fireflystasis

I'm going to George Mason this fall for fiction! The faculty sounds enthusiastic about my work, and it's by all accounts a great program. It'll be my first time in the US, so super stoked.

Love to cause shame. Love to inspire embarrassment. Some people are bullied too much as children; others, not bullied enough as adults. Especially people who make alts just to cultivate bizarre onanistic relationships with their other alts. Some activities are just indecent outside the bedroom and should be treated as such!

Possibly the most pathetic thing is how obsessed they've gotten with some of the regulars here, to the point of actually tracking their notification statuses. Who does this? Who admits to it? How embarrassing. If you want senpai to notice you, this is not the way.

Same. They really only accepted 6 out of 400 applications!

I'm so antsy for notifications, even though most of mine won't come till late February at least. Not checking my email, but checking Draft and GradCafe compulsively. How are you all coping? I just want one acceptance! ? One!

Honestly I'm just really impressed that you're a nurse, especially at a time like this, so I have to express my thanks and admiration. I feel like you're already doing 100x more meaningful work than most people doing an MFA, and you should be proud even if a bunch of admissions committees with very particular tastes don't consider your writing a good fit for the direction of their program this year. So many genuinely talented authors aren't going to make it into programs due to a myriad of factors that don't actually have much to do with the objective quality of their writing. It really is a crapshoot.

Kind of mad right now because I finally got an email from CSULB today after radio silence. "Subject: MFA Fiction Follow-Up We haven't heard back from you since we offered you admission to our MFA Program in Fiction. Although the deadline has passed for your reply, if you are interested, please write back to us by tomorrow, Monday, April 26th, by noon, and we will let you know ASAP if a slot has opened up as we make our final adjustments to our incoming roster. Also, feel free to let me know if you have any questions." But they hadn't sent me any decision. The subject line says "follow-up", but I checked my e-mail every day and I checked the site for updates and have never received such a notification. Did a search through my inbox, spam and trash folders just now. Nothing. When April 15 passed, I assumed I'd been rejected or that my app hadn't been processed properly. I declined the offer. Oh, I also just got my Iowa rejection letter (postmarked 5 March ha ha). Onward to next cycle.

Cue me furiously refreshing my inbox for the rest of the day!

They'll email you if you're waitlisted. My portal didn't change after I got the email.

Anyone know if having your work published in litmags and the like helps your chances? Does it look good to adcoms? I was thinking of trying that before the next application season in case this one doesn't work out.

My prof said the same thing, that there was no point getting into a prestigious program and being stuck with a faculty whose writing you don't actually like and aspire to.

Good idea, I'll look into that! I did think getting into specific classes taught by them would be a long shot, but was hoping I could at least get to meet them. A tangent: It was pretty alarming when I mentioned one of those profs to my writing prof and he said "Oh cool, she dated my roommate at Iowa, you should hit her up on Facebook." For obvious reasons, I did not do that. Little did he know I had already found her Facebook years ago, written a heartfelt letter complimenting her oeuvre, then never sent it. Now it would probably look like awkward brownnosing. ?

Good to know, thanks! Personally, Columbia is my dream program. It's the reason I got so enthusiastic about applying to MFAs in the first place, when a writing prof advised me to try last year. I didn't know anything about them, but then I saw two of the authors whose works I'd been inspired by and trying to emulate for years were actually professors at Columbia. Teaching nonfiction (although I applied for fiction)! The courses also look fantastic. Realistically though, on the infinitesimal chance I get accepted, I might have to decline on the basis of it being way too expensive. Especially given the number of funded programs elsewhere. I really don't want to go into debt for grad school.

Things are heating up in the grad school application fandom.

The MFAs didn't hug them as an adult