dangermouse

shot(s) Fired. that is brutal

it REALLY goes straight for the gut doesn't it! but i love waking up to a gentle neg so it really does work somehow. in other news, villanova (who i haven't applied to nor shown any interest in) have moved on from emailing me suggestions to apply to their masters and have actually sent me a leaflet about it, all the way to england?! i do respect their commitment but my GRE wasn't THAT good haha.

does anyone here subscribe to the enneagram? (aka my favourite of all 'personality' 'tests') my daily update feels like a pretty strong condemnation of me choosing to spend my time daydreaming about grad school rather than, you know, actually reading or engaging in research: do i HAVE any real skills? it seems unlikely.

one of the professors i mentioned in one of my SOPs has just followed me on twitter. i am sure it is a very mundane and insignificant decision, but hopefully he isn't a sadist who wants to watch the carnage unfold when my rejection comes in

i probably was - everyone used to mill around the cabinet at odd hours because an update was posted every ten minutes with a photo, so i'm sure i was there somewhere! i did! i'm sorry we now have to be bloodsworn enemies, but on the bright side i absolutely delight in retelling the rumour that kcl used bentham's head as a football and now it's too hideous to display to the public. most students when i show them jezza just looked appalled, but i did a campus tour for some 11 year olds once and one student asked me 'aren't you ever worried he's going to follow you home one night?' ?

he has a LOT of opinions, it is very difficult for anyone else to get a word in.

my undergrad institution is where they keep jeremy bentham's beautiful mummified corpse on display. i still think about him wistfully sometimes - we shared a lot of good memories, him encased in his glass cabinet, me proudly showing him off to uneasy prospective students...

i agree - i think this is absolutely an important and comforting thing to keep in mind during what can be an intensely self-flagellating experience - it is sometimes difficult to remember that there are ways of pursuing a passion for literary criticism outside of The Academy(tm), and that these ways are just as legitimate even if externally they don't feel as real or as concrete as being enrolled in a university and going to classes. this thread alone shows how much conversation and inspiration we can find and create outside of the classroom!! so i am determined over the next month or two to really dig deep into reminding myself how much enjoyment i can have with reading and writing criticism, and enjoying the lack of constraints that i currently have on what i want to research/explore/develop. maybe i'll finally read infinite jest?! the world is truly all before us.

i LOVE happy birthday johnny! i'm a big fan of all the variants of slow disco; i also really love the piano version of saviour. i remember not being convinced by pills as much as the other tracks on my first few listens but naybe i should give it another go!

@The Wordsworthian on spotify last year my #1 top song played was visions of gideon which i think shows you exactly what sort of mental fire-staring state i was in for a lot of it haha. @flungoutofspace i LOVE st vincent! i've had the piano versions of MassEducation on repeat for the last few weeks.

@Englishtea1 congrats !! what's your field/area of interest? do colours appear differently now?

i do a lot of walking so i get through a decent amount of lit that way! i love historical fiction, horror.. i read a decent amount of fantasy as well but i think i've got a bit burned out on it now so have struggled to get into it recently. how about you?!

@rxing963 i'm actually reading dune at the moment! well, listening to it on audiobook. i'm not the biggest fan of sci fi as a genre and so i'm pretty new to it, but i am enjoying dune SO much and have found it very readable and accessible whilst still being a very clever work. me and my dad are going to see a screening of the film in mid february so i'm trying to finish the book in time for that.

@pdh12 congrats on the interview!! i got an offer from the university of york in england today (!) - it's slightly less exciting because funding information isn't released until march so it's not really an actual acceptance, BUT it is still a thrill to know that someone read something i wrote and liked it!

i am feeling woefully theory-dumb in comparison to some of the conversation on this thread, but i can't wait to get stuck in to those pdfs and Expand My Literary Horizons! will have a think about what i can offer in return when i emerge.

@kendalldinniene that is super exciting - as someone who has experienced very little of the US, i have always said chicago is the one place i have dreamed of living if i ever made a permanent move overseas, so please vicariously live out my dream for me! long term goals on my end... i'd like to move back to london if i don't get onto any phds, and i have a lot of friends there currently so that seems quite doable and exciting all in one! i'm also currently working on a novel (holla @ everyone's poetry/fiction discussion a couple of pages back) and my ambition is to finish, revise the hell out of it, and send it out to agents so that should give me some good post-rejection distraction if i need it! i'm working in academic publishing currently but i'd love to move towards more trade publishing in the next couple of years maybe - who knows!

on the MA discussion, i completed my MA (or... well, they called it a Master of Studies to be #different) at oxford this summer, which was luckily fully funded. i mostly did it because in the UK where i'm from, you have to have a master's degree to apply to phd programmes and it wasn't until this year that i realized other systems don't necessarily require it - but i'm glad i did it, and hopefully it will show in my applications that i feel a lot more prepared for doctoral study?! we can but hope... @placeinspace i read that article and felt like it had reached through the screen and punched me in the face. but like, a tender, sympathetic punch.

i'm sure that my professors potentially saw through this excuse, but when i had to remind one of my recommenders i basically wrote something along the lines of asking if they had received all the email requests because another of my letter writers had lost some of the emails to their spam filter, and then gently adding 'i believe X's deadline is on the 15th so let me know if you haven't received that one and i can resend it.' if they did see through it, they replied very promptly and politely to assure me they were writing the letter and they had just been very busy from end of term stuff, so i don't think they took any offense either way! but i don't think there is anything wrong with being more explicit as long as it's done politely as Marie80 suggests :)

i'm very glad i didn't leave submitting my apps to the last minute... my bank has NOT been pleased to be hammered by so many foreign transactions and has blocked 2/4 payments so far ? if only that was a decent enough excuse to get out of paying at all...

i'd be happy to help - feel free to PM it to me :×)

@kgras13 i don't mention my papers by name, but i give a brief overview of the main argument - so i wouldn't say 'In the winter term, I wrote a paper entitled XYZ' but i WOULD say 'In the winter term, I wrote a paper on X and Y, arguing that....' which i think gives you more content than the paper name and fits more naturally into a sentence.

@jadeisokay again very much not an expert, but i was speaking to someone at UNC about writing sample related queries and they stressed the importance of a succinct sample and advocated for the minimum rather than maximum page limit - as it's only approximately 20, i would hazard a guess that the adcomm will welcome your 15 page paper

ETS PowerPrep 1 (September 1st) - 149Q, 166V <- this was when I started studying ETS PowerPrep2 (September 15th) - 153Q, 168V Actual (September 22nd) - 156Q, 166V i also did one of the Princeton practice tests for the analytical writing and scored a 5, which i also got on the actual test. so my verbal scores pretty much stayed the same which i think makes sense as i'm applying for english lit. i spent a decent amount of time reminding myself how to do maths, and i think even though i had a few weeks you can see that the studying DID help there, although it's still only 61st percentile. i mostly used the princeton review and also Math Lab for maths revision.

i'm on the third draft of my SOP and i'd really appreciate having someone else look it over and give me some suggestions - and i'm happy to offer the same in return! so if you'd like to swap SOPs, or even if you don't want to share yours but would be happy to give me some comments on mine, please post here or PM me. some quick background details, if they're helpful: i'm an international student from england, i've recently completed a masters from oxford in eighteenth century and romantic literature - and so whilst i know everyone finds the statement of purpose unfathomable, i am finding it particularly difficult to get the balance right, especially when it comes to the research proposal part as i'm worried i've gone too specific. most of the schools i'm applying to have requested a SOP of around 1,000 words or 1-3 pages so mine comes in at roughly 950 words, but i'm happy to look at shorter/longer ones. if anyone is thinking about applying to uk phds/masters, i'm also happy to share/swap research proposals! as they are quite a different beast to SOPs. (i'd also be happy to swap with people in similar areas i.e. other humanities students, if anyone is interested)

i think the main thing your statement is missing is exactly what you did in regards to research & classes - what exactly did you like about the classes you took? what questions did they inspire? how do they relate to your intended research? what specifically in your graduate study did you enjoy/research/investigate? whilst it's obviously great to know you had such a wonderful community, that isn't as relevant to your statement of purpose as the specific discussions you had in class or the essays you wrote. i also wouldn't suggest you had any doubts about graduate study that were erased. i think that just sets you up for the person reading your statement to wonder what doubts you had, and whether you're likely to have them again in the future - instead, i'd say something about how your experiences 'strengthened/confirmed' your desire for grad study. overall i think it's a decent start but it's far too general - 'classes on theory and all eras of literature', for example, doesn't say any more than what your transcript will say. the best advice i've read about SOPs is that you don't want any line in it to sound as if anyone could've written it - you want it to be personal, you want it to be your own intellectual autobiography. and the best way to sell yourself is to emphasise the details.