wetheplants

Got mine too!!

Hi there - I'm a Boston native, mixed-race/brown kid! I've lived here since I was born and worked a lot in the city - I have to say that I've never experienced any racism of really any sort. Nothing overt and obvious, but also frankly nothing of the more subtle kind. My dad is a very dark skinned Indian guy and hes worked here for like 40 years in the city and he thinks this is a very safe, great place to live. My personal experience with all cops here has been great, which means something since there have been so many problems on the news lately. Now that's not to say that there isn't discrimination at work here ever - of course not! - but we've always found this a very safe place to live and have never had any bad experiences here. Boston isn't quite as diverse as places like NYC, but there are a lot of black folks and a LOT of Asian immigrants (Vietnamese, Indian, etc), so it's not like some kind of whitewash. BU is also pretty diverse, as far as I know - lots of international students - and its HUGE. My boyfriend lived in Allston, which is where many BU students live - it's a middle income neighborhood with lots of Asian families. Definitely not super white! And even when I wasn't with him, I felt pretty safe walking around (as a woman, POC).

I don't have any input from you, but I'm interested in knowing the same. I'm applying to Masters at the moment, but with the intention of boosting my name pedigree upwards with each step, and eventually going for a PhD. I'm also very interested in Oxford and Cambridge, partially because the PhDs are so much shorter!

Hi guys!! Has anyone heard back from Cambridge, Oxford, Dartmouth, or Columbia yet?? I am still waiting on them. I've 4 for 4 so far in acceptances... and BC even offered me full tuition!!

Anyone have any advice about submitting excerpts of a longer work? Formatting, what sections to pick? Do you need to include your introduction or should you just include as much research and meaty stuff as possible? I have a few schools which say it's okay to send in an excerpt, and I'm applying to places in the both the US and the UK. Right now I'm cutting a 2,000 word chunk out of a 6,000 word essay to submit. Thank you!! =]

Or any other formatting ideas for headers? Do you need your name on there?

Hey guys, what are your thoughts on this? Can I email my writers and nicely remind them that the deadlines are this weekend/monday...? I'm the bad application kid who is probably going to submit three applications (due on 15, 15, and 17) tomorrow... woop woop. The links have been open for my LOR writers for about a week now, though. One out of three have submitted it. I've been emailing them over the last month letting them know I'm working on stuff (and I gave them months in advance heads up to actually write it.) Is it really pushy to be like "hey, the deadlines are this weekend?"

If you feel that you made that decision, in error, you could always email whoever is in charge of grad admissions at your school, right? Just tell them you didn't understand it and that isn't what you intended to. It probably won't change much and I doubt they'll be able to do anything formally, but at least if it comes up in conversation, someone can say "Oh yeah we heard from them, it was a mistake."

Oh, and I know this is a bit late, but I would definitely include political blog writing. It's like freelance writing and it'll show that you're committed to producing professional written work and you've made an effort to get your writing out there- even if it's not in a journal.

Oh, also, how did you cite your poetry? Did you like do a full MLA citation, or just list the magazine/anthology and the date?

I just went through this... woof, that's a lot of stuff. I wonder if all of it is relevant for younger academics who haven't had any college teaching experience or academic publications though. Or a Masters degree. I have some teaching experience, but it's all like random positions where I was working with high schoolers (which I think is pretty good for a kid who is 23), so I don't really know what to do if I don't describe it at all. What kind of order did you end up using for yours, if you don't mind me asking? Mine is: Education, Honors Thesis, Research Experience, Teaching Experience, Play Productions, Published Poetry... Yeep.

Oh I'm so glad there is already a CV thread, I was about to make one!! Me: Applying to US and UK Schools hoping to Medieval AND Renaissance drama - focus on performance history as well as lit. Three Questions: 1. Languages. What do I include...? My languages background isn't really great for someone looking to do medieval... I did two semesters of Old English that I'm pretty proud of (although somewhat unrelated) and 3 semesters of mediocre French grades in college. Did 4 years of Latin in HS. Better than nothing... but not much better. Should I include like... reading ability in Old English? Basic Latin and Basic French? Or just skip the whole thing altogether? (I do have a line in my SOP about wanting to improve my Latin and continue Old English) 2. Creative Writing Thesis? So I had a concentration in Creative Writing as part of my English major for my undergrad, so I wrote a novella as a thesis (and yes that was AWESOME and I will never regret it.) I figure I may as well include it, but I know most people write like a description of their research... so I put in my tag line? Is this totally weird? Here's what it looks like. HONORS THESIS ___ _____ “Strada di Casa: The Road Home” May 2013 Advisor: Jennifer Finney Boylan Second Reader: Adrian Blevins Completed a 108 paged novella utilizing multiple languages. When the jaded and cynical senator Paul Cattello agrees to take a road trip through his ancestral Italian homeland with his teenage brother and incorrigible grandmother, he begins to wonder if home isn’t as far away as he imagined. Presented in May of 2013 at the Colby College Undergraduate Research Symposium. ----- 3. Descriptions of jobs/teaching experience? I've got some teaching related work done, so I wanted to put that in, but I see some of you guys are saying not describe things? So no bullet-style, resume style descriptions of what an individual job would be? Just if anyone else is interested, I'm also including a section each for which of my plays have been produced and what poetry I've published.

Masters in Medieval and Renaissance Literature. They don't seem to be too fussy about contacting people on their web pages. Their page for admissions (includes the PhD program too) says "Please note that although prospective graduate students may wish to look at the list of faculty members' research interests before they decide to apply here, supervisors aren't appointed until after the candidate has been accepted and can't appoint themselves to supervise a project in advance."

Guys, any thoughts on what I should be focusing on in a 500 word SOP?? It's so short! And it's for Cambridge in the UK. Any differences I should be keeping in mind...?

I'm working on my application to Cambridge right now and there's an optional section on the application where you can specify profs you'd like to work with. Any thoughts if I should be doing that (and contacting people?) or skipping it? I mean, there are like 4-5 faculty whose work would go nicely with mine, I just feel weird picking one person randomly. I wouldn't want to offend someone who I didn't pick.

Right. I'm at like 536 and removing content at this point... eep. Also, it's for Cambridge, so I don't know if they're more fussy than Americans.

What about when a school is asking for about 500? How close to 500 do you have to be? Do they want it on the dot exactly?

So I've done loads of edits on my writing sample, a paper I wrote during undergrad... How do you know when to stop? When do you say it's done and let it go?

Guys, I got a 600 on the Subject test and a 164 on the Verbal on the General one... is that ok?? Good enough for top schools? Like is Columbia gonna roll their eyes at me? =/ Congrats, all of you!! So many good scores!! =]

Okay, just took one of ETS practice tests online and got a 168!!! Let's hope I can replicate that next week!!! One thing that has been REALLY helping me with the verbal is just doing all the vocab questions first. Like, I cannot praise this strategy enough. I just skip right over anything that involves reading and finish up all the verbal questions - usually takes me like 10 minutes or less, 1 minute or less per question. If you're getting good with your vocab, you can do 2 a minute or so. Anyway, this has been extremely helpful because with vocab you either know the words or you don't, and its easy to narrow down you list if you're not sure and just pick - no lengthy reading and going back and forth. Just finish all these up, and then go back to all the reading questions. Hopefully you'll have about 20 minutes to answer the rest of your questions, so you can chill out a bit and not have your eyes go all buggy on you. By that point you've already gotten all your easy (or just didn't know it and won't know it) questions out of the way, and you can focus in on the long passages. At this point you know what your time budget is - if you're doing hot and moving through, great, if you're loosing time, you can at least skip around and make sure you're devoting at least a few minutes to each question. Also - I very often skip the questions that say 'select all correct answers'. Almost all the time, I save those for last. Those are statistically the hardest to get right, so unless I'm like really in the jive of a particular passage, I save those for the end and do what I can with whatever time I have left.

Nope, still useful! Thank you! =] Well, I guess I am gravitating towards smaller colleges, with Magdalene and Pembroke. I was also thinking about Leckhampton which is CC's all grad campus but mreh. The other two seemed like better options. I guess I just really didn't want to be living far away from the city because I I won't have a bike or anything and I'd like to be able to get to things quickly. And yes, I don't know if I'd want to do any sports teams (my big sports are snowboarding and softball, neither of which I'll find! ) but I definitely plan on participating in dramatic stuff, either with set/writing/acting, so hopefully that will get in me in touch with people. Also, speaking of dramatic societies - are they actually as college-centric as they sound? Like, will most of the people in the Pembroke Players be members of Pembroke? Or from all over? Should i care about being a college with a dramatic society or not? Thanks! This is very helpful, I have a few friends in England but none at Cambridge =]

I mention Holinshed's Chronicles at one point and I'm wondering if I need to cite a dictionary somewhere for the meaning of a certain word that I'm fairly certain is no longer in use. Here's my text: In his first edition of Chronicles, Holinshed uses the word “ferly” in place of “wild”, which eloquently emphasizes the witch’s supernatural and ‘strange’ nature, implying that they are ‘unusual’, ‘astonishing’, and ‘causing terror or wonder’ (243; ed. 1577). Now I had no idea what ferly meant and just looked it up. Can't be that archaic if it's on dictionary.com - http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/ferly Should I be citing the dictionary? (Or should I find a better dictionary?) Can I chalk that one up to common knowledge? Should I get rid of the little quotes around the definition words or keep them?

Do you guys know if English programs actually give two hoots about the analytical writing stuff? I figure I'm just going to wing it and maybe just write out a few outlines ahead of time - I don't see the point in devoting time writing essays that I can't even grade anyway.

In terms of what people are saying about the lots of reading, you kind of have to figure out what is going to work best for you. As someone who is a speed-reader, I usually go to the questions first. Sometimes they're just "Fetch" questions, as Princeton calls them, and they ask about something specific, usually a proper noun. So literally just skim the passage for the proper noun, and read only whatever puts that in context. Don't bother with anything else. If you want to, just briefly skim whatever else is going on in the passage, but it's not really necessary. I just find it helpful to make a distinction between reading for skimming and reading to understand. Skimming the passage should be something like "ok, first passage is a boring intro, they are talking about supernovas, something confusing about distance and speed, okay." And that's it. And then for each question you can just hone in whatever particular 2-3 sentence section you need and actually read them properly so you know what they're talking about. Also, for the ones where they ask you to pick a sentence where something is happening, just write down like a-e or whatever for however many sentences there are and just quickly look through them. It's usually really obvious if they are going to be right for your particular question or not and there's no need to actually sit and wade through what is actually happening. Also, are you guys timing yourselves when you practice? I was wondering if I should time myself for 25 minutes instead of 30 for the verbal sections, just to get myself used to working fast, but I don't want to train myself to rush. Any thoughts?

Unless you've done some really specific amazing things with the international guy and he can talk about those things specifically in a letter, I would go for the one who knows you better. Also, it's worth considering if Guy #1 knows anyone in the departments you're applying to, because that might be a real boon if he likes you. I personally don't think my profs would be offended if I asked them about that, but I have no idea how that works with other people.