diehtc0ke

I get the feeling someone's rewritten Moby Dick from memory on the walls of that bathroom. You wouldn't be safe there either.

Though I'll admit to being confused as to how Penn was brought up at all, I know on the page that lists graduate students, people are divided into first years, second years, third years, ABDs and MA students. The MA student group is only about five or six people long if I recall. The distinction is definitely being made between those who are in the terminal MA program and those who are in the doctoral program.

That's great to hear! Though I didn't reply in that thread, that's where I secretly was hoping you'd go.

Not that I think it will affect too many at this stage in the game but I've finally declined offers from NYU and Rutgers today.

I honestly haven't done much research on programs that are good for postcolonial studies, let alone one with a focus on South Asia but I do know that UPenn is particularly strong in this field.

Because I don't really feel it necessary to get into the qualitative/quantitative debate because what I was going to say pretty much echoes inextrovert's comments, I'd like to speak briefly in response to this paragraph. With these "rankings" that we keep talking about (and I can only assume that we're all speaking of the annual US News and World Reports' "America's Best Graduate Schools" issue), I was under the impression that, at least for English graduate programs, their methodology was to use a simple numbered ranking system which was meant to reflect some sort of qualitative consensus amongst administrators, professors, etc. The question runs something along the lines of "What is your opinion of the quality of Program X?" and those "experts" rank that program 1-5. Whereas, for law, medical and business programs, the magazine takes more quantitative data than these questionnaires into account for its ranking system, the ranking for English programs (which CLEARLY are not important enough to be given a more substantial consideration, am I right?) uses them as the only criterion. If this isn't the case (I have no idea where my copy of the issue is), I stand corrected but I'm pretty sure that's how it goes. If this is the case, I feel like this graduate school heirarchy is even more shoddily constructed than we've imagined it to be. I found out the 2011 rankings come out in three days. I'm (not) holding my breath in anticipation.

Those links and your information is super helpful. Thanks.

This brings up the problem that I've had with this whole process but I have no idea how to fix it. No one is going to take you seriously if you write in your Statement of Purpose that you've actually been living a real life while you were also doing these applications but I realize that I had an advantage that is unfair to you. This class privilege clearly does not mean I am more deserving of admission to these programs than you but how are adcoms supposed to know this? Though we both might have gotten our degrees in 2009 (just using that date because I don't know when you graduated), we may both be in completely different life stages and that doesn't really come out except for maybe on a CV now that I think about it. What is the solution for this?

I don't have those kinds of connections with people at the other schools I applied to, mostly because I find that the professors at my school don't have many of these connections. I happened to get letters from two people who are also full professors at the CUNY Graduate Center but most of my other professors were rather insular in their work from what I gather. This specific instance that I cite felt like Mother Scholar was going to Grandfather Scholar to get me a job at his factory or as if I were a legacy student applying to undergrad. Maybe this is something (once again) exclusive to my experience at a school that's not known for churning out potential PhD candidates and I am aware that these kinds of connections occur at just about every other school, but this particular application felt like I was keeping everything in the family. I've already felt that small worldliness, just from these past visits. The DGS at one of my potential schools knew that I had a specific concern with going to his institution and so he emailed another scholar (who is actually huge in my field and I've been reading his work for years) at another school so that he could give me objective advice on my options and his opinions on my apprehensions. Turns out that other scholar was also the professor of one my best friends from undergrad who is in her first year in the doctoral program there.

Hey all. I was just wondering how bike friendly Philadelphia really is. I see a couple of people mentioning that one should bike but are there bike lanes? Do drivers treat bikers with animosity? I want to be able to save as much money as possible and I think one of the easiest thing would be to not take my car with me. I'm primarily speaking about the area around Penn.

I'm also going to say that I really don't believe the Lit GRE is weighed very heavily either. I don't know how "disastrously" translates quantifiably but I know that I received sub-600 scores on that God forsaken test and I did just fine this round. There was another thread in which some found that funding at certain schools was distributed somewhat on the basis of GRE scores but I haven't come into contact with that so it was a moot point for me. Don't bomb it but don't let it get in the way of your writing. As we've all said for Ph.D programs (and I can't imagi this would be much different for master's programs), your writing is what is really evaluated.

Hmm. I do see what you're saying though, of course, that kind of performance was not my intention. I didn't go to these visits to tell people that I'm aware of the class capital that got me there. This was more of a personal thing because sometimes I've wondered whether all that free time has made me appear to be a better candidate than I really am. I've had to get over this fear but I think it came out in these kinds of unprompted apologies that I offered up (which, I want to make clear, I never gave any forethought to and almost absentmindedly kept reciting). Your point is well taken.

Well said. To move backwards a little, back to the Year 3 thread again and its original intention as a space for advice for those reapplying, you can have the best scores, the best writings sample, the best personal statement, and have Cornel West, Leo Bersani and Eve Sedgwick (posthumously) write you letter of recommendations but if you're someone who reads 17th century women's writings with an ecocritical focus and Harvard already accepted two people who do that last year, chances are you're not going to get in. Of course this is an overexaggeration but the point still stands. I find that what this process is about is cleaning up every single part of your application so that you can get to be one of those fifty students at multiple schools, increasing the likelihood that at least one will find you worth taking on. The school I'm going to didn't accept any Medievalists this year (though I did meet one who was at the top of the waitlist) and I think three of the handful of acceptees were specifically doing 20th century American and two of those three were interested in issues of sexuality. It made no sense to us (we're an extremely small cohort) but looking at the current graduate students, this was work that wasn't being done to the extent that the program wanted. If you were an amazing Medievalist though, you were SOL, probably from the get go. It's funny. When I went to visit the school that I'm going to, I made sure that just about everyone I came into contact with knew that I was aware of the class and economic privilege that had gotten me there. I had taken a year off after undergrad and was able to devote about five months to the application process. I held a part-time job for the sole purposes of breaking the monotony of going to the library every day but I was living at home with my parents, not paying rent and able to immerse myself in a writing sample the ended up saving my less than perfect transcript and GRE scores. But, anytime anyone would ask me about what I had been doing for my year off, I always started my answer with some variation of "Well, I'm definitely aware of the class privilege that I was able to tap into but..." This isn't meant to try and absolve myself from fitting the characterization that you've formulated for some people getting an Ivy League education. I'm actually just reflecting on my experience in that I knew that this kind of privilege existed, called upon it and called it out on a few occasions but still personally tried to recognize that it wasn't there. That kind of Horatio Algiers story of working really hard and achieving success is all well and good and of course does have some validity in this process (no one's going to accept an applicant that can't produce a coherent thought just because they happen to know Werner Sollors) but it is important to know that it's often more than that. For example, I know that what definitely helped my application at the institution that I'll being going to is that my mentor, who also wrote one of my letters of recommendation, was a former advisee of the Graduate Chair of the English Department there. When I went to visit, the Chair remembered me as "Shirley's student." I also went to a school that he had taught at several years ago and I think he personally knew the tenured faculty that wrote my other two letters as well. In my case, academic incest took on a whole other meaning.

It's actually nothing like that at all and it seems highly unprofessional that you would look that badly on an NYU graduate because of a question on the school's application (a document that they have nothing to do with). It really is as willmpioneer said--the admissions committee wants to make sure that people actually realize that they are a good fit for NYU as a program and already have a working knowledge of the specific resources that they could enact and implement in their research. For the record, the NYU graduate students that I have met are anything but entitled.

Now, this is exactly the reason I've chosen the program that I've chosen. It's been a really, really long month for me with going to these different schools and trying to gauge exactly what it is I've been looking for in a graduate school. I did all the preliminary research on the schools when I was trying to figure out which schools were worth applying to but until I was able to experience each institution first-hand (even if only for a couple of days at best), there was no way to make that decision. In my case, it just so happened that I felt most comfortable but also most challenged at the school that was ranked the highest for me (there's actual a considerable gap in the ranking between this school and the 2nd highest that I applied to--about 12-15 spots actually). This is not to say that I didn't feel anything like that at other schools; I actually felt similarly about schools with bad reputations for snobbishness and overall unlikeability. I just hope that people don't think I'm going where I'm going solely because of a name or a reputation and, in the end, that isn't fair.

Well, I think to a certain extent it has been because a lot of the most interesting work has come out of non-Ivy schools. For years, places like the CUNY Graduate Center and UMich, which have nowhere near the levels of funding as the Ivies have been the ones producing the cutting-edge scholarship in multiple fields. One of my professors, a grad student at the Grad Center, turned down multiple other options with much more lucrative offers (I don't know how many of you know about the Grad Center but it's notorious at this point for it's ridiculously low amounts of funding and heavy teaching loads). At the time, she was so excited by Eve Sedgwick's work and the possibility of working under her tutelage that she took the offer that required teaching in its first year with little funding. To this day, she can't say a bad thing about that program because she finds that not only is she able to produce the best work (the work that she wants to do over the work that her advisor would want her to do), but also she has been able to teach upper-level undergraduate courses that follow similar trajectories to her dissertation and bounce ideas off of students in a way that was completely impossible at the other institutions she had been looking at. As for the Ivy situation, I honestly don't know. I've been a part of the public school system since kindergarten and, though my parents always wanted me to go to those schools and I actually did get into a couple of them for undergrad, I was always trained to have a certain level of skepticism about those schools. They were an arms length away but never within grasp whether it be because they were too expensive (ultimately, the reason why I didn't end up going to an Ivy) or because the level of academic bravado at those kinds of institutions was too stuffy and pretentious for a black kid from Jamaica, Queens. This is completely on a personal level, obviously, not from an academic one. I still like to think that I'm blissfully ignorant of how all of this works in some sort of nationally bureaucratic stratosphere. I am, however, going to stick up for my future cohort at UPenn--the graduate students there are probably the least snobbish (and most brilliant) group of students that I've ever met. The same can't be said for other institutions that I've seen and heard about (I'm looking at you Brown) but the negative connotations of the "Ivy" designation should be noted as clearly not universally applicable.

I do realize that this conversation is on its last legs but I did want to succinctly throw my hat into the fray just because I've been following this thread as it's developed. What we're all talking about, to a certain extent, are personal issues, right? manatee makes the claim (explicitly or not) that it's top school or bust but has often qualified this by saying this notion has been drilled into him for some time and that he himself would find it hard to justify going to a lesser ranked school for myriad (i would argue, legitimate) issues. The job market is ridiculously tight, these reputations can carry a scholar farther, certain names sound more attractive than others, etc. There are definitely more than a couple of degrees of validity to this perspective and I say this only because this is ALSO the advice that I've been given and I didn't even go to Berkeley. I got my degree from one of those Po Dunk Colleges (which happens to be in NYC--I say Po Dunk because it's a commuter public school that has no national or even tri-state reputation to enact in these situations) and I've been told more than once that the committee that looks to hire new faculty at my undergrad has rarely considered even perusing an application that didn't come from someone who got their Ph.D from an Ivy or comparably ranked institution. With all of this over my head, I came into this process with the same kind of mindset and this is reflected in the list of schools that I applied to. I sent applications to 11 schools, all of which were in the top 35 as could be gathered from the small box of English graduate programs in the 2010 edition of US News and World Report's America's Best Graduate Schools issue. My research on where I would be happiest rarely, if ever, left that small window of schools. Thankfully, I was able to actually get in to some of those places but if I had to do it again, I don't know if I'd realistically be able to objectively research lesser-ranked schools but only because I've had this "top 50 or bust" background color my judgment for this long. Perhaps a lot of the people on this fora were better trained in how to approach this process than I was but I just wanted to come in to say that I sympathize with manatee's words more than I (or others) have cared to let on.

I think that the bolded part is true to a certain extent. Who you work with gives you access to scholars from other schools that you probably would not be able to get in touch with so easily. From what I've been told from undergraduate advisors and from many of the faculty that I've spoken with at the schools I've visited this past month, it is even more than just who you work with but what you work on and how well you do that work. Perhaps this was there way of trying to get me to go to their school when they knew I got into a school that was ranked higher, but I sincerely doubt it. I was told this even at the school that had probably the most well known scholar in my (sub-)subfield. You can do that work at schools that are not in the top 20 but it's going to be an uphill battle on an even steeper hill.

I wish I could be this articulate about my own application process but I feel like your post sums it up to a certain extent. For what it's worth, I will be accepting an offer from a top 5 program as well (I haven't done so yet for a variety of reasons but my official acceptance of the offer will be posted in the mail before the end of the week). I can tell everyone for a fact that there was no part of my application that would be considered stellar except for the caliber of my writing, which is something that I have painstakingly paid attention to as my undergraduate career progressed. My grades were all right; my GRE scores left much to be desired; my CV took up maybe 3/4 of a page and was made up of a couple of small conferences I had been a part of and a couple of fellowships that I kind of haphazardly fell into in the past four years. I don't have a master's degree and my undergraduate institution was an urban public school known much more for its education programs and working class students than it is for churning out Ph.D bound students (though we do end up with a few every year). What really did it for me is that I took a year off after I finished undergrad. I sent out a few applications senior year but I was only able to come up with a rough draft of my honors senior thesis in progress as a writing sample and a vapid outlining of the work I wanted to in graduate school that was summed up by saying, "I intend to focus on the problematics of race" and "I might want to become an Orwellian scholar on the weekends" (what? these are actual quotes). Obviously I was rejected with what I can only imagine was extreme prejudice. This second time around I became firm in my stances and projected myself as a scholar. All I can say is read as much scholarship as you can as you wait to begin this next application cycle. Absorb it and let what you read become a part of who you are as a scholar. Reject that which you find unhelpful and embrace the styles and techniques that you find most engaging. Admissions committees want to be excited about your work and it's the most memorable applications that are most likely to get the nod of approval.

I got into several schools, all in the top 30. Most were in the top 20.

Just came in to say that I don't have an MA and only took one official grad course as an undergrad. My BA is also from a fairly low ranked school (last time I checked it was maybe tier 3 on the US News and World Report?) but I was a part of a citywide Honors College that has gained some notoriety at least in NYC over the last few years. Edit: Just to make this post a little more substantial, from what I gather at the schools that I applied and was accepted to, having a BA vs. an MA was a moot point as long as the scholarship that an applicant provided (i.e., writing sample, personal statement and, in some cases, CV) all was of a graduate-level caliber. In my case, due to an incomplete on my record that will take too long to explain and will only get me angry by explaining it, I had been out of coursework for over six months before I had actually "officially" graduated so though I had said that I had a BA, I didn't really at the time.

I don't know if this is going to make you feel better or worse since you seem pretty set on Stony Brook but I'll be declining WashU's offer tomorrow. I'm also declining IU-Bloomington's offer which leaves three offers on the table. =/

Did you at least provide an abstract that glossed over that introduction work? I think providing an excerpt from your master's thesis is a good idea but it should feel like a complete paper (beginning, middle end). I was just starting my year off when I began this admissions process and so had the time to construct an entirely new paper from scratch that ended up being 25 pages exactly, which was a good length for most programs. My advisers also told me that adcoms give much weight to the first two or three pages of a writing sample so I would keep that in mind. If you think you're sample is "disjointed or random" in the slightest, you have to start making sure it feels as tight and cohesive as you can.

This, this, this. I don't think I've ever met anyone who has been really successful at this without having a solid person (preferably, group of people) who were willing to sit down with an applicant and go over these crucial parts of the application. Many professors have been on adcomms at least once in their professional careers and they know what theyre looking for and can help you tailor your SOP to fit what many academics are looking for in a graduate student's application. I'm willing to bet it's not your stats that are a concern but your SOP and writing sample, which, though they may be solid pieces of writing, haven't been presented according to the (tediously) specific "Successful Graduate School Application" rubric. This, too. No matter what field you're in, you need to show that you're interested in something VERY specific about it. Perhaps for this exercise that focus didn't come out but if you don't think it's there, you have to find it. The SOP isn't a written contract, every program I've visited has told me that no one's going to hold me to the project I outlined in my statement and many of the students I've spoken with have at least switched to a different century to focus on if they haven't moved on to the literature of a different continent. But, again, for the purposes of the rubric, you have to present yourself as a confident scholar who's already done research on something esoteric and particular. Edited for typos. My mother just woke me up by yelling in my ear to ask why her computer (which just got upgraded to Windows 7) doesn't have Microsoft Word.