JerryLandis

Reading about long dead intellectuals, you always hear about how they spent hours bent over books, teaching themselves lots of crazy languages. Nobody ever seemed to go to a class. Why can't I do this?

I want an interview! My outfit would blow everyone else out of the water... Things like interviews always throw me off a bit, because I usually dress quite formally so I'm concerned that dressing as I normally do or a little bit nicer may make me appear nervous and overdressed. I can still remember back in the day when I interviewed for my prep school, and the other girl being interviewed that day, a 14 year old, was wearing a khaki pantsuit with hot pink lining. It was a cheap one that made ruffly sounds when she moved nervously. I was embarrassed for her. I think wearing a suit can be okay but is still a little excessive, i.e. I think I'd personally err on the safe side and go slightly more casual. How often do you see professors wearing suits? Mine never do. If you do wear a suit, I guess just don't wear a really slick one (pinstripes come to mind as being somewhat snooty) and maybe wear a neutral-colored one if you have one? I find that people tend to look much friendlier and more intellectual when they are wearing brown instead of black. In a similar vein to what someone mentioned already, black has much more corporate connotations, at least to me. I wouldn't wear jeans. Jeans can't be dressed up or down enough to squeeze through awkward dress situations. If you are afraid of looking too formal, wear pants of another material like corduroy, or denim that isn't blue. You won't appear too formal in that, because those are the kinds of materials that people often wear to casual events. Sorry if these style musings have gone too far, but I am still working on coursework for the semester and need an outlet of procrastination!

I don't think there's anything wrong with that, since you would not be choosing one or the other. The only thing to consider is that sometimes UK departments seem to want their masters students to reapply there for a PhD. I've heard from masters students that their department really pushes them to apply. But I wouldn't think that having plans for next year would affect your admission to a one-year program. If anything, mentioning that you would put off your Columbia plans, or would decline the acceptance and reapply later, shows how committed you are to entering the Oxford program.

I applied to a masters program that specifically says it is not for people looking to go on to a PhD, but for people who want to teach in secondary schools or community colleges. Now, my aim if I don't get into a PhD program this time around is to do a masters and reapply, so I was worried about saying that in my SOP for this school. But then I figured, hey, this school is really my LAST choice - as I was drafting my SOP, I realized that the program is really not what I'm looking for, but I figured I was almost finished with the application so I may as well apply. I didn't say in my SOP that I intend to pursue a PhD, but made a vague reference to wanting to "teach" as a profession. So I didn't lie, just gave them something to draw their own [untrue] conclusions from and assume that I mean I want to teach in secondary schools or community colleges. What I've told myself is that if I don't get into any PhD programs, okay, I'll just do the masters and reapply. I'm fairly confident I'll get into at least one of the other masters programs I have applied to. But if I don't get into any of these masters programs (especially considering admissions at one of them is not very competitive) and am only accepted to the abovementioned place that's not recommended for PhD hopefuls, then I suppose that means I should be reassessing my goals anyway. If I can't get into any of the other places I'm applying to, then I probably am not cut out for PhD work and should go ahead with my somewhat falsely stated goal of becoming a high school teacher.

While I'm sure it's better to have come from a more highly ranked university, I don't think it's really the be all and end all of admissions. I'm not speaking from personal experience, since I'm currently applying, but I'm sure that attending a less prestigious university, as you say yours was, won't ruin your chances since you performed so well there. It's great that you have an entire year to prepare your applications, and I suggest working on it as soon as you can. I started well in advance (summer before applying), but definitely could have done more. Spend a lot of time preparing for the GRE, for example - it's only once you're cramming a day or two before the test that you realize just how much you can improve your vocabulary and math skills by doing practice exercises. If you do a little bit every day or so, you'll be well prepared when you take the test. Also, you can use this time to read works by potential research supervisors. If the departments you are applying to have language requirements, perhaps you can take an evening language class in the coming year and a half?

It does annoy me how much they shroud everything in mystery. I understand that these are private institutions, and they have no obligation to divulge admissions statistics and other information, but since we are indeed paying to apply I think that changes the dynamic quite a bit. If I am going to pay $100 to apply somewhere, I should be offered enough information to gauge whether I have any chance at all before committing to that payment. This especially applies to the rumor I've heard about some universities having an unofficial GRE cutoff, meaning that certain people who had paid the application fee would have their applications tossed out, unread, due to an unspecified "requirement," despite having paid the hefty fee. Do you really think the process is intentionally engineered to keep poorer applicants from applying, or to discourage them? I personally would have thought that all the intimidating language and hard deadlines were there so that only people who are really serious about applying will, regardless of economic background. Obviously having less money will discourage people from applying widely or at all, but I don't think that universities actively seek that result - I think it's more a case of people thinking that things like application fee waivers, undergraduate scholarships, etc. will take care of people's economic problems to the extent that it won't be the responsibility of the graduate programs to address or acknowledge the issue. Maybe I'm just an optimist, but I think that it's more a matter of idle wishful thinking than calculated social engineering.

PS my transcript doesn't say I'm the smartest person ever - maybe it was a Freudian slip, but I meant to say that my transcript would show me to be a shameless liar if I put something like that in my SOP!

I think that there is only so much you can get away with making up. If you claim to be fluent in a language, generally speaking that can be backed up by credits and grades earned in language classes, or maybe a writing sample using that language. I suppose that may be more tricky for people whose first language is considered a "foreign language," although in that case, if you do get accepted, you'll have a very tough time keeping up the lie once you enrol! I'm sure that the people reading these SOPs have read many of them and can spot excessive boasting. I tried to give my SOP a more humble tone, because there's no need to say "I am the smartest person ever and I get the best grades ever" when they have a copy of my transcript right there. I think that the SOP is intended more to give the reader an idea of a person's research interests and general attitudes about the subject, whereas the transcript and recommendation letters will establish how strong the person's qualifications are.

Oh right, sorry, I didn't notice that you had said you are currently in a different field. What are you doing now?

A second PhD? Thank goodness you're not applying to the same programs as I am! I am curious though - doesn't a PhD act more as an introduction to the academic world, as in, can't you just develop new and different interests by writing a book as part of your current employment? I would just think that going back to the PhD stage would be weird, since technically you could be supervising such a student yourself.

I understand why they need to have application fees, but it seems a bit odd in applying for what is basically a job. I've never had to pay to apply for a job, seems a bit off for me to have to pay for this. Especially with all the hard mailing deadlines - postage here is usually reliable enough for personal letters, but I don't trust the basic service to get an important letter across in under a month. I just had to mail everything in very very far in advance, which meant that I lost weeks when I could have been improving my writing sample and SOP if I had more time to mail it in. Using a courier service to send a letter from the UK to the US costs £40 per letter if I remember correctly.

GRE: $180 GRE transport: $300 (maybe more, conveniently erased that from my memory) GRE scores: $20 (yay for non-US schools!) Application fees: $110, $110 Canadian (so like 200 USD?), $95, $55, $50, $50, $100 Postage for Supplemental Materials: four envelopes each costing about £7.50 - so $50 total comes to $1100

Another medievalist, I posted my whiney "will I get in anywhere" info on this board already! Applying to 3 PhD programs and 5 MA's. I probably have a slim chance at this round of PhD spots since I've applied to so few places, but I didn't want to apply to a million places where there was no real fit with my interests, and I'd have to lie and pretend to be interested in something else in the SOP. The 3 places listed are the only ones that I really seem to fit with at all - hopefully they'll have the same sentiments about me! I'm finishing my undergrad in the UK. My grades and experience and all that are excellent. I'm one of those people who cries about an A- (or whatever the equivalent to that is on the grading scale here). Hate to brag, but like some other people on this website I'm one of those people who has wasted the past four years of my life in the library and will probably have a permanent hunchback as a result. HOWEVER, the major blow to my application is that I only speak one foreign language, which does not happen to be the all-important Latin, whereas most people applying to medieval programs are very strong in languages. Gee, would've been nice if one of my advisors had bothered to inform me that you have to be at least trilingual to get anywhere in this sub-field! I'd really like to hear whats up with the other medievalists that may be applying, so I can get an idea of who the competition is and where I stand in comparison with people from American undergraduate programs. Basically, I just want some confirmation that wasting my youth in the library has been worth it, because I'm tired of hearing people I know to be huge slackers report to me about the awesome graduate job they've just been offered. Gah!

I've been sleeping a lot. This morning I hit the snooze for two hours, and now I am on this website because it's too cold to get out of bed and I don't want to do my morning workout (although it's not actually morning anymore).

Actually I do realize what that means - I live in the UK but I am American, born and raised, and have lived in a few different states. New York is out more for reasons of personal preference than responsible reasons like finance - it's too big and dirty for me, plus I don't like the attitude many New Yorkers have to the rest of the country (hope that's not too offensive - but I have several close friends/family members who exhibit this quite clearly!). After living in a foreign country for my undergraduate years, pretty much ANYTHING in the US will be nice, as long as it's not in NYC and has the basic cultural/social amenities that come with being in a university town. I want to be able to see family and friends on occasion, to be able to afford stuff because the currency is dollars instead of pounds, to be able to drive my car, to shop at a decent sized grocery store, to be able to go out and buy a load of bread without being noticed for my foreign accent, to have access to basic medical care since the NHS doesn't seem bothered whether I live or die, to have my pets live with me without having them quarantined, to be in a somewhat close time zone to the people I speak to on the phone, to be able to AFFORD speaking to people on the phone, the list goes on....

I don't care too much about geography because I have moved several times before, and I know that after 6 years of PhD stuff I'll just have to move again if I'm lucky enough to get hired somewhere. So I'm not applying anywhere that would make me miserable, but anything within the United States (except for NYC) goes. I still looked at some departments located in NYC, but I was very relieved not to see any relevant faculty members there! I think the obsession some people have with "fit" is mostly a reaction to the assumption many people have that applying to grad school is just like applying to college, and the universities can be ranked neatly and easily.

The Masters programs at my UK university are filled with Americans. This is because anyone who is not an EU citizen has to pay much higher tuition than EU folks, and even higher than UK people. Because my university somehow always manages to be hovering on bankruptcy, the way universities do, it accepts a disproportionate number of American students to cash in on the higher tuition fees. So I would say that Americans probably have an easier time getting into the Masters programs, although not PhD (I don't know much about PhDs here at all). However, this preference towards 'diverse' candidates produces anything but a diverse class; of all the masters students I have met here in my discipline, all but one has been North American.

I stapled my writing samples, and my SOPs where necessary. I figure it will be easier to organize or go through my documents if they're independently stapled and secure. If they don't want staples, they should have specified that in the directions! As for the envelope, I sent my documents in A4 envelopes, the same size as my paper (I hope whatever files they use are long enough to hold the A4 pages - didn't think about that until the last minute, but hey, maybe it will make my application seem more distinctive!). I wouldn't stress too much about all that, since I'm sure there's someone working in the admissions office who sorts out all the paperwork before the admissions committee looks at it. I doubt one of the secretaries doing this will find the way I assembled my materials offensive enough to say anything about it to the people evaluating my application!

I plan to include my full bibliography for the (different) writing sample I am working on now. As I mentioned on another post, I am going to submit the introduction and one chapter (of three) from my undergrad thesis. The chapters deal with very different themes, which I discuss in the introduction, so I am going to include an outline of the thesis (not very long) for the readers' reference so that they can see where the excerpts are coming from and how they fit in to the greater framework of the thesis. I am going to include the entire bibliography (2 pages... which I am assuming don't count as part of the 25 page allotment) for the same reason, so they can see which sources I am using overall. Also, this is because it is not a works cited page, but a bibliography, so even sources that I don't directly cite in my excerpts are relevant and may have contributed to the argument indirectly. I don't think that's particularly misleading, because if they want to know exactly which sources I used for the excerpted samples, they can just read the footnotes!

I am going to submit the introduction and last of three chapters from my thesis, which I am currently writing. I haven't yet written the other 2 chapters or the conclusion (or, at this moment, the last couple hundred words of my third chapter...). I don't even have a title yet, so I'd better think of one my tomorrow! I hate writing abstracts, and since I haven't even finished writing this thesis yet, I'm sure writing an abstract for this would suck more than usual. So I don't think I'll include one - the relevant information is in my introduction, which hopefully they will actually read. What I do plan to include on my cover page is my name, my application number, the program I am applying to, 'Autumn 2010,' and the title once I think of one, plus something along the lines of "This is an excerpted introduction and chapter from my current undergraduate thesis" and then an outline/table of contents (maybe on a second page) so that they can see the overall structure of my thesis and how the excerpted material fits in. Now all I have to do is finish writing the thing so I can submit it by tomorrow!

Actually, I don't think I will mind the waiting so much. Don't quote me on this, but I am kind of looking forward to when my applications are all in, but it's too early to expect any results. This is because there's very little chance of me getting into the programs I really want, so until I hear back, I can live in my dream world, in which I pretend that next year I'm going to be in some amazing place, participating in some amazing program. And I can think about this without then thinking "shoot, I need to remember to mail this to University X" or "I need to rewrite those couple sentences in my writing sample" and other little things that add up to a giant stressful monster.

More venting: I don't think this can be said enough. Nobody who isn't applying to grad schools seems to understand how much of a pain it is! Back when I was applying to college, college admission was all anyone ever talked about. Where are you applying? What do you want to major in? Blah blah, etc. Maybe it was because I went to a prep school, where the entire point of the institution was to get us students into college, but I remember there being an incredible support network for people applying to college, even in junior year and before. Obviously, I don't expect the same degree of obsessive, smothering hand-holding now that I received in high school. But still, it would be nice if someone were to acknowledge how much work these applications are! For some reason people expect you to have your applications finished in a couple days, like you just have to casually enter a few test scores and grades into a computer and you're all finished. Especially in social situations, people can be annoying. People expect me to be able to come out all the time and dismiss working on applications as a legitimate thing to spend time on. The good thing about this process is that it will be finished by the second semester. At least, my part of it will be. After this horrible semester, which has been a constant barrage of stress, near nervous breakdowns, challenging work, and eruptions of self-doubt, I will be the happiest of all my friends. I will be able to enjoy the second semester, and it will seem so amazingly easy and carefree in comparison to this one. So I'm glad for that.

Yeah, I'm definitely glad I'm not applying to law school!

What bothers me is when people say "I was soooooo disappointed with my GRE score. I was getting 1600s on my practice tests but then I only managed a 720/750! Eugh, I'm so disgusted with my self, is it even worth applying ANYWHERE?" I see the reason for it though. I work my hiney off for my grades and yet will still probably be rejected everywhere due to lack of necessary language preparation. So I understand why people who feel the same way as I do might fish for compliments because the realization that not everyone wants them in their program (or that no one wants them in their program) might be quite harsh coming at the end of a lifetime of positive encouragements and "Great job!" enthusiasm.

That sounds like a relaxed version of my high school dress code! I dress quite formally so if anything I tend to worry about overdressing, but it's just the tattoo - it's definitely noticeable.