everyblueline

Yup! : )

@Warelin & @TheNostalgicFunction -- Wow--you all are wonderful. Thank you so so much--those are both super helpful responses. Esp //I had definitely thought that the School for Criticism and Theory was more tightly associated with Cornell than that, and it was having a definite impact on my decision-making process. The point about the city v. small town is also very helpful, and not something I had thought about enough.

Thank you so much, @Silabus -- that does actually help a lot

ok, question about this, from a long(!)-time lurker---I found out Tuesday that I was accepted to Cornell, and I was accepted a while ago to Chicago. Am interested in visual art, theory, and poetics. Out of those two depts, which would people recommend? Would v much appreciate help! ?

HeyIowa: Awesome! Congrats, btws. Getting in for fiction is ridiculous: )

HeyIowa: Thank you : ) I still kind of have a hard time believing it happened. I think I'm probably going to end up choosing Iowa (my recommenders/advisors pretty consistently said to do Iowa over Cornell.). Or maybe Brown if I get off the waitlist, but they said they only accept people off the waitlist every few years. So I'm not really counting on it working out. pdh12: I don't know, really. If I had to guess, though, I'd say it was at least partially that this time around my work was a lot more focused, and informed by a wider and better understood set of sources. The year I didn't get in anywhere I applied with poems from undergrad creative writing workshops only. They were just kind of random things I'd written/ were all over the place. My statement was basically like "I like writing poems. The end." This time around, my portfolio was mostly recent poems, with the best ones from undergrad thrown in as well, and the new ones were kind of thematically coherent: I'd just finished a weird year of art school, and they were mostly about that. I also had my first introduction to philosophy/theory/art history while I was there [art school], and over the summer I read way more than I'd ever read. My statement this time was +/- about how I wanted to write through ideas from visual art.

I would say it doesn't matter at all. I had only one publication in a tiny unimportant journal, and I ended up getting into the IWW, Cornell, CU-Boulder, U Montana, UW-Madison, USF, and am waitlisted at Brown. I applied a few years ago, and got rejected across the board, but I had the same publication stats. i.e., not much at all.