dilby

I don’t think so. I think adcoms are fairly small so in a big program your POIs might not even be on it, whether on sabbatical or not. In fact, since I came to my program the only person I have talked to (other than the DGS) who I got a sense had actually read my materials was someone who left before I arrived.

@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.

This. Grad Schools are looking for someone that they feel have a good base and can grow in their program. If you're already a developed scholar, there's no point for a grad school to accept you. Grad School exists for the developing.
 
That is the goal. Not everyone will make it there. However, great programs will work with you to develop the article and to provide valuable feedback to try to help you get a peer-reviewed publication. I think it's also important to remember that the majority of people will be rejected by journals. It's important to keep your head up even when you face rejections.

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.

I think it is a good idea to ideally mention 2+ professors, and ideally they would be a mix of assistant/associate or tenured professors. I say this because it seems to me that assistant/associate professors may often be serving on an admissions committee and get to look at applications. I'm theorizing, but pretty sure that the likes of Bill Brown at UChicago or Henry Louis Gates Jr. at Harvard are not reading through applications. If you're lucky enough to have one of your POIs on the admissions committee and they see that you want to work with them, then they would probably vouch for your application if they like it, especially if they're trying to get tenure. This could be wrong, but I'm 82% sure it worked that way for husband's Harvard admission.
That being said, do not put all your eggs in one basket. If you can only see yourself working with one professor, that will probably not go well for you for numerous reasons. 1) That professor may not receive tenure. 2) That professor may retire. 3) That professor may move to a different institution. 4) That professor may have a working style or method that conflicts with yours. 5) Your interests may change. Not to mention they may not be on the admissions committee in the first place or the school may be looking for students in a particular period/field, etc.
So, my advice is to identify at least two, ideally three professors who are not all assistant/associate and also not all heavy-hitters and who you could see yourself working with, then directly reference them in your SOP.

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.

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.

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.

I’ve spent more than I should have buying cotton and linen stuff because it’s so hot in Texas meanwhile I live in Sacramento where it’s hot as balls and my existing wardrobe works just fine ?.
Just wait until I get into my new apartment and start decorating though, haha, talk about major bucks!

I got a 4 on AW. I don't think it mattered at all!

Three cheers for UT offering the seminar, "Weak Theory." friggin stoked. 

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!

Harvard has the same, and it basically seems like an excuse to allow a ton of undergrads to show up for a week to classes they probably shouldn't be in lol.

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!

I just signed my lease in New Haven! At the beginning of June, I'll be moving out to the Texas countryside for three months to perform Shakespeare plays all summer, and then I'll be making a very condensed move to the northeast, just in time for registration.  

I haven't gotten many new emails since April, so there's not much going on on my end... I have, however, probably memorized their website, graduate student handbook, and all the degree requirements for the next ~5 years, at this point... Yeah, I really need it to be August now.

I just signed my lease in New Haven! At the beginning of June, I'll be moving out to the Texas countryside for three months to perform Shakespeare plays all summer, and then I'll be making a very condensed move to the northeast, just in time for registration.  

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!

I just signed my lease in New Haven! At the beginning of June, I'll be moving out to the Texas countryside for three months to perform Shakespeare plays all summer, and then I'll be making a very condensed move to the northeast, just in time for registration.  

I just signed my lease in New Haven! At the beginning of June, I'll be moving out to the Texas countryside for three months to perform Shakespeare plays all summer, and then I'll be making a very condensed move to the northeast, just in time for registration.  

I just signed my lease in New Haven! At the beginning of June, I'll be moving out to the Texas countryside for three months to perform Shakespeare plays all summer, and then I'll be making a very condensed move to the northeast, just in time for registration.  

"I would say that 10 percent is certainly too low in describing their placement, but I also think wordstew is right to say that 87 percent is a gross exaggeration."
On the basis of what knowledge do you think 10% is too low? Notice that last year's "placements" are missing altogether. We agree that the only fair and accurate way to do this is for a program to list every conferred doctorate and then indicate the placement (academic or otherwise for that person). But if that were to be done, it would be very grim. I can tell you with 100% certainty that not even 50% of graduates get tenure-track jobs three years out. 
This is my last post here because I'm not going to keep going back and forth about nihilism, trolling,  etc. I understand the difficulty of applying to these programs and how competitive and stressful that work can be. I did it. I also understand the mentality--and the need--to rationalize participating in this with some modicum of hope that it will work out. I did it. I also understand the love for the work and the importance of it. I've done a lot of it. 
In my experience, most graduate students have not come to terms with what has happened to our profession, and again, it's probably because to confront the reality would make continuing this difficult work nearly impossible. I don't have to tell you about how challenging it can be. But I have more clarity now that I've seen this mess from a variety of angles. And what I have seen is that young scholars have been left out in the cold. It does not matter how good, capable, or promising we are as teachers and scholars. It simply does not matter to the tenured or the administrators that we will never have financial security, job security, or support for our work. That takes an extreme toll on a professional person who cares about their work. It has taken an extreme toll on me to be reminded again and again that my labor is nearly invisible and that it doesn't really matter to the people who financially benefit from it (students are a different story). I could give numerous personal anecdotes that would shock and appall, but it's all been documented by others in numerous monographs and Chronicle articles. Take Rutgers, for example, where the faculty make totally obscene salaries; you can look them up online. These people simply do not understand--they do not want to understand--what has happened to their profession. And many of their students do not really want to understand either because they desperately hope that they will be the exception--that they will get the job. Most of them will not, but one or two will. And what they'll discover is that they are still part of a system that grossly exploits adjunct colleagues and tries to rationalize that exploitation by 1) Denying the full extent of the devastation and 2) Assuming that they're better or more deserving in some way. To do otherwise would be to admit that your salary is made possible by an entire underclass of workers who are just as qualified but have no hope of economic or professional security. That's the reality I'm talking about, and I have a difficult time understanding why someone would choose to participate in that at this point knowing the full extent of how deeply the exploitation runs in academia and how little has been done to address it. Because of how these institutions work, there is simply nothing you will be able to do to advance your career. You will be stuck making peanuts with little to no benefits until you decide not to continue. Each year you will get older and each year your escape from being taken advantage of by your peers will become more and more insurmountable until 20 years have passed and you're left with no choice but to continue. Think I'm exaggerating? Instead of attending catered open houses and distinguished lecturer series, go find several humanities PhD adjuncts on your campus and have a frank conversation with them. 
To answer the other question about how a PhD proved to be a liability: The most important thing I've run into is the need for experience in whatever career track you want to enter. The people who did best when they graduated already had professional experience in the worlds they re-entered. I had told myself (and was told by others) that a PhD would be great for consulting, marketing, etc., but that's just nonsense talk by people who do not know. Maybe a PhD in economics is desirable for a consulting firm. I think that the doctorate does show your capacity for working hard and critical thinking, so it can be a good supplement to experience, but it does not make up for experience. And it can be awkward for bosses and supervisors who don't have a graduate degree and don't even understand what it means. This also depends a lot on the sector and the geographic market. In my experience, "versatile" is the last thing that comes to mind to describe this highly specialized credential. And the problem is that if you are really working toward a tenure-track job almost every ounce of your time and energy goes into your research and teaching. Looking back, I have no idea how someone is supposed to do a PhD and prepare for an alternate career at the same time unless they come from one that they can fall back on, which was the case for a number of my peers.
Finally, I'll say that it breaks my heart to write all this. I think that this work is incredibly important, and I want to celebrate people who continue to demonstrate their interest and enthusiasm for it. But I think that it's unconscionable that the prestige and veneer of these programs continue to seduce people into thinking that there is a profession for them to join. My basic point--and others have made it better--is that the very idea a profession has become a falsehood. What that means is that most people who give years of their life to this pursuit will be left in very challenging circumstances. Many people delay families, children, home purchases, retirement savings, and other major things so that they can commit to this work. Would they make those sacrifices if there was a complete and full disclosure in detail of their real prospects? The fact that Rutgers (among other programs) seems to go out of its way to avoid providing that disclosure speaks volumes. 
 
 
 

I guess I'm reticent to ask because the stipend is so big (comparatively) I'm worried I'll come across badly...but goddamn those texts add up.  I know several of my undergrad profs wanted me to buy the "correct" edition as well, for the reason you stated, but I always made it work.  Eventually I charmed them into not caring, haha.  But maybe it's unprofessional to do that in a graduate program.

I'd check in with your profs. Some of them will probably want their students to be reading the same edition so you can all easily talk about the same parts and not have people trying to figure out what page they need to be looking at.