intextrovert

Yay, more PM runners! I have NEVER been able to run in the mornings, even when I was a track athlete in high school and (briefly) college. I need to have a day's worth of food and activity behind me so I feel like I have something to run on. If I went in the morning I never did as well on the run, and then felt dizzy, weak, and awful the rest of the day. In undergrad after I quit track, I took up distance and ran just about every day for 4-7 miles. I lived in a really beautiful place and so the mountain scenery was always a reward, but I just remember it being such a good thinking time for me - some of my best ideas, as well as a sense of calm, came from running. I don't think my thesis would have been the same had I not been a runner. Needless to say, I really, really want to get into that rhythm again for grad school! Being a high school teacher meant my afternoons/evenings were completely consumed, so I'm hoping the more flexible student schedule will help me get back on track. I just think I'm a clearer, more creative thinker and saner person when I'm running. Yoga also sounds like a good idea and I might give it a try - one of my friends in law school, a sort of type-A guy's guy, not the type you'd usually imagine would be saluting the sun, recently took it up and says it really has helped him both stay in shape and feel centered. I'm sometimes a little suspicious of anything that sound too hippie-dippy, so maybe that's why I've made myself into more of a Pilates girl than yoga, but that's probably an unfair prejudice. Though, I do also recommend Pilates. I plan on checking out several of the fitness classes - I'm sure your university posts them as well. Always a great way to balance out running when it gets monotonous! As far as being a beginning runner, I kind of feel like I'm starting over from scratch, too. What I always did and am doing now to get back into it is start with the treadmill - the terrain is even, the climate is controlled, and overall it at least makes me feel a little more in control at first. You can also more quantifiably track your progress, which keeps me motivated ("Oooh, last week I could only make 18 min without slowing for a bit! Now I can do 30!" That sort of thing). Eventually when I've built up the endurance I start running outside, and it's freeing. But I tend to find outside running the opposite - frustrating - when I'm not yet in shape. But that could just be me.

This is nice advice - thanks for sharing! Although the part about exercise is depressing. Hopefully I can prove him wrong - back in undergrad I was so good about it! I'm hoping the student lifestyle is conducive to it for me, because I've fallen off the wagon in these past two years of working. Anyone know of some good humanities grad student blogs?

You don't have to have a data plan if you have an iPhone - I have a friend who doesn't. The contract thing, though, is true. Here's a really interesting article about the insane cell phone plan system we have here in the USA: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/business/15price.html I have an iPhone as well. Basically, you need AT&T, which people complain about but I think works fine, and should expect to pay about $60 a month if you don't get data. You'll get free nights and weekends and free anytime calls to other AT&T users. Data plans are great, but if you can cope with only having internet at home and certain places on campus, then you'll be fine without. Good luck!

Just agreeing with the above - I struggled with the same question this past season, as I was reapplying to six programs I'd been rejected from in the first round (and added a few more). I'll be attending one of those six in the fall. Ultimately I just let the box speak for itself - and some didn't even ask. I would say very strongly that you really should not mention your previous season unless specifically asked. You get a fresh start and have the right to be treated like any other applicant. They really don't care what their previous decisions were on your previous applications - this is a new one, and bringing up the past is just letting it weigh you down more than necessary. Other than answering direct questions honestly, treat yourself like a new applicant, because you are. There's an element of feeling very vulnerable in all this as a reapplicant, but you have to remember that's just your feeling and thus is your business, not something that's part of the application process itself and certainly not something that's coming from their end. It's business, it's professional, so approach it that way - reapplying is not making up for past mistakes and you have nothing to apologize for or explain away. That's so not at all on their radar. Just be the applicant you want to be/are this time around! Good luck!

Why don't you ask for job placement statistics for each of the programs? That's what really matters, not a nebulous (and subjective) concept of "prestige." I'd lean very strongly towards UW. If the comparative prestige of the programs is close enough that it's debatable, tripling your debt for it seems very unwise. Especially for a Master's program.

This is tricky. I think the key for the SoP is to mention it in a detached sort of way, and perhaps almost in passing. It shouldn't be emotional or a saga of overcoming adversity (although a personal history statement/diversity statement could lean more that way). But the fact is that your intellectual interests are informed by this experience, and thus I don't see why you should avoid it as part of the narrative of your intellectual development. So perhaps something like a one-sentence "As a first-generation college student and child of an immigrant coming from a background of habitual neighborhood violence, I became interested in learning about strategies and methods of creating more functional communities than the one I had grown up in." Obviously made to sound better, but you get the gist. See what I mean? Tell the story not as an end in itself, but as part of what motivates you to do the work you want to do.

I do want to just add one thing that I do think is more broadly applicable than just to you, MM (and for the record, I really don't think the above posters intended to attack you, but just intended to make it clear to other applicants who might be considering taking your advice/example that they, as people who would literally be on the receiving end of those emails, think that it would be a bad idea). In some ways, I totally sympathize with you and the impulse to establish contact with profs and students at programs you'd like to apply to. But, like the above posters, that email made me cringe a bit as well, and here's why: After my first unsuccessful application season, after taking a year off from the whole thing to recover, I wanted to do everything differently the second time around, and was convinced that one thing I needed to do was more networking (that idea was probably influenced by my time in an NYC publishing house). I LOATHE networking at every level - hence one of the reasons I left the corporate world - but I felt like my problem had been that I was just utterly gauche about the inside world of academia, and felt that I needed to somehow establish "productive contact" with people on the inside of these programs. Yes, it was to find out if I would really be a good fit there, but really, a big motivation was also to begin getting initiated into that world, or to prove I was or could be part of it. But the ironic thing is that sending a long, detailed email is itself one of those things that conveys that you're not a part of it and makes you run the risk of looking a little clueless. We may certainly be doing some of the things that academics do, like teaching and going to conferences and writing articles, etc., but we're not quite in the world at that level yet and may have to accept some degree of humility about how much we know, or can possibly know. I couldn't see it at the time, but now that I've gotten at least a little bit more direct experience with the way things work in PhD programs, it's so obvious to me why the giant emails I was tempted to send would have been a politically terrible move. If a bunch of current grad students are saying (candidly, I think, and not bitchily) that an email like that would be the sort of thing that is fodder for the proverbial departmental water cooler, then it probably has some merit. In the end, I was too chicken to send any emails to most programs and ended up just doing it for two. But I'm now grateful that I was what I though of at the time as "chicken": it was really my intuition telling me not to do something that was forced (again, HATE networking), and would feel forced to everyone involved. I sent a short email (200 words - you really ought to be able to reduce your interests down to that) with just a few (2?) broad questions to a prof I had heard was generally receptive, and after an enthusiastic response, and a few phone calls and further conversations, did establish that productive contact. That's the program I'll be attending, but only after a long season of sweating it out on the waitlist. I want to emphasize that I highly, highly doubt that any of the conversations I had with them (aside from the core content of what they'd been saying all along, which was that my work was a great fit) had anything to do with my getting in, which could have easily not happened - I got in on April 15. The other email I sent to the other program, very similar, resulted in a short but polite reply, and I got rejected. All the programs I got solid acceptances from? No contact. Eventually, I did send longer emails, but only after I was accepted at programs. Even at the places I was waitlisted, I was hesitant to send detailed emails, and the one longish email (500 words) I did send went unanswered until I got in. Much of academia is about implicit, subtle hierarchies, and you really have to be careful about respecting them at every level. So, my non-personal, general take-home message is that despite how nerve-wracking it is, there's really not much you can do other than write great SoPs and samples. Trying to appear/make yourself a part of that world will likely backfire by making you look presumptuous, thus making it all the more obvious that you're not part of it (which, really, is the reason you're talking to them about their programs in the first place!). And also, that trying to know SO much about a program doesn't make sense at this stage: you should just go with the CV/article/website research you've been doing, and once you get some acceptances, the nuances become more important. Really, the only way to get any accurate sense of the nuances of a program at all is by visiting, and the fullest experience of that comes after your acceptances have narrowed down the pool for you. In forming that pool, you just have to go with those "objective" criteria - it's not fair to ask profs and students for that level of nuance so soon. It will come later, when you're in. There really aren't shortcuts. I wish you luck!

Most, perhaps, but not all. The program I'll be attending, for example, has no distribution requirements. But yes, no matter what, Ph.D. programs are going to be looking for people who already have pretty good direction and focus. I am amazed at how little my results correlated to the US News rankings. I applied to 3 top-10 schools, and was waitlisted at one; 4 ranked 10-20 and got into 2 (one was initially a waitlist); 2 ranked 20-30 and got into both; 3 lower than 30 and was rejected from 2 of the three (and the one I was admitted to is particularly devoted to my subfield). So there's not much of a discernible pattern there. But then, when I consider my own "fit" list that I made beforehand, there are definitely correlations, and my admits/waitlists are grouped at the top of that more personalized list (though there are of course exceptions). My conclusion based on my personal experience is that all you hear about the importance of "fit" is true. I don't think Santa Cruz rejected me because I was "too good," but because it was too nontraditional of a program for me, and they probably picked up on that. Even "lower-ranked" programs get an extremely high volumes of applications, and they are all going to have varying definitions of what constitutes "fit." You're probably right that there is some hedging of bets to yield higher matriculation rates, but I suspect that's less common than we're suggesting here. But I also like what soxpuppet says about fit not being just about fit with research interests, but also with the sort of preparation, and the sort of goals, the applicant seems to have. But a straight-up "She's clearly really great; let's reject her before she can reject us" seems out of line with the nuances (and caprices) of the admissions process.

I sent all of my letter-writers kings cakes from my favorite Cajun bakery right before Mardi Gras (I live in Louisiana), with thank-you notes on them. But I just like giving people king cakes, and did it because I wanted to, not because I felt obligated. A gift is really not necessary - hand-written thank-yous are probably already more that what most people do. I also have given them periodic email updates throughout the process, and sent one last update yesterday about my final decision. If you've already sent hand-written notes, it's probably overkill to do it again or send a gift as well!

Vermont. So not a very fair comparison. I also just declined Wisconsin, and thought Madison was a really, really beautiful city. So maybe also compared to that. Michigan is a better choice, but I was sad to let Madison go. One of my major research interests is place/geography/space/environment in literature, so I'm especially attuned to that. But this is exactly what I want to hear! I got only a very limited view of Ann Arbor during a very rushed December visit. I'm thinking I'll love it once I'm there.

That does sound like an incredibly tough choice, but I tend to say, "go for the adventure!" and that seems like what you did. USC sounds like a place that you would have been comfortable, that's very much in the vein of what you've already done or been doing. But MIT seems like it's going to challenge you and perhaps bring your work in new, exciting directions - which is ostensibly the goal, right, for you to develop as an artist? And it sounds like that program provides a lot of different avenues for you to develop, so that's just exciting, to see your future open up like that. The line, "I felt their basic intellectual thrust (that of "creation of knowledge through art-making") fit very closely not just with my career as an artist, but my ideals as a person overall" is what sells it to me: this is clearly the right choice for your career and professional life. And yes, money talks, and with more stable income you will be better able to concentrate on your work. I had/have to remind myself of that as well: it's not just for greed that the funding package should seriously factor into your decision - there are a lot of offshoots and benefits of a program that can fund its students well. And plus, Boston is lovely! You'll make friends. Worry not.

I'll be starting my Ph.D. in the English department of UM this fall! I'm really very excited. I'm always curious about how different people in different fields make their decisions, and I'm especially interested when those people ended up deciding on the same place I did! So, then - why UM? Why did you ultimately choose Michigan? I'll start: It's a highly-regarded program with great placement ("great" of course relative to the humanities job market), it's known for its collegial atmosphere among students and between faculty and students, it's strong in my subfield and there are quite a few people working on the specific things I'm interested in within that subfield, it's got great financial structure, including two fellowship years out of six guaranteed years of support, and everyone I've met associated with the department has been lovely. Ann Arbor itself was both a plus and a question mark. I like that it's supposed to be a fun town and a good place to be in your 20's, liberal without being too hippie, foodie-oriented. It seems very grad-student friendly, as the graduate population is so large. But I'm a little worried that it's sort of an island. I'm no big city person at all, so I should be okay, but it's something I think about. I'm actually not worried about the weather - I went to school in Vermont, and now living in the South I really miss the change of seasons. But I've also gotten used to being surrounded by a lot of natural beauty, and am worried I might feel a deficit of that in Ann Arbor. I'd love to hear anyone else's thought process that led them to Michigan, or thoughts in general about the school/place!

Being on 2.5 waitlists (2 actual, one accepted but on a first-year funding waitlist) until April 15 made the decision part especially difficult. I am very, very happy with where I'll be going in the fall - it had been a top choice for me from the beginning - but it meant that I had to turn down a program that I really LOVED. Worse, I had just found out that morning that I was getting that first-year funding at that program, and had been so elated and basically thought I was going there. When I got the call from Dream School a few hours later, it was obviously amazing and wonderful and all of that, but also really confusing. I had to make a choice in a few hours that a lot of people got months to make, and the up and down of emotions gave me vertigo. Ultimately, the program I chose is not only as good of a fit for me as program #1, but has a much stabler and less stressful financial support and program structure, as well as better placement rates. Still, I've gotten little pangs when looking at the courses I won't get to take at the first school, or the email from someone I had really wanted to work with saying they're disappointed I won't attending, or looking at the pictures from my visit. So I think that's normal; you have to "mourn" that whole future you had imagined. But the truth is that if I hadn't gotten into or decided to attend the program I am going to, I would have mourned that as well, and I think ultimately my life would have been a lot harder at that other program, which probably means I wouldn't be as happy as I will be at the program I'm going to. You just have to focus on what you're getting in exchange!

I declined an unfunded offer from the University of Washington MA/PhD program (since it's unfunded the deadline was May 15th - I would have declined sooner but couldn't figure out how, or who to contact!). I also declined a fully-funded + fellowship offer from the UC-Davis PhD program. Somewhat painfully - everyone there was so lovely!

Wha...? I really can't figure out the tone of this post. Here's my jargon-free explanation: Basically, think of these threads as rooms. You enter a room where people you don't know are discussing something with a lot of personal relevance to everyone in the room as well as people outside of it, and interrupt it to ask a question completely and exclusively centered on you. Basically, that question seems to be: "I'm bad at math, and don't like it much. Can I thus be a literary scholar?" We all look at each other perplexed, because we have no idea (especially since we don't know you, much less your work), and don't really see what one has to do with the other anyway. But we want to include you in the conversation, and thus try to reframe your question in terms of something that would have broader implications, for other people aside from you, and also for the conversation we were all having. But it turns out that you don't care about the larger issue and really just want us to talk about you, and answer an unanswerable question. So we then explain that liking qualitative methods over quantitative ones has zilch to do with your aptitude as a literary scholar. Then you get mad, sarcastic, and belligerently drunk (in my head, this is a cocktail party), and yell at the host. Everyone uncomfortably sips on their wine, and probably leaves the room.

And, voila! Agreement! Indeed. Although I wouldn't say "begin." And SFW, I'm not really sure what you're asking, either. Of course English is not the only discipline using qualitative methods, and of course it doesn't use them exclusively - Wayne Booth and his Aristotelian ordering and categorizing comes to mind as a somewhat quantitative approach to literature. Maybe literary scholarship tends to value qualitative methods more highly, and it certainly, obviously, lends itself well to that. But as you yourself (or your wife) point out, and as I think Chesterton and I just came to, those categories are more fluid than that, and trying to frame them as oppositional categories doesn't hold up to scrutiny. And when I said "the context from which this debate arose," I was talking about the actual origin of the debate, before you entered - so MJP and wordslinger's exchange about how much we should trust the (ostensibly quantitative, though, as diehtc0ke points out, like anything, wound up in qualitative determinations as well) rankings. Whether you call it quantitative or qualitative, the methodology of the rankings is clearly - there's no other way to put it - sketchy. But it's what we've got, and to a limited degree can become a self-fulfilling prophesy. Though I think some of this thread points to some reasons to hope that cycle may begin to be broken, at least in small ways.

Argh, sketchy internet strikes again. Sorry for the double post.

I agree with you, Chesterton, that self-examination and critique is always a good thing, but I don't think that means that it's impossible to remark on trends that might actually be positive. For the most part, I agree with your arguments, and the privilege that got a lot of us to the level where we can even think about grad school is undeniable. But I do think (optimistically) that things are changing for the better, and don't think it's wrong to talk about that while of course keeping in mind the systemic problems that remain up and down the education system. (And yes, it's amazing how far a measured tone can go - I sometimes need to be reminded of that as well!) I would disagree, however, with the part where you say that democratization is linked to work done primarily in the social and hard sciences. I wouldn't disagree with you that work being done there has been crucial for some of those advances, but so is the work of many people using more qualitative methods - theorists, for example, of race or class or gender have done much to challenge and question the way society thinks about inequity. I would disagree also about some of those assumptions about qualitative vs. quantitative analysis. I have nothing against either and think that a good analysis of any issue can benefit from both. But you seem to suggest that quantitative data are inherently more objective, and that is operating on certain assumptions that can be dangerous. Quantitative analysis is also susceptible to bias and is conducted based on a certain set of assumptions that need to be questioned every bit as much as any qualitative analysis. And it is all the more problematic because we tend to more easily accept numbers as something that stands above human bias - the very trap you seem to be worried about in qualitative analysis, where intuition sits unquestioned. Quantitative analysis doesn't escape the fact of its human origin. See The Bell Curve as one of many examples, right? I actually think that theorists, etc., or people employing qualitative methods to reach conclusions can provide standpoints from which to look critically at quantitative data that seems otherwise unquestionable (because of those common-sense intuitive senses you're talking about, which new theories, sometimes reached qualitatively, can challenge). Anyway, I think we lost sight of the context from which this debate arose, which was about the value of rankings and all the quantitative data that goes into them versus more qualitative data about the strength of programs. Both of those are flawed, and so one should be skeptical while using both. Soxpuppet acknowledges at the beginning of the thread that we have relied on that quantitative data so some degree, as many of us didn't seriously look at programs outside the "Top 50." Though I'd say after that, qualitative data became equally as important.

I’ve been following this thread with interest, and thanks to soxpuppet for gracefully extracting the most productive part of that other conversation! I’ll repeat what everyone has said, which is that this sort of exchange is exactly what excites me about entering grad school and academia in general – it's thrilling to get to call all of you people colleagues! Which has sort of made me think about forums like this one, and the role of the internet and online communities, which has been mentioned in passing. Financial disadvantage is always going to be the big one that affects and/or determines other types of advantages, period, but that’s another animal. But there are other types as well, I think, so I wanted to talk about those – I think that’s how the conversation started, thinking about the “hegemony” or lack thereof perhaps, of well-established and well-respected programs in the field, including but not limited to Ivies. From hanging around places like this, I’ve really noticed a correlation between the type of undergrad institution and how well-prepared and thus successful applicants are. This is certainly not deterministic – there are plenty of applicants from lesser known schools who do well (holla, diehtc0ke!), but I’m talking about correlation. As strokeofmidnight has pointed out a few times, this is not necessarily due just to name recognition and prestige, but what sorts of resources and opportunities for scholarly development come along with being attached to one of those institutions. It really seems to me like that is mostly true. But it hasn’t been just prestigious undergrad institutions in general, but ones that also have at least respectable graduate programs, with faculty very much immersed in the current state of the field. Here’s what I mean. Disclaimer: I know that this is a totally different discipline, so I’m using it as an analogy more than as an example or as anecdotal evidence, but I do think in this capacity there are likely some correspondences. I went to what is generally considered an “elite” school, a top-ranked SLAC. My best friend was the star of our undergrad econ department – multiple profs doted on her, she won awards, and has done some really incredible work in her field since graduation, and will be first-author on a publication. Heck, a country’s government even used some of her research to determine policy! She has been working for an Ivy League department, and recently sat down with one of her bosses to talk about applying to PhD programs. Basically, he told her that she’d have almost no shot at this school. If an applicant comes from an undergrad department outside of one of the respected (top ranked) econ grad programs/research institutions, the adcom doesn’t know anything about your department and is unlikely to think it has prepared you for any serious work in the field. Additionally, my undergrad institution’s departments tend to not think about pre-professionalizing or even providing the option for it (it’s all about love of knowledge! is the constant refrain), and thus she had gaps in knowledge and background that are considered essential for those programs. This is particularly bad for econ, which requires a lot of math that my undergrad institution didn’t (I think of that as analogous to the fact that we come across almost NO theory as English major except for one catch-all class isolated from any other work we did, and I literally never read a literary scholarly article for class, or have ever been told how to use secondary sources. It was all close reading). She’s going to apply in poli sci now, but some of the disadvantages of coming from an undergrad department that is NOT at a research institution are still going to apply. So you see, there’s a mix of old-school elitism as well as legitimate concerns about her background that would prevent her from getting in to the Ivory (Ivy?) Tower. Now, this is one school, and I think English departments tend to be significantly more open than that. But the point is that I only realized from frequenting these forums that there was a lot I didn’t know I didn’t know, about (pre)professionalization, current discourse, theory, academic parlance, whatever. And how can you remedy the gaps in your knowledge if you don’t know what you don’t know?! My undergrad has people who see themselves mostly as teachers, and are thus somewhat removed from the current discourse. My advisor, who I’m close to, told me that my thesis was “clearly of publishable quality,” that I approached my work like a scholar, and she along with a few other profs encouraged me to apply to grad school. But the truth is, while they’ve offered support, they haven’t really been able to offer advice, or connections. They don’t really know much about who is doing what at what school, or what different departments are like, or have extensive connections. They’re mostly detached from that world. Knowing what I know now, I think it’s insane that I was told my senior year that my thesis was publishable – I clearly have a long way to go before that’s true. Which brings me to the role of online communities. The answer to the above question (“How can you remedy gaps in knowledge if you don’t know what you don’t know?”) is to make contact with people who do know what you don’t know. The internet gives you access to resources you would not have access to otherwise – mostly in the form of well-informed people who are a part of that discourse, whether through their undergrad institution or other connections/opportunities they’ve had. (Of course, I recognize that if you can’t get access to internet/time to research, the economic disadvantage trumps this potentially equalizing tool). As I’ve mentioned a lot, I was rejected my first round, probably for a lot of reasons, but the major one is that I went into it blind. My undergrad profs had only a vaguely better idea than I did about what I was up against, or what I needed to do. The curriculum had been aimed at helping students find literature meaningful and enrich our lives, not prepare us to engage in any sort of discourse or enter any scholarly community. Another (talented) friend from my undergrad essentially had the same experience this round, with the same results. This time, though, I sought out advice. I got names of scholars whose I might want to check out, knowledge about programs’ tilts that I had no idea about. I read about the sorts of projects others were working on, the angles they were approaching from, and investigated schools of thought I didn’t even know existed. Obviously, I had to do the work of actually reading and researching and reframing and refocusing, but I could do that with a baseline framework to start from. No one can do the work for you, but they can tell you what that work is. I really think that the internet has the potential to really even the playing field in that way, where applicants who, for whatever reason – their undergrad institution, their socioeconomic status, their life situation, whatever – don’t have that knowledge and have found themselves out of the “club” that soxpuppet talks about, now have the opportunity to acquire it (due to altruistic strangers), if they do the work. Having said all that, I don’t know that in my situation anything about it was really unfair, per se. It's just the way it is, and I accept that because of my academic background, there are some gaps in my knowledge and preparation. I accept that I had and still have some catching up to do. I sure as hell wouldn’t trade my undergrad experience for the world, despite the disadvantage at which it may or may not have put me. But I may not feel that way if I didn't have any way of getting that information in order to catch up. I mean, I ended up doing fairly well this season by my standard, and I really do owe a lot of that to what I learned from people like a lot on this forum. Do I think I might have done better if I’d had a different background? Sure, maybe, but I also might have done better if, say, my parents were different people, if I’d studied a different language, or I had a different job, or even a different mind! Who knows – you can’t go down that path, you can only deal with what you are and what you’ve done, and it’s fallacious to think any other way. Anyway, I think it is interesting what’s happening now, because of the ease of dissemination of information. I’ve mostly been talking about people with different academic backgrounds, but even on top of that I think the greater availability of info means that people can get enough info about programs, people, etc. to make decisions based on things other than perceived prestige or ranking. I would say during my first round, I would have been a lot more likely just to choose the highest-ranked program, just because I didn't know much more, but now I have about a zillion more important aspects to consider. I mean, we have enough access to information that we can say to our advisors and profs, “No, maybe X University was like that 10 years ago, but not now” and make decisions accordingly. That in itself is amazing, and has to challenge the rules of the game.

I'm going to give up as well, but just one final note: it is funny that manatee is casting him/herself as a therapist or qualified advice-giver, when the people arguing with him/her are not the people s/he is aiming the advice at: Pamphilia, strokeofmidnight, soxpuppet and I are going to those top programs, and I believe Strong Flat White hasn't even applied once yet. So attributing our eye-rolling at some of your more ridiculous comments to defensiveness/insecurity/personal hang-ups, instead of considering the idea that it might actually be the content of your argument that is flawed, or more accurately your assumptions and attitude, doesn't make sense. We don't have anything personally at stake! Anyway, aside from the laughable levels of pomposity reached, I've enjoyed reading some of the responses to this thread - Pamphilia, I think that's an interesting perspective about the democratization of the discipline, and hope you're right. wordsliger, I like your handle, because it could either be Word Slinger or Words Linger. Good luck to all!

Oops, double post.

Agreed, it is never a bad idea, and everyone going into this needs to know exactly what sorts of odds they are facing, especially in lower-ranked programs. And I really am glad you brought your German-inspired bluntness (this also happens in Vietnam - my friend living there was first told she was too skinny and then later, "You're getting so fat and white!") to the question. These are doubts we've all had at some point, but arguing against them reinforces for me why I made the choices I have, like reapplying this year. Believe me, teaching high school seniors at a private school has made me pretty weary of the snowflake syndrome and general sense of entitlement. If another of my kids complains that they shouldn't have gotten a D because they tried their hardest, I'm going to vomit. But again, your assumption is that that is what is necessarily at work here - that you are the truth-teller (the ACTUAL special snowflake!) and the rest of us are just living-in-illusions snowflakes. It's not the question itself that is problematic, but the implication of judgment and, more than anything, ironically, a sense of that very entitlement itself lurking underneath the surface of your posts! I think essentially we all agree and are well-aware that more prestigious schools will open more doors (though why are you hatin' on Indiana? It's juuust barely out of the top 20, and from what I understand, for Victorian lit it could hold its own with much higher-ranked schools). The quibble most of us have, though, is the assumption that if you are not lucky enough to be accepted into the top 20 (and are we really putting this much stock into US News and its 35% reply rate surveys?), it's a stupid move and not worth it to go. That's where the "worldview, different goals," etc. stuff comes in. A little self-reflection is a good thing to call for, but I mostly take issue with the assumption that if these people actually self-reflected, no one in their right mind would go to BU or Rice or re-apply, because that's what YOU would decide. Give people some credit - we're all adults here. Consider the possibility of a different value system. And seriously, when I say "different" that's not bullsh*t sugar-coated snowflake talk for "lower" or "worse." It's just different. You're right that you'll have a better shot of getting a nice job at an Ivy, but as foppery points out with his/her anecdote, even that's not a guarantee. Pots and kettles, remember! This is not a very practical or financially smart move for any of us, even if you're going to Harvard. At any rate, yes, it's never a bad idea to question yourself and whether this is really the right way to go. The problem comes in judging each other, or thinking that because you've had the opportunities and, I would daresay, luck (and with these odds, I do consider my success this round to be partly due to luck), you're charmed. So I would say, ask yourself the same question! If, after you get your Ivy Comp Lit Ph.D., you can't get a TT job, will it have been worth it to you? If the answer is no, well, I might ask the same of you that you've been asking of others here: reflect. As long as we're characterizing entire cultures, the nice thing about the American perspective is that ostensibly it's open to different viewpoints and backgrounds, whereas this other, harsher one assumes that its own standard is the only standard that exists. I mean, hell, I'm going to produce the best work I can at my top-25/top-20/top-10 (gah get me off these waitlists!) program and try to meet that sort of standard, but I'm aware that if I don't, I will be meeting more personal standards of success. Snowflakes!

Why, though? This is going a little off-topic, but do you actually regret going to Thailand or spending time people-watching in Paris, regardless of whether you had gotten into grad school? Money matters, but life is more than that. I really don't see anything wrong with drifting for a few years in your 20s, especially your early 20s, and especially if you're not going into debt. In fact, I think it can even be valuable. Even a lot of my friends who never planned on going to grad school "drifted" for a while after graduation, working abroad, doing fellowships, or waiting tables and writing. What's the rush towards the "adult" things? I know a lot of people who launched straight into the career track, and are now taking time to drift because they need it to figure out what they really want. You're only young and relatively free to be irresponsible for a limited amount of time. There are also tons of very successful people who didn't get anywhere until their 30s or so. My cousin, for example, in his 40s, now a high-powered PR guy in NYC with his own firm, drifted and was totally directionless for a long time (at 29, he was unemployed and sleeping on an air mattress). So to me there is nothing wrong with having no idea about your future, and keeping grad school as an option doesn't seem detrimental to that. I think you're assuming everyone has the same sort of vision for the future. I did start down the "career" path, working in publishing at a major house in NYC, but hated it. HATED it. I could do it, I could have worked up the corporate ladder, but I would have hated my life. So I decided to start teaching high school. Again, I could easily do this and probably be fairly content, but I've always wanted to be a professor and really miss producing my own scholarship. So I'm going back to grad school, and will likely be attending either a top-20 program or possibly top-10 program (still have some waitlist issues to sort out), though last time I applied I was rejected across the board. So as for your idea of "having it," I agree with you up to a point, but it's just not deterministic like that. My profs in undergrad told me I "had it," but that didn't stop me from getting rejected my first round. I needed time to mature as a scholar, and my undergrad institution, an elite SLAC, really hadn't exposed me to any kind of critical or theoretical discourse (as in, I didn't even really know that existed to a large degree, much less how to insert myself in it). I needed time to catch up. So yes, while I agree that to be a successful scholar you do have to have some natural aptitude/personal qualities, that "it" factor, inasmuch as admissions committees or anyone else can predict, is much more fluid and malleable than you seem to suggest. I'm under no illusion that I'll definitely have a job waiting for me when I come out, but the alternative is what? Working up the corporate ladder in a job I can, at best, tolerate? I don't have those ambitions. More likely I'd just continue teaching high school, which I can do when I get out of grad school if I can't find a TT job, and which having a PhD will qualify me for more money to do (especially at the good private schools). And I will have spent 6 or so years of my life doing work that is meaningful and valuable to me, and teaching. AND I'll have a shot (in the dark?) at that dream job and making it big in the only world I would care about making it big in. AND I won't even have debt. That's worth it to me. My point is not that everyone has these specific paths, but that there are lots of paths and that different people have been given different opportunities at different times and have different visions of their futures. But it's unfair to assume that because they don't have the same vision or the same opportunities as you, they are less informed or making a stupid choice by re-applying or applying to programs out of the top 20 or so - it does come off as elitist. I think strokeofmidnight is right in that people are more informed than you give them credit for.

A studio apartment in NYC for $1200?! Certainly not in Manhattan, right? Or even Brooklyn...maybe Astoria? I paid almost that for a teeny tiny room in a 3 BR apartment in Manhattan. The cheapest studio or one-bedroom I ever heard of in Manhattan, outside of Harlem/Washington Heights, was $1800. One of the many reasons I left...