Between Fields

I agree with this. But I would also say that you should get to that 10th priority by the time you're turning in a final draft, and that's based on my experience with rhet/comp faculty who have been very process-centered and interested in student success. Process > product, but... you also have to make a product at some point. Focus on getting your ideas out there and really refine your essential argument--I doubt that OP's problems with grades are related to her grammar, unless this is actually coming through in her papers. A B to me (see later in the post) signifies substantial problems with the paper, at the graduate level. In regard to the OP's initial quandary, though, I do have to agree with some posters who have suggested that B's are a very worrying sign for a prospective PhD student. And I disagree with rising_star's point a few pages back that B's aren't a kiss of death, from a discipline-specific perspective. I've had numerous graduate professors in English tell me that the only grade a graduate student who is going to continue on (in the program or in academia) should be an A. A B+ represents a major issue, on a paper. A regular B represents profound disapproval with a student's work, especially if it turns into a -course- grade, which OP indicates as having received. On a paper, it's a signal to do some major revision and have an in-depth conversation about that professor's expectations. By the time it's on your transcript, though, it's a signal that your professor is advising against further graduate-level work. This may vary from program to program, but the professors who've told this to me have been from a wide range of different institutions. Honestly, OP is being pretty flippant when people are making points that might not be nice to hear, but don't seem to be mean-spirited. ("Of course I don't edit my writing here" is kind of a weird thing to say in a thread that you're asking for writing advice...) That attitude can't be helpful in the conversations she would need to be having with professors to make positive change necessary to improve as a writer. After all, we can give you general writing tips all day, but it's not going to translate to grades. Graduate students need to be very independent when it comes to genre research and thinking about the kinds of writing they need to do to succeed, but the main way you do that in a graduate-level course is to ask the professor what they're looking for and find examples of that genre to work from. It's all very context-specific--context that we can generalize about from our own experiences, but can't provide for you without knowing your actual professor's whims and fancies.

I got a parking ticket for failing to hang my tag from the mirror--we're not allowed to drive around with them up (nominally), but my previous university had window stickers, so it's a hard habit to get into. I'm a grad student coming into campus to do work for the fall semester that I'm not getting paid for and take a professional development course. The $35 is actually not a small expense to me, considering it's infinity percent more than my monthly income in June, July, and August. The bad thing is that my car has a few distinctive stickers on the back windscreen (my alma mater and my honor society), and it's almost always parked in the same lot, so it's not like it was some strange visitor's car. Plus, it's the summer... Gah.

I'll preface this by saying that I'm a former president of the national collegiate honor society for the study of Greek and Latin, and the classical languages are pretty essential to some of my current research. According to the Princeton Review, Classics majors score markedly better on the GRE and do better in medical school, law school, and graduate school admissions. (http://www.princetonreview.com/college-majors/64/classics) The benefit of Latin is not to emerge from high school or college with a speaking proficiency in the language (sed possim dicere scribereque latine, si necesse sit...), but to develop the critical thinking skills that engaging with a highly-inflected, richly literate language produces. Even in a best case scenario, two years (or even four) of high school French or Spanish is not going to develop much more than conversational fluency, and it's rare that students ever get to practice these language in situ. I took two years of French in high school, and one in college, and though I can read pretty well, basic conversations are a challenge. Modern language pedagogies that emphasize speaking also emphasize memorization, not only of vocabulary but of sentence structures and formulaic expressions. (I know this isn't universally true, but it's an approach that is common in high schools.) The fluidity of Latin and Greek word order and sentence structure make this sort of instruction less possible, and so students have to learn the actual grammar and practice using it to dissect texts. I know my English grammar backwards and forwards, and was able to pick up Italian pretty quickly. I never read a single non-adapted work in French, but by year two of Latin, they had us reading Caesar and Cicero in the original Latin. Can I put Latin on my resumé and expect to get a job speaking that language with anyone? No. But I've used it countless times in my English (the discipline) studies to enhance my understanding of a text or improve my relationship with a professor by demonstrating my commitment to rigor. But I also have French from high school that I could put on my resumé and still not be able to get a job that would require that language. Really, none of the high school language options can actually promise proficiency in that language--the purpose is more about cultural enrichment, and beginning to look into a language. In all practicality, students don't need chemistry, physics, or anything more than an integrated earth sciences course in high school, either. Thankfully, high school isn't strictly vocational, and we're still hanging on to some vestiges of the liberal arts there.

I have that same model and I agree with everything you said--I also never figured out how to read non-eBook type things on it. OP, you mentioned trying an iPad and running up against its limitations. I have an Air 2 and I've found it's great for both books and PDFs. It's much easier to carry to class than my MacBook, and it's really convenient to be able to access all of my different eBook delivery apps at once--with the Kindle Paperwhite, I think you're stuck with Amazon only.

I have a canvas Fossil bag that was around $60. It's a cheaper version of this, and you can sometimes find it in department stores. It's worked pretty well for the last three years, although I had a Samsung laptop with plastic corners for a while--when those started to crack, they cut holes into the corners of the laptop compartment, so that's something to watch out with this bag and any other canvas bags without reinforced corners. In general, though, my MO is to spend a little more and hope it lasts a long time.

I think it's admirable that you're keeping an open mind. What's inadvisable, though, is to incorporate things into your research that you're not actually passionate about. Imposter syndrome feels bad enough when you actually are interested in something, so I can't even imagine what the inner turmoil would be like if you're just doing something because it's popular. With that being said, I'd urge some caution on your resistance/apprehension towards "contemporary theory." I say this both as someone interested in medieval and classical literature as well as reception theory, which is more or less interested in how and why people take up certain texts in certain ways. Looking at old things has the tendency to give scholars a sort of nostalgia for their subject--it's old enough or classic enough not to need a theoretical framework on one end or "My professors and their professors didn't need it" on the other end. Prosody is a beginning, not an ending, just like all kinds of philology. The "form-your-own-interpretation," New Critical approach is not ideal for a number of reasons, but the most important reason is because it's borderline disingenuous to disconnect yourself from the scripts and frames that help you form your own interpretation of a text. Not acknowledging perspective or subjectivity is akin to an appeal from authority fallacy--the line between this is my reading and this is the reading is quickly obscured, and reinforces a lot of troubling hierarchies and privileges that English studies should be working to tear down. All theoretical frames are applied retroactively. In terms of looking at antique and ancient literature especially, there is no way to actually access the cultural and linguistic context necessary to understand a piece of writing in its exact intended manner. A pragmatist in linguistics might even argue that there's no way to get 100% reception of meaning even with the author right in front of you because language simply doesn't offer that kind of precision in thought transmission. Any reading or interpretation you argue for therefore has to be composited from your own preconceptions/skills/scripts/frames and the available information in a text itself. Not attending to theory obscures this fact. To me, the best sorts of articles in English Studies do two things: they provide a robust theoretical framework that is in conversation with other scholars and an application to a specific problem in a text/pedagogical situation/etc. Being able to appropriate that framework and to apply it to another text is actually really difficult in most cases, but I find that it's a really good way of going about seminar papers. Taking someone's methodology with bits of other peoples' and applying it to a new problem and then explaining what that teaches both about the theory and the artifact you're examining is really sophisticated. Viewing things like marxist criticism or deconstruction as pre-fabs is simplistic, but not an uncommon view, and I think it stems from not seeing that individual scholars are rarely doing things purely from one perspective or another, and the very best are tailoring their methodology very specifically to their actual problem. I had a few people in my MA program who said things to the effect of "Why can't we just read books and talk about them?" and one professor's response was "This isn't a book club." Theory isn't so much a hot topic as it is necessary for English Studies to work properly. That isn't something I realized, though, until the graduate level, and I was pretty resistant to theory in undergrad, so I understand your point of view.

Not having funding changes my advice: Don't do it.

First: it looks like you copy-pasted this from Reddit, so it makes your post appear as a wall of text. It's difficult to read. Second: I have a BA in English and Classics, an MA in English, and am doing a PhD in English. The choice between applying your skills to the "real world" or academia is a difficult one. Worrying about the academic job market as a prospective MA student is probably not worth the stress, to be completely frank. That's something you'd need to think about before getting a PhD, but the job market is so bad that an MA just isn't enough to get into academia, except in community college settings. Even there, though, the surplus of PhD's is making that use of an MA start to become more and more uncertain. What an MA does do for you, however, is make you more competitive on the regular job market in a way that a BA or PhD does not. An MA is a BA+ in today's market, because of the proliferation of the BA. If you have a funded offer, I say go for it. There's no reason you couldn't still freelance while working on your MA. If you like it, then maybe you'd want a PhD later, knowing all the risks that such an endeavor entails.

The only rhet/comp person where I got my BA also taught creative writing and children's literature. It doesn't seem likely that a PhD or MA in rhet/comp would translate into an actual instructorship or professorship in Creative Writing exclusively. I suppose if you also had a strong record of published work in both creative and academic circles, it could be possible. But you'd be competing with MFA applicants, and an MFA is a terminal degree, while an MA isn't. There are also PhDs in Creative Writing, and all of these programs are over-producing graduates for the available openings, so it'd have to be a position specifically tailored to your research background.

It really depends on what sort of job you're looking for at the very end of all of this. Keeping in mind that a publication made at the pre-PhD Student phase (and really the pre-PhD stage in general) won't have as much impact on a job search than one done when you're more established, it's not uncommon for generalists to have publications in a few different areas at once. And I don't mean that term in a pejorative sense--if you're looking for a job at an SLAC or medium-sized university where you might be expected to teach composition, literature, and maybe theory all at the same time, having generalist tendencies is a good thing. That's on top of the fact that there are few rhetoric and composition master's programs compared to English and Literature programs, so few people going into rhet/comp PhD programs have an MA in that subject. There are also very few bachelor's programs in rhetoric and composition, so people going into rhet/comp MA's also rarely have a BA in that same subject--the point being that everyone's making a transition at some point, and it's usually from literature, so almost all rhet/comp scholars have at least a few vestigial interests in literature. Publishing something now and then later publishing in rhet/comp wouldn't really make you look un-focused because of that transition that most people make from literature to rhet/comp. It's publishing something on Shakespeare after years and years doing work in composition that might raise an eyebrow, but even then, that's not a given. I'm in an English Studies department where interdisciplinary work is encouraged--my work looks at one problem from several different perspectives, and so my publications will likely end up in several different kinds of journals. Basically, you're not far enough along to appear scattered. Publishing in more than one sub-field of English could help you in generalist job searches. And, again, I'd be cautious of publishing anything that didn't emerge from graduate-level work.

I would honestly hold off on publishing anything until you're well into your MA. Once something is published, it's out there forever, and you might not want your very early scholarship out there, especially if you're moving into a new field.

Label it as a table. Is it an image you pulled from the PDF or did you make it look like your own tables? If "yes," then you should re-do it as an actual table, and not an illustration.

What if you don't like the Netherlands, but you're already committed to a PhD there?

It's likely that would be an assault and/or battery charge for her, if she tried it and were caught...

It means that the admissions process can be influenced by personal connections. That's nothing new.

It's very likely you won't get a check until a few weeks into the semester. (Mine is paid out on the last business day of each month, as an example.) You may also be expected to pay student fees in that first month, so budget for that, too.

You could ask for a deferment, if your life circumstances are temporary.

One of the other PhD students down the hallway forgets my name, constantly, and calls me "honey" or something like that, even though my freakin' name is on my freakin' office door. She asked me about the results of a search committee I'm on and I told her politely that I couldn't discuss that until an offer was made and signed by a candidate and she proceeded to vent loudly with another student in the hallway outside my office about how awful she thought our second candidate was. I don't feel like I can say anything about her to anyone because I'm a first-year and she's a fourth or fifth year. Ugh.

I'm sure your pedagogy is fully-formed and perfect, developed independently from a century of research into first-year composition. How many five paragraph themes do you assign in a semester? Academic freedom does not entitle you to do whatever you want to the students under your care--nor does it exempt you from professional development. It boggles the mind to see someone educated about literature think that writing is something that just anyone can teach for a general education, first-year student audience. Why not have history and philosophy professors teaching FYC, too? And chemistry professors obviously must know how to write. And the linguists. In what possible world does this make sense? Unless your WPA is standing behind you in your classroom, how is being exposed to other pedagogies in any way oppressive to you? Writing is such a complex activity that it needs a field devoted to its study that literature just doesn't cover. You continue to cite Bousquet which leads me to believe that your own education in rhetoric and composition is severely lacking to be making such claims against the discipline. The vast majority of scholarship in the field has nothing to do with WPA work, and most of it is targeted to individual instructors. Why would anyone want to hire you if they knew how much you'd whine about discussions of pedagogy? "What works for one teacher does not work for another." Sure. No one teacher is the same and no class is the same, either. That doesn't mean you won't benefit from learning how someone else does something. Thinking explicitly and conscientiously about pedagogy is important. Surely, you must be acting like such an anachronism to make some sort of point. Perhaps your doctoral training was so woefully inadequate or misleading with regard to writing instruction that you actually believe that we don't need to produce scholarship about it. Why does writing not deserve its own field? History professors read a lot. Shouldn't that make them qualified to teach literature? Just because you write a lot does not mean that you know anything about writing pedagogy, nor does the fact that you "value" that kind of work. A lot of terrible instructors are perfectly nice people. You might not even be terrible, but sticking your head in the sand and claiming oppression is not productive or forward-thinking.

I know you're bitter about feeling led-on by your PhD work, but come on. (I started a more elaborate defense of rhet/comp studies, but you're clearly just trolling the conversation.)

The number of rhet/comp MA programs is small compared to the number of general English and literature MA's out there. My MA is in "English," which where I went meant "Literature." My thesis is on postcolonial theory and reception studies, and my PhD emphasis is rhet/comp. It hasn't actually been a huge transition for me. I've always been more interested in authors using texts to accomplish goals/readers using texts to accomplish goals/interactions between authors and readers, and that sort of thing, which literary studies is not really keen on most of the time. It sounds like a lot of your interests would be equally at home in rhetoric and in cultural/literary theory.

Think of it this way: you're going to have to write a dissertation if you get into a PhD program. The only academic experience that even comes close to that is a master's thesis. Sitting down and proving to yourself that you can produce a document like that and then have it go through committee review can help you decide if more academics are right for you; it's done that for a lot of my peers. I don't think I would be ready for a PhD if I hadn't had that practice sitting down and actually working out an extended argument on a topic I'm passionate about. Plus, you'll never have the same research freedom on a seminar paper that you would on an independent project like a thesis. Whichever program you end up at, I hope you take the thesis track. Of course, YMMV and I'm in English, not Philosophy.

The opinion of one interviewer does not constitute an admissions decision. If it did, you would have been handed a letter right then and there. Recruitment events almost always work like this. It's your fault for not asking questions.

I would say no. Don't pay to go to grad school. Or look at the stipend you'd be getting and subtract the difference between the tuition waiver and the actual cost of your tuition and see how much you left over. It's an easy way for them to claim they're paying you a certain amount, but they know they'll get a portion of that back in tuition. Plus, in terms of income tax, you wouldn't have to pay on a tuition waiver (under a certain amount for admin., at all for teaching) but you will on that stipend.

(Apologies if I come across as harsh, but you asked for feedback.) I agree with another poster who said that this could be a lifetime of work. Anytime you're bringing up a unifying theory of anything, it's got the sort of weight that would honestly make me nervous, if I were reading your statement of purpose. How many professors did you have look at this statement? You mention graduate students (who are good resources), but the first draft of my SOP looked something like this and the first professor I showed it to ripped it to shreds. Especially coming from a BA (my assumption, if you're going into an MA now), even with published sonnets, I think being this specific in your dissertation prospectus (which this reads like) is dangerous. I don't see in this paragraph (and you might address it other places) how you would be gaining anything from graduate school, since you've already got your trajectory locked in. That is, at least, how it reads the way it is written. To restate the information you've given us: "I'm interested in early modern sonnets, especially the forms that influence them and the forms that they influenced." or "I am interested in the reception of the early modern sonnet." or "I'm interested in connecting my work writing sonnets to a critical understanding of that form and its evolution before, during, and after the early modern period." You have too much verbiage, which seems to stem from an anxiety over not having enough of a speciality at this point in your career. That's understandable, but I'm not sure not having a speciality really the problem. Avoid phrases like "transhistorical prosody," because both of those terms are very complex and would require a specific, contextualized definition that there's just not room for in a statement of purpose. That's what your writing sample is form--show them that you are doing that sort of research already. (In the same vein, mentioning that it would be pretty easy for you to learn Italian raises some flags, too... Best to avoid, for a number of reasons.) Doing an MA will help you figure this out, though. That's what they're for. Then you will able to be so specific (which I think you are--as you explicitly state that you want to develop a unifying theory), because your MA work can back it up. --- To answer the other part of your post, though, I stumbled into my specialization by realizing that there isn't a specialization that precisely matches my academic interests. I have a bachelor's degree in classics (I like Latin and Greek poetry) and an MA in English (I like postcolonial theory), but as a PhD student I'm studying rhetoric and composition (I like seeing how words affect real people). I've put that together in a number of fun ways, but broadly the question that I'm asking as a scholar is: How does English Studies impact/incorporate/oppress/liberate voices from outside the center? And so from there, I'm looking at the rhetoric of English Studies scholarship surrounding the canon and the non-canon, especially how it relates to queer and colonial voices. What I said in my SOP was something along the lines of "I'm interested in exploring the link between Classical Studies and Postcolonial Theory from the point of view as a rhetorician." I had part of my MA thesis which did that attached as the writing sample to show that I was already doing that sort of work. Honestly, though, I've never worked with either of the two people I identified as POIs, because I found connections in coursework and teaching that led me to other people anyway. Is that helpful?