missmarianne

Yeahhhh. "Almost finished" does seem pretty relative. Well, here's hoping someone has space for me this year even though it's looking rooough.

AHHH! Yes, like NAMES ARE NOT THAT HARD. Marianne is not that hard. There are television characters with my name that are not from the South. My Michigan camp friends used to laugh at my name being super Southern so I got into the habit of holding my hand like a mitten and playing the, "What part of Michigan are you from?" game but then I flipped them off at the last minute. Like, why is no one extending a PhD invite to me when I am a literal genius?

Bahahaha! At the risk of perpetuating a farm girl stereotype, my family 100% raises cattle in another part of Georgia even though my sibs and I grew up in the suburbs. Whenever I used to go horseback riding at my out-of-state summer camp, kids always assumed that I, as a nine-year old girl, could lasso bulls and jump barrels.

Okay, South Carolina needs to calm down with its stereotyping. ?

Good points and I sort of have a question about this. As you recommend, I looked at commencement programs and saw that two students were set to graduate this year in my sub-field. I gathered that the department had brought in two Contemporary Drama students simultaneously, but I also wondered when they decided it was a good time to bring in new people. Is it after the majority of students have graduated in a sub-field or do they start bringing in new students when it looks like the original students are graduating in the next year or two? As I asked myself these questions, I also looked at current students and realized there were no drama scholars but there many first-year people who might not have decided on a sub-field yet and I felt very confused. So my question: does anyone know when profs start thinking about bringing in new students for a particular subfield?

Oooo! I feel this! Southern accents and speech patterns are hard because they're steeped in history and cultural signifiers. I was always confused, when my friends came down from Boston to my town outside of Atlanta in the late nineties, and skeptically asked how my family had the internet. I guess they heard the region they were traveling to and assumed we were backwards. In my experience, though, most people from the Northeast (who are not ten-year olds from Boston) view the outsider cultural perspective quite favorably because diversity is very good for academia. I will add, however, that some academic/intellectual people outside of the South cannot help but view Southerners through an anthropological lens. In those cases, I have 100% leaned into their narratives and said, "Why yes. Boys in the South DO get dueling pistols when they turn ten years old. The rumors are true." So just...feel free to troll anyone who fetishizes your region.

YES! This was actually a great tool for me as well, looking at the theorists profs mentioned in the course description. If I didn't know at least a couple of names, I knew that it likely wasn't the best fit since it was probably going to be out of my reach in terms of my previous coursework. This year, my plan is to track down some recent performance seminar syllabi and compare those to the course offerings at Indiana, Rutgers, etc so I have some idea of the trajectory of scholarship within each program as well as a basis for performance in my own work.

I also got the sense that a relationship had been built while reading some of these posts, though I don't think one professor's word is going to make or break anyone as it all depends on who has the most influence in the deliberations. My own advisor happened to be working on a project with someone at Cornell around the time I applied and it's possible that he mentioned my work to that colleague but it obviously didn't help me very much, haha. I guess I'm just trying to figure out the best way to manage my expectations and also how to force a window open when I can't get through the door. Maybe my advisor isn't best friends with whatever professor, but I can look into what journal/s that prof edits and submit a project there and maybe it gets published and I reach back out to the prof later in the year. Don't even know if that helps me, but at least they know my name through emails.

Thanks very much! This is excellent advice on reading their work to get an idea of where they're at in terms of scholarship. I am in a very specific field so I really need to work on generalizing my focuses. I will almost certainly reach out to you. Thank you for your insight here!

This is so true. It has always been super beneficial for me to get outside feedback, especially from people who are reading it for the first time. Even after my committee had approved chapter one, I still had some misgivings about structure in the back of my mind. I still sent it into a journal, though, knowing that the peer review would probably be helpful regardless and they sent me back the same back-of-my-mind criticism, only it was beautifully articulated by someone who hadn't written and re-written the project a million times.

The first time I applied, I used a published piece that I felt went well with my SOP. As to this year? Ehhhh. Not precisely. I chose to use an unpublished version of chapter two from my thesis because the fine people at the journal I sent the first chapter to were all, "Oh honey, no." Haha, there were some major structural issues that I was still working out--and that I'm still working out as we speak--in my revisions for that journal. Chapter two was related to my subject--which was sexual violence in recent re-stagings of some plays--though it could have been a little too general.

Yikes! My advisor recommended I send a published writing sample because a professor, two outside readers from the press, and two editors had approved it for publication, but the takeaway here seems to be that someone on an admissions committee could still disagree with all five critics and hate it. ? Cool, cool, cool, cool. ?

1. Ahhh! This is my fear--someone leaving a school. The people who were open to zoom chats...when did you contact them? I might try contacting them earlier next time. Definitely hit everyone up in November, last time, which is final papers time, so. 2. I'm honestly feeling better knowing most of you didn't have this happen. My advisor had mentioned, in passing, Skip Gates contacting someone at whatever university to give them a recommendation and I was just like, "Cool. Cool, cool, cool, cool. ?" 3. Good to know. GOING TO CRUSH MY SOP THIS YEAR.

Yeah, that's a good point about building on what others have done. In retrospect, it's possible that my drama-focused work suggested that I was not up to date on current performance-oriented scholarship. I didn't cite any performance-oriented critics though I emphasized in all of my SOPs that I was applying to work in certain programs because they had performance resources/coursework and I wanted to expand on my drama-oriented work. I plan on spending the first part of the year creating a perfect writing sample. Last year, I was reluctant to work on it because I thought the pandemic might be impacting admissions so I had one of those editing processes where everything sounded pretty good when I sent it off but I didn't take ten days away from it and come back to it with new eyes which is generally an important part of my writing process. I think I felt pretty okay about what I sent because it was mostly coming from my already-reviewed/approved MA thesis. Who knows, though.

This was my concern, too, especially with the people planning on retiring. I think it might be a mix in my case. Like, if I've heard that someone is retiring, I can ask grad students or people that know that person, etc.

That's very true and this is helping me realize something. My field is sort of transitioning because a lot of drama critics from a certain era--basically all the people that taught me--are retiring and departments are hiring new performance-focused scholars. I'm thinking I need to try to publish some performance-oriented work this year so I have something to talk about with those scholars instead of just hoping the drama-oriented people remain at their universities for another five years to work with me.

1. Yes! I've heard the same thing and ALSO gotten the exact opposite advice! It's confusing me. 2. I'm glad this is not a thing for most of us, because I would feel like I had no autonomy. 3. This is good to know and takes some pressure off of me. I was sort of wondering if there was a networking step I missed somewhere.

Oh okay, perfect! I've had about a 50/50 split on whether or not to reach out when I asked my mentors and LORs but I've also seen a lot of people on GC that seem to have made more of an impression on their POIs prior to applying, so I was trying to figure out if I should have been doing something different. I like your prof's point about being a fit for one particular person, too. That definitely makes sense to me since my work felt a little overly-specific.

Sorry I attached these questions to your post! I feel like I've done that with a few people on this thread to ask questions that were only loosely related.

Okay. Actual (ignorant) question for next year when I inevitably have to do this again. Most people do their MA's and PhDs at my school and don't venture elsewhere so I feel like I'm not understanding major components of this process. I'd definitely private message one of you, but I'm keeping this here in case some other confused person needs this information as well later on. What are POI email exchanges supposed to look like? The past two years, I've just introduced myself/my work, praised the POIs work (sincerely), and asked about potentially working with me if I were accepted to X university. Ordinarily, the professor emails me back and says "Your work sounds interesting. I'd be happy to work with you if you're accepted" or, if the person knows one of my LORs, they might comment on that as well. That has really been the extent of the exchange for me, though--with Rutgers--I never got a reply back. I had heard, through one of my editors and a grad student I reached out to, that that particular professor was considering retiring soon, so I was not confident about that application going in and I didn't feel comfortable emailing that person a second time. Now I have a few questions. 1. Was I supposed to be carrying on an ongoing email exchange with these professors beyond the introductory/inquiry email and the thank you-for-replying-email? I assumed that I would be disrupting their work if I did that... 2. Did y'all* have other professors reach out to them first to make an introduction? Is that a thing that happens? 3. Did y'all know the people you were going to work with before you emailed them and, if so, how did you meet them? *using y'all because it's gender neutral and I'm from the South. ?

dying at the clown.

Okay, but mine doesn't say that, tho. It's still at In Review. ?

I have a feeling I'll be able to post it soon! Just need to get that sweet, sweet non-grad-school rejection from them in the next few days.

Agreed! Though I got a rejection yesterday and my name was in a different font than the rest of the letter because someone had clearly copied/pasted it from a list and I laughed a little (while trying not to cry, obviously). In the meantime, I composed a very silly rejection letter written by my anxiety disorder that I sent to McSweeney's and, whether or not it gets published, I will be sharing it with the group to ease the pain of my inevitable shut out.

Yeah, I guess it's important for this process since we definitely want committees to be able to read our work and I should probably take it a little more seriously as well since speaks to my professionalism. That's really frustrating that he didn't let you know, though, especially since he seemed comfortable offering you advice AFTER the fact.