xolo

Getting back to the topic of lack of forum activity, the Languages forum has not had a bona fide interesting thread in over a month now. Hardly any activity to speak of at all. I sure hope that this means there are fewer applicants this year. On the other hand, Language departments are usually small affairs, not like the big bad English, Psychology, and History departments. I've heard Professors say that getting a PhD in a language other than English was the same as accepting a life of poverty. They then asked me if I still wanted to impoverish myself. Made me feel really odd, but maybe the word is finally getting out that there are few jobs.

None of my schools said anything about formatting. My discipline's standard is MLA, which requires my name and page number in the header. In reviewing my applications after submission they added my name again along with the application number. No problems, everything is legible.

Don't stress, no biggie. If this is the biggest 'issue' in your apps, you're golden.

Well it seems relevant to me. For Spanish programs, I know at least some of them wanted foreign residence noted on the CV.

So far I'm just relieved to have gotten the apps done. Maybe the waiting will become more nerve wracking as we approach the time when decisions will be made. Right now I'm too busy with finals to worry about it much. I'm not lit, I'm linguistics, but I'm not a traditional student so I'm relying more on my writing, recommenders, and SOP than my academic record. I gave myself 6 months to write the SOP and Writing Sample- way too little time. Maybe I am slow, but I damn near killed myself. How'd it go in previous cycles? Was it very competitive? Espero, sinceremente, que veamos más aspirantes por aquí. Un saludo

Hopefully some other people will join in. Was your MA in lit or linguistics or something else? I am officially in the waiting game. I thought getting the apps together was going to kill me but I managed to get it done. Un saludo

Easy to answer: It's never done, you just run out of time or collapse from exhaustion.

I agree with the preceding posts. I would add that the SOP is used for communicating your message. This means clarity and precision, but also telling your story, not choosing low frequency words

Wyatt, I upvoted you to cancel your down vote - you are too hard on yourself! What I MEANT to say to 1Q84 was simply, don't stress. The app process is super stressful anyway and you don't need to get tied up in knots over little gray areas. I'm not sure people always help themselves by emailing POIs and I'm not sure they always hurt themselves by not emailing.

Contacting POIs seems to be an emotional topic. I tend not to contact POIs unless I have a good reason to. I have, however, had some really good conversations with high ranking professors who could be my advisors - those were achieved through unique ways, almost by chance. So my point is that this is a subjective area and the general answer, like many answers in life, is "it depends". The university systems is from medieval times and I guess it shows, although I see a lot of benefit in this direct one-on-one as well.

I do not consider myself a person with a particularly large vocabulary, but I have had this theory that knowing Latin roots, especially of low frequency words, as evident in a modern version of Latin, helped me. I got a 168V (and we shan't discuss my Q either)

thank you kindly mollifiedmolloy!

Bummer, so close to near perfection. I think the AWA is the least important section and for sciences even less so. "they say" that 3.5 to 4.0 is "safe". It did annoy me when I got a 4.0 and I ended up re-taking even though I said I would never take the GRE over. I studied a little and got a 5.0 the second time, so you can study for that test of formulaic writing. I was surprised by my verbal too, it went from 163 to 168, which was a pleasant surprise. Too bad my Q didn't change much

Thanks for the report shadowclaw. That is about what my experience was also, except in languages there wasn't much lab work discussed, more of a cultural discussion. We did discuss fieldwork and data collection in the context of linguistics. The professor I spoke with was really nice and gave me tons of great ideas. I really think there is a tendency to overthink the interview, at least in my experience, anyway.

How about "While creating the program I was able to explore programming from a hands-on perspective and what started as a chore quickly became a much bigger exploration of what goes into a good program. I then designed the framework for the data collection and this pushed me to learn about the architecture and organization of data"... There is just so much you could do with this!

Is that Hemingway in your avatar? I went from BA math directly to MS Engineering. What field of engineering are you interested in? You really need to talk to professors at the different schools. I found a wide range of pre-requisites, from having to take all the undergrad engineering classes (yuck) to being accepted because I had a math degree. I ended up going to Santa Clara University because at the time they accepted math degrees equally to engineering degrees for grad engineering. It really worked out good but I had to talk to a number of schools.

I agree with your strategies. If you are taking the test computer based, one thing I did was after about a minute if I didn't have the answer I gave what I thought was the answer (you can usually reduce the number of possible correct answers after a minute) AND I MARKED THE QUESTION. This allowed me to answer all the easy questions and start to answer the harder ones and still have 10-15 minutes to circle back and try to crack the remaining questions. For me, especially in math, time is my enemy.

I had the same thing happen to me - I overbooked while obsessing on the GRE and then got a pretty good score, good enough for me to stop obsessing anyway. It does still say "unavailable or absent" on my ETS account for the test session I cancelled, but I sent my scores after the testing and only sent my single best test. I don't think you have anything to worry about, ETS probably has some kind of legal responsibility to maintain records I suppose, but it should say "cancelled"

I studied off and on for 3 weeks and raised my verbal 5 points and my math 1 point. That was with Magoosh which I like. That dang math was sooo boring. I really believe this, and in your case even more so, a big variable is taking the test with the right attitude. You need to stay calm - remember you can take the test as many times as you like (until ETS has the contents of your bank account anyway). So just make sure you have the time set aside for the exam, get there a half hour early, and just do your best. I'm betting you get that high score.

I'm in a humanities field so I'll post my somewhat related musings. Spanish departments are just starting to recognize that not all PhDs are going to get jobs, or at least not going to get good tenure track jobs that end at Professor with no qualifying adjective around the title. I felt I had to put on my SOP that I intend to teach but I really don't know what the prospects are for that. It seems good statistics are not easy to come by. My real interest is research. In the case of Spanish, I was thinking about starting with Latin American studies but found that Spanish departments don't necessarily welcome someone who demonstrates a lack of focus by moving between programs (something to think about if you want to go the MFA --> PhD route).

My bad. I over-reacted to the very thought of writing multiple SOPs from the ground up! Now that you mention it, I do have a question. My "native" SOP is 900 words and it can be reduced to about 700 without too much negative affect. I do have a couple of schools that state 500 words. Do you think a 700 word SOP for a 500 word limit will be a problem?

Oh, I definitely did this, that's just common sense. At first, all schools sort of looked the same. As time went by, they all started to look different. I just didn't write each SOP from the ground up.

I just want you all to know how jealous I am, I think the Languages forum has gone belly up. Hopefully it will pick up. There is no way my SOP is going to be unique to each school. That is too much creative writing, it took me a year to write the sucker, maybe you creative types can handle writing multiple SOPs. What I did was write my SOP and then tried to find schools that matched it. I feel I have a unique story and I feel it is strong. Of course, how I feel doesn't really matter at admission time.