silenus_thescribe

Major props! While we'd certainly miss out on an excellent student at UT should you end up there, you should of course go where you feel is best

*sheepishly raises hand*

It's worth noting that the UT Austin stats are 3 years old now; those numbers reflect the 2012 application cycle (see here). I don't know if it's gotten better or worse over the years; some comments I've seen in the various threads here suggest that it's getting worse. The university doesn't have any statistics on admission since 2012; why, I'm not sure. In fact, I wonder why some universities are hesitant to post statistics at all. Thanks for throwing all these numbers together! They paint a bleak if sobering picture.

Race is quite similar to Oleanna in the way critics misunderstand it, I think. (Been meaning to write a paper about this.) Too often critics focus on the specific standpoints of the various characters and assume Mamet is taking one side. For instance, lots of those who view Oleanna negatively assume that Mamet is taking John (the professor's) side. To me, both Race and Oleanna are about the overall structure of the respective conversations (sexual and racial politics, respectively), rather than the particular views expressed by the characters in the plays. A big part of what feeds what in my view are the misreadings of these plays is Mamet's admittedly bonkers take on politics, which is super heavy-handed and rhetorical. His book on politics, The Secret Knowledge, is pretty bad. Unfortunately people have taken his becoming more outspoken about politics in tandem with his most recent work, and assume that those plays are merely polemic functions of his political worldview, which is, I think, a wrong move.

Officially called it for UT Austin today. Couldn't be more pleased. Look forward to meeting any fellow GCers at the visit weekend in April!

This is very true. Couldn't be more pleased with Austin... although Cornell is my #1, on paper UT is the best research match I applied to. I'm very lucky, to say the least.

Just got the MAPH acceptance from U of Chicago. Kind consideration from a top 10 to be sure, but with no funding this is a definite no.

I'm wondering the same thing. I saw rejections come up before acceptances; the latter happened via phone and at the end of last week, according to the results board. I've got radio silence on my end, and there's been no update to my online application.

Not strictly speaking, but it does involve the mindset of a con artist, as many of Mamet's plays do. As James Spader said when he was being interviewed for the Broadway debut of that play, Race exists in "the world Mamet writes about in his plays", where things are viewed through "the prism of hustlers and con-men". My undergrad thesis is on how Mamet depicts the transition from childhood to adulthood as a sort of initiation into this world, so I agree with Spader in that the mindset of the con artist is there, even if there isn't a traditionally understood confidence game, in the way there is in films of Mamet's like House of Games and The Spanish Prisoner. That's a shame you didn't get to cast your play! I think it's a good one, and very misunderstood, at that. I was lucky to catch the Pacific Northwest debut of it back in 2012, where it was given a fine showing.

Bit of a late post here, but worth mentioning: during the January purgatory period of having just finished applying/waiting for acceptances, I read the debut novel by a guy called Will Chancellor, entitled A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall. (It was published last year.) It's about an aspiring Olympic water polo player who loses his eye in a match and has to leave the sport as a result. Since he's built up his whole life to the Olympics, he feels his whole world has come undone, and he runs away to Europe to pursue art -- without telling his father where he's going. His father, a professor of classics, decides to go to Europe to find his son. He starts in Greece, where he holds a speaking event with an utterly delightful fictional depiction of Jean Baudrillard. (There's even a great Zizek joke in there.) From there he goes about Europe in pursuit of his son. Even though I'm lucky to have been accepted to a PhD program, reading the novel was good for me because it depicts someone who feels that all he's spent his life building towards was ultimately a futile enterprise. Of course, getting shut out of a PhD program one year doesn't prove one's ambitions to be a futile enterprise, but it's hard not to take a prospect like that really hard. Liminality is a big theme in the novel (lots of theory/philosophy chat along these lines, if that's anyone's cup of tea -- certainly is mine!), and with this being my year between undergrad and grad the story really connected with me. I imagine it'd be quite relatable for many of us on this here forum.

20th and 21st century American drama is my jam. David Mamet is my main author of interest within this field; my one PhD acceptance, UT Austin, has his complete papers in their humanities library, which is just... tremendous. Suzan Lori-Parks, Tony Kushner, and Eugene O'Neill are some other favorites. (I highly recommend Parks' TopDog/UnderDog to everyone here; a tremendous play on race and American history. Mos Def and Jeffrey Wright were the leads when the play was first performed, which is also cool.) The main research project I (briefly) outlined in my SOP is how American playwrights like Mamet and Parks stage a fragmented epistemology. This ties into the figure of the confidence artist, which is replete in Mamet's body of work and a main theme in TopDog/Underdog. I'm interested in how plays involving confidence games, ones that usually have "twist" or "reveal" endings, usurp traditional epistemological expectations. I have an inkling that this will involve reader/audience response theory, particularly with regard to horizon of expectations.

Wait and vomit in the DGS' office to establish dominance. *may have binge watched House of Cards season 3 this week*

Official rejection letter from Oregon. Sad I won't have a chance to live in that fine state once again, but I'm lucky to have a good offer already. Congrats to all those who got in, it's a great place to live.

Understanding Drama was my first lit class as an undergrad, and it's what cemented my interest in dramatic literature. We read everything from canonical Shakespeare stuff to contemporary avant-garde stuff like "Information for Foreigners." Most fun I've had reading for a class, easily.

The amount of acceptances you have is.... a lot. *slow claps*

That's good to hear on the stipend. While I have no illusions about making money as a grad student, it's good to know that folks are getting by on it.

Does anyone know how long we have to make a decision? I saw no notice of that in the various correspondence I received. I assumed it'd be April 15th like the rest, but I want to make sure. I'll 99.9 percent sure be calling it for UT this week, but I want to make sure I'm not missing a deadline here.

*choir shouts AMEN*

You are killing it with the acceptances this week! Props.

If I may offer up a suggestion, youngcharlie101, and I say this not knowing if this is something you already do, so if I'm preaching to the converted here you can tell me to shove it. The thing about the GRE, and really standardized tests in general, is that they are very little about memorization of particular things, but rather about adapting to the logic of the test itself. The relevant comparative is not, for instance, learning the bones of the body for an anatomy test. One could liken it to learning a new system of thought (and language). There were many cases in practice tests where on the sentence equivalence sections there were really three options that could fit equally well into an answer, but, of course, ETS has its own idea of what is "the most right answer". Memorizing vocabulary words, mathematical formulas, and so on are important parts to be successful on the test, but on their own they won't get you a good score. You need to internalize the logic of the test itself, a process that I found comes when you just take as many practice tests as humanly possible. The sites/books that are of the most help here are those which give not just the answers to the questions when you're done, but the reasons for the answers as well. Up until the day I took the GRE, I still found myself asking, "Really? Why did they think that for the answer?", but noticeably less so than I did when I first started taking practice tests. Since I don't experience anxiety myself, I don't mean to say here that this will be a cure-all. But I find that if you approach the test with the mindset of the test, rather than as someone who has stored a bunch of answers in her head that you will then apply to the test, it's a lot easy to feel more comfortable. If you think like the test does, the answers will come easier. Again, I don't know if you were given this shpeel at any of the courses you took, but that's what helped me get through this test, both the general and subject. (Although the latter definitely involves much more memorization than the former.) I jumped nearly 50 percentile ranks on the subject test after a few weeks of applying this methodology, and I got the exact scores I needed on the general. Finally, and most importantly, I would reiterate what CarolineKS and several others have said: GRE scores, while not irrelevant, are not gonna be what's gonna make your app shine. Lots of people get in the 90th percentile of the general test. But if you have a sharply written SOP and an inventive writing sample, departments will notice you.

As hypervodka and others have articulated, this is not the germane issue here. Of course no one should act like not getting hired at Harvard is a social injustice. Getting a tenure-track job at any institution, let alone an Ivy, is difficult. For anyone to expect that they're owed a job at any one university (Ivy or otherwise) is indeed ridiculous. The various criticisms regarding Ivy prestige are about the bearing it has on applying to/getting hired at all universities.

That last edit is an important and necessary qualification. This isn't, to say, meant to start a #NotAllIvies thing, but rather to say the problem is institutional first and foremost. If the universities didn't inordinately valuate Ivies over other schools, students wouldn't either. After all, since placement is a concern for those of us looking to enter the professorial job market, if Ivy X got hiring treatment equivalent to State School Y or small liberal arts college Z, then there is no reason to put X on a pedestal, all other things being equal. Even the things that one can reasonably quantify when comparing universities don't necessarily prove the decisive factor when making a decision, nor does it prove one way or another that a university is better. (In fact, I find the discussion of a "better" university problematic, particularly at the graduate level, where specialization is quite important, meaning that evaluating schools wholesale seems a fruitless enterprise.) For instance, by most ranks Oxford is the best place to study English literature in the world. Having been there for a semester during my undergrad, I can confirm that the libraries and resources there are gargantuan, and would understandably be the envy of any English scholar. However, even though Oxford's resources are "objectively" more plentiful than most of the universities I applied to, I nonetheless was not compelled to apply there. I very much enjoyed Oxford and found it refined me as a scholar for the time I was there, but when considering doing a D.Phil there for four to five years, I ultimately found their educational model too individualistic for my tastes. So while places like Oxbridge and the Ivies get lionized because of their resources, it's not the case that one is guaranteed a better or, more importantly, a more "fit" education by attending them. I myself applied to two Ivies, not because of being Ivies as such but rather because their programs were a genuinely good fit. Even though Harvard is undeniably top-tier, I had no desire to apply there. Part of the "Ivy bias" seems to me to stem from the reasonable recognition that in terms of funds, faculty, and resources, they are truly excellent institutions. When it comes to hiring PhDs or accepting people into PhD/MA programs, however, this recognition is carried out to unwieldy extremes. That someone was able to work with a particularly vast scholarly treasure trove for their PhD says nothing about students who do incredible work at comparatively smaller institutions. When you add in things like family legacy and particular donor bases, this issue of prestige becomes even more magnified. Worst of all, though, is that this prestige bias enhances societal-wide prejudices, of the kind that have been identified: racism, sexism, transphobia, and homophobia. Appplication is certainly correct to point these out, as they are at the fore of the issue of hiring (in all sectors of the economy, to wit). Nevertheless, as hypervodka points out, these discriminatory practices aren't unique to Ivies: So while I think there does need to be a serious re-valuation of the way Ivies are perceived in hiring practices, pervasive social discrimination of groups like racial minorities and LGBTQA* folks would still be a major issue absent the preference for elite institutions.

Yeah, as fine an institution as this is, close to 50k for a one year MA is a pretty insane proposition. That's not to say the quality of the education is bad -- far from it, I have major respect for U of C -- but man, is that rough.

I second kurayamino's remarks! The state of Oregon is a wonderful place to live, and U of O is a beautiful campus.

If I may add another two cents to thepriorwalter's, the writing sample that got me into UT was on a relatively obscure film of David Mamet's. My application season isn't nearly as impressive (five acceptances -- props!), but I did get into one of my top choice PhDs.