angel_kaye13

The PhD TT crisis is not just in the humanities: http://www.npr.org/blogs/ed/2015/02/27/388443923/a-glut-of-ph-d-s-means-long-odds-of-getting-jobs

Good lord. I've been around since the dawn of the Internet, and never have I seen a meme go crazy like that one has.
 
I'm going to start taking a zen approach to it.
 
There is no dress.

Dear UPenn,
 
Tomorrow's my birthday. Don't worry if you didn't get my gift quite yet. I know just the thing.
 
Best,
-Z.

This is actually why I decided to get a cat last year. It was my last year of undergrad and I wasn't sure where I was going to be. I applied to both grad school and jobs all over the country where I would be completely by myself. I adopted Sirius so that we would always have each other no matter where we went. :3

Oh my gosh!!!! One of my hopeful, "someday" schools!! A VERY hearty congratulations to you!!!

Like IRToni, I would ask everyone to please consider very, very carefully before getting a dog while in grad school. Unless one person is at home full-time, I think having a dog should ideally be a team activity in which multiple family/house members take care of it. If you are taking care of the dog alone and have a full-time job (and grad school usually is a full time job), then frankly I doubt that you'll have enough time to give the dog the attention and exercise that it needs, especially if you're living in a house or apartment without a yard. As has been mentioned by others, training a puppy also takes a lot of time and patience that you may not have when you're just starting grad school, so I would absolutely advise against embarking on that particular adventure until you have a whole lot of free time on your hands to devote to your new "baby."
 
Here in Germany, a dog is considered to be a member of your family, and most people typically take their dogs out for a walk a minimum of three times a day if they live in an apartment, some even more often. If you wouldn't leave your child at home alone all day, then it's understood that you also wouldn't leave your dog at home alone all day. I have never heard of a dog here being "crate-trained," and my dog in the US was also not crate-trained beyond showing her how to get in and out for trips to the vet. All dogs need exercise, even small ones, and most of them need lots of it, and they also need stimulation or they tend to develop nervous habits like chewing or licking themselves or other objects. 
 
I believe that an experienced dog owner with a well-trained dog should be able to strike a compromise between grad school time and doggie time, but I honestly wouldn't recommend dog ownership as a new thing to begin with when you also starting a (potentially stressful) period of graduate studies.

I adopted my rescue beagle during my last year of undergrad last year. He wasn't house-trained, but thankfully since I lived on campus I would come home every four hours and check on the doggie. He moved with me when I started my MA in September 2014 and has actually mellowed into a great apartment dog. I don't leave him alone for more than 7 hours and 2-3 days a week I don't go to the campus at all. I've found it pretty easy to balance my time even with classes, teaching, and some other university commitments. I just had to be super-careful about scheduling my time. Honestly, my dog made the transition to grad school and a new city so much easier. I always have a super-loving and -affectionate being to come home to - it's a seriously amazing privilege.

Glad I'm not the only one crazy enough to keep a dog and a horse through the grad program.  I adopted my baby and he is really well behaved.  I live with my brother who comes home a few hours earlier than I, so I'm not as worried about him being left home alone.  I would like to get a cat though so he'll have someone to play with, and cats make me laugh with their antics.  But I don't know how responsible that would be given my financial situation.  So maybe after a year in the program I'll reasses and decide then if I want a kitten.  I also have bunnies to care for, but they are old, so I'll probably get something once they are gone.

Looking at the results boards, I'm proud that I haven't seen the brattiness in posts of English rejections that I see in some of the other fields.
 
Sheeesh! Entitlement!

I didn't understand how grad school worked until the start of my junior year, so up until that point I had little preparation for grad school applications besides a high GPA. Before college I had never met anyone with an advanced degree, so my image of grad school was high school teachers and business managers going to classes at night to get their masters so that they could be paid more. The summer before my junior year I joined a project that was part of my college's summer research experience program because it was paid and it seemed interesting. It was then I learned about grad school from my labmates (they were already planning to apply and would talk about picking research interests, finding POIs, funding, etc).  Before that I honestly had no idea that you could get a MS/PhD and be paid for it, or that classes were just a small part of graduate school.
 
At my college the vast majority of science majors were pre-med/dental/health, and the few that were interested in grad school were into genetics and molecular bio, so it took me awhile to figure out how to find opportunities in ecology. I took a year off after undergrad because it took me too long to get involved in research that was relevant to my interests. 
 
Fortunately one of my recommenders told me about the NSF GRFP in September the year I applied, and my advisor brought it up as well when I first contacted her. I probably wouldn't have found out about it in time on my own (I didn't find this website until December).
 
Honestly I'm still surprised sometimes that I'm getting paid to get a PhD. And that I'm getting paid to work on a project that's all my own. The autonomy was jarring at first: I used to feel uncomfortable with the amount of freedom my advisor gave me in developing my research plans. Some days I do wish someone would just give me a project and tell me what to do. But I'm more confident now, and surprisingly not stressed out most of the time. The whole stressed, starving grad student stereotype has not been my experience at all. 

If you're looking for some info to share with students, this article has some great statistics: http://www.salon.com/2014/02/16/the_wal_mart_ization_of_higher_education_how_young_professors_are_getting_screwed/

(crappy school computer erased original post, so this might be a little terse).
 
I was dismayed to only find out about this event late last night, which prevented me from being able to adequately plan for any action today. As I understand it, NAWD is meant to be awareness-raising action only, so in that I think organizers have both failed (I didn't know about it until last night) and succeeded (main goals have been pushing us to inform undergraduates/general public).
 
Here's what I did: I didn't tell students class was cancelled but when they arrived, I informed them that it was NAWD and talked for a bit about adjunct issues and how they affect higher education (and thus, their education). I fielded questions and allowed any pushback. Then I "refused to teach" and allowed them to leave (they were pretty happy about that last part). So kind of a half walkout.
 
Most students, surprise surprise, didn't care much (most hadn't even ever seen the word adjunct before) but some came up afterwards and said they were glad to be made aware of the issue, which was comforting.
 
Anyone else take action today? Some good examples here: http://nationaladjunct.tumblr.com/page/2/
 
 

I am also surprised by the opportunities I wasn't aware of, not just in grad school but those that were available as an undergraduate. For example, there were many paid summer internship and field jobs related to my field that I could have applied for which would have made me an amazing ecology applicant had I done them. In terms of grad school, I honestly had no idea that fully funded masters programs existed when applying, nor did I know that there were job boards advertising these positions. I also never heard of the NSF GRFP prior to this past summer. Don't ask me how.

I was also surprised at how much time I ended up spending sitting. I spend so much time on the computer or a tablet reading and writing.

During my candidacy exam (and the time spent studying for it), I was surprised by how much I really remembered from my intro courses. At the same time, when preparing for my TA position, I was surprised at how many little things have slipped my mind.

A Battle Royale with cheese

Rejected from Rochester's PhD, and was offered to apply for their MA. Given that funding appears spotty, I won't be doing that.
 
Rejected from Chicago's PhD, but my application was forwarded to the Masters in Humanities application pool. Unsurprising, but nice to see that my app wasn't thrown out outright at a top 10 school. 

Well unfortunately these are not often things you do consciously or that you can actually influence. But, for example, the paper topics you have in your first year and second year seminars will probably determine to some significant extent what your qualifying papers and ultimately dissertation will be about. The people you choose to talk to will inform the theories you will think about. Some of this will be determined by the topics the particular instructors you had in your intro courses chose to cover in the particular year you took the class (and topics and instructors change from year to year) and who was accessible and available to advise you on these projects when you were just starting out. Not to mention the school you chose over other acceptances you didn't take when choosing grad schools. The luck of the draw will determine that some abstract will get into a conference and another might not, and you might pursue the one that was accepted at the expense of the one that wasn't. You might study language X for your field methods class, but if you'd done it the year before/after you'd have studied language Y, and the project that would come out of it would be very different. A lot of projects come out of work in these field methods classes, sometimes leading to whole dissertations and research programs. Same for experimental methodologies - you need to decide very early that you want to be trained in that, and have the luck of having the right courses offered at the right time, and the right advisor being around and available (for example, not on sabbatical or busy with a sick family member), and even the right research question that is amenable to being asked experimentally using the tools you have available. 
 
In the 1-2-3 year most people are not in a position to articulate their research program -- which is ok and makes sense, because to a large extent that is determined by your research experiences. But by the time you get to 4-5 year and go on the job market, there is not too much you can do to "invent" parts of your profile that don't exist but you wish were there. Not too many advisors will actually have a conversation with you once in a while about how your profile as a scientist is developing (and a lot of people may not want that or may be too intimidated) but as it turns out, my profile now as a 1st year postdoc is determined almost exclusively by what I've done in grad school, which in turn was determined to a very large extent by accidents of topics and instructors that happened in my first year. That determines to a large degree the broader research questions I can formulate that encompass (most of) my previous work and the work I want to do in the future (or at least, the work I tell hiring committees on job interviews that I want to do). 
 
This all said, I am of the firm belief that although my research might have been very different had I gone to a different school or had a different independent study advisor in my first year, or if I had not stumbled onto experimental work, etc., it would have been just as good. My character is my character and my abilities are my abilities, so my productivity would have been similar, just that the actual papers and topics (and methodologies, languages of interest, etc) would be different. I think it would have been good either way, just.. different in ways I can't imagine, which is what I mean when I say that early choice points lead to very different possible outcomes.

I can't ameliorate your depression. But I want you to think about this. 
 
Many of the top programs in these fields select perhaps 5 or 6 students for their programs. They might get 300 applications or more on the high end. Right off the bat, we're looking at admissions percentages in the small single digits. Now let's think about this from the perspectives of these programs. The nature of the beast is that these departments will always be serving their own needs first. That's how it goes. So if Prof So-and-So has been lacking in advisees, and they need someone who studies the same things as he or she does, and your  specialty is already overrepresented in the department, guess who's going to get a leg up over you? Or if your department is heavily skewed towards women scholars and you're a man? Departments require subject-matter diversity because of the nature of graduate programs, and the want demographic diversity because of the noble principles of multiculturalism. Then, there is the fact of patronage and connections, which people hate to talk about here but absolutely do make a difference. Maybe just one person in your application pool will get a spot because they have the connections you lack. But if there's only 5 people accepted in a round, what does that do to your odds?
 
And so you have to arrive at this inevitable conclusion: if you're not a great candidate, you'll never get in. But you can be a great candidate and easily get left out. People know enough to say that this process isn't fair, but I suspect after they get in to programs, they secretly believe that it is. Well, "fair" is not a concept I'm really interested in. What I am interested in is acknowledging that  chance and randomness and weight of numbers plays a huge role in this process, and you've got to give yourself a break for that reason.

I just want to add, too, that I do not in any way think that accepting an unfunded offer is "crazy," and that the decision is ultimately, entirely up to you. I went into 80k for debt for undergrad and then when I graduated into the recession and a terrible job market, I regretted it sorely. However, I have friends who went into even more debt than I did to attend my alma matter--another big, private, expensive NYC school--and are still very glad they made the decision to attend their dream school, in spite of the financial burden. So my only real advice is, explore all options, decide what's best for you, and then go for it--which is what it seems like you are planning to do. Best of luck with your decision, drownsoda, and with your graduate studies, wherever you decide to go!

I was actually thinking precisely that-- working while attending, wherever I can, whenever I can. New York has a plethora of job opportunities, so I assume I could find some sort of related work to do on the side. I am acclimated to commuting and public transit because I had to do that between work and school during undergrad, so it's a grind I know well (it's also the reason I was able to escape undergrad with hardly any debt; granted, this was a state school, but I only worked part time waiting tables). My acceptance letter said that they couldn't offer me funding "at this time," so I presume that doesn't mean it's an impossibility down the line; granted, I'd have to plan accordingly and be prepared for the worst. My father is passionate about me pursuing the degree, and could possibly help me, though I'm not sure how much, as he's not really rolling in dough. I also have an uncle who is a lawyer and is really well-off, and he and his son (also a lawyer) expressed the possibility of helping me finance the degree; again, not sure how comfortable I'd be with that. I have not had any help from my family with tuition my entire undergrad career. I paid for it myself. I applied for financial aid and am going to wait and see how it all pans out. Like I said, I've still got a couple other programs to hear from, so I'll weigh my options accordingly when that happens.

Hello!! Yes, it's me! But, watching yours, hannalore's and hreathmus' (sorry for the intentional typo, I'm on my phone, and that's the closest it'll give me!) credentials, I felt I wasn't I the same league. (Hence my holding out on ND and Toronto.^^) I am very excited to {hopefully?!?} work with Dr. Gwara, he was my first contact at USC, and my reason for choosing them. His studies are closely allied to where I want to go (philological), and he's followed the trajectory I hope to, institution-wise. He said there is another Medievalist there, as well, a Holly Crocker? Her line wasn't as closely aligned, but...it have me excitement to get to work, that I could be working on real and relevant research, with colleagues who are there!
This is VERY encouraging, thank you so much for your encouragment, really. Though I've wanted this for so long, and have been working towards it, some days I still feel that "I'm SO behind my peers!" feeling. And, as small as our specialization is within the English realms, it's nice to hear kind encouragement, rather than the converse.^^

How was the ND visit? that's right near my hometown, relatively speaking (I was a bit south and easy of South Bend).^^ Beautiful area, and I've grown up all my life hearing its accolades.^^ I've never stepped foot on campus, if you can believe it, but I studied for a time at Oxford, and...I imagine that kind of feeling: the intoxicating sense of having, literally, vast amounts of resources and ancient manuscripts at your fingertips.

ETA: I guess I listed on my profile my interest in OE, but It doesn't show on my posts. My fault. Still. I've a long way to go!^^

There are indeed plenty of places that still take people straight to PhD from BA, and even in programs that don't grant an "MA along the way"; I've been accepted to a few this cycle (as have plenty of other people in this year's GC cohort), and in the interview weekend I was just at, only two of the six candidates being interviewed for the spots in a PhD program had MAs. Both "people can go straight from undergrad to a phd program" and "MAs provide valuable training and professionalization" can be true at the same time. (And this is field dependent, too, right? I hear that in rhet/comp the MA first is much more the standard path, but I'm not in the field, so ProfLorax and comebackzinc would know better than I.)
 
I think it's hard to generalize about what makes an applicant successful, and while these discussions are interesting, I'm not sure how useful it is to extrapolate from personal experience to recommendation, to go from description to prescription. It's easy to say "I did this, and I was successful," and so it's tempting to slide from that to "this is what works," when it's really just "this is what worked for me, a sample of one." Pace fancypants, I didn't contact POIs; pace goldfinch, while I did work on it some over the summer, my writing sample was indeed just a reworked course paper, not a thesis at all (honors or otherwise). I don't bring up those examples because either was implying that those things are required; I just bring them up to show that there is really an awful lot of diversity in what people do in terms of what yields acceptances (and rejections). Unfortunately, that makes useful generalizations--at least ones that aren't so broad to be meaningless (i.e., "have a good writing sample!")--about the process so hard to come by.
 
ETA: Especially when those generalizations so obscure the parts of the process that really are out of an applicant's control, as a bunch of others have pointed out.

Congrats! And I think South Carolina does really well placing their people in PhD programs, don't they? I at least know three medievalists who did MAs there who are in great PhD programs now.

So as someone who days ago had steeled herself for another round of applications, it is with great pleasure I can say what a difference a few days makes. So far I've been offered MA slots at UVA, Boston U, and University of South Carolina. While the first two were unfunded and sent me into a fury of Scotch sipping and accounting tape, USC offered me very generous funding for their MA (50% tuition abatement year one, 100% year 2, and generous stipends for both years PLUS I GET TO TEACH IN YEAR TWO YAAAASSSSS).
 
Honestly, I think I've learned a lesson in being humble. I applied to USC as my complete and utter everything-has-gone-to-shit backup (which is extra ridiculous because they are ranked #77 and have a great reputation). I was so grateful to get that e-mail and know that I don't have to sit out another year AND I won't have to be in debt $100k or $64k respectively for UVA or BU. More than that, now that the worry of finances is gone, I can see what an honor it was to get offered MA slots from UVA and BU. Yeah, it is somewhat a "consolation" and the lack of funding gives me sad face, but as someone coming from a generally unheard of SLAC with a 4 year gap in my undergrad career and a writing sample I now realize could've been stronger, I am impressed that my application was given such consideration.
 
I'm now hoping that an MA at USC will further prove my track record in academia, prove I can cut my own at graduate-level work, and polish my skills up enough so that when the time comes for me to apply to PhD programs UVA, BU, and (god willing) a few others will offer me that golden ticket.
 
Congrats to everyone and any Uni of South Carolina peeps hit me up~*
 
P.S. Lesson to the kiddies - don't let something like a desire to get out in the world let you demean the value of local programs. Seriously.

Oh dear, I had a horrible time at work today so I have to say it really is uplifting to see all of the wonderful news on this board - definitely has brightened what had been an abysmal day! Congrats everyone! So very, very happy for you and could not think of a more deserving, generous group of people! 

bgt28, not just an up-vote, but a wholly platonic-yet-hearty "I love you!!!!!"