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Oh, isn't that lovely!

Although even this, too, apparently shows a marked difference in conventions across the Atlantic! I have a friend who used to teach at one of the Oxbridge schools in a humanities field, and he'd get an email every year that the college would send out to the tutors who were asked to write recommendation letters. It said that, basically, if the students were applying for other programs in the UK to feel free to write as they normally would, but that if they were writing to US programs, the letters would need to be just over the top hyperbole. Anything else--i.e. the standard British academic reserve in which "quite competent" is high praise--would (these emails claimed) be read as implicit criticism by American committees and tank the application, so florid and effusive is the normal American LoR tone!

Hey--I've applied with different papers to both Kalamazoo and Leeds, so we'll see if either is accepted! I'll almost certainly be going to Kalamazoo no matter what, but probably won't go to Leeds (read: do the work of finagling funding for it) unless I'm presenting.

Hey, thanks for starting this! Our departmental orientation was on Monday, and it's been fun to watch the cohort (there are thirteen of us) sort of start to get to know each other, jell, etc. The first day of classes is today--the required theory (among other things) intro doesn't look like the reading for it is too bad (closer to 100 than 200 pages, and spread over two days per week, although more some weeks a bit heavier) since a lot of emphasis is put on our individual research projects for the course, which is cool. What is not so cool--or cool, but terrifying--is the reading load for the history seminar I'm taking, which is about 600 pages of secondary stuff a week--usually most of a couple monographs and then some articles, or one monograph and a larger number of articles. I know historians read differently, and an explicit goal of the course is the inculcation of those sorts of reading habits, but: ah! Combined with the two other courses I'm taking for credit plus the one I'm hoping to audit, that's a little much. And yes, there is something so delightful about getting to know people from one part of your life in another--it's weird but great to be just beginning in a cohort with someone I met on here over a year ago!

Don't know why any of us bother to chime in when ProfLorax invariably asks just the right questions, but I've got some experience that is oblique to some of your concerns, if not wholly parallel. In re interdisciplinarity, I hear rumblings from friends in the field that the job market in WGS is in even worse shape than it is for lit programs. I have no direct experience with that, though, but I can speak to my experience as someone who weighed whether to apply to programs that were intra- or interdisciplinary last year, although in a (potentially) very different field--medieval studies. There (and again, this might not be the case for the interdisciplinary fields you're considering), program choice and the training you receive are vital. There are only two real Medieval Studies programs on the continent (I'm kind of ignoring Yale, since they only admit one student per year) that regularly place people; anywhere else, it's a bit, as you say, career suicide. And the reason those programs place the people they do is because for all their interdisciplinarity, they strongly emphasize the need for a disciplinary identity when going on the job market. There are vanishingly few interdisciplinary programs (in any field) in the US, and certainly not enough to provide jobs for the smallest fraction of their own graduates; most place their students within the confines of traditional disciplinary boundaries, which means it'll behoove you to be able to walk and talk like an English (or whatever) PhD. A cautionary story of someone with an interdisciplinary PhD who was at one point being interviewed for a TT job in an English department, told to me by someone who was on the hiring committee to illustrate the importance of disciplinary prep: when asked to name what sort of literary texts he might teach in the bog-standard "Intro to the Major" class, he blanked, and could hardly name a single novel. That's an extreme example, sure--I certainly still applied to an interdisciplinary program, and almost attended one--but a useful one. Your statement that for you theory is not a means to an end but an object worthy of study in and of itself makes me say that you should really, really, really consider UC Berkeley, or at least keep it on the list. I can't speak to the program in Rhetoric, but that same exact sentiment--studying the work of critical thinkers not as a practical toolbox but as a body of thought with its own history, contours, and importance--was repeatedly and explicitly stressed by current graduate students as a strength of the English program over some others, and while I'm just starting out there this fall, it's certainly been borne out by some of the things I've already seen of the department. If you have any further questions about either my experience navigating interdisciplinarity or UC Berkeley English, feel free to shoot me a line!

Senior scholars tell me it's not really quite as bad, anymore--but some of them say it a bit wistfully.

I'm not a historian, but one of my favorites is from Reviews in History--Michael Lapidge's careful, clinical 2007 filleting of a book on Beowulf's (supposed) historical context. The full thing is worth reading (and is available here), but here's the money graf: "One’s overall impression of this book is deep disappointment: that a scholar so evidently familiar with Beowulf, and possessed of wide-ranging (if not always accurate) learning, should spawn hypothesis upon hypothesis without ever taking the trouble to subject these hypotheses to common sense. One can only wonder about the process, and the readers’ reports, by which such a book came to be accepted for publication by the Oxford University Press. Because of the outrageous and uncontrolled nature of the speculation which it contains, The Origins of Beowulf is, in this reviewer’s opinion, unlikely to have any impact whatsoever on the field of Anglo-Saxon studies."

I just. I mean. I can't.

There's a difference?

I do wonder how much of this variation is based on the specific test people take. The September exam, while certainly having more reading comprehension questions than PR would lead you to believe, still had plenty of super-POE.

Thank you so much! Two of my tasks this summer are to learn to use LaTeX (which gets used a lot in my corner of the humanities) and start using a real bibliographic manager, so this is very helpful.

Can Mendeley output the bibliographical data as a BibTeX file, or do you need to enter it twice?

Thank you so much for this! I had written off attending the general orientation at Cal because I dreaded having to sit around and listen to a bunch of info I didn't really care about/need to know, but the idea that we can choose our own tracks makes it seem actually useful, and less of a timesink.

WT gets just at the rub of the thing, which is the breadth of the test, but I'll complicate that a bit. I do think you'd probably be fine just using Major Authors; moreover, personally, I wouldn't bother with the Norton American. At all. I did. I was really worried about my lack of American coverage--I'm a medievalist, and got out of my school's American lit survey requirements, which meant that I knew I'd be just one month in to the only American lit class (focused narrowly on American poetry from 1860-1910) of my college career when I sat the exam. So I bought the American anthologies, but, being the restless creature of sloth and desire that I am, opened them exactly never. Granted, I only saw one form of the exam, so who knows? Maybe this year's will be all colonial homilists, but I think--others should jump in--it is the case that the emphasis generally is much more on specifically British lit than either American or Anglophone. I would, though, recommend a different Norton: the Theory and Criticism. Not--and I can't stress this highly enough--NOT to read the actual selections, but for its helpful headnotes, and the introductory précis it gives of the scope of modern criticism at the front. I wouldn't necessarily shell out money for one if you don't already own it (although it's a useful, often-required book; I needed it for one course in undergrad, and it's--but this upsets me--required for one of my grad courses in the fall), but it's definitely worth some time spent in the library with a copy.

Let me start by saying that I know a medievalist who went from a religious studies MA to an English PhD, so that's certainly a transition that can (and does) happen! In American PhD programs, it is most definitely not required that you have a particular idea in mind about what you want to do your dissertation on. This is a bit weird, since one of the things you're supposed to do in your SOP is to describe, at least in very broad terms, a project: the type of texts you see yourself working on, and a critical approach. But that's a bit of shibboleth--committees want to see that you know what a project looks like and what kinds of questions are current and appropriate to the field, not to see a chapter-by-chapter prospectus signed in blood. No one expects that you actually work on what you describe in your SOP, and given the fact that coursework, exams, and growing relations with your professors and engagement with the field will all change your interests and approaches, very few people do. Likewise, even though this can change once you're in a program, the fact of the matter is that most English programs (and certainly PhD ones) aren't really equipped to handle generalist applications--it is necessary to apply to work in a specific period. Again, once in the program, you aren't locked in to that period--it's not at all unheard of for students to switch--but it is expected that the application (and usually the dissertation) has a strong period identity. That's just how programs (and the profession) are set up, unfortunately. Aside from it being the business of scholarship in the humanities, reading secondary literature is vital--not only because it will help you find scholars whose approaches and topics are good fits with yours, but your eventual writing sample (which will, ideally, be on texts of the period you're applying to study) will need to engage with them heavily. What was your undergrad major? Does your MA allow you take seminars in the English department, or to do work in religious studies seminars on primarily literary texts or applying primarily literary methodologies? What about languages? Will the MA allow you to do any language work as part of your coursework? This will vary based on the period you end up in, of course--medievalists have vastly different language requirements from modernists. But no matter your period, if you end up writing a dissertation focusing extensively on Schopenhauer you will be expected to use him in German, not in someone else's translation. GC user Cloudofunknowning can, obviously, speak to scholars who work on late medieval mysticism better than I; perhaps he'll chime in? And I think there are other people around the boards who do mystics, too. But you're also right: with medieval literature specifically, since departments tend to have only anywhere from two to six (at very most) professors studying an entire millennium of literature, it's much more important to be with a good medievalist who's qualified and comfortable supervising your dissertation on a topic even if it's not what they do than finding an exact match for your interests. Although obviously, if there are exact matches for your interests those are definitely people whom you should be applying to work with! I hope that helps!

My experience and recommendations as someone who took the test recently (last September) and did pretty well on it (760): I'd gone into studying with plans to make 50,000 flashcards, but those never really materialized due to a bit of busyness and a greater amount of sloth; in the hurried couple of weeks leading up to the exam, the Princeton Review book is pretty much the only thing I used for studying, together with going back and reading some of the poems mentioned in there in their entirety. Don't get me wrong: the PR book has problems, and a ton of minor inaccuracies. But I fall into the camp--admittedly a small one on GC--that thinks it's still an accurate reflection of what's on the exam, at least in broad strokes. There was a bit more reading comprehension, but also plenty of straight-up identification, and some very, I repeat very, esoteric passages and questions. And certainly in terms of types of works discussed, I think it's still very useful--I can think of at least five questions that I got right because of things I'd learned reading the answers (especially the wrong ones!) in the PR's practice exam. Moreover, and as WT says, the "cocktail party" approach they advocate in re level of knowledge required is just the right one, I think. I mean, I've read almost nothing; I'm shockingly, terrifyingly, embarrassingly poorly read. But, if this is a distinction that holds, I've read about a a lot of things I haven't read, and I know all kinds of things about the things that I don't know. The other big thing I think some people miss out on is the extent to which, like all multiple choice exams, it is ultimately just a test of your ability to take multiple choice exams. You shouldn't guess wildly, but you are able to eliminate at least one option from the five answers given, you should guess; even taking random stabs in the dark, that approach will yield a net .25 pts for every four of those questions answered--and usually you won't be guessing that randomly. (I don't remember the exact number, but the number of questions I left unanswered was in the mid teens.) All of the tools of elimination, logic, and deduction can be brought to bear on the test, and all for the better, especially on the huge, multiple-part question series. I agree with echo449 that you're probably due for a break--especially if only one of your programs requires it, there are other things that will be a lot more important to the contours of your applications in total than this one component of one app, and those are the things you'd most likely do better to think about at this point. I will also say that my percentile score tracked relatively well with the scores on the practice tests I took--both the one in the PR book, and the one provided by ETS. If you've taken those and are happy enough with the score you get, I wouldn't worry!

I can't speak to rhet/comp as a field, and for all I know there may be very different disciplinary hiring practices at work. But I know that at least for lit people, some programs will try to give their students lectureships while they're (still) on the market but out of funding, which has become more and more common both as the job market has tanked and as time-to-degree reqs have meant people are going on that market earlier and earlier. The expectation is still that they will find a job someplace else; the positions aren't intended to be permanent ones, and a large number of them can, at some schools, be a sign that they're having trouble placing their grads. (The flip side to that of course is that everyone isn't placing people, and it's better they support you while you're looking rather than throw you to the wolves.) I'm not saying that's what those hires are that you're seeing--again, there are disciplinary differences, I'm sure--but I think it'd be useful to separate out those stopgap, "feed you while you're still on the market" posts given to recently graduated PhDs versus permanent positions. (And the latter is what I assume things like WC directing would fall under?)

!!! ETA: Seriously, they do not give me nearly enough upvotes.

Yeah--it's not that it's unusual, I don't think. Cal, for example, only requires that a little over half your courses be in English (seven of twelve) and I know I'll be using everyone of those allowed classes (and probably auditing some, too)to fulfill my interdisciplinary Medieval Studies reqs. And in the English (and one Gender Studies) grad seminars I've been in thus far, there've usually been students from other departments. But the differences in methodology and approach can sometimes be striking, and I've never been the one doing it from the other side, so to speak!

You're welcome, VirtualMessage. If you read my post you'll see I was asking for clarification of the moderators' policies given that the other thread was shut down. I didn't say "this conversation should end," I was asking where the line was that that conversation crossed but this one apparently doesn't; I frankly didn't see much of a difference between the two. ProfLorax's point that the other conversation was just between you and CBZ, whereas this one is broader, makes some sense. My issue isn't with your anger, VM, and I don't mind heat with attendant substance. Hell, you and I even agree on a hell of a lot of things, and I like a lot of your helpful posts elsewhere on the fora. My issue is entirely that every time someone disagrees with you on this thread or on the virtues of rhet/comp as a field, you belittle them and the straw man argument you say they've made instead of engaging what they actually said. You alienate even the people who agree with you; ComeBackZinc was, in the early days of this thread, one of the posters telling others that your perspective and experience was valued and should be heeded. It doesn't make me uncomfortable, my poor little feelings don't get hurt, and I don't need a trigger warning because somebody's being mean to strangers on the internet. I just don't much see the point.

Sure thing; let me know! And I know the feeling you describe--I spent pretty much all of my time last year between August and the end of January "freaking out, possibly irrationally, about X," as did/does/will do everyone who goes through this process. Which is another way of saying: Welcome to the fora!

There is a useful conversation to be had about all these issues--the lack of jobs, the exploitation of contingent faculty labor, the fact that alt-ac is not the viable option it's often painted to be, the creation of narratives of "doing what you love because you love it" that are not only financially dangerous but that valorize that financial danger, and the blithe, self-delusional attitude that many applicants take to thinking that while things are bad, it'll be different for them, you'll see. Those are good points, and pace TakeruK, they have been made across twelve pages of this thread, for any and all future visitors and lurkers to come and see and read and digest as they consider graduate study and how to effect change in a broken academy. This is no longer that conversation. I understand the argument--usually most cogently expressed by 1Q84--that no one has to pay attention to these threads, and that's true. But there should also be some thought given to what kind of community GradCafe wants its fora to be. And so, at the risk of "demonstrating [my] submissiveness to the foreman," a serious question for the mods: A thread on rhet/comp recently got shut down when it was no longer productive, when the discussion descended from definitely heated but still interesting disagreement into bitter personal attacks, vitriol, and sarcastic spleen-venting that are better carried out through PMs or not at all. When and how do you decide a discussion has reached that point?

It's an interesting topic, though! I can't imagine what the substantive differences between a UK and US paper would be, and my gut would be to say that the things I've heard a writing sample is supposed to show in the US--that you can make, research, and support a sustained and lengthy argument, and that you can engage with the critical dialogues in your subfield--are applicable everywhere. My guess is that if you're writing what seems to you a "good paper" in a UK context, you'll be just fine. I'd say I'd be willing to share the writing sample I used in my applications (and to be clear: I definitely am) but I'm in a very different field, so I'm not sure how helpful that'd really be!

They're in a French department, in a program that emphasizes literary study. Others can (and should) chime in, but I think the "A is expected; B means profound doubts about readiness for graduate study" scale is still pretty standard across the humanities, even though things are different in the social sciences and even more so in the natural sciences?

I know 1Q84 took a Marx seminar that was housed in the English department but was chock full of philosophers, and while it wasn't an epistemology course, it generated some interesting discussion in the philosophy forum on differences between the disciplines. I think the thread is called "How to Talk to Philosophers" or some such? But maybe he, or some philosophers, or others with relevant experience, can chime in!