John_Duble_E

We have a Science Fiction and Technoculture Studies designated emphasis at UC Riverside--it's a huge thing here, and Sherryl Vint is pretty big in the field.

TIMOTHY MORTON

Once again you completely and totally ignore job placement statistics in favor of anecdotal browsing. The top programs often place well, but I have no idea why you are so stuck on the idea that only top 20 schools get their graduates jobs. Not everybody wants or should want an R1 job (I do, but I will live if that doesn't happen.) Here is an interesting article on the R1 bias in the job hunt. There are some programs with very low job placement and completion rates, and applicants should really look closely at that information, but many excellent programs with strong placement exist on all rungs of the methodologically unsound "rankings."

For what it's worth, I've a thing for browsing the CVs of faculty members I admire (for whatever reason) or who I just find interesting. This is regardless of discipline. So, I can say I've viewed at least more than a hundred CVs of faculty members who are doing exciting research (and, accordingly, are either at major public/private research institutions, or leading SLACs). I only know of one professor who did their highest level of work at a non-"brand-name" institution. 

and you continue to be bad at reading

that article did nothing to refute anything I said. it's framed in apology. its point is not "you can get a job at a research institution with a degree from a lesser school," its point is "hey, getting a job at a smaller school ain't all that bad." ok, sure. and how many people who try to get PhDs at lower ranked schools have no research aspirations? and as the job market becomes more and more flooded, who is to say that even positions at these schools may not go to the plenty of graduates from top named schools? given how abysmal the job market is regardless of who you are or where you went, frankly more people should only be bothering with top schools with a track record of placing people in positions that both pay money occasionally and also allow you to do more than act as a caretaker of overprivileged idiots flooding upper-crust liberal arts schools A, B, and Z. I don't care if you hate the ivy league, I don't care if you don't think rankings are worthwhile--frankly I don't think I care about anything you think--but there are people who obviously do care about those things, and those people happen to be in charge of whether or not you get a job. luckily for you, Buffalo is quite highly ranked. so you and your frankly annoying milquetoast regurgitation of every platitude of academia are more than on track to pollute our educational institutions with your mediocrity. fifteen years from now I'm sure you'll happily tell little suzy english about all the wonderful paths a PhD from Bumfuck McNamedafteraphilanthropistnoonehasheardof U will open up for her, so long as there are enough Bumfuck U's holding enough conferences and running enough journals to ensure that you will look busy enough to secure tenure while you encourage people to follow their dreams all the way to foodstamps and suicide.

hey-o! the things you can say when you no longer plan on posting here!

Jobs

as a fun exercise, go click through the bios/CVs of professors at any school you've heard of. see where they got their PhD's from.

This will do nothing to better your chances for a Ph.D. in English literature.
 
 
Sure.
 
 
DO ALL THE MASTERS

Yes, but it's also better not to attack and/or deride said individual for being "woefully misinformed." Better to kindly enlighten them on the (grim) realities of the situation, wish them luck, and move on. Anyway, moving on...

Everyone on here is so mean, it's pretty amusing

My waitlist converted... I'll be attending Texas A&M as a direct-admit PhD student! Hooray!!!

It's possible I'm the last person to declare themselves in this thread but I have officially accepted Brandeis' offer. I'm not sure there was EVER another option for me but the school named after the Supreme Court justice.

LOL @ thestage downvoting my gif explosion of celebration for gwwg. What a terribly rotten party pooper.

As long as the visit day goes well tomorrow and the department isn't a bag of dicks, I'll be officially accepting my offer from Ohio State!

"Based on my own experience (I attended two third-rate state schools, and now
am getting an MFA from a major state school):"
 
Yes, but applying to a MFA program is not quite the same as applying to a MA or PhD English program...the MFA programs do not care about GRE scores.... and much less concerned about where you received your undergraduate degree.... 

Then someone please explain how people get a 4.5 on the writing portion and still get into an English program? It would seem that if a program begins with numbers they're not very consistent.

Edit: Not that I disagree to an extent, but if we take the results board for its word, some recent acceptances had 4.0 and 4.5 writing portion numbers, including a Stanford acceptance, which seems counterintuitive.

Indeed, this is often the case. Hence why I shake my head when people mention the irrelevance of the GRE in the context of applications. Very often these scores are particularly crucial for top programs. And if they are not used as initial  cut-off marks they will almost undoubtedly be weighed in some fashion.

Headed back west! Arizona State it is! Whew, it's a lonnnng way from Maine.

Lol, wow. Ok, first of all, there is no need for rudeness. I am willing to accept that there are plenty of good qualities about everywhere and that there are plenty of people happy to live everywhere. I have also, somewhat clearly given the list of schools I applied to, found some schools that I am willing to move to certain places for. But, frankly, grad school is one of the few times in my career where I will have some say in location so to deny that my feelings of safety had some say in determining where I applied would be just a lie. (I also recognize, as someone who has been a victim of a hate crime in a super liberal pocket of a blue state, that this is not necessarily logical but, having experienced what I did, feeling safe matters to me a lot more when I know I can't actually control being safe.)

Yes, as a political science major, I have a fairly extensive understanding of state/federal law. Enough to know, too, that federal anti-hate crime legislation is virtually non-existent and poorly enforced at the state level when it does exist. Don't be snide.

We are all weighing different things in different ways. For some of us, location matters a great deal. I'm not judging or attacking anyone for NOT caring about location, please extend the same courtesy.

Yeah, totally. Because lit faculties/grad students at UGA, Emory, Arkansas, LSU, Auburn, Tennessee, Vandy, South Carolina, Duke, UNC, Rice, UT-Austin, Chapel Hill, and Mississippi are full of right-wing Evangelical bigots and the college towns/metro areas have nothing to offer beyond the stereotypes propagated by people who have never been there.

Oklahoma and Texas are not so bad. I wouldn't trade my life here for anything. Looking forward to Baton Rouge, too.

Congrats! We're glad to have you! :-)

Congrats! We're glad to have you! :-)

Super pumped to be able to say: officially attending Rice University in the fall!

Look, here's the deal: people know rationally that rankings don't matter. But they want to feel validated and justified by those ratings even as they understand them to be bullshit. So they gravitate towards whatever ratings they feel support their own choices and their own path. 
 
 
But why are they off the wall? Where does that opinion of yours come from? Yes, prestige matters. But actual prestige and perceived prestige for those outside of the current academy are very different things. People flip out about the NRC rankings because they aren't the usual "Berkeley plus the Ivy League" stuff that people gradually assume. I'm no expert, not close. But UConn being above Brown is the opposite of off the wall, if you actually look at the quality of the faculty, the recent publication history, and their ability to place students in jobs. Arizona State over University of Chicago? I'm on board, based on who is actually there now rather than on broad notions of school quality that are based on undergraduate exclusivity, which has precisely nothing to do with the quality of an English doctoral program. If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say that you're assuming that the quality of literature doctoral programs should more or less track with the assumed prestige of undergraduate institutions. And frankly, I think that is a profoundly mistaken perspective, and one that has resulted in an ossified notion of quality in English, to the detriment of people working in the field. It makes it impossible for vibrant programs of quality scholars to advance, thanks to the legacy of what a program once was decades ago.
 
So I guess the question is: on what basis do you justify assuming that UConn is necessarily a worse program than Brown?