ExponentialDecay

Discount rates (and package tours) are the only situation where I have been asked to pay upfront. In my limited experience with group booking, it is common for hotels to ask payment upfront when you book a shit ton of rooms, you know, because you're booking a shit ton of rooms as a group and if you decide to cancel, they're basically better off just closing down. Outside of those situations, I would find it hella sketchy if a hotel asked me to pay for anything before I actually used the service. I don't know, I'm not in the hotel business though, so maybe this is an oft-repeated white swan-black swan thing.

No hotel or hotel booking service should charge you in advance for your stay (otherwise, what happens if you need to cancel?). Booking takes your credit card # on file because, if you decide to cancel within 24 hours of arrival (see the policies of the hotel - sometimes it's if you cancel after check-in hours on day of arrival), hotels can charge you for the first night of your stay. Booking isn't allowed to use your credit card for anything else. When time comes for you to pay for your stay, you can charge it to a different card or use cash, as that is between the hotel and you.

It does have relevance for schools that rely on their endowment to function. If you rely on alumni financial contributions, it makes sense to offer small bonuses to those who continue to support the school - through tuition dollars as well as donations. I'm not sure why this is controversial. Institutions that aren't funded by the government need other ways to find the money to, among other things, admit underprivileged students on scholarship. I attended on an an alumni scholarship; it would not have been possible for me to get my education without it. I'm sorry that some people can't achieve highly enough to to beat out qualified legacies on merit (which is what legacy status is - it is a marginal benefit), but not every case where two applicants are not considered equally is an injustice. ​Also, notice what bhr actually said: Mind you, 90% of schools, and almost all public schools, don't care about legacy status. It is only the money-obsessed schools like the Ivies, with an eye on their endowment, that give preference to legacy students over students who actually deserve enrollment, thus continuing to stratify economic privilege. They are clearly implying that having legacy status wipes out any and all personal or academic merit a student could have. According to them, where your parents went to school should determine where you go to school, i.e. you are "undeserving" to attend a school your parent went to.

It doesn't make one qualified. It's an extra point on one's resume. Dude, come on, you're in grad school - you should know how competitive processes work.

Why do you believe that legacies don't "deserve" enrollment by virtue of being legacies? You know that having privilege doesn't automatically make you a bad person, right? Like, that's the fundamental concept of privilege.

Any and all academic MA programs in the US are for students who didn't get into the PhD or didn't have the coursework to apply. Consider going abroad. If you are a solid statistician with research experience, you will be recruited into economic consulting from the BA. If you are not a solid statistician with research experience, you won't get into the PhD partly because you won't have the coursework to apply, so you will end up doing the master's anyway.

Okay, I will itemize my questions. 1. Your interests are anchored by the philosophy of Schopenhauer. Again, you can use whatever you want as a critical lens, but you are getting a degree in literature, which means you must be anchored by literature. You will be developing a detailed knowledge of a period and maybe a movement. That's what you will be teaching later on. That's why the "I can do anything with Schopenhauer" shtick would be a hard sell. Forgive me if you felt that I was denigrating your critical lens, as that was not my intention. However, I don't see the similarity between it to something like Marxism or feminism. Marxist scholars don't just read Marx. There's like 15 other famous thinkers who fall under the umbrella of Marxism, all of which are particularly relevant to literature because they say something about cultural production. Marxism is a whole separate field. Ditto feminism. You have just the one guy. And it's great that you already have a project in mind - maybe you're a great applicant and you'll get in everywhere with double the funding, I don't know as I only know what is written here, but then, you can just ignore us internet bullies - but keep in mind that that is just the dissertation. Scholars that continue on in this market hopefully do much more work, which is in conversation with their colleagues, and which speaks to the interest of the field, which is literature. It is easier to write compelling criticism of, say, Beowulf when you have questions about Beowulf, rather than about Schopenhauer. For a literary scholar, coming to literature through philosophy (not even critical theory) first is kind of the other way around. That's why I said that Schopenhauer looks like good material for an article or two, but you can't build a career as a literary scholar on Schopenhauer. Anyway, this is something to ponder. People have certainly gotten in having expressed a strong interest in some philosophy or other, but never without good hards. 2. There's all sorts of programs out there, but if you want to get into a good one, either for medieval literature or 20th century, you will need languages. Probably more than one to be admitted. It is impossible (I ignore the negligible outlier) to get into a medieval program without Latin, plus the language of the primary texts you are interested in studying. That is why most medievalists do a masters first. But we have many medievalists stalking around here who occasionally drop by to comment, so I hope somebody can make a more topical contribution than myself in this regard. Then, if you want to read Schopenhauer, as in form your scholarship around him, people will expect German. The modicum you do have seems fine for admission to me. You see, with your interests, I would recommend that you look to more interdisciplinary departments which are open to more involved work with philosophy, like some Comp Lit programs or stuff like Modern Thought, but since you have no languages, I can't recommend that in good faith. Languages, people. If you want to be humanities scholars in any discipline, you need to know lots of them. 3. You need to read criticism, as in the work of your future colleagues, not Derrida and Foucault (you also need to read those). You need a writing sample, which you will send to programs for $100+ a piece, which is aware of and engages with that criticism. As in, though you may be interested in Schopenhauer (whew, couldn't you pick a shorter philosopher to type, like Kant?), you need to show awareness of the wide scholarship in your field. You will also need to engage with that scholarship throughout your career. This is also something to ponder. If we were being real, your flippant attitude towards existing scholarship, to the interests of other scholars, and to necessary shit like knowing and engaging with those and knowing languages makes me question whether you've looked where you're about to jump. Sure, I've internalized some of those values, but that doesn't mean they're not fundamental to what you want to do. It's probably not a good idea to ignore things like Derrida, because that directly interferes with your ability to understand your colleagues' contribution to your field. It's probably not a good idea to call postmodernism or feminism fads, since those things have, over a period of 50 years, become stalwarts in the field. What I'm saying is, this is fundamentally the wrong approach that you are taking here. One thing your committees will be asking themselves is, does he play nice with others? Something to keep in mind.

Looking at your interests, I wonder two things: 1. Whether you have enough background in actual literary scholarship to make an informed decision. I think reading books by faculty that interest you is a great first start though 2. Whether your interests, as stated, would be best served by a literature program rather than an anthropology or sociology program, or similar. I guess I struggle to understand how you would show that literature can be a catalyst of social change through literary criticism. That sounds like a social science project. Literary studies is more concerned with literature itself, rather than necessarily what effect it has on people (though I'm sure this project is feasible in a humanities department given an adequate selling pitch) If you do go through with this, I would apply to Comp Lit rather than English, for a number of reasons. For one, they value languages much more than English, and they are more open to translation work (Columbia and Princeton, in fact, are gaga for it). For another, your project sounds transcultural to me.

About the Schopenhauer thing. It sounds like a fascinating thesis for a journal article, maybe a couple. But it cannot form the basis of your scholarship. English scholarship is a profession, and like any profession, it has standards. An English scholar isn't simply a well-read person - they are a specialist who understands their particular area in a systematic way. The value of an English scholar is not that they know who Melville or Poe are, but that they can connect Melville to Poe and then to others in a systemic narrative that is focused, but which does its due to a number of interpretive possibilities. English scholars form a community, and these conversations happen within the intellectual bounds of this community. That is why you are required to be an expert in a time period, that is why you need to know languages, that is why you are required to read other people's scholarship, and that is why you are required to understand and appreciate "fads" (honestly, when will we stop calling feminism a fad? Women are people, and we are gonna stay that way). Linking everything and its dog to Schopenhauer is nice to do when you're retired on the Côte d'Azur, but you will need a - how can I say this - broader appreciation for literature than as an explication of Schopenhauerian principles. As regards applying. You cannot get into a program if you don't have solid grounding in languages (regarding Medieval, that would be Latin) and especially if you are not familiar with the critical literature in your area. Languages are to your scholarship as mathematics is to the scholarship of a theoretical physicist. They are your fundamental skill and your best advantage. Your knowledge of existing criticism is what speaks to your potential as a scholar and what lets you, firstly, know that your pet project isn't some bullshit that was looked at 60 years ago by a youthful Harold Bloom. I am frankly surprised that you are considering this path if you have never read any criticism. I mean, you don't even know what the job entails. I get the feeling that you are trying to shoehorn your interest wherever it will fit. Not that all of us don't do that to some extent to get the ole funding, but if you are reluctant to pay your dues to the profession, then maybe the profession is not the right choice for you.

Since summer breaks at US schools are 3-4 months, I'm not really sure how much longer you want them without wanting school to consist entirely of breaks. That said, whilst it's possible to visit home every summer, it's not, uh, how do I say this - convenient. For one, obviously, tickets from the U.S. cost a great deal of money, and it may not be feasible for you to buy them yourself with your grad student stipend. For another, depending on your citizenship, you may need to renew your entry visa every year, which also incurs an extra cost. I would also consider what being so attached to your home may mean for your future career. Academia pretty much requires you to be able to move anywhere for a job. Maybe you can get a job in your home country with your humanities PhD, and maybe it's a certainty that you will - different countries are different - but if not, you have to consider the possibility that you will have to move away from your parents permanently for employment. I think the user hj2012 works with humanities PhD applicants from Asian countries, and it may be useful to drop them a line if they're still here.

...Why would you need to have worked in a lab and collected an original sample from the population if that's not, you know, what people in your field do? I mean, that's like learning to dunk in order to make the swimming team.

I don't think there is a single Green Card immigration case out there that hasn't been covered somewhere on the internet. There's even a handy flowchart floating around.

Those are undergraduate acceptance rates, so to you they are irrelevant.

So, by that logic, if 81% of the US population falls into the 34-44 age group, and 84% of the US population falls into the 45-54 age group, then together they make up 165% of the US population?

TakeruK, I think OP is using Pearson's r (aka rho - the correlation coefficient), otherwise I don't know why they're squaring any r-values. I would love to see the output of whatever program ran this, though. Anyway, as regards the research: I am confused by your histograms. Are they supposed to be cumulative frequencies? If so, why do they strive to resemble the normal distribution? Whilst I have garnered this to be true from ianfaircloud's valuable contribution to transparency in philosophy admissions (seriously, could we get some of that in my neck of the woods?), can you explain how your data supports this notion? All you've shown is, in a self-selecting sample of students with nearly identical scores, those scores play a dubiously unbiased 10% role in admissions selection. Whilst your r-squared can support a statement that factors besides the ones in your model play a more significant role in predicting Y, it cannot support the notion that anything overrides anything else. I'm not sure you can assume that the remaining 90% of the r-squared is due to qualitative factors - it is due to some as-yet unknown model misspecification.

I am currently compiling sources to support my argument in response to your previous question, but I saw this and just had to say that it was absolutely beautiful, and that I am profoundly gratified that our conversation has thus inspired you.

Without revisiting the texts, which I admittedly hadn't seen for a while, I struggle to find in Kafka these others you are talking about. I was under the impression that, given none of Kafka's protagonists ever reach some corporeal entity that enacts judgment (I refer here to The Trial and the short story that inspired it, the name of which escapes me at the moment), Kafka is talking not about others, but about a self-sufficient, self-enforcing system - a no one, so to say. This is also the impression I get from his Letter to Father. I recall that famous passage where he tells his father that he does not blame him, because they both were subject to forces outside their control (these forces are, from what I have read of the criticism, cultural and social). As such, without resorting to some speculation regarding what the author really meant to say by his blue curtains, I would argue that attributing Kafka's worldview to an upset at being subjected to the whims of others is a surface reading. Anyway, let's get back to our chickens. "Has become"? The gist of my post was that academia always was. The pockets of time when some humanities disciplines were comparatively booming were the exception due to circumstances, not the rule. Without a doubt, many students need to be taught. Tenure? Salaried research into the finer points of Kafka? Nothing to do with teaching. Maybe humanities academia needs to be restructured so it doesn't follow the STEM model anymore, and become devoted to teaching composition classes to freshmen. Then you're going to see a lot more non-TT appointments, since instructors in the use of the subjunctive don't need political protection, and 4/4 loads, since you're not gonna be needing all that time to do research anymore. As it is now, with the R1s and the 0/1s and the high salaries, a high-employment humanities academia is untenable. Non-humanities academia is also untenable, but a number of those PhDs have better industry prospects, from working in outreach to quantitative finance. I think there is a limit to how much the general public will care about something that doesn't make its material situation better. Time has shown that the liberal arts model doesn't work on a wide scale. Maybe tenure doesn't either. In the alternative model, see Europe and Britain, most people essentially adjunct their entire careers. What I am trying to put to you is that humanities scholarship is a road to poverty because of the nature of humanities scholarship. You can sit here complaining about it all day, but that 's how it is. That said, aside from the ensuing 13 pages, I think this thread is a valuable asset to this forum.

Oh well. It's not like there's some kind of prize for resisting the temptation of endless troll threads. VM, by Kafkaesque do you mean Kafkaesque, ie a system that is frustrating because you are not privy to its internal logic? If so, then you have to agree with delimitude's point, that you're only angry because you're not with the in crowd. Whilst I agree that many schools exploit NTT faculty and am horrified at the embarrassing situation of the humanities in the list of governmental priorities and in the public conscious, I fail to see, but may I be forgiven, where the great injustice lies. I mean, let's get real, literary scholarship is completely gratuitous. That is not the same as saying that it is useless - only that, in a socioeconomic order aimed at material gain and producing or helping to produce things, it's hardly surprising that the humanities are not in demand. By good old Papa Marx, use value and exchange value are not the same thing, but it's exchange value that determines how much you are getting paid for your shit. Certainly, the current state of humanities academia is partly due to bad management and bad rhetoric, but even taking those away, there's only so much you can do with what you're given, and the humanities aren't given much. Do people not know that the humanities, and academia in general, don't pay? Do people go into this without a plan B? I mean, this wasn't news 50 years ago, and it isn't news now. The baby boomer economic boom is over (moment of silence for those graduated in 2008-2009), the new economic reality is a lot harsher, but in the humanities, it was always pretty bad. Are you seriously complaining that you were somehow blindsided by it going from bad to badly bad?

I had something similar happen to me. 1. Unless your sample will be read by a person specializing in this exact poet, and unless the criticism you found is well-known, no, people are unlikely to notice. There is such a volume of critical texts around that one barely has time to read everything to do with one's speciality, much less somebody's PhD thesis on something well known but tangential or irrelevant. Moreover, if you are indeed working with something well-known, it is likely to have been explored in detail by many others. As long as you show an interesting and different thesis, you should be fine. 2. At the same time, that you look at the same theme using the same theory is not good. In order to find the degree to which it is not good, one would need to read both papers, therefore we can't help you here. If you can cite the majority of your paper's argument as coming from this published paper, that is probably a dangerous degree of not good (exceptions apply). If that is the case, I would look into condensing that part of the argument, acknowledging the paper you read, and expanding on the novelties you say you bring to the table. A fundamental skill in literary scholarship is being able to synthesize the scholarship that comes before you and rework it, value added, into a new narrative, and this skill, to my mind, is rarer in PhD applicants than close reading or application of theory or whatever (I don't sit on committees, I just look at other people's papers, so what do I know?). Remember, however, that your paper doesn't need to be publishable, so the originality bar is a little lower. I would not use a paper that doesn't engage with critical theory though.

I haven't been inside a public educational institution since kindergarten, and I testify that this is not the case. Elite schools give you more opportunities to pursue what you want and make those opportunities more readily available, but nobody is chasing after you with a potty chair to make sure that you know vaguely archaic grammatical conventions. The only time I was asked to know the subjunctive was in foreign language classes, as I am sure is the case with all the rest of you. Ah, I lie - I was asked to know the subjunctive and a bunch of other archaic constructions when I attended public night school in order to pass the school state exam in my native country. That was the local school system, though. Anyway, in my experience, people learn this nitty gritty from extended reading in their free time. That is a function of willpower. Knowing the conventions of the field - of which excellent grammar is one - is essential for a scholar, and that is all I believe telkanaru is saying. Yes, the bar is high. That is because the field is competitive.

I am sorry to upset you, rising_star, and I am also surprised that my post didn't garner more downvotes. It was unhelpful and unforgivably rude, coming from a stranger. That said, I have been following the shitshow behind the Francophone1 account since last year. That doesn't mean I know her situation in detail - but I do know that she is unfocused, apt to take passing fancies for her life's calling a-la Mme Bovary, habitually rude to commenters who answer her threads, and she had been receiving Bs for 2 years already. I don't like bullshit and sometimes I am too vocal about that. However, OP's professors have been gently hinting to OP that PhD scholarship is not her strong point for so long now that I can't not answer their cry for help. Academia is a high risk, low reward scenario for the best of us. If OP's father owns an oil field in Siberia, OP can do whatever she wants. If he does not, OP is about to sink a few more $k down the shitter. Why? I don't care. But why can't I say that this is not a rational passtime? I am not so presumptuous to believe myself able to save OP from ruining her life; at the same time, I do not believe I should be chastised this viciously for pointing out that she will indeed be ruining her life if she goes on with this pipe dream of getting a PhD.

My advice is, just don't do it. I don't know if you need a job, I don't know if you need funding, but you don't need a PhD. 2 years of B grades in an MA program makes you uncompetitive for virtually any PhD program. Frankly, even, your grades aren't even the deciding factor; that you are unable to, for whatever reason, construct an A-grade essay after 18 years of education is the kiss of death. You should be able to do this consistently come undergrad. Maybe you will be a great high school teacher or novelist or whatever you want to be. Maybe you will continue to enjoy writing essays. But professional scholarship is not for you.

Is it just me, or is a person who is getting mostly Bs at the graduate level because they struggle with, arguably, the most important skill that a literary scholar has a little premature in thinking about PhD programs?

You should really be asking this on the history board. Your question is not trivial.

Technicians aren't strictly research scientists though. They don't publish. I think there's definitely a mentality that people are clamoring to get into these programs, so PIs are like, I can take this $50k (and the PI's grant doesn't always pay the full $50k, as tuition is, I believe, in the majority of cases, covered by the university or the department or some combination thereof, so to the PI the grad student is about 70% cheaper than a paid professional) and I can get a grad student whom I will train to be a good scientist, and who may contribute a lot to the field, and who will sleep in the lab because they really need me to like them, because there is no shortage of people applying to the program. However, again, this training doesn't guarantee you a job. I see people (including on GradCafe) trying for 3 years to get into mediocre programs, and I don't understand it either, but if they, for some reason known only to them, want to do this even though they are fully appraised of the circumstances, who is anyone to tell them no? I have friends who are PhD students who consult on the side. I have friends who are PhD students for the stipend, who spend the salient part of their life writing well-received poetry. I have friends who have received NSF grants, Rhodes fellowship, etc, who are really committed academics. I can't say that I have any friends who treat their PhD as training for a guaranteed job (as we here are often advised to do), rather than as an opportunity to spend 5 years of their life doing the one thing they really want to do, because the chances of finding a TT position are so ridiculous that there's just no point worrying about it. My QM friend is about 30% likely to get tenure, but are you going to suggest that he quit now and they give his position to a research technician because of the contingency that they might not want him to stay? At a certain point, it's caveat emptor, and at that point, if you still want to do whatever it is you're doing, that means you're getting a fair exchange for your risk and effort. All of the suggestions here regarding science postdocs are great. I can definitely see that the system can and should be reformed, because it's not helping anyone in its current state. Will that functionally limit the number of grad students who can't find a job? Eh. I'd run Stata on this if I had anything to run Stata on, but I doubt it, to any practical amount.