piers_plowman

Thanks Wyatt! Another person posted an acceptance as well, hopefully they also claim it!

This is somewhat (quite) embarrassing, but it's actually early modern - I created a medieval handle because I was venting massive anxiety on these forums that I didn't want traceable to me by other members of my current department. I'm an early modern ecocritic with subfields in the history of science and sound studies, applying with MA. Northwestern had (in your excellent phrase, Wyatt) a couple hand-in-glove fits.

Northwestern is me, got the email this morning at 6:11 AM from the grad school - details and funding to follow shortly from the department itself. So thrilled! First response! Already feeling the Lake Michigan chills.

Comp Lit is my guess - while English and Comp Lit are technically the same department at Columbia, they insist that you specify CL on your application so it can be read by those professors, implying nominally separate status. They even have their own CL institute, apparently. From their website: "If you are planning to go on in Comparative Literature, you should list "Comparative Literature" as your subfield on the first page of the application, perhaps as one of a pair of subfields, such as "Comp.Lit./Renaissance" or "Comp.Lit./Postcolonial." This specification will help ensure that your application is read by faculty in your areas of central interest. Please see the home page of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society for further information on the Comparative Literature program" This is pure speculation, could be English, but my guess is no.

No problem. It's designed as a three-year program; it's possible to finish in two, but you'd be hard-pressed to do so, especially trying to apply to PhD programs in the fall of your second year. That third year might be a detriment to some who are looking to finish quickly, but I've loved the extra time to plan my apps, polish my materials, and write a quality, extensively researched thesis. The third-year, where you write the thesis and nothing else, models a dissertation year. Everyone admitted is funded for three full years. Extra merit funding is awarded from a checklist - high GPA, high GRE, etc etc. I can't remember the exact cutoffs though. The first and third years you're a TA for a lit. survey course, where you grade and lead three discussion sections a week. The second year you teach a single section of First Year Composition each semester. During the summer you'd teach one section of a survey lit. course, either in June or July. They show preference for first-years, meaning you're basically guaranteed a teaching slot your first year, but it's fairly easy to get them afterward as well, and if not there are many Research Assistantships, which pay less but are less work. I pay $500 a month, which is high because I prefer to live alone. I know many people who split houses for $800 or so a month. Oxford is tiny (20000 permanent residents, 20000 students), so virtually anywhere you'd live is within 3 miles of campus. I do have a car, and I'd recommend it, but because of the size it's possible to get by without one, if not ideal. There is a bus system that's fairly reliable, 7 days a week until about 9 at night. Several color-coded lines. For more info I'd email the department secretary, April Wootten (awootten@olemiss.edu). She'll either forward your email onto our listserv, or set you up with someone to correspond with. Hope that's helpful!

I'm finishing up my MA at Mississippi, and it's been lovely. Small, inclusive department in a college town. The $10000 is just the base pay, they might offer you merit bonuses (I got an extra $1000 a semester for the first two years), and summer teaching and research assistantships are readily available, paying $3500 and $2000, respectively. MS is obviously a cheap state, and it's not like you'll be loaded, but I've found my stipend (including bonuses and summer work) adequate. Plus, the three-year program is excellent with an eye toward the PhD; it's longer, sure, but you get a full year beyond coursework to write a thesis (meaning you're digging deeply into your intended field) and to prepare your apps with much greater leisure than you would if you were scrambling to finish coursework in the second year.

Seventeen - anxious terror about not being accepted drove me to send more to spread the risk. My girlfriend and friends staged an intervention to get me to stop. Unfortunately we're the perfect subset of people to overdo this kind of thing - perfectionists who build complex projects over time by adding a wealth of detail slowly but steadily. When your paper needs revisions, you add a source here, a footnote there, rephrase this or that sentence. Anxious energy is normally very productive, but in this case it isn't - since the outcome is so opaque and random, after a certain point that anxiety just drives you against a wall.

I received a response today from UCLA about a late rec letter; they said as long as it's in in the next couple weeks or so they'll still consider my application as complete. Most schools are flexible, as it's the end of busy semesters and the letters are out of your control (and no one reads anything until January anyway), but there are stricter exceptions, like Northwestern.

Thanks, @screamingacrossthesky, that's great advice. My other components should convince the committee I'm a worthy applicant. I've written an explanation of the grade that I'll attach to any apps that allow "extra" documents or "any more info," but you're right, I can't waste SoP space for that. @WildeThing, I heartily second the advice of other posters to practice speed reading, and watch your time. I'm a good test taker, and was prepared, and I still finished with just about 5 minutes left. I also skipped grammar questions: those take time, you consider, you read the sentence aloud to yourself twelve times. Most other questions are know or don't know. Also look for patterns of answers: if this were a Romantic poem, that would also allow the author to be Blake in the last question, and would explain the Coleridge answer in the next question, etc. The questions frequently build off each other, as series, so you infer some of them by looking for patterns of answers. I also just had some inherent advantages: I went to a liberal-arts college, interested in broadly familiarizing me with the canon. Then I went to a three-year Master's program, so I've had more time than most to be exposed to different periods and texts.

I'm wondering if relatively good GRE scores can compensate for a (comparatively) low GPA. I have a 3.71 undergrad GPA, and a 3.85 Master's GPA (grandfather died mid-term, was out of town for three weeks, got one B in a pedagogy training course - i.e. not a lit. seminar - all other grades As). These aren't terrible grades, but I'm applying to top programs. However, I have solid GRE scores: 170v, 158q, 5.5aw, and a 780 (99th%) on the Subject Test. Will these cancel each other out?