly emblematic academic. She has scoffed at TT positions at various places due to location, being a SLAC, etc. Not everyone will refuse to live in the South, or teach at a SLAC, live in a small town, etc. Still, it's not pretty out there. Don't forget that. Just make sure you understand your own prospects specific to your research, your field, your PhD-granting institution, your living and teaching preferences, and all of that.

I submitted my last application today after a fair dose of procrastination. As soon as I finished with it, I grabbed my phone which I had silenced so as not to distract me into further procrastination. What do I see on there? An email notifying me of induction to my second major department's honor society. Would have looked nice and schnazzy on my CV. Oh well.