politics 'n prose

Congrats on the interview requests, @Tessjane77! I’m assuming you’ve applied to English/Lit programs, in which case two interviews out of six schools is a pretty great yield—especially considering the fact that the healthy majority of English PhD programs don’t conduct interviews at all. To offer another comparison point to @Rrandle101‘s: I applied to seven English/Lit programs and only one of those schools traditionally does interviews. So, unless the six schools you applied to all happen to be ones that interview—and, hell, even if that is the case—I’d say you’re in pretty good shape.

Congrats on the Northeastern news, @karamazov! Also, for those of us left high and dry by Chicago, I came across the following just now in the results search: Spoke with DGS; all interview requests have gone up. Not everyone will be interviewed, but everyone accepted in recent years has had an interview. Not too much of a surprise for me (Chicago was absolutely my one-in-a-million, snowball’s-chance-in-hell school), but I just wanted to share this here because I know a number of folks have been wondering what’s up. Congratulations and good luck to those who are in the running for an interview!

I take it the chat with UMD went well, @merry night wanderer—glad to hear it! Also, I’ve been remiss: congrats to you and your partner on the Chicago and Notre Dame interview news, @Indecisive Poet!

To add to @Dogfish Head‘s point re: OSU... Ohio State has historically updated the portal prior to official acceptance emails being sent, so there’s nothing so anomalous about this. Department secretaries also tend to speak in generalities when asked questions about the status of the app review process, so I would just take what you were told at face value: Applications are still being reviewed and nothing has been made official yet (an “official” acceptance would presumably be one that is confirmed by both the applicant portal and by email, phone, or letter). I’d say the odds are in your favor here, but I can definitely understand your confusion and concern. If it helps, based on last year’s results, there were only a few days in between when the portal was updated and when acceptance emails went out, so you’ll likely know by early next week what your official status is. Fingers crossed that the news remains good, @brownjournal!

Congrats, @pinkfruit (and congrats again, @Rrandle101)! OSU is a great school—as I mentioned in the other thread, I did my MFA there. If either of you have questions about the program generally or the city of Columbus, don’t hesitate to shoot me a message! OSU has historically been one of the few (possibly only?) schools that updates its portal before sending out notification emails to acceptances. I’m guessing our lucky admits will be receiving some correspondence from the DGS (a real character of a guy!) within the next few days.

Heh, yeah, I’d had it in the back of my mind while applying that the unstable (though nominally “good”—like, what does that even mean?) economy might result in a greater number of applicants this cycle, as tends to be the case. Ah well, so it goes...

Congratulations, @Rrandle101! As the first admit of the season, I think the honor is yours to open the 2020 Acceptances Thread... (Also, I did my MFA at Ohio State, so if you have any general questions about the English department or Columbus itself, just let me know!)

Agreed. This shouldn’t be a problem, especially because transcripts uploaded to the application are generally understood to be unofficial (i.e., subject to change for those students whose final semester coursework is still in progress), with acceptance contingent on students furnishing a final, complete transcript. Think of it this way: If one of the courses you’d scheduled for the spring semester wound up being canceled by your school between when you applied to grad school and when the spring semester started, that would create a similar discrepancy between your unofficial transcript and your final transcript, through no fault of your own. Don’t sweat it!

Agreed. At the end of the day, the content of your SOP--how you present your academic history and research interests, how you locate those interests in the larger discipline, and how you articulate your professional goals--will matter far more than the stylistic flourishes. (Also, not to throw shade at academics, but there's certainly plenty of phraseology in published articles in English/Lit that could generously be described as, shall we say, "a bit clunky." ?) Try not to sweat it, @HPurple! Ooo, yes, I am also curious to hear more from folks on this. I only applied to one school that seems to do interviews--and said school (Chicago) is so far out of my league anyway that the odds of me getting an interview to begin with are close to nil--but I still have no idea how to approach or prep for a hypothetical interview. (I had a dream last night--my third app-related dream of the season so far, for those of you keeping score at home--that I had a phone interview with a made-up POI at a made-up school, and it was stressful.)

This is all anecdotal information that I've gleaned from avidly (obsessively?) reading old threads, but another complicating factor is that some schools only interview candidates applying in certain periods (e.g., Columbia has historically interviewed, I think, medievalists, but not others). I don't mean to traffic in false hope--and, in fact, I think @WildeThing's advice is spot-on--but the main thing to keep in mind about interviews specifically is that every school does (or doesn't do) them differently, and it's still way too early in the game to count yourself out. Congrats to all those who are already hearing back from schools--and have heart, those who are still completely in the dark. We're just getting started!

Yup, most places don’t interview, but those that do will generally send an email to confirm a date and time. (And, for what it’s worth: Acceptances tend to be by email or phone call, depending on the program, while waitlists and rejections are generally by email (or even snail mail).) Burying myself in my job (I work in higher ed administration, and this time of year is always plenty busy) and, in my down time, playing video games (I just acquired a Nintendo Switch, god bless). I’m also a fiction writer who’s trying to pawn a novel manuscript off on agents and get some short stories and essays published in various venues, so I have plenty of other reasons to obsessively check my email that have nothing to do with grad school and can sort of rotate what I’m anxiously awaiting/preemptively freaking out over at any given time.

So it begins... Congrats and good luck with the interviews, @merry night wanderer and @coffeelyf—always promising to start the cycle off with good news, I’d say!

Ha, I was just coming here to post the same thing, @caffeinated applicant. As far as shellackings go, this one was relatively tame for me: I’ve read through enough old GradCafe posts to have had a faint recollection of a similar email going out from Chicago around this time last year. I was, however, shellacked by my own subconscious last night when I dreamed I’d be “recommended for acceptance” (not even actually accepted) by Pitt’s English department. Even in my dreams these schools can’t give me a straightforward answer!

Ha, solidarity, @Rrandle101 and @vondafkossum—I submitted all my applications in the first week of November, and have already experienced the Five Stages of Waiting (spoiler alert: all five stages are anxiety). I’m just thrilled to finally be into the new year, and am just gearing up for the rollercoaster ride that will be the next three months. Godspeed and good luck, all!

Ooo, yes, this is a good point: at my institution, those on fellowship were explicitly forbidden from working an outside job without written permission; I’m pretty sure teaching assistants were similarly discouraged from holding a second job, but I don’t think it was actually written into the contract that this was a no-no. With that said, my sense was that the rules governing outside employment for fellows and TAs were set by the graduate school itself, not by the English department; in my program, at least, I don’t think anyone was actively discouraged from making extra money on the side. Obviously the goal is for the stipend to be livable enough to preclude a second source of income, so students can focus entirely on coursework, exams, and dissertating, but of course that is frequently not the reality.

The pinned post at the top of this forum can give you a pretty good (albeit, general) sense of how a number of programs’ stipends correlate to the cost of living in their respective cities: In my own experience, the stipend I received during my MFA was enough that I only had to find other work over the summers (summer funding wasn’t guaranteed unless you were on fellowship; many students did receive teaching assistantships over the summer, though). I also lucked into a relatively low-commitment but well-paying freelance gig in the final year of my MFA that allowed me to actually start saving money, which is obviously not typical of everyone’s experience (though I found the gig through the graduate program’s listserv, which was oftentimes a great resource for finding part-time/supplemental work at the university or in the surrounding community). Of course, I was 23 at the time: the $15K I made each year as a grad student was more money than I’d ever seen before in my life. I also was fortunate to have very few financial obligations (the biggest of which, my student loans, were able to be deferred during my MFA), and my school was located in an area with a low cost of living; I also lived with a roommate in my first and third years, which meant rent and utilities were split down the middle. I budgeted pretty comprehensively and always managed to have some money left over each month for social stuff, though I definitely didn’t have a ton in savings and was essentially living paycheck to paycheck. So, in short, it’s definitely possible to live relatively comfortably on a grad school stipend: the biggest factors are going to be the cost of living relative to the stipend, and your own existing financial situation (are you supporting one or more dependents? Do you have a lot of personal debt that isn’t deferrable? Etc.). And it’s definitely worth noting that the majority of schools are still woefully lacking in support for lower-income or nontraditional students (e.g., parents), so that’s always something worth asking about if you fall into either of those categories. (Oh, and schools that allow their grad students to unionize—though few and far between—will probably offer more comprehensive or competitive benefits; I went to a school that was openly hostile to unionizing, though, so I can’t speak from experience there.)

From your list: OSU, WashU and Duke have traditionally notified in late Jan/early feb. Schools tend to notify acceptances prior to rejection. Some schools might have hidden waitlists. An approximation list of notifications can be found here:

Agreed--this is a great (and important) question! At my master's institution (which, caveat, I graduated from in 2018, so things may have since changed), MA, MFA, and PhD students all operated out of shared offices. I think there were between four and six office spaces scattered throughout the building where the English department was housed. Some students were on fellowship during their first year, but they were still assigned offices alongside the TAs, and generally the offices were a good mix of those who were teaching and those who weren't (though obviously the former group spent far more time in the office than the latter). There were a decent number of desks in each office, but there were still more grad students than desks, so we'd have a share. On busy days, if you got to the office at the wrong time, you wouldn't necessarily have a work space (or there would be way too much commotion and distraction to really get any work done). I personally didn't get a ton of writing or reading done in that space, but I found it conducive enough to grading and lesson planning (and I held office hours there); in fact, having other grad students around was helpful in this respect because I could bounce pedagogy-related questions off my peers as needed. In terms of my own work, I was fortunate to have a spare room in my apartment that functioned as a home office. There were also plenty of quiet nooks on campus to be staked out, and a handful of coffee shops farther from campus that were generally low-traffic and offered a bit more in the way of ambiance than my dank basement office.

Yeah, I’m inclined to say this is not a big deal. Obviously plagiarism is a no-no, but if you properly cited the paraphrase and just didn’t utilize language unique enough from the original source, that’s probably what’s tripping up Turnitin (which is by no means the be-all, end-all of academic integrity checks). Now, if you actually used a direct quote from the source but neglected to put it in quotation marks, that’s some sloppy citation, and certainly something to be more cognizant of in the future, but still not a sign of ill intent on your part. (Not that plagiarism is defined solely by intent, but it’s good to remind yourself that you were not trying to pull the wool over any adcoms’ eyes.) Without more information on the exact nature of the less-than-perfect paraphrase, though, I’m not sure we can really tell you whether or not this rises to the level of having to inform your schools. As a chronic over-thinker myself, I think you may be overthinking this—but I also understand the impulse to notify schools and submit a corrected draft, and I don’t think it would necessarily hurt your chances to do so. (And, for whatever small comfort this may provide: I don’t think you’re the only PhD applicant who’s ever submitted a writing sample with some dodgy citations. We’re none of us perfect, and we’re all still learning—go easy on yourself, and just be more careful next time!)

Yikes, I’d hate to think my odds of admission were in some way contingent upon my ability to visit campus as an applicant (and not even an accepted applicant, at that!). I agree with you entirely that this sounds like the purview of the privileged few—it reeks of “old boys’ club” nonsense to me. For what it’s worth, I don’t believe this is a common—or even desired—practice across the board. In fact, most of the schools I applied to had FAQ pages that directly addressed the “Can I schedule a campus visit prior to receiving an admissions decision?” question with a resounding “NOPE.” Designated visit days seem relatively common for accepted students, but my sense is that most English departments are too strapped for resources and time to accommodate a sea of pre-admit applicants flooding campus.

Oof, $120 is criminally expensive. If you’d still be excited to go to this school if it were the only one you got in to, and if you’d already budgeted for the app fee, then I suppose you have nothing to lose...but fit is definitely among the most important considerations, and if you’re pretty sure at this stage that your research interests wouldn’t be as well-supported at this school than at some of the others you’ve already applied to, I think there’s a strong argument to be made for crossing it off your list. If it were me, I think I’d probably just go ahead and apply at this point unless you absolutely can’t find a single professor, grad student, or recently-taught course that sparks some amount of intellectual excitement for you. But it’s definitely a tough call!

So the other night I had a dream that I was accepted to the PhD program at UC Davis, a school I did not even apply to in real life. But at least it was an acceptance! (Seriously, the next three months are just gonna be brutal...)

Heh, totally—and I’m savoring that feeling, knowing it may be the final validation I receive from all of these schools. ?

Part of my research for each program did involve checking out the directory of current PhD students, just to see if any of them had MFAs instead of/in addition to MAs; a few schools anecdotally seemed open to admitting MFAs, so that was heartening. (Not that any school would be openly antagonistic toward the prospect of admitting creative writers, but it stands to reason that some programs are more keen on it than others. I hadn't thought of this receptivity as corresponding to whether or not the schools themselves had creative writing undergrad/grad programs, but that's definitely a logical conclusion.) Not to derail this thread too much, but I'm curious if any of my fellow MFAs are applying to their master's institution for a PhD. The school where I got my MFA happens to have an English program with strong concentration areas that align with my research interests, so I gave it a shot and applied for the PhD, but I'm not holding my breath or anything.

Re: Updike, I picked up the entire Rabbit, uh, quartet at a used bookstore about 18 months ago—a mix of paperbacks and hardbacks in various editions, so it’s quite the eclectic collection—because I’m a 20th/21st century Americanist who’s never read (or taught) any Updike beyond “A&P.” I’ve been bracing myself for the misogyny and still haven’t cracked open Rabbit, Run, but now I’ve been re-inspired to give it a shot. At least now I know I’ll be in good company!