HesseBunuel90

I will point out that your AW score is excellent. It baffles me how most ad coms seem to underrate this section, as analytical writing ability is a far more important indicator of grad school success than a multiple choice exam.

Has anybody been waitlisted at Rutgers yet? I've only seen acceptances on the results board.

Are there any applicants to Carnegie Mellon on here? I haven't seen too many and I have yet to hear from them. Apparently CMU are late accepters. Anybody hear any news?

Did that letter mention you by name? I'm an Americanist who checked off being considered for the MA if not accepted for the PhD there, so just making sure there wasn't a mixup.

I just was rejected at WUSTL, a school I thought I had a chance at. Oh well. I'm hoping for a miracle now.

I got rejected too. I did receive a MA offer, but the tuition is ridiculous.

I just received another PhD rejection/MA offer, this time from BU. What this apparently tells me is that while I'm good enough to be a graduate student, I'm not quite elite enough to be a direct admit PhD student. Still, I have a handful of schools to hear from. These two offers are still an ego boost.

WT: I have about the same number of schools to hear from. What's great is that only one acceptance is needed. It's not over yet.

WT: That is interesting. I too polished my SOP a bit after I applied to UMD, yet similarly the program so far has been the only bit of good news (even if "just" a MA).

Me too. Three rejections in two days now.

I'm in the same boat WT. It's a small consolation, but it's still a slight ego-booster.

I just received my third official rejection; from CUNY. Oh well; it's far from over.

Me too.

Lately I've been listening to Jenny Lewis' album The Voyager. The lyric in the opening song "Head Under Water" (there's a little bit of magic, everybody has it. There's still sand left in the hourglass) has been my rallying cry lately.

It's now inching towards mid-February, and I have yet to receive a single acceptance. However, I have plenty of schools to hear from, even as all the "implied rejections" (most recently from some of my dream programs) are starting to grate on me. I'm just glad I applied to as many schools as I did. For everyone in my boat, remember Yogi Berra's eternal mantra.

Right now I'm reading Walker Percy's Love In the Ruins, a brilliant social satire with allusions to More's Utopia throughout.

My Plan B is to enter the field of TESOL/ESL. I have some experience in and I am certified in it. I would probably look for a job in it overseas. But as I have 16 rejections to go, I'm hoping for the best.

scribnera: Was the acceptance for english or comparative lit?

LifeAlive: are there any PhD Programs that are easy to get into? Obviously Columbia Stanford UPenn etc are ridiculously difficult, but even the lowest ranked programs admit a small percentage. Also, as been stated frequently on these boards, many applicants have been rejected from "safety schools" but accepted to Duke UCLA etc. It's too early in the process to tell if applicants will be shut out, and it could easily happen that applicants who are waiting will get accepted into schools they never seriously thought were achievable.

WT: We are in the same boat. We applied to many of the same schools (as you noted) and so far I received one actual rejection and a few implied rejections. Yet, we both have a whole bunch of schools left; February is just starting after all. This should be the theme song for all of us who have yet to receive an acceptance:

Well, a 99 in verbal would be impossible. The minimum is 130.

I would love to hear from them. Vanderbilt is one of my top choices, and also the university that contained my most meaningful contact with a POI. (Crosses fingers).

ramus: Do you know how this person found out about the UMass acceptance? My app status still says "applied."

WT: I agree with you about the GRE scores. I got around the same percentile as you, but I'm trying not to let the results psych me out. After all, only about half of those posting on the results page actually report their scores. I was heartened to see a Chicago interviewee with nearly identical gre scores, and a lower undergrad gpa. Of course, there's no guarantee this interview will result in an acceptance, but still.

Fancy pants: for a while I stressed after re-reading my writing sample too. Then I realized that an ad com that looks over hundreds of samples are not going to dwell on the little imperfections. The fact that you were contacted for an interview proves that.