squankabonk

Ended up emailing the DGS yesterday and got some really encouraging news. While he said that he couldn't offer admission yet, he did suggest that it's pretty likely to convert. Hopefully that means I can forego most of the awkwardness of attending the open house as a waitlister. Or, at the very least, it'll allow me to calm down and be a little more natural. 

I'm echoing a lot of the other posters, wetheplants, but I wanted to speak from my perspective having done MAPH with a partial tuition scholarship.  I had a great experience, and I'm a much better scholar, thinker, and writer after it.  That said, I totally regret it.  I regret the debt.  Going significantly into debt for a humanities MA is not worth it.  I know you've said that your parents will pay for your MA, but seriously, save them 60-70K and ask them to put that toward an eventual downpayment on a house or something like that.  Even setting aside who is spending that huge chunk of cash, Ph.D. programs are well aware of the cash cow reputation of programs like UC's MAPH, UVa, and NYU.  If you get a tuition scholarship from one of those programs, that's a different issue.
 
Basically, money follows money, so you want to be able to show a Ph.D. program that an MA program has invested in you financially.  Just because you or your parents have paid for an MA from a top 10 program like UC doesn't mean that a program has invested financially in you.  The UC cohort is huge, and they accept a ton of people largely to bankroll their Ph.D. program.  Is their Ph.D. program phenomenal?  Absolutely.  Is their MA program?  Widely divergent opinions on this both from other institutions and from people who have done MAPH.  My cohort had over 100 people, and several of us went on to Ph.D. programs, some of which did include Ivies and top 20 programs, but a few high-profile placements loses its attractiveness considering that is a significant minority out of the number of MAs they produce.  
 
Sure, BC's Ph.D. program is ranked lower, but there are no rankings for MA programs, and the Ph.D. rankings do not map neatly onto MA programs.  BC's program is great, they're investing in you, and there are great professors there who will help you develop as a scholar.  One of the reasons that the BC prof may have been somewhat dismissive of doing the Ph.D. in the UK is that other than Oxbridge (and sometimes even then), if you want a TT job in the US, you need to get your Ph.D. here.  Basically, asking to do the Ph.D. there shows that you may not know a lot about the way academia works in the US.  No offense, but it sounds like you might want to do some more research on placement in terms of percentage of placements out of cohort, the places that accept people with MAs and where those MAs come from, and job prospects in the US (if that's where you want to stay) concerning where various tiers of institutions hire from.
 
Your choice, obviously, but picking an unfunded program when you have a full-tuition offer from a great school in a great city with great scholarly resources is a horrible decision (in my opinion).  Again, my opinion and I don't know you or your circumstances, but from the perspective of someone who did MAPH, didn't know hardly anything about higher education when I applied (because I was a first-generation college student), and has benefited from several years of experience, I can't say enough that following an institution's investment in you is far superior to going to a program with a prestigious Ph.D. reputation but tarnished MA one.  Lastly, if you want to go to UC, doing the MA there is pretty much a 100% guarantee that you won't get in there for the Ph.D.  There are exceptions (way less than 1% per cohort. . . 0% in mine), but if you really want UC, doing the MA there is a pretty good way of making sure you can't.
 
(Don't mean to sound harsh, but I think real talk is really important.) 

Good point. I should just go read some Faulkner to keep myself busy and off the boards

I think this 
 
 
is one of those situations where it's pretty much impossible to read the tea leaves. Who knows who makes the changes on that website? My guess would be that it's an admin person for the grad school that has little knowledge of the decision-making process of individual departments. At many schools I've heard from (waitlist and otherwise) my status on the website never actually changed one way or the other, changed way late, etc. If you've already heard from them, your "Decision Made" moment happened a while ago, and I very much doubt that you' should assume the worst just cuz they have to mail notifications to a wave of rejected folks who were never on the list in the first place.

I'd be interested to see studies that focus specifically on recent PhD graduates, since just looking at where current professors studied tells a lot about placement trends when they were hired--which was often decades ago--but doesn't reveal much valuable information for new grad students entering an economy where institutional hiring practices are changing very quickly.

(inspired by windrainfireandbooks talking about x-files in another thread)

I'm in off the waitlist at chapel hill!!!!!!!! I'm walking around downtown Charleston SC sobbing and I don't even care.

Three years of funding just isn't enough. Frankly, I don't care if a program insists that PhD students always get funding their fourth and fifth year; if the funding is guaranteed, then guarantee it! Your third year of a PhD program should be focused on starting a killer dissertation, the kind that will get you a job, not rushing through just in case you can't get funding. Or, just as bad, focusing your energies on applying for funding rather than your research. Sorry to be so blunt, but offering three years of funding is straight up unethical, especially in this financial and political climate. 

I'm having flashbacks to my days working at my university's writing center, where all clients seemed to think, "It's your job to fix my essay, as I look at you as little more than a service worker slinging a red pen instead of a spatula." 

Can we charge $200/hr?

Wuff wufff wufff wufff wufff wuff May fifth wufff wufff wufff wufff.
 
Sorry I am just Dog.

Theoretically, it is possible for two people to apply to the same schools and each be accepted to their #2 school, which is at the same time the other's #1 school, and waitlisted at their #1 school, which is at the same time the other's #2 school. In which case they will both sit until April 15th, waiting for the other to decline who is waiting for them to decline, until they both shuffle into their #2 school, never knowing what might have been. 
 
These are the thoughts that are going through my mind as I sit on three waitlists.

Even though I have no evidence, I'm also going to say our love lives are better.
 
I've now written 3 term papers and a thesis chapter on Henry James.  
 
My joke is I do the short 19th century.  Melville to Henry James.  But seriously, folks. 

Don't let them! I applied to 16 and (so far) I have only one acceptance, but it's one I'm super proud of. Own it! 

So not really a rejection, but slightly a grad app fail. I just realized that I applied to Florida State by accident instead of Florida.
 
I was talking to my adviser about applying there because of one cool prof whose book we read in class, and he told me I had the wrong school. Oops?

At what point do we think Florida will be done calling acceptees? I'm (clears throat) I'm asking for a friend.

Holy Holy, I got into USC's creative/critical PhD off the waitlist today. They only accept 3 poets and have stellar funding, so this is a surprise on top of a season of surprises, for me.
 
Waitlisters DO get accepted! My fingers are crossed for everybody!

Thanks, Caroline!
 
Discounting implied/actual rejections, Mississippi is definitely up there on my list. My personal "first tier" programs are primarily those I have yet to hear from, but I sent out e-mails to most of the schools today (given that I have the looming March 13 deadline for one of my offers) so hopefully those will all shake out soon enough.  

Urgh. The UCI rejection/wait list notices are right around the corner, if history is any indication (though I've heard elsewise from folks who have already been accepted--it's more of a rolling wait list?). Either way, it's my last notification before I close the books on Fall 2015 app season. COME ON ALREADY.... starting to lose it....
 

Bless you. I hope this also. In fact, I'll go so far as to say that it I hope it goes to me.

Declined BC this morning. Really hope it goes to a GradCafe human! 

Ditto to this. I find myself wanting people to turn down offers so that AYE can get into more schools and take MY time to muddle though my decision. Which, you know. Isn't really all that much better, since then I'll be sitting on spots that somebody else wants. I need to remind myself: in the end we'll all have plenty of time to figure it out.

All the kudos to you folks who are turning down offers this early.
 

 
While I am amongst those who are suffering in wait list purgatorio, I've tried to be very careful not to pester or beg others to turn down their offers. They deserve all the time they need to make a very, very important and tough decision!