Sparky

They don't fund everyone, no, at least not first semester. I know multiple MA students who got funding at SLU, tuition remission plus either full or half stipend. What subfield are you aiming at? They are, I suspect, more likely to fund HT people due to that being the PhD program focus. A couple of PhD people I know started there with no funding, and the department was able to obtain it for them by the second semester, so there's that, too. The dept does control funding, it's not linked solely to GRE scores, so if your writing sample is really great you might be in luck. But you'd most likely get in, regardless. If you are looking to stay in the Midwest, what about UChicago or one of the seminaries there? (Also Marquette, but Marquette is horrible for funding, and rude about it to boot). If money is more of an issue than geography, I was offered a relatively decent aid package as an MA applicant at the GTU (California), so you could look into that. Otherwise you can look through older threads to get an idea of what schools offer M* students funding.

No. Adcoms want proof. The "self-proclaimed language auto-didact" is a very real phenomenon in graduate school applications (as well as at conferences... ). Inflating your language abilities in your SOP is *such* an easy thing to do, and it's so tempting to convince yourself that you're not *really* cheating b/c, after all, you're going to spend the rest of the spring and the summer really learning that language, right? Adcoms do not look kindly on informal language training. If you don't have coursework to back it up, you can make it up through (in the case of Latin) sitting for the SAT II or Toronto's language exam, or by having a prof attest in an LOR that you worked with Latin primary sources that have never been translated quite beautifully for a paper, or by getting an LOR from a tutor or some such. Get proof. (You are actively taking extra classes--that looks so awesome and dedicated and is just what adcoms are looking for. Go you.) On the other hand, I would say three semesters of Latin and one beginning modern language will not put you out of the count in medieval. I'm a medievalist (late medieval) as well, and although I did know German pretty well, it wasn't attested on my transcript beyond the AP transfer credit (!)...and I only had one semester of Latin (the grad intro class...which I guess is the equivalent of 2 or 3 undergrad semesters, depending on the school). Make sure your writing sample uses original source primary texts, though! Whether Latin or Italian! I do second remenis' advice about taking an intermediate Latin class this summer. Most of the medieval-friendly grad programs will offer an intermediate class as well as the standard graduate beginner one, and if your program does, you can probably get your financial aid to kick in during the summer and pay for it!

Definitely worth it. Very thought-provoking, and I've seen it put to good use in literature, theology, even historical scholarship, so I can see it being helpful in the future. And isn't the point of an independent study to allow you to get course credit for "stuff I've always wanted to read"? I doubt you need extra recommendations on book-length treatments, but when you go searching out articles/chapters you might want to include one or two disability theory essays on your list. I'm thinking especially of ones that deal with assistive technology and end-of-life issues; depending on how you define 'technology,' you might also consider medicine-as-technology. (But if you were thinking of using Dick or Gibson you are probably operating with a narrower def of 'technology' than that, which is of course A-OK, this study is your gig and you get to make it awesome for you!) ETA: If you are also looking for novels with which to play around--Robert Sawyer's Mindscan, absolutely. It deals with some of the same issues as Do Androids Dream, but you can see Sawyer engaging with the implications (both of the technological leaps within the story, and the ethical questions for the readers) more directly and less...on acid than Dick did.

As for trendy, I got nothing. I can tell you that medieval literature scholarship right now seems rather obsessed with postcolonial theory, but I don't know how broadly that applies. I actually think that, rather than peg yourself as fitting into or partially into a particular School Of Theory, it can be more useful to think in terms of "which recent scholars have influenced me." That avoids the appearance of what I guess they call 'doctrinal rigidness' (rigidity? is that a word? it should be.) or some such. So something like "I draw inspiration from Scholar's work in expanding disability theory to cover discussions of sin and redemption in Text." I'm pretty sure my SOP dealt with this just by saying something like The work of Z on Q1 has been influential/inspirational to me as I investigate Q8. Plus, as long as you can name a currently-working Big Shot in your field, you can feel confident that you are not behind the proverbial times. Bah, I wish I'd said this in my earlier post. (The "which scholars have influenced you" question also came up at the interview, so I suspect this is an Important Thing, perhaps more important than being able to rattle off names of theory schools. Just wait until you realize that one of the people you name as an influential scholar in your SOP is (1) on the adcom (2) your advisor. It's...mortifying.)

Submit your best essay, period. (After heavy revision). (What follows is totally my-opinion-based-on-my-experience, and I am confident that people will be along to disagree.) I wouldn't be too worried about using old theory. I *would* be worried about your thesis/argument not being original. (I can't quite tell if you're suggesting that, sorry.) As I understand it, the point of the writing sample is not "This is the quality of work I am going to produce in your PhD program." It's more of a "I am capable of integrating close reading/source analysis with a methodological framework (whether Theory or not), using or modifying said methodology in a way that is both logical and allows new insight into the sources, and putting this together in an intriguing, coherent, and well-written argument. This is how I think. Now let me into your program so you can show me the most current ways people are doing this and I can apply my awesome unique analytical perspective to the strategies I will learn." Anecdatum: my writing sample involved interpretation of a particular theological point that I got flat-out wrong. Not outdated, not controversial; just plain wrong. (I had no idea at the time, needless to say, and I am retrospectively mortified. Although it's probably worse that the professors with whom I wrote this paper also had no idea I was so far off.) The faculty here apparently figured this meant I needed to be in a program where such things could be pointed out to me. (And FWIW, the literature people who read my app were apparently the happiest with it, which is why I think my experience is relevant here.) ...You might want to make sure your SOP positions you better with current scholarship, though. Combining psychoanalytic criticism with [currently trendy theory] to analyze [books], or some such.

The general procedure for submitting part of a larger work is to attach a cover page giving the general outline of the project (if it's a completed master's thesis, the title page is often used) along with a *short* paragraph explaining the whole paper as well as where your particular extract fits in. ~ As for reducing page length: YES on the footnotes. Stick as much background/"lit review"/etc stuff in the nice single-spaced 10-point font footnotes as you can. ("Lit review" here reduced to two or three sentences that say, "Look, I really do know the scholarship on this topic, really!")

What about all the undergrad "meet the page limit" tricks? 1.9 spacing, 1" side margins (it's the default in OpenOffice, so you even have an excuse on that one...)? Just make sure your SOP matches the format. Cheap, yes. Cheating, perhaps. ...It worked for me. Although, what *really* worked for me (25 pp + biblio => 15 pp including bibliography) was to have someone else go through it and be merciless. Often times other people are better at picked out what *can* be cut and what absolutely, absolutely must not.

Nah, that's sort of my point. I was probably thinking more of the PhD program when I wrote that (which has an absurdly low acceptance rate--much lower than the MTS, one assumes). But the MTS seems to be selective enough to be one of those programs where who gets in and who doesn't seems completely random. They have so many qualified and overqualified ("written a post-liberal take on Kierkegaard") candidates that in the end it comes down to which side of the bed the person who reads your application first woke up on. (That's what *I* meant, at least. There are a decent number of ND MTS alums on here whose interpretation of that absolutely overrides mine.)

Careful with this, though. Make sure your LOR writers know how many letters they'll be writing and that they should have received notifications from N number of schools. The reason for this is that multiple colleges (of course) use the same general application software. So if the professor's e-mail provider is Gmail-based, like many universities, e-mails sent from the same corporate address even though they have to do with different schools' applications, like rec_letters@applyyourself.com or whatever, they will show up as ONE THREAD in the prof's inbox. Make SURE your profs are aware that this might happen, and to look for ALL the e-mails in the thread, not just the one their browser jumps to when they click on the link. You really, really don't want to be dealing with the last minute panic when you realize it's a week past the deadline and one of your apps is missing 2 out of 3 LORs, simply because the profs never scrolled up to the first e-mail in the thread! (ETA: The corollary advice, of course, is don't wait until a week after the deadline to check up on whether the LORs were received.)

Gwuh? Why do so many people have the idea that ND doesn't fund its grad students? I mean, yes, it's ridiculously hard to get into, but the MTS has free tuition, the MDiv is free for Catholic students (the MDiv program is designed specifically for Catholic lay people who want to work within the Catholic Church), the PhD program has tuition remission and a decent baseline stipend...IIRC, nearly all academic (versus law/business) grad students at ND automatically get full tuition remission. Hard to get into...well, that's another story.

The point that everyone else has been trying to make is, visiting in advance will not help you get in. I know we all like to feel that we are super-impressive in person and that our sparkling personalities will win everyone over, but this is just not how grad admissions work. (In large part, BTW, because the vast majority of grad students really are that d*mn impressive.) Furthermore, if you're thinking of it as a way to make up for a weak GRE (probably the least important part of the application in terms of getting in), even if a visit hypothetically would help you, the GRE enters the process at entirely different stages. First, *some* schools use it in combination with GPA as a weed-out measure to help screen out the weakest applications. (Most descriptions of the grad admissions process you will read on the Internet, however, stress that a faculty/staff member always combs through the auto-reject pile to make sure otherwise awesome applicants with a weak GRE for whatever reason still get a chance). It is highly, highly unlikely that a personal visit would make any difference at this stage. Secondly, some schools use GRE scores *after* admission to help allocate extra funding. So again, not a factor in straight-up admission. Also, you have no idea whether the profs you meet will be on the admissions committee, or how much say they will have in the process. You want to work with Arabic-languages sources and your Arabic isn't good enough to use in a paper? SPEND THE MONEY ON A TUTOR. Get your language into shape before you start the program. All of the schools to which I applied stressed that demonstrating an ability to work with primary sources *in the original language(s)* would be crucial to include in my writing sample. Granted, I'm a medievalist and our language standards attempt to be a little more rigorous, but this is a far, far bigger weakness in your application that you *can* start to make up now. It will do you entire worlds of good, both in terms of your own scholarship and in terms of admissions, to work on languages instead of worrying about the non-benefits of an expensive visit or your potential GRE score.

This shouldn't be about them at all--it's about you. The dept knows what they do and what resources they have; the SOP isn't about telling them what they already know, it's about showing them how you fit in. "In addition, I am eager for the chance to learn from Dr. Who, whose research into life forms around deep-sea geysers offers fascinating possibilities for my own work about volancoes." "The Fancypants Research Laboratory offers the equipment that my research requires, such as binoculars." &c.

Honestly? I doubt programs will care all that much. Either about a tutoring position, or about the difference between a 3.7 and 3.9 GPA. It's nice to have another line for the CV, though, on a personal psychological level. But I'm a little concerned that you seem to be expecting your own schoolwork to suffer as a result of you taking the job. Generally, those of us who also work but were/are planning on making education our priority, prioritize our own educations. (...or is this another example of me living on another planet? ) It's a conscious effort, not the result of simply not having anything else to do. (ETA: or I could just totally be misreading you and you're just trying to get a sense of tutoring's value, not explaining the impact you expect it to have on your life. In which case, my bad.) I enjoy tutoring and highly recommend it--it doesn't help you develop quite the exact skill set you need for teaching, but it's in the general realm.

Um, I'm sorry to be blunt, but you simply don't have the language background for graduate work in classics. Google "classics ma" to get a sampling of what you'll be expected to handle once you're in the program, as well as admissions requirements. (ETA: I'm assuming that "one year of Greek" is the standard introduction-New Testament two semester sequence. If it was in fact a year of Greek comparable to my Latin class last fall, my assessment changes, and--you have my eternal sympathy.) If you really want to do classics, consider a post-bacc year at Penn or someplace to get your languages up to speed. Expensive, but worth it. On the plus side, you're probably on track for a history MA. Just plan to take more language classes once you're there.

Bah, religion M* programs barely look at GRE scores in the first place. (It's possible this may go double this year due to the altered test? I know they've been doing the "experimental" section for years to get baseline score ideas, but still). If you're talking about something like, say, a 600 total, then maybe I could see it being worth an explanation. As far as PhD programs go, if the school gets to the point where they're reading your SOP, then you've already passed the GRE hurdle and you have little to worry about on those grounds. Scores seem to matter mostly for extra fellowship money from the university/graduate school once you've already been admitted. Those people aren't going to be reading your SOP. As for explaining why you want a second master's--absolutely. Not just because you don't want to come across as the perpetual master's students, but because it's simply part of your story, your academic trajectory. Where do you want to be, how will Z program help you get there? It also gives you a chance to brag about your languages. And I agree, many of the Western theo PhD students I know came in with multiple master's, especially those working in biblical and earlier historical (medieval, patristics) fields. This is probably a combination of necessary language work, wanting more classes, and tough admissions pools.

Idea: Once you submit your applications, do NOT reread your SOP. It will drive you batty.

What are you interested in studying within history of gender? The awesome thing about women's history, after all, is that there have pretty much always been women. Political, legal, intellectual, economic history? What region, what era sets your soul on fire? History academia works according to geographical and occasionally chronological divisions; you don't, typically, get a job in "women's history," but you might get a job in Latin American history, having written your dissertation on women in labor movements in 20th century Guatemala. Graduate programs tend to categorize students and, by extension, applicants, similarly. The best way to look for programs is to look at recent books and journal articles that resemble the kind of work you want to do, methodologically, in something approximately the time and place in which you plan to specialize. What professors wrote those books and articles? Hit up Google; chances are that at least a handful of them are tenured profs at universities with strong doctoral programs. Look at programs that are explicitly in History of Gender, but don't be afraid to apply to straight-up history programs. I'm certainly not in a women's/gender studies dept, but the majority of my papers have something to do with gender issues. You learn ways to tailor your class projects to your interests, even if the class at first seems like completely foreign terrain. As for MA programs, primarily look for places where there are professors who do women's history and which offer funding. There have been several threads in the past about funded MAs that you could browse through. Time-place may be less important as a criterion for master's programs, too, so if you're categorically not ready to pick a subfield yet*, it might be wiser to hold off on PhD apps this cycle. * Yes, some people switch radically once they're in a PhD program. But if the very thought of narrowing it down makes you go all queasy inside--like it did for me when did my master's apps--it's probably a good idea to consider limiting your applications to master's programs, simply b/c you're probably not 'historically mature' enough for a PhD program.

Please forgive me if I'm misinterpreting your post, but I gather that you're really saying the following: (1) Professionally, you know you need an MDiv. (2) Personally, you don't wanna. Allow me, proud holder of an MA in historical theology and thus someone with no personal stake in promoting the idea of an MDiv, to sell you on the idea. I heartily dispute the notion that an MDiv is necessarily academically less rigorous. At the school where I did my MA, the PhD students who were the most knowledgeable (in terms of texts read and theologians/religious movements studied) had MDivs from Duke and Vanderbilt. They weren't necessarily the smartest or the best writers (well, the dude from Vandy is one of the smartest guys I know, period...come to think of it, he is SDA ), but they were the most academically experienced. And we're talking about HT, so I observed this from patristics all the way through postmodern theo/contemporary phil of rel. I rather suspect it has more to do with the school and the specific program than with the letters that follow M in the degree. My understanding is that at Harvard, too, the MDiv is basically "MTS-plus." On the other hand, it *is* school dependent--I'm pretty sure that Notre Dame considers their MTS to be the more academic theology master's. If you're unsure about the strength of a specific program, one thing to do might be to contact the school and find out what students do with the various degrees. Obviously you should expect that many MDiv students are simply uninterested in doctoral work, but if the program is strong there will be at least some students who caught the academic bug and were/were seen as well prepared enough for a PhD by top departments. Your second main area of concern seems to be time. And I totally get that, especially seeing as you already have a degree in theology with some pastoral training! It's rather frustrating to see all the people on the English (especially) and history boards (as well as all the soc sci and physical sc) applying for PhD programs directly out of undergrad when religion throws this nice stumbling block of the de facto required master's degree in there. Your enthusiasm to get to that point, to get through the work, to get the prize degree is awesome and will be important in motivating you during grad work. Don't lose it. That said, graduate school, especially if you're looking at an eventual PhD, is an ultramarathon, not a sprint--or even a 5K. No, you don't want to be the perpetual student, always ABD, never a PhD--but you also need to be ready for when the "this is a four year program" turns out to be 6-7 years. (As a side note, I'm pretty sure that MA/MTS programs in the U.S. are generally 2 years full-time, not one. So it's only a one-year difference with the MDiv that you're talking about.) The other consideration, which was absent from your post, is languages. Language training is an integral part of any theology graduate education (and successful PhD application. ) I don't know what your languages are like right now...probably you'd be okay applying for the M* without background, but most master's programs will require you to pick up at least one (more likely two? two is standard for M* in HT, but I don't know about systematics) for the degree. To be competitive for PhD programs, it's very useful to have a primary research language as well as secondary scholarship ones. (Can you even minor in OT without Hebrew? Biblical people, help me out on this one. I got nothing.) You seem to be dreading the idea of a couple years as a pastor, less for the work itself (I don't think anyone would even make inroads in that directions unless s/he really did feel some vocational pull; it's a crazy hard calling) than for the time off academics. One thing you might consider is to be like the pastor from my church back home. Although he's not planning on doctoral work, his "hobby" is learning languages, usually by taking night classes at a local seminary. (It makes his sermons awesome.) That might be one way you could feel like your time as a pastor is contributing to future education in more tangible ways than just life experience. That said: one of the smartest, quickest, most all-around awesome guys in the PhD program at my MA school had been an [evangelical denom] pastor for more than a decade before starting the PhD. He knew his stuff.

Do you mean give them a copy of your rubic/a modified version thereof? Does this really make grading easier? (As a student, I really appreciate having a copy of the rubric in advance, so it would be awesome to find out that it also makes grading go more smoothly...unfortunately the profs I'm currently TAing for are adamantly opposed to their use.)

Yup. This. The SOP is marketing. It's your chance to sell yourself as a brilliant scholar. For me, at least, it was impossible to know whether I'd written a "good" draft b/c I was so frightfully embarrassed at bragging so much! My rule was that a trusted confidante had to read each paragraph and tell me whether it was actually bad and thus I could wipe it from existence, or whether my modesty was standing in my own way. If I hadn't done that, I don't think I would ever have written the thing. Modesty is nice, but it won't get you into grad school.

OP, I'm curious if your background is in literature, or in philosophy/religion. I know in religion depts (yes, in the U.S.), there is sort of an underlying assumption of "female ergo feminist/womanist theology." No matter what you actually work on, people just expect you to be interested in Women's Issues. There is apparently also a sense of "Hispanic ergo liberation theology," according to some of my Hispanic friends. (Female and Hispanic tend to be the most marked identities in theo discourse, at least at the departments I've been in.) So if the OP's background is in theo or philo, it's really not a bad guess that the same phenomenon would be widespread in lit departments. OP, I'm sorry they singled you out to provide "an Asian perspective." Instead of, you know, your perspective. (Hands up, everyone on this thread who's been the only minority in a room and everyone else automatically assumes that you speak for everyone of that particular subgroup? Hands up, everyone who's either witnessed or been the only black kid in your middle school class and the day the textbook hits slavery, the teacher calls on her/you for the first time in a month and says, "So, Lakshmi, what did you think of the reading?") That's ignorant and obnoxious on their part, even if they think they had only the best of intentions. (With the above in mind, I'd like to add that this pressure is refreshingly not present in my current history and literature departments. So OP, if you are indeed switching disciplines, lit may be a nicer fit for you than philo.)

Wow. This is not about efficiency. This is about surviving. As I said in my first post, at least at my school (maybe you had a bad experience elsewhere, Sigaba? If so, shame on them for letting you down), the grad student support group attracts people from all sorts of programs. Academic PhD, academic master's, MBA, law, med. It's an emotional support group, not a "how to get an academic R1 job" seminar. You vent, cry, people give you Kleenex, and then you listen to other people vent, cry, you give them Kleenex, and you leave feeling not so alone.

Of course completion rates are low. But there's a difference between "hovering around average" b/c PhD work sucks at times (am I not the person who referred to the first year of her PhD as "an entirely different universe of pain"?), and "inordinately low b/c the program pressure on its students who are basically finished not to defend if they don't have job potential." Sorry for not making that clear, and for making it seem like I think anyone who doesn't finish a PhD is a loser.

Apparently I erred in putting the most important sentence of my post in parantheses--who wants to make any part of the app process harder than it is? As far as making this post actually relevant to the thread topic, advice and random chitchat for this cycle's applicants: The problem with the method that Sigaba suggested is that it leaves one gaping hole--PhD completion rate. A program's 90% "tenure-track placement" doesn't mean as much if only 20% of students who start the program ever get their degrees, and the other 80 drop out when they can't get a job or are still hanging around, ABD. (Incidentally, that's why I'm advocating only the last few years' of data--people who go on the academic market ABD and aren't successful the first year often push back their defense date in order to have a "fresher" degree for the market the next year.) And also, a general warning--departments are not always faithful about keeping their websites up to date! Current faculty, current/past grad students, program requirements, admissions procedures...

1. Because it's frelling *terrifying*, and I recall that when I was an applicant, all of my communications with prospective schools felt fraught with eight thousand tons of "how is this going to look." I sure wouldn't have had the confidence to be so bold. (Whether that's good or bad is irrelevant. It is the case. I suspect I am not alone on this point. And really, who wants to make any part of the app process harder than it is?) 2. Because for all practical purposes, the only years that matter are 2009+, so if you have another year of data it should give you a better picture. This is especially important if the dept doesn't graduate someone in every subfield every year. This data *should*, of course, be public knowledge, and I believe the suggestion is raised every time the AHA evaluates history graduate education. But it makes Important Programs look bad, so of course it won't be.