knp

Hi, welcome! @nom I PM'd you.

Hey! I'm one of the Penn interviews, which will be held by Skype—I'm sorry if I caused any any extra/avoidable anxiety by posting it! From previous years, (the key search terms being penn* history -art -state), it seems like there's usually 2-3 interviews recorded in the last week of January/first week of February, and then 6-7 acceptances in the last week of February, followed by more sporadic decisions, including the bulk of the rejections. (As per the results search; I have no idea what percentage of the interview/acceptance pool those capture). So, I'm excited, and the interview sounds semi-formal, but interviewing is clearly still not a necessary step for acceptance! I think part of why I got one is that I, personally, have no idea whether Penn is one of my best fits, or the worst fit out of seven applications. (Although I like all the schools I applied to so much that "worst fit" is still really good, and I'd still be really excited to go.) I go back and forth on that question every day, though, so perhaps that less-than-obvious-but-potentially-great fit is why they want to talk to me. I'm nervous but looking forward to it in part because I want to learn more about them!

I've been getting into amateur bartending lately, and I'm so behind on my unpaid internship which I usually do from home. (The unpaid internship is a whole other saga, and hopefully will turn out to be an opportunity of short duration.) These factors combined today, so now I am drinking an alcoholic beverage to bribe myself to do my work. Self-bribery via winter cocktails isn't a sustainable solution—this drink's got vodka, creme de menthe, Bailey's, and heavy cream, so boy is it not good for you—but it is helping for now!

Oh, yeah, I'm not fussed about it! (If that was directed at me.) I just find their presentation of it pretty funny—let's make sure to use BIG FONT!

xp

That was a throwaway line based on my impression of what earlier posters had said—this is so not my field! So I have no idea whether that was wrong or not, but all I meant was to end with a sentence of generic support/positivity.

It's the TMI trap! As a recovering over-explainer, I am a big advocate for reducing the amount of information you tell people in situations like this. I used to say "I'm sorry I'm late! The bus broke down when the wheelchair lift got stuck outside because the driver hadn't checked if it was working, so we couldn't leave until they fixed it, so oh my god, we waited for like twenty minutes for the bus to get fixed, and then it didn't, and then another bus came, and man if it didn't just take forever until it showed up, and so we all got off on that bus, and then the replacement wasn't quite the right bus, and—" Look, that's too much information. Nobody cares! It was just a brain dump of all the irrelevant things that had stressed me out. It often made my listener feel bad about their place in my priority list! So now? "Hey, I hope I didn't keep you waiting!" is my mantra. (For short periods: "Hey, I should let you know my flight was delayed four hours" is an exception, e.g., of course.) This applies more generally, and TakeruK's analysis of what to do instead is spot-on. That said, I assume OP's situation is recoverable from here, and I hope the professor's reaction was just symptomatic of an off day, not a perpetual state of being.

Yes, of course! How many cats do you have?

Oh, I find these kinds of comments so difficult to respond to! On the one hand, I don't want to tell you you're wrong, you'll get so many more acceptances! That seems overly chipper, I don't know it's true, and most importantly, I don't want to be like "no your feelings are wrong." On the other hand, I don't agree with you! I don't think think it's true you'll probably get rejected from everything. Those numbers you have so far seem to indicate an application that is, at the very least, competitive for admission at a whole bunch of places. But I'm glad you have an okay offer from a good place, and I hope you get a lot more offers!

Congratulations, how wonderful! Are you rewarding yourself with something?

Congratulations, everybody! All my schools are late-notifying, but I'm so happy for you guys.

SIX interviews, @kingslayer? And an acceptance! Wow, you are slaying it, congratulations!

I applied to Berkeley sociocultural! Which is so, so, so competitive. But I think this might be me anyway down there v This isn't just a pity party I'm throwing for myself: I think I have as good a shot as anybody—however slim that might still be—at some of the non-social programs I applied to. But given how absurdly competitive Berkeley is and that sociocultural was a bit of a reach for me anyway....yeah, I think I might be the applicant described in red! haha

Right? I feel like something changed this week. I was very good and totally not stressed for 6-8 weeks after my applications went in (based on the different deadlines), but yesterday something changed. Okay, now I'm nervous! And there's no way I'm going to hear anything for another two weeks, and possibly 3-4. (I looked up the usual notification dates just after submitting, but now I am not allowing myself to look up them up again! I just have to remember them, perhaps inaccurately, because otherwise I will get more obsessive.)

If you don't want to do a PhD, the research track sounds like a great option! I can't think of a practical reason to write a thesis as preparation for almost any job in the workforce. (Advanced museum work would be one exception, but you don't mention the field(s) you're considering. You mention "professionally" at one point, but do you mean professionally within academia, or in another field, or potentially for both?) But since you say you're considering a PhD, I do think a master's thesis will prepare you for that better than a series of essays will, even if your PhD topic ends up being on a different subject/theme, region, and time period than your master's thesis was. As a writing teacher, I've found that writing papers of different lengths have something of an exponential effect as preparation for writing even longer papers. Back in college, writing two-page papers was a good preparation for writing five-page papers. Writing five-page papers was good preparation for writing 20-page papers. Writing 20-page papers was good preparation for writing 100-page theses/senior projects, etc. Each "level" scales up as good preparation for the next one. I'm pretty sure that a student can write five-page papers ad infinitum, and even if they write a hundred of them, that's still not going to prepare them for a hundred-page thesis as well as having written two twenty-page papers would have. Depending on the lengths we're talking about, a master's thesis might therefore provide much better PhD preparation than a greater number of shorter papers—although there are lengths that would make this not true, e.g. writing two 10,000 word+ papers might be just as good or better than a 15,000 word thesis. But although I can't think of a way to ask this gently, but I think it needs to be asked since you are considering the PhD—if you can't find something you'd be really passionate to work on for the months required for a master's thesis, how do you think you will find something you can work passionately on for the 4+ years of writing a PhD dissertation?

"Quiero que todos los tacos" is "I want so that all the tacos"—it's an incomplete/wrong sentence, and it's pretty funny! "Que" there works as a "that" of purpose, so if you want to say "I want all the tacos," it would instead be "quiero todos los tacos." That said, I'm not familiar with native Spanish-speakers using "all the" for emphasis like we do in English, although my Spanish experience was long enough ago that that's not authoritative. (For an English example of that emphasis: "how much beer do you want?" "all the beer!" = "a lot of beer.") So even with "quiero todos los tacos" I think you'd have to pretty literally be looking at like a food cart with three tacos or something and trying to order all three of them for it to make sense. I have always said that you can travel anywhere in the world if you learn five words in the local language: "please," "thank you," "that one," "yes," and "beer"...but I might have to update that list to include tacos!

Duke—oh my god, right? First of all, those essays were all wicked long: most SOP word limits I encountered were 60-75% of what they wrote. Second, all four of the successful examples they gave had master's degrees. When I think about how Duke chose those examples, I waver back and forth on what the apparent MA-based model of success means for me. On the more obvious side of things, that would seem like a bad sign for people, like me, who only hold BAs. On the other hand, I have got to hope that the standard of specificity those examples faced (and attained) was at least slightly higher than is expected for the applicants who do not yet have a graduate degree. Who knows—my SOP is still very research-based, even though far less so than an applicant with an MA and four years of fieldwork could produce, so I suppose I'll know how well my attempt to square this circle worked when admissions results start coming back.

Oh yes! I didn't mean to be negative or to imply that anyone else was, if perhaps the caps and italics etc. suggested that. I just get shouty, on the internet, when I feel like I am repeating myself. OP's experience sounds great and like a very interesting background that will hopefully one day make them an awesome counselor! I just strongly disagree with that one framing decision—mentioning your own mental illness in your very first sentence—for the reasons queerpsych and the linked article mention. I could suggest a prose edit—have you tried reading it out loud to see if all the sentences sound natural? I am always recommending that to everybody, since it works well for me—but otherwise no particular suggestions. Anyway: while I think some of the "kiss of death" talk as it exists in the article (rather than in this thread, I should have clarified!) is pretty hot garbage, given that the imperative to pretend to be neurotypical is 1) flaming terribleness and 2) bad for mental health, it's still one of those topics that you should present carefully. Some ways of discussing it will come across much better than others.

Have you read this article I posted on your previous version of this statement yet? http://psychology.unl.edu/psichi/Graduate_School_Application_Kisses_of_Death.pdf As PersonPeople and queerpsych referenced, some of the things you are doing are well-known "kisses of death" for your field.* Do you know what that idiom, "kiss of death," means? It means that "if you do this thing [that is a kiss of death], you choose to destroy your own chances of acceptance." Maybe, if you're lucky, the "kiss of death" only cuts your chances of acceptance in half. If you are unlucky, according to these people, choosing to include one of those kisses of death will lead to your automatic rejection. Now, on my part, I don't like that these people say that talking about your own mental illness is a kiss of death. I don't think it's fair to require that people hide mental illnesses, nor does a close reading of that text suggest, in fact, that you canNOT disclose a mental illness. I think you can, briefly and with care, mention your personal connection to the subject, and I think that's probably not what that article is objecting to. What you must not do, however, is LEAD WITH THAT. There is no graduate school that works as therapy FOR YOU. What you do, instead, is (in counseling) receive the training to provide this service for OTHERS or (in psychology) to do research about a subject of intellectual inquiry. So mentioning your own work on your mind at the beginning of your essay comes across as self-centered, in the very literal sense—this essay is being framed about you, not about the counseling you want the training to provide or the research you want the training to do. So while I as a human being think that it's totally fair to discuss a personal connection with mental illness as part of your motivation in the middle of your essay, that information should NOT be the subject of your FIRST SENTENCE. *I can't tell whether you're applying to a counseling program or a psychology program. In your last essay, you mentioned a psychology PhD, like the article writes about, and which I have synthesized here. This essay sounds more counseling-focused, without research. I should guess that counseling is not SO strict on the "don't mention that you've ever personally, rather than professionally, encountered mental illness" than a psychology research PhD, but I'm guessing that "do NOT bring up a personal mental illness in your FIRST SENTENCE" is still the right advice.

Are you applying for a graduate degree in proofreading? If not, then no.

When I got into a scheduling bind at the beginning of my junior year, the professor who teaches my current field was the only one to email me back. What can I say? I'm a believer in chance.

Surely some of the semi-plentiful programs in medical anthropology have faculty who could supervise this project? It's true that it's a topic that's less represented than I would have guessed—I checked the UCSF/Berkeley faculty first and I didn't see anyone directly relevant, but I wonder if someone is close enough to supervise you if there's also a sociocultural anthropologist of education at Berkeley. But I think people with this interest must exist! During further googling just now, Barry Saunders at UNC popped up as just the sort of person I think you're looking for. So although I can't recommend any other programs specifically, I do recommend starting your search in programs of medical anthropology. If I were you, at some point in the next year or two, I'd go through all the faculty of all/many of the programs in anthropology that offer a medical specialization and of all the programs in medical anthropology. People must study this! And I think medical anthropology is the one of the more likely places to find them.

Double pants! Double pants! (As a woman, even without thermal underwear or whatever, I always have leggings on hand to serve as the under-pant.)

Wow! One of my favorite professors followed my academia.edu profile! Even if/when I get rejected, it's a nice gesture.