jrockford27

I would say, don't get too sore at particular departments about a lot of these things, a lot of them are standardized at the college-wide or university-wide level. If an English department wanted to stop requiring GRE scores and official transcripts they probably couldn't do it without getting the change made globally across whatever college they were in, it is very difficult to do anything in a university bureaucracy. With regard to dates and fees: I can totally understand the points made about application fees, I dropped like $800 on them, but there needs to be some way to keep the number of applications down because application reading is exceptionally laborious. That probably sounds like a whine, but imagine a school that requires a 3 page SoP and a 20 page writing sample gets 400 applications. That's 9,200 pages of reading, not inclusive of CVs, transcripts, and letters of rec, all of which have to be read carefully in order to ensure a good application process. The adcom at my program has 6 people on it, who break out into groups of two and divide the applications evenly between them for the first round. Even then, you're still looking at 3,000 pages of reading just for the SoP and writing sample. If you don't find some way to decrease the total number of applications, then you would have to fall back on some other quick cut metric, like, for example, a greater reliance on GRE scores as a cutoff, which is already a bugaboo. Pinning down an exact date for responses is also quite difficult given the nature of academic committee work. As one person pointed out, profs do not get any kind of work release for adcom work and so those thousands of pages of application to review come on top of their current teaching, writing, conference, and research responsibilities. It can be very difficult to coordinate an adcom on a particular date with so much involved in actually completing the review process. What if a member of the adcom has something come up, becomes ill or has a death in the family, would you want them zipping through your SoP at the last minute in order to get it read on time? They're also probably thinking of their already underpaid and overworked department administrators, because what do you think will happen to them if the responses happened to go out a day... or hell even an hour late? Getting anything done in a University setting involves a lot of moving parts, cat herding, and bureaucracy. Even something as trivial as updating an out of date website can require multiple layers of approval from various functionaries. While there are doubtless a great many ways the process can be improved, there aren't easy solutions.

I would not pay too much attention to the web portals. I seem to remember that I had portal statuses from various schools that said things like "Pending" or "Under Review" well after I had been rejected or accepted by them.

Congrats. I did my undergrad at UMN English. My interactions with CSCL were limited but all positive! It may please you to know that one of my grad instructors from that dept. interviewed for and received a tenure track job during the course of the class I was taking from him. Minneapolis is a wonderful city, though I'm a bit biased having been born and raised in the area. However, Prince once told Oprah that he would never move away from Minnesota because "the cold keeps all of the jerks away." Good luck with the rest of the process. Also, as you probably know, you would be living a stonesthrow from the birthplace of your namesake!

This came up in the acceptance thread re: Buffalo, but oftentimes schools have outside or university-wide fellowship nomination processes that don't coincide with their overall admissions timeline. Oftentimes the department needs to nominate an applicant and then forward that nominee's application to an extra-departmental committee for approval. That could potentially be a reason for admissions notifications that seem out of whack with tradition. If this doesn't show up in the survey in previous years, it could be because some fellowships rotate between departments; or because a department used a fellowship that ordinarily goes to a student already attending in order to recruit a particularly good or interesting applicant they think may go elsewhere. Also, I'm sure that if a dept. tried to notify an accepted applicant by phone and didn't get an answer that they would leave a voicemail, contact the applicant by e-mail, and patiently wait for a response. If they're calling you that means they want you, possibly just as much as you want them. Even Harvard has to compete for accepted applicants, so remember that it's a two-lane street, even if their lane is substantially wider than yours!

The great thing is that this will not be the last time you experience these sensations. I just finished submitting all of my fellowship applications for next year, as well as an article for publication, and it will require all of my willpower and more to be able to transition back to dissertation work and not just pointlessly check my e-mail for the next 4-6 weeks. Academia will always be keeping you in terrible suspense! My program's DGS just sent out the form asking who would like to help with new grad recruitment visits. Warelin's projected date is pretty much right on target for my program as far as my experience goes. My experience also tells me that my program, and many others, tend to accept on Fridays (in my program this is the day that committee meetings are generally held, as there are no graduate classes, and lends itself to committee members going for drinks afterward). It will be interesting to see if any of you fine folks come to visit.

Warelin has made great points, but the jobs argument may not be effective at convincing a student of law, where the job prospects are almost equally as dismal! We have an ex-lawyer in our program who just defended his diss and has a pretty nice job now heh. Law firms are now offering positions for unpaid associates, "to get experience." The more effective argument that it is longer, more involved, and potentially more stressful and difficult, for similarly meager prospects at the end (my dad is a lawyer and is stunned at the amount of work a PhD is compared to his law school experience). Five years ago when I started I was very much of the mind that, "oh, I'm not worried if I don't get a job, I get to spend a half-dozen plus years getting paid to study things I love" -- but by the end of of year four my attitude was definitely "if I don't get a $&@*ing job at the end of this I'm going to be pissed." This is not a unique experience based on my conversations with others. Once you get knee deep in the process your attitude gets warped. I still have few regrets, but my disposition is definitely quite different. You're taking something you love and turning it into very difficult, high stakes, intellectual labor. My first cycle I applied to exclusive interdisciplinary (y'know, MTL, MCM, HistCon, etc.) and poli-sci depts. with strong qualitative/cultural studies focuses before I applied to English. There were a great many reasons why I was completely shut out that year, but looking back it probably was a fool's errand to apply to poli-sci PhD programs straight out of my B.A. when the only true poli-sci class on my transcript was Introduction to Global Politics. After my mass of rejections, I briefly considered going for an M.A. in poli-sci (I opted to cast a wide net for English programs closer to my interests), which seems like the thing for you to do (but, y'know, in English). I would strongly recommend looking at funded M.A. programs, because you've probably already got a lot of debt stacked up from law school. Funded M.A. programs. At the risk of offending folks here: Do not go into debt for an English M.A. if you're planning to go into academia. Do not be hypnotized by masters acceptances from big name schools that will want tens of thousands of dollars from you. In my program we have M.A. students from unfunded name-brand schools and we have M.A. students from funded not-so-name brand schools and you can make of that what you will.

I sent out a statement that had a subject-verb disagreement in the last paragraph. This particular school allowed more space, so I took advantage of it to add an extra paragraph about my teaching philosophy (I think that was the reason they had more space than most apps) and that's where it snuck in. This was the statement I sent to the program I currently attend. So don't worry, that little mistake isn't going to submarine your whole application!

I believe, if memory serves, that there is a particularly nice SUNY Buffalo fellowship that is offered very early in the process. I was accepted at SUNY Buffalo and as I recall, the main body of acceptances arrived in February, so fear not. Also, don't feel bad about not getting the nice fellowship, as SUNY Buffalo's standard compensation package is quite nice, especially given the relatively low cost of living in Buffalo!

Well, it's like I've said a great many times on this forum: if you were a fully finished scholar, capable of drafting impeccable academic manuscripts, then you wouldn't need to be in grad school. They likely don't care too much about how graceful your prose is, they care whether you demonstrated that you are capable of forming interesting and original ideas. This is probably especially true of applicants whose first language isn't English. I've personally taken @GreenEyedTrombonist's advice to the extreme. I applied to grad school in 2012 and I haven't laid eyes on my writing sample, or any of my materials, since then. Your committee will help you become a good writer. I'm in my fifth year now and I still seem to catch a bit of hell from my advisor for technical issues every time I get feedback on a draft For now, what's important is demonstrating you have potential. @waltzforzizi, I'm sure the POI will make sure your documents get to the right place if they went through the trouble of asking you for them. Try to imagine the faculty at the programs you're applying to as people not so different from yourself (after all, that's what they are, a more experienced version of you). Would you cut yourself some slack in this situation? If the answer is yes, you probably don't have that much to worry about.

If money is a problem, I've known many students who have obtained textbooks via Inter-Library Loan. Not ideal, since you aren't supposed to write in them and you might not get to have them out as long as you'd like, but something you might consider.

I didn't contact any professors at any of the programs I was accepted to. There were programs where I exchanged e-mails with professors and didn't get in. I've witnessed people actually pay to travel to my program's campus to meet with profs in person and not be accepted. This isn't as important as a lot of people think. Do not lose sleep over it. There is a very good chance that your POIs will not even be on the admissions committee, which doesn't mean you wont get in, but certainly would diminish the significance of the one-on-one connection. If you've made the case in your statement of purpose that you're a good fit for the program, then you've done what you need to do.

Do you mean, by "faculty consulted", the extent to which the applicant has corresponded with faculty members? It really shouldn't matter at all. I didn't get into any of the programs where I corresponded with faculty, and the programs I was accepted to I never corresponded. It's a good idea to have "faculty" of interest though, because it helps you make the case as to why the department is a good fit for you.

Good, luck, it's a good feeling. Make sure to drink plenty of wine and eat your favorite junk foods the next few months to help you ride out the period between now and February/March. I am currently at one of the programs on your list, perhaps I will see you some time down the line.

They say that all applicants will be considered, so if you feel very strongly about the school, I'd still throw out an application with the understanding that it's probably a long shot. I'm sure that your sense that this has to do with the current makeup of their grad population is correct. It could be that other subfields are very crowded, or maybe they are lacking in these subfields and want to build them up, because the faculty in them don't have students to advise. That said! A lot could happen. They could not get enough strong applicants in those desired subfields. They could get very strong applicants in them, but then lose them in recruitment and need to go to their waitlist. Etc., etc.

@WildeThing, while I think it's totally bizarre for your letter writer to pull that on you, and your letter writers seem a bit tactless, I think there is something to be said for casting a wide net. Every single grad school offers a very low chance of acceptance. Even a so-called "safety" school is only likely to admit 5-15 students out of hundreds of applicants. Within this group, your list is dominated by the most exclusive of the exclusive. While you may well have a very good fit at those institutions, I would encourage anyone to consider that people are doing big work with brilliant scholars at any number of institutions who may not be household names, as most of the schools you list are, and people also get jobs out of those institutions. Casting a wide net is also very advantageous because your application could be positively brilliant, but if the two profs on the adcom who happen to get it don't feel like they need another grad student in your subfield, then you're not going anywhere. The profs you think you have a great fit with might not be on the adcom, might be on sabbatical, etc., and so you're then depending on another member of the committee to think, "Oh, they'd be a good fit for [x]". This is really, I think, the most important aspect of admissions, and it's one over which you have no control, and is incredibly capricious. It underscores the importance of going far and wide. I was once told that one particular professor in my department fought very hard for my application. If that professor wasn't on the committee, I'd likely be somewhere else! I say this as a person whose first list looked very very much like yours and was shut out, and the feeling was absolutely devastating. In my second round of applications, I opened my mind to other possibilities, and I ended up at a school that isn't an ivy (or ivy equivalent), but is top notch in my subfield and has a good record of placement, even if its name doesn't impress my aunts and uncles when I'm home for Christmas.

It depends on the program. In mine it is not unusual to admit students straight from a B.A. (my cohort had two rhet/comp students who had no MA), in some this seems far less common. I would ask the DGSs or current students in the programs you're applying to.

I deal with some of the same issues you do (including attention deficit, anxiety, depression) but over the last few years of grad school I've managed to refine my methods, maybe some of this will help. First. I find that a solid work schedule begins and ends with a solid sleep pattern, because this helps you establish a routine which I think is so important to dealing with some of these mental health issues. If I go to bed on time, and wake up on time, the day goes well. If I stay up too late and oversleep, surprise surprise, I have a hard time even getting grounded and it can be very hard to recover. Have a routine, and have set work hours. It doesn't matter if you work from 11am-7pm, 9am-5pm, or 9pm-5am, routine is important. If you're struggling with getting to classes and meetings, pick a set of working hours amenable to that. Keep that time sacred for work (though remember to take a break here and there - though don't get too far afield). If you're like me, and struggle with focus, there are apps for that! Don't rapidly snap into this new routine overnight, work your way up to it. I find that even on the weekend I only deviate slightly from this sleep schedule, I shoot for 7 hours of sleep each night, your body may have different needs. Second. Protect some time for non-work stuff and keep that sacred as well. Don't buy into the myth that you should be putting in 70 hours of solid work each week. Nobody is really doing that, and even if they are, there is plenty evidence to suggest that working in small, intense bursts actually produces better output than dragging out your workday for the sake of being able to comfortably say you logged a lot of hours. If you have nothing to look forward to then it will be very hard to stay committed to your work. Third. Never go into anything as important as a day in your life without a plan. Even if you wake up and finish your breakfast and walk your dog and you're just itching to sit down and write until your fingers bleed, take some time to plan out your day. I have used checklists, but I've found that I've had more success after I bought a small lined notepad. Each day, I mark out the clock hours I'm going to work, each line represents a 30 minute increment, and I visualize how my time will be spent, accounting for time spent on the bus or walking from place to place, as well as any breaks. Each day starts with a 30 minute block I label "planning/prep", in which I check my e-mail, check and update my planner, get any old coffee cups off my desk, and get whatever books or materials I'm going to need for the day. After that, I turn on my website blocking app for the next 6-7 hours and I work. Fourth. Try doing creative/intense intellectual work in short, highly focused bursts. There are studies that show that even highly trained and experienced experts in various skills have a very very finite amount of mental energy/willpower that they can expend on their practice before they start to see diminishing returns. Since I've started actually producing my dissertation, I limit my actual writing time to two very intense 90-120 minute chunks of writing each day. I've found that I'm having quite a bit of success this way. In a typical day, I begin at 9:30 a.m., I take care of prep stuff and everyday tasks until 10, I then write until about noon, at which time I take a 30-60 minute break to eat, walk the dog, etc. I then write for another 90-120 minutes. These minutes of writing, of course, are focused and intense (I don't check e-mail, don't use my phone, etc., just write). I then leave the rest of the day for reading and research, or other less intellectually demanding stuff. I always take the last 15 minutes of the day to close everything down, make some notes on what I need to do tomorrow, and then I take like five minutes or so to just close my eyes, breathe, and disengage from the work. The strategy of short, intense, flurries of output takes some practice, but I think is ultimately far more rewarding than the drawn out days I used to spend at my desk distracted and despondent. If you're still in coursework, you may have to alter this formula slightly in order to keep up on reading and seminar prep, which is demanding in a somewhat different way, but I think the principle still holds true. It goes without saying that this is a very fragile system, it takes some discipline to adhere to. I have really excellent productive weeks using it. There are also some weeks that nothing seems to go right with it, and I can't get a groove. Consistency is key, good days beget good days, good weeks beget good weeks. If there is something disruptive coming up like a holiday, or a conference, or research travel prepare yourself for it and figure out how you'll get your groove back when you return. I can't stress enough that the strongest indicator I can find as to whether a week is good or bad is a consistent sleep pattern that helps lock the routine in place. Also, finding a workspace conducive to highly focused work is essential as well. There is a book I've found very helpful called Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Dr. Cal Newport. Some of the strategies I talk about in this post come from that, though most are modifications of things I was already working about. What Newport provides is a solid well researched basis for these strategies and ways of refining them. It's not geared toward academics, but the author is a professor at Georgetown so the strategies are actually rooted in his academic life. It's not without its problematic aspects, but overall very helpful.

If they ask for three, why provide more? I would imagine that intentionally not following such a specific instruction would, indeed, be frowned upon? The best case scenario is probably that they simply don't read the fourth letter, the worst case scenario is that the adcom senses that you're either incapable of following instructions or are being disingenuous and trying to get a leg up on your competitors. If there is some very compelling reason why you need to submit a fourth, I would suggest asking the Grad Administrator for permission, and explaining in your SoP (and using valuable space under your word count) why you've included the extra. The application forms universities use are usually used across the university, which would explain potentially why it allows the submission of more than three. Some programs may require four, five, six, or however many. I've been in the position of applicant and I know there is a tendency to overthink anything that seems like an ambiguity. The only important thing here is that the program your applying to has specifically requested three.

In English, which, based on your post history is your discipline, it is very very normal. This is, of course, because freshman comp is required to some extent at most institutions and English departments require lots of bodies to teach all of those students. There are some programs that turn new graduate students loose teaching their first semester, regardless of their experience. That sounds pretty jarring, but I suppose that in my first year I didn't teach but I don't know that I gained anything especially relevant to teaching comp, other than another year of academic writing experience and more confidence than I would have had otherwise (owed more to a sense of 'belonging' in the program and department, more than anything else). In my program I was called a TA my first two years of teaching, and in my third year of teaching, my designation mysteriously changed to TF, which I think came with a very (very) modest pay bump. Unlike the above poster's experience, the method of payment remained the same, a flat sum, once a month. The shifts will depend on your program of course. My program, I taught two sections of freshman comp my second year, TA'd and taught recitation for a large lecture my third year, and taught a mix of comp and "Intro to..." my fourth year. This was mixed with some opportunities to teach upper division summer classes as well. I may not teach again due to fellowships, but all told I've taught eight classes and I was the instructor of record in seven of them. I'm pretty sure that for larger, especially public institutions, this isn't unusual, especially in English. However, I've heard that at "name brand" private-school English departments solo-teaching, and teaching generally, is less common. If it feels odd to call someone who teaches their own class a "Teaching Assistant", think about "Assistant Professors" in your department, they probably don't "assist" anyone so much as write their own books and teach their own classes. It's standard terminology but does not work well for all disciplines!

This would be a great thing to ask the grad administrator on a case-by-case basis. My memory tells me that I did not count works cited pages as part of my page count, but obviously if the school specified that it counted I sure would have. I think it would be a mistake to submit a writing sample without a complete works cited page. Funny story: I accidentally submitted a writing sample five pages over length to a school, seven over length if you include the works cited. It was the school at which I am currently working on my dissertation. All of which is to say, be careful, but don't be overly concerned that a small procedural mistake will tank your application.

Based on what I've learned, I'd pick the profs who are best established who know your work the best. I had two recommenders from the English department, and a third from a well established History professor for whom I wrote several long papers - but in a subject area (early modern scientific history!) that had nothing to do with my SOP (Cold War era U.S. popular culture!) While his subject specialty was distant from my application materials, he had read many more pages of my work than one of my English recommenders.

I didn't really e-mail professors in advance. I named two profs on each statement I wrote (whether I could make a good case for two was actually a good litmus test as to whether it was worthwhile to apply). Oddly enough, neither of them is on my dissertation committee five years later - so this whole business about someone being available or not being available isn't all that important. Your work is going to change substantially by the time you submit a prospectus, the adviser you think you want now may be miles and miles away from your interests by the time you decide what you're actually going to do.

See this opens up some other considerations! If you feel like film is more critical to the methodology than an EALC approach (I'll confess some ignorance on that) then you might consider, for example, whether you might want work with a horror scholar. Would it be stunting to the type of work you want to do to end up with an area studies film specialist, but one who isn't well read in horror? My totally seat of the pants guess is that you're more likely to find a horror scholar who has thoroughly studied Japanese/east-asian horror than to find an east-asian film specialist who is well read in horror! Though I could be 100% wrong. Only you know what you're looking to set out after of course, this is just some advice for potentially widening your net (Chicago, Harvard, and Yale is a very very small net!). This would lead me to again suggest taking a look at Pitt, which has a long history of work on horror film and some eminent scholars (for example, Adam Lowenstein) on the subject as well as people specifically working on east-asian cinema more generally. Also UC Irvine has, coincidentally, a scholar who works on east asian horror film (Bliss Cua Lim), albeit not necessarily Japanese, and has recent written an absolutely fantastic book recently called Translating Time. People who have gone to these programs have recently gotten good jobs, too! My work focuses on the ways in which changes in material space, as well as to networks that structure space and life, change and are changed by cinematic representation. Focusing primarily on north America in the mid-to-late 20th century. Incidentally, my interests overlap a bit with horror studies. Too much more detail and I risk revealing my secret identity if anyone from my program happened by the forum!

Pitt may also be an option. As well as UC Irvine. Most Film and Media Studies programs are going to have one or more people who do east-asian in some form. It may help more to think about what issues/eras/theories you're looking at than at a geographic region. This may already be clear to you, but for example if you're working on silent-era Japan a person who works on contemporary Japanese cinema may be able to help you far less than a silent-era scholar who has published primarily on France but who has a global knowledge of the period. I don't mean to assume you haven't considered this, but it wasn't clear from your post! Thank you for starting the thread!

Film & Media studies person here, welcome to the wonderful world. Your situation is not at all unusual. I had a student tell me in office hours that my Intro to Film course had convinced her to dump her occupational therapy major and turn her sights toward film. I told her, "That's amazing, don't tell your parents it was me." All of this is to say that if they decide to look closely at your transcript, this narrative will be apparent to them both as experienced teachers and as people who get paid to pay close attention to narrative. While I don't think you should leave it out of your SOP, you may already be devoting too many precious words to it.