gatsbysghost

Yeah, I was that poster, and I feel as though they completely pulled the wool over my eyes. I know it can't be easy to tell the truth to people who are in for massive disappointment, but it still seems a bit...cowardly.

I'm in the middle of it now, actually--and, I have to say, it's been an incredible ride. I absolutely recommend it if you have the opportunity to get over here for a year and do it. Students are allowed a lot opportunities for independent reading, and the course-load is rather small (only two courses are required, and they last for two of the three terms in the year). It's a bit confusing if you're not familiar with the UK system, but it will suffice to say that, although the organization is a bit byzantine, the course is stimulating and the faculty are incredible. I am so, so grateful to have had the opportunity to study here. That said, it's looking more and more like I'm going to be rejected from every program but Michigan this year, which...I mean, I know I applied mostly to first-tier schools, all of which have really low acceptance rates--so I was prepared for something of a massacre. But I had hoped to be accepted to at least one of the bigger-name programs. And with three implied rejections and two firm ones, one's ego can't help but...deflate, slightly. But Michigan is going to pay me to read Old English for five years, so at the end of the day, it's really hard to complain!

Yeah, I'm going to go ahead and identify that poster as myself. I'm at Cambridge, and I wanted people who read the notes to get some sense of my background. That just seemed like the right level of abstraction for the context of the results board.

Congratulations!

Accepted at U Michigan Ann Arbor! I may have accidentally danced my way across campus when I heard the news. This is my first acceptance, and before I got an acceptance...well, the mind goes to dark places. Like, "I'm not smart or qualified enough to be an academic; I'm a fraud; I should give up this fanciful dream of academia and manage a Chipotle" sorts of places. Good luck to everyone else who applied!

You are correct--it's the 1-year M.Phil. He told me that, effectively, all he had to tell Yale was that he had an offer to do the M.Phil. here, and he was hoping to defer his acceptance for a year to complete the program. And Yale told him, "Go ahead, go to Cambridge, we'll have a place for you when you get back." I can't speak to whether other departments are as forgiving, but he had a very good experience with Yale English.

Even if they only have 5 spots open, they should still accept more than 5 students to fill those places. That said, one of my fellow master's students here at Cambridge was accepted to Yale last year and deferred his admission for a year so he could attend this program, so however many spots there were for admission may potentially be reduced by one. Or deferred admits may not count against this cycle--difficult to say.

Well, speaking as an American, here's everything that I find to be wrong with English food (in my opinion; your mileage may vary). And please bear in mind that I love England (and the whole UK) and I feel incredibly lucky to be here! I just wish they would follow the U.S.'s lead with food. Or Sweden's. Or Belgium's. ...or, really, anywhere on the Continent. 1) Nobody puts enough seasoning in anything--especially salt. So everything from vegetables to pasties to pasta is utterly bland. You can salt things that don't have enough salt, but you can't make up for unseasoned or poorly-seasoned food (though, in fairness, the English do try to make up for this; usually by adding lots of onions, which I despise). 2) All food is more expensive here. You can't get a hamburger for less than about eight dollars, and that's from a food truck or cart; in any cafe or restaurant, a burger is usually about ten dollars. And they are always overdone. Which brings me to number 3: 3) British people have no understanding of grilling. I've been invited to "barbecues" here in Cambridge, which are disgraceful shams to anyone from the civilized world. People bring tinfoil tubs, which they fill with charcoal briquettes (because no-one owns a grill here). Then, because British people lack something which I'm choosing to call the Griller Instinct (it's a pun! ...), they overcook one side of everything and leave the other side raw. 4) There is no British equivalent of Panera Bread. Actually, there's no restaurant which is healthy, quick, and inexpensive-ish--at least, none that I've been able to find. For any food here, you can usually pick one or two of those attributes--never all three.

I recommend England! The food is actually almost as bad as everyone says it is, but leaving that aside, there's something about this country that really grips me, as a student of English. I wouldn't want to live here for multiple years--I've grown to miss too many things about the U.S.--but for a year or so, it's a wonderful place to spend time.

Hi all! I'm from the U.S., but I'm currently working on a one-year master's in the U.K., and my interests are pretty wide-ranging. My master's thesis is a semantic-field study on the Old English notion of "comfort" in an extra-religious context. My intent is to write my Ph.D. thesis on narrative devices in Old English and Old Norse poetry, and most of my academic experience thus far has been focused on Old English literature. In the realm of literature, I'm also very interested in Chaucer (especially Troilus and Criseyde), as well as a lot of non-medieval stuff that I won't bother you all with. I also do a lot of work with linguistics, and especially Germanic historical phonology--I actually wrote my undergraduate honors thesis about the semantics of a certain verbal prefix in the Gothic language. So, as you can imagine, I'm a big hit at parties. Great to meet you all! Many thanks to AC for starting this thread!

I went to Cornell for undergrad and I can absolutely recommend the Lansing West apartments. I lived there for a year and it was great: http://www.solomonorg.com/Lansing-West-Apartments There's a nearby bus stop with regular service to campus. It's close enough to campus that the bus ride is only about ten minutes, depending on where you need to go. I would recommend a car (as it's the best way to get to Wegman's, which is heaven on earth), but you definitely don't need a car as such. More importantly, I can vouch for the quality of these places. They're nice, spacious apartments and a reasonable price, and they're managed by a company rather than rented by individual (and potentially shady) landlords. This location is great because 1) you're not in the middle of Collegetown, which is an absolute pigsty; and 2) it's right across the street from the Ithaca Bakery, which has the best all-day breakfast sandwiches known to man.

Glad to hear it! No, they didn't say what sort of group they'd finished--it could just as easily be alphabetical, by subject area, or completely random. But in a way, not having that information actually makes me less nervous, somehow...anyway, good luck to you!

No worries! I'm just happy the information's out there. I know I breathed a huge sigh of relief when I found out, so I'm very glad to have shared that feeling with you, too!

Hey guys, I have some news for UChicago hopefuls. I just called their English Grad Admissions staff (and there are some very lovely, very polite folks over there, by the way). Having seen the four admits posted on our forums, I asked them if they had contacted all admits. They informed me that not all decisions have been made, and that they're contacting admits and rejections as decisions are made. More specifically, they told me that they're evaluating "groups" of applications and sending out decisions when they finish a group. TL;DR? If you haven't heard from Chicago yet, don't give up hope!

That is seriously the most comforting story I have heard in a very long time, and I cannot thank you enough for it! Seriously, I'm just going to go make some tea and calm down for fifteen minutes

That is...well, completely terrifying, but thank you!

Speaking of "implied" rejections, is it not the case that decisions may be sent out over the course of several days? How...how much should I be panicking if I haven't gotten an email on a day when everyone else seems to be getting them? I don't mean to inflict my own neuroses on you all, but the mind goes to some awfully dark places in February...

Two of my recommenders are full professors, and one is a Senior Lecturer. But I had the lecturer for three separate classes, and he is more familiar with my work (and me as a person) than any of the other full professors I could have asked for letters. At the end of the day, isn't it preferable to have a letter-writer who knows you and your work?

Mom: "Oh, I'm sure you'll get into every school you applied to." Me: "That is literally a statistical impossibility."

I suppose that depends on how bad they truly are. I'm in nearly the same boat--I'm applying to English programs, BA from an Ivy, forthcoming Master's from Cambridge. I also did well enough on the Verbal, Analytical, and Subject tests, but my Quantitative was sort of tragic, really. So, there's good news and bad news. Bad news first: There's no way that a low QR score helps you. Whether or not you need to retake the test is a matter of precisely how badly you scored, really. I can help quantify that in the "good news" section. Time for the good news, and there's a lot of it: I read on Duke's English program website that the average Quantitative score of their matriculants is 149 on the new scale (which, happily, is even lower than my score...). I also read on one school's website (Harvard, I think, but don't quote me on that) that GREs are taken much less into account than your writing sample, statement of purpose, and GPA, and all of those are subordinate to your past research experience and the lucidity of your research proposal. I also read that the average QR score for people offered admission to Humanities departments at Princeton is something like 155. I've also heard it whispered that departments don't care much at all about GRE scores, and that they tend to be used either as "tie-breakers" between equally qualified applicants, or as determinants for the amount of financial aid to be offered. In my correspondence with an Ivy-league school's English Dept. Director of Graduate Studies, they implied that it wouldn't really make a difference to the adcomm there if I failed to submit GRE scores altogether. So, really, I wouldn't worry about it too much. It's sort of late now to do much about it, but I would wager that in a field like history, a bad QR score won't impact you much, if at all.