SleepyOldMan

hj2012: Many thanks for your reply. The adcom procedure you outline makes a lot of sense as to how a (presumably) small committee cuts through a large number of applications to reach a small number of acceptances. The initial weeding process is more refined than my guess, but the principles are similar. I'm surprised the number of below-grade applications is so high (I can be quite naive), but I'd also guess that the number of remaining admissible applications is also quite high. It may be, as you suggest, that it is rare for subject matter specialists to become involved, as I thought, but I'm pretty sure this is the way it's done at the school I will be attending. Perhaps this is equally myopic on my part, but I have to imagine that adcom members are, at least to some degree, aware of what their colleagues' subject matters and methodologies are, and sensitive to what they are looking for in students. (Just a matter of basic professional respect for one's colleagues: They're not going to admit someone whose methodology is deconstruction to work in a field where one of the faculty members has made a career of burying deconstructionists.) I don't know how many members an adcom generally has, but I would guess there's a some representation among specializations. I agree that it's impossible to tailor your application essay as closely and specifically as you would a term paper for a professor whose class you are taking, but I would still argue that knowing as much as possible about the methodologies and subjects the faculty in your field write about, and weaving this into your essay, will better your chances. When I refer to "spark of recognition," I have in mind something that clearly and sharply differentiates one essay from many others, rather than some series of miniscule differences, that makes the reader take special notice: It's more of a Yes/No kind of thing, "I know it when I see it," rather than a numerical scale. And I sense you would agree that when assigning numerical scores to applications, the professional biases of each reader cannot help but enter in, to some degree. Regarding your comment about the "sophistication" of writing samples: I can't help but think that when faculty members speak of "sophistication," it has a lot to do with one's ability to "talk the talk" of one or more in-vogue methodologies. Ie, not so much what you know, but how good you are at sounding like the pro's do. I can't prove this, of course, but I do believe that attempting to mimic the sound of one or more faculty members in the schools we apply to can't help but raise our "sophistication" score. (Tongue a bit in cheek, there.) Again, I appreciate your taking the time to write. That's a lot of very useful factual information.

gwarner13: The point of this example was to suggest that people who are successful at something can often be mistaken or self-deceived as to the reasons for their own success. Due, perhaps, to their own self-image (or ego), the google founders had a certain idea of why they were so successful: They were really, really smart. (The unspoken assumption: Not only smart, but in fact smarter than everyone else.) And they therefore believed that they could apply this formula to hiring employees for their own company, and also that they could apply this formula and be as successful in other businesses as they were in web search. Both beliefs turned out to be inaccurate. The employees they hired in their own mold often turned out not to be very good employees. And despite enormous investments, they have not figured out a way to make money in any other field besides web search. Which naturally gives rise to the question: How do we explain this seeming contradiction? ---I would humbly suggest that they did not fully diagnose all the reasons for their success in the web search business. Yes, they are very smart people, and without that they never would have figured out their web search algorithm. But IMO there were also, quite probably, other, material, nonduplicable environmental factors that contributed materially to their success. In other words, it wasn't "just" because they were so smart that they succeeded. This was intended as an analogy to the grad school admissions situation. Those posters who were accepted to the first schools that announced their decisions seemed to credit their "strong SOP and WS" as the reason for their admissions success. Later on, of course, they found themselves with a material number of non-acceptances. How do we explain this seeming contradiction? Did the later schools simply not recognize how strong their submissions were? Was school B's admissions pool far deeper and stronger than school A's? Did their own applications somehow become weaker over time, evidencing some heretofore unknown law of decay in the verbal universe, akin to the half-life of elements in the periodic table? (I'm being facetious, of course.) By this point, it probably comes as no surprise to hear me say: There must have been other, nonduplicable, environmental factors, specific to each school, quite apart from the "strength" of any applicant's submissions, that resulted in each acceptance or non-acceptance decision. Some might call this "luck." I would rather say: "context."

To coin a phrase: That is not what I meant at all! That is not it at all! (Just kidding, of course, about the coinage.) The main point is this: Grad schools are not interested in determining, from among several hundred applicants, which ones are the very absolute "most talented" or which ones have submitted the very "best" writing samples or SOPs. They're not interested in determining whether an individual applicant would grade out at 98 or at 96 or at 94. That's not a significant difference to them, and they have no interest in spending their limited time that way. Rather, I think the process works like this: 1. They first make an initial cut of applicants, based on all the credentials they present and whatever general standards each department may have, into two categories: "Are they admissible or not?" Which means: "Are they talented enough to do excellent work in our department?" 2. The group of admissible applicants that results from that first cut is, I would guess, in every case, significantly larger than the number of spots a school may have available. So, how do they proceed? Do they apply a finer grained analysis and try to rank the admissible applicants in order? Do they try to distinguish the applicant who is a 98.6 from the applicant who is a 98.4? 3. I don't think so. I believe the adcom instead then goes to the various subject matter and methodology specialists in the department and asks them to read SOPs and WSs of relevant applicants, and have the specialists decide whom they would most be interested in having as potential students. Knowing that a six-year commitment is involved, it's likely that they're going to choose applicants whose interests closely align with their own. Which makes all kinds of sense from any number of perspectives. It's important that people in a department feel some sense of comfort and familiarity with those they're going to be spending time with. So, yes, once the first cut is made, the focus is on "Whom do I/we want to work with?" rather than "Whom do we think are the very, very, very most talented students (in some "objective" sense) in the admissible pool?" It just doesn't make sense for a department to admit someone, no matter how talented they might be, if their interests don't make a good match with the faculty. (Though, it might be said, it's also human nature for a faculty member in a particular specialization to think A is more talented than B because A's views more closely agree with those of said faculty member. ---If you don't think this happens in grad school, then you probably haven't been to grad school yet.) So, once you're in the admissible group, it's a question of how faculty members respond to your interests, as expressed in your writing. Of course they want to know that you're an excellent writer, but presumably this is true of everyone in the admissible group. My view is that the degree of polish applied to the SOP or WS matters quite a bit less than whether your writing sets off a spark of recognition in your readers. Which is why I believe that investing time in trying to understand what will cause that spark of recognition is likely to be the most productive thing one can do to achieve a greater percentage of acceptances. You are not going to be accepted because your SOP or WS is especially "strong," because nearly everyone's is. You're going to be accepted because, from among the large group of very strong applicants, something in what you say catches the eye and fancy of a decision-maker. And if you can develop a clear idea of what is likely to matter most to Professors A and B at School C, and are able to tailor your writing in that direction, that will increase your chances of admissions success more than merely improving the quality of a non-tailored writing sample. ---Of course, it's natural for someone with a fantastic record of prior academic achievement, someone whose grades were always at the very top, to think that how well they do in the admissions process will be a direct reflection of how "well" they write their SOP and WS, how "strong" they are. Natural, yes, but IMO it's just not true. It really does come down to fit, where "fit" means, from the perspective of a relevant faculty member in your potential field: "Does this person's project interest me?" So, to conclude: Jazzy: I agree we're in agreement as to the main part of it. I would say, though, that some people are probably more perceptive than others at figuring out in advance what might or might not be attractive to a particular department, and that's why people are often surprised at what departments say when they tell them why they were accepted. The process can often appear as "whim," but once we get to know more about the people making the decisions, they usually end up making a lot of sense. I hope this is more clearly stated than in my previous post, and also that no one will feel there is anything patronizing about it. It's my best attempt to make sense of the process, of what I have learned over the past months. If you disagree, let's talk about it.

ArthurianChaucerian: The whole argument behind whether or not to censor City Lights who published Ginsberg's Howl was about literary merit. Just saying. Not sure that's an effective way to look at literature. ---What other basis is there to distinguish art from something that might otherwise be thought or claimed merely to violate community standards of decency? The courts are forced to deal with this question regularly as a matter of law. Were it not for considerations of artistic merit, these sorts of things would in fact routinely be banned.

To the contrary: It's not meant cynically at all. Let me explain. Let's look at what you've said: First, you said that you worked really hard on your WS, polishing and polishing, implying that you thought it was particuarly good, and at least suggesting that it was better than other applicants', and that it was on this basis, its goodness, its being superior, that you believe you were accepted. Second, you referenced the fact that professors you spoke with *mentioned* the SOP and WS when you spoke with them. Now, let me ask: Is this really the same as what you said first? Does it imply what you said first? The question is: Did they say, "Gee, the quality of your work was clearly *superior* to those of other applicants, and that's why we accepted you"? Or was it more along the lines of "We thought these things you wrote about (subject matter, methodology, etc) were really *interesting* and that's why we accepted you"? (The implication being, of course, that we found it interesting because the very same things are interesting *to us*.) I would suggest it's more likely to be more like the latter. Ie, we're willing to spend the next six years with you because you're interested in the same things we are. ---Which is exactly the tribal sort of consideration on which fraternity and sorority admissions decisions are based. Not without reason, I might add. So, it might well be more the subject matter and methodology you or anyone chooses to write about, rather than whether your WS would have graded out as a 93 or 95 or 97 or 99, that determined why you were accepted. ---Although, to be sure, if another candidate's subject matter and methodolog were nearly the same as yours, then the goodness of the essay would be more likely to factor into the decision, There is, of course, a very strong inclination for a successful applicant to think that he/she was chosen ahead of others because the school thought he/she was "better" than other applicants, perhaps smarter, perhaps a harder worker. This is the basis of the way in which we are normally graded in school. And, in fact, we saw this among posters who were the first to report acceptances: They all said: "I had a really strong SOP and WS." My point is that this is likely a delusion: At this level, the pool of applicants is just too strong; many many people have SOPs and WSs that, objectively (if that even means anything) are just as strong; and it strains credulity to suggest that an admissions committee would even be interested in spending its time trying to make fine gradations among a pool of exceptionally strong applicants to see which were the "very, very best" in some objective terms. They just have no interest in that. Rather, they first come up with a large group of potentially admissible candidates, and then ask the relevant faculty to pick which ones they would want to work with. And this usually means picking applicants whose work resonates most closely with their own. And this explains why people are accepted to some schools rather than others. The group of applicants to Yale, Princeton, Berkeley and Duke assuredly contains a good deal of overlap, and yet, for the very most part, it is not true that they admit the same students. How do we explain this difference? Since the applications people submit to each school are by and large the same, it can only be that each school is looking for different things. And, moreover, in a significant number of cases, what the schools tell successful applicants were the reasons for their acceptance, is different from what the applicants themselves thought it would be. ---See the "Perspectives on Success" thread, and also my recent question to mikers86 on the 2014 applicants thread. Which suggests that in many cases applicants are not particularly good at figuring out what adcoms are looking for. If one had the time, funds and inclination, I think the best way to gain admission to a particular graduate program would be to visit and talk with the students who are already there, and figure out what sorts of subject matters and methodologies they represent, and then incorporate these into one's own SOP and WS. Because it is likely that the next class they admit will resemble the recent classes in these respects. Coach? Or Dooney Burke?

Well, it is interesting how many successful applicants are surprised when they learn why they were accepted, and how this differs from their own estimation of why they "should" have been. ---There's a tendency on the part of successful people in all walks of life to extrapolate from the way they view the causes of their own success and suggest that the same will work for others, but it rarely works out this way for others, and may not even be a very good explanation for why they themselves were successful. (Consider, for example, the case of google. The founders are, of course, very successful people, and they viewed their success as primarily a function of how smart they are, i.e. smarter than just about everybody else. Based on this self-analysis, they initially instructed their HR department to hire people just like them, to the extent possible: People with high SAT scores, high IQ scores, high grades from brand name schools, etc. Later, to their great surprise, they found out that this sort of person generally turned out not to be a particularly good employee, and they eventually they changed their hiring model to one based on more traditional predictors of employment success. ---What this anecdote further suggests is that the reasons for the google founders' own success may also have been something other than their own sheer intelligence, though they may well not have come to this final conclusion quite yet.) Depending on what sorority one may be rushing, it may be advisable to invest in a Coach bag rather than a Dooney & Burke, and a little research will disclose this. And I'm suggesting something similar may apply in the grad school application context.

If this is right, it suggests that there's a certain "popularity" element that perhaps cuts against the more or less strictly meritocratic grain that I think most of us initially approach the process with. Ie, that grad school admissions may bear a certain unexpected similarity to fraternity and sorority "rush."

One more guess: I imagine that the way the process works is something like this: A small group of faculty do a first read of the applications, (i) filtering out some whose academic qualifications (by some measure, which no doubt varies from school to school) don't seem quite as strong as those of the best group of applicants and (ii) dividing the remainder into piles by subject matter. After this "first cut," they send each pile to the faculty member(s) who specialize in that field, who, presumably on the basis of SOP and WS, then pick which ones they want to work with. If there are more "want to work withs" than available slots in the program, the final phase will involve horse trading, bartering, & etc among the faculty to see who gets their favored applicants in. Again, just a guess.

To be sure, if you don't have that kind of LOR, there's nothing you can do about it. But I think you will find that those applicants who have the very highest percentage of acceptances to the most selective schools do have it, and IMO it's the single most advantageous thing you can have. ---Again, it doesn't mean that you can't get into a very selective school without it, or that you should worry about it if you don't, since it's out of your control. Just that those applicants with the very highest "batting average" by and large will. It's a profession of networks and prestige. As regards SOP and WS: I think there's a temptation to overestimate the extent of one's control over them, which I'm sure sounds a bit odd. Yes, only you have control over the words you put down. But you don't have control over the reviewers who read them. And a truly superior WS will not mean much to someone who is not interested in taking on a student whose subject matter or methodology is not of interest to them. ---This is just speculation, of course, but if there were a way of measuring the "objective strength" of applications (whatever that might mean), I think we would find that most if not all schools accept "lesser" applicants they want to work with over the very strongest applicants whose work they don't feel the right affinity with.

Regarding perspective: Contrary to what one might think, grad schools are NOT making admissions decisions primarily in terms of "Who are the very most talented students in the applicant pool?" Rather, they ask themselves: "Which among these many highly-qualified applicants do we want to spend the next six years with?" Ie, they need a specific reason to pick you, and that reason will usually look something like: "Professor X needs another PhD student, and of all the applicants in her area this year, this one sounds most interesting to her." Or, to put it another way: The "objective strength" of your application (whatever that might mean) means relatively little in comparison to how interesting one or two professors view your application from the very subjective perspective of their own research interests. And when you're accepted and you ask them why, don't be surprised if their reasons surprise you. And lastly: IMO the single most helpful thing you can have in your application is a strong LOR from someone very famous and influential. Not to say you need this, of course. But it is the equivalent of a diplomatic passport.

I would agree. In my experience, if the words don't flow, it almost always means that I haven't yet fully figured out or conceptualized what I want to say. But, at the same time, more time spent just thinking or outlining isn't likely to help. So I just begin to write, knowing that major revisions will be necessary. At some point in the process of writing I usually find that I have written myself into a problem that reveals the specific unclarity of my ideas, ie. something that I thought I had fully thought through, but in fact had not. Once I see what the problem is, it's a lot easier to focus on that and try to figure it out. When I have, the words flow again, but it usually then pretty much means rewriting from scratch.

Well, I have to say that I agree with much of what you've said. She's a very effective storyteller. Rather than stepping back and providing background in more or less prosaic terms, she has the ability to start and keep every chapter in the action, providing details along the way in a manner that fully catches the reader up without ever interrupting the story's advance. The pages turn themselves. This is hard to do, and she seems to do it effortlessly. There is also no mistaking her commitment to the range of ideas expressed, and I wouldn't begin to disagree about their merits or importance. And she has the rare ability to express ideas in a popular form, accessible to everyone. I just found nothing of particular interest in the prose or in the form. She seems to view the novel as a congenial delivery mechanism for her ideas, the words as mere instrumentalities. Each chapter has a set of ideas she wants to convey, and once they have been, the chapter ends, and she moves on to the next chapter's ideas. The work is a contribution to the history and discussion of ideas, but my question is whether there is anything specifically literary about this. The same ideas can equally well have been raised in many other forms (magazine articles; letters to the editor; cocktail party conversation; documentary films; scholarly symposia). We would normally classify the ideas as primarily of sociological or political or anthropological or philosophical interest. It seems more or less accidental that here they take the outward form of a novel, other than the fact that this form, in her hands, is a lot more interesting to a far broader audience. IMO specifically literary merit, value and interest lies in the way a writer uses words and raises ideas in a way that simultaneously explores and questions the possibility of the form of writing itself. ideally, there is no separation of the form from the content; this particular work can only have found expression in the particular form it took; the best writing has a trajectory that aims at something beyond ideas, themes, etc. ---This perspective is sometimes referred to as "modernism," but I would argue that it applies to great writing of (all) other eras as well. This is likewise true of other arts. For example, a jazz piece may begin with a theme, but the interest in the music, and of the musician, is in exploring the possibilities of music that arise out of the theme, seeking through changes the perfect "blue" note, the seemingly "wrong" or out of place note that is nonetheless right. This becomes the perspective from which the rest of the piece is then understood, in purely musical terms, transcending its starting place in the theme, ultimately communicating something more than could otherwise have been found in the theme alone. Others may, of course, have other viewpoints.

One can't help but notice that this list does not reference anything that might be thought of as a "literary" quality or merit. Is it possible for a work of literature to have value where the words themselves have none? ---Yes, I read a hundred pages.

It's interesting how often that has seemed to be the case.

mikers86---When you visited Duke, did you get a sense as to what it was in your application that made the difference for them? And was this the same as or different from the way you conceived your strengths and fit?