Anonymous Snow

Yeah. Sigh this is confusing. I feel bad for our DGS. The grad exec does what it does and then hides behind her, and she has to field all our pushback and frustration. Anyway, good luck to you and I hope you get into your first choice! Many people do an MA at UConn and then move on.

Resistance from graduate students to cutting down cohort size? They have blown up admissions in recent years in order get seminars to make and have people to teach FYW. They used to only admit 7 or 8, which is a respectable number in relation to the number of actual jobs on the market. In 2018 they admitted 15 students though! And we are paying the price because they are spread so thin in terms of resources for us.

Oh okay thanks. I was there, but don't remember the DGS throwing out any numbers. My impression was the graduate program has been keeping the uppermost cohort in the dark regarding that but I could be wrong.

Who at UConn gave you this information back in October? I'm also an English graduate student. This was only officially announced on the grad listserv last week.

I'm sorry to say the University of Connecticut English PhD program is a dumpster fire these days and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone serious about an academic career. It's a very bad model for how a graduate program should run. Faculty openly mock graduate students and treat them as second class citizens, however graduate students' 2-2 comp loads are literally the only reason they have the light workloads they do. It's so bad that a faculty member on our graduate executive committee felt comfortable disparaging students who complain about our inequitable and antiquated program structure as "weak," though the word he actually used was a quasi homophobic slur. I have been in this program a few years now and lately find myself asking why it should even exist. I tend to think that sooner rather than later it won't.