M(allthevowels)H

This is officially my favorite thread on this forum! I applied and got in!!!!!!!!!!!!! ?

Hmmmn, I’m at once skeptical and dubious about non-students of color commenting on the legitimacy and/or the frequency of such events for students of color. One of my main reservations about attending Duke, was the feedback I received from more than a few students of color—in short, it was not flattering or encouraging, and was told by more than one student to consider attendance elsewhere.

So I recently got engaged and will be starting a PhD program this fall. How terrible is it going to be to plan a wedding and start my PhD in the same year?

I also get engaged - yesterday ^^,  my partner will join me later as he wants to work on his resume a little bit more (international couple)

Also wondering this! I proposed to my boyfriend two weeks ago and was so nervous about the proposal that I completely forgot that after he said yes, we'd be planning a wedding. I'm starting my PhD in the fall and he'll have 1 year left finishing his BS, and then will come join me. We're not planning to get married for two years so we can save up some more money, but I'm starting to think that maybe we should just elope because being in grad school, on a grad student budget, while planning a wedding that will take place ~2000 miles away (our family is in the same city we grew up in, but I'm moving to the West Coast for my PhD), well, that all sounds like a recipe for stress and disaster.
I am really looking forward to having him out there with me though, and him having a more stable income. I do wish there were resources for spouses of grad students though, as I can definitely foresee us running into issues with him underestimating the commitment a PhD program *actually* is.

I like the Pilot G2 gel pens. I also sometimes use ballpoint pens (Pentel fine or medium, different pack but the same pen in proflorax's picture above) depending on whether I care about being able to see the ink on the other side of the page.

Welcome to the English board! 
Please don't be offended when I write this because it's not intended that way, but you need to do some research. This board is a gold mine of facts and information from past cycles and many people in your situation have asked similar questions, so I think you'd be well-served going back through the board's history and reading threads about each of your questions. In addition to reading this board, you should talk to professors in your English department ASAP. They've all been through this before and they know you better than people here do, so chances are they'll have plenty of helpful advice from a more informed perspective.  
With that being said, I can weigh in on a few of your questions: 
1. Doesn't matter that much. If you do some reading you'll notice that most PhD/MA programs require a writing sample that's a maximum of 20-25 pages. While I'm sure it's a helpful, rewarding experience to work on a capstone/thesis, it's by no means a necessary step at this point in your academic career. Dig into the requirements of the programs you're going to be applying to and I think you'll see the same thing.
2. Again, don't worry too much. Getting into a graduate program isn't like applying as an undergrad, so banish any concerns about honors societies, etc. 
I think researching this process on this board and other places will be much more helpful than any other answers that will be offered here. Once you've got an idea of exactly what this process entails you'll be able to ask the best questions for you (and I bet a thorough understanding of the process will allay your concerns about most of these questions).
I'm a Modernist, btw, so feel free to PM me if you have specific questions.   

WUSTL is indeed a hidden gem.
I'm unaware of any other program that offers English PHD students to take cw courses as electives and offers service-free fellowships during coursework. There are dual CW and English PHDs but they require a certain amount of workshops to be taken and are often more cw-focused than Lit-focused.

University of Denver both allows and encourages their Lit Studies PhD students to take creative writing classes for at least a few of their electives, and is even willing to accept a creative component to a scholarly-track dissertation, as long as it meets all the expected standards of academic rigor and all that in the more traditional bits. I minored in CW as an undergrad and did a lot with my MA institution's university press and creative writing program, so one of the huge draws for me about DU is that I'll be able to keep double-dipping ?

I will probably be going for PhD in Biomedical Engineering this Fall 2018. 
Hope to meet you , ahoy!

Hey! You and I are in the exact same boat.
I'm starting my lit PhD in the fall after graduating from my MFA, ( I took a year off before applying), and I've already committed to continuing my writing career during my PhD. A large part of the reason I applied to Rice and Vanderbilt is that you don't teach during coursework. Since the MFA was teaching + coursework + side writing, my plan is that creative writing will occupy the space on my schedule that teaching/lesson planning/grading occupied before. It might be worth a shot to look at programs with a similar set up, especially if you have teaching experience from your masters so your CV won't be disadvantaged by having less during your PhD.
(I wrote this assuming you haven't already applied, please disregard if not so ?)

Going to the place from where that person you quoted did his undergrad.
Dartmouth for PhD in CS.

Accepted my offer to Johns Hopkins University for Mechanical Engineering !

I'm officially staying at Miami of Ohio to pursue my PhD in comp/rhet! ?
I am soooo excitedddd, and I feel such a weight lifted off me now that I've decided. I feel seriously so much less stressed. This process stretched out for quite a long time because I just didn't know what I wanted... Until I did, and until I realized I already had it all along (*insert cliché feels*).  
I'm ready to start PhDing!!!!! 

Applied to the MA in English Lit at the University of Arizona, hadn't heard anything at all, then two days ago I received a fully-funded acceptance into their PhD program! Though they were my top choice when I was applying, Rochester's offer-- for me-- is pretty much unbeatable. So if anyone is still hoping for a spot at U of A, I will be declining! 

No kids, but in a longterm partnership, & relieved to find a whole thread of us (presumably) not-out-of-undergrad folks. If all goes well, I'll be starting a program in my mid-thirties and I've been a little neurotic about that! 
I don't know how you people with kids do it. I'm already balking at the idea of grad school and trying to write fiction (I've just finished my MFA, and definitely want a lit PhD, not a CW one). 

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!

It's your CV, you choose what to list. It's not a job application where you're asked to list *all* of the higher education institutions you've attended. If you ask me, I really don't think it hurts to list a CC degree, but just like you can choose not to include a publication in a more obscure venue or whatever else takes away from accomplishments you want to highlight, you can omit this degree too. 

I just wanted to update and say that everyone's tips really helped me in pulling together a really good, solid seminar this past week! Everyone who I've talked to complimented my presentation so I guess it went pretty well. I think the only thing I could have done better was to have maybe have had one more day of practice, but unfortunately less than 48 hours before my presentation my PowerPoint turned all my pictures into red X-es so that unforeseen mishap took away a few hours I had been planning on practicing during (and I had some personal stuff come up that previous week that made me less productive than planned and meant that I was doing final practice runs later than I had planned on). I think the tips on focusing on practicing and fine-tuning the rough areas/slides were the most helpful because that meant that I definitely felt fairly comfortable on those and it meant that I wasn't practicing the whole presentation over and over and over.
I should also say that I successfully defended my masters thesis with my committee on Friday! Now I just have to modify my seminar into an ~25 min presentation that we need to give in front of the people who helped fund and provide permits for the project for this upcoming week. Hooray!

Hey, all - I wanted to pass this link along in case anyone might be interested. Bucknell University is currently accepting applications to their fully funded MA program in English. 
https://www.bucknell.edu/english
I did my BA at Bucknell, had two friends do the MA at Bucknell, and am happy to answer any Qs about the department or the area! 

Oh my stars! Thank you ( and @Warelin and @a_sort_of_fractious_angel) for providing this. I see it as a "Fit Finder" but also a "Final Decision Assistant". I love *love* that it has a space for "concerns". It's easy to get so excited (especially after we've gotten an acceptance) to forget things that actually made us hesitate before; having fields for all of the abstract information that isn't numbers or names is so valuable for comparison.

.....
Honestly, you don't seem to really want to have a discussion. You either call other people's arguments absurd, narrow the field of your arguments so they can't possibly be as much of an expert as you are.... And at the same time want other people to provide sources and then argue that that's an "absurdly high standard of evidence". 
On an academic forum, for a discussion among academics, proper citations and peer-reviewed research with data is pretty much the expected standard of evidence, not "well I've heard" or "I know people who say..."

I was going to write a thoughtful long response, as someone who is active in advocating against gender discrimination in my field. I have a lot to say, both from personal experience and based on a large dataset I've collected along with a committee I'm active on showing bias in almost all aspects of a woman academic's life once she graduates from college. (Before you ask for the data, it's confidential and we're in the process of writing up a paper, so if you're *actually* curious, ask me about it in a few months.) I'm in a field where there are more women undergraduates and about as many graduate students as male students. But fewer women get onto shortlists for academic positions; in fact, even once on a short list, they are still less likely to get hired than a man on the same list; fewer women currently serve as faculty members; fewer women get chosen to present papers at conferences; fewer women have their papers published in peer-reviewed journals; fewer women get invited to contribute to handbook articles, which feature the top scholars in the field giving an overview of their main research topic(s); fewer women are invited speakers at conferences; fewer women get their work funded by government agencies. I could go on.
But this poster thinks that being a woman magically opens all doors for a candidate, from sample size N=1, and not even having a full picture of that particular one. To which all I can say is, Wow. 

I agree and I apologize if I implied that a mismatch of the gender distribution of graduate students and the general population means there is discrimination at the graduate admissions level.
(Aside: I do, however, think that each field of academia should have roughly equal distribution in demographics of academics as the general population. One reason is that people are often personally motivated to do research, often in areas of disease treatment etc. Another is that it is my opinion that the only point of doing any research is to benefit humanity and therefore, the people doing the research should represent humanity, not just a subset of humans who have the opportunity to do so. However, this is problem at a much larger level and I'd say it is beyond the scope of whether there is bias at the graduate admissions level or not.)
Back to the scope of this thread: The "control group" we must compare to is the pool of which the graduate applicants come from. So, if you accept the basic premise that men and women are equally brilliant**, then you would expect that the demographics of people accepted into grad school should match the demographics of people applying to grad school. If we do not see this, then there is something introducing bias at the admissions committee step. This is why I also brought up the fields medal example. The fraction of women in Math is much more than 1 in 56, yet the Fields Medal has only been awarded to a woman once in 56 times.
The bias could be many things, including unconscious ones due to the committee choices, conscious ones due to prejudiced committee members, and systematic ones that unfairly favour men over women that aren't directly in the control of the committee. An example of the last one is GRE scores. Findings from ETS show that men score higher than women. Again, if you accept the premise that men and women are equal, the only logical conclusion is that the test is biased to favour men. Incorporating these metrics into the evaluation means the committee will (knowingly or not) favour men.
Why does everyone think it is happening if no one can actually provide evidence for it. That doesn't sound like logical thinking to me and this also leads to observation/confirmation bias. I have had colleagues comment on the gender bias in conference sessions (i.e. "too many women were speaking") but when you actually count, it was representative of the field. When the norm is under-representation, equal-representation appears to be over-representation.
Also, I want to address this point too. I think you are setting up an unrealistic imaginary scenario and then trying to draw conclusions from it to apply to circumstances you appear to be observing in the math departments. For any pool of applications to grad school, it is very unlikely for two applicants to be otherwise identical.
However, there have been lots of actual studies done where reviewers/evaluators get two applications/proposals/resumes/etc. that are indeed identical, except for the name, and the result is that men are picked much more often than women. Here is an example. Same resume, different gender for a STEM job: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/unofficial-prognosis/study-shows-gender-bias-in-science-is-real-heres-why-it-matters/

In my committee work, we have seen clear empirical evidence to the contrary. That is, we find women underrepresented in the candidates that were accepted to the program. In all of the STEM fields. We find further underrepresentation in the number of women that choose to attend (i.e. the fraction of women that attend our school is lower than the fraction of women accepted to our school). Our school is a top tier program. 
I don't think there is a bias against men at all in STEM admissions, if that is what you are implying. If we want to discuss Math specifically, I can point to many examples of gender bias against women / for men. For example, the Fields Medal in Math has been awarded 56 times since 1936, to 55 men and 1 woman (in 2014) [citation]. There will be another round of medalists this year so maybe that number will increase. Yes, I am aware that the Fields Medal is certainly a different type of competition than a graduate school application, but to match your statement, I would say that anyone familiar with the field of Math would contend that the field itself has a bias towards men and the Fields Medal list is just one example.
As @Comparativist said, can you provide any evidence for your claim that math graduate schools are biased towards admitting women?