mudlark

I agree with the content of this post, if not the cynicism. It's best not to be wedded to a particular idea this early in the game. Is there a way that you can be flexible without ending up with a project you'll hate? It might be helpful to go read some of the publications of the people in your department who you want to work with (if you haven't already) and then see if there's any element in their work that really grabs you, or that you can stretch into a connection with your ideas. You can also go talk to your grad chair about other options. Can you have someone who's in an adjacent field, but shares an important geological or methodological focus? Can your chair think of anyone that you've overlooked? The program has a certain amount of responsibility to help you out here.

fuzzylogician, you are awesome.

Part of it might be that thread that you started about your reputation. It clearly gets under your skin, which might motivate people to keep it up. You do not come across as open-minded to me. You have a tendency to hijack threads in order to expound your own theories about individuality and freedom, and then yell at anyone who disagrees and accuse them of being conformists. Not a very open-minded thing to do. Neither is comparing someone to Hitler with next to no provocation. Even your more innocuous posts seem like they're just excuses for you to prove how radical and freethinking you are, and how boring and pedestrian everyone around you is. Frankly, it gets tiring to read. It doesn't seem like you're here to actually interact with people on the issues that they want to talk about... it seems like you're just here to posture and make yourself feel rebellious, which is better suited to a blog than a message board.

Really? As a Canadian, this has not been my experience. I got a different deadline from each acceptance. OP, I would talk with the grad director and see if the deadline is flexible. I had to ask for an extension last year so that I could fit in a visit at another school, and it was so worth it! Oftentimes schools will be flexible if they really want you. Just be straightforward and polite.

It probably changes depending on the discipline, as well (doesn't everything?). In my department, nobody's funding is riding on who their supervisor is, and nobody's doing the kind of research that needs supervision in the first year. As a result, a lot of people come in without supervisors lined up, and it's not uncommon for students to completely change their focus from the project they applied to do. Heck, I *just* formally lined up a supervisor last Friday. Trying to deliberately game the system that way is different, but it also sounds like it'd be super hard and not make much sense as a strategy. You would need to know a whole lot of department info--who's taking on students now, how many do they take, are the students they want the same as the students the department wants, is the person you want to switch to taking students, how they feel about switching--that it's really unlikely you could figure out. And even if you did, the applicant pool could throw a monkey wrench into the whole thing (ie you 'feign interest' in the prof you think is the best bet for admission, and then three people with better CVs apply to the same area).

If either of you don't get into a school during the regular competition, what makes you think that you could get in as a transfer student? And on a similar vein, if one of you doesn't get in this term, why would you get in next term? No school is likely to take your engagement as a good reason to admit someone who they previously rejected. I know a lot of couples who are at different schools, or one is away at school while the other works a job they don't want to leave. Most couples do temporary long distance relationships. Distance is hard, but if you're committed enough to be engaged, you're committed enough to handle it. At least it's an MS rather than a PhD! I know a few crazy people who have done long distance for four years or more.

I wouldn't use the lecturer, regardless of how experienced s/he is.

Zombie thread! Run away!

I highly doubt that a slandering letter from a non-faculty-member would be taken seriously by an adcom. It likely wouldn't make it past the mail desk, or the chair's secretary. It might go to the grad chair for an opinion about what to do, I guess, but it wouldn't go to the full committee. What could he possibly say? You have a whole file full of corroborated proof of how capable and accomplished you are. Someone appearing out of the blue to say differently would be the one coming across as crazy, not you.

*waves* Hi! I had a transcript snafu (prof submitted one person's grade early to help them meet a deadline, and didn't realize that doing so would close grade submission for the class and make everyone else's grade a few weeks late) when I was applying for my PhD. I got unofficial results out as soon as possible, ordered an extra transcript on top of the one I needed, opened and faxed the extra ahead of the one in the mail..... and got in. Lots of people have paperwork mishaps. There's probably a protocol in place, and there's probably a hard deadline that's later than the stated deadline.

I'm not waiting on admission, but I am waiting on a major fellowship decision (SSHRC). Here are the things that I've done since my last failed application that should improve my chances: - maintained my near 4.0 GPA (I think it might be up to a 3.96 by now) - completed my MA - presented my MA paper at a solid conference (won a small travel award to attend) - started my PhD at a school with a much better reputation - won a highly competitive recruitment scholarship that only goes to the top 12 incoming students campus wide (top one or two per department) - earned two As and an A+ in my first term of course work (fall grades don't get considered, though) - built a good relationship with my grad chair, who writes support letters for SSHRC files (not for deliberate networking purposes, but because she's great) - rewrote my research proposal so that it's much more informative, even though it took massive cuts to sections I was very attached to And the thing that I'm really proud of but can't brag about openly is - upped my graduate awards/fellowships dollars total to over $65,000 over three years. All without a single publication- take note humanities folks! At this point, it really is about potential in a lot of cases.

That sounds like a great (and I mean GREAT) decision. I lurked here during my application year, and pretty near drove myself crazy. Regular breaks are very good for your sanity.

What, even in a fairy tale the dream doesn't extend to a tenure track job?

I met my husband between the third and fourth year of my undergrad, and we got married halfway through my MA. We didn't meet through school.

What you say sounds perfectly sane and good. I'm decidedly NOT a go with the flow type, which probably colours my opinions on this. I definitely plan other parts of my life around my grad school plans. My husband and I just bought a house in my PhD city. We started house hunting once I had accepted an offer, and not a moment before. Our timeline for potential children is entirely dependent on when I start dissertation work. For me and for a lot of people, being in limbo about a PhD means being in limbo about a lot of other things. If you can keep the applications cycle going and still love your life and accomplish other things, more power to you. But if it's seriously interfering with your emotional health or ability to pursue other goals, I think you need to be honest with yourself about that. ("You" being the general 'you', of course, and not any specific poster.)

Actually, I know a couple of these people. One stretched his undergraduate degree out for ten (!) years because each term he was convinced that this one would finally be the one that would bring his average up enough to meet the minimum requirement for a handful of weak MA programs. He was absolutely convinced that if he could just make it to grad school, he would be a successful professor, even though he was constantly struggling through the classes that he believed he was born to teach. He got an education degree and is teaching middle school now, but is still planning his life around someday finding some loop hole that will get him in to grad school. One got his MA, and kept applying to stay at the same school (not super competitive) for his PhD. He kept working as a TA at the school while they rejected him over, and over, and over. He kept seeing people come in after him move on to the PhD program he wanted while he was kept around as cheap labour, but never accepted to do more academic work. He now has a job at a for-profit ESL college with a fairly bad reputation. On the upside, now that he isn't putting everything off until after the PhD that will never happen, he's expecting his first child this month. Him and his wife are both forty. I'm not trying to be a downer on a support thread. Both of these guys are bright and kind people, and both have good jobs. But because both of them clung to a goal without looking at the cost/benefit of following it, they ended up very bitter before their time. They also sacrificed the earning potential of their 30s pursuing something that didn't work out, and both seriously delayed personal milestones like moving out of their parents' house, becoming financially independent, and having kids. If either of them had been brave and humble enough to switch paths and look at education or ESL teaching as a goal in itself rather than a consolation prize, they might have been happier. Pursuing your dreams is important, but rabidly clinging to a single dream can be incredibly damaging. Grad school involves serious, heavy opportunity costs, both financial and personal. I know it's easy for me to say because I'm already in. I just wanted to offer a counterpoint to the other posts on this thread and say that it absolutely can hurt you to persevere. Just like there are lots of relationships out there than can make you happy, there are lots of jobs that can make you happy. Doesn't it make more sense to come up with a good alternate path that will make the best use of your abilities rather than building your life around the same woman who keeps rejecting you? Please excuse the mixed metaphor and the negativity. I just think it's important to go into this process being realistic about the long-term costs.

Fuzzylogician is exactly right. You need to showcase your ability to organize detailed support of an argument in your writing sample. The SOP has the big ideas, but your writing samples shows that you're able to translate those ideas into well researched pieces of writing on a realistic scale.

If you really feel there's key information missing that will keep your reader from understanding your chain of logic, I think that a short note in square brackets and italics explaining what was deleted might do. Something like-- [Explanatory section on X, Y, Z removed from original for the sake of length]

Ex-profs aren't professors, but they are still PhDs. That's their title. Did he leave voluntarily, or did he fail tenure review? Great letter or not, it might be better to find someone who's still working.

My favorite is the 10 page SOP that portrayed the applicant as Dorothy on the road to grad school. AWESOME.

Me too, although it's the class I'm the least worried about. This semester went pretty well. I liked not TAing for a change, and being able to just focus purely on my course work. Taking three classes at a time (as opposed to two at a time in my MA) and learning German on top of that more than made up for the extra time I had, though. I found that was the case in the first term of my MA. It turns out I had two softies, and the second term was much more rigorous. I hope that things pick up for you next term! Anyone else have a class from hell this term? I had one that felt like it lasted forever... next to no conversation, presentations were all over the place, and the prof was an unpleasant, joyless person with a persecution complex who treated every question with disdain. I got out of it with three credits and a good grade, but good riddance.

I have a friend who badly misspelled the first name of the key critic she was basing her proposed dissertation on. Got in everywhere, and is one of the strongest people in her program When I applied last year, I had to cut my SOP down to 400 words for an awards competition at a prospective school. In my rush to get the word count down, I ended up making a fairly major error that anyone familiar with my period would have laughed their head off at (the equivalent of lumping a British author in with two Japanese authors and calling them all Japanese). I won a highly competitive major award in that competition. This is absolutely not true. People on adcoms want the best scholars, not the best spellers. They know better than we do that the best people can make embarrassing mistakes, and have probably made one or two of their own in much more public circumstances than an SOP. They're (mostly) rational human beings. And they want the best people for their program! They don't want to pass on a strong candidate who will do good work for them just because of a mis-placed preposition.

Looks like this is already in pretty good shape. I'm anti-anecdote, but you do a nice job of balancing yours with polished, professional sections about research. I wonder if you could be a bit more specific about the critics you're working with, though. What I get from this is that you're into bell hooks and feminist epistemology, but I'm left wondering how you're planning to add to existing work. It seems like you know your field, but I want to know where your place in it might be, kwim?

On the off chance that you're not making a joke... you do get that she just put 'blah' in there temporarily to avoid giving away the name of her actual professor, correct? and that she'll replace it with the real name when she submits?

I have a theory that when we're faced with a process that seems huge and unpredictable, we respond by focusing on the tiny little details because they're the only things we can control. This makes them seem important when they're really not. Like envelope selection. I worked in a university office at the mail desk once upon a time. When I got a reference letter, I would rip it open and staple the envelope to the back so that if there was any question about where it had been mailed from, there was proof. Nobody but me, lowly mail desk me, would ever look at the envelopes. So I would recommend ones made out of paper, that will hold other pieces of paper.