Mercyhurst2010
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Posts posted by Mercyhurst2010
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Looks like Colorado is sending out rejections... who could've guessed?!
I'm curious about Colorado. It seems that there have been both rejections and acceptances sent out, but I applied to their PhD program (already have a MA) and have not received anything. Could we get more tomorrow? I see you applied there--did you get anything today?
In other news, I got an offer from Case today! I did my MA there, and I really do love the program. For anyone else who received offers from Case, do not underestimate based on the US News ranking. They have done very well with placement, they invest a tremendous amount of time and energy into their students, and it's an incredibly collegial and supportive environment--with faculty and fellow students alike. Depending on where else I get in (if I get in anywhere else), I may strongly consider returning to Case over a few other more highly rated programs because it really is a wonderful department.
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I definitely think Maryland will be notifying Thursday, Friday, or Monday. This seems to be right around the time when they usually do, and it's a big one for me. Maryland and Rice are my top choices right now, and both could be going off the board within the week. Fingers crossed for some good news tomorrow!
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Question for you all: do you feel like you're driving your friends CRAZY with all of your grad school talk? Only two of my friends are applying at all this year, and they both applied to 1-2 programs that they pretty much know they'll get into. They don't talk about it very much.
Meanwhile, I feel as if every other sentence I've spoken since October has been related to my applications somehow. I hear myself doing it, I think "stop, stop, no one cares!", and yet I can't help myself. Word vomit! I keep apologizing for it and I know they love me anyway, hah, but I hate that I've become like a broken record. Maybe it's not as annoying as I think it is.
Yes. I definitely understand. My wife is understandably really tired of hearing about it, although she has also been a pretty good sport. She's anxious to know where we'll end up moving, of course, but my obsessive email checking does strike her as awfully overwrought.
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If this doesn't pan out, I'm going to get on higheredjobs and start searching for entry-level positions in college / university administration. Two tracks that I would be very interested in are academic advising and admissions. That's a pretty competitive gig too, though, so I'll also need a plan C. For now, that would be to start finding out what other decent jobs exist for an MA in English with a strong academic background. The subject area of my degree isn't very marketable, but my track record coming out of school very well may be, so I'm sure if I widen my job search there is SOMETHING that could turn up.
One thing I've taken to doing lately, as I'm reviewing the placement records of the PhD programs I applied to, is to make a note of the occasional non-academic job that recent PhD graduates have accepted. After all, most of those positions don't require a PhD for consideration, and those who took those jobs did so as an alternative to the bleak job market after they spent the duration of their 20s living off less than $20,000 a year. Anyway, we should all keep reminding ourselves that if the PhD doesn't work out, there is life outside of academia and there will be alternatives for those of us who did well enough in school to even consider applying to high profile PhD programs.
Plan D, of course, is to continue working the job I'm at now. I'm making almost twice what one would make in a service job (i.e. - working at a book store or a coffee shop) by working a temp-to-hire job in a title company. I sit at a desk and push documents around a computer system all day, and I basically walked into the job with the easiest interviews I've ever had only a few weeks after I stumbled back into the USA (long story about a teaching-abroad experience that didn't pan out) without any sense of a plan. So for those of you who are really freaking out about surviving in a brutal job market--trust me, there is hope. Just get on job search websites and punch in random search keywords related to things you think you might be good at, see what turns up, and shoot off a few applications. While teaching and academic jobs seem to be the only ones "tailor made" for an English degree, the old "you can go anywhere with an English degree" mantra may very well be as true as you're willing to make it.
Still, though, I'm hoping for an offer from a few good PhD programs so I can do what I love and avoid the nastiness of the 9-5 office grind.
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Congratulations dazedandbemused!
It's dead silent from Pittsburgh for me, and it looks like waitlists even went out. Congrats to the lurkers, too.
Dead silence for me as well. With as many acceptances and waitlists as went out today, I'm thinking this might be another one to give up on. Maybe not though. Looks like a few years back there were some that went out Friday and some the following Saturday. Hard to tell!
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I had been feeling pretty confident heading into the application season, but after this week that confidence is really starting to wane. I had strong recommendations coming from former advisors from my MA program, and lots of people who sit on adcoms themselves telling me that I would likely have options when this is all finished. And truthfully, I've only heard back from one program so far: Vanderbilt, which was a rejection (along with about 98% of the rest who applied). But as of tonight I count another five programs that have shown activity on the board (Notre Dame, Emory, Missouri, WUSTL, Iowa) and so far there's been nothing but silence on my end. Still, even if those are all rejections, I applied to 13 programs and I'm not even halfway through them, so who knows how it could all turn out. It's making me pretty anxious, though, and I just wish I would get something from somewhere fairly soon to allay my fear that maybe somehow I screwed up on some part of the process.
Oh well. Congrats to all those who have heard good news!
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Is it the same link that takes you to your application status page, which shows "application status: submitted" near the top? If so, there's nothing about "Decision Status" at all, so maybe mine is just still pending. Or, is the email link to a different page altogether on the applyyourself website. (I'm basically just trying to see if I can find anything out right now since I haven't gotten an email.) Thanks!
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Looks like a couple Missouri acceptances are up. Anyone want to claim those? And where do you check your status? I logged into the "apply yourself" site and all it shows for me is "application submitted."
I'm hoping there are going to be more acceptances on this one, if only for my confidence level right now. No good news yet, and I felt like Missouri was one where I had a pretty good shot...
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On 2/5/2013 at 9:43 PM, ishmael said:
The school I'm very seriously worried about is Maryland, as it's my top choice... Last year, first acceptances went out on the 14th... next week will be nerve-wracking.
I hear you! My top remaining choices are WUSTL, Penn State, and Maryland. If I don't get into any of those, the decision could get a bit trickier.
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I can't remember why I didn't apply to Rice University. I just know that I should have.
Anybody already wishing they could update their school list?
I applied to Rice in late December, as I was padding out my list with the last 4-5 programs. I'm so glad I did, because the more I look into their program (fit, location for me and my wife, requirements, etc) it is now my top choice with Vanderbilt off the menu. Nevertheless, as I see these results roll in I'm really regretting a lot of things about my application list. First of all, I applied in a gap year (which I was expecting to spend volunteering abroad--didn't happen like I had planned, but that's a different story) and didn't decide to go for it in this season until late October. So I was stuck with my GRE scores from late 2009 when I applied to MA programs, and I hadn't taken the subject tests. So, about half of the top-50 (including almost all the California and New England schools) were immediately out. Still, as I see other people get their results, I realized that a LOT of programs I thought I couldn't apply to actually DIDN'T require the subject tests (Duke, Chicago, Wisconsin-Madison, Emory, Penn) and now I'm kicking myself HARD for it.
Granted, given my GRE verbals and my pedigree (BA from a small unknown liberal arts college, MA from a wonderful but admittedly 2nd tier program), I'll probably find better luck with programs like Rice, Missouri, or LSU than schools like Duke and Vanderbilt. So maybe I shouldn't worry so much. Still, I'm putting together a "wish I'd tried here" list in case things don't work out this year.
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I'm in a "gap year" right now, post M.A., waiting on PhD applications, and working full time, so I don't quite have the time for all the reading that I have had in the past (and, hopefully, will have in the near future). Still, I've tried to keep up. I recently finished Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh and Paul Harding's Tinkers. Currently wrapping up Delilo's White Noise (because how can I dare claim to be specializing in 20th Cent. American and contemporary fiction without having read that!?) and looking at picking up Camus' The Stranger once I finish. Also, I've been making efforts at starting On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction by Brian Boyd, but so far I'm only a couple chapters in. With sparse opportunities for reading, I seem to get less theoretical reading done.
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Congrats to all of the Notre Dame finalists!
Is it pretty safe to say that all the interview invitations went out this afternoon, and that if you didn't get an email it's probably a reject? I'm not quite familiar with how the programs that interview (uncommon as they are in English) tend to operate. If so, looks like I'm 0 for 2 now.
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There's another Iowa phone call acceptance on the board, so that makes three. What do we think? Could there be more on the way, or is this likely to be it? I really have no idea how many offers Iowa usually makes, but I do know that (based on previous years on the results board) this seems fairly early for Iowa's decisions.
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The Penn State acceptance on the board is freaking me out. I haven't heard anything from them. Le sigh.
That one is freaking me out, too. On the other hand, a friend I graduated with got into PSU's PhD program when I started my MA, and I just spoke with him a week ago. He tells me that the (very unofficial) word around the department was that they would likely be making their offers in the 2nd or 3rd week of February, so this still seems extremely early.
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Regarding the decline in admits, as the Duke stats indicate, I will say that I'd rather have it be this hard NOW than in five + years. In other words, with the current crunch in the English job market, I would rather get rejected by more PhD applications than have it be twice as brutal than it already will be when I'm on the job market.
I guess that's one way we can all console ourselves. If we think we're stressed now, at least we aren't currently on the job market! I watched a couple good friends go through that while doing my MA. They were successful, but man, it's harrowing.
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Yeah, that's one of the main reasons I felt ok using the old GRE scores. I heard that all the time during my MA applications. I do worry, though, that with some of the larger and more selective programs, a 610 Verbal score might be just below the threshold to get weeded out before they had a chance to look carefully at the rest of my materials. My writing and my recs are (as they were with MA applications going into '10) by far my strong suit. Never been much of a standardized test guru.
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I was part of the Vandy bloodbath today, and it sucks because it was my first notification and my top choice. Now I'm really kicking myself about the weakest link in my application: GRE scores. I came back early from teaching abroad (in October) when I had planned to be gone for a year. Decided "what the hell, I'll do my applications this season" but it was too late to retake the GRE general or take the Subject for the first time. So I used my old scores from 2009, which I used to apply to MA programs. But I'm pretty sure my GRE verbal would be MUCH higher after two years of MA study. Anyway, the rest of my application was much stronger than the GRE scores reflected (verbal in the low 600s with the old scoring), with a 4.0 undergrad and grad GPA along with conferences, a minor publication, a writing sample that I'm working into a publication, and, to top it off, the fact that one of my recommenders (the DGS at my former institution) is a Vandy alum. Very painful. I definitely feel like I sabotaged myself a bit by not retaking the GREs while I was finishing up my MA last year.
Oh well. Here's hoping for better results elsewhere--still 12 more to go, and a wide range of programs. And a HUGE congrats to those of you who are still in the running for this one. Enjoy the filthy lucre of Vandy's tremendously generous funding if you get in!
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Also rejected by Vanderbilt. This was a tough pill to swallow, even though I knew this program was one of my bigger reaches. It was my top choice, and it was also my first response. Oh well. 12 other options to go, so I'm hoping maybe I'll get good news somewhere else in the near future.
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Well, after a full day of clicking "refresh" every 30 minutes on the results search page, no news from anywhere that I applied. BUT, I did at least get some good news. A paper I proposed for a small conference in March got accepted! Granted, it's not a big conference and it's being put on by the Graduate Organization of a lesser known program. But, it will be conference number 3 before starting my PhD, and I'm doing this while taking a gap year (post MA), so it's a line on the CV and an opportunity to air out some new research ideas!
Maybe it's time to stop scouring this site every 20 minutes. I spent some down time at work today searching the last few years of each program I applied to on the results search page. Broke down the schools into "early Feb," "mid Feb," "late Feb," and "March." If the patterns stay the same, I could be hearing from Pitt, Vanderbilt, and Notre Dame any day now. Nervous and excited, because Vanderbilt is my top choice and Notre Dame has very close affiliations with one of my specializations (religion and literature). !!!
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I joined this message board a bit late, it seems, but my increasing sense of excitement / panic as February approaches fueled a series of Google searches that led me here. So, I might as well put in my oar:
13 Applications:
Vanderbilt University
Rice University
University of Maryland, College Park
Penn State University
University of Notre Dame
Washington University in St. Louis (WUSTL)
University of Colorado, Boulder
University of Kentucky
Louisiana State University
University of Iowa
University of Pittsburgh
Duquesne University
Case Western Reserve University
So far, I haven't heard back from any of these, though it's still (technically) only January. I'm going in with a MA, two (regional) conference presentations, a publication in a very minor journal, a writing sample I'm currently revising to submit for publication, and what appear to be very enthusiastic letters from my recommenders--some of whom have alma mater ties to a couple of the programs I'm applying to. So, we'll see if it's enough!
The big drag on my applications are the GREs. My decision to apply this year was a knee-jerk reaction in late October after my wife and I came home suddenly and unexpectedly from what was supposed to be a year of teaching English abroad as volunteers. We were gone a month, and due to some unforeseen circumstances had to return home. With all this going on, I realized it was time to go back and finish what I started during my MA work. Unfortunately, I was stuck applying with the same GRE scores from 2009, which I used for my MA applications. The scores aren't bad, per se, but I don't think the reflect what I would be able to produce after two years of graduate study. Plus, I never to the subject test, since my application search during the MA was a bit more limited. How I found 13 strong PhD programs to apply to without the subject test is a bit remarkable to me, but I did, unfortunately, lose out on applying to a few programs (U. Texas Austin, California programs, etc) that I would have loved to include in my search.
My fields are: American Literature (esp. 20th Century), Religion and Literature (esp. interdisciplinary work between philosophy of religion, critical theory, and fiction), Contemporary Fiction, and Multi-ethnic / immigrant literatures.
Best of luck, everyone! Hopefully we all start to hear some news (any news! I'm just sick of waiting!) by the end of this week!
Acceptance Freakout Thread
in Literature, and Rhetoric and Composition
Posted
I think most academics / intellectual types in the humanities suffer from impostor syndrome. I know I always have. Anyone take the Myers-Briggs personality test? I bet 75% of us are INFP's....