Minnesotan

Gah! Reading that list made me wish I had time for fiction this summer. I love it all (although there were quite a few on that list that I need to read, too). *DROOL* Anyway, not a Victorian by trade -- just an armchair Victorian. =)

I think the only reason I did so well was because my mom and my elementary school teachers beat me over the head with the philosophy that if you come across a word you don't know, you look it up immediately. I've been doing that all my life, so I didn't have to study. I'm sure some memorization before the test will help a bit, but not as much as a lifetime of examining every new word you come across.

Ass-kissery

Ha! Threats only reinforce the diagnosis of vocab envy! Rising's going to go out and buy a Humvee, soon!

I told you mine is bigger!

There's a queer theory discussion going on in one of the summer reading threads below. I'd check that out first, if you're looking for fellow theory nerds.

Unless you're a top choice in both fields, I seriously doubt they'd even notice (provided it's not the same secretary working on both admissions pools). The likelihood of you being a top choice in two fields at the same school is very small. My program just sorted through nearly a thousand applications for three spots this year, and while the program has some legends in the field, it is housed in a middle-of-the-pack department. I can't imagine what the even bigger names had to go through this application season.

Don't pay or grad school. Grad school should pay you (albeit a very small salary).

Their idiotic @#$%ing strike held up my MA for a whole year! How do you cancel a convocation, when people already fulfilled the terms of their degrees, anyway! As much as I realize TAs and adjuncts are exploited, the unions just make things worse. "We don't make enough money? Let's stop working for 6 months, then! That sounds like a good idea!" /rant

Swilly's is fancy, but has really bad food. Nectar (in Moscow) is supposed to be good, and the Old Post Office in Pullman -- soon to be called "The Fermentation Station" (ICK!) -- is, as well. Honestly, though, the ethnic food around here is much better than the continental fare. The Americana is frankly inedible. (I'm talking about you, Cougar Drive-In!) The best tasting meals are going to be at Tokyo Seoul (Korean + decent sushi), Nueva Vallarta, or Golden Teriyaki (Hawaiian and Chinese). Sella's calzones are worth the uncomfortable chairs and hordes of loud, drunk, softball-playing, tobacco-spitting townies. If you want a special dinner, it's only an hour's drive to Spokane, where there is a good deal of variety. You really should try to make it out to Spokane, Seattle, or Missoula once a month, if you're used to big city amenities -- the trip will keep you from hating Pullman, which is really a great little college town.

Agreed! I went to a university that nobody outside of my home state has ever heard of. I got into a very good school for my MA, and am now studying under a dissertation advisor who is a legend in the field. You are the master of your own destiny. Do what you need to do (with integrity and honesty) to get to the top, and people will recognize your hard work, no matter where you did your undergrad.

If you get two word lists from reliable sources and learn them all, you should be as prepared as you can get in a limited time. If time is unlimited, just start going through Webster's New Collegiate one page at a time. =) *EDIT: By the way, you all should go to FreeRice.com to study. That way you learn your GRE words and help feed starving people at the same time.

Kittens normally work. Everyone gets all emotional when they see kittens! Seriously, though, I think the "make everyone you know read it" suggestion is the best advice you can take from this type of discussion. None of us have seen your SoP draft, so we can't get more specific.

It's funny that a Research 1 with almost 30k students has so few people who want to meet and greet. Then again, most of the action is over on the Pullman thread.

Casa Lopez made my whole party sick the last time we went there. I would suggest Nueva Vallarta in Pullman, if you want "sit down" Mexican. Qdobas in Moscow is the best of the giant burrito offerings, but there are a ton of other shops with similar (yet inferior) offerings if you, like my girlfriend, have no taste (i.e. don't like Qdobas burritos with extra habanero sauce). As far as what to avoid, there are some fundamentalist Christian groups in Idaho who have hassled (albeit in a very minor way) some homosexual folks I know. They own one of the coffee shops and one of the restaurants in town. You'll figure it out pretty quickly, if that kind of stuff bothers you. I certainly stay away from those stores, despite my general indifference to sexual preferences. I just don't like judgmental folks. Town and gown disputes around here are normally caused by the religious crazies throwing out edicts from their megachurch castles on the hill. Luckily there are enough zealots from the other side working for the university, so everything stays happily moderate to maintain the peace. =) As for delivery, I think Quiznos delivers now, too. They might have a minimum order, though. That said, delivery is almost completely unnecessary in this town; it takes 45 minutes to walk from one end to the other, so you're always within walking distance of something. Just be careful on the weekends, as things close down fairly early, if they aren't geared toward college students. Grocery stores, bars, and restaurants are fine, but there isn't a single all-night coffee shop, or anything like that.

Jasper summed up much of my reasoning. I did an interdisciplinary MA before making the tough choice to pick one discipline for my PhD and stick with it. I knew I would be more marketable if I had a well-established "home base" from which -- once I got hired -- I could strike out and do my cross-disciplinary work. Even within most of the general Humanities departments across the country, they hire mainly people from the disciplines, and they do so for a reason: those are the people with the best teaching and research experience in their particular field. They took their classes in that field, they passed their comps in that field, they developed courses in that field, and a goodly number of grad school colleagues worked in that very same field. That's not to say an American Studies degree is by default any less rigorous than any other degree; I'm merely saying that the course of studies is more generalized, and new hires are often brought in to fill very specific niches. As for GoodGuy, digging for personal information, I'll be the first to admit that my statement about AmSt being code for ethnic and gender studies isn't "completely true." To say that every last person who occupies this (inter?)discipline is studying one of these topics would be unsupportable. However, to imply that A) the majority of the AmSt folks I've spoken with, at my institution and others, have studied race or gender, and that this opinion is commonly held among humanities scholars regarding what work AS departments do (with whatever positive or negative connotations that carries -- I was only concerned with issues of marketability in my original post) is quite supportable. If you don't believe me, ask around.

I seem to recall someone posting a link to their blog, wherein they produced daily flash cards for the lit subject test. Let m see if I can... wait... yup! Here it is: http://www.grelitblog.blogspot.com/ It looks like the blogger's enthusiasm petered out after a while, but what is there might be helpful. Many people use the Norton's intro material to study, but I would also suggest using those 100 greatest short stories and 100 greatest ideas books, etc., because they often divide themselves up by tradition/location (e.g. "100 Greatest Russian Short Stories").

...and most people have to pay for it. I had a buddy who went there with 1/3 funding, whatever that means. I think the degree is one step above a scam. Kind of like summer intensive language programs. Don't pay to do grad work.

While tech is more marketable, you have to go with what you love. (Then again, many people love living above the poverty line more than they love English Lit., so whatchagonnado!) I could not imagine putting the kind of time and energy that I do now into a subject I wasn't absolutely obsessed with. Without passion, you're likely to burn out halfway through (possibly incurring a large chunk of debt, or at least missing out on the opportunity to make some real money, along the way). As for American Studies degrees, be careful. Race and gender studies markets are flooded with scholars, and the R1s just keep cranking out these degrees, in order to fill grad courses and exploit cheap teaching labor. (Although I have no idea what you want to study, at my institution AS is code for "colored folk" or "womenfolk," so I feel this piece of advice may indeed be helpful.) If you're not into ethnic/racial/sexual/gender studies, I'm not sure why you wouldn't go for the more specialized degree in English. The days of being able to consider yourself a generalist in academe are long gone. You will certainly be at a disadvantage if you are applying to English departments with an AS degree, if all of your competitors have degrees that are specific to the discipline.

For Lit, CMU and Pitt are extremely competitive. I can't say much about Syracuse, since I've never really looked into their programs or known anyone who did.

For what? RhetComp, Lit, complit? I know Carnegie Mellon's RhetComp program is VERY picky. They accepted something like 3% two years ago, when I contacted them.

You should be contacting the profs you want to work with, anyway, so just ask them. I had lots of email conversations with the mentors I wanted, starting months in advance of the application deadline, and I'm sure it helped.

You must not be teaching, otherwise our universities probably define the term "course" differently.

Four courses in one term? That's lunacy!