merry night wanderer

This week. Is so. SLOW. I was bracing myself for an avalanche but instead I'm just refreshing results every hour or so pretending I have any control over my life right now lol. (It really does not help that I work a boring corporate job from home)

I can't remember the topic where this was discussed, but as I recall someone said anecdotally that they'd never seen someone outside of the top 10 placed in other countries, and they don't tend to emphasize publication history the way American universities do. I think it was NowMoreSerious' AMA thread.

This is how I would do it, for whatever that's worth: take a long, hard look at placement records. The "supportive climate" thread has some really good advice I hadn't thought about regarding finding a way to talk to senior PhD students and asking them about how supportive the program is in the later stages, so see if I could do that. Budget things out ruthlessly. Then take a long, hard look at placement records again, particularly in my area. Your intuition is a valuable tool that shouldn't be ignored (this has been a long, hard lesson for me personally!) but it's one variable among several imo.

And it looks like you had a great run of it! Congrats.

Did anyone here apply to USC, and know what's going on? That lone waitlist in the results is making me curious.

Out of reacts, but congrats to the Brown folks! That's an amazing department!

Yes; I think absolutely no one should feel obligated to rush any offer, waitlist or admittance - hell, take until April 14th if you need to! - but if you're sure, everyone benefits from you moving the process along.

I would imagine something like 'I'm honored, but I've decided to consider other offers' - perhaps worded a little less stiffly. It sounds quite tricky to phrase, but I think if you know you're not going to take a waitlist, it helps them out a lot (they can make another offer, they can possibly fly the person out for recruitment, etc). So they'd be default grateful for it.

Wow it is depressing knowing the humanities crisis extends to UK schools.

(Kudos to the people emailing the depts and willing to report back - it is much much appreciated. And probably a boon to them, since they get fewer emails overall.)

I'd add UC Santa Barbara based on last year. There is also one lone waitlist for USC's creative writing/lit PhD program in the results that is absolutely maddening. I honestly consider that my longest shot (Creative Writing odds are always brutal!) but I want to know what's going on-

I know, right? No rest for the wicked, etc. I don't know if it's a good or bad thing.

Oregon is notifying! I just got in. (I'm also super stoked about this because I am a huge fan of Forest Pyle's work!)

I love this idea! I'd love to get to know other periods better. It's just hard to find the time, and having someone else curate a place to start would be super helpful.

That's pretty much the point I'm trying to make, though. In classes, you write to people who know context. In conferences, you give panels to people who are at least interested in that context. In articles, you can safely assume that most of the people reading literary journals are there for a specific reason, and that reason is related to their familiarity with some of what you're discussing. This audience is, as CUNY states, slightly different, and it's not something I thought about, since to me, "make sure your writing sample is good" meant "make sure the people who know their shit in the topic you've chosen think it's a worthwhile read." As I said, now that I think about it, I wish I'd given my paper to people outside my field as well, and that might be good advice for future applicants. I don't see why CUNY would bother to explain the audience for a writing sample to the degree that they do if it did not merit slightly different considerations than a course or MA paper. Whether what you're describing makes you a better literary critic or not is beside the point I'm making, which is much more limited and pragmatic: all the feedback you'd be getting to improve in the course of your education would be geared toward such papers. I agree providing context likely does make you a better critic, though provisionally (I feel I've read a lot of sharp, focused, clear close reads that just roll up their sleeves and dive right into whatever text is at hand, too, that I'm sure wouldn't make sense to people who haven't read the specific work; I'm not willing to say that kind of analysis doesn't have a place). But you are not evaluated or given feedback by people who don't have context, as a matter of course. This is not something that is emphasized in writing sample advice, in general, and it may be something to think about; people just say submit your best work, related to your SoP, vet them by your professors and mentors - but if you're me, you vetted them mostly by the people you're closest to, who are in your field or close to it, and their green light might not take this point into consideration. It sounds like your sample was a synthesis of a lot of topics/approaches, so kudos to you for getting it right; I can't imagine that was easy to frame and explicate. Also, again, I'm speculating wildly here - I know from the schools I heard back from personally that a specialist read my sample, but I know that some schools do things differently in that a set committee from all over the department makes all decisions. It's definitely unpredictable. And I have no idea if this is even an issue (with my sample, or in general!) or I'm just bracing myself for next week's drama with extensive analysis lol.

So first: this is totally idle speculation on my part. It may or may not be useful to future readers. I think that the usual advice of "write a sample, show it to your profs, revise" is by far the most solid thing we can say about any application, and I'm not married to any of it. Particularly since, as you say, I'm dealing with a canonical text. But for context, here's the section of CUNY's website that made me think about this: "Often the writing sample will be an essay (or a selection from an essay) that you wrote for a college or MA-level course. Since that essay will be read by a diverse group of readers who know nothing of its original purposes or contexts, be sure that your introduction clearly presents the essay’s methods and aims. Remember that your readers will be faculty and students with expertise in various fields, so if you submit a writing sample on Bleak House, for instance, you cannot assume that your readers are experts on that text, although most of them will have some familiarity with Dickens’ novels and with Victorian literature. Particularly if you are engaging any highly specialized topics or obscure texts, you should be sure to provide the necessary background information to aid your readers’ comprehension." Now, abstractly, that's pretty much what we've been saying, and it's something I agree with, but CUNY is specifically calling out that the readers may "know nothing or the original purposes or contexts" of any specific, given work of literature. Adcom members are certainly literary experts, but there is a lot of literature any given person, even an expert, hasn't read. And plenty of academics these days aren't interested in obscure poems by Shelley; the canon's broadened (which is a very, very, very good thing). And this is worth thinking about to me because anything anybody wrote for college or an MA-level course is going to do it in the context of being taught by someone who's read those texts! The paper is going to be geared toward a person who does very much know the original purposes or contexts, not adcom people with a potentially much broader knowledge base. And although I checked my sample by numerous people and I did try to couch everything understandably, I could have possibly strengthened it by giving it to someone in another period entirely, to make sure those contexts were clear to people who aren't specialists in my field; I think possibly now they weren't clear, in my case, and if so, I wish I'd thought about this soon enough to have done something like that. It's too late for me to do anything about, but it may be helpful for someone else, and might be something to consider in the future just to make sure my work's as clear as it could be. Hopefully this makes sense.

I agree with your approach to some degree, but I think in the case of an article that is specifically about a single piece of literature, it seems very reasonable to expect they've read the piece of literature first. To clarify, this isn't about jargon or accessibility. I think if you've read the poem, my writing sample would make sense, and I agree that a brief overview rather than a namedrop is ideal - when I mention scholars, it's always in the context of a specific thought or body of work that I introduce. I wouldn't assume someone's read a literary scholar! And I think articles should be readable for those who aren't involved in the scholarly conversations; ideally you explain those contexts as you go along. But I think the writing sample may be a special case. Whereas in classes, I was writing for an expert, and in published articles, I would be able to assume some familiarity with the subject matter for anyone to choose to read that article, the only assumptions I can really make about an adcom committee is that they are familiar with literature in general to a greater degree than the norm. I did lay out my topic, aims, and a blueprint of my argument in the introductory paragraph, but perhaps I should have adjusted my approach for such a perspective.

I do have a thought related to writing samples that I'd like feedback on: It's occurred to me that my sample might be too specialized. Like, the feedback from Romanticists who have read the poem and know the issues involved with interpreting it is all I'd want; I revised this sample plenty. However, that is not very many people in the world, and committees are full of scholars from various fields. I think it's likely that if you're a committee member who isn't familiar with Shelley, I may have jumped into things too fast and not framed my reading of the text in such a way to make my insights understandable to people with different specialties. My sample was definitely written for Romanticists and given the page requirements, I got to the point blindly quickly. And the two schools I've had positive responses from do indeed have Romanticists that work with Shelley in particular. This is how I was taught to write (and makes sense given that's how journal articles frame themselves), and the approach I've taken toward all of my English classes, but when I was considering CUNY, I saw that they recommended your writing sample be something that diverse committee members could understand, and this planted a seed of doubt of sorts, hmm.

I just want to say - meghan_sparkle, though I totally appreciate all of your disclaimers and humility, it does definitely say something that you got into these schools. That "something" may not mean "I am objectively better by all metrics," but lottery or no, best friends keeping you honest or no, you did seem to work very hard for it and I hope you're celebrating like a monster. What you wrote hit a serious chord! And it bodes well for your career. I had a rough damn week, but what you said did remind me - I am actually very proud of my writing sample, and it's genuinely reflective of my interests. I worked hard to say something about a poem people have spilled books of ink over, and I think it's a relatively original take that is still firmly rooted in scholarly conversations past and present, and close reading. If schools aren't into that, we likely just weren't a good fit - though of course I'm going to take the opportunity to look at it again and see how it can be improved. Thank you for your honest thoughts and best of luck on what is probably going to be a really rough decision, lol

Okay, okay, fine, California, I get it! lol

This is why I kind of looked at the "reserve" post askance! Like when do they need to use a waitlist, period? lol But naturally, I'm sure there's a lot we don't know.

I think some schools pull from the waitlist more than others, but it's definitely true that in most cases, they will inevitably draw upon the waitlist. I mean, it's maybe not something to bank upon, but look at how many programs we've all applied to - it's often the case that people have more than one offer, even though the odds are so bad overall. To get the cohort numbers they want, I suspect it takes a lot of maneuvering. Not an enviable job, to make these lists, and I do think it's likely more than just a platitude- they do reject and waitlist people they like for all kinds of reasons.

Me too - which was a huge bummer, since I thought the interview went so well, but it was a nice email, at least.

Stanford and (probably) UCLA yesterday - oof!

There's no way around it, this is an incredibly difficult situation. (And I feel it, since I'm also long distance, and hovering over my decision is the fact that my partner is currently located in Baltimore, but is in tech, so might eventually go to California? Ugh.) But it's still early and I'm sure they both have plenty of responses to take into consideration. The "trying to make partner and career work together" calculus is never easy, particularly if you're both in academia, but who knows? This process is full of curveballs. My two favorite professors in undergrad were a couple who had gone to Harvard together and then got jobs at my school, and were a powerhouse of a matching British and American Romanticist pair. I wish a similar fate upon you!