intextrovert

Haha, I didn't mean to sound judgey or harsh. My internet persona maybe comes across a little more sarcastic than I really am. I mean, I was naive and not too informed my first time around as well. And there's nothing wrong with liking the idea of living in New York while you're young - it's just not great criteria on which to base your decision to go to grad school. There are bound to be a lot of uninformed applicants, since it's really hard to get info about programs, so basing it on things like location and institution reputation is the easiest thing. But because we are all on Grad Cafe and thus have done our research, that doesn't apply to any of you fine people!

Yeah, it seems to me that there are several factors that create enormous application numbers, and the two most important seem to be Ivy League status and location in a major city. Both Columbia and Penn qualify for that, and Columbia seems even Ivier and big-citier than Penn - hence the consistent figure of 700s. But I'm not convinced the quality of those large applicant pools is comparable to, say, Indiana's, which would draw people who have done their research and want to go there for reasons other than the idea of living a shiny, glitzy dream city and the idea of going to a school that the world at large recognizes as "good." People who aren't necessarily extremely informed or serious might apply because of perceived prestige and the glamorous idea of the city. That's a major and maybe unfair generalization, but that's my sense. There's no way that Columbia is that great of a "fit" for all those applicants, so it's got to be something shallower. Even looking at those dubious rankings, it gets way more apps than higher-ranked programs. This sense is reinforced by the fact that the number of applications NYU receives is also regularly close to that range. All I can think is, good lord, it was difficult for me to get by in New York with a cushy salaried job in publishing and sharing a tiny 3-bedroom apartment with 3 other people. I can't even IMAGINE doing it on a English grad student's stipend! Godspeed to those "lucky" few of the 700! BTW, those links I posted are almost definitely outdated - departments don't keep them up regularly. I remember all of them except for Michigan's being the same in 2007. So who knows how helpful they are. Bottom line is that acceptance rates are absurdly low.

From Brown's site: We receive approximately three hundred applications each year, and we are able to offer admission to approximately 18 of those applicants. From Michigan-Ann Arbor's site: we aim for an incoming class of 12 students. During the fall 2009 admissions process, we received 353 applications. From UC-Berkeley's site (though, due to budget cuts, this will probably be much lower this year): The English Department typically receives between 450-550 applications each year and offers admission to 40-45 applicants, of whom 18-20 enter the program. From Stanford's site: We are able to matriculate about 10 students with funding from an applicant pool of 350+.

All my apps had December or January 1 deadlines, so I can't help you there. But you might want to post this question in the Literature, Rhet and Comp board on this site: http://forum.thegradcafe.com/forum/43-literature-and-rhetoric-and-composition/

Sure! When you have the Wordle, take a screen shot of the window and save it. Then upload it to photobucket or another of those free photo uploading sites. That will give you a link, so when you hit reply on here you can select the little "insert image" icon and just type in that link.

Creeeepy, you just listed some of my favorite books, and/or ones I've recently read or ordered. Are you tracking my Amazon account? I'm a diehard Walker Percy fan, just finally read Moby Dick since I assigned it to my honors students, and I LOVE Ada and all things Nabokov. I ordered Revolutionary Road but haven't gotten around to it, because fretting over my already-submitted application materials is incredibly time-consuming. Same with The Golden Notebook - not the same Lessing novel, but still. Lorrie Moore is the only one I can't relate to, but I do own and love the Best American Short Stories edition she edited. Since we clearly share the same book taste genes, I'll have to give her a shot, twin. The schools I'm applying to are in my signature. I love them all. My fears, like all of us, are also across-the-board rejection or "acceptance" without funding, which I basically code as rejection. Just ONE accepts me and my bags are packed. I do have a good job on the faculty at a great school, so I'm not dangling over a black hole, but I'm so ready to move on and really dread the idea of going through this process again. I miss learning and having my own projects to work through. (P.S. No way is the MFA going to be a disadvantage.) By the way, y'all should post on the Literature, Rhetoric, and Composition forum on this site...it's been a ghost board lately! Also, is everyone planning on posting results on the results page once they start coming in in about a month? I can see that info becoming a major source of anxiety for me, which I'll appreciate in a sort of masochistic way.

Most English Ph.D. programs require an online application, but then you have to send at least a 15-25 page writing sample to the department through the real mail (sometimes with other supplementary materials). Of the 12 English programs I applied to, only 4 had a place to upload the writing sample on the online app. Also, to the OP: I've heard over and over that this is nothing to worry about. They weren't even open, which means they haven't started to review. The general consensus seems to be that programs are not nearly as strict about deadlines as they seem. Plus, you had it there on time - they just weren't there to answer the door! No worries.

Can you talk to current grad students? Since you're more worried about the social aspect than the academic, they would be the best ones to speak to that. I'm sure if you are open about your concerns (and you're in! so you have a little more freedom in how you present yourself), they'll be able to give you an honest answer about how much the religious aspect of the school permeates campus life. That said, I work at a Christian school in the Deep South, and I'd say the majority of us faculty and many of the students are agnostic, some are other religions, and the Christians are quite tolerant and open. Then there are schools down the road that are EXTREMELY religious, and have anti-abortion rallies, condone homophobic sentiment, and spout the kind of intolerant dogma that makes my blood boil a little. So it really depends on the school, and the best way to find out if it's a significant enough issue to be alienating for you is through the people who are there and have an inside view.

Haha, I am said "someone" on "that other board" that nerdily posted the SoP Wordle idea! Just swooping in and taking credit. And posting mine here, too, because you just can't have enough Wordle! P.S. Coyabean I am secretly really pleased that you enjoyed this as much as I did.

Agreed - what I love about English is that a lot of departments really embrace interdisciplinarity, sometimes even requiring cognate courses in other departments. But if I had to go back and change course, I'd do cognitive psych or evolutionary bio (if I had more science aptitude). Or cultural/human geography. But then again, I intend to incorporate those perspectives in my lit research! Good question!

WOW, those are so much more exciting than my grad school nightmares! Mine involve run-of-the-mill universal rejection, and palpable disappointment in the faces of everyone I have to subsequently tell. Komodo dragons FTW!

I'd be 25. That's one of my "scary ages": an age at which, when it still seemed distant, I imagined I'd have my life together. I really hope I get in for so many reasons, but hitting my 25th birthday with a real direction is definitely one of them!

With all my applications in (sent the last today - hooray!), I need something else to direct my nervous energy towards. I heard that a few English/Literature programs do phone interviews during the application review process. Anyone have experience with this? Is it just for the candidates they are pretty close to admitting? How do you think they are used? What sorts of questions do they ask? This question will probably turn out to be moot, but just curious!

UT-Austin and UC-Santa Cruz: Dec. 1 (Panic button, please!) Berkeley is also Dec. 8.

Well, Ursula Heise is of course the main ecocritic, and I love her work. But there are several people there working on issues of place even if they don't call it ecocriticism. John Felstiner does what I would call ecopoetics, Franco Moretti and Stephen Hong Sohn are all about cultural geography, Judith Richardson, Nicholas Jenkins, and several other people who work in regional literature or globalization. I'm interested in spatial theory in general, and there are a lot of people doing that with a sort of cognitive approach. Some of my other interests also intersect with a lot of the faculty's work, but there are definitely a lot of "place and space" people. Basically, it's my dream school. Though Michigan is up there, too.

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I think that test is a big truckload of BS. If you've got an MFA and and MPhil from Trinity, there's no good reason for you to get a 3.0. I'm not a professional writer, but I have won several awards for my writing, and always sort of prided myself in it. I got a 5.0 the first time and a 5.5 the second. Doesn't seem bad, only a 5.0 is the 73rd percentile (and 5.5 in the 88th). Maybe I'm just being snobby, but the rest of my scores were in the 90-99th percentile range, and I do think writing is a strength of mine! I think what the other poster said is probably true: they're not looking for genuinely good writing and certainly not sophisticated writing - they want a simplistic five-paragraph essay with lots of silly concrete examples. Basically, the kind of essay I'm trying to move the high school seniors I teach beyond. They have computers and out-of-work elementary/middle/high school teachers grade them (not that I'm bashing teachers - I am one - but not all are equal, and the bar to be a GRE grader is low). They grade heavily based on arbitrary things like length. I have to believe the admissions committees know that! I don't think they care about it so much. Your writing sample and SoP are what's important.

Yes, GPA (overall and within the major) definitely goes on a C.V. But what about GRE scores? I have mine on for now, but I'm not sure...

Thanks for the help! That list is great (and I thought I had exhausted that website!), and I'm definitely looking closer at Davis now.

Uh, not what I've heard. My friend who got accepted to Comp Lit programs at Berkeley, Harvard, Yale, and Columbia contacted profs at all those places. The only place she didn't get in was Stanford, where she didn't make contact. I think she actually went to all those campuses, too. I hate networking, so I wish it weren't true, but I do think it probably helps - if only because you're slightly more than just a faceless application to them that way. I don't think it's 100% necessary, and I have heard people on here say that they got in without doing that, but every little bit helps when you're going for 10-20 slots among hundreds of applicants. Plus, a lot of profs are really nice, and it's interesting to hear about what they're working on. They can lead you to other faculty that may be interested in working with you, too.

Anyone out there interested in studying sense of place in literature (ecocriticism, cultural geography, psychogeography, etc.)? I know it's a relatively new focus, and I'm not quite sure I'm doing a great job finding out the best programs for it. I'm currently swooning over Michigan and Stanford. Does anyone have some insight into other schools who have people working on issues of place? I worry sometimes that it appears to be too narrow, even though I don't actually believe it is. It's not my only interest, and I indicate that in my SoP, but I'm worried about how it's perceived, since I'm essentially selling it as my primary focus. If I had to pin myself to a period it would be late 19th/early 20th century. Should I emphasize that more? Also, Oregon seems to be trying to sell itself as THE ecocriticism school. But their ranking is in the 50s. I know, the rankings are unreliable and subjective, but it has to say something about reputation and job placement ability, right?

I'm applying to English PhD programs this fall, and I noticed that on a thread somewhere, someone suggested in passing that non-residency in state schools could be a more important factor than I realized. Worrisome to me, considering the vast majority of the programs on my list are in state schools in states that aren't Louisiana (where I'm a resident)! So how important of a factor is that? Enough that I should consider more private schools, even though I'm dreaming of Virginia and Michigan?

Oh good lord, do Medieval! You'll increase your chances tenfold (which is still very tough!). Tailor your app to that while there's still time!

Whoa, this thread got really heated really quickly! I think understand where both of you are coming from. It's only natural that when you're starting out in the process, you'd want to reach for (what is typically perceived as) the biggest prize. I do dream of teaching and researching and publishing at a R1 or a great SLAC like my undergrad. That's sort of what I envision as the ultimate goal of going to grad school, so when I hear that top 20 is going to get me there, that's what I automatically focus on. But since that didn't happen the first time around, I'm trying to dig deeper and figure out the real reasons I want this, and whether or not they could be satisfied by a different route. But I do think both "yes" and "no" are valid answers to that question, and the former isn't necessarily settling and the latter isn't necessarily arrogant. I teach now at a wonderful, academically rigorous private secondary school in an area of the country that could probably be pretty easily described as "podunk." I admire a lot of the faculty here, and see them as people who could easily be teaching at the university level, maybe even top schools, but choose not to (and many of them do have PhDs). Teaching is taken very seriously here. So when I ask myself whether I want to give 6+ years to get a degree, I have to ask whether what I get when I come out will be different enough from what I'm doing now to warrant it. No doubt that teaching at the university level is different from any secondary school, no matter how academically rigorous, but the type of thing you describe, elaleph, a lesser-known school with a heavy focus on teaching that really inspires its students, sounds like a college version of the school where I work now. And that's not what I envision at the end of getting my degree. Maybe I will change my mind or decide it is different enough to devote that time, but in any case the question does make the only-top-20 question relevant. I think we all love literature, love teaching, love researching and writing, so if it came down to it we'd be happier as profs anywhere than not. But going to a less prestigious grad school will limit the range of choices you'll have later on, because that's the way the world works. Although there's absolutely nothing lesser about deciding to teach at one type of school over another, one of those options happens to be less difficult/impossible than the other (not better!), and deciding how prestigious of a grad school to aim for means facing those choices that otherwise, you might not have had to face until later on. It looks like elaleph may have already made that decision (as evidenced by the condemnation of the publish-or-die ethos, if I interpret correctly), which is fantastic. But GoodGuy doesn't have to yet. Maybe GoodGuy will go to Harvard and decide after to teach at one of those less prestigious schools and be totally happy, or happier - who knows? But I don't think there's anything inherently arrogant, either, with wanting to teach at a top tier school and being fixated on making that happen (and I don't think GoodGuy seems arrogant about it). It's a particular type of experience/life, and it means you're doing it for different reasons, but each has its merits for different people. I, for one, am going to work my butt off on my app, apply to top-20 schools and a few lower ranked ones that are good fits, and then cross my fingers and hope it gets me where I want to go! Anyway, I really did want to thank everyone who gave me advice - I sort of overwhelmed by the goodwill of knowledgeable people willing to so extensively help total strangers over the internet! I feel like I have some great direction now; I'm feeling energized. Also a little anxious about all the work I have ahead of me, but now I know what that work is, which is what I wanted. I'm genuinely grateful. Thank you!

I'd like to join, too!