hypervodka
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Posts posted by hypervodka
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Yes, VM wants people to pursue the PhD only under very specific financial circumstances, gaining a Masters at most to pursue something outside of academia. That's not something that I have or will take to heart, probably, until it's too late.
Hopefully, the last link I posted makes it obvious what I want people to do, what I want to do: when this system (statistically inevitably) fails the people working under it, I want everyone to know that you can and should leave it.
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Even if all participants perform perfectly within a capitalist system, some of those participants will absolutely always be unsuccessful in a free market. Professionalization MAY help, but only individually--and VirtualMessage played the game, had the publications, had the networking, had the Top 6 degree, and still did not succeed in this market. Professionalization, even if it helps you individually, will do nothing to change the fact that three-quarters of the hopefuls scrambling through grad school right now will definitively not get the job that they have been training for nearly a decade in order to do, whether they are thoroughly professionalized or not. What do you DO when you wind up in VM's position, jobless or virtually jobless, 30 to 40 years old with no savings and a **Liam Neeson voice ** very particular set of skills? What do we do then? It's the question that seems to be driving VM's posts, and it's one that no one has moved to answer very well.
http://theprofessorisin.com/2011/11/29/the-facepalm-fails-of-the-academic-interview/
http://theprofessorisin.com/2012/02/21/be-professorial/for tips on professionalization
http://www.selloutyoursoul.com/for when the system does not work with you in it.
- ComeBackZinc and echo449
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Can I say, as one of those newly entering graduate students this thread is nominally directed at guiding, that nothing about this thread has actually been at all helpful?
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Do you think it's worth sending an email to check in? I emailed last week and was told that I "certainly still have a shot" and would hear something by the end of the week, but I've been waiting on tenterhooks and nothing has arrived!
Should I just try and distract myself or is politely asking for an update reasonable?
I think it's a great idea. And be sure to mention that someone had told you that you'd hear by the end of last week (which is a good excuse).
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Right back atcha, tenfold. I'm hoping for the best!
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Thanks for the information! How did you find out if you don't mind me asking?
I know both of the students who turned down the offer (because I'm one of them
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Anyone planning to turn down a spot at Emory???
It is in my (limited) understanding, that two students have just been pulled from the waitlist and invited to interview. I know that at least two out of the original seven spots have opened up, and I believe that the department has already started moving toward filling the available spot.
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Isn't this thread amazing? This time last year we were all swapping GRE study guide tips, and now.... Like, nine months ago, unraed and hreathemus were joking about the fact that they may eventually join the same cohort ha ha ha and now it's actually happening. Congratulations, everyone!
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I went to an unknown school as well. My first advice to you is: that is not a bad thing, and don't apologize for it. Do not sell yourself short. If you are doing good work, no one on the adcomm is going to care what school you went to.
I did pretty well this season, so I'll speak to my own experience. I studied hard for the GRE--I knew that no one was going to accept me just cause I got a 780 or something, but I also knew that because my school was unheard of, getting a solid score was a great way of showing, even subliminally, that, yes, I actually learned something in school. Multiple adcomms mentioned to me that my letters of recommendation were really, really strong. All of the writers were full professors that I had known between three and six years. That's a great thing about going to a small school.
The most important document by far is the writing sample. My writing sample was not something I wrote for a class, so don't stress about crafting the perfect essay in your sophomore year of college. I would strongly recommend taking a year off--to study abroad, yes--but also so that you have plenty of time to devote to finessing your sample into the perfect specimen. Taking time off meant having time to make my personal statement and writing sample sample identical. Your personal statement gives adcomms an idea of the research questions you most anxious to explore in graduate school; I made sure my writing sample did a thorough job of beginning to answer those questions.
The one thing that I wish I had done while I was in school was, I wish that I'd taken advantage of our school's internship program, in publishing or in marketing. I wish that I had taken advantage of external funding earlier, as well. For example, Sigma Tau Delta and other English fraternities have all of this scholarship money that's pretty much up for grabs.
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Congratulations, IQ84!
- kurayamino, jean-luc-gohard, bgt28 and 2 others
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Haven't been posting lately because my focus has been on school and since I was rejected at every place I applied to and waitlisted at one, I was waiting for it all to pan out.
Well, it panned out. I got accepted into the PhD program at Brandeis with a package of around 22,000/year (exempting summers) for 5 years. I was thrilled -- but my decision is more complicated than it would have been a few months ago.
Congratulations! Great news, great program. What's complicating the decision?
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Lying about the schools you applied to would be the absolute worst thing you could do, and it would do nothing to actually help you. Tell them what schools you applied to and what schools you were accepted to, but emphasize that the waitlist school is still your top choice. It's perfectly reasonable for them to ask what other schools you are considering. Just be upfront.
You also can't quite trick schools into thinking you are more "in demand" than you actually are. After the initial culling is done, many schools separate the admissions committee into subcommittees, and each subcommittee identifies which applicants they most want, forming a ranked or unranked list. Some students appear on every list--those are the students that get "topping-off" fellowships and incessant phone calls. In this way, a lot of schools already have their own internal list of students who are "in demand" for that particular program. No one's going to think, "Oh, she was accepted to Harvard WE SHOULD ACCEPT HER QUICK QUICK QUICK" if it wasn't the snuggest "fit" in the first place.
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I'd like to recommend the Smart Student's Guide to the GRE Literature in English Test. It looks very suspicious, but it was actually supremely useful. I'd skip the Shakespeare section, though, because there's just not enough questions on the test to be worth it.
Ha! I would gladly take it, if I could. How did you bag that?
Translation: "Exactly how badly did ETS screw up that they actually managed to compensate you in any capacity?"
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Below is all of the data that we've been able to collect about acceptance rates at English programs this season. The document is still open, so please post any additional information you've been able to uncover.
Please note that, sometimes, there's a slight difference between a university's acceptance rate and their matriculation rate. UVA's acceptance rate is around 11.66%, but they have a target class of about 12, so their matriculation rate is about half of their acceptance rate. A lot of schools, like UCLA, for example, post their matriculation rate on their website rather than their acceptance rate, which makes the program look slightly more competitive. (Other schools, like Emory and USCalifornia, admit only as many students as they expect to enroll.)
In past years, Columbia has had upwards of 700 applicants; this year, the university had 543. For that reason, I think some other universities that historically receive a large number of applicants (Berkeley, U of Michigan, UT-Austin, Harvard, UCLA, Yale, NYU) have also experienced similar downturns this year.
In general, English literature programs are pretty competitive, with very few programs accepting more that 15% of applicants.
University: accepted/matriculated, applied, acceptance rate/matriculation rate
U of Toronto: 18, 125, 14.40%
UC-Berkeley: ~20, ~400, 5.00%
Harvard U: 10**, 300**, 3.33%
Columbia U: 19, 543, 3.50%
Yale U: ~14, ~300, 4.67%
Cornell U: 11, unknown, unknown
Duke U: 15*, 309*, 4.85%
UCLA: 20, 350**, 5.71%
UVA: 26, 223, 11.66%
U of Michigan-Ann Arbor: 12, 408*, 2.94%
UNC-Chapel Hill: 15, 266, 5.64%
UT-Austin: 41, 357, 11.48%
UW-Madison: unknown, unknown, 12%
CUNY Graduate School and University Center: 21, 197, 10.66%
UC-Irvine: 10, unknown, unknown
Emory U: 7, 170, 4.12%
OSU: 20, unknown, unknown
Vanderbilt U: 12, 350, 3.43%
U of Maryland-College Park: 9, 200, 4.50%
Rice U: 8, 120, 6.66%
U of Southern California: 8, unknown, unknown
Tufts U: 8, 120, 6.67%
U of Minnesota, Twin Cities: 12, 135, 8.89%
Boston U: 5, 200, 2.50%
U of Colorado-Boulder: 4, 200, 2.00%
Boston College: 5, unknown, unknown
Texas A&M U: 12, unknown, unknown
George Washington U: 3, 63, 4.76%
Michigan State U: 20, 61, 32.79%
Syracuse U: 4, unknown, unknown
UCONN: 15, unknown, unknown
U of South Carolina: 10, 100, 10.00%
Texas Tech U: 5, unknown, unknown
*:recent application cycle, **: from website
- mmmscience, kurayamino, khyleth and 12 others
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What do you mean USC and UCLA students switch around a lot, though?
Oh, I just meant that several USC students I've spoken have taken courses at UCLA and vice versa. The process for becoming a visiting student at those schools is smooth and really straightforward (despite the fact that USC is on the semester system and UCLA is on the quarter system). I wouldn't be surprised if Riverside and USC had a similar relationship.
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But, money, and location, and job placement.
Is it that UC-R isn't giving you a livable stipend (in which case, don't go there, please), or that they're not giving you as much as other programs? I know USC's package in particular for creative writing students is, um, distracting. If it's the latter, personally, I've come to terms with the fact that short-term financial difficulties are a small price to pay for long-term academic happiness (but, at the same time, my long-term academic happiness involves some certitude in job placement). I'm really just echoing greenmt here, but go where you'll be happiest.
Location was important when I was even choosing the programs to apply to, because I knew that it's somewhere I'd be living for five or six years. I've just visited LA as well, and, for whatever reason, I loved it too. I do think that should be factor, but only as an extension of the happiness question. Go with your gut: could you stay in Riverside for five years? To me, Riverside isn't that bad, but that really is just me.
I will say that I exclusively applied to very traditional English programs, but a POI at one of these programs has always been an aggressive outlier, which was the reason I approached her in the first place. She started working at the department in the god-awful 1990s, when it was an extremely academically conservative working environment, but she's still, you know, her. It is possible to do interesting work in a relatively uninteresting environment. There are some schools where your dissertation is pretty plainly dictated by the members of your committee, and there are some schools where graduate students actually have intellectual flexibility. I get the sense that USC was fairly flexible, though everyone seems to take the same classes and work with the same professors, which can get insular. I didn't realize that Riverside had bad placement, and of course USC's is far better for creative writers.
Also, aren't Riverside and USC in the west coast equivalent of a consortium? There is a lot of intellectual exchange between Irvine, Riverside, USC, and UCLA, as well as Claremont and Pomona. Not to mention all of the people who aren't affiliated with universities at all. Even if you may not be able to take classes at Riverside officially (though you should ask because I know USC and UCLA students switch around a lot) if you attended USC, you'd still have access to that intellectual sphere. It's an hour and half to get between LA and Riverside. There is a lot to do in Los Angeles that doesn't involve USC directly so there is going to be a lot of opportunity to develop your interests independently.
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I've started practicing guided meditation. I use one of two mobile apps: Headspace and Breathe.
In regards to the app season, it's been helpful to me in promoting self-awareness and -reflection, and it's helped me be forthright with professors at my target programs about my thoughts, concerns, and interests. Before I didn't talk about applying to graduate school to anyone accept my immediate family, my BFFs, and my recommenders, because I didn't want to have to talk to too many people if I got rejected (I also just don't dig it as a convo starter), being honest about my choices and struggles now is very helpful, because it means that the people who are in the best position to help me at the schools I'm considering can be reciprocally forthright in return.
My first love always has and always will be television, and Broad City's back on air. That's probably the most important thing.
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I'm not saying that you said adjuncting was "sufficient" or "just." I'm not accusing you of anything more or less than what you actually said, my only point being that the intersections of your various privileges were obvious without annunciation, just as mine are, as are anyone's, when I say pretty much anything.
- fancypants09 and cjmullis
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Announcing your privilege just before you write a post that in itself exposes your privilege (like for example, making a comment that dismisses the work of an entrenched, sub-poverty-level workforce that regularly and insecurely gets paid below a living wage as a "great problem to have") is just unnecessary. It's redundant.
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Again, getting hired/not getting hired at Ivies has never been the focus of the conversation here, and no one here is clamoring about the injustice of being refused a tenured position at Yale.
Worrying over whether or not you will actually get a job at all because of the school you were able to go to is a legitimate concern, and it doesn't make sense to devalue it based on the larger concerns plaguing the globe. Even if this had been a conversation preoccupied with getting us all jobs at Ivy League institutions, I don't understand how that "minimizes the injustices that happen across the world." If someone had complained about their desperate need for a post-doc at Princeton, they wouldn't have been doing so to put that need in direct competition with other, far greater and dire social needs. There are threads here fretting over the weather in Chicago during campus visit weekends, how to make a good impression, what music people like, the price of and preparation for ETS's endless exams, and a wide host of cosmically insignificant topics that do nothing to minimize macroscopic social issues.
I'm not sure I'm really understanding you, so please correct me. It does not make sense to point out that not getting a job at Harvard is a far lesser problem than violent transphobia, because no one has been arguing any different.
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Except that hasn't been the dominant focus of this thread at all. Who on this thread has been preoccupied with their chances at teaching at Harvard? Several people on this thread, lifealive for example, have been vigorously pushing against the narrative that non-elite PhDs lack value. Several people have pointed out the potential TT hiring opportunities for graduates from non-elite institutions. From what I understand, empress-marmot in particular was concerned about getting a job period, and Who has been complaining about the fact that their degree from Emory won't land them that job at Cornell?
One of the Slate articles posted here, about the dominance of graduates from specific universities in TT/tenured placements at ALL institutions (though it's focused on a couple of different non-humanist disciplines), does a great job of illustrating the significance of this discussion. Myopic hiring practices at certain institutions (which, again, I honestly don't think was ever the focus of this thread) are indicative of myopic hiring decisions at ALL institutions, so I'm really not understanding the distinction you're making here.
- kurayamino, 1Q84, goldfinch1880 and 2 others
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I can't believe anyone would be concerned about diversity in higher education without acknowledging the accumulation of disadvantage figured from the potential myopia of hiring decisions. If there's bias toward degrees from particular institutions, that bias extends out beyond the Ivory Tower, and deserves to be addressed.
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Good job, everyone!!
Course selection? (Fall 2015 Entry Applicants)
in Literature, and Rhetoric and Composition
Posted
Take it, absolutely. If breadth of study is only one of the criteria they use to assess your performance, it doesn't seem too dire to take two (out of what? eight courses your first year?) disability-centered classes. You'll be able to make up any lapse in "breadth" next semester. In any case, your classes do seem to be covering a broad range of topics regardless.