JerryLandis

The difference between the GRE and cable is that cable TV performs a function. People choose to pay for it because they want to watch cable TV. People choose to take the GRE because without it you can't apply to graduate school, even though many departments admit that they don't really care what your GRE score is. I don't really care that ETS has a monopoly on standardized tests, I care that I have to pay to take a completely unnecessary test, and that the company that offers the test gets away with shamelessly ripping me off. So I'm getting ripped off for something I don't even want, something that serves absolutely no function. The GMAT and LSAT are completely different from the GRE because they are actually used by admissions committees in business and law schools. No history department is going to accept or reject me based on my GRE score. They specify on their websites that they could care less. And yet, as a formality, I still have to pay to take the test, travel to the test center, and sit there for hours clicking on trivial answers.

People who tease those in other majors for working towards "useless" degrees should just be thankful that we're not doing the same subject as they are, and saturating their job market with more useful people. My father, who is a doctor, constantly mocks me for studying a completely useless subject. When I point out at at least I won't be miserable for my entire adult life like he's been, he just frowns and walks away. Very few well-respected jobs are useful these days. All the useful people - farmers, people who work in manufacturing jobs, plumbers, construction workers, electricians, etc. are those who are less respected for having received less education, and for being paid less. The one exception seems to be doctors. People pursuing careers in law or business like to sneer about how little money I'll make, but what they accomplish in their careers will likely be just as "useless" as my accomplishments. In fact, they may be even more useless, because at least someone following a more intellectually stimulating career path can have the satisfaction of, well, intellectual fulfillment. As a society, it seems many of us, at least those with better educations, work in useless professions, getting paid to sit all day and fill out paperwork. So yeah, what I want to do may not be very practical, but unless someone has a truly useful job, I don't bother listening to the criticism.

I'm applying to US programs from the UK. The time difference isn't quite as bad, but it can still be annoying. What drove me crazy was having to mail everything. Not only was it outrageously expensive to send my materials with a tracking label, but it also took at least 2 weeks for anything to arrive. Since I wanted my materials to arrive early, just to be safe, this meant sending everything in WAY before the deadline. I lost very valuable time that I could have spent improving my materials, especially my writing sample. I ended up finishing my thesis before my applications were due, but couldn't use it as a writing sample because it would not have arrived in the mail on time. For this reason, I'm very glad that most places are starting to use online systems. It definitely makes the application process much more fair for those not applying from the US. Ultimately, the worst part about applying from abroad was not having anyone to go to for advice. My professors were not able to give me much advice at all because they know even less than I do about the American university system. I felt that this put me at a serious disadvantage, but thankfully I received lots of extremely useful advice from people on this website.

I was having trouble with this a couple weeks ago. Hopeful dreams, constantly thinking about my future life in various locations where I've applied. That's not happening anymore, now that I've heard from one place and am expecting to hear similarly bad news from others quite soon. Strangely, I prefer this current state of mind. I'm not as restless anymore. Maybe the hope is gone, but at least the fear has subsided now that I've accepted my fate. Hopefully the rest of you applied more widely than I did, and have a larger number of places to hear back from.

Fear of having to reapply is a very reasonable reason to dread not being accepted this year! 6 months of application related stress is very different from stressful academic work, because it's extremely demoralizing, costs a lot of money, and is very mysterious and annoying to finagle. I can handle the stress of studying something I'm interested in. But the stress of taking pointless tests, obsessing over stupid meaningless sentences in bullshitty SOPs that might not even be read, editing old pieces of work to fit an arbitrary writing sample word/page limit, and all the while fearing that the person reading it will toss it out in 20 seconds with a sneer, is much different from the normal stresses of student life. I remember taking the GRE and thinking "that better be the last aptitude standardized test I ever take in my life" and looking forward to giving away my prep books. Well, I guess I will still have to get rid of the prep books as the test is supposed to change and I'll have to re-learn a bunch of stupid strategies from new books. But I can't believe I'll have to take it (and pay for it) again! I've accepted the likelihood of doing an MA next year. I shouldn't complain, it's a great opportunity. But I really just wanted to be finished, and settled, not in limbo for another year or two, with the stigma of having been rejected across the board from PhD programs. It's not nice to think that I ruined the first semester of my final year in college by having to go through all this crap, and I won't even get anything from it. Ah well, at least there are people to commiserate with!

I know what you mean. I've always taken great pride in my coursework, and usually am always thinking about the next assignment right after I hand in the old one (as in, that same day, after completing an all-nighter...). However, I'm no longer quite so enthused. Today I got back two outstanding grades from last semester for a year-long class I'm taking, which put me at a higher average than I've ever had in any class. But when I got them, I wasn't even that excited, just glad I didn't do badly. I guess that no matter how proud I've been of my grades, the fact that they haven't impressed any admissions committees makes me feel like I'm a generic student, and having a 1st class undergraduate degree is an average accomplishment. I'm afraid that when I get rejected from all the PhD programs I've applied to, my family will assume that I'm just not very smart (i.e. not as smart as my top tier PhD/MD/JD cousins.. grr!), and my accomplishments as an undergraduate will go unnoticed. What a downer!

I've stumbled across one potential advisor's blog, which is full of musings about how she thinks she's intellectually/academically inadequate, and other very personal stuff like that. Also mentions reading graduate applications. I don't read it though because it just seems like TMI about a person I've never met.

Cost effective my ass. It simply does not cost them anywhere near that much to send test scores. The most obvious example of the company ripping people off is the way that they deliberately send out scores as late as they possibly can, in order to get people to pay to hear their results over the phone for $12. Any fee for that is slightly ridiculous, but $12 to hear the score of a test you have paid to take, and whose results are available but not yet sent, is ridiculous and is clearly done solely for profit. I wouldn't really mind the test being monopoly controlled if they weren't getting away with ripping off thousands of people every year for the sake of a test that most admissions committees seem to consider almost useless. If scores from different standardized tests that test English language/reading skills and aptitude can't be compared, that's because they don't really do a very good job of measuring those skills in the first place.

Well, if that so happens to be the case with me, then I'd like my application fee back please. The whole point of contacting professors before applying is to find out whether or not they will be accepting new students that year. So when someone responds to my email saying, "Yes, I will be taking on new grad students in the coming year," that had better be the case, or else they're wasting my time convincing me to apply. Now, I did appreciate the email I got from one guy which said that he should be accepting new students, but that the department had lost a huge amount of money and would be taking fewer students than usual. That made me really sad, but also has given me reasonable expectations, and also gave me the chance to reconsider making the application. I think that in most cases, it's just not that easy to tell from an email correspondence how strong an applicant someone is. Just because they say that your ideas sound interesting does not mean that they will definitely want to admit you once they read your entire application. As BlueandBluff said, they can't be sure of anything until all the applications have been submitted and read (hopefully read - again, if they don't actually read my application I'd like my money back please), because there may be a large number of great applicants for a small number of spots. Lastly, I don't mean to make it sound like I'm implying you're not qualified, since I obviously haven't seen your applications. The "you" is just a colloquialism or whatever. I know that I personally received some very encouraging, and some less encouraging, emails from professors I contacted, but I'm not really expecting that to predict how my results come out because of all the heavy competition. Best of luck in the rest of your applications! I need to get the hell off this website if I want to be sane when I do start a program next year.

Post a bunch of stuff about how horrible the program is, so that someone who has been accepted sees it and decides not to attend... I'd kill for a waitlist spot right now, if that makes you feel any better.

Well, I don't mean to ruin everyone's day here, but I just looked at the results section for last year, concerning Yale. It seems last year they sent out acceptances on the 6th (a Friday), 2 of which are posted on this site. Then on the 9th (a Monday) they sent out a slew of rejections. So, since we've already had our 2 Friday acceptances posted, I won't be at all surprised if I receive notification on Monday that I've been rejected. Stupid interfering weekend!

I'm not an English or Literature major, but I saw the word "Medievalist" and clicked. I'm also interested in the earlier part of the period (from the historian's perspective, although for this period that tends to involve reading the more "literary" works as well as the dry bones stuff), and very frustrated at how little attention it seems to get in history and medieval studies departments! I had so few options for places to apply to. Anyways, good to see a nice number of medievalists, plus the occasional Anglo-Saxon fan. I am hoping, probably in vain, that having an unusual focus/period of interest will help me in the admissions process, but that thinking hasn't given me any results yet.

Yeah, I'd be surprised if a whole lot more Yale notifications went out today. My money's on next week. But why the hell do they do that? Why notify one person at a time, and why not reject us already if we're already in the reject pile? I don't get it!

I had a dream last night that I got into Yale and went to an accepted students weekend there, where everybody was like "OMG, I CAN'T BELIEVE WE GOT INTO YALE!!" Then I woke up and, as you imagine, was pretty pissed off to realize that it wasn't real. I really need to get out more!

But if you get the call when you're out at a bar, it's just so convenient! Drinks to celebrate, or drinks to drown the sorrow.

PS I'm doing the housewife thing because he pulls the "but you're better at it!" excuse, plus I am very picky about the way things are done and will often re-do something someone else has already "finished" and then nag about it later. And because his mother was too good to him and has given him false expectations of what a woman should be expected to do in the house!

Maybe 2-3 years is a stretch. By slump I mean that he's worried about his future but isn't gung-ho about improving it. He's finishing a masters this year and working part time, but he's pretty much just doing that because after spending a year unemployed out of undergrad, he wasn't sure what else to do. So essentially, he's a normal person for his age and for this economic climate. But it's just the attitude that bothers me, because he fails to see that in shirking his responsibilities for his future, he's essentially just dumping them off on me. Thanks for your heartfelt advice. I think that I will simply tell him exactly what I think about the situation, so that he can disprove my fears if he really wants to salvage things.

My long-term boyfriend intends to follow me wherever I end up, which is great, except that he has shown absolutely no resolve in finding a teachers' qualification program, as he says he wants to do. He keeps saying he wants us to "look together" for programs, which in my experience tends to mean "I want you to just do this for me." I know I'm lucky to have someone who's willing to up and move wherever the wind may take me, but I envision rocky times ahead if he continues to have absolutely no motivation to apply for anything. I'm terrified I'll end up being a full time stressed out grad student and essentially a housewife at the same time (throughout undergrad I've cooked, cleaned, done all the laundry, sorted all the bills, etc. etc.), and that I'll have to support both of us with whatever measly stipend I may or may not get. I imagine I'll need a lot of support as a graduate student, so I can only imagine that constantly needing to support someone else would be an absolute nightmare. Of course, this is only one possible future. Everything could turn out great. But it's entirely possible that it won't, and I really don't want to make him move 3,000 miles only to break up with him. Anyone here have experience with de-motivated significant others? Mine has been in a slump for 2-3 years now, and although I try to be as encouraging as possible to boost his self-esteem, every now and then I just get so angry about his behavior and unwillingness to improve his (and OUR) life that I think I make it worse. I'd really appreciate any advice about this. Please take into account that I'm being very negative at the moment and that otherwise he is a very loving, intelligent, and fun person, and that he has always been extremely encouraging of me and has put up with a lot of stress and freaking out on my part.

I want to have kids when I'm relatively young because I want them to be around for more of my life, and vice versa. Maybe it's a morbid thought, but I sometimes get a bit jealous of my friends whose parents are younger than mine, and may well live a lot longer. Sure, having older parents has meant having a much more secure upbringing, both in economic terms and also in terms of my parents' stress about their careers. Obviously everyone who wants children is going to have a different "ideal" time for that to happen, but for me, I hope I manage to have kids in my 20s. Some of my friends already have kids, and I have to say I'm quite jealous of them. But, we'll see. I'm hoping that as the years go by, eventually I'll have an epiphany one day and suddenly decide it's the right time. Either that or mess up taking my birth control. I have to say I'm rather jealous of the lesbian ladies who've posted - it would be awesome if my [currently non-existent] husband and I could take turns getting pregnant, instead of me having to do it over and over again. Anyways, professors somehow manage to, well, manage their lives. Most of them seem to have spouses and kids, even hobbies. So, if they can do it, surely the next generation can too.

WWOOF sounds really interesting - and a good way to improve language skills to boot. I'd love to do something like that, especially since I've recently come to the conclusion that I'm not that crazy about traveling. I mean, I like going places, but then I don't like just looking at things and moving on to the next thing on the list. It would be great to actually stay somewhere for a while and interact with the local people. I'm assuming you have to pay for your own transportation there, correct? Well, it sounds like an interesting thing to do over a summer break or something. Too bad I've already made plans for this coming summer.

I've decided to be picky, since I am applying right out of undergrad and, if unsuccessful, can always apply again later. I've applied to only 3 PhD programs, not really expecting to get into any of them, but expecting to get into a couple MA ones. I decided to only apply for so-called "brand name" universities, although this was partly because my particular interest isn't very well represented at other universities, so I'd actually fit in better at the higher ranked ones. My logic here is that it's going to be very difficult for me to get an academic job at the end of all this, so I may as well give myself the best possible chance by going to a well-known, highly reputable program. I don't really care where I end up working after my PhD, as long as it's in a nice area - but I'd like to give myself some choice down the line, so I don't think it's outrageous to be picky and snobby about grad programs. I personally found it kind of embarrassing to apply to such fancy schmancy universities. I was afraid the professors writing my recommendation letters would think I'm delusional and exceedingly arrogant. I don't want to make a fool of myself by getting rejected everywhere, so I try to be as modest as possible when people ask me where I've applied. I hope no one associates me with those people who, upon deciding to apply to grad school, simply apply to the top 10 universities according to the US News & World Report, without even looking up anyone in the department or considering less competitive schools (and then complain about how unfair the system is when they don't get in anywhere). I simply don't want to attend a lower-ranked university, where I don't have as much in common with my advisor, unless I absolutely have to. If I don't get into a PhD program this year, I'll do an MA, then reapply much more widely, maybe even with multiple research proposals that aren't exactly what I'd ideally like to do. But I figured I'd save the money this time around and only apply to my absolute top choices.

Oh PS: I am taking an intensive language course this summer, but unfortunately there's nowhere I can move to next year to immerse myself in Latin-speaking culture! I suppose I could devote the entire year to working just on languages, but I'm afraid I'd forget everything I know about history in the meantime, and that readjusting after a year away from it would be difficult. However, I am wary of having to wait an extra year to do my applications - do all MAPSS students who apply to PhD programs do so AFTER completing the program? What do they do for the next year besides finishing the thesis?

Thanks for the advice guys. The only reason I assumed I'd be able to work on my languages at MAPSS is that their website lists several language departments in their list of classes to choose from. Now, there were only a couple of history classes under the heading of "History," and none of them looked appealing to me, so I wouldn't be surprised if the website is completely inaccurate and is just some random link that somehow got jumbled in. Anyways, I was under the impression that I could take a language as part of my MAPSS coursework (being an important part of interdisciplinary learning). Would I have to take language classes on top of my courseload (which I am led to believe would be impossible), or is it possible to take, say, an intermediate level Latin class as an integrated part of my degree? Lastly, to the person who recently replied concerning his personal experience at MAPSS: Why did you not apply to UofC for the PhD? Did you dislike the department, or the campus? Or did you simply find that it wasn't the best place for your interests? Do you think that the somewhat negative experience you had at MAPSS would have repeated itself if you'd gone there for the PhD? Thanks for all the feedback. I wish I could get this much info about some of the other programs on my radar!

I haven't heard anything yet. But I bet I'm not really being "ignored," they're probably just sitting there looking in amazement at my application thinking "how could such a wonderful applicant exist?!"

I'm surprised they are one of the few big history programs that do interviews. You'd think they wouldn't want their top admits to visit the place until after signing the agreement, instead of paying for them to see it, and in February at that! Maybe everyone will reject them and we'll be admitted.