mandelbulb

you mean officially in-denial-of-our-impending-dooms season surely...............

mostly the affective experience of the female characters...... hitchcock has a thing with making women super miserable in his films i'm not a poet, unfortunately. i do write fiction, but i didn't have time or the creative capacity to write much the last two years one day i'll learn to balance creativity and academia lol

teaching-wise, i briefly mentioned my teaching philosophy in my statement and indicated i was eager to continue growing as a teacher. the places that asked for a personal statement, i did mention teaching a bit more @Bopie5 i'm working on a paper about hitchcock and melancholy on-and-off. i don't think i'll do anything with it, but i'm hoping that going through the motions will make sure i don't forget how to write a paper lol

getting an MA before heading into a PhD was important for me because my BA and work experience is in a completely different field. i wouldn't have been competitive at all, nor would i have had the skill set necessary to excel in a PhD program. i've been told by a lot of people the reality of the job market. an incredibly supportive young faculty member encouraged me to apply for rhet/comp because she wished she had, as she felt it was more versatile and there were better job prospects. every applicant should weigh the reality that after 4+ years in a PhD program that there may not be a perfect dream job at the end.

in keeping with our UChicago theme, did anyone get an email about applying to the Foreign Language Area Studies (FLAS) academic-year and/or summer fellowship?? i didn't get this last year.

usually when i have to use psychoanalysis, i tend to rely more on lacan and i always always pair him with kristeva/cixous/irigaray. i rely more heavily on them to do the heavy lifting. i hate that it's almost required to name drop the old white dude before working with the the progressive female scholars. in the future, i'm hoping i can just skip that part lol i've skimmed through Moi's essay in the past (when i needed to use lacan in my thesis), but i think it deserves a thorough reread now!

@placeinspace i think a lot more people apply than actually report, and a lot more people report than they do hang out in this thread lol @bernardthepug very relatable. thanks for sharing! @Ranmaag welcome to the thread and good luck to you! i'm going to be sending off my final application once i get home (payday!!!) and i'm afraid i'm not going to know what to do with myself. december was defined by applications. rather than allow january to be defined by anxiety, here's to hoping i can adequately distract myself with alcohol cough i mean friends.

i got an email, too. i checked from last year, and it seems i got the same email on 1/4. it probably means nothing? or at least that's what i'm going to tell myself.

to me, fit meant (1) a location where i felt like i could personally thrive, (2) possible prospects after graduating, and (3) faculty with expertise in areas where i need more knowledge in order to answer (and ask more questions about) the research i'm interested in doing. more or less, i tackled this last part more as though i'm building a dissertation committee. who will help me think deeper about X questions? who will help me develop ideas around Y theories? who will bring an additional layer of questioning about Z? so i started with (2) and (3), curating a list of programs with prestige and programs with scholars i greatly admire in affect, posthumanism, and ecocriticism. then i tackled (1), so places where i felt like i wouldn't like living much (like Atlanta) fell off my list. i also took off programs that required the GRE subject test because fuck that. i discovered programs as i researched, too, finding collaborators through browsing faculty research. in my sop, i listed 2-3 professors depending on word count requirements and bridged my proposed research questions with their specific areas of knowledge. i often also identified 1-3 other professors in the department that could support my work if there was room (and if it made sense). i figure more or less what i've done is present a fun research project to a handful of people who, out of all of the professors in the US, would be most likely to be interested. maybe this isn't the project that i'll end up doing specifically, but it'll likely be similar. if these professors think it's cool, then fantastic. if not, then that makes sense too. it's not like i can read their minds and determine across hundreds of miles what types of projects they're interested in mentoring over the next 5-6 years or whether over their career they've mentored 1000 people who want to work on XYZ. there's a part of this equation that we just can't figure out from this side.

since we're sharing rejection stories, here's mine: in 2014, i applied to 5 MFA fiction programs and was rejected in late february, throughout march, and one day before the April 15th deadline. it was really crushing. however, i'd already made plans to travel to Paris with a friend in a MA art history program in the UK and we had a lot of conversations about grad school and dream careers. i also talked to a mentor of mine since my freshman year of undergrad, and he asked me as well to think about where i wanted to be in 5 years, in 10 years, in 15 years. so in 2015, i applied to 8 MFA fiction programs, 4 MA English programs, and 1 English PhD program. I was rejected everywhere except the 4 MA programs. i was accepted with limited funding from 3 and waitlisted from the fully-funded 4th. eventually, i got off the waitlist. while all the rejections sucked a lot, the acceptances i did receive more than made up for it. the 2014 run ended up being a great learning experience, albeit a soul-crushing one. so last year, after talking to my thesis adviser and my graduate adviser, i decided to go for a test-run of PhD applications. that's at least what i told myself what i was doing! it did not work! i applied to 5 English PhD programs and received rejections starting early february. my last rejection was in late march, which was later than other rejections. the downside of these rejections was that i'd sent an early draft of the first chapter of my thesis, and so it made working on it in the winter and spring incredibly difficult. in the end, i changed a lot about my thesis, and i feel very much that what i'd sent was good but not quite good enough. i was encouraged to follow-up with my POI from a close friend who's currently a PhD candidate there, and when i did, i learned that my POI had been very interested in my work and had been impressed with my writing sample. this little tiny bit of hope is why i'm applying again this year. tldr; the downside is that rejection really fucking hurts, but the upside is that often you are a much, much better candidate the following cycle because you have experience writing SOPs now and you're rarely starting from scratch, your WS should be better by virtue of you continuing to work on it and the additional time you've now sat with your material/thoughts/questions that'll be reflected in your revisions, and you'll just have a better idea of what "fit" really means to you. if i'm being honest, i'm not as anxious as i was last year. i have a much better idea now than then what i'll do if this all doesn't work out, and that helps a lot. this sounds like me... i tease myself for this all the time.

fwiw since it still isn't due and you may not have submitted yet, i restated my research questions and elaborated a little more to tie together some of my other research interests that would've seemed tangential in my SOP. i also discussed the work i did as a psychology research assistant in context of my current research interests as a way to present my approach as interdisciplinary. then i discussed the papers i wrote during my MA to demonstrate the (small) breadth of knowledge/canon i'd encountered within my field.

i've told my family (and my roommate) not to ask about my applications from here on that if there's no news, it's bad news and i don't want to talk about it. until then i'm going to distract myself with movies and friend dates and puppies. (this is a hint for anyone with a pet to feel free to attach one picture to every one of your messages--to help us all with our anxiety!) i was actually thinking back to when i first discovered affect theory in my first quarter of my MA. it was really weird because on the one hand, i'd never really experienced theory in literature/film before. on the other hand, i knew about psychoanalysis from my history of psych class and all the smack we talk in evidence-based treatments about "talk therapy" (like psychoanalysis), and i was also familiar with affect because of my line of work. affect theory was the thing that married together all of my broad research interests. it seemed like a missing piece to me that i'd never known was missing lol when did all of you bump into your research interests for the first time?

as soon as my brain will let me, i'll be reading NK Jemisin's Broken Earth series. she is absolutely amazing and i've heard so many great things about the series. i just haven't been able to pleasure read in a while lol

hi all! i graduated from a funded Master's program this last year, and after a close-but-no-cigar at Notre Dame last cycle, i'm here again with a longer list of schools and better material to work with. my BA/work experience before my MA is in another field, though not entirely unrelated to my research. i'm primarily interested in studying affect theory as applied to nonhuman bodies and natures in contemporary science fiction film and literature. my fingers are crossed for Notre Dame since i've made a connection with my POI, but i'd be happy anywhere at this point. i took a long enough break after my BA and didn't really want a break after my MA, but life never quite goes the way you want, right? at this point, i'm starting to think of which schools i'll add (or remove) for next year if i have to do this all over again. contingency plans are really the only thing that keep me sane when i'm experiencing high levels of anxiety. anyone else like that? so what is everyone's dream program and why? and on the other hand, if you don't get in anywhere, is there anything you can fall back on that doesn't make you feel sick about facing another application cycle? edit: i forgot to mention i've been lurking for a while but felt too intimidated to join into the conversation. this is me trying to convince myself i'm not an imposter lol