disidentifications

Yep! Good riddance, GREs!! On a side note, I'm not sure if this was always the case (since this is my first year applying), but Harvard now requires two writing samples instead of one. I suppose this gives their admissions committee more material by which they can holistically assess their applicants, though I really can't imagine them slogging through 25-30 pages of written work per applicant.

Ohhh I love this book and it's probably due for a reread soon, though I'm currently still working through my TBR pile for this year. Am slowly making my way through Anna Burn's Milkman (not as difficult as reviews make it out to be; quite dark and tender actually) and Olga Tokarczuk's Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (wacky and brilliant), whilst rereading some old John Bergers and Anne Carsons for class next year.

I'll only be able to download my unofficial transcript from mid-January onwards (requesting an official one will take a few more days), so I don't know if the additional information will be of that much use to the adcom then. I might just check in with Princeton's admission's office to see if I'm able to provide them with a cursory note of my new grades first, with the guarantee that official documents are on the way, though it doesn't sound likely that they'll agree to my request based on what's stated on their website... ?

The thing is, Princeton does request it (but I'm not sure if it's necessarily a requirement), and there's also a rather conspicuous field in Columbia's application portal for the submission of fall grades, so I don't know if it's a "good to have" for these schools? In any case, thanks for your advice anyway! Perhaps I'll email the coordinators for these particular schools to check if (and how) I should submit my fall grades after the winter break.

My fall grades have just been released today, but they won't be reflected on my unofficial transcript until mid-January (which is when, I presume, most adcoms are already deep in the midst of the application review process). Thus, I was just wondering if anyone has any experience with submitting fall grades. And if so, do you know if unofficial documentation (i.e. screenshots of your results page) will suffice until I'm able to obtain official proof of my results?

@The Wordsworthian Seeing as it's December, Christmas is always on my mind... And what better carol with which to celebrate Christmas than Carol (2015), the best Christmas film of all time ?

A long-time lurker here! I've finally decided to join in the collective panic on this forum to keep me from spiralling alone into an abyss of ceaseless worry. A bit about myself: I'll be graduating with a BA in English Literature (w/ minors in Linguistics and European Studies) from a top 20 international research university next year, and I'm currently applying to a mix of Masters programs in the U.K. and PhD programs in the States (GPA 3.82, GPA in subject 3.91, GRE 165V, 160Q, 5.5W). I've already gotten my applications to Brown, Chicago, Columbia, Duke, Princeton, and Penn in, which means there's only Harvard and a couple of other U.K. universities left to go for me. My research interests are primarily in C20 and C21 British literature, especially in women's life-writing — autobiography/autofiction/autotheory and the likes. As for my secondary interests, they include French feminism, psychoanalysis, and visual culture, though the latter is not something that I've explicitly mentioned in my SoP, just because I haven't had the opportunity to delve into it as much as I'd like at an undergraduate level, and hence also haven't found a way to work in with the rest of my interests. Nonetheless, I always welcome discussions on the topic. My written work deviates slightly from my research interests, since I found it to be my strongest piece of writing, and is a Derridean reading of Ali Smith's How to be Both. It deals with themes of loss, mourning, and memory, and questions how we can remember our dead responsibly. In a similar vein, the honors thesis that I'm currently working on extends the same line of questioning to Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room and The Waves. I really should be working on my thesis right now, but instead, application fever's got me checking this forum every other hour, so if anyone would like to nerd out with me about Woolf (to make sure I get my work done), feel free to PM me. Otherwise, best of luck to all of us!