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BuddingScholar

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  1. Upvote
    BuddingScholar got a reaction from ChurchLover in 2014 Applications... waiting room.   
    Just wanted to report that I am super excited for having received my first news... and a great one.
     
    I received this email earlier today:
    "Your application for admission to the Art History Graduate Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has been favorably reviewed by the Admissions Committee.  We have forwarded a recommendation to the Graduate School that you be accepted into the M.A. program."
     
    Now I hope that the Graduate School will not go against the department's recommendation! I will not "fully" celebrate just yet.
     
    After striking out last year, it certainly feels very good to receive such great news this early in the game.
     
    I wish you all the same sort of news!
  2. Upvote
    BuddingScholar reacted to Borden in 2014 Applications... waiting room.   
    Ugh I hate the words "Documents Pending." I know that the admin has to go in and change everyone's over manually but waaaaaah it's been a month and everything's already marked as waived or received, I just want to see the little notification saying "Application under consideration."
  3. Upvote
    BuddingScholar reacted to Lamantin in 2014 Applications... waiting room.   
    Congratulations, brazilianbuddy! That's certainly wonderful news. 
     
    My one word of caution is that funding is a bit tenuous at Wisconsin. I say this as someone who was admitted to the MA program and offered funding, but ultimately went elsewhere. So be sure to be upfront with the department and your POI in particular about whatever concerns and hesitations you may have about funding. This isn't to detract from your acceptance, but to simply pass on the situation from last year's cycle. As an aside, it's highly doubtful that the Graduate School would turn down the recommendation of the department. 
     
    Do you have a sense of with whom you'd like to study?
  4. Upvote
    BuddingScholar got a reaction from Lamantin in 2014 Applications... waiting room.   
    Just wanted to report that I am super excited for having received my first news... and a great one.
     
    I received this email earlier today:
    "Your application for admission to the Art History Graduate Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has been favorably reviewed by the Admissions Committee.  We have forwarded a recommendation to the Graduate School that you be accepted into the M.A. program."
     
    Now I hope that the Graduate School will not go against the department's recommendation! I will not "fully" celebrate just yet.
     
    After striking out last year, it certainly feels very good to receive such great news this early in the game.
     
    I wish you all the same sort of news!
  5. Upvote
    BuddingScholar reacted to annie_lull in 2014 Applications... waiting room.   
    congrats!!
  6. Upvote
    BuddingScholar reacted to thegirldetective in Lesbian life in various places (recommendations? warnings?)   
    (Caveat: Straight person's perspective)

    While most definitely not a city, Amherst MA (and the nearby town Northampton) are pretty gay-friendly. They are liberal progressive towns in a liberal progressive state. You won't find the same kind of diverse community or nightlife (the night life is very limited, regardless of your orientation) you would find in a city, but you also won't be the only gay couple holding hands in the grocery store, either. Also, on an unrelated note, there are a lot of good restaurants and cafes for a town of its size.

    The UMass campus itself may be a slightly different cup of tea - I can't really speak to that as I didn't go there.
  7. Upvote
    BuddingScholar reacted to qwer7890 in Best grad programs for late 19th-early 20th c. art?   
    i find that the process of finding faculty to support one's work can take generally about 198 years.  
  8. Upvote
    BuddingScholar reacted to annie_lull in 2014 Applications... waiting room.   
    That toefl thing you're going through sounds so annoying! i was born outside the US too, but i think all my schools automatically waived TOEFL for me since i went to college in the US. None of my schools list it as an unmet requirement as far as i can tell, but same thing could happen to me.
     
    what im going through is a couple of my schools are saying they haven't gotten my GRE score or my college transcript. I e-mailed all of them today after giving them 3-4 weeks to process the material. We'll see what they say. All the admission committees are probably getting a ton of emails right now so i don't expect the turnaround to be very quick.
     
    I saw a couple of more art history posts on the results board. ahhhhh nerous!!
  9. Upvote
    BuddingScholar reacted to Loric in 2014 Applications... waiting room.   
    I got a birthday card from my admissions advisor (who is on my adcom). Weirdest thing EVER. Handwritten too.

    Gah. Gah?!?!?
  10. Upvote
    BuddingScholar reacted to Borden in 2014 Applications... waiting room.   
    Does anyone want to join me in harassing the science people to see if they have a time machine so we can speed this whole process up?
  11. Upvote
    BuddingScholar got a reaction from m-ttl in Rutgers   
    Me neither. One address to submit the first part of the app, one to upload the docs, and one to check the status? Pretty crazy!
     
    They were the only one missing from my list. Now I am officially done with all my apps!
  12. Upvote
    BuddingScholar reacted to m-ttl in Rutgers   
    No problem!! It took me a while to find it because it's weirdly not attached to the rest of the application.... I really don't like the way they arranged things.  
  13. Upvote
    BuddingScholar reacted to m-ttl in Rutgers   
    Should be right here! https://grad.admissions.rutgers.edu/CredentialUpload/Applicant/Login.aspx
     
     
    I applied, but I had an error with the LORs. No word back from Rutgers, of course, even though I emailed awhile ago. 
  14. Upvote
    BuddingScholar got a reaction from ChurchLover in 2014 Applications... waiting room.   
    I am a mix of anxiety and indifference. I struck out last year, so it's all-or-nothing for me this time around -- at least I feel this way. Though I think I fixed all the major problems with last year's app and am confident that my background is considerably stronger this time, one aspect of my app (GRE) still concerns me -- I am afraid this will be my demise. Well.. at least there are no Ivys on my list, and no PhDs either. So we shall see!
     
    I had promised myself that this season I would be "only" lurking around gradcafe. Well... it hasn't worked thus far as you can tell.
     
    For some reason, this stressful process seems a little more bearable when I know that there are many others going through similar pains. Besides it does cheer me up when people start to receive good news -- I am very vicarious!
  15. Upvote
    BuddingScholar reacted to Swagato in 2014 Applications... waiting room.   
    Will be rooting for you all + checking in on this thread.
  16. Upvote
    BuddingScholar got a reaction from SMDance131 in 2014 Applications... waiting room.   
    Pandora decided that I needed to listen to the following by Jewel -- and I thought it was quite fitting after all.
     
    If I could tell the world just one thing
    It would be that we’re all ok
    And not to worry because worry is wasteful
    And useless in times like these
    I will not be made useless
    I won’t be idled with despair
    I will gather myself around my faith
    For light does the darkness most fear
  17. Upvote
    BuddingScholar reacted to m-ttl in 2014 Applications... waiting room.   
    I do find myself on here quite a bit more than I thought I would! But this is my first application season and so I'm not sure how stressed I should be. (if that even makes sense!).  I split my applications between MAs and PhDs. And since striking out is a possibility... I'm going to have to start looking for jobs, too. Both of the jobs I have right now are student jobs, and only one of them can re-hire me after graduation. 
     
    Not sure if I should wait to start doing that after I get all the decisions.
     
    I've decided to try to angle all my stress towards my current research project I'm doing for a professor/local art collection and practicing my languages.
     
    If it's alright to go off topic -- does anyone here use ipads? I just got a mini with retina display (after some saving up!) and I'm seeing what apps I want to download/use for classes, research, language practice, etc. I've been downloading anything I think will help organize me or force me to practice languages. The problem with language apps is that you have to pay for so many of them... Or more broadly, do you have any new year's resolutions regarding school?  
  18. Upvote
    BuddingScholar got a reaction from m-ttl in 2014 Applications... waiting room.   
    I am a mix of anxiety and indifference. I struck out last year, so it's all-or-nothing for me this time around -- at least I feel this way. Though I think I fixed all the major problems with last year's app and am confident that my background is considerably stronger this time, one aspect of my app (GRE) still concerns me -- I am afraid this will be my demise. Well.. at least there are no Ivys on my list, and no PhDs either. So we shall see!
     
    I had promised myself that this season I would be "only" lurking around gradcafe. Well... it hasn't worked thus far as you can tell.
     
    For some reason, this stressful process seems a little more bearable when I know that there are many others going through similar pains. Besides it does cheer me up when people start to receive good news -- I am very vicarious!
  19. Upvote
    BuddingScholar reacted to chagallgal in 2014 Applications... waiting room.   
    best of luck to everyone, and good vibes to all!
  20. Upvote
    BuddingScholar reacted to Borden in 2014 Applications... waiting room.   
    I have an interview in three weeks and I'm already losing my mind.
  21. Upvote
    BuddingScholar got a reaction from Borden in 2014 Applications... waiting room.   
    I know it's a little too early for that, but I thought it would be nice to start--what seems to be an yearly tradition--our waiting room thread. 
     
    So let the commiserating, nail biting, heart pounding, anxiety-laden, grueling wait begin.
     
    I am hoping that we will get to share tons of great news this year... I surely need that for my health sake.
     
    Let the 2014 Hunger Games begin!
  22. Upvote
    BuddingScholar reacted to stephd016 in Williams (without images)?   
    I just sent my application in for Williams as well. I found that they didn't want images to be slightly odd. I assumed it was just to save some space on the application though. I wouldn't over think it!
     
    I did find it extremely discomforting that they did not ask for a CV though...so I already emailed them about an interview. I'd love to have a face-to-face one, but temperatures where I am currently living are below zero and the roads are frozen solid. Just incase another storm hits, I am going to go with the phone interview for my own safety. 
     
    Good luck!! I feel like I need to say may the odds be ever in your favor every time I refer to graduate school...
  23. Upvote
    BuddingScholar reacted to m-ttl in Williams (without images)?   
    I get why, but the idea of divorcing a text from the images we're discussing feels odd to me. (It's not as if they couldn't tell if someone had weak writing with the images available, you know?) 
     
    I haven't requested an interview as of yet. Personally I dislike phone interviews and I'm on the other side of the country. It's not that I think I don't interview well (as far as I know, I've never really had an interview hurt me before; I've just had neutral interviews), but I'm a visual person (hah) and prefer to see who I'm speaking to, gauge their expressions, verbal cues, etc. Part of me thinks it would help me more than it would hurt me to interview, but then the part of me that has anxiety with with phones says maybe not...
     
    Are you going to interview? 
     
    But you're also right. The lack of a CV was bothersome to me. Sure, we had quite a bit of SOP space but that's not going to cover all of my CV (nor should it!). I'm hoping my professors will step in with their recs for that part. I gave them all my CV and I feel like they all know how much I do outside of class, and one of them supervised two of my internships -- so for that, at least, I will get some extra things touched on. 
     
    Still, compared to every other application I've completed, Williams' application felt very brief. It felt strange for such a highly regarded program to want so little to go off of! Maybe I should interview. 
     
    ETA: Best of luck to you as well!  
  24. Upvote
    BuddingScholar reacted to danieleWrites in Some Advice on Writing an SOP   
    First, my credentials. Well. I can spell my own name, though I don't usually know exactly how old I am. I'm within a year or two, but I'm usually wrong until I've done some subtraction. I teach composition and like to write calculus equations on the board when I take classes in poetry writing. But, here's my real credentials: consider what is written herein in conjunction with what the various instructions on SOPs that you've read have said, with the requirements the program you are applying to has put forth, and with your own experience as a writer. Do you think I know what I'm talking about? Should you pay any attention to it? Is any of it useful?
     
    Second, I'm not going to give you a formula for what the standard SOP is like, or a list of things the various thousands of admissions committees will be looking for. There are plenty of prescriptions on the internet, many of them written by professors who have presumably gotten sick of badly written SOPs.
     
    Third, I'm not promising that SOP writing be easier after this. It'll be harder, actually. I'm not promising that you'll get in to any place you desire, or that there is any one best thing to put in the SOP to get noticed. That would be totally impossible. Each discipline has its own needs and values, as does each university, each department, and each faculty member on the admissions committee (adcomm). There is no one size and it doesn't fit most, let alone all. There are conventions (use Standard English, for one), but other than include your research interests, I won't advocate that any one thing is strictly necessary. I leave that up to the more knowledgeable.
     
    The advice:
     
    First thing is to deeply understand that you should write an SOP for each program. Most people take this to mean write one master SOP and then tweak as necessary to make the one SOP applicable to each university (U of A becomes U of B, Professor X becomes Professor Y). You can do that. You can be very successful doing that. You most likely, really shouldn't do it.
     
    The next thing to understand is the SOP's purpose. Why do the adcomms want to see SOPs? Shouldn't transcripts, letters of recommendation, and a writing sample do it? After all, transcripts and samples show the actual scholarship and the letters verify it. The SOP isn't for showing scholarship off, or to act like a resume, or anything. So why do the adcomms want an SOP? Why are the SOPs one of those make-it-or-fail things? What is the SOP's purpose? In job hunting terms, the SOP is like a cover letter. The cover letter is to make clear connections between the resume and the job ad. For you, its primary purpose is to make the adcomm offer you admission with full funding. For the adcomm, its primary purpose is to help them see how you would fit into their program (make connections between their program and you). By fit, I mean do they have faculty (or enough faculty) in your area of research interest that can advise, mentor, supervise, and/or committee you through the program to get your degree? Do you have the kind of understanding of the discipline, your research interests, and their program that would make you successful? Do they have something to teach you? Offer you? What can you offer them? They want to brag on you as much as you want to brag about them. If they offer you admission, will you be a good scholar? A good student? Here is the most basic question the SOP should answer: What is it about you that makes you a better prospect than everyone else who's applying?
     
    Understanding the SOP's purpose, in practical terms, means that you will know what to put into it and what to leave out of it. And how to phrase it.
     
    So, with the purpose in mind, there comes the question: what should you put into it and leave out of it? What format should you use? (MLA? APA? Is footnoting okay?! What about citation?!) Should I stick in a personal story that everyone seems to recommend, except for the half that don't? My research interests? The story about why I got on F in that one, very important class? I'm not going to answer those questions because I can't. Every discipline and department is different. I will give you an answer you won't like: research. Find out the requirements each program you're interested in has for the SOP, think of the SOP's purpose: and now research.
     
    Research is one of the basic keys to writing an SOP. It's no different than the writing sample you'll be including in your application packet. For each program you apply to, do some research. How much research you need to do depends on a lot of things, the least of which is your personality. More research does not automatically mean a better SOP. Less research doesn't automatically mean a better one, either. What makes the right amount of research? The ability to craft an SOP that is specific for the program that you're getting into. Here's some ideas (not an exhaustive, inclusive list of what to do) on what to research:
    The program itself. Look at the recent graduates and, if possible, read their theses and/or dissertations, at least in part. The acknowledgements can give you an idea about the program's culture. The introduction can give you an idea about what kind of scholarship the program produces and expects. It will also, and this is very important, give you an idea as to how the program uses language. If you speak to them in their own language, that helps your case. You've likely done this, if not, seriously, you should have done this. Look at the program's website and read it all. What kind of classes are offered for both undergrad and grad. Who are the faculty, the tenured, the assistant, the visiting, the emeritus, and the graduate students. What kind of ties to the community (both academic and their local town) do they like to talk about? Do they talk about how their graduate students are working with community partners? Do they host conferences? What happened at the last one? This gives you a taste of the program's culture. The faculty. All of them that might be on the adcomm and the ones that are relevant or somewhat relevant to your interests. Crack open JSTOR etc. and search for recent faculty publications. If you're basing your interest on a faculty member on the interests they've got listed on the site and a reference to them in an article from a decade ago, or worse, only their reputation, you don't have a strong basis to establish clear reasons why they have anything to offer you. Read their recent publications, see who they name drop in terms of theory, other faculty, and so on. Make a list of what each faculty member can offer you in terms of research, not just the ones that are directly related to it. If you're into studying apples, but Dr. V works with oranges, think about how Dr. V's work might help you out. Take notes when you research. Each program has a bunch of people, and you're likely applying to multiple programs. It's easier to refer to notes than to go back and look it up all over again. What's happening in the field with your current research interests, if necessary. This is so you can situate your research interests in the discipline, and then situation your research interests in the program. You can just tell them what you're research interests are and leave the situating to them, but you can lose that chance to sell yourself as the best amongst the rest. Research you. Yup. You. Scribble out some lists or paragraphs or whatever that inventories you. Who are your influences? Who are the theorists you keep coming back to? Who are the theorists you loathe, mock, and/or ridicule? What are your research interests in general and specifically and anywhere in between? Some SOPs will need to be more general, some will need to be more specific. Length restrictions, what you found out about the program, the faculty, the state of the discipline, and so on, can alter this for you. What kind of scholar are you? Student? What's the difference? How do you manage your time? Stress? Health? Do you expect to bring your dog? Do you have health issues? Do you have any academic things that are a negative? If you do, how negative are they? It's easy to see that as an either it's entirely bad, or it's somewhere in the huge good category, but some things are negatives that need to be addressed for certain programs, while other negatives can be ignored, or you should discuss with the one relevant letter writer so they can address it. While Sam ultimately received a C in the Research Methods course, the grade doesn't reflect the actual scholarship as Sam fell ill during the mid-term and consequently failed it; my course policies do not permit re-taking the test. What are the good things about you? Not just the grades, awards, publications, and presentations, but also the character traits. What are you weaknesses? Don't do the job interview baloney, my greatest weakness is my perfectionism. Of course, the important, probably ought to be on the SOP questions: why grad school? What will you do with the degree you want? Why are into the research you're into? Why that particular school? Why are you worth admission and funding?
     
    Research the assistanceships. Some SOPs will want you to write a bit about teaching or research with assistanceships in mind. So, do a bit of research on what these entail in the programs you're looking at. What do they do and how do they get it? Have you done assistanceships in the past? If so, what were they like? Do you have a teaching philosophy? If not, make one. Have you done anything that can be discussed in terms of the assistanceship? I taught kung-fu to white belt children, so I have teaching experience. I was part of the state herpetological society and went out to help them with their field counts twice a year. I learned that licking petrie dishes is always a bad idea, no matter how much they resemble pistachio ice cream.
     
    Research SOPs. You're doing that, right? Go on to forums (like this one) and read the SOPs people have posted and then read the responses. Look particularly at SOPs in your discipline or related disciplines. Psychology might look at other social sciences. Physics might tell the joke about the Higgs Boson and Sunday mass. Bear in mind that the people responding to and/or criticizing the posted SOPs are likely not on an adcomm. Some have been  or will be, but it's not likely they'll be on the adcomm you're hoping will like you best. However, you can start to get a sense of what SOPs are like. What format is it in? Does yours look like everyone else's? Do you have the exact same opening sentence as half of the people hoping to get into a program in your discipline? I've always wanted to be a librarian since those wonderful, summer days I spent in my (relative of choice)'s home library. 
     
    So, to take stock. First, understand the purpose. Second, research. A lot. Let the purpose of the SOP guide your research efforts.
     
    Next, get the specific requirements for the SOP from each program. Make a list of similarities. If they all ask for a statement of your research interest, score! One sentence fits most! Most of them will be of different lengths and will have different ideas of what specific information they want. Most won't tell you enough, aside from length and one or two "should have" things. They mostly won't tell you if you should use APA or if you should footnote, or how to format it. Single space? Double space? They will tell you whether it should be on paper or what kind of file format to use. I have only one suggestion: consistency. Okay, two suggestions: unless otherwise specified, don't include anything other than the SOP. No bibliography or footnotes. If you quote or paraphrase someone, cite them in the text the way they do it in the average newspaper article. As Scooby says, "Ruh-roh!"
     
    Now, start writing. Create something of a master SOP, or a set of master sentences for the SOPs. Some things should be in every one of them, like what your research interests are. Because length requirements are different for each program, you should work out more than one sentence or set of sentences for each thing you plan to put into more than one SOP. Have a more detailed explanation of your research interests and a more concise one. Even though this might be central and, perhaps, most important to the SOP, you don't want most of a short SOP taken up by one thing. Make these sentences do extra duties. If they can explain not only why you're into what you're into, but also why it's significant to the discipline/program, and how the program factors into it, bonus! The more functions one sentence can serve, with clear, readable logic, the more room you have in the length requirements to bring in other things. Think of this master SOP as more of a set of sentences you can hang on the individual SOP's unique structure. A flesh and skeleton metaphor can work here. You can order all SOPs at this point, you'll probably want to put research interests in the middle or toward the end, rather than in the first sentence, but the key here is that the skeleton of the individual SOP and most of its flesh will come from the needs of the program you're writing it for, not from some predetermined formula. No generically applicable, master SOP that has a few tweaks here and there.
     
    Here's the thing. The SOP is one of the most important documents you'll write in your life. It's not something that should be done in a few hours, after looking at the program website and spending some time on the net searching for a how-to-write-an-SOP-guide. It takes work backed by research. The readers can tell quite easily how much research you've done on them by the way you structure and write your SOP. They can tell if you're sending out a generic SOP to several programs because it will be too general. You can't change faculty names in and out, along with a detail or two that makes it seem tailored to the program. The individual SOP should be tailored from the beginning. Some sentences won't change much, so you can pre-write them. But how they fit into each SOP, the reasoning you'll use to try to convince the adcomm that you're the best applicant, and the perspective you'll take all the way to the words you use should be done with the program in mind. It shouldn't be generic. Even if it doesn't seem noticeably generic to you, that doesn't mean that the adcomm won't notice it. They read many, many SOPs every year. People who read SOPs develop a sense about the generic, the cut and paste work.
     
    How to name drop gracefully, or bring up the theory and histories and whatnot you're working with when there's only a teeny amount of space for everything? That's a bit easier than it might seem. It's not in the explanation; it's in the usage. If you can use the relevant theories and people and methodologies correctly in a sentence, you don't have to show the adcomm that you know how to use them, or how they're related, by explaining it. Trust them to have enough education to make a few connections for themselves when it comes to the discipline. Example: Novels such as Twilight exemplify how Marxist alienation can be applied to childbirth. My research interest lies in the alienation of women from the product of delivery in Modernist American fiction, such as Faulkner's Sound and the Fury. (Huh, I wonder if that would really work?) Two sentences and I've referenced theory, period, history, relevance for today, and some methodology (it's literature, not science). Use it, don't explain it.
     
    If possible, have a professor you know read the SOP to your preferred school and give you some advice. They know more than most other groups of people. If not possible, your current university's writing center can help, or other people who are familiar with the field, or with writing. Your high school English teacher or your English major buddy can probably say something about your grammar, but might not be as helpful as expected. Example, in English, the convention is to speak of historical people in present tense. Shakespeare writes, "To be or not to be," because he thinks it is the question. History has kittens. Shakespeare has been dead for centuries, he can't write! Past tense! Shakespeare wrote, "To be or not to be," because thought it was the question. Someone in the field is preferable!
     
    Finally, a word about my real credentials. The adcomm is going to do to your application what you've just done with this post. They are going to judge your credentials (your ethos, trustworthiness, veracity, credibility, knowledge, and so on) based on the impressions they get of you from what you've written. So, be knowledgeable about you, your field, and the program, and use that knowledge well.
  25. Upvote
    BuddingScholar reacted to condivi in Where is she?   
    Probably didn't get tenure.
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