Cassifrassidy

I think this helps to prove that fit is ultimately, a very weird thing and is not only determined by how well faculty matches, but where the department is hoping to be (which is really an impossible thing to determine in any given year. Applying broadly to schools that have a major interest to you is a very important thing to do as you'll never know where you might fit into a school's puzzle. The ivies have often been said to recruit from the same pool but @punctilious' husband earned 1 acceptance, 1 waitlist, and 1 rejection from the Ivy League and had mixed results elsewhere. It's important to not apply only to top 10 schools, but also to not discount schools just because they are ranked highly. Faculty fit + Institutional goals + class profile all play a much larger role which may be invisible during the whole process to us as applicants.

They were my second offer, I heard back in February. Sorry I can’t be more help! If it makes you feel better, I’m still waiting to hear from SMU myself.

I just did a quick goog and haven’t read through this yet https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_research_universities_in_the_United_States

You are welcome! I'm glad it helped. That's a good approach to it - I hope the DGS gets back soon and with good news! 
And not at all! I declined Syracuse yesterday (while remaining on the funding wait list) but not because of the funding situation. It's a great program, but I do have another program that is a better fit across the board. 
I'll keep my fingers crossed for you! 

I should specify--I'm in the literature program, not rhet/comp, so I'm not sure how your waitlist works, it might be totally separate? So the ranking might be legit, and your MA cohort might have a different number than 4.
Ugh waitlist is quite possibly the worst place to be--I just want to know!

Thanks for the response!! That is very helpful. I emailed the DGS who initially emailed me and essentially let them know that I wouldn't accept an offer without funding, I have another funded option, and asked if I could visit in case I do get funded super close to the deadline (I said it in a polite way though lol). So we'll see what they say. If you don't mind me asking, did you get off the waitlist? Or are you planning on accepting another offer? Just curious tbh.

Hey! 
I don't know if this will help a ton, but I was wait listed for funding at Syracuse for the Lit PhD. In the original email/letter (which I'm assuming you received as well), they didn't indicate rank (for me) - just said it was a wait list of about 10 people (I'm unsure if it was both PhDs and MAs or just PhDs) - and said that movement tended to happen in late March/early April. 
My past application cycles & general anecdata support that statement. It's quite possible for people to make decisions now (I'm doing that and there are definitely other people out there like me!) Some, however, (and sometimes most, depending on the year) hold close to that April 15th deadline. Accordingly, I'm not sure @ClassyBrat420, that there's any way to guess if/when you'll get off. I do wish I had a better response and I'll keep my fingers crossed for you! 
Obviously, funding is hugely important and you will need to know those details prior to committing. However, I think you @Cassifrassidy can do (and already have done?) some evaluation of the two programs. It sounds like Syracuse would be a great option for you - have you talked via email with current students or faculty there? Or scheduled a visit? If not, can you?
I'm not sure at all what Syracuse's policy is for that, but they obviously want you (since you're in) and they might be amenable to helping you learn more about the program as you wait for funding, especially since you have another good offer. 
If I were in your position, I might email an adviser or letter writer to ask - they will likely have some insight on if/how to communicate with Syracuse and how to evaluate these programs without having all the data. I'd also do as much as possible to learn about the program and the area itself in the meantime so that (1) I could decide if I wanted to wait and (2) if I did wait and funding came in at the 11th hour, I could plug it into the rest of the equation.

i like the dramatically sad ones the best

Saw one from UC Santa Cruz that just said "Surfs down."

Colorado State: "Apparently you don't even have to apply in order to be rejected from certain schools. What a cluster F it must be over there that they're emailing people who have simply requested information that they're 'rejected'."

Someone must have received multiple rejections at once because one said "I'm an idiot" and the next "I'm still an idiot!"

I read one the other day that simply read: "Wow!"
 
 
My favorites are more of a type and not any one in particular.  They fall under two categories:
 
"I have the highest GPA and GRE scores of anyone in the history of the World.  I published in every single research journal on the planet.  I won ten Nobel Prizes last year...I was so positive I was going to be accepted that I moved to [location of school] before I even submitted my application.  Graduate school admissions officers are a bunch of imbeciles who are too ignorant to exist".  A bit of an exaggeration, sure, but these types of "quotes" are there. 
 
And,
 
"No biggie.  I knew I was not going to get accepted".  

Thanks so much for your congratulations! We were super relieved when we received notice that we'd both been accepted into one school together, and when the second school came in we were thrilled that we have the option to decide between the two! Also I really had no idea we would each be so competitive for these extra fellowships, so that's been really exciting.
I'm from Louisville, so I guess I'm from the big city of KY haha! My partner is from a tiny town in SE KY.

I agree with everyone here that prestige doesn't really matter for your BA or MA! Just work as hard as you can (while still taking time for self-care, of course), cultivate good relationships with faculty EARLY so they really know you and your work by the time you need recommendations, and make sure that there's at least one faculty member in your area of interest. For what it's worth, I went to a "prestigious" MA program and some people received many PhD offers while others received none—it's all about what you DO in your program, not where you go!

haha!  It would definitely be okay for you to post the questions list, but here it is.  Also, I'd just be honest with the programs, especially since the money they're giving you won't be enough to cover either visit individually.  
 
-PLACES TO STUDY AND WORK
-Where do most people do their writing and reading?
-What study spaces are available? Do students get a carrel? Do those who teach get or share an office?

-LIBRARY
-What is the library system like? Are the stacks open or closed?
-What are the library hours?
-Are there specialized archives/primary sources that would be useful to my research?
-Are there specialist librarians who can help me with my research?

-FACULTY
-Are the faculty members I want to work with accepting new students? Are any of those faculty members due for a sabbatical any time soon?
-Are professors willing to engage you on a personal level rather than just talking about your work?
-Are there any new professors the department is hiring in areas that align with my interests?
-Students’ relationships with their professors – are they primarily professional, or are they social as well?

-FUNDING
-Is funding competitive? If so, do students feel a distinction between those who have received more generous funding and those who haven’t?
-How does funding break down among the cohort? i.e., how many people receive fellowships?
-How, if you don’t have much savings, do you make enough money to live comfortably?
-Are there external fellowships one can apply to? If so, what is available? Does the program help you apply for these fellowships? How does receiving an external fellowship affect internal funding?
-If people need more than five/six years to finish, what funding resources are available? (For instance, Columbia can give you an additional 2-year teaching appointment.)
-Do you provide funding for conferences or research trips?
-How often is funding disbursed? (i.e., do you get paid monthly or do you have to stretch a sum over a longer period of time?)

-COHORT
-Do students get along with each other? Is the feeling of the program more collaborative than competitive?
-Do students in different years of the program collaborate with each other, or are individual cohorts cliquey?
-How many offers are given out, and what is the target number of members for an entering class?
-Ages/marital status of people in the cohort – do most people tend to be married with families? Are there younger people? Single people? What sense do you have of how the graduate students interact with each other socially?
-Do people seem happy? If they’re stressed, is it because they’re busy or is it because they’re anxious/depressed/cynical/disillusioned?
-Is the grad secretary/program administrator nice?
-What is the typical time to completion? What are the factors that slow down or speed up that time?
-I’ve read that there are two kinds of attrition: “good” attrition, in which people realize that the program, or graduate study, isn’t right for them and leave early on, and “bad” attrition, in which people don’t finish the dissertation. What can you tell me about the rates of each, and of the reasons why people have chosen to leave the program?

-JOB MARKET/PROFESSIONALIZATION
-What is the placement rate? How many of those jobs are tenure-track?
-What are examples of institutions in which people in my field have been placed?
-How does the department prepare you for the job search? Are there mock interviews and mock job talks?
-Are the people helping you navigate the job search people who have recently gone through the process themselves?
-If you don’t get placed, is there anything the department can do for you? (e.g., can you stay an extra year?)
-How does the department prepare you for and help you attain conference presentations and publications?

-SUMMER WORK
-What is encouraged/required?
-If there separate funding/is the year-round funding enough to live on during the summer?
-Do people find themselves needing to get outside work during the summer in order to have enough money?
-Am I expected to stay in town in the summer, and what happens if I don’t?

-LANGUAGE REQUIREMENT
-What is done to help people who don’t have language proficiency attain it? Does the university provide funding?
-What is the requirement, and by when do you have to meet it?
-Given my research interests, what languages should I study?
-When do you recommend doing the work necessary to fulfill the language requirement? (i.e., summer before first year, summer after first year, while taking classes, etc.)

-LOCATION REQUIREMENTS
-How long are students required to be in residence?
-How many students stay in the location for the duration of the program? (i.e., how many dissertate in residence?)
-How is funding affected if you don’t stay?

-Incompletes on papers at the end of the term: What is the policy, how many students take them, and how does this affect progress through the program?

-TEACHING
-What sort of training is provided?
-What types of courses do people teach?
-Does teaching entail serving as a grader? Serving as a TA? Developing and teaching a section of comp?
-How are students placed as TAs? Is there choice about what classes you teach and which professors you work with? Do classes correspond to your field?
-How many courses do you teach per semester/year?
-How many students are in your classes?
-How does the school see teaching as fitting in with the other responsibilities/requirements of graduate study?
-How do students balance teaching with their own work?
-Is the department more concerned with training you as a teacher/professor or with having cheap labor to teach their classes?
-How, if at all, does the economic downturn affect teaching load/class sizes?
-What are the students like? Can I sit in on a course a TA teaches to get a sense of them?

-METHODOLOGY
-Is a theory course required?
-What methodology do most people use?
-Where, methodologically, do you see the department – and the discipline – heading?
-Is interdisciplinarity encouraged, and what sorts of collaboration have students undertaken?

-Typical graduate class and seminar sizes

-What should I do to prepare over the summer?

-Ask people I know: What are the questions – both about the program itself and about the location – I should ask that will most help me get a feel for whether this is the right program for me?

-Ask people I know: What do you wish you knew or wish you had asked before choosing a program?

-Is the school on the semester or the quarter system, and how does that affect classes/teaching/requirements?

-What is the course load for each semester, and how many courses are required?

-What kind of support is provided while writing the dissertation? I worry about the isolation and anxiety of writing such a big project. What does the program do to help you break the dissertation down into manageable pieces, and to make the experience less isolating?

-What do writing assignments look like in classes? Do they differ based on the type/level of class and/or based on whether you intend to specialize in the field?

-Ask professors: what have you been working on lately?

-Ask professors: What is your approach to mentoring and advising graduate students?

-How long are class meetings?

-How often do professors teach graduate courses?

-Are course schedules available for future semesters (10-11, etc.)?

-Can I see the grad student handbook? Are there any other departmental documents – such as reports on the program prepared for accreditation – that I can see?


-QUALITY OF LIFE
-Prices – how does the cost of gas, milk, cereal, etc. compare to other places I've lived in?
-Cost and quality of typical one-bedroom apartment.
-What does the university do to provide you with or help you find housing?
-When (i.e., what month) do people start looking for an apartment for the fall, and where do they look?
-Is it easy to find a summer subletter?
-How close to campus can—and should—one live?
-What grocery stores are there in town?
-How late are cafes, bookstores, malls, restaurants typically open?
-What do people do to make extra money?
-Does the town have more of a driving or a walking culture? What is parking like near campus (availability, ease, cost)?
-Where do most English grad students live? Most other grad students? Most professors? Where is the student ghetto? Do most students live near each other, or are they spread out far and wide?
-How far does the stipend go in this location?

Definitely going to FINALLY get to North and South and Wives and Daughters by Gaskell, also planning on reading the entirety of The Madwoman in the Attic (a bit old, but definitely a staple). Also am planning on reading Anne Bronte because I have (somehow!) never read her. Will also be brushing up on my literary theory as my undergrad program doesn't do a theory component, which made the subject test extra painful. Any suggestions for books on theory would be great! I already have the Eagleton book, but anything for someone who basically has no formal background on it and is about to enter an MA program would be incredibly helpful.

Oh, wow! Thank you, that definitely makes me feel better knowing that you both come from similar-ish backgrounds as I do and both are so successful. I'm also definitely not trying to have a crazy prestigious career, just one where I can be happy and also make enough money to survive  Congrats to you and your partner on the great offers! Especially since you guys got into the same program--that's awesome! What area of KY are you from?

Hello fellow Kentuckian! I am a firm believer that programs are definitely what you make them, at least from my experience in my Bachelor's and Master's. My partner, @Melvillage_Idiot, and I did both of our degrees at small state schools in which I highly doubt either of our programs were ranked highly, but we always took advantage of any good opportunity given to us/sought out things to further our educations. It has all been worth it too. Because of this background we have essentially no debt between the two of us since we both had full-rides during undergrad and, also, both had fully funded master's programs.
We have both been accepted into 2 of the 3 schools (see signature) we both applied to together for our PhDs and I've received additional fellowship money at both schools I've been accepted and my partner has received a fellowship at one of the two schools too. I can't say the schools we chose are ranked tremendously high and the one school that was ranked the highest out of the 3 we applied to doesn't seem to want us (partner rejected and I've heard nothing since the Dec. 1st application deadline...). That school though was the poorest fit for each of our research interests though, so it really isn't too much of a surprise. But I do firmly believe the programs at the 2 schools we've been accepted are good and will get us the careers that we want - as long as we keep working hard to remain competitive in our fields despite whatever name is attached to our degrees. Also neither of us is trying to break into academic positions in Top 10 or Ivy League schools so I don't think that our school names will matter too much in that aspect.
Sidenote - my partner is also from rural KY of a town less than 1000! Also feel free to PM me or my partner if you wanted to know the specifics of our backgrounds to have a better idea of what our applications consisted of, if that would make you feel less worried about the prestige of programs/school names.

I don't think my MA program is ranked, but it was fully funded with a teaching fellowship including a living stipend. I used my MA to seriously work my butt off -- develop my research interests and develop myself as a scholar -- before applying for PhD programs. Even though neither my undergrad -- a mid-size, private liberal arts university -- nor my MA institution is "prestigious," l was able to secure a few solid options this year. So yes, I agree with @la_mod, it matters what you do there, not where you go. 
This all said, I don't know if I ever had a fighting chance at the Ivy Leagues  

Full disclosure: I am running on exceptionally little sleep right now, I know you didn't ask for advice, and I'm a composition wonk.
I've found that grammar instruction on its own doesn't really do a lot for students other than make them sleepy and insecure about their writing and/or identity (so-called "Standard Academic English" is a construct and not an actual linguistic standard, so it's fraught with a lot of classism, racism, etc.). In my experience, students are more likely to retain, personalize, and use that kind of information in productive and meaningful ways if it's offered not as a way to diagnose poor writing, but as a series of rhetorical choices that they can make in order to have certain effects on their audience. 
Writing centers tend to focus on "global" issues like organization and content over "local" issues like grammar, unless there are things happening at the sentence level that significantly interfere with clarity of meaning. This approach works well in writing and content-survey courses, too. Once students get interested in more clearly expressing their arguments, and feel empowered to do so, they may seek out grammar or other avenues of rhetorical choice.
With my own students, I focus a lot on content, and then they either end up asking me about grammar because they feel comfortable doing so, or--if I notice there's a pattern of, say, passive voice construction--I can say something like, "Ok, so now that you've got the argument down and you know who your audience is, I think you're ready to challenge your own writing a bit by exploring what happens if you write this sentence in the active voice [briefly explain active vs. passive, using their sentence as context and example]. What effect(s) might that have on your audience? What effect most strongly aligns with your goals for this project? Ok, cool, so think about that, try it out in this draft, and let me know if you want to talk about your ideas or explore other strategies." An approach like this can help students to build confidence in their writing, and to be more willing to accept feedback, revise drafts, etc. because it's more individualized to their needs and goals and it offers choices rather than serving as proof that their writing is bad. I also find that this approach is a lot more fun for me to teach and it helps me to build good relationships with my students because I'm kind of like their personal trainer for writing; they have goals, and I show them a variety of options they could use to reach those goals. Sure, sometimes I might strongly suggest leg day when they want something else or think donuts sound better, but at the end of the day it's ultimately still up to them to decide how they want to communicate their ideas. I think that empowering students with the ability to think about writing as a heap of choices and not rules also helps them to transfer that skill to other courses and professors who have more traditional views on things like grammar. 
TLDR; you don't have to be a grammar expert, and neither do your students, to be successful in the classroom.
If this approach sounds like something you'd like to learn more about, I highly recommend Kolln and Gray's Rhetorical Grammar. This forthcoming special issue of The Dangling Modifier looks like it should also have some helpful perspectives on this topic. I'm also happy to chat via PM or on a separate thread.
Also, I know imposter syndrome is ramping up for everyone now. You're all going to be okay!
 
 

I’m sure someone who has a MA could speak to this better, but: fuck prestige for BA / MAs! It matters what you do there. I went to a kinda meh-ranked school and made up for it by doing well while there, taking extra research opportunities, etc. I know that other people on this forum went to unranked MAs and got into great schools. 

Congrats @Cassifrassidy !!

Just wanted to update that I got my acceptance email yesterday! So there IS hope to move off the waitlist--fingers crossed for everyone!

I am currently first on the waitlist for University of Alabama's Masters in English--if anyone is not planning on attending, please, please decline because I would really like to attend!!