whereareyourcitations

It's best to get advice from faculty members on this front, but their time is limited, so I thought it might be useful for all of us gearing up for the 2021 cycle, or celebrating/healing from the 2020 cycle to talk about our apps and their weak spots. Here's a summary, I guess, of my app: Stats: GRE: V161 (88th percentile), Q151 (41st percentile), A5.5 (98th percentile) Undergrad GPA: 3.97 at a public research university Graduate GPA: 3.96 at a small, unranked rhet/comp program Teaching experience: worked as a TA (instructor of record) for two years, have adjuncted two junior-level courses, assisted our college's WPA in curriculum design Publications: a nonfiction essay for a smaller women's journal, and currently working on submitting an eco-critical lit theory piece to some journals Conferences: none, I was working full-time and teaching during my degree so I unfortunately left that on the back-burner. I have given several professional developments and spoken at some seminars at two universities, though Areas of focus: digital rhetoric, ecocriticism, and data mining/text mining as both a literature and a composition tool SOP: haven't drafted yet, but I plan to focus on how place and environment are inextricable in my understanding of the beauty of language, and that I think empirical methods (data mining, contextual analysis, etc) can be used to carve a path for its beauty to be understood more widely by more disciplines. I'm vying to be a part of a program that encourages interdisciplinary study, not because language/literature/rhetoric needs to be supplemented, but because it needs to be expanded. Only anecdote I plan on discussing is my time as a backpacker and how it inspired my first research project. LORs: one from graduate school chair, one from very well-published friend and professor, and one from a linguistics professor I absolutely adore Based on your own experience, or on advice given from your own mentors, what would you say can and needs to be improved?

What do you feel helped your application the most? Would you mind sharing your stats (GRE scores, undergrad/grad GPAs, number of publications, etc)? What's your area of interest? Would you say it's more niche or mainstream? How specific/niche did you get in your SOPs? Did you reach out to specific faculty or current candidates? How did you approach those conversations? Thanks in advance