kurayamino

Finally an official rejection from Chicago with recommendation to MAPH.

By that token should we extrapolate and suggest that everyone who is on this website is privileged because we exist in a society that has Internet and allows for informed discussions? Should we carry the argument out to its farthest point until it becomes meaningless? The hierarchy of privilege is stratified, it is not black and white, all or none. Getting into a PhD program is A privilege, but I would hesitate to argue that all who get in ARE privileged. They are certainly not privileged in the same way or for even the same reason.

Ahhh mine finally came.

I wish mine would already :/

I'm wondering if chicago has some sort of silent wait list or something.

More rejections from chicago on the board, both to maph and otherwise and still nothing. It's driving me crazy lol.

Thanks y'all

My adviser suggested to visit and then trust my gut about which one to choose if all else seems equal. Good luck to you on your choice!

Yay! I got into umich joint lit and women's studies!

Congrats Empress on the additional money and to the Oregon acceptances!

Yeah, I agree that it sounds encouraging, but... it doesn't mean it'll open up TT positions. Schools have found that adjuncts can do a great job at filling all those gaps for one quarter the cost of a TT professor. Or, at my school they hire new faculty but they're now hired under "no advancement TT" meaning, they'll never rise above assistant prof pay, no matter how much they publish. I hope I'm wrong, but I'm afraid I won't be.

I love Wall-Drug. There's nothing better than sitting on a giant jackalope for a great photo opportunity! I'm planning on moving with some cats and figuring out those logistics is very interesting.. haha. Between first month deposit/security deposit/ and moving expenses... I can't imagine how I'm going to afford this business. Thank goodness for a tax refund

Hello everyone, I'm resurrecting this thread because.. well I was up until 2am worrying about moving coast to coast. There's some helpful information in here that others might find useful. Also, it would be good to start discussing strategies if we come up with alternatives to what has been suggested.

I think the stigma against borrowing for education is also based on this fact: When you finance a home or a car and find yourself out of work with too much debt you can file for bankruptcy. When you finance your education and find yourself out of work there is absolutely NOTHING you can do except extend the term of your loan. You will be in debt for your education for the rest of your life and if you have kids, the rest of their lives. The loan industry for education is one of the sharkiest businesses out there and while some debt may be unavoidable or even worth the risk taking on massive loads of debt (beyond say, the price of said Mercedes) can be a huge risk.

Plan B information for post PhD: http://versatilephd.com/ a book called “So What Are You Going to Do with That?”: Finding Careers Outside Academia by Susan Basalla and Maggie Debelius.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/parenting/2015/02/11/the-community-collegereal-college-divide/?_r=2&referrer= This is a great article about the difference community colleges make in peoples lives. It may belong elsewhere, but I'll post it here for now.

Hear hear! I'm out of upvotes, but you deserve them. I wish I had great ideas about how to change the system, but honestly I have no clue what the system even is. No one in my family even went to college before so I feel completely unprepared for how to change the system from within. I want to, desperately. The systematic bias I've seen even at my tiny home institution is alarming. The biases further out in programs that are even ranked must be astronomical. I think unions are a good answer to some of that, but the adjuncts at my school who have rallied to demand fair wages found themselves without work the next year. Is the way to change the system only from the margins? Or is it from the inside? Have those who have wanted change before just been outnumbered by "good ole boys"? I'd like to think so. I'd like to think there will be so many of us who desire the system to change that we can actually make that change happen.

Thanks for the good news! I'll be keeping my eye open for other successful candidates as well and I'll be sure to try and gauge what the hiring practices are for the places I'm visiting.

Yeah I definitely didn't mean it that way at all. I'll be happy to teach at whatever school would be happy to have me as a professor, but I don't think that the satisfaction I'd find working at a CC excuses the behavior of elite universities against professors who come from non-elite schools. It may be distasteful to talk about, but these discussions are important.

I don't think that participating in conversations about elite institution preferences for other elite institution students is undermined by using "Podunk" or "dinky" as a description for non-elite institutions because this is the language used by those elites. I also don't think it reflects that these discussions are counterproductive or that this elitism is ingrained because the message was that this kind of thing is ridiculous. I certainly only used dinky to refer to something very very small, not as a pejorative.

I wish that was my problem, but alas.. my spam folder has been squeaky clean since Feb 1st

Yes please! I do know it happens.. a number of people I want to work with came from dinky colleges to higher tier institutions, only.. that was over a decade ago for most of them. I need recent success to feel confident in my own chances of pulling off such a maneuver.

Yeah, I came from a CUNY school and am going right into a PhD. I think this just proves how utterly ridiculous and crazy the process is though. I think a funded MA is nothing to sneeze at and that if you feel it's right for you bgt28, you should do it.

Yeah.. my adviser just emailed me this as well. We had a long discussion about how prestige is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's more problematic for the humanities though as there have been tons of discussions about "diversifying academia" and what that means and how to do it, but it seems if most humanities majors become professors from a small set of institutions it doesn't matter how diverse the rest of the PhD student body is. *sigh* It's great to talk about these problems and it's not as if I wasn't aware of them, but now that I've been admitted I want to try and change the system. Not just for me, but for everyone. And that makes me feel so very very tired.