ladystardust

Thanks you all. Looks like im just going to have to bite the bullet and call back.

So, on Thursday I was admitted to the University of Arizona as an MA student, and awarded a Teaching Assistantship (yay!). The director of the program was very friendly and (of course) knowledgable but I was too flustered to think of the right questions to ask and concerned I would ask questions that everyone else just already knows. Anyway, I wasn't able to ask for a real description of what a TA does, and feel silly calling him back to ask at this point. In my research, I have seen that the job description ranges from grading to independently teaching a course. My question is, does anyone know what a TA at the Masters level at the University of Arizona (with no previous experience) would be expected to do their first semester? I want to make sure I am very prepared to do well in whatever duties they assign me! Any info would be much appreciated.

Hey everyone. So, yeah... I totally got rejected from all the PhD programs I applied to this year. Still waiting on the M.A.s to give a decision but i am thinking of just waiting and trying to apply for more PhD programs for Fall 2015. So, my question is, does anyone have any experience with application consultants? like www.stratusprep.com or www.admissionsconsultants.com and the like? They are terribly expensive. I'm just wondering if hiring these places is kind of like a given that everyone knows to do and if I just missed the memo. All the news articles floating around sure make it sound like if you don't hire a consultant, you might as well not apply. Also, if anyone knows of any good consultants that are a little less pricy, I'd be interested to know about that as well. I'm hoping, however, that these places are just gimmicky businesses that no one actually uses.

Wow, thanks so much for taking the time to give your take on this stuff pink robot. I see that you've been admitted, so I appreciate you taking the time to comment, and honestly I'd love to have the chance to pick your brain even more. I feel very naive about this stuff. At my school, unless I missed it, there were never any lectures on how to get into grad school for an English PhD or anything like that, and my professors were awesome, but I felt like an idiot asking, and it looks like my application might have suffered for it. Everything I know about personal statements, I read from a book : "Graduate Admissions Essays" by Donald Asher. It recommended that I open up with a story about myself. I never thought incorporating professor's work into my writing sample might come off as gimmicky, but I'm so glad you drew my attention to that possibility. Honestly, I didn't get the idea until I started going through their articles and they spoke to me and I thought, why not? But I see where you're coming from. Pink Robot, can I ask if you would mind looking at my personal statement and seeing how it all works together and giving me feedback on it directly? Because that would be awesome! I totally fell in love with the opening to my personal statement, and I know in retrospect that's usually a good indication that I did not cut everything I should have. Sorry if I'm getting too "me me me" here guys. Please feel free to keep talking about other application strategies and stuff. I really like the conversations here

No, actually I did it through IFSA-Butler I take it you did a similar program?

UPenn interviews? I am sooooo totally unprepared for that. Do you know if UPenn interviews everyone that makes it to the end of their process, or is it only done as a tie breaker? Anyone know anything about whether Brown interviews?

Thanks Shortstack, this is exactly what I was hoping to hear from people. Your qualifications are intimidating; such a high subject test score and high GPA with an advanced degree from a school with a real name in the graduate school world! I had no idea that graduate schools put up example personal statements online. I wish I would have thought to look for that. Might have found examples from the schools I was applying to. I'll keep that in mind if I have to go through all this again next year. I also see that you and a lot of other people have gone to conferences to present work. That is amazing. I presented my honors thesis at what i think was a conference of sorts, but i never considered it a "real" conference, and I thought that conferences were for well established professors with high ranking Ph.Ds. How exciting to know that I may be able to try for them even now! And after getting my first rejection today, I am certainly thinking your strategy (and that of others that I've noticed have posted here) of choosing more than one POI is likely the smartest way to go about things. This is so helpful. Thanks Shortstack, and others who gave similar information. Also, the resume design sounds much fancier than it is. I just sent in my basic info to loftresumes.com and, for $100, they put your info into one of their premade designs. I added a custom color for another $30 in hopes the committee wouldn't find my twin in their stack. I find this immensely helpful already. Good luck to you as well, Shortstack! I just wanted to say... wow. A physics in undergrad and a masters in creative writing. I took a couple physics classes as an undergrad, and they were grueling. Not that i know much about this stuff, but I would think an application like yours with those kinds of accomplishments would jump out at an admissions committee. I hope you get in where you most want to so you can keep building upon your already interesting resume Maybe what Chadillac meant was research about the prospective schools rather than individual research? Not sure, but if so, I am interested if anyone has any takes on how to go about that as well. I used ranking lists, graduate handbooks, forums where students reviewed their college experience (mostly undergrad, not very helpful) and even wikis to point me to historical facts that might give me some directions on where to look to give my personal statement some color. I find that looking to see what a programs strengths and weaknesses are (in terms of subject areas) is more difficult, and that seems an essential piece to determining "fit". My strategy was using an article database to find a list of several professors articles and kind of guess on the specific topics and critical lenses they favored, and try to determine a departmental trend. Long, hard work and not very successful. I only saw one program that directly talked about what it was strong in-- for the life of me I don't remember which one, but it was an east coast school that said right on the grad info page that they emphasized study in American Lit. Anyway, If there are suggestions on how to better research a school, I'd love to hear those. So I did not do my writing sample and my personal statement on plain paper. I matched them to my CV. Does anyone think that this may come across as too gimmicky and hurt me in the application process? And any thoughts on using POIs papers to rewrite my writing sample? Is that just another way that I could box myself in? I also wanted to say, I'm sorry if this is scaring some people. I am scared myself, and for me personally, I just feel less helpless if I can already start building solutions to problems that I may well have to face. I am certainly intimidated by many peoples track records, but their successes give me great ideas of where I can improve for next year (taking my GRE again, taking my subject GRE, looking into how to get into conferences, and finding examples of personal statements on the school websites that I'm applying to ). So thanks for the great material so far, everyone

At my university, I used "Dr." I thought professor was for someone tenured. Am I wrong?

Just a heads up, this'll be a long one! This is my first (and hopefully last) year of applying to grad school, and like everyone else, I'm bouncing off the walls trying to get through the last few weeks. I've been looking through the board and seeing how people have applied to like 16 programs, and It makes me feel like my choice to apply to only five schools was a bad one. in short, I am afraid that I am so inexperienced in this process that I might have made some fatal errors, so I wanted to open a thread to talk about qualifications and application strategies, in hopes I can get a better idea of where i stand and help others maybe do the same. I've noticed there isn't a whole lot of talk about individual credentials around here, so I hope I'm not out of line starting a thread like this. I just thought it would be nice to get a look at the competition as well as everyone's strategies for applying, and get opinions and more full pictures to match up with the acceptance/rejection statistics on the other part of the site when the time comes. About me: I earned my BA in English with an emphasis in Literature from New Mexico State University, a university that doesn't even usually rank on any lists. I've got a 3.9 overall GPA and a 4.0 in English Literature, and graduated with distinction in honors. I scored in the 93rd percentile on my general GRE, and I wrote an honors thesis my senior year as an undergrad. I won many awards and scholarships for my essays from the English department, and I studied Jane Austen abroad at Oxford for six weeks one summer, in addition to placing as a finalist in the national Atlas Shrugged contest. I also worked at my university's newspaper for 1 year and my university arts and sciences library (as an aid) for 4 years. I have no publications, no teaching experience, and no foreign language (not since high school). I have studied for at least one semester in several other fields, including nursing, accounting, biology, and other sciences and actually have lab research experience in psychology, as well as a BA in Psychology. I am interested in 19th Century British Literature (Romanticism, Gothicism, Victorianism), Modernism, as well as Feminism/Gender Studies. Oh, also, if it matters, I am female and half hispanic. My Application Strategies: I originally had a list of 9 schools I wanted to apply to, but tapered the number down as I discovered that I would not have either the time or resources to complete applications in the way I wanted to for that many schools. In the end, I applied to Brown University, University of Pennsylvania, Washington University in St. Louis, University of Arizona, and University of New Mexico. I personalized my Personal Statement for each university. The first half was all the same-- opening with a story from nursing school and a (I hope) deep, bittersweet quip about how understanding people is more rewarding for me than saving them, and go on to talk about my career goals, how my wide experience in other disciplines has made me sure of my course, my love of literature, my strengths and weaknesses, and my experience writing my honors thesis. The second half varied with each school. I tried to show I knew about the school, understood what it meant to move to the area from the place i currently live, and tried to show as well, by picking and discussing a single POI (except for UPenn and UNM) that I knew what I wanted out of their program, as well as how my interests meshed with their research areas. For my Writing Sample, I extracted a 16 page piece of my honors thesis on Christabel by Coleridge and totally reworked and expanded on it. by the time it was done, I had a 24 page writing sample. And this is where I tried to be really different, and why i had to cut down on the number of schools I applied to. My idea was to choose one POI from each University, discuss them in my personal statement, and also integrate a journal article of theirs into my writing sample. This, as you can imagine, was no easy task, and in order to achieve seamless integration of their ideas into my essay, in two months, I was only able to complete this for my Brown application and my WashU application-- though, most successfully for my Brown application. I chose a paper by Ellen Rooney from Brown and a paper by Guinn Batten from WashU. In case you're wondering, no, I did not write several versions of my paper, which might have been smarter but somehow struck me as dishonest. I started with Batten's paper, and rewrote my essay using that, then did the entire process again for Rooney's paper. I did not research a POI for UPenn, and so talked about aspects of the program I liked, after looking through the graduate handbook. I did the same for UNM. For U of A, I identified Hogle as a person of interest, but could not integrate his work into my already weighty paper due not only to time constraints but also length limits. I have also heard numerous things about identifying POIs in your application. I decided to do it so that I could integrate their work into my writing sample-- which, admittedly, is also risky. What if they don't like how I used their ideas? I knew identifying only one could be a problem, but at the same time, I felt like identifying more than one could appear wishy-washy and insincere. My hope was that, particularly at Brown (my first choice), if Rooney couldn't take me on, others wouldn't mind doing so since (it is my understanding) she is primarily a feminist. Thus, my hope was that someone that was primarily a literature scholar would still want to take me on even if they weren't my first choice simply because my first choice was (largely) from a different discipline-- ah, Brown (and WashU) and their multidisciplinary professors! One of the things I really love! (this is not to say I don't truly want to work with her. I went over at least 3 of her papers in depth. Her work is amazing!) I did not submit any of my applications until at least a week before they were due. Some I submitted on the day they were due (could not stop obsessively proof reading!). I've heard that some grad programs actually start reviewing applications as soon as the systems open. I hope that is a myth! I hope others want to share this stuff and I'm not the only one! I'm very interested to know about how others are qualified and what their strategies and thoughts on the process were. If you have any comments on my qualifications or application process, even if its "Oh no! you did that?" I'd like to hear that too, while I'm still in a positive receptive mood, before the inevitable rejections start trickling in, so that I can start getting strategies together for next year if I don't get in this go around. I mean, I think the first thing everyone thinks when they're rejected is, "What did I do wrong?". It would offer at least some comfort if I could answer that question for myself if need be.