posts

hahaha, thank you for this! Totally brightened my day. I'd honestly achieved this state of total peacefulness because I was so sure it wasn't happening. My wallet disagrees since like... you know, hundreds of dollars in app fees is not chill at all, but I was just calmly going about my backup plans. I'm kind of bewildered still. But happy!!

Thanks! DGS called me Sat. morning too. I've been getting a lot of spam calls, so hearing a real friendly human being on the line freaked me out. Glad I wasn't sleeping in when the call came! She said the official notices and funding info can take some time to be sent out, and she wanted to let people know quickly instead of waiting for that. They have a visit weekend in a few weeks, so they probably want people to know the dates as early in advance as possible.

I DIDN'T GET SHUT OUT LOL University of Kansas--teaching assistantship for the whole time.

A whole slew of UT Austin acceptances on the board, congrats!!! I applied, but I'm not even going to be a little bit surprised if I'm rejected, so I don't feel too bad about it. Although there might be some tears out of sheer exhaustion when I get the official rejection. I would love to go there for my PhD though since they have faculty that combine some of my specific interests, so I'll definitely apply again.

The extra cynical part of me thinks schools intentionally keep info like GRE cutoffs on the dl so they don't scare away applicants that they can reject to lower their acceptance rates. It's a lot harder to say stuff like "We receive hundreds of applications every year but can only enroll 5" if you don't get a hundred applications that you can just immediately throw on the "no" pile because they didn't get a 169/169/5.5.

I took it twice too and the people at the first center were also a lot scarier. The lady there who metal-detector-wanded me with no expression whatsoever on her face is who I was thinking of when I said "prison warden". At the second place, they were no-nonsense about the regulations, but they treated me like a normal person and smiled sometimes so it was overall not bad. I got 162Q/170V/4.5AW the second time, after putting in some considerable effort to bump up the math score. Too bad it probably won't do me much, if any, good. Ripoff!

I understand application fees, to some extent. They are nuts at some schools, like Stanford's $100+, but I understand $40, $50. I do not understand transcript fees, or schools that force you to send (and therefore pay for) an official transcript with your application. It's an electronic PDF emailed from what I'm sure is an automated service! Are you joking? It costs me ten dollars to send a copy of grades that I already paid tuition for and worked my butt off to get? Letters of recommendation should be centralized and sent from one place so I only need to ask my recommenders once and still have the freedom to add or remove programs from my list throughout the application process without bothering them with updates. I know my professors didn't personalize the LORs to any great extent for most of the schools, so who cares? School websites have to get better, and information has to be collected more cleanly. We have to crawl through hundreds if not thousands of webpages looking up professors and the poor design just makes it twice as bad. Broken links, links that direct to a link that directs back to the first link, slow animations, mailing addresses and email addresses scattered across five different locations, and on and on. I think that depends on the testing center. I was allowed to be pretty relaxed when I took the GRE. Had my shoes off, put my feet on the crossbar under the desk, crossed my legs, had my feet up on the chair, was hanging halfway out of the chair at one point. Certainly some testing centers are staffed by prison wardens though. I'm an otherwise horrible applicant with a fantastic GRE score (even did pretty well in the math part, but strangely not especially great in the essay part) so this actually cheered me up a little... Thank you for the link to look into. With that said, even I agree the GRE is stupid and terrible and a detestable ripoff and should be axed. I don't know how ETS execs sleep at night. But holy shit: "Chinese applicants appear especially challenging to many American professors, who report that they “seem alike” and hard to distinguish, when the admissions process is designed to do just that. One humanities professor told Posselt, “How do you compare six students from China, who all have the same last name?”" WOW.

I got some great pants recently that shrank in the wash. They were perfect before but now they're not only shorter than my preferred length but just a bit shorter than fashionable short. Why do bad things happen to good people?

The horse will fill in as TA, of course!

This thread is giving me heart palpitations. But like happy palpitations. Congrats everybody!!!

I'm fully prepared for a shutout so I'm occupying my time with applying to master's programs! I think I'm just not a good PhD candidate right now. Probably should've arrived at that conclusion hundreds of dollars in app fees ago, but as awful as the app process was, I learned a lot about both applying and my own goals so maybe it was a good investment that I needed to make.

Have your cake and eat it too! Southern Spice and Minnesota Nice: A Southern Girl in the North Country.

Loved the info from Minnesota folks. I'm from California, so of course winter is just a scary myth to me, but from your comments, it sounds like a really nice place to live. My only experience with genuine cold is a semester abroad. But I kind of liked it once I had the right clothes!

ahh haha like I said I feel embarrassed about it because now that I look back, the fit doesn't really make sense at some of these places, or they're insane reaches. I applied to a few UCs (I'm also in California), UT Austin, University of Kansas, Northeastern, and Ball State (MA).

University of Memphis, George Mason University, and Georgia State University were places I looked up for rhet/comp PhD. They all have Feb. 15 or later deadlines. Maybe similar deadlines for lit?