jrockford27

I guess the VAP complicates what I said in ways I hadn't thought of. No, I still think that if I were advising a prospective graduate student I would give the advice the way I phrased it above.* You want a letter of recommendation from a tenured member of the faculty if possible - not because those people are inherently wiser, smarter, better people, but because their letter is likely to carry more weight with an admissions committee because tenure usually carries the perception of a strong record of publication in the field, as well as experience advising graduate and undergraduate students. Not to say that an Assistant Professor can't write a strong letter, my advice came from a strictly pragmatic place. *Edit: I see you probably meant the phrase "non-tenure lecturer", so yeah, I guess I could have put "track" behind that. With regard to the other paragraph, I think that that is a fair way to see the discussion. Devaluing anyone's work is the last thing I'd want to do, and I'm involved and vocal about advocating for better conditions for non-tenure track faculty and graduate instructors. BuI think euphemisms hurt the cause of non-tenure track faculty because they obscure the professional stratification of the university. Those job titles mean actual things, and I think students and the general public really ought to know that. My university had an "adjunct walkout day" a few years ago, and while I wasn't an adjunct so I didn't walk out, I spent the first 10 minutes of my class explaining what academic job titles mean t to a group of freshmen that were half-bored and half-intrigued. I think explaining the way teaching is handled at a large research University actually improved their impression of their non-tenure track and graduate student instructors. I now realize that I've dived headlong into the pedantry I had once decried. So my real feeling is, call yourself whatever you want, but think about what you're calling yourself when you're calling yourself something.

Wow, this thread has gotten very pedantic since I last checked in! I think it's funny when my students call me Dr. or Professor, I usually joke that "those are titles that come with pay and benefits that I don't receive, so you can just call me [firstname], or Mr. [Lastname] if you're not into the whole brevity thing." Nevertheless, the undergrads still seem to want to call me professor or Dr. I suppose if one of my fellow grad students told a local at the bar they were a "professor of English" I'd probably snicker a bit. The only reason the discussion of job titles is important to a discussion of admissions is because you want to get your letters of rec from tenured faculty wherever possible.* If this seems unfair, this was advice I received from a non-tenure lecturer I asked for a letter of rec! In American universities, this person will hold a job title that has the word "professor" in it, otherwise I can't imagine why this is relevant. I suppose my goal wasn't to tell you that reading the secondary literature wasn't important. It is. But at the stage you are at in your academic career (finishing/recently finished undergrad, I think) nobody expects you to have expert knowledge of a subfield. You will go to grad school to develop expert knowledge of a subfield. That is what your comprehensive exams will be. How much do you need to have read in order to write a good writing sample: enough to be able to write a good 20ish page research paper. Without trying to assume anything about your plans, I'd just warn that if you use too much of your writing sample to show off how much you've read you're going to write a very lousy paper. Plan an argument that shows you can work interestingly with the sources you're already familiar with, show them what you're already strong at. Or really, just use your best paper from undergrad, because you'll already have feedback on it, if it's not long enough, think about how you can expand it. *A word I'd add to the job title discussion, is that I think it's useful for people (students, people outside academia, etc.) know how the system functions, they should know who is teaching them, and what titles mean. For example, they ought to know they're being taught by a smart person with a PhD but who nevertheless makes minimum wage and receives no insurance, if that's indeed the case. If you're calling yourself a professor but are a grad student or contingent instructor you may be contributing in some small way to concealing the way the system functions.

Forget "completely original thoughts." If your research concept doesn't overlap to some degree or another with other scholars in your area, you're either thinking too narrowly, or you're not in the area you think you are. I've been writing the first chapter of my dissertation the last few months, and one of the most important things I've had to learn is that an intellectual discipline is a conversation. You are entering into it to contribute, not to eviscerate your competition. Read widely in your area, follow back footnotes, don't get defensive when you come across something that either seems to "steal" your idea, or contradict it. Instead think about your place in the conversation. Do not feel the need to recapitulate the secondary literature of your area in your writing sample - in fact, avoid this, using only what you need. If you were already completely versed in your area, you wouldn't need to get a PhD. My partner has recently been reading the book They Say, I Say: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing and says it's been very helpful in this regard. I plan to take a look when she's done. Looking back, my writing sample wasn't even remotely original, but it showed that I had potential. If you were capable of busting the lid off of your discipline already - again - you wouldn't need to get a PhD. I recently got some advice about dissertation writing, "Do not think of it as the last great thing you will write, think of it as the first good thing you will write." If that applies to dissertations, then put the writing sample in perspective. Your originality is far less important than your potential.

Aha! I first learned of her in a course I took called 'Galileo and the Foundations of Modern Science', which was actually a history course and involved quite a lot of literature (Galileo was quite the prose stylist!) It sounds like you must also have read Edward Muir's "The Culture Wars of the Late Renaissance", which I think was among the top 10 most interesting books I read in undergrad. The following semester I took a course in the history dept. called "Daily Life in Early Modern Europe" where I wrote a final paper about Tarabotti, Mary Astel, and some other primary source stuff. I was really on my way! It was the main interest of my junior year. And what is really funny, back to this topic, is how it is all about a million miles from where I'm at now in terms of my research, so I probably shouldn't be starting any new conversations with faculty! Though this thread has me wanting to revisit those books some.

I mean early modern literature. I was really interested in (what I saw as) proto-feminist and proto-Marxian texts in early modern Europe. I was really interested in, for example, Arcangela Tarabotti's "Paternal Tyranny". It was all pretty half-baked. I sought out early modernist faculty at my school to help me get something more fully baked and I couldn't manage to pin anyone down. At the same time I was writing papers about film for very convincing, somewhat less prestigious instructors who were showing me that all kinds of interesting things could be done in that realm. My experience was somewhat similar to yours in that all of my diverse interests seemed to be swirling around a single center of gravity. I remember a particularly zany paper that put Paradise Lost into dialogue with Rocky Horror via Frankenstein. I found myself writing about film in my literature classes and getting very positive feedback from my professors, and it really turned out that this was what I was interested in all along. In my mind (and I still don't know whether this was accurate) I needed to limit where I applied only to English departments with strong film sections, because I assumed that a pure film studies program wouldn't take me. Even then I'm very thankful that one of my top English program choices was willing to take a risk on a student with very little formal film studies background, and it meant I had some catching up to do. But I think that really drives home what I said about showing potential to create an interesting project, rather than demonstrating mastery. This is why I tell my students, especially those that think they might want to go to grad school, that the best papers are the ones where you at some point think to yourself, "this is nuts, can I get away with this?", because I think those are the papers that show an interesting flexibility of mind that allows you to really do novel and interesting work.

At the end of my junior year I was sure I'd be an early modernist, I now study cold-war era film. This was a transformation that began around the fall of my senior year (and was in some ways, thankfully, dictated by the faculty who were open to me and willing to work with me [let's just say the early modernists in my undergrad dept. were... inaccessible]). A lot can happen your senior year! I would also point out, as many often do, that you're unlikely to write your dissertation on precisely what you say you plan to work on in your applications. Thus, while the decisions you make now are important, don't get the idea that you're setting anything in stone. You will, however, want to produce a writing sample in the wheelhouse of what you plan to talk about in your personal statements. However, even your writing sample isn't a contract. My personal statement said something along the lines of, "In my senior thesis I researched [x], I wish to use the knowledge accumulated during this process to begin a new project examining [y]." Indeed, my first couple of seminar papers danced around [y], but my dissertation is definitely on [z], which wasn't even on my radar when I was looking at [x]. if you were a fully finished and developed scholar you wouldn't need to go to grad school! What matters isn't that you can show existing mastery or specialization, what matters is that you can show the potential to develop an interesting and fruitful project.

There isn't a subfield you can choose that isn't risky to some degree or another! This is graduate English studies we're talking about! If you're very interested in psychoanalysis apply with that understanding (I'll throw in a recommendation for University at Buffalo [SUNY], which even has a 'Center for Psychoanalysis - although I think they recently lost Joan Copjec it's still quite strong). If a program seems like a "stretch" in terms of fit, then you're probably throwing good money after bad. Learn from me, I now look back on my apps and with 80% of the programs I applied to I think, "what was I thinking?" Chances are that your ultimate project, under the guidance of your committee, will deviate dramatically from what you first envision in your SOP. You also don't need to have an advisor that works on exactly what you do (in fact, I can see where this would be a very very bad thing). You also aren't likely to find a department in which there will be half a dozen folks who do psychoanalysis as a specialty. Think about it, such a department would be pretty homogenous. However, you'll probably find a lot of scholars who are familiar with Freud and Lacan on some level and would be interested in a project related to those bodies of theory, even if those things don't appear in the bullet points on their page. My committee (chair included), for example, has only the most general connection to the direct subject matter of my dissertation, but they all offer really amazing intellectual insights.

Hey, I did my undergrad at Minnesota from 09-11. Maybe I had you as a TA! It reminds me that I should drop my honors thesis adviser a line. In any case, congrats on finishing! Good luck with the job market!

There shouldn't really be much to hear at this point (and likely, the folks in your department are probably scrambling this time of year trying to finish everything up). You should focus on tying up your loose ends and getting ready for a big move and life change. Make a "bucket list" for your hometown and really savor and enjoy the feeling of guilt-free leisure time and the liberty of living life free of the expectation that you always be thinking about work. Grad school is waiting for you at the end of August, and while this silence probably seems like an anti-climax after all of the anticipation, excitement, and pomp-and-circumstance of applications and acceptance, there will be plenty to interest and excite you again in a few months! Though if you have questions that need answering, there's no reason not to contact the DGS about them. You might also consider seeing if your department's grad students have a Facebook group or a listserv where you can get help related to finding a place to live and tips on moving.

Teaching something like freshman comp right off the bat on your own isn't terribly unusual in PhD programs (especially at very large, public universities). The dept. will probably give you a week long workshop of some kind to get you ready, but frankly, you learn to teach by teaching and the best way to do it is to give you a bit of prep then turn you loose. No amount of training workshops can simulate the contingencies of a real classroom anyway. While it may seem odd to learn this sort of thing on the job, I can't imagine a training program that would really make you "ready" to step into your own classroom. After all, every classroom is different and poses unique challenges. In my program we're fortunate enough to get fellowships our first year, and then begin teaching the second year. Our TAships are a 1/1 with summer teaching offered third and fourth and occasionally fifth year as demand/enrollments dictate. I honestly can't imagine doing more than a 1/1 as a grad student, but I'm sure folks find a way to make it work. Here you start off doing freshman comp, then you TA for a large lecture in your specialty, before then being turned loose to make your own Intro-to type courses in your later years. Summer classes offer opportunities to teach self-designed required and elective major courses.

A 2/2 as a grad student sounds crazy. I have a hard time getting around to my own work on a 1/1. Proceed with caution. Ultimately, placement should be the tiebreaker though.

If I understand your meaning, I don't think should be a problem. Many landlords in college towns are probably already renting their August 1 move-in spaces and so if you simply put the deposit down now you should be good to go.

This was probably the most stressful aspect of "the summer before" for me, trying to rent a place I thought I could afford, sight unseen. It is not easy, and will always entail some anxiety and uncertainty. I'll try to wrack my brain for advice.. 1. Don't always believe the hype on Yelp etc. about landlords/rental management companies. My unscientific opinion is that usually the only people who are inclined to review their landlord are terribly aggrieved and disgruntled outliers. You're unlikely to find a rental company you can afford on a stipend that has better than 2 stars, and tales of roaches and other vermin and collapsing ceilings, mold, and trespassing employees will abound! This will only serve to stress you out. Frankly, I rent from one of those 2 star companies with a litany of horror stories on their yelp page, and while it hasn't been perfect, it's been fine. Ditto other grads I know who rent from allegedly "shady" rental companies (if Yelp is to be believed). On the money we make, nothing is going to be perfect, so don't get lured in by the horror stories, it will stifle your search. 2. If you're so-inclined you could ask a current grad student if they'd be willing to check out a place for you, or at least vouch for it. See who is on your department's Grad Student Organization (or equivalent group) board - these people are usually inclined to be helpful. Bear in mind these are also people who have probably been in this situation and understand how stressful it is. Always ask a current graduate student or two about the neighborhoods - how convenient they are to campus, how affordable and practical they are on a stipend, and anything else that matters to you. Oftentimes GSOs have Facebook groups where available rooms, or people switching apartments let others in the program know. Which brings me to my next advice... 3. Consider renting a room/attic or a sublet your first year. At the very least, if you end up in a bad situation it shouldn't cost you as much as renting a place on your own. My guess is that other programs, like mine, have a few "houses" that are generally rented by multiple students in the program. I personally lucked into renting a very nice attic apartment from an older couple my first year. 4. You may need to live further from campus than you originally dreamed. Housing near campuses is usually high demand and expensive (catering to faculty, administration, full time employees) or low quality undergrad oriented housing. Look for things that are close to public transit or bike lanes. That said, do not be lured out to the sticks by cheap rents, you'll hate yourself for it later. That's what I can think of now.

I'd highly recommend getting living space pinned down early - very soon. Especially if you're departing for a "college town", the good, affordable places become quite scarce if you wait until summer to rent and it becomes a complete landlord's market. Figure out your moving expenses as well and set up a plan for getting out of town. Independent study syllabi should go to whomever the DGS is I imagine. In the department I'm in they're usually evaluated and approved by a committee chaired by the DGS. Recommendation, get in touch with your cohort early, or make contact with current students in the program. Especially if you're arriving a few weeks before classes start. I arrived in town around August 1 and felt pretty isolated for a few weeks before things started happening.

Tread carefully if you are considering dog ownership in grad school. While my partner and I wouldn't trade our little mutt for anything now, he definitely complicates our work schedules.

Have a strong scholarly writing sample, a high GPA, acceptable GRE scores, and a personal statement that articulates why you will be a good fit and why you have the potential to produce good research someday and why you'll be a valuable member of the department. If you haven't produced a substantive research paper to use as a writing sample, I would recommend getting together with a Lit/Comp Rhet professor you're thinking of asking for a letter of rec and talking through a paper, and seeing if they'll give you notes on your drafts. Auditing couldn't hurt, since they'll want to see you've completed some substantive coursework (if you haven't already). I was accepted to my top choices without any publications, and without any conference presentations other than undergraduate conferences. I've seen little to indicate that these are all that important to adcoms - if they expected you to be a finished scholar you wouldn't need a PhD. Though every program is definitely different, and your mileage may vary. My program is (as I understand it) very well regarded in rhet-comp and has admitted a number of rhet-comp students with MFAs in CW but no scholarly publications. However, I'll second the comment that "I want PhD in English" and "I want to improve my job prospects" are not especially consonant aspirations!

Relax. Don't buy in to the culture of not only claiming a 70 hour work week, but masochistically wearing it as a badge of honor. Settle into habits of work and mind that allow you to accomplish what you want to get done. Measure your work by its quality, not the amount of time you can claim you spent on it. Set realistic goals. Take on manageable levels of department of service while learning when to say "no". Stay connected to people around you. Attend talks that have nothing to do with your dissertation. Cultivate hobbies that have nothing to do with your dissertation. Read books that have nothing to do with your dissertation. Remember that a PhD is just one part of the life that you're living and that other things are also part of your life. Don't let your PhD become your entire life. Recognize that the system is designed in such a way as to make you feel perpetually behind and that the people who don't feel behind or under pressure are probably posturing. Remember that you're not an impostor, you were accepted to your program because they believe in your potential. Exercise. Drink plenty of water. Eat nutritious food. Sleep when it's time. Most of all, if your program offers you good health insurance or a counseling center - avail yourself of therapy when you need it - or perhaps before you need it.

I think this speaks to one of the problems I indicated about these types of ratings up thread. It's difficult to know how much knowledge anyone taking these surveys has of what the English department at a particular university encompasses. However, I wouldn't let it dissuade you. People in the know, people who will make hiring decisions, will likely know these types of things.

I once had a member of the faculty at my school tell me that they're suspicious of freshly minted PhDs with too many publications. It's hard to believe, they argue, that a PhD student with voluminous record of peer reviewed and edited publications could possibly producing quality content across the board. Also, ditto what Bumblebea said. It's also worthwhile to consider that one reason people at brand-name PhD programs are able to publish a lot more because they typically teach a lot less. Right now, I project I'll finish my diss in about 25 months - but if I get a non-teaching fellowship, I'd bet I can crank it out in more like 18. Teaching load really matters that much. While some schools fall over themselves for the brand, other potential employers may value someone who has designed and taught a number of classes and can hit the ground running as an instructor.

On the one hand, a subjective peer survey has some merit, in the sense that people aren't hired based on hard math, they're hired based on perception. On the other hand, English departments are often sprawling huge entities, often among the largest programs in a university. Often times English departments bundle together comp-rhet/literature/film/etc. under a single umbrella. A school may be very highly regarded in one and less so in the other, and people in the concentration area who make hiring decisions will recognize that, but it may not necessarily appear in the rankings. And on still a third hand, as someone above astutely pointed out, high ranking and name recognition often correlate with strong placement, but not always. Placements may also often have less to do with how well known your department is than how well known your adviser is. So while I'm sure it probably feels good to be rated highly, those of us attending programs in the dirty thirties don't need to get too down on ourselves.

I got shut out my first time around (7 or 8 apps). It doesn't mean your work isn't good or valuable, it just means it wasn't what a few particular adcoms were looking for this year. Take a break, cultivate your other interests for awhile, and get a new set of eyes on your materials in a couple of months. it worked for me!

I was shut out completely the first year I applied. I took a couple of months to brush myself off, poured myself into other interesting things, took a night job as a karaoke host at a neighborhood bar. It really hurts, it was absolutely devastating, but it's important to remember that a rejection is not reflective of your worth as a scholar or as a person. Oftentimes it's as capricious as who happens to be on the adcom that year. If the committee assignments in the department had been meted out differently, you might be in at your dream school. Instead a person who dislikes your subfield was on the adcom and you find yourself out. It really can be that simple. When it got back around to June, I started looking at the app process from different angles. Consulted with my letter writers. Looked at other schools I hadn't even previously thought of because I wasn't perhaps looking at my work in the right way. I found two programs that I hadn't even really considered before because I wasn't looking at programs for the right reasons that turned out to be dream schools. I got into one, where I'm at now, and was waitlisted at the other, and had a couple of other admittances to boot. The point is, it's difficult, but don't let a year of rejections discourage you from your ultimate goal. Take another year to cultivate yourself and your interests, and also take a couple of months not thinking about application B.S., which will give you a fresh set of eyes when you start the process again come May or June.

I was waitlisted at Vanderbilt a few years ago, and as I recall, I was going through that particular stress pretty late in February, after I'd heard from most of the other programs I'd applied to.

Ha, it seems like a century ago now that I wrote it, but the topic was on the interplay between films in stabilizing or destabilizing the cultural memory of the Vietnam war in the United States. Relied heavily on Althusser and an intransigently modernist conception of both national identity and opposition. Six and a half years later I'd be a bit embarrassed if I had to read it again. It involved Apocalypse Now, Rambo, and No Country For Old Men as principal texts. As I think frequently happens when folks go straight to PhD from undergrad, I'm worlds away from the subject matter now, and the argument was exceptionally vulgar. But I think something that a lot of folks forget when applying to grad school is that if you already knew everything you were supposed to know, if you were already a brilliant fully developed scholar, you wouldn't need to be in a PhD program. What seemed to matter most to the program was not whether I was already a real smart well-read guy (I was certainly not), but whether I seemed like I could find an interesting trajectory given time, mentorship, and resources. My program director said to me the other day that he was really surprised, in a good way, about the direction I ended up going. Every program differs, but I don't think a writing sample needs to be a ready-to-publish, immaculately conceived and executed document that provides a segue directly to your dissertation. It should show them something about you and what kind of scholar you would like to be.

For programs that allowed longer samples, I used the first and third chapters of my undergrad honors thesis. The first to give an idea of my theoretical chops, and the third because I felt it best represented my critical capacity, research interests (at the time), analytic skills, and my scholarly voice. For programs that limited the size of the writing sample I simply used the third chapter, because I felt the latter issues were more important in terms of establishing my fit in a program. I included a very brief explanatory note that summarized the gaps associated with using excerpts from a larger piece.