egwynn

I'm on the east coast in a fully-funded program, and I only know of one person at any level in the program that started when they were over 35. There are, in fact, several people who started my direct-entry PhD program when they were 20-21. The place where I did my MA seemed to admit people in their 20s pretty exclusively, and the same goes for this program. I don't really know how common that is, but both graduate schools I've attended seem more inclined to admit 20-somethings in all of their humanities departments (I have also never met anyone from Comp Lit, German Studies, Hispanic Studies, French Studies, Communication Studies, and so on who didn't start while in their 20s). There's always the chance that other cohorts at my current institution have older students in them whom I have not met. And I guess I would also qualify all of this by saying that, for the most part, I am guessing age based on appearance. I don't usually go around asking people how old they are. You might want to go look at student profile pages for each program if you're worried about having a broader age-range in your cohort/program. I can't imagine that they post ages, but many of them have photos.

Have you looked at McGill and UBC? McGill, at least, is in a more affordable city (do your research, though... they're having huge budget cuts, so your resources may be disappearing and some of the faculty are as well).

strangle hold

rat pack

Mine are along the same lines as yours (having more skills won't hurt), but the only thing I can imagine it "helping" with in a less vague way is if it's a teaching-heavy program. You could market yourself as having the skill set to be more prepared for teaching ESL students and those who struggle with grammar. But I think this is a rather weak helper, if that makes sense, and I doubt it would be a game-changer. ETA: This is all just guessing, though, if that's not clear.

white wedding

paradise city

standing wave

good lawd. I had it easy. 2 institutions and no major courses at the first one. I think I averaged/recalculated to combine them for total GPA, but I wouldn't put any money on that.

Rose Egypt: If the person you emailed is in the States, it's a holiday weekend here.

id quid, I was a UG transfer as well. I had a pretty limp GPA before transferring, but I don't think that my transfer affected how adcomms looked at me. So I wouldn't worry too much about that if I were you.

I agree about people getting hung up on fit. I think something that made this a non-issue for me is that I went into my MA with a real hard-on for working with two particular people. That did not pan out. At all. Working with one of them was, actually, one of the worst experiences of my life thus far. So, in picking a PhD program, I thought about it in a very different way. Instead of asking who is doing what I'm doing, I asked myself who is going to think about what I'm doing in a way that will supplement and complement my work. I don't want to work with someone who makes me feel redundant, or whose role in my work is basically to simply affirm all of my efforts regardless of their actual merit. I want to work with someone whose work is actually quite distinct from mine. So that's what I'm going to do. The bigger question was which PhD is going to leave me in the best place in 5 years (i.e. with little to no debt, publications, great referees, a respected degree, great experience that's prepared me for the job market, a backup plan for when I don't get tenure, and a really impressive CV). It's a bit mercenary, but your job prospects aren't going to care in 6 years that you and your advisor were bffls if you're not also bringing a hell of a lot more to the job talk. And if/when I discover that some of these people I thought I would work with don't mesh with me, I'm going to shift my priorities just enough to work with someone else. I have had Plan Bs for every step of this process, from what to do if I don't get in/don't apply to what to do if everyone in my specialty up and retires on the same day. It's a bit paranoid, but my experience at my MA made me feel that it's more or less necessary to prepare yourself for these kinds of eventualities.

I feel like I'm always Debbie Downer when I drag this into these conversations, but I'm going to do it anyways. I highly (and repeatedly and fervently) recommend that you give yourself as many options as possible. Here's why: 1) What you want right now might not be what you want in January. The time between submitting apps and hearing from schools can be a strange and mystical part of your life: you might read Jamaica Kincaid for the first time and become obsessed, you might meet your POI at a conference and discover that he is the devil incarnate, you might realize that you wouldn't live in Chicago if it were the last place on earth, or many many other things. Be a little flexible about what you can imagine yourself doing, because not only will you possibly change what you want between now and March, but you'll almost definitely change direction at least a little bit once you arrive at your program and start trying and learning new things. 2) This is obvious, but it's worth stating and considering again and again. What you see online, what you get in emails, what you hear from students before going places, and what your POIs tell you is all marketing. I was admitted to a program this past season that seemed really good on paper and online, but when I visited it, I was immediately put off by the attitude of the department. Be critical. You don't want to end up somewhere that doesn't work for you because you were starry-eyed. Being negative and fastidiously evaluative is a bit of a drag and might make you unpopular at margarita Mondays for a few months, but it will also probably put you in a better position than just riding on what the program says it offers and is. 3) If you can produce (and afford) 15 applications of the same quality that you would achieve if you were only producing 3, I would recommend applying more places. I know that people feel strongly in both directions about this, but my reasoning is pretty basic and mathematical. Both times I have applied, I have had a 25% success rate. Had I applied to 4 schools, this would give me 1 option. Because I applied to 16, I had 4. You want options for reasons 1 and 2 and also because, when you have multiple offers, you can haggle. This is not true everywhere, as some schools have a standard stipend and that's that, but there are many schools that will ask you what your other offers are, and if you can return that U of A has offered you $5,000 more than U of B and you'd really prefer U of B, then you might just get $7,500 more from U of B. (This is looking way ahead, but I'm also going to recommend not feeling timid about haggling; don't haggle if they have a set stipend, but if you think you have leverage, do it.) 4) Unless you feel very strongly that you would be utterly miserable living somewhere or you are moving with a partner/kids and need to consider location more, don't eliminate schools because of where they are. I'm not particularly keen on Texas, California, or NYC, but I applied to 6 schools in those locations and very seriously considered the offers I got from some of them. The fact that I ended up in a program that is both highly-ranked and pretty much exactly where I want to be is pure chance (and this program only became my first choice after I visited all of the programs I'd been admitted to). Weigh the pros (what the university is going to do for you) against the cons (horrible weather, in a city, not in a city), and the pros will very probably win. 5) Listen to advice and recommendations, but also don't feel timid about rejecting it. My advisor at my last program suggested about 30 programs to me, and probably 15 of them made it on my list or were already there. I was pretty dubious about one of those, but I decided to go for it even though I wasn't keen on the location and the program wasn't represented well on the website. This program became my #2 and I very nearly ended up there. Even though I did not choose to do my PhD there, I made very valuable connections with the faculty during my visit. The program I chose is not the one he was pushing for, but I decided it was the best fit for me. Anyways, those are some of the more nuanced ways I made my list. I'll also answer id quid's question a bit more directly with this bullet point: • ask any helpful faculty Your an advisor is, obviously, important in this process, but you have far more brains to pick than his or hers. Ask profs you get along with in your department and in relevant departments. If you're not a dick about it, people who are in radically different specialties than the one you want to enter will probably be willing to take the time and effort to think about it and even reach out to contacts they have on your behalf. Be polite, friendly, and solicitous, and you will be inundated with helpful information.

I'm going to both agree and disagree with Bunny (and both my agreement and my disagreement will be conditional... how helpful). I don't think that you should necessarily head straight for the rhet/comp route. Now, I say this assuming that you're interested in researching literature/theory as much as you're interested in researching rhetoric and pedagogy. So, if that's not true, then go rhet/comp. But both programs I mentioned work with their lit PhD students to very strongly establish a base for teaching rhetoric, and pedagogy is necessarily built into that. This is especially true of Rochester, whose offer I turned down essentially because I did not want to concentrate so heavily on rhetoric and composition. I'm sure there are many, many others that have strong inclinations towards rhetoric. But from what I've seen at my MA, at the programs I visited before choosing for my PhD, in the one I chose, in stories from friends in other programs and prospective PhD students on my visits, and on most of the boards here is that you're going to be teaching rhetoric and composition no matter what as long as you're teaching during your graduate work. My impression is that this is because most profs in English departments don't want to teach freshman writing or that terrible survey where they start at Beowulf and plow through to Faulkner while also teaching the "hamburger essay." So you'll teach it (or you'll TA it). The question is more how formalized it is and how specialized you become in it. I also want to say that I feel very strongly that my teaching (and my change in specialty) is what made my last application season successful. I'm sure no one looked at my CV and said, "Oh, gosh, Lons TAed English 101, we must have her!!!!", but teaching made an enormous difference on how I write, how I think, how I explicate my interests and my intentions and thoughts, and what my goals are. This made a huge difference when I was writing my SOP, talking to people in departments, communicating with my LOR-writers, and so on. That said, I can also name a fistful of friends who are in top PhD programs and got there without ever having so much as supervised Sunday school classes, so it is not necessary, but I really think it was a game-changer for me. Anyways, lastly, I'm totally going to agree with Bunny on the MA thing. If you're on the fence, the MA will give you time to pick a side and/or decide if it's the right fence to be on to begin with. I entered my MA as a prospective Shakespearean who refused to write about women and still couldn't really abandon the burning desire to be a Romantic and I ended up fixated on women in the 18th century and in reality television. So... MAs help you decide.

I'd look at Cornell for theory, Rochester for rhet/comp. I can't think of anything else off the top of my head, but that might change.