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TDazzle

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    Washington DC
  • Application Season
    2014 Fall
  • Program
    English/Comp Lit/Interdisciplinary

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  1. UChicago! I've already steeled myself against the 5-10 months of apocalyptic froze wasteland.
  2. Hi Ivan – I thought the program seemed really interesting, but at the end of the day I felt more comfortable calling an English Department my home-base. Haven't chosen yet, but am deciding between Chicago and Columbia, each of which allows for a good deal of second-language work. Seeing that Rancière is visiting this semester certainly tempted me to keep the offer open... Good luck on your choices – turning down the Romance Studies Department was incredibly difficult!
  3. I just don't think this – that it's a popularity contest – or what you have said about the LORs are all that true, from what professors tell me about the process and from what I have been told by professors from the schools where I have been accepted. No one mentioned my recommenders to me, and I didn't have big names writing for me (I thought about it – I have a good enough relationship with two professors who are much bigger names at my MFA program – but in the end it was more important to have professors who could speak about my class role and my writing). I've posted this before: the only thing I heard from each school I was accepted to (3 of 4 English PhDs, 1 French PhD) is that they liked my writing sample and that it was evident that I had a project in mind (so the WS and the SOP). My GPA is fine but nothing special, and I never took the English GRE. To weave this into advice: know what you want to do (at least on a broad scale!) and use your SOP to show that you know the discourse. And submit a writing sample clearly in your interest area.
  4. Why, exponential, my apologies! Had I known I would elicit such a response, questioning my very personhood and interests and knowledge, I would never have so glibly compared Ayn Rand to a pile of bricks floating in the air, or written Nozick in all-caps. I'll be a bit more clear and non-jokey, because Libertarianism is serious! Ayn Rand: Just a terrible writer, but she doesn't deserve to be on this list, so I apologize. Future TAs and instructors should definitely read her; she's really useful for teaching writing. Nozick: I don't want to be a bad scholar! I never meant to dismiss Nozick: I just didn't realize people still took that book seriously after the critical theory debates of the 80s when we started to realize that when white people talk about minimizing state control and "entitled liberties," a good bit of a particular reading of history is perpetuated. Or that after theories of late capital people could ever imagine Nozick's abstracted system could actually impact our economic or political realities. (Just calm down sometimes? If one happens to dislike a writer, and makes a joke out of it, it may not mean s/he discounts the entire discourse! [Though with Libertarianism, I do, 'cause it's dumb] Still there is no need to make such elaborate personal comments about one's future academic career! If you are aghast to learn some proto-scholars aren't moved by what you are moved by, I can't imagine what might occur when this happens, as it does, in a classroom, even by a professor... I had a prof tell me she can't stand Wallace Stevens or understand why people read/studied him and my heart exploded, but I did not reply by telling her " I am surprised that you have enough passion to spend the rest of your life studying some arbitrary and not hugely relevant literary nonsense, and yet you wouldn't endorse the study of what is, according to you, similar arbitrary and irrelevant nonsense, if not on purely aesthetic grounds, then at least on grounds of figuring out why so many people are convinced by it.")
  5. [Obligatory note: Ayn Rand, as a stylist and a philosopher, is utterly worthless. "Breezy"?? Maybe in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy sense: "The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't." And why the hell are people talking seriously about Libertarianism? OR NOZICK???] Over the last couple of years, I've read a number of books I think I could have skipped. None more than Ian Bogost's Alien Phenomenology, which was wholly terrible and began my quick exit from the Speculative Realism/OOO fad. The second one I'll mention is one I had such high expectations for after the introduction: Mel Chen's Animacies. I really wanted to like that book, but it was as disconnected as libertarian thought is from philosophy (sorry...).
  6. I too applied for Comp Lit at Cornell -- they emailed me early in February to say they moved my application over to Romance Studies/French and accepted me there (I declined the offer last week). The email I received said they were accepting very few people into Comp Lit, so I'd be surprised if more offers are going out. As a general note, and for people like exponentialdecay considering applying to Cornell, the Romance Studies Department seems really awesome. It is a very flexible department, as well, and assured me I could travel between languages/discourses.
  7. But this isn't a thread about the "job market." That's the problem. This is a thread about not pursuing a humanities degree because of the job market. One started after acceptances and rejections to the grueling admissions process have started coming in. A thread on jobs, fine. A thread on even doing the thing you've been spending countless hours preparing for? It's the depths of unthinking paternalism. Of course, it doesn't have to be. There are great conversations to be had, even about whether or not to continue on to a phd. I know more than a few grad students who talk about leaving academia (without bitterness even). But I think both the subject matter and the tone of the OP ("The most important question, I think, you should be asking yourself in this season of acceptances is if you should go to grad school at all") are not aiding in these conversations. This gets on my nerves not because the academic market job prospects are bad – I've had every faculty member ever tell me this through undergrad and my MFA, and I would be shocked if there is a reader on the forum who doesn't know that English literature isn't the most lucrative field out there – but because the post is written from the god-perspective of almost seeking to get readers to doubt decisions they have been stressing enough this month over. It's condescension in the pose of helpful aid.
  8. I had a gif up that accurately conveyed my thoughts about this. But instead I'll just say: no one should enter this process unless four or five actual human beings have actually said to that person, "oh a literature phd, how will that give you food." I don't retract my initial "snark," but will say this is not anxiety producing – I just think the initial post was utterly facile.
  9. So just to be clear: you came to a message board full of people applying to English/Rhetoric/Comparative Literature PhD programs and decided that, now, in March, 5 months after applying, you will remind us of the news no one doesn't know and repeat to us the websites and stats our loved ones, family members, and friends harp to us constantly? Do you have a Kickstarter page so I can fund you to push kids off swings while telling them Santa doesn't exist?
  10. I'll try to give some particulars on my case. I applied to 4 English PhD programs and a couple interdisciplinary/comp lit programs and received 2 top tier offers in English and 1 offer in French (Columbia and Chicago, and Cornell, respectively. Might as well mention them since I posted them previously). I applied while completing an MFA in poetry (in a program that is "studio-academic," meaning I got to take a ton of grad-level English courses) and received my BA from Northwestern in philosophy and english/creative writing (and have the undergrad debt to prove it). Took two years off in between. I am also finishing a "graduate theory certificate" this semester, and, starting last summer, I began attending Middlebury for an MA in French (by the by, those programs are incredible. They are funded, at the master's level, and they are summer-only, meaning you can do whatever else during the year). GPAs between 3.7 and 3.9, GREs at the 97%v, 75%m, 97%w, no subject test (just didn't even think to take it). 2 of my 3 letter writers were tenured -- one a poet (my thesis advisor), one a professor I took a really great class with (but is utterly outside my interests), and one a Modernist prof. They all came from my MFA school. No one who has contacted me has mentioned my LORs. Unlike Jazzy, fit is something I spent a lot of time on, but in a sort of nonlinear way, perhaps. I didn't just look for faculty in "transatlantic modernism," but in all the surrounding areas of my interests. For example, with my interest in nonliving, nonhuman objects, I would sometimes throw in a Marxist scholar and talk about how, in order to talk about materiality, I must understand historical materialism as well (which is, I think, probably quite true). I structured my statement of purpose wholly around my interests (transatlantic modernism, american/french avant garde poetry, ecocrit and the nonhuman), mentioned a lot of possible avenues and writers and thinkers I wanted to work with, and mapped that on to the department I was applying to. I also talked a lot about what I don't have, and how I can find that in the work of the scholars at X school. SoP was: corny intro, 2 wide paragraphs about interests, specific paragraph about WS and how it displayed these interests, paragraph about faculty at school that would further aid my development, educational background in terms of how it has made me the applicant I am/have the interests I do. For example, I spent a couple sentences justifying going from a creative degree to an academic degree. I edited it like a madman as well, like Jazzy, especially to make the connections and transitions between the paragraphs I didn't change and the ones I did appear seamless/natural. I wrote my writing sample in the fall, directly before applying. It was directly within my interests and was titled "Wallace Stevens and Radioactive Materials" (don't know if I should be worried about being specific). It is an admittedly (and I said as much in my SOP) anachronistic reading, and two schools mentioned that explicitly to me as something they found interesting. Who wouldve guessed (not me!). I think the take away here is awareness: I mentioned anachronism because it seemed like a point of critique against me, when it turned out to help, oddly. Point is the same I've said before in another post, and a strong echo of Jazzy: SOP and WS were what the profs who have called/emailed spoke about. That's what they looked at, that's what they cared about.My SOP presented a detailed enough proto-project, that had room to grow/change, that wasn't stated as a Definite, but that showed at least an awareness of the overlapping discourses I hope to work within. And my WS was a direct example of what I talked about in the SOP. Those were the parts I had control over, and at the end of the day, I know I am lucky that the readers of my application felt some level of resonance with my project and that they had something to offer me.
  11. Hi andromache – I wanted to reply to this since it fits with something I was discussing with a friend who is a PhD in English at Maryland. Your situation is certainly frustrating, and I totally resonate with your desire to be in academia and your feeling that that's where your strengths are, where your passions are, etc. But here's the important point: are you ready to return to this Exact position in 5-7 years? By which I mean, are you ready to work hard on something you love, and then, after graduating with a degree, not having a job in academia? Or will that be the absolute pits? More than one professor sat me down during my senior year of undergrad and told me, "If you go into a PhD program for a job, you will leave it bitter and depressed and regretting your decisions. If you go because you want to be in the PhD itself, and afterwards you are fine returning to the workforce or doing something completely different, go for it." This is a repetition of the post above that quoted from "The Professor Is In"'s website. I get loathing one's jobs, but please don't make academia your only hope for happiness! Most of us who are lucky enough to have offers, and who follow through with them, won't have TT jobs afterwards. We'll be eking it out in the adjunct world or doing something else, moving into other fields, leaving the universities behind. And that's not a sign of failure (how much better would the world be if more businesspeople had PhD's in English?). (Also, there are a lot of good ways to travel AND make money! Well, maybe not a lot, but English teaching abroad is a great route before heading to a grad program. I taught in Egypt; my brother has taught in South Korea, where he made bank. Great way to spend a year if you decide to apply again to PhDs and funded MAs. And don't worry about timelines either – I ended up taking 2 years off and that was still on the low side.) Underlying all of this: don't choose an unfunded MA because you think it's the only option left! Being backed into 1) taking on serious debt and 2) doing it in an unrewarding field will not help your overall worldview, even if it gets you into that school so prestigious none of us have even heard about it.
  12. As a different sort of response to this question (and I too am against the notion of unfunded MAs): take into consideration that a lot of students get offered this consolation prize. That is to say, unlike funded MAs, that read your application and accept you as a student who they, the program and the professors, want to work with, an unfunded MA accepts you as "someone who might pay for this." Now that might be a bit extreme, but I believe it's closer to reality: unfunded MAs look for students who meet less-personalized criteria, and that level of engagement with the faculty/program won't stop there. I know people who have had fine experiences in unfunded MAs, but I also know some who felt looked over, disregarded, and invisible – as if they had to fight for professor's time. Are you concerned you weren't accepted because of your stats? Stats take a back seat to your project, the specificity with which you can talk about it, and your writing sample. Those are things you can work on without more school. Do you not yet have a project/area of interest that is well defined? Apply for funded MAs, or even to some out-of-field programs (Middlebury offers a funded, summer-session only MA in their language school – if you have enough language experience and can write a 2 page essay in another language, it's a great puzzle piece to add to one's application and life). Or work a boring job and just read, constantly (see: Don DeLillo as a valet). My first round of applications, back in 2009, came up empty, and I was tempted by Chicago's MAPH and NYU's Humanities MA. I'm glad I did neither. I lived/taught in Egypt for a while, applied to MFAs in poetry (funded only), and now, as I finish up the MFA, am heading to a PhD in the fall. Those experiences all helped me define my interests, making me a more competitive applicant -- and they kept me from piling on the debt. You will have so many opportunities within your doctorate, and your career afterwards, to make risky financial decisions: that's the underwritten life of an aspiring academic. Don't start off that career already in the hole.
  13. Just came back home to see an email of acceptance for Columbia. Super excited.
  14. I think I count as half an Americanist? I intend to follow Wallace Stevens into "avant-garde" American poetry while mapping that development onto its influences and resonances within 20th Century French poetry (maybe a little 19th, with Mallarme). So transatlantic modernism, primarily poetry, primarily the avant-garde/shit that makes no sense. Currently working on Francis Ponge's La Bougie, its English translation(s), and how it itself translates material, real candles. Which doesn't sound all that American now that I say it...
  15. I'll hazard an experience-based answer here. I've been fortunate to receive an offer from a top ranked program. I am not fluent in French, but nearly fluent, and I have not published a paper. But these questions get to a more fundamental point to all of this: The stats aren't the deciding factors. I know we compare GREs (I never took the subject test) and GPAs and if big name profs write our letters and how many papers etc, but after watching a number of application seasons during my MFA at Maryland, and after speaking with a professor about one of my current options, it's become so clear to me that what matters is fit and your project. A writing sample and a personal statement that speaks to a/a few professor(s) is far more useful than worrying over the intangibles. French is a nice extra for me, but the professor who said he pushed for my acceptance only spoke about the relevance of my sample to his own work and how he feels there would be productive overlap. I find this is a good thing: we are all, stats-wise, exceptional. But programs seem to care far more about how an individual might fit in a department than they do about the 5 point difference in a GRE score or the "proficient" speaker vs the "beginner" speaker. After a season of rejections when I first applied to PhDs five years ago, before I traveled and then decided in favor of the MFA, I feel at least a bit confident saying that this makes rejections better as well. A rejection is not an attack at skills or qualities or futures - it simply says your application is a square piece, and the department is a circle slot. During that application cycle, at least.
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