othersamantha

I would also add that emailing or calling the graduate assistant might be another good course of action -- I emailed a few for clarification about different aspects of applications and they sometimes add in some additional helpful information that's not otherwise readily available!

This is my first application season, so I can't speak from experience about this, but the advice I was given by my advisor throughout college and for grad school apps in particular is that you should aim to be within 10% (so in your case, that would be between 9 and 11 pages) for any length requirements. A caveat to this is if it is strictly stated that nothing beyond the requested page count will be read -- in that case I would err on the side of caution and get it as close to 10 as you can. If you have a professor you feel comfortable asking, I'd definitely check with them and see what they think! And if this is for this application season, all I can say is... GOOD LUCK!! Even if that app is due tomorrow! I certainly wouldn't agree that it's "too late" to be thinking about that for this season; everyone works on a different timeline and you have to do what's comfortable for you! Definitely don't let that discourage you from applying this year if that's your plan. That said, if it is a close deadline and that's stressing you out, there's nothing wrong with waiting another year. You do you!

Haha, thank you! I called the graduate assistant who confirmed that the writing sample had been successfully uploaded, and said that this was a glitch in the "preview" function that some other applicants had experienced as well! I guess it wasn't an ApplyWeb problem after all...

Has anyone run into the issue of some materials not showing up in the "review/proof" stage right before submission? For my application to Vanderbilt, on the writing sample page it shows that the file attached successfully, but when it shows me a preview of the whole app on the review page, those pages are simply missing even though my statement, CV, and transcripts are all there. Have tried getting in touch with Vanderbilt, but haven't gotten a response yet! I'm not sure if their system is ApplyWeb or something else. I may try calling the grad office over lunch to ask for advice?

You too!!

I have that sense also -- it seems like most of the programs I'm applying to don't highlight the CV as an important element on their "information for applicants" pages, but rather it is just something that pops up as part of the online application system. Speaking from absolutely no experience whatsoever (meaning, don't take this too seriously) it seems to be just a box that needs to be checked. Still, trying to present my best side in mine! I'm worried that it seems a little short/sparse because I was advised by one of my letter writers to exclude any sales/customer service experience (even for jobs where I earned a promotion) to keep it as academic as possible and that because I'm applying from a BA, I don't have a lot of formal teaching experience. Agree with all above that it's hard to know what level of detail to include about courses taken, paper written (especially those that fall outside of my intended subfield), etc. Good luck all!

Got it! Thanks for clarifying!

Hi all! Just need some help battling paranoia here -- can anyone else confirm that Harvard's deadline to apply (for the English PhD) is January 3rd? It seems that most of the other Ivy League schools are sticking to December 15th, so I thought this was a bit odd. Harvard also doesn't post the deadline directly on their page, but rather refers you to the GSAS site. Just wanted to make sure I am not missing something here and don't miss out on the deadline. Thanks!! Good luck to everyone; hope no one is stressing out too much this week!

THE MATH SECTION. The worst. I scored in the 30s (percentile), and am more or less certain that no one will care.

Thanks! So in other words, do you think it would be okay to submit an excerpt with perhaps a one page addendum to add context, even if not specifically prompted to do that in the application?

I'm planning to submit roughly one section of my undergrad honors thesis. All together it's 50 pages, and since most apps are looking for 15-25, I'm essentially choosing one of the three sections. The issue I'm running into is editing. Some schools state that it's okay to submit an excerpt with a page or so to contextualize it, but others strictly ask for something "no longer that X pages." I guess for those schools, I will edit the section a bit to make it more standalone, but that in itself is tricky. Anyone have any tips on cutting down/submitting only part of a longer project?

Just wanted to say that I hope everyone did alright and is content (if not thrilled) with his or her score! Nice at least that they got them to us a bit early, eh?

I've taken the exam twice -- the first time I was completely underprepared and ended up canceling my scores (this was more than a year ago), and the second time was the October 29th test. It was honestly still awful and one of the more degrading experiences of my academic life. What follows is a disorganized summary of my thoughts/recollections from the exam (I've honestly blocked a lot of it out already, but have tried to include specific examples of the types of questions/passages I came across): The first time around I used Vade Mecum and Hapax Legomena to create flash cards, but as I said, the test did not go well. The timing is a complete nightmare, as WT mentioned above. The second time around, I used the Princeton Review because I was desperate for some sort of guidance, and it definitely was comforting to have a list of things to read and people to know. I think though that the PR lulls you into a false sense of security and greatly exaggerates the likelihood that there will be an obvious clue in each passage. I think he leads you to believe that there will be a character or setting mentioned or some obvious stylistic quirk in any passage for which you will be asked to identify the author or work, and that was simply not true. Furthermore, I took the Princeton Review practice test a few weeks before the exam and was confident that I had the timing down (I finished all of the questions with just a few minutes to spare), when in the real exam, I was left with more than 100 unanswered questions with one hour to go. I also think there was more Old and Middle English on the real exam that I took than in the PR book, and the questions were more involved than "Is this Old or Middle English?" There were a lot of questions like "which modern English word is the closest in meaning to ____" or "which line uses a grammar convention differently than modern English." These questions were not extremely difficult, but they could be time consuming depending on what you were being asked to do, how many lines of the passage you had to examine, etc. I wish that I had spent at least a little time more familiarizing myself with Middle English and thus would have been able to answer those questions even faster. The one other thing I will add regarding the PR is that the degree of separation between the answer and the question is much greater than you would think from the PR book. What I mean by this is that in the PR book you will find practice questions along the lines of "the author of this passage is also the author of which other work" (A to B), but in the real exam, it seemed to me that the questions were more often along the lines of "the author of this passage is the contemporary of an author who wrote which of the following works" (X to Y to Z). It is definitely important to know contemporaries and be able to quickly match them up with one another in order to answer these questions that ask you to go one step beyond general work-to-author matching. I do think the PR's strategy of first and second passes is worthwhile -- if it is a passage you recognize, the questions are (fairly) straightforward, and there will be a few standalone questions that will be very easy. The issue that I had is that in the real exam I probably only answered 20 questions on the first pass (compared to the PR practice test, where I'd estimate I recognized 40 to 50 percent of the passages straight off; again, false sense of security). I truly think the key to mastering this exam is to take a lot of practice exams, but unfortunately, there just aren't that many available (and as I mentioned, the PR practice test is very much a test on what is in the PR book, rather than an accurate example of what is to be found in the real exam). I will close by saying that although I'm not sure all of the many, many hours of work I put into preparing for this exam will pay off in terms of my score, it was actually quite fun to study for, and I feel much more knowledgeable about a lot of areas of literature that I had never formally studied before. I definitely think that if (cross fingers!) I am accepted into a program, it's knowledge that will be useful to me. I think it's important to keep in mind too that a lot of programs (even those who require it) don't set a lot in store by this exam (or so it seems). I don't think that I bombed it, but I certainly didn't ace it. I'm really hoping that my very strong verbal GRE score will be of more importance to admissions committees than this very expensive and very frustrating exam. If you think about it, it's probably the least important element of your application. So definitely take the time to prepare and do what you can do, but keep in mind that this is only one element of it, and also keep in mind that this is exam exists so that ETS can make money off of us. You can only do what you can do! And the feeling of being free of it, even if you're not confident about how you did, is just so, so sweet. Good luck!

Will do, thanks!

So sorry for everyone that has to pay to get transcripts sent out! What a hassle. My undergrad will send mine for free, so luckily that's not a cost I need to consider. I took the GRE general in 2015, so that's not a cost I'm factoring in for my actual application season, but I will need to send out score reports. I'm planning to apply to 5 or 6 schools, so that about $160. I'm taking the subject test later this month, so that's about $150. With application fees anywhere from $40 or $50 to $125, I'm hoping that it will total between $300 and $500. All in all, I'm REALLY hoping to not spend more that $1000. I definitely want to look into fee waivers too, although I looked at a few online and it seemed like it takes a lot of work to get the documentation together... anyone have experience or tips for this?

Is there any chance you're willing to name names here? Just curious as to what the policies of particular schools are.

I've thought of another, more general question-- I will also need to resend my GRE general scores, since I took that exam last year. Anyone have any idea how long "additional score reports" take to send?? The sooner the better I would imagine, but definitely need to budget the cost of sending them out! Thanks!

I couldn't agree more with this-- I took the Princeton Review practice test this weekend feeling reasonably confident with the preparation and studying I had done, and ended up with a 550 :/. I agree that Princeton's POE method has flaws, and I think in the real test I will guess slightly less aggressively to avoid the 1/4 point penalty (ie, only guessing if I can eliminate 2 answers or more, and passing over any questions that I truly have no knowledge of). It's so difficult because it comes down to so much recognition-- I definitely missed a lot of the "match this obscure excerpt to the author/title" questions. As a tip for others, I've checked out this book https://www.amazon.com/Literature-SparkNotes-101/dp/1411400267/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1476711721&sr=8-1&keywords=sparknotes+literature+101 from my local library, and it's been helpful in picking up character names and basic plot details. Thanks again to all, and good luck to those still studying! Will be crossing my fingers that scores are sent in time for December 15 deadlines!

I too am taking the October test with the intention of sending scores for this application season (December-January). To be honest, I didn't even consider the possibility that October scores might not make it in time, because why would it be timed that way?! ETS is just such a horrible entity. I am happy to hear though that @Ramus seems to think that it won't be an issue! Can anyone else weigh in on this?? Has anyone taken an October test and NOT had their scores arrive in time? Feel quite paranoid now.

Hi all! Just curious to see if there are others who are planning to take the 10/29 subject test, and if so, what your study focus is going to be over the next two and half weeks or so. Currently trying to brush up on literary terms and verse forms. If anybody has any good resources regarding verse form/scansion, I'd be very interested to know! I'd also like to suggest Quizlet as a great study tool for making flashcards-- if, like me, you find making hand-written flashcards to be exhausting, it's a good way to speed up the process and give your hands a break from writing. They also have an app, so you can create the cards on your computer but then have access to them on the go. Best of luck to everyone taking the exam!

Thank you for making these excellent points. I tend to agree with you that those types of statements rarely read as genuine, even if they are meant to be so. I was, however, under the impression that many programs want you to indicate faculty you'd be interested in working with by name, even if they're not someone you're already particularly familiar with. Do you think it would be sufficient to make a statement such as, "I'm particularly interested in working with the early modernists for reasons x, y, z" without specifically naming each prospective mentor and referencing their work? I'd love to hear more about your/others' thoughts on "namedropping," since I agree that it's something that's a bit awkward to write, but which I thought was more or less requisite.

Hi all! I'm the OP of this post, and I just wanted to (very belatedly) thank you all for your advice. It really has been extremely helpful and has definitely made me feel (ever so slightly) more relaxed about this whole process. I've just finished my first draft of my SOP. I've been working on it for about a month here and there, and I'm not especially happy with it, but I think at this point it's just time to send it off to my letter writers and get feedback. For the SOP: Did you tend to focus more on the work you've already done, or the work you'd like to do in future? For example, one of my letter writers told me that the goal of the SOP is to tell a narrative about myself as a researcher and writer. I wrote a 15,000 word thesis as a senior, and talk about that process and my research in my current draft of my statement, but I feel that I'm not left with a lot of room to discuss my future direction. Do you think committees are more interested in you proving that you can do the work (past experiences) or spending a big number of words on prospective faculty partnerships, specific lines of research, etc? Finally, and this may seem like a silly question, but I'm having trouble striking a balance here-- to what extent did you "flatter" the program to which you are applying? I understand that it's obviously in my best interests to express a true interest in a program and show why I am a good fit for their faculty/methodology/approach, but there just doesn't seem to be enough space for "X program's commitment to training graduate students to teach is impressive..." or "Y's exceptional faculty are..." etc. Basically, is it more important to sell myself to the committee, or to stroke the egos of readers? Thank you all so very much! I wish you the best of luck as we get into the last couple of months!

Hi all! This is just a quick question for anyone familiar with Penn's grad program. Does anyone happen to know if Rebecca Bushnell works with PhD students? I've noticed that she hasn't chaired a dissertation since 2003, and am not sure if it's worth mentioning an interest in working with her if she's no longer supervising research. As a follow-up/more general question: Has anyone ever run into anything similar, and if so, how did you go about finding out if the person in question was actively working with grad students? Is it appropriate to reach out to them directly by email (or perhaps to the program administrator)? Thanks all!

Hi all! I'm writing today for some general advice about the application timeline-- I know that this varies person-to-person. I'm a notorious procrastinator and generally will leave things until the last minute unless I force myself to adhere to a schedule of some kind. I'll be applying for Fall 2017 admission, and just am trying to get a sense of how behind I likely already am! For those who've applied in the past, when did you: -Begin working on your SOP? When did you feel you were "finished" (if you ever did)? In general, was it months of redrafting and tweaking, or a solid week's worth of work? -Ask for letters of recommendation (is it ever too early)? -Finalize your list of programs? -Reach out to POI? -Begin revising your writing sample (if you did indeed revise)? I've already taken my GRE (I'm planning on taking the subject test in September or October-- I've done some studying/flashcard making but it's sucking the soul out of me and I've decided it's not the most important thing anyway). I have professors who've written letters of recommendations for me in the past, and will be able to revise their previous letters for me, so I would like to give them time to add in relevant information about the work I did at the end of my senior year and what I have done in the year since graduating. What I'm most worried about is the SOP and revising my writing sample (I'm going to need to cut down my 15,000 word honors thesis to 15-20 pages). I guess I'm also a little nervous about finalizing my list of schools-- I find it really difficult to judge what caliber of programs I should be considering, so I'm hoping my advisor might be able to help me with that. I realize there's no time like the present to get started on all of this, but just wanted to see what others' past experiences were like! Thanks in advance; hope you're all well! Best of luck to everyone working on applications right now!

Thanks for the reply! As a follow up: if I do follow through with the test and get a below average score, will that be enough to throw me out of the pile? Or will no one care?