piers_plowman

At Ole Miss, it's a 3/3 your first and third years (TA for large lit. survey, teach 3 discussion sections a week, 20 students each). 2nd and 4th years are freshman comp., a 1/1. Fifth year a lot of people get diss. fellowships, but if not you could either TA or teach comp. At Cornell, it's fellowship 1st and 4th years. 2 and 5 it's a 1/1 freshman writing, 3 it's TAing, but only one section.

Thrilled to accept my offer from Cornell. The place was full of energy (not to mention its material correlate, $) for the humanities, with a constant stream of speakers, institutes, fellowships, yearly themes, not to mention a solid collegiality and openness between grad students and faculty. And excited to be done with it all!

At this point I've declined offers from UC Davis, UC Irvine, UNC Chapel Hill, Johns Hopkins, and Michigan - hope someone here benefits!

The only reason I'd say GWU might be faculty (Jeff Cohen and Holly Dugan are great, and would particularly be so if you were doing eco stuff), BUT Emory is just as good with Patricia Cahill and Jonathan Goldberg, and it's a much more prestigious school. So, go to Emory, unless you see yourself entering the specific subfield of GWU's faculty strengths (which, if you stick to performance/disability, you won't be).

A much more reliable indicator of quality is placement record, which I feel doesn't get discussed as often as it should. How many people a year is the department putting in tenure-track jobs? How many years after graduation does this usually take? Are people netting VAPs and postdocs? What is the ratio of dissertations filed to jobs obtained? And of course, there's plenty of nuance to the raw numbers. How is the placement in your particular subfield? Does it vary by advisor? Are 1 or 2 senior profs placing students at much higher rates, potentially skewing the data? Making this particularly difficult is the selectivity of the data posted; you either can't see what percentage of people are being hired (more important than the raw number, I'd argue), what field they're in, or what kind of position they got, all of which are very important. Websites notoriously display partial data to inflate perceptions of success. Some programs don't post data at all (not a good sign). All this to say that what we usually value (not always, but usually) about ranking isn't the quality of the education we might receive, but how that education becomes a hiring vector, for which placement data provides a much clearer picture than these rankings.

They've postponed it (indefinitely) due to weather. I'm visiting solo on Friday since this is my Spring Break, the only week I can travel.

Unless you have personal resources that might make up the difference (could live at home, etc.), always chase the funding. Especially at the Master's level: getting a spot in a PhD program from a lower-ranked school is much easier than getting a TT job from one. You're entering a career that will never pay you very well - the last thing you want is a debt-monkey on your back holding you down.

This week I've turned down offers at Irvine, Davis, and Rice. Good luck to all of those waiting! (I'm an early modernist, in case any of these schools have subfield-specific waitlists).

Thanks Wyatt for your (as ever) simultaneously astute and encouraging response. Not enough is said for gut affect - personal enjoyment isn't just a nice plus, but fundamental to mental health and satisfaction, which improve the quality of the work, and thus one's chances, regardless of school or mentor. Self-care is a major part of this lonely and self-starting profession.

Very interesting, and dovetails with another question we've been considering: which is more important on the job market, the overall prestige (i.e. rank, as this survey reduces rank to pure prestige as others see it) of your program or the individual prestige of your letter writers? I'm in a decision situation right now in which one choice has a better overall department, prestige, and placement rate, but its faculty in my own subfield are relatively young and untested. Did you get the sense that the aura around the name on your degree did more for or against you than the reputations of your advisors?

For all of you who are juggling multiple offers, how is your deliberation affecting you emotionally? Maybe I'm not the only one who thought getting some offers would end the stress and usher in a golden age of confidence and excitement, only to find that a decision now seems impossible without disappointing one or more people and sacrificing some truly great options. My advisors are split, with very strong opinions as to where I should go - they're people I want to associate with for the rest of my career as colleagues, conference friends, etc, so I greatly fear that this decision will alienate and disappoint at least one of them. Then, I worry that no matter where I pick, there won't be any excitement, just guilt and "what if's". So, the questions then: how are you all coping with the stress of decision making? Are there things about it that are surprising you? Is anyone else experiencing intense anxiety about disappointing a mentor? After all, they wrote us letters; don't we "owe" them a say in our decision? I can't say this feels worse than waiting for decisions, but it certainly is a new kind of hell. Anyone feel the strong urge to just wildly accept an offer and end it all, like those people who have the sudden urge to drive off the road?

Accepted to Chapel Hill! And on Saturday night, but the email went to my Spam folder! Anyone waiting on them, be sure to check yours. Final response, thank god this is over and I can get to the decision-making. 9a/0w/8r

I'd guess they're yet to notify. We're only a couple days past last year's notification date for them, and they're not famous for tiny cohorts where they could send offers without any GCers getting them and posting (like Vanderbilt).

Unfortunately I think Brown and Michigan are done - I was admitted to both and I've gotten detailed info about campus visits, so I'm pretty certain all acceptances are out. As for Yale I'm in the same boat as you - probably rejection as well. On another note, rejected at Columbia too. Got a personal email from a person I interviewed with, not an official notice from the school. But, it does mean that if people don't hear today, it's likely an implied rejection.

Agreed. They also claimed to be notified by phone, something Columbia has never done before (always email in previous years). Not that that means anything, but for those who applied don't give up hope!