JustPoesieAlong

Traveling back from a lovely campus visit, wearing a UNC hoodie! Planning on giving my formal response as soon as I get home!! ?

Traveling back from a lovely campus visit, wearing a UNC hoodie! Planning on giving my formal response as soon as I get home!! ?

I'm traveling back from a wonderful visit at UNC Chapel Hill, and will be turning down my offers at U of Alabama (Strode),UGA, and TAMU. I'll also likely be taking my name off the OSU waitlist. Hope this helps someone here!

Traveling back from a lovely campus visit, wearing a UNC hoodie! Planning on giving my formal response as soon as I get home!! ?

Traveling back from a lovely campus visit, wearing a UNC hoodie! Planning on giving my formal response as soon as I get home!! ?

I'm traveling back from a wonderful visit at UNC Chapel Hill, and will be turning down my offers at U of Alabama (Strode),UGA, and TAMU. I'll also likely be taking my name off the OSU waitlist. Hope this helps someone here!

Traveling back from a lovely campus visit, wearing a UNC hoodie! Planning on giving my formal response as soon as I get home!! ?

My husband and I have already been together for almost ten years, and we have two kids...I think the way being married affects your life as a grad student has more to do with your relationship style. For me personally, being married and having kids has given me a solid foundation of support that I may have lacked otherwise. That said, especially being married with kids often makes me feel somewhat isolated from most of my peers--or it did in my master's program. I'm hoping to connect with other student parents in my PhD program. 

Officially accepted my offer at Berkeley! Yeesh. Congrats to everybody

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

I just got accepted off a wait list at Illinois-Urbana Champaign (MA for Hispanic Literature). This was my second choice so..I'm ecstatic! 

@FishNerd and I are off to University of Denver! Took us a while to get that figured out, but the visits made everything clear.
Now to look up terrifyingly expensive apartments!

You'll be busy enough with work (and lacking in money) that you might not notice that you've moved to a substantially smaller town!  
Bloomington is a substantial sized university and a substantial sized college town though, and it's a 90 minute drive from Indianapolis which gets major concerts and shows and has a wonderful art museum. I'm from a medium-large city and now doing grad school in a medium-large city and have always been impressed with Bloomington when I've had occasion to visit.
My fiancé has a saying, she says, "Bloom where you're planted."  It's pretty good advice for this profession, because you might end up on the market and only get interviews in Topeka, Tucumcari, and Tallahassee. You generally get fewer options as you move up the professional pyramid.

Former UW student here. It used to be true that funding was easy to secure beyond the contracted years and practically a guarantee. That is no longer the case. They now have a complicated system for ranking students for additional years of funding based on everything from progress on dissertation to teaching evaluation scores. Ask a lot of questions of the DGS, talk to some current students, but I would be wary if the four years doesn't feel like enough (which its not for most people).

I responded to this on the other thread. One of my universities has a similar funding situation, but I heard from a grad student that they mostly use that just in case a student doesn't progress--but basically, everyone who does their work gets an additional year. You could check in with some current grad students to see if there's a similar situation at UW.
P.S. Congratulations again!

Congratulations! I have heard that some universities will only officially guarantee something like four years, with a "possibility for an additional year" so that they have something in place if you don't progress--but that most people in the program end up getting that last year. Maybe that's what going on with UW? You could ask a grad student what the likelihood of an additional year of funding is. 

I'm also almost 30. You may have read me saying this already in the Literature forum, but I took three years off to explore life as a non-student. I was surprised to discover that, although I wasn't a student anymore, I felt a lot less...professional freedom? Part of it may have been that I was an hourly employee, but something about having to answer for every minute of my day and have near constant interaction with supervisors of differing levels made me feel more infantile than I did as a grad student. I guess I almost felt more of an adult professional as a grad student than I did in my office jobs where I always had to answer to someone. By contrast, as a grad student, budding professional scholar, I felt more trusted accomplish tasks--or had to face the consequences if I didn't make that happen, but even then it was more of my choice to be responsible or not. I don't know if that makes sense, but I'm really looking forward to being a student again. 

I was unanimously rejected from almost 10 universities last year. So I took a gap year with the full intention of making it the “best gap year ever.” I had a volunteer position with Americorps Vista and was determined to travel and improve my spanish speaking skills.
But after a month into the Vista program, i realized that the program wasn’t for me. I was not in a good place mentally and emotionally while the small living stipend only stressed me out even more so. I moved back home. I thought I could easily get a job with my newly earned degree but after countless interviews the only job I could find was at Verizon Wireless and the pay wasn’t worth the commute. My parents own a restaurant and after watching me struggle with grad school rejections, employment rejections, and dropping my volunteer program they made me move back in for good and take over the restaurant. I still wasn’t in a good place emotionally so they were very adamant about just working at the restaurant and not worry about anything else. So I’ve spent this year as a cook, server, manager, janitor etc. I don’t even get paid. The point Im trying to get at is that my gap year was the most unremarkable year I’ve ever had. I served pasta and fried chicken while working my way through Spanish children’s books.
But I still think this year was incredibly successful. The break from school helped me realize how badly I wanted my PhD and career. It gave me time to reflect on what I wanted to do and put a lot of things in perspective. It was successful b/c I got to take a breather before jumping back into academia. The difference in my application was night and day. I’m fact, 4 of the schools that rejected me last year, admitted me for the upcoming fall semester. 
As for balancing work and application perpetration : you’d be suprised how much time you have when you’re not in school. A “regular” job/life leaves you with lots of down time, so use that time to figure out your interests, both academically and recreationally. Read some books, watch some Netflix, go to the gym!. If you have some schools in mind, find your people of interest, and read some of thier work. If you are still enrolled in a university, download or print thier research from academic journals while you still have access to it and a reliable library. Then take the next few months to read through it. I read the research of at least 3 ppl of interest for each school. For 10 schools, thats 30 people and multiple papers each! But i also used thier research to narrow my own research interests and form my own ideas. (I’m want to study American modernism and African Americans lit.) I also kept in contact with my advisor and sent him drafts of my statement and writing sample. I did all that and regularly worked on Spanish acquisition. My 9-5 job gave me lots of time to do so. So don’t worry too much about time. BUT make a plan early. You have lots of time but that time needs to be organized. Give yourself deadlines and stick to them. Make a budget too. The application season will be here again sooner than you think so you don’t have long to get everything as perfect as possible! So take a few weeks of down time and then get organized.
Use your gap year to relax. You deserve it! And good luck next year!

My interactions with Washington University in St. Louis have all been positive. I also wanted to provide an update to this thread (for future readers) that the subject test is now optional at WUSTL. The SOP and Writing Sample remain the two most important components of the application.

Gearing up for accepting my Michigan offer this week!

Just turned down UT Austin. Hope someone gets my spot soon!!

I have 

This this this. I was a salaried employee, but I was still junior (the head of the division was in her mid 50s, and junior staff were in their 20s and 30s). Professional life can be very hierarchal, but as a PhD student you have 100% ownership of your project. You don't get that level of responsibility as a professional until you are right at the end of your career. 

I don't know if anyone here is waiting on Emory, but I did finally get some information from them that may be of use for future applicants: It turns out, they do use a secret/invisible wait list, or pool of applicants they keep on hold in case there are any "unexpected openings." That's where my application has been slumbering. Unfortunately, they don't expect a spot to open up at this point and I can expect a formal rejection to come soon. Frankly, though, I'm quite pleased to have made it that far!

I think an in person conversation makes sense. That said, if the program isn't supportive, that tells you a lot.