rhetoricus aesalon

I have no idea how this will go or how much time I'll be able to devote, but I have been on Grad Cafe a long time and have always believed in it as a place where graduate students support other graduate students, even when tensions and anxieties run high in discussion threads. It offered a lot of help to me as a first-generation PhD student and academic, and now that I am a faculty member with responsibilities for doctoral admissions, I want to practice giving frank but kindhearted advice to interested prospective students. I am not nearly as polished as Karen Kelsky in Ramus's recent post, but I have always found her style of communicating helpful in cutting through bullshit to deliver meaningful advice built on her many years of experience in and outside academia. So with the caveat that my answers will only represent my experience and that I will probably not be able to answer every question or every part of a question asked given my other personal and professional obligations: What do you want to know from an admissions committee member? What part of the graduate admissions process can I make explicit from the other side? I want to privilege questions from non-white, disabled, first-gen, and/or international (i.e., outside the US and Canada) prospective students in this space as well, so I will not be responding to questions chronologically but rather by progressive stacking. If you identify with any of these communities or cultures, consider requesting to have your question added to the stack in your reply. You can do this by writing "add my question to the stack" in any part of your post, or by DMing me.

I would not recommend applying to a program this year with the intention of deferring enrollment.

Seek out advisors who will support articulation of your background as an asset to future study in English, both in their feedback on your application materials and in their letters of recommendation. You are right that not having a clear path into a specific field will be a hard sell. So make sure the materials you are writing now make that path as clear and seamless as possible. In some cases, your inexperience in English could be more of an issue for funding depending on institutional policy or state law.

I am looking at the general rankings, not English graduate program rankings. Job search committees are routinely made up of faculty outside a candidate's area of specialization and, often, with at least one member outside the department. Departments will want to hire someone with specialization they do not have in order to round out program and university expertise. This means a graduate program's prestige can be less important to a university's overall prestige when on the academic job market.

The irony here is that both schools you've listed are top programs. Yours, Washington University, is in fact listed as a top 20 by USNews. So I'm not really sure why you're trying to convince early career graduate students that you've somehow beat the odds with your modest graduate education when in fact you've benefitted from the prestige of your program as much as anyone.

I can't speak to SMU specifically because I do not have a relationship to that school, but these events in general are meant to recruit admitted students into making the final push to enroll. In other words, this is now your opportunity to interview the school to make sure it is a good fit before you agree to whatever offer they have made to you by the universal April 15 deadline. It will also be a chance to meet other students who will be in your cohort and get a better sense of what your life would be like while at the institution and living in that area. You will most likely meet professors whose interests align with yours, and you might even sit in on a graduate course to get a feel for how they are run. You will likely get a group tour of the department building and campus, and you will most likely eat meals with current graduate students and have the chance to candidly speak to them about their experiences in the program. In other words, this visit is intended to be fun, build community, and convey to you that attending the program would be worth the half-decade plus you will be devoted to it. So enjoy it. But also, use it to your advantage. The program has made a commitment to you, but you have not yet made a commitment to the program. There are very few moments you will have power over your circumstances in academia, and this is one--however small it may be. Gather intel about how students support themselves over the summer, if they work other jobs and where those are, where they live, if they are comfortable, where your children (if you have any) will be going to school or daycare, where your partner (should you have one) work, etc. The school will do everything it can to put on its best face for you, and they will do what they can to get you to make the decision to enroll. Use the opportunity to be kind, open, and honest about what you need to be successful, and see if in the absolute best of times (because you truly will never have the university on the hook like this again) if they are able to give you that. They might not be able to do much, but even knowing how they communicate that to you will be very telling about what life will be like over the coming years.

Do you mean that you would be naming an affiliated faculty member? As in, faculty that have a formal relationship (such as a joint appointment) to French and comparative literature? If so, then there is no risk with naming this person because they are faculty in comp lit as much as they are in French.

Remember that you are not drafting a contract when you write your SOP. Naming a POI in no way means that you will actually work with that person. Listing faculty that you want to work with in a SOP is one way to convey your fit within a department and not much else. Trying to read into who might be moving, or not getting tenure, or retiring is usually information that you will not be privy to. Just list the faculty who work in similar circles as you want to; otherwise, they might be curious as to why you didn’t list them and if you really know much about the academic community you want to engage with.

As the first person who has responded to your post who has actually been on the market, let me say: No, it is not that bad. It is worse. Far worse. If you don’t want to believe your professors, then do your research and read the many, many people who were not as lucky as them and are suffering now because of their choice “to take a chance and see.” There is literally so much of it that it forms a genre: quit lit.

Great advice in this thread, and I'll just add that if you haven't already done so, talk to your professors at your current institution about this and ask them about how to fund it. Ask the chair in the department you are majoring in if the department has money to support your trip. Ask your college dean if they have money for undergraduate research travel, even if the deadline for their grants has passed. Your acceptance to this conference also makes them look good, and they might be able to help you out. Also want to echo what has already been hinted at. This conference will look good in the short term for grad school applications, but 5-8 years from now it will not matter. Don't go into debt for this conference. But most importantly: Celebrate! This is a big achievement, very worthy of your excitement. You may already know this, but your work was almost certainly judged anonymously -- it was reviewed for acceptance alongside graduate and faculty member work without your name or status as an undergraduate attached. And it was accepted! Congratulations!

I wouldn’t actively go seeking letters from former profs of the school you’re applying to, but if it just so happens that they were that doesn’t seem like cause for concern. I’m assuming this person worked with graduate students and left on good terms? If not, I still don’t think anyone would hold this LOR against you, but it really wouldn’t be all that helpful to you either.

Most adcomms LOATHE the GRE. If the program hasn't already abolished it as a requirement, then they would likely be delighted to have a well-qualified candidate with low to mediocre scores (not saying yours are) to use as proof that the college should get rid of it in application considerations. GREs continue to be less important, and more of an embarrassment, to schools that still use them in admission decisions. See: this recent study demonstrating STEM students who score in the lowest quartile either (for men) outperform or (for women) show no difference from their counterparts in the highest quartile when measuring rate of degree completion. Do not waste your time, money, or energy giving the GRE one additional thought.

What if I told you this is exactly what happens, again and again and again, on the market? I’m not here to fight or agree or disagree, because I genuinely value the mission of Gradcafe in grad students supporting grad students. But I have to say I see very little of my and my cohort’s market experience represented in what you’ve written here.

Thank you so much for saying this. I completely agree. But going back to OP's question, going to a higher-ranked school will still offer the best change of getting this job than not. What I meant by my post is that top-ranked program graduates are the most likely to be in a position to make this choice.

A lot of truth in that post, @MetaphysicalDrama. Ranking schools is yet another tool of academic white supremacy, and we need more people to share their experiences so future scholars are better prepared than we were. I'm a little wary of the story we tell ourselves about the candidate who botches a teaching college interview, though. That one circulates a lot. What we might see as someone (usually a woman) making "inappropriate" demands of the institution may be someone negotiating an offer comparable to another they already have.

Stats about where students end up tell only part of the story. I think it is far less likely that top programs don't train their students to be good teachers than it is students from top programs get multiple offers and turn down those from teaching schools because they pay significantly less for substantially more teaching. In a profession where your research is the most important thing to mobility, it takes a lot to accept $15k less a year to teach two or three times as many classes.

@Lowe, you may also consider when you reach that point in your graduate career, you can ask a top professor doing similar work outside your institution to be an external reader on your dissertation committee. This will make your materials stronger on the job market because you will have a letter from someone -- in the words of Karen Kelsky (AKA The Professor Is In) -- who is not paid and obligated to be your adviser, giving search committees a more unbiased evaluation of your accomplishments. Having external letters also shows you are building a reputation outside your institution. But as someone who is just now wrapping up their first year on the market and has landed a good job coming out of a top program in my field, I think it's incorrect to say rank isn't one of the more important factors when landing a first-round interview. I believe fit -- which unfortunately is something you cannot really know or control very much on the market from year to year -- is the most important, but I truly believe rank is also high on this list. I have seen students in high-ranking programs with no publications get offers after successful on-campus interviews. And I have seen students from lower-ranking institutions with multiple peer-reviewed publications receive few if any first-round interviews. Of course it is impossible to know why exactly, but over and over I have heard faculty say some version of, "Coming from X program, you are just going to get more interviews than people in Y program. That's just a fact."

That IS rude. I’m so sorry that you are both experiencing this. But I think in the end you just can’t know why they aren’t responding. Maybe they don’t know the answer and they are waiting until they do. Maybe they do have an answer but it’s their policy to notify applicants in groups. Maybe they thought they did respond, but the email didn’t send correctly. Maybe it is just a crappy department. In any case, it’s not okay that you haven’t heard back. I hope that you do soon!

If your goal is to enjoy grad school, feel supported and valued in your department, and get the best education possible: go to the lower-ranked school. If your goal is to be as competitive as you can on the imploding academic job market: go to the elite private school. I’m not saying both aren’t possible at the same institution. But without knowing more about your specific situation, this is the (problematic) assumption that still predominates in academia. Especially from the perspective of the academic job market.

GRE scores are among the least important elements of your application, though they do have a purpose. I had similar scores to you and was accepted to many of the top programs in my field. Focus on perfecting your SOP and WS; those have a much larger impact on your chances of getting in. GRE scores matter, and frankly the only reason programs still might require them, because of Graduate Schools. There is a threshold, as @kgras13 mentions, that applicants must meet in order to be competitive for college- and university-level fellowships, which are limited and can be fiercely competitive among all departments at the university. Departments want students on university fellowship because then they do not have to pay their stipend for as long as the college/uni does. If you don’t meet that threshold, advisors who want you may have to make a special case as to why you should still be admitted, which can be perceived as a drain on limited department resources. So, unfortunately, this does mean that the quantitative score can also be important, since at some unis it could mean you are competing with math and science students for the same pot of college funding.

I have never heard of anyone doing this. But if the student's adviser and committee were okay with it, it would be possible at my institution.

Absolutely! There is a wave of rhet/comp work that fiercely advocates for divorcing rhet/comp research from writing classroom pedagogy (see: Sid Dobrin's Postcomposition). But overwhelmingly, the jobs in rhet/comp are in composition, so I find it's still very much the case that grad students -- at least in my program -- are strongly encouraged to practice articulating their work as it intervenes in composition writ large, even if it doesn't specifically take up classroom writing. If you are geographically constrained, then I would recommend not worrying about applying to programs in your area. Rhet/comp does have a prestige hierarchy (with Midwest programs tending to be perceived as more prestigious than others -- Penn State being the one exception), but my perception is that it is not as strong a hierarchy as in other fields. And I really don't feel I can think of any program that couldn't support your research interests in political rhetoric and propaganda, which is a staple in the history of rhetoric and also very much central to work in visual rhetorics. (Now that I think of it, Laurie Gries works a lot with images [many of them political] and developed a method for studying them longitudinally called "iconographic tracking," which may interest you. Her recent book is Still Life with Rhetoric.)

+1 to all the wonderful work renea has done writing their response. Answering big questions like this about an entire field -- especially one that has pretty much been in flux and trying to define itself since its start 60-130 years ago (for modern composition) and 2500+ years ago (for rhetoric) is hard. So I totally want to echo renea -- it isn't your ignorance but the how-do-you-hold-a-moonbeam-in-your-hand way in which rhet/comp is always anything and yet not everything. I think the best way to really get a sense of the field is to either (1) take a class in it if you can, or (2) take a look at Views from the Center, which is a collection of chairs' addresses from the Conference on College Composition and Communication, which is the largest conference in the field, from 1977 to 2005. You should be able to Google more recent addresses, but my recommendation is to try and look at a good range because in general a chair's address will try to account for where the field currently is and where it needs to go. That isn't to say that's going to be a whole picture of the field -- just an idea of its core in a certain place in time. To add to renea's long list, there's work being done in rhetorics of labor, feminism, historiography, ecocomposition, posthumanism, ambient rhetoric, sonic rhetoric, object oriented ontology, feminist new materialism, feminist technoscience, writing centers, crip theory, etc., etc. One other way you might want to think about your questions is to think about what classes you want to teach. You could certainly study propaganda, advertising, and political rhetoric in many, many rhet/comp programs (though they would probably stylize it as "visual rhetoric"). But in just about every rhet/comp program, and in every rhet/comp job, you will teach composition. Usually first-year composition. A lot. You will probably have to direct or oversee a writing program or writing center at some point in your career, even if you aren't hired as a writing program administrator or writing center director. You will be a go-to person for anyone who has questions about the teaching of writing, and you will be expected to be an expert in the theory and practice of writing instruction, no matter your sub-area of study. If that doesn't sound appealing to you, then I would say rhet/comp is probably not the right fit. Even tenured professors in rhet/comp at R1 institutions who teach graduate seminars in courses that align perfectly with their subfield will at times be expected to teach intro-level composition courses. And just about all of them love it.

It is not a fun thing to share, but it is important to share that higher education is in a labor crisis, and it stands to only get worse now that our government has become ultra-conservative. Getting a graduate degree in the humanities is difficult enough, and even if you do finish there are a mountain of obstacles awaiting your future as a professional. With that said, law school graduates don't have it all that much better -- perhaps even worse since, statistically speaking, you are about as likely to land a job as a law school grad now as you are an English graduate school grad but are more likely to have amassed much more debt in law school. I don't share this to dissuade your choice. I love grad school. I love what I do; I am personally fulfilled and feel I do important work. But you (and any partner you might have) should be knowledgeable about exactly what you're getting yourself into no matter the choice you make.