subzoo

ouch

I can't believe I'm posting here, since I have nothing to do with Minnesota, and you'll probably find this out soon enough, but there actually was a Minnesota waitlisting reported.

Thanks, relieved to hear that. Incidentally, a theory of mine, based on the fact that Buffalo is apparently still reviewing applications, despite having made a number of decisions already: maybe some of these schools reserve one last wave of decisions, to be made after they've gotten some idea of how many of the accepted students will actually be enrolling. That way, instead of making, say, 10 offers of admission and 30 waitlistings, they can decide that, since they've already got 6 people enrolling, they'll only need to waitlist 15 people or so. In any case, as I've said elsewhere, it seems strange to me that the adcoms can have finalized their decisions when they don't even know how many of the students they've accepted will be enrolling - unless they have a huge waitlist, but in general there are very few waitlistings reported on the results page. I've certainly lost some faith in the reports about schools having finished making offers, because I personally contacted a DGS at a school reported to be finished, who said they were still reviewing apps.

I don't want to get anyone's hopes up here, but I received (by request) an e-mail from the Graduate Secretary in the English department at Rochester, and she simply said that they are on break this week, and that the adcom should finalize its decisions and send letters out next week. Frankly, I don't see how any of these schools can have truly finalized their decisions until they know how many spots they have open - which depends largely on how many of the accepted students enroll.

To SUNY Buffalo applicants: it's a little late for this now, but, when you check your status on the website, does it tell you whether or not your supporting documents have been received? Mine only says "not reviewed," but it says on the "Help" page that it should also inform you of the receipt of supporting documents.

seems like a great letter to me, the professor sounds like a very cool person

I'm just a PhD candidate, but I still haven't heard a word from Cornell. Anyone in the same boat?

But it's Friday already, and I haven't received a rejection letter yet, and I'm only an hour away from Rochester. (sorry to nag, chalk it up to desperation.)

Have they already notified people if they've been waitlisted?

I don't understand; did the grad sec. imply that they had sent out all their acceptances, and only had rejection letters left to send? Or will they send out acceptance letters March 15-19 as well?

However much we may disagree, Subzoo, I appreciate the fact that you’ve stood your ground and kept this entertaining back-and-forth going . It has provided a welcome relief from the stress of waiting to hear from grad schools.

I suppose that answers my first query well enough.

Would you mind pointing out exactly where I've stated that a) I hate academia; I don't want to be a scholar; and c) I want to be the next J.D. Salinger?

What?? Are two people on this forum actually appreciating my little quotation and not seizing it as an opportunity to spout their deadly serious opinions on "The Academy," or "academe," or whatever the hell it is they call their all-powerful overlord?

Has anyone else still not received any word from SUNY Buffalo?

Does anyone else find it strange that only one rejection has been posted so far? Shouldn't a great big batch of rejections been received in the past few days? Are people just too embarrassed to report them? In any case, I for one still haven't heard a thing from Cornell.

"I think I despise every school and college in the world, but the ones with the best reputation first." Just a friendly reminder that most of the great writers didn't attend Ivy League schools, let alone get paid by them. ...I hope this doesn't start a long and pointless debate about whether Salinger was a nut or a genius. I for one refuse to offer my opinion.

[Note: What follows is a lengthy and occasionally ironic defense of my standpoint, so, lest anyone read it in a hostile light, let me just say that I really appreciate all the well-considered responses, and that I spent a good five, sobering minutes pondering them, and giving serious thought to whether I'm cut out for this business. So, though I do dispute many of the arguments you've made, I by no means consider them unreasonable or unfounded; I simply (surprise surprise) have my own opposing arguments. I hope they don't offend, and perhaps they'll even make you look a little more leniently on my presumptuous little ambitions.] Okay, those are all convincing, or rather, from my perspective, very deflating arguments, and maybe I will forget about becoming an English professor - but only after giving it a shot. I still love literature and love writing about and discussing literature (in addition to professing a genuine aptitude for doing so, after my own fashion), so why shouldn't I try my hand at doing it as a profession? I'm almost embarrassed that I'm venturing on this profession without any of the intellectual apparatus you all seem to possess, and deem indispensable, but maybe that just means I'll be a different kind of literary professor and critic than you all aspire to be - one who judges literature from a different perspective than is offered by that intellectual apparatus. After all, there are literary critics who have done this: they simply happened to do it over a hundred years ago - but they're still great literary critics. Arnold, Pater, and Hazlitt, to name a few. I'm sure you're all thinking, everyone in "The Academy" would turn up their noses at such an anachronism as a literary critic whose idols are a hundred years dead. But maybe someone, somewhere, would be interested, and perhaps that tiny little public would be enough to justify my existence. Should it really matter so much to me that I would be a misfit, someone whose work most of my colleagues regard as worthless simply because it doesn't adhere to the same conventions and principles as theirs? Would I get in trouble? Would somebody arrest me? In short, isn't it enough to follow my interest in literature in my own way, even if it's different from other people's way? Is it really fair of you to say that my method of criticizing literature can't be practiced at the university level, simply because it's different from the accepted method? I see your point: if all I wanted to do was read and talk about what I read, I could just as easily do that in a high school, or on my own. But, though I don't share your confidence that I perfectly fit into the Academy, I do feel a sort of calling to share my views of literature with the most intelligent, most sophisticated students of literature out there (as well as with the general public, God help them), and I feel that that calling is enough to justify me in at least trying to be a professor of English. The anticipation that my work won't fit in very well with the work that's being done in the Academy does worry me a little, but look at it this way: should we really look at our work and think to ourselves, "Barring a few discrepancies of opinion, this is exactly like what is being published by my colleagues! Great!" Isn't it perhaps better to look at our work and say, "Hmm, this probably won't quite mesh with my colleagues' work, but, damn it, I believe in it - perhaps it really is worth putting out there." (And here I might add that I do not, as everyone seems to assume, disparage modern literary theory. If anything, I look up to people like Derrida and Deleuze and Guattari, precisely because they didn't try to conform to the Academy, but simply put forth their individual theories of literature. Surely no one would claim that their work suffered from their not having attended enough conferences on literature. Granted, they didn't write about literature as though it were in a vacuum, but nor do I propose to do: I simply propose to write about it from a different perspective than that offered by the latest papers published on JSTOR, just as they wrote from different perspectives than those offered by the academic research of their time. ...please don't exaggerate my little criticism of JSTOR, as everyone (understandably) took my statement about literature conferences far too seriously. I don't really think these things completely worthless, I just don't think they're nearly as important as everyone says they are. (When a man hasn't read half of the masterpieces of literature, or perhaps even a quarter of them, can he really be expected to spend much time on JSTOR?) For some people, perhaps JSTOR and all the contemporary literary journals are quite central to their work; if they aren't central to mine, does that mean I'm not qualified to be an English professor?) Finally, let me say one more thing, more or less in my defense. Ever since I became a "student of literature," I've heard teachers tell the class to write their papers in a certain way, and express their thoughts in a certain way, etc. etc. And it always worried me, but I couldn't let it stop me from writing in my way. When I set the book in front of me and honestly expressed my thoughts about it, the paper just took on its own shape, and, instead of making what I considered to be a "convincing argument," I ended up simply saying something (or some things) that was true about the book (which in itself is a kind of argument, since everyone has their own version of the truth). Now, if I had listened to my teachers, I would have gotten scared and torn up my paper, and written it all over in the way they advised. But I never did, I gave them my disobedient little efforts, and (sorry to boast, it's not like it's hard to get an "A" in our days of grade inflation) not once did they fail to praise my work. Is it possible they just didn't know what they wanted, and were pleased when they received something that didn't quite resemble what they were used to? I don't know; my point really is simply that I'm not going to get scared just because everyone's warning me about the dangers of non-conformity. Jesus, haven't we read enough great literature to know that nothing worthwhile conforms perfectly to the status quo? I know, I know, I know, literature is not the same as literary criticism: but surely some of the wisdom we gain from literature should be applied in our practice of literary criticism. Surely literary criticism is more than just a job, to be performed according to the rules.

Fair enough. I guess I'm just banking on the idea that all you really need in order to be a good teacher and student of literature is to love and truly understand literature, and be able to communicate that love and understanding to other people. I'm not saying that it's not important to keep abreast of contemporary literary studies as well; I'm just saying that, to me, that's not nearly as important. What I really protest against is that literature itself is so completely over-shadowed by this "contemporary literary study," simply because English professors are more interested in their own mediocre (or possibly very interesting) work than they are in the true masterpieces of literature. Am I the only one who would rather lose 50 percent of all the literary studies published in the last century, than lose a single novel of their favorite author? In short, isn't literature more important than the study of literature? Is it possible that much of the reason we spend so much time writing and talking about literature and comparatively so little time actually reading and pondering it, is that we've simply gotten bored of the literature itself, for the same silly reasons that the general public gets bored reading great literature? And again, please try not to take what I'm saying as some kind of personal attack (for instance, I did not call Str2T "boring and petty" - I said that the activities he or she described as enriching seemed boring and petty to me). I'm not trying to start some English department revolution; I'm honestly just curious whether anyone else shares some of my concerns.

I hear what you're saying, but all of those things sound so boring and petty to me. I just want to study write about and teach literature - I hate that I'm considered unqualified to do so until I've accumulated all of these stupid little accolades. It's like the old argument about whether anyone can really learn how to be a writer; I look at the study of literature as pretty similar to writing, which is to say, I don't think it's just some job that you learn how to do, but rather a kind of calling that you just do. But maybe I'm just bitter because I've never published and never presented at any conferences - and for that matter wouldn't be caught dead going to a conference on literature - much better to just read or write, or better yet just live. ... I'm not saying all this to criticize you; your answer makes perfect sense and I'll probably end up scrounging those qualifications myself. I'm just wondering whether anyone else feels this way - feels alienated by the business-like attitude of all these so-called lovers of literature. Alienated by the fact that all these English department people sound exactly like the finance department people and the psychology department people etc.

sorry to interrupt, but something just occurred to me about the results reported about Cornell: there have been 2 admits reported, but one of them only says "Literature" - not english literature. Is this just a repeat of the other admit reported, or is it a comp. lit. result, or what? anyway, do you think they're still making offers?

Are PhD programs less inclined to accept applicants who only have their BA, no master's degree? Are BAs generally supposed to apply to master's programs?

There seems to be some etiquette against asking this question, but do those of you who got into SUNY Buffalo mind sharing some of your credentials? i.e. GPAs, where you got your B.A., GRE scores, that kind of thing? Can't help but be curious about that.

I really shouldn't have even mentioned that e-mail - it probably caused unfounded anxiety. It just occurred to me that they probably sent it to me because I'm from Buffalo, so they figure going to an informal info session would be feasible for me, while for out-of-towners it would be silly to travel for a two-hour event. I'm almost positive it was sent to all local applicants - it says it's for "prospective students and applicants to our graduate programs." Sorry for the false alarm.

Fair enough, although I really just meant in general (and to be fair, I did specify the PhD program). I don't know that I'm "applying" to any particular field; my area of interest is 19th C. English lit., especially Romanticism. But again, I was just looking for very general answers, not detailed personal advice.