meghan_sparkle

Just declined Chicago. Damn that was difficult. Not sure if they have a waitlist but if they do, hope this helps someone on it.

I'm only trying to plan my life!?

Aaaaand just turned down Harvard!

Just declined Chicago. Damn that was difficult. Not sure if they have a waitlist but if they do, hope this helps someone on it.

I’ve accepted my offer at UW and declined mine at BU. Hope this helps someone who wants BU more than I do!

I've been teaching and on department committees for awhile, and the connection between university endowments and the stock market has been on my mind. I've been doing some reading here, and in a few other places. Here's my thoughts: I don't know what the specific situation at that OP's institution is, or how financially vulnerable their department is outside of a pandemic (and some are certainly more vulnerable than others). I also don't know how long COVID will last or how long it will take the stock market to bounce back. We're all catastrophizing right now, which makes sense given the state of the world, but that does leave the possibility that all of this may be less bad than we're preparing for. That's personally what I'm crossing my fingers for. However, even worst-case scenario, I think there's some reason to hope for us as grad students... specifically, for us as grad students. I've seen first hand at a struggling university how spending is generally cut in disasters like this. Student cohorts are usually the last on the plate, even for funded students. Why? Because even funded students still spend money at their universities. They might live in the community, perhaps even on campus, with a meal plan or otherwise buying campus food, paying fees, buying books, teaching, and performing other forms of (unfortunately) cheap labor. Part time lecturers, for example, both cost more, and put less money back into the institution's ecosystem, so they're often cut first, along with university staff, etc, long before student roles get sliced. In fact, it's beneficial for programs to continue to offer spaces in their programs, as the relationship of how funding is allocated to departments is in many ways cyclical, allotted by their enrollment. So, even while there may be some minor cuts, I don't think that's going to translate across the board as there being no spots at all in 2021. Cohorts may on average be a bit smaller, but I think that what that's going to shake out to is a lot less admissions at already-struggling schools, and cohorts of about the same size at schools with wealthy donation bases with highly diversified, massive endowment portfolios. That's just my guess, and that's also kind of what tends to happen in recessions. We don't see a lot of the old, prestige-y schools on the East and West coasts turning away more students than usual, but we see the smaller, regional schools taking a real punch to the gut. The real shitshow for us will be around 2026, when we're trying to get jobs.
I hope this is helpful information for some of you folks. I notice a lot of Literature students, in particular, seem to apply almost exclusively to Top 20 schools. With this in mind, you may not feel much of a change. Another thing to always remember is that university admissions are ALWAYS a shitshow. Seldom does it ever come down to who is the most qualified, it comes down to things like "who had the most research experience in undergrad?" (when many undergrads flat out do not have research experiences offered at their universities), or things like "X Applicant is great, but they would work with Y Professor, who is presently on 11 committees and cannot oversee another one for a few years, so we're going to go to the next name on our list,". So even if you do feel shut out, or feel more shut out from one year to another, the reasons might be entirely separate from COVID or the budget.   
 
 

I think people have a tendency to be dramatic when it comes to crime. When I was heading to study in Russia, everyone was going on about terrorism. When I was moving to DC, everyone was going on about crime. I say perhaps talk to real people who live there. I have an aunt, uncle, and three cousins who have lived in Toledo forever, and a good friend from college from Toledo. They're all fine. I went a few times as a kid and I lived, haha. I hear Toledo has a great art museum.

❤️❤️❤️ 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

One thing that has been helpful to me while trying to sort through my longings and instinctual impulses is remembering that the decision isn't just about the next year or two, but has to still feel right even in three or four years when dissertating. In that vein, a less stressful teaching experience should weigh more heavily in terms of your daily working schedule. Whereas having to move cross country—although it's a hassle, inconvenient, a lot of work and may distance you from family/friends—is something that will probably feel like a blip 6 months in when it's over and done with and you've started building a community of friends within your cohort + started to fall in love with a new city. I also note you said "possibly" less stressful teaching experience; maybe it will help to talk to a few more current students so you can see what the teaching is like functionally for them?
At least for me, the question at bottom is: What's the ideal environment where I can most contentedly see myself writing for the next 5-6 years? Liking the city you live in certainly factors into that. But tbh, no summer funding and immediate teaching are both huge deals. Even in cities where it's reliably easy to obtain summer income through teaching summer schools/tutoring/research assistant work, that's a lot to wrangle each year, and a lot of work totally unrelated to your research. Plus there's no guarantee of it—for instance saw the other day that Stanford students (not English I don't think but other departments) who normally relied on teaching summer schools for summer income now have nothing because all those summer programs have been cancelled due to COVID. 
If they're both excellent programs with vibrant communities, you probably can't go wrong—pretty much all I would encourage is making sure that your instinctual pull covers quality of life (in terms of teaching, cost of living, general happiness) across the years of your program, as difficult it is to think big-picture in terms of such a large timespan.

After a solid two months of agonizing, I am beyond thrilled to say that I've accepted my offer to the MA/PhD program at Penn State! If anyone else winds up PSU-bound, hit me up--I'd love a chance to get to know some of the incoming cohort since we weren't able to meet at the open house.
Also, good luck (thoughts, prayers, the best of vibes) to those of you still deliberating--whichever way you go, hopefully there's some comfort to be found in the fact that there are only nine days left of this part.

One thing that has been helpful to me while trying to sort through my longings and instinctual impulses is remembering that the decision isn't just about the next year or two, but has to still feel right even in three or four years when dissertating. In that vein, a less stressful teaching experience should weigh more heavily in terms of your daily working schedule. Whereas having to move cross country—although it's a hassle, inconvenient, a lot of work and may distance you from family/friends—is something that will probably feel like a blip 6 months in when it's over and done with and you've started building a community of friends within your cohort + started to fall in love with a new city. I also note you said "possibly" less stressful teaching experience; maybe it will help to talk to a few more current students so you can see what the teaching is like functionally for them?
At least for me, the question at bottom is: What's the ideal environment where I can most contentedly see myself writing for the next 5-6 years? Liking the city you live in certainly factors into that. But tbh, no summer funding and immediate teaching are both huge deals. Even in cities where it's reliably easy to obtain summer income through teaching summer schools/tutoring/research assistant work, that's a lot to wrangle each year, and a lot of work totally unrelated to your research. Plus there's no guarantee of it—for instance saw the other day that Stanford students (not English I don't think but other departments) who normally relied on teaching summer schools for summer income now have nothing because all those summer programs have been cancelled due to COVID. 
If they're both excellent programs with vibrant communities, you probably can't go wrong—pretty much all I would encourage is making sure that your instinctual pull covers quality of life (in terms of teaching, cost of living, general happiness) across the years of your program, as difficult it is to think big-picture in terms of such a large timespan.

Hi all! Checking in to see how folks are doing this in strange, strange time. Never in a million years did I ever expect 2020 years to turn out like this. I'm especially saddened for all of you and the future Fall 2021 cohort, going into grad school with this much tumult is something I cannot imagine. Even in the best of times, the process of applying and deciding whether or not to go accept a program's offer was mentally taxing without the pressures of anything external. I vividly remember experiencing a strong case of cold feet and 'should I or should I not' before I started my first quarter. With COVID at hand? My goodness.
I'm happy to keep chatting, offer support, or help proffer advice on decisions. I know that the April 15th deadline is coming up incredibly soon. Always happy to talk.

Hey, I'm really sorry. This must be awful, especially with faculty encouraging you like that—I wonder if it points to COVID really messing things up behind the scenes, making even fewer spots available when normally they would pull from waitlist when someone declines. Fwiw I haven't responded to Berkeley yet, though got a nudging checkup email from their DGS yesterday.
To be honest I really wish what was going on behind the scenes with department admissions and COVID-19 was less opaque and cloak and dagger than it is right now. I imagine humanities budgets are being devastated left and right, which bodes badly for current students, admits, waitlists and future applicants in ways that aren't totally clear rn. My instinct is that the financial fallout from this crisis will hit a public university system that was already buckling under pressure (UC) very hard. And even though Berkeley English is in a better position funding-wise than most other departments, in all of my conversations so far I've gotten nagging sense that beyond what's explicitly outlined in my funding letter, not a lot can be promised. The faculty are stellar and I'm impressed by their recent placement record, but times like these really show how crucial it is to feel looked after and safeguarded as a grad student. 

For what it's worth I doubt this—there may well be fewer spots but I don't think that means MAs will be functionally mandatory. There are a good number of BA only applicants in all of my admitted cohorts, and to me they're indistinguishable from the ones with MAs, tbh. Ofc to a degree it's program specific (some already lean toward students with MAs, though not the ones I applied to, and maybe those will become even more MA-centric). What will get you into the PhD is an excellent sample and good recs, and an MA is only one way of many you can get there (I did a one-year masters, took a year out and worked after, and applied only with undergraduate materials that I revised while working in November 2019 before submitting in December. Obvs the fact of the masters on my transcript may have been a factor in my admissions, but purely in terms of materials I think it was revising my written work + having a year out to be a semi-normal adult that made the most difference.) Personally I wouldn't take on 70k of debt to do an MA thinking it will be mandatory/even more advisable than normal to get you into the PhD because COVID. Not least of all because even setting aside the question of how this crisis will affect funding/# of spots, there are almost no TT jobs at the end of the PhD (and will be even fewer in future), so you'll still have all of that debt following you while you're on the market, even best case scenario. The question of whether to risk taking on debt would be slightly different if there was actually a somewhat viable or semi-stable market at the end of all of it, but ... there just isn't, unfortunately

Hey, I'm really sorry. This must be awful, especially with faculty encouraging you like that—I wonder if it points to COVID really messing things up behind the scenes, making even fewer spots available when normally they would pull from waitlist when someone declines. Fwiw I haven't responded to Berkeley yet, though got a nudging checkup email from their DGS yesterday.
To be honest I really wish what was going on behind the scenes with department admissions and COVID-19 was less opaque and cloak and dagger than it is right now. I imagine humanities budgets are being devastated left and right, which bodes badly for current students, admits, waitlists and future applicants in ways that aren't totally clear rn. My instinct is that the financial fallout from this crisis will hit a public university system that was already buckling under pressure (UC) very hard. And even though Berkeley English is in a better position funding-wise than most other departments, in all of my conversations so far I've gotten nagging sense that beyond what's explicitly outlined in my funding letter, not a lot can be promised. The faculty are stellar and I'm impressed by their recent placement record, but times like these really show how crucial it is to feel looked after and safeguarded as a grad student. 

I’m so excited to say that I officially accepted my offer at University of Oregon today! It felt so weird to submit the acceptance letter; I stared at the screen for like ten minutes before I finally clicked send. It’s such a good fit for me, though, and I think I’m going to absolutely love it there. The faculty and students that I got to chat with were all wonderful. I can’t believe this is finally happening!
Thanks to everyone here for all your advice and kindness!

I'd add to this that the crisis has essentially annihilated the (already very grim) academic job market for 2020-2021 (not just TT jobs but also a large percentage of postdocs), which means programs will face a lot of pressure to find ways to support students in their final years who will be left with very, very few options for continued funding. Finding money to extend funding packages an extra year will very likely cut into the available funding for new cohorts of PhD students and thus the number of available spots. 

My anecdotal experience suggests that students who have spent a few years doing something other than school are often more emotionally and intellectually prepared for the rigors of graduate school than those who went straight through. There are obviously exceptions to this, but I certainly don't think there is any imperative to go straight to graduate school in order to be successful. 

VERY small. I'm realizing this myself every day, it's crazy!

Incidentally I shared this with one of my POIs, and he told me he taught him!! What a small world

Aww Dan! ❤️ 

I agree that you may not want to go into further debt to get your MA considering your existing undergrad debt. I also don't think it's a big deal to take off a year (or more) between undergrad and grad school. I took a year off between my bachelor's and my MFA, and will have taken two years off between my MFA and my MA/PhD. Being in the so-called "real world" during those gap years only strengthened my resolve to get my grad degrees; they weren't always a picnic, but I don't regret the experience, which I believe has ultimately been a net positive. Over the past two years I've been able to work on the administrative side of higher ed and establish the beginnings of a non-teaching career, which is experience that will stay on my CV and may come in handy six or seven years down the road if I'm looking for an alt-ac career.
On the other hand, to @Cryss's point above re: the long-term effects of the pandemic, I've heard from one DGS that there's a possibility that admissions will be even more competitive for the 2021-2022 academic year because there will likely be even fewer funded spots. I don't believe you should accept one of your partially funded offers for fear of being shut out next year, but conventional wisdom does say that an economic recession (which seems like a mild term for what's happening now, to be frank) tends to result in a flood of grad school applicants. By the same token, in a year you might be an even stronger candidate, if you take this time off to read more, revise/rewrite your strongest research papers, and put together a kick-ass personal statement. So playing the odds here might just be a wash.
I feel like I'm talking out both sides of my mouth here, so here's the advice I'd give, if pressed: don't go into debt for a master's degree in the humanities. If you can find a way to work part-time during your MA to recoup some of the tuition costs, maybe that will be a viable solution for you, but part of the beauty of a fully-funded offer is that you can devote your full time and attention to your studies. So, yeah, I return to my original point: don't go into debt for a master's degree in the humanities.

I got through Cambridge, English for a PhD, with the Gates scholarship! So excited for what comes next.  

After a few further conversations I want to modulate my earlier panic a bit. Universities won't know for certain before our commitment date how the fall is going to proceed, simply because no one knows how exactly this is going to play out. Will the worst of it, the part requiring total lockdown, be 6 weeks? 2 months? 6 months? Impossible to say right now.
That said, many places are planning to be live, in person, in fall, and a dean at one of my schools (sorry to be vague; trying to be informative while also not making private conversations public) said she would be surprised if things were still online in fall. One thing she stressed that I hadn't fully thought about before is really how devastating remaining online would be to so many departments in the arts (and even sciences) where education and classes are 100% built around active, live in-person education. I think everyone is done a disservice in the switch to online but for a lot of departments there really is no replacement the way there kinda is with, say, a literature graduate seminar of 8 people. It would really devastate the university to proceed like that, and (this dean said) she can't see it happening without clear, concrete, firm government directives to continue quarantining based in hard data and health advice.
She said most likely, places will be aiming to go live with extensive contingency plans about what to do in the event of another outbreak—say, a resurgence in fall. It may well be the case that fall starts as normal and there's another outbreak and we have to go back online for two weeks, and so on. Again, all of this is speculation (even faculty, DGS's, and that one dean I've talked to are really only speculating based on whispers or conversations that higher-ups are only just beginning to have). I don't think we'll get a clearer indication for weeks or even months, but fwiw, things aren't looking completely, inalterably bleak. 

After a few further conversations I want to modulate my earlier panic a bit. Universities won't know for certain before our commitment date how the fall is going to proceed, simply because no one knows how exactly this is going to play out. Will the worst of it, the part requiring total lockdown, be 6 weeks? 2 months? 6 months? Impossible to say right now.
That said, many places are planning to be live, in person, in fall, and a dean at one of my schools (sorry to be vague; trying to be informative while also not making private conversations public) said she would be surprised if things were still online in fall. One thing she stressed that I hadn't fully thought about before is really how devastating remaining online would be to so many departments in the arts (and even sciences) where education and classes are 100% built around active, live in-person education. I think everyone is done a disservice in the switch to online but for a lot of departments there really is no replacement the way there kinda is with, say, a literature graduate seminar of 8 people. It would really devastate the university to proceed like that, and (this dean said) she can't see it happening without clear, concrete, firm government directives to continue quarantining based in hard data and health advice.
She said most likely, places will be aiming to go live with extensive contingency plans about what to do in the event of another outbreak—say, a resurgence in fall. It may well be the case that fall starts as normal and there's another outbreak and we have to go back online for two weeks, and so on. Again, all of this is speculation (even faculty, DGS's, and that one dean I've talked to are really only speculating based on whispers or conversations that higher-ups are only just beginning to have). I don't think we'll get a clearer indication for weeks or even months, but fwiw, things aren't looking completely, inalterably bleak.