americana

God, that's kind of terrifying, isn't it?

I think that April 15th should mean April 15th. If a school "cannot wait" until April 15th, then they should leave the Grad Council and move their deadline back to a different date. As an admitted applicant, you have the right to that time to help you make your decision. My program tried to pressure me as well, but not in quite as startling a way as yours did.

This does seem to be a recurring theme. Does anybody want to volunteer any info regarding the extent to which graduate departments communicate with one another, both before and after April 15th?

But we should clarify that McGill does not offer funding to the majority of its MAs, aside from one or two isolated grants. That said, tuition is a fraction of the cost of a comparable American school.

I read it somewhere on this forum. It had been posted by someone who had spoken with a prof on the adcom.

I'm so sorry to hear about your results for this season. Be not deterred; there are many, many people out there who were once in the same boat and went on to find great offers down the road. If I could do it all over again, I would have started much earlier (i.e., now, in the spring). The purpose of contacting professors should not really be to make a friend who might champion your application, as such a thing is more likely to happen based on the ideas put forth in your writing sample and SoP, rather than some chummy email exchange. But determining if a school's resources match your own interests is essential. Find out what these professors are working on (and it's good to be very specific), what they're interested in, what they're bored with, and who they've admitted recently. Don't submit an SoP to a school stating that you MUST and WILL work on Dryden if they just admitted five Dryden scholars last year. Use this as your chance to sleuth out what's going on in the department. You will need as much time as you can get your hands on. And keep good notes. I heard a story somewhere that one of those SIX people admitted to Penn got in because she mentioned an obscure play that someone on the adcom happened to be working on at the time. (Clearly, the applicant had tons of other stuff going on for her, I'm sure, but when things are this competitive, it's these kinds of details that get you over the last hump). That's my two cents. Truly, best luck to you next time around.

I think that the heart and soul of my having brought forward this question was to determine the following information: Should applicants be deterred from applying to School A if they think that school A would not accept them based on the applicants' apparent likelihood to turn them down to pursue better offers? (We can maybe refer to this as a school's Yield Hesitancy.) Of course, applications are expensive and consume huge amounts of resources (from our recommenders, plus our own time constraints, etc.), so determining whether to roll the dice on applying somewhere really is a big deal. If an applicant chooses to go forward with that application to School A, what can s/he do to improve her/his chances of being accepted in light of what s/he may suspect to be that school's Yield Hesitancy?

I'm a "her," not a "his." I'm sorry I've offended you. I'm really just trying to answer a question.

The rankings don't strike me as "meaningless." They do have meaning. The question at hand is the degree to which they have meaning. And I do not require validation. I have a fellowship to a fantastic program in a beautiful part of the world. This was never about my personal circumstances. I'm simply trying to unravel the application process, just as the rest of us are doing. I can't say I appreciate your personal attacks nor your presumptions about my character. But maybe people behave differently in your discipline?

See, this was the point of my question. I also think that there's a huge amount of luck to this process, but I find it curious that my acceptances came bunched into one spot on the rankings ladder, and that I tend to see very similar results all across this forum. It's quite rare to see a person accepted to both Brown and Arizona State (for example). So while luck may be a massive factor, there does seem to be an identifiable pattern. I'm sorry that my remarks have motivated so many people to press the little red "ME NO LIKE" button under my comments, but please recognize that this is a legitimate issue for current and future applicants.

I'd be careful about that Chicago MAPH, though. There's a lot of talk on the Lit/Rhet forum about how it's one of the biggest cash cows in all of American higher education. I'd love to hear some feedback abou that, though. But I'd be wary of paying 50 grand for any kind of Master's degree, and especially one in the humanities.

Maybe some of us would be perfectly happy teaching at community colleges or regional state schools or even high schools. And perhaps there will be a lot of students who will come through our classes at those places and learn a great deal. And maybe they'll go on to build beautiful lives and families and careers. Would that be a professional failure on our parts? Would that be a reason not to apply to graduate school? Let's keep things in perspective. The best jobs are not necessarily at the best schools.

Just double-check how the SoP will be submitted. If you're writing it in MS Word and end up with a 520 word count, that's no problem, but if the application is online and they cut you off after 500 words, then you'll just have to go back and trim it anyway. (And what's up with 500-word SoPs? That's like a haiku.)

That's always been my suspicion, as well. Besides, think of how detrimental it would be to the morale of a cohort if and when they found out that they'd all been accepted off the wait list? It would suggest not only that the entire cohort had gotten second-place consideration from the adcom, but indeed that not one originally accepted applicant had decided that the program was good enough.

To correct the record, I was referring to having cited certain of these schools' professors in my actual writing sample, not my SoP. That is, I read their articles, built an essay around them, and cited that work as a means of demonstrating my commitment to the school. True, anyone can name-drop a couple of professors in their SoP, but this was a significantly greater and more deliberate effort. Your snide dismissal of this work was based on your own erroneous reading of my post.