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Everything posted by Quarex
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I actually got a rejection via postal mail a couple of days back, so if you have not heard yet it might be a good sign.
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Harvard vs. Social Thought for Pol. Theory
Quarex replied to Canadianpolsci's topic in Political Science Forum
The proper term, I believe, is "an embarrassment of riches." I suspect you will do well at either place; not that I know you at all, but it is clear through seeing your posts on these forums that you are intelligent enough, and are not nearly as egotistical as many others in your position! Harvard's placement record certainly is more impressive than the Committee on Social Thought's, but the latter's placement record also, well, is not a placement record that any school would be ashamed to have, either. I am hardly ashamed to admit that I had never heard of the Committee on Social Thought until this thread. How did you even find out about this program? I spent a couple of days looking for good interdisciplinary Ph.D. programs when getting this whole search underway, and though I did find and apply to a couple, this post has shown me I most assuredly missed plenty. -
I only ended up applying to two Public Policy Ph.D. programs, even though when I started this whole process I thought I would be applying to nothing but public policy programs. Maryland's program seems to be one of the top in the country for security/technology policy, which is basically where my interests lie if they do indeed lie with public policy. George Mason was the other program to which I applied, and as much because the faculty seemed to work in my field as that I had ever heard anything one way or another about the departmental reputation. Ultimately, what you have both mentioned ended up being the problem with public policy for me -- every department seems considerably different from any other given department, which does not seem to be the case in most disciplines. There were dozens of public policy programs that did not even have any security/defense policy options, or even anyone on staff working in those areas. A lot of places called "public policy" sounded to me more like "social policy" departments that were misnamed (like I am an expert on the field and can just casually say that, but you know what I mean). Environmental policy, health care policy, transportation policy, education policy, they all abounded. But never my field!
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After a series of rejections and a few M.A. political science consolation admissions, I finally have my first Ph.D. admittance to this ~5-year-old program at Rutgers. Obviously, its age makes it relatively unlikely that anyone here is a graduate of the program, but I figured it would not hurt to throw it out there. Someone might have at least heard something about it. The program has several people working on issues related to my research, a diverse student body, and sounds right up my alley, but it was one of the programs I knew the least about going in. Now I am playing quick catch-up. If nobody else has any knowledge about this program, you could at least post to tell me about how weird New Jersey's full-serve-only gas station policies are. Edit: Do not make me start telling jokes in here. I will do it.
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Firstly, I was not referring to you when I mentioned attacking Realist, but rather the half-ad-hominem-half-just-angry posts by someone else on page 6. Your posts certainly raise interesting points. The rankings are a difficult subject, as there are certainly lots of different ways to look at them, and perhaps giving any concrete examples of schools that were "the ones you had to attend" was bound to cause more problems than it was worth. But just as I said in my last post, it seems to go without saying that the quality of the academic experience, though hugely variable even beyond rankings, surely has a positive correlation with said rankings. The faculty at the lowest-ranked school in the country may well be, through coincidence or deed, a more rewarding group of people to study with than those at the highest-ranked. But with all the dizzying array of variables, including the "x" factor, that go into success after (and during) graduate school, it seems to make sense to try to get the bulk of the academic momentum on your side, rather than pushing against it*. Obviously, I do understand your second point; I agreed that surely, when it came to discussing the feasibility of rankings and which schools or which professors or which anything is good/better/best, there is never going to be a definitive answer. Of course, most everyone else here seems to feel that as well, hence that being the focal point of the arguments sprawling across the pages. Furthermore, it is important to question the accuracy and validity of advice dispensed in any circumstance, let alone mostly anonymously on the Internet. That said, Realist's original post is an insightful set of observations into the process, for the periods both during and after the Ph.D., which is essentially all he/she was trying to say (discussions about the "top 25" section evidently notwithstanding). The subsequent debate has gone farther afield. Realist also came here to post this likely not as an assertion of fact that should be instantly "stickied" and "closed," but to see what we had to say about it (despite being "frustrated" with the response, he/she is not frustrated that there was a response). Yes, from a "more enlightened" position--but is it any different than anyone with [x] years of experience in anything professing to someone with [x-y] numbers of experience that there are things the latter should know if trying to reach the same point? Particularly when phrased, as it was, that he/she just wished this knowledge had been around when the process began for him/her. Regardless, I love this forum. Keep it up! *This coming from one of those people who has spent his entire life "going against the grain," and looks forward to doing so in the future--but would still rather go against the grain in, say, an efficient modern farm, not in his fifth cousin's overgrown garden.
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All other things aside, it is important to separate one's revulsion for the world Realist is describing from Realist him/herself. That it took until page 6 for someone to finally post a wholly scathing diatribe in response astounded me, personally, and was a testament to how calmly our debates really do go here. Now, could Realist have sugar-coated what he/she said more? Yes, but he is also not a motivational speaker or an encouraging friend, but rather someone who (assuming he is not just completely making all of this up, which would be great, but exceedingly unlikely) has a unique set of knowledges, insights, and experiences that qualify him/her to give advice on the subject. Attacking him/her is not going to make what he/she has already said suddenly more favorable to your own views. Realist's impression that a degree from anywhere outside the top 25 is not really a degree that will get you anywhere in academia is the only fact laid out on the table that seems open to any reasoned debate; there are enough different subfields and specialities and conflicting opinions that notable exceptions are possible (and some have already come up). However, it is also silly to imply that you would be better off at 95th-Ranked-Tech than #1 Megaversity, even if the most prominent scholar in your field did just move to #95 to try to kick-start a rejuvenation of its program (though that would certainly help). As said in Realist's last post, do we really find it hard to believe the things set out as advice? That the job market is hard? That better-ranked programs are good? Now, I have heard the competition for tenured positions was considerably less fierce about 30 (or maybe even 20) years ago. However, as we do not live in that world, but rather in one where cost-saving means fewer tenure positions, certainly it does not hurt to imagine that things are going to be more competitive than we might want to hope. Ultimately, what this thread is most missing seems to be Realist's take on the best way to turn your chances around if saddled, due to circumstances or a lack of motivation or both, with an application poor enough to never get you where you need to go. If he/she is like most any other professor I have ever met, he/she knows (or even once was, though likely not) an excellent scholar who overcame a particularly underwhelming pre-graduate-school performance. How precisely a person turns his/her life around is certainly no set pattern, but every individual rags-to-riches story helps both motivate those of us who are not likely to get what we want this time around, and to guide us as to what we might still able to do to accomplish our dreams. Now, are those of us not doing so well right now going to end up getting our Ph.D.s from the #1 program, and tenured at the #2 program, with shoddy backgrounds? Not too likely. But I know one professor (or perhaps it is more appropriate to say I was born to one professor) who went from a bottom-rung "directional-state" undergraduate program, to a Princeton Ph.D., to tenure. And hey, I am not even asking for Princeton!
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Well, you might as well contact the places that rejected you and ask what was lacking about your application. If it is something more easily fixable (GRE, statement of purpose) then that is nice, but if it is something else, you might have to figure out a new path. Some people give taking more graduate courses in the subject as a student-at-large a shot; it can show your continuing efforts to excel in the field, give you new potential writers for letters of recommendation, and maybe give you some more impressive grades to show off. Of course, some other people also think that this is not liable to help. This probably means that it will help you with some programs, and not at all with others. Of course, you also might still get accepted from one of those last three places, so first try staying hopeful!
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I cannot wait to find out who the most well-regarded people in my field even are! I have read so many books by so many different people, with no real formal organization in place to tell me which of them are supposed to be revered and which reviled. It will be great once I find out someone I think an unequivocal genius is widely considered an irredeemable blatherskite. CanadianPolSci, clearly part of the purpose of these very forums for us is to get a sort of less-intimate braintrust made up of our fellow posters. I have already discussed much of the advice heard here with others, and obviously brought up issues from others in these forums. Once you get about a thousand different pieces of advice, you can finally see that about 800 of them point in one direction, even if there did not seem to be a pattern initially. Also, this is not related to anything, but I spent a lot of free time in my last week making a custom Google Maps array of every Political Science Ph.D. program in the U.S., with six or seven rankings listed in the descriptions for each school. Does this make me crazy, or just someone who likes projects? I plan on adding Public Policy programs to the map in the next few days, though I really do not want this to turn into a life's work.
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This forum is great. Vibrant, impassioned debate! Flaring emotions! New obscenities! We have it all. While I appreciate the law school advice (and considered law school at one point), I am pretty sure that if it would be more advantageous to spend three years studying something I am only tangentially interested in researching, rather than two years ideally working in a department that shares my interests while maybe even presenting conference papers and publishing something, then it starts to sound really confusing. Keep in mind, now, I have no political science background. I am coming from a completely different field, with precisely one actual political science class to my name. That I was accepted to any programs at all should probably amaze me (but I always set my sights as high as humanly possible). But I really feel like actually having a degree in the field (while I have been told it is not necessarily essential in the social sciences) is going to help more than a law degree to go with my other two degrees from unrelated disciplines would. PoliSciApp: I think we talked before about how you went to law school first; how much does it seem to have helped your application over an M.A.? Not that you are likely to know the answer to that. This page is chock full of great advice. You are all fantastic.
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Now, while that would be great if it were true, and maybe it is, everything I have seen puts the number much closer to 125-150; do you think the lists you found included departments with terminal master's programs in addition to doctorates? It is obvious that you are a very talented person, and likely well-qualified to comment on these subjects (and I will refrain from making fun of your typos, as requested). But ultimately, the problem with even wanting to take your advice to heart is that plenty of us are past the point when we could. I thought college was just high school v.2, grades 13-16, and have the GPA to prove it. There was no hope for me getting into a "top" undergraduate school (though I did end up at UIUC, somehow), let alone a "top" graduate school, because I had no idea what I was doing and no idea how to get there even if I did. Now, in the last year, I have tried to make up for my previous years of failure, even though I know it is incredibly difficult. Is there any hope for those of us who are basically trying to re-boot our academic careers? I mean, if I end up in an M.A. degree at a, say, "30-40th" ranked school, would any amount of work and effort and energy expenditure actually make admissions committees ignore my mediocre at best undergraduate record (in a totally different field)? Is it sort of like the idea behind law school, where if you do not go to a top school, you at least have to finish first in your class to have any hope for the future? Obviously, there are not going to be any set rules, and everyone thinks he/she will be the exception to any rule anyway. But is it really all people from top 25 undergraduate/master's programs ending up in top 25 Ph.D. programs? I see Tidefan has a few things to say on the issue as well. I do not even want to get into the upbringing issue, because it is safe to say both that I lacked 90% of the resources that wealthy families in bustling urban areas had ... and that plenty of people had it far worse, too. Like you, apparently, Tidefan. And you are still stomping me in admissions this time around.
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How do you find departments that are a good fit?
Quarex replied to Quarex's topic in Political Science Forum
Thanks, you two, and the people who e-mailed/PMed me. That was all definitely helpful. I have added quite a bit to my "notes on how to do this right next time" file, which admittedly I am secretly hoping I will not actually have the occasion to use. Rising_Star, I did the exact same major-field switch from undergraduate to graduate (in my case, English Literature to Criminal Justice) before doing the less drastic social-science-to-social-science switch for my next round of graduate studies. Google can certainly work wonders for this process; I sadly never found a comprehensive political science/public policy list like the geography list you described, but I found that spending three months of my life scouring every English-speaking university (from unixl.com's list of English speaking universities, naturally) for Ph.D. programs in those fields was the kind of experience that really showed me how determined I was to do this right. I highly recommend it to anyone completely wrong in the head. I wonder if it will make you a pariah or a "good student" to try to fanatically get involved in every conference you possibly can? Anyway, c'mon, now, everyone else. Everyone else. -
Gentlemen, Gentlewomen, please; we are all scholars here, let us not sink to endlessly discussing a profane typo. No matter how hilarious it may actually be. That list of professorial positions by subfield was fascinating; thanks, Silencio. Now, of course, the missing data from that study is how many Ph.D.s of each type are awarded each year, or at least a percentile breakdown of general trends. It makes me feel like I should clearly focus on the American side of my comparative politics tendencies, so I can have the best chance at a job--but if there are twice as many American politics Ph.D.s as comparative politics Ph.D.s, then that may not be a good idea after all.
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What will you do if you strike out completely?
Quarex replied to MissingVandyCandy's topic in Political Science Forum
I am not sure if "getting into an M.A. when I shot for a Ph.D." is striking out completely. I am still waiting on some more letters, but things do not seem too terribly optimistic. Of course, for some reason, now I am almost excited about the prospect of applying again in two years with a renewed sense of purpose, a degree from the field, higher GRE scores (they expire in May!), and AN INFINITE QUANTITY OF HOPE! MissingVandyCandy, you can come crash on my couch in Arizona or Kansas or Connecticut or wherever I end up. Well, only if you are not a sociopath. -
Firstly, thanks again for your post. It is indeed a great read, particularly the reminder that if you really want to be somebody who stands out, you have to go above and beyond what most people think to do. This is pretty much why I am chomping at the bit to go back to school. My comment: What really confuses me personally about the top-(X) rankings is that 80% of the top schools had, if my research was not mistaken, either nobody or only one person doing research even remotely in my area. Surely I am not the only person with this dilemma. If some of the most interesting work in the area is coming out of random middle-of-the-road institutions, why does it make sense to ignore them to work on the top tier? Well, other than the notable fact that clearly better schools are going to give some of their prestige to you when you finish, thus increasing your marketability, and it would be awesome to go to a top school. Of course, this comes back to my often-repeated pondering on this forum, as to why it seems like I ended up with a research focus that seems to straddle three or four academic disciplines and gets a short shrift everywhere. But I am also not the only person in this situation, as I have learned, so it is something worth examining. Regardless: You have made it abundantly clear that you realize some(infrequent)times people at less-prestigious places do end up with good placements, though focused primarily on the insanely intense competition for tenure track no matter where you go. That is an excellent lesson to learn, and one we all need to take to heart. Still, there are so many factors that seem to go into where someone really "belongs" that it gets hard to keep track of them. That is why I have a spreadsheet.
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DPhil at Oxford or Cambridge vs. PhD in the US?
Quarex replied to anav's topic in Political Science Forum
Sarcastically veiled serious question: Does this mean that those of us with slightly-less-than-top-25 Ph.D.s should look to the English or Australian academic job market when we finish? -
Somebody might want to move this to the "Applications" subforum, but I thought getting specific advice from other people in your same field would be more useful than opening it up to posts like "well, in theoretical analytical practical professional bio-org-sub-unionized physiochemistry, we usually just pass around a hat with our names in it. Hope this helps with learning about your field." Now, this is obviously a strange subject to bring up in the waning days of acceptances, rather than in the early days of applications. However, since it looks increasingly like I am going to end up doing an M.A. in the Fall rather than a Ph.D., and am certainly not the only person who is striking out, it may be a good time to bring it up while the board is still active. What is the most direct course of action to actually find the best fit? Obviously, if you are in the field already, your department (and maybe even your field librarian!) should be able to send you in the right direction, and likely suggest a handful of places, though they are unlikely to know every single department doing work in your area of interest. So what then? Some interesting advice that came up on the PHDComics webpage of all places was: Go back through all the works you have considered really pivotal in your area, and boldly contact every single author to compliment their work and talk very (very) briefly about your own. Odds are good that you might offend some with your unsolicited inquiries, and that you will not hear back from plenty others, but that likely some percentage of these academics will be fascinated by what you are doing and either give you advice or even suggest you apply to their program. Their advice will logically lead to other people and departments, who you can then contact and keep the ball rolling. A simpler version of that would likely be to just analyze where they work, and who they worked with, and aim your applications accordingly. But it seems like personal contact can really make (or break) an application. Regardless, there has to be even better advice out there amongst all the brilliant people on this forum, and it is clearly currently going to waste. *** Feel free to stop reading and respond to that "general purpose utility" part, but if you do have any specific suggestions for me, I would seriously appreciate it *** Now, my situation was different than many of yours, since I was coming out of a different field entirely. None of my professors or advisors had any concrete suggestions as to what schools might be good for me. My dad is a political science professor, but the overlap between our interests is minimal. I basically had no-one working in the field on my interests to talk to about it, and even my quest to go to one of the institutions represented by the works I cited in my thesis failed when they were almost all retired, dead, or not political scientists in the first place. As far as my research (possibly best described as "national security via identification systems/privacy/civil liberties/surveillance with some communitarianism thrown in for flavor"), the exact field I belong in seems to confuse everyone (which may be part of the problem), even though TO ME it sounds definitely like public policy/political science. Until I actually find someone else anywhere (and I do mean anywhere; no luck so far) working on this, which in my mind should be a huge issue but is evidently infinitesimally small, I just have to keep hoping to find departments who are kind of vaguely sort of generally interested in these issues instead. Feel free to post a link to the big Internet extravaganza encyclopedia of departments doing exactly this research. I will love being horribly shamed in this particular circumstance, particularly given how many months of my life I gave to trying to find such a place (and how every few months a news story comes out with a headline like "$5 BILLION TO BE SPENT IMPLEMENTING WHAT QUAREX TALKED ABOUT IN HIS THESIS" [FBI biometric surveillance database] yet nobody cares).
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Haha. But some of us are trying to do exactly this. It is not as easy as you might think to get accepted at any level, even the master's, to some of these programs, particularly when your entire scholastic life was in shambles until you suddenly realized how much you loved academia. Seriously, until I started writing my master's thesis, I had never considered that research and academia could be all that entertaining; ever since then, I have not been able to imagine why I would do anything else. But this does nothing to make up for my years of sub-par at best academic performance when I was in a field I hated. Now, granted, I did not actually apply directly to M.A. programs at any of those schools; are you saying it is much easier to get in at that level? The advice I heard was that if you apply to the Ph.D., it is functionally like applying to the M.A. anyway (which seems to bear out considering the M.A. admissions I have already been offered).
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I love American, despite having also heard nothing from them, because they send you so many newsletters and updates and everything that it is hard to imagine they are anything but a very student-friendly, positive environment. Do not forget, though, that they have an online status page for you to check. Not that it is likely to say anything right now, since nobody has evidently heard back.
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As an aspiring comparativist with well-defined ideas of what to study but ill-defined comparative areas in which to study them (maybe I am doing this all wrong), I am generally interested as to where they really specialize in advanced post-industrial democracies. It was easy to find places specializing in Africa, Post-Communist Eastern Europe, Latin America, China ... not so much Western/Northern Europe, Australia, and North America. Is there some kind of academic bias that says people in countries like this have to study themselves for it to count?
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I am looking forward to tearing it up in whatever mid-tier M.A. consolation acceptance I take, and actually having people in the correct field who are interested in what I am doing able to come up with suggestions for places to apply. There is a reason my application process took from June until January; I wanted to try to find every school in the country (or Canada, or England, or Australia, or South Africa, or Ireland, or Wales, or Scotland, or the Antarctic, or ) that had two or more people on staff interested in my general field. It really does not seem to be too big a shame to go somewhere not high-ranked if you are working with someone whose work you admire; one of my acceptances has a professor on staff who is currently not mentoring anyone and who wrote a fascinating book that is right up my research alley. In some ways, that would likely beat going somewhere that every professor is guaranteed to have dozens of other voices clamoring for his/her attention at all times. What I clearly need to do this next time is find out where people actually working on my specific interests are. I have no idea how you do this, short of actually reading every single piece of academic work written by each of about 10,000 people working in your field. Reading all the curriculi vitae took long enough. All the research I did for my thesis barely helped, either, in that regard, since almost everyone I heavily cited was either not a Political Scientist, retired, dead, or all of the above. I cannot imagine doing all this again without someone on THE INSIDE helping me choose. And hey, I only ended up applying to like 3 of the top 20 programs in the country, through the sheer confusing fact that security and defense policy seems hugely underrepresented in a time of constant fearmongering. Maybe things will have picked up in a few more years!
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Ooh, it sounds like you are the first person who I can relate to here, research-wise. I was basically run out of Criminal Justiceburg on a rail for getting too heavily into policy and theory (not really, but my committee thought it would be a natural progression to move on to public policy/political science with my work), which left me in the unfortunate position of a second field change, likely not helping my application. Do you dare to disclose your topic? I suppose you are thinking that it is so specific that you are likely to be instantly identifiable by that alone. We had a pretty substantial discussion about this in a grad school thread on another forum. I, and other people in my situation who once had no idea why they were in college (and have the grades to prove it) until suddenly "clicking" with the field that they now know they want to become professors in, talked about how we would jump at the chance to do a Ph.D. anywhere, no matter the funding. The general consensus was that if they do not offer you funding, with some exceptions for schools that are just having extremely bad financial fortunes, they do not really want you in the department anyway, and will likely not offer you much in the way of non-financial support either. Naturally, I asked why these programs would admit you at all if they thought nothing of you, and that answer was less clear. But having still received no outright Ph.D. acceptances, I am still mulling over going into any unfunded Ph.D. I receive, versus going to one of the three M.A. programs that admitted me and trying again in two years with a vastly improved application. My dad got his Ph.D. with abundant honors from Princeton, complete with years of amazing field research and grants and the whole nine yards, and then settled after one year of adjuncting into a position at a state school. He was always happy there, getting several more Fulbright grants to travel and teach about what he loved, even if at the end of the day he was not at a research institution. Not only do you make your own opportunities and increase your chances of getting where you want, odds are pretty good that if you are determined, you can get what you want by doing that as well, even if you do not end up where you think you have to be to do it. Of course, the odds that you will be revered in your field probably go down as does your institution's ranking, but I imagine most of us do not really live for that anyway. Aw crap. Congratulations, but Delaware was one of the last places I still had some hope might admit me. Darn you and your better application, ShamPain! This just means I have to keep hoping that my girlfriend just gets admitted somewhere I have already been admitted. So I at least do not have to face the prospects of having neither a Ph.D. program nor a short-distance relationship. Edit: Oh man, harsh, rejected from Princeton via e-mail even as I talked about my dad's good times there. Fortunately he is not the kind of dad who will disown me for failing where he succeeded.
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I went to add that one to my database, and realized halfway through that I already had it in there. I may have checked too many rankings. Anyone else putting "Ammar from TheGradCafe.com's Buddy's rankings" into their database? Of course, he also missed U-Del and George Mason in addition to Brown, and likely others, so it is NOT FULLY EFFICIENT FOR MY NEEDS. Also, it puts my three choices thus far entirely too close together for the rankings to throw things off-balance. But it still gave me another field! Everyone else check China's ARWU social sciences system? The London Times Higher Education Supplement's social sciences rankings? The customized ranking scale you can create to fit your criteria with phds.org? The school mascot? Proximity to Steak 'n' Shake?
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Hey, the rest of you rejected-so-far people wanna get together and form some kind of alternative Ph.D. commune? We can study things like the supports of the bridge under which we live, and write extensive papers detailing the movements and predicted future migration patterns of the common gray rat.
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Compared to UK/Australia?
Quarex replied to lalalacereza's topic in IHOG: International House of Grads
Gotcha. Yeah, that makes sense, and sounds about right. The English system really is fascinating to me; it makes more sense in so many ways, but also seems fundamentally incompatible with the average college student's disinterest in learning. Now, maybe the English system thus makes students more interested as well, and they realize that when your whole grade is based on one paper that you had better learn something. -
Hmm, yes, you seem to officially have the best "this system is very cruel" story so far. One of the things most backwardly keeping me sane during this whole process is that I know my application was completely all over the place. Awards and recognition and great letter-writers here, abysmal undergraduate performance in unrelated field there. I knew I basically had no chance of getting into anywhere really good, so I was just going to be happy if I got accepted anywhere (hence the huge number of applications). If I end up finishing an M.A. with a great GPA, doing an even better round of research, presenting at conferences, stacking up the positives in my application, and then still get shot down again everywhere in two years ... well ... yeah. You still might get accepted somewhere, though, right? Also, the guy complaining about Minnesota's curt response just got owned in the responses, though I do not know if it was a legitimate post.