jrockford27

Get a miles card early, I lament how many miles I could have been earning on trips that were ultimately reimbursed by my department. I personally use a Delta American Express, because it's convenient to my school, as well as to my home and my fiancé's home, and the free checked bag on every flight is the tops, and more than pays for the annual fee.

Somebody beat me to Hidden Brain! But also 99% Invisible (about design), The Side Door (the Smithsonian's podcast) and Radio Lab (which is on NPR in most markets, but is so good.

I actually did not take a single course that would have outrightly identified me as a scholar of film/media. I came to the study of film/media through my study of English literature, so in my Literary Theory Class I found myself writing about popular film, ditto textual analysis (though, for better or worse, my Chaucer papers were straightforward literary analysis! ) My personal statement and writing sample identified me unambiguously as a film/media scholar (working within the context of English studies). Obviously I have never been on a graduate admissions committee, but based on what I've gleaned from my conversations over the last five years I have a hard time believing they spend too much time trying to read the tea leaves of your transcripts as long as your substantive materials are compelling and show promise. The primary reason for this may be that when you get to a PhD program you're going to end up specializing so narrowly that your undergraduate work isn't really going to do a whole lot to prepare you for your specialty anyway apart from providing a little bit of fertile topsoil (that's my experience, anyway). The exception might be if you say, changed majors after you were well underway, or are applying to an English PhD and only did an English minor, or majored in something else altogether.

No, you do not need to justify it, not at all. I applied to grad school with an SoP that said I wanted to study popular media during the late cold war. My transcript included such lovely diversions as "Chaucer," "Transatlantic Modernism," and "Daily Life in Early Modern Europe." If I were on the adcom I'd be more suspicious of a transcript that showed no desire to experiment.

You're not nuts, this is all - unfortunately - very typical and natural. When I first started, I was convinced that I was the stupidest person in the room at all times, and that the admissions committee must have made some grievous error. Fortunately, my program spares us the anxiety of first year teaching on top of all the other first year anxieties, but nevertheless, things were daunting as hell. You're adjusting to new experiences, a new position, and a new way of being in the world and in academia. It's going to feel overwhelming, and there are going to be growing pains. It never becomes easy, but as you become more familiar with the lay of the land, and a new body of expectations, things will become much easier to handle. If it helps at all, most graduate students I know also manage to have vibrant personal and social lives if they want them; and, likewise, grad school is isolating but also offers remedies to isolation. You're going to figure out how to make your life work. Everything is going to be okay.

It's very hard for you to know, for sure. I did not begin to have a real handle on reputation until I was in grad school for awhile. Which is why reputation isn't really a great litmus test for determining whether to apply to a school. I will tell you, my first time around I was focused much much more on prestige than fit in putting together my list, which is one of many explanations of why I was shut out. I'll tell you what I did the second time around. Maybe this sounds super tedious, but this is a major process and must involve some tedium: I went to the U.S. news rankings, and I just started going down the list, looking at the faculty in the programs, skimming their publication titles or their listed interests. Some schools make this exceptionally easy. If I could find 2-3 professors who really seemed to interest me, I put the department on the "long list." I stuck in the top 50. Then, my "long list" established, I started looking a little deeper, actually skimming book chapters and articles, reading the department's grad handbook (if it was available), and that was how I constructed my short list. It contained programs from across the top 40. After I'd conducted this process, in fact it emerged that all things being equal, my favorite two programs on the list were in the 20s and 30s. Indeed, in my first time around I had my head so far up my ass about prestige that I didn't even realize there were programs so well attuned to the type of work I wanted to do. Those programs weren't even on my radar the first time around. In determining fit, too, I'll go back to something I said in another thread last week, that no department is likely to contain a "dream team" of faculty working and actively publishing in your area. My committee's work has very very little to do with the content of my dissertation. Instead, I chose them based on a combination of how well I worked with them (which you wont know until you get there) but also how interested I was in their work, and if I sensed it had methodological or theoretical kinship with mine. Actually, I picked my chair in part because her work differs so wildly from my own inclinations, and that I knew she could keep me honest and make sure I don't drift too far afield ("fit" is very complicated!).

A few things. 1. Your in major GPA isn't bad. People have gotten accepted to good programs with worse, I'm sure. In any case, GPA doesn't even really rate in the top three most important aspects of an application. While you correctly cite that this board is filled with people who have 3.9 or even 4.0 GPAs, some of those folks get shut out (for example, I had a 4.0 and I was totally shut out my first time around). 2. You should consider all schools that genuinely interest you after thoroughly researching the subject (this number should be between 8 and 13). There are people doing absolutely fascinating work at schools who aren't household names. Off the top of my head, none of the major citations in my dissertation work at "Ivy/Ivy Equivalent" schools. If you are casting a truly wide net, and really being diligent about picking schools that are a good fit, your list will likely contain a healthy mix of schools whose names will impress your aunts and uncles, and schools whose names contain "State" or at least are named after states. As you are likely to learn, the academic job market is largely a crap shoot, and a scholar's level of brilliance does not necessarily correlate with the prestige of their workplace. 3. Relatedly to #2, If your goal is to be a university literature professor, that should be the uncertainty that really terrifies you! However, specific prestige of school - I think - matters less in getting a job, than who your advisor is and whether you can make the case that your dissertation is compelling through your cover letter and a strong publication. People in the field are aware for example, that some schools lack a general prestige but have excellent reputations in sub-disciplines. This is not always apparent to outsiders or undergrads, but is (naturally) common knowledge within sub-disciplines. I attend an English program that is top 40 on USNews but well regarded in a pair of subdisciplines that don't get ranked, we've recently placed people at Stanford, UNC-Chapel Hill, and Cornell, among others. 4. Nothing is likely to cut down on uncertainty. I can honestly say that applying to graduate school was one of the top three most anxiety inducing and miserable experiences of my life. I spent most of that time attempting to struggle against uncertainty, the best thing is to find some way to embrace it. 5. One way to embrace the uncertainty is to realize that you have almost no control over the most important aspects of the application process (the makeup of the committee, their current needs/desires, the composition of graduate students already attending, and the pool of other applicants) and that your admissions results have nothing to do with your level of brilliance or worth as a human being (I say this because I wish somebody had been there to tell me this when my shiny 4.0 failed to secure me any admissions my first time around). 6. Contained in all of this, is that the most important thing is to think really hard about the schools you apply to, cast aside all biases and preconceptions about the names of schools and the rankings of their department. If your list only contains "Ivy or Ivy equivalent," go back to the drawing board and look harder.

No need to apologize, and I think my post contains some generalizations (I apologize, I'm flipping between browser windows and my dissertation and that doesn't lend itself well to giving ironclad advice). You should be asking lots of questions, and this is a place to ask them. Your questions are good and worthwhile. I didn't know any of these things when I was an undergrad. Some departments have working groups around things like ecocrit, childrens lit, etc., but within those you're likely to find a lot of diversity in theories and approaches. My bit about the SoP may be a little over the top. If you aren't interested in Marxism as a subject, there is absolutely no reason to include Marxism in your SoP. On the other hand, (and I'm being reductive again for the sake of ease and time) it is hard to imagine a strong statement of purpose that does not engage with prevailing discourses in some way. As bumblebea said, a good scholarly project is going to have at least a little theory behind it. You show that you're potentially conversant in theory/scholarship by identifying what authors/critics/theorists influence your approach to close reading, and why you think that this approach is important. A statement of purpose, I think, is (among other things) where you propose a starting point for inquiry. What questions drive you? What contribution do you want to make? Why do you think [school x] is a good place to do it? It's hard to imagine forming a substantial inquiry without placing your work into dialogue with prevailing theories (be they cultural studies, critical theory, or aesthetic theory). I apologize to you, actually, because this is probably very confusing. Unfortunately, grad school applications are a very confusing process, and (speaking of relativism) you're going to get a lot of potentially conflicting advice!

I'll start by saying that there is really no lack of current and ongoing humanities scholarship that does not address questions of social-justice, cultural studies, relativism, etc. With regard to relativism, there is actually a growing sentiment that "postmodernism" is "over," whatever that might mean. What can be said is that projects revolving around the critical theories of the experience of marginalized groups is very "hot" right now because we're in a cultural moment where marginalized groups are increasingly gaining footholds within established structures, giving them a platform to critique those structures in ways that have not traditionally been done (or even allowed). Those kinds of projects get a lot of attention because they respond to current events and changes in academia and culture at large in very important ways. However, that does not mean that aesthetes and formalists are unwelcome in English departments, there are tons of them, and they're publishing all the time! This board gets a lot of threads that ask questions about programs that emphasize this or that. I think there was a thread last year where the OP asked people to recommend programs that had an "emphasis on psychoanalysis." While there is something really romantic and intriguing about the idea of a department full of like minded Frankfurt School Marxists, or Lacanians, Deleuzians, or even formalists, regularly gathering in smoke filled chambers to hash out the specifics of their shared discipline, for better or worse the economics of the University prevent this from happening. The important thing to remember about academic departments when determining whether one is a good fit for you or not is that most (if not all) English departments strive for broad coverage. That means that you're unlikely to find departments where you have a ton of professors whose interests contain a lot of overlapping concerns. They may have particular areas of strength (for example, the Center for Psychoanalysis at Buffalo, or the Children's Lit concentration at Pitt), but will generally strive to incorporate a broad range of approaches, genres, time periods, etc. All of which is to say, you're not going to find departments that are totally eschewing one approach or another, especially, as @Bumblebea says, approaches that are central to the discipline. If you're a strict aesthete or formalist, you'll probably be in a department with Marxists or Lacanians or whatever who will find problems with your methods, and the opposite is true as well. I'm a cultural studies scholar, and I had a graduate colleague who found the whole backbone of cultural studies based criticism to be of questionable worth. We still get along, and we both have professors in the department who supported our work. Your concerns about the application process are valid, since (this is becoming my catchphrase on this board) the most important aspect of the admissions process is the one over which you have the least control: the composition of the admissions committee. @Bumblebea's advice is sage here, a successful application statement - I think - needs to have at least some theoretical and/or historical undergirding. Striking a balance between a statement that is narrow enough to show strength, and broad enough to show flexibility, is one of the biggest challenges of your application. You will want to show that you can become conversant in relevant issues of critical theory (you will be expected to do this) even if they don't find their way into your dissertation, because a well rounded scholar must be conversant in the major issues of the field. I had to read Kant and Cavell, and my aesthete colleagues had to read Adorno and Althusser!

I asked a non-tenure faculty member from my undergrad who was a major mentor of mine for a letter of rec, he told me that he wouldn't write me one unless I'd first exhausted all possible options to get one from a member of the tenured faculty, which I did. It wasn't that he wouldn't write me a glowing letter, it was that he didn't feel like it would hold as much weight, no matter how glowing it was, and wanted to give me the best chance.

I don't want to take on actually trying to score your essays (traveling, not much time generally), but I'll share an anecdote here I've shared elsewhere about GRE writing, the short version. Took the GRE twice. The first time I was like, "I'm an english major, I got an A on every paper I did in college, I don't need to prep." I had the Princeton Review GRE guide so I got to take practice tests through their website (you should do this, they pay people to evaluate practice tests and the book doesn't cost much), I was scoring respectably without prepping. So I get to the actual GRE, and I get like a 4.5, which felt pretty lame to me. I was pretty annoyed. I'd already decided to take the GRE again because my quant score, it seemed to me, was humiliating enough to matter (it probably wasn't). This time I decided I'd breathe out my ego and look at the section in the Princeton Review book on the writing section to. Their instructions are essentially to write the most formulaic essay imaginable (largely because they're paying unemployed PhDs to grade these things in less than 120 seconds). I followed Princeton Reviews instructions to the letter and got a perfect score. Long story short. I'll always endorse Princeton Review's GRE book. They know what they're talking about.

A fair and exceptionally salient point! Really drives home the importance of contacting grad students in the program and asking them how livable the stipend is.

I would be incredibly shocked if any program listed in the top 40 or so of the US News rankings in English didn't fully fund every student they admitted. I don't have an intimate knowledge of each of those programs that allows me to say for sure, but my jaw would drop if I met a grad student in one of those programs and they said they didn't have a tuition waiver and a stipend. Most programs have a standard funding package. Some have special funding packages they offer to applicants they find very desirable that have more money. That language you're describing is pretty boiler-plate. Grad school funding is full of things that departments are unable to "guarantee" because budgets vary wildly year to year, but that in practice everyone gets. If you're very concerned about that language and it's giving you anxiety about applying, e-mail the DGS of that program and ask them about it. It's a very fair question. Now, how far that stipend goes and how well it allows a grad student to live is another matter entirely. It is a really important question to ask when you're talking to grad students attending programs you're interested in.

Yes @dazedandbemused, I believe we began the same year. As I transition to my 6th year, it's very odd to find myself increasingly in the position of "village elder" in my program, and, perhaps, here as well! I'm happy to have arrived there not catastrophically jaded by the experience, and still able to encourage others who are embarking on this troublesome yet somehow alluring path!

I didn't propose a dissertation in my SoP, no. I did propose, I suppose, a slate of interests. "My interests lie in [x] influenced by [x] and [x] theories." My thought on the statement of purpose is that it's less important to articulate a coherent research plan than it is to show that you have definable and well developed interests that can develop into a coherent research plan. Indeed, my amorphous early interests set me on a trajectory that eventually led - however mystically - to my dissertation topic. What I think that means is that you definitely want to avoid proposing a dissertation (after all, some prospectuses are 20 pages long!), but want to demonstrate that you've used your pre-PhD time to become conversant in a field of interest. In mine, I explained that I was interested in issues surrounding popular culture, ideology, nationalism, and masculinity in the Cold War era (which was also the subject of my writing sample). I made sure to mention a few theorists who were essential to my work. What I think this showed, at least to the 5 out of 13 programs that either accepted or waitlisted me, was that I had developed enough as a scholar to begin a program. It sounds like you've already done this to some extent and are in better shape than you think you are. Therefore: I don't think there is any expectation at the application stage that you know what you'll end up researching. I imagine that the expectations applying out of MA might be different, but I can't imagine they're that different.

You've answered your own question! I bet you never knew you were this smart all along! In all seriousness though, I came to grad school (BA - > PhD) with a broad idea of what I wanted to do. I discovered my dissertation topic over the course of writing several seminar papers. Use your seminar papers to explore topics that are of interest to you. Try not to duplicate seminar paper topics. Try to incorporate plenty of secondary sources into your seminar papers so that you use them as a tool to become more widely read. While my dissertation is wildly different from what I proposed in my SoP, I can definitely trace the trajectory between the two through various conference and seminar papers. You will always be discovering new things, because the literature on literature is voluminous. Every month or so I have what I perceive as a minor catastrophe where I see a citation to some book that I'm sure in that moment contains the argument of my dissertation, and feel that my life is over. Then I read that literature, and figure out how it relates to my own, and incorporate it. Your dissertation is not going to be, and is not expected to be, a revelation that turns your field or subfield upside down. All academic fields, humanities and otherwise, proceed by minor nudges and trial and error.

That depends on what you want to do with your life. Disclaimer: I've never done an MFA but have friends who have/are. To state the obvious, and something I'm sure you already know, the expectations between writing a dissertation and writing an MFA thesis are wildly different. While it might depend on your committee, a dissertation isn't likely to satisfy your appetite for memoiristic writing (I had a bit of that in dissertation initially, but had to cut it to make room for... you guessed it, more theory and analysis). The dissertation form traditionally does not allow for a lot of stylistic experimentation or inventiveness, as its purpose is (generally speaking) to be a work of lengthy, rigorous, and original research that makes a contribution to, and is in dialogue with the field. For better or worse, that has generally come to mean a very specific kind of work and specific kind of writing. Of course, if/when I get to convert my diss into a book, I intend to restore the more personal, memoiristic touches, if my hypothetical editors approve. Fortunately there is a wide (usually very wide) gap between your dissertation, and the book you'll ultimately publish. But you may be delaying the gratification of realizing that goal for 4-6 years after you defend your dissertation. PhD time is glacial, it seems to me, compared to MFA time. Likewise, if you don't like teaching English comp, then you're going to have a rough go at most English grad programs. That said, I know many grad students who vocalize their dislike for teaching comp, and even teaching generally, and still seem to be successful in their programs. Based on your interests, it really sounds like the MFA is the way to go. The best thing about the MFA in comparison is that it usually takes less than half as long as a PhD, and so depending on your age you'll still have plenty of life left to pursue a PhD if you want it. My PhD program is chockablock with MFA holders.

Everything above is correct. I would add a couple of things. First is, if you've never done a major conference before, consider targeting graduate conferences. The stakes are lower, and the environment is more easy going. They might also be a better use of your resources, since you're more likely to be accepted. The acceptance rates for the major conferences can be very low, and even top flight scholars can get rejected, so if it's very important to you to get the line on the CV think about where your resources are best applied. It isn't going to be important that you have major field conferences on your CV until you go on the job market. On the subject of "presenting a new paper or one you've already written," I tend to think that every conference paper is a "new" paper because the conference paper is a completely different genre than most other forms of academic writing. You may have a seminar paper you think would be a good fit for a conference, but remember, you're only going to get about 20 minutes, so you're going to have to hack that seminar paper down by 50-70% or so to make it fit, depending on how long the seminar paper is and how fast you talk. (130 words per minute is a good pace to shoot for). You'll want to massage the language to make sure that it 'listens' better. So you may get the *idea* of your conference talk from a paper you've already written, but it will help you to think of your proposal as a new project. I would also add, that if your paper addresses visual matter at all, USE SLIDES! As a film scholar this one gets me. Good god, there's no reason why, at a conference talk in 2018, I should be listening to a person waste 60 valuable seconds of conference paper time describing an image or film clip that that they could have just shown us on the screen. This goes for sound too. Images should do heavy lifting for you, why use up words when you can show it? (this is with the caveat that you should always contextualize an image you show on a slide, and this will probably require some small amount of description, or drawing the audience's attention to particular details). I think it's good practice in any case to at least have a slide with the title of your talk, your name/affiliation, and e-mail address. Lengthy high theoretical quotes are a good cause for a slide as well (and perhaps the only case in which I think it's okay to violate the 'don't just read what's on the slide' rule). Your audience will pick up the nuances of that Deleuze quote a lot better if they can read it along with you. Twenty minutes is a long time, and even experienced scholars can lose focus, changing slides keeps the brain cued to your talk, and engages more of the audience's sensorium, so find a way to use them. That said, make sure you know the tech setup as far in advance as possible, and try to create as many technological redundancies as you can, and have a plan in case the technology fails. I was giving a talk at a major film conference and the audio for some of my major clips failed, fortunately I was familiar enough with the clips in question that I was able to narrate them myself. I've seen talks absolutely fall to pieces when the tech fails. Practice your talk, with others if you can, but alone too. Make sure you are under time, nothing will erode the good will of your audience and fellow panelists more quickly than if you run over. No one will complain or even think twice if your talk comes in at 18 minutes. Remember, the Q & A will give you a chance to expand on things. Think of the questions you least want to be asked and formulate answers for them, nobody will actually ask those questions, but it's a good intellectual exercise.

I don't think it's true that you MUST attend them for your PhD application, but it can't hurt, especially as an MA student. Your graduate conference should be just fine. That said, I don't think conference presentations, strong personal statements, and a good writing sample are mutually exclusive. When you're a PhD student you'll be expected to be preparing conference papers, writing your papers/dissertation, working on fellowship/job applications, and potentially teaching all at once; and you'll be expected to do all of those things well! I would also recommend to suppress your "cynical" skepticism of professionalization, as that is not going to look good either in your applications or when you actually show up to begin your program. Academia is definitely a profession, if your goal is to pursue a fiercely independent life of the mind in my experience academia is probably not a good place to do it. In any case, going to conferences isn't just a matter of getting a CV line, conferences are where you go to connect with other like-minded scholars and figure out what's going on in your field/subfield. The CV line at least demonstrates the possibility that you're interested in being a part of a broader intellectual community, and not just someone who wants to hole up in a dimly lit room and write a dissertation.

There was a lengthy post about this on this very subforum a few months ago, so you're definitely not the only person thinking about this. I have a dog. I know lots of grad students with dogs in my program, some of them have more than one! Like anything there are advantages and disadvantages. I think you're at an advantage since this is a dog that comes (presumably) trained, and that you're familiar with. I think the worst part about getting our dog was that my fiancé (who is also a PhD student) and I got just about zero work done the first three weeks we had him. I'll try to focus on things specific to grad school since it sounds like you already know the basics of dog stuff. Depending on the dog's energy level, you may find that you have to settle into a more routine work schedule based on the puppo's needs. If I haven't finished everything I need to get done that day by 5:00 p.m. it's tough shit, because the dog wakes up about that time and demands validation as a dog. He may also wake up in the middle of the day and decide it's time to play, sometimes these breaks are a relief, sometimes they're a benefit to my intellectual work, and sometimes they're a total pain in the ass. If you're like me, and as an undergrad you got used to doing your academic work in huge chunks, marathon work sessions, etc., that doesn't fly when you have a dog. Luckily for me, I was already phasing myself out of that way of working anyway. Being a good department citizen means attending meetings, talks, seminars, etc. that will definitely make your schedule irregular, and I know my dog hates deviations from routine. Another big thing is money, while the day-to-day of dog ownership doesn't cost all that much, you're going to be living on a grad student stipend and every little bit counts. We make it work, but our dog had an E.R. visit recently (don't worry, he's fine) and the cost was a punch in the gut for our meager grad student finances. I think the biggest thing is though, that before I became a grad student, I never thought of 30 minutes of my day here and there as being valuable. But 2-3 walks a day, plus care and playing adds up and definitely becomes noticeable. All in all, I'm glad I have a dog, and I think a lot of grad students I know have them, but it is definitely an added challenge. Think of it this way though, some people do this with kids!

The best bet for this kind of work would be to find a funded MA somewhere. While there are exceptions, if your goal is to beef up your profile so you can improve your PhD applications the best place to do this is in an academic setting. There's very little you can do to help your PhD app in a gap year that can't be better accomplished in a funded MA program. I'm not a financial adviser, but it seems like not such a good idea to enroll in a pricey masters program that you don't know anything about (by your own admission) in order to defer your student loan payments. I'm also confused why you would go for an MA in Philosophy, as that isn't likely to help you get in an English/Comp Lit program (unless you meant to post this on the Philosophy board); why not try and do it in English/Comp Lit. If your goal is to get a PhD in English, you can find programs where you'll be allowed to write enough about Freud and Psychoanalysis to get a PhD in English (in fact, my understanding of philosophy programs is that Freud and poststructuralism aren't often well regarded objects of study). Your book project actually sounds like it would be your dissertation proposal for a PhD program. Also, why the rush for 2019? Many MA programs will take you two years.

I am not a comp lit scholar so maybe I'm talking out of my rear, but given the context I can't imagine it would be a problem to have quotations from Portuguese texts in Portuguese, but I would assume that you would provide a footnote with the English translation like you would if you were publishing in a primarily English language journal. Even in a comp lit department your writing sample is likely to be read by people from a variety of sub-disciplines, it could well be that there are no Lusophone scholars on the admissions committee that year.

I was born in raised in Minneapolis and did my undergrad at UMN. While yes, it is cold, I'll go to bat for it every time. It rates at or near the top in every major quality of life survey. It has world class theaters, museums, concert venues, parks, and natural resources. It's also a clean, green city with walkable neighborhoods and the best biking culture in the country. And even in the winter, believe it or not, people still go out and take advantage of these things. I really wouldn't let climate play too huge a role in where you end up going. My fiancé was born and raised in southern California, when she first moved to our current (northern, cold-weather, midwestern) city it was a freezing, cold, wet, rainy day and she says she almost vomited because she didn't see how she could live here. She's been here for 10 years now between undergrad, masters and PhD and she loves it here and would prefer not to leave (fortunately for me, her experience here has made her amenable to possibly moving to Minneapolis one day if we're lucky enough to get jobs there). All of our major cities have their charm and their benefit, I wouldn't rule any of them out based on the weather. If you don't get a good vibe from UW (not trying to convince you to attend is a big red flag) and don't see yourself fitting in at USC, these should be just as important. Being cold for a few years but thriving academically is one thing, being warm but in a bad work environment seems much much worse to me.

I know the lie was pointless because the school wasn't going to rescind your acceptance if they'd learned you hadn't been accepted anywhere else, and it wouldn't result in you being treated worse than your colleagues. As has been said here many times, there are people that get accepted to a school in the top 10 or top 5 who were rejected by schools in the 20s and 30s. This is common knowledge. The professor was probably just curious, programs like to have that data so that they can know a bit more about their applicant pools. My admittedly armchair psychoanalysis is that when you were asked, you had a moment of impostor syndrome panic (which happens to the best of us), and wanted to seem more impressive to your future advisor. It is perfectly understandable, but, like so many other behaviors associated with impostor syndrome, is unnecessary and leads to unnecessary anxiety! Going forward, just remember that they wouldn't have admitted you if they didn't think you were a smart person with a whole lot of potential who will fit nicely into their department culture. He isn't going to find out. I can't think of a conversation in which it could possibly come up without really wracking my brain to concoct a series of coincidences. If he did find out, it's possible that he wouldn't want to be your advisor anymore, but I think that would speak to a lack of professional maturity and empathy that would not be becoming of an advisor anyway. If it were me, I would probably chalk it up as one of many incidences I've experienced of an anxious graduate student having a gaffe and saying the wrong thing or behaving in a baffling or frustrating way. I would probably use it as a teaching/mentoring moment to prevent you feeling like you need to lie to me in the future. But you don't know this person, and you don't know how they'll react. It is exceptionally unlikely this will come up again as anything other than a joke at your dissertation defense. So just bury it and move on.

While you shouldn't have lied, since it sounds like it was a pretty pointless one, I would just forget about it. The chances that this will come back and bite you are slim. Think about all of the factors that would have to fall into place for this to even come up again. I know as grad students we have a habit of catastrophizing things, but try to bury this one. In a couple of years, when you've developed a relationship with your advisor, you'll probably end up bringing it up and laughing about it because we all know that impostor syndrome and nerves cause us to do silly things.