Medievalmaniac
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Posts posted by Medievalmaniac
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So, I finished with a 4.0 this semester in 4 graduate only courses at a top public Canadian Master's program.
Obviously, a 4.0 is high, and I feel that I worked for these marks. Indeed, I felt that I worked harder this last semester than I ever had in my undergraduate program (at the same university). However, at the same time, I'm left to wonder: does everyone really get an "A" in graduate school?
What is the value of an "A" in grad school? Is a 4.0 the de facto standard?
NO, everyone does not get a 4.0 in graduate school. There are certainly departments at just about every campus where grade inflation occurs, but there are also nearly always members of each cohort who are dangerously close to being on probation and/or asked to leave for grades/ under-performing. There are also departments where it is really hard to get an A. In just about any situation, the 4.0 means that you are doing what you are supposed to do, the way you are supposed to do it, and that you are good at it. Consider it a positive job evaluation.
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My blog is about my second round of applications this year. It really is just as bad. No - it's worse, because we KNOW we can be shut out.
Last year I really thought I was the ideal candidate - 4.0 GPA at the master's level, publications, conference papers, teaching experience. This year, like my signature says - just reading tea leaves and consulting the oracle. Hang in there - we'll all know soon!!! -
Hello,
I am a Pakistani teacher with a Masters degree in English Literature (3.6 GPA), a Masters in ELT with (3.9 GPA), an MPhil in Literature (thesis ongoing), and 4 years of teaching in a college.Recently, I appeared for GRE and scored pretty mediocre. 540 in V, 460 in Maths, and 5.5 in AWA. What chances do I have for a Phd in any good American university. Plus, I am also intending to apply for Fulbright. Please give honest feedback (even if its discouraging)
I think that realistically, there are positives and negatives to your application.
First - you're an international, non-European student - which is a desirable trait for an international applicant, because it adds to campus diversity.
Second, you have teaching experience at the college level - also a plus.
Your GRE scores meet the unofficial cutoff requirements for many schools.
The eyebrow-raisers in this portfolio (for me, and I'm no adcomm member, and therefore no expert on red flag elements of an application, it's important to keep in mind) would be firstly, that you already have two master's degrees and are now working on an MPhil. Even though they are all in the same general subject areas (English, literature, teaching of English) that looks a little strange - why three master's degrees? Why not just have gone straight to a PhD from the first or second MA? Also, American universities place a great deal of weight on your undergraduate grades/GPA, which you have not mentioned here.
In the end, I think it would certainly boil down to your statement of purpose and your letters of recommendation. But it's probably worth at least applying, if that is what you want to do!!
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Ah, but it means filing my US tax return 6 weeks before it's actually due, which is a lot more trouble than it might overwise be as I live and work in a country with a tax year that doesn't end until April. I'd prefer to confront the international tax kerfluffle once I know schools have accepted me (and I'm sure I'm not alone in this boat!).
ooooooooh - that definitely makes it a lot more complicated on your end. I didn't realize you were overseas.
Is there a way to get an extension, in your case?
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I also saw that UChicago English notified January 28th of last year.
And, Duke Literature sent out interview invites on January 25th in 2009!
I wish I wasn't thinking about it so much, but those dates are approaching so quickly I can't stop checking the results page.
Some of the earliest admits in English on the results board are UNC-CH, which has sent out acceptances as early as January 24 in the past. That's next week, if the pattern holds true! So yes, admissions season is nigh. Best of luck!
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Thank you all for your answers.
What about financial aid- Can I accept admission+financial aid and then change my mind?
Why would you change your mind? Ostensibly, you want to go to graduate school. Ostensibly, you have applied to programs which you would like to attend. If you are accepted and pay the deposit, why would you turn around and decide not to go, barring some unforeseen, dire family emergency (or ragnarok?)
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Ok, so call me crazy, but I was under the impression that there were only 3 possible admission decisions: Accepted, Rejected, Wait-list.
Well I got an email from one school saying that my status has been changed to "On hold".....what does that mean?
I wrote back to ask if it was equivalent to being 'wait listed' and they said it is not equivalent. So does anyone know what it means?
Might be awaiting something for your application, re. GRE scores, recommendations, etc.?
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Wait, so did you upload the document as a PDF and then the PDF was subsequently affected by the ApplyYourself system? Or did you upload it as, say, a doc file which ApplyYourself converted to a PDF for you? If it's the latter case, I've always uploaded my documents in PDF format to ensure that what I see is what everyone else sees - I highly recommend that.
I converted the documents to a PDF, but my program may be an older version...? All I know is that I converted the documents from .doc to .pdf, but somehow when they went through Applyyourself, those characters disappeared into stars and dots.
HOWEVER - it may also be that the computer I was checking them on had an outdated viewer that didn't read those characters, and the actual upload was fine...?
Either way - I thought it was worth noting for future applicants' benefit - better safe than sorry.
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This thread has been therapeutic. I feel so much the same. Best of luck to everyone.
Just joining in the feeling of solidarity concerning anxiety, moodiness, and general "pissed-offery".
I find everyone and everything pretty much annoying as sh*t just now - except the people I'm working with in rehearsals (I'm in "Almost, Maine" this February for our local theatre troupe). I LOVE them. They have decided my moody and b*tchy attitude are awesome because they render me a method actress. 
(My charaters are by turn b*tchy, and neurotic, lol). -
For example, when you are discussing your previous research experience, integrate it into the part where you describe your responsibilities in that research project and how you demonstrated exemplary skills in blah blah blah... but you have yet to master your skills in blah blah blah--but hope to in grad school. Boom strengths and weaknesses done and you did not have to write a new paragraph or anything. Eh, I hope this helps.
This. To me, their prompt is checking for your ability to self-assess, which is an invaluable and frankly necessary skill in higher levels of academe. They seem to want to know that you know what you are good at and what you need to improve, and that in turn can show them whether or not they have the resources to help you acquire or develop the skills or thinking/behavioral patterns necessary for success at the graduate level and beyond.
You don't have to say "I'm really strong in interpersonal conversations and group work, but I am weak in my ability to conduct an independent study without a lot of teacher feedback", or "I could stand to improve in time management and study skills, but I'm really great at fashioning an argument and supporting it with texctual and secondary evidence." It can certainly be integrated into the rest of your statement, as the above poster has suggested. So, for the first, something like "In my capacity as the discussion leader for our group presentation on taxonomy, as evidenced by my group's evaluation of my performance, I demonstrably improved our group's overall communication patterns over the course of compiling our research and crafting our presentation, as well as facilitating a larger discussion involving nearly every member of the 150 student seminar, a feat that the professor specifically singled out as noteworthy in her grading report. While I did require a lot of professorial assistance on that assignment, I learned a lot about how to go about conducting research in taxonomy at the university level, a skill I am keen to improve upon in graduate school." etc. etc. etc. In other words - it doesn't have to be a separate and glaringly evident part of the SOP, it just has to be there. Embedding it in the overall narrative is a smoother and more professional way to handle it.
ALSO, for what it is worth - don't bother "turning your negatives into positives" (ex. "I have a tendency to take too much on, but while this can be viewed as a deficiency, in the end it's really a positive thing because it speaks to my enthusiasm for education" blah blah blah) - maybe it's what every PR person expounds upon as the way to go, but adcomms have seen all that before, and I think it is counter-productive. No one is perfect. The question is, can they work with you and your particular strengths and weaknesses? Answer that, honestly, and you will be fine.
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card tower
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So one thing I noticed, when I was trying to come up with a title for my writing sample (for English/Lit programs) was that every title I came up with followed some kind of pattern. Usually I incorporated some kind of catchy phrase or quote, and then I followed (generally in the subtitle) with at least two conceptual ideas, ending with "in the [bLANK] of [sOME WORK or AUTHOR]." Eventually it got to be a kind of game, where I felt like I could just plug any words in there and it would sound just as academic or just as meaningless. (Dyslexia and Grief in the Ballads of Bob Dylan. Inversion and Ambiguity in the Footnotes of David Foster Wallace. etc.) Not that it was total BS... but I think I'd been spending a little too much time with JIRA.
Anyway, my final title was "Parenthesis of Light: Intermediacy and Potentiality in Pynchon's Stoner Noir." Which I actually liked quite a bit, even though it sounds ridiculous considering that the source novel is about a pot-smoking detective who calls everything "groovy."
Curious about whether other people (especially English/Lit candidates) struggled to find a title that 1) didn't sound obnoxiously abstruse and yet 2) sounded appropriately academic, while 3) would be original enough to keep the adcomms' eyes from glazing over. I like to think that my title fit in there somewhere, but every now and then it still makes me laugh.
Being a medievalist, almost all of my titles invariably point towards Monty Python.
A paper I gave at a conference last year: "I'm Not Dead Yet: Patterns of Victim Agency in Medieval British Texts".
My thesis: "King of the Who? Crafting National Identity in Medieval Arthurian Texts."
And so on and so forth. I also sometimes quote Mel Brooks - "It's Good to be the King: Images of Monarchy in Medieval English Romances".
Etc. etc. etc. - I always try for something that I think is funny, followed by a brief description of what my paper is about.
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report card
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So wait, this is a systematic thing? When you apply to Colorado, they send you a "please come to Colorado" junk mail packet? Why on earth would they do that? You already applied there...
Wow...y'all are making me glad I didn't apply there!! I'm crazy enough over this whole process - don't need large envelope mind games!!
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In the end, I was told that if my final marks were exceptional I would be considered.
(Does this mean final marks...in my last semester? Seeing as how I kind of...ruined Fall '10...)
As the other person has told you, English schools tend to favor heavily the latter part of a degree as the indicator of success; they will place emphasis on your final marks in your final semester of classes. I suggest that you send the full official transcript when it is available, but also that if you have access to the final term grades as a stand-alone webpage, you copy, paste, and send that information on its own as well, if you want that considered more so than the rest of your transcript. It won't count officially, but will serve to highlight the later grades, especially if they are exceptional.
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I also had thought Feb to March, but a well qualified friend just got a reject from a large state university so I was just curious. Thinking it might be a SUPER competitive year!
There's at least one rejection posted for Comp Lit. in this forum already this year, but it is very early for Humanities folks to be hearing back. I second the late February/Early March suggestion.
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The California deadline is March 2nd, which may be before we hear from all the California schools. This really annoys me! All that FAFSA work only to be rejected from schools would be like rubbing salt in the wound.
You say, "all that FAFSA work" - but the FAFSA only takes a few minutes to fill out online - it's not that bad. And once it is done, you're done - no need to re-do it for the full calendar year.
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Hey, All -
If we have new items that are exciting and/or relevant to our application that have been added to our CV since our initial submission, do you think it is advisable to email those in at this point?
I have now been notified that my essay abstract has been accepted in a book proposal for an edited collection of essays on Chaucer, to be fielded by Boydell & Brewer, the premier publisher in medieval studies. It's a pretty exciting list of scholars contributing, and I feel that the fact my abstract is included alongside such figures as Lorraine Stock and Karl Tobias Steel is kind of a big deal.
Is this something worth sending in as an addendum to my application/ the CV I sent in with my application, or at this point since it is a proposal and not a publication does it not really matter?
Thanks for your thoughts on this.
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Just curious, how many applicants have publications on their CV? Anyone have a pub in a decent journal?
I have an article in the Virginia English Bulletin, a chapter in an MLA edited collection of essays (forthcoming), and multiple articles in subject-specific encyclopediae from Brill and Routledge, as well as nonfiction essays and poems in regional and national journals. Also, book reviews in Hortulus, the online graduate journal in medieval studies. I am currently working on a chapter for an edited collection of essays on Chaucer from Boydell and Brewer.
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Another vote for the yellow legal pads. I couldn't live without them as a scholar. I buy them in bulk and use them for everything.
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I think it is important to keep in mind that there is no "right answer". or actual formula for success, here...myriad writing samples and statements of purpose are sent and accepted each year. There's no "tried and true" method for assuring anyone of a writing sample or SOP that will guarantee an admit - there are many potentially successful ways of approaching these tasks. In the end, it really does depend on the exigencies of who is reading what, when. It's unfortunate, because it means a lot of people don't end up getting an acceptance when they probably would do very well - but I think adcomms have a general idea of what they are after, and it's sort of a "we'll know it when we see it" mentality in many cases.
Hang in there - it's all over but the waiting at this point, and then we'll know what did and didn't work this year.
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I'm sorry for your news.
( Here's hoping the rest of your season is a positive one!!!
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