Between Fields

(to echo juilletmercredi) If you're really set on only having one piece of technology in your life, a Surface makes sense. I wouldn't recommend having just an iPad, as that's not its purpose. I have a Macbook Pro, Thunderbolt Display (docking station w/ keyboard and mouse), and an iPad Air 2. (I also have a Samsung laptop and custom Asus tower for gaming.) I can type on my iPad like a normal keyboard, but I really prefer a physical keyboard for any extended writing that I'm doing. It's really nice to be able to work on something here in my home office, and then just unplug the Macbook from the display, take it with me on campus, and keep working. The battery life is also great. I use my iPad extensively while I'm teaching--there's an app I use for attendance, one for randomly selecting students, and then I can control the course manager through the browser. I also use it for ebooks in class, which I can also open (and copy and paste from) from my Mac. For me, I don't really need the iPad, but I couldn't use it in a completely effective way without also having a Mac, so that's something to keep in mind. I know some people who do use it alone, but I'm a bit of a luddite with the whole tablet revolution. My university has Office 365 for all students, so I have the full MS Office suite on my laptop and my tablet. It's relatively inexpensive, if yours doesn't offer that. I also have Dropbox, MS One Drive, and Google Docs on all of them.

A two-year program is better preparation for a PhD than a one-year program (except maybe if you would be getting your PhD at the same institution). Having a strong background in a single language sounds like a good thing for comparative lit--I do work in and around that field as part of my English Studies program and professors have consistently appreciated my background in Classics. I find comparativists that don't have a strong home turf to be a little suspect, anyway. In a lot of ways your MA won't matter very much (the experience of it will, of course, but the name on the piece of paper won't), as it's just a stepping stone to higher places. Pick the one that gives you the best shot of getting into the PhD program you want--which is probably the two-year once, since you'd be starting PhD applications during the first semester of your MA with no real connections with faculty yet. That's just my two cents, though.

I'd be cautious about this. I saw in one of the other threads that you were offered an MA slot at one of the schools you were applying to, so does that mean you don't already have an MA? I personally wouldn't try to publish anything that didn't come out of a graduate-level seminar or an MA thesis, before you're a PhD student in an academic journal. It will be there forever, after all, if you get in. This isn't to say anything about your abilities as a scholar, but advice I've seen given in the past.

He's probably being genuine about offering advice, but it seems like it would be polite to ask him to help you strategize about his program, though. It sounds like you'd be a shoe-in for an MA there, though, so why not follow his advice? It couldn't hurt to have that to fall back on, and then you'd be there at a top 5 program once you finish that MA and are looking for a PhD program again.

As long as it's in hand before you walk in the door, it won't matter.

Right, but as a grad student you're expected to build off of the work you do in one class and adapt and expand on it for other classes. That's not plagiarism. If she failed and is retaking, clearly she's not going to copy verbatim all of her old answers, so she's adapting and expanding off of her old work. Are you expecting her to throw out her old notes and not try to learn from what she got wrong last time? That seems like a waste of her time, and a waste of -your- time if she starts forgetting things she learned the previous semester. I think it's reasonable to ask her not to share her notes with her colleagues, but if she's using them on her own it doesn't seem like it's cheating. Cheating would be if she had someone else's notes and was copying them. The best solution would to have different assignments each semester, so this couldn't happen, which is what happened in the situation the previous poster described.

This probably isn't the best place to ask this question--do you have an advisor you can talk to?

To be honest, no, not really in this scenario. A poor gpa can be explained by a lot of things (health, money, work) but a competitive school is only really an explanation for a 3.7 or 3.8 at a really tough school. I know UNC is well-regarded, but you'd have to work up a narrative to explain why your GPA is that low and how you're still qualified for graduate school. That is not to say, though, that there's no chance of getting in. There's a whole thread dedicated to sub-3.0 acceptances here. (And I had about a 2.95 because of health issues my first two years and got in). Using the school's name won't do it, but being able to show how you still were able to do research or did really well in your major classes can help. Getting an MA/MS and getting a really really good GPA in that would make a PhD possible (it's what I did). Hope that helps.

Are the headings designed to stay in there in the final draft or is that just for your drafting process? You don't need them. There's an odd jarring effect between your use of phrases like "esteemed university" and slang/informality like"5x higher." Try to make your language more consistently formal, if that's what you're going for. Your use of the word "information" here is strange and non-specific: "With over three years of experience at some of India's leading start-ups - delivering critical business strategies via data analysis day in and day out - I still feel I have barely scratched the surface of the gold mine of insights that information holds. I want to learn the best techniques to take full advantage of information from today's complex digital world." It seems awfully long.

Most often, yes, this will delay the process for you. Without it, your application isn't complete and the graduate school can't forward it to the department for review. That doesn't mean it ruins your chances, though, but it could mean a waitlist instead of a direct admit depending on how late it is.

An analogy: My Ford Fiesta Titanium cost $17,815 and it's great for my life. If I had kids or more demand for cargo space, it wouldn't be that useful. A Tesla Model S costs $71,070 in its base configuration and is arguably a better car in a lot of different ways, but costs four times as much as the Fiesta. I didn't look at the Model S when I was making my decision on what car to buy, and still got a pretty great car. The quality of the more expensive car was made irrelevant by the magnitude by which it was more expensive, and so I didn't look in depth at its specs. In graduate admissions and funding, cost is a factor and there is no getting around that. If a school can't afford any international applicants one year, I wouldn't expect them to review those files. That's always a risk and savvy international applicants would be aware of that reality. The funding decisions that would let them know that they don't have money for those students likely wouldn't occur until after applications have already been accepted. No one has said that a stellar international applicant shouldn't have a shot, and it's even been shown that after domestic offers have been sent out Madison does review international applicants. The fact is that applications don't get reviewed by the committee for any number of reasons (improper postage, missing pieces, low GRE, low GPA, rudeness during the process, things being held up in translation, etc.) and most of those reasons are on the fault of the applicant not communicating well enough with the program, but also because the committee has other responsibilities and if they get 1000 applications for 15 slots, some amount of sorting by the school is necessary. In Madison's case, international status is one of the qualifying factors for this sorting.

The number of rhetorical fallacies you have been displaying is amusing. If you read the email, as some have suggested that you did not, the representative did say that international applicants would be reviewed. You're trying to set it up that other people are arguing that it's okay to reject applications without review, when people are actually saying that international status is an acceptable criterion to use in the decision making process, contingent on the realities of the education system we have.

I've done it in the three major ways: normal roommate, significant other, and alone. I've been the most productive living alone, because on the weeks where I absolutely have to get stuff done I can do so in my home office (rent is cheap here) without worrying about the annoying stuff that being stressed out produces: i.e. a mountain of dishes I can get back to when I want, laundry on the floor, etc., that even the roommates in my program found time to bitch about during the stressful points of the semester. I like being able to decide how social I'm going to be on a given day and worry about cleaning on my own schedule and to my own level of comfort. I did think it would be lonely at first, but I made friends in the department pretty quickly, and I've realized that even when I do live with people, I'm mostly in my own room doing my own work, so I don't think the amount of time I've spent interacting with humans has changed drastically.

It's not about better or worse. It's not about fair or unfair, really. It's about money. Tuition waivers are complicated, because they're somewhere between compensation and a scholarship. Some universities like mine don't charge graduate assistants more money for being out of state. Many do, though, and this is cost-prohibitive for departments with limited budgets and a fixed number of assistantships to hand out. If I need sixteen new graduate assistants to staff thirty-two courses, it's a non-starter to hire someone that takes three of my slots but is only able to fill two courses. The ways around that are a fellowship from the graduate school (very limited), a government grant (hard/impossible for international students to get), or external funding (possible). What all of these need, though, is direct contact with a POI and stellar grades. (The OP's master's grades seem pretty marginal, but that might be a discipline specific thing.) There's no indication that the OP talked with a POI or had any special research or publication credentials. So at most, he's as good as a domestic student. Why would a school want to go through the trouble of finding the extra funding and dealing with immigration hassles if the first time they see an applicant's name is on the actual application? This seems like a failure to communicate properly on the applicants part more than an ethical failing in the school. If a nobel laureate's file doesn't get read because the admissions committee filled up the seats with domestic students, where was the applicant before the process started lining up POIs?

If you're applying to programs whose deadlines are after your school's grade reporting date, I don't think it would be a good idea to avoid sending your fall grades. It's reasonable to not send fall grades to schools whose application deadlines are after that date, but trying to hide your A- on applications that haven't been submitted yet would be ill-advised. (And an A- is still an A, for goodness' sake.)

Arguably, it's not rockin' if it isn't followin' the guidelines. Having a long SOP says a few things: 1.) you didn't read the directions 2.) you read the directions and decided not to follow them 3.) you have a lot to say about yourself 4.) concise communication is difficult for you.

I regret offering extra-credit wholeheartedly because I'm giving A's to people who didn't do A work. Also, I missed two students' extra-credit which has meant grade change forms which has meant, on the plus side, the department chair saw me at work on December 23, but on the downside the department chair knows I'm scatter-brained.

I agree with you, mostly, in terms of applications deserving review by a committee set out by the university to review them. I'm a little disappointed, though, that someone on this forum would refer to the professionals in university graduate schools and colleges as "peons," though. Even when computers are involved in collecting applications, it requires a significant amount of human intervention to review international applicants and code them properly for GPA (which often requires contact with the registrar's office at the university and often translation assistance) and to otherwise make them work for admissions committees. It's likely that that low-paid person does sort applications into piles, but it's equally likely that all of the piles make it to the admissions committee. It's also very likely that said person is familiar with the school/college's requirements for international graduate students and would be qualified to at least flag a file that wouldn't make it past the school's review process if it got to and from the department. (When I did this I had a bachelor's degree, and later a master's degree, and office staff in graduate schools often [but not always] have at least an undergraduate degree.) Some things like test scores and GPAs are non-negotiable on the college's end, and while those files often still get passed to the department, they don't have a shot unless someone takes a real interest in them. International applicants can be in the same boat at state schools, and that's just a reality of our system, which sucks. Everyone should get a fair shot, but it's simply not collegial to refer to admissions staff by their pay grade in such a disparaging way.

I agree with what others have said about the application process itself. It could be something as simple as your perceptions about being overqualified for the program bleeding into your statement of purpose. Something to consider, though, is what a successful appeal would mean: 1.) It would be an unacceptable administrative trespass into the faculty's ability to run their own program (unless it was clearly demonstrable that the application was rejected in contravention of a university policy); and (more importantly for you) 2.) You would be in a program where faculty decided they didn't want you to be--the people you would be working with for five+ years. Who would want to supervise you, knowing the admissions committee told you no and was overridden. It would be bad for departmental politics and you wouldn't get much out of it. I don't think I've ever heard of an admissions appeal process to start with, though.

At this stage in the game, no. Acceptances go out in waves, and waiting list notifications go out after that. It's only when you get to March and April that you haven't heard back that it might be OK to bug the school about it. I was on a waiting list at one school but was never told about it, for instance. I think I actually referenced GradCafe stalking in my email and said something along the lines of "I haven't yet been rejected or accepted but am aware of people that have been. Am I on a waiting list?" and the response was "Yes."

This is a situation where Yoda's maxim applies: do or do not, there is no try. Going to an unfunded MA in rhet/comp would be inadvisable. A funded MA is always better than an unfunded one, because it means that the department is invested in your success and you'll be getting valuable professional development opportunities through teaching. The good news is that rhet/comp revolves a lot around FYC and so there are usually assistantships available in those programs. To add to your list, though: Bowling Green State University (in Ohio) and Illinois State University have good rhet/comp programs, and to answer your question: ranking doesn't mean as much as one would hope, look at job placement rates instead.

True, but the university might. There are often minimums for the graduate school that you have to meet, whether or not the department wants you.

If you don't have any publications (peer-reviewed or otherwise scholarly), omit that section on your CV. Conference Presentations belong under their own heading, and papers you've written but haven't published don't belong on a CV at all except for works submitted to journals, while you're waiting to hear back. If it's for a grad application, just leave that box blank.

If you complain to the dean who do you think is going to want to write you letters for the next application season? What blisis said is true for the most part. If they want you, they'll still want you if a letter is late. It sounds like you have other applications out there, though? Why bother applying to multiple schools if not getting into this one would wreck your future?

Yes. It's often a rubber stamp, but not always.