bigdgp

I'm using MLA, and I did check and there was nothing articulated on this matter in the handbook.

The full title of the translation I'm using is The Holy Bible: Douay-Rheims Version. This version was and has always since been published under the title of The Holy Bible. Thus, I'm pretty sure I shouldn't use "Bible" as the alphabetized word.

So this may sound like a stupid question for an aspiring English PhD student to be asking, but c'mon, we all have those embarrassing gaps in our knowledge. I know that at least a few of you out there rely on spell check to remind you that "committee" actually does have two "m's," two "t's" and two "e's." Please answer and try not to make too much fun of me. When listing The Holy Bible in a works cited, is one supposed to use alphabetize using "the" or "holy?" I know that normally "the" is supposed to be skipped when alphabetizing. However, there are certain cases where it is more than just a demonstrative article, and it seems like this is one of those cases. If it is conventional to go by "holy," is it at least a gray area? Thanks!

I'm an American medievalist at York right now and I'm in the same boat as you are. I would love to stay here for my PhD, but I have no money and neither do the schools here. I am applying mostly in the US for my PhD. However, I know there is some money and a reasonable amount of teaching opportunities here at York, at least for the second and third years of your degree. Nothing is guaranteed, but it is reasonably common for students to teach. I can't say enough good things about doing anything medieval at The University of York, and the Centre for Medieval Studies here is very good at taking advantage of its surroundings.

You absolutely do have a chance. A 670 Verbal, 5.0 AW and 3.8ish GPA would put anybody in the running anywhere. That said, LOTS of people will be "in the running" based on numbers. If you submit a wonderful writing sample and a clear, eloquent statement of purpose, you can put yourself at the head of the pack. Every year people with 700+ GREs and 4.0 GPAs lose spots to people with scores in the 600's and GPA's in the mid 3 range because the latter do better research and write better papers. An adcom member is not going to be unsure about whether to take somebody who wrote a publishable writing sample and earned a 600 GRE over somebody with an 800 and a "pretty good" writing sample. They will take the better writer, period. Rest assured that your numbers won't raise any red flags, especially not at the places where you are applying. That is all you can hope for from your stats.

I doubt it. My sample is about 14.33 or so pages, and many of my schools say they want a writing sample of approx. 15-25 pages in length. I am sure that 14 or so really good pages is far better than 15 pages where you have obviously made it a page longer than it needs to be. Also, If they read your paper and are impressed by it, I can't imagine that their impression will immediately fade upon reaching a "premature" conclusion. I wouldn't worry.

I totally second everything Pamphilia said! Talk to professors, not us! That said, here is my humble opinion. 1) I am really glad for doing an MA. My application will be a lot stronger. Not necessarily because I have another degree, but because I really know what I want to do. I thought I did two years ago, but if I had applied for PhDs then, I would have been raked over the coals. Adcoms can tell from your SOP whether you know how to sound like you know what you want to do (or you think you know what you want to do) or whether you have pinpointed exactly what you know you were put on this earth to study for hours upon hours a day for the rest of your life. 2) Ethnicity probably won't help. I don't think it should at this level, unless maybe your ethnicity specifically informs the approach you want to take to the literature you want to study. But even that might be a hard sell, and you could come off to the adcoms sounding like you are trying to exploit your ethnicity rather than get in on the merits of your work (not that you are, but you would have to be very careful about how you come across). 3) I don't think a professor with a PhD from the school to which you are applying will make much of a difference. I am sad to say this, because I have one of those too!

I can't imagine that it would have anything to do with your admissions decision. I would claim residency because it is cheaper and you may be able start paying in-state tuition by next year.

Right after I finished my undergraduate degree at the University of Nebraska, I moved to NYC to teach high school English. In Nebraska, I rented with three friends a five bedroom house (yes, that's one empty bedroom) that had a washer, dryer and dishwasher on the premises for $200/month pp. I moved into a tiny 3 bedroom apartment with two roommates that was an hour subway ride from anywhere you would want to be with a gaping hole in the ceiling living above a drug dealer, no washer, dryer or dishwasher for $550/month pp., and that was five years ago! I am applying to schools in NYC after I finish my MA in England, but I am NOT applying to CUNY because of the funding situation. Disclaimer: Any run-on and overly paratactic sentences are intentional and included for a very specific and deliberate effect.

So I am down to a late draft of my SOP. It fits into most of the limitations of the schools to which I am applying and it says what I want it to about research interests, fit and past experience. My one concern is that I don't really discuss any specific critics. Is this a problem? Have other applicants had success without them? I do mention overall trends in the research of my field and I mention one old critic (Joseph Campbell) as an example of the type of approach I want to move away from. What do people think?

The only program I have seen that says it wants to see two shorter (5-10 page) writing samples is USC. I think, anywhere else, your chances of being admitted are severely limited if you send two shorter papers simple because, as was said before, longer papers require an entirely different skill set that is much more similar to that which you will need to successfully complete a PhD.

I am applying to the Medieval Studies department at Yale. The department doesn't have much at all about application materials, but defers to the Graduate School website. That is where I found the 500 word limit. I assume that if the English Dept. gives a different stipulation, that should be your court of highest appeal. I'm glad you let me know, though. I will have to shoot them an email to find out if the 500 limit applies to the Medieval Studies program or not.

I think I was a little misleading when I mentioned Geoffrey of Monmouth, Lay(or z)amon and Wace in my post. I don't particularly want to focus on them, or on Arthurian literature. They are ancillary to my overall topic which will be more focused on the process of a cultural development that eventually arrived at their work. I am more interested in things like finding "Loathly Lady" tropes in Anglo-Saxon saints' lives and things like that. I'm all about the earthy, firey, windy and watery...gritty early stuff! That's why I am not looking at places like Penn State. I'm generally trying to follow the Ango-Saxonists, preferably the ones who can also teach me Old Norse!

To the poster above who said that Columbia had a 500 word limit, I just received an email response from the admissions office saying the limit is 1,000 words. Yale's however, is 500. Sheesh!

Hey all, just thought I'd take a moment in the middle of preparing all of these applications to find out a little more about my intellectual community. I know that we have all, for the most part, done this in other places, but it may be a fun (and helpful) exercise to do it once more now that we have thought about SOP's, writings samples and other ways to sell ourselves to programs. What are everyone's interests and where are people applying? I want to look at England's imagined history, particularly in the way that she accommodated her pagan mythologies even after becoming Christianized. I want to focus on Anglo-Saxon lives of saints and poems mostly, however, as they represent the culmination of the phenomenon I want to research, I will have to say something about Geoffrey of Monmouth and Layamon (and Wace by association). I am applying all over the place: Fordham Columbia NYU Yale Medieval Studies Ohio State Notre Dame Minnesota UCLA McGill Toronto Trinity College Dublin Oxford York

Does anybody know if the "maximum of 500 words" is actually a hard line for the Fordham PhD statement of purpose? I mean, trying to discuss an idea for a 100 page doctoral dissertation AND fit to a program AND preparation for doctoral study is hard enough in a statement of 2-3 pages or 800 words like most schools ask. 500 words is just ludicrous! Is there anybody around who has gone over the limit at a school and still been admitted?

Also, a cursory glance at any major English department in the country's faculty profiles will affirm that, in the stat that matters, the Harvard's, Chicago's, Columbia's, Berkeley's and so forth far outmatch schools like Kentucky, ASU and Oklahoma. The placement record of a school is really the only stat you need to worry about. Even more than that, it would be smart of you to try and find out where professors who specialize in your discipline at various institutions got their PhD's. I say this because a university department will almost always have a period or discipline within the department for which its placement record and reputation are significantly higher than that of its overall ranking (unless, of course, you are at Berkeley, where the reverse could be true). I am a medievalist, and this is very much the case with Fordham and Notre Dame in my area. Neither is very high on the USNWR rankings (ND is in the 40's and Fordham in the 70's). However, in medieval literature, USNWR ranks ND in the top 10 and both have excellent placement. I would worry about fit and placement records instead of overall rankings. The more you can learn about a school's (or even a specific professor's at the school) ability to position you, in your discipline, to get the kind of job you want, the better.

For Children's Lit I would check out Pitt, and look at Rutgers for Victorian Lit.

I would be willing to offer half of my application fees (that's approximately $300) to anybody who can answer this question! LOL

It's also worth noting that it can be very difficult to discern between acceptance and enrollment rates. Many schools publish the number of applicants and the number of available spots or percentages of applicants who ultimately attend the university. However, to account for students who are admitted but may choose to attend elsewhere, most "top" schools offer to admit at least twice as many students as available places, and this number generally rises pretty quickly as one moves down the rankings.

I am trying to finalize my writing sample and I am struggle with something that I assume is on the minds of many of you as well. I am applying to a decent number of schools and there is a great deal of variation in the requested lengths of writing samples among them. Some of them ask for samples that are 10-12 pages, others want up to 25 pages. My sample is about 15 pages long. Will that be seen as a cop out to schools that allow up to 20+ pages? I don't want to seem lazy, but I really don't want to have to write different samples for different schools. Is it common for people to do that?

Alette, I know that percentiles on most GRE sections changed significantly after the economic downturn. When people's small business startups went under, they decided to go back to school. This meant a lot more people who were just kind of interested in further graduate study took the GRE, which, in turn, added a significant number of scores on the lower to middle side of the bell curve. I think the impact was more significant on the general test, but I'm sure this must have had at least some effect on the subject test as well. I do know that 20 points on the test does not translate to 20 correctly answered questions, it is more like 5-10. Foppery, I have never heard of the test score going up to 990. From what I understand, all aspects of the GRE other than the AW are given a score out of 800.

I'm into Medieval Literature, so I can't offer you insight into which programs to check out. I can tell you, however, that the US News and World Report grad school rankings does a breakdown of the top ten programs in each subsection of literature research, so you might check that out. Go to the humanities and social sciences rankings and then select English specialties. This is only a starting point, though. There really isn't a substitute for finding a professor whose research interests you at a school with a reasonably good reputation and just getting in touch with him or her. It's time consuming and difficult, but it really is the best way.

I am getting ready to go overseas to do an MA in Medieval English Literature and I am trying to decide if it is worth it to buy an ereader (nook, kindle, etc). It will be exorbitantly expensive to ship all of the physical copies of the books that I will need. Thus, my options are to buy an ereader (if it is worthwhile) or buy new copies of the books once I get there. Has anybody tried to do this to cut back on space/cost? Which one have you found to be better for scholarly purposes? I'm assuming that it will be difficult to use it for class textbooks, but what about critical articles? Has citation been an issue? Any advice would be helpful. Thanks!

I am not in a PhD program yet, but I do have experience applying to and being accepted at elite MA programs. It sounds like your prof. is a just an idiot. I wonder if he or she doesn't have a lot of experience teaching students who are interested in getting a PhD. You should definitely try to write an original piece. You probably won't know all of the critical conversation surrounding your topic until after you finish your PhD, which is possibly why he said it was unlikely that a grad student would do original work. Reviewing the critical conversation is a grad-school exercise designed to help you do just that. However, I don't think that means that you shouldn't try to be original. I think your topic is really interesting (failure of the chivalric knight) and you should pursue that further. Also, New Historicism is THE BOMB, and after about half a drink, I might be persuaded to call Deconstructionism bull$#!%.