jazzyd

I guess I'll have to ask for a little more specificity in what you're referring to as far as responses about people surprised about what was a key factor of their admission.
 
My only "surprise" - if you could call it that - was how immaterial parts of my application other than my SOP and WS were when it came to online and face-to-face discussion with faculty. Many faculty mentioned my WS topic or a particular area of interested mentioned in my SOP; nobody said anything about my alma mater, GRE scores, GPA, classes on my transcript, or even my letter writers. 
 
While I totally think a degree of cynicism is necessary in discussion of grad school applications and academia as a whole, likening it all to Greek rush is more than a little unfair and inaccurate. But considering the time of year, it's understandable. 

Katla, I think it's wise to be skeptical of only three years of funding, and I think it's fair to raise your concerns with the DGS. I raise my eyebrows anything under five years of guaranteed funding for a PhD.

UW system schools have already cancelled a bunch of faculty searches, and they're talking about laying off pre-tenure TT faculty. A friend of mine in the system was told by her chair that they might not be able to do her tenure review on time. So devastating.
 
In conclusion, fuck you Scott Walker.

Not a Wisconsinite, but from just across the border in Minnesota, and have followed the Scott Walker saga (and that’s really the best word for it at this point) for the past few years.    My take is this: Walker is interested in doing serious damage to the University of Wisconsin system, but he probably won’t be able to put enough political clout together to do it, so I would still leave both your Wisconsin admits in firm consideration.    Walker himself, as far as higher education is concerned (and lots of other things are concerned, but that’s for another, much longer, post) isn’t just interested in cutting back the budget at the public university system: lots of conservative pols want to do that across the country. Walker—in a move that mirrors his actions related to public teachers—is actually interested in completely changing the concept of what a university does, and what its relationship is to the state as a whole. Walker has pushed very, very hard for UW to begin granting “experience based credits,” where a person gets academic credit for “relevant life experiences.” In other words, if I’d been an executive at a small business for a few years, I could pay for the credits and get myself halfway to an MBA without ever stepping foot in a classroom. Obviously that’s not great for instructors who need to teach courses to get paid.    But perhaps more threateningly for the humanities, Walker is strongly convinced that the only role of a university system is to provide career-based training that gets people ready for the workforce. He’s so convinced of this, he actually tried to amend the University system’s charter to delete the phrases “the boundaries of the university are the boundaries of the state” and “"Basic to every purpose of the system is the search for truth” and add the phrase “"meet the state's workforce needs." This isn’t just a guy who wants budget cuts—this is a guy who wants to radically change UW-Madison, just as he radically changed public K-12 education in the state. And you can imagine that Walker’s idea of meeting the state’s workforce needs doesn’t involve a lot of English or Comp Lit courses.    However, many of these things Walker’s attempted have been blocked. It’s very possible he’ll do some damage in the short term, but as mollifiedmolloy notes above, your own funding would likely be guaranteed and safe. In the long run, I think the political winds will shift. Walker has national ambitions politically, and having those is always a good way to alienate Midwesterners. And Wisconsin still has a strong core of left-leaning folks who haven’t completely lost political clout. That should prevent Walker from putting most of his ideas into full practice, although it’d also be naïve not to expect more budget cuts to the UW system, much of which will lean heavily on the humanities departments there. 

After accepting the likely scenario that I won't get into any PhD programs, I applied to Villanova on Friday. Last night I got a call from a curren grad student there, asking about my interest level in the school and offering to answer my questions. She was kind, helpful and seemed very honest. I have to say, after getting nothing but crickets until the rejections started flooding in, it was wonderful to be contacted by a school, even if it was just a preliminary call to gauge my interest. 
 
Things are starting to look up. How's everyone else doing, as February winds down?

I didn't think you were implying that about lower-ranked programs, so I'm sorry if that's the way it came across. But frankly, a lot of people think that there's no value in going to a non-top school. The content of and comments on the Slate article underscore that much. So do hiring practices more generally.
 
Personally, I have never expected to get a job in academia, and I don't intend to be in academia long term. I had a previous professional life to fall back on, so for me academic life has never been a life-or-death prospect. I would not adjunct. But having said that, I have little patience for the rhetoric that tells people that they can't expect a good career--despite whatever they've achieved--simply because of the name on their diploma, and because they "should have known better."
 
Now, I know that no one in humanities higher ed can expect a good career for reasons that have nothing to do with prestige. But it's the casual dismissal of non-top-10 PhDs' potential contributions that I take issue with.
 
It's interesting to me that everyone expects a fair shake at the admissions process and the top schools, even if they don't come from the swankiest background. But on the other end of this thing--the job market--the rhetoric changes. Then it's: "Well, you knew before accepting that offer to the PhD program at University of Colorado that you'd never be competitive for a tenure-track job." Really? So it was okay to expect to be evaluated on "merit" when you were applying to graduate school, but apparently it's too much to ask on the job market? Think about the disconnect here: we favor the Horatio Alger narrative when we're talking about getting into a great grad program despite a less-than-ideal background. But we feel that narrative doesn't apply to grad school itself. Instead, it's considered perfectly acceptable to understand that where you get your PhD will limit where you will work. We accept that the "legwork" needs to be done during the application process.
 
Unfortunately, a lot of people don't have the resources to do the legwork before they apply because they don't come from a place where they have access to good preparation. That's all I meant about Berkeley. It's terrific if you have a school in your area where you have access to this world-class education. But many people do not have that kind of a university system in their state.

Okay, I really don't want to be the biggest Debbie Downer in the world here, but these are often the kind of jobs that people from "non-elite" institutions get, with the exception of Dr. Schwebel. And her MA was from McGill--and yes, having gone to an elite school, even if you didn't get a PhD there, can help on the job market.
 
The other two jobs--okay, they have to do with Writing Centers and digital rhetoric. And those are great jobs, don't get me wrong, but they are geared more toward people who work in rhet/comp. Rhet/comp does not really exist at the top literary studies programs. Therefore, you will often see people from state schools doing rhet/comp jobs.
 
The problem is for people who go to public universities and want to teach purely in literary studies. That's where things get dicier. Often times, these people have to far, far out-publish their elite peers just to get a very small piece of the pie, or they have to develop a rhet/comp skill set on the side in order to have any kind of job.( Zelany and Youngblood both have PhDs in English but marketed their dissertations as "multimodal" and "rhetoric-based." --I'm assuming they understood the market value of doing so.) But then they have to complete with people who have rhet/comp PhDs, and that can also be dicey.
 
I also wonder about the teaching load that these people are doing. I don't know, but I'm just guessing that ECSU and Alvernia require a lot of teaching. Maybe 4/4. So that, unfortunately, often spells the end of whatever "research life" a scholar wants to have. And this is another way that academia ultimately screws over a lot of promising people. Delaware and Florida aren't even bad programs--they're actually really GOOD schools--and I'm guessing they produce great research scholars. But the job market has gotten so tight that these once-good programs are just not able to place their students anymore in traditional literary studies jobs. Those who do get jobs get jobs with heavy teaching loads; as a result, they take longer to publish books, if they publish them at all. Those who are funneled into 2/2 positions are able to publish and to participate in scholarly discourse at a higher rate. This fact once again cements the perception that the good schools just produce better scholars who are therefore more worthy of jobs and research fellowships.
 
I have tons of stories I could tell about this stuff--some of them super personal--but I think I'll keep quiet for now. And once again, I don't mean this information to be discouraging for people who were accepted to state schools, and more encouragement for people to maintain a "top 10 or nothing" attitude. I went to a state school for PhD and I don't regret it. Despite my "state school" background, I feel I was able to make a contribution, and such a thing is invaluable to me. But it is very irritating to see your accomplishments devalued based on a system of prestige that was put in place before any of our grandparents were even conceived. I also know that these systems of currency/prestige are inevitable in a capitalist economy, but academia should really try to rise above that.

This is mentioned in the Professor is In link someone posted awhile ago, but going into debt for an education was considered "good debt" until fairly recently, when people began to realize that many jobs graduates can expect to receive don't actually allow debtors the financial stability to pay off the substantial debts that often come from student loans, and there's no reprieve for those unable to pay these loans off. It used to be considered an "investment," but the pay-off just isn't worth the buy-in.

I think the stigma against borrowing for education is also based on this fact: When you finance a home or a car and find yourself out of work with too much debt you can file for bankruptcy. When you finance your education and find yourself out of work there is absolutely NOTHING you can do except extend the term of your loan. You will be in debt for your education for the rest of your life and if you have kids, the rest of their lives. The loan industry for education is one of the sharkiest businesses out there and while some debt may be unavoidable or even worth the risk taking on massive loads of debt (beyond say, the price of said Mercedes) can be a huge risk.

I adjuncted at a community college for three years. For every tenure-track job opening, the department received 100 to 200 applications. The one full-time position that was open while I was teaching was pulled for funding reasons. This is all to say that community college tenure-track jobs are no longer a given either.

ETA: I also want to caution against the "well, there's always community college!" line of logic because there are plenty of scholar-teachers whose first choice is to teach community college, so you'll be competing against folks with extensive experience and knowledge of basic writing, FYC, and English language learners--basically, people who have been training to teach the community college student population.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/parenting/2015/02/11/the-community-collegereal-college-divide/?_r=2&referrer=

This is a great article about the difference community colleges make in peoples lives. It may belong elsewhere, but I'll post it here for now.

Are you serious? That's like calling Trump Intl. a nonprofit organization. This is actually the most outrageous thing I've heard all week.
 

Accepted at Columbia!!!!!!!! So unbelievably excited right now, didn't expect news on a Saturday at all!

Not an English applicant, but you guys, just got my first acceptance to UCLA! National lit department. Had a good, happy cry in my apartment. Here's wishing good news to all!

P.S. Official letter of acceptance from UC Santa Barbara just popped up in my inbox.

Basically a repeat of my last "I wouldn't" post in this thread. It's just too far along in the process, and frankly a paper "under consideration" and a theory group for undergrads aren't really things that will have much of an impact either way. Don't get me wrong -- they're great things for you personally, and for long term C.V. data points...but probably not all that compelling for an adcomm at this point.
 
For what it's worth, I had a paper accepted to an academic journal a few weeks back (albeit an undergraduate journal), and I decided not to email my schools about it. I don't think one publication (or a publication under review, for that matter) will push an app over the edge.

Yeah I think you two are correct. I'll go to the gym instead.

I received an unofficial acceptance by phone from a POI today! I can't say where yet because official acceptances haven't gone out, but I'm so excited! Congratulations to everyone else who has received good news and best wishes for speedy acceptances to those still waiting!

Hell yeah, congrats!
 
um.  also.
 
(i just got accepted to the University of Chicago)

Just got an email to schedule a phone interview with Columbia! Email asked for a chat in anticipation of "final admissions deliberations on Friday"

Edit: missed the acceptance posts for Davis and Chicago: so much congrats eveyone!!!!

Just got an offer from UCLA (via an email from a POI)! Very excited (and surprised) to have options.
 
Still haven't heard anything from Chicago, so I'm assuming that, at least, is a dead end...

My first bit of news was a rejection, and I was gutted. Barely slept that night, convinced that no school would want me. The next day I got a phone call letting me know I was accepted to NWU. So...don't freak out, one rejection doesn't mean you won't get in anywhere! It's still very early! (That said, I know how you feel! It's a horrible, horrible feeling!)

I might have actually said these exact words today

Hi all! I've been lurking on the forums since application season/haven't really dived into the community yet, but I figured now that it's officially February (!!!!) I'll need the therapy of this group to get through all the stress. So far I've heard nothing from most of my schools (which probably means a rejection from Chicago), but I received an offer from Northwestern today after spending the last few days in a results-board-induced-despair.
 
Thanks, WT, for that incredibly helpful link. Does anyone have any insight on visiting weekends? Do schools usually fund your travel or is it more of an out-of-pocket thing?
 
Good luck to everyone still waiting, and congrats on these great acceptances!

Just got an acceptance call from Boston College! Wooooooooo!