davidipse

I don't understand why schools won't accept unofficial copies of the GRE score report (which you can download through your ETS online account), and then ask for an official score report if you're accepted—like how some schools process transcripts. Is there some legal contract between ETS and the universities?

Spiced rum in tea or whiskey on ice.

I just finished reading Joan Bolker's Writing Your Dissertation in 15 Minutes a Day: A Guide to Starting, Revising, and Finishing Your Doctoral Thesis and found it immensely clarifying and helpful. I haven't started a dissertation or master's thesis yet, but for what it's worth, I did do an undergraduate honors thesis, and wish I had read that book back then. If you don't want/have time to read the whole book (it's actually rather slim: 184 well-spaced pgs.), here are my notes/summary (some of them redundant) I wrote while reading: - Write 15 mins a day, everyday, at least. - Write at every stage of the disst. - Take own work habits as seriously as the disst topic/material. - Write about these habits: what does and doesn’t work - Choose a topic that matters to you persnally as well as professionally. - Take notes in class. Rewrite notes for dissertation. - There are going to be dark times, inevitably. Write during/through the dark times. - I don’t have to read only what I’m writing my dissertation about. Or, I don’t have to write my disseratation about everything I’m reading. - Write about advisor meetings right afterward; not just disst. related, but relationship related. - How best can you use other people’s talents and input? - Seek what you need, not what you ought to need. - How do you start writing? First you make a mess, then you clean it up. - ”Park on the Downhill Slope”: near the end of each writing session, summarize, state unanswered questions, and sketch out possible future paths. This jump-starts the next writing session. - ”Write first” (before doing other big things in the day). - ”Choose a work style that suits who you are, not who you’d like to be; do not try to create both a dissertation and a new working style at the same time.” - Write about the problems you’re having with writing your disst. - Can each paragraph be summarized into a sentence? If yes, then you have the para’s central idea; if not, it has too many ideas to be covered in a single para. - Make a realistic, tentative time-table. - Set easy goals and generous deadlines at first, and reward yourself upon their completion. The point of these is not so much to improve the work as improve your working habits. - “Pay close attention to who you are, not who you might like to be.” - Writing is writing; if at a certain point you can’t write your dissertation, write anything (temporarily). - Try to end a writing session on beginnings, so you don’t have to begin a session at the beginning. - “Write one day at a time.” - Glorified proofreading VS. Revision - Advice for Advisors: “The fundumental principle of dealing with students in the midst of their dissertations is to assume paranoia.” - Advice for Advisors: “Don’t write anything on his dissertation draft that you wouldn’t feel comfortable saying to his face.”

The diversity of opinions on rankings held among faculty probably reflects—more-or-less, approximately, [qualifier], [qualifier], [qualifier]—the diversity of opinions held among hiring committees, since these are primarily composed of faculty members.

John Shoptaw, who teaches at Berkeley, wrote On the Outside Looking Out: John Ashbery's Poetry, which has blurbs from Harold Bloom and Charles Bernstein (who probably would disagree on everything else) identifying it as the foundational text for its subject. Charles Altieri, also at Berkeley, has written a number of articles on Ashbery. The only other critics I've read on Ashbery are Bloom (Yale), Helen Vendler (Harvard), and Stephen Burt (Harvard) but I'm sure there are more people writing on him. Nice to find someone else interested in Ashbery—who else do you like to read?

I received an acceptance email yesterday from the English Department, but my online application still says "decision pending."

Has anyone applied to UVa? There are a dozen rejections up on the gradcafe results board, but no acceptances. Do they typically send out rejections before acceptance notifications? (I know it might just be a case of none of the acceptees putting their info on here, but ...)

In theology they distinguish between, as they put it, Cataphatic (positive) and Apothatic (negative) definitions of God, who shares probably much more than two letters with graduate school in terms of influence over us the meek. So if one can't see what fits (though that's still contentious), one might try seeing what doesn't fit. I would in no way, were I applying to Duke or Chicago, "submit my best work and hope for the best;" merely in terms of number of faculty, those departments lean heavily towards theory, while I find my strengths have always been in dealing with concrete language and historical data. The best essay I wrote, not just in my opinion but because I edited it and had others help edit it heavily for publication, is on a novel. I didn't use it in any of my applications because I was applying to study poetry. And, since there is always more to you than you can put in a 500 words SOP, "fit" can be a factor in what aspects of yourself and your work you choose to emphasize. This isn't being insincere, inasmuch as that emphasis would probably end up being the effect of getting an education in department A rather than B anyway. In other words, if you have even latent or marginal interest in the digital humanities, this interest will probably intensify if you study at Stanford rather than, I dunno, anywhere else. In short, we're not helping ourselves by insisting we can avoid thinking about what a department will think of our fit with them—however elusive or speculative a concept this might be.

Thanks for the recs. I'm an alright writer, if there's a way of putting that without sounding like a jerk, but I still found the portions of They Say, I Say that I read pleasant and useful. I like that kind of categorizing tendency. I get all the hype in literary studies about bursting bubbles and pushing boundaries and breaking boxes, but, still, something about lists and taxonomies—however arbitrary, ultimately, they're bound to be—just warms the proverbial cockles. This is part of why I loved reading Skunk and White. One of my ambitions as an aspiring critic—(jerk factor redoubles)—is to marry a kind of, why not, journalistic prose to an academic one. I love how some critics pull this off. On another note, that Williams paper—LOL! I'm completely convinced (though I still like Skunk and White). I'm getting his book. Also, this article's helped me a lot: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/23/zombie-nouns/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0

Thanks, Eigen. I'll definitely read at least the Belcher; it's the 3rd time someone's recommended it to me. Though I study literature, I'm actually intrigued by those STEM titles—just to know how things work out in a lab.

Thanks! I just figure if any of these books, given how humanities-centric they appear to be, get a seal of approval from a Chemistry person, then they MUST have something going on. Helpful quote from the Bolken book: "Choose a work style that suits who you are, not who you’d like to be; do not try to create both a dissertation and a new working style at the same time."

Bummmp! Eigen, I'm dying to know the contents of your bookshelf.... : )

Dear people; I spent the morning leafing through Amazon, so to speak, researching research books. I'll be attending a doctorate program in English coming fall and would like to make my work there as efficient as I can, so as not to take an overly long time to finish the degree. So far, based on Amazon reviews and some skimming, the following are the books that I feel will be most worth reading on this subject. Most are writing guides and others address other aspects of research. If anyone has read any of these, or has suggestions about others, I'd be very grateful if you would share your thoughts (I don't want to read them all, and one has more trust in this forum than in Amazon reviews, unsurprisingly.) Research/Graduate Study: 1) Graduate Study for the 21st Century: How to Build an Academic Career in the Humanities - Semenza 2) Writing Your Dissertation in 15 Minutes a Day - Bolker 3) The Craft of Research (3d ed) - Booth, Colomb, Williams (also recommended by a prof.) 4) Literary Research Guide - Harner Academic Writing Guides: 5) How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing - Silvia 6) They Say, I Say: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing - Graff General Writing Guides: 7) Writing with Style: Conversations on the Art of Writing - Timble 8) On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction - Zinser Thanks!

Thanks everyone for the congrats, and hope everyone will get in somewhere they want to go. Au1342, I got the exact same email. I've heard a lot that their funding varies per student. This document was compiled by the people has this to say for Berkeley: Variety of packages. 23k for five years, 23k for two years and 17k for three, 30k for five years, 28k/2 with 26k/3 (are all of these packages updated? or are some of these figures from past years? 23/17 seems low compared to the rest of this list? thanks!--looks like they're from past years. last year, minimum package was upped to 31, 25, 17 17 17--about 22 per year)

Can I high-jack this? I love James Merrill, so it would be great to work with Stephen Yenser. I really hope I get accepted. Do you know anything about him as an advisor? (thanks!) ------------ Also, fantastic news today from Berkeley. At a loss as to who to share it with, and what to do with myself, and grateful for this forum. I wish everyone who's in the wait speedy relief from this ridiculous state of suspension, and congratulations to the already (if only partially) relieved. It's been hell.

My impression was that you don't need the TOEFL if you have a university degree from an English speaking country. Of course every school is going to have a Romanticist (it's not, after all, a niche like ecofeminist noir or even bioethics etc.), but approaches vary a lot. If I wanted to write on Wordsworth, I would much rather have studied, say, with M. H. Abrams (now, alas, retired) than with, say, Geoffrey Hartman (likewise retired, I think). I wasn't, I think, too picky regarding location, but I would prefer not to live in a megalopolis, but near one. So I limited myself to only one school in NY, and only one in LA; there are more schools in those cities I'm interested in, but not enough to justify the location compromise. Also, certain schools might have special library collections (Wordsworth manuscripts at Cornell; Mark Twain at Berkeley) or programs (the Digital Humanities stuff at Stanford; the Ellison Poetry Room at U Cincinnati) that might make them more desirable for some people.

I've been wanting to read Boland for a long time. Predicting, from a few snippets, that I'll probably like her, I'm holding off for now so as not to make Stanford even more attractive for myself. Just came, in reading (to establish relevance), across this curious contumely re LA by some guy named Bruce Bliven: "Here is the world's prize collection of cranks, semi-cranks, placid creatures whose bovine expression shows that each of them is studying, without much hope of success, to be a high-grade moron, angry or ecstatic exponents of food fads, sun-bathing, ancient Greek costumes, diaphragm breathing and the imminent second coming of Christ." (from Writing Los Angeles, A Literary Anthology)

Dear owner of the best username around here, how'd you like Particulars of Rapture? I read it (with some skipping) and found it rather painful to get through...

Let's bump this? Taking a "gap" year between undergrad and grad, I'll die of boredom if I have to read for another year without talking about it (if I don't get into any schools this round). I'll kill if one more critic suggests that reading is its own "conversation." It's not. Anyway, I'm trying very hard to like Whitman nowadays, and there are some hits, but more misses. I usually like taut, structured (though not necessarily formally) poetry (like Elizabeth Bishop, Dickinson, etc.), so Whitman just seems to go on and on. I'm sure this isn't the case (probably). Nevertheless, I can see the structure of thought in the shorter poems (e.g. Dalliance of the Eagles, A Noiseless Patient Spider) much better than in the more famous, longer ones. I just checked out Madam Bovary (Lydia Davis trans.) from the library and will usually also read a bunch of contemporary poems every day—most recently, James Cummins, whom I strongly recommend, who will crack you up and open, whose loveliness increases etc. I don't really recommend David Mikics's Slow Reading in a Hurried Age. Read about 3/4 of it in Barnes and Nobles but decided against buying. I agree with most of what he says, but he says it so mediocrely.

Yes, a phenomenon remarkable not just for its inverse relation to logorrhea. On another note, is there a financial aid deadline? Also, do we even need to fill out financial aid if it's the school or the department—not the gov't—is the one doling out the money, and doling it out based on merit rather than need?

Dear people, It appears, scientifically, that digestion begins not when food enters the stomach, not even when it enters the mouth, but as early as the anticipation of a future meal, or the memory of a past one, excites the salivary gland. Thus, through a process that is, really, psychosomatism in disguise, purely mental images translate into a real, physical substance: saliva. I have concluded—eureka—that the human condition is one of salivating, either forward or backward. We live in anticipation. Then we live in memory. Then we are no longer living. Sincerely, Fellow Secretion Mechanism

Hello! The website of this English PhD program ask for writing samples to be "no more than 20 pgs." No minimum length is specified, but it needs to be only one paper. I have 2 options: 1) an excerpt (first half, and conclusion) of my 40pg senior thesis,. This is a good paper and got an A+, but is not as related as the other one to what I propose to study in graduate school. 2) Or I can submit a 13 pg. paper that's the most polished thing I've ever written. It engages exactly the topics my statement of purpose says I want to do my dissertation on. In 13 pgs, it says more than the 20 pgs of my thesis excerpt. It's much more succinct. Anyway, is 13 pgs (1 pg. is works cited, so it's really 12 pgs) too short to submit. I'm afraid that even though the program website doesn't specify a minimum, there's an unspoken rule that the sample must be as close to the designated page limit as possible. This is due tomorrow, by the way, so I can't really expand the shorter paper. Thanks a lot.

Thank you guys for the suggestions. I wanted to put in that I talked to a prof. today and he suggested, instead of indicating the dollar value, to have a line or two describing the applicant pool, selectivity, purpose, etc. of the award/grant/scholarship. I think I'll do that—maybe quoting, briefly, the scholarship websites when they say something especially indicative and give the link. Thanks again.

Hello. Thanks in advance for any and all advice. I have a few q's about what to put in the CV/resume and how to put it. 1) I assume one lists awards and scholarships. But should I note the monetary value too? I'd think one reason to do this is it's an indication of the scholarship's selectivity, but then it also seems really tacky. 2) Some of these scholarships were more like research grants (i.e. you had to do some research and present a paper in exchange for the money given). It wouldn't be gratuitous to give a short summary of the research, would it? 2) In fact, for any published/presented paper listed on the CV, is it wise or is it gaudy to give a short abstract (1-2 sentences) of the paper's topic? Thanks again.

Hello. Verbal: 168 Math: 150 (I know) GPA: 3.8 I think everything else (e.g. letters, statement, research experience) is in excellent shape. I really want to get into either Yale's or Harvard's English PhD program, not because they are "the top ivies" but because my favorite critics teach there. So I think there is a great fit too, for either. Should I retake the GRE? Will my current math score really lower my chances? Or should I concentrate on honing the rest of the application. If I decide to retake the GRE, it will have to be within less than a month, and I'd have to spend a lot of time practicing math (my issue is mostly speed). This would mean I would have relatively little time to devote to revising and revising my personal statements and writing sample. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure my math score would increase substantially. The other school I'd like to go to that's very selective are UC Berkeley. The rest of my choices I think could be considered safe, whatever that means. I only want to retake if the current low score will seriously spoil my chances. Otherwise, both self and pockets are burnt out. Any informed advice would be much and sincerely appreciated. Thanks! (really)