poliscar
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Posts posted by poliscar
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41 minutes ago, Warelin said:
I wouldn't say it is common to negotiate with programs that are fully-funded. Depending on how stipend is determined, some programs (that don't provide equal funding for everyone) might be more open to negotiating than a program that equally funds everyone. I also wouldn't try to negotiate unless it really is the only factor that is causing you to not accept the offer. If more funding is acquired, it's common courtesy to accept on the spot. It's also good to keep in mind that while programs won't rescind their offer because you're asking for more money, it might leave them with a less-than-desirable impression of who you are.
I'd have to disagree. I negotiated a higher offer from a fully-funded program (in relation to an offer from another) and it was treated as a totally normal part of the procedure. I was also told by the DGS of the second program to email him if any programs offered me more money. Obviously you don't want to be too aggressive or pushy, but I think it's difficult to come across that way when a lot of programs expect a sort of miniature "bidding war" for students. I'd also say that there are clear upper-limits to funding; while a lot of programs will ask you to forward your highest offer to them, not many will match a stipend like Stanford's.
TLDR: ASK FOR MORE MONEY -
Congrats to the Berkeley acceptances! Looking forward to meeting y'all at visit week
Feel free to message me if you have any questions about the program.
- northwestnative, FiguresIII and Mumasatus
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17 hours ago, Eucerin said:
@sad_diamond Thank you!!!
I really like the program and can't be more happy. But I am still kind of worry about the funding situation ?
Anyone know anything about Berkeley rhetoric funding?
As a current Berkeley grad student (not in Rhetoric, thankfully), don't do it unless you get a Mellon or something. Funding and teaching are distributed very unevenly in the department—some admitted students have to teach from their first semester onward—and research funding for graduate students was recently cut entirely.
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One upside to German is the easy availability of money. The DAAD (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst) has a very ready supply of funding for students learning and/or doing research in Germany. Obviously there are comparable opportunities in Italy, but with nowhere near the same level of funding, and with a lot more competition.
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On 2/11/2017 at 4:34 PM, losemygrip said:
At least one person on that list is a horrible human being. Others are not so young. Just FYI. (I suppose it doesn't matter if you're just looking for reading material.) I just saw that English is coming out with some new things that look very interesting.
I don't think that the objective "youth" of scholars was really central to the question. None of the people I mentioned are close to retirement, whereas the OP specifically mentioned that the scholars they were looking at are. The question—as far as I understand it—is about potential supervisors, and the scholars I mentioned are either mid-career (in terms of supervision at least), or just seeing through some of their first doctoral candidates.
Re. the personal attack on one of the people mentioned—sure, it's very possible. That being said, it's probably best to keep that sort of commentary to private messages. -
Before anything else, you'll be very, very hard pressed to find a PhD program in Art History (the humanities in general) that allows you to defer admission. It's just not something that happens; programs will tell you to apply again the next year.
In terms of appropriate programs, I'd definitely look at Berkeley (Darcy Grimaldo-Grigsby, Lisa Trever), Harvard (Tom Cummins), UCLA (Charlene Villaseñor Black, Stella Nair), Yale (Mary Miller, Carol Armstrong), and potentially Northwestern (Jesús Escobar, Stephen Eisenman, Hollis Clayson). I think there are a lot of cases where she won't necessarily find a perfect advisor, who works in 19th century Latin American art, but instead has to focus on finding places where she could put together a great committee. So in that case I'd be on the lookout for schools with Latin American early modernists, pre-Columbianists, and scholars in 19th century American/European art. -
I believe that Wood's courses in German have been cross-listed with the IFA, so I imagine it would be fairly easy to work with him. Also since he has coauthored a fair amount of work with Nagel (including Anachronic Renaissance!), I wouldn't be surprised if they end up co-chairing dissertations together. In that case you would still be working through the IFA, so I wouldn't worry too much about the interdisciplinarity of things (though I understand the apprehension). Probably worth emailing one of them to check, but I don't see why it wouldn't work out.
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It would be worth looking into Alexander Nagel at NYU/IFA. Christopher Wood is also at NYU, albeit in the German department.
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Chicago interviewed around January 27th-28th last year I think, so their turnaround is pretty quick!
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4 hours ago, Warelin said:
It's hard to tell if you're serious or not but misinformation can be dangerous.
If you go to: http://gradschool.cornell.edu/academics/field-metrics
Then click: "Selectivity and Yield Over 5 years", you'll be guided to Cornell's admission stats. If you select "Comparative Literature", you'll see that SU/FA 2015 saw a total of 7 out of 71 applicants get admitted. Of the seven, 3 chose to enroll. I think one of the most important things to realize is that there is a difference between the numbers of applicants accepted and the number of applicants matriculated. While the matriculation seems low, it's important to remember that there may have been a significant overlap between Cornell and students that chose to enroll in another "top-school". While we don't have data from every school, I don't think there is a school that has 100 percent of its acceptances take up their offer 100 percent of the time.I believe Yanaka was referring to the number of languages required!
Re. Cornell being a top program in Comparative Literature—uh, yeah, it definitely is, just look at the faculty. Jonathan Culler, Bruno Bosteels, Naoki Sakai, Cathy Caruth, etc... It's definitely top-notch, especially for certain theoretical strands. -
I honestly don't buy the 700 applications statistic from Columbia. For comparison, Stanford mentions that they get 300+ applications and admit 9, and Harvard lists a similar ratio of 300-350 applicants & 10-15 students admitted. The same goes for Brown, with stats of approximately 300 applications/18 admitted. Really, even if living in New York is a significant draw, I don't see how that would lead to a difference of 350-400 applicants, especially since the programs in question are all of comparative quality and reputation.
Part of me wonders whether Columbia is including MA applicants to inflate the overall number, but I can't say what the motives behind that could be. Something about their statistics seems pretty off though, regardless of motive. -
12 minutes ago, JessicaLange said:
I'm not sure if this is the right place for this, but I'm sort of worried about the limitations of most PhD programs. 19th century British literature is definitely what I want to study, but there are so many other authors that I love that don't quite fit in this time frame. For example, I would love to be able to teach a class in early 20th century American literature, but I'm afraid that my focus will sort of pigeonhole me for the rest of my career.
A lot of programs will have you declare a sub-speciality or second area for your qualifying exams. I don't think there's really a huge split at all between the two periods you mention. I mean, so many Victorianists end up writing about Henry James.
Also to add, you could easily situate your work as Atlantic/hemispheric/oceanic (whatever is floating around at the time) and dip into 20th century American lit from a British base. -
I think Chicago interviewed last year because the previous cohort was much larger than expected. It will be interesting to see if they interview again this year, or if they change things up again.
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On 12/6/2016 at 7:18 PM, Warelin said:
Thanks for the advice, Poliscar. I've managed to cut it down by a few pages.
I have my CV divided between education, teaching experience, relevant employment, publications, awards/honors, and public readings. I've noticed that I do include a few awards/honors from my undergraduate years. Do you think this information is important or do you think this can be cut? Shall I also get rid of readings? (It's a section added that was encouraged to be added by my professors) I'm curious to hear your thoughts on the manner. (Or anyone else's if they'd like to chime in.)
It's hard to say—at the end of the day it comes down to what you want to communicate to committees. I do think that it is super helpful to look at examples of scholarly CVs, both those of current students and junior faculty. As far as I can tell, employment isn't often listed because the most relevant experience (teaching, research assistant work, editorial positions) are generally covered in other categories. In that case having an employment section can be redundant, or contain information that isn't particularly useful.
Anyhow, take what I say with a grain of salt. It varies based on your background, so—like I said above—the best thing to do is probably to get a feel for the CV genre/format by looking directly at other scholarly CVs. Academia.edu can be brilliant there! -
Yeah, when I said "bloated" it was partially in reference to actual content, but also a lot to do with presentation. Yes, mention your teaching experience, your poetry, your comics, etc, but don't overload committees with excess information. You shouldn't be devoting a line/bullet-point to each section you've taught of a course. Present the concept—i.e. you have a lot of teaching experience—without drowning it in minutiae.
- dazedandbemused and knp
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Honestly, if your C.V. is much over two pages at this point, it is probably bloated.
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Well yeah I'd shit my pants if I got to Skype with Jameson...
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4 hours ago, Yanaka said:
Ughhhhhh I don't like that prospect!
For what it's worth, I know of people who were accepted even after they supposedly "bombed" their interviews.
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8 hours ago, Quickmick said:
Just thinking that I don't know if I agree with the "they want the app fee" argument. Columbia, for example, has an endowment of 9.5 Billion, even if they get 12000 applicants at 85 per that adds about to about 1 million--just doesn't seem that significant. I wonder if more applicants = more rejections which increases their apparent selectivity.
Who knows, maybe they just don't want to deal with people begging for an extension and an automated email is simple to set up. Also, regarding the 'early consideration' idea...they want the best people they can find in their applicant pool...it would not be in their best interest to start making decisions until they had seen the whole pool, though they could probably begin to weed out the obviously poor applications.
I'm not sure if it's that clear-cut. Columbia's endowment is large, but spending at the university has been/is somewhat controversial. They've come under fire for throwing money at massive building projects, while tenure-track positions in the Humanities haven't been filled, or have been replaced by sessionals. Likewise, there's a lot of money going towards the business and law schools, while the Core Curriculum is being comparatively underfunded. I guess it suffices to say that there's really a stranger political landscape beneath the overall wealth of the school.
I think it's also worth pointing out that Columbia is one of the few schools of its calibre to offer standalone, unfunded MA programs in a number of Humanities disciplines, like English and Art History. Ironically, the other school that comes to mind here is Chicago, whose MAPH program is probably the best comparison. In both cases—and I've heard this from students in the PhD programs—the MA students are seen as subsidizing PhD candidate funding. Moreover, rejected PhD applicants are often funnelled into the MA programs. As cynical as it seems I don't think it's out of line to believe that Columbia and Chicago are fairly intent on maximizing the number of applicants to their PhD programs, so as to likewise maximize the $$$ coming in from their masters programs.- unræd, ploutarchos, JessicaLange and 2 others
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2 hours ago, Warelin said:
Just because I'm curious: http://english.yale.edu/faculty-staff?field_people_type_value=All&field_fields_of_interest_value=Gender+%26+Sexuality
Nobody from that list grabbed any interest? On a side note, I really wish some programs would stop lumping queer studies with gender. I like both fields but they are both distinct. I also wish that there would be more uniformity when comparing areas of strengths between schools.
Well the field in question is Comparative Literature, rather than English, so that changes things a bit. Still, neither is a particularly stellar place for the interests in question, in my opinion. Michael Warner in English is great, and so are Tavi Nyong'o and Daphne Brooks in African American studies, but I'm not sure if they make sense in this situation.
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The GRE is just a way for schools to filter out the poors.
I'm only half-joking, really. Once you consider the cost of the test(s), the extra cost of sending scores, the money spent on prep material, etc it's pretty obscene. That and the inherent class (and racial) biases in standardized testing.- anxiousphd and Dr. Old Bill
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I wouldn't say that UChicago is any more focused on European literature than some of the other programs on your list. As far as I know they have faculty working in Chinese, Tamil, Azerbaijani, Arabic, Japanese, etc. Mostly I mention the program because Chicago is pretty stellar for Queer & Feminist Theory (they have a Grad Certificate in Gender and Sexuality), and they also have really top-notch faculty in East Asian & Middle-Eastern Studies.
On that note—it's hard to say! Things change considerably based on the diaspora(s)/diasporic communities in question. A school that is stellar in the area of African/Afro-Caribbean diasporas might not be great in the area of East Asian or Middle Eastern diasporas, and vis versa. It really depends on the work you see yourself doing, which will be considerably more specific than the fairly generic category "diasporic literature." -
Based on your interests I have to say that I'm sort of confused. Some of the schools you mention could work well (Emory, Irvine, Duke, possibly Columbia and NYU), but others don't seem to be good places at all for you. Why are you looking at Harvard Comparative Lit instead of something like their program in Visual and Environmental studies? The same goes for Brown—you'd probably be better suited to Media and Modernity—or even Berkeley, where Rhetoric or Art History might be a closer fit.
I would recommend going through lists of dissertations completed at the institutions in questions, because they will probably put a lot of this into perspective. Frankly, I don't think you'll find anything similar to the work you want to do at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, or UPenn (in Comparative Literature, that is). Other programs, like those I've mentioned above but also including Performance Studies at NYU and Modern Thought and Literature at Stanford, are far more likely to be good fits for you. I'd also throw in UChicago and Northwestern Comp. Lit, which seem more amenable to your interests.
Frankly though, I think you should step back a little and seriously think about why you want to work in a Comparative Literature program. Obviously the field has a pretty capacious scope, but it still is grounded in Literature & the Literary. If you want to study New Media and Contemporary Art, alongside Feminist/Queer and Diaspora Studies, a lot of Comp. Lit programs will be too "traditional" for you. Alongside some of the programs you've listed, I'd take a look at Art History, Performance Studies, Media Studies, etc, because I'm not sure that your current list makes a lot of sense.
2019 Acceptances
in Literature, and Rhetoric and Composition
Posted
I can't speak directly from experience here, but I'd imagine that most things outside of direct monetary funding would be more difficult, since they'd likely be more out of the control of the department. You might be looking at broader graduate school decisions for housing, etc. Teaching might be something you could negotiate, but sometimes that is also tied to a source external to the department, like a "writing centre" or something. I have heard of people negotiating for some smaller, but significant perks, like extra language/conference/research funds, etc. That said, those probably aren't things to be concerned about unless all of your offers are pretty similar financially.