mmorrison

Guess that answers that question. LOL

Perhaps they should What happens if they opt for a linguistic solution and, instead of "canceling" her talk, opt to "boycott" her?

Thank you, adorably inquisitive ginger cat! I have not yet chosen a school, but I am declining two offers of five. I feel like it's better to let them know as soon as I've ruled them out from among my choices. Is that a reasonable assumption?

I need to contact a couple of schools and decline their offers. Why didn't anyone tell me how hard this was going to be?! I researched programs for months and selected departments that truly fit my interests, schools that I would be absolutely thrilled to death to attend. It didn't occur to me that I might be in the position to have to choose among them. I know they probably don't really care that much, and they know that plenty of these calls/emails are coming, but I want to be as respectful and humble as possible. Is there a "right" way to decline an offer? Is phone or email preferred? Is it appropriate or presumptuous to sound apologetic? I would appreciate any insight. Thanks!

Right? "I'm sorry… what's that?… You say there's been a swiss cake?… I can't quite hear you; we have a bad connection. BRB, cashing this fellowship check."

Oh, yes. I have kids and need a 3-bedroom (not shared with other bill-payers), and all of the schools I'm still considering are in areas with a higher cost of living than where I am now. I know how to live frugally, but it's still anxiety-producing. The "I'm not good enough" worry is most profound with the school that offered me a hefty fellowship. I'm doing the [*points to self* "who?… me?"] thing, for sure. It's intimidating.

There's no reason to think that PhD applicants would be considered first or ranked higher in the decision process, as far as I know. You are all coming from the bachelor's degree and taking the next step. Equal footing, I would imagine. Just coming from different piles of paper. ETA: Plus, if you applied for Humanities, not English, then we might be talking about different committees, different timeframes, and different applicant pools altogether.

I was drinking wine with the professor who likely had the most hand in my successful application process. We celebrated together. Poetic. And then I left her house, got in my car, and cried like a three-year-old with absolute joy and relief.

Oh, my, yes. Well, maybe not lazy, but certainly less productive. Senioritis. I didn't anticipate (wouldn't let my mind go there) the extra work load and time-suck of planning campus visits, talking to people at various schools, and just deciding. And besides the time drain, it's so emotionally exhausting--in a good way, but exhausting nonetheless.

Thanks! They were my first rejection, but if I have a chance to meet Dr. Kaulbach, I will seek him out. Perhaps at Kalamazoo? Thank you for the suggestion!

Sophisticate, that's terrifying. And with kids, it's hard to justify living somewhere even moderately risky. Gunshots… no. Even the recommended areas of Riverside have pretty awful public schools (according to the "numbers," which I realize must be taken with a grain of salt), so I'm starting to think it would be best for me to embrace the idea of a commute. :-/ I'd love to be close to campus, but wow. I guess it would be a good idea to find out how many days per week I'll realistically have to be physically present on campus. Thanks for the detailed (and helpfully illustrated!) response.

Wait. Stop. This just in: wine+ice+cream.jpg I'm not sure this is even acceptable. It's like a unicorn-pegasus. I can't look directly at it.

I'll let you know if I end up coming in at the same time; maybe we can get breakfast/brunch before the craziness starts Wednesday afternoon.

I checked Ontario, and it's a bit more from here. I think I will probably suck it up, though, and go that route. The flight schedule is not ideal; I was really trying not to miss both meetings of my T/R class right after our Spring Break. It looks almost unavoidable, though, even through LAX, so it might be a moot point and I might arrive late Tuesday, too. The only way to arrive on time for Wednesday is to get up at 3 am, which of course is midnight the night before, Pacific time. I think I would probably look like a drowned cat, perhaps not the ideal first impression! I am planning to rent a car so that I can check out the area, but I might hold off until Friday for that if there is a shuttle or possible ride option. Good suggestion. By the way, thanks so much, Ryan, for the insight on neighborhoods. I am trying to decide whether or not buying a condo might be a better idea for me than renting, maybe after the first year. I think I just have rent sticker shock, having lived in a super-cheap area the last three years. Before that, I owned. I would seriously consider the UCR family housing, which look like adorable little low-maintenance bungalows, except that they don't allow pets. :-/

I understand this sentiment very well. It's guilt-inducing to find yourself overwhelmed by having to choose when you know what a rare and wonderful "problem" it is to have.

Coffee when I'm working. I've been ill, so I've taken it easy on the alcoholic beverages lately, but I'm slowly easing back into my evening wine habit. As far as eating, I am not big on sweets, very big on flavor. Anything with chipotle tabasco will do. Lately I've been into the caramelized veg flavor; I've been roasting cauliflower "popcorn" in the oven. Many nights (like tonight), I just roast an entire head and call it dinner. Kale chips, too. And I finally learned how to make mjedra, one of my favorite dishes at a local Lebanese restaurant that I can't really afford anymore, so we've had that fairly often lately. You basically cook sliced onions until they are so caramelized that they look like melty chocolate, stir them into lentils, add stock, and cook. The caramelized onion flavor pervades the entire dish; it's amazing. Oh, and we have tons of leftover Nyakers pepperkakor gingerbread cookies from the holidays. I make tea (always PG tips) and have a couple of those when I need comfort food. Basically I believe that the AM/PM system should be abolished and the hours of the day broken up instead into "coffee," "wine," and "tea."

I suppose that makes sense; spreading it out makes it easier to accommodate us all. At least they are fairly soon. Davis isn't doing theirs until 3/31! That seems like forever from now.

The open house for the English department is in the middle of the week. 3/12-13. I don't know about anyone else, but I'm thinking that my choice might come down to that most sacred of determining factors: the number of faculty and current grad students who can lead a swingout and are willing to randomly bust out some lindy hop moves in the middle of the department. I can't see how I can reasonably be expected to make a decision without that taking that statistic into consideration.

I would ask around to other students about their experience with recommenders before asking them to write. Back in APRIL, I asked three professors to write for me. They all said yes, and over the summer I trickled supporting materials to them as I had things ready. Then I started sending the notifications through the apps, so that they could upload their letters.* Well, one of my recommenders, the only full professor of the three, completely flaked. She later sent me an email, at the end of January, saying "I know I have a letter due for you to UCLA soon; what's the deadline again?" Yeah, that school's deadline was 1 December, and the other 8 schools' deadlines had also passed by that point. Fortunately, one of my other professors had since taken it upon herself to insist that given my research interests, she should write for me as well. Basically, she saved my biscuits. (Did I lovingly hand-knit her a thank-you gift out of $60 worth of luxury yarn? Why, yes. Yes, I did.) * - There's another good bit of advice: be aware that while some schools let you enter recommender contact info ahead of completing your app, so that your recommenders get their link and can upload their letter at their leisure, SOME schools do not send those notifications until you have absolutely finished every smidgen of your application. ::horror face::

Good to know; thanks! Talk to me about the ethical issues with academia.edu. I haven't posted anything there other than a CV, and the topic hasn't come up among my cohort and our faculty.

Great! I got a similar email, and I'm working on making my travel plans. I plan to work in some extra time to check out the area and get a sense for things like traffic, neighborhoods, etc. Maybe we can all procure coffee from our preferred vendors and meet somewhere neutral to imbibe it while debating roasting methods. I'm game. I've been frequenting Starbucks only because there is nothing else within 10 miles of my current campus, and for $1.65 I get a bottomless cup of coffee, free wifi, and get to stay warm for 16 hours on someone else's gas bill. That's my kind of coffee. ;-)

Oh, wow. What sort of materials do you have on your academia.edu page? I just looked, and I did have two views from Davis (although no way of knowing who). My LinkedIn page, though is. a. mess. I haven't updated it in ages, and most of my endorsements are for skills from my previous work, not at ALL related to academia. I really hope no one found that one. Fortunately its under my maiden name, so perhaps they didn't even think to search for that. Yikes.

I'm sure they are up to their ears right now, and I'm not in a hurry other than wanting to book travel. I can wait for the questions I was wanting to direct to Tina. I did hear from Dr. Hackel today when she sent a rough itinerary for the open house. It sounds like they're planning some worthwhile activities; I'm looking forward to it. She said she'd been negotiation with the Grad Division for travel funding, which is A-ok with me! If you haven't heard the details yet, she said they're putting us up for two nights and can contribute up to $400 toward air and ground transport. Tickets from here are over $400, even into LAX, but I can swing the difference. The "official" stuff starts at 2 on Wednesday. I might fly in the day prior because of the weird flight schedules from here, so if anyone wants to get brunch before showing up, maybe we can make a plan.

I had a couple of people say the same thing about the language background, but many, many more balked at the idea and tried to put me off it. After having spent the entire summer (ok, there was some beach time in the mix) reading recent critical works by medievalists I might want to work with--primarily those working on material culture--I reassessed and looked again at other options. I decided that in general I am especially drawn to medieval literature for its thematic elements and for what both its form and content reveals about ways of knowing in the middle ages. That's what fascinates me most. I was working very closely with a particularly enthusiastic and supportive mentor in my MA program, who is an eighteenth-centuryist and whose passion for the long 18th c is contagious, and that got me thinking about the Enlightenment and the epistemological sea change that occurred over the medieval and early modern periods and through the Enlightenment. I looked at where that might overlap with some of my specific topical research interests (maternity, reproduction, metaphors of generativity and origins) and I realized that there was some there there. I think that working in a later century but tracing the residual signs of earlier ways of knowing and understanding will give me a valid excuse to deepen my knowledge of medieval lit as I work my way through Enlightenment-era texts finding evidence that the assumption that "ok, we don't think that way anymore now, because science" is unfounded. So, while the advice to rethink my medievalist trajectory felt a bit deflating at the time, I think it was serendipitous (side note: see, that's totally unscientific!) Wow; it's late and I'm exhausted and I just went full nerd, there. Sorry.

I don't. I got the offer summary on a chart, and the letter didn't include teaching load or anything similar. I sent an email to Tina right after I received the official letter; I'm probably going to send a follow-up this weekend. I also sent a thank-you to the DGS for her lengthy, helpful email. They might be trying to get the details firm for the open house before setting off another volley of emails. I'll let you know if I hear anything new.