Baudrillardist

Wait are you actually in grad school or are you 549 posts into speculating on what life in the academe is like? I'm not here to get into a snide quote war, I've already said my piece to the original poster.

"The problem is that I already have a good job with great pay at a wonderful institution." You will not have this after grad school. I say this as someone who dropped out of a degree from one of the oldest and most prestigious institutions on planet Earth: I would never, ever, go to grad school for English Literature unless you found yourself living somewhere between the 15th to 19th century. The dream-dusted days of being a wry don are over. The capitalists have moved in, and if you can afford a tweed jacket right now before attending school, you better get it tailored long enough to sleep in because there is only horrible toil with no pay ahead. There is no noble life of the mind where you are excogitating on first causes and the nature of things and then disseminating them to well-heeled, beautiful dreamers and the poetic geniuses of tomorrow. There is no love of knowledge; it has been replaced with love of work. (Thank you German research university.) The essays you write will be the most willfully "erudite" rubbish and will require more masks than Nietzsche and every protean postmodernist ever born could ever summon in order to avoid dipping your toes into the icy waters of self-awareness. Academics put vacuous pop-culture celebrities to shame when comes to disguising their emptiness from themselves. Also I would suggest attending graduate school if you are massively wealthy, perhaps a potentate of some fairy kingdom or something. This could be seen as a vile attempt at trolling, but I would earnestly admonish you to find something else to do. I had (what I believed to be) sanctimonious professors give me the polite version of my sentiments above only to disregard them and attend anyway. I romanticised noble poverty and esoteric conference papers with the best of them--technically as one of the best of them. Being a professor *used* to be a noble and meaningful occupation, but those days are gone. Whatever you decide to do, bon chance.

congrats on the acceptance! I wouldn't pay for the PhD, though I was happy to pay for my mphil (at the other place). I would take a hard and sucky year out and re-apply next round. Try to get in on scholarships (take the time to explore the rich colleges and all the obscure scholarships oxbrige has to offer) and apply early. That's my plan anyways. One question I would ask (because I had to ask myself this question) is that when I look at academic CV's, usually these people are awarded money to study, and they make sure to mention that on a CV. I wonder if there is any sort of taciturn snobbery/discrimination about paying for the DPhil (or any PhD), since there may be a situation where they interpret a lack of financial awards for the years you studied, and (wrongly) assume that your project was not interesting enough to attact outside funding. Again, I don't say this to be derisive, but that is what I thought about for my own particular application. I'm back in the US, yes the economy is crappy, but then again I haven't really tried all that hard to obtain a job so far. I've got some possible teaching lined up for next semester (though who knows if it will come through). Also I think it is rather difficult with the new immigration laws for U.S. students to get jobs in the UK (I didnt look hard while there either). Kind of crepe-y all around. Good luck with your decision!

haha, it was both earnest and jest!

Thanks for the suggestions so far. How do you pick a location? Where have some of you ended up hosting the readings? The best thing I've come up with is hosting each reading at a pub/coffee house in the city, with a different location each week. :/ (As there are a great deal of tourists, this won't actually be possible.) Right now I've got the book selected with 4 people from my discipline ready to read it, but I am going to enlist the department secretary to send out an email blast for others who may be interested in the particular text. Have others invited professors or is that considered untoward? Again, thanks for all the help!

Hi all, I am starting a reading group next semester and, having never done it before, was wondering if anyone had any general advice on the process. For example, whether or not 8:00pm on a Friday is a good or bad time =P

I have a accept/decline deadline coming up at the end of this week for another school and while I have been advised that my app was recommended to the bogs for acceptance, I have not received an official offer from the board of graduate studies. I called up bogs and am supposed to get an email back (that didnt happen today so im praying to every religion possible that it comes tomorrow). I was wondering if anyone else was waiting on the bogs for an offical offer, of if anyone knew a basic time frame it took from being recommended to getting the offical offer. I've had my application in there since dec 14. in closing, F#CK! They have got bureaucratic torture down to perfection at this place.

I agree with the general sentiment here that writing sample, sop, and lor > test day. Im a terrible test taker, but I took 13 practice gre's and obtained a decent score, and by that one that I assume a few people will have to look at the rest of my application before tossing it in the trash (730 v, 480q, 5 writing); warm up on paper tests, then move on to the computer based ones. There is no substitute for the computer practice. I studied vocab casually for 2 months before moving into my actual test practice. Also, reading and analyzing scholarly prose really helps. Books I used were Kaplan, Barrons, and Princeton. I got to the test center 20min early and took a 15min walk around the whole complex, lots of deep breathing etc because of my anxiety. I would be interested to see what schools are accepting the people who say "I got accepted into a top 10 school with drooler scores", since we might be able to see/create a list of top schools where fit, sop, and writing sample really (thankfully) seem to trump bad test days.

Are there any major works that explore the idea that the greek gods and goddesses are symbolic of different aspects of the human condition as opposed to simply mythological deities in charge of governing the world? I'm going to start looking at some classical influences in romanticism and Keats in particular, but was wondering what some major scholarly works in the area of classical mythology were...again mostly greek and roman gods and goddesses. thanks!

Yea I had taken some great classes at one of those schools listed but had decided not to apply there (not from any bad experience, but from wanting to be elsehwere.) Switching disciplines is certainly not an ideal place to be with the costs that seem to come with it; I can't find any funded master's programs where I was also able to find people doing work in line with my research, and any venerable program seemed to be either a minor ivy (like brown or Chicago's maph option) public ivy (like UVA) or place like Cambridge and Oxford. I've come to accept the fact that I will be paying, and if I'm going to pay, might as well get a trip to England out of it, instead of New England ;p Said perhaps another way, at my stage it would be more costly to wait out another year, rather than just pay and establish a solid basis for future research. I'm giong to give Oxford a closer look, some of those people might not be as much of a stretch as I thought before.

I'm switching into english from another discipline, and looking to do a masters before going on to a phd (I had about 3 english courses in undergrad, and recently took 2 english graduate courses to familiarize myself with the current academic enviroment and acquire a few basic tools) . I'm mostly interested in hearing from people who have actually completed the Mphil from Cambridge and whether or not you felt that it helped your research and ultimately your chances of continuing on to doctoral work. I'm interested in British Romanticism, have read a formidable amount of secondary literature for my writing topic, and yet I still feel like I am stumbling through my SOP; working backwards from my writing sample I can give a few bland sentences on "my interests" and how they intersect with current issues, but I can't say how my project might look going forward, and, most troubling, I feel unable to fully express my research interests other than trite generalities. What I think I am most looking for in a masters experience is more exposure to British Romantic authors like coleridge, keats, shelley, wordsworth, and hume, with the hopes of being able to ultimately more cogently articulate my research interests. Since the mphil is only one year, I'm not sure how much I will be able to benefit from it since I am still not fully coherent on what direction my research will take, or if, given ~9 months to myself, will come up with some wild and absurd thesis. I did a cursory look at Oxford, but they didnt really seem to have any professors working with what I was interested in, and no one using a methodology that I was interested in. I looked at MAPH also, but that's only a year, so again, not sure how much I will benefit from it given my current situation. oh yea, other stats are 3.3 gpa from an invisible smlac, 730 verbal and a cringing math score (still clear the 1200 mark however.)

I know there is a research section that is supposedly identified, but you all are saying that now you do your AWA, Verbal, Math, (in whatever combination they appear) and then you have the identified expirimental section, instead of it being embedded in the normal test?? If that is true, that is really awesome since you know all the sections you are working on are counting toward your score.

You're right. 2 mils is not nearly enough to live off of, much less to philosophize with. No wonder why Socrates and Nietzsche sucked so much. Fraco was intellectually screwed unless he could matriculate to a top 5 school with funding, because on top of all those "agents, money managers, personal managers, lawyers, pr people, taxes" he now has to pay assistants to go to classes for him, concoct a dissertation for him, and then write it. I mean that's going to cost at least 10 latte's per day!

No, I actually never fell asleep during a lecture because I cared about what was being discussed and had a sincere desire to learn. I doubt Franco went through any sort of normal application process, and he has enough money to where if he really wanted to embark on the via contemplativa, he could go buy an island, write, and then create a powerhouse publishing firm to disseminate his foundation shattering thoughts to the rest of the world. But he wants to go to Yale. This sounds more like he is currently bored with acting, and gravitated towards a "prestigious" school for some intellectual fornication, since that is probably the furthest thing from his everyday existence, or the most radically different thing a person in his situation could do. Chicks? All the time. Parties? All the time. Fast Cars? All the time. Knowledge? Never. Just following his curiosity--nothing wrong with that--but do you really need to burn $$$ at Yale and Columbia to learn? Yale should have said no thanks, but I imagine if you look at the population who "gets in" simply on renown and connections, they would have to say that a lot more than they do already :/

relatedly, it was suggested to me to attend a conference, that it would be a good chance to meet people and network in my field (i'm not presenting a paper, would just be visiting). My thought is, why does it cost so much (hotel room, food, plane tix) to simply apply to grad school? Are the advantages really that serious, that I should pay 700ish dollars to go network??

so as i am fraying and writing and rewriting my sop and writing sample, i returned to blogging, and have created a blog that is so postmodern it exceeds postmodernism. It is basically the final thoughts of Deleuze before he threw himself out his window; if not that, then I have captured what his long fingernails might say were they given a voice and not suppressed into growing on the very margins of his body.