tinuvielf

I applied to the English program and my status has not changed online yet. It still says check back in the future. (No Y's in the admit sections.) Apparently the decision hasn't made it to the graduate admissions office yet. Hope you hear from them soon. Keeping my fingers crossed for you.

Thanks for offering up your knowledge, tlsaborido. I guess I have two questions. Is it easy to get around without a car in Davis? And what's the apartment scene like there? I guess I'm wondering if a person could afford to eat after paying rent/utility bills on a grad stipend of what I'm guessing might be $1200 or $1300 a month. (I don't have a clue what the stipend would be yet, but I saw some data from about 6 yrs back that gave $14,559/yr as the stipend for English grads at Davis). Thanks again for volunteering and good luck with everything!

Intextrovert... did your acceptance email/phone conversation say something about an accepted students' weekend? Mine didn't. Although I wonder if that might be because I'm international and they don't know if I can make it to the U.S. I've been checking out apartment info and other stuff on Davis. It seems a fair kind of city and since it's only about 20-30 mins from Sacramento, it shouldn't be too bad. The prof who emailed me said he was on his way out of the country for a few days but would give me a call when he got back later this week. I'm writing down questions to ask him, so I'll broach this one concerning the campus visit. Congrats on being accepted!! We should get each other's email and other info and chat sometime. You can email me through my profile. It'd be great to meet you as there's a possibility of our being colleagues in the future.

This one had me in stitches!!

Hahaha... One of my UG professors had an office that sounds a lot like that. It was the most envied office of the department. He wasn't the dept. head, but he was sort of the grandfather of the department, so was allowed to have the best office. It was amazing. And his office television seemed to be always on. He was also very gothic. A Romantic genius. At his house in the livingroom (where the English Club often met) he had a throne...

Okay, well this is somewhat encouraging. One thing that's been worrying me though is my non-US-institution grades. We have no GPA system, and the grading scale is ridiculous. B-plusses are like A's in my department, and there's no A-minus on the scale. I'm afraid the adcoms are going to take one look at my grades and throw away my file. Plus Yale's English department website pretty much says only the undergraduate GPA really counts in their admissions process. Here's a quote: "Selection is based on the applicant's undergraduate record, the results of the Graduate Record Examination and the GRE subject test on "Literature in English", evidence of motivation supplied in the candidate's personal statement of purpose, evidence of ability to do advanced work as expressed in a writing sample (10-15 pages) and supported by three letters of recommendation, and sufficient preparation in languages." All that bold type is their emphasis, not mine. (And, btw, I goofed and sent in a 20-page writing sample by accident But what of all those people who improve in the master's years?? I guess the original link to the Chronicle Forum that got this discussion going addressed that issue: "automatic rejection." (Sigh)

I do acknowledge the fact. I'm quoting myself when I say "Of course, non-native English speakers are at a disadvantage in such tests—a large disadvantage, and I don't mean to discount that." I also acknowledge that GRE verbal measures a great deal more than just vocabulary. (And I'm not talking about intelligence.) It measures your knowledge of a given language, which involves familiarity with colloquial expressions and other nuances that simply may not translate from one language to another. Non-native speakers have it hard. I'd be the very last person to say that they are not disadvantaged by the test. I'm always in awe of the non-native speaker who manages a high score on the verbal portion of that test. My earlier post was simply an attempt to point out an area in which many (esp. Indo-European language speakers, as I also mentioned) do possess something like a wedge into doing well on the test. If it sounded like was disregarding the hurdles internationals face, I assure you that was not my intention at all.

I think we should also take into consideration the conflation (inbreeding?) of vocabulary at the higher levels of intellectual discourse. Take any French/Russian/German novel and try to read it. Then take a lit theory or philosophy text in the same language and try to read that. As a person exposed to difficult English vocabulary, you'll have an easier time with the high-brow theory and philosophy texts than you will with the basic novel. That's been my experience, anyway. Plus, many everyday words in non-English, European languages (especially Romance and Germanic ones) share the same root as “difficult” English words. I remember hanging out with a married couple, one of whom was an educated American and the other a less-educated Colombian. Once when the American (wife) used the word “castigate,” her husband looked up sharply and expressed his surprise that English “had that word too!” In Spanish “castigar” is just your basic word for “punish”; in English it’s a hardish word. The point is that educated international students do have a certain advantage regarding many difficult “GRE” words. Educated non-native speakers of any language often bring more to the table than they realise—especially if the languages in question are of the Indo-European family. I use my knowledge of Spanish a lot when I'm trying to learn new words. I find my knowledge of Spanish (in general) and my knowledge of hard English vocab useful when faced with words/phrases in French and Latin (of which I have very very limited knowledge). I also use my knowledge of English when looking at stuff in Greek (with which I’m also almost entirely unfamiliar, but which shows up from time to time in books I read). I'm sure it works from the other end as well. Of course, non-native English speakers are at a disadvantage in such tests—a large disadvantage, and I don't mean to discount that. I just want to point out (among other things) what no one else has apparently noticed: the linguistic commonalities that exist among the vocabulary in use in various languages at the higher levels of academia. This reasoning would also appear to apply in cases similar to those of your friend who's from Benin, as that country's official language is French.

Favorfire: I think I understand the spirit of your comment and am sympathetic toward it in some respect. However, many (if not most) of the underrepresented minorities who take the GRE do in fact care how well they do, and they study quite hard. Yet the fact remains: they often do worse than non-minorities. The reason is that there's more to it than cultural mores' simply leading us to *want* to do better on standardised tests. Those same mores were often inculcated in our parents, who were likely heavy handed in encouraging those behaviours in us when, in our youth, the desire simply wasn’t there. Most minorities didn’t have that, and when perhaps in their teens they "wised up" and came to want it as badly as the rest of us, they had a lot of catching up to do. And their competition wasn't just standing around and giving them the time to do it. During those formative years when our parents (and our teachers, even our environment) were pushing us to study hard and making it very nearly impossible not to, the education we were picking up was not only invaluable, but indispensable to our current ability to present ourselves attractively in all those areas adcoms look at and ultimately to do well in graduate school. In one of my education classes, I learned about a cognitive instrument known as the “schema,” which refers to the framework of knowledge one possesses. It is constructed over time and acts as a foundation on which other (related) knowledge is built. But it’s more than that too, because it works as sort of a filing cabinet that makes it easier to organise and retrieve data. The long and short of it is that the more information you have, the easier it is to gain more. That’s why people who are coming from behind have a harder time catching up. So while I appreciate where you’re coming from (your comment is based on the nature vs. nurture debate—your argument being from the nurture side), it’s rather unfair to imply that culturally/economically disadvantaged grad-school hopefuls simply aren't studying as hard as we are. Chances are they're having to spend some of that study time learning things that we already learned long before we were the ones pushing ourselves to do well. As far as GRE scores go and the argument about socio-cultural-economic biases and all that... I think that coaching has perhaps helped for many people, so that the gap between underrepresented minorities’ scores and their counterparts’ seems wider than it perhaps ought to be--all other factors (including the disparity between quality of elementary/secondary education for different demographics) remaining the same. Whether the expensive kind of coaching (Kaplan, etc.) is better than the type you could provide for yourself via a little sleuthing on the internet—that remains to be proven conclusively. I’m somewhat sceptical. I think the difference exists in the quality of the academic foundation upon which such “coaching” is expected to rest. The difference between the outcome of such tests for a person who has had a strong and focused K-thru-Undergraduate academic career and that of a person whose formative (K-UG)years have been less academically focused is akin to the difference between total immersion and classroom study when learning a language. It’s the difference between being bombarded with the relevant knowledge 24/7 and being exposed to it only in school. It makes a HUGE difference. Rote memorisation isn't the only thing that earns anyone their GRE score. It might elevate our scores from 1300 to 1500, but try to think about what got us those first 1300 points. Don't think adcoms don't know or care about what the first 1300 mean.

Glaring 'D' in a stupid water ballet class that I didn't even have to take. Actually it was Aquatic Exercises. No publications. Unknown/unrespected Christian school (UG) in Middle-of-Nowhere, U.S. Recommenders who went to pretty good schools, but are still basically unknown. One school that still hasn't updated the status of my application to "complete" and is supposedly missing my last transcript, even though I sent it FedEx five days before the deadline and FedEx's tracking service provided the name of the person who signed for it. I wrote an email to the admissions dept. telling them all this and they still said they couldn't provide any info on the status of my app. All that for $95 in application fees! Thanks a lot. I feel better already. I like this thread...

I'm about to start On the Road too. My copy of Kerouac's first MS (The Original Scroll) should be arriving from Amazon about next week. Maybe we can compare reactions to it. I must admit, I haven't yet read On the Road--even the regular edited version. I've read The Town and the City (which I loved--his language/diction seem like transliteration of the universe's own). Also read many of his letters. Looking forward to reading his most famous work now though. Interestingly, I recently read a play by Wole Soyinka called The Road.

I've applied to six schools with one more application to complete (all is ready to be mailed tomorrow). The schools are Brown, University of Reading (UK), Harvard, Columbia, UC-Davis, WUSTL, Yale. My reason for applying to these is that they all have faculty that have an interest in literature and science, and I would like to explore how the scientific discourse of the early 20th century impacted the literature of the Modernists. The worst case scenario I envisioned (apart from being rejected by every school) was not getting my transcripts from my current university in on time. I had a bad experience with a professor who took several months to submit a grade for me. Only a letter to the dean was forceful enough to induce him to submit my grade. When I found out from other students that he was notorious for that I began to panic, but luckily complaining to the dean did the trick. If I don't get in anywhere... I might try to take a trip to South America somewhere and learn Spanish fully once and for all. Or I'll just stay at home and get a job. Either way, I'll pursue my research topic on my own time. Books great enough to distract... Tough one, since a lot of the literature books feel like work, especially when you feel compelled to read with a pencil or highlighter. I personally find popular science books interesting, but of all the "literature" books I've read it's been Edith Wharton's works that have been page turners. Ethan Frome and The House of Mirth are wonderful and great at keeping you interested in the people. The Never Ending Story is also good and distracting. It gave me the feeling I had as a child when reading came with no strings attached. Good luck to everyone!!

The House at Pooh Corner is wonderful, btw. Just my way of catching up on all those wonderful kids' stories I missed by not having access to them in Jamaica when I was small . Also reading The Never Ending Story.

Wow, you're actually reading Herodotus' histories? Impressive. You seem to be a big Coetzee fan. I've read The Master of Petersburg (MoP) and Waiting for the Barbarians. Reading MoP was like walking into a crypt. It was so dark all the time. I liked that about it though. It sort of freaked me out a bit when I got to the section where the protagonist declared himself to be Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky. I'd had no idea going in it was a re-writing of Dostoevsky's The Devils. Now I feel I'm obligated to read The Devils just so I'll get any references I'm sure I've missed. I started reading Elizabeth Costello a few weeks ago, but got distracted by work. Fielding sounds like great fun. I haven't read anything by him yet, though I get a Dickensian vibe when I think of his work. Oh, I should also mention that there's a Librivox recording of Ulysses that I've been using to make reading that tome a bit easier. It seems to be a recording of a live reading event, which means its treated pretty lightly--people laughing when they've made mistakes and stuff like that. Very informal, but can be helpful if you don't take it too seriously (which I did a bit too much at first). Happy reading.