
unræd
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Questions for Current PhD Applicants
unræd replied to js17981's topic in Literature, and Rhetoric and Composition
I'm sorry to have snakily done the quote-the-rank-dropping thing; I was about to remove that, having thought better of it, when I saw you'd already replied. The reason it rankled is precisely because, as you say, the conversation about jobs gets tied up in really disgusting ways with conversations about prestige, and so--and possibly also as a result of the fact that I'm hyperaware of being one of the few students at my program who didn't come from an elite undergraduate background, and as a result of wanting to be equally hyperaware not to be a turd and go on about my own program's ostensible (and utterly meaningless) top ranking in English--I tend to get knee-jerky whenever someone uses that sort of language. But my knee-jerk reaction needn't have made me a jerk, so I'm sorry. As someone who does do traditional work by day and take programming classes by night (I am deeply implicated in all that I criticize), I certainly hope I'm not producing subpar scholarship! My unease with the discourse surrounding the restructuring of the humanities PhD doesn't have to do with individual student agents producing subpar work as much as it does the fear that more traditionally literary modes of knowing and researching are devalued as more ostensibly "objective" methodologies are brought to bear on formerly humanistic objects--this idea you sometimes get from DH administrative people (and I say this as a--deeply conflicted, yes, but still--DH person) that the humanities finally matter because they can be quantified, that they shall only be valuable to the extent to which they become like the sciences, that all our readings shall be distant and not close. There's a way in which I am thus deeply ambivalent--in the etymological sense--about the preparation of students for careers in industry (or Industry): the part of me that thinks the traditional system of graduate education is, if not actively predatory, certainly unsustainable wars with the part that wants to fight the neoliberal university's idea of the importance of the utility and instrumental value of knowledge. ETA: Which is not really an answer so much as a ramble, but it's late and I think we agree for the most part. -
Questions for Current PhD Applicants
unræd replied to js17981's topic in Literature, and Rhetoric and Composition
Yes, and I think preparing for non-academic jobs is all to the good. The disagreement wasn't with the idea that preparing oneself for non-academic employment isn't "a detriment to the chances of securing TT employment or their scholarly fields"; it was with the quite different claim that preparing for non-academic employment leads to better chances of securing TT employment. This is in fact why the MLA, Stanford, Harvard, et al. are arguing for a "restructuring" of the humanities PhD in favor of something more flexible: not because that preparation will better land their students TT jobs, but because there simply aren't TT jobs for all their students. Note, too, that much of the discourse surrounding the rethinking of the humanities PhD is just as focused on professionalization at the expense of doing good scholarship as programs focused on traditional preparation for the academy; it's simply neglecting careful research and thought in the service of professionalization for a different kind of of job. I completely agree that professionalization for professionalization's own sake is an affirmatively bad thing, and that it is better to produce good work than more work. That is uncontroversial, and should be the advice given by any advisor, whether or not they are "the chair of your top-ranked department." We all know those people who publish too early in low-stakes journals, or who present too often at low-stakes conferences when they don't have anything to say, or an intervention to make, and everyone rolls their eyes when they see those CVs. That's not what I'm talking about. It is certainly the case that, as you say, the limiting reagent in the equation of who gets jobs is the vanishingly small number of jobs, period, not the number of articles each candidate produced. However: if you look at who does get the (again, infinitesimally few) jobs that there are, it is people with publications (or whatever proxy measure you'd like to insert here). There are many more--again: many, many more--candidates who are equally "professionalized" (blech; the word makes me feel dirty even as I'm the one saying we shouldn't ignore it), who have just as many articles published, who don't get jobs. I'm not saying it's meritocratic, and that the best people find work; that's bullhooey. But the ones without publications? Ouch. I'm not saying that's a good thing; I think it should be clear I don't actually think it is. But to pretend that it's not the case, and to say that someone who has prepared more for non-academic work than for traditional academic work has an edge on finding a job on the academic job market ignores the realities of the tightness of that market--unless we're defining "edge" as "ability to get the hell out of the market sooner," which, while maybe a better idea, wasn't the original claim. -
Questions for Current PhD Applicants
unræd replied to js17981's topic in Literature, and Rhetoric and Composition
There've been posts to that effect on this thread in the History forum--perhaps it's what your thinking of? And yeah, no, I agree with your gut and with ProfLorax: that's not the case for English, at all (unless we're counting things like archival or DH experience as inherently alt-ac prep, which they're not). It's certainly not the case I know for the people I know who have been successful on the job market--in part because of this awesome bit of AbrasaxEos' post: Graduate school in the humanities is a professional program, as much as law school, medical school, dental school, or HVAC school is. Almost all programs are designed to provide narrow job training in the specific skills and cultural norms of a specific profession, albeit a profession that doesn't exist anymore (or that at least doesn't exist in enough numbers to justify the number of people getting the training, etc etc etc). Can you treat it as though it weren't, and just take a few years to read some books and have some thoughts and get paid for the privilege? Yeah, sure, totally! But it's really not what programs are designed to do, especially when you move out of exams and start dissertating. It's one thing to say you don't care if you don't end up getting a job at the end of it and don't plan on going on the market; but if you want even that infinitesimal chance that you will get one, you have to act like you sure as shooting' do care, much earlier. -
Questions for Current PhD Applicants
unræd replied to js17981's topic in Literature, and Rhetoric and Composition
I've been lurking and avoiding the conversation because I didn't have anything particularly interesting to say or different to add: like many of the posters that responded to the OP (and as I've said at length in the other thread), the specific language of deceit and intense affective response that gets attached to Dire Warnings from the Other Side isn't one that I think is particularly useful or accurate. That being said, though, there is also occasionally a certain note of blithe disregard ("I'll just get VAPs, and everything will be great!") here that does, frankly, ignore the realities of both the job market(s)--academic and otherwise--and the structure of PhD programs in the humanities. Which is to say that I'm also sad to see the OP go, and really wish that they'd stuck around. There aren't a lot of late-career grad students on the fora, and those are voices that applicants--and current grad students, but we (hopefully) get that from the 5th-year-and-beyond students in our programs--need to hear from at least as much as they need to hear from those of us who went through the application process recently. -
A friend of mine got her notification of acceptance to NYU on Feb 3rd, so they did at least some notifying then.
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Hey, Medievalists... (Fall 2015)
unræd replied to littlepigeon's topic in Literature, and Rhetoric and Composition
Indeed! Both my papers were accepted as well, so yay. -
Medieval Applicants (Fall 2016)
unræd replied to Grettir's topic in Literature, and Rhetoric and Composition
Congrats on the acceptances--those are some awesome schools! -
2016 Acceptance Thread
unræd replied to BarAndFrills's topic in Literature, and Rhetoric and Composition
Congrats! I'm in English, not Rhetoric, but if you have any non-department-specific questions about Cal or living in the East Bay, let me know! -
2016 Acceptance Thread
unræd replied to BarAndFrills's topic in Literature, and Rhetoric and Composition
A friend of mine was accepted to NYU's English program yesterday--she got a call from the DGS. -
will stanford interview this year?
unræd replied to cloverhinge's topic in Literature, and Rhetoric and Composition
I can't speak for years prior to it, but they didn't interview English PhD applicants before accepting them last year. -
It's funny. There was a moment at one of my interview weekends last year when one of the current students was driving me and another prospective around. To make conversation, he asked what we would be doing if we weren't headed off to study medieval lit, if we chucked it all and did something wild and crazy. That moment's stuck with me a lot, because I'm a (slightly) older student who went to college to major in Medieval Studies at 28, leaving a perfectly successful career in restaurant work to pursue academia. Which is to say: this is it. This is my chuck it all to do something wild and crazy, work as a florist or own a bookstore or move out to the country and run an orchard. I'm living my dream, man!
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No ragging assumed! And Berkeley's placement is certainly as good as anyone else's--although an important thing to remember about the yearly figures is that students on the market now matriculated before UCB contracted their cohort sizes, so they're coming from a larger pool. The part that made me pause about your initial statement was less the "tend" than the "easily." But yes, I suppose given the probabilistic capaciousness of "tend" it's more or less accurate--my hesitance is just because of how hard the market nonetheless is on the friends here I have on it currently and for those here on the other side of that "tend," and I don't want to diminish that or make it sound like it isn't. And, to be fair, it's probably as much my own reflexive apotropaic tic--irl I never discuss future career possibilities without saying something like "assuming we should be so lucky to get jobs"--that I use to try to inure myself against even the possibility of the coming horror, and to try to disarticulate the fiction of meritocracy that being at a place like Cal can set up in your brain.
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Celebrate Good Times (Come On)
unræd replied to ProfLorax's topic in Literature, and Rhetoric and Composition
Congratulations on candidacy! I presented at a conference in October, which was cool, and have just had a paper accepted to the International Medieval Congress in Leeds (the European version of Kalamazoo) for this summer, which is also v. neat. But honestly, the thing I'll be celebrating most is sheer survival, because: hot damn, that first semester's a doozie. -
Not to diminish the institutional privilege and support that I'm well aware I have, etc etc etc--but Lord, if only that were the case! (Which is another way of saying that there's no PhD program for which I'd go into that level of debt--or even just for which I'd fork over $200,000 I had lying around--either.)
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\emph{YES}.
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Not today, Satan. Not today.
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(Merovingian chancery hands, man. Or New Roman Cursive. Adcoms today don't know how good they have it.) Of course, what really makes mollifiedmolloy's comment so excellent is that, in the broadest sense, it's true--and is so for everyone here.
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I'm normally as big a typesetting geek as the next guy--I write all my papers in LaTeX, and use Junicode as my default font for its facility in producing attractive medieval characters--but I think WT is right that (assuming your document is readable and professional) font really doesn't matter. I did all my app documents in TNR, and whether or not it's falling out of fashion, it didn't seem to have any adverse effect.
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I know I sometimes come off as the blissed-out dude in the back of the van telling everyone to "just relax, man, relax," but I really think that the "mentioning specific professors in the SOP" thing really is something people sometimes worry about too much. Sure, it's a much easier part of the SOP to evaluate/control/whatever than, say, the much more important "does this just feel like a professional document?" part, so it gets a lot of attention. But ultimately I really don't think it matters nearly as much; like toasterazzi says, it is definitely possible to be very successful either by mentioning professors, or not. Of course, some of my successful SOPs last year had the standard "mention an article and how it relates" name-a-prof gambit, but I also got into some schools (Yale and Stanford, I'm looking at you) with the absolutely lamest, broadest, afterthought-est fit paragraphs you can imagine--think along the lines of "their strengths in blah blah subfield, and hey, they've got a library!" Now: those schools were actually still good fits in terms of those strengths and resources, don't get me wrong. But--eh. I didn't worry about making that case explicit in my SOP for them, really, at all, and certainly didn't specify professors, and it was just fine. And like Proflorax says, the research you do before applying and the research you do before deciding where you will attend are necessarily different beasts; it's one thing to think you have an idea of what someone might be like as an advisor when you've made yourself intimately familiar with their biography, it's another entirely when you've had a beer with one of their advisees at the recruitment weekend.
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Need the Real Story On My Top 5 Programs
unræd replied to maxined93's topic in Literature, and Rhetoric and Composition
The bridge-burning thing is obviously dependent on the culture of the department and faculty, so I can't speak to that. And maybe UCB's weird in this, but a big part of all of the cohort-wide meetings/orientationy stuff we've done has been one professor or another (or the DGS) saying "Hey guys, you all applied here to work on a period, but you're not locked into that, so keep yourself open to change and do what you what!" (Hippies, man.) I know two people from last year's cohort were admitted as early modernists, worked on Romantic texts in the intro class, and have now both switched to bring Romanticists. I don't know them, so I can't speak to their experience, but every time I've heard other students and faculty discuss it it's always been in terms of "gee, isn't that cool?!" -
Need the Real Story On My Top 5 Programs
unræd replied to maxined93's topic in Literature, and Rhetoric and Composition
Ramus is right, and I don't mean to hijack his rightness, but I did want to emphasize his point about changing fields when you're in the early stages of a program: it happens all the time, and very few people will bat an eye. The application process (in the US, not the UK) is weird in that it expects you to lay out a specialization in detail, even the broad glimmers of an actual potential project (!), when absolutely no one will hold you to that. They're passport documents, essentially: once you're in the country, you can (with certain disciplinary restrictions) move around freely. -
I don't have any specific advice about the year-off question, unfortunately--I went straight from undergrad to my program without a gap year. But I know there are a ton of people in my cohort who didn't get Master's degrees but who took time off--some of them were doing related things (teaching, working at academic presses), some not; my guess is committees only care about what you've done in your year off if it has a substantive relationship to your application as a whole. So, that's not helpful, really. But since no one else has, I also wanted to jump in and address the strain of uncertainty in your post, and the broader issue of whether or not you'll be at a disadvantage (or whether or not people with MAs have a "leg up") applying to programs straight from your BA. A bunch of disclaimers are necessary here: this is very field dependent (MA are expected in rhet/comp), and varies by school--the incoming PhD classes at my undergrad institution had a much higher proportion of entering students w/ MAs (at least in the cohorts I'm familiar with) than those at my current grad institution, and there are all kinds of stereotypes about different kinds of institutions preferring either students with or students without MAs. And I don't mean to suggest that MAs aren't useful in refining applications or exploring/narrowing scholarly interests/focuses; of course they are! All else being equal, taking extra time will necessarily make one better. But don't let the fact that there is a preponderance of students with MAs here on GC stop you from applying. Last year's Yale admissions, for example, had precious few people who'd done any Master's work (and most of those were UK-style, one-year Master's), while in the current cohort of 13 at UCB, there are three students with Master's: two have UK degrees (M.Lit. and M.Phil.) and one an MFA; there are none with an MA degree. So basically: go for it. The one major piece of advice I'd give is to make sure you know the field and understand what professional literary scholarship is ("was," he says, looking mournfully at the joblist), and isn't. That is the thing that my friends who did MAs say was most helpful to them: making them scholars engaged with the field and the kind of questions the field asks in a way that their undergraduate classes didn't really prepare them for.
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I think this paragraph is vital to keep in mind--as well as its corollary, which is that factors other that your sheer quality can help in an application, as well. To be sure, no school's going to admit an unqualified candidate just because of connections, or having gone to an especially fancy undergraduate institution, but I don't think the idea that the application process is well and truly a blind meritocracy is really tenable. Yeah--it's an interesting question, and given the available evidence of just Hreaðemus's and my case, I could construct plausible arguments for both sides of that debate. Yes, we were both admitted to Berkeley as Old Anglicists (I'm trying to make the term happen), and this year's Cal cohort is strong in medievalists overall (3 were admitted with another 2 on the wait list in admitted group of roughly 20; there are 3 in the final cohort of 13) even though there were two medievalists in last year's even smaller cohort of 12. We were also both admitted to Yale, when there's only one (outgoing) Old English faculty member, and the overall pool of admits was also very small. But then again, both Yale and Berkeley overbook, as it were (and as suggested above), and there were other Ivy League schools to which one of us was admitted and the other wasn't, and vice versa, suggesting that it's not the case that a good person will always get in (which I know is a stronger argument than anyone here was making). Moreover, while Berkeley had admitted plenty of medievalists in the years ahead of us, they hadn't had an Anglo-Saxonist in the cohort for two years prior, so they had lots of spaces to fill. So basically: who knows? As Ramus pointed out, different schools really do process application in sometimes very different ways. As to what Cal itself is like, and with the disclaimer that I've been in classes for only like two weeks, I can certainly share my impressions of the department, as well as what faculty themselves have said about the department's flavor, which is that it doesn't have one: everyone repeatedly stresses the department's size and catholicity, and that there is no one "right way" of doing English at Berkeley. Again, to use me and H. as examples, she's currently working a project that is all about negative space and which is very Deep Thought-y and Theoretical; I'm looking at dry as dust scribal practice stuff in an OE poetic manuscript. It's certainly borne out in other terms, too: in the past few weeks I've received invitations to a bevy of officialesque working groups on everything from the Frankfurt School to DH to psychoanalysis to translation studies to materiality; Stephen Greenblatt both gave a fancy invited lecture here this week and was beaten up (in absentia) in one of my seminars; and my cohort has an eco-crit person, a person who does new media, a couple of queer theory people (both modernists), etc. There's a lot of other great advice in this thread I don't need to repeat--the different between UK and US applications in terms of specificity of project and the degree to which you're held to it, the importance of your materials showing that you know what the professional academic study of literature really is/means, etc etc etc. But if you have any other questions about Berkeley specifically that I can speak to, do feel free to ask!