Dr. Old Bill

Yeah, I can vouch for retake going poorly. I don't think I've ever wasted $170 quite so spectacularly (though a night at the River Rock Casino hold'em table comes close...)

Focus on the verbal, and only the verbal at this point. 160 is "fine," but on the low end of "fine." As Mikers86 said, the quant is less important except for in funding situations. But usually cutoffs are amalgam scores (SUNY Buffalo, for instance, has a funding cutoff of 313 combined GRE, though I read somewhere that that can be fudged a bit). Aiming for 310 or above combined is probably a good idea. And since you're an English major, it's probably easier, more intuitive, and generally more sensible to work on getting that verbal up by a few points rather than getting the quantitative up. High scores across the board is the ideal, but in most cases it's chiefly the English department looking at your application, and they generally don't care if you can solve for x.

Moreover, I know a lot of institutions encourage their students to take a gap year after either the BA or MA. The thinking is that since a Ph.D. program is a minimum of a five year commitment, having a year to gain so-called "real world" experience and perspective can be helpful. I think a gap year matters less the older you are, but the bottom line is that a large number of the people applying to the same programs that you will be applying to will have had a year (or more) off as well. So long as your letter-writers remember you, and you can make a simple comment or two in your SOP about why you took a year off, you'll be fine. This process really can take up to a year. I first started researching Ph.D. programs back in late February, and most of the acceptances/rejections will come through by...late February. It's only because I took the process bit-by-bit throughout the year (and had a slow summer) that I was able to feel on top of things. I can definitely see the benefit in taking a year off for similar reasons.

Would you mind elaborating on that, Proflorax? I've heard/read this same sentiment a few times, but never with any details...yet it's something I'm quite curious about. The post-acceptance, pre-admittance limbo region isn't talked about much. What kind of info is imparted after acceptance?

I'm normally tempted to say that no education is useless education...and indeed, if you're planning on spending a life doing a lot of writing, getting the experience of formalized workshopping and structured feedback etc. can probably be very valuable on that front. However, I'm honestly not sure whether or not an MFA will be at all helpful to your chances at getting into a Ph.D. program. It's entirely possible that I'm misinformed, but the sense I get (for good or ill) is that MFAs are generally not seen as academic degrees as such. They're sort of in a category of their own. Since there's typically no (or not much) academic research or writing required in the process of obtaining an MFA, there's very little interplay between the graduate work of an MFA vs. an MA or Ph.D. Literally all of this comes down to your expectations of the respective degrees, however. There are some excellent reasons to pursue an MFA. Usually those reasons include improving one's writing in a structured environment, or having access to, and discourse with, successful authors (and burgeoning authors) in their own right. But if you're going in to an MFA program thinking that it will improve your chances of getting into a Ph.D. program, you'll probably want to do some more research and talk to more professors before you commit to that path. I can only tell you what I've heard, gleaned, and observed, and that's that an MFA doesn't hold a lot of academic / scholarly value. But as the saying goes, your mileage may vary.

I can't speak to the Art History Ph.D., but I can tell you from literally scores of professors and fellow poets that the MFA is all but worthless when it comes to the job market. They're rarely funded, and are offered by a large number of institutions. So in theory, so long as your material is solid, you could probably find an MFA program that would admit you. But when you come out of it, your job prospects are going to be almost exactly the same as they were when you went in. Honestly, the best way to gauge this is to simply pull up a bunch of colleges at random -- community colleges, state colleges, low-level liberal art colleges etc. -- and see how many professors there are teaching with just an MFA. Or I could just save you the time and tell you: not many. Having said all of that, I seriously have no idea about the marketability of a Ph.D. in Art History. It be statistically just as useless as an MFA. Having said that, if there are fully funded Ph.D. programs you could conceivably get into, then you've at least got a few years of income on the path to a doctoral degree. And if it's a true passion of yours, then it might just be worthwhile. For what it's worth (perhaps not much), I'm a fairly "successful" poet, if success as a poet means having a bevy of publication credits, a few poems anthologized, poems solicited, Pushcart Prize noms etc. Almost all of my "success" (again, it's such a strange term for this discipline) came before I even started working on a BA, let alone having an MFA in hand. Oh, and after getting my Ph.D. in English, I'm hoping (perhaps even expecting) to teach creative writing some day. I just plan on taking as many creative writing courses as possible during my program. Some English Ph.D. programs are more amenable to this than others, but again...if you look at creative writing professors at the good colleges, you'll see almost all of them have a Ph.D. Sometimes an MFA too, but usually not just an MFA. Hope some of this is helpful.

SUNY Buffalo might be a consideration. Their poetics program in particular has a sort of "out there" feel, as they express "openness to critical theory, connections to the linguistic flux and polyphony of modern diasporas, and a keen appreciation of the cybernetic worlds of hypertext and digital media." It seems like a program that would be receptive, at the very least, to a more scientific / technological approach.

This has been said elsewhere, but it's also really important to remember that the way the lit exam tests your "knowledge" of literature is in no way conducive to the study of literature! For instance, there was a poem I studied literally two weeks before taking the lit exam. It's a fairly famous poem, typical of this particular poet's style, and thanks to an hour or more of intense close-reading in the classroom (not to mention reading two critical essays that touched on the same poem), I had a very good grasp on the poem and its various interpretations. On the lit test, I was delighted to see this poem excerpted, and five or six questions related to it. I'm sure I got a few of them correct, yet I distinctly remember one "interpretive" question that had the usual five options...and none of them seemed to fit the way I had studied the poem. Even the usually-helpful POE method suggested by the Princeton book didn't help, because all of the options seemed equally implausible. And you know why? because one of the beauties of literature is that it is subjective. My best papers (and indeed, most of my WS) have presented new ways of looking at old texts. That's what we're supposed to do! Five questions with pre-fab analyses just aren't helpful, and aren't even necessarily correct by any objective measure. And the GRE is all about objective measures. What I'm getting at is (again), you can't view anything other than a great score on the GRE subject test as anything more than a checklist item. Great scores might help your application, but a mediocre score will probably not hurt it (provided that your other elements are solid -- the usual disclaimer). A couple of the programs I applied to mention this quite explicitly. So going into the test, be calm. Be cool. Be collected. Take it lightly. View the questions as "trivia." Give it your best shot. Make your best guesses. Try to answer every question unless you're completely baffled. And don't spend the month after the test biting your nails while waiting for your scores. There's just no need!

UPenn is a great program for your field, too. I considered them for awhile, as they have a strong poetics faculty, but it's mostly geared toward the theory side of things, and more recent in terms of periods than what I prefer. But since you're all about theory and 19th and 20th century poetics, it's probably a great fit for you. And Philly's a hockey town to boot.

Hmm...just checking, but are you sure you're not hearing that about Penn State? I hadn't heard anything like that about U of Penn, but Penn State had a fiasco about that last year. (Look up Penn State English in the Results Search to see what I mean). Ice cream and Netflix accounts are cheap enough to make it worthwhile either way, I think.

No no...didn't think you were humblebragging at all (I like that term...is it yours? If so...may I use it?) One very important thing to remember is that the 70th percentile is among English graduate applicants. And usually the only applicants that take the GRE lit test are applying to the "tippy-top tier" schools. This means that if you're getting 70th percentile among the best English graduate applicants, you're in pretty good company. It's not like the standard GRE wherein your percentages are derived from a group of everyone. Science majors, math majors, herpetologists, numerologists, alchemists... Okay, maybe not numerologists and alchemists, but you get the picture. In other words, you can be happy with a 620. Heck, even Harvard's stated "good" score is 650.

We shall see in a week or two, my friend... Fingers crossed! I think I would be disappointed if I got lower than 500. I'd be fine with 500-599. I'd be happy with 600-649, and elated with 650+. Maybe I should make an emoji scale for when the time comes... <500 = 500-599 = 600-649 = 650+ = There. Now when I get my scores back, I'll mark roughly how I did by emoji. I suddenly feel like such a millennial!

Tell me you're not sad about that score... I'll be reasonably happy with a 620 on the REAL test.

I suspect that 700 for a 500 requirement would be problematic. 550 might fly, but considering how many SOPs they see, it will be easy for them to spot an outlier.

I would say conversational French would be somewhere between Intermediate and Advanced. I assume you can read French as well, for the most part. I've taken a couple years of Spanish (through Intermediate level), which is causing me to list it as Intermediate...but I don't have enough command of the language to speak it with any confidence. So you're ahead of me there.

Oh. Unless I'm completely mistaken, this is what folks generally mean by writing a unique SOP. The first two paragraphs of most of my SOPs are the same, though the third (and sometimes) fourth paragraphs are usually program specific. The other thing to bear in mind is that some programs want a 500 word SOP, some want a 1000 word SOP, some have spacing preferences etc., which forces you to have to adapt. But so long as you're doing some customization, you should be fine. My apologies for the misunderstanding.

Well, despite being an English Major / Creative Writing kinda guy (so take this with a grain of salt), I'm not sure customizing your SOP is a creative pursuit. Think of it this way: you're on an adcomm panel, and you come across a SOP that is interesting, yet says absolutely nothing about the specifics of your program, nor does it mention anything about professors the applicant would like to work with. What do you do? You put it aside for safe keeping, and move on to the next application, which has a few sentences making the link between the applicant's strengths, and the strength of your program, perhaps mentioning some professors with similar interests as well. As an adcomm member, your job has just become easier: you can safely say "Oh, this applicant would be a good match for Professor X, who happens to have no graduate students right now." Suddenly the application isn't in the "aside" pile, but in a "potential candidate for so-and-so" pile. This is a fiction, of course -- we don't know exactly how adcomms work. Chances are, they work differently at each program. But by making a few connections for them, you save them from having to figure out where (or if) you fit in the context of all 200+ applicants. Chances are that program / professor specialization puts you in a smaller proverbial "pile" than would a general, one-size-fits-all SOP. And hey...it's mid-October. You've still got six weeks to work on adding a few sentences to each SOP! Yes, I'm a writer, but even for a non-writer it shouldn't be too hard to make a blurb that says "The program at X is a good match for me because it offers __________. Additionally, Professors X and Y have done extensive research in __________, which is in line with what I would like to do during my course of study." Trust me, this brief bit of personalization has the potential to go a long way. No one wants a form letter. Just my two cents, so take them for whatever they're worth!

Don't worry, Thepriorwalter -- though I might not make it as major of a consideration as you do, the presence of a hockey team near where I wind up attending is at least a minor consideration! And I note with no small enthusiasm that all of your chosen programs are in locales with hockey teams as well.

Yes, that's a great point Mikers! I have folders for every institution I'm applying to, and each folder contains its own customized SOP and WS. I also keep a master spreadsheet of all places I'm applying to and their various requirements. Somehow I've managed to have a WS with a page count in the "sweet spot" of all the places I'm applying to. The one exception is Princeton, which states "25 pages," but an email to the DGS received a reply that a 20-page sample would be considered as well. Font types and sizes can help in this regard too, though professors aren't stupid, of course -- they'll notice if your 15 pages is in 8-point font to preserve space.

This has come up amidst a couple of other recent threads, not to mention some of the older "advice" threads, so it probably warrants its own thread at this point. There are MANY great reasons to start your applications early. As in now. Other current and former applicants can certainly confirm this, and will hopefully add some more reasons, but here are a few key ones off the top of my head: It's going to save you from a lot of stress in the long run. This is kind of obvious, but the more you can get done now, the less you have to worry about later. This means that while you're working away on polishing your SOP and WS, you won't have to worry about the time-consuming process of inputting countless pages of biographical information. All applications are different. This is literally true, just as much as it is figuratively true. Even programs that use the same general software will have vastly different requirements and expectations. If you are doing a bunch of applications at the last minute, you might very well overlook some of the nuances of application requirements (like what format they want your transcripts in, for instance). Transcript requirements vary. This is an important sub-point of the above item. As mentioned in another thread, some programs require that transcripts are ONLY in black and white (in other words, you'll generally need to have a hard copy and scan it in as "greyscale"). Others require transcripts as .pdfs AND as direct mailings. Others don't want transcripts mailed to them at all. Some want only the official transcripts. Others are fine with unofficial / web transcripts. All these finicky little details take time to sort out...so doing an application every few days or so is remarkably helpful. Letter-writers need time. If you are planning on applying to, say, a dozen programs, and decide to do all of your applications on December 1st, how much time will this give your letter-writers to upload every letter? Even if you've given them all advance warning, and they've theoretically completed all of their letters, it can take a lot of time for them to actually upload those letters. We're talking about English professors, after all: wonderful, wonderful people, but not typically known for their computational prowess. And if they happen to have procrastinated on writing your letters, those first couple of weeks in December, waiting to see if they've finally managed to upload their kind and essential words about you, can be agonizing. Save yourself that trouble by starting applications early and sending the recommender links. You don't have to complete an application in one sitting. At least, none of the applications I've completed have forced this. In most cases, I was able to fill out a chunk of information, save it, then come back to it later. In other words, it's a fluid process, and even if you haven't completed your SOP, CV, or WS, or haven't received your GRE scores yet, getting the finicky personal details out of the way will invariably save you time in the long run. You don't have to pay until it's submitted. No money? No problem. Well, until you actually click on the "submit" button, that is. But this works both ways: if you submit a couple of applications each week, you're paying up to maybe $250 per week, as opposed to shelling out upwards of $1200 in a short span of time (using the "ten applications" model above). It's the same amount of money over all, but for some it is a heck of a lot more convenient to spread out the payments... They take longer than you think. No, seriously -- even if you're thinking "Oh, they'll just take around an hour each, so I can bang 'em all out in a day," you're probably wrong. Normally they do take around an hour on average, but there are too many variables to list here...and any variable can cause a long delay. Even little things like quickly re-reading your SOP (or even your WS) after it has been uploaded tacks on time...and it's important to give all documents at least a quick once-over after they've been uploaded to make sure you haven't written "Stanford" instead of "Princeton" somewhere. Minutiae like that can instantly render your application worthless. Applications and finals don't mix. If you're currently working on a BA or MA, there's a good chance that you'll have term papers, final exams, presentations, or other stress-inducing items for you to deal with. Do you really want to feel the pressure of current school deadlines with application deadlines at the same time? The answer is no, no you do not. You'll feel better about yourself. Perhaps this sounds sentimental, but it shouldn't be discounted. As Unraed pointed out in another thread, there's something to be said for having actually started or even completed your application. It makes the process more "real" than it was before. Seriously, seeing an email come through with the subject line "Thank you for applying to Harvard" (or institution of your choice) is an instant rush, no matter how stoic you may be. This is merely a sample of good reasons why you should start your applications sooner rather than later. There are many others that I have either decided not to mention, or simply haven't thought about. I'm sure others will chime in with nuggets of equal or greater wisdom. P.S.: Incidentally, as I was writing this post -- in mid-October, no less -- I received an email notification telling me that one of my letter-writers has uploaded her LOR. Because I had started all of my applications, I was able to send her all of the upload links, and she opted to take Fall Break as her opportunity to write and submit her letters on my behalf. Sure beats worrying about it in December...

Yes. UMD and Harvard both require that. UMD actually requires you print out a form, manually write out every English course (and courses tangentially related to English and other languages you've studied), scan it in, and upload it in addition to your transcripts. Others require that transcripts are ONLY in black and white (in other words, you'll generally need to have a hard copy and scan it in as "greyscale"). Others require transcripts as .pdfs AND as direct mailings. Others don't want transcripts mailed to them at all. Some want only the official transcripts. Others are fine with unofficial / web transcripts. All these finicky little details take time to sort out...so doing an application every few days or so is remarkably helpful. Otherwise it can be easy to conflate all the assorted requirements, no matter how organized you might be...

Oh yes. Nothing beats the feeling of completion. Except, perhaps, the feeling of admittance...

I asked this in a thread a month or so ago. You just put as many schools as you want there. Folks who responded in that threat mentioned that schools like to see what other programs are being considered in addition to their own -- it's primarily for statistics, and shouldn't have any impact on your application. By the way, even though you're not going to have a writing sample done until the end of November, there's no reason not to start the applications and get some of the basic stuff out of the way to save you the time (and tedium) of having to do it later. One of the underrated things about this whole process is how much time it takes to fill out an application. Mine averaged around an hour...perhaps a bit more. I've applied to 14 of my 16 schools so far. If I'd left it until a few days before the deadlines, it would have been a very stressful rush to get them all done in time. Every single application I've completed allows one to save his / her progress. So in most cases you can get the vitals out of the way and just upload your WS and SOP when you're ready.

My SOP has winged its way off to 14 places already, so an "exchange" might be akin to closing the barn door after the horse is glue, on my end. I would be happy to read and comment on the occasional SOP, however, so long as it's not needed back immediately (i.e., I'm busy, but I enjoy squeezing stuff like this in when I can).

Great thread idea, Queennight! I feel like I could write countless paragraphs about my choices, but I'll try to keep it brief... Oh, and don't feel bad about changes to your list. Three weeks ago I was certain I would apply to 14 schools. Then I took another look at Rutgers and saw a few things that appealed to me (placement rates, location, ability to take courses at Princeton etc.). Then I was convinced that I'd cap my list at 15, before I decided to apply to Brown just yesterday. It's a little more theory-focused than I prefer, but there are three POIs there who have very similar interests to my own, and I had been on the fence about it for a very long time anyhow. Other than the $102 of application fee and GRE score sending, I figured it couldn't hurt. Most, if not all of the programs I am applying to are "top-tier," and some of them are "tippy-top tier." Believe it or not, this is not about prestige, but simply because the fields I am most interested in -- transhistorical prosody, formalism, history of the lyric etc. -- are the strongest at these institutions (save for one which has one excellent POI in an otherwise weak poetry department). At Yale, Princeton, and Harvard, I can rattle off a half-dozen professors who have extremely similar interests to my own, and having contacted grad students at each program, all signs indicate that each of these places would be a great fit for me personally. I have to be very careful not to get my hopes up, of course, since they are all quite exclusive, but I honestly believe I have a decent shot at getting into one of them, at least. Most of the other programs are in a very similar boat for me, just minus the sheer number of like-minded POIs. UMich, Northwestern, U of Chicago, Stanford, U of Wisconsin all have prosodists and poetical historicists on faculty, as do some of the other programs. A few of the other places I've applied to, like UMD, might be a little weaker in terms of exact matches with my interests, but they make up for it by having a few faculty members who are in the ballpark of my interests, and also have other benefits, like great placement rates, funding, or even location. Being married, and to a wife with a good career no less, there are other considerations involved -- I would prefer an urban setting in an area with an abundance of arts opportunities. This is why the only application I may slightly regret is the one to Penn State -- nothing against their program, but the sheer remoteness of location might prove problematic. My wife and I are fully prepared to live apart, if need be, but that's obviously more expensive and undesirable if it can be otherwise avoided. A final consideration with many of the programs I have applied to is the ability to take a few creative writing courses along the way. As a fairly widely published poet already, I would love to be able to get some kind of accreditation for my written endeavors along the path to getting a Ph.D. in English or English Literature. This would, in theory, broaden some of my future job placement horizons. It's one of the main reasons why I've applied to Cornell's joint MFA/Ph.D. program, and also why Northwestern and WUSTL hold a fair amount of appeal for me...not to mention a few others. Overall, I don't know if I could make any effective "ranking" of the programs I'd most like to get into. There are probably ten I'd be over the moon to be accepted to, another four or five that I would "happily accept," and just one that I would be slightly trepidatious about. Of course, I may add one or two more applications before all is said and done, so tune in next month... ETA: Dammit, I did wind up writing countless paragraphs... Apologies to the tl:dr crowd.