M(allthevowels)H

Hi, I'm new here; but I'm in my 10th year of my PhD program and am currently working on my dissertation prospectus. My situation is probably unique in that I had a guide dog (well, actually, two guide dogs since one retired in the middle of my 2nd year) throughout my program. And, if you can believe it, some fellow students were hostile to the necessity of my use of a service animal. I did not have it easy with my colleagues and even some faculty (I was banned from taking a course because of assumptions made by the professors about my visual disability). But, I insisted on my right to use a guide dog and my right to attend grad. I'm determined to finish my degree however long it takes.  

bumping an old thread, but the GRE. SUCKS. my fee waiver so very generously covered 50% of it, but 50% still makes the test 100 bucks. and there were technical difficulties. i lost a paragraph of the essay and two/three minutes due to the server crashing. thanks, gre!
poor website design and poor wording on said websites are absolutely maddening. if it takes me more than three or four clicks to get to graduate funding, or at least a preliminary explanation of the funding, i get a little nervous. 

That's a different matter altogether and neither here nor there. As a graduate student, your aim needs to be to write articles that can get published in peer-reviewed journals, not to unsettle the assumption that only single-authored publications are the goal. As a graduate student, you have limited time and resources. You need to make the most of that time so you can put yourself in a good position for the job market.
 
Again, same idea applies. Edited book volumes are nice, but they do not carry the same weight as an article in a peer-reviewed journal when one is on the job market. 
 
But this is your institution. And again, we're not talking about the field in general but about what will help a particular graduate student maximize their time in graduate school, and it's still widely accepted in English that a graduate student should not "throw a publication away" on an edited collection or to try to co-author an article.
FTR, I *do* encourage attending conferences. If nothing else, they get you ready for a very crucial part of your career. They also prepare you for job talks. I just think that some of the information being thrown around here is not useful for a beginning-level English graduate student, and by "some" I mean just a small portion. 

A couple of field-specific points:
Bullets 2, 4, and 5 are absolutely true. Presenting at conferences really allows you to get your feet wet and refine your ideas. However, as with everything academic, I often receive opposing recommendations, or questions that are more about the person showing off his or her knowledge. Also, not every participant in the discussion may be acting in good faith. Some people are awful, and they will use any excuse to tear into a budding scholar as a way to build themselves up. Luckily this is rare; I've seen it happen only once in my life, when a panel respondent used a graduate student's paper to go on a diatribe about how we needed to declare a moratorium on the subject she had just spoken on because it was just so, well, in his words "self-evident.: These things rarely happen, but they do happen once in a while. 
Having said that, I'm glad I presented at those two dinky conferences (and then two other dinky conferences during coursework) before I started at presenting at the "big time" conferences, which were indeed stressful. You really do need the practice. You don't want your first conference to be when you're a third-year PhD student at the biggest and most important conference in your field. But, as a master's student, going to conferences in and of itself will have little to no effect on your application.
As for bullet point 3--people in English rarely coauthor papers. And coathored papers do not "count" as much on one's CV. But it is indeed a good way to meet people so that you can organize panels in the future. 
As for bullet point 1--I would say it's rare that you'd meet a famous scholar who would then want to work with you on the basis of your conference paper. My friend did get approached one time when she was a master's student and invited to apply to this professor's program, but we discovered later that he had a difficult time getting and keeping advisees. He was also looking to recruit more minorities to what was nearly an all-white program. 
But something else can and often does happen at a conference--if your paper is good and a journal editor is in the audience, they may come up to you and invite you to submit it to their journal. And that's exciting (though obviously it's no guarantee of publication). 

Sure. But you might need to play the game to some extent if you want to make progress in academia. I don't think (graduate) conferences are the worst part of professionalization in our domain... 

I don't particularly like my cat. I feel bad even saying this, but it's true. I thought I would like having a cat, but I don't. I've had him for almost 4 years, and it hasn't gotten better.  He gets into everything tears things up, and wakes me up in the middle of the night. I don't think he likes living in my small apartment, and so I let him outside, but then he wants in and out randomly. And last night he decided to use my couch as a restroom because the room his litter box was in was closed off, and now the whole apartment smells like cat pee.  Sometimes he's cute, but overall I feel like our whole relationship is me telling him not to do stuff and him annoying the heck out of me.  Don't get me wrong, I'm not going to get rid of him. If I commit to a responsibility, I commit to it. But I just don't like him 75% of the time.

I am super pumped to meet my future cohort in the fall, but if one more person replies-all to the email thread about the Facebook group to inform everyone else that they just joined it, I'm going to lose it.

I just paid my driving lessons! ?

If your ultimate goal is to teach creative writing, I'd recommend looking into either English PhD programs with a creative dissertation or a Creative Writing PhD program. 

I'd like to add a note here that Cornell University only has two tracks (fiction and poetry) for the MFA program. Nonfiction is still an often ignored portion of Creative Writing.

Some programs that offer Nonfiction as a track include:
Adelphi University
Bard College
Bennington University
University of Cincinnati
University of Houston
University of Rhode Island
University of Wyoming
University of Utah
As a side note, there are programs such as Washington University in St. Louis (WUSTL) and (@M(allthevowels)H, correct me if I'm wrong) Vanderbilt that allow their enrolled PHD students to enroll in their well-regarded Creative Writing courses.

That depends on what you want to do with your life. Disclaimer: I've never done an MFA but have friends who have/are.
 To state the obvious, and something I'm sure you already know, the expectations between writing a dissertation and writing an MFA thesis are wildly different.  While it might depend on your committee, a dissertation isn't likely to satisfy your appetite for memoiristic writing (I had a bit of that in dissertation initially, but had to cut it to make room for... you guessed it, more theory and analysis). The dissertation form traditionally does not allow for a lot of stylistic experimentation or inventiveness, as its purpose is (generally speaking) to be a work of lengthy, rigorous, and original research that makes a contribution to, and is in dialogue with the field.  For better or worse, that has generally come to mean a very specific kind of work and specific kind of writing.  
Of course, if/when I get to convert my diss into a book, I intend to restore the more personal, memoiristic touches, if my hypothetical editors approve. Fortunately there is a wide (usually very wide) gap between your dissertation, and the book you'll ultimately publish. But you may be delaying the gratification of realizing that goal for 4-6 years after you defend your dissertation. PhD time is glacial, it seems to me, compared to MFA time.
Likewise, if you don't like teaching English comp, then you're going to have a rough go at most English grad programs. That said, I know many grad students who vocalize their dislike for teaching comp, and even teaching generally, and still seem to be successful in their programs.
Based on your interests, it really sounds like the MFA is the way to go.  The best thing about the MFA in comparison is that it usually takes less than half as long as a PhD, and so depending on your age you'll still have plenty of life left to pursue a PhD if you want it. My PhD program is chockablock with MFA holders.

Don't know about all the rest bc I am a lowly undergrad but I too have looked at MFA/PhD programs and there's one at Indiana Bloomington, and then the University of Houston and the University of Southern California have PhDs in both. I've also heard on this forum that some people can get into one and then create a hybrid program while at the school, even though one might not be published.

Congratulations on making your decision!!

I don't think it's true that you MUST attend them for your PhD application, but it can't hurt, especially as an MA student. Your graduate conference should be just fine. 
That said, I don't think conference presentations, strong personal statements, and a good writing sample are mutually exclusive.  When you're a PhD student you'll be expected to be preparing conference papers, writing your papers/dissertation, working on fellowship/job applications, and potentially teaching all at once; and you'll be expected to do all of those things well!
I would also recommend to suppress your "cynical" skepticism of professionalization, as that is not going to look good either in your applications or when you actually show up to begin your program. Academia is definitely a profession, if your goal is to pursue a fiercely independent life of the mind in my experience academia is probably not a good place to do it.  In any case, going to conferences isn't just a matter of getting a CV line, conferences are where you go to connect with other like-minded scholars and figure out what's going on in your field/subfield. The CV line at least demonstrates the possibility that you're interested in being a part of a broader intellectual community, and not just someone who wants to hole up in a dimly lit room and write a dissertation.

First off, I think your scores are fine. They most likely won't get you discounted during the first round for those who go through rounds.

A lot of schools are moving away from the subject test in general. Chicago, Columbia, University of Pennsylvania (Penn) , Brown, Duke, UNC, Wisconsin, UT-Austin, Illinois, Pennsylvania State (PSU), Vanderbilt, Emory, Ohio State, Maryland, Washington University in St. Louis (WUSTL), and Rice University do not require the Subject test. Some of these schools are test-optional but many note that it will not make a difference when it comes to them deciding whether or not to admit you.
Conference attendance won't really make a difference. Conferences might matter if you were presenting at a major conference but there isn't much that can be accomplished by attending. Presenting at conferences could also show that you're keeping up with the field and are involved with present ideas. Most students don't have any publications and many are advised against publishing early because the publication will be on your record forever.

My concern is your focus on the top 30 schools. There are a lot of great schools just outside the top 30. Some are better than schools in the top 30 depending on your specialization. What do you want to focus? Schools in the top 30 are very different and each have significant strengths in certain areas which others may lack.

Happy to say I will be attending the program at Edinburgh! I absolutely can't wait to live there -- I studied in Ireland during undergrad and visited Edinburgh for just a few days on what I believe were the only sunny, 70-degree days of the whole year, and I loved it so, so much. This is saying quite a bit for me as I am generally not much of a city person at all. Definitely reach out if you come for a visit!

Same all around, with the exception of being an international student. The best part about dragging my partner across the country for my MFA was I had a built-in person to do stuff with when I wanted to explore the area. "Who wants to volunteer to clean up an abandoned graveyard and then hunt for Maillard's Automaton at the Franklin Institute? You do, because you're stuck with me." I will say, and this may not be the case for my upcoming graduate program, the MFA skewed older. I was 25ish when I started, and that put me maybe lower middle of the pack, with a good number of my cohort in the early to mid 30s when we started. That might just be the nature of writing programs, though. It sounds like maybe Lit PhDs skew younger.
Okay, but isn't this the strangest reaction? I had one woman in my MFA cohort, who was also married and had opted for a long distance option, actually kind of sneer at me? She said something along the lines of "Oh, they don't have their own career?" I'm happy to say she was an outlier. Most of the coupled cohort brought their partners with them, and those who didn't (usually because they were attending somewhere else) often had them visit and would even get permission for them to sit in on classes.

Late: after orientation. 

Early: during interview weekend.

Hey, @indecisivepoet - I'm not punctilious but I have some info/opinions that might help you. 
I found the NRC rankings more useful than USNews precisely because they don't have one definitive number (like USNews does with the rank number and its corresponding 1-5 score.) The more holistic score gives (I think) a better sense of how programs are perceived IRL. Granted, the NRC rankings are now, what - ten years old at least? Bear that in mind. Also, USNews is not "updated" for this fall (it's the 2017 rankings, I believe.)
When I first started thinking about programs, I looked most closely at the S-Rank, Research, and R-Rank columns. What I found interesting is that there are programs that score well in Research but not so much in R-Rank. I paired that info with the dept's strengths (which I learned from the websites/etc.) 
Doing so made me realize that some programs are generating powerhouse scholarship BUT - for myriad reasons - maybe aren't viewed that way by other programs. Could be that faculty at school A don't really know anyone at school C, so they don't have a favorable (or unfavorable) perspective on scholarship (so, like, if a 19th century scholar is asked about a program that really doesn't do 19th century scholarship, they probably won't have a high score to give.) Could be a handful of other reasons. 
So, if you're going to go down the rankings rabbit hole, I think the NRC is better than USNews because you can use it to learn a bit more about strong programs that you might not have otherwise considered. Beyond that, both of them are pretty much useless. 
My advice would be to skim both lists to see if there are any programs you hadn't thought about looking at, but then turn your attention to what kinds of info the programs themselves are offering and what kind of work the faculty/and students are doing. 
Re: handbooks - @Warelin is spot on. The handbooks explain what milestones you need to meet by when. And it gives you a sense of what kind of support is offered by the program beyond "we will fund you."

Same all around, with the exception of being an international student. The best part about dragging my partner across the country for my MFA was I had a built-in person to do stuff with when I wanted to explore the area. "Who wants to volunteer to clean up an abandoned graveyard and then hunt for Maillard's Automaton at the Franklin Institute? You do, because you're stuck with me." I will say, and this may not be the case for my upcoming graduate program, the MFA skewed older. I was 25ish when I started, and that put me maybe lower middle of the pack, with a good number of my cohort in the early to mid 30s when we started. That might just be the nature of writing programs, though. It sounds like maybe Lit PhDs skew younger.
Okay, but isn't this the strangest reaction? I had one woman in my MFA cohort, who was also married and had opted for a long distance option, actually kind of sneer at me? She said something along the lines of "Oh, they don't have their own career?" I'm happy to say she was an outlier. Most of the coupled cohort brought their partners with them, and those who didn't (usually because they were attending somewhere else) often had them visit and would even get permission for them to sit in on classes.

I've been gone for a bit, but wanted to chime in and say I entered my PhD when I was married, and we had our first kid last year. There are quite a few people in my program who have kids, too, so we aren't unicorns. I suspect that most people who use gradcafe are younger or just entering their programs though. It's nice to meet those of you who do have kids/spouses!

I think that would definitely count as discrimination to expel someone for that? I currently know quite a few sex workers who are in graduate school and some of which are even about their line of work, however those that are open about it are both in fields that it makes sense for them to be more open minded (one in art school pursuing an MFA and one working towards a PhD in Women's Studies). Regardless, without a doubt, to punish a student and scholar for sex work would be extremely unethical, however the social backlash is a very real fear that keeps many people from being open about that. 

Congratulations! I love it when a plan comes together.

Hi everyone, I just wanted to thank everybody once again for your advice and give you an update. I eventually applied to the Hudson Strode program at UA. I was accepted into the MA program and I'm thrilled to say I'll be moving down to Tuscaloosa this fall. Now I just have to find an apartment!

Wow, y'all managed to not read any of the women or Black writers...
That it's self might be an interesting way of spinning a topic though? "Find an Early American text from this period that I have failed to include and convince me why it should be included in future courses"
Why did you select these specific works (or did you select them)? It seems like you have some clear divisions here (i.e. creation myths, European contact, early settler colonies, founders, American Renaissance/Dark-Romantics) that you can have them analyze or compare/contrast. At the end of the day though, I imagine who ever charged you with teaching this class is the ultimate resource here.
That aside, if you teach this course in the future you should really consider fitting in the likes of Cabeza de Vaca, Rowlandson, Wheatley, Bradstreet, etc