onerepublic96

Aw thank you! I am totally still traumatised from my own cycle, but also incredibly grateful for where I ended up, because I really love it here. I can't even imagine how much tougher this new cycle has been, emotionally, mentally, etc., so I just wanted to cheer everyone on, because every single person here deserves to get into a great program. Wishing you the best of luck! Especially with Michigan, since I'm a little biased, haha. Please feel free to reach out if the stars align and you end up coming here! ?

The meeting is today! I expect decisions should come sometime next week.

Michigan decisions are being made today. Good luck to everyone!

Hang in there! In my cycle, I got into my top choice off the waitlist. ? These things happen!

I agree with @WildeThing. The way this cycle has worked (or next cycle will work) is not going to stick around for too long, but on the other hand, some of the changes being made regarding drastic cuts in admissions: I truly believe these things will never return to "normal." We'll be looking at much smaller cohorts for many years to come, I reckon.

Hi all just popping in to wish you all another round of good luck! Also, I saw someone on the results board post about UMich notifying in the first week of March, so if anyone gets in and would like to have a chat with a current student, please feel free to reach out!

Hi all! I've been pretty MIA on this site for a while after last year's cycle ended, but I just wanted to pop in and wish you all good luck. I can't even begin to imagine how stressful this process must have been this year, and each one of you smart, strong candidates deserves to make it into your first-choice programs. ?

There are many, many reasons why doing two (incredibly strenuous) degrees at the same time is an awful idea, and potential visa issues aren't even among the foremost concerns.

Hi there! I like to think of myself as a modernist but I also am specifically interested in Southern lit (though my subject interests are a bit different from yours). Honestly, I'd disagree that Southern lit is a dying field. When I was applying in the last cycle, I found that the programs at Boston U, Harvard, UMich, and UPenn were my favourites. While it's true that you won't necessarily find tons of scholars branding themselves 'Southern lit specialists' and working in large numbers at any one department, there's a fair number of them in quite a few departments (even at large universities) working with Southern lit as part of a larger project. For instance, much of the scholarship on African American lit also tends to intersect heavily with Southern lit taken more broadly.

Everything @Glasperlenspieler said. Also, just throwing this out there, but you might not necessarily need to find a prof who works specifically in the YA lit branch of queer studies/theory/lit. Finding a queer studies prof who tackles some questions similar to yours, uses methodology that is interesting to you, etc. might just be enough. I'd regroup, look at programs that lean strongly into into queer studies or departments that have lots of people working in the area, go through each prof's research statement, see what they've been writing about and what courses they've been teaching, and determine if any of these things resonate with your own research interests.

I agree with @Glasperlenspieler. The WS is the most important part, and when I was applying, I was generally advised that recommendation letters + the statement of purpose are the second most important aspects. CV + transcripts + GRE scores are tertiary (in very rough terms).

Honestly, the best round to apply was last year's round. And I mean that in the sense that with the current covid/economic/political situation, the next few years are going to be completely unpredictable and range from "weird" to "total shitstorm", but we don't know which will be which. So at this point, the best decision you can make is going to depend entirely on your own financial and mental resources, and not at all on any kind of strategy or statistical game. Do you personally feel like you need to try to get in with the soonest possible cycle? Do you have the resources to deal with it (from figuring out how schools have been affected by Covid to your application/test expenses)? And if you strike out this time, will you no longer be in a position to try again with the next cycle and wish you had waited? Or will you have enough of a cushion (of whatever kind) to try again?

Some programs will allow two samples totalling 15-25 pages, but even those usually note that they would prefer one paper of that length (or even a 15-25 page excerpt of an even longer piece).

"Freestanding M.A. applications are not affected." Well, but of course.

As the above posters have said, philosophy can be/often is a major component as you work on literary studies, but it is almost always a tool rather than an object of study in itself. Otherwise, you would be in the Philosophy Department.

If I had started by MA one year later I would be finishing up my dissertation right now and I cannot even imagine how that would have gone... my god. And the fact that there is no end or respite in sight to ANY part of this COVID/economy tanking/universities in major flux/job market dying off before our eyes is so incredibly taxing...

Ah that’s reasonable. Thanks!

Last year it was right about October for me.

Hi all. Just wondering how much editing is permissible between a paper as given at conference and subsequent publication in a post-conference volume (NOT talking about proper journal publication here)? I’ve got a conference paper that’s a bit more conversational and informally structured, which makes for good talking but not so much reading, and since I’ve never had to deal with this kind of “publication” before, I’m just wondering how much editing it would be acceptable for me to do for this second part of the affair. Whether any extra referencing/argumentation would be permissible...

I took the subject test a couple of times and in my experience, I always got scores back strictly at the 4 or 5 week (I think?) mark that they indicate as their wait time for results. Though you do have to remember that if you wait to see your result before sending the score report to your schools, you have to add an additional 5 days for processing.

I think the general consensus here is going to be that GRE tests (both general & subject) are worthless and unless you are required to submit scores for an application, it's best to not waste precious time on something that won't get more than a cursory look-over.

I agree with @Glasperlenspieler in that it might be worth your time to look into English programs as well. From my time spent looking at faculty pages, there is a lot of work being done on all of these topics in traditional English departments, not just Comp Lit.

I just got an email from a professor who was on the adcom at my program, reaching out... just because? This isn’t someone I mentioned as a POI but it seems they just wanted to reach out as a friendly contact of sorts in the program, and I’m a bit confused as to how to respond to this... any tips?

I feel this! Every few days I keep wanting to clean out my PhD docs folder because all those SOP and WS drafts and other clutter are taking up unnecessary space, but I just can’t bring myself to do it because a small paranoid voice in my head whispers ‘are you suuure? what if admissions get revoked, though? what if funding gets cut? you never know what can happennnnn....ssss’. ?

Thank you, all! I’m off to celebrate with some eclairs!