lifealive

Teaching one class will give you ample material and experience to work with for your research. Even pedagogy and composition people need some space for their own writing and coursework. Most graduate programs with which I'm familiar are adamant about keeping the teaching load to one class per term (and if they allow you to take on another class, they compensate you for it). To be blunt, I'd be a little concerned about the 2-2 load. Frankly I'm a little shocked that a first-year graduate student would be put into a situation where they'd have to teach two classes--I'm speaking from experience when I say that that is A LOT. If you absolutely love the program and feel you'll get a good job afterwards, then go for it. But you'll want to ask how long it takes most grad students to finish the program, how many students they expect you to teach per class, and where PhDs get placed.

As others have said, it depends on what your goals are after graduating from your program. First of all, I don't think that any program in the 40s should be considered "lower ranked." SUNY-Buffalo and UC-Santa Cruz are still very respectable programs, and a lot of people work very hard to get into them. So you shouldn't cross any of them off your list because they're lower ranked. If you were debating whether or not to go to program #90 vs. an MA program, then my advice might be different. I don't think that going to any top-50 program qualifies as a KOD career-wise. Second of all, the answer to your question depends on how much time you want to take getting a PhD. Getting an MA might not put you any farther ahead, coursework wise. Many top-ranked PhD don't transfer any or all of the credits you did elsewhere. So you might sink two years into a master's degree and then find yourself having to do an additional five or six years of PhD work. Third, having an MA might not open doors for you at the nation's top programs. You might encounter adcom members who have an old-school bias against accepting people with MAs into their program; at best, you'll be held to a higher standard during admissions season. Fourth, I wasn't aware that any programs in the top 20 had terminal, funded MA programs? As far as I know, OSU was the highest ranked program to offer a funded, terminal MA, and they just got rid of it.

Ideally you shouldn't have to teach at all in your first year. But if you do have to teach, it's not the end of the world. One course per term should be the max for the entire time you're in your program. Be wary of any program that expects you to teach 1-2 or 2-2 at any time throughout your graduate career. They don't have your best research interests at heart.

Thanks for the reassurance and transparency, wildeisonmine. I just wanted to add to the chorus about numbers: GRE scores in the mid-600s are not low or average. They are, in the grand scheme of things, pretty high. I say this because 1) I think that applicants have misconceptions about needing to hit a 700, and 2) I think that successful applicants often mischaracterize their perfectly decent scores as low. Elsewhere (not here) I've seen successful applicants say, "I got into top programs with low GRE scores" ... only to discover later that their idea of a low verbal is something like 670. Mid-600s is still a really good score.

My knee-jerk reaction is to not sympathize with someone who bemoans the fact that they will be, gasp, thirty by the time they finish their graduate degree. Perhaps it is time for you to "move on" with your life. If you think that not hitting a certain goal by a certain age is the only way to succeed, then I agree that you lack the pragmatism, flexibility, and adaptability to succeed as an academic. Best of luck.

I'm sorry you had this experience. And while I don't doubt the truthfulness of it at all (I see this behavior from undergrads constantly both in my class and the class I TA for another professor, and it's ridiculous), I'd like to chime in and say I had no problems like this in my own MA program. I got my MA at a big mid-level state school, and most of my peers were early- to mid-twenties. For the most part, they were professionally behaved and always did the reading (or acted like it). Sometimes class discussions weren't all I wanted them to be, but that just comes with the territory. I switched to a different school for my PhD, and I have to say that my current program has more of a "laptop culture." Which drives me crazy. Some of the younger MA students like to sit in seminar with their laptops open and they occassionally diddle around on Facebook and email. There's no obvious disrespect going on, but it's annoying. I don't see this behavior among PhD students or older students, who tend to take notes the old fashioned way. To the OP: I have seen people over 40 in both my graduate programs, though I have to admit that people in their 20s make up the bulk of the population. If you want to go back to graduate school, then go. But you should be especially aware that the job market is cruel and unforgiving, and while I have seen "older" people get hired, the preference, as in all other fields, is for young upstarts with long lives in front of them.

In one sense, you might be right. Applicants here seem to get hung up on the insignificant details of the application process: "Should I retake the GRE to bump my 690 verbal?" "Double or single space?" "Is it acceptable to go 50 words over the limit?" Etc. And I think that much of the advice here needs to be taken with a huge grain of salt. No one can read the minds of an adcom. The admissions process is arbitrary and not-at-all transparent (I have a hunch that connections and behind-the-scenes phone calls figure much more prominently in the admissions process than we might want to admit), and these forums are simply evidence of our very human impulse to understand what's beyond our control. I even think that much of the advice from current grad students is yet another attempt to impose a narrative on a process that was absolutely mystifying. Having said that, I do think that there is useful information here. Not everybody has a wealth of information at their fingertips; not everyone can ask their professors, mentors, and other fellow applicants for help. I did not have any help at all when preparing my application. I'd been out of school for several years, and my former adviser was dead. I don't think I would have ever, ever gotten into grad school at all without some of these forums, which introduced me to a language of professionalization I was not aware existed. (I seriously didn't even know what a conference paper was.) I spent a lot of time googling other people's interests and research terms. Before I frequented these communities, I was an applicant who merely liked to read and had a vague idea of one author I wanted to focus on. After lurking and reading hundreds of posts, I was finally able to define my interests and write a statement of purpose that wasn't completely cringe-worthy. My bottom line "truism": if you're brilliant, well-prepared, well-connected, have an in-the-loop adviser, and have university resources at your fingertips, you probably don't need TGC. But if you're missing one of these vital pieces, you'll find the information here useful. At least--more useful than anything you might channel or mysteriously divine while alone in your bedroom.

Every applicant should print out the above quote and tape it to their monitors.

I agree with everything that Pamphilia wrote. And you also want to keep the broader picture in mind. Your difficulty in finding an advisor speaks to a much larger issue; if it's hard to find a 20th C. Americanist to help you with a project concerning Dante, it might be even more difficult to adequately frame such a project so that a graduate program might be interested in taking you on. It might leave admissions committee members scratching their heads--is this person interested in Medieval literature or 20th c. American literature? Italian? Comparative literature? Such are the pitfalls of periodization. Professors don't do that transhistorical, cross-cultural, pan-humanities work anymore (though perhaps they should). Joyce people often HAVE to have a firm grounding in classical mythology and medieval allegory (because Ulysses requires it), but 20th c. American novels don't often do that same intense mythology/allegory work. (I'm generalizing here.) This is not to discourage you from pursuing this whole Dante/McCarthy allegory thing--it sounds fascinating and promising. I think there's a lot stuff to be done with allegory in American literature, but I think you'll ultimately have to decide whether your primary focus is post-1945 American lit or comparative Medieval literature, and you'll have to home in on that particular area. And yes, keep asking around for other Americanists. If you can, take a lot of classes in that area. And re: the value of doing a thesis: Here's my advice. Yes, it's very valuable. But it's much more important to produce a sustained and original writing sample. You would be better off revising and re-revising a paper until it's a 15-20 pp. well-researched article, rather than spending all year struggling over an 80-page mini-dissertation. (I wish someone had told me this.) The problem with the thesis project is that it isn't really similar to anything we do at the graduate level. 20-page seminar papers can be turned into articles, and many articles can be turned into a dissertation, and a dissertation can be turned into a book--but what can you really do with an undergraduate thesis? (Mine is currently collecting dust.) I wish I had spent my time and energy perfecting a shorter paper rather than writing a really long thesis that eventually had to be (clumsily) excerpted and rewritten when I applied to graduate school. The benefits of doing a thesis are that you get to immerse yourself in a topic for a sustained period of time. However, you could do this just as easily in an independent study.

I think the relevance of your project is an extremely valid concern, though you may be approaching it from the wrong direction. Instead of trying to guess what approach the adcom likes or finds relevant, do some research in your field. Find out what approaches people have been taking in the last five years. Make sure you're not doing work that was already done in 1983 (this was my mistake the first time I applied). It's probably unfair that adcoms expect new BA holders to have an updated understanding of the current trends in scholarship (especially when some people work for several years outside of the university), but this field has become increasingly competitive. BA-holders are professionalizing like never before, and people are now entering graduate school with a lot of research experience and a pretty decent understanding of what they want to dissertate about. When you revise your writing sample, you should spend a lot of time trawling the MLA bibliography for recent articles, and then track down the critics that these people all reference. With this in mind, you should pursue your area-specific interests but not get too hung up on doggedly applying certain types of theory. Dropping references to Foucault and Judith Butler and Stephen Greenblatt can misfire if 1) you misuse them, and 2) the adcom happens to hate these theorists. For instance, certain professors at my graduate program absolutely despise New Historicism and race-class-gender theory flim-flam. They send any whiff of "performativity" to the shredder. However, if these stodgy people AREN'T on the committee, then it's a different ballgame. But if you're an outsider, then it's impossible to know who's on the committee, who has a lot of pull, and how things will go during any certain year. So, my point is twofold: Do your research, but don't try to outgame an adcom. Trying to suss out an adcom's particular tastes and whims is a waste of time, and you should ultimately spend your time doing what interests you.

At the end of the day, the evaluation is really going to be about quality. However, when a school asks for 20-30 pp, I'm inclined to think that they're expecting samples to be article length, and many candidates WILL have written full-length seminar papers. I don't think you should be as concerned with cutting your sample down as much as making sure you've fully explained all of your points. And just for future reference, we don't count a bibliography as part of the paper.

Forget about overall length and instead focus on making your introduction as strong as possible. Most committee members only read the first two pages or so before deciding to forward the application to the next round, so it's important to make your introduction a winner. For the same reason I just mentioned, I don't think you need to cut the sample for the 10- or 12-page writing sample requirements. Seriously, the only way your writing sample is going to get a thorough, evaluative read is if you're down to the final round. And by that point, no one is going to nix your application on the basis of some bureaucratic nicety about page requirements.

1) No. There's no hard and fast rule on this, but an MA probably won't help too much at the programs you are interested in applying to. It may make you more prepared, but it will also "raise the bar" for your application, and adcoms will hold you to higher standards. Instead of planning to get an MA, you should instead prepare yourself as well as possible while you're still in undergrad. You're at a good school right now. Seek out those fabulous professors. Do an independent study or two. Do a thesis. Beef up on 1. foreign languages, 2. philosophy, and 3. theory. Ask professors if you can take classes at the graduate level. If you do those things, you won't need to do an MA. 2) I'm going to voice an unpopular viewpoint here and say that your particular ethnicity MIGHT help you in this case. It is by no means a "golden ticket," and it probably won't provide much of a boost at the country's top programs (no top program is going to make a decision about a student based on their minority status), but Puerto Ricans are considered particularly underrepresented at many mid-level schools. You will be eligible for minority student fellowships, and departments absolutely LOVE to brag about the percentage of their students on university-wide fellowships. My department recruits minority students quite aggressively for this very reason and has even set up a special search committee. And please be sure look into the Ford Foundation Fellowship, which defines Puerto Ricans as a group "whose underrepresentation in the American professoriate has been severe and longstanding." 3) No, not at all. Most R1 professors went to famous programs.

A friend of mine got into CUNY and didn't find out about funding until very, very late in the admissions process. Apparently they eventually come through for most people, but you really have to wait it out (and you don't want to accept until you have an offer in hand).

I think that admissions comittees are much more forgiving of people applying only with a BA. I know a lot of people who have had success without getting an MA--and it seems that at that level it's more about raw talent, close-reading ability, and potential. MA candidates are expected to be much more on the ball and specific about their proposed interventions. (That one year of graduate-level coursework is supposed to clarify everything and crystalize your critical approach, apparently.)

I don't think it matters very much.

Short answer: No, they're not serious. I've heard that most members of admissions committees don't even know that their programs HAVE such word limits. I guess Northwestern is one such program. They tell everyone 500 words, but those in-the-know understand that this is not a hard-and-fast rule. However, if everyone else is respecting a certain word limit, then your 4-page-single-spaced statement is going to look a little obnoxious. This goes against the general grain of advice on this topic, but I sincerely do believe that all statements should be around 1-1.5 pages single spaced (or three pages doubled spaced). For the most part, you should ignore word limits when putting together your statement. You can always cut down later. And yes, your statement should be as specific as possible.

I understand this point of view, but the NCR "data" (I guess we can't call them rankings) still give me pause. After all, statistics such as job placement rating and funding can get you only so far. Job placement statistics don't tell you what kind of jobs people are getting--is a program placing their graduates at peer institutions, for instance? Or at small branch campuses? I've seen programs boast a placement rating of over 90%, only to find that those jobs were ... not great. Additionally, where are graduate students or recent grads publishing? I've seen programs brag about how frequently their students publish, only to find out later that those publications were not well respected. Much of the NRC data seem skewed to favor quantity of professionalization over quality.

I could be wrong, but I don't think that a person's exploratory posts on a message board are an indicator of how they might come off in an application. Moreover, the information here is not useful to helping the OP strengthen his or her application. "3.7 is a low GPA for English majors" and "you need the stamp of approval of a creative writing professor" "MFAs can't get community college jobs": none of this is particularly accurate or helpful. And I'm not even going to touch the question of tone. One thing I do know: the OP would probably best be served by asking these questions of faculty memebers rather than anonymous people on the internet.

A few misconceptions here. I'd like to clear them up. First of all, many MFA graduates DO secure community college positions, just as many PhDs secure community college jobs (and the MFA is a terminal degree--technically more similar to a PhD than an MA). What's necessary for such a career is a strong interest and experience in community college teaching (adjunct experience, experience with remedial English courses, etc.). And persistence. And a will to relocate. Second, I don't think any of us is in a position to make predictions about how a person will fare mentally or emotionally when he or she is deciding to apply to grad school. And so what if someone gets to grad school and then decides it isn't for him? So he withdraws. It's not the end of the world. For some people, graduate school IS like trying on a coat and then taking it off, and that's not necessarily a terrible thing. It's not the Marines. We all know people along the way who decided it wasn't for them, or got a better job offer, or just couldn't cut it. OP: I applied to MFA programs once upon a time. What I remember most about my process is that admissions committees stressed the importance of the writing sample, and the writing sample only. Test scores and GPA were important only to the extent that they needed to meet the bare minimum. I'm not quite sure about how much English coursework an applicant needed to have done, but I do recall that there was some kind of minimum (may vary from program to program). You also don't need to have a thesis or manuscript that has the "stamp of approval" of your creative writing director. If you're good, you're good. And if you're not, then what's the worst that happens? You get rejected and wait awhile and apply again.

Valid scores are valid scores. It shouldn't matter whether or not they were taken in 2006 or 2011. Five years is a (relatively) small period of time, and your brain probably has not changed that much since then. For most people over 30 or 40 (i.e. most admissions committee members and faculty), 2007 was yesterday. Even in 2011 it will be like yesterday. In fact, I think a lot of older people would laugh if you referred to anything from 2007 as "old." If your scores are decent, you should just plow forward and work on the real meat of your application. That time will be well used. I wish I had taken my GREs well before I worked on my applications so that I could have focused more on what mattered.

I have to second and third everyone who says that mentioning teaching in a statement of purpose is pretty much just taking up valuable space that you could be using to discuss something else. In fact, I'm going to be more adamant and unequivocal about it: DON'T MENTION TEACHING and no! especially not in the first paragraph. Look at it this way: a lot of people get into PhD programs each year without ever having taught. Most people who get into the BEST schools have never taught. Many are fresh out of undergrad or a year or two in the working world. But they get picked up by top programs because of their scholarly potential (writing sample)--not because they have teaching experience, or any other kind of experience for that matter. In fact, I've never heard about anyone getting a second glance from an English lit admissions committee because they founded a non-profit, worked or studied abroad, won an award for being the best high school teacher in town, or worked as a journalist or something. All these things are impressive in their own right, but they don't matter one iota for English lit admissions committees. In fact, I can't think of a single academic field that cares that cares less about your life outside your proposed research, and I have seen wildly successful teachers and professionals get swiftly rejected from all programs because they didn't have a research-focused statement of purpose. And another point: at most programs, a teaching-free year is a reward. In fact, most really good programs (like the ones on your list) shield their students from teaching in their first year and dissertation year. At a lot of average programs, teaching-free fellowships are a reward for their very best applicants, and TA positions often (sadly) carry less money and a lot less prestige. In academia, teaching is viewed as grunt work. It is not valued as the pursuit of special, exceptional people. It is viewed as something you must do in order to get a job and pay the bills. In order to be a successful applicant, you must not project the "I want to teach" attitude (even if it's true and, let's face it, a realistic and healthy life goal for an academic). You must be 100% about your research. You must be like "OMG my research is the best on the planet and the reason I get up in the morning and sometimes I forget to eat because I'm just so obsessed with the long 19th century!" Okay, I'm being glib, but you get the idea. As a sidenote--one thing I noticed about your proposed area of study--"19th-21st Century British and American Lit, with a Women/Gender Studies slant"--is that it seems overly broad. At the graduate level, 19th and 20th century are considered quite different animals and are usually housed in different departmental divisions. Within those centuries are a few different distinct literary movements--romanticism, Victorian lit, modernism, etc. Then there's the genre issue--poetry or fiction? Realistic novel? Gothic novel? Likewise, most people do not specialize in both British AND American literature. And within American literature (which I know much more about) there are also very distinct divisions. Colonial? Antebellum? Postbellum? Post-1945? Graduate school in English lit is all about periodization, or picking a certain time period and knowing everything about it. I don't know as much about PhD in creative writing statements, but I'm assuming that in those cases you should make your creative work sound like the center of your life. I'm guessing the same no-teaching principle applies, and maybe even moreso. These programs want to enroll the next big-thing writer who will bring prestige and attention to the program, not a great workshop facilitator. Off to labor some more in the "TA salt mines" ...

Yeah, ditto that. Most adcoms realize that the AW portion is graded by people who barely bother to read the essays in the first place. The other scores look fine for any program.

What mudlark said is a brilliant piece of spot-on advice. Your prof sounds like a total jerk--and I think that anyone who is so categorically negative should be avoided when going through this very stressful process--but I kind of wish that someone had given me that kind of hard-knock sobering feedback about my methodology and writing sample. Why? You're going to run into adcom members who are just as negative and hostile to your theoretical inclinations. In a way he's right--New Historicism (with a capital NH) has fallen out of favor somewhat (though so has Deconstruction with a capital D, so I don't know what that's about). Thing is, everybody "does" New Historicism (it's so quotidian and almost necessary) but everyone is eager to be seen as doing something else. So any statement of purpose that includes the phrase "New Historicism" or "Stephen Greenblatt" is probably (and somewhat unfairly) going to be met with a little boredom. Now, obviously you should do what you love. You shouldn't try to please people, and you shouldn't try to become an expert in some whacked-out, cutting edge theory just to impress an adcom. That would backfire, obviously. But just be aware that certain buzzwords aren't that buzzy anymore, and by presuming that they are--or by foregrounding out-of-date methodologies under the guise of originality--you may run into some problems. At the application stage, I maintain that it's more important to produce a stellar close reading and weave in methodologies secondarily than it is to show a great aptitude for a certain kind of theory. Adcoms recognize and appreciate a good close reading and love originality--even if the applicant doesn't quite yet have the theoretical terms to describe what they're doing. And some adcoms are suspicious of undergrad theoryheads. My professor calls these applicants "one trick ponies"--in the sense that they just apply one set of theoretical skills to everything they read rather than actually looking at what the text might be doing.

I understand what everyone is saying here about writing samples and statement of purpose mattering the most, and I agree, but I don't think that one should be so cavalier in dismissing the GRE's importance. I'm going to be more cautious here. Maybe it's okay not to worry about test scores as much if you know you've made a critical intervention (i.e. you're certain your writing sample really stands out, has won a prize, is original in the eyes of a few good professors) ... or if you've gone through a really outstanding undergrad program ... or if you've done something else that really distinguishes you from a lot of people .......... It's good to be on the safe side. I don't think that you need to get a 700 verbal, though it certainly can't hurt. It's been my experience that most successful candidates have really, really high scores. (I'd also be interested in how people here who reportedly received "low" scores define "low". Are we talking less than a 600 verbal? Less than a 550?) And believe me when I say that scores matter for fellowships, and fellowships matter. My friend's program admitted her without seeing her GRE scores, but once they saw her GRE scores they were unable to give her fellowship. That cost her five grand a year in summer funding plus health insurance.