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You. Congratulations, to you and to all!

Ugggghhhhh--upvotes! I need more damn upvotes!

I've been rejected (or at least am assuming rejection, given that acceptances have gone out) from two programs, SO THERE!

I know! And now Cornell's is a Wednesday, too. We shouldn't complain--it's a lovely problem to have!--but the number of times I've had to email teachers to say "Um, so, about attendance in this course…" And what about people coming from MA programs, who have to be teaching during that time? I get why they do it, but still.

Hey Gnossienne--are you going to the Yale visit weekend? ("Visit midweek," more like.)

Congratulations--me too!

See, now this is the kind of valuable information I come to GC for.

Lovely! Are you presenting, or just attending? I'll be going down with a slew of grad students from my (current) dept, just to attend/check it out/get my free cardboard astrolabe. In re IMA, I won't be there, but there are some lovely sounding papers…

This is also a good thing to ask current grad students, as well--the ones I've contacted at the schools I've been admitted to have been very upfront about cost of living and what it's like to live on a given package in a given city.

Hey, anybody here going to Kalamazoo this year?

We could of course always set up our own little medieval Latin translation group of the medievalists here, too.

She beat me to it!

Yeah, I'm quoting myself, I know--but that link takes you to the correct edition, with the correct ISBN's. Yes, it sucks there are so many crappy OCR pirates of bad editions, but that's really it as far as hardcopy OE dictionaries that aren't the B & T, which is too much gun for the hunt most of the time.

Yeah, that's very much the issue with Baker. Have you seen Fulk's textbook? A friend of mine has a copy and says good things, but I haven't examined it at length.

I love that book! And it doesn't get nearly enough love.

I do indeed! The texts put out by the TEAMS Middle English Texts Series are generally excellent, and I've used the first volume of their complete three-volume Confessio (it has books 1 and 8, so you can read the frame story portions), and found it quite nice. It's not bilingual, but Gower's ME isn't that tricky, and as always, TEAMS editions come with copious glossing (and the introductory material/annotations are good, as well). Also, they make all of their texts available for free online--I like hardcopies, but their online interface is much better than you'd think given the amount of paratextual elements they need to juggle. Different strokes, etc etc etc. The link to the overall TEAMS project webpage, which will give you info on ordering published volumes if you can't find them in your library, is here; the link to the "G" page of their online text repository, where you'll see they have a ton ("tonne"?) of Gower, is here.

I've started doing this thing where I have a giant (like, seriously, ridiculously huge) plate of chicken wings whenever I hear a decision from a school, whether it's good or bad news. By now it's totemic.

My God, Hannalore, why did you not say until now that you're a budding Anglo-Saxonist! If you navigate back to page two of this thread, you'll find a long post I did with tips/hints/whatever (including some bibliographic recommendations) for learning Old English. Basically, I really recommend Peter Baker's Introduction to Old English, which is available both as a pretty cheap book (make sure to get the most recent edition) and entirely free online, for someone entirely new to the language. It "walks" you through things, as it were, much more than Mitchell and Robinson's Guide to Old English, which is sort of the standard text (and an excellent book!) but perhaps not as useful to someone learning on their own, unless they have a background in learning dead languages from books. (If you do, though, go straight there!) In re Latin, trust your advisor more than strangers on the internet. But I will say that I'm decidedly "meh" on Wheelock--it's great for giving you solid morphological skills, but I hear people who've used it sometimes struggle with moving to real, unadapted, continuous Latin more so than with other approaches. The Lingua Latina series is indeed nice (and I also hear excellent things about Yale's Learn to Read Latin, although I have no experience with it myself), but especially if your goal is reading quickly, I think it's hard to beat Cambridge's Reading Latin series, which also has more resources for self study than either of the above. It's also a direct lead in to Cambridge's Reading Medieval Latin, which is (without a doubt) the best/most helpful Medieval Latin reader on the market.

Notifications for both the initial Skype interview round and the upcoming finalist weekend were all via email; statuses on the website don't appear to have yet been updated.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the finalists for admission were notified of their status and invited to the interview weekend a couple of weeks ago. Best of luck this season!

Are you thinking about Medieval Studies programs, or is this just a general question about the state of the discipline(s)? There are, essentially, no jobs in the United States in anything called "Medieval Studies." None. Period, full stop. Because of the way universities are structured, most Medieval Studies programs don't house their own faculty, but rely on faculty in affiliated departments. That means that anyone graduating with a PhD in a topic like Medieval Studies (and this holds true for other interdisciplinary degrees as well) will have to be able to sell themselves primarily as a historian, a literary scholar, an art historian (or whatever), to a committee looking to hire someone able to teach World Civ I or Brit Lit surveys or Visual Art Through the Renaissance (or whatever), not someone able to lead advanced seminars in Beneventan paleography. Medieval Studies PhD programs recognize this, and the best ones among them make a point of preparing their graduates to seek employment in traditional, disciplinarily-bounded departments by making their students specialize in a discipline and by requiring them to take courses in that discipline outside of the medieval period. As in the case of any program in the humanities, though, much is dependent on the placement strengths of the particular school/program in question. Sometimes, to be sure, the degree can be a hindrance, but at other times it can be a definite plus; the placement rate for Notre Dame's MS PhD, for example, is pretty much 100% for people seeking tenure-track employment. Edited to remove (probably unnecessary) snark on my part.

Indeed it is! You deserve every last "huzzah," friend. And congrats to all the other admits of the day! Did the last two days set records for acceptances this season on GC? I think so!

Out of nothing but sheer curiosity, I just checked--Yale's was one of the SOPs where I mentioned no one by name (although Roberta Frank was used heavily in my sample). I did mention strengths of the school that could presumably be tied to specific faculty (and since I'm in OE, that's a pretty small pool), but there was no extended "discuss a POI's research, and connect it to my own" paragraph like in some of my other statements. I think this is very interesting in terms of data points for applicants next year! (And so maybe this doesn't belong here, but on the "What we learned" thread?) Hreaðemus and I present a pretty solid test case--similar grades, scores, in the same subfield, and with somewhat similar linguistic emphases/approaches--for the argument that you can make a strong case for admission to programs both by mentioning specific faculty, and by being more general.

Lycidas got into Tufts, and hreaðemus (the board's other Anglo-Saxonist) and I got into Yale. I have no idea where I'll be going yet, but I'm interested in studying issues of sexuality and gender in OE lit.

Thanks! Absolutely no apologies are necessary--Proflorax is (but then again, isn't she always?) right about different threads helping to keep people's very real joy from complicating other people's very real sadness and vice versa, but I certainly didn't feel derailed. No worries!