jillcicle

I'm in at UNC Chapel Hill as well! (Medievalist.) Email from DGS with attached PDF containing acceptance and info. Also, yes, the timing was weird - email arrived at 11:32 pm PST yesterday? So I'm still too asleep to react except blind relief because I had become certain I was shut out this year. Hold onto hope, my friends!

Just accepted to Berkeley!!! I had completely written off Berkeley as an implied rejection, and was bracing myself for a shut out, so try to stay hopeful friends. 

I'm in at UNC Chapel Hill as well! (Medievalist.) Email from DGS with attached PDF containing acceptance and info. Also, yes, the timing was weird - email arrived at 11:32 pm PST yesterday? So I'm still too asleep to react except blind relief because I had become certain I was shut out this year. Hold onto hope, my friends!

Anybody have any idea about the way acceptances work at NYU? For ex: Do they only make phone calls? Or is it possible to get an acceptance w/o a call? Also, anyone know about how many students get accepted? I couldn't find that info anywhere. 

Bumping this back up as a reminder.

In a few weeks, you'll find out where you're accepted, rejected or waitlisted. By now, I'm sure you're experiencing all sorts of highs and lows. This is a very stressful process. Sometimes, all you want is some news because you're starting to feel down about the process.

Big News? You're alive.
-There are currently seven billion people alive today and the Population Reference Bureau estimates that about 107 billion people have ever lived.  -Having just a few coins makes you richer than most people on Earth.
-You are unique and nobody in the entire world is like you are
-The opportunity to attend school is something many people don’t have. (Which makes having a college degree even greater!)
-Most people lack a bed of their own to sleep in
-Many people on earth lack access to clean water.
-Cell phones make talking to loved ones easy.
-You have friends that will always have your back. (And if you don't, message me. Let's talk. And if you do, let's talk anyways)
-You can enjoy pizza. Or Ice Cream.
-There are people in your life who love you more than you could ever know -The Internet, n'uff said?   But in all seriousness, try not to compare yourself to others. We have a tendency to look at how great the lives of other people are going without realizing the stresses they're hiding. No matter where you get in or don't get in, please be proud of yourselves. You've worked incredibly hard to get to where you are. An acceptance doesn't determine who you are and a rejection doesn't make you lesser than. It just means not this year. You might realize that your passions change over the course of a year. And you might discover those new interests are really interesting when you do reapply. You might discover some universities that previously rejected you might accept you the following year and viceversa.   Lastly, a word on rankings:
USNews rankings for English are determined by 14 percent of respondents who were department heads or director of graduate studies. As such, it's hard to take rankings those seriously when a lot of the rankings are based on "name brand". Most departments are only paying attention to a few select schools and placements may vary considerably across specific interests. Follow your heart when making a decision. Happiness is the number one thing that will make you succeed in a program and that happiness will translate to the quality of work you produce.

Good luck all. You're going to do great!

Is it safe to assume that not hearing from Berkeley means it’s a no? I wish they would send the rejections along with the acceptances and end my suffering.

I feel that! I could only afford 7 too (had one waived), and there really isn't a likely scenario where I can spare more than that. It sucks to feel so limited by finances in the process. 

On one hand I feel you bc I keep dreading the mental burden of just weathering 5 more potential rejections, and I can't imagine more, but on the other hand it would have been nice if I could have afforded to broaden the net!

*waves*. I do 12th/13th c., paleography and codicology, dig. hum. (Python corpus analysis), and medievalism studies. Been shifting gear to the latter two since my MA, so I just finished Medievalism: Key Critical Terms and can't recommend it enough. I am currently reading pulp fiction and hiding in bed from my crippling certainty I will be rejected from all the programs I applied to. ?

I haven't heard back from any program, so I'm emotionally preparing myself to be shut out. I'm ready for 'em! 

Same.
I especially enjoyed that three step process with random password I got to go through just to see my UCLA rejection ??.  Is this cycle over yet?

Rejected by UCLA Not too surprised though, fit was a big stretch in hindsight and my very, very bad subject GRE probably meant that if they had an initial cut on numbers, I was likely out right from the start. I'm ngl glad they were able to send out decisions quickly but a rejection at 3AM PST? Could barely sleep after seeing that letter lol. Still, many congrats to all who got in. You've all been accepted into a very fabulous program.
Crossing fingers for good news for all of us as February rolls on.

I also thought this was a delightful touch.  Just a liiiiitle glimmer of hope before the kick in the stomach.  I'm amazed and seriously impressed with the fortitude of people who apply multiple cycles . . . 

Hey! Our situations do sound remarkably similar! I even do 12th/13th c. English Legal History. (The best time period, right?)
(And best of luck on your housing hunt, and I hope you can find someone with easy answers. My lucky situation with college housing unfortunately means I don't have much helpful experience.)
As far my experiences here - this has been the absolute best year, and I have learned more than I thought possible in this time period. As far as the Latin goes, they give you every opportunity to learn and every teacher I've had has been amazing. To put it in perspective, I just finished an essay with a large part of my evidence based on a Latin text I translated myself. Not WELL translated, I would say, but I know enough to fumble my way through some pretty complicated stuff. I have also had some incredibly useful/entertaining training in paleography, which has been helpful.
The academic community here is just unparalleled. It really is such a great experience, and the faculty here are so supportive. I feel like I am absolutely getting the professional training and experience needed to move forward in an academic career. The University provides as many learning/research opportunities as you are willing to take on.
For PhD prospects: I was in too much of a state with moving and getting acclimated to a new program to meet ANY deadlines beyond the Oxford one. I have been accepted for a DPhil here - without funding, sadly. A truly minuscule amount of history DPhils were funded this year. I am looking for alternate funding currently but we'll see. That being said, if I choose to re-apply for PhD programs next year, I feel highly confident in both my competitiveness for funding at other universities, and in the quality of referee letters I would receive from my professors here. I would love to stay here, but funding for international students is so scarce that I think my only realistic chance at funding would involve some sort of Hunger Games-esque.
SUMMARY: I do not regret coming for one single instant, and if at all possible I will stay for the next three years. But, barring that, I feel that this course has fully prepared me for continuing my education elsewhere and allowed me the opportunity to make useful professional connections with some very important people in my field. 

This is a friendly reminder not to feed the troll. 

I take it, "fuck off to Starbucks because you're an English major trolololol" is valuable help?
You know what grinds my gears? People who think they're ~~providing a service by shitting on posters on an anonymous forum. Like, shut up. You're not here to help anyone. You're here to rant and feed your ego. Any tough love "advice" you give you do because acting mean and superior makes you feel good about yourself. If you actually wanted to help, you'd use those skills that you're punching into OP right now to figure out that nobody gives a shit about what somebody with "truther" in their name thinks about them, and put a face to your advice by mentoring students in person, joining organisations, or otherwise getting off your ass and doing something in the real world, and you'd do it with compassion, because the first rule of helping someone is not hurting them. But noooo, it's easier to sit on the throne with your pants around your ankles and diddle angry messages into the internet, and if you close your eyes, you can even feel proud for doing it!

Congrats on your offer, jillcicle! I moved from the US to Oxford to start my master's last year, and I have loved every minute of it. The university is such a great place (although the town itself really wasn't what I expected!) I second everything hippyscientist has said.
This website has a lot of really helpful information for international students in the UK generally about life, moving, etc. There are a lot of international students at the University, so you will be in good company and have a lot of help once you get here to get everything figured out. I found that my MCR had a lot of resources for me, so hopefully your college will as well. It might be worth getting in touch with someone from your college admin team as well to see if they have any suggestions. People generally seem to try to be very helpful.  
That is very unfortunate that you didn't receive college housing. That does make life considerably more difficult. I was able to secure college housing in the city center so I don't have any experience with your particular situation, but I understand that the large rental search engines (gumtree, etc) tend to work fairly well for finding accommodation. I think the University Accommodations Office also publishes some sort of alternate housing guide. As far as renting sight unseen... again, talk to someone from your college and see if they have any recommendations. If they have already notified you that you want receive housing, then they must have very limited facilities, and should (presumably) by very used to assisting students find housing elsewhere. 
I did find that - compared at least with my area of the US - everything is very very expensive here, housing included. 
Bring lots of pictures and things from home for the inevitable home-sickness (your third or fourth week in a new country is usually the most difficult, and things tend to improve after that). Most food things are accessible somewhere, but it might be worth thinking about what snacks and things you really love that they might not have over here. It can really make a difference when you're under a lot of stress. 
A month or so before I went over my MCR started a Graduate Freshers facebook page so that everyone could communicate and ask questions. Again, this will depend on your college. Things can vary quite widely depending on which college you are at.
Over here, we are actually only juuuust about to start our third term (Trinity) so everything is geared primarily towards finishing out the year. In July, after term has ended, people should become much more available to answer questions, help you figure things out, get ready for new students, etc. 
Let me know if you have any more specific questions, I'm happy to help! Good luck!

Okay so housing - Oxford might have an off-site housing website, but Spareroom.co.uk is great for finding housemates/a room in a house. A lot of students live Iffley Road/Cowley area (but that might be more Oxford Brookes students). Avoid Blackbird Leys at all costs. Tips - talk to people, use skype, get them to show you around the place, or at least take time-dated photos. When I was in San Diego I managed to sign a house in the UK with Spareroom this way.
Clothes: it's going to be colder than SoCal and NorCal. It's not going to be 6ft snow-drifts cold though. Be prepared for rain. And wind. But the UK doesn't really have temperature extremes. In summer it will hit highs of ~ 25C, with an average of 15-20C, nights ~10C and winter averages about 5C with nights down at freezing. General wear: jeans, t-shirts, jumpers/sweatshirts, hoodies, jackets, (waterproof jackets), trousers, thick dresses. Basically layers are your friends. You're not going to need anything too drastic - just make sure you have cardigans/jumpers and a coat to go over the top. 
Moving from the US: Voltage is different. That means things like your hair dryer may not work properly over here. Other than big-price items, it's more effective to buy electronics over here. Cell phone (mobile) networks are also run differently, so you won't be able to buy a UK sim card and put into a US phone. In Oxford, Vodafone, Three, O2 and EE all have good signal (these are mobile companies). Oxford colleges are gorgeous but the town itself isn't amazing. You do get musicians come play in local venues though which is pretty cool. Lots of hidden pubs (check out the Jericho Tavern - it's a local favourite). Remember to put "u" in words! Let's see. Although our countries share the same language, there's a lot of differences - if you're open to these and happy to laugh off Americanism's and adopt a few English phrases that's cool (I would expect the same of any Brit going to America). Cockney rhyming slang reallly isn't that much of a deal but sometimes we forget that we use it in daily phrases (e.g. I'm having a butchers = I'm having a look) but people might ham it up a bit initially. Also, we use Centigrade not Fahrenheit. We use miles on the road. We use kg or stones and lbs (only for body weight though) for weight. We're not very consistent. Be prepared to have strong opinions over all sorts of trivial things (which brand of tea bag for example). 
Sorry I can't help for the more specific university things and contact points for incoming students, but if you have any more questions about Oxford the place, living in the UK, doing a transcontinental move ask away  Finally, congratulations! 

LMH is a delightful college. Its grounds are pretty, and it's settled in a really lovely part of Oxford (up north - the greenery is much more lush, with more quiet, and many fewer tourists than in town.) The people there also seemed excellent; one of my friends on my proxy-strand had done his undergrad at LMH and only ever spoke highly of it. The Table is only for undergrad study so don't even pay attention to that, and age only ever seemed to be a proxy for pretension to me.
Given your college assignment, for housing, I'd see if you can find something in either the Jericho or Summertown area, if you're not going to try for university accommodation in Wellington Square or something. Both are great areas nearby the college site. Also, if you don't know how, learn to ride a bike. It'll make the (many) trips you'll have to take down to the Bod and the Faculty quicker, and the ride down from there (on Parks Rd.) is extremely pleasant by bike. I'm getting nostalgic just thinking about it. Have a great time!

This is probably a stupid question, but seeing as Google has failed me: Can Oxford students visit colleges other than the one to which they've been admitted? Can they visit only within the posted visiting times? Do they have to pay the suggested fees (usually a couple quid, but still)? 

I've also accepted my UC-Davis offer. Pretty excited about their program and about moving on up to NorCal.

I accepted my offer from UC Davis! So happy  

Just stepping on, since I did an Oxford MSt last year (though a different strand.) 
I have no idea how programs in general "perceive" the degree, other than to say I did fine on my apps this year. Oxford in general is perceived as a little stuffy and traditional on this side of the pond, though that's probably a more meaningful critique in my period (contemporary) than in yours. What I will say is that trying to apply while you're doing the program is a nightmare. It is a rigorous and intense nine months, the applications I did last year were *much* worse than this year's, where I had the time to think and write, and it'll take away your attention from actually doing the coursework. So, I'd suggest waiting until after. I don't think programs care about "gaps" like that as long as you're doing something productive in the interim (like working on foreign languages or something - literally just half a sentence implying that you haven't checked out entirely.) Honestly, I think the most important thing is not to worry much about how the program "looks." I cared a lot about that last cycle, and it only made it worse when things didn't work out. The true value of a Master's program is helping you learn to think like a grad student in that discipline, to help hone your writing, to teach you additional skills, to give you a chance to produce grad-level work you can use for writing samples or article submissions, and to have a nice community to socialize with.
In the faculty, the pass grade is 60, with the possibility of a distinction, which you get with either a 70 across all assessed elements (3 coursework papers and the dissertation) or a 72 average on the 3 shorter papers and a 68 on the dissertation. Something like 20-25% of the whole group, across all strands, got a distinction last year.
If you're paying, one vs two years is not nothing, and Oxford has a lot of ways to pick up extra money here and there, or get studentships. There's a research and travel fund in the faculty that gives 400 quid over your grad career at the school, which is great if you're only there for the Master's and planning not to stay on for the DPhil; lots of colleges give more research money or even full studentships, etc. 
For me, the Oxford degree did five major things:
(1) It let me solidify my interests in my specific national literature, coming from another related discipline;
(2) It gave me venue to draft the paper I ended up using as my writing sample, as well as a decent pool of other materials I've used and will use for articles and conference presentations;
(3) It's how I met my course convener, who ended up being one of my letter writers and has been a gem of a mentor throughout the application process; 
(4) It gave me the chance to decompress from, and work through some lingering feelings from, a somewhat tumultuous and stressful experience in college; and
(5) B-course.
Oxford does postgrad socializing and pastoral care like nowhere else, via the college system - I had friends in my strand, in my secondary temporal strand, throughout the English program, and in my college, sometimes overlapping but never completely, and it made the entire experience feeling much less competitive and stressful than it might have been otherwise. The 650-1550 strand was particularly excellent - though I work on a completely different area, the Medievalists were always brilliant, friendly, and hip, all at once, and Oxford's collections are unrivaled when it comes to your period. The new rare books library is massive, beautiful, and remarkably well-organized, though with the standard bit of British fussiness you wouldn't find, like, at the Beinecke at Yale or the Houghton at Harvard. Likewise, though I don't know how much bibliography or material textual studies you've done previously, but the B-course was worth the price of admission alone - it's one of Oxford's great strengths as a department and is an incredibly helpful skillset to have going into graduate study.
tl;dr Oxford is excellent at social life, collections, and book history; the medievalists there are great; one year is cheaper than two; and most importantly, think about what you'll get out of whichever program you choose intellectually and personally far before you worry about "how it'll look," since at the level you're looking at it's basically a wash.

I'm not in English lit, and I'm on your side of deciding about a PhD, so take this with a grain of salt.
Yes, a 2-year degree has the potential to teach you more than a 1-year degree.  That said, I'm not sure that you gain much more except in academic terms.  After all, an MSt in Medieval and Renaissance literature is kind of obscure, but there isn't a huge market of people dying to hire English MAs, either.  Sorry.
Marking 'schemes' are somewhat less differentiated in the UK, or at least, more obscure.  Oxford is more or less like Cambridge, where you'll have modules with essays or exams that will generate grades, and then (I suppose) a dissertation of some kind, with its grade.  Postgrad degrees don't indicate how you did (unlike the undergrads who will get a "first", a "2:1", a "Desmond", etc. actually printed on the diploma).  But you'll have a transcript and an average, any part of which you can tell people about.
That average may be confusing for someone not used to the UK system.  Unlike here, where you start at 100 and have things chipped off, they start at zero and see what you can add.  At Cambridge, in order to pass a Master's program, you need 60.  67 is the "leave to continue" mark, which indicates that you probably have what it takes to get a PhD.  70 is the equivalent of a "first" and 75 and 80 are varying degrees of distinction.  Some programs will have a grade for the whole thing (apart from "pass"), and the rules can get tricky.  I think at my program at Cambridge, you need a 70 in all of your work to get a distinction.  Now, I'm averaging 70, but even if I get well above that on my thesis, I'm knocked out of a distinction on the whole thing because two of my essays weren't as good as the other two.  I could, of course, if I finish strongly, say that I got a distinction on my thesis (as well as the "high pass" on the coursework).
The vocabulary changes a bit, but the scale is roughly the same.  Some say the humanities have more compressed grades than the math/science areas, because it's a lot harder to be original and brilliant on a topic that has been around for a thousand years, whereas the math guys actually can get completely right answers.  But you'll be getting recommendations with your scores, if you ask nicely, so that ought to sort itself out.  In other words, unless you blow the doors off the place and get a starred distinction on your thesis, or some such, it might be harder to build a completely bulletproof CV.  But you will, I would think, be able to make yourself a stronger candidate by learning different working and learning styles and maybe getting a better clue of what you want do in later research.
About selectivity-- rates of acceptance are higher at Oxbridge, but there's also a lot of self-selection and intimidation involved.  They will say up front what the minimum GPA will be of any successful applicant, which probably weeds out a lot of the marginal cases who wouldn't hesitate to try their luck with Yale.
If you go to The Student Room board, you'll find a lot of Brits who are very fluent in this, talking about aiming for a score on one module that will pull them up into a 2:1 average, which is kind of their B+/A- territory, and is required by a lot of employers as well as further education programs.  
Again, I have no idea what US PhD committees think about all this.