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For what it's worth, a prof. of mine got into Notre Dame with a paper on a 19th century topic. Not that that's the same as a paper that's more methodologically innovative, and not that I'm wholeheartedly recommending that--I certainly chose the portion of a longer paper that I'm submitting as my ND sample because of its philological work, and it's a fairly traditional piece of scholarship. But there is precedent for something that might seem to be outside of Notre Dame's "box" still passing muster!

Welcome! While keeping both the abysmal nature of the academic job market and the ridiculously low admission rates of highly-ranked programs in mind can only ever be a good thing, those Cornell statistics are perhaps not the best illustration of it. They show a 50% increase in graduate applications overall, sure, but if you look at the breakdown at that link the vast majority of the increase has been driven by applications to Cornell's MA programs--professional and otherwise. Cornell doesn't offer an MA in English; it's a direct-admit PhD school, and according to those figures applications to Cornell's PhD programs are only up 13% from 2003, not 50%. That's still an increase--and even if applications had stayed steady, or dropped (we should be so lucky!), the dismal job prospects at the other end of the process should be enough to give applicants pause, no matter the bleak outlook for admission. But still worth clarifying!

As little as I'm studying now that classes have begun, when I do study, it's more often for the subject test. Partially that's because I'm taking it first, but also because I think that, at least for me, it can be studied for more readily than the general exam. That doesn't reflect the tests' relative importance, though, I don't think--sure, while I have some schools on my application that require the subject test, none of them have firm cutoffs for it, whereas the general exam is often used to help determine funding funding, hit basic admissions cutoffs for the graduate school, etc.

Yeah--unless I get a score that is ridiculously phenomenal, I'm only sending it to places that absolutely require it--and even in that (impossible) scenario, I'd only additionally send it to programs who specifically say scores are "helpful," "will be considered," or some other such language, in addition to them not being required. Least important part of the application, time better spent on SOP/writing sample, extra money, etc etc etc.

If it were I, I'd definitely do the graduate track--for me, I think the opportunities afforded by the smaller class size would outweigh the paper requirement, especially since you plan on doing OE work in graduate programs. Besides, by the time you need to be kicking out that paper you'll no longer have the GRE on your plate!

The law school example is an especially interesting one. There was a glut of lawyers that resulted from blue-chip legal hires cratering during the recession, which was exacerbated by more and more people attending law school hoping to find a way out of that recession. But the situation has begun to show signs of, if not turning around, at least beginning to self-correct--after the truly horrible press that going to law school as a career choice got in the past few years, in 2014 law school applications were down a whopping 37% from 2010 and the current first-year class will be the smallest in 40 years, which is a pretty stunning shift. I have zero data on the topic (out of laziness; I'm sure it's readily available) but I wonder if graduate applications in the humanities will see (or are seeing) the same decline.

I, for one, have never had cleaner counters than I do right now.

My classes start this week, and even though it will be an intense semester I am SO ready for them to begin--I keep reloading my school's course management page, waiting for syllabuses to be uploaded! I meet w/ two of my letter writers to get their revisions to my SOP next week, and to have the one of them who's in my subfield sign off on (what hopefully it) the final draft of my WS. I haven't yet started doing any actual application filling out, and probably won't, frankly, until after I'm done w/ the GREs (and freaking out about the GREs) in early October. (Except for those programs that require complete apps before letter writers can do their thing, of course.) It's going to be a busy fall, but like WT, I'm glad I took the summer to get (at least most of) the fiddly bits out of the way. If I have to do some of the application materials while I'm in coursework, I'd rather it was form completion, and not major writing! I've never been turned down for a letter before, but then again I've tried to mostly use profs with whom I have a good relationship, and who've already offered to write letters, as opposed to asking them cold. Were I turned down, I of course hope I'd handle it w/ grace, even though I'm sure there'd be a moment or two (followed by a cocktail or two) of self-doubt. But after all, better someone turns me down because they're not familiar enough with me, my capabilities, or my work than they say 'yes' and write a lackluster, general, 'meh' letter, right?

I've had this same issue. I'm very comfortable making very traditional arguments based on linguistics, close reading, and historical/cultural context, but while I have plenty of theoretical interest (and firmly believe that any tool for working with texts can be profitably applied to any text) my background isn't nearly as strong there as it is in other areas. (And yes, I realize that there is no literary discussion that happens in the absence of a set of assumptions that underly our reading practice--i.e. 'theory'--and so valorizing some practices as 'traditional' and others as 'theoretical' blah blah blah boilerplate disclaimer etc etc etc.) In short, I feel very much behind the curve, too, and so I'm less giving advice than seconding your question for other more theoretically-inclined medievalists here! For what it's worth, I had a very productive conversation with a prof about this in the spring. He gave me a big ol' honking reading list based on my specific interests, but in general he said affect is quite big at the moment, as is "Thing Theory," and issues of gender and sexuality spring eternal. As far as specific journals to look in, you'll know these, but Exemplaria and maybe postmedieval. Also consider checking out In the Middle?

Don't hide! Come back! Which programs have you seen that require OE of everybody? Are they US programs? I think that's incredibly cool! (And not just because, oh, I dunno, I want there to be a robust market for people qualified to teach Old English in a few years.)

Of course, I feel the same way about both classicists and theory people--two groups each able to look at (what appears to me to be) impenetrable language and get it like it's their mother tongue!

Seriously, WT, we're where shit's at.

Felibus is right on with charts--write out your paradigms, over and over, until you bleed ablatives! I haven't used Wiktionary for looking up Latin morphology, but I know a lot of people who do really like it, and have used it in all sort of classes; when I'm looking to, ahem, complete a translation without spending too much time puzzling over parsing I use Perseus's Word Study Tool. It has some idiosyncrasies (it doesn't handle prefixed verbs well, for example), but I like that it's linked to full dictionary support (Lewis and Short), which is often necessary. The University of Chicago has a free app called Logeion that's pretty sweet, too--it doesn't have morphological lookup capabilities (you need to know what headword you're looking for), but not only does it have Lewis and Short, it has Du Cange, which is the major medieval Latin dictionary. (Downside: De Cange only gives uncommon defs not found in other more basic dictionaries, and its definitions are in Latin, so it's not intended to be your first stop.) A lot of the stuff I said in my ginormous OE post applies: take the time to really get morphology and syntax down, and start reading continuous unadapted Latin as soon as possible. I know a lot of people have trouble making the transition from textbook Latin to real Latin, but I think this varies based on what textbook your intro class uses--I hear it more as a complaint about Wheelock's than other programs. And read fun things! There are a ton of Latin readers out there, that cover just about any kind of literature you'd like to read--and that often focus on the proverbial juicy bits--all with appropriate aids (glosses, glossaries, notes) for students. Knowing your interests, Hreaðemus, there's a cheap student edition of extracts from Bede that might be right up your alley! I haven't used that one myself, but I can recommend other readers I've used (and some specifically medieval ones) if you or anybody's interested. There are lots of bilingual options (Loeb, Dumbarton, I Tatti, depending on your period of interest), too, and the simpler texts in those are great when you've got syntax and morphology down but maybe don't have as much vocabulary. Before that they can be a bit too much of a crutch, I think, but when you're at the point where you can see that a Latin sentence says that "BLANK did BLANK to the BLANK," but you just don't know what any of the blanks mean, they're useful.

I'm pretty well-versed ('okay-versed'?), but by no means an expert--I'm still a lowly undergrad, obviously, but I've taken two semesters of Old English (one intro, one grad Beowulf seminar), and lead my university's Old English reading group. I'll give you some nitty gritty, practical tips first, and then some general thoughts: Go to this website, print out the Magic Sheet you find there, fold it in half, laminate it, and LIVE with it. Keep it in your OE textbook at all times, do your OE readings with it ever by your side, sleep with it underneath your pillow, and stroke it gently when the lonely hours come. From there, on to bibliography. So, your instructor will require whatever book they require, but Peter Baker's Introduction to Old English (make sure to get the most recent edition, there are some egregious typos in earlier ones) is, for my money, the best introduction for people without experience in an inflected language. If you do have that experience, or are looking for greater philological detail, Mitchell and Robinson's A Guide to Old English is a great bet, and an excellent reference. There's really only one good student dictionary--the Clark Hall & Meritt, but BE WARNED: Amazon abounds w/ unscrupulous vendors of public-domain OCRd copies based on old editions that are uniformly crappy and to be avoided. You want the 4th edition published in the Medieval Academy Reprints for Teaching series, put out by Toronto. It's the one w/ the blue and white cover with OE text in an inset window, and can be found here. Peter Baker's intro textbook is also online, and make sure you check out the links to the left--there are great resources there, exercises, annotated readings, etc. The Dictionary of Old English is online and should be available through your university, but it only runs through G; Bosworth-Toller (the best complete dictionary) is available for free online, as well, but often entails (as does the print version, sigh) having to look through various supplements and addenda to make sure you've done your lexicographical legwork responsibly. Baker says: "Indeed (though some Old English teachers may not approve of our telling you so), you may find it possible to read Old English prose pretty well without having to put in a lot of work on adjectives." This is, to put it gently, litotes. My advice? Do not bother to obsessively learn adjective endings. At all. I say this as someone who adores morphology, fetishizes philological rigor, etc etc etc. The payoff simply isn't there for the complexity of the paradigms, and that time would be better spent working on things like i-mutation, other sound changes, strong verb classes, etc, or even just having a beer or two. It is largely unnecessary in prose since adjectival hyperbaton is rarely an issue, and while there will be moments in poetry where the proper reading will turn on an adjective (usually when dealing with substantives or unexpected weak adjective endings) being correctly parsed, they're pretty rare--and when they do happen, you'll have your Magic sheet to refer to, anyway! Of course this advice is useless if you'll be tested on them in class, in which case: ugh. Gird your loins. Other than that, though, learn your paradigms, backwards and forwards. Don't learn them as isolated, discrete units; look for connections between them. It's a lot easier (I think) to remember that the feminine accusative singular pronouns/articles are always the same as the plural nominative and accusative pronouns/articles than to try to remember them as three separate things. This is, again, only one of the many moments in which your Magic Sheet will be more than handy. Read real Old English things as soon as possible! The first few weeks of morphological drudgery can be a bit of a slog, but remember that at the end of your road paved with hard-won paradigms are the manifest glories of Anglo-Saxon literature. Since the end of that road can seem a little far off when you're wading through a sea of ðæm and þisses, though, put real Old English in front of your weary eyes as soon as you can. Baker's great about that, Mitchell and Robinson less so. Cambridge publishes a great Old English reader (edited by Marsden) whose marginal glossing is ridiculously complete (and with a full glossary in the back). The Dumbarton Oaks series by Harvard (it's the medieval equivalent of the Loeb Library, and if that isn't enough to make you wet yourself think hard about the choices you've made in your life) publishes a ton of OE stuff in bilingual en face editions, but since the texts aren't normalized or glossed it's probably a choice for when one's a bit surer with the language. Read aloud! Not only does it sound cool (eventually--you'll feel like embarrassed/like a jackass at first, but there's no avoiding it), but it'll help internalize the rhythm of the language, which will help you internalize the syntax. As far as how to study, I found the process for doing translations/preparing readings outlined here to be enormously helpful (even if a crapton of work), at least during the early stages. More general advice: Hreaðemus is (as usual!) exactly right--Old English is, if not easy, at least considerably easier than a lot of other medieval languages, to say nothing of Latin. I'm about to take what will be the equivalent of my seventh semester of Latin this fall, and while my Latin's not necessarily shabby, I still hobble and stumble and falter my way through it with tons of dictionary support, confusion, and cursing. In comparison, Old English is a breeze. It's funny. I tend to get all needlessly indignant when I tell people I study Old English and they say "like Shakespeare?" and I have to patiently explain that, no, it's an entirely different language--showing them the first few lines of Beowulf usually clears that up. But, at the same time, the following are all sentences of Old English: Harold is swift. His hand is strong and his word grim. Late in life he went to his wife in Rome. Is his inn open? His corn-binn is full and his song is written. Grind his corn for him and sing me his song. He is dead. His bed is under him. His lomb is deaf and blind. He sang for me. Those are obviously cherry-picked examples (and they're Mitchell and Robinson's, not mine--they have more of them, too, if you're into that sort of thing), but there's a lot about Old English that will be at least familiar to a speaker of modern English. That doesn't mean, though, that there isn't a lot that isn't familiar, and that will trip you up if you approach it as if it's just funny looking ModE. Aside from lexical differences, Old English is an inflected language, and that means that it preserves grammatical distinctions that ModE doesn't, and that it can be much freer with word order (especially in poetry) and use constructions--bare instrumental datives, for example--that have zero equivalent in ModE. This is where time spent learning morphology and syntax, as boring as they are, really pays off--if you haven't, it's all too easy to just completely miss the sense of an OE text because you aren't able to pick up on the grammatical clues the various inflections might be giving you. I hope some of that helps, and wes þu hal!

I've engineered it so my spring semester will be uncharacteristically light--three of my classes will require a fair bit of work, but then the other two are easy online gen ed classes. On the one hand, I wanted my last undergraduate semester to be not very intense (the word "coast" may or may not have been used), especially after the application insanity of this coming fall. On the other hand, it means that I won't have quite as much to occupy my mind during January, February, and into March. One of my classes will be a new language, which is always fun, and I can kind of throw myself into that, and I've told my workplace that while I'm not working much this fall I'll want to pick up extra hours in the spring. And then (like every English major, ever) I have stacks of books that I've always meant to read but never have, and I always nurture (again, like every English major ever) dreams of finally working my way through them. (Because sitting quietly in a room with a book will TOTALLY prevent me from freaking out and checking my email every five minutes, I'm sure.)

And it goes both ways--I was asked earlier this summer to write a letter of recommendation for a former professor's (not one of my letter writers, so it's not some tit-for-tat thing) promotion committee. I've never felt awkward asking profs for them, but if I had, that would have put an end to it right quick!

Flaschards. Reading Norton headnotes, and the shorter poetry. Flashcards. Listening to Yale's Lit Theory course podcast on the bus. Flaschcards. Oh, and I might have made some flashcards.

I'm out of up votes for the day, but besides: the forums would only have allowed me to up vote this once, which wouldn't have been nearly enough.

I am--does it have a handy mobile site? Honestly I've never tried to use it on my phone! And Lord, there's no reason for you to be familiar with OE morphology before you've taken a class in it! You will be, soon enough, from your intro class. Not to mention 8 credits of Latin--that'll beat case distinctions into your head darned fast. And in re your fear: pshaw. You'll do just beautifully, I'm sure!

Yeah. Wait until I start a 'poetics' forum and innocently ask a question about a particularly tricky bit of scansion--then we'll see if you're templing your fingers in Burnsian joy!

My school only allows independent studies as pass/fail, which is how I've taken a lot of my graduate-level coursework, so I'm familiar with the "but will I have enough credits for the Dean's List?" gunner dance! I'm on vacation at the moment and don't have an OE dictionary with me, so I might be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that muth (damned vacation, again, so I can't type eths/thorns) is masculine, yes? In which case (and unless it belongs to one of the anomalous morphological classes, but I think it's a garden-variety strong noun) it'd be fot on muthe, in the dative.

Ooooh! Have you been? I've heard nothing but lovely things!

I wouldn't worry about it as much, frankly. Keep in mind that the general electronic apps are often the same for the entirety of the graduate school, which admits thousands (well, depending on the size of the university) of students into all sorts of programs (academic, professional, etc) with vastly varying admissions criteria, and those boxes are sometimes used to identify students who might be available for extra funding from the graduate school, but the admissions decision in our cases are going to be made by English departments, and predominantly (one would think) on the basis of fit. Do you really foresee a situation in which the admissions committee is deciding between two applicants who both happen to focus on the nitty-gritty details of poetic form, and it's that box that guides their decision, and not the other--writing sample, SOPs, letters, etc--elements of the application? For what it's worth, I'm going to check the box for "overrepresented upper middle-class white guy" without a second thought, largely because of the legitimate data collection purposes. (True story: my partner comes from a country where he's racialized as white, but here in the US that's most definitely not the case. His instinct is always to check "white," and I'm always like "Dude. C'mon.")

Oh! Ack! I hadn't thought that's what you were implying, or meant to myself imply that's what you were! Your comment didn't read like that. I think we're all a bit dazed just imagining the thing.

I have zero doubt you'll succeed in it, hreathemus, given your past academic success, but I'm with WT as to the sheer dauntingness of it. I've done twenty credits a semester twice before, but not with grad school appcrap on topic of it!