snyegurachka

I contacted the administrative offices of Emory (comp lit), Brown (comp lit), Stanford (MTL), and Berkeley (rhetoric) to see if any of them conducted interviews. The answer was "no" everywhere except Emory (Brown might do phone skype but likely won't). So I don't think we will be hearing anything until ~February 3 at least. Keep on keeping on...

I had a professor make fun of me once for addressing all of my emails "Dear Professor..." I don't even know what is appropriate anymore.

This is probably going to sound like one of the most pretentious titles ever, but nevertheless... I took a course my senior year of college called "Joyce and Lacan" and it was amazing. It was co-taught by two professors, both of whom were experts in each subject. The class was mostly about close reading and viscerally responding to the texts—we generally received lectures about contexts and backgrounds after we completed our readings for the day. It was a lot of fun and taught me how to look into and around a text without necessarily having a point or argument but seeing the multitude of ways that language/context/narrative express meanings. Considering that I am an English/Literary Studies person, I am actually very unenthused about a lot of the works I read. Joyce is one of these exceptions—I always enjoy reading him and have read Ulysses all the way through at least three times and Dubliners so many I can't even remember. Both levels of Joyce's complexities are intriguing but still pleasurable to read. Theory reading is different for me—its being difficult is like solving a puzzle and is fun for me in a separate way. So this course was delightful because it was fun and challenging. Because of its nature, I did not produce any usable writing, but I learned/was exposed to a lot that inspired much of my later work.

One crazy thing is that it was quite easy for me to get waivers at Brown, U of Chicago, and UC Berkeley—also schools that do not require the subject test (I applied to Rhetoric at Berkeley, but I think maybe English does require it). Unfortunately I also had to take some good state schools (like UT-Austin and UCLA) off of my list because of the subject test. It's all such bullshit, especially because it seems to be much more of a "you have it or don't" thing than any measure of cultural aptitude.

I am actually in a similar position—I live in the midwest but would really like to get back to the Northeast. I only ended up being able to apply to one school near (in) my home zone. And having lived in both Boston and New York, I know that I don't want to live in either city again. I was so averse to California, but when I narrowed down my choices to the best fits and top programs for my field, it made the most sense to aim for those schools rather than spend the money on applications for programs close to where I grew up that I am probably not as good of a fit for.

There was just no way I could take it...not only is it nearly $200, but it is offered nowhere in my city. I would have to rent a zipcar, drive to suburbs more than an hour away, and then pay for the car the whole time I would be taking the test. Oh, and I would have had to miss work to take it. One of the reasons I applied for Comp Lit programs over English was because most do not require the Lit subject test. I think it is all a conspiracy to weed out those who can afford/have the time to take subject tests. From what I could tell from practice versions, there is a HUGE British/American bias in terms of what are considered seminal literary texts. I also realized that most of what I knew came from Peanuts cartoons and Jeopardy.

December 2–March ??? When I think about getting in to Stanford (or insert any other program with an acceptance rate below 10%): And when I think about the reality of the situation: When my advisor/boyfriend/friends tell me they know I'll get in somewhere and everything will be fine: but I keep telling myself

I know some people who are fulbright scholars—fulbright pays the tuition. That may be a thing that is only available for international students coming to the US, but it could possibly go the other way. Often international MA programs are funded because the systems are different. I am in an MA program and about 1/3 of my tuition is paid from grants from the school. I pay the rest with loans, and live off of work and SNAP benefits. Even though I am not funded, I am able to appeal to my program for funding to go to conferences etc. Anywhere that offers a phd but also has an MA track is probably going to be poorly/not funded. From what I have heard about U of C's MAPH program, the professors do not put in much time/effort working with MA students. Though my MA is not a terminal degree, I am receiving it from a school that does not have phd students, so there is more funding and access to professors. A couple of Liberal Arts colleges and Art Schools offer similar programs. But I digress. H-net often has listings for grants and fellowships: http://www.h-net.org/announce/group.cgi?type=Funding

That is super shitty, and I am so sorry. This is another one of those things that makes it so difficult to be a woman in academia. I don't think you need to give up because of this! I am guessing you are talking about applying next year because the application season is finished. I would suggest applying fellowships or research/writing residencies in your field and getting a recommendation from someone you work with there. Many of these application cycles are still open.

28th I think? I am doing thesis (which is just advising in terms of in-school time) and an independent study with a professor from the Writing department. I have been working at school all winter and am not really starting class-y classes, so there's not much of a change in store. I am excited to be getting more feedback on my writing/thesis though. I am also auditing a Russian Literature (in Russian) class at a nearby school to try to get my language game back, and that has already started. Sort of having trouble fitting it in to my schedule, unfortunately.

I just think we are really perpetuating this competition and "oh it's so hard" attitude by making everything harder and more competitive for others and thus ourselves. As in, we make the stakes higher by accepting that they are so high. We are acting the way schools want us to act so that they can make money off of fees that people are paying to programs that they are not good fits for because everyone is so hysterical about getting in somewhere. I am not saying that everyone who applies to more than 9 programs is necessarily applying to each program just to apply and not because the faculty/program are a good fit, but I do think it perpetuates the notion that graduate school admissions are random when they aren't. I was genuinely curious about the whys and hows of people's application decisions. I didn't expect this to get so intense.

And were accepted to nearly half? Gives me hope that my thoughts about statistics are right. My five choices were top programs, but I figured I should go for the best fit at the institutions with good funding and placements. Whenever I encounter a school that does not even consider offering fee waivers...I really just don't want to go. What assholes. How much of a difference did applying to so many programs make, do you think?

What I have heard is that the name of the school matters but the person you study under has a lot of pull as well. So if you study under someone who is a top person in his/her field at a state university, that can be as good as the Harvard or Stanford name in certain contexts.

I just think that this kind of insanity perpetuates both the idea that academia is a cushy bourgeois thing to do, a labor of love and not a job—it's a profession that most of us enjoy and have an aptitude for, but it is still work. We shouldn't be defaulting on our credit cards just to make ends meet. I don't know about you, but when my SNAP benefits were cut off because I was unemployed for six weeks, I had to get a credit card to be able to eat. I live with my partner and we share many of our expenses, but ultimately these are my goals and my own decisions and I did not want to borrow his money (which he doesn't really have much of anyway) to get there. Obviously my situation is different from marriage, but I really don't appreciate your implication that I don't want it or don't care enough to get myself into even more financial trouble just to take a step that I really hope will work. In terms of tasting the chocolates...every school you apply to has its own acceptance rate and things that it is looking for. Statistics do not work in a way in which your applying to x number of schools raising your chances of getting in to a program. What it does do is lower the acceptance rate of each program to which you apply. That is why so many programs have gone from having 50 applicants to 200+. I don't know about you, but I don't think there were more than 10 schools that really seemed like good fits with the right faculty for what I want to do. You get what I'm saying? There are schools that I wish I could have applied to, but not enough to stop eating or being able to pay my rent/utilities or take the train to work. What happens if you don't get in to all 17 and have $3000+ of credit card debt? When you don't have a lot of money to work with, that seems to me to be a huge gamble.

Yeah...I just keep hoping that my "life experience" has somehow made me more inured to life and its disappointments. I haven't even been working full time much of the semester, and I honestly think that the only thing more stressful than being super broke is the stress of working more than I can handle. Or maybe I'm wrong. I can't even think of a time in my adult life that I was not poor. I'm so prepared to live off of a phd student stipend

I think we are...simpatico. My MA program turned out to be great, but it is unranked. Just happened to offer some need-based aid and be in an affordable city. My plan B is to get some kind of certification in Rhetoric/to teach writing at a college/professional level. Or just get a job at a writing center if I can. Still...with 15 schools + your perseverance, I have a feeling you will be okay

Do you think that schools keep your socioeconomic background/present in mind when they review your applications? Where are you coming from, and how did you get yourself to this place of being able to (somewhat confidently) apply to phd programs? Regardless of where you are coming from, I know that it takes a lot of hard work to get to a place of being a viable candidate for top programs. However, sometimes when I see the number of schools people have applied to, time spent not working, how many times they're taken the GRE, their undergrad institutions, etc, I worry that maybe I'm just up against a lot that I can't really compete with. It's not like I'm coming from a privilege-less background at all; I grew up in a middle class family, my father is a professor, I am white, American, I went to a pretty good liberal arts school...I just had to work the whole time, and my transcripts and extra-curricular (or whatever the grown up version of that is?) activities reflect that. I decided to get an MA to make myself a more viable phd candidate, but of course that just compounded my debt, and even with loans, I have to work 20-40 hours per week to get by. As those of you who also have work study jobs or any kind of wage work in academia know, the holiday breaks really fuck up your financial shit (and coincide with deadlines). I only applied to five programs because four were my only choices that offered fee waivers (Duke, University of Pittsburgh, and U-Penn do not), and the one I paid for was my top choice. I kind of doubt that Stanford really cares if its fee is the equivalent of two weeks of food for me. Anyway, I don't want this to get any closer to "oh poor me" territory. I'm just wondering how the rest of you who aren't 100% professional/full-time students, don't have parental/spousal support, who either don't come from much money or have been pretty broke for a while handle these things. I don't want to feel that sinking every time I see someone post who has applied to 9+ schools, but I do. It just doesn't seem right to taste all the chocolates if you're only going to eat one. Sorry, this was the only metaphor I could think of and it is just okay. And for those of you who are in programs now, did this kind of stuff really end up mattering? Do you feel like it put you at a disadvantage or limited your choices?

This thing. I was advised not to talk about teaching because programs are looking for students who will become prominent scholars in their fields, which in turn will make the school/program look good. Regardless of the realities of academic work, the ideal is that a successful scholar publishes and produces work and happens to teach as well. Take in mind that this advice came from a professor/scholar of Art History and not English/Literature...but I think that, with word limits and so on, it is best to focus on your research and proposed future study/dissertation. I have relatively thorough descriptions of what my teaching experiences entailed on my CV and am confident that programs that value teaching experience will get what they need from that.

My partner knew that this was my plan when we started dating, and I think he has wavered between feeling okay about the possibility of moving and dreading it. He was (secretly not so secretly) ecstatic that I didn't get into Emory due to the location. We are doing different things with our lives, so there isn't much of a "your career or mine" thing going on, at least not yet. He is not crazy about a lot of aspects of his job right now and wants to get an MSW (probably?) so that he can do more of the things he wants to do and fewer of the things that he doesn't. All that being said, the plan is for him to start looking for jobs in all the areas of programs I get into and hope he finds something, then apply for MSW programs in the fall in that area and get in-state tuitions. Of course, I could not get in anywhere, or get in to the school I applied to that is in the city we live in now, but this seems to be the general plan. I think what it comes down to is that things will hopefully work out because we are both ready for a change.

Nope! that's great. I also did Russian and ending up moving more towards the ways that our languages and cultures create the conditions for the relationships between humans and objects/materiality. I work with literary criticism, history-writing, and philology but not so much with capital "L" Literature anymore. So that is probably the main thing that makes me an odd candidate for comp lit/English programs. I was very excited about the prospect of working with Mikhail Epstein—we emailed back and forth a bit but he is on leave this year so that may be a (probably minor) thing. It sounds like you are a very good fit for the program...let us know how your visit goes? Also, do you have an MA? I (will) have one, and I wonder if this works for or against me.

First off, congratulations! I emailed the department administrator at Emory to ask if Comp Lit carries out interviews, and he told me that invited would be going out this week or early next week (I think all at once) and that they will also interview some applicants by phone/skype. I did not get an invite and am pretty much figuring that I probably won't make the cut. I submitted my app early to receive the fee waiver and unfortunately don't think I did as well as I could have because of it. I understand if you're not comfortable answering this question, but would you mind telling me a little bit of your background/area? I know it's not a science by any means, but right now I am feeling a bit lost about what different types of programs want/look for.

I hear that...I'm auditing an advanced/graduate level Russian class this semester, and it's making me feel like it's my first year all over again.

a] awwww, I hope so! b] were there really only 3 admits in the past four years? Or just in the results search here? I kind of figure that 1/6-1/3 of accepted applicants post their results on the results survey. I thought it was something more like 2-4 per year. Now I feel even worse c] I have a kind of "ick" feeling about the bay area (even though I have never been there). I lived in Portland, OR for a year and thought it was the worst. Now I have west coast phobia. I also lived in NY and know how stressful high rents can be. Other than these situational aspects...my thesis advisor did his post-doc at Stanford and has only amazing things to say about the school and the MTL program. The interdisciplinarity of MTL—particularly the program's openness to combined art/writerly practice within academia—and its general ethos of theory/cultural studies backed by literary studies' approaches fit perfectly with my project(s) and methodologies. I'm also psyched on taking classes/working with Paula Findlen and Ian Hodder and the general prospect of doing literature-y work while studying closely with people outside of those disciplines. how about yourself?

Ohh it's just about that time of the application cycle that I could use some comradery. I got my B.A. from a small but fairly respected women's college in Massachusetts with a double major in Studio Art and Russian Language, Literature, and Culture. I transferred a few times before I reached my degree-granting institution and had a number of personal issues, but managed to graduate in 4 years anyway. My 3.4 GPA clearly shows this. I took a lot of literature and theory classes and did better in them than most of the classes I took in either of my majors. M.A. (expected 2015) in what is essentially interdisciplinary Humanities and Cultural Studies at a well-known Art School. We don't have official GPAs on our transcripts, but mine would be a 3.8–3.9. Not sure about my exact GRE scores, but I got 90th percentile in Verbal and 4.5 in the writing. I have one publication in a gender studies journal and another forthcoming in a literary and cultural studies journal. I have presented at two conferences and am in the midst of planning a conference at my own institution. The summer after I graduated from undergrad, I had a three-month research fellowship (for current and recent undergraduates) in the Gender and Judaic Studies field. I have had a number of T.A. and T.A. Instructor positions at my current school as well. Interests: Museums as cultural archives and indexes of present and past experiences. "Weird" museums and the fetishization of the vernacular object. Collecting as an editorial process; the collection as an autobiography for the future. Constructions of the self through language and things. Subject/object dialectic. The livingness of Things. Non-American American identities (articulated through things). Bakhtin. WS: The piece I chose is something of a condensed version of my MA thesis and is the draft of my upcoming publication. I look at the collection and museum in different time-space dimensions (chronotopes) as a means of displaying the multitude of ways that objects and human-object relationships manifest/ed over time. The Kunstkammer of Rudolf II and the City Museum in St. Louis are the primary sites of my exploration of the formation of narrative through the collection and arrangement/display of objects that stand in for an ideal (self or space or time). I weave these analyses in with anecdotal recollections of my own immigrant grandparents' collections of the "old country" in America and my lived experiences as a collector and visitor to collections. Sorry, this isn't a very good summary. My thesis uses incidences to demonstrate the multi-faceted meanings of things and the stories they tell, in a structure that moves somewhat linearly through time but bounces across cultures and subjects. It is more "writerly" than many academic writing samples, which makes me nervous, but it is also who I am and what I do, and I don't want to be in a program that won't at least tolerate my bad academic behavior. I submitted a different part of a thesis chapter to Brown, which required a ten page sample. That section looks at the (emptied) Hermitage during the siege of Leningrad and the literary/physical figure of Peter I. Statement of Purpose: I start off by stating my prerogative—to redact personal, provincial, partial, and peripheral histories that together create a multi-faceted picture of a time/space/experience/culture. I talk more about some specifics of my ideas about collecting/curating as editorial processes. I talk about my unique approaches to text as an artist (or really, someone immersed in artists) and to visuality as someone with a literary studies background. I also describe the influence of Russian culture (my family) and my connection to the language (mostly academic) as avenues through which I approach the material of my writing/research, citing some examples from my thesis. I then outline my proposed dissertation, which will have something to do with finding and relating stories from the confluence of cultures represented by personal, provincial, and often strange museums across the United States. I give a very clear reason as to why I am applying to literature programs and not Art History or American or Cultural Studies. Then of course I have my whole spiel about how great x and y professors are and why z program is the perfect site for me to do my interdisciplinary work. I applied to: Emory, Comparative Literature Brown, Comparative Literature University of Chicago, English UC Berkeley, Rhetoric Stanford, Modern Thought and Literature I was really psyched on all these programs when I applied, but the more I think about it, the more it feels like Stanford and I would fit so well together. Hello, upcoming failure.

You as well! I just keep reminding myself that I applied to all those other programs not in Atlanta, trying not to take this one loss as a barometer of the appeal of all my applications. Anxieties!