dilby

been thinking a lot today about this nice person who got into UC Irvine

That's wonderful, congratulations to all of you! Was the email a form or were you contacted directly by a POI/interviewer? Wondering when I should stick this one in the implied rejection column ?

hey so um is that Duke Literature interview anyone here ?

!!!! gonna have to now !!!!

brilliant idea @mandelbulb, here is the meme: as an aside (heh), this is basically my version of Caesar putting aside the crown three times before accepting it

I made a Julius Caesar "oh my god he has Airpods he can't hear us oh my god" meme, but apparently I've used up all of my media upload bandwidth for this forum ?

Two of my POIs are major secondary sources in my writing samples. Hopefully they won't think it's weird or sycophantish but I am generally confident in that thesis chapter so I'm not too worried.

What a coincidence! I'm glad I chose to share the UCLA statement here I may hit you up if they ask me for an interview.

This is unrelated to anything but I googled Madison's English dept today and I could not stop laughing when I saw that this was Google's suggested photo

Achtung !! Does that Duke interview belong to anyone here? Wondering if it was a POI/DGS email since it appears to have arrived after what are called "business hours" ???

get you a grad program that emails you like Tom Perez

Sounds like someone at Chicago is reading this forum lol

Duke where u @ tho

oof. fastest unsubscribe in the west.

I set my phone to give me push notifications for my .edu email address — although since I'm not in school anymore, I don't use that for anything other than PhD stuff. It's been a good way to stop myself from relentlessly checking.

Hell yeah, this factoid fuckin rules. Have a meme.

They accepted my application and $$, so I hope they are taking new students !! Yep! Literature used to be Comparative Literature but they changed the name because Comp Lit departments are historically eurocentric, and because they wanted to move in more of a media/textual studies direction. They are an epicenter for media theory these days.

lmao holy shit. yes, I've been checking my email and the results page like crazy.

Hang in there! Have a meme!

@kendalldinniene that's really kind of you to say, thank you ? I really admire the clarity and social vision on your own work. It'll be exciting to see where you end up!

MTL is probably first on my list of the programs I applied to this year (if I had to rank them) That is VERY good information to know about UCSC though!! Hopefully I will not end up needing to consider it because I'll be admitted somewhere this year, but .......... you never really know.

There are a few too many proper nouns in my SoP for me to share the whole thing here, but I am happy to post the second half of it. The first half was a sort of big picture summary followed by a personal history of my undergrad research experience. After spending a paragraph discussing my thesis methodologies/takeaways, here is what I had (this is the UCLA version): I plan to expand these questions beyond the formal focus that characterized my thesis’s observations about bodies, minds and emotions and engage more critically with our responsibility to the changing world in which subjects are situated. I have spent my two years away from school watching environmental protections and regulations unceremoniously disappear, pushed out of focus by flashier and more apprehensible scandals. To me, the repeated failures of calls for change in our interaction with the planet illustrate the limitations of our ability to explain enormous global crises which confound the cognitive mechanisms that lead to political action. This is not a separate question from my thesis’s exploration of animation as a visual language of mind—comprehending the scale of phenomena like climate change and migration will require new textual strategies and perspectives that will give us access to incomprehensibly large and phenomenologically distant events. In my graduate coursework, research and teaching, I want to continue exploring the shared conceptual spaces between cinema and theories of mind, particularly the way that film theory, contemporary media studies, and ecocriticism have commingled to challenge our ideas about human consciousness and its relation to a rapidly changing planet. Animation’s openness to the transformation of material and cognitive boundaries has made it a useful medium for exploring these questions. Keeping that observation as a center of gravity, I plan to expand my focus to include a broader array of texts and technologies that mediate and theorize our interactions with the planet, investigating the way they interrogate the limits what we are capable of representing and understanding. I am confident that animation studies, ecocriticism, and media theory more broadly, will benefit from this interweaving of new and well-established critical vocabularies. UCLA English’s faculty in the environmental humanities make it an exciting place to envision this project. As I’ve reconsidered and reconfigured the trajectory of my research in my post-graduate years, Ursula Heise’s work in Sense of Place and Sense of Planet has clarified the urgency of perceptual disparities between global and local—and given shape to my motivating questions about the impact of our representational strategies on environmental policy outcomes. And her Public Culture article “Plasmatic Nature” was a guiding light in the early stages of my thesis as I sought to understand animation’s capacity to depict and modulate the boundaries between minds, bodies and worlds. Working with Heise has been an appealing prospect since before I began the application process. I am also drawn to Allison Carruth’s research on technology and the environment, and particularly her work with the Laboratory for Environmental Narrative Strategies. I am looking for a program that offers the methodological flexibility to investigate interdisciplinary theories of ecology and perception while also providing opportunities to develop essential teaching and research skills in literary studies. For this reason, I’m encouraged by the presence of scholars like Heise, Carruth, Elizabeth Deloughery and Louise Hornby, whose work encompasses a wide variety of textualities and critical frameworks. They show that UCLA recognizes the persistent, evolving value of textual analysis and theoretical literacy in an increasingly interdisciplinary humanities field, and they give me confidence that my graduate studies will prepare me for a career whose contours are yet unknown to me.

I am sort of breezily thinking about what programs I might apply to next cycle if things don't work out this time around. UCSC History of Consciousness and Minnesota Comparative Studies in Discourse and Society both seem pretty cool. But not nailing anything down. If you can't stop checking your email and are looking for a fun distraction, check out Steven Soderbergh's Mosaic. It's a pretty cool interactive narrative series.

Some feedback I got from a mentor/LOR writer is that you can use "Dr" or "Prof" to signpost the people you've worked with in case the adcomm is reading your application in a hurry. But I did not use honorifics for a single POI in any of my 9 SoPs. So........I guess you can use me as a case study when all is said and done

I have a similar wistful desire to see Ulysses faithfully adapted as a 9-hr experimental TV series, but am content to enjoy the Joycean qualities of filmmakers like Terrence Malick, Stan Brakhage, Isao Takahata, etc