Enzian

money maker

Holy shit, congratulations takethiswaltz! That's awesome! Especially because: Glad you stuck it out? :-)

left coast

east germany

far out

thing two

thing theory

after theory

The sidebar in this article cracked me up -- a photo of a bummed-out armadillo captioned with: Most armadillos are simply too dead to contract leprosy. Rejoice, armadillo community!

My stepdad was just telling me how he and his buddies (or the rest of the world, for all I know) used to call the prime parking spot in any parking lot a "hula spot" because when you got it and got out of your car you'd be all excited and do a little hula dance in celebration. I wanna do the grad school admissions hula spot dance.

potato head

karma police

inspector protector

pilot inspektor

Blurry, I feel you on the impostor syndrome and I just went through the interview process at one of my top choices (way scarier than already being accepted and visiting, in my opinion) and made it back unscathed. I agree with svh and rising_star. Visit! People are nice, they want to show off their school to you, and you really owe it to yourself when making such a huge decision. Nobody's going to give you a pop quiz or pull you all the way out there just to laugh in your face (just the two most pleasant of many possible outcomes I considered for myself). Think of it like this: now that they've offered you admission, they would like you to accept their offer so they're going to put their best foot forward and that's a great situation for you to be in since the attention really isn't on you, it's on making the program appealing for you. And if you come away from a visit with a bad taste in your mouth, that should tell you a lot. Good luck with your decision!

human league

Hey, congrats! As for me, I've gotta wait for funding decisions to come back before I decide. UNC is pretty appealing, though.

owl towel

Code-switching is fascinating. As someone who wants to begin study of BCS and use that as my primary language, OSU's program may not end up being the best choice for me but we'll see. Good luck with the rest of your applications!

I'm in! Good luck, y'all. That's wild! Honestly, I'm also kind of a beginner at all of this. I did my undergrad in an English department and only have Russian language/lit experience via three years of Peace Corps service in Central Asia (a region I'm happy to ignore for the time being). It also looks like we're going for different programs: I'm just a Regional Studies MA guy (excepting my [comp] lit apps) while it looks like you're going full PhD, right? So, hurray for not being in competition at all and best of luck to you and your kick ass research interests! :-)

master (&) margarita

social suicide

Whoa, what? I also had a creative writing concentration. Let's blow off this grad shit and start a writers' colony!

what lies ahead - Yeah, I'm definitely considering OSU but everything's going to depend on money, naturally. My interests are Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (I applied to each of my programs and for FLAS as a beginner in BCS), Russian, memory studies, and literature of the (post)Soviet/Yugoslav era.

Congrats, clur! I just got my Indiana acceptance and a few hours before that received my acceptance to SWSEEL. Still awaiting funding for both of them, of course. Good luck to you with funding and summer programs!