mads47

You should wait till the end of the week before you do. They are definitely making individual calls, and the person I spoke with mentioned that they are behind schedule.

@JustPoesieAlong @Dogfish Head I'll keep my fingers crossed that you both will hear good news sooner than you expect!

@M(allthevowels)H @FreakyFoucault @Warelin @a_sort_of_fractious_angel Thank you!!! You all have been so supportive on hear, I don't know how I would have gotten through the past few weeks without all y'all's fun posts.

I just got an acceptance call from Penn State!! I must have sounded like such a spaz on the phone, because I was literally jumping around my room in excitement.

Ah okay, thank you!

One of my applications (UIUC) says that its status is "awaiting decision." What does this mean? Does this mean the decision is coming soon? Maybe I'm getting prematurely excited, but this is the first of my apps to say something besides "submitted" or "under review" or (my favorite) "paid."

Same! I am trying to get myself excited for backup plan options.

I think this thread proves that we all do XD

I have not...lol. Maybe I need to X)

Haha it's just so hard to flirt with early 20th century poetry: "I will show you fear in a handful of dust." -Elliot "As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow –/First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go –" -Dickinson "The lonely peering eye /of humanity/looked into the Néant/and turned away" -Loy "I came here to seek the spirit of mountains, and now/my soul is slipping from me for I only find the dead" -Joyce

Haha that is great! Whenever I start to date someone new, I have them read some of the poetry I like. It's a good litmus test and I feel like it is my small part of spreading poetry appreciation. On second thought, this is maybe why I'm single. LMAO

Since we all have strong opinions about the things we read, and many of us are currently in application limbo, I thought it would be a fun distraction to make a thread for book discussions and recommendations. So has anyone read anything good lately? Or have all-time favorites they would like to share?

@Dogfish Head @a_sort_of_fractious_angel Yes!! I’m loving all the Faulkner love. This is fantastic. Definitely a good distraction from the panic of waiting!

Yes! I read Absalom, Absalom! last year and I have been fascinated by in ever since. I haven't read any of his other novels though, just short stories, so those are definitely on the docket for the near future.

That sounds fascinating! Yes, I'm hoping to focus more specifically on the theme of stagnant reproduction in American modernist texts. Ideally, I want to continue research I did for my undergraduate thesis about how these repeated Modernist stories of characters unable to or refusing to have children parallels the contemporaneous Modernist art movements that refuse to reproduce images of reality in a traditional sense.

Right! Hopefully we'll both get good news soon. What's your area of study?

Base on past years, it looks like they do their acceptances in 3-4 waves and then do their rejections in a couple waves I have also been freaking out, because I feel like it's my best shot of getting in anywhere.

Idk if this is relevant for anyone else, but I think Penn State will be starting to notify MA and Ph.D. acceptances in the next week. They sent out their first acceptances on 1/27 last year and on 1/18 the year prior, and the application portal has said for at least a week now that they are currently under review. Unfortunately, it looks like there is a large gap between when they notify their acceptances and their rejections, so we might have to wait a long time still.

What a fun thread! In undergrad, I was a History and English double major, and I have always felt that my heart is split in two with my love for both disciplines. Certainly, there is a lot of room for overlap, but in English I am most enamored with American Modernist Literature, while I spent several years studying 17th and 18th Century European and Middle Eastern history, with a particular interest in the major artists and art movements during those centuries. While I doubt these interests will have much influence my future academic career, I have been spending this year tutoring high school students in History and it has been quite fun to share my side passions with these students.

Ok I have absolutely very little evidence for this besides a strong gut feeling, but I feel like Chicago is gonna send out their invites tomorrow afternoon. It seems that in past years, their various notification waves happened on Fridays and it would make sense that they would want to send everything out right before the weekend so that they don't have to deal with a wave of panicked and upset calls right away. Again, this is just my unfounded theory based mostly on the fact that I really hope Chicago hasn't sent out interview invites yet.

On one of my SOPs, I ended my last sentence of my last paragraph with a comma....I didn't realize until I was rewriting it for my next school. It's hopefully a forgivable error but I had a flush of mortification when I realized.

You're welcome! I don't think it was an intentional decision. From what I've garnered, their original system crashed completely in October. o.O

Don't stress about that! UCLA is also displaying mine as "Not Recieved" and I sent them in about 4 months ago. I doubt it has anything to do with the English department specifically. In November, when the application portal was down, I spoke on the phone with someone in the admissions department and someone in the English department. Apparently, it has been nonstop tech drama for UCLA admissions this year, and both people I spoke with were extraordinarily kind but sounded a little stressed out.

Hi, I am not sure if this is the right place to post this question and I am new to grad cafe, but I was looking through past years' threads and I saw that some schools interviewed people before making their final decisions. Is this common? Does anyone know which schools are planning to interview this year? My apologies if this has already been asked and answered. (: