meghan_sparkle

Also oh god somehow I forgot about the MOVING part; my lease in the UK is up in July and I have already said I’m not extending and told my job that’s when I’m leaving. I assumed I would move from there to the city of whatever program I was attending with possibly a few weeks/a month in between ... if I can’t do that uh ?

❤️❤️❤️ I don't know whether gradcafe frowns on expletives or not but I just typed several and backspaced. You are incredible and I'm so upset this is affecting you

I mean, having spoken to several DGS's and professors at a few of the programs I'm looking at in the last few days, most of them are not treating a return to in-person, on-campus classes as a likelihood, though it's far from an impossibility. The next two months or so will tell, and I think everyone's preference would be physical classes for so many reasons (everything from 'zoom sucks' to 'residential life is so important to the university community and we were all genuinely heartbroken to have to send students home'). I post way too much on these forums lately for my own good, but I'll end with one last big picture ominous thing (and maybe someone much smarter than me can offer opinions and/or reassurance). If the economic impact of the virus on the US economy is as bad or worse than the 2008 crash, then that's bad for . . . well, not just the job market, but also universities as a whole, whose endowments are often comprised of substantial investment. Princeton lost 25% of its endowment in the 2008 crash; Harvard lost 27%, or 8 billion. Does something like that touch graduate students, or does it amount more or less to mowing the lawns every other week instead of every week? Who knows. It's probably the case that state schools already under pressure (like the UCs) will be the hardest hit by budget cuts. And maybe it's way too early to speculate, possibly counterproductive. But I think it's worth thinking about, as we contemplate devoting ourselves to an institution and making it our home for 5-6 years. The ability to access funding through the department for all kinds of things (travel, conferences, research, emergencies, fellowship opportunities, other projects), to count on funding packages staying the same and properly adjusting each year for inflation . . . all of that is really important and sorta dependent on how well the institution as a whole is doing. Anyway. Something to consider. (Disclaimer: this all comes second to the general economic devastation on so many Americans right now and the inevitable loss of life we'll be seeing, ofc. Compared to that, so much of this seems miniscule. Hoping you all are safe, well or recuperating, and self-isolating.)

Sorry my phrasing was vague—I just mean getting an idea of how readily and intensively they will support students' particular concerns about placement and the market. Because this is all so new and no one knows what the impact on the market precisely will be yet, no one will have an action plan. But you can maybe get a sense of which programs will be more responsive to the challenge than others.

As a current Princeton 5th year just told me on Skype (to my horror), it's also not just whether schools will open online in the fall vs virtually and how that will affect an incoming class of graduate students ... it's also—more subtly and perhaps more importantly—the fact that given current events, we are almost undoubtedly heading into a multi-year global recession that will cripple an already heavily struggling academic job market. It's impossible to say precisely what things will look like in 3 or 5 years, of course, but even at this early stage, it's certain that it's going to be bad, very bad. So everyone facing a decision should be asking programs how they plan to support and meet student concerns, even if (justifiably) no one will likely have a plan yet.

You would think it would help, and it may well help (especially internationally, if you dream of moving to, say, the UK or something, the Harvard/Yale/Princeton etc label may well be valued by international departments/faculties less aware of how programs like Berkeley/Chicago/UCLA are rivalling and even exceeding them), but there are a lot of misconceptions. My verdict (not that it should count for much—but your question is one I've had too so I've asked around a lot) would be that an English PhD from a place like Yale or Princeton etc is always going to carry a certain weight that others just aren't going to, but that weight can be easily overestimated when in reality the benefit of going to a certain institution on the job market is always going to be subfield specific. Harvard English for instance has had unusually bad placement the last few years—'unusually bad' as in, everywhere is bad because the market is bad, but Harvard has flatlined in recent years in a way that you wouldn't expect because it's Harvard. Source: current and recent Harvard English PhD students, several professors I know who have been on the market in the last 2-3 years, and one high level professor who often reads postdoc and TT applications for American lit and remarked that those out of Harvard the last few years feature projects that just look under-advised, compared to the ambitious work coming out of, say, Columbia. The answer to "why?" is anyone's guess (as you can tell, so much of this is anecdotal) but "under-advised" might give a clue; the conjectures I've heard is that Ivy League brand name prestige can be counteracted when, say, the biggest star names in the department tend to have hands-off supervision styles, be difficult to reach, and (given the fact that they're superstars who've had tenure for decades) may not really be clued in to the realities of the market right now. Which is to say, if you're coming out of a Harvard PhD with an advisor who may not have extensively mentored you and improved your project, who may not be inclined to advocate hard for you or write a very strong recommendation letter when you go on the market ... then the name will probably matter less. Especially in a comparison with comparatively better mentorship and placement efforts at one of the other non-Ivy institutions you mention. However, an exception to that is that Harvard is an absolute powerhouse for medievalists and is generally relatively good at placing them. So the answer is: sure it helps, but probably not as much as you'd guess, and much less so in the last few years, now the job market has gone from Very Bad to Practically Barren; I'd say it's more a combination now of name/program prestige, how well matched you are with your advisor(s), and whether resources/placement efforts at specific institutions are alive and well. In the last 5 years, there are several top 10 programs that have had good years for placement, but if you look closely, that almost always had to do with subfields—i.e. the department is strong in a subfield that just happened to be hiring that year, i.e. Berkeley's strength in Asian American may make them look much better one year than Columbia and Yale, which may be hugely strong in, say, British modernism, but quite simply no one is hiring for that subfield right now. In your specific case, if you think the quality of education, mentorship and placement help you'll get at (e.g.) Yale and UCLA are fairly equitable ... I would just repeat what has been told to me, which is that the market is so bad right now that choosing one place over another (when the two options are equitable and when you might even fit better with the non-Ivy program) for Ivy name brand purely for the sake of the job market ... well, I'd question the logic tbh. I find the notion (which I hear over and over again from academics in response to this kind of question) that it doesn't really matter because you probably won't get a job either way really dispiriting and frankly annoying, so sorry if this answer is similarly irksome. You'd probably be better off going with the best fit and, as you mentioned in your post, paying attention to how happy the students seem—it does matter!

Also is it just me, or do virtual visits/phone calls really just feel like disembodied voices trying to persuade you of things and giving you advice?? It's all a little too close to Chaucer's House of Fame for my liking!

Honestly, this is misery and I regret ever complaining about my empty inbox lol. Getting over 10 emails a day now—everything from current students making themselves available for a chat, replies from DGS's, professors reaching out, admins reaching out, admins requesting additional documentation (for the THIRD TIME) for reimbursement for a nonrefundable flight for a cancelled visit (which I'm starting to think I'm unlikely to ever see, which means I'm out $400). And I spent like 2 and a half hours over the weekend on the phone with the DGS and then a POI for one of my programs. And instead of feeling more informed, it honestly just created another list of things to research and people to contact. At a time when the last thing I feel is on top of my inbox, productive, or motivated. Also, despite the deluge there are still a lot of important POIs who just ... still never responded to my email, and I feel like it would be really impolite to follow up again in the middle of a world health crisis. This is just so much time to invest, on so many different fronts, and I constantly feel 10 steps behind. I said in a previous post I wasn't sure going through all the motions for virtual visits/phone calls (for the 4 schools that had to cancel visits) would lead to me feeling like I could make an informed decision compared to the two I got to visit ... but at this point I'm not even sure I can keep doing this for even another couple weeks, let alone til April 15th.

whomp you were right

what! that is awful!!!

Maybe I manifested some kind of witchy energy because Harvard's DGS called me out of the blue just now. ? Shook. I am shook.

FYI got this forwarded by to me by an administrator re: Harvard — wouldn’t usually share this on a public forum but I think right now it’s probably helpful to make people aware of what’s happening at particular institutions because a lot of programs are probably each operating independently and in the dark.

Yeah, it's a little disappointing if I'm honest—and of the remaining schools I'm considering that I couldn't visit, Berkeley has been on the more-proactive-than-not side of the spectrum, so it doesn't seem to bode well for the rest of the others. And I was just saying the same to someone else too re: how much work this is placing on applicants! Totally agree with you. The time needed to reach out and email various people, or respond to multiple emails if it's the DGS, admin, faculty and/or students getting in touch, set up the calls, prepare all the questions and then have the call/Skype meeting ... whereas with a visit, everything is coordinated for you, provided you indicate some names of faculty who you'd like to speak to, and it's the faculty that lead the meetings, no pressure to prep. Now it seems the only other option is either mammoth coordination or an information dump; Columbia for ex sent out an FAQ doc of commonly asked questions about the program and a list of course offerings for the next couple years—soooo yet another item on my to-do list is going through course offerings for fall 2020/spring 2021 at like 5 different programs and comparing. In addition to reading through the entirety of the Princeton graduate handbook and continuing to pray that Harvard does not keep ghosting me lol. I realize this is like the least of the world's problems, but it's just a lot esp for people who already work full-time. (You graduating seniors too—I can't even imagine.) I work from home and always have, thank god, but still. Spending pretty much every day now on my parents' couch (my flight back to the UK isn't til the 29th, no changes possible and not refundable) staring at a computer screen, either for work, for emails to professors/students, or scrolling through the madness on Twitter/the news.

Just got the info email for a virtual Berkeley visit that is ... a couple hours, 12-2 PM EDT Monday on Zoom. And a virtual icebreaker (not clear if only a few people responded or if the admitted cohort is small) with the instruction to just start emailing each other if we want to. .... Alrighty then.

Yeah fair, I didn't think about how moving to say April or May would really impact waitlist movement that comes through in, say, June or July as you said. I think the combination of lack of communication/recruitment from schools after cancelled visits + the rigidity of the April 15 date just really panicked me so I thought it worth asking the question. Dropping the idea now! The VP of the Council for Graduate Schools said this morning the decision @Warelin linked to is final very unlikely to move, so I'd say the chances of it happening are about zero. So those on waitlists can rest easy (or easier, at least).

Sigh, I'm going to drop the April 15th stuff actually. Just heard from Princeton's DGS that even if they wanted to, the decision to extend would lie with the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, not the English department, and unless there's some kind of tidal sea change between now and the start of April, I'm pretty sure it'll stay the same.

I think everyone is in a tough position at the moment and I'm not sure that keeping the date as is for this reason actually helps those on waitlists. Every admitted student I've spoken to has said that visit cancellations and the uncertainty generated by world health epidemic will lengthen the process of their decision making, with many totally unsure how they'll reach a conclusion with half or all their visits cancelled; to me this says that almost all waitlist movement will occur at the very last second or even after April 15, rather than trickling movement April 1st-15th. I had hoped to be able to decline spots as soon as possible post-visits to open things up for people on waitlists (and have declined one school already). But without being able to meet anyone in person or see the schools—plus, at current levels of havoc, with faculty slower than usual to respond to emails and set up calls—deciding will be incredibly difficult. And it's ominous to me that the worse this crisis gets, the less faculty have been receptive to my contact. A huge difference between 72 hours ago and today for instance. That'll only get worse I'm sure. Sorry to be so pessimistic, but I'm just really freaked out. Not saying that people on waitlists aren't biting their nails even harder than those with offers—god no—but I think everyone is fucked by this situation, and by the current deadline. Just my two cents.

Does anyone know if there are whispers of moving the April 15 decision date given coronavirus? I'm not sure whether it would even be possible but it seems insane to me that it isn't being considered given the state of things right now.

Welp in the midst of the madness professors (with the exception of a couple at Columbia) have stopped responding to my emails about setting up calls/Skype to replace meetings on visits, so ... that's fun!

totally agree with this!

I'm all for prophylactic measures and think the current administration's resistance to widespread testing and quarantine procedures is bordering on criminal, however I have a sneaking suspicion that a big part of the reason schools are shutting unceremoniously—Harvard students have to attend classes this week and then be out by Monday, wtf?—is an attempt to avoid the possibility of future lawsuits. If a student contracted the virus through the classroom/campus interactions, I can just see overzealous parents involving lawyers and suing the university. I hope I'm wrong, but something smells fishy. Not about the decision to close and cancel gatherings (which I think it the right one considering how far students can travel in a short time over spring break before returning; it could make colleges hotbeds for the virus) but more specifically the speed of the decision, telling students (including ones who have nowhere to go or whose visa requires them to remain in the US) to vacate dorms—it just makes me irate.

I didn't speak to anyone in Chicago about Columbia MFA, no--the stipend might actually be nearer to 35k but yeah, I think functionally it restricts you to Columbia housing, which is at a subsidized rate. Livability on the stipend was one of the main things I was going to ask at the Columbia visit on the 25th but .... now I'll just email current students ? On my list of 203943240 emails to send

Both good choices, but I've heard excellent things about Irvine the last few years.

Yeah, agreed. I have what I think (?) is the highest fellowship offer from Berkeley right now and even then, it will go down to ~27k from year 5 onward according to the DGS. Trying to live on that in the Bay Area? Oh honey no. When Harvard's package is 36k, Chicago's and Yale's 31/32k, and Columbia's 34k for 6 years guaranteed ... it's just vvvery hard to see how I could justify it to myself, even though the faculty fit is fantastic. EDIT: Despite that it's still true that they have the best placement in the country rn! Which is hard to ignore.

It really sounds like the second program is where you want to go and where you belong. The difference between 17 and 27 does not sound like it should be a dealbreaker to me given the other factors, though hard to say for sure as a third party that isn't you and doesn't know either school. Plus rankings can change a lot in 5-7 years' time (evidence schools like UC Davis working hard to develop their PhD program and jumping up a ton in the last US News rankings release compared to the previous one). It also may be #27 school is markedly stronger in your subfield than #17 school and that should matter. Could you ask the grad administrator if they could provide contact information for other cohort members, for the purpose of connecting given the lack of ability to visit and met each other? They may want to send a blanket email giving people the option to opt out, but both UChicago and Princeton have given us the emails of other admits. You may have middling success but it's pretty common knowledge that cohort camaraderie / getting a feel for your fellow students is often a big factor in people's decision-making process so it can't hurt to ask! Last, I totally sympathize re: feeling much more "wanted" by one school than another; I'm in this situation myself and it's hard not to draw conclusions or develop instinctive feelings when you have a lot of professors reach out from one place and fewer from others. However my very limited experience so far (cruelly cut short by cancelled visits!!) is that every school has a different strategy when it comes to recruitment, some much more aggressive than others. No one at Yale seemed to have the vaguest clue of what Harvard or Chicago were doing, and Berkeley's DGS had zero idea either when I spoke to him and was very curious about it ... so if possible try not to set too much store by it? Other than the loveliest email from the DGS I had no contact with Yale professors before my visit (compared with 5 professors at Columbia emailing me and 3 at Berkeley) and I went in assuming that maybe they didn't want me as much or there wasn't much of a fit. But this wasn't the case at all. It's worth a good faith effort to reach out and have conversations is what I'm saying, though from what it sounds like you may well still end up liking program 2 a lot better.