straightshooting

Of course it's possible, but whether you want to will depend on the degree of convenience that you demand. Yale has a shuttle system (free for students) that goes between Yale, the East Rock neighborhood, and the New Haven train station. See the following for information about routes and schedules: http://www.yale.edu/transportationoptions/shuttle/index.html. Note that there is late night service. Like all campus bus systems (or bus systems at all), yes, there are going to be times when you have to wait longer than the theoretical maximum amount of time between buses, but you can survive. There is also a relatively extensive bus system in New Haven that can get you around to other parts of the city if you plan your travel appropriately. Also, graduate students tend not to live much farther than 1.5 - 2 miles from the main part of the Yale campus, which makes for a rather low-impact bicycle ride.

Yes, this is exactly right. Even if extremely competent, papers that are Just-Another-Close-Reading™ aren't going to be the most competitive. Critical/methodological sophistication is what separates the wheat from the chaff. I also highly recommend that you have your letter writers work with you on your writing sample (and personal statement). Most directly, this will result in a better paper, but there is another benefit: your professors will be able to attest to the quality of your writing sample in their letters.

gracieb, OSU no longer has an MA program, as such. Beginning this year, all admitted students enter into a direct PhD-track program. Yes, the website still calls it an MA program in the sense that students must first complete an MA prior to beginning the PhD, but I was told that some students' statements of purpose made it clear that they wanted to complete an MA without advancing to the PhD. Such students, naturally, were not admitted. In any case, those external applicants coming from an undergraduate program (and, thus, into the MA portion of the PhD track) are in the same boat, notification-wise, as the rest of the external non-fellowship applicants. At least as of the other day, not all students had been notified.

I get the sense that you tend to prefer suburban environments to cities in general, especially from your comment that you wish there were more chain stores and supermarkets. I do suspect that many people who attend Yale come from hermetically sealed white flight suburban communities, so I don't discount your assessment at all for people from such backgrounds, but everything that you mention (sans the crime, naturally -- though that's just how it goes in a city) seems more positive than negative to me. Not that I have any illusion that New Haven will be the bee's knees, but little about your description makes it seem bad. If anything, it seems less urban than I'd prefer.

Alright, kids, here's the word: First, rhetoric and composition decisions are made at the same time as literature. Second, all decisions have been made. Third, all internal candidates have been notified of their decision one way or the other. Fourth, all of the fellowship recipients have been notified (for some time now). Fifth, some, but not all, of the external non-fellowship (TA-ship) students have been notified. Sixth, the external wait list students have yet to be notified. Seventh, everyone should know if they have been accepted or wait listed in the very near future. Hold on. Chill Out.

Though obviously not definitive, this entry in the results search leads me to believe that all decisions have been made: Ohio State UniversityEnglish (Language And Literature) - Accepted via E-mail on 27 Feb 2010 - To the person asking if I am an internal or external applicant: I'm external. They may still be sending out notifications, as I received mine at 5pm EST yesterday. Since this person heard on the 27th, we can be fairly certain that the offer wasn't for a fellowship.

I believe that, at this point, OSU's English department has notified all accepted and wait listed students. This includes rhet/comp.

UPenn tends to admit a disproportionately large number of Early Modernists, and my understanding is that faculty in other areas have been actively seeking to remedy the imbalance. Basically, I am quite curious to learn whether any were admitted, especially given the extremely small size of the new cohort.

w2010 - yes, all fellowship decisions were made in late January. This, however, does not cover all external applicants, as a good deal receive TAships. My understanding is that all decisions have been made -- though I do not know if the external non-fellowship applicants have been notified yet.

Well played, diehtc0ke and w2010! I am actually quite interested to hear about the research interests of both of you, as I heard that there was a good deal of jockeying by faculty members for a different distribution (sub-field-wise) of graduate students than the past couple of years have yielded.

I have heard the "5" number from a very well-connected, reputable, source. There is no reason to doubt it.

They are distinct departments with distinct admissions committees. Some faculty, I believe, have joint appointments, though the probability is that there isn't anyone on both admissions committees.

It seems to me that the difficulty with looking toward GRE and GPA numbers has to do with the tendency to take correlation for causation in a way that misrepresents their ("stats'") significance. It may very well be the case -- I'm arguing that it is -- that most of the admitted applicants to a given program will have high "stats," but that the reason for their admittance has little to do with them (beyond meeting a certain baseline). Elsewhere in this thread, posters have quite accurately pointed to the SOP, LORs, and writing sample as the most important parts of an application, the ones that (in conjunction with "fit") get people into programs. My strong suspicion is that most (but certainly not all) applicants that deliver very strong performances in these more substantive items are also likely to have high "stats." If true, we would expect to see a high degree of correlation between "stats" and admittance, but the fact is that the cause is something else: the rest of the application. Here's what's perhaps most important: while high quality SOPs, LORs, and writing samples may most often be accompanied by stellar "stats," I highly doubt -- and the anecdotes that I've read in these forums of people with high "stats" being denied across the board seem to bear this out -- that the converse is true, that having a great GPA and ace GRE scores means that one's other application materials are likely to be strong in the eyes of committee members. Hypothetical situation: someone here reports that they were admitted into UPenn's English PhD program with, say, a 680 verbal GRE, a 660 subject, and 3.77 undergraduate GPA. These are all pretty decent "stats"; they're nothing special, but unlikely to result in a trashed application. On the one hand, this would almost certainly indicate that the rest of the application package was quite strong. The problem is that I can imagine two responses to such information that would not follow from the data: 1) "Wow, I mean, I have a 780 verbal, 740 subject, and 4.0 GPA, so I should be set." 2) "What the fuck, man, my scores were higher than his/hers, why didn't I get in? Admissions are a sham!" Both responses acknowledge that the lower scores can result in acceptance, but still hold to the idea that the scores have a strong causal relationship to the likelihood of acceptance, which is most likely not true (once above a certain threshold). I can absolutely understand the desire to know numbers, because you're unlikely to have access to the other application materials, but they ultimately can tell you very little.

I can say, very simply, that OSU's English department has not sent out all (most) of its acceptances yet.

I'm going to have to agree with palindrome. Excepting absurd lengths (1500+ words), if the intellectual bildung that you provide in personal statement is well-written and demonstrates that you are a highly qualified candidate, I have it on good authority that no committee member is even going to register that they've read a few hundred extra words. Certainly no one is going to actually count (submit in PDF if you're worried)! If cutting 100 words means that you don't get to discuss something that you deem important, then leave them! If you have a mediocre statement, of course, more length means more mediocrity--and no one likes that--but it's not the length that's the fundamental problem in that case, it's the mediocrity.

The strong language that you used to characterize the motivations of those applying to graduate school lacked any nuance and came across -- to me anyway -- as advocating a "might as well" approach to graduate school. Admittedly, I was not particularly inclined to give your post a charitable read, because to me your comments reeked of the same "I mean, I like books and being in school, so I should probably go to graduate school" that I hear from a lot of people at the well-ranked program that I currently attend. We'll see where I end up next year after this round of applications. This in no way came across in your earlier post. Graduate programs -- at least when you go from an undergraduate degree into a grad program -- don't actually expect you to be hyper-specialized and focused when you apply. The best personal statements that I have read (and that admissions committee types have told me are the best) are ones that demonstrate aptitude in the intellectual bildung that they provide as well a projection toward some degree of direction, a gesture toward specificity that is not, by any means, locked in. Indeed, showing too certain a trajectory by claiming that you know exactly what your dissertation will look like is a decidedly bad move. Yes, there is plenty of unsatisfactory scholarship in the humanities -- just as there is plenty of garbage science -- but most in academia can ascertain whose work is solid and whose isn't. Yes, scholars produce scholarship of varying degrees of quality. Yes, there, of course, are problems in academia with people who don't know anything outside of their niche, but I would ask, what is it that you expect out of humanist scholarship? The arguments of Porty and Menand are provocative and in many ways right, but they both (I would say) presuppose the necessity of the academy for doing certain types of work, but seek to identify problems within it. The way that you proceeded in your first post distinguished between being "intellectual" and having "research interests" in the context of pursuing graduate education. I gather now that you didn't want to posit a mutually exclusive dichotomy, but the way that you seemed to do so before led me quite naturally to the conclusion that your definition of "intellectual" was of the wishy-washy type. I'd say that more than 3 minutes is probably too long to spend on anything written for a message board!

Intextrovert: I in no way meant to suggest that you have to be 100% certain about what you want to study as you pursue your graduate studies - that would be absurd. What I objected to was the way in which Baldwin (or at least the language that he used) suggested that one decides to apply to graduate school based on a desire to be "intellectual" (whatever that means) in a socially permissible way, not because of the desire to pursue a set of "research interests" (however nascent) with any rigor. The problem with the "intellectual" motivation, as I've observed it during my own time as a graduate student, is that for people in that boat research drive and motivation -- which is requisite for good scholarship -- is secondary to the motivation to be in an "intellectual" setting or to simply be "intellectual." To put it in a different way: your narrative indicates to me that you want to go to graduate school because your primary motivation is to pursue and develop your research interests, which seems quite different from what Baldwin was suggesting. Indeed, he seems to be denying that it's possible to be in your situation. I take it that you're going to graduate school because it's the only way to pursue what it is that you want to do, right? Shaky Premise: Graduate committees cannot see through applications into motivation all of the time, of course. I wish they could, but they cannot, so the onus is on potential applicants to decide whether they're pursuing a graduate degree for the right reasons. What constitutes "right" may differ for terminal MA programs and PhD programs, but it is quite clear that there are people in most graduate programs who do not demonstrate the motivation or ability to complete their program, which I would argue that, in most cases, is something that these people could have figured out before they applied. I don't recall the numbers offhand, but the percentage of people in PhD programs who fail to complete is very high. Deduct a chunk of those who have genuinely extenuating reasons and you're left with the people that I'm talking about. They consume fellowship and TAship money that was denied to potentially more worthy people, let's say, who were left sitting on the wait list. This seems increasingly common given the boom in applications occasioned by the subpar economic climate. I cannot imagine that more people are "seeing the light"; it's that they don't know what else to do. Lastly, "cultural capital" should be a by-product of good scholarship, not the pursued object itself. It certainly doesn't hurt, but it's not the reason to go to graduate school. Aquinaplatostotlestine: You must not be in the same academic community as I am! In absolutely all seriousness, though, I am rather disgusted with the "might as well" approach to graduate school that I so often come across. Baldwin may have unnecessarily become my straw man here, I'll admit, but I sensed an all-too-familiar subtext in his motivational message. As for your story, the fact of the matter is that when you applied last time and were blanketly denied, there were other people who got in who won't complete their programs because they cannot/don't want to hack it. I'm not in a position to say why things didn't work out for you last year, but you can rest assured that there were people (perhaps you) who had strong applications that were denied in favor of someone with lackluster motivation and ability who shouldn't have applied. All said, I don't want to pursue any further antagonism; people on this message board are clearly stressed enough as it is.

I'll have to respectfully disagree with you that Baldwin's statement, "We develop research interests because we want to go to graduate school, not the other way around," was a polite one. I gather that he was trying to be encouraging, but such a blanket declaration that categorically denies the genuine motivation of virtually every respectable scholar that I know can hardly be considered polite or even "well thought out." It is extremely presumptuous--and I would suggest, indicative of the mindset of many lackluster graduate students--to assert that "we all just want to be intellectuals, but we figured that out by going to college (or anyway, being in school). So our intellectual models are teachers/professors." I could care less about being an "intellectual," which from what I gather, means to Baldwin a person who receives recognition for being "intelligent" and "cultured"; I want to contribute to scholarly debate and knowledge. I have known many graduate students who are either on board because they want the sort of cultural capital that Baldwin speaks of or simply didn't know what else to do after undergrad in this less than stellar economy. By and large, they don't hack it as scholars, either deciding not to continue after finishing an MA or eating up funding as PhD students who never finish their dissertations. I would argue that the "having research interests that produce the need to attend grad school" motivation is the only one that should (and frankly, does) fly, at least at the PhD level. There are so many people who consume funding that would have been better spent on other people, realizing that graduate school is hard work that requires more than the desire to be thought of as an "intellectual."

Based on your signature, it look as though you've applied to quite a few programs. Remember that the decisions are often made because of fit, at best, and bizarre departmental quotas and bureaucracy, at worst (which is probably the norm, at least in part). Worry not.

I cannot say that I agree with this whatsoever. As it turns out, it's not possible to pursue -- at least with any rigor -- many scholarly endeavors that require a great deal of research without being in academia, whether it be graduate school or a tenure-track position. Though I'm hardly a fan of anecdotes, I will offer my own as an illustration. After my undergraduate degree, I spent two years in lucrative IT jobs. During that time I continued to pursue my "research interests" -- which existed prior to any desire to attend graduate school -- but it became very clear that without more time to dedicate, as well as without access to various resources, I wasn't going to be able to do the sort of research that I aimed to do. After nearly two years of graduate school, I can say unequivocally that I would not be able to do what it is that I do now in any other setting. To be quite frank, I will say that you don't have any business filling a slot in a graduate program if you're just signing up because you're looking for a way out of another line of work or if you think that an advanced degree will earn you some sort of cultural capital. I could give a flying fuck about the social acceptability of my pursuits. What I do care about, however, is having the time to spend eight to twelve hours a day scouring old books, writing articles, and otherwise contributing to the scholarship in my field. Though there are some exceptions, that requires being in academia. If you want to be an "intellectual," grow a goatee and pontificate at your local coffee shop, or impress your family with your knowledge of Foucault and Derrida at Christmas dinner. That's all fine and dandy with me. What's not, however, is for you to take the spot of someone whose "research interests" preceded their desire to sign up for graduate school.

Interviews for literature programs seem to be more the exception than the rule. That said, if the program did conduct an interview weekend (or other period) for its applicants, I would - I hate to say this - take your lack of an invitation as a less than favorable sign.

The English department is awaiting approval from the graduate school for the funding packages that they plan to award before contacting those applicants who have been accepted thus far - worry not.