Dr. Old Bill

Yes -- and the comment also evokes the notion that the only jobs worth considering are TT positions at R1 institutions. There's more to the world of academia than ivory towers.

Way to go, you two!

Yeah, it looks like UNC simply hasn't made their decisions yet. I would imagine they'll come this week, but they've traditionally been one of the later programs to notify. No sense in assuming an implied rejection just yet!

Not to dishearten you, but I'm an early modernist, and when I applied to PSU two years ago, I didn't receive an official notice of rejection until April 16th -- yep, a day after the official commitment date to a program. Whether or not that meant I was on an invisible waitlist, the lack of communication was pretty awful. In other words, don't expect to hear from them anytime soon.

I'd give it a few weeks. If you had other offers that you were strongly considering, you could justify contacting them earlier, but otherwise, just remember that there's a good reason for them to do things the way they do them...especially when it comes to funding. When funding info isn't available up front, it usually means that the department is having to liaise with the Graduate School (or elsewhere), who often have their own timelines. This is especially true when fellowships are involved. Either way, it's sometimes hard to be patient, but...be patient.

Thanks, Commissioner Gordon. But yes -- there are lots of funding options on campus, though they're typically "competitive." I would indeed say that most M.A. students in the English department have full or partial funding through TAships or GAships. Personally, I've had a full ride the whole way through, and even managed to teach 101 as an overload...which meant that I actually made more money than the Ph.D. students. At the risk of being a little lazy, I'm going to copy and paste what I mentioned via PM to another UMD M.A. acceptance's query recently -- it's all relevant, I believe: ---------------- Assistantships are officially "competitive" and not guaranteed. That being said, in past years (under a different DGS, mind you) five M.A. students were offered a 1/2 TAship, which allows you to teach in your second, third, and fourth semesters for a stipend of around $9000, and half tuition remission. Not a bad option if you can get it. Beyond that, you are able to mix and match GAships / TAships / RAships (the latter are rare in our field) up to twenty hours per week. In other words, if you are granted the 1/2 TAship option (which is possible, given your interest in rhet-comp), then you can be on the lookout for a 1/2 GAship in any department to make for a FULL assistantship...which will pay all of your tuition and give you a stipend of 18 - 21k per year. You can look for all active GAship / RAship postings here. Bear in mind that anything you find there you will have to interview for. Having said that, you can also sort of root out GAships by being diligent, sending emails to the right people, checking into alternative possibilities, and being in the right place at the right time. This was the case for literally all three of my assistantships. When I first accepted my admission offer to UMD, I figured I might try to supplement my 1/2 TAship offer with working as a tutor in the undergraduate writing center. I contacted the director, sent along my resume, and she let me know that they were actually looking for a replacement for their scheduling / budgeting person who was retiring (and who they couldn't replace with a staff position due to a hiring freeze). I just so happened to have a lot of administrative experience in my past, so I came in, met with the director, and was given a full GAship! This meant I had to forgo my 1/2 TAship, but the DGS at the time let me push it back by a year, meaning that I would be at least partially covered in my second year. Once my first year was coming to a close, they hired a full-time staff person to replace me in the undergraduate writing center, but right around the same time there was a position that opened up in the graduate writing center, and a couple of my co-workers put in a good word for me with the director there (without my even knowing it). Simultaneously, my advisor gave me a heads up about another 1/2 GAship with the graduate field committee for medieval and early modern studies...which is perfectly in my field. Her recommendation was basically accepted without question, and voila! I had two 1/2 GAships that made for one full assistantship. The one problem was that I had the 1/2 TAship, which I couldn't technically accept any longer because of regulation of hours (there's a 20-hour cap). However, the DGS granted me a one-time "overload" to teach a section of English 101, which not only allowed me to get some teaching experience, but also gave me an extra $4600 over and above the $20k I was making from my other two assistantships. It made for a very busy semester -- two 1/2 GAships, a teaching appointment, two courses, and preparing Ph.D. applications -- but it all worked out. That big, long paragraph is all to say that there are lots of funding possibilities. I would go so far as to say that more M.A. students in English have assistantships of some sort than do not. Sometimes this means you have to work a desk job in some weird department like puppet studies or something (I'm kidding...I don't think we have a puppet studies program, sadly), but it also means money and tuition remission. My advice, then, would be to put out feelers in the near future. Contact the writing centers, go through the website and find some of the departments within the College of Arts and Humanities and see if there might be some things that pique your interest...then reach out with a brief, pleasant email to see if they'll be needing a GA in the summer or fall. My situation might sound like I lucked out a few times (and I did), but it's not THAT unique. ---------------- Hope this is helpful!

Definitely the latter! One for each of those paragraphs. Sheesh...

Nothing to add but to say that that's a lovely and inspiring story, @Silabus, and I'm really glad you shared. Kudos!

For those of you accepted to OSU: who is planning on attending their visit day next month? I was going to set up a group PM, but I've lost track of all the various acceptances, since it's a fairly large cohort... I'll be driving in on the Sunday, and should be in Columbus around 2:00. I may do a bit of general driving around the city (looking at possible living areas etc.), but I'd be happy to pick up anyone who happens to be flying in that afternoon / evening and take you to your hotel. I've heard that there may be an unofficial get-together with the DGS and others at a pub near campus on the Sunday night, but haven't heard anything specific yet...so if that's not happening, then perhaps we can have a little pre-visit pub trip of our own? Anyhow, feel free to chime in if you're going to make it to the day for admitted students, and we can potentially work out specific details via PM!

Unfortunately all of their sources are from anywhere between seven and fourteen years ago...

Wow. I know nothing about fountain pens -- in fact, I'm not sure I've ever even used one -- but these posts are giving me a legitimate hankering to go down that particular rabbit hole. All those wonderful, luscious names...

Honestly, this mentality blows my mind. I've heard it in this thread, heard it in other threads, heard it in PMs with other GCers... Its prevalence astounds and angers me. Why is there this underlying assumption among many people that A.) women have to be baby factories, and B.) that getting a Ph.D. definitively means you will never, ever, not ever have children? It's like they think that using your brain too much will dry out your ovaries. My heart really goes out to all of you who have to put up with that extra layer of resistance, and have to deal with the fallout of guilt-trips and other unpleasantness. Amen. Spoken like a true early modernist. Art and knowledge indeed! And turkey legs. Can't forget those large, delicious, roasted turkey legs.

Sorry about your friend, Mel... It was a jerk thing to say, but it was probably borne more of obliviousness than ill-intent. At least I hope. As for your main question, people have generally been pretty supportive of me in this. I'm not going to get too much into personal details, but I sort of beat a lot of odds to get here -- not the same kind of stacked-against-you odds that some others have, to be sure, but I grew up in a family that put almost no value on education, and had a father that might be considered "anti-intellectual." I'm essentially the first person in my family to get a college degree...and as I've mentioned elsewhere, I didn't even start on an A.A. until I was 32. I got a couple of vocational degrees in my 20s, and was essentially an autodidact when it came to reading and writing poetry, and reading and analyzing literature. I only mention this background to illustrate that I'm rather surprised that most of the reaction to me going down the Ph.D. path has been positive. My parents couldn't be prouder, my friends are all happy for me (outwardly, at least), and even my ex-wife, who split with me last year in part because of our different positions in life, is also extremely proud of my accomplishments. It has felt really good, of course, even though I have this odd tendency to enjoy the recognition of my accomplishments while shying away from actual praise. Honestly, the people who have discouraged me from this path the most are other academics...but in each instance, it has seemed to be more out of concern for the state of the industry than my lack of ability to succeed within it. I do get very annoyed at how many people don't get what's involved in going for a Ph.D. You can't blame them, per se, and yet many seem to have this smug (yet often tacit) assumption that we're just spending a few years reading books and writing self-serving essays about literature that will only be read by others in a somewhat incestuous community.

Indeed. This forum is a blend of light-hearted banter, serious advice, legitimate camaraderie, and rampant anxiety, but beneath all of those things is a layer of vulnerability, because we've all spent countless years of education, thousands and thousands of dollars, and an extreme amount of time and effort to get to the point of applying to graduate programs...programs that take a small percentage of worthy applicants. Beneath everything else, the process is extremely serious, and shapes our lives, in large part defining the paths we will take for the next several decades. Pranking on decision results is not even remotely funny, but is instead rather cruel, and I hope the person who created those false acceptances (or purported to create those false acceptances, which is just as bad) has it sit heavy on his or her conscience for awhile.

So does the person who just posted this on the Results page... ...think he or she is being funny? Because that's not funny in the least. Goes to show that it doesn't take much for the seeming legitimacy of the Results board to be compromised.

I was telling @Warelin about this in a PM the other day -- whenever I open my copy of Paradise Lost, I come across this index card I wrote as an undergrad, giving a glib overview of the four main demon strategists in Pandaemonium. I'm sure I would have written it in the margins if there were room. (For what it's worth, I'm totally a Mammon man. Things would have worked out MUCH better for everyone if they only followed his advice...)

Anyone else hoping for a 6:00 AM email from UNC tomorrow morning? Because that's when acceptances went out last year: 6:00 AM on the last Saturday of February...

Here's a vent: this is the second day this week that I've dedicated to working on a paper revision for my Capstone project, and I've never been less motivated...even though it's due on Tuesday. I keep trying to convince myself of the urgency of the matter, but it's not working like it usually does. I know it will get done, because I always get everything done on time etc....but I want to be on the other side of this thing already. UGH.

I have to admit that I don't feel impostor syndrome as acutely as others. That's not to say that I don't feel it -- I do -- but for my own part, I think a bunch of years of non-academic life experience helps to put things in perspective. That being said, I figured something out a few years back that stopped those occasional "impostor" pangs from becoming...more than pangs (pangolins? Hmm...). That realization (which I think is important enough to bold) is that when you are daunted by another's scholarship, you are only daunted by what that person is demonstrating he/she knows; what you don't see is the massive gulf of things that person doesn't know. There's sort of a double-blind at work in academia -- your scholarship is defined by what you can talk confidently and write confidently about, and not what you know nothing about. Psychologically, however, we're naturally inclined to think that if we don't know something that another person knows, our knowledge is somehow inferior...when the truth is that the other person has gaps in knowledge as well...just different gaps. The moral of the story is that impostor syndrome is completely natural, almost universal, virtually inevitable...and fundamentally stupid. This big blob of grey meat inside our craniums is an amazing thing, but sometimes it works at cross-purposes.

So I was a rampant note-taker as an undergraduate, albeit on my laptop. I recognize that studies have "proven" that you retain knowledge better when writing notes by hand than typing them, but studies be damned -- typing worked much better for me. What I find extremely interesting, however, is that I barely take notes at graduate level. Maybe four typed pages per course by the end of the semester. It's truly counter-intuitive, but I find that at the graduate level, you have to be more invested in the level of discussion, and there's a lot more interplay, meaning that you only want to jot down salient points that you'll want to keep in mind for your own benefit. Since there are rarely exams etc., you don't need to take notes for those reasons either. I hasten to add that I might be an anomaly here -- I certainly see others taking a lot of notes in a given graduate course -- but I've gotten by just fine without doing much of it. I am a rampant margin-writer, however. I'm constantly circling, underlining, bracketing, dashing, and writing comments beside items throughout critical essays or other texts. This is part of the reason why I like to own everything I read for class. I use colored Sharpie pens for my margin notes, as it stands out against the usual black of a text. By the way, notes aside, I'm also very much a fan of Pilot G2 .38 pens, and buy them in bulk. There's never a day that goes by that I don't have two regular pens (usually a .38 and a .7) and a Sharpie pen in my pocket.

Most students wear average day-to-day kind of clothes in class -- guys wear jeans or pants, sweaters, sweatshirts, henleys, polos, button-downs, occasionally t-shirts, occasionally shorts. Some dress up a bit more, but that's usually just a question of personal style. For women, it's usually jeans, slacks, leggings, skirts, dresses, blouses, sweatshirts, sweaters etc. In other words, casual wear...though it's rare to see grad students wear anything too casual, like short-shorts / hot pants, sweatpants, pajama tops or bottoms (I'm always amazed by how many undergrads do this...) etc., or anything overly formal unless they're giving a presentation. If I'm going to be up in front of the class for something significant, it's always pants and a long-sleeved button-down for me, and for the women, it's usually business casual skirts / dresses / blouses etc. In other words, you don't need to come to class in professional garb. Teaching is a different story, however. While there's no dress code for teaching at UMD, most grad students (and professors) go the business casual route. I would sometimes wear jeans (nice jeans), but only with a collared shirt...typically a button-down. Likewise, most women do the blouse / skirt thing, or pantsuits, or any number of business-casual-appropriate attire. It's hard to say whether tight pants and shirts would be too "sexy" on campus -- it's possible, but if that's your style and it's not objectively risque, it's probably fine for attending class. You may want to avoid it when teaching undergrads, however. 18-year-old men are easily distracted at the best of times...

Every Rory has a Lorelei within.

Dude. I'm expecting the ghost of Graham Chapman to create an account just so he can say his catchphrase.

I was starting to worry that the three of us have taken over this thread with our silliness, but then realized that the others have a place to vent about it...

1. AHEM. His preferred nomenclature is Meat Loaf, thank you very much. (Oh Marvin, we never knew ye...) 2. Ten silver oak trees, I jump to and fro...