harleth

congrats on your offers and hopefully the funding situation works out! there's a slavic-specific thread elsewhere (under 'Languages'), other people might be able to weigh in there. you're right that most US Slavic departments are Russian-dominated, but there are actually quite a few that offer PhD programs where you would not be made to study Russian Lit as your main area, or possibly at all. depending on which Slavic languages you focus on, you might want to look at Harvard, Columbia, Brown, UC Berkeley (though if you're international the UC schools are famously tough to get into), possibly UW Madison. i know that in some of these you would also have flexibility to do some comparative work or formally have a secondary field in Comp Lit. i imagine there are other programs that's i'm not aware of as well. hope this is helpful and happy to exchange impressions about schools!

fwiw i imagine it wouldn't hurt to ask about where they are in the process. might shorten the waiting period if nothing else? fingers crossed for you

congrats!! please please share with this thread once it's published, so excited to read it

got my form email rejection from princeton today... @buendia.macando hope you had better luck!

same, there's a few profs who MUST be on the verge of retirement that i wanted to work with but i don't think there's any polite way of asking 'are you planning to retire soon', lol. i mostly contacted them in late september iirc, ahead of the end of semester rush. but i ended up getting rejected from all those schools anyway and admitted to a dept where i hadn't even emailed anyone, so ymmv! not sure what i got out of the chats other than a temporary rush of validation. ? indeed. and yess, good luck with future SoPs!

chiming in! i only emailed people if i had an actual question (this cycle for the most part i asked if they knew if they were planning to admit ppl since some schools decided really late). it was helpful in one case bc a POI revealed they were planning to leave that uni and i decided not to apply. 1. i agree with your assumption/what others have said! some of the POIs i contacted offered to chat via zoom so i had some 20-min convos but nothing beyond that 2. i didn't do this but i'm aware it's a thing; if i was aware of a connection i threw it in at the beginning 3. technically yes because i applied to work with my current MA supervisor also, there was zero correlation between my results and which schools i contacted, so i'm skeptical about how much it actually helps. who you mention in your SoP and how you articulate fit there deffo seems more relevant!

thank you, am thrilled and it's given me some immunity to the yale cold shoulder. good luck with hunkering down and focusing! still radio silence from them for me. looks like last year they sent rejections out on feb 24 ?

ugh, was rooting for you! got the generic rejection in the portal and it feels so much colder somehow after interviewing. glad i got some good news earlier this week & that you're already in a program, but honestly it's been rough. i 'splurged' on some non-screw top wine to celebrate/wallow and highly recommend it! wish i could get you all wine/beverage of choice and thanks for being such a supportive/non-toxic bunch ❤️

thank you! yes, i am in a master's now. that sucks if admissions are moving toward admitting fewer ppl with just a BA, it becomes another barrier to entry considering how hard it can be to come across funded master's.... it's hard to figure out a pattern from current grad student profiles, since not everyone includes year of entry and previous education, but from what i could suss out last year Harvard Comp Lit took at least one person straight out of undergrad and one person with an MFA (fwiw!). cornell has a few points in their FAQs about how they assess MA/non-MA applicants, and i once heard from a prof that adcoms look at master's differently depending on if they're funded or self-paid--anyway, like anything in grad cafe this is just guesswork and hearsay.

yes! the one in the results board is me actually ? got the (informal for now) email late last night and have been buzzing since. i don't know if they've sent out all of them or what their status is otherwise. good luck to you both!

oh hi, discovering this thread a bit too late! were you guys admitted/waitlisted?

i could imagine this as an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education or like, becoming part of the twitter culture wars (kinda like when UChicago English announced that they were focusing on Black studies/theory), but prob not much beyond that afaik, when Stanford didn't admit a few years ago there were no repercussions for them, and i only know about it through word of mouth. i think they offered to waive future application fees for the people who had applied as a weird consolation lol?

someone posted an MTL waitlist today so presumably they've accepted people? i'm kinda operating on a 'hope for the best but expect the worst' basis and just assuming that people haven't been posting their acceptances or they're being sent after rejections for whatever reason (Cornell CL seems to be doing this), but i guess there's no way to know for sure...

i heard that Stanford comp lit/the language depts did this a few cycles ago, when they didn't even have covid as an excuse, and i was afraid a bunch of programs would accept applications but not admit anyone this year. glad that i've been wrong for the most part!

fellow harvard applicant here, @literature and @cursivesense! hoping we'll get a response this week, it's one of the few schools i'm still waiting on. lots of them have been off-schedule this year D;