lifealive

Withdraw your paper and submit it somewhere better, preferably a peer reviewed journal. Conference proceedings are not recommended publishing venues--especially not graduate conference proceedings. They don't count as real publications. You shouldn't throw your articles away on them.

Very few first-time US English lit grad students have taken a class in rhetoric/composition either. I tested out of it at my university, as do a lot of English majors. I also know there are schools--mostly private, elite colleges--that don't even offer rhet/comp classes. So, in other words, the people who end up teaching rhet/comp are often the ones who have almost no experience with it. That is to say that you'll be in good company. I was exposed to rhet/comp for the first time at my department's teacher orientation. A week later I was teaching it. As far as what to expect? Yes, you'll be learning a lot alongside your students. Most of the time you'll be grading them on the clarity of their arguments, the development of their thesis statements, and the structure of their papers. You might be using a reader to teach (a book book like Ways of Reading, for instance), and if that's the case, you'll be devoting the bulk of your class time discussing those essays/articles and helping the students think about ways to analyze those essays. Most rhet/comp classes require a lot of revision. Your students will hand in a paper and you'll read it without grading it and then offer comments on the paper or in a conference. Then they'll revise the paper and hand it in for a grade. You'll probably do this three or four times throughout a semester.

I personally don't think that writing/composition and literature exist as separate fields, and that literature PhDs can't be of use to composition classes. I'm a lit person who moonlights as a compositionist, after all, and my favorite composition professor also published frequently about early modern lit. I think that my work as a lit scholar informs my work in composition and vise versa. I also think that composition runs the risk of becoming just as arcane and irrelevant as high theory if it doesn't hold fast to its own interdisciplinary/democratic underpinnings. But the idea that we should cede the classroom entirely to certain people because they are unassailable geniuses a la Toni Morrison is f'ing ridiculous. As is the idea that someone shouldn't have a basic position statement or teaching philosophy. If you can't even articulate why you're teaching or what methods you're prone to use, then just what. Having such things doesn't even come close to standardizing or micromanaging education. The strain of elitism running through this entire argument is sort of laughable, too. That's what makes me think this is some sort of troll job.

Cool story, bro.

I think it goes without saying that certain sentiments on this thread are not shared by all who hold literature PhDs. But because I didn't see a lot of literature people chiming in, I wanted to make that clear. My teacher training took place almost exclusively within the rhet/comp division. I don't agree with everything they do (who does), but I've certainly found their perspective valuable. And indeed, they are keeping English departments afloat right now. If it weren't for rhet/comp, we truly would have gone the way of philosophy or Classics. A lot of the resentment toward them does indeed have to do with funding issues and the job market. Which is to say to the OP: If you can make the transition to rhet/comp, do it. The job market isn't spectacular, but it's better. I, unfortunately, just could not have done rhet/comp because I didn't have a high interest in it (that's not say it isn't interesting--it just wasn't for me personally). I would have liked to do it, but at the end of the day I couldn't muster up the desire. Remember that you have to write a dissertation in your chosen field, and that means having a burning passion for something. That's what will carry you to the finish line above all else. So if you feel that you can get interested in rhet/comp the way you can get interested in postcolonial pirate stories, then go for it. You might find yourself pleasantly surprised by the opportunities.

Personally, I don't regret having gotten my PhD. I think I would have regretted more NOT getting a PhD. And that's really what you have to weigh here. Would your life really be better without your PhD? Would you honestly have made more headway during the last seven or eight years without one? Because I honestly believe that if I had decided to not get my PhD, I'd always have wondered "what if?" And even if things had flourished in my professional life, I'm sure I would have always secretly regretted not getting my doctorate. But that's just my personality. I'm the sort of person who just has to know. Okay, what the hell, I guess I'll share my sob story in the interest of full disclosure. I went to an average program (ranked somewhere between #25 to #39). I have a ton of teaching experience, presented at all the national conferences, publications (one major). Because I went to such a lackluster program, I never really expected much for myself in terms of landing a sought-after TT job. I knew it was possible--other people at my program certainly did so, but I never really thought that things like that would happen for me. Moreover, most of the jobs that people landed were in the hinterlands--rural North Dakota, for instance, with 4/4 teaching loads. The *best* graduates landed those jobs. I was always on the fence as to whether I would take a position like that or try to do something else. I went on the job market my first year as I finished my dissertation, and it was pretty disappointing. I didn't get any interviews. I didn't even get any requests for more materials. Then, suddenly, something came together for me, and it was a huge surprise. I interviewed for and landed a postdoc. A major national dream postdoc with a fancy name and no teaching responsibilities. I'd applied for it on a whim, thinking I didn't have a chance in hell. Anyway, when that happened, I began to actually think, hey, maybe I can do this. Maybe I can actually go on to become a professor. My advisor told me that the postdoc was a golden ticket that would put me squarely at the top of the list for a great TT job, and that there was no way I couldn't have like seven interviews at MLA. Everyone actually told me this--other postdocs and people who had recently landed TT jobs. I didn't have one interview at MLA. I had two phone interviews and no campus visits. I think my advisor was more distressed than I was. I was just like, of course this is happening. I do honestly think it's time to pull up stakes and move on. My advisor--and a few other people--have told me to do the job market again, and that this was just an extraordinarily bad year, and that there's no way someone "with my talent" could not someday get a job. But every year is worse than the last, and I'm guessing that next year will continue on with the downward trend. The university system really doesn't want us. They're dismantling English departments as we speak. And unfortunately, I don't think that any kind of organizing or advocating will turn that around. The demand just isn't there right now for English professors. English enrollments are falling because people don't want their kids to major in English, and no one sees the usefulness of a liberal arts degree anymore. Other people here have advocated "talking about" or "raising awareness" about these problems, but we've been talking about them for a while. Unfortunately, we live in a very cruel world where capitalism has been allowed to carry the day. People here have accused me of being a neo-liberal; really, I'm a realist. It doesn't matter whether or not you believe that free markets are right; free markets, tragically enough, have been allowed to take their course. The basic fact of the matter is that there is no demand for what we do because no one perceives the English degree as having value. And yes, this is all a confidence/perception problem, but it's a perception problem that runs deep. We can't force people to think that English departments are necessary and English degrees are important. That might not happen ever; if it does, it'll happen because something external to us changes in the market. That's just the way it goes anymore. We used to regulate our markets, but we don't anymore. Our society used to set aside taxes to support English and liberal arts, regardless of market value, because it believed that a well-rounded education was a right. It just doesn't do that anymore. Despite all that, I can't say I regret getting my PhD. I also don't think it's my place to tell anyone what to do with their lives. Getting a PhD certainly wasn't a terrible thing for me, even though my job searches were completely unsuccessful. I learned more than I ever imagined I would, and I published (a lifelong dream), and I wrote a dissertation that other people think is really good. But really, I don't think that anyone here has the right to tell anyone that getting a PhD in English will shatter their lives and destroy their dreams. That's making a huge assumption about how other people handle setbacks or how they value their education. Some people here might be coming from a much different perspective. Some people here might have spent the aughties pulling sand out of their ass in Afghanistan, so getting a PhD and launching an unsuccessful job search might seem pretty minor in comparison. Personally, I'm trying to look at my failure on the job market as something of an opportunity. As I detach from the idea of being a professor, I've started to think about doing the things and taking the big risks that I'd always thought about but didn't have time for. I've also sought out career counseling. I'm trying to meet with ex-PhDs who can give me some advice for how to market myself for other careers. In a weird way, it's also kind of freeing. I've been thinking of all the things I DON'T have to do anymore--because there are always things about our jobs we're not wild about. I think, "Oh God, I don't have to live in North Dakota if I don't want to." At the end of my academic job search, I realized I was applying for jobs that I never in the world thought I'd ever apply for--5/5 load in the middle of hot nowhere like six hours from a medium-sized city and all for the pleasure of $29,000 a year--and I realized that this was the definition of insanity. The problem with this entire profession is that we have all indeed become slaves to this kind of market, thinking of ourselves as not having any choice in the matter, and as a result, our expectations are completely off-kilter. This leads universities to take advantage of us in terrible ways. To break this cycle, we really do just have to walk away from it. Did the job market shatter my world? Kind of. It has been extremely disappointing. You do invest yourself in a vision of living an academic life. Worse things have happened to me, though. In the long run, not getting my dream job is a set-back but not a tragedy. The post-doc was what got my hopes up, not really the PhD in general. I am irritated about my program, though--it has a terrible placement record but still manages to recruit 15-18 new PhD students a year. I think it should really come with a warning label.

You've been nothing but condescending to people on this thread, though. Trying to stop people from taking the same opportunity that you had in order to protect them from feeling bad is pretty shitty. Telling people to get a different line of work--when you won't because you'd rather talk about how you've been victimized--is also shitty. You're basically telling us that between 2008 and now you couldn't figure out that the job market was tanking and that you should possibly think of a Plan B. Or cultivate other possibilities for a career. Sorry. This train wreck was 20-30 years in the making, and we all saw it coming. I'm sorry it didn't work out for you. It didn't work out for a lot of people. We've all invested something of ourselves in our research--I only know that I'm satisfied with having gotten to make a contribution at all, even if it didn't result in my having a tenure-track job. But I have lost track of what exactly you're trying to accomplish on this message board.

I don't think you even have to censor the names--it's common knowledge that Chicago, Johns Hopkins, and Berkeley are shark tanks. Having said that, I would have no problem going to any of them. The psychological toll aside, those "hardball" programs get you ready for academic conferences and readers reports like nothing else. Not to mention job talks. Job talks can be feeding frenzies of a spectacular sort. Better to be exposed to that in the seminar room, I guess, than somewhere where it counts. I know a lot of people from Johns Hopkins, actually, and the reputation is deserved. That's a rough crowd.

Was this really supposed to invoke Rumsfeld's "known knowns" speech? Or is this just how you think? In any case, it might not be a bad place to invoke Rummy's epistemological theory. Obviously, as conversation makes clear, the academic job market is something of an unknown known for most people who have not yet begun grad school. As much as people profess to know something about it, they really don't grasp the full extent of it, as ComeBackZinc has made clear. The OP, however, is making it seem as though the job market was an unknown unknown to them, that they just had no idea, and I'm sorry, but that just doesn't wash. We all knew the job market was bad. We knew it was bad for a long time. I also started grad school before 2008, and I knew it was bad back then. And then, even if it wasn't THAT bad pre-Recession, it quickly became bad, and it became clear that it was going to stay bad. No one can tell me that they didn't know. Even if the OP's professors were spinning fictions about his/her prospects, there was every indication in the world that the job market was in the tank. This fact, for the OP at least, was a great unknown known: what Žižek calls the things we pretend not to know about because they prove uncomfortable or damaging to accept. The information was there. The OP just didn't think it applied to their situation. I think the lesson to be learned here is this: don't bury your head in the sand. Don't pretend that your status as a grad student at an "elite" institution will protect you from the horrors of the job market. There is no such thing as "Ivy exceptionalism" anymore. Even people with elite degrees are being shut out. Going into a top program with the thought that it's going to be different for you is setting yourself up for the kind of "emotional devastation" that the OP is going through. Same goes for the adjunct market. Don't bury your head in the sand. Don't believe that adjuncting will save you or make you more employable as a professor. It won't.

No one said anything resembling this, though. What's troubling is the implicit attitude toward the profession, here--that one should never complain about adjuncting because it sure beats working at Wendy's, and that if you complain about adjuncting you must not know what real hardship looks like. No. College professors deserve a working, middle-class salary (as does everyone--including those who work at Wendy's). Everyone deserves a job where they can have health insurance and where they can possibly aspire to own property and save up enough money to send a kid to the local public university. These things didn't used to be unusual, and asking for them or demanding them does not make one ungrateful or unfit to teach undergrads. The rhetoric that you should just be so happy to be an adjunct because teaching is your passion and your vocation and is so much better than cleaning the bathrooms at Walmart--well, that's the same rhetoric that justifies keeping professor pay so low. We have framed our work as a calling and a vocation for too long. I don't see doctors--who also work for the common good--thinking it's okay to get paid 20k a year because they love helping patients. Universities are certainly capable of paying their teaching staff a much better wage--if you eliminated one administrator salary at my university, you could hire six full-time professors the next day.

I agree wholeheartedly with your first paragraph--that telling people they'd be better off working a brutally low-paying fast-food job than going to grad school betrays a lack of awareness about working conditions in general. However, I'm not in agreement, as much, about some of the points you make in your second paragraph. And to be honest, I think it also betrays a lack of awareness about adjunct labor. If you get paid $3500 a course, you'll make about $28k a year--assuming you manage to lock in 4 courses a semester. That's before taxes or health insurance. 28k a year could be doable in some areas of the country--but to be honest, you probably won't make $3500 a course in the areas of the country where 28k is doable. You'll make less than that. Worse, the 28k assumes that you lock down eight classes a year, and that's hard to do. Right now, even the adjunct market is clogged. So let's take that figure down to six classes a year. Now you're only making $20k before taxes and health insurance. And that's going to be dicey in a lot of areas of the country. And, again, I want to reiterate that $3500 a class is very, very rosy. Most adjuncts in composition aren't making that much. As an adjunct, your time is probably not going to be your own. You'll be teaching at a few different locations--lots of commuting (that you pay for--no employer reimbursement there). If you're not making ends meet on $20k, you'll have to take a second job, which will mean less time for yourself. And as far as "opportunities to advance" being "plentiful"? Well, again, it depends on your definition of advancement. But adjuncting qualifies you to do little but adjunct. Your adjunct experience, in fact, may actually hurt you on the academic job market as there is a bias right now against hiring people who looked like they couldn't get a job. Additionally, adjuncts rarely get hired on at the community colleges or institutions where they are adjuncting. Whether or not the experience is rewarding or meaningful? I suppose it can be. I don't think it is for a lot of people, though, because their work conditions and constant freeway flying (not to mention working another part time job) make it difficult to devote time to teaching and meeting with students. It's hard to hold office hours when you don't have an office. Sure, it definitely beats scraping the grill, but I'm not sure that that's a productive way to frame this discussion. Just because one type of low-paying job isn't as bad as another, it still doesn't make the lesser of two evils something to aspire to. Guys. You can do other things with your degree other than adjunct or work at Wendy's. That's all I'm trying to say here. Yes, even in this economy. Guys, please. We teach undergrads. Some of them want to be English majors. In fact, we want them to be English majors so that we can go on teaching them. And yes, times are tough for English majors, but the degree doesn't simply exist as a way to enrich your mind while you prepare for your future in the food service industry. As much as I resist the idea that any discipline has to justify its existence with its marketability, I honestly know--as a previously employed English major--that the degree holds real value in the professional workplace. I hate to think that some people here want to teach undergrad English majors while believing that their own work as an English major qualifies them only for menial labor. Because it's just not true. And I say that as someone who is not having a jolly time of it in this economy. I still think that a degree in English qualifies you to do some things.

This is true, and I definitely don't want to minimize the hardships of looking for non-academic work when you've been in academia for 5-7 years. I'm actually going through this kind of hardship right now. But I've been through job hunts before, and I have to say they're always agonizing. I even looked for a job when the economy was good at one point (sort of) and it was still agonizing. I looked for a job when I had no experience and was young and entry-level. Couldn't get a job most of the time then because I didn't have the experience. I looked for a job later, when I did have experience, and I got turned down by most jobs then for who knows what reason. You will always get tons of rejections. Tons. You send out 100 resumes and interview for maybe two positions. It's extraordinarily demoralizing. But sometimes I do think that academics who have never worked outside of academia are out-of-touch with this reality, and hence the hand-wringing on places like the Chronicle and VersatilePhD. Job searches are always long, drawn-out, and agonizing affairs. But when you get accepted to grad school as a 22-year-old and manage to finish by the time you're 29 with publications and all else, not finding a job after months of searching can feel very alienating. Despite all this, I still maintain that a PhD does qualify people for work. Ex-academics do have jobs--they don't all end up unemployed or adjuncting. I also don't think that "just don't go because you'll make yourself unemployable" is a very good reason. And if anything, your unsuccessful academic job search can prepare you for the long, agonizing drawn-out post-academic job search.

Well, that's interesting--because what you said in your first post was that the people on this forum should "take their intelligence and their drive" and go do something else--something that would pay them for a living. When I suggested that you take your own advice, I was suddenly a frothing-at-the mouth neoliberal urging you to pick yourself up by your bootstraps. Newsflash: Those of us who don't come from the best programs have pretty much always known that our chances of getting tenure-track work were never that great to begin with. So the realities that you're confronting? Were things that we'd dealt with a long time ago, to be honest. And another newsflash: tons of out-of-work academics make fine lives for themselves outside of the academy. Acting as though you don't have a choice of what to do with yourself is just disingenuous and dim. Bless your little cotton socks. Believe me, I've experienced my share of exploitation in the workforce. Perhaps that's why I won't adjunct--because exploitation isn't much fun to abstract when it's actually happening to you. And perhaps it's why I recognize the differences between my situation now and my situation then. I have skills. I have a few degrees. It won't be easy, but I can take those skills and, as you say, find something else to do. I have no wish to be exploited again. I recognize that some people adjunct because they have to--because they live in a place where there aren't any other options, and they can't afford to move. And yeah, it's wrong for universities to exploit their labor. Criminal, really. But since that's not me--since I do live in a place with a healthier economy--I'd be an idiot if I took that kind of work and then ran around calling myself the invisible poor. Even more, I'd be wrong to take a job adjuncting since it only further enables universities to eliminate full-time lines and further exploit people--especially those people who really, honestly don't have a choice. For me, the choice not to adjunct is both self-serving and out of concern for the entire profession--not because I'm on some sanctimonious binge. Universities get away with treating people like crap because they can. In fact, you should read the latest opinions from university administrators. They're not all that concerned with unionization efforts, because even unionized adjuncts are a bargain for them, and a class they'll continue to exploit. Even with concessions, it's still a win-win for them. Another thing that should motivate you to avoid adjuncting: you're wrong in that it's not a means to "advance." It actually works against you on the job market. Hiring committees these days turn their noses up at adjuncts as people who didn't have the chops to get real jobs when they actually applied. Lovely sentiments, and a way that privilege continues to replicate itself. But like I said, you should really take your own advice.

I guess that was me, but I didn't quite say that. I do think that adjuncts are in a terrible position. However, I was simply making the observation that adjunct exploitation would collapse tomorrow if adjuncts refused to do it anymore. That is true. And no, you should not do it if you don't absolutely have to. Your labor is worth more--your skills are worth more. You deserve a better job than adjuncting; you deserve a living wage with health benefits. You just do.

Nice assumption-making there. First of all, just because I have a postdoc, that does not mean that I have been successful in finding a job. I am actually in the process of leaving academia myself. Second of all, your willingness to equate adjuncting with migrant labor pretty much says it all. PhDs are not factory workers, and it's an insult to appropriate that language of "exploitation" to talk about people who were in a position to devote seven years to getting a higher degree. You are indeed portraying yourself as a victim here--framing this as something that is "happening to us" rather than acknowledging that you have some agency here. Save the denunciation of "neoliberal" bullshit for when it really counts--for when it applies to the invisible poor who never had the opportunity to go to college, much less pursue a higher degree. Our current economy is indeed exploitative--for everyone. But getting on here to write some angry jeremiad because it's happening to YOU now is just gormless.

The OP's assessment of the job market is accurate--as is the assessment of the unethical behavior of PhD programs. And ComeBackZinc is right to note that half the open positions aren't "open" anyway--they're inside hires. However, I don't think the solution is to just not go to grad school. It's to go to grad school with your eyes open and cultivate other possible professions on the side. DO NOT ADJUNCT. By adjuncting, you're contributing to the destruction of the profession. (I hate to blame the victim, but it really is a problem that would stop tomorrow if people simply refused to be exploited anymore.) On a personal note, though--and probably a totally unnecessary one that I will regret articulating--I often get eye-rolly when I come across people like the OP, and I come across them a lot. I don't know how you could make it through grad school and to the job market and just now experience this sense of wide-eyed shock about your job prospects. This reads like a rant from someone who's never had to deal with rejection before. See also Patrick Iber. "I can't believe this is happening to MEEEEE! I was one of the good ones!" I have lost all patience with these people. Well, OP, assuming you're earnest, here: take your own advice. Pick yourself up, dust yourself off, get your balls back, and look for another job where, as you say, you will be rewarded with a decent living. If you got a PhD from a top school, you should be capable of that much. You're not alone. A lot of us are making the same move. And above all, you weren't victimized by the profession.

It's really impossible to answer this question without the specifics of what programs you're looking at and what area you're planning to study. You should ask a professor or advisor who knows the specifics of your situation. This is the point in the conversation where GC advice can do more harm than good--because none of us here is a professor on a hiring committee.

That's where you should look at placements. I do think that certain schools place most of their students in certain regions. A glance at placements will tell you if the school tends to place people regionally or all over the country. But if the southern school is a better fit and had a national reputation (like I can't imagine going wrong with a degree from Duke or Vanderbilt, for instance) then that would be a compelling enough reason to stay in the south.

I've never heard such a thing. I've only heard that getting all your degrees at the same institution doesn't look good. I can think of more than a few successful professors off the top of my head who got degrees in the same state or general location--Berkeley and Stanford, for instance, or Swarthmore and UPenn. And truly, I think that some specializations are strong in particular areas of the country, which might explain why people stay in one place. Rhet/comp is big in the Midwest. Medieval lit seems to thrive on the East and West coasts. Early American seems to have its strongest programs in the Mid-Atlantic cities and in New England--I'm guessing because of the libraries and resources there. Southern lit is big in the south, obviously. Really, you should go to the best school you get into that serves your interests regardless of where it is.

Well, that's pretty strawmanish. I don't think that anyone here is trying to scare this person away from PhD programs or from being an academic. But when someone gets on here obviously very angry and very emotional because of a previous program--regardless of whether those feelings are justified--they're going to get questioned about why they want to do this incredibly difficult thing, especially when this thing is completely optional. No one has to be an academic. If you don't enjoy it, then don't do it. Because there are few tangible rewards involved. There is very little money and even fewer jobs. Moreover, as someone who worked "real jobs" before committing myself to a PhD, I have to say that the PhD has been both more difficult and more rewarding. It's a trade-off, I suppose. My work in developing a non-profit--a "social work" position, and an "office job," as you call it--was actually far easier than writing a dissertation, writing academic articles, and presenting at several high-pressure conferences. And living on less than 20k a year. I wouldn't recommend that someone do that willingly if they haven't enjoyed their grad school experience so far. But YMMV. I certainly haven't held every job in the world.

I'm very sorry you went through all this. I had a really miserable experience the first time I went to graduate school as well, so I sympathize. I also have two master's degrees (in different fields), but both were fully funded. I wouldn't recommend going back for an MA in English. Frankly, I don't think it will do anything for your PhD application other than underscore the fact that you couldn't get into a PhD program. It's not fair, but PhD programs often look at candidates with unusual trajectories as having been left on the vine for too long. I definitely confronted that bias when I applied. If you want an MAT, you should get one with the thought that you really want to be a teacher. Otherwise, I don't think it's wise to invest so much in that kind of degree. I really don't think it's wise to invest in that degree with the thought that you're just doing this for the time being but you REALLY want a PhD. Have you thought about doing some other things to get experience as a teacher without plunging directly into an MAT? What about Teach for America or NY Teaching Fellows? Moreover, if you have a certificate already, you should probably continue to try to find work with it. It may take a long time in this market, but I'm not sure that the MAT will make you more employable as a teacher. This advice might be unnecessary here, but I also have to point out that PhD programs are incredibly stressful. Like, ridiculously so. I really enjoyed my PhD, but I think that was because I was a little older and had some perspective. When I went back to school at 30, I also knew who I was. (The first time I went to grad school I was 22 and I didn't know right from left, and I got eaten alive at my program.) But even though I enjoyed it, the PhD was still really, really hard. Coursework is hard--it's constant performance. Exams are hard--I almost failed mine. Writing a dissertation is a constant slog--I would have chapter draft after chapter draft get turned down by my advisor. On top of all that, I had to teach every semester, and sometimes my students were not nice. Then there's the job market, lol. The job market is like the PhD admissions process on steroids. Instead of vying against 300 people for one of 14 slots in a grad program, you're vying against 500 people for one little job, and some of these people already have TT jobs and books published. And oh yeah--then there's getting published via anonymous peer review. Readers reports can be brutal. All of that is to say that you need to be in a mostly secure place before you embark on a PhD program because PhD programs are a test of emotional and psychological endurance. I could not have done it in my 20s, and I could not have done it after coming out of the MA program where I did not have a good experience. It took working outside academia for about 5 years to get to the place where a PhD actually seemed fun in comparison.

I certainly wouldn't disagree that there are some people who get into programs on the basis of their stellar writing samples and statements of purpose, regardless of middling test scores ... but I'm not willing to be optimistic enough to draw any widespread conclusions about those experiences, either. First of all, none of us really knows what goes on behind the doors of a committee decision room. Adcoms can be quirky. Perhaps those success stories got a committee that, for whatever reason (ideological or practical), doesn't care about test scores. Or perhaps the successful candidate has a connection or a mitigating factor that they don't even know about. (A lot of people don't know whether or not their professors are friends with the people on a particular committee; or they didn't realize that the committee accepted them because they were looking for someone who combines science fiction with medieval manuscripts.) My point is that there are a lot of exceptions in this business; you can feel you might be one of them, but it might be safer to just make sure that all aspects of your application are solid. Second of all, adcoms have a material reason for taking people with high test scores: many programs (my own included) have to report the average GRE of their entering cohort to the graduate school at large. The graduate school decides which programs are a priority for funding. If the English program can say "our admits' GRE scores exceed the engineering program's!" then this puts them in a better position overall, especially in a university system that is very hostile to the humanities. So, even if you have professors who resist the tyranny of the standardized testing complex, they can't ignore the realities of funding. Maybe this isn't as true at Ivy League programs, where funding is always plentiful and support for the humanities is unwavering. Or perhaps Ivies get so many brilliant people applying with sky-high scores that they can afford to admit a few people whose scores are more modest. I don't know. All I can tell is that both state programs I attended made a big deal of taking people with high GRE scores because it made them look good to the people who cared about such things. Third, I would urge people to look at the GRE as an opportunity to offset other aspects of your application. That's really what it's good for. Didn't do that well in your junior year? Dropped out of school for a time? Attended a school that no one's heard of? Didn't major in English? Well, having high scores can convince an adcom that you do operate at a certain level. My friend, who had a GPA of 3.1, is convinced that a very high GRE score got her into a top choice school. Fourth, I'm not sure why everyone always says that you should focus on the things you can control rather than the things you can't--implying that you can't control GRE scores. Really, you can control them--at least to a certain extent. Anyway, in these discussions, a lot of people often cite their own anecdotal evidence for why the GRE doesn't matter, so I'll cite my own experience to show that it maybe mattered more than I originally thought: 1) I went to visit one program where I'd been accepted. When the DGS pulled my file, I saw that a piece of paper was clipped to the outside of it. It had my name, where I'd gone to school, my GPA, and my GRE scores. ALL my scores (even quant). The paper had nothing about the things that we're convinced really matter--my proposed area of study, for instance, or whom I wanted to work with. It was just my basic stats. I could see other people's files, and they were similarly organized by stats. (It actually really freaked me out--I'd been under the impression that people just glanced at scores and made sure they were okay before moving on to more important aspects of your application. Someone at this program had actually take the time to write out everyone's stats on a piece of paper and then rank files accordingly.) 2) When my master's program made decisions about who would get into the PhD program, the DGS pulled my friend (fellow applicant) aside and told her that she should be proud of getting in because the GRE scores that year had been higher than usual, and they'd had their pick of really fantastic candidates with high GRE scores. The recession was underway, and they had funding issues to think of. They needed the grad school to recognize their efforts to recruit the best students. 3) My PhD program didn't necessarily place a great deal of emphasis on GREs when you were trying to get admitted, but funding decisions were made on the basis of GREs and GREs alone. Thus was created a very unequal system of differential funding. Those with fellowships didn't have to teach as much, got summer funding, and actually got a better health care plan. Go figure--your health care was related to how well you'd performed on a math test. (This was pre-Obama Care.) The difference between having a fellowship and not having a fellowship was something like five or six thousand dollars a year.

I hate to reopen the "do GRE scores matter?" debate for the 459th time on this forum, but I do have to say that I disagree with the advice about the GRE. They do matter. If your scores aren't good, retake. GREs don't matter as much if you're coming from a really great school with prominent letter-writers. But otherwise, they do matter. In fact, they matter a lot more than I even thought when I applied. They help your application get a second or more lingering glance, and if you're not someone who's connected, then this second glance is super important. Of course your writing sample should be fantastic as well--original, well-written, and forcefully argued. But just because the writing sample matters MORE, it doesn't mean that the GRE doesn't matter that much. I actually think that the "GRE doesn't matter as much as the writing sample!" consensus on GC has transmuted into "GRE doesn't matter at all!" And that's inaccurate, and one of the biggest pieces of misinformation that's been circulated here.

Which thread have you been reading?

You don't ever have to adjunct.