meghan_sparkle

Notified by email because, classic me, I do not have a working phone, but I'm "in" at Brown, and I say "in" because I've finally caught on to the fact that this is not real life but a very cleverly engineered simulation, y'all really had me fooled, please wake me up now.

You know what's funny, there was also one lone Brown acceptance via phone last year on the board, and the rest came in 3 days later (via email I think). Wonder if that's happening again this year? You might well be the chosen applicant @Rani13 !

Congrats!!!!! Ahhh!

Mm well, this is new: a friend (who is a Yale alum) has taken to writing the beginning of a fanfic involving me, my POI and ... baseball. He also checks the board more often than I do. I love him but he needs a hobby.

Yeah, almost no one gets funded on the Oxford MSt — maybe 1-2 per strand out of 14-17. Even if you turn out to be one of those, it is definitely, definitely not worth turning down Yale for it. Under any circumstance. Imo! haha

PhD is very different from MPhil/MSt when it comes to the Oxbridge applications process—I know many people that did the Criticism and Culture MPhil and none of them had an interview for it, so don't worry about it. Interviews when candidates are being considered for DPhil funding is a slightly different story, since unlike the US, funding is much harder to come by in the UK especially for humanities degrees and much more competitive.

Hear, hear!!!!!

It seems contrary to what I've read on gradcafe, stipends are taxed as income, even if they're not teaching fellowships ... looking at the chart here: https://gsas.yale.edu/resources-students/finances-fellowships/tax-information After federal, FICA and state taxes, that brings Chicago's fellowship from $31k down to $25,145 take home, and Yale's from $32.7k gross to $27,097 take-home, estimated according to the calculator ... which, given cost of living in both Chicago and New Haven, is ... definitely an important consideration!

I've finally made a big pro/con spreadsheet and one of the first categories is figuring out what my annual stipend is after taxes and university fees. However, trying to figure out federal and state taxes on any of these fellowships (which so far are all in different states) is proving near impossible, even when places like Yale have extensive GSAS tax information webpages, because I am stupid. I haven't taken a math course—haven't taken anything but English literature courses, actually—since the age of 17. In the UK my wages are automatically taxed and I don't really have to do anything, and I just have to fill out an IRS form for my US taxes saying that I live in the UK with income already taxed there and make way under the threshold of taxable income. Is there an easier way of going about this? Like a two or three-step addition and subtraction-type deal...? Like really breaking it down, Taxes-For-Dummies style. Just for my Excel spreadsheet.

Mood. This is me every time a bit of positive news enters my inbox: Edit: Just for the record (since my sense of humor is terrible) I'm kidding, I love several of the places I haven't heard back from, but oh man. Trying to figure out whether I should go to the café first and library second or the other way around paralyzes me with indecision most days. How will I make an even harder decision??

Tbh I don't want to get hung up on this but I will say: that's CUNY, and obviously you should pay close attention to the specific advice and guidelines about the SOP and writing sample outlined by each school (mine varied widely in some cases), but it's not a one-size-fits-all thing. In fact more than one school (I won't call out names, sorry) I applied to said to me that because my app (both SOP and writing sample) cut across multiple periods and approaches, "a lot of people ended up reading it". Meaning that after an initial reading or readings, it was allocated to multiple people whose specialities and interests aligned with the subject matter, covering all bases. Which suggests to me that while sure, committees are filled with professors of varying specialties and subfields, and not everyone has read Bleak House. Hell, I did a masters in Victorian literature and haven't read Bleak House. But you know what I read for the 3rd time today because its close readings of the novel and particularly the character of Esther are just wickedly sharp and brilliant? Mary Gaitskill's essay on Bleak House. Anyway, what that CUNY advice is really saying (at least imo) is "you may have written this paper for a very specific course with a very specific collection of set texts, and you may have written as if you are directly addressing your professor, whose knowledge of that material + the lines pursued particular seminar discussions or lectures; keep in mind that the admissions committee is not that person". To me it's the difference between "Remember your audience" and "Your audience isn't going to understand you when you start writing about an obscure poem they haven't read; break it down". And it's an important difference. More broadly I wonder whether the distinction CUNY is making there (and the one future applicants should be making when revising their writing sample with faceless committees as the audience in mind) is not one between specialist/general, but between good and bad practices of literary criticism—i.e. the difference between sophisticated, well-explained and supported readings that address both their intended specialist audience & a smart general reader, and criticism whose level of abstraction/sophistication assumes such a level of familiarity on the part of the reader that the task of introducing, contextualizing, supporting or explaining significance is totally abbreviated. Edit: It's also worth saying that the central question of this discussion—what can I assume about my reader? What would be condescending to them? What would be respecting their intelligence? And at what point, taking that further and further, would I lose them?—is like, the central question of all literary writing. It is tough. Always reminds me of this bit from George Saunders talking about how he edits his sentences. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmKKofJOyAE Around the 26 minute mark, til the 31/32 minute mark!!

I have to say I'm not really following this line of argument. Regardless of their specialty, most (if not literally all) professors sitting on adcomms have been educated in all periods of literature (someone like Shelley isn't exactly obscure), and have a wealth of experience (probably on the daily!) reading academic material from outside their chosen specialty or sub-field—whether that's journals, listening to talks and presentations from their students and colleagues, leisure reading, etc. They may not be abreast of the most recent critical debates and scholarly undercurrents in say Shelley studies or Romanticism, but I don't see why they wouldn't be able to follow your argument. Or why, say, a 20th centuryist would ding a sample for being pitched at Romanticists very specifically. They're admitting you with the hope that you will write and publish vigorously within the academic discourse of your field, after all. To me the idea candidates should pad in paragraphs in the introduction to pitch it at the "general reader" in case the first person whose lap it lands on is way afar from your field just sets off alarm bells—imo a high level of theoretical sophistication/specialized discourse is not going to doom your writing sample; impenetrable argumentation, unclear writing and needlessly deployed jargon will. None of this is directed at your sample @merry night wanderer of course—obviously I can only go off what people are saying in these replies. But maybe this is a discussion for somewhere that isn't the acceptances thread aha

98% of my happiness in the last fortnight has been witnessing the reactions of my friends and family. They are so wholesome and I have to resist from being super obnoxious and sharing all of them lol. Your post made my DAY @MichelleObama, especially the thought of the bar cheering. I proofread my Columbia app in a Manhattan bar at 11 PM before the midnight deadline and several strangers spotted a couple typos, I was so grateful.

I heard Princeton's committee met and finalized decisions on Thursday so fates are decided there, eek. They've released on 14th February for yeeeeears so I wouldn't necessarily expect it earlier this year, but there you are.

From everything I felt going in and all of the replies I've had so far, what set me apart was my writing sample. It was a revised combination of my undergraduate dissertation and a masters seminar paper, both on the same (contemporary American) poet. It ranged back to 19th century, had original archival work, careful close readings, and chewed on broader issues of genre, criticism, reading and the ethics of handling a writer's work and papers.I reaaaaally worked my ass off on it. I usually hate everything I write, but every time I opened that pdf file in between submitting and now, I didn't think 'oh god this actually sucks', I thought 'yeah that's really about the best I could humanly do and I think they'll like it.' Once the cycle is over, I'll have more thoughts—feel a bit weird being so specific in such a public forum without having made a decision yet, knowing that a few places I have left to hear from are probably still deliberating. And again, I really don't think it's helpful in the sense that certain interests = a secret sauce; that kind of logic just isn't correct. Edit: I will just say that even though I worked my ass off on it, it had typos. And I think I'm the first person ever to get into Chicago with a statement of purpose that referred to the fiction of—I kid you not—'David Foster Fallace'. Do not edit your statement at 3:30 AM before the 5 AM deadline (I'm in the UK). It will not "get better". Point being, my app had flaws, and I don't present as a "smart" person, and in many ways I really am not lol. My best friend was over for dinner when the Yale email came in and in the course of screaming and celebrating she said, "It's actually really encouraging that someone who is as much of a mess as you are could get into these places" and reader, she is RIGHT.

I am SO GLAD I didn't book my Chicago flight yesterday: Yale's visit is earlier!!!!

Eek thank you!

Yale visit days are March 2-3, according to DGS's email

Did you check the portal?

You all are too sweet. I hesitate to do this, not necessarily because it would reveal personally identifying information (though no doubt it would—I just mean I don't really care about that; I mean, I've showed my ass here no more than I usually do on Twitter or something similar) but because ... well, I'm not sure it would be helpful, and at worst it might be misleading? I first looked at gradcafe the last year of undergrad (a 3 year BA for me) and it freaked me out so much that I didn't apply that cycle, or the two after that! (Did a 1 year masters and have been working full-time as an editor the past year.) From the results board, it seemed like scores of people with insanely impressive stats got rejected each year; from the forums it seemed like everyone was doing so much and it was all a lottery and I felt paltry by comparison. I had weak parts of my profile, weak parts of my app—still did even this year!—and literally none of my mentors educated at places like Yale/Harvard/Brown said 'Oh you'll get in you'll be fine'. Nothing is guaranteed, and I think there is an element of lottery here. The fact is I did a ton of things with the hope that it might make my application stronger and I could roll out that laundry list, but I'm sure only a few of them were deciding 'standout' factors and it's impossible to know which (I mean, I have a couple hunches, but maybe they're different for each school, who knows). I would hate to say "Hmm, maybe I got in because of this", or "Maybe it was a combination of this, this and this" make anyone think they had to do all of that in order to get in. Also: the few schools that have indicated to me what they felt was strong about my application—well, news to me, that wasn't my opinion of those elements when submitting lol. What this process has taught me, if anything, is that a strong writing sample and an SOP that truly reflects your research interests and intellectual ambitions—whatever those may be—is really what counts. And the thing is, those're the two elements that we on GradCafe never see from each other! Anyway sorry this was a roundabout non-answer, if y'all still want to know I'll give some profile details but did wanna give that disclaimer!

In at Yale with the kindest email I've ever read from the DGS oh my god

I can imagine several cases where the later visits would change stuff, yeah! A couple of the schools I haven't heard from were vying for my top choice, and it just happens that they're later to get back. Hmm ... I guess either way I'll have to book the Chicago/Berkeley flight before hearing the outcomes—waiting til the 21st or something to book a flight for the 5th just seems like a terrible idea given how much prices climb up in the fortnight leading up to the flight. Aggggh

Just to qualify my earlier reply re: Berkeley: it might be the case that like most schools they extend more offers than they want to enroll, knowing a few will decline, so they might not actually pull from the waitlist every year if the no's hovers around the same number—but still I think that grad coordinator's framing, if true as conveyed, is kinda disingenuous. I have a question, though unless current students are lurking maybe it won't get answered. When is a good idea for international applicants to book flights to visit dates? I'm an American living & working in the UK, and still have 6/8 schools to hear from (expecting nothing, though; even if I get rejected everywhere else I'll consider this cycle a success) so not 100% sure what days in March I should plan to be in the US. Right now it's Berkeley (weekend around the 13th) and Chicago (6th). I don't want to book a round trip flight just for the two I've heard from assuming I'll fly back after Berkeley's because these tickets will be nonrefundable (I know you can book flexible tickets, but they're way more expensive and probably outside of the travel allowance). But then again, I guess most other schools I haven't heard from—even if by some miracle/poor choice on their part I get into any—would have visit dates much later in March, so the choice is already between two trips (one early March one later March) or one long trip (staying with family in between visits). I work from home so could do this. Just not sure what is the best idea ... organizationally. Anyway, this is silly, maybe I should just book now assuming I won't get in anywhere else? Tickets will only get more expensive the longer I wait, and judging by past years, I will have some news next week, and then the rest the week after.

Really? Man, if so, this is just crazy and so inappropriate of him to say. I know multiple people from my university who've turned down Berkeley English or Comp Lit just in the last few years. There are people every year who get accepted to multiple top programs, and, faced with an impossible choice, turn down places for all kinds of reasons. It isn't a rare thing and no program is above it.

I would guess it's because you already have an MA, yeah!