medicine

I'm also an early modernist waitlisted at UT, so that right there means that there are likely multiple students waitlisted in all subfields. That said, lyonessrampant, you should know that the odds of me ending up at UT, even if I'm eventually accepted off the waitlist, are about 1%. (based on family considerations, NOT the quality of the program.)

Sorry, I realize that was really vague; more ECF's will be given out as the first round of acceptees begin to decline them, I was told.

It seems like one's chances of getting in off a wait list would depend on the way the school sets up their wait list. For example, being wait listed at a school that admits 12 students and looks for a class of 8 would be far worse than being wait listed at a school that admits only 8 students and looks for a class of 8. In addition, if the school has large teaching obligations for grad students or a particularly poor stipend, one would expect many students to decline offers, opening them up for waitlisters. it might be helpful to email the DGS and ask gently if he or she might be able to provide you with some numbers, even (for programs like the first one described above) what their typical acceptance rate is. But perhaps hope should not be too high. This comment from the results board informs us that last year, at least, seemingly everyone wanted to go to UT-Austin: "I called the Graduate Program coordinator and was told that every first round offer accepted admission except for one, who has not yet made a decision."

Yes, I've been in contact with the DGS.

I was told in an email that they are definitely not done giving out ECF's.

Are there any Vanderbilt admits or alternates out there working in Early Modern/Renaissance studies? I'm on a sort of second waitlist, and I'm desperate to find out if I have any chance at all of making it in eventually. If so, could you maybe send me a personal message? Unfortunately, due to family circumstances I would need to know before this Wednesday at 8 pm. Send me a message, and I'll explain all. Thanks!

Yes. Last year, their fellowship offer covered out of state tuition, if it was necessary.

Seconding this. In general, I was advised (I think rightly) to avoid mentioning specific names as much as possible, if only to avoid turning off AdCom members who might irrationally dislike this or that theorist. Instead of using a proper name as a shortcut, it's preferable just to describe your own approach and interests with precision and verve, which will demonstrate that you know more than just the big names, but that you can engage their ideas and the critical and theoretical problems they address or raise. In sum, I would say that proper names shouldn't be verboten, but should instead be used if they still seem necessary, after you've done the hard work of describing your own interests.

I recall being told last year that there were 22 fellowships available- so most students, but not all, received one. As I recall, the offer was for year 1 as an RA, years 2-4 as a teacher (either 2-1 or 2-2), and year 5 as some kind of writing guru administrator for 15 hrs a week. I know that there were some students without fellowships who taught 4 classes a semester at different CUNY colleges, which is something I'd prefer not to do.

Note also that UVA insists upon 2 different papers: "Applicants to the MA and PhD programs must submit two critical papers. Applicants may submit an excerpt from a thesis or longer paper as one of these samples, but are still expected to submit a second writing sample."

Are MA and BA holders judged the same? Most people say no; and often, that can work in your favor as BA holder. I can pass along, for example, that Rutgers told me (an MA holder who was rejected last year) that the bar for MA holders is much, much higher than for BA's, and that not a single MA holder was admitted last year. Hope that gives you some confidence!

The GRE general scores, at least, do change over time-- which is very strange. Apparently, my 5.0 writing was 71st percentile four years ago, but is, as of today, all the way up to the 84th percentile. That suggests that people are performing less well on the test, which would suggest that your percentile is likely to rise over time. That said, however, you might actually do better on the subject test this year, simply because it seems to have changed dramatically, I think beginning with last fall's tests. Everything I had ever been told -- all message boards, all prep books, all the materials from ETS -- implied a test heavily geared toward knowledge of dates, periods, authors, and titles: a kind of trivia test. The test I took last October, however, had almost none of that. Instead, it seemed mostly to consist of one difficult passage after another (difficult either bc it was avant-garde modernist or bc it was old- think Keats and older), with a set of 5-8 questions on each passage. Usually, all but one could be answered if you were a good reader: if you could spot the antecedent of "he" in line 7, or if you could untangle the subject and verb from a winding miltonic sentence. Among all the Spenser/Milton/Gray/Wordsworth, however, were single questions on "literary theory," which mostly meant matching theoretical catchwords to theorist (e.g., discourse-> Foucault, or aporia->Derrida, interpretive community-> Fish). All in all, the passages seemed to test one skill of literary study-- the ability to sort through complicated language-- fairly well. So if you happen to be an "early lit" kind of person (like myself- I was lucky), you're going to do well on this newer subject test. Did anyone else take the Nov. or April subject tests? If so, were those tests like the one I just described, or were they more like the old-style trivia test?

I’m a bit surprised that this article hasn’t come up here, but I was struck by this comment from Peter Conn (UPenn) in the Chronicle of Higher Education: http://chronicle.com/article/We-Need-to-Acknowledge-the/64885/ “How have humanities faculty members and their administrators responded to this cluster of threats? They haven't. In 1987, the first year for which tallies of humanities doctorates were computed according to the preferred CIP (Classification of Instructional Programs) methodology, humanities departments graduated 2,991 doctoral students. In 2007, the most recent year for which CIP data are available, that number had risen to 4,366, an increase of 1,375, or 46 percent, over 20 years in a flat or declining job market. To cite only the most recent data, the latest jobs report from the Modern Language Association indicates that the number of positions on offer in English has dropped 44 percent in just the past two years, from 1,800 to 1,000­—the lowest number in 35 years.” I understand why he uses these numbers: they are comprehensive. And yes, there is a job market crisis. But from our perspective as applicants, the most relevant question is this: what are my chances of getting a job from this particular school? (By the way, see this article by Ohio State’s English DGS on the problems answering that question: http://chronicle.com/article/An-Open-Letter-From-a-Director/64882/ ) The question that I seem unable to determine a good answer for is this: how does the placement rate at the top-ranked schools differ from the rate at unranked schools like (to choose at random, no offense intended) TCU or South Dakota? I know that at my barely-ranked M.A. program (in the 80s, I think), the placement rate was invisible. The only thing anyone I knew did was to adjunct in the area. I suspect that until we start distinguishing between the schools where the professors and students are seriously engaged in their profession (publishing often in the big journals) and those where the professors are interested mostly in teaching (or sometimes, not even that!), the conversations about whether to do to grad school at all, or about the demise of good jobs for English Ph.D.’s, seems to me unproductive. I want to know what the placement rate of (to pick an arbitrary cutoff) schools ranked in the USNews top 20 is, compared with that of schools 20-40, etc. This would tell me whether there is a point in the prestige rankings at which yes, I can plan to get a decent job from this kind of school. (I am aware of the problems with the USNews rankings, discussed ad naseum elsewhere; I’m using them as a very rough guide for what the gossip is in the profession). In a way I’m rehashing problems that have been discussed elsewhere; but I’m wondering: how did you all answer these questions? Or are they at this point unanswerable?

Intextrovert, you’ve inspired me to post. I’ve been following gradcafe for several months now, but haven’t said anything yet. My own experience confirms what you’ve said. I went to a school much like yours for undergrad, except that mine wasn’t even prestigious. I then applied to a few Ph.D. programs with what was hardly even an SOP, was somehow admitted to a pretty poor school or a rather directionless MA, at least until my last semester there (a bad decision, I realize now, but at least it gave me a little time to figure out a few things I wanted to study). The professors there had low expectations and (with one exception, my advisor) didn’t challenge us at all, and students weren’t interested in getting Ph.D.s. Basically, its was the not a place where people were doing much “work” or “research” at all, much less publishable stuff that spoke to current critical questions. This means that only now am I really figuring out that my research needs, in some way, to address questions that others care about. Hopefully, the gradcaffeinated will have helped me to do so when I reapply next year. (I got into three programs out of 12 this year- two okay ones, one pretty good one with less than ideal funding, no top 20 ones- but because of a family situation I can’t matriculate this fall). My professors, unfortunately, seem to think that getting into graduate school is a breeze, and told me to go ahead with what I see now was a pretty weak writing sample. My friend who is finishing a Ph.D. at Chicago gave me some pointed advice right before I applied, without which I suspect I would have been turned down everywhere. I guess I just want to affirm what intextrovert is saying and add that the majority of English majors in this country are not taught being how to write and think about literature with reference to a scholarly community. I don’t regret (much) not being taught to do so as an undergraduate, but this fact means that it’s the rare student who “breaks out” of a no name school, if only because the concept of what academics do at all takes quite a while (it took me at least 2 years, including my time as an MA student.) Sorry this is so long. I’m trying not to sound aggrieved or bitter (I’m not), but as someone who attended less than prestigious institutions, I have certainly found that I was not trained to do what many of the excellent students posting on these boards have been (all of these students, of course, are also exceptional in that they have put in much hard work to take advantage of that training!)