WildeThing

Sounds like an acceptance! Congrats!

Tentative email? Can you provide some more info? Like when, are more emails being sent, what your specialty is? I also applied to comp lit there.

I’m presenting on the topic at NeMLA but this is the 2nd time I send a proposal to this school’s conference and 2nd time it’s been rejected. While not the same thing, you wonder how the program will select you if your two big ideas aren’t good enough for its graduate conference.

Today is great. Get an email from my top school, it's the grad conference I applied to! I'm rejected! Yay!

Congrats! Glad the day is finishing on a higher note!

So it's 5pm in Chicago, guess we're done. Best of luck to all of us, shit got real.

As I refresh my email fir the 1000th time waiting o Chicago I get an email from Ch...atham. Spam. Thank you.

So, 18 rejections would be tough. My alternative is to apply for a PhD in my homd country (where I'm guaranteed entry but there is no funding) and find some kind of job (in a country with 25% unemployment). I might reapply to a handful of programs next year but I doubt it because: a. it's another year down the drain and I neef to start earning money, b. 18 apps was expensive, I have a wedding to pay for in the summer and paying for another round without a guaranteed source of income is tough and c. it might mean that there is no interest in my proposed idea and I'm not sure how I would handle that as I've been passionate about it for years now.

Humor is a defense mechanism damnit! I just emailed Chicago some knock knock jokes.

Another Chicago interview. The Good: - Might mean that emails are still being sent. The Bad: - One more spot taken (how many people get interviewed?) The Ugly: - How worn my Email-refresh-button-pushing-finger is becoming.

Totally true, but don't you come over here with your logic unless your logic comes with honey-mustard sauce so I can stress-eat it.

I mean, it certainly doesn't look good and doesn't feel good. This being the first response makes me question whether I aimed way too high and should have rethought the whole process, but I guess it is still uncertain and even if it is a rejection there are still other schools on the horizon. Of course, this also means that I am going to go through this emotional rollercoaster 17 more times.

So how often are you guys refreshing your email inbox? I'm doing once a minute, I think once a minute for the next 12h is probably good.

OR! They want to pull out the red carpet for us!

Holy shit, Chicago interviewees! When do those of us who haven’t heard anything take this is as a definiteimpliedimplicit rejection? Congrats to those who got in! PLEase come and share the experience!

Nothing of the sort so far. The closest was that a few days after submitting my Cambridge app I check the portal and it said ‘Under review by degree committee’. Now, normally Cambridge processes apps by having the department weigh in first, they then select applicants they want to offer and move them to 5e degree committee who then confirm whether the department acted accordingly and decide on thenoffer type. This is then sent to the central office which contacts the students. You can imagine my excitement when my app had apparently blazed through the first phase! It would appear that this is standard practice in English, and means nothing either way.

Also married with no children, though the situations are more different than they are similar I presume.

Glad to see there’s another traumathusiast in here! PM if you ever wanna talk shop. And let me know where you land!

It was great, I've only participated in major conferences beyond that in the US like the regional MLAs and this was much nicer, though certainly not close-knit.There were plenary talks by Cathy Caruth (Cornell), Dori Laub (Yale), Robert Jay Lifton (Columbia) and several others. I was surprised that so many of the 'big guns' came and were participants. Looking at your list of schools, there was Gavriel Reisner who spoke about Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon and he was very nice and I enjoyed his talk. I particularly enjoyed a panel with Laura Vickroy and Jean Wyatt since I've cited them both in the past and Wyatt was very warm and open and came up to me after the session to talk. It was quite diverse, as people came from all backgrounds: literary, creative writing, psychology, psychiatry, medicine, education, journalism, etc. I was told that the organizers thought it was successful enough that they might try it again, but it might take them a few years. The conference website is no longer active but here are links to the speakers and sessions in case you want to have a look at what sort of things were being discussed: https://web.archive.org/web/20161015013207/http://www.listeningtotrauma.org:80/conference/schedule/ https://web.archive.org/web/20161026213748/http://www.listeningtotrauma.org:80/conference/conference-breakout-sessions/ I've seen some trauma conferences pop up on UPenn lately, I think one in Long Beach, so it's just definitely still an active field and one that I think is very enjoyable.

While the height of trauma studies is certainly in the past there is still a lot of interesting work being done on it. Just last year (academic year) I went to a big trauma conference and most Unis have at least one person still working on it to some degree. In fact, when I was writing my SOP one of my advisors told me I needed to highlight my work on trauma MORE.

MLA all the way.

Small topic to distract us for a day: When I started the last year of my BA I had to select an advisor for my BA thesis. I decided to select someone whose expertise was American fiction because I felt like I hadn't done enough of it. My other alternative was to do something about Samuel Beckett, but I was worried that I had done so much work on him that I would be too specialized. Since then I have not done a single piece of work on Beckett but have continued with my BA thesis topic over two MAs and have now proposed it for my PhD (it has changed, of course). When I was applying for programs several places had Beckett experts and I wanted to say 'Hey! I'm a huge Beckett fan! I've done X work on him', but since it was completely unrelated to my current topic, and I haven't really worked on it in years, I didn't. Similarly, there are a bunch of other topics that I wanted to work on but have put on hold and hadn't worked enough on to declare as a stated interest for the PhD. Another example: when I met with my advisor I came in with two ideas: the one I wound up pursuing and something on Chuck Palahniuk. Since then the first one has become my main research but I have done some work on Palahniuk and because it's fairly self-contained I've managed to present those pieces at conferences more often than my main research. Looking over my CV I realize that like 80% if not more are about Palahniuk and material outside of anything I mentioned in my proposal, simply because it didn't fit, as those are ancillary topics for me. So, what things were going to be 'your field' which aren't anymore? Or things you're interested in but couldn't fit into your proposal?

I received an email from Fordham yesterday saying that if I complete my application before Wednesday 24th they would consider it (I left it unfinished because I didn’t have the time or money to have my international transcripts evaluated). I don’t know if this is standard practice but I guess that any applicant shouldn’t expect anything for a while longer.

Fixed!

FALSE ALARM, DON’T PANIC: There’s a Chicago interview in Cognition on the board that really got my heart going.