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blueturret

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  1. I'm new here but so grateful to have found this community and all the amazingly helpful information on these fora. This may be a long post, so I'll leave a tldr at the end. Like many people here, I was a huge literature/creative writing nerd in high school (though I doubt this counts for much now, nearly 3 years out of college), where nearly all of my extracurriculars were writing-related. I was a YoungArts finalist in creative writing, attended the Iowa Young Writers' Studio, won two National Scholastic Gold Keys (in flash fiction and creative nonfiction), had a poem published in the Kenyon Review, etc. I ended up getting into the college of my dreams but succumbed to many outside pressures of needing to study a "useful major" so I gave up on literature and became a math major, with the goal of working as a machine learning engineer or quant trader. I did fairly well in my major (~3.9 GPA), earned an M.S. in Statistics to boot, and have been working as a quant at an algorithmic trading shop since graduating a few years ago. But I'm honestly kind of miserable and wish I'd followed my heart as an undergraduate. I'm mostly interested in contemporary American literary theory and criticism, though for the purposes of M.A. admissions (which I understand are CRAZY competitive), I'm willing to spin the narrative necessary. The pros going for me: 1) I have strong computer science/programming skills which can hopefully translate to and/or be used to justify an interest in digital humanities. 2) I have C1 competency in Japanese and Korean, B2 in Spanish, and B1 in German. Not sure if this counts for much in the grand scheme, but thought I'd include it in case it moves the needle even a hair. 3) I won a small writing award for a humanities class I took in college. I'll be able to ask this professor for a letter of recommendation. The cons going against me: 1) I've taken a whopping total of 2 humanities classes of any sort in college, despite my undergrad institution having a top 5 English department, so I have no one to blame but myself for not engaging in the literary community in college. 2) Following from 1), this also means I have only 1 humanities professor whom I could ask for a reference letter. I'm assuming letters from mathematicians/economists/computer scientists wouldn't count for much.. 3) I have essentially 0 writing samples to speak of at the moment (other than my senior thesis—on abstract algebra lol—and my essay from 3) under "pros" that I wrote during my sophomore year). So what do you all think? Is there any hope for me to pivot back to critical theory/contemporary literature by going back to school for an M.A. (and/or PhD down the line)? What would I need to do to get back on track? I'm willing to entertain any length of detour. Thank you for reading this! Tldr; Math B.A. who did a lot of literature-related things in high school wondering if there's any chance of returning to my roots? Will an M.A. be enough to have a shot at being a literary scholar, or does one really need to get a PhD? Thank you!
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