aigilipos

Thanks for starting this! Accepted UVA's offer last week.

Congrats to the UGA MA admit! Let me know if you have any questions about the program or Athens, and I'm happy to tell you all about it. Has anybody gotten good news recently? I'm still waiting on a handful of schools.

Congrats!!!

I'm also waiting on BU -- I see they interviewed someone earlier this month, but it wasn't me. I didn't apply to Michigan, but I hope you'll hear soon. The decisions do feel like they're dragging along this year, but maybe that's because we're stressed out! Nope, no word yet on my end...

Thanks! I was not interviewed, so I don’t think I’ll be accepted. Miracles do happen, though. Good luck to you too!

Yes, but not optimistic about it.

Not yet, but I’m waiting for them too... Hopefully in the next week or so, but that might be wishful thinking!

I'm definitely thinking about going! I would need funding, naturally, but hopefully I was enthusiastic enough in my response email to show my interest We'll see what other news I get in the next few weeks, but Seattle is a definite possibility. Fingers crossed you'll hear from Cambridge soon!

Holy cow, just got an out-of-the-blue acceptance to University of Washington. No funding, but it's a place that wants me!!!

It’s still so early! Give it a few more weeks. We should start hearing more in February, I think.

You are on FIRE!!! Congrats! Now you’ve got a really difficult decision though...

Wishful thinking ?

Some perspective that a professor friend gave me: nobody can predict what specifics these departments are looking for this year (or ever, really). I fall on the Latin side of the field; maybe the places I applied matriculated 4 Latinists last year, so they're stocking up on Hellenists this cycle. What's keeping me (moderately) sane is looking at it from that angle. Essentially, it's not you, it's them!

I haven't heard from Columbia either. Fingers crossed for everyone, and congrats to those with interviews/acceptances!

That’s where I did my undergrad! Let me know if you have any questions about the people/program/city in general!

Congrats on the upcoming Penn interview! Where was your earlier one? Glad it went well!

Good to know. Thanks for the reassurance!

Someone posted in the results section that they received an interview request from Princeton on January 10th, which is why I'm a little nervous! I applied to lots others... Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Duke, Johns Hopkins, UT Austin, NYU, BU, and OSU. I'm playing the numbers game, since I've been out of academia for a few years; I think I have 13 total schools. Hoping somewhere wants me! Which school is your top choice?

That's awesome, congrats!!! Let us know how it goes! We have some schools in common: Princeton, Brown (my top choice, fingers crossed), Washington, and UVA. Did you hear anything from Princeton? Someone else posted an interview, which makes me a little nervous, though there are always multiple rounds. I hope you get more encouraging news from the rest of your schools!

Oh whoa, here come some results! Congrats to them! I applied to Duke but haven't heard from them; IIRC, it wasn't as good a fit in terms of research/profs as other places I applied to, though. Time for the anxiety to ramp up some more...

I haven't heard back from anywhere yet, but if you look back at acceptance data over the past few years it seems like the first round of interviews/acceptances goes out after around the third week of January. It tends to go in waves after that; there's another spike in February and a third in March. That doesn't make the wait any less nail-biting, though!

Sorry to double-post, but I forgot to address this -- yes, the articles are assigned, but you're obviously encouraged to do more research into what interests you particularly. The profs give direction with bibliographies for research papers (they'll name a few noteworthy works in whatever subfield off the top of their heads), but you have a fair amount of leeway in developing your own topics and exploring your own interests within each course.

So for the full-time MA, we had placement tests, but the dept uses that term pretty loosely. They were mostly to give the grad coordinator (Naomi Norman at the time) an idea of what language level you should take. It's not a strike against you if you fail -- just a formality, for the most part. My Greek was pretty rusty, and I actually ended up doing an independent study (well, co-dependent, since another cohort member was in it!) with Naomi that was sort of a bridge between undergrad and grad-level Greek. I'll message you about the profs, since my response is getting lengthy!

I earned my MA in Classical Philology from UGA in 2016, so I have very recent experiences there. I cannot recommend the faculty more highly -- extremely supportive, both personally and professionally. That being said, I admit I don't know too much about the post-bacc program, as it was in its nascent stages when I was a student. I can say with confidence that the courses I took were challenging but doable; the profs have high expectations for student achievement, but do the work and you'll be fine. I'm not sure how this will differ for online courses, though, since all of my classes were very focused on discussions. The profs assume that you will do the translations for homework, so class time is spent mostly addressing any grammatical issues anybody had as well as discussing the content (rather than simply going over the translations verbatim). Of course, a huge part of every class was scholarship -- on average, I expected to read 2-3 articles per period for each class that met 2/3x per week (more if a seminar course that met only once a week; for these, usually a few book chapters or 5-6 articles). A fairly large component of each class beyond discussing the primary source material was addressing the arguments of the articles we read: how they used the ancient material, their intertext with other modern writing, the perspective of the author, that sort of thing. Your own writing, too, is very much emphasized; the profs loved to have checkpoints for turning in bibs, outlines, drafts, etc. throughout the semester, and they gave excellent and timely feedback about how to develop arguments and produce graduate-level writing. That all being said: my experiences might be entirely irrelevant given that the post-bacc is online. Looking at the course listings for this semester, the online classes are taught by a professor I haven't had or TA'ed for (Dr. Corrigan, who taught mostly undergraduate courses during my time). I've experienced most of the other professors, though, so if you have questions about people (or the Classics dept in general) I'm happy to answer!

Oh gosh, I don't even want to think about how many drafts it took me to be satisfied! I had many different versions with increasingly long and ridiculous file names by the end. I subjected my poor referees to quite a few of them over the months, though they were nice about providing comments. I'm happy to proofread if you want more eyes on anything. Here's to another deadline passing -- one (or more? who knows at this point) of my schools has a deadline of tonight. Let's hope we all get good news relatively early on! I have to sign my contract for next year in February, so I would like to avoid any awkward conversations with my boss. Maybe the stars will align!