caffeinated applicant

I would pose this one to the grad coordinator or DGS! If you get the email in now you'll have the advantage of being first in their inbox at open of business in Chicago, too.

Emailing for program information or for timeline? I feel bad emailing about timeline, since it seems like it's a bother (if everyone emailed the poor grad coordinator, she'd be completely overwhelmed with emails!), but I couldn't help myself. I have no idea if it actually comes across as rude to department coordinators or not. For program information, they're happy to help. I emailed the graduate coordinators at about half of my programs with specific questions about application process (questions like "Do I put my study abroad transcript as a separate school or fold it in with my BA transcript?" and "Is there a cap on the number of students that graduate students instruct in a semester?"). I chose to contact the coordinators and not the DGS because the coordinator's whole job is administrative, and they may well know the rules and regulations for those things better than the DGS, as the DGS is a professor and the position rotates. Also, frankly, the department coordinator isn't going to be on the committee, so if I sound like an idiot to them, it seems lower-stakes!

In other news, I finally caved and emailed UMD's grad coordinator to ask about a timeline. I'd already emailed with her about teaching in the fall, since I didn't see the teaching load posted obviously on the website (fwiw, grad students teach a 1:1 in years 2-5), so it seemed a little less awkward than emailing someone completely new. I'm pretty sure if I haven't heard anything by now it means I'm out, since the results page indicates waitlist folks were given the dates for the March open house, and they found out last week on the same day as the one acceptance on the board (which is a rhetoric concentration), and everyone here in the forum who's on the waitlist was interviewed. But if I happen to be given a timeline for when they'll be emailing all pending candidates, I'll be sure to post!

I've run out of reactions for the day but that's a big thumbs up from me ?

Thanks very much for clarifying--I remembered expressly calling my senators about not taxing tuition remission, but couldn't recall whether at the time stipends were also not taxable (this seemed less important at the time, considering it's both less money and it's money that you're actually being paid, as opposed to the tuition remission you never see!). Ugh, this is all such a nightmare--it's already so little money, and then it's carved up even more. I honestly don't mind paying my taxes at all right now when I'm working a regular full-time office job--I'm glad to pay for my neighbors' kids to go to school and my neighbors who are less fortunate than me to have health insurance! I like driving on well-paved roads and going to the public library!--but when I'm receiving what's expressly a "living stipend" because calculated hourly it would be below the minimum wage? I think I'm gonna be a bit salty!

That fellowships are taxable came as a surprise to me, but I'm recalling now a large dust-up about graduate student taxes in the debate on the 2018 tax reform bill. Is this only a recent change from that tax reform measure? Perhaps grad students who entered prior to 2017 may be able to comment...? (This, for me, goes in the bucket with discussions about health insurance premiums labelled "difficult to keep the discussion off American politics," but I'm doing my very best...)

Congratulations!!!!

MEGHAN_SPARKLE'S GLORIOUS REIGN CONTINUES! Congratulations!!

I'm not in a position to comment on common/uncommon, but I know that this is A Thing, and it's like, the absolute worst Thing in all of the offer/admission process nonsense. My two cents is, once you have an acceptance, speak w/ a union rep if they've got a grad student union, then calculate your TAship minus health insurance and see what it does out to. Can you live on $15,800 in that area? If it's a no and you'd have to turn it down anyway, it won't hurt you to try to negotiate. Alternatively, if your partner's $0 premium doesn't go up to $350 when adding a spouse... elope??? (This is like 70% a joke and 30% something that I am legitimately considering for when I age out of my parents' insurance.)

On Duke lit--since there are three results on the board already (and they only admit, what is it, six per cohort?), I'm assuming that no word = out of the running, and the rejection notice is in some pending purgatory between the adcomm and the graduate school. Still, it's not a rejection until it's a rejection, and we do already know that they did a second wave of first-round interviews (that person on the results board who was interviewed a week after the others). The best that I can tell appears to be that at some schools, the adcomm submits recommended acceptances/rejections to the graduate school admissions folks, who finalize the results and post them to the portals. This would explain why it takes a couple days for accepted students to get official letters at some schools after already receiving notice from the DGS, and why rejection letters come through a bit later, too. I got this off of a deep dive in Maryland's graduate admissions FAQs--where they state that it could be five full business days between the adcomm recommendation and the official confirmation from GS--so I can't say for sure that it follows for Duke or any other individual program, though.

Throwing this out there--I've seen some evidence that schools will work with you about visit dates, and it doesn't seem outlandish at all to book your current plan and tell future schools that offer you a visit, "I'm in the US for these dates. These dates are out for other visits. Would it be possible for me to visit during X days?" even if that isn't the weekend they've scheduled. Like, I've heard of programs letting accepted applicants visit at alternate times if they've got multiple visits/open houses scheduled for the same weekend, and "transatlantic flight and time off" seems like a situation where it would at least be reasonable task for some wiggle room. And since English programs do visits after acceptance letters go out (contrasting with sciences where interview visits are common), you already know they want you. Not sure if you'd want to do this, since you'd miss out on the formal schedule and meeting other potential cohort-mates, and it's a short time to cram in as many visits as possible (maybe stay a bit longer, if you're going to be visiting family anyway?), but it could be an option.

Seconding @KaterGator, I'd definitely recommend you look for top scholars in comic studies and then go for the programs where those people teach. (I happen to have a friend from undergrad who took this exact approach for graduate school, and now their papers are getting published and they're going to conferences and generally having a fine time with comic studies.) You might have luck with interdisciplinary programs as well, like film programs and American studies departments, that could have graduate students in comic/graphic novel studies as scholars in the pipeline. If you haven't already tried looking at the participants list at whatever the major conference is in comic studies, that could be a shortcut to finding these people. Essentially I would say don't wed yourself to having graphic novel in the name of the degree, because it's very possible that a "better" program of study for you could be focusing on graphic novels while in an English, Film, or Literature program. This bearing in mind that I have developed something of a bias against degrees with program names that are extremely narrow--it seems that in my experience, if the program name is too narrow, it may not be as prestigious/useful/high-quality.

On the other side--obviously I only know as much as you've posted, but I was thinking Option 1 would be better, if it's that much better funding. Vibe from faculty is extremely hard to gauge before you're in it, so unless there were very obvious turn-offs/problems with #1 (for example, if it were notorious for not supporting graduate students adequately, or there was only one faculty member you'd have to work with based on your interests and you've learned that this professor is Not someone you want to work with on a personality basis)... I'd go with it for the chance at better financial stability, both through the stipend period and in a future career. This is assuming that the relative stipend amounts hold after considering cost of living. But also, maybe I'm biased because I assumed that your Option 1 is Duke Lit, which I applied to and expect to receive a rejection from very soon! And I'm a very risk-averse person by nature. Either way, it's great that you're in a position to weigh options--wishing you the best of luck wherever you choose!

Went straight to the Goodreads Want to Read shelf with that one--yes pls. Related on the field of interest front: I finally got around to Rebecca Makkai's The Great Believers a few weeks ago and it Wrecked Me. Read it in about two days, sobbing on the couch at the end, whole nine yards. I haven't read much that's focused on Chicago during the AIDS crisis, and I look forward to diving into the extensive sources that Makkai lists in the acknowledgements.

w o w. Not sure there's anything else to say to that...

Rejected from Chicago, no MAPH referral. Finally I lay my weary hope to rest!

And now in addition to the potential six-week wait period for a rejection, notes about an "active reserve" list at Berkeley. What does that mean? Is it a second pool of waitlist students? Does Berkeley's Graduate School mandate that departments can only have a certain number of waitlist students that is fewer than what the English department requires, necessitating a second list? Is the waitlist like one alternate for every accepted applicant and then "active reserve" is another pool of other qualified people? Do they actually pull from "active reserve" or is the waitlist large enough that they wouldn't need to? I expect never to hear the answers to these questions, but I truly wish that I could listen in on these meetings. What a strange process, building graduate student cohorts--there's so much that is inscrutable from the applicants' side of things.

Here I was thinking that Harvard was going to be a pain because there was a week gap between their acceptances and rejections in 2019. At least I can be pretty sure that I won't be left hanging for 6+ weeks! I don't know what is up with the delay from Chicago this year, but it is so annoying. Like please just rip the band-aid off so I can get on with my life, thanks.

Didn't apply to Berkeley but dang, this is the worst system I've ever heard!

The way I've been thinking about it, which was re-affirmed by the language in the waitlist email I received from UT-Austin, is that it's a strong endorsement of your application. Like, your application is strong enough that they're as confident that you would be a successful graduate student and that you would fit well in their program, but for whatever reason, your application just missed the cutoff. For example, maybe there was another student in the same subfield, they couldn't take you both, and that person's research interests fit slightly better with what their POI wants to be advising in three years, that kind of thing. Definitely from past GC results it appears that many, many students end up accepted to programs off of the waitlist, which intuitively makes sense if you assume that top-ranked grad programs don't want to admit outright more students than they can fund and support. Edited to add: I also can't think of any real incentive that grad programs would have to waitlist candidates they don't consider viable. For undergraduate programs, more students = more money, so sure, waitlist enough students to make sure you'll have a big enough freshman class. But for graduate programs, where students cost money and advising resources and their success or failure reflects very strongly on the program itself, and there are 250-500 applicants, many of whom have quite strong applications, for your 6-14 slots... there's no reason to think that they'd stack the waitlist with candidates they don't really, really want.

I'm 20th/21st century fiction and queer/gender stuff. You?

I've run out of reactions for the day, but thanks for the details! I need to sit back and take some deep breaths, haha--it's not as if posting on GradCafe 14,000 times is going to make the decision come around any sooner, and everybody else here is in similar positions waiting for results, and there's nothing I can do about the decision at this stage... Curiously I've been able to remain calm about the decisions that I know won't come in until the end of the month... I can't tell if that feeling will last, or if as soon as I get the rest of my first wave of results (Chicago, Duke, Maryland, UT), I'll immediately go into Full Anxious Mode about the second wave. Fingers crossed for the former!

I feel like I am going to lose my dang mind waiting to hear anything, anything at all, from UMD... I didn't receive an interview, but I seem to recall that UMD is one of the schools that only interviews some candidates, not all candidates on their short list? Maybe? (There was definitely some school that did this, but I can't for the life of me remember who it was.) Back to refreshing my email...

Yes and no--I still read in my field of interest (contemporary short fiction by women and 20th/21st c. fiction about queer women more broadly), but I space it out a lot with hobby reading. Mystery/whodunits are my main "brain cleanse" read--used to be YA, but the analytic side has started to creep in with the YA and spoils the enjoyment of it. Currently I'm reading The Tenant of Wildfell Hall as a "fun" read, in part because I don't see myself going into 19th century fiction--it's one of those chunks of literature that I never particularly liked or found easy to read in college, but now I'm whipping through this novel and thinking huh, I get why this was a bestseller!

Congratulations! Waitlist is definitely a vote of confidence! To be a bit nosy, as I'm waiting to hear from UMD... Did you receive an email from them? Email them yourself to inquire about status? Happen to see a random portal update?