mudgean

"Another thing to consider is this: A lot of universities, and this is probably even more true for the big name ivy league institutions, get a lot of application from people going through a mid life change, who now "want to go to graduate school at..." These applicants have a B.A.. from 20 years ago, maybe in English, maybe in Biochemistry, but they've always loved English. Let's say they've got great test scores and undergrad GPA's...but they don't have a writing sample, so they have to come up with one or rewrite a term paper on Wordsworth from eons ago. They get recs from professors who reply to their requests with a "Yes, of course I remember you fondly." The recs that get written by these profs are indeed fondly boilerplate -- the letter devised from template that sits in a folder titled "recommendation letter from students who I don't recall." So, this is a student with great GRE scores, great GPA's, maybe decent writing sample and very impersonal recs (whether from celebrity profs on unknown profs, doesn't matter). This candidate will struggle to get into a top 20. What they'll likely end up doing is cry age discrimination -- but really what killed their application is dreamy SOP's ("When I first read Tennyson at age 5, I knew that..."), or LOR's from profs who have lost excitement about them even if that student showed exceptional promise several decades ago." You really seem to be making stuff up here. (I don't know if universities discriminate based on age or not, but that's another issue.) First of all, any halfway intelligent person knows that if they completed their undergraduate work more than ten years ago, they are going to need coursework and letters of recommendation that are recent. As a "mature" person who applied this year to programs, I never once thought of asking my undergrad professors for letters. Also, what makes you think that an older candidate would write a "dreamy" and cliched SOP about some childhood notion? I've been reading widely across disciplines for years. I imagine most older people applying to literature programs have a lot more to write about than their childhood dreams. I didn't even write about college. I've done a lot higher thinking and learning since then. Mid life people who love learning and want to go back to school most likely have been reading in their areas of interest for a long time. For me, academic reading has provided a sense of what intelligent, rational, and interesting writing sounds like. I imagine I'm not alone. I mean, there may be some really deluded older people out there who for some strange reason suddenly want to go to grad school and have NO idea of how to go about it. Most of us have friends, colleagues, computers and a library card and can figure it out. I realize that the paragraph I'm addressing was part of a longer post making a larger point, but the thinking in this section didn't make a lot of sense to me.

Has anyone read The Children of Sanchez, by Oscar Lewis? I doubt it's considered a "must read" in the league of Marx or Weber, but it illustrates many constructs of sociology, such as the culture of poverty. I was enthralled with this book when I read it. I felt like I was a tiny video camera inside Mexican shacks, bars, swap meets, and prisons.

That really hit the nail on the head. Thank you for a good laugh.

Interesting thoughts milestone. I have also wondered what adcomm's conversations must be like. Where do they begin with a stack of 500+ applications? Do they start putting apps into piles based on GPA or GRE's? Probably not rejection or acceptance piles, but piles like "looks promising" "definitely maybe" "a snowball's chance in hell." Or do they just pick an app off the top of the pile, open it up, and dive into the writing sample? I wonder if anyone has ever videotaped an adcom. It would be really helpful to know how the committees discuss writing samples.

fj20 I guess I would go with what people are your program are suggesting. I'm only taking two classes because my program is on the quarter system. Also, I've been out of school for awhile and the last thing I want is to get overwhelmed and fail out (you must maintain a 3.5 GPA) Besides that, I'm persuing this degree partly for my own enrichment and I don't want to to feel that I'm having to skim material or slap together papers. I'll need to take more than two classes the following quarters though. Last summer I took an upper division literature class for graduate credit at a local university. The professor assigned some extra reading and required an annotated bibliography for the final paper. It was a concentrated four week class so the reading was intense, I thought...about one Victorian novella a night, along with reflection papers, an analytic essay, a final essay and a final symposium. There was no real research required though, which I think is the difference between classes like that and the graduate seminars.

Thanks for the information DC and SOM. The issue of mental energy is so important. I'm going to stick to only two grad seminars this fall (they are 600 level classes for grad students only) Writing two 20-30 pages papers will definitely keep me busy. SOM: In my program there is a three course sequence of pedagogy classes (teaching lit comp) that are required the first year if you want to teach and get funding the second year. Those classes start winter quarter.

Okay, I get to be the dumb one once again on this site. My original plan was to complete an MA in three academic quarters, plus one summer (my program requires twelve seminars) I was thinking you could take three or four seminars per quarter and be done. The program director said no way, that it's a two year program, and recommended taking no more than two seminars (that's only 10 credits total) each quarter. I am wondering what other people's experiences have been. How much reading have you been assigned per seminar? How much writing and research did you do for each class? I will take my director's advice, but I'm wondering if it would be crazy to add a language and/or a pedagogy class to this schedule. Is the work load of a graduate seminar much greater than that of a language or teaching class?

I agree. Life is too short to grind away the time at an unfulfilling job. Rationally, I know that a person who chooses not to have children in this overpopulated world/resource depleted world, and instead chooses intellectual pursuits, has to be more valuable to the planet than someone like the octomom. I don't think society's values have quite caught up to the environmental realities. And as far a money and contentment go, calculating the "return" on an Phd, financial or otherwise, is much different for a person without children than someone with a family.

GK Chesterton you are totally right about how the system of "meritocracy" is used to legitimate exclusion, using SAT scores and all the rest. I feel that there is a much greater class warfare going on, and the topic of education is where it all comes to a head. Something like 75% of the wealth in this country has been transferred to the top 1%. This reality is what's shaping everything else. I probably don't need to explain how all this affects student attendance, dropout rates and under representation in college. When Soxpuppet was talking about the democratization of the discipline, it seems like he was talking about people already in the field, who are attending top graduate programs but not the Ivies. It's unfair how they don't get published as much, or are less able to get jobs at R1s. Some others and myself were talking about people who have finished their BA's and are applying to graduate programs. There is some inequity as as access to information and knowledge about how the system works. Still, a group of people who have finished their BA's should be able to compete based on merit provided they can find ways to get information, which these days seems very possible. I think the GRE is one kind of equalizer. Otherwise, people could say, this A from the guy at Yale is way better than this A from the guy at Chico State. The GRE is straight up vocabulary and basic math. Look, on the SAT the highest I ever got was a 560 verbal, and that was after taking it 3 times. I didn't study because people kept telling me it was an IQ test. Just last October I took the GRE for the first time and got 710 (98th percentile) verbal. That's because I've been reading a lot and learning words over the years. I'm sure I could get better math scores too if I cared. There is no mystery here. Besides, it's all about the SOP and writing sample. The field is what it is and you must have great writing skills. One of my friends from the liberal arts college I went to is from a very poor family in Jamaica. The learning curve for her was really steep, but in four years time she closed the gap. She now has a PhD. I don't think she wanted any breaks at the graduate level for being a woman or a minority. I am all for affirmative action at the college level, for the reasons you mentioned. At the graduate level, I don't know. I could say more, but I have a stack of papers to grade.

I don't understand the qualitative vs quantitative debate when it comes to this discipline, and even less your response to it. You seem to be throwing in everything including the kitchen sink, and perhaps trying to impress us with your knowledge of theory. I'll only respond to the TS Eliot/noblese oblige part since I'm the one who wrote that. I didn't think I had to spell out exactly what I meant by that because I think pretty much everyone understands that the noblese oblige thing really didn't mean much to the poor. It seems clear that throughout history the wealthy have not done that much to help the masses. If this were a thesis I would back this up with references to Marx, Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky, Galeano...but this is a thread, right? My point was simply that, hey, people have wanted a meritocracy and now we have one. Elitism of the upper class is now replaced by the elitism of superior intelligence and education. That's a good thing. It's too bad people feel the need to be snobby and judgmental based on the name of their school, but it seems that much of humanity feels the need to be snobby and judgmental about something. When it comes to resentment of the Ivies, I say, life isn't fair in a million different ways so get over it. If you don't want to get over it, put it in its proper perspective and become a social worker. (Anyway, I've been in the trenches for ten years teaching at-risk kids in a severely underfunded state school system, so really, don't worry me believing in noblese oblige) I understand Soxpuppet's main point much better now thanks to many insightful posts. I have learned a lot reading these threads. I like the a certain amount of vitriol too because it keeps things interesting.

I think you would be better off moving on as soon as possible. I don't see what you stand to gain from this place.

You preach it, medieval! There is a lot of wisdom here. The whole contentment issue is another story. It takes life experience and a lot of reflection to figure that out, but you're right, everyone will come to their answers in their own way.

I thoroughly enjoyed "year 3" and I'm glad there's this new thread. I'm coming from left field, just FYI. T.S. Eliot said something to the effect that he was opposed to a meritocratic class system because it would destroy the "noblese oblige" that kept the upper class morally bound to help the low class. If people at the top are smarter and harder working, then people will feel that those at the bottom deserve to be there. This idea is not politically correct today, but it's an idea I've turned in my mind over the years as a public school teacher. I'm thinking about it now as we define our terms "elitist" and "democratization." Certainly the Ivies have a history of admitting a few "legacy brats" and that is definitely elitist. However, it seems like by and large now they are accepting those with the top test scores, the highest GPA's, the most brilliant and creative writing samples. They have huge endowments that they use to fund deserving, down-trodden students from all over the world. It's pretty merit based. Is that elitist? The world is never fair, and many brilliant children all over the world never even get a chance to attend school, but less develop writing skills necessary to compete in academia. Maybe what we are talking about is the equal opportunity to be elitist. To answer your question, I have seen some "democratization of the discipline" here in the Northwest. The University of Oregon has a friendly and inviting website. It tells you straight up the four major areas of emphasis in their PhD program. You don't have to worm your way around inferring, go to the Library of Congress, or begin some mysterious process of interviewing/seduction to get some basic information. Their Literature and the Environment program strikes me as something the Ivies wouldn't have. The University of Washington has become extremely competitive. My guess is that the migration of Californians to the Northwest combined with this recession has led to a huge increase in applications at public Northwest universities, and there are just not that many public schools relative to the population. So UW helps diminish the Ivies and maybe the UC's, but it's not doing anything creative, inspired or different if their website is any indication. It doesn't have to and probably doesn't want to since it gets an annoying number of applications to begin with. That may be true with the other Ivies, although of course those schools are filled with creative individuals. So maybe schools like UofO will create niches that may ultimately make them more appealing to students. Maybe these schools will compete with Ivies for status or maybe not. While there may always be one pie of status to be carved up, that pie might get bigger. Maybe programs in Ethnic Literature and Literature and Film will create more interest in literature at the undergraduate level, thus reversing the decline of literature departments. I would like to see English programs take away status from law schools, rather than worry about the status of Ivy English programs.

The areas Pea-jay mentions are full of character, plus Mission Hills, but that is a little more expensive. University Heights is right next to Hillcrest and has become very cool. I'm from San Diego and if I ever move back that's one place I would like to live. The area right around SDSU is not as cool, but probably less money. A little further east from University Heights is Kensington, which is also nice. It went way up in price around 2002, but it may have come back down. If you want access to the coastal highways/beaches, Kensington feels out of the way. Hillcrest is really the best as far as character, restaurants, movies and location.

1) I read Twilight and enjoyed it, but it was like a giant wad of cotton candy. Besides, I don't need a twisted metaphor for sex. Just do it already. 2) I've been reading the short stories and the profile pieces in The New Yorker. I read that Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy was influential to Paul Krugman, so now I'm curious about that. 3) Laurie Moore's new book The Gate at the stairs. She is an amazing writer, but I think better in the short story format. 4) I finally read Great Expectations. Kind of a strange story when you think about it.

Addiction memoir sounds very cool..I'm thinking of Burrough's Junkie, Augusten Burrough's Dry, and more recently Mary Carr's Lit. It makes sense to me that many people focus on the 21st century because there is new literature coming out all the time that needs to be analyzed and viewed through all these different lenses. What I don't understand is how all these people who specialize, say, in Victorian lit, can be expected to publish articles and books in their field on a regular basis. There are 4,000 universities in the U.S. Let's say each one has at least one Victorian lit professor. Are there 4,000 professors of Victorian lit researching and publishing books in their specialty right now? Do they know what the others are doing, or are they reinventing wheels? True, there are many wonderful yet somewhat obscure authors from that period who have less written about them, but still. There are only so many primary sources from those years I would imagine. You are more likely to come up with something original if you focus on 20th/21st century authors, but each university only needs so many professors in that area. I'm just curious about this. There are so many sharp people on this site, maybe somebody can fill me in.

Thanks mocha. After reading Childhood's End and The Martian Chronicles recently, I've developed a taste for sci-fi, and I've always loved children's lit. Medieval literature is my weak point and if I ever take the subject GRE I'm going to have to brush up on it. Good luck with this process.

I'm going to start a Master's program in the Fall at University of Oregon. I think a Phd would require way too much discipline and focus for me, but I am very curious what people choose to focus on. What topics keep people engaged for 5-7 years? There is a woman at Harvard who is writing her dissertation on racial identity as seen by black comedians, up to and including Dave Chapelle, so this field is a lot bigger than I thought. Anyway, I'm trying to get a sense of things. I would love to hear anyone's journey or thought process along these lines.

I may have a similar dilemma if I get into this one school. For me, I'm going to research job placements. If my cheap(er) and easy lower ranked school has comparable job placement statistics then I'm going with that one. If I DID want a PhD later and to teach at a four year college then I would definitely go for the higher ranked school. I wouldn't worry too much about how interesting the city is. I bet being in a graduate program full time, having kids and possible applying for another degree will keep you plenty occupied.

Clearly that person has a problem. There was no need for that. I've read in several books that if you undergrad studies are ten or more years out they don't really care how well or how poorly you did. They look for more recent graduate classes, writing, academic references, test scores etc.

My goal is to teach at a community college. I have no ambition to become a researcher or a lecturer at a top university. Right now I'm trying to decide between a program that is ranked in the top 100, and one that I don't see any ranking for at all. The second one is much cheaper. Both schools will offer me a stimulating intellectual experience and the MA that I need to teach at a two year college. I already have a teaching credential and experience with kids. My questions is, does status of the program matter? Will community colleges really care if I went to the higher ranked program? I'm wondering if anyone has any knowledge or experience with this.