diehtc0ke

I worked part time at a Staples while I was applying and promptly quit after I got my first acceptance lol. A friend of mine will be applying for PhD programs this fall and she's finishing up an MFA and working at our school's writing center.

There definitely isn't a standard. My stipend will be paid on the last day of each month and I have a friend who received a lump sum at the beginning of each semester.

If you still have all that time in undergrad, quite honestly, I wouldn't be as worried about the grad school process as you are now. In those 1-1/2 to 2 years, you might decide to change your specialty which, even with regional restrictions, could change your list of potential programs drastically. Furthermore, this approach that I've excerpted might not be the most fruitful. From what I gather, adcoms are pretty lazy and don't want to have to find the fit between you and their program; they want that fit to be blatantly obvious. Though foppery may disagree with the effectiveness of this exercise (lol), a lot of successful applicants took the time out to point out specific scholars in their statements of purpose and discuss why the research of those academics was so compelling for their own critical trajectory. These "fit paragraphs" go beyond mere presentation and insert an applicant into the conversations that are already going on at Universities X, Y and Z. Plenty of applicants are going to present themselves well and if you're just generally a good student, it's going to be difficult to warrant taking you on as a student. I'm going to be even more honest and say that I didn't read all of the responses in this thread but it can't hurt to reiterate that if you are serious about going into a PhD program in Renaissance lit, find the Renaissance scholars at these schools and look up their articles, books, etc. See where/how their research aligns with your interests. That's where you're going to find whether the fit is there.

*they're. *it's. Don't get me started on the comma splices. Now I'm being pretentious.

This, I think, is what primarily felt so disconcerting about the e-mails that were provided as models on the previous page. The level of intimacy in both their playfully interrogative tone and attention to seemingly minute detail felt unwarranted, especially at this stage of the game. Certainly, theoretical approaches and access to childcare are appropriate questions to ask but I think really only once those offers of admissions are actually in play. It's been made perfectly clear over the past few months that getting into an English PhD program (regardless of ranking) isn't a given for anyone and there's a level of presumption in those e-mails that almost says, "I know that I'll be getting into University X so just let me know about the day-to-day logistics about the department so I can figure out whether it's worth it to send in my application fee." Now, of course, this probably was not MM's intention but I think it would be fair to point out that it would be more than a minority of graduate students that would/could interpret these messages that way; we see this even just from the responses in this thread. Finding out which program to apply to should be much more about whether an applicant's future work meshes with that of people already there and much less about becoming closely engaged with how a program operates--that's an exercise that should be left to when the prospective applicant becomes the prospective graduate student. I will, however, add the caveat that of course this is not universal and I don't want to erase MM's success in receiving positive feedback for her e-mails from this discussion. Again, I just don't remain convinced that anyone should rely on receiving such responses if they go into such detail when writing to professors/grad students before they've been accepted. I also want to say to MM that I don't think you should completely disregard a program if you receive a curt response or don't receive one at all, especially if you sent these e-mails out anytime in the past few months. I haven't even received responses from close friends who are in graduate programs right now just because it's always so very busy and such e-mails can easily get lost in the shuffle. This can't accurately reflect how "the department and the individuals within it function as a group" not only because you're only speaking with one graduate student and one professor (I assume) but because people simply might not realistically have the time to 20 questions that require more than yes/no answers. I know that if I ever were to receive such an e-mail, I wouldn't want to half-ass it and give a less than full reply so in the middle of the semester, I probably just wouldn't write back at all. It wouldn't be worth it to send a short reply saying that I'll get back to it when all the craziness is over because I'm liable to forget. Furthermore, I think that just about everyone in the program that I'll be entering in the fall is genuinely helpful, courteous and/or, at the very least, quite agreeable but I'm having a hard time picturing many of them taking the time out of their day to respond to e-mails that require such involvement.

Really doesn't sound like a program anyone would have wanted to be a part of anyway.

I think the principal reason why your inquiries worked so well for you is that you, unlike most graduate school applicants, know what you want to go into and what kind of environment you're looking for. These aren't correct/incorrect approaches; they're approaches that may or may not work for particular applicants. I know my letters would have been, at best, rambling piles of nonsense if I had written them on April 20th, 2009. Not only that, at that point I thought I wanted to go into a field that's fairly different from the one I want to go into now. I have to agree with Pamphilia in that if the OP feels compelled to write a letter to potential professors/advisers/graduate students, it would be best to wait until after the summer, which I imagine will be a growth period academically. If, on the other hand, an applicant is like you or Branwen who has that kind of confidence in his/her work and his/her future academic trajectory, by all means. Do you.

I actually was told the exact opposite--if I couldn't mention at least three professors in my SOP that I wanted to work with, I probably shouldn't bother sending in the application. I actually did recognize a sense of unwarranted boldness in my first couple of drafts in which I structured these fit paragraphs by saying something along the lines of "If accepted to University X, I would want to work with Professor Y, Z and Goldfish." In the final draft, however, I used that paragraph just to show that I was already familiar with the work of faculty members at these schools (whether this was true or not was another story) and that I would be excited if the opportunity to work with them arose. So I would throw in a few sentences like: "I am already indebted to and hope to work with Professor Goldfish, whose publications have been paramount in my own coming to terms with yadda yadda yadda." Yadda yadda yadda was a very brief sketch of the work that Professor Goldfish has done that I've found pertinent to the research that I was outlining in the rest of the statement. This (an actual quote from my SOP) is probably the most overwrought of these kinds of sentences by far because it was for a professor that I did actually admire and was the person who had initially gotten me interested in my subfield. Others were much less overly enthusiastic in tone.

Completely off topic, but how do people even find out about things like that? For what it's worth to others reading this thread, I think that contacting professors, though helpful in narrowing down what schools are the best fit, is not completely necessary. I'm a fairly shy guy and the thought of e-mailing these scholars that I admired out of the blue was too daunting a task when I was applying so don't feel like this is a prerequisite for being accepted to a program. With that being said, however, had I been more confident I probably would have e-mailed potential advisors more towards the end of the semester at the school you're looking at or wait until August. I think right now is a crazy time for professors and graduate students alike since semesters are winding down.

To piggyback off of SOM's post, I actually hadn't realized that so many people could be ignorant of how other programs are run and perhaps there is some harbored resentment there that never went away. Thinking about it now, I've been given that impression of Berkeley over the years with no real reasoning to speak of or recent example to illustrate it. Though I had no intention of going to the West Coast for my Ph.D, had I applied to Berkeley (which I would have) and gotten in (which I probably would not have lol), that impression would definitely have kept me distanced from that program until I visited and saw how things operated first hand. My own opinions about Columbia (a school that I did not apply to for various personal reasons along with what I'm about to say) come out of a professor telling me about her experience there--in the 80s, before I was born. Back then, before flash drives and back up services, one girl burned another girl's only copy of her seminar paper the night before it was due. In 2007, I was still being told that Columbia does indeed accept a larger number of students with the intent of providing a cutthroat environment to separate the wheat from the chaff (pardon the cliche. It's one of the only ones I actually like). The fact that most applicants don't visit potential schools before they're applying makes this whole business of trying to figure out exactly why someone was rejected from any school, regardless of ranking, seem nonsensical in the first place. Despite claims that you did research on schools and determined that it was a good fit for you academically, who are we to say that it really was a good fit for you in totality? And that's what I was trying to get at before my replies took on an even more personal bent. This might not have been an issue of ranking (because, let's be real, I doubt schools like BU or UCSD think they're second-rate programs because they're not in the top 40 of a largely arbitrary national ranking system)--you might actually have not been a good fit for these programs. I'm framing this in the context of the OP's specific situation because that is how this all was originally framed. And, just because I find it to be a heartwarming tale, I am more than just guilty of putting the wrong program's name in my SOP. I remain convinced that the school that was easily my number one choice when I began this process (School 1) never got the chance to really evaluate my portfolio. Why? I sent them a copy of the personal statement that had been tailored for the school I will be attending in the fall (School 2), complete with a list of about four School 2 professors that I admired and wished to work with and a concluding paragraph in which I named all of the different archives and cultural institutions that would be of great use to me. I also went on to the claim that School 2's city was the ONLY city in which I could properly conduct my research. Lovely.

The original post wasn't pompous and the question is valid. I think that subsequent posts were unnecessarily self-congratulatory and the framing of the question was problematic in both its specificity and tone (as if those programs that rejected her were so clearly beneath her anyway). There are plenty of people on this board that were "excellent candidates" and "accepted to highly ranked programs" but they've been much more modest about it.

I'm not offended--I'm not one of the people who knocked your posts down. I do apologize for my careless use of the male pronoun. I should have known better. Perhaps it's that I'm growing weary in debating the validity and truth-making ability of these rankings. It's been brought up more than once (framed by much less personal circumstances) and, in my mind, the horse is dead. We've all agreed that the rankings have very little to really say, if anything at all, and the level of self-importance that can be found in your original and subsequent posts has clearly rubbed people the wrong way (again, I'm not personally offended but I can see how others would be). Given this process and how random it can seem, I just remain unconviced that coming up with an answer to your question (which seems to be pushing for people to know exactly how to gauge the strength of their application package and apply it to the proper tier of graduate schools, whatever that may be) is a fruitful exercise for future applicants. The tried and true advice of applying to a number of schools that range in selectivity and prestige seems to hold fairly solidly despite your experience in this process. I'd much rather engage in this discussion that has arisen out of people tip-toeing around your personal situation.

This. I found the USNWR rankings useful because it provided a list of schools that were well regarded generally. I went to the website of each English department listed and made a subjective decision on which programs were best for my intended research and field of interest. These decisions were made on the name recognition of specific faculty members in my field and the number of professors who were at least tangentially interested in what I wanted to do. Of course, I also went to my advisors and mentors at my undergrad institution for their opinions but especially in those early stages of the process, having a list of schools was helpful to somewhat narrow down what seems like an endless pool of English Ph.D programs. With that being said, I agree that the rankings don't matter and those rankings by subfield matter even less. For what it's worth for the original subject of this thread, I'll admit to being fairly successful this application season and if we wanted to pretend this was some kind of sport I guess I went 8-2. I didn't end up applying to any school that was below the arbitrary cutoff of the USNWR rankings in its printed iteration for a Ph.D but I did apply to a lower ranked school for an MA as a backup and they seemed just as excited about my work as any of those top 20 schools so I don't really know how to respond to your inquiry. Are you really being honest about the fit for those schools that rejected you? Was it just as good for those programs as it was for those that were higher ranked? I was also going to say something else in regards to the OP's apparent bewilderment at people's negative reaction to the pompous tone of his posts but... I guess that says enough for now.

Perhaps it's my stereotypical jaded New Yorker rearing its ugly head but I never even thought about buying my letter writers or mentors a gift of any sort. I sent several e-mails updating them on the statuses of my various applications and each ended with something along the lines of "Thank you again for all the help you've given these past few months." I also happen to: 1) still live by my undergraduate institution (I'm on my year off) so I've visited them all at least once to say my thank yous in person; and 2) live around the corner from my mentor so we've gone out for coffee a couple of times. edited for unintended smiley

It's a little bit of both actually--there are several classes that I want to take and the norm (and the requirement) is in that first year to take three seminars each semester with a proseminar tacked on as a fourth class in the fall. (Un)Luckily for me, I chose the program with the heaviest work load of the programs I got into (I also have a 50 book oral exam that will be conducted the day before second year begins). I know it's nowhere near the same but (I hope) I've learned from the mistakes I made when I took seven classes each term in my senior year which (I hope) will give me some perspective on how to tackle such a ridiculous feat. My sense is that this workload is completely dependent on the professor but 99% of the time will be a rather substantial increase from the workload of an undergraduate class. I'm not going to try and quantify what this increase actually is because I've never actually taken a graduate course except for a couple at my undergraduate institution (which barely has a master's program worth mentioning) but from what I've heard, strokeofmidnight's assessment seems spot on. A lot of the programs I looked at had at least two levels of graduate seminars: one that had a mix of graduate students and upper-level undergraduates and another that was exclusive to graduate students. The former set of classes usually has less reading and requires a shorter final paper.

Somehow I'll have to find a way to live through four seminars in the fall. Oh and that's for a Ph.D program.

That wasn't incoherent at all. You're right in that "feminist theories" is easily a better term for what we're talking about but because I was so focused in my reply on defending what I think you're referring to as "old school" feminism (I hesitate to call it that because I guess that unintentionally lumps together works like The Second Sex with much earlier works like A Vindication on the Rights of Women. Both engage in a discussion of what I would call feminist philosophy but both are also responding to extremely different cultural moments), I used the singular. Your point that "working on gender" is not synonomous to "engaging with feminist theory" is also well taken--men's studies does exist (and is a field that I am particularly interested in) and not all approaches to speaking about women springs out of these feminist theories that we have discussed. I have professors who work exclusively with ideas from second-wave feminism and other professors who have balked at scholars "stuck" in that second-wave in favor of work that has fractured and problematized those positions and methods (something it looks like you want to continue doing). I think the best advice that I could give to you, Branwen, would be to look at departments that are strong in the theoretical approaches that you have embraced so far but make sure there are other strong faculty members who come from different theoretical fields. Perhaps those people could also work on Medieval texts but that isn't even necessary. Chances are that in those first few years you won't only be taking classes that deal with that time period and it would be great if you could come to terms with these other kinds of theory without letting them overwhelm your own way of producing scholarship (that is, of course, unless you want them to). I'm realizing that this post has no point. I'm just in agreement haha. Edited for coherence.

Please don't take this as antagonistic and I'm sure you weren't creating this thread in hopes of defending your stance on feminist criticism but can I ask you what kinds of feminist theory you've read? I think that reductive black/white binary you speak of is indicative of the work that was being done around the time de Beauvoir writes The Second Sex in the middle of the 20th century. This was crucial foundational work because that transition from "Other" to "equal" (which was being prompted alongside changes in thought on things like reproductive rights) was completely necessary if we wanted to talk about "woman" as a gender/sex that is worth speaking about critically. And yet it did not take into account how "woman" as a binding cultural category slipped certain kinds of women (i.e. non-white women, lesbians, etc.) under the rug for the articulation of a specific social project. Out of scholarship like that we get much more nuanced feminist theoretical texts like Haraway's Simians, Cyborgs and Women or de Lauretis's Technologies of Gender (I use these as examples only because they're the last two feminist theoretical texts that I've read), which, though they may use that model of the big bad patriarchy, are almost forced to engage with the social model that has been overwhelmingly prevalent for centuries. I really hope this hasn't sounded soapbox-y but I felt it worth noting that there's plenty from feminist theory that you can take to help tease things out of what you were saying about Guinevere, even if you are more interested in her as an archetypal example. I also don't think that the professor example you speak of is unique to those who are feminists or do work on gender (not that that's what you were saying). I find that scholars are all about inserting their own work into just about everything that everyone around them is doing. Look at conference culture. Anytime I go see someone speak on their work there's the man in the tweed jacket towards the back that raises his hand during the Q&A and starts off with "Well, I work on X and Y and have found this esoteric part of my research that speaks to what you have just presented." Sometimes this sparks a productive discussion and sometimes it doesn't.

You'd be very wise to go to Harvard, then. Seems like a wonderful fit for you. I only said gender (and unconsciously allowed sexuality to slip in there) because the questions you presented begged for a feminist theoretical lens (though with my limited medieval background, what do I know? I'm a 20th c. Americanist through and through) and the Grad Center is A+ for that kind of work. I may be biased because I went to Queens College, which is also a part of the CUNY system and have worked with a few really great professors whose interests were Medieval lit, children's lit, contemporary sci-fi/fantasy and Celtic myth so I think that EVERYthing associated with CUNY would be a good fit for that kind of research. Admittedly, this may or may not be the case.

I'm going to +1 on the CUNY Graduate Center because there are several really great people who work on just about everything you're interested in (based on your forum signature). I can think of at least three people off the top of my head who work on late medieval stuff and issues of gender and sexuality and many more who do children's literature from multiple periods. Unfortunately, Catherine McKenna who would have been perfect for your research has moved on to Harvard but I know there are several full professors in the CUNY system (outside of the Grad Center) who work on Celtic myth and Arthurian legend.

Officially accepted Penn's offer yesterday and I'll be entering the English department. Already have a possible roommate and probably going to try and secure a place in the art museum district.

Unfortunately I feel like this thread has gone the way of the Chronicle forums.