intextrovert
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Posts posted by intextrovert
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We had the opposite problem with our cat - he kept throwing up dry food. He's a brat and only accepts Trader Joe's wet (or Fancy Feast, but TJ's was our cost-effective compromise).
Dry food is generally cheaper and more convenient for you and may be good for their teeth (though actually there have been some studies disputing that it really makes a difference), but wet food is healthier overall for their bones and muscles, as well as for avoiding bladder and kidney problems, diabetes, and dehydration. They're also way more likely to become overweight on dry food.
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Are you guys with/against reapplying to one or two of the same list of schools for last year? What do programs think of those who apply once and twice and never takes the hint???
They don't even keep track of who has applied before. I re-applied to five schools I had been rejected from the first time around when I had no idea what I was doing, and was admitted to three of those five the second time when I did.
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WVU has the Appalachian Prison Book Project, which is a huge draw for me, and they're really invested in recruiting me.
I just looked this up - so cool! Have you read Meg Sweeney's book, Reading is My Window: Books and the Art of Reading in Women's Prisons? I'll cop to not having gotten to it yet, though I've been meaning to, but my friends in my department rave about it (it's also won several prizes). Meg is also brilliant, lovely, and a truly fantastic teacher. Seems like it'd be a great resource for reference if you end up getting involved in that project at WVU (and maybe even if you don't - seriously, people describe this book in terms I'm not used to hearing too often about academic books - "moving," "engrossing," etc.)!
As for the tenure discussion, I second dazedandbemused. Tenure has its problems, but it also has a crucial purpose: it protects intellectuals from the whims of the market and the political sphere. We've already lost so much ground; totally giving up on tenure seems like resigning ourselves completely to the business model of the university, and in that, relinquishing much of the value of our role. Maybe it will have to happen eventually- obviously something does - but we should not cede that ground willingly and in accordance with a market-driven vision of the university. This article, which calls for senior professors to protest more vocally about the abuse of adjuncts and grad students, seems to me a much better direction.
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I completely agree with other posters about placement being the most important thing, far more than ranking, but I'd urge you to look deeply into placement numbers. Ask the schools for all the records they keep - sometimes the university's graduate school compiles statistics, as well as the department itself. It's not always easy to find, but not keeping good records is a red flag in and of itself. Are there particular subfields (or advisors) doing notably better than others in a particular department? What sorts of jobs is each school placing people into? By that, I mean not just tenure-track vs. lecturer or adjunct, but also what sorts of schools and positions - ones that are heavy teaching, with 4-4 loads, or research universities that give you more time for your own projects? Many "lower-ranked" programs place quite well because their grads are looking for totally different types of jobs, in which case their raw numbers become incommensurable with schools more focused on training researchers. It may be that you'll want to think very seriously about what sort of job you envision yourself in, and make your decision accordingly.
My (admittedly under-informed) impression is just that Buffalo is in a completely different league than West Virginia - they're definitely a "known" program in a way that WVU isn't. They're also known for having an untraditional, hip, theory-oriented program. That's not to say Buffalo is necessarily right for you, but I think it's important to keep in mind as you figure out where you want to be. Good luck!
- jazzyd, Phil Sparrow, nonysocks and 2 others
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As much as I like Ann Arbor, you're not really wrong. Structural racism is a bitch. The affirmative action cases UM was at the center of, along with slashed state budgets for the university, have exacerbated the problem. It would be a mistake to totally blame that on Ann Arborites/UM itself, though, and it's not a problem unique Michigan. To your other point, yes, I'm from the South and it's a big pet peeve of mine when people from the North or West - who often have had little to no interaction with people unlike themselves - dismiss it out of hand as bigoted. It's a complex, but certainly diverse, region.
To be fair, though, Harvard isn't terrible on diversity - it's at least less than 50% white.
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I think fit is most important in figuring out where to apply and also from their end, in who accepts you. But once you're past that point, things like placement (and with that, reputation) and funding should definitely take the place of fit in importance. Unless it's a really bad fit - but presumably you wouldn't have applied or gotten accepted if that were the case.
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I know you're unlikely to take the advice of anonymous strangers on the internet, so I would really urge you to talk to your academic advisors about this and listen to what they have to say. I would be very surprised if you can find anyone who thinks it's a good idea - it's not just the consensus of this forum that taking out that much in loans to finance a humanities degree is unwise (to put it mildly), it's the consensus of the field in general. In fact, it is widely considered unethical for programs to admit students with no funding at all, for this very reason: it is taking advantage of people who feel desperate to "pursue their dream" and treat the money they are taking out as abstract, when later it will feel very real, and crushing, and have a serious impact on your quality of life in the future. Loans have to be an investment, and this is a very bad one.
No one is trying to be a jerk. Everything people are saying is said out of concern - and it is concerning. I've been there, and understand just wanting to do something towards your goals, but your time and money would be much better spent re-applying. Please to talk to people you know and trust in the field.
- hashslinger, JosephineB, socatoa and 3 others
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Twenty offers is not a lot at all - almost all programs, including mine, admit about double the number they expect to enroll. That's reasonable when most people will have multiple offers. But yes, like I said, lower-ranked programs like UCSC that do well tend to do well in particular subfields, not overall - hence the need to do detailed research beyond just raw numbers.
Yes, feel free to PM me with questions about Michigan!
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Full professors with named chairs are not just fair game, they are generally the best people to target and seek out as advisors - they are the most established and known in the field and thus the most able to help you. Yes, a possible trade-off is that if they are really superstars they might be quite busy, but that can be true of any academic. If they're in your field, it would be a mistake not to mention them in your SoP - you don't want to talk about only junior scholars.
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If you have the equivalent of a major, complete with thesis, but not technically a major, it shouldn't hurt you at all. Admissions committees will just want to see that you have demonstrated aptitude for and basic knowledge of the field. Not everyone in English grad school majored in English.
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My department just hired a recent UCSC Lit PhD into a TT position. Nothing to scoff at - it's a great program! Donna Haraway is emerita in their History of Consciousness department. Plus, Santa Cruz is gorgeous. I generally agree with Phil Sparrow, but it's also really important to do your research about not only placement numbers but also what sorts of jobs people are getting in particular departments - there are a few wild-card lower-ranked ones (~30-60) that do quite well in certain subfields and aren't just placing into heavy teaching colleges.
smellybug, I'm a third-year at Michigan and had no idea that Rackham collected and published all that data! Seriously, all schools should do this. Here are the English stats for anyone interested. Looks like a 71% rate of grads in TT jobs within five years of graduation - really about as good as it gets. Thanks for posting!
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Aside from perhaps the "cognitive science applied to lit crit one," I don't see how any of those subfields are imitating the sciences (which, for the record, is a tendency I find incredibly annoying, since I think the value the humanities have is precisely because we are not a science. I say this as someone who does STS stuff and is interested in the value of various epistemologies).
I tend to agree with Michael Berube:
But I do want to say one thing about the fields of expertise we have created and validated in the humanities over the past 30 or 40 years. They have been, on the whole, pretty awesome. That's a technical term, so let me explain. I have never been among, and indeed I have never quite understood, the people who believe that the rise of the study of race, gender, and class represented a vitiation of the humanities. Nor do I see the rise of the study of sexuality or postcoloniality or disability as an indicator of a decline in the intellectual power of the humanities. Quite the contrary. Though I have not agreed with every aspect of every intellectual initiative of the past 30 or 40 years, I think there is no doubt that the study of the humanities is more vibrant, more exciting, and (dare I say it) more important than it was a generation ago.
And every year I think: This is what makes graduate study in the humanities so fraught, so full of contradiction for so many professors and students. The sheer intellectual excitement of the work, whether it is on globalization or subjectivity or translation or sustainability or disability, is one thing. This work is so valuable—and it offers such sophisticated and necessary accounts of what "value" is.
It's from a quote in this article, which is about alt-ac and how to translate that value to the wider culture: http://chronicle.com/article/Humanities-Unraveled/137291/
I don't think the solution is to go back in time to a politically neuter version of literary study, which I do find boring.
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Just reposting this document, which is seriously great and really illuminating. I wish I'd had this info in such a neat form when I was applying and deciding!
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Re: close-reading Taco Bell and Wendy's menus: http://www.theonion.com/articles/grad-student-deconstructs-takeout-menu,85/
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I do not believe that we must have separate canons for separate mediums of expression, for the simple reason that medium-specificity is dead. Gone. The digital has erased that. In this context, you should definitely read Rosalind Krauss on the "post-medium condition." Medium specificity is not tenable in an era when letter, sound, and image can all be collapsed to binary bits of data.
This argument sort of reminds me of how so many scholars of technology in the 1990s were talking about "the end of geography" because the internet was supposed to obliterate all borders and connect the world into "one world village." And now it's twenty years later and we're like, oh shit, actually geography still matters a lot, because it turns out space is a fundamental aspect of human experience. So are the modes in which we perceive things. Just because we have different types of media now, and are capable of combining media in new and interesting ways, doesn't mean we've rendered media irrelevant. It's important to be able to think about what different types of media are capable of doing.
As far as the canon goes, it's important because literary history is important. It's also important to interrogate it, and do recovery work to challenge it, and let it evolve in that way. But let's not pretend we have no aesthetic measures, or that some texts don't do more interesting things than other texts. We just shouldn't try to make some objective, monolithic scale on which those texts can be judged.
(btw, there are, in fact, people who would pick some version of #3 at least in certain contexts, but don't ask me to explain it because I don't get it.)
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Thanks for the advice. I definitely see the point. Michigan is a school I plan on applying to. I'm just worried that with my scores (they aren't bad but they aren't great) that some of the higher ranked programs won't even bother. I just don't want to have another application season like my last one, where I applied to a bunch of top schools and got slew of rejections. I do see that you are at Michigan, though, correct? Would you mind if I PMed you some questions about the program and faculty? I would love some advice, especially a fellow ecocrit.
Yes, of course! PM away.
(I would say, though, that top 50-ish programs are not necessarily any more or less forgiving about scores than top 20-ish ones. Unless you're below 600 or so on the verbal, in which case I'd suggest taking it again, you're fine. "Top" programs regularly admit applicants well below their average. It really just depends on the program and your fit, etc. We can talk more about second rounds and such over PM.)
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On 3/8/2013 at 7:44 AM, MissHavishslam said:
Yeah, I don't know how much I am willing to rely on rankings. Just because the school is a top 20 does not mean that it will be a good fit for you. When I did my first round of applications I was accepted to Tulsa with no funding (no thank you), but it also was not a good fit for my interests. I think my main approach this time around is going to be POIs, placement records, and funding packages. I think that I'm willing to shoot for one top 20 school but that the rest (probably 9) will be more within my reach. I mean "in my reach" in regards to my GRE scores and undergraduate transcripts. My MA transcript is from a top 30 school and is stellar but I'm not sure how far that will get me.
Also, in regards to rankings, I think placement is more important. Who cares about the ranking of your program when they have the ability to help place you in ANY job in our field?
I mostly agree with you here, but the flip side is that just because it's a top-20 doesn't mean it won't be a good fit for you, either! Don't limit the number of top-20 programs you apply to simply because they happen to be "top-20." I was admitted to several top-20s when I applied, but also rejected at several programs outside of the top 40. Purposely limiting yourself to just one program in that very arbitrary range, when there are several that would be good fits, is letting the rankings dictate too much, and you may miss out on some excellent programs that are good fits simply because you're hedging your bets prematurely in a way that doesn't really make sense. Seriously, fit is going to dictate where you get in, not ranking.
On that note, looking at your interests, of which I share some (particularly ecocriticism), mind if I suggest a few (mostly top-20-ish) programs? First, Michigan's Scotti Parrish is currently doing a project on Hurston (and Faulkner) and ecocriticism; Patsy Yaeger is deep into ecocrit and also has a background in Southern lit; we also have many excellent African-American lit scholars (Meg Sweeney, for example, is lovely, and we are in the process of hiring another) as well as an African-American Studies certificate program; regionalism is also a thing the department does well. Definitely apply! My other suggestions are the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which has plenty of ecocritics and an awesome interdisciplinary environmental humanities program led by William Cronon as well as a strong African-American lit faculty, and definitely UC-Davis, which is a very ecocriticism-oriented department that also has several people that focus on working-class lit. Oregon is trying to brand itself as a decidedly environmentalist-oriented program, so it would make sense to apply, but be warned that even good funding there is paltry (and I don't know much about its placement, so be sure to ask for that info). Hope that helps!
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Also, for anyone accepted to Michigan who enjoys writing, enter the graduate division of the Hopwood Awards. Enter ALL the creative writing contests UMich offers (there are many). I snagged a creative writing fellowship through the Hopwoods in my final semester as an undergrad which will mean I don't have to panic about loan payments/moving expenses this summer as I look for a job.
Well, the Hopwood Graduate Awards pretty much always go to MFA students - which makes sense, since they're the ones that have been selected for their creative writing abilities (and if you think PhD admissions are bad, our MFA program gets over 1,000 applications for ~10-15 spots in each genre of poetry and prose!) and devote all of their time to it. The only exception I can think of is a PhD student here who also has an MFA from elsewhere and published a book of poetry the year he won. Not that you can't enter as a PhD student, but your shot at winning in the grad division is much longer - our MFAs are really good. They're pros!
(Congrats on your award though!)
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Rob Nixon's work might be of interest to you. He works on human rights as it intersects with environmental justice, postcolonialism, and issues of representation - his most recent book, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, is excellent. He also writes about the position of the scholar-activist.
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I like your list here, though I must admit to not having read many of these thinkers. I'm curious: what are your areas of interest/prospective areas of expertise?
Ha, yeah, I hadn't read any of them (except for maybe tiny bits of Lefebvre and Morton) before I got to grad school, either! I'm a modernist, but my interests within that are in spatial/environmental/ecocriticism and epistemology/science studies (STS). Latour is really STS's main guy and writes about political ecology (The Politics of Nature), Lefebvre is contemporary spatial theory's progenitor (The Production of Space), Silverman thinks about relationality in a way I'd call ecological (Flesh of My Flesh), Morton is an ecocritic (Ecology Without Nature). Cronon is an environmental historian, Davidson an epistemologist, Haraway and Shapin are STS.
All this theory is helpful to know, but now that I'm reaching dissertation stage I'm also trying to extract myself from it a bit and think about my primary texts more - at a certain point theory can just send you down a rabbit hole if you make it central, when really it's just supposed to be a tool to help you frame and talk about what you're actually writing about, and which to me feels more "real."
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Contemporary Theory:
Sara Ahmed
Judith Butler
Judith Halberstam
Elizabeth Grosz
Also, the OOO crowd... (Harman, Meillassoux, Brassier, Shaviro, etc.)
"Minor" Theorists:
Husserl
Heidegger
Merleau-Ponty
Foucault
Deleuze
Any advice on where to start with Elizabeth Grosz? I've been meaning to read her forever but she's one of those people who's written zillions of books and articles so it feels overwhelming or impossible to figure out what's important. Have a recommendation for one that's a good intro to her?
Oh, and to play this game:
Contemporary:
Bruno Latour
Henri Lefebvre
Kaja Silverman
Timothy Morton
(Honorable mentions: William Cronon, Donald Davidson, Donna Haraway, Steven Shapin)
Historical:
Bergson
Whitehead
Dewey
Spinoza
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Then someone please explain how people get a 4.5 on the writing portion and still get into an English program? It would seem that if a program begins with numbers they're not very consistent.
Edit: Not that I disagree to an extent, but if we take the results board for its word, some recent acceptances had 4.0 and 4.5 writing portion numbers, including a Stanford acceptance, which seems counterintuitive.
Because they already have your actual writing (in the form of your SoP and especially your writing sample), so they can judge it themselves. The GRE Writing section is scored by a mix of a computer and maybe a high school English teacher (not that I'm knocking those, I was one before being a grad student, but their judgment of writing can be based on very different metrics than academics), which ad comms know. I get the feeling the writing score is one of the ones they care about the least.
- intextrovert, ProfLorax and practical cat
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Fall 2014 applicants??
in Literature, and Rhetoric and Composition
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Portia: just FYI, it's University of Louisiana at Lafayette (ULL), not Louisiana State. The only Louisiana State (LSU) is Baton Rouge. I lived in Lafayette for a few years and loved it!
Is there a reason you're just limiting yourself to Louisiana? If you're willing to expand even just a little bit, you could also apply to Ole Miss or Alabama.