punctilious

I am excited about The Look of the Book because it is sort of the intersection between my husband's and my interests since I'm a graphic designer! And David Alworth was his main POI when he applied to Harvard.

My husband is always happy to share his SOP for anyone who wants a sample in the future! Just shoot me a PM.

Husband is on break now (woo! first semester down!) so if anyone needs last minute SOP or whatever edits, advice, etc. we are here to help!

Just to be clear, he just had a footnote, no works cited page. But yeah I'm not sure that it really matters.

My fingers are crossed for all of you! I can't believe a year has already gone by since we were in the same position.

Husband used a couple quotes in his SOP from Pynchon and Latour but he only put in a footnote for Latour. Coming from a person who works in marketing and development, I'd imagine if POIs are skimming your work and see one footnote and it's citing someone they're into, it might help. My department at my job sends out lots of letters to donors, and they generally will look at the "P.S." stuff after looking at their name and first sentence. That's what hooks them. I would think that might work here, too. Our POI at Harvard is super into Pynchon and Latour. If he skimmed, our first sentence is a Pynchon quote and our only footnote is Latour. I might be reading into this too much, and it's not something we actively thought about when he was writing the piece, but looking back on it I imagine it grabbed our main POIs attention at Harvard, and he was the one who made the first acceptance follow-up call to husband. All that being said, I really don't think it matters much. None of our letter writers made any comments on footnotes/citations when they were looking at his SOP.

You seem to have a somewhat limited list of 'big cities' here (what about Chicago? DC? Boston? etc.). My husband and I were very selective in the places we were willing to live as well (big cities or quite close to big cities, and mainly in the northeast), and it's certainly plausible to have that as a limiting factor but I would perhaps consider expanding the locations you're willing to consider. This may allow you to determine more schools with strong fits of varied rankings.

I think this is roughly how my husband did it. Happy to send you his as an example if you PM me.

Just to throw in our experience, my husband (American student) originally applied to MAs in the UK and Ireland because we want to live in Europe after his PhD, and despite getting into TCD, Cambridge, and Edinburgh, he ultimately decided not to accept and instead to re-apply to PhDs in the US. This was due to funding--there was none for him at those schools, and there was no guarantee that he'd get any for the PhD that he wanted to go onto. I think we ended up making the right decision, though it was painful for him, as he's now headed to a great fully-funded PhD program.

Husband’s cohort is 8–quite a few people who were admitted seem to have ended up choosing Princeton, Berkeley, UChicago, etc. over Harvard.

Feel free to message me if you need support--I'm a graphic & web designer.

Play to your strengths, not to your weaknesses. You have a lot of incredible experience that can be discussed in your CV and SOP, and like @CulturalCriminal said, I don't think you need to focus on explaining yourself. The successes my husband has seen outside of school in his two years between undergrad and starting at Harvard this fall (publishing a couple book reviews and a short story) very likely contributed to his acceptance at his dream program, so the work you've done outside of school can be just as valuable as what you've done in school.

Since my friends have already answered your other questions, I thought I might jot down some notes here. Funny enough, husband did reach out to one professor almost a year before he applied (when he was debating taking a Master’s offer at Cambridge). He never responded, but that ended up being the first professor who called him from Harvard. Did it make a difference? Unlikely. He probably never even read husband’s email. But others have found success in contacting professors at prospective schools I think. We didn’t contact anyone else. I do recall some applications asking you to note faculty you’ve had contact with, though. This has less to do with what the school explicitly wants and perhaps more with the experiences of those who have applied at those schools. Kind of like how husband and I now know a bit more about what’s harvard was looking for, others who have applied to schools you’re interested in may have found that reaching out to professors did or didn’t work for them.

Absolutely! I'm always happy to help.

Please note that our experience of course differs from everyone else's, but here are my responses based on my husband's application process! Husband didn't write an undergrad thesis and got into his top choice, so I wouldn't sweat this! He used a paper he wrote on Charles Olson for an American poetry seminar, and another paper he wrote on John Donne for a high-level / non-seminar transatlantic poetry class (he's not studying poetry tho lol). Husband's research experience was in the history department rather than English, and he had no writing center experience, so again I wouldn't worry about this. Husband's was a 163 so I don't think that will be a problem for many schools. Husband had a couple fantastic and helpful letter writers that only had him for one English course. Only one of his letter writers was someone he worked with in multiple courses, and that was actually a Russian professor rather than English! One of his other letter writers was his history research advisor and I think he may have only had her for one course. Again, he had no thesis, so I don't think that matters much as long as you find some reliable professors that have good things to say about your capabilities! I can't speak to this one as well, but I'm sure your writing sample(s), statement of purpose, and letters of recommendation mean more than your GPA. They want to see that you fit in their program and a GPA doesn't tell them much. You can't know for sure whether any school is looking for someone with your interests. The best thing you can do is research schools that are a good fit for you based on the factors you deem important, like location, resources, faculty in your field, etc. We had no clue that Harvard was moving more toward creative writing, public-facing writing, and theory but that they currently have a strong focus on close-reading. Amazingly, my husband's two writing samples were close readings, he's published a couple book reviews and a short story recently, and his SOP touched on some apparently 'hot' theory. So he was a match for this particular cycle. There are so many factors that go into the process, and you can't predict what will happen. Feel free to message me if you need any help with the process!

I'm so sorry to hear that. I'd imagine it was a pretty painful process having to wait that long, but now you can focus on the upcoming year and getting your list of schools / application materials ready! I second Warelin--if you need absolutely anything, let me know! It's going to be rather sad not getting to work on application stuff this cycle so I'm totally happy to help you (and anyone else) out!

You fill it out with potential schools to determine which you’d like to apply to based on the factors most important to you. It can also help with writing your SOPs and making final decisions. When we filled in our spreadsheet, we were able to see whether a school was in a location we wanted to live, had multiple strong POIs, etc. I also have a pretty crappy memory so it was helpful to look at my spreadsheet to see oh yeah, that’s why we aren’t applying to Stanford, Oregon, Northeastern, etc. Building my spreadsheet was one of the first things we did the summer before he applied based on advice here and elsewhere—it was invaluable in our process so I wanted to pass that on!

Hi everyone! I wanted to share this resource I built with the help of @Warelin and @a_sort_of_fractious_angel! It's a spreadsheet for prospective English PhD students to fill out to determine which schools they may want to apply to. I'm calling it The Fit Finder. Please feel free to check it out, and if you like it, you should be able to hit File -> Make a copy in order to save it to your own Google Drive and use it! Let me know if you have any issues or questions. I used a similar spreadsheet to help my husband decide where to apply, and we would have been in absolute chaos without it.

YAYYYY so happy for you! Congratulations!!!

I’m sooo excited for everyone! What an adventure it has been with you all.

Congratulations @a_sort_of_fractious_angel and @automatic!!! So exciting!

And the final result is in: rejected from BU but accepted to their MA with a rather pathetic $10k tuition reduction scholarship. I should probably edit my signature to include the MAs we were sent onto. What an incredibly strange experience this has been!

Huge congratulations to @ThePandaBard and @la_mod!!! It’s so exciting to see all these decisions being made!

Yay!! That is so awesome! Congratulations!

More like a 20-25 minute walk (ask my husband about the brutal winter walks he took from UVM to where I was living on the waterfront during my last semester! Lol) but there’s a free shuttle down College Street that’ll get you there faster, and a lot of people live between UVM and the waterfront so you could be closer. The waterfront park is nice, as are the biking trails. It is a lovely place to spend a couple of years, especially if you enjoy outdoor activities and winter sports. It’s a super liberal/hippyish/hipster city as I’m sure you’re aware. There are some fantastic restaurants (A Single Pebble, Sherpa Kitchen, Skinny Pancake, and Asiana House are a few faves). It’s also close to Montreal which is always a fun weekend trip. I had to escape Vermont, but I do think I can say I enjoyed Burlington and UVM overall. Burlington will probably feel small if you’re from a city. The entire population of the state of Vermont is smaller than the cities of DC or Boston, which felt stifling to me but will be invigorating and refreshing to others. UVM is also severely lacking in diversity, which may also be a bit of a culture shock if you previously attended a diverse institution, though Burlington is more diverse than the university. Husband was more involved in the history department than the English department, but he did have some stellar English professors.