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;

hey @mashatheicebear, just popping in to say i agree w what people have said so far and add my two cents! i'm a fellow comp lit/slavic person and had looooots of discussions w faculty about whether to apply to slavic or comp lit phds leading up to this cycle. you might have had similar convos yourself/some of this might be self-evident but here are a few things that might be helpful to think about as you decide: (1) it is possible to do a slavic phd as comp lit, or a comp lit phd as slavic, especially when it comes to your dissertation. the main difference will be the course reqs and examinations, but (afaik) comp lit is rather flexible about those. slavic departments conversely tend to be more conservative about what they ask of their students (most will "force" you to do a course on pre-19th C lit, sometimes old church slavonic, and a non-Russian slavic lang). if you have access to the program's grad student handbook, it might be good to take a good look at it and see how much flexibility you would have to focus mostly on Russian? (2) generally my recommenders said that it is MUCH easier to get into slavic phds than comp lit, and this has been true for friends who've applied to both programs in recent years. the cohorts are smaller, yes, but there are also fewer people applying. so, i wouldn't think that it would be impossible for you to get into a slavic phd next year if you decide to reapply (or transfer?). i have no idea if the age thing matters though! (3) you mentioned that the university doesn't have a separate Russian grad program. that probably means that whatever classes in russian that you could take would be undergrad-level and you might have fewer 'interlocutors' amongst the graduate community. ofc with the internet plus most research events moving online with covid this is not necessarily a problem, but might be something else to think about (4) this is more anecdotal, but i will say that most of the faculty in slavic depts i spoke to were almost anti-comp lit. even the ones who had comp lit phds would talk about 'reading list envy' and missing that very specific slavic training. i'm not sure how this anti-comp lit bias translates to the (mostly nonexistent) job market, but i do agree that job market considerations shouldn't be at the top of your priority list rn please feel free to dm if you want to talk more about any of this! i'd be happy to share some of the long emails i got from profs about this privately. i'm sort of in the opposite situation rn--i WANT to do a comp lit phd but have no comp lit acceptances (yet?) and an offer from a russian dept that i mostly applied to out of fear of having no options good luck and hope at least some of this is helpful!

I was also expecting to hear from Cornell much much later since they were my last deadline. Seems like covid is weirdly speeding some timelines up and slowing others down. haha love the crypticness, mine was with KC and MFr--I mentioned them in my SoP too. I appreciate that they try to match people with their POIs for interviews, makes it a bit more engaging (or worse, because they can drill you more pointedly? can't decide)

My (very generic) rejection email said "If you indicated on your application an alternate field choice, you will only hear from them if you are admitted into their field.", which makes me think Comp Lit would let you know if they're rejecting you anyway? So maybe it does mean waitlist, idk. yup, definitely! felt very inarticulate after one of my interviews was over and like i was barely able to formulate a coherent question for them. also interviewed at Yale and got good vibes but i stupidly blanked on a few dates and two authors' names, which wasn't the best look. very much in favour of wine and more wine.

thank you! i was contacted by the dept admin person with a list of times a week in advance. the actual interview lasted ~25 minutes and they recorded it so that faculty who weren't present could review it too. like @AdiCallai said, there was a panel of about 8 ppl (someone joined halfway through, another person got up at one point, seemed like they were just coming in and out) and they took turns asking questions about my SoP/stated areas of interest--it was entirely academics-focused. they opened with the classic 'tell us about yourself', which always stumps me no matter how much i prepare haha, & left time for me to ask questions at the end. i think it went reasonably well but really have no idea what to expect. i didn't feel great 'chemistry' with the panel and none of my PoIs were there, but i've learned not to try to make predictions (like many here, i got the Cornell rejection last night and i considered that my best fit by far!). hoping that we'll all get some clarity in the next few weeks ?

for me it was the opposite, only one of the 8 or so panelists/interviewers shared one of my languages, so it felt more like they had a set group of interviewers rather than a group tailored to me. good luck you too!! hopefully we'll hear soonish

hi everyone! thanks for making this thread, have been lurking for a while but decided to make an acct when I saw this question -- just to say that I got contacted by Stanford for an interview on Jan 22 and met with the DGS and the adcom on Jan 29. got the impression they were doing all the interviews around that time but not 100% sure ofc, and did not get any info on timing otherwise. (this is for their Comp Lit department, not MTL)