Glasperlenspieler

I wouldn't put too much stock in that. Being a potential student is sort of awkward as it is and especially in this scenario, so you probably didn't really have a chance to see their personalities. Plus, you don't even know which of them will end up matriculating. I would try to talk with current grad students (preferably out of earshot of faculty). Their personality/behavior/attitude will be much more telling.

My first thought was that it sounded like a Mountains Goat lyric, but not quite sure which song fits. Maybe this?

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I can't speak for Texas specifically, but most universities require you to register for a "dissertation reading and research" section for every semester you are enrolled after completing coursework. This is usually equivalent to one course in terms of credit. So, you will still be on the hook for tuition if it is not covered through a fellowship or TAship, but depending on the tuition pay structure of the university, it may be significantly reduced in comparison to a semester of full coursework.

Will you have the opportunity to pursue your interests in an academically stimulating environemnt? Yes Will you benefit from high quality advising? Depends on who you work with Is it worth spending 60k plus cost of living so that you can do those things and maybe (but maybe not) have a more successful PhD application next time around? No way in hell

I wish I could speak this confidently about articles I've published in high quality journals.

I'd echo @snorkles but also add that you should remember that at this stage of the game, you are evaluating them. They've already accepted you and decided they want you to come (barring some unlikely horror story). So you're job now is to figure out if you like them. So, be yourself, ask questions, and keep your eyes open for signs (good and bad).

1. Save up money. Moving to a new city and starting grad school can have lots of unexpected financial costs and you might not get your first paycheck until a month or two into the program. It's also good to figure out housing, home essentials you will need to buy, etc. as early as possible. There will be a lot hitting you once you move, so the better prepared you are, the less stressful it will be. 2. Read something that has nothing to do with your research, hang out with friends, binge watch a series, get some R&R. You will want to be fully energized at the start of grad school. You're bound to feel burnt out at some point, but preventing that from happening too early will make your first year much more pleasant. 3. If you must do something academically related, then try to read a few things for your classes in the first semester. Ideally, try to read things that will be assigned for the middle or the end of the semester. You'll probably keep up fine for the first few weeks, but you're bound to get bogged down at some point, so having that big book that you know you will have to read out of the way will give you a little breathing room down the line. If you do this, take good notes though, so that you don't forget everything you have to say about it by the time you need to talk about it in seminar.

This is a really important observation. I'll just add to the sage advice offered by @BwO, @EM51413, and @WildeThing and say that before attending an interdisciplinary or comp lit program, it's certainly a good idea to look very closely at their placement record and I would also advise taking some time to look through what sort of jobs get posted here: https://academicjobs.wikia.org/wiki/Academic_Jobs_Wiki It's true that one can't predict the market 5-10 years out, but I also think the volatility in desired specialties is just as likely to mean that the market for a given specialty will get worse as it is to indicate that there may be an increased demand for a particular specialty.

At the point, the best thing for you to do is gather as much information about the program as possible so that if you are eventually offered a spot (which may happen at the last moment), you will be prepared to give an informed answer. Asking questions about the program will also demonstrate your interest, which could help you, though I think at this point there's not much you can do to improve your chances of admission. They obviously like you, otherwise they wouldn't have put you on the waitlist. What you need to happen now is for enough people to reject their offer (and depending on how they manage waitlists, people in your field). But you demonstrating your further accomplishments won't help that happen.

While there's a lot of truth in this, it's also worth noting that there are some veterans on this forum who are well into their PhDs or finished with them and can certainly provide some valuable insight into academic life. Among them are @Ramus, @Warelin, and @Bumblebea. (I don't want to so presumptuous as to place myself in this esteemed crowd, but I've also been around for bit, having just passed my qualifying exams). You should certainly take all advice with a grain of salt. This is especially true of anonymous advice, though as @Ramus rightly points out, even your professors aren't immune to giving bad advice. However, it's also important not to merely accept or reject advice on the basis of whether or not it's what you want to hear. NB: none of this is to deny that it's a very good idea to reach out to people who may have more direct insight on your particular situation and see what they have to say.

I couldn't agree with @NowMoreSerious more. I would also add, that while I very much appreciate the impetus behind this thread, the sort of answers you want to these questions are not always the sorts of answers people will be willing to post on a public message board (especially at the level of detail needed to be truly informative).

Given your answers to these questions, I suspect you might be better served by a linguistics MA than an MA in French Literature. While this is perhaps less true at the beginning, graduate training and professionalization tends to prioritize specialization, rather than generalist knowledge. And for the job market, you're likely to be looking at 2 sorts of jobs. There are those jobs in which you would teach primarily elementary/intermediate/advanced French (but likely more elementary and intermediate) and then there are those jobs in which you will perhaps be teaching some language courses but also upper division topics seminars and maybe even graduate courses. For the former, a specialization in applied linguistics would make you competitive, and as long as you having a general familiarity with French literature (which you would get through a PhD program in a French department), it won't matter if you're weaker on the literature/culture side of things. For the latter sorts of jobs, the topics you would be teaching would primarily be linguistics oriented, and thus your lack of literature/culture background also wouldn't be a huge issue. In terms of admissions to PhD programs, however, what will really matter (in addition to your French competency) is that you show the potential for producing original research. Even though PhDs generally earn a living through teaching, graduate school tends to be very research oriented, and that will be the focal point of graduate admissions. So in order to be competitive, you will need to demonstrate that you are asking research questions that are worth pursuing and that you have the skill set to pursue them. One good thing to recognize that in comparison to undergrad, grad school is much less about learning and much more about producing knowledge. Whether or not this is always a good thing is a different question, but that tends to be the orientation. I've met many graduate students that were frustrated to discover this. (Obviously this is not entirely either/or though and producing research means learning a lot and you will learn a lot in grad school) NB: I'm not in a French department but I am in a different European language/literature department and I'm relatively confident this all holds true for French as well, but there may be some differences.

A few thoughts: 1) Most PhD programs do not require an MA for admission. In some cases it can increase your admissions odd, but there's no guarantee of that. 2) I don't think most PhD programs are going to put much stock in an online MA. (It won't necessarily count against you, but I don't see it really helping). 3) I certainly wouldn't pay out of pocket for an online MA. (It rarely makes sense to pay for a graduate degree in the humanities unless you're independently wealthy) 4) Whether or not having an MA will decrease coursework for your PhD will vary widely from program to program. Many private schools won't offer any transfer credit. State schools can sometime be more generous. 5) Is your ultimate goal to teach at the university level? 6) Do you have a genuine interest in French literature/culture? Or are you just pursuing this option because you think it will improve your odds? 7) Do you have the linguistics background necessary to pursue research in French linguistics?

Forgive me, but I don't quite follow this line of thought. I certainly agree that research topic and ability are the most important part of admissions. However, it's not at all clear to me what undergrad conference and journals have to do with that.

While I don't know your situation, I can certainly recommend the latter as a great option.

For better or worse, the opportunity to do philosophy full-time takes place within certain economic, cultural, and institutional structures. If one wants to have that opportunity and one wants that opportunity to last, it's important to understand those structures and what you have to do exist within them. The willful dismissal of these structures is naive. I happen to think the continental/analytic distinction is pretty philosophically useless. However, that is not to say that the distinction doesn't play and institutional and cultural role in academia.

That's pretty much right. Waitlists are often (but not always) shortly after acceptances. Rejections can be a fairly significant wait depending on the programs. Since acceptance and waitlist emails are sometimes personalized, there can be a bit of a trickle, but usually it's all on one day. Occasionally it extends for a couple days. Rejections normally come all at once, since it's usually a form letter (some of which are better than others).

NB: This tends to be much more difficult in the German academic system, in which students have less contact with professors (particularly those who occupy a Lehrstuhl) and professors and students are much more institutionally removed from one another than in the American system.

Given your profile picture, the image of Dostoevsky in a pant suit just jumped into my head and it made me very happy somehow.

A few quick thoughts: Then you should. Nobody expects an undergrad to have published. Here you've lost me. You're interested in CS and want to major in CS, but you're thinking of dropping it so you can pursue a career in philosophy? CS is the safer career bet and since the odds of success finding employment in philosophy are very low, it seems strange to prioritize it, especially since everything you write here makes me think you're more interested in CS than you are in philosophy. Am I missing something? At the end of the day, you should study what you're interested in. It's good to have an eye towards what you will do afterwards, but that would seem to point even more strongly toward CS. Two other thoughts: I'm not really sure what you have against an MA. You're main justification for pursuing philosophy seems to be that you enjoy teaching. Why not teach CS?

That sounds really freaking cool. Good luck!

I second everything @philosopuppy says about MA programs. Don't underestimate how attached you will become to the idea of an academic career over the course of a PhD program. The ecosystem of PhD programs acculturates you into thinking that a tenure track position is the only valid metric of success. This is bullshit but it's very hard to escape this way of thinking at a certain point in your graduate career. And once you become attached to an academic career, if you're in a program that doesn't actually set you up with high odds to attain one, it's a recipe for misery. So, even if you're convinced that it's the opportunity to study that you want and not merely a certain professional trajectory, it behooves you to attend the best PhD program you can. An MA is great way to enable you to do that. It also allows for an easy exit, if you decide academic philosophy isn't for you. In general, I think it's wise to think about PhD programs in the humanities as a peculiar sort of vocational school, because that really is how they function and operate. I don't necessarily mean to endorse this model, but I think it's important to recognize that that's the way things are. I'm as attracted to the idea of the life of the mind as much as the next person. But the idea of it can be very different from the realities of university life. This doesn't begin to capture the way things are. When I applied to PhD programs the first time (the fall 2014 season), I got waitlisted at a school then ranked in the 40s. They received well over 200 applications and were looking to have a matriculating class of 6-8.

This is mostly seconding what other people have said, but I wouldn't worry too much about being a "non-traditional" students. While there are certainly students who go straight from their BA to a PhD program, I know plenty of people who had more circuitous journeys to grad school. I don't think this should make too much of a difference regarding admissions and I often find that people who had a few years (or more) off before grad school are better off in terms of maturity, motivation, etc. I do think the low-tier undergrad degree will make it hard to get into top PhD programs. The best route for you is almost certainly to pursue a funded terminal MA, after which you can reasonably apply to even top-tier programs (NYU and Rutgers will still be very tough to get into, but there's no reason, in principle, why a Tufts/NIU/Brandeis/UWM/etc MA can't compete for those spots).

I'm a little confused by what you're going for since your questions seem much more directed towards the role of publishing in the academic job market for literary studies than they do with actually publishing in literary studies. If you're thinking of trying to get a job in an English/literature department with a social psychology PhD, that's extremely unlikely. With that caveat aside, here's some answers to your questions. This depends. Going on the market without any publications isn't great (but is done). More than, say, three articles would probably be pretty unusual for someone coming out of a PhD program (though again, it happens). Single authorship is the norm. This may be slowly changing and there are increasinly initiatives encouraging various forms of research collaboration. The vast majotiry of articles published in literary studies are single-authored. I have no idea on the comparative. Conferences matter but more for networking than your CV (though the lack of any conferences probably isn't good). Generally people read a paper at a conference. Sometimes slides with relevant quotes are provided. It's pretty rare for someone to speak extemporaneously for a conference presentations (though it happens). Again, can't help you with the comparative. PhD students don't normally publish books. To get tenure, many departments require that your first book be (at minimum) accepted for publication. They don't count for nothing but they're not as important as articles. They can be a relatively easy way to get a publications since they're usually pretty short. Most reviews consist of a summary with a handful of critical/laudatory comments. They allow scholars to determine if a book's worth reading and sometimes function as a sort of accreditation. More extensive "response papers" are sometimes published by journals, but those are usually by more senior scholars. What counts as a contribution to the field is sort of like asking what the field does. You'll get lots of different answers to that. The only way to really get a sense of it though it to become acculturated in the discipline. A starting point for this is reading lots of academic articles in the field and trying to figure out what they do. Depends on the department/professor/student. General rules. Publishing is good/necessary for professional success. Don't publish sub-par work. Don't focus on publishing to the detriment of your dissertation. Don't publish in sub-par journals. As a grad student, you probably shouldn't submit something to a journal without consulting an advsor. At least one article is probably good. If not an article, then definitely try for a book review. More is better as long as it doesn't extend time-to-degree, or take time away from your dissertation. You also don't want to publish too much though, since things published before getting hired generally won't count towards your tenure review. Book chapters count less than articles but more than book reviews. But that also depends on the book.