dilby

Congratulations to the Yale admits you'll be getting more info (from me and others) soon via email, but feel free to DM me if you have questions in the meantime.

if I had to guess based on this year's DGS.....that 10 minutes is not going to damage your application. rest easy. congrats on getting your app in.

Also, since I know everyone here either is a grad student or is hoping to be one in the very near future, I would strongly (strongly, strongly) recommend leaving a comment on the Trump National Labor Relations Board's recent ruling that graduate employees are not workers. You will not want to go through six years of PhD program with this job market and no right to bargain collectively for better benefits (e.g. making sure mental healthcare is included in your health benefits package, transit benefits, etc) and working conditions (e.g. having a reasonable and relevant teaching load, a grievance procedure for discrimination and harassment, etc). Here is where you can view existing comments, and here is a site with some extra information about the ruling and how to write an effective comment. Also, if you're visiting a university in Boston in the near future, consider joining striking Harvard graduate students on the picket line. Even the most elite and privileged universities in America are searching for every opportunity to roll back compensation and benefits for graduate students so they can save a few extra dollars, and they will do anything they can to prevent students from unionizing. Solidarity matters.

Hard to say, unfortunately. I get the impression that Yale's admissions process is pretty holistic (based on conversations with the old DGS as well as the new one who starts next month), and based largely on an overall picture of you as a thinker/writer/person. I would just try and make sure that it contributes to the statement about yourself that you are making with the rest of your application. If you feel that all of your materials are presenting a clear and honest portrait, I think you will be in good shape.

Hmmm. If it doesn't say mandatory, then it probably isn't. My mistake. But I do remember hearing a couple of upper-year grad students talking about trying to make it required. I'm glad to hear you were able to find an answer that feels good and sincere.

I remember feeling exactly the same way before I submitted my apps last year. I check basically all of the privilege boxes, and I think it was valuable and important to reflect on this; to consider all of the things that have been easy for me and which maybe haven't been so easy for others. I think.....the key is to just find a way to be honest. What experiences have you had that make you who you are? What has shaped your outlook and why you want to be a graduate student and what you want to get out of the experience? How do you like to interact with people and what's your general attitude on life? My statement was pretty short, like a single good-sized paragraph. But in that space I managed to talk about a couple of formative hardships I've experienced, as well as some experiences I was really glad to have. Try and remember that diversity includes all kinds of different considerations and try and answer the question as truthfully as you can. Some inside info is that making this question mandatory was a request by current Yale grad students who want to see more diversity; but that doesn't mean anyone will be trying to poke holes in your response if your response is sincere.

@karamazov coursework from high school is not particularly important; I had about a year's worth of credit from HS, but I think I only even sent information about this to one school (Duke?). I'm not sure how it should work with the transfer stuff though.

4.0 is all you need. Your scores are excellent. You can relax about this part of the application.

Yes, you should include these. Absolutely no one is expecting you to have a peer-reviewed article published before you start your PhD—in fact, even PhD candidates are really only expected to have a single peer-reviewed publication by the time the go on the job market. A CV is intended to be a fairly complete picture of your intellectual life, and undergraduate publications are part of that; no one will look down on you for writing undergraduate level work when you were in undergrad. In fact, by making the effort to get them published in some form or fashion, you went above and beyond what was expected of you and that will reflect positively, not negatively.

Others have identified the various tricky elements of this question and things to consider. Namely, people might leave for one reason or another (retirement, not getting tenure, which happens a lot at Ivies, etc.). I think one way to balance this concern is to try and get a feel for the department's reputation and current clusters of exciting faculty--in other words, what have been its historical strengths (early modern at Michigan/Virginia, Romantic poetry at Yale, Feminist theory at Berkeley, that kind of thing) and where is the department currently moving (what goals is it signaling with its recent hires?). It is a sort of laborious process to dig through illegible department websites to look for this kind of information, but making a meaningful statement about the past and current character of a department is pretty impressive to an adcomm, particularly if you can compellingly nestle your project into that narrative. This is probably something your mentors/recommenders can help you with: just ask them what kinds of scholars they associated with various departments either when they were in graduate school or just "back in the day." Odds are they have at least some kind of sense of what most top 10 departments were/are like.

I spent weeks working myself up to contact a POI at Chicago but just couldn't shake the feeling that it would be a totally inorganic, artificial, bullshit outreach with the obvious subtext being "please let me in to your program" so I didn't end up reaching out to anyone. It doesn't sound like many of the people in my cohort did either, except for one person who had a fairly direct personal connection via a mentor. So I would not say that this kind of contact is required.

So, I didn't do any contextualizing in the WS itself other than giving a summary of how the last six pages of the paper went, but I did go into some detail about the shape and drift of my thesis in my statement of purpose, so I assumed they had the context they needed.

I had the same problem as @Cryss during my app cycle (apologies OP; this will be a little less helpful to you). All of my programs wanted 20-25 except for one (Yale, ironically) which wanted no more than 15. The thesis chapter I wanted to use for the WS came in at 29. I tried various cutting/condensing strategies, but ultimately what worked best was completely rewriting the chapter. I created a new document and just started writing again, occasionally copying and pasting passages but for the most part trying to express every idea with fewer words, fewer sentences, better and more efficient moves. It was hard as shit, but also sort of fun and I ended up getting it down to exactly 20. At this point I did not have the energy to do another rewrite and get it down to 15 for Yale, so I said "Fuck it" and cut it at a section break 14 pages into the paper. I ended up writing a bolded, bracketed summary of what I did with the rest of the chapter. It felt reeeeally slippery at the time and I was positive that I would not get in, but here we are. hopefully this will come as some relief to all who aren't sure what approach to take just yet.

Yeah, I haven't heard from either department I'll be affiliated with. But I'm planning to email the DGSes soon to let them know about some conflicts with required orientation events. I imagine they would be the best point of contact for you as well!

Western and Postcolonial Marxist Cultural Theory, Literature and Philosophy from Locke to Kant, the Film department's required theory seminar (taught by Dudley Andrew!!) and one additional film course (the list isn't out yet). Although I should say that at Yale they have something called "Shopping" which is a two-week period at the start of the semester where you can sit in on classes before deciding whether to fully register. So who knows!