Bumblebea

Yes, I think people often do take one of two approaches when narrowing down their interests--they decide they want to research literature by a particular region or identity (Black Atlantic, Caribbean, queer Southern gothic, post-WWII disability) and look for literature that they can use to explore that specific culture or identity; or they focus on a particular genre, form, aesthetic trend or literary technique and grow their interests from there. Both approaches are completely valid. The former, though, will be more readily identifiable to adcoms; the second has the potential to be extremely rich and fruitful and exciting (IMO), but you need to work to "situate" this approach in your time period, if that makes any sense. Like (and here's an example I'm just pulling out of my ass so probably not a good one), let's say you're interested in modernist poetry because you love the ways in which authors experimented with form and language. Well, maybe you'll talk a lot about the form but also think about formal experimentation as it might have related to, say, other types of experimentation. Maybe you discover that a certain poet was really interested in social and scientific experimentation (the evidence is in his poetry or other things he wrote), and so you're willing to hypothesize that thinking about poetic forms in connection to social engineering might have been something writers were doing at the time. You're still privileging your interest in form/aesthetics but using it to branch off into other contextual issues. Maybe you're dipping into posthumanism or critical race theory while you do so. You're not pigeonholing yourself as a critical race scholar, but you're using a particular approach to deepen what we know about poetry of the early 20th century. So I think that's what some of us are trying to say here. In this day and age it's going to be difficult to "sell" yourself--on either the admissions trail or the job market--as someone who focuses only on aesthetic/formalist issues. But you can certainly privilege your interest in such issues while relating them to other issues. Like, upthread you talked about an interest in the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution. Do you see Enlightenment-era literary forms as providing a particular window into the industrial revolution? Do the literary forms of the era (and some of the aesthetic critics--there are so many of them) give us insight into how people wrestled with massive ideological questions (human rights, women's rights, revolutions, modern capitalism)? So, I would say, don't take the approach that you have to have some kind of cultural studies "angle"--the angle should emerge naturally based on questions that pique you and the surrounding historical contexts. And to answer your other question-- Correct. I don't think you would necessarily have to telegraph that you are combining a formalist approach with Western Marxist theory. Instead, maybe if you're looking at the Enlightenment, you mention X about form and aesthetics and then discuss how you'd bring it to bear on Y aspects of early modern capitalism and industrialization. Or something like that, you get the idea.

Yeah, this. I wish I'd thought to ask these questions before I applied to PhD programs. OP, you're ahead of where I was, let me tell you. (And I'm also flipping between revising an article and writing these posts, oh crap, I mean procrastinating ?)

(Disclaimer: My own scholarly interests lie in the distant past, so my need to historicize the crap out of things is definitely coloring my responses to you here. People working in different eras might have much different advice.) I think what everyone is recommending is that you need to retreat from the idea of taking one specific approach and instead think about combining different approaches. That is, if you like to come at literature from an aesthetic/formalist approach, that's great, but the literature you study is still going to require close attention not only to form but also to the historical/political issues that inform the backdrop of your chosen literary era. Combining approaches isn't going to be like "add a dash of gender criticism and a sprinkling of Marxist theory"--no, these days we think about approaches emerging organically from what the text is telling us about authors and readers of the time. Like, for instance, let's say you're writing about a picaresque novel that involves cross-dressing. You're probably not going to be able to write an article ONLY about the formal properties of the picaresque mode, though you might start there. You instead would do a detailed discussion of the picaresque combined with gender issues, and you'd think about how gender issues might influence the author's use of the mode, or how the mode might push the author to have specific engagements with the theme of cross dressing. And you're going to have to do research into cross-dressing and gender issues of the 18th century (or whatever century you're studying), no way around it. Then let's say the next picaresque novel you study takes place against the backdrop of the Atlantic slave trade. Same issue will apply--you'll have to do research into the Atlantic slave trade and think about the relevant theories as they might help you discuss the novel. And if gender issues also arise there (since race and gender and colonization don't exactly respect boundaries), then you'll also want to address that. Basically, you have to think about what the literature is telling you and work from there. Like, IME the time has passed when people self-identify as "Marxist" or "feminist" alone and go through novels and poems and stories and apply only one theory. Their work might deal with the same issues time and time again, but that's probably because the approach is useful to the literature they study. Scholars tend to pick approaches that are most helpful to them rather than starting out with "feminism! feminism! I must do feminism!" and then applying feminist theory to everything they read. (In fact, excessive focus on one cultural approach is probably bad because we now recognize the importance of intersectionality. If someone is focusing only on gender, they're going to get called out for ignoring the experiences of non-white people, and if they're focusing on social class issues as they relate to men, they're going to get called out for ignoring women, etc. etc.) I mean, Gilbert and Gubar might have written a landmark text about women and literature ... but their work has (maybe unfairly) served as something of a punching bag ever since and an example of a narrow-minded approach. So I'm being really long-winded here, but my main tl;dr takeaways are: Any program worth its salt is going to have a whole bunch of people on faculty who do all kinds of approaches. You're not going to find a (good) program that is invested in one thing and hostile to all others (and if you do, run). It's true that some programs seem to produce more scholars who work on a variety of aesthetic approaches (Berkeley comes to mind--a lot of their people do novel studies and poetics) ... but people are also always going to market themselves as having a cultural angle, since that's what the job market wants these days, and that's what's going to publish. Look closely at grad student interests and review recent dissertations. Think about what your chosen literature is telling you. It might have formal/aesthetic aspects that you find really cool, but it's also going to be engaging with other cultural issues in some way. Think about how the form might influence the treatment of issues and vice versa. This might be a way to integrate approaches and therefore seem more attractive and identifiable to adcoms. Check out this guy's work: http://mcgarrett.faculty.wesleyan.edu/ I'm not an Americanist, but I love his work and it seems to me that it's very formalist but also attentive to social and political history.

First of all, I don't think you're going to find an entire program *without* something pretty central to the discipline, like cultural studies or critical race theory. Second of all, I don't think what you're asking is that unusual. There are a lot of people out there who focus on issues of form and genre. In fact, I think that most programs are recognizing that cultural approaches by themselves (Marxism, gender, queerness, race) are pretty tired, and that English departments shouldn't be history/social science lite--we need to focus on literature as a distinct expression. But the thing is, you can't just begin and end with formalist readings of texts. At some point you have to address history. For example, let's say you want to focus on the rise of the novel, and you want to look at the types of aesthetic philosophies that may have informed the proliferation of the genre. At some point, you are going to have to think about why novels mattered to people, and why your intervention matters, and this will undoubtedly have a historical dimension. You'll also have to address the content of those novels, which will probably be political in some way. So all of this is to say that you're in good company. You won't be made to apply theory like a lens and go through a text doing a feminist reading. But you won't be able to escape history, either.

There's another possibility, though: people could be unsympathetic to your approaches because your approaches might not be considered "good" by the discipline at large. Or they might be old news. Or, field wise, they might have evolved into something else. That's not to say that professors know best, or that their approach is right while yours is always wrong. But if you're consistently coming across articles and book chapters that seem disdainful toward your particular underpinnings and inclinations (or ignorant of them altogether), then it might be worthwhile to think about why. And if only a small number of professors in a small number of graduate programs seem to gel with your interests, then you should proceed with caution, as it might be more difficult to get a job when you're finished. Like, take Lacanian criticism, for example, and this is just an example. There are a few people at a few programs who do this, and and if you're into it you might be tempted to throw all your eggs in a very small number of baskets. But a lot of scholars consider Lacanian criticism to be "intellectually bankrupt" (a direct quote I heard just recently). So if you're coming out of a program steeped in the stuff, you might find yourself with worse employment prospects than usual. I think another way to possibly narrow down programs is to look at what the grad students in your proposed area of study are dissertating or publishing about. Because graduate students aren't necessarily going to be carbon-copies of their advisors, and the best ones are going to be engaging with relevant issues while branching out into new realms. When I was figuring out my dissertation prospectus, I spent time studying the projects and abstracts of recent graduate students in my area (but from other schools) who'd won national recognition for their scholarship (ACLS dissertation fellowships, article prizes, etc.).

I would recommend trying to get into the best program you can get into rather than trying to find someone who does exactly what you do. The top programs will be a good place to study almost anything (though obviously it varies, so always run your choices past your current faculty mentor). I think a lot of people here have already given good advice in this regard. I honestly think that people overestimate "fit" and get fixated on certain programs where they can find an adviser who does something very similar to what they want to do. But fit shouldn't be overemphasized for a number of reasons: 1) Your interests will probably change while you are in coursework. 2) You know a lot about your interests right now, but in the grand scheme of things you're still at the beginning. You will learn a whole lot more along the way. 3) A good program with good advising will allow you to grow into an independent scholar. In other words, if the program is doing its job, you won't *have* to have an adviser who does exactly what you do. And then a few anecdotal points from my own time in grad school: I knew a person who chose our program because he really wanted to work with Professor Famous, who did exactly the kind of work he wanted to do. Well, Professor Famous was not as nice a person as he seemed, and he refused to take my acquaintance on as an advisee. Not because he didn't like my acquaintance--but because he didn't like having any advisees whatsoever (and he was famous enough to get away with that). My acquaintance ended up having to scrap his dissertation project altogether because he could not justify coming out of a our program with a dissertation on such a specialized topic without Professor Famous (known worldwide for this topic) on his committee. It's important to stay open-minded as a scholar. Be willing to try out different topics and different approaches. The people I know who struggled the most in graduate school were the ones who came in with a dissertation project already mapped out rather than the ones who let their interests develop over time. (YMMV--I'm sure for some people it's the opposite. But there is so much value in just letting your coursework change your approaches and interests.) I wrote my dissertation on a topic that my adviser was very familiar with, but I undertook a second project that NO ONE in my program was familiar with. I'm currently in the process of publishing this second project as an article and then hopefully turning it into a book. But it was not a topic that anyone in my program knew anything about, just an obscure interest I developed on my own. If you've gotten good advising and good feedback on your writing, you will be able to apply these skills to other interests you want to develop.

@rising_star, I'm not quite sure why you're replying in such a defensive and condescending manner here. I agreed with most of what you said and just had a few nitpicks. But we're talking about conference presentations here, not the virtues of collaborative scholarship. If you want to talk about collaborative scholarship, I'm guessing the research forum would be a better place? But here we're discussing the value of conferences for early career grad students. I don't doubt that you're very good at what you do. But you represent just one institution (or class of institutions, I suppose), and you're not in English, and you're not on every hiring committee. If we're going to go to qualifications, I was on several search committees as a graduate student, and I too am currently a faculty member at a much different type of institution from the one where I received my degree, and I've been on the job market very recently and have gotten a TT job. I'm familiar with P&T guidelines (as someone striving to fulfill them currently), and your recommendation just doesn't apply to the situation we're discussing here. Like, it's great that your institution encourages collaboration. It's certainly not the case everywhere. In fact, English faculty at all kinds of institutions these days are striving to publish a book for tenure--even when a book is not required. It's quickly becoming the standard, though, because the discipline is so talent-rich (you have people working at teaching-focused institutions who in the past would have easily been hired at an R1). This has changed the topography of English scholarly expectation quite a bit. But this conversation isn't about scholarly collaboration and people getting tenure. It's about people trying to get into graduate school and wondering what conferences will do for them. As I said previously, graduate students in English have only a limited time to get through a program. Publishing a solo article is A MUST. You have to get your name out there before hitting the job market, and a co-authored essay probably won't do that for you. Are there exceptions? Probably. Do I know people who have co-authored papers and gotten jobs? Of course. Was the co-authored article the only thing they produced? Absolutely not. Can a co-authored article help you if it's your second or third article rather than your first or only, and you already have a scholarly footprint? Probably, but it depends on its quality and the level of your involvement. However, it still does not carry the weight on the job market that a solo project does, and this is why many DGSs and advisors discourage it. When you only have five years of funding to get through, you need to prioritize your time to get that solo article out, because that is what will get you an interview. That's the thing: writing articles takes time, even co-authored articles. They are an incredible time suck. And I recommend that graduate students try to get the maximum return on their investment by publishing two peer-reviewed articles (usually one that's published or about to be published when one is on the job market and then one that appears soon after one gets hired--that's still ideal, even if the hiring crunch has made it more difficult to have a job by the time that second article comes out). If you've already published your two articles and now want to co-author a third, why not. It's another notch in the belt. It probably isn't going to light the world on fire, but it's a line on a CV. But this conversation should not be about co-authorship. It's about conferences. And this is still my advice about conferences: If a scholar approaches you at a conference and wants to co-author a paper with you, great! Flattering! But is this article something you're already doing on your own? Do you already have an article in the pipeline and another one under review or soon to be under review? How much funded time do you have left? How much more of your dissertation do you have to write? How much time do you think this project will take? Depending on the answers to these questions, co-authoring a paper might or might not be a great idea. Get that information together and take it to your advisor to see what they say. (And anecdotally, and somewhat related to this conversation: I was approached at a conference five years ago by a famous scholar who wanted me to turn my conference paper into a book chapter for a collection. I passed on the offer, submitted the article to a journal, and later won a prize for that article, which was instrumental in my success on the job market. Turning down the edited book collection actually paid off well.) They need to just put it out there. In the social sciences you consider co-authoring papers to be part of one's training? Well okay, there's a difference in disciplines here. In English programs we still believe that a valuable part of one's training is to tell someone to finish the article, attach it to an email, and send the damn thing.

I'd say this is true only if one is heading to a PhD program that doesn't offer many teaching opportunities. Like, I know a lot of people from the Ivy League who got their PhDs having taught only one or two classes. (I, on the other hand, as a PhD student at a large flagship, had more teaching experience than I knew what to do with.) Having said that, none of these people had a difficult time getting a job despite their relative lack of teaching experience. Sometimes less is more on the job market, in that quality of teaching matters more than quantity. However, I do think that getting teaching experience for its own sake is useful, especially if you can teach a population that you don't normally come in contact with. Like, say you get your degree at an elite private school. Adjuncting at a community college or public university might show potential employers that you are dedicated to public inclusive education and that you know how to reach students of different backgrounds. (Again, though, I've seen a lot of people with very skimpy teaching experience get very good jobs at all kinds of colleges and universities, so who knows.) Lol, that's actually what I think. Sadly. I think that universities are probably more likely to do away with humanities requirements altogether than actually pay their teaching staff a living wage. But just so I'm clear, that's not an endorsement to adjunct! There are still many other things an MA or MFA in English can do that will guarantee them the living wage and benefits that every person deserves.

That's a different matter altogether and neither here nor there. As a graduate student, your aim needs to be to write articles that can get published in peer-reviewed journals, not to unsettle the assumption that only single-authored publications are the goal. As a graduate student, you have limited time and resources. You need to make the most of that time so you can put yourself in a good position for the job market. Again, same idea applies. Edited book volumes are nice, but they do not carry the same weight as an article in a peer-reviewed journal when one is on the job market. But this is your institution. And again, we're not talking about the field in general but about what will help a particular graduate student maximize their time in graduate school, and it's still widely accepted in English that a graduate student should not "throw a publication away" on an edited collection or to try to co-author an article. FTR, I *do* encourage attending conferences. If nothing else, they get you ready for a very crucial part of your career. They also prepare you for job talks. I just think that some of the information being thrown around here is not useful for a beginning-level English graduate student, and by "some" I mean just a small portion.

No, your friends should not do that. They don't need more teaching experience. They probably need more money and should do what @a_sort_of_fractious_angel did. Adjuncting is horribly exploitative and should be avoided if at all possible, not just for their sake but for the profession's sake as a whole. And as @a_sort_of_fractious_angel points out, additional teaching experience will NOT help their application.

A couple of field-specific points: Bullets 2, 4, and 5 are absolutely true. Presenting at conferences really allows you to get your feet wet and refine your ideas. However, as with everything academic, I often receive opposing recommendations, or questions that are more about the person showing off his or her knowledge. Also, not every participant in the discussion may be acting in good faith. Some people are awful, and they will use any excuse to tear into a budding scholar as a way to build themselves up. Luckily this is rare; I've seen it happen only once in my life, when a panel respondent used a graduate student's paper to go on a diatribe about how we needed to declare a moratorium on the subject she had just spoken on because it was just so, well, in his words "self-evident.: These things rarely happen, but they do happen once in a while. Having said that, I'm glad I presented at those two dinky conferences (and then two other dinky conferences during coursework) before I started at presenting at the "big time" conferences, which were indeed stressful. You really do need the practice. You don't want your first conference to be when you're a third-year PhD student at the biggest and most important conference in your field. But, as a master's student, going to conferences in and of itself will have little to no effect on your application. As for bullet point 3--people in English rarely coauthor papers. And coathored papers do not "count" as much on one's CV. But it is indeed a good way to meet people so that you can organize panels in the future. As for bullet point 1--I would say it's rare that you'd meet a famous scholar who would then want to work with you on the basis of your conference paper. My friend did get approached one time when she was a master's student and invited to apply to this professor's program, but we discovered later that he had a difficult time getting and keeping advisees. He was also looking to recruit more minorities to what was nearly an all-white program. But something else can and often does happen at a conference--if your paper is good and a journal editor is in the audience, they may come up to you and invite you to submit it to their journal. And that's exciting (though obviously it's no guarantee of publication).

No. I would advise you not to do so. A good program is a good program, and you will be able to study Southern literature at a good program regardless of its location. In fact, your main field area of specialization will be 20th-century American literature (that's what you would take your exams in and what you would be trained to teach), so you should look more at schools that have a solid faculty in that area. You would then do your dissertation in Southern lit. If you want to stay in the South, you obviously have an array of prestigious programs to choose from: Emory, Duke, Vanderbilt, UT-Austin, UNC-Chapel Hill, other ones I'm probably forgetting. But the good programs will be good in everything and able to handle someone who wants to do a dissertation in Southern lit, even if the program is located in New England. Yes, this is another example of hyperspecialization. Someone might want to do their dissertation in 19th-century Irish lit, but for the sake of applying to programs, they would look for programs that have a strong focus and faculty interests in 18th- and 19th-century British, Anglophone, and possibly postcolonial literature. (Or 19th through 20th century, whatever you're interested in.) I think a lot of times applicants think they have to find the perfect program and faculty fit for their really niche interest, but that's not how programs think or how the job market thinks. Programs are still very much steeped in periodization, so you need to telegraph not just what you think your dissertation will be about but where you fit in more broadly. Plus, your exact interests will most likely change while you are in course work and doing exams.

Honestly, the people deciding whether to let you into grad school will be interested in the quality of your writing sample, not whether it has been presented. I presented at two conferences as a master's student, and I can honestly say it did diddly for me when I was applying to get into the PhD. And I did know at the time, and wouldn't know until later, that the conferences I presented at were unimportant "vanity" conferences. (One was a teaching conference at my university, and the other was at a regional conference, on a panel organized by my professor and stocked with my own classmates.) Graduate conferences are not considered important conferences, though they do serve a specific purpose (helping you learn how to present). Regional conferences are also not that important. Typically, when you are farther along in your PhD, you will begin presenting at the major conferences in your field. These are the important conferences that actually "count" when you are going on the job market. At that point conferences are a must. If you don't have any on your CV, you might be in trouble. That's not to say you shouldn't do it at your stage, though. The reasons others have cited are also valid--you'll get the experience, and you might get some feedback. But it's not going to impact your application one way or another.

Whatever makes you happy in the long run. I would point out, though, that your interests may and probably will change. If the program admitted you, it is indeed because they think you "fit" with them. In this cutthroat era, they do not admit people they think won't gel with the program. They could just as easily admit someone else, but they didn't because they see something truly fascinating about your work. I went into my PhD program thinking I would specialize in naturalism/queerness/masculinities and after a year changed my specialization to something that piqued my interest in coursework. (Incidentally, the seminar paper I ended up writing at the end of my first year--on a novel I'd never heard of before that class--ended up winning me a pretty major article prize several years later.) Obviously you should go with your gut and choose the program you think will make you happiest. But I'd also encourage you to keep your mind open to classes and possible angles you might encounter on the way.

Their dual English-Creative Writing PhDs probably do benefit from being able to throw their hats into multiple rings for a job. (The job market favors being able to kill two birds with one stone and get the biggest bang for their buck. A person who can teach both creative writing and literature is definitely a prize because they save departments from having to hire two people.) The fellowship offer from USC is still very attractive, though.

I'm going to give you advice based purely on these programs' reputations (which aren't reflected accurately in the US News rankings) rather than anything personal going on in your life: Go to USC, go to USC, go to USC. USC is doing a better job of placing their students in what is a completely miserable job market. I run across their graduates all the time. I have rarely run across a graduate of UW (and, taking a look at their website, it seems that they are not very forthcoming about their placements). More importantly, the fact that their DGS isn't even going to bat for his/her own program ... holy smokes! Back away! That's a huge red flag. And four years of funding is likely not enough time to make it through a PhD program, even if one already has an MA. (Most people take a minimum of five.) I'm less acquainted with UMN, but a glance at their placements page tells me that they are placing people, though not at the rate or caliber of schools that USC is. It's also less clear how they've placed recently. (The job market has really tanked in the last four years, so you should disregard information about placements from a decade ago.) And the fact that USC is offering you three years of fellowship? That's incredible, and quite a credit to you.

FWIW, I've heard that people really like Bloomington. I had a friend who'd lived in some of the world's premiere cities--Montreal, Tokyo, San Francisco, London--and she loved Bloomington so much she never wanted to leave. From personal experience, I faced a similar problem, and I have to say I agree with @jrockford27. Before grad school I'd only lived in big cities, and I really wanted to get into a Boston-area school for my grad work. Instead I ended up in a small town (much smaller than Bloomington). There was some culture shock at first, but after a few months I was so busy I rarely thought about the big city anymore. And my program was really tight and friendly, so my social life actually improved. If everything else in your life is going okay--like if you enjoy your program and get along with your cohort and feel challenged and adequately mentored--then you will probably be happy regardless of location. And trying to survive in an expensive city like Chicago or San Francisco on a grad student stipend can be an added stressor that makes things a lot less fun.

Yeah, there are next-to no tenure-track jobs anymore. English may be the best bet, though, (and still a lousy risky one) if only because colleges still need people to teach writing. Philosophy and foreign languages are looked at as "optional" courses (with few majors) and history is getting there. People do not go to college to major in humanities anymore, and universities are relaxing requirements so that they do not have to even take general education courses in these subjects. Of course, even the "you must take writing" thing is losing steam. Many universities are allowing students to test out of entry-level composition classes with a very nominal score on AP/SAT tests. The university where I got my PhD--a very economically viable public university--is looking to shrink its number of humanities majors to almost nothing by 2020.

My friend has been wrestling with this question for the past five years. He has a really great job at a community college but is still sort of itching to get his PhD in rhet/comp. He's gotten into some programs but has made the decision to not pursue the PhD for the time being. Obviously no one knows what the future will bring, and rhet/comp accounts for a lot of the jobs out there right now. But with the tax bill that the GOP is jonesing to push through ... I don't know. This is a bleak time to be an academic--I really can't stress how terrible the job market is right now (it's fallen off a cliff in the past few years to completely unprecedented lows). But then again, there's no such thing as "job security" for any of us, even in a long-term lecturer gig. Your position, though seemingly secure, could be extinct in a couple years, as far fewer students are going to college to study the humanities. So that's why I would recommend that you do what is right for you and what you really want.

Yes. And women are of course *expected* to be more approachable, friendlier, and infinitely available. If you're a woman who does not uphold this end of the unspoken social contract in the way students (who have been conditioned to expect extra attention and ~nurturing care~ from women) think you should, you will oftentimes open yourself up to criticism for being "arrogant" or "inaccessible." Most of the time my students do evaluate me as "approachable" and "friendly" (which always makes me flinch a little due to the gendered expectations I'm inevitably playing into). But in every class there is a small minority who see things very differently, and I often think it's due to off-tilt expectations. They are oftentimes overly sensitive to criticism (the "B" grade on a paper; the gentle correction in class). You will never, ever please those students, so don't knock yourself out trying. Like, for instance, one time as a graduate instructor I had a student who needed extra help and wanted to meet with me very often, so I made myself abundantly available to him, staying after class and offering to read extra drafts over email. This took a LOT of energy on my part--energy and time for which I wasn't compensated, of course. When I got my evaluations back after the semester was over, I found that this student had reamed me, writing "she doesn't do a good job of caring for her students and shouldn't be allowed to teach at this university. Her feedback was useless and she and would take FOREVER to respond to my emails." Moral of the story: if a student is overly demanding and insists upon sucking you dry as a resource, they are unlikely to appreciate the sacrifices you are indeed making for them. If you are a woman, you are probably going to be held to an even higher (and impossible) standard, and then criticized for not catering enough. So it's best to observe office hours and do what you can, but to not overextend yourself. It's nice to stay 5-10 minutes after class, as someone recommended, but it's also okay to "shut down" and go home. You are a TA, not a customer service rep, and your main obligation is to yourself. And if "friendly" or "outgoing" isn't a natural part of your personality, then that's also okay. Make your peace with your personality (maybe slightly shier, more businesslike, or more reserved) and move forward. You have other valuable assets to offer your students--your knowledge and thoroughness, for example--and not every professor or instructor needs to be bubbly and nice in order to be effective. There are other ways to be a good teacher. Students see this and many will appreciate it. Even if you're not a barrel of laughs like Joe's TA or bringing cookies to class like Mary's GI, you will always have students who appreciate your competence. Moreover, students need to learn that adults are not always going to be their cheerleaders, asking them about their weekends and greeting them each by name every single day. And if you want to be the TA who wears a suit or a tie or work clothes to teach your damn class, then goddammit, that's your call.

It's too late to turn back now, so I would advise just proceeding as you would have before getting your scores. You'll either get in or you won't. If you don't get in anywhere, you can start studying for the GRE for next year. If taking a prep class is a possibility for you, I would recommend it. I wouldn't add "low ranked" schools to your list. It's really not worth it to go somewhere just to go. And if you decide to apply to MAs, only apply to those that offer funding.

Make sure the intro of your writing sample is glowing. It needs to come out of the gate storming. They are not going to read the middle (at least not until you're in the final rounds, and maybe not even then) but the conclusion should be strong as well (though the intro is most important).

I also want to say that involving the professor is not trying to "hand off" work out laziness. It takes a lot more energy and time to bring a paper to a professor than it does to just slap an "F" on it and move on. Bringing questionable papers to your professor is part of your job, and part of their job is to deal with undergraduates and oversee their TAs. If they rely on their TAs to deal exclusively with undergraduates, then they are not doing their job.

No. As a professor, I would want a TA to bring papers to me that have these kinds of issues. I also know that the professors I TA'd for encouraged me to bring questionable papers to them, and to keep them informed of students who seemed to be having problems. And while I and my former professors are not representative of everyone, I believe that most *good* professors have their TA's best interests in mind and also want them to become better teachers. Remember that a TA is still a student, and a TAship is like an apprenticeship. You are not expected to be a full-fledged instructor at this point. You are still learning, and it is the professor's job to mentor you. Part of that learning process means taking strange papers to the professor and asking for their input. It is normal to ask for their advice, and it is standard (and expected) to involve them in disputes. I don't think you are having the same discussion that the rest of us are having. We're not talking about "contrarian" students; we're talking about students who express racist, sexist, homophobic, or xenophobic views in their papers/in class, and how to handle them. And the way you handle them, if you're a TA, is to involve the professor at every stage of the process. The professor is still the instructor of record for the class. A TA is a TA. The instructor of record ultimately decides how situations should be handled and what grades students should receive.

Your "boss's" job in this case is to reach a solution, and it's not up to you to "go rogue" and handle a situation like this on your own. When you're a TA, you defer to the professor--especially when it comes to troubled, aggressive, or disruptive students. And when something like this is going on, you also need to involve the professor from the beginning. It's much better to let them handle the situation from the get-go than to handle it yourself, only to have your grading overturned and your authority undermined.