knp

For some reason I thought it would be clever to use Leslie Knope's last name but to take all the vowels out. I must have been very tired haha

I believe Penn is aiming for sometime next week—these things do change, but during the last week of January I heard that it would be "about three weeks."

Maybe this is just because I have been on both sides of the impostor syndrome feeling, but within academia, I am often more inclined to trust the academic talent of the less prestigiously-qualified half of any room. At this point in my life, my resume is nice and shiny. Graduated with honors, fancy college, whatever. Looks great on paper. When I got to my fancy college after a totally mediocre high school education, though, there were all these kids from prep schools even fancier than my college running around talking about their senior year thirty-page research projects (!) and their electives in tenth-year Japanese and jazz guitar, while my eyes bugged right out of my head at the idea of writing a college paper that was five whole pages long. What I learned over the seven years in which that transformation took place, and which I hope you will come to realize too, is that a glossy resume like mine has little to no correlation with intellectual depth. They may shine, but you are absolutely worthy of shining right along there with them. For an admissions committee to choose you, as one such excellent committee has already, means that they saw your talent. I don't want to give the impression that I think that all or even most students with more traditionally prestigious qualifications than yours are coasting by on a thin layer of polish and gloss. It happens, though, and because you are working for this, and working your way up, you should know that your admissions committee(s) chose you for you. I don't think it's very helpful to think about this as a question of "talent," though, even though I just used that vocabulary. Instead, I find it much more effective to think of academia as a question of skill—skills can be nurtured and grown through practice, and a tremendous amount of academic practice is based not on talent, but on practiced skills. For the near future, for you, I think the rate at which you hone those skills is only going to accelerate. You mention that your analysis and prose have greatly improved in a year—it is really hard to make dramatic improvements once you're already at the top of your game. How many Olympians can easily shave 10 seconds off of their mile time? Not many. I probably could shave whole minutes off, though, with an investment of only a month or two, because right now I am a couch potato. I don't doubt that you'll have your work cut out for you in your PhD program, but (even beyond the fact that PhDs push even the most prestigiously-qualified student, so everybody should see their skills rapidly develop), the improvements you've been making make me feel even more certain that your skills haven't even come close to the peak you're going to end up attaining. As a writing teacher, can I also make a more specific suggestion on your issues there? It's much easier said than done, but can you try to relax a bit when you write? The most effective writing comes when people use words with which they are comfortable, whether that comfort is with "ain't" or "elucidate." Can you aim for that? If you feel limited by the words you currently know, it's a great idea to learn more—but don't go shoehorning weird new words in there to try to sound smarter. Expressing ideas simply and clearly is wicked hard, but it pays off in the reception of the work. (And sure, there's like .04% of the population that naturally speaks like books, and they're probably overrepresented such that they make up like 4% of academics. But here is a Macarthur-winning writer brainstorming with a childish ditty because hey sometimes the right words just aren't coming; Not being able to think of the right phrase immediately, all the time, is an affliction that besets all of humanity, even the geniuses!) Maybe your right place has already accepted you! Maybe it hasn't, and you'll get into somewhere better. But, no matter where you end up, I hope you can find some of your own steps and ways of thinking about this so that you not only know in your head that you belong, but that you also feel it in your heart.

Thank you, you guys are the nicest! I look forward to congratulating you all in turn, too

Rejected by Princeton, but accepted by my first choice! I do get to go to graduate school!

Princeton's usually pretty fast about sending out rejections along with their acceptances, so I'm expecting one of the former any time now... xP I thought the timeline of my programs' usual response dates meant I'd have some good news before this one!

I know, right? Not the weekend!

Hey guys, I had one, too! I think it did not go great, but I liked the faculty with whom I spoke.

The admissions version of this: http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/faq-the-snake-fight-portion-of-your-thesis-defense

I was so sure that I was going to hear back from about three programs this week, one way or the other! Two of my programs sent out word to somebody or other that they'd be sending out decisions "probably at the end of this week"—the third, UNC, I now understand, thanks @KLZ. Dear POIs...you have my number, so

I knew that my undergrad had prepared me enough for the rigor of graduate school, although I definitely have huge weaknesses in my knowledge of my actual subject field (due to some major-switching shenanigans on my part). But I've always had a pretty good sense of how I think about things, and specifically, how long that often takes. I'm always bothering my friends to take breaks! This is in part selfish behavior on my part, because if I get stuck on an idea and go take a walk or get a drink with friends or even walk down to the break room to get coffee, I can feel ideas percolating away in the back of my head as I go, so when I come back, I'm usually not so stuck anymore. This process, but on a much larger scale, is why I took my couple years off—I could tell that my life plans were bubbling away in the back of my head, and I applied when they'd been working away for long enough that I could get a good read on what I wanted. Your last sentence makes me think that a funded master's degree might be an option you should look into. It would give you more training and two years' more life experience (even if it's not the "real world", you'll still mature while you're there), without locking you into a longer degree while you're feeling unsure of some things.

Honestly, it didn't even occur to me to apply while I was still a senior! I knew I wasn't ready to apply the following fall, though, because of what happened when I sat down with one of my favorite professors to talk about it just after I graduated. Normally I am fairly confident and articulate, but my attempt to express graduate school plans came out as a garbled and insecure mess. I figured that if I couldn't talk about my plans at even a pretty vague level without getting frustrated and upset, I probably wasn't ready to write them down in a polished way. So I went away and worked for a couple years. When I got back to it, I could articulate my plans, a much better research project, and have an itch to get back to it, rather than feeling a vague dread of having to do more school without a break.

Have you actually created the applications yet? I found that a lot of my department websites tended to say things like "Writing sample required." How long? What topic? Didn't say. But within the application itself, it would tell me how many pages it had to be and if there were any other requirements. Otherwise, email the departments! The department administrator is probably the first person you should ask.

@Pink Fuzzy Bunny I dunno if it was on here or somewhere else around the internet, but I saw a point made recently. It was like, hey, remember all the classes you've ever taken, or invited lectures you've watched? Have you seen any of those by very successful people? (Me: *nods*) Were any of those talks by very successful people just excruciatingly dull and/or awkward? (Me: *nods vigorously*) Conclusion: If some very successful academics are very bad at public speaking, interviewing well must be nice but often not a dealbreaker.

Wow, congratulations guys, that's awesome!

@RamyaS I hope so, and for you and everybody else in this thread, too! Not at Yale, no. (And I've got nothin' on Minnesota, sorry!)

Me too! I wasn't really that sure I was a good fit before the interview. After the interview, though, I love them! The only program I've applied to that's actually started to return decisions is UNC, from which I have heard nothing... No rejections have popped up on the results board yet, though. (Does anybody know if all acceptances have gone out?) But I'm pretty sure that 2-3 more of my programs will have released many/all of their decisions by next Monday, and all but Penn by next Friday! (At that interview, they said they'd most likely send out notifications in the third week of February.) Who me, nervous? What would make you say that?

@RamyaS I actually think one of my very best applications was the last one I submitted! I only ended up having a day and a half to tailor my material to that school, so I did that part in a righteous hurry. Without the time to over-think "fit", though, I think I might have been more eloquent than the ones where I was trying to split the hairs of exactly why I was interested. I got an interview for that one (over in anthropology), so you never know how the circumstances of writing an application will affect anything! I dunno if I'll get admitted, but I was Super Not Expecting to even make it to an interview there.

I mean, yeah. Some people have a strong bias against people whose speech patterns sound young or whatever... But clearly those people aren't everybody! I mean, I try not to use "like" etc. too TOO much...but at the same time, I don't think that the bias against people who sound young should be indulged to the point of eradicating my natural speech patterns. "Totally" is totally not going to totally disappear from my vocabulary.

@123hardasABC One of my friends who's done a lot more interviews than me has A Thing about using professional vocabulary in interviews. I don't know if that's good advice in general, or if it's just her thing because she has a more formal style of speaking and writing than I do. So when we practiced doing interviews together, she was trying to get me to stop calling works of scholarship "awesome" or "cool" quite so often. I don't think this was a requirement for admission, but it was probably a good idea. Anyway, fast forward to my interview with the school where I'm interviewing with one of my favorite scholars. I ended up describing her most famous book, to her, as "like, totally awesome."

@emiliajulia How did the interview go?

I felt that applying as an undergraduate would be to my detriment. I could have done it, but I'm very glad I took two years "off." It helped mature me as a person, and it also helped me create a more mature graduate application than I could otherwise have managed.

I had my interview yesterday! I got a lot of "is this program a good fit for you?" "Can you expand on that?" "Really?" "...Are you sure?" I'd guess that was because my fit was, in fact, less obvious than would have triggered them to start pitching the more nitty-gritty historiographical stuff.

I posted this in the whine wait already, but I love it so much I will post it twice