Junior1919

I found this: Of course, that thread is filled with competing information about whether or not it's a good idea, so I'm just going to bury my head in the sand and hope that it is.

The original plan was to go straight from undergrad (graduated in '10) to PhD, but I've come around to the idea of a funded MA program to begin with in order to narrow things down, get better letters of recommendation, and a more suited writing sample. There's something to all of it that makes sense. Well, when I wrote it I guess I was speaking as the general audience. Movies have a collective audience while books usually have a singular one, so I thought the we was appropriate when I wrote it. I get that it's presumptive and I'll for sure edit it out if I do end up using it. I think you're right. You're talking a lot of sense. The whole application process seems like a Brazil-ian kind of nightmare where one wrong move or one ill-timed step will ruin you. As I said earlier, the MA thing looks like the way to go with my current situation re: not knowing exactly what I want to do quite yet. Are there any resources you or others know of for finding funded MA programs?

I've got an essay I wrote in an undergrad class designed to be as close as possible to a grad-level class. It's an essay that explains how Pan's Labyrinth (movie) works as a Homeric epic and, specifically, how many of the scenes and ideas in that film have direct antecedents in the Odyssey. I'm pretty happy with the quality of the essay but I think there are a few things that I could polish up, and maybe I could use some help on how to frame it in my SOP. 1. I guess my prof let me use first person pretty generously throughout the essay. There's a lot of 'we' going on. Is this something that I should polish out of the essay to make it feel more academic or should I leave it in? 2. While I did write this essay in an english class, it is technically about a movie. Is that an issue? I feel like it could go either way. One, it is interdisciplinary, and thanks to some film electives taught by a fantastic professor, I have gotten really good at writing about film in a technical way, which is certainly a different set of skills than writing about writing. There's the Odyssey based stuff to show off my more traditional skills as well. But on the other hand, it's a little off the traditional kinds of things I've seen in here. Will that be alienating to the members of the adcomm who maybe haven't seen the movie or whatever? 3. This is more of an overall problem I have, but it's related: I'm not entirely sure what I want to study, which makes basically every step of the app process a little more difficult than it needs to be. I'm interested in things like fairy tales and children's lit, but I also really love modernist writing. I can safely rule out things like Shakespeare or medievalists, but there's still a wide range of things that are in play. So how do I position that openness as a positive, and how to I match that to this very specific writing sample?