Deadinthewater

Keys to the cute professers' bedrooms and a tiny child to do your bidding.

You should tell them that Berkeley is giving you $300,000 a year plus your own reality show.

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Man, I seriously expected this to get at least one upvote...

I don't love literature, but as far as I have seen that is not a prerequisite for graduate study.

Thank you for needlessly raising my empty hopes. ETA: Oh, yeah, congratulations.

I am modern/postmodernism, aesthetics, realism/representation. Don't get me wrong, I like Buffalo, and I like a few of the professors there a lot. I appreciate your response.

This topic interests me because I have been accepted at Buffalo, implicitly rejected at NYU and Chicago (my #1), and I'm wondering whether, in the case that my other schools don't pan out, should I accept a funded MA offer and try for a top-tier school again in two years, or take Buffalo (still a pretty good program) now? I don't expect a yes/no answer to this question, just wondering if anyone else perhaps has had similar moments of indecision... or no response is cool, too.

I thought Chicago didn't waitlist...

Tracy it's killing me to see you this anxious.

UNL was my undergrad. I am not a creative writer necessarily, but I know that it constitutes a large part of their graduate program. Most of the graduate students I interacted with during undergrad were MFA's who were pursuing a PhD so they could become more employable. If anything, in my experience, the Creative Writing PhD didn't seem excessively challenging, so that should help. But I can't say for sure. It's definitely more of a passive, learning experience than an active, writing experience. I would think that if so many MFA's were returning to get a PhD, they did so because they had tons of "writing time" and not very much "money," or something like that. As far as Lincoln, the city, well...it has its advantages and disadvantages. I lived there on about $8,000 a year, so, $16,000? I can't even think about what I'd do with all that money. But I am also a degenerate slob whose only expensive purchases are fine wine and gourmet food. I won't say that Lincoln is a well-planned city, but it is really conveniently laid-out if you're a student. You can get anywhere you'd ever want to be on foot, and it is unbelievably flat (if you're into biking). If you do end up going, feel free to message me, because I could probably give you some information about the city's hidden cultural offerings, and about where you might want to live.

I just went back and re-read my Buffalo SOP to see what exactly I said in my fit paragraph. I discovered two unbelievable typos (a completely missed period—like, a new sentence just begins; and an omission of the word "is" that forced me to re-read a sentence 2 or 3 times) and an overuse of the word "particularly." I remember this was my last SOP on the Dec. 15th megadeadline. I had to go to a show that night, and I was typing the last sentences of the fit paragraph while everyone was shouting, "Come on! Let's go! We were supposed to be there twenty minutes ago!" If I remember correctly, I was drinking a beer at the time. Not feeling so bad about the typo in my Irvine SOP anymore.

In at Buffalo. So so fucking excited.

I'm putting my phone and laptop away for the afternoon. I can't do this. a,mrnta,mnyaklrjoiaufglkjadlakkzvjkznjdagjznxcv,m.mq,temnq,.taogipuzdofhgk;,aejrt.m,anaqejtalgrnam,gksdakl;a;ggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggkl

Another NYU acceptance up. What have I been doing today? Not much, just checking the results board multiple times before noon on a Sunday.

Well, congratulations Bluecheese on your haul thus far. If you don't mind me asking, had you contacted this professor prior to applying?

Sounds gross, but yeah.

If NYU notified Friday then people are being oddly shy about updating the results board...

Okay who got into penn state?

Thanks, and thanks for responses from other people. Won't be able to call the professor back until tomorrow, but it feels nice (really nice) to have a tentative acceptance to begin this process (even if it is from my last choice).

I just received a voicemail on my phone from my last-choice school (I don't want to say the name yet because I'm not quite sure of the nature of the call. I will just say that it's a large state university which isn't terrible but is probably not anyone's first choice). The voicemail was the graduate chair saying he had "good news," but that he "really wanted to talk to me" before the weekend was over. What am I supposed to expect during a phonecall like this? Is this phonecall probably going to be part of the decision-making process? How nervous should I be?

I don't know, man. I have a buddy who is a top-ranked chess player. I asked him if, during tournaments, when his opponent loses because he/she makes an absolutely stupid mistake, or because he/she simply runs out of time, does he feel like the win is devalued because it is more of his opponent losing than him winning. He said no, absolutely not, because he has lost enough via his own harebrained mistakes to know that the loss, any loss, is real, and a win, any win is real. Perhaps a loss/win conception of grad school acceptance is not the appropriate way to be thinking about this. But perhaps it is. Once again, I don't really care. And if I don't get in anywhere, I'm not going to blame the people who "outperformed" me. I hope everyone gets into every program they applied to. I hope we all see each other at UC Berkeley next semester! GRAD ACCEPTANCE CLASS OF 2013 LET'S DO THIS SH*T

I probably won't resort to running anyone over, I'm only saying that a little bitterness (especially in a subjective selection process) makes sense to me. And "calling" everyone in the world stupid won't make you smarter, but if everyone in the world actually is stupid (or if an admissions committee deems them to be stupid), then I think this really does, on an empirical level, make you smarter. On the other hand, I guess you have all proved to me that the world isn't as cynical of a place as I thought, so that's heartening or whatever.

So if there are 25 admits to your #1 top-choice school, and you were 26th on the list, you don't think other people's success would be relevant to your (hypothetical) failure? I think it's nice how positive everyone on this forum is, and I intend to be positive as well, but I also don't think anyone here could possibly be 100% happy with an anonymous admit's acceptance to a school where they also applied. Pure and honest 100% neighborly bliss—I mean, I'm not going to decline an offer to any school just so my anonymous brethren can jump in off the waiting list, even if I claim it makes me 100% happy. ETA: I don't know why I'm arguing this because I don't actually care.

It's a dawg eat dawg world. Each acceptance someone else gets is one you didn't get. It's good to be happy, but I'm not sure it's healthy to be 100% happy.