vondafkossum

Penn is KILLING ME. This unusually competitive cycle has fully flubbed the projected acceptance dates. I too am ready for my rejection.Or acceptance. Or waitlist. I don't care anymore but also I fully, deeply, truly, care. Having the time of my life. Heaven is a place on earth.

SAME. My fiancé trying to explain what I do to her family always says something like “she reads English..... but old.... like Shakespeare.... but less English..... and more old..... also she likes old books..... and libraries....” Needless to say, they’re baffled. 

Um, I'm in at Penn. Dead.

Oh, no. Those are some unfortunate mistakes.
I used to grade standardized exams and one ninth grader somehow mixed up Anne Frank and Harriet Tubman. 

And *I* have to ask, were they wrong??
If it makes you feel any better, last week I graded a draft that indicated Tennessee Williams was "the best African American play writer[sic] in American history." (Which reminds me of an apocryphal story about someone from my undergrad cohort who, apparently, wrote an entire paper on Emily Dickinson while laboring under the misunderstanding of her being a Black poet.)

I think we should all be aware of our positionality when making these arguments. In addition to a great reading load, it is unfortunately true that some scholars will not read all parts of the application. For example, when conservative scholars in English (which there are A LOT! in both public and private school committees) read an application from a private US or British school, they spend more time considering the parts of their application. These biases are real.
Although I have published for respected publishing companies and journals, attended regional and national conferences, and have letters of recommendation from highly respected scholars, private schools will not spend as much time on my application because of my background as a community college and state school alum. That is my experience in academic circle at large. I have been caught in binaries of tokenism and "inferiority" because of my gender and race. So, I think that conflating experience with bad faith is dismissive of people with different backgrounds. I think as scholars and future teachers of english we should be very aware of how we respond to other people's experiences in academia. 
I am curious as to where you received the knowledge that they extend unbiased attention all WS. 

I hope we hear something from BU tomorrow. I'll be staring at my phone from dawn to dusk. My partner is from southern Louisiana and I'm temped to ask him how much he knows about voodoo. If I need to drive to Boston to get my hands on a stuffed BU mascot to pray/sacrifice to, I'll do it. Desperate times, ya'll. 

Thinking about my post last night, and how frustrating this process of delayed rejections is because it really disrupts the necessary stages of acceptance/closure. For almost every school, you have to see people get acceptances and then wait an arbitrary amount of time to hear back. Besides invisible waitlists, is there any reason why schools don't send rejection notices at the same time as acceptances? For the past week, I've been stuck in the cycle of breaking down and then feeling like I need to suspend grief until things are officially over. Seems cruel esp. in the case of somewhere like Columbia where I didn't interview and so there shouldn't be any further review of my app going on. 

I was talking to one of my Classics professors about how my cycle was going during very early February and at the time I was kind of bummed out because I only had one offer but he told me that I should be thrilled because more and more frequently people are just getting shut out in all the humanities fields. He had actually gone to Amherst for his undergrad and was shut out the first round he applied and had to work a few years before reapplying and then got into Harvard along with a bunch of other top choices! I also have other profs who talked about being shut out their first cycle of applying but then eventually getting in so if you find yourself in that situation this year I don't think it's because your work is invalid or that you aren't smart enough. I won't say I know how any of you feel rn (because I don't and that would be insulting) BUT I do know people who have gone through the same situation and come out of it with a PhD and TT job (there are also people on this forum who did insanely well this year after getting shut out their first time and/or working in industry before applying). I hope that what y'all are seeing as reaches/implied rejections for the schools you have left turn out not to be and that you secure your spot somewhere but if not, just know that this does not have to be the end of the road for academia for you unless you want it to be. 
 
If any of y'all want to vent or anything like that you can DM me and I will send you my number if you want to talk and get it all out to a complete stranger. I'm hoping for better news for a lot of y'all going into next week!

Coming out of heavy lurk mode (I feel like I know everyone here!? ?) to say that I was also admitted to Princeton today. I missed the phone call, but the DGS left a very nice voicemail and followed up with an email. 
Fingers crossed for everyone still waiting to hear back! x

Wow!! I join the other lucky folx who have heard good news from Rutgers!!! One of my top programs and the email could not have been any lovelier! So personalized and thoughtful... I teared up a little bit reading it tbh. :') I suspect I got emailed instead of called because it's a Saturday, but we're setting up a time to chat on the phone soon! 
After a string of rejections (six in a row, oof), what a pleasant and unexpected surprise. Hearty congratulations to my fellow Rutgers peeps!

Okay so there's an applicants thread and an acceptances thread. Where's the thread where someone tells me what to do.

@meghan_sparkle about to come out here like Jesus with the fishes and loaves in a couple of weeks for all the 20th-century people on the big boy waitlists

Oof I’m in at Princeton too. What is my life.

I pledge allegiance
To the Susans*
Of the Princeton University English department
And to the novel
For which it stands ...
*Wolfson and Stewart obvs
---
Okay I'll stop now. My heart is being pulled in 10,000 directions and beating very fast because I wasn't expecting anything over the weekend but ... I just ... got in ... to Princeton.
I know it's obnoxious but I'm posting 1. For posterity, so people know this can happen 2. Because my entire family asked me repeatedly over Christmas "What will you do if you get rejected from everywhere?" and I was so terrified because I'd worked so hard night and day on apps I didn't have an answer. And while I was feverishly working on them an awful ex-boyfriend asked to "swing by and wish me luck" a few days before the deadline and walked into my living room to say "You know you're really not smart, right? You try to make it seem like you are but you just never ... produce much of anything" About that, luv. About that.
I felt like a loser for two years after a particularly shitty time during my masters, and I've struggled with having zero self confidence even longer than that. I have had embarrassing failures that made a huge dent in my ability to move forward. This? It can happen. Admissions is a wildly unfair process and I think more than anything I've just been incredibly incredibly lucky, but I lurked on these boards on and off for years thinking, "I'm too stupid, I'm a loser, this will never happen for me." For anyone who remotely fits that description reading this now or in future just please know that it can.

It might be silly, but maybe you’ll have a more defined moment of clarity when all your decisions are in? Right now you’re still sort of in limbo in a strange way. The acceptances you have don’t feel “real” in until you can put a check or an x next to *all* the ones in your list. 

I just found out I'm in at Rutgers!! I am shakinggg. Also, if I wasn't already in the abyss of indecision I sure am now! 

Just got the call from Rutgers! Kind of surprised - I didn't think it was that great of a fit. But I'm not complaining!

Just heard back from the UPenn graduate admin. She said that final meetings are being held now and that decisions should be out in the "next week or so." Pretty vague, but it doesn't look like we should expect to hear from Penn today! 

I'm pretty much realistically just waiting on UC Santa Barbara (maybe BU?). This whole experience has felt like a choose your own adventure novel, complete with plenty of death in the form of rejections lol

I woke up every hour and a half to check my f*cking email, then dreamed I was admitted to Brown in an email that referred to Trump as the "Dark Lord." I also dreamt I was accepted to Dartmouth, and they don't even have an English PhD! When do I ever even think about Dartmouth?! The subconscious is TRASH and so was waking up to no f*cking emailsss

Happy to be of service! I had a rare moment where my anxiety wasn't paying attention, so I just hit send and closed my email tab ?

Finally cracked and sent an email to the graduate coordinator at UPenn asking if there was any update on when decisions will be released. Will report back if I hear from them!

Am having the world's worst day otherwise but: Harvard!

You'd think I'd learn out of all my rejections, but I do not have a healthy amount of outcome-detachment from one of my remaining schools. (It's not an Ivy, which somehow makes it even more dangerous.) I keep finding myself staring out the window during work going, "But the interdisciplinarity...." 
honestly I can't wait to be an actual sufferable person again lol