Ramus

Thanks for posting this. Two cycles ago I received a tuition remission offer from Boston College for their MA program, which, at the time, was one of my top choices. But their DGS asked that I make a decision in a week. Considering he emailed me the third week of February, I thought the move unusual and unnecessarily pushy. Good to know now that that's not standard practice.

Been wondering about this myself. In years past they sent out all the interview emails (15-20 total) at once, but they have a new DGS this year and she may be doing thing's differently. I couldn't imagine that, if the do in fact have people left to contact, they'd wait longer than the end of this week. Interviews usually happen on the penultimate weekend of February.

The rejections at UChicago take a bit longer to go out because once they've dished out their PhD slots, those who don't make the first cut (and who don't already have an MA) are considered for their MA Humanities degree. Only after they've decided on this second pool will the rejection emails go out. At least that's what I recall from my own experience applying there two years ago.

If it's any consolation, I think you made the right decision. Paying for a MA in the humanities is almost always a bad idea. What's more, many of the so-called cash cow programs (I'm thinking especially of the Chicago Humanities MA) have achieved such notoriety that their graduates often have a difficult time securing top PhD offers. Not saying that this same stigma is attached to Temple, but you still don't want to drop 20, 30, or 40K on an MA. The payoff isn't worth the debt. In any case, I hope that you'll hear back soon from a program willing to fund you!

Thanks for the clarification, proflorax! This is incredibly helpful. I'll be in touch towards the end of the month or the beginning of next, once I've got a better sense of the options available to me. Thanks! That's very kind. I'm sending best wishes your way for locking down one of your top choices. And let me extend a belated congratulations on MSU. They sound like a great option; I have a buddy in their program and he's always singing praises about them.

Just got this email from UMD: "I am emailing to let you know that our Graduate admissions committee in Medieval and Renaissance studies has been very impressed by your application, and we are excited about the possibility of you joining our program next fall. We received some 200 applications and anticipate being able to admit 8 or 9 new students to our PhD program next year. You are currently in second place for the slot in Med-Ren. Most likely, we will only be able to make one admission in this field, but there is usually a lot of movement between early February and the middle of April. It is still very early in the process,and I am sure that you will have other attractive options. But if you remain seriously interested in UMD after you have a clearer sense of your options, we hope that you will visit our campus for our Open House event on Friday, 27 March. I would be happy to speak with you on the phone about this event and our program. If you give me a time and a phone number, I would be happy to call you at your convenience." A bit confused on how to interpret this -- is this standard waitlisting language? Am I in the ambiguous realm of half-acceptance? I was under the impression that programs have one set waitlist, so I was a little surprised that individual "slots" have a pecking order. Also, is it typical to invite waitlisters to a program open house? Any body else come across something similar this cycle? I'll end up getting in touch with the DGS directly; I'm just trying to figure where I stand before I go into that conversation. I'd appreciate any insight y'all might have! ETA: Having gotten over the initial shock of the email, I'm pretty confident this is a waitlisting. I suppose I had figured being put on the waitlist would be a little more straightforward, whereas my position seems to hinge on a number of other unmentioned conditionals. For example, am I to assume that if neither of their two early Americanist spots (or whatever) go unfilled, that I accepted even if Med-Ren #1 accepts? Ack! I need to stop fretting and just call them.

I apologize, hypervodka, if you've felt attacked for the string of critiques. In any case, I do think you should be commended for the Vandy acceptance. As Wyatt's Torch has said, it is quite a feat. I wish you the best of luck for continued success this application season.

I certainly have no interest in GC returning to the nastiness of yesteryear, but I don't think that means we can't note when someone is being pretentious or arrogant. Edit to add: It's a tense time for everyone. I just think that those who are experiencing a lot of early success with acceptances need to be mindful of how they convey that success. For those that are still waiting for a first acceptance, posts like the one being discussed can come off as especially uppity, even if that wasn't the poster's intent.

I wish this were the case, but we've already seen this untethered egotism hinted at in a couple of the entries in the Google Doc that was started up. Edit:...which were subsequently deleted.

I chuckled a bit about this. This applicant must be working on headier stuff than I am. But it might not kill him/her to keep some sense of perspective and humility in mind.

Too early to tell. It's safe to assume rejection only after all of their interview notices have gone out (they interview all of their finalists). Give it another day or so.

Leah Marcus would be awesome to work with, though I get the sense that she's moved past the textual studies stuff she was doing in the 90s and early 2000s. Too bad, as I would love to see more work like Unediting the Renaissance, which I thought was fantastic.

I know of another medievalist (though he leans towards late medieval) that got the thumbs up from Berkeley today. Really brilliant and down to earth guy. You all should have one hell of a cohort.

Awesome! That's great news!

Yeah, I think it's just a form email. Notifications of finalist status/invitations to interviews will come in the form of a personalized email.

To be honest, it seems a little late in the game to receive an email like this, even though ND's deadline was 1/2. Two years ago they sent out interview notices on 2/4, so getting this email now suggests that they're a bit behind this cycle. But I might be reading too much into it; I'm not sure.

Yes, I got the same thing. I interpreted this as the basic "your app has been forwarded to us" email, but it is definitely unusual that they'd talk about being excited and interested in our work, and mention contacting us soon. I think they're just trying to psyche us out.

If history is any indication, UCLA won't notify until next week. But like everyone else, I'm hoping the word comes sooner rather than later.

I just happened to catch his news as a status update on Facebook, which didn't specify how he heard. I double checked the results from previous years, and they don't seem to have a consistent method of notifying folks. Can't hurt to keep those phones on and within reach, though.

Just heard from a guy in my cohort that he got into UMass-Amherst. I'd imagine other calls/emails will go out shortly.

This is my sense of things as well. Having creative publications certainly won't hurt your application; I just don't think they'll generally affect your application. And this was my point in my earlier post: we shouldn't think that there's some type of causal link between 14 (presumably creative) publications and the Duke admission. Creative pubs might have some bearing on an application if one were applying to, say, a program with an emphasis on poetics. But I don't think having 14 publications of any kind is the new standard for admission; those of us that haven't published needn't been anxious.

Either the Director of Graduate Studies for the program or the admission folks at the larger School of Social Work. If you're still leaning towards social work at CSU Long Beach, this page might be helpful: http://www.csulb.edu/colleges/chhs/departments/social-work/contact/ContactUs.html

I can almost guarantee that these 14 publications are not academic publications. I really don't mean to sound like a dick, but I think this is a perfect example what's been discussed in another thread -- applicants placing an emphasize on a quantity of something, instead of talking about the quality or prestige of those things (pubs, conference papers, etc.). Now, it seems like it worked out in this applicant's favor this time. But I don't think we should extract anything generalizable about this. You do NOT have to have a thousand publications -- or even one -- to get into a good program.

I tried for a couple of schools, but most programs' graduate student pages are a little spotty, with interests being either absent or a little vague. But I do think it's something important to think about. Frankly, this may be just as important, if not more so, than the interests of faculty members, especially at top tier schools. At those programs, the faculty are going to be stellar and capable of supervising / advising your work even if your interests lie beyond theirs. Your interaction with other graduate students -- and this is difficult to predict based on student webpages -- will likely have a greater effect on your everyday happiness within a program.

I was a bit skeptical of taking the info on various program websites at face value. Every program, for example, has a statement about how interdisciplinary they are, even if its faculty do not regularly employ interdisciplinary methodologies. And the other thing you have to worry about is professors not updating their faculty pages regularly. In my own program, the lone medievalist's faculty page states psychoanalysis as an interest, but she's said in class that she's grown tired of that theoretical approach and hasn't published anything Freudian in a number of years now. This is problematic for us applicants, of course, if we only look at faculty pages. I know in my own research, I was a little down on NYU at first, only to find that one of their early modernists has recently (in the last year) published on the exact subject that I'm interested in. More than faculty/program pages, I've found the MLA bibliography immensely helpful in determining what professors are working on now.