VincentH

Holy cow - this is so thorough, and such great advice! Thank you for this! I've been struggling in particular with my SoP (as I'm sure others have, too) and this really helps us dial in our focus on what's most important. Cheers!

Hello, everyone! I figured after gaining so much insight from this thread that I ought to stop lurking and just make an account already! Hopefully I'll be using it to update the status of my applications come the spring so I needed to have one anyway I'm applying to ~15-16 schools this cycle (yikes - the app fees...). Which still sounds absolutely ridiculous to say out loud, but I know it'll give me a good shot at it! I would love to study 18th century British literature - my passion is Restoration drama, particularly. I absolutely adore the Restoration playhouse and all of the debauchery that went on there! I'm working on polishing up a brand new paper on Aphra Behn and the masquerade (masquerade phenomenology is a new-found love for me - so fascinating) that I've been working on with my mentor. She's a badass Restoration scholar in her own right with a successful career, so I'm hopeful that her advice and expertise will ensure an airtight sample! One worry I have, though, is how specific my areas of interest are. There are very few profs in my area (of all of the schools I researched, I can count on one hand the amount that have more than two 18th-century scholars, and even fewer were particularly Restorationists), and I'm anxious that I'll have a very strong application but schools will reject me simply because they don't know where I'll "fit." I'm applying to some of the best 18th-century programs in the country (WashU, Rutgers, and Brandeis are the schools I'm most excited about), but if I get rejected from those, I'm terrified the rest will be resounding rejections simply because of my field. Should I broaden my scope/adjust my language in my SoP? Am I digging my own grave writing about my love of the Restoration in my SoP and writing sample? Any advice is much appreciated! Wishing you all the best of luck with your applications!