silenus_thescribe

This is pretty important. Unless Boulder offers amazing funding -- which I don't believe it does (I applied there last year -- than in terms of money it's a wash either way, though that's not to say getting by in LA is easy. Given UCLA's resources in reputation, I too would say it is the better choice, unless you believe Boulder to be a better fit.

If you come in with a BA, the TAship will be about 13.5k (excluding summer funding, which you usually don't get for your first summer, though there are pursuable options); if you have an MA, it bumps up to about 14.5k. When you teach your own class starting year three, it bumps up to 16.5, I believe. Getting by in Austin on those stipends isn't easy, but it is doable, particularly if you choose not to live in Hyde Park (the neighborhood directly north of UT's campus, where many grad students live). It's commonly acknowledged around the department that our stipends are far too low -- a sentiment that many professors acknowledged at the visitation weekend last year -- and all of us are hoping that there's some movement towards getting them raised, as both of the above figures are well below the living wage in Austin of 27k/year.

I was happy to see that UT Austin has begun notifying people about admissions decisions. If any of y'all have questions about the program, feel free to ask away. I'm a first year in the program and am absolutely loving it here in the English department.

For what it's worth, I don't know how helpful it is to consider what schools pay the highest stipend. Save for the exceptional cases -- Vanderbilt's 35k option being one, as that is a pretty good income all things considered in Nashville (though the city is getting more expensive) -- you won't ever make money as a graduate student. If you're smart about your money you can save small sums, but in most circumstances you'll be living within modest means. I have a friend who has friends in Harvard's PhD, which in comparison to smaller schools "pays more", but Cambridge is also really expensive to live in. Of course, no one goes into this field to make the big bucks, so I'm sure folks are aware of the need to budget conservatively. But, and I'm not saying this was your intention lordclive, I would not advise "following the money."

I wonder how situations like this happen. U of Rochester's deadline last year was 15 January, and they were already letting people know by the start of February.

My dream is fairly vanilla, but it is what it is: a tenure-track job at a good school with a perfect teaching/research balance. I know that's a lot to ask for at the moment, given the job market, but simple as it is, it sounds delightful.

This really isn't an "achievement" -- certainly nothing to the level of what y'all brilliant folks have done -- but rather just a, "Hey, this feels nice" moment. Right now, I'm finishing up a paper on Samuel Beckett's plays that I feel really good about. I knew I'd love to start working in my field (modern/contemporary drama), but the interest hasn't diminished at all; I feel really fulfilled by this work. Of course, this is a seminar paper, which means it will need heavy reworking before it becomes anything else, but I am pleased nonetheless. What really makes this paper for me, though, is thinking about where I was last year: turning in the last few of my applications, in a state of zero confidence and fear. I was sure I wasn't going to get in anywhere. Looking back on it now, that feeling seems a lifetime ago. While I know there's little one can say to assuage the application season stress, I can say this based on my own experience: don't give up hope.

The other thing I'd add to Ramus' excellent comments is that at the graduate level, you're applying to programs, not to schools as a whole. So, for instance, unfunded MAs at Columbia or Chicago sound appealing because the weight those names carry, but in just about every other respect they will do you far less justice than a two or three year funded MA at a school like Delaware or Alabama. With things like the MAPH, you get one year in a really intensive setting, where you are not ensconced in any specific department (hence the general "humanities" designation). Any work you do will be slowed down by the fact that, in contrast to the grad students in the English department, you will have to go out of your way to make connections -- connections that, unless you're able to be the rare bird who goes from unfunded MA to PhD at the same school (which is very, very rare), will not last long because you'll be gone in a year. Plus, considering the cohort sizes are pretty large -- Chicago's MAPH takes 100-120 per year -- you're less likely to stick out of the glut. Moreover, unless you're fortunate to have oodles of cash to afford taking on the unfunded MA without being slowed down by an out-of-university job, the jobs you'll have to take to pay your way through will make it less likely you'll have time to devote to your independent (i.e. non-coursework) scholarship. Whereas if you take a funded MA through a place like Delaware, you're getting paid to do field-specific work; that is to say, teaching experience. As far as I know, U Chicago/Columbia don't give TAships or RAships to unfunded MA students. So the opportunity cost is pretty large: in taking an unfunded MA at an admittedly prestigious school over a funded MA, you're sacrificing both money (debt) and job experience (teaching). This isn't to say the unfunded MAs don't produce excellent scholars, or people who successfully go on to PhDs -- there are many examples on this very forum of both of those things. But if you are certain academia is what you want to do, accruing as much experience as possible while minimizing debt is crucial, especially given how bleak tenure-track prospects are. Finding a school that is willing to support your scholarship and pay to give you teaching experience is an essential.

FWIW, I got into my program (a top 20) with a 570, or a 56th percentile. My school also claimed it wanted at minimum a 60th percentile. I really wouldn't fret too much about your score at a broad level, though from what I can tell Ivies want that number pretty damn high.

I agree with Joan here. I mentioned professors in each of my personal statements, with varying degrees of specificity throughout. While I won't of course make this a universal role, it's worth noting that the statement of purpose for the program I'm in contained the most specific references to professors and their work. As it happens, my department has several profs whose essays I used in undergrad for some of my bigger papers, including my thesis. In one case, I directly quoted from an article by a professor. That might have been excessive on my part; after all, you're applying to work with a whole department, not just one professor. That being said, I'd say that mentioning professors is best done strategically and precisely.

There's nothing to add to this excellent comment of my_muse's; right on the money, this one. One of the biggest struggles of the application season is wrangling the feeling that your statement of purpose has to do everything: cover everything you've achieved, learned, and hope to ever do. Of course, fitting that into word limits spanning 500 to 1000/1500 words is impossible, and ad comms know that, even if you keep telling yourself that you need the everything of it all. With an application, you're asking a university to say, "Yes, we'll make a 4-6 year investment in you as a scholar," a major decision that no SOP can ever be fully convincing about. The right frame of mind, then, is not, "How do I write this SOP so that I look fully ready for graduate work?", but rather, "How do I write this SOP so that the ad comms sees the potential to make me a professional scholar?"

Unless your score is something like 7, I think it's not worth your time to address your Subject Score. A really low score could evince an unfamiliarity with the canon, which would be necessary to address to some extent, but if your score is just "meh", it's not worth the opportunity cost on your statements of purpose. While GREs are not unimportant, I know of no places where they're a primary factor in the decision calculus. You want to spend as much space on your SOP detailing your unique scholarly ideas and projects; focusing on explaining one test score could read as pedantic. Your SOP should be all about why you're great; only talk about weak spots on your application if you're highlighting ways in which you're overcoming those weak spots (e.g. compensating for weak language training by enrolling at a community college course, etc). If anyone else has had a different experience, however, I'm interested to hear it. I myself got into a top school of mine with an average Subject score, so that in part explains my answer above.

My personal rule is no fewer than 10. If you're coming in with a BA, it's worth applying to funded MA programs as well, given how tight PhD admissions have become. I myself applied to 13. One thing to note: I was initially only going to apply to 12, but because I checked some box thing on the GRE, my scores got sent around to places, the result of which is that I got an application waiver for Brandeis, a school I had initially considered but then ruled out for time/money constraints. Adding on another app does create an additional time burden, but if you can increase your chances of getting in without additional fiscal costs, you should definitely do so.

If this post is a troll.... stop. If this post is genuine in its question: look up the answer for yourself. It's pretty obvious. Rhet/comp people do a hell of a lot more than regurgitate Aristotelianisms. Rhet/comp is a robust scholarly field. Even the most basic Google search would tell you that.

I second the wise comments of echo and unraed, who both hit the nail on the head. My cohort is also not loaded with MA students; 4 out of 14 came in with MAs in hand (one of which is an MFA). If a university doesn't restrict PhD applications to students already with MAs (which some in the US do and, to my viewing, all in the UK and Canada do), then by definition they are looking out for highly qualified students with BAs. There are some but not many places where an MA bias is made open in a university's admissions website; U of Georgia, for instance, makes it clear that TAships can only be given to students with an MA (or 18 hours of graduate coursework) due to a university accreditation requirement. One thing I would say as an addendum to echo's comment: while being specific about a particular field of interest is a critical part of making a BA student's application stand out, I wouldn't be too specific, as I think this is what likely held me back on some of my apps. (Not to say that unraed was suggesting you lay out your dissertation, of course.) To make it clear that I knew what was going on in my field, I laid out a hypothetical dissertation in one of the paragraphs for each of my personal statements. While I fortunately ended up right where I needed to be, especially given the subject material of said dissertation idea, I can't help but think that many ad comms thought, "Well, this is a bit much right out of the gate." Furthermore, I know it can come across as idealistic/naive (something you don't want to seem, given the roughness of the discipline at the moment) if you make it sound as if you know with 100 percent certainty what you'll study. Departments will want you to have an area of focus, but they'll also want you to be flexible; coming in with a BA, you'll be exposed to plenty of coursework, and it's entirely possible -- in fact, common -- that things will change. In short: be reasonably precise but not myopic. Also, importantly, as echo points out, you aren't going to be held at gunpoint on what you say in your personal statement. In my program, several students who come in as literature PhDs end up switching to rhet/comp, and are not viewed as betraying a promise for doing so.

That feeling when you see this thread is still a thing

I'd also recommend Charles Bressler's Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice for any study of theory (although it's worth noting there are probably less than ten theory questions on the subject test). It hits all the necessary buzzwords; although it regrettably skimps on feminist, postcolonial, and African-American criticism, it definitely addresses the major works of each, and covers the major developments of the 20th century (structuralism, New Criticism, etc) in a thorough fashion. Also includes a glossary of buzzwords and critical movements that makes for easy flashcard making. It's definitely worth picking up a used copy; you can score earlier editions (the current is the 5th) for a couple of bucks.

I'd echo what echo, unraed, Wyatt, and IQ have all said; they're spot on. The cocktail party analogy is apt, and it'll quickly bear itself out in evidence as you take your practice tests. My experience with the test, relative to how my season ended up, is unclear on the matter of how much my score had a bearing on my eventual acceptances (three: 2 PhD, 1 MA). Of the 13 schools I applied to, only 5 required the test; two others "strongly recommended" it (or some variation thereof). One of my PhD acceptances required the subject test; the other did not. My MA acceptance didn't require GREs at all, including the standard test. On their website, the school that I got accepted to that required the Subject Test (that's it in my signature line below) states that any score below the 60th percentile "raises questions about applicant readiness". I got the 55th. In addition to the fact that I was just shy of the 60th percentile, I think part of why that ended up not discounting my application is because of my areas of focus, which time-wise are almost entirely 20th century on. Since the test doesn't really ask too many questions on that subject, I think the ad comms might have thought, "Well, for someone not as ensconced in the canon, a score like that isn't entirely surprising." That's purely speculative, but it's one of the reasons that makes sense of why I got into my now future university with an otherwise "meh" score. While 55th percentile ain't great, it's worth noting that the first practice test I took at the start of October 2014 (I took the October test, on the 25th) was dismal -- 7th percentile. A big part of that was that I poorly managed the strategy of the test (cf. the comments by Wyatt, IQ, et al -- like most standardized tests, I'd be willing to say the test is really 60-40 on strategy/knowledge, maybe 70/30), but after that failed test, I made more notecards than I thought humanly possible, and bumped my score up almost 50 points in a few weeks. On some practice tests, I even neared the 70th percentile. So while I know the test looks daunting, even requiring an impossible amount of knowledge, superficial knowledge truly reigns supreme, save for the spare tricky interpretive question (which are few and far between). The test wants a human literary Wikipedia, not the knowledge base of a tenured professor. Like Wyatt said, it's fantastic that you're thinking about this now; I know if I had been studying as much this time last year as I did last October, I'd have fared far better on the test. You are not in a bad place at all. Lastly, I would especially emphasize IQ's point about the prevalence of reading comprehension questions. While the Princeton Review book -- which is definitely a must-purchase -- gets the types of individual questions right, it gets the overall structure of the test, at least based off of my October 2014 experience, wrong. The practice test in the PR book, as well as the numerous tests available online, feature numerous shorter excerpts with one or two questions; as the PR book sells it, these are largely identification. The October 2014 test, however, was much heavier on reading comp, as IQ points out, and the structure was longer excerpts with many questions -- sometimes upwards of ten -- for each excerpt. It's somewhat of a relief because it felt like like a "cram as much historical details" kind of test (although there will still plenty of identification questions), but it's also tricky because, if things remain the same, the test you'll take will be structured noticeably differently from the normal practice tests.

Additionally, I'm wondering if any of you had this experience: I made a spreadsheet of all the places I applied to in September 2014, charting things like deadlines, app fees, etc. Back when I did that, I had seen and marked Rutgers' deadline as 5 January. When at the start of December I was finishing all of my applications, I saw that it had changed to the standard 15 December. Fortunately it proved no problem in terms of getting my app in on time, but I'm wondering if the switch in date had anything to do with the extension.

Thanks to you and to unraed for your replies! Austin is indeed analytic by a strong margin, but I'm actually not particularly averse to that; in fact, part of what I want to do in grad school is to find the cross-sections of analytic philosophy and literary studies. As a field literature is definitely continental, and appropriately so, but I think there's something to be said for more integration of analytic thought. Simply put, I don't think analytic philosophy is as bone-dry as many might believe it to be. So you are right, echo, I'm really hoping to do some good work in bringing those together. Fortunately, since high school, analytic philosophy has been what I've primarily read, even though in practice (that is, in my literary scholarship and poetry/fiction writing) I appear to be a continental-type person. So I'm not worried about jumping into a new kind of language without any sort of reference; I do have some familiarity with it, though I know I'd be definitely thrown into the flames in an advanced seminar. Luckily epistemology doesn't always play out in the mathematic, formula-driven way that, say, philosophy of language often does, particularly the kind of epistemology I'm interested in.

I'm hoping to take some philosophy seminars throughout my PhD, as epistemology is pretty important to the stuff I want to study. Would love to hear if anyone has had experience on that front (taking philosophy seminars as an English grad student). I'm comfortable with philosophy overall, but epistemology tends to get more mathy/analytic once you get up high enough, which isn't exactly my bag.

Signal boosting this. The most recent Princeton guide, while helpful in many ways, underestimates how much reading comprehension there is on the test.

From what I can tell in my limited experience, ProfLorax is right. While a thesis is a nice thing to have on a CV, plenty of undergrad programs don't have their students center their majors on a thesis paper. As has been said on this thread and others, the important thing for a grad applications is to have a solid work of scholarly research. It doesn't particularly matter if it was called a "thesis". For instance, my senior thesis, which runs about 27 pages, is not the paper I used for my writing sample -- instead, I used a paper I did for a seminar on my study abroad (19 pages), because I felt it was a more sophisticated research question in my field. (It also was more usable across the varying page limits for writing samples, whereas I would have had to truncate my thesis for certain applications.) Across the many requirements for grad school apps that I researched -- and I researched a lot, as I'm sure we all did -- I never saw "thesis" as an express requirement.

I find myself having mixed emotions on this. What I think I'll spend time doing is reading many of the literary works I imagine will in some part play into my main areas of research, such that I have a good groundwork laid down. I've had some ideas for potential papers that I've been sitting on for some time, and doing any reading that ties into those could give me a boost in advance. One the one hand, I very much want to enjoy my summer window (about a month and a half), because I know grad school will be a new challenge. But on the other, given that I'd like to have some leg up in preparing for future research, I feel that getting some reading done could prove helpful. My goal is to do reading that is beneficial for future research in a non-stressful way. EDIT: I forgot to say, though, it's nice to read perspectives like those from dazedandbemused and ProfLorax. I think part of why I and I imagine many others feel like we need to spend the summer prepping is because the effects of the app season are still somewhat wearing off -- particularly that feeling of, "I'm not good enough, I need to have more on my CV" (although that for me is a fairly persistent feeling, app season or not).

I don't know I'd say it creates a "hole" in your CV; in fact, I think it can sometimes be a good supplement to a CV, one that gives benefits you might not otherwise have gotten. I came from a little-to-barely-known undergrad background, and for that reason I think my semester in Oxford likely showed ad coms that I was able to hold my own in an internationally recognized research university. Moreover, since language requirements are often overlooked by undergrads applying for grad school, studying abroad in a place where you'll be immersed in a language that will be useful to your graduate studies would be a major plus, even more so than had you taken a language course during that time. Yes, you might lose out on some conference/research time, but especially in the case of learning a language, that's a trade-off that is pretty sensible. Simply put: if you can demonstrably show that the study abroad period directly ties into your graduate studies, I think it's a big bonus on a CV, rather than a hole.