hypervodka

I think it's a great sign that I've forgotten the details of that test already.

I was going off of the information on ETS's FAQ, so, of course, it's wrong. Thanks, guys. (Wrote "October," but I actually took the September date. Not that it matters.)

A couple of my application are requesting unofficial scanned copies of the GRE Subject test... and I definitely haven't received mine yet.

I emailed the director of Graduate Studies at Emory U, and he said, "All we need is a title." So, that's something I encourage you to ask each department if it's important to you.

I have no idea. She seemed genuinely interested in my research, which is fairly non-traditional, so I don't think it was, like, a preliminary screening process or anything. I do kind of regret sending it to her, though, because the paper is still being workshopped.

For what it's worth, the only POI I've contacted so far has done the same to me. Not the CV, but the writing sample.

You absolutely have to mention it in your statement of purpose. An F in a Masters-level course sends a terrible signal. As Donald Asher explains it in his book on personal statements, the way you need to present the failing grade is to, firstly, make sure it fits these criteria: It has to be in the past. It has to be resolved. It has to be sympathetic. It should be unlikely to recur in graduate school. Is the reason you did not turn in the assignment reasonable and understandable?

That's exactly how I've seen it done.

An update, for anyone who finds themselves in the same situation: I tried to follow pretty closely what proflorax, lifealive, and surefire suggested. I messaged my primary my condolences, then emailed my back-up... who then called my primary and asked Prime if he could write my recommendations... and then my primary texted me to tell me he would write my recommendations. For that reason, I would suggest (to anybody whose primaries and secondaries know each other) to email the primary about any new schools first, and just explain to him that you are planning on emailing a secondary in case he is unable. I think this would different if our situation was a bit different. I think you should only ask someone this close to a tragedy if you already have sturdy relationship (if, when you asked for a recommendation, they said, "Yes! Of Course! I'm so excited!" rather than, "Sure. Could you send me a paper from your class? With comments? I don't really remember very well.").

That's extremely helpful. Thank you.

Hutcheon, Heidegger, Sedgwick, Hall (or, I should've written, S. H. H. H.)

I think I'm going to go ahead and find a new recommender, though this previous recommender was actually my thesis advisor and a close friend. There is no possible timeline where asking would not be "too soon."

That's true. He does already have a "base"; so I guess it would be okay to wait a couple of weeks before bringing it up to him. Neither of the schools I was planning on adding have deadlines before 12/15.

The mother of one of my recommenders has just died. That recommender has already completed all of his recommendations for me (because his mother was sick), but I am now thinking about adding more schools. I don't know how to broach this with him, or if I even should.

That's a larger problem depending on what you're actually interested in studying. Understanding French, Old English, Italian, or German is far more important if you're studying medieval English literature than if you're studying American literatures of the 21st century. Knowing Greek and Latin is more important when studying T. S. Eliot than when studying Paul Laurence Dunbar.

For the record, my own writing sample has a couple of instances of usage of the first person. I do think, though, that when you're examining a nontraditional text, you should ere on the side of tradition in as many other ways as possible. I had one professor from Oxford who hated it when I used first person, even sparingly, and sometimes, people are just like that. So, no, a couple of "Is" isn't a deal-breaker, but I'm worried that the whole paper may seem too unorthodox, and the wrong committee member will read it as ungrounded/unprofessional.

Well, I have a counter-question. Are you applying directly out of undergrad? When you're applying to schools, it's pretty important to have some idea what you want to study, not just because that's what's going to make you stand out, but it's also going to peak one or two POIs' interest in you. You're not alone in enjoying several different time periods. I have an Early Modernist, an American Naturalist, and a Victorian writing my recommendations, but I still managed to boil down my interests to critical race theory in 19th and 20th c. American literature. If you're using a paper grounded in "study of the novel" (which is definitely transhistorical) and classical traditions in pop culture, then that should be your tentative focus in your SOP. Still, a paper on a film of this kind is a bit of a hard sell for an English literature program. Film Studies, or even Comparative Literature, could probably work better. Please draft out the first person. It is not a good idea to keep that in.

Now, that I'm thinking about it, I think part of the reason that I felt the test seemed more "familiar" than what other people are reporting is because I never used the two-pass method. Princeton Review, for example, has been hawking that method since I first took the SATs, but I've always been more interested in just barreling through. (For future test takers: it took me about all but the last forty minutes to finish, then I went back a reviewed unanswered questions.) So, if anyone ever asks me what percentage of the test was ID and what was interpretation, I'd be hard-pressed to tell you. But, honestly, the "interpretation" does rely fairly heavily on identification in the first place. For example, there's one such question in the PR practice test, asking why the speaker is so upset at some other character--and the question is pretty to answer if you're familiar with the poem as Robert Browning's "My Last Duchess." The interpretations are pretty straightforward, but only if you're familiar enough with the voice of the authors. I got a lot of comprehension questions wrong on my practice exams (I even missed the Browning question, despite recognizing, and even memorizing, that poem from my senior year), but, as I studied more texts, my score got higher and higher. Just reading beforehand was so helpful to me, because foreknowledge of the texts is basically some pre-interpretation.

Just generally, if you're planning on focusing on the digital humanities, posthumanism, 21st century culture, and networks, my gut would be to apply to Literature programs. But there's some overlap, so it should really depend on who you want to work with at the school. It sounds to me like Literature is your best choice.

Whenever they don't specify, call them, but typically it doesn't count.

670. **collapses into a puddle of THANK GOD THAT'S OVER**

I'm sorry, that website used to have a graph that discussed every MFA program from a whole bunch of different matrices. If they list their graduate students, check to see if any of them have a website (most creatives do, nowadays), and that should give you some indication about fit. Their faculty are all published writers, so you can read their work online, in anthologies, at the library and establish connections to your own. You can also look at recent graduate profiles to see what people with degrees from that U actually do with them.

http://creative-writing-mfa-handbook.blogspot.com/ This website gives some information about all creative writing programs. There's a couple posts about Miami U.

My favorite undergrad trick: fudge the character spacing not the font size. If need be, this is the most undetectable method of paper stretching, if you're running just below.

You could actually try reverse image searching via Google (https://www.google.com/imghp?gws_rd=ssl, click the camera icon that says "search by image").