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whodathunk

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  • Application Season
    2017 Fall
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    English Literature

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  1. I got this too! I found it disquieting but ultimately ignored it bc 1. I don't have time to panic about it 2. I don't see why in their right mind a "submit now!!!" email would make people suddenly ready to submit if they're not 3. It seemed to come from the general GSAS rather than the English department? And if they're saying the whole graduate program cycle is competitive--I mean, duh--I'm less worried. Would love to hear others' thoughts though, this is odd!
  2. I've never considered applying to any of those, but that's all fine of course--a department's stated preference is different from hearsay is all my post was saying.
  3. While I'm sure you actually heard this and I'm not saying it's categorically false, I might stop short of taking anecdotal evidence as evidence of a broad trend, just because it's fallacious and a bit dangerous (seriously, no one stalking these forums has this kind of info). Applicants do read these forums, see things like that, and get psyched out, ultimately for nothing--me included--I can't tell you how many times 'insider advice' I read on Gradcafe 6 months ago turned out to be blatantly, comically false when I asked professors about it--on the subject of everything from SOPs to BA vs. MA to subject tests. On this particular subject, I actually hear how the opposite of this is true quite frequently, but I've only ever spoken to professors at top 10 programs. It might be true elsewhere too, though. Can't say! And honestly, that's my only point--that much of this forum is built on hearsay, anecdotes, and casual advice, and posters don't emphasize that quite often enough & instead phrase posts as the relation of true insider knowledge. Really, the only evidentiary support of a shift toward preferring MA students would be a stated preference from a committee, or maybe the demographic makeup of the program. E.g. if 70% of people came in with a masters, there's probably a preference for them, but it's still the case that at places like Harvard, they explicitly state that most people don't come in with MAs. If a student with a BA and an MA are equal in all but the degree, I see no reason why the MA student would be preferred. I've also never heard of a PhD program that dissuaded someone from applying because they didn't have an MA. You're absolutely right that an MA can aid someone in preparing a strong application--stronger than the one they would have submitted with only a BA--but it doesn't necessarily then logically follow that all MA students are more prepared than BA students.
  4. I mean, it might get you the answers to two questions, but "massive" is overstating it. I pointed it out more because it signals how the test focuses less on ID questions now (they're not fussed if you're clever and look in the back of the booklet for a couple of the answers; I can't imagine they printed the tests without knowing) and more on reading comprehension--the ability to read complex literary texts quickly and answer 5-7 questions about them.
  5. So just to follow up on my previous post, I might have been a bit too conservative. Turns out radical academics are Trump's first target for pillaging. Scary.
  6. Don't have a lot of time as I'm running up against a deadline but I'd like to offer some thoughts here, as I agree that there's definitely a paucity of online anecdotes about the current state of the test that are actually informative rather than just "what the fuck" screamed over and over. It's probably most helpful to show how it distinguishes not from the prep book (I didn't even open the PR book) but from the four practice tests that are available (I took all of them in the runup to my own testing experience). Test content. While the distribution of subject matter is the same and it's not like there's really any new material, there are more passages, longer passages, more questions per passage. I was finishing practice tests with 20-35 minutes to spare, easily, and the first time I took the test I didn't even get to three of the passages. Just completely ran out of time. And I can only put a small part of that down to nerves/fatigue, really. I wasn't expecting how much of my mind-power would have to go not only toward answering the questions correctly, but also keeping up a very quick pace, in order to finish it. So my advice on that front would be to speed read and be aware of how your practice tests will differ from the real thing. The identification questions are fewer in number and are also a bit of a joke, on that note--two passages I had asked the standard "Who wrote this" question, despite the fact that the back of the testing booklet had rights permissions (where the author and name was identified!) Such a huge giveaway. Whereas the first time I took the test, I found several of the ID questions impenetrable (e.g. translating a very old foreign language work with no context clues into modern english and asking you when the original was written...there's just absolutely no way of knowing unless you were very, very familiar with the OG text.) Vade Mecum is still a help, though I'm dubious as to whether PR has much contemporary relevance--it's just so outdated from what people say. Quizlet helped a lot with learning poems; some people have uploaded mammoth GRE Lit sets. Definitely (re)learn the Bible and mythology if you aren't up to scratch on those; those questions are easy points. Listen to podcasts, watch documentaries on YouTube on various movements (i.e. is there something on Paradise Lost, another on Romantic poets, etc.). Basically in the month or so leading up to the test, utilise various modes of learning and absorption that don't only involve rote memorisation, which can only get you so far (and while making flashcards is great, it's also incredibly time-consuming, as you're probably writing a lot down on a single card to make it useful). Knowing the names of all of Donne's most famous poems will get you far less mileage than knowing how to distinguish what might be a poem of Donne's from a poem of Herbert's instinctively from their style and diction choices. There are far too many bad posts on this forum about preparation that involve actually trying to read several authors' oeuvres (I remember seeing a 200 book reading list which really freaked me out) and that could not be a more colossal waste of time for this specific purpose. TLDR: The test as it currently stands an overpriced game of trivia on crack. Tailor your strategy accordingly, taking into account how you might cultivate skills of stylistic and content-based recognition, guesswork, and breadth of the canon.
  7. Let me try to answer bit by bit. "I'm really loath to talk politics on forums etc., but in light of Trump's largely unexpected victory, I think it's perfectly relevant to ask: what does this mean for us as applicants? And what does it mean for us as future English scholars?" To be honest? I don't see how much has changed or will change in terms of net effect on your PhD. The creeping effect of neoliberalism into academic departments and the general decay in funding for the humanities occurred long before Trump and will continue (I'm assuming that any PhD applicant knows about this, but if you want an incredibly current and incisive #hottake, read Newfield's The Great Mistake particularly chapter 3, or even Helen Small's The Value of the Humanities which gives a good map of the various happenings and their value-based implications). However, I'd urge any applicant to consider how protected you'll be compared to others: academic institutions are culturally and financially elevated, mostly white, and fairly wealthy. They are not going to be Trump's first, second, or even third pick for pillaging. "These questions are only partially related, of course. The first one addresses whether or not a Trump presidency will have programs pre-emptively reducing the number of applicants they accept in anticipation of major cutbacks to education. There are thousands of similar concerns people will be raising in the coming days and weeks, but since this one affects us directly, I'm curious to hear your thoughts." Yeah so again see above--I think this betrays a fundamental naivety as the "major cutbacks to education" you anticipate have been going on in the USA *for decades* and are mainly enacted on a state level. Read Guillory, Guess, Wendy Brown, etc. This backdates Trump. A lot. And while any funding cuts to the public school system may have implications for public universities, I fail to see the uniqueness, i.e. Republican governors will gradually defund anyway. My second question is broader, and speaks to the fact (and it really is a fact) that this election was primarily won by the sheer number of white Americans with limited education coming out to vote. In a very real way, Trump's win was about appealing to the masses who have either had limited access to, or a pronounced disdain for higher education. It's impossible to know what is going to happen over the next four years, but how do we persist in the face of a majority that undervalues education? tldr: the majority already undervalued education! (See above!) Also I've been seeing this everywhere: framing Trump's victory as a class issue (e.g. access to education = more likely to vote for Clinton.) This isn't really the case--66% of white women voted Trump; a majority of men with and without college degrees voted Trump; women with college degrees voted Clinton but only by a margin of about 5%. It seems you're eliding the bigger issue here: whiteness. Trump won because he mobilised the white vote, not the uneducated vote, though the latter is part of the former, if you get what I'm saying. As for what changes in the academy, I would hope that it's a call to action, to activism and a revitalized strain of critical theory for the modern age. Who knows though. Just my two cents.
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