ἠφανισμένος

Placement is what really matters.

How often I have sat alone
And waited for the phone to ring,
But only heard the dial tone.
 
Some nights the silence holds me prone
In reverie, remembering
How often I have sat alone.
 
I've stared it down; my hopes have grown:
I thought I'd hear the siren sing--
But only heard the dial tone.
 
I've perched, a pauper on a throne
Before the phone, my rightful king;
How often I have sat alone.
 
When once I left it on its own
I rushed back at its summoning…
But only heard the dial tone.
 
Before its altar, I atone
With reverential suffering:
How often I have sat alone,
But only heard the dial tone.

I finished my interview as well. Thought I'd share:
 
-I had a series of one-on-one interviews, rather than a panel of area group faculty or the admissions committee.
-They told me each of the people I was meeting with beforehand. Most of them were people I mentioned in my SOP, so I was pretty familiar with their work.
-"Interview" is used very loosely. I was never interrogated. It felt more like a series of conversations, in some cases about things I mentioned in the WS or SOP, but also about pop culture and outside hobbies. My last "interview," the first thing he said was "This isn't an interview." The only question he asked me was, "What questions do you have?"
-Other people who were at this interview excursion received SOME hard-ball questions, like an Asian-American scholar was asked how she would defend her interest in Afro-American literature and another person was asked how they would present their skillset on the non-academic job market, but overall, the atmosphere was very light.
-Most interviewers made some mention of my SOP and WS, and in such a way that compels me to here emphasize how VASTLY IMPORTANT THOSE TWO DOCUMENTS ARE in the selection process. My SOP for this school was set up in such a way that I spent between a third and a half of the time talking about the research of my POIs. One POI was very appreciative, and even impressed. Another interviewer (who was one the admissions committee) also noticed, and commented how several other applicants would right SOPs that never mentioned their target university by name. Be descriptive and earnest. Make sure you re-read those documents in particular before the interview.
-I mentioned speaking French in my CV. One POI is a native French speaker (and also speaks Spanish, my two languages)--she mentioned my languages, but none of our conversation took place in either, except in reference to the titles of works of literature.

Keep in mind, too, that since this thread is geared specifically toward folks focusing in literature/composition, you're probably not going to get the best information for grad programs on Social Work here. Maybe I'm being presumptuous, but I bet that most folks posting here can't give you the details about how programs in your field work. I know that I certainly can't.  I would imagine that grad programs in social work put less emphasis on GPA than other programs do. As I believe Wyatt's Torch mentioned, your field experience will probably be a big plus in a potential application.
 
This is all to say that you shouldn't necessarily be dismayed by what you're hearing on this thread. I agree with others that your best bet is to contact someone in the department and explain your situation, and ask them to be frank about your chances. I wish you the best of luck!

I can only speak from the one experience I had with a program interview; I'm sure much of what goes on varies by program.  I'll also say before I go on that my interview was an in-person interview - I don't know how doing an interview over Skype will alter things (outside the obvious, like not having to shuttle around between different events). 
 
Notre Dame has an entire interview weekend, which involves several program information sessions, panel-style Q-and-A's with current graduate students, informal dinners and lunches, and three one-on-one thirty minute chats with individual professors who specialize in a subfield at least somewhat related to your field.
 
Questions varied by professor. The first professor I met with was a Dante scholar, so we didn't get into the nitty gritty of the state of criticism or anything like that. He mostly asked me questions about my teaching philosophy -- which, as a twenty-one-year-old college senior, I didn't have the faintest clue -- and how I would explain/justify the value of pre-modern lit to undergraduate audiences. Going into the weekend, I didn't think I'd be expected to figure out how to teach before I'd actually been in front of the classroom, so I made up some vague BS on the fly. I'd suggest that you at least talk with your professors about teaching philosophies if you don't have one in place, as the question might get brought up, especially if you have an MA.
 
The other two interviewers asked me specifics about 1) what I was interested in, 2) my methodology, 3) plans for expanding my research, 4) and specific questions about my writing sample. My advice for addressing each is the same: practice what you're going to say and anticipate potential objections. For example, I primarily employ something like a historical formalist angle in my own writing and research; one of the questions an interviewer raised was whether my approach offered a way of addressing the presentist challenge in early modern studies, which has been dominated by historicism for thirty years. As an undergrad with no sense of the state of early modern studies, I had no F'n clue how to answer that. So my advice is to have, at the minimum, a sense of what people are doing in the field now (last five years, not last twenty-five) and be able to situate your own work in relation to that.
 
And just a bit more about #4. When I applied to graduate programs the first time two years ago, I had never written a paper that was more than twelve pages long, so my writing sample was written from scratch a couple weeks before my first applications are due. The idea I wrote on was an interesting one, but it wasn't very well researched and needed more time to incubate before it was sent off. Well, as chance would have it, it essentially staked out a position directly counter to that one of my interviewers (a big name in Milton studies) had outlined in a book published a couple years before. So, naturally, when we sat down to chat, he pulled my writing sample up on his computer, and went page-by-page asking questions about the claims I was making. I didn't stand my ground and essentially said "I'm not entirely sure -- you're probably right in your book when you take the opposite position." Needless to say, this didn't go well at all. But the takeaway, again, is that you need to be very sure of your writing sample and be able to defend it if it gets brought up in discussion. 
 
And, again, Skype interviews probably won't go down exactly the same way as my interviews did. If you're worried about staying on message (I know I ramble when I'm nervous), you might print off a bulleted list of subjects or main points to come back to. Just a thought.
 
Hope this all helps with you prepare! Good luck! 

Take a list of questions with you.  There was a great thread on this back when I applied, and I took this and asked them of the DGS when meeting with her, grad students I met there, and some here with people at the schools I was considering.  Depending on where you go, you'll probably be put in contact with a current grad student.  These people are great resources, and most will answer your questions directly about both strengths and weaknesses of programs.
 
I just looked to see if I still had this list in an old folder, and here it is.
 
-PLACES TO STUDY AND WORK
-Where do most people do their writing and reading?
-What study spaces are available? Do students get a carrel? Do those who teach get or share an office?

-LIBRARY
-What is the library system like? Are the stacks open or closed?
-What are the library hours?
-Are there specialized archives/primary sources that would be useful to my research?
-Are there specialist librarians who can help me with my research?

-FACULTY
-Are the faculty members I want to work with accepting new students? Are any of those faculty members due for a sabbatical any time soon?
-Are professors willing to engage you on a personal level rather than just talking about your work?
-Are there any new professors the department is hiring in areas that align with my interests?
-Students’ relationships with their professors – are they primarily professional, or are they social as well?

-FUNDING
-Is funding competitive? If so, do students feel a distinction between those who have received more generous funding and those who haven’t?
-How does funding break down among the cohort? i.e., how many people receive fellowships?
-How, if you don’t have much savings, do you make enough money to live comfortably?
-Are there external fellowships one can apply to? If so, what is available? Does the program help you apply for these fellowships? How does receiving an external fellowship affect internal funding?
-If people need more than five/six years to finish, what funding resources are available? (For instance, Columbia can give you an additional 2-year teaching appointment.)
-Do you provide funding for conferences or research trips?
-How often is funding disbursed? (i.e., do you get paid monthly or do you have to stretch a sum over a longer period of time?)

-COHORT
-Do students get along with each other? Is the feeling of the program more collaborative than competitive?
-Do students in different years of the program collaborate with each other, or are individual cohorts cliquey?
-How many offers are given out, and what is the target number of members for an entering class?
-Ages/marital status of people in the cohort – do most people tend to be married with families? Are there younger people? Single people? What sense do you have of how the graduate students interact with each other socially?
-Do people seem happy? If they’re stressed, is it because they’re busy or is it because they’re anxious/depressed/cynical/disillusioned?
-Is the grad secretary/program administrator nice?
-What is the typical time to completion? What are the factors that slow down or speed up that time?
-I’ve read that there are two kinds of attrition: “good” attrition, in which people realize that the program, or graduate study, isn’t right for them and leave early on, and “bad” attrition, in which people don’t finish the dissertation. What can you tell me about the rates of each, and of the reasons why people have chosen to leave the program?

-JOB MARKET/PROFESSIONALIZATION
-What is the placement rate? How many of those jobs are tenure-track?
-What are examples of institutions in which people in my field have been placed?
-How does the department prepare you for the job search? Are there mock interviews and mock job talks?
-Are the people helping you navigate the job search people who have recently gone through the process themselves?
-If you don’t get placed, is there anything the department can do for you? (e.g., can you stay an extra year?)
-How does the department prepare you for and help you attain conference presentations and publications?

-SUMMER WORK
-What is encouraged/required?
-If there separate funding/is the year-round funding enough to live on during the summer?
-Do people find themselves needing to get outside work during the summer in order to have enough money?
-Am I expected to stay in town in the summer, and what happens if I don’t?

-LANGUAGE REQUIREMENT
-What is done to help people who don’t have language proficiency attain it? Does the university provide funding?
-What is the requirement, and by when do you have to meet it?
-Given my research interests, what languages should I study?
-When do you recommend doing the work necessary to fulfill the language requirement? (i.e., summer before first year, summer after first year, while taking classes, etc.)

-LOCATION REQUIREMENTS
-How long are students required to be in residence?
-How many students stay in the location for the duration of the program? (i.e., how many dissertate in residence?)
-How is funding affected if you don’t stay?

-Incompletes on papers at the end of the term: What is the policy, how many students take them, and how does this affect progress through the program?

-TEACHING
-What sort of training is provided?
-What types of courses do people teach?
-Does teaching entail serving as a grader? Serving as a TA? Developing and teaching a section of comp?
-How are students placed as TAs? Is there choice about what classes you teach and which professors you work with? Do classes correspond to your field?
-How many courses do you teach per semester/year?
-How many students are in your classes?
-How does the school see teaching as fitting in with the other responsibilities/requirements of graduate study?
-How do students balance teaching with their own work?
-Is the department more concerned with training you as a teacher/professor or with having cheap labor to teach their classes?
-How, if at all, does the economic downturn affect teaching load/class sizes?
-What are the students like? Can I sit in on a course a TA teaches to get a sense of them?

-METHODOLOGY
-Is a theory course required?
-What methodology do most people use?
-Where, methodologically, do you see the department – and the discipline – heading?
-Is interdisciplinarity encouraged, and what sorts of collaboration have students undertaken?

-Typical graduate class and seminar sizes

-What should I do to prepare over the summer?

-Ask people I know: What are the questions – both about the program itself and about the location – I should ask that will most help me get a feel for whether this is the right program for me?

-Ask people I know: What do you wish you knew or wish you had asked before choosing a program?

-Is the school on the semester or the quarter system, and how does that affect classes/teaching/requirements?

-What is the course load for each semester, and how many courses are required?

-What kind of support is provided while writing the dissertation? I worry about the isolation and anxiety of writing such a big project. What does the program do to help you break the dissertation down into manageable pieces, and to make the experience less isolating?

-What do writing assignments look like in classes? Do they differ based on the type/level of class and/or based on whether you intend to specialize in the field?

-Ask professors: what have you been working on lately?

-Ask professors: What is your approach to mentoring and advising graduate students?

-How long are class meetings?

-How often do professors teach graduate courses?

-Are course schedules available for future semesters (10-11, etc.)?

-Can I see the grad student handbook? Are there any other departmental documents – such as reports on the program prepared for accreditation – that I can see?


-QUALITY OF LIFE
-Prices – how does the cost of gas, milk, cereal, etc. compare to other places I've lived in?
-Cost and quality of typical one-bedroom apartment.
-What does the university do to provide you with or help you find housing?
-When (i.e., what month) do people start looking for an apartment for the fall, and where do they look?
-Is it easy to find a summer subletter?
-How close to campus can—and should—one live?
-What grocery stores are there in town?
-How late are cafes, bookstores, malls, restaurants typically open?
-What do people do to make extra money?
-Does the town have more of a driving or a walking culture? What is parking like near campus (availability, ease, cost)?
-Where do most English grad students live? Most other grad students? Most professors? Where is the student ghetto? Do most students live near each other, or are they spread out far and wide?
-How far does the stipend go in this location?

Certainly, you can do that. But in the end, I would suspect that the committees want to see that you reached an A standard by the end of the standard Latin or Greek progression you took.

Let me second what Anonclassics just said. Even if you really, really, want to become a Classics/Archaeology Professor, you really need to consider some brutal facts about yourself and ask some brutal questions of your academic mentors:
 
1) Am I good enough to get into a "good enough" program? (i.e. look at the placement records of the places you are applying to--look at who is successful, look at the CVs of recently appointed VAPs or tenure-track APs). This is serious: I see way too many MA students being given false hope by their own programs that they will get into a PhD program, when in reality, the program just wants their tuition fees, and the students will need much more work to get to the required level than the 2 year MA can provide, or, quite bluntly, the students just aren't good enough. Classics isn't for everyone--everyone would be wise to ask themselves whether they are really good enough.
 
2) Do I have the endurance to survive the demands of the program?
 
3) Am I willing to sacrifice a lot of emotional energy, physical energy, TIME, and other goals (making a family, etc.) for the program and career?
 
4) Am I willing to be financially poor for 5+ years? (that is, if you don't come from a place of means).
 
5) How many people are getting jobs? (the answer is already there: usually a smaller proportion than the number of accepted applicants to a program each year--Berkeley Classics probably bucked the trend last year, but that was exceptional. Basically, universities have been flooding the academic job market with newly minted PhDs; self-regulation of admittance numbers is needed across the board, but for now, there are too many job seekers out there and not enough jobs.)

Just my 2 cents, as someone currently in a PhD program--a top 5 program, if you want to call it that.

Being a better professor* is putting the cart way before the horse. The ad comms want to know that you can handle the ancient languages because you need to hit the ground running with grad-level classes and preparing for exams. It's purely practical.

*I'm going to stay this even though I know it will not be well received: the chances of becoming a professor in Classics or one of the related areas is incredibly small. Please think about the very real possibility of spending the next 5-7 years of your life pursuing Classics and then not finding gainful or viable employment.

Hi there - first thing is first: I don't think any program would offer you funding for the incoming summer in an MA program, unless under exceptional circumstances. Second, a B average in the languages is not going to look promising to graduate committees. You need at least an A- average in the languages. Here I would suggest a post-bac program to bring those up to speed and have some better grades under your belt. Your research and field experience is excellent, but that needs to be backed up with philological surety--at least in the eyes of programs such as UoAZ. Perhaps UPenn's post-bac vel sim. might be a good option to pursue.
 
best wishes--

Unless you've published your writing (not just through ProQuest, mind you) a writing section shouldn't appear on your CV; you'd include your MA thesis title under the Education heading.

You're coming across as rude and entitled and passive aggressive. People here were trying to help, and characterizing their efforts as "grudging" simply because they couldn't read your mind and give you "exactly the post you were looking for" makes you look like a snowflake. If this is how you approach your recommenders and professors, then you might have more difficulty getting into grad school than you anticipate.

Parfit, On What Matters Vol. I (for a seminar)
 
Ernst Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought
 
Pierre Duhem, The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory
 
Peter Bowler, The Eclipse of Darwinism
 
Daniel Velleman, How to Prove It

I'd recommend doing three things before waiting for a response:
 
1. Copy your topic title without the question mark.
2. Paste it into your Google search bar.
3. Hit enter.
 
Edit: I did these three steps (since I feel bad just scolding people on here--it's not like I have 500+ posts). These are the first 5 schools that came up:
 
1. UChicago
2. Boston U
3. Penn
4. Columbia
5. Harvard

Love this "autocorrect."
 
In all more seriousness, you might be interested in Ohio State as the department recently strengthened its modern US history program in the area of women, gender, and sexuality.
 
Your GPA is a bit low and I'd encourage you to apply to more MA programs.  
 
I wouldn't stay at UIUC for your PhD unless you're working with a super star because  having all three degrees (BA, MA, and PhD) from one institution suggests that you might not have broad intellectual exposure as if you do take 2 out of 3 degrees in one institution.  No two departments are alike and you would be challenged at each department you work in.

Yes. There is no restriction as far as I'm aware that prevents you from having Associate professors on your committee. Honestly, there are far more Associate than Full professors and it would be unrealistic to only have a committee populated by Full. Even Assistant professors are options. The catch to the latter is tenure and the potential stress that can cause. 

Thanks for the elaboration, it makes it easier to see where you're coming from.
 
This sentence that I've quoted is where you're going off the rails a little bit. You are making a mistake in assuming that the addcomm is going to go ahead and do the work of mentally slotting you in with some available profs. They have hundreds of apps to read, you can't expect them to do this, this is work that YOU should be doing - that is, articulating a RELEVANT research fit with some AVAILABLE faculty. You are not hedging your bets by avoiding any tailoring at the risk of excluding a potential POI - that is a weak and paralyzing approach, better to just DO YOUR BEST to research the department/program and try to account for a good chunk of the prospective fits (and maybe name one or two of the MOST relevant, as determined by your research effort). The statement is not a test with one right answer, where you can avoid flunking because you're leaving up to the adcomm to project the correct response; you might not end up working with the faculty that you name - adcomms KNOW this - the "test" is seeing whether or not you can articulate your interests aptly and whether or not you can identify resources that make sense. You should generally aim to establish "fit" in two respects: why THIS discipline and why THIS institution/program. You've established a great statement for the former, now you need to tailor a bit to capture the latter. I would suggest a sentence or two at the end of your "areas of interest" bit, where you can connect it by stating that your interests would be extended/cultivated by (specific resource in program) given (something relevant about that resource that parallels your interests). It doesn't HAVE to be a faculty member; I'm in a different field, and sometimes people cite program specializations or department conferences or a university's research institute that can be relevantly connected to their interests. You don't HAVE to read the work of every prof in the department (that is an anemic rationale for not doing the "fit" work); look at faculty pages and see who has listed areas of interest that parallel yours, and then skim through THEIR articles (and check to see if maybe they're going on sabbatical before naming them); faculty interests do not have to DIRECTLY mirror yours or be "obvious" on first blush (if they already had a faculty person doing your EXACT interests, they wouldn't take you anyway right? what would be the point?), the point is to find someone relevant and articulate the fit.
 
Best of luck, you've made a good start here!

The sentiment you express in this post is an important one... but I would urge you to be cautious in writing publicly about your interactions with current students. Since you're only TAing for one class, and its your first one, it will be very clear to your students and others at the university which class you're talking about. And although you didn't name names, it might be clear to students in the class which students you've quoted from. FERPA laws are rather strict... but more importantly, you risk making public something a student told you in confidence--and the students, particularly the female students who you quote from, might feel publicly shamed.
 
When in doubt, I think it's best to treat interactions with students as *highly* confidential... I know I might feel very upset or that trust had been breeched, if an instructor wrote publicly about a private meeting. 

Here's my advice, Francophile: stick with national literature departments unless you feel like you really must be in a comparative literature department. Almost all comp lit graduates get jobs in non-comp lit departments. Which departments you can apply to will depend on your focus. Also, it should be said that the language requirements in comp lit programs are quite strict; it does vary from program to program (some are stricter than others), but by and large your language skills will be among the first (if not the first) thing considered in your application. At least this is how it works at Yale. You've said that you studied linguistics, so I can imagine you have good language skills--nonetheless, many of the comp lit grad students that I know were multi-lingual from an early age. 
 
There isn't stimga against interdisciplinarity, although I suppose that depends on your definition. There's a lot of push back happening right now against the national literature paradigm, periodization, and the like--and much of the most interesting work right now moves across the temporal and spatial boundaries we're used to. But it should also be said that much of that work is coming from already tenured professors (ie already experts in such periods). My suggestion would be to familiarize yourself (as best as possible) with the different characteristics of different departments: some being more liberal than others. If you're interested in working with anglophone lit. then there are definitely a few english depts that would appeal to you--meaning they have more open boundaries to the kind of work it seems like you wanna do. 
 
as for teaching: yeah, a comp lit students teach language classes post-coursework, unless youre in english in which case you teach 101 equivalents. again depending largely on the program, the university (public or private), etc. 
 
there isn't a stigma against comp lit or against interdisciplinarity as such: reservations come from being practical (ie, what you'll be able to teach, where you'll be able to get your books published, and of course the difficulty of gaining expertise in variety of fields, periods, languages, etc.). There's also a lot of "neither fish nor fowl" arguments against comp lit, as in youll get breadth but not depth, but I think that just depends on your work. 
 
I hope this helps. For what it's worth, im not a comp lit student. 

You don't seem to be learning from the above responses. 
 
All PhD programs in history will be different, as will all MA programs. They will not all have the same length of time to degree, nor will they have the same teaching requirements or times. 
 
This is something that you seem to be having a hard time grasping, and it's an important basic to understand if you are interested in pursuing an advanced degree. 

I filled those out without thinking twice about them.  Because when I went to interviews a question that came up from PIs and other students was always: "where else have you interviewed/applied?"  and one PI went so far as to say, what is our competition, because trust me that is how they are seeing it.  When I made my decision and filled out the declination for the schools that all accepted me one of the questions always asked was, where did you decide to go?  Why did you feel this school was a better fit for you,   etc.  they all want to know how to get the applicants they want and how to improve themselves.  Remember its kind of an interview process for them to show you what they can offer you too.  Just like we don't know all of our applicant competition, they don't know either and they are equally as interested.  Best of luck and let that be one of the easiest questions to fill out in all of the application forms!  

I'm not a professor, but I am in Comp Lit.
 
 
 
 
Your knowledge of languages and the fact that you plan to work cross-culturally makes you a strong candidate for Comp Lit programs. Although I don't necessarily agree that you would not be able to do the kind of comparative work you want to do within a national language department, I do think that a) you would enjoy Comp Lit more, and b ) working within a national literature would entail you concentrating on that literature with occasional forays into the other, whereas it seems to me that you want to concentrate on both equally.
 
 
 
 
It is true that you will need to know your languages quite well, and the reading will be in the original languages, but you'll be writing your essays in English and perhaps the western half of your concentration will be in English. The bulk of the criticism will be in English (is anybody still forced to read the post-structuralists in the original nowadays?). Take a look at the degree requirements. Most degrees require that you are very strong in one language, and demonstrate proficiency in another 2-3 by the time your comps roll around. Most of my professors absolutely use a dictionary and compare translations when reading original texts (which is useful in order to acquaint yourself with existing scholarship, not just to look up the meaning of words). I think you can do it.
 
 
 
I need to have an extensive knowledge of the literary histories (so in my case my M.A. in English is not quite sufficient, as they will want to see a degree in Slavic studies)

 
As in, if you want to do a Comp Lit degree with a concentration in Slavic languages, that you will need to have read the major Russian writers and maybe Milan Kundera? Well, one hopes that you have a nodding acquaintance with Tolstoy, but we don't need to go as far as Chernishevsky (whom I recommend to you if you want to do anything Soviet or post-Soviet, especially in relation to Western liberalism). The thing with extensive knowledge of the literary histories (what does that even mean?) is that you don't need a degree to have one. This comes down to the intricacies of applying: if you have professors who can vouch for you, a relevant writing sample, and demonstrated knowledge of the language you will need for your studies, you emphatically don't need a degree in Slavic studies.
 
Once again, this is my experience, which comes from one school and a few people who are not me. It's all very situational - but I don't want you to give up on yourself.
 
 
 
and that most PhDs end up in national language (rather than literature) departments.

 
That's because it's better to end up in a national language department from an employment perspective. When you have, say, a PhD in Russian Literature, people immediately understand what you are: you are a Slavist. When you have a Comp Lit PhD, nobody actually knows what you do. It's much harder to get hired with an interdisciplinary degree like Comp Lit because, although you purport to do a lot of things, the impression is that you can't properly do anything. A vast scope and diverse background is great for research, but most literary scholars are hired to teach languages to undergrads. There is an assumption that a person with a national literature degree does, if anything, have a working knowledge of their language.
 
 
 
 
 
Comparative Literature began in 1946 in the University of Istanbul, where Erich Auerbach published Mimesis. Auerbach was a German Jew on the run from the Nazis, and, ironically, a Western purist. In Istanbul he taught a graduate seminar for scholars who, like him, loved Western values but were marginalized by Western society. Basically, it was a bunch of Turks writing about French literature. Comparative Literature started out as an attempt to unite all Western literatures under one flag. A bunch of these guys immigrated to the States in the 50s and 60s and popularized post-structuralism, cultural studies, all that continental stuff. At this point, everybody's still mostly concerned with the Western tradition (which people like Harold Bloom try to consolidate, sometimes successfully), but "area studies" and "cultural studies" concentrations start to emerge, as distinct from national literatures and Comparative Literature both. The next big breakthrough was Said's Culture and Imperialism, when Western academia was suddenly made aware that non-Western literatures relate to Western literatures through colonialism, and holy shit we can analyse them together and get more grants from the government! This generates more interest in Comparative Literature because, in order to do this kind of comparative work, you need to have equally strong grounding in both, say, the English and Hindu traditions. However, the better scholars still get bought out by national language departments simply because they're older, bigger, and have more money. Nowadays, the big languages in CompLit are Arabic and Mandarin, and the big research areas are translation theory, or anything that can use any kind of natural science at all (linguistics and neuro being the obvious choices, though I myself think that pushing economics could result in some mad profits). 
 
If we're talking course catalogs, Comparative Literature is the dumping ground for courses that are too general to be a specific literature, or use too many foreign-language readings, etc. That's why you get a lot of theory or structural courses in Comparative Literature, and why the discipline in general is more theoretical than your average literature degree, even though comparatists read roughly the same theory as everyone else. 
 
The English department is very open to interdisciplinary work with philosophy, psychology, gender studies. The cachet is whether you want to do all your work on English literature. Generally speaking, if you want to do your research on English-language literature, you should be in an English department, if you want to do research on film, you should be in a film department, and if you want to do research on the similarities between Ukraine and -wherever-, you should be in a Comp Lit department. Overall, it's as useless as any literature degree, so go for it.
 
tl;dr if this is what you want to do, and you think you can do it, you should apply. We're not the admissions committee and we can't tell you if you'll get in.

I have been on five search committees in the past nine years, and "passion" has not entered into the decision-making process even once that I can recall.

I'm pretty well-versed ('okay-versed'?), but by no means an expert--I'm still a lowly undergrad, obviously, but I've taken two semesters of Old English (one intro, one grad Beowulf seminar), and lead my university's Old English reading group. I'll give you some nitty gritty, practical tips first, and then some general thoughts:
 
Go to this website, print out the Magic Sheet you find there, fold it in half, laminate it, and LIVE with it. Keep it in your OE textbook at all times, do your OE readings with it ever by your side, sleep with it underneath your pillow, and stroke it gently when the lonely hours come. From there, on to bibliography. So, your instructor will require whatever book they require, but Peter Baker's Introduction to Old English (make sure to get the most recent edition, there are some egregious typos in earlier ones) is, for my money, the best introduction for people without experience in an inflected language. If you do have that experience, or are looking for greater philological detail, Mitchell and Robinson's A Guide to Old English is a great bet, and an excellent reference. There's really only one good student dictionary--the Clark Hall & Meritt, but BE WARNED: Amazon abounds w/ unscrupulous vendors of public-domain OCRd copies based on old editions that are uniformly crappy and to be avoided. You want the 4th edition published in the Medieval Academy Reprints for Teaching series, put out by Toronto. It's the one w/ the blue and white cover with OE text in an inset window, and can be found here. Peter Baker's intro textbook is also online, and make sure you check out the links to the left--there are great resources there, exercises, annotated readings, etc. The Dictionary of Old English is online and should be available through your university, but it only runs through G; Bosworth-Toller (the best complete dictionary) is available for free online, as well, but often entails (as does the print version, sigh) having to look through various supplements and addenda to make sure you've done your lexicographical legwork responsibly. Baker says: "Indeed (though some Old English teachers may not approve of our telling you so), you may find it possible to read Old English prose pretty well without having to put in a lot of work on adjectives." This is, to put it gently, litotes. My advice? Do not bother to obsessively learn adjective endings. At all. I say this as someone who adores morphology, fetishizes philological rigor, etc etc etc. The payoff simply isn't there for the complexity of the paradigms, and that time would be better spent working on things like i-mutation, other sound changes, strong verb classes, etc, or even just having a beer or two. It is largely unnecessary in prose since adjectival hyperbaton is rarely an issue, and while there will be moments in poetry where the proper reading will turn on an adjective (usually when dealing with substantives or unexpected weak adjective endings) being correctly parsed, they're pretty rare--and when they do happen, you'll have your Magic sheet to refer to, anyway!  Of course this advice is useless if you'll be tested on them in class, in which case: ugh. Gird your loins. Other than that, though, learn your paradigms, backwards and forwards. Don't learn them as isolated, discrete units; look for connections between them. It's a lot easier (I think) to remember that the feminine accusative singular pronouns/articles are always the same as the plural nominative and accusative pronouns/articles than to try to remember them as three separate things. This is, again, only one of the many moments in which your Magic Sheet will be more than handy. Read real Old English things as soon as possible! The first few weeks of morphological drudgery can be a bit of a slog, but remember that at the end of your road paved with hard-won paradigms are the manifest glories of Anglo-Saxon literature. Since the end of that road can seem a little far off when you're wading through a sea of ðæm and þisses, though, put real Old English in front of your weary eyes as soon as you can. Baker's great about that, Mitchell and Robinson less so. Cambridge publishes a great Old English reader (edited by Marsden) whose marginal glossing is ridiculously complete (and with a full glossary in the back). The Dumbarton Oaks series by Harvard (it's the medieval equivalent of the Loeb Library, and if that isn't enough to make you wet yourself think hard about the choices you've made in your life) publishes a ton of OE stuff in bilingual en face editions, but since the texts aren't normalized or glossed it's probably a choice for when one's a bit surer with the language.  Read aloud! Not only does it sound cool (eventually--you'll feel like embarrassed/like a jackass at first, but there's no avoiding it), but it'll help internalize the rhythm of the language, which will help you internalize the syntax. As far as how to study, I found the process for doing translations/preparing readings outlined here to be enormously helpful (even if a crapton of work), at least during the early stages. More general advice: Hreaðemus is (as usual!) exactly right--Old English is, if not easy, at least considerably easier than a lot of other medieval languages, to say nothing of Latin. I'm about to take what will be the equivalent of my seventh semester of Latin this fall, and while my Latin's not necessarily shabby, I still hobble and stumble and falter my way through it with tons of dictionary support, confusion, and cursing. In comparison, Old English is a breeze. It's funny. I tend to get all needlessly indignant when I tell people I study Old English and they say "like Shakespeare?" and I have to patiently explain that, no, it's an entirely different language--showing them the first few lines of Beowulf usually clears that up. But, at the same time, the following are all sentences of Old English:
 
Harold is swift. His hand is strong and his word grim. Late in life he went to his wife in Rome.
Is his inn open? His corn-binn is full and his song is written. Grind his corn for him and sing me his song.
He is dead. His bed is under him. His lomb is deaf and blind. He sang for me.
 
Those are obviously cherry-picked examples (and they're Mitchell and Robinson's, not mine--they have more of them, too, if you're into that sort of thing), but there's a lot about Old English that will be at least familiar to a speaker of modern English.
 
That doesn't mean, though, that there isn't a lot that isn't familiar, and that will trip you up if you approach it as if it's just funny looking ModE. Aside from lexical differences, Old English is an inflected language, and that means that it preserves grammatical distinctions that ModE doesn't, and that it can be much freer with word order (especially in poetry) and use constructions--bare instrumental datives, for example--that have zero equivalent in ModE. This is where time spent learning morphology and syntax, as boring as they are, really pays off--if you haven't, it's all too easy to just completely miss the sense of an OE text because you aren't able to pick up on the grammatical clues the various inflections might be giving you.
 
I hope some of that helps, and wes þu hal!

A lot of this is dictated by program. If you attend a doctoral program where research is prioritized over teaching, and a program's attitude is generally known by hitting committee faculty at institution x, y, and z, where x and y are SLACs and z is prestigious R1, then it will likely require more on your part to convince x and y of your dedication to teaching. If you have Big Uni Degree, sure, that looks great for the department, but there's also the risk of you leaving said SLAC to go to R1 a few years down the road, and another hiring process repeat will ensue. (This is all hypothetical in a universe where you're even likely to land a TT) Things like certificates in college teaching can help offset that risk if opportunities to teach are limited at said degree program.

All that said, I view teaching and research as relatively equal. What you teach (you know, that one seminar or upper level course you actually want to teach that isn't a survey of British lit 1800-present every few years) should be to a degree an extension of your research, and your research should be influenced by what and how you teach (in an ideal world). I'm sure it's wonderful to land grant and fellowship after grant and fellowship that allows you to pursue your research and not have to teach. But if you're lucky to get a job, some blend of research and teaching is the norm. There are obviously exceptions.