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scratchedrecord

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  • Gender
    Nonbinary
  • Pronouns
    they/them
  • Location
    Michigan
  • Application Season
    2021 Fall
  • Program
    English Literature

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  1. Waiting on UIC right now. No idea how long their waitlist is but supposedly this year they only offered 4 spots for critical students and 4 spots for creative students.
  2. Radio silence here, too. I suppose no news is good news, but it sure doesn't feel like it.
  3. Did anybody else get that email chain from Berkeley? First nearly giving me a heart attack with the header "You are important to Berkeley. Then the email preview saying to pay my application fee (which I've already done!). Then the email itself being basically nothing more than spam. Then FINALLY a second email apologizing for the first one - but only for the error saying to pay the application fee!
  4. So I've been working with a professional admissions advisor to help me with my applications, and one of the things they recently recommended was to take graduate classes as a non-degree-seeking student, with a STRONG recommendation to take a statistics course. Their reasoning was that, in a graduate program, I'll always be working with data, and so taking statistics will be necessary no matter what program I'm working in. The thing is, though... I'm applying to English programs. There's no data collection. There's no experiments to be conducted. What am I going to do, calculate the standard deviation of the length of Henry James novels? It feels to me that my advisor has a fundamental misunderstanding of what exactly English research is, and while I'm sure taking a statistics course would certainly be helpful in very specific instances, I can't imagine that it could come in much handy in a humanities program. I'm open to being wrong, but I just can't see it. Is there any justification for why statistics might be helpful in an English program?
  5. Hi all, So, I’m hoping to apply to English MA and/or PhD programs this upcoming cycle and I’ve got a bit of a weird situation. This means that I’m not confident of my prospects either way and I have no idea which sorts of schools I should even be applying to. I was hoping y’all could help me out and figure out just what the hell to do in applying for graduate school. My undergrad experience was extremely rocky. I spent over half of it pursuing a fruitless double major in both math and English that ended up giving me a disproportionate amount of stress and sunk my GPA a ton. I ended up with a cumulative GPA of 2.87, which, since COVID-19 has forced our entire spring trimester into a pass/fail grading system, isn’t going to change no matter how well I’ve done this term. My major change doesn’t explain my entire GPA situation, since there was one term where I took only English classes and still did kind of average. Yet, since winter 2019 – that is, in the past five terms – I haven’t got any lower than a B+ in any English course – and that B+ was from a creative writing class. Everything else has been an A- or higher, including all advanced-level courses. During one particularly bad term last year, where I had a pretty severe bout of depression and as such received Ds (or lower) in three other classes, I still came out with an A- in a 400-level English class. Furthermore, despite my low cumulative GPA, my major GPA is 3.41, and my senior year cGPA is 3.58 – a far cry from the 2.87 from all four years, and one which surely would have been higher had I not been forced off campus and into online classes. My poor GPA, then, clearly isn’t an indication of inability to do the work. Far from it: in fact, I know I have the ability to excel in English. My senior year grades prove it. Right now, I’m thinking that my main prospects are to either A) take non-degree-seeking classes in order to boost my cGPA above the 3.0 mark or apply to MA programs in order to have a better shot at PhD applications next go-around. Problem is, the former would take quite a long time, and the latter has limited options due to the former. Plenty of MA programs have GPA limits, and I have no idea where to start looking for universities that would accept a student with my GPA. I don’t want to be stuck taking more undergrad classes at my local state university in a non-degree trajectory that has no definitive end. I’m just confused as to what to do. I don’t want to be held back by who I was in my underclass years, but it feels like every minimum GPA is saying that that’s going to be the case. Anyone have advice for my situation?
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