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I'm intrigued by this! What would you have done differently? Maybe it's a difference in what we mean by matter-of-fact-ness and what it means to be "clinical," but I'd definitely say my own SOP fell much more into those categories than not. I mean, sure, I tried (struggled) to write it well enough that it both wasn't going to make anyone fall asleep and that it did the weirdly targeted things an SOP is supposed to do, but it was pretty, well, clinical--a tied-together rundown of my interests, prior coursework, languages, scholarship/approach, and (only about half of the time) a fit paragraph. Another question for Analyticchic: have you thought about whom you'll be asking for your letters?

I don't know if this is the case in Florida, but it's true in the states I'm familiar with (Minnesota, Ohio, and California), and is very important to keep in mind (both for the OP and everybody): being a legal resident is often NOT the same as being classified a resident for tuition purposes at state universities. It is very possible to have your legal residence in a state but not be considered a resident for the purposes of levying in-state fees and tuition. Which I'm sure everybody knows, anyway. I've just been running through the list of documents, etc, necessary to corral to apply for in-state residency classification at Cal, and am a bit put out at how easy it is to establish legal residence versus the former!

Mollifiedmolloy has both given excellent advice, as is par for his course, and mentioned almost every single one of the schools I was going to! I'd add OSU, which regularly offers both Old French and Old Occitan, and I'd check out Penn--I don't know their Old French situation, but they're gangbusters for Middle English. I'd also lean on the Yale and Berkeley recommendations; Ardis Butterfield's doing some really cool stuff with medieval multilingualism and French, and Cal's Medieval Studies concurrent PhD requires work in a second vernacular, plus I've heard nothing but great things about Hult. Yes, please, do feel free to PM me! (And mm: pshaw!)

Welcome, fellow medievalist! Are you looking for English faculty who do work in Old French, or faculty in French who would also be able to be on your committee? If the latter, I can think of several other schools with strong medieval English programs with affiliate French faculty you might want to consider. In re the subject test, I'll say that I didn't find the test I took last fall to be wildly different from the practice ones available--there was more reading comprehension, yes, but still plenty of point blank "Who was the author of XXX?" questions. That's a minority opinion, though, so YMMV. I will say that I still think the Princeton Review book is incredibly useful preparation--I started last year's app season with grand plans to drown myself in flashcards, but me being my procrastinatory self, ended up just using the Princeton, and did well on the exam. One of the things about the subject test to remember and that often gets lost in discussions about it is that it is still at its base just multiple choice test, and is therefore very susceptible to general crafty test-taking strategies.

Congratulations!

Ugh, yeah, I feel for you. I didn't apply to Toronto for that very reason (plus their OE faculty's in such flux) but damn--that must be hard. Such an amazing program in academic terms!

Eh, I am very much with echo499 and VirtualMessage on this one. I mean, maybe he didn't need to enumerate every single one of the theorists, questions, or aesthetic texts Adorno is responding to in those three long paragraphs, but he was also very careful to reiterate that knowledge of none of those things would be assumed or expected. And I'm not quite sure why pointing out that knowledge of German is indeed helpful for a course devoted to the close reading of the work of a German-language thinker counts as pretentiousness? Also, note that that is just one course description (and from comp lit, not English). Having recently read, well, pretty much every one of their archived English course descriptions, it doesn't seem to me like an "arms race" so much as professors trying to develop rigorous, thoughtful seminars and then accurately describing their content and motivating questions. And there are certainly plenty of more terse, telegraphic, "we'll read a selection of secondary literature" course descriptions, as well! Obviously I'm a bit biased; I'll be starting at Berkeley next year. But a big part of the reason I made that choice--aside from the people: as many others mentioned above, the grad students currently at Berkeley are very warm and supportive of each other and each other's work--is, yeah, the explicit emphasis on rigor. I see a description like that, and I get pretty damn excited for getting my ass kicked around by my reading lists in the fall. ETA: There is of course rigor all over; I don't mean to imply Cal's got a monopoly on it, at all. That's why I still just don't quite get the evidence for Wonton Soup's "That course description was specifically written so that people would read it and be like "oh man Berkeley so rigorous much superior." As echo499 says, there are certainly other syllabuses at other schools that read like that.

I'm not going to speak for Sigaba, but I, for one, didn't read his comment as necessarily being directed at you. I could very much see it being directed at me, though, which I understand, considering I'm one of the current applicants who've been saying that yeah, no, they really do know how bad the market is. But I've also said (and in several different posts now in this thread) that while I do occasionally joke about the frequency of it, I appreciate more experienced members of the fora constantly bringing up the job market, and that it is definitely the case that no one can really know the emotional toll of that until going through it. And that's why I, at least, think this discussion is valuable, even if I'm curious about (and yes: admittedly troubled by) the language of "deception."

Glad to be back, although I returned to a thread that is severely lacking in cheery GIFs.

I agree completely, but the question wasn't really whether or not deception exists in graduate admissions in English. (Of course it does--as it exists any time two or more people are gathered together.) The question is whether or not it's endemic, and whether it's a structuring force--the "Ponzi Scheme" of the thread's title. I sure as hell buy that it was in the past; now, given the widespread publicization of the job market in the past few years, I'm not so sure how it could be, and that most of the deception involved in the process isn't self-deception. ("Ah, I'll be different! I'll be one of the lucky ones to make it!") Producing more PhDs than can find gainful employment is a special kind of sin, but assuming they're not saying those students will get jobs, it's not deceptive--just a turd move.

This has not been my experience, at all, as someone deciding between programs this year. Of the programs I seriously considered (which ranged in rankings from top 5 schools to top 25), all were very transparent about their graduate placement (including about people who hadn't yet gotten jobs), and while getting attrition numbers was more difficult, senior graduate students certainly knew those figures. As far as advisors, that also was not the case. I'm in a small specialty--there were roughly 25 medieval TT jobs last year--and all of the faculty were very upfront about the way the discipline has changed, how the ways medievalists need to market themselves have radically changed, and how even given that, placement is not a sure thing--all of which accorded with what I've heard from friends of mine on or just off the job market currently, and who certainly don't have any reason to paint me a rosy picture.

That perhaps came off as more strident than I intended. I'd really be interested in a discussion, from people on the other side of the process, about where and whether people see this kind of deception today.

The hyperbole people are reacting to isn't that the emotional distress isn't real, it's comparing that emotional distress with 14 hour backbreaking shifts in a dishpit. I'm not saying adjuncts should be happy with their lot--they shouldn't, at all. They should be (and are) mad as hell and organizing against their inhumane working conditions, and we should organize with them. But are we really comfortable saying that the reason the Wendy's analogy fails is because it's too weak? That at least dishwashers don't have to deal with the "hypocrisy and deception" of the academy? That seems to be what your last paragraph implies, and I think that's a tougher row to hoe. And can we talk more about the hypocrisy you bring up? It seems like there are (at least) two separate conversations going on in this thread. One is that people say that they know the market is awful, but don't (and can't, probably) internalize what that really means for when they go on the job market and find they won't be able to do what you've spent the last seven years training to do. That's an important conversation, and I appreciate the note of hard-nosed practicality from those who say the job market doesn't get mentioned enough, that it's a different thing to be on the other side of it, and that alt-ac isn't really some magic solution. But you mentioned "deception at work in higher education," "being Ponzied," and the title you gave this thread was "The Graduate School Ponzi Scheme." You feel like you were sold a bill of goods, but isn't that a distinct issue from the one above? Self-deception is one thing; a concerted scheme to dupe poor young applicants into setting their dreams on the tenure track is another. Looking at it from another perspective, is anyone at this point actually being told that they will get a job, or that academia is a meritocracy? Does anyone believe it?

I don't mean to be flip; the OP's words about how even going in with rational knowledge of the terrors of the job market doesn't prepare you for its emotional toll make a good point. But at the same time, some of us are going into this knowing full well what's on the other end, having watched friends, family, and loved ones struggle on the market, and have appropriate other (it seems silly to say "back up" or "plan B" when they're perhaps more likely) plans/careers/ways to feed ourselves in place. (Moreover, the brand new account and level of surprise at the fact that that "the profession often actively undermines these labors in favor of careerism, self-aggrandizement, and nepotism" makes me read this a little differently than a pure warning of "you don't know how bad it is.")

I officially accepted Berkeley's admissions offer last week, and can't wait to start.

I chickened out and emailed--the DGS if I didn't have a lot of contact with the school, or the DGS and POIs if I did. I'm done with my notifications, so at this point I've turned down Notre Dame (Medieval Studies, the rest are English), Yale, OSU, UCONN, Stanford, Cornell, and Urbana. Hope there's good news in there for someone!

Wait a minute--are you saying there's some kind of job market crisis in the humanities?

I'm not at all rhet comp, and I don't mean to barge in, but: that is the single best idea, ever.

If you show up, I'll totally go along with it.

Which makes you wonder if at some point in the past that had happened! Probably not, but it's a funny/tragic thought.

I thought we all agreed it was an utterly specious, almost incomprehensible rhetorical move when Appppplication made it, so much so that it would be patently clear I was being very, very ironic. Apparently not--I'm sorry; I should have been clearer.

I have no problem talking about reputation, and I certainly don't think we should pretend it doesn't exist; I think it should concern a lot more people here on the board than it does, frankly. My wish for this thread to die quick, painless death has less to do with its incivility--although there was a bit of that--than with the extent it just got weird, especially since every moment we're posting here is another moment we aren't caring about trans* violence. In re the question of schools that fight above their weight in some subspecialties, though, wasn't Gustav's point that the importance of fit-vs.-rep can in fact be overstated? One of my profs talks about it as hoping your diploma will "glow in the dark," i.e. that everyone will know that your school, while not at the top of the heap generally, is actually super good for what you do. But the problem is that the people who know that are the other people in your subspecialty, who aren't really the ones whom you need to know that--that's the hiring committee, which might not have anyone on it who has any idea what's going on in your field.

Oh God, I thought it was dead.

Me too! *clinks glass*

When I left the thread this morning… I mean, you know when you're walking down the street, and you look up, and all of a sudden you have no idea where you are, or how you got there? Yeah. That.