lewisthesamteenth

It seems that one of us Stanford hopefuls may have to bite the bullet and send out an e-mail? (Finger to nose)

I still have heard nothing from Stanford, and the results board has shown absolutely nothing. The application indicated that "every effort would be made to send out decisions by the end of February," so until that day comes, hope remains alive?

Seems that no one among us has yet heard from Stanford. Either they're in some serious deliberations, or no one from the Gradcafé made the cut. Hopefully, the former.

Yes, all the even-numbered Star Trek movies are good. Despite your omission, I think VI has its moments. However, I cannot agree with your use of the adverb "easily" in "TNG is easily the best iteration." My biggest problem with TNG is that it lacks what I believe made the original series so awesome, and superior: the Kirk/Spock dynamic. One could even toss Bones into that ménage-à-deux. JLP, for me, is a mixture of Kirk and Spock, but completely unleavened: while he is both inventive and logical, he lacks the timely impetuousness of Kirk and the subtle humor of Spock. That's not to say that TNG is bad; the characters just never gripped me in the way that TOS's did. So yeah I'm 25.

BIIIIIIIIIIIIIIG !!! Congrats !

Yes, of course: the evil Rent ! It's another one of those American monsters that requires constant feeding; an ugly m-er-f-er if I may be so bold. I would also suggest, to improve your writing skills, the simplest method of all: READ, widely and voraciously ! Proper English grammar is something acquired by careful and considered study, and I wouldn't necessarily count you out of the game if English is not your native language: I am convinced that for 95-98% of Americans, English is not their native language, neither. I find that 19th-century British novelists demonstrate the best, and most accessible, commands of English grammar. Thackeray, Trollope, and Henry James are all great teachers. Look to the masters for your cues, always. Hope this helps !

There are a couple of options for someone in your position, depending on the specific motivation behind your taking courses, whether it be for something to add to your CV or for to pursue (little Chaucer grammar, forgive me) a subject or skill that interests you. If you want to take summer courses solely to boast of them on your CV or with a transcript, it's going to be difficult. American universities are insatiable monsters fueled by consuming large amounts of capital and the dreams of students in the humanities. It is regrettable, but many universities here are run more like businesses than bastions of intellectual cultivation. However, if you wanted to come here and AUDIT courses, that would not be totally out of the realm of possibility. I have had luck doing just this at both Yale and NYU: I send a very, very friendly letter to the professor teaching the course I want to attend, describing my situation and my interest in his/her work, and have thus far never received a negative response. My experience, I realize, does not a universal law create, but it's worth a shot. There are also a ton of great courses available through iTunes (iTunesU, I think it's called), which sounds lame, but I've personally been really enjoying a lot of them. There is a Yale OpenCourse that provides a great overview of schools of literary criticism, a University of Oxford lecture series on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, a great radio show out of Stanford called "Entitled Opinions," and lots more. This option would require more personal discipline, but I find myself almost always compelled to write SOMETHING in response to whatever I listen to. It's also nice to have on in the background while working out (cheating!)

Very well-played.

Still Ulysses. O, you've read it already? Read it again. But you don't want to read it again? Fair. It's almost Spring-time: it's about damn time we dust off our volumes of The Canterbury Tales and get ourselves excited for the auspices of meta-Winter.

A hearty congratulations to the Cornell, Princeton, and UNC-Chapel Hill acceptances so far today !!! With any luck, there will be many more to come !

Sometimes, I wish I could share my Myers-Briggs results in lieu of GRE Subject test scores: Alas!, crieth the INTJ.

Fingers crossed for the best of all news for everyone today! The days are growing longer: soon it will be Spring! Here's to everyone getting in SOMEWHERE so that we can all enjoy the auspices of the coming season without neither dread nor loathing; here's to 100% confidence of acceptance; here's to Friday ! Courage, my friends !

Congrats, Sursie !!!

It's always hard to make generalizations about the types of people that you find at certain school: academic institutions are so desperate to paints themselves as "diverse" that there will always be exceptions to any "rule" you try to apply to or create out of a student body. While I wouldn't say that all of the Ivies are snobbish, I would say that many of their students grossly estimate their own intelligences (back! back!--those of you who attended an Ivy league school) based exclusively on the nominal prestige afforded by matriculation into "Harvard" or "Yale" or "Princeton". After I did my undergrad at a non-Ivy League school--at, in fact, a pretty middle-of-the-road Liberal Arts College--I became friends with a group of Yale students, an ended up joining their fraternity (Old School, anyone?). The guys were total party animals--great guys, to be sure, and I made some awesome friends--but not all of them matched up with what you might expect out of an Ivy League student. A couple of them were total geniuses, but most of them were kids of average intelligence whose parents had put them through the proverbial wringer throughout high school so that they could get into an Ivy League college. Graduate students at the Ivies seem to be a lot more humble, probably because they don't have the energy to sustain the braggadocio carried around by undergraduate population. These, of course, are generalizations based on limited experience; but, let's not invalidate it simply because my sample set is so small. Just offering my two-pence.

I will continue my independent studies of French and Latin, make an effort to have an article published, study for a re-take of the GRE Subject test, write extensively, work, bake lots of delicious loaves of bread, run, work on a farm or two in rural France (Normandy, Brittany, Dordogne, Bourgogne), &c., &c. I'm not going to concoct any new strategies in order to weasel my way into a program, but rather, continue to cultivate myself in such a way so that should I receive nought but rejection, I'll have accomplished quite a bit, nothing to be ashamed of. Then there's also Plan C: invest in a boombox and go from campus to campus playing those power ballads from the 1980s that are, at once, epic and insipid, à la "Say Anything . . . " O, snap!, this is just the thread for Plan B's. Just pretend like you stopped reading after paragraph number two. Nothing to be ashamed of.

That is certainly a possibility. However, it seems that, according to the "Results Search" from previous years, Stanford has interviewed candidates for the English Ph D program before making their final decisions. Most of my anxiety issues from historical trends. Obviously, I cannot claim to know by what sort of process they are operating this year, and I am armed with the same "by late February" timetable; and in the "by" rests our hope and our salvation !

I think MA Programs are great if the fit is right: you're not locked into the 5-7 year commitment of a PhD program, so you get a little extra time to both knead together the issues and problems and literature and theory that could ultimate form into a smooth, satiny dissertation; and to make sure that you're in love with your subject enough to put yourself through the ensuing years of doctorate work. I am in an MA program presently, as a sort of stopgap, to keep myself occupied academically more than to earn a degree. Plus, it's flipping AWESOME to be a student. I don't care what anybody says, might say, or can say: there is nothing that makes me happier than a student's existence; moi, I am totally addicted to that sinusoid of stress-relaxation; the smell of university libraries couldn't be tastier; and walking around a college campus just feels right, chaleureux.

Ditto on congrats to UCLA-ers!!!!!!!

As regards the Subject Test: the test itself blows. So much. I took it 2.5 years out of undergrad and did reasonably well (88th percentile), but it is such a marathon that I am dreading the prospect of doing it again. The first 100 questions aren't THAT bad; it's the last 130 that are the worst. That being said, I think there is also some merit to the process of preparing for the test. I learned SO much in studying for the test, read so many great works that I was never required to read during my undergraduate years, and get some great insight into the overall trajectory of the canon; in a word, it really furthered my passion (for lack of a better word) for literature, and liberated me from my 20th-century obsession. The Norton anthologies are underrated !!! But I'll repeat: the test itself BLOWS: such an emotional roller-coaster. The only questions that seem justifiable are the ones you know right-off-the-bat, the rest make you say, "Who the hell needs to know that?"

Second that, librarygremlin. Looking at the historical records, it seems that Stanford should have sent out interview notices by now. The deadline was later last year, and interview notifications had been posted by February 6th. There are a couple options, I suppose: 1. No one among us has received an interview-invite from Stanford. 2. We make up such an awesome applicant pool that they are tearing their hair out, clawing at their eyes, and beating their breasts because they can't decide. Personally, I'm hoping for the latter, in which case, I'm scheduling an appointment for a bikini wax ASAP, as I know that I'm going to need to shine for that part of the application.

Great post, pomoisdead. There really is no conceptual graduate student for any given program; the fact that there are always exceptions to the rules indicates that the rules themselves don't really exist. Granted, it might be difficult to find your way into a top-10 if you have a 2.5 and 150s GREs, but if you're applying to these programs on more than just a whim, chances are that you have prepared sufficiently. We should not understand rejections as a school's telling us, "You're not good enough," but rather that we do not quite make the right match. The porridge of the three bears is the same substance; Goldilocks simply chooses what she prefers, that which meets her standard of taste. Some of us are too hot, others too cold, but there are programs out there that will find us juuuuuuuust right!, and will satisfy themselves by swallowing us up in one great big gulp. Bottom line: make your sacrifices to Zeus. He's got your back.

I understand your view, and I can sympathize with you, having myself been "playing the game" (le mot juste, methinks) for some time now. Moi, I prefer to ignore Voltaire and hide under the warm blankets of Leibnizian optimism. I try to focus on the most positive features of my application, and acknowledge that there is ALWAYS room for exceptions to the rule.

Judging by history, I'd venture that I will be hearing back this week or next if I am granted admittance. No one on the forum has reported hearing from either of those programs, so my Hope maintains its feathers.

C'est très gentil ! I try to assume a more positive attitude toward these things. Sure, statistically speaking, it's unlikely that any applicant, no matter how gilded his or her application or vitae or what-have-you may be, will be admitted to these programs. But, as the percentages admitted, despite being small, are in fact positive, then I've no reason to assume that my chances are nil. Sounds to me that someone has caught a bit of the choler; temper your humors, s'il vous plaît. And I'll re-iterate my inquiry: did anyone apply to Berkeley's Rhetoric program?

Anyone apply to Berkeley's Rhetoric program?