champagne

That's a shame. What are you writing for, then? If you aren't trying to make people better through their relationship to your writing, then it all seems like a futile endeavor of ego-boosting and salary-making. There's nothing wrong with that, but I would find it shallow and unfulfilling. Also, once a person buys a book that has been published, it becomes their property, at least in a free-market economy. Therefore, they can "deface" it however they please. That's how capitalism works. It's not socially acceptable, but I would be okay if someone took my published work and went to defecate on it on the National Mall. At least it would be some sort of performance art. This is petty, but I couldn't give two craps about your delicate sensitivities to the inch of white space that doesn't constitute your work. In the end, it should be the other inches of the page that you actually care about.

Marginalia is not defacing a book. It augments you, the text, and the relationship between those two.

For terminal M.A. programs, especially, they are looking for your concrete, explicit writing skills, which they will probably be able to gather from not just the first ten pages but from the first five. Obviously, having a great 8-10 page sample with a succinct and proven argument that exhibits the knowledge of your subfield would be ideal, but I doubt having more than this (rather ludicrous, if you ask me) page limit will damage you. If they wanted a publishable, graduate-level piece, then they would've expanded it to 15 pages or so. FWIW, I've asked professors about this seemingly anomalous page limit that pops up in applications every now and then, and they told me not to worry about it or cut my sample down.

I might actually get pretty good at this whole "filling out applications" thing by the time this is all over. This part has been pretty insufferable. When I was working on my sample and SOP, I felt purposeful and had fun because I was doing something I enjoyed. The tedious process of actually filling out the damn things is miserable, though.

Is the general consensus at programs that they don't expect letters of recommendation to arrive precisely by established deadlines? My letter writers are understandably a little spottier in being able to submit my letters to different programs since the semester ended, and I have four due over the next two days. If they expect LOR's to be in the same day as the application, then my application won't be completed with LOR's by the deadline, so should I just count on being summarily rejected from all of these programs?

Me too! Huzzah!

I can't wait to read TFIOS! I understand it wrecks you emotionally, but I've had so many people recommend it to me. The prose I've read from it has just been heartbreakingly beautiful. I suppose part of my coping process is thinking about all of the fun-time reading I'm going to get to once I'm done tweaking and turning in this God-forsaken writing sample: re-reading Confederacy of Dunces, re-reading Catcher in the Rye, The Pale King, Crying of Lot 49, Gravity's Rainbow, re-reading 100 Years of Solitude, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao... Dammit, I hope I can read all of those before I start next fall and still maintain my edge with theoretical/academic reading interspersed throughout.

Because their application total isn't being driven down by their costs (i.e. supply and demand). There are still hundreds of people (delusional though some of them may be) that think that the $120 fee is well-worth it if they can get into a Ph.D. program with the prestige of Stanford. When you think of the opportunities that having a name like Stanford on your C.V. gives to someone on the academic job marketplace, you can't really blame them for risking the $120. It's not that much of a risk if you think about it like that. Unfortunately, too many of them get mystified by the prestige and not the hardcore reality that is the unlikelihood of them getting accepted. To answer your second question, I'd imagine it goes into the Graduate School Office of Admission. I'm sure that schools do it differently, though.

I just talked to one of my professors about my SOP, and he told me that he was afraid I might come off as a little naive. I generally think of myself as one of the most cynical people I know. WHAT DOES GRADUATE SCHOOL DO TO THESE PEOPLE?

Proflorax is the best.

After this day, my first round of application deadlines, I'm looking forward to eating something greasy and drinking something alcohol-y. That appears to be the best way to deal with the stress of today.

I ended up saving and uploading it as a .pdf, and it lined up correctly. Very strange.

Umm, well, I'm trying to submit files for one of my applications, and every time I preview the file before submitting it on their website, the formatting gets all wonky. This is dumb and frustrating.

Ha! I got an e-mail from the DGS at one of the schools to which I'm applying, and she attached a brochure for additional information. Lo and behold, I find a typo about halfway through reading the attachment. For some reason, that made me feel a lot better.

This is probably a dumb question, but should I include presentations I've given at events just for students at my undergraduate institution on my CV? It probably seems like I'm trying to pad my background, but these presentations were approached with professional intent. I just wanted to show that I do have experience in that type of environment. My current CV doesn't really reflect that.

I think it might be important to point out, for discussion's sake, that adcomms might not be looking for the next Foucault or Butler in their applications. In fact, having that kind of dense language and thought in your writing sample might be more damning than anything. I've been told (which could be untrue as evidenced by some of the information disseminated by other faculty members) that adcomms are more looking for your ability to write well, succinctly, and elegantly. In reality, they merely need to see the trajectory of your ability rather than your current esoteric knowledge. It's their job to help you develop in that direction. Publications, meanwhile, only are concerned with your piece providing something new to the field. My first draft of my writing sample was way dense, and my professors advised me to strip it down, essentially make it more "elementary". Of course, this could all be my professors just kindly telling me I'm a terrible writer, but I don't want you to think that rejection from a journal means rejection from an admissions committee.

Oh, hey, crippling lack of confidence in my ability as an academic. It's so nice of you to drop in right as I'm filling out applications to graduate programs. If you would come back at a time when I'm more available, I'd be glad to tackle you then. FUCK YOU. KTHNXBYE. -champagne

Sorry for the disappointing scores, friends; however, the majority of programs I've come across do not require the subject test. I'm not saying that's the case overall, but there are plenty of (good) programs that rightfully don't give a rip how much you know about Milton when your specialty is the African diaspora.

Weird. I got my writing sample back from one of my professors, and he didn't have many positive things to say about it. Instead of frustrating me, it made me strangely excited to keep working on it.

I've actually found two of the schools I'm applying to that require it to be mailed in, neither of which are UVA. I only checked to be sure because one of my recommenders asked me. I thought he was simply used to another time before the sheer prevalence of the internet. I was shocked to find that people still require use of the postal service for anything of importance.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that requiring application materials to be sent through the mail does not do much to help literary study's image as being egregiously outdated.

Actually, the way they've re-engineered the test plays to context rather than just remote vocabulary skills, so that's probably why you're not seeing the words you're studying. So, the bad news happens to be that you won't find many of the words you've taken hours to memorize. The good news is that it's based on drawing connections from surrounding information which everyone applying to literature graduate school should be pretty good at! The verbal section of the general GRE is not a big deal. Of course, you want to focus and take it seriously, but you should not freak out over it. I've (usually) been a good test taker, and people have asked me how to do well. I think I've given them simple, obvious, good advice: Will your worry about the score you're going to make on the test five minutes beforehand give you a better score on the test? No, of course not. Then, don't worry! Trust in the preparation you've done previously, and the rest will take care of itself.

Hmmm. This is a good question. Perhaps it's best to get specific answers from the DGS at each program. I'm really not sure at all, though.

"So you're fucked too, Edmund Fucking Burke." Absolutely brilliant.

I mapped out my deadlines earlier this morning, and my stress level increased by ~1,068.32%. I suppose seeing the actual dates made me realize that less than a month from now will see my entire academic career judged by several someones I've never seen before.