ArcaMajora

Thank you And that is insanely flattering haha. I'm just trying to do the best I can tbh. There's a lot of uncertainty in this process, so I've basically been doing as much legwork to plan to busy myself and also to make sure that things don't go astray for the upcoming fall. (even now I'm just like... things are going so fast, in two months it's gonna be April 15 and whatever plans we create now are gonna start crystallizing or at least be put into motion soon even if time feels insanely slow atm. I can barely believe it's mid-February.) Ahhh I hope I become that kind of professor in the future (oh job market, bless us all with that magic full-time TT position). I've had a very, very strong support system amongst my professors in undergrad and my letter writers are basically my role models in both teaching and research. Even with busy schedules, they always made the time to support undergrads and they were basically one of the foundations as to why I became excited about continuing onto PhD work. I hope to do right by any student in the future, whether that be undergrad or high school.

Have been lowkey thinking about this since applications tbh. A lot of my out of academia work has primarily been in high school teaching (my experience so far is teaching summer camps, haven't gotten my feet wet in an in-school year HS classroom just yet) so if academia doesn't work out for me during and after the PhD (like... let's say I can't do PhD work at all and fail at the MA exam or fail my PhD quals), I'll move back home and hustle for sub work here and there to balance out my savings. I'm taken and passed the CBEST, just need to do the paperwork to sub and read up more on it, as well as contact a few people I know who have subbed and see how I can feasibly catch up. I don't mind doing HS teaching for the long term as a stable career, but I'm not quite as good on the crowd control front... Short stature and weak voice have been weak points, but I've been working on smoothening those out and using what I have in my toolbox to improve my teaching (also contemplating this for the eventual TAship as well). I haven't really thought up of anything beyond of that though. I have like default statements, 'maybe paralegal, maybe interning somewhere, hopefully AmeriCorps if I'm still eligible' but no play-by-play plans yet. I'm still trying to keep my options open as admissions rolls on.

Duke: Feb 21-23 University of Alabama: February 28-March 2 Washington University in St. Louis (WUSTL): February 28-March 2 UC Boulder: Feb 28-March 1 Indiana University: March 1 Queen's University: March 1 U Wisconsin-Madison: March 3-5 SMU Interview Visit: March 3-5 Illinois (Urbana): March 4-5 Stanford: March 6-8 UC Irvine: March 7-8 Northwestern: March 7-9 Saint Louis University: March 8 UC Santa Barbara: March 8 Florida State University: March 12 University of Minnesota: March 14-15 UC Santa Cruz: March 14 Kansas: March 17-19 Vanderbilt: March 21-22 Rice University: March 21-23 USC: March 24-26 UT Austin: March 28-30 UC Davis: April 2 U Oregon: April 4-6

Out of upvotes but this is absolutely wonderful Thank you for posting these! These are going to be of massive help for anyone looking forward. Reading these more, actually wishing I had this kind of concrete advice while drafting my SoPs. While the general contours of these pointers were floating around my head, they are very easy to forget in the stress of pushing an application through to the system, so being reminded of this is key in helping sharpening future SoPs and samples. The optional statements on diversity caught me by surprise for sure when I applied. For disclosure, I am indeed a URM (with some limited teaching background alongside some fairly... I don't want to say harrowing, but life definitely threw me curveballs and then some in undergrad) so I did feel somewhat impelled to respond, and I can't deny that it was a refreshing change to write with a bit more of a personal touch than a constant drafting and re-drafting academic prose. These are all very salient points you've made though.

Kinda freaky, I had a dream about my top choice not too long ago. It was far more ambiguous, and in fact my dream seemed to be almost toying with me some sort of existential crisis about 'how far would you be willing to get accepted into the school of your dreams' o_O I don't want to comment on what that school is though, considering I did just get rejected from the one school that appeared in my dreams way too often haha (lookin at you Cornell.) That kind of dream you had sounds awesome and yet terrifying. There's the high of being accepted in the dream, and then you wake up in real life to an empty inbox... it's not great on the mind lol. (and my university e-mail is probably very tired of me refreshing over and over.) @emprof Thank you for joining the forum And welcome! Like Bopie I was terrified that anything I said here would hold me liable to some sort of apocalyptic outcome in admissions, but I'm really glad that a professor like you did come forward (there's definitely a faculty presence in GC, but I don't think English faculty specifically have been forthcoming with accounts to my knowledge, someone with years of experience in the forum feel free to correct me though) I do have to say, the thought of a fairy godprof in residence is an awesome idea for future applicants (especially those planning for Fall 2020). Any advice you give would be indispensable.

Anyone who applied to Cornell, looks like decisions are being released right now. Didn't make it Congrats to anyone who has gotten accepted tho Cornell seems to historically notify all results on the same day, so there should be a flood of Cornell results coming in today and/or tomorrow.

Has anyone here had dreams about applying to grad school/decisions so far? Wanted to ask cause I've had way too many this cycle I haven't had nightly admission season dreams yet (thank god) but they were... vivid enough that I remember a few O_O I'll try to go through them in sequential order and describe what happens (there is no context to what happened, they just... did lol) 1st dream: My Cornell application got referred to another department somehow and I also found out that UCSB rejected me (I did not apply to UCSB this cycle and from what I remember... dream UCSB basically said my SoP was awful). I also found out about some site where apparently... there was some sort of application tracker/genie that gauged our chances? Surely enough, that site was predicting 'low chance of acceptance everywhere' (I saw an awful lot of red) and I remember being devastated when I saw that I was looking unlikely for my top choice. 2nd dream: Imagine if schools combined the real-time updates of the results board and also listed (publicly too) the names of their accepted students as they came up. This was a school with red colors (my mind flip-flopped between Madison and Cornell after I woke up, didn't apply to Madison this cycle) so I remember frantically refreshing the page and seeing these names pop up. Eventually, my name did not so the school was an automatic rejection then and there. This dream was also a world where the feedback for rejected applications came almost instantly. So I clicked on my portal and found some... scathing notes on both my app but also poetry I wrote being ripped apart O_O 3rd dream: Nothing weird really happened except I was living a normal adult life and I owned a house... and then right at the end of the dream I got an e-mail with a form rejection letter from UC Irvine. (this happened the night before I got an e-mail requesting a phone conversation that turned into the unofficial acceptance) 4th dream: this one was basically even more blatant O_O I dreamt that I got rejected from Cornell via ApplyWeb and that I also got rejected from Buffalo from their portal. So far... that's all the admission-related dreams I've had.

Upon more reflection I agree with all of this tbh. My subject score is... ouch (it was bad enough that I contemplated giving up literary study). Beyond that though, looking at the one acceptance and the implied rejections I have, it is definitely fit that was the bigger factor (outside of the multitude of unknowns). The one program I've been accepted to so far fit incredibly well with both my current interests and the future direction I want to take in graduate study (alongside a POI that I'm really excited to meet and work with), and it's looking like there's a fairly high chance I'll be matriculating there in the fall. So reading this re-assures me a lot, and thank you It's very easy to forget all the intangibles, unknowns, and luck throughout this process tbh, but it's also good to be reminded that they're there and that sometimes... nothing but pure luck and the whims of what a department desires in its cohort is what separates that fateful choice between acceptance, waitlist, and rejection And also massive congrats to you! I've seen your acceptances and you have some awesome programs to choose from. I'm rooting for you and for everyone else here.

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.

Those UCLA results Watching out for my email and holding out for some semblance of hope. Fingers crossed for all of you.

@Bopie5 Really sorry to hear all the rejections on your end I'm waiting on a bunch (Buffalo's up in the air) so I feel unqualified to say all of this but when it comes to figuring out interests, what absolutely helped me was a gap year. It's a bit more risky applying without an MA at hand, I only felt far more confident about what specifically I wanted to study and what kind of lines of thinking that I want to bring into a graduate program after all my undergraduate work was done. By the time I graduated with my BA in June, I had the exact kind of CV and research experience that I felt far more proud of showing to a program versus applying while in senior year, when I didn't have a single presentation or published paper to my name. There's def some give and takes, but I found the SoP far more refreshing to write without having school on my chest all the time and I felt I had a greater focus on my work because I had a few months to get away from scholarship. Thus, I was able to return to my research with what I felt were fresher and more critical eyes than I had while writing it. However, during the gap year, I really and absolutely missed school, so if you can find some work to help offset the app fees, the better. And ofc, if you feel you'd be a far better scholar with a Master's degree, definitely take a look at funded MAs. That's the one regret I have this cycle, I'm applying only to PhDs but blanked at looking at terminal Master's programs.

Ahhhh, I don't wanna get too excited tho considering how strange the process is in general for apps. Still, thank you I hope it results in good news for us both haha. I can't deny this pattern is strange for Buffalo, though... The early acceptance follows their pattern from years past, but then a Master's referral and a rejection before regular admits? o_O Good luck to you as well! And congrats to your boyfriend!

Thanks to all who provided info on Buffalo! I can't deny I've been hitting refresh on everything today. Applied to Buffalo as well but also receiving radio silence on my end, and my app status is still under review. I've seen an acceptance on the board in poetics, which scares me. Now considering Buffalo an implied rejection Good luck to all though, hope we hear good news today.

Congrats to everyone who has been accepted To that Irvine admit, please feel free to send me a PM. I too am applying to UCI English I just got a phone call today from the program as well, but want to confirm just in case. I may have been unofficially accepted as well but I don't want to take my chances. I'm not the one on the board but I also got a phone call. EDIT: Just posted mine up on the results board. This is surreal and my emotions are everywhere.

I feel this so much. Okay so I'm about to stream of consciousness some questionable advice so bear with me. But the good thing with your current oeuvre is that there's definitely a workable themeatic that allows for a constellation of lenses (embodiment is an excellent one, and to my reading it feels like you're interrogating and examining the critical points of agency and the body, and how agency and permission can be constructed and enacted on bodies whose agencies are controlled, and of course... there is the notion of what is agency and what constitutes permission). it may look messy to an adcom now (which I relate, considering I'm basically going 'I'm not just a modernist or a postmodernist, I'm both'), but I can imagine it being a valuable asset to have when you start to centralize and focus your research and reading lists for PhD quals and the dissertation. Having a thematic this focused could def help in finding primary and secondary fields later on. I work in embodiment myself, but I normally work in reading queer embodiment in verse as reading practice more so than it as the larger point of my research. It's difficult to articulate, especially since queer embodiment can manifest in so many different forms as queerness itself is still a very elusive modality (which is precisely why I study it, simply because it can mean so much in a wide variety of contexts, and identifying those subtleties and resonances it very gratifying). However, my research has taken a more constellatory and archival route as of late (which is why I mark my periods as solely 20th and 21st century). My advisor once told me that I was tending my interests towards a constellation of queer poets in my own independent research (starting from Hart Crane to now, possibly up to Alex Dimitrov, I need to look into the very latest of queer poets however... it's been a while). I've been interested in challenging and interrogating the canon wars of the 90s as of late, and utilizing queer reading practices and theory... What would it mean then to queer the American poetic canon? In which one places center stage queer poets and centralizes this 'archive' (queer archiving is something I've also been in looking into recently) of queer poets, and how does that de-stabilize normative literary practices and more critically, what does it mean then to conceive of a literary canon in an ever-changing and evolving literary landscape? Halberstam sounds like a similarly great fit for you as well tbh. I'm hoping, but at this rate, only the adcomm knows. And what a happy coincidence haha! In terms of O'Hara, my first exposure and still favorite is 'Having a Coke With You.' I took a seminar on reading poetry two years ago and a graduate student working within my field was invited to the class to read the poem out loud, and I remember being moved (even moreso now, considering what's happened between then and now).

No problem! Tbh tho you yourself sound like you have a veritable body of work if the WS summary is any indication. Crossing fingers that one of the programs you applied accepts you into the fold. Also, this seminar on feminist theory ❤️ I'm in love. This would make my intellectual life and more. Foucault, Cixous, Kristeva, Crenshaw, hooks, Butler, Spivak, Hennessey omg. If there was any class I wish I had when I was undergrad, it would be this one. Thank you so much! It's much appreciated as well, since this whole process has made me question everything top to bottom about all the research I've done. Queer poetics is my jam tbh, and Halberstam was one of my first anchors into queer theory. I'm applying to Columbia and listed Halberstam as a POI and it would be a dream come true if miracles happen. In terms of favorites... It's difficult but if I had to name a favorite, Elizabeth Bishop. I personally relate to a lot of her poetry and find her verse and short story writing to be nothing short of sublime, and she's also been an inspiration to not just my thesis, but to more contemporary poets I've studied as well. If I could expand my thesis into a dissertation, she's next-in-line for an entire chapter. I'm also into Robert Lowell (who I'd love to do a queer reading on), Sylvia Plath, Henri Cole, Hart Crane, Frank Bidart, Wallace Stevens, Frank O'Hara, and James Merrill.

Indeed Fairly recent hire iirc, graduated by the time García started teaching classes so I can't say a lot beyond pure speculation. I'll see what I can dig up. And good luck! I hope you get in. The department's been making a push to hire more faculty as of late (I know there's active searches for tenured and tenure-track Black Studies faculty atm, and an Early Modern search is also happening due to recent retirements, tho as I write this... this feels more a nudge towards interested applicants in future cycles in the 2020s and beyond now lol)

Indeed, and much appreciated ❤️ Munoz was absolutely formative during my undergraduate career, probably couldn't have finished my thesis without them tbh. I've read your summary of your WS and I'm absolutely digging the kind of work you're doing. You've got an excellent set of programs in your sig that fit very, very well. Also, I see you've applied to UC Riverside. That's my alma mater Feel free to DM me about campus culture, living, and the department any time. The English department hired a professor fairly recently that is in the ballpark of your field iirc.

@Bopie5 I love the concept behind your WS omg. And also massive props to utilizing Kristeva. You have a far, far stronger theoretical basis than I do but I've been playing catch up in the interim to stop myself from thinking about decisions so much. (also, great to see a reader of 20th century poetry utilizing feminist/gender theory). My period and literature are related (I'm taking too big of a risk and marketing myself transhistorically, focusing on modernist and postmodernist queer poetics but in my SoP, marking myself as cleanly a 20th and 21st century Americanist), but I primarily work in queer theory as my methodological lens (Edelman, Sedgwick, Munoz, Halberstam, etc are the theorists I tend to float around). My sample is a direct extract from my undergraduate thesis with edits made for clarity and to help the pacing of the paper. I primarily work with the poet Henri Cole and the formation of a 'queer confessional,' arguing within the sample that the de-stablization of truth-making and truth-telling are integral to the formation of reading the confessional mode through a queer theoretical lens. I situate the model of queer confession as one of slippage, through which the direct and simultaneously surreal crafting of Cole's verse tends towards allows what is ostensibly confessed to slip in the in-betweeness of text, the produced image from the text, and text as imagined by the reader. In identifying this slippage, I then further argue the retrieval of confession as one not necessarily rooted in a clear, cleanly coded truth; but instead I question if there is a necessarily clear truth within the text to begin with. With confession as the primary genre I trouble, I draw upon Lee Edelman and Jose Munoz's work to further ground queer confession as both literary model and reading practice, to which I demonstrate how Cole's verse is cognizant of the very points that are proposed in No Future and Cruising Utopia respectively, in which Cole is acutely aware of Edelman's critique of the familial heteronormative while looking towards a poetics of queer futurity that also straddles Munoz's salient point about how 'we are not quite there yet' in the formation of queerness. Thus, what is at stake is the notion of queer confession that plays with and resists the notion of poetic truth, one that situates Munoz's work in Cruising Utopia as a necessary lens to which queer confession is neither a model of espousing an 'alternative' notion of literary truth or literary genre. Cole's poetics, as does queer confession, are instead crossings and slippages that emphasizes futurity and relishes in ambiguity. The whole project surrounding the above was basically the base I used for my SoP to draw upon the larger project I proposed and to describe my experience with literary research.

Honestly been thinking this for my apps tbh. I haven't yet received any official confirmations from any programs but I don't think my SoP or WS were strong enough to make the cut, especially since I applied to mostly name-brand programs. My test scores on both the general and literature (especially the literature test, which did not go well) I should've taken as signs that I should've applied much more wisely instead of letting ambition take the best of me in the form of app costs... I am grateful for the process (for round 2, I now have a much better idea of articulating fit), but it really does take a lot out of you and forces a deep, inward look into your scholarship and interests. Even with a lot of the sunk costs (those app fees...), I'm grateful for the things that I've learned throughout this process. Beginning to think academia may be one of those things that I'll never be cut out for. I've dreamt of this opportunity for a vast majority of my undergraduate career and dedicated the last two years into building my profile for PhD applications, but now... I'm just thinking it's probably not meant to be. I love researching and reading poetry and I can't imagine doing anything else, but I think life is slowly telling me to take a detour or to pivot directions into another path. I'd be grateful for one acceptance, but at this rate... A shutout is all but guaranteed (I've applied to seven, and a vast majority I'm feeling are implied rejections already knowing the crumbs of information that programs put out for the profile of an accepted student)

This sounds tempting Thanks for passing this along. I've been getting into narrative games lately (Quantic Dream was where I started with Indigo Prophecy and Detroit, but some really astounding ones have been released this generation). I've heard very fantastic things about What Remains of Edith Finch, and the fact that it's also free makes this even more tempting. I'll add this to my gaming backlog. Ngl same here lol. And I'm also going through RDR2 myself rn haha. It's an insanely good timesink though and I can't help but marvel at the open world that Rockstar has created. (it also definitely helps pass the time, Arthur Morgan is a great distraction from my e-mail and from checking admission portals). Glad to see another person here playing Red Dead though.

I would absolutely love both of these I need to get into the habit of reading scholarship for its own sake and I love Sedgwick's work. So yes please haha (and it would also help distract me from reading way too much into the admissions database. Video games help but then I'm back into The Grad Cafe again...) Wishing you all good luck in this waiting game! Been kinda biting my fingernails way too much. SUNY-Buffalo is one of the programs I applied to and hearing that they do early admits made the waiting game go from 'ok it's just an abstract concept right now' to 'my god it's actually real somebody help me' in a span of one day.

This one was a very finicky process on my end. I've read a lot of the posts here and tbh all of you here considered things I wish I did when I was configuring the fit parts of my SoP (and at the same time, reading the posts was also a relief because the line of thought I had while constructing the SoP was also fairly similar). Basically, when it came time to determining fit, I took a holistic look at the program's faculty strengths, historical strengths, and whether or not I could determine a sort of skeleton dissertation/exam committee from the faculty. Three to four faculty that had a strong correlation or adjacency with my research interests was the ideal sweet spot, though a few of my programs there was as much as five or six faculty I definitely would not mind contemplating as an eventual dissertation advisor. I selected my seven schools on the basis that I could feasibly select a committee of faculty that would be interested in the proposed project in my SoP. I didn't quite go in depth as I wanted in the researching for faculty aspect, but I focused on researching the works that my POIs did. One top priority went towards looking towards scholars who I have cited in the past (and cited fairly consistently) that are still active faculty, which I admit does have a strongly implicit bias towards more established names and funded chairs who may be too busy/overwhelmed to take on another graduate student on top of their professorial duties. Other critical aspects of fit also involved evaluating their dissertation records (this helped me sway my direction towards a few of the UC schools I am applying to, bless you eScholarship) and the graduate students they chaired or served as committees. Additionally, I also did some field work in evaluating the kind of research that my POIs performed, as well as also evaluating how adjacent my own specific interests could be, as well as also closely evaluating their respective methodologies and favored frameworks of analysis. It does not necessarily have to be a perfect fit, but the potential for dovetailing interests was absolutely critical for the programs I was considering. Now as far as department culture and availability... Those are a massive gamble. For the latter, I think all of the professors I mentioned should be available for the Fall of 2019, but department culture and politics is a shot in the dark and a gamble I had to take in constructing the fit paragraphs of my SoP. Ultimately, the direction I had to take in demonstrating fit is (similarly to another post), point out how the professors I am interested in could mentor and shape my research interests towards more complex nuances than their current form. The impetus behind all of my SoPs and demonstrating intellectual fit to a program is that I already have established academic parameters through my undergraduate research and seminars, but that these parameters are open to becoming more complex and nuanced through the rigor of a graduate program and the mentorship of the professors that I am interested in (whose specific fields may well run through or are adjacent to my interests). Personality fit is itself another thing I've also had to contend with, and the points that Mumasatus brought up are very salient. Mentioning professors that I could work with is definitely a large gamble in determining the 'fit' paragraphs. I tried to take an approach in which I tried to make it clear that in mentioning my professors, I was evaluating their fit with my research interests in a holistic manner instead of making an absolute commitment. They are critical signposts in which I hope I demonstrate that there are appropriate faculty resources for the type of graduate student I envision myself as. Despite my most informed efforts, fit feels very clandestine even now. In my discussions with my letter writers, none of the programs I applied to saw any 'Ranmaag no' type of resistance from them. I'm very much hoping for good things come next months, so I'm keeping an eye out that the admission committees see fit within my own application materials.

Been a while since I posted, but I wanted to check into Grad Cafe as I am currently applying this cycle I have applied to seven schools, and I can't lie I've been doing all I can not to think about the thought of being shut-out (but I have been laying preliminary plans, in which the IRT link posted in this thread has especially inspired me should things not fall into place) I'm an Americanist interested in 20th and 21st century poetry alongside queer theory. I primarily work in queer poetics from the modernist era to the present moment, asking questions about the state of postmodern poetics and the future of queer poetics itself (as well interrogating the notions of archive, archival work, and how a queer perspective on poetics upends, deconstructs, and reconstructs the notion of genre). In short, I love all things poetry and poetics related, and am an especially big fan of poets such as Hart Crane, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and the like. To list them all would turn this post into an essay haha, and I've spent far too long explicating my interests in my SoP that I'm still in my phase of 'ok, I need a break from going way in-depth about my scholarly interests.' I decided to take a gap year. I wanted to apply last cycle, but Senior year of undergrad was stressful on too many fronts. Thesis, work obligations, family. Upon further reflection, I don't think I had quite a strong handle on my interests either... It was really only after finishing my undergraduate research that I had that final eureka moment where I felt most at home in poetry. I've always had a preference for it across all of my undergraduate classes, as many of the classes where I felt comfortable with was analyzing and discussing poetry at any length from any time period. However, I always felt doubtful about my own research interests, and questioned if moving forward with graduate study was the right thing to do. It wasn't until seeing my thesis complete, seeing its introduction to publication, and realizing I felt most comfortable being a 20th and 21st century Americanist was where it clicked. Good luck to all of you This process has been fraught with stress, and I can't deny that I've been second-guessing a lot of the decisions I've made (the GRE was its own hell, the GRE subject test even moreso. The WS... *screaming*), but I really hope many of you get into the dream programs you want to be in.

Hello there! I'm a long-time lurker (looks like I created this account shortly after I finished Sophomore year of undergrad, so I apologize for the incredibly random name) but am only just now posting on grad cafe. I figured that I'd wait until I finished my entire undergraduate career to begin posting. I've read every post here and there's not much I can add as every post has been far more lucid than I'll ever write (I'll be honest and say that some of these posts have been immensely calming down my own anxiety over the SoP and defining my research interests), so I can only offer solidarity. I've only just recently graduated from undergrad and am currently preparing my application materials for the upcoming fall cycle. I've already squared off letters and I'm beginning initial inroads in studying for both the GRE General and Literature tests. I'm also beginning to make a handy-dandy sheet to remind myself of the various program deadlines that I want to apply to. I've decided to take a gap year just to save myself from the chaos of applying during the senior year and to give myself some breathing room from having been in school for a long time. How I found what I wanted to specialize in is basically 90% luck and 10% realizing I performed better in this field after a bit of internal hesitance. I initially went into my undergrad program with a very vague interest in F. Scott Fitzgerald and early 20th century American literature. That got upended very, very quickly by the end of my Freshman year. Now, the field I intend to go into and put in my applications is 20th and 21st century American poetry (starting from the Modernist movement and up to the present moment) with a theoretical subspecialty in Queer Theory. I'll be quite honest with you, trying to even describe what I'm specifically interested in feels terrifying, as I feel like I would just be parroting the senior thesis I wrote and would look very unaware of current scholarly debate. In terms of finding my research interests, I got very lucky in finding just the right professor and right class during my freshman year of undergrad. I discovered very early on that I had a much easier time constructing essays critically analyzing poetry than prose. I noticed this even as I progressed through my undergraduate studies. I felt far more at home in any poetry class versus classes filled with novels, and it didn't quite matter what literary period of poetry it was. (I felt more comfortable studying Romantic Poetry versus the American Novel etc.), but I felt most at home with my American Poetry classes. I was lucky enough that my passions, both in terms of primary text and critical theoretical work, fit very snugly with my interests in 20th century American poetry and onwards. I decided to softly declare it as my specialty right around the time I became a Junior, and it being an actual specialty was ingrained in me when I wrapped up my honors thesis and realized how many holes I could feasibly fill in with the projects I was working (not just my honors thesis, but also a 15-page seminar paper that was more focused on the 20th century part of my interests). My interest in queer theory is kind of even more of an accident. I don't even remember how I was interested in it, I've just always had an extant interest in that critical theory that intensified as my undergrad advisor gave me possible poets to research for my thesis. The poet I settled on allowed for a very clear in-road for a queer theoretical intervention, and reading texts in queer theory is just as enjoyable as monographs on poetry (either movements or specific poets). Monographs that combine both are even more enjoyable. I've had far too many moments, and going through one right now, where I feel ill-prepared to even apply because of how broad-ranging my interests are and can be, even if I've temporally marked the period that I want to research. There's a lot of possibilities I'm considering... One part of me wants to create a constellation of a queer American poetic archive from Whitman to now, there's a part of me that wants to do a critical biography on someone I've studied, one wants to explore the notion of queer lyricism, another wants to continue my undergrad work and see how the conception of queer poetic/post-confession stacks up in literary discourse, another part of me is interested in exploring the island of Key West in poetics as queer and colonized space, another wants to continue reading Jose Munoz, and etc. etc. I have a lot of possible projects crafted out of lunacy and strange over-thinking. At its worst, I feel absolutely clueless and have no idea how I was even able to finish my undergrad degree. I'm still trying to find a way to articulate this all into a reasonable package for a SoP, and I've been very lucky to have supportive undergrad mentors who were able to help gently guide me through research. This is just my anecdote so far from a recent undergrad turned grad. No doubt in a year or two, this will be massively different. Hope this provides some sort of help, but I'm only just starting the formal process of thinking about graduate school and PhD programs in English beyond just an abstract 'I will apply.'