rinneron

Hello all, I'll be moving to Boston in September (possibly earlier) to attend BC -- coming from NYC, I'm terrified/extremely wary of bedbugs, unsafe neighborhoods, and super high rent. My boyfriend and I are moving together (yay! built in roommate!) and want a 2 bedroom/1 bedroom with an office, at $1600 or so a month at the high end of things (we'd obviously pay less if possible!). Ideally, I'd love to be able to walk/bike to BC, but I'm not against using the Green/B line (still figuring out this subway thing). We may have a car, but for now we don't, and even when/if we do, I'd rather use it less than more. I'm totally all for quiet neighborhoods with grocery nearby, and I'm not that into a city (and neither is the boy). Any ideas where I should be looking? I've begun scouting Craigslist around Brigham Circle, Cleveland Circle, and Allston, but I've heard rumors of lots of noisy undergrads and/or bedbugs in those areas. Thank you!!!!! Any advice is much appreciated.

I survived on about $15,600 my first year and then $18,000 my second year in NYC while doing my MA (not including tuition, paid for separately). She must be funding at least a crack habit, if not supplemented by heroin. (Apologies if Ms. Mathis ever finds this thread!)

I'm extremely happy I got (am getting... it's not May yet!) an MA, but I also definitely attend one of those cash cow schools (thanks NYU -- no secrets here!). When you're an MA student here, the program is alienating, difficult to navigate, and I've also (not singularly, but during my courses) been discouraged from getting a PhD because, basically, if you only got into the MA this time, you're not getting a PhD ever. (There are some nice profs at NYU, however, and if you can find them, hang on with all your might! They got me through the last two years.) That said, the MA students themselves all basically feel the same (with a few lucky exceptions, and god knows I won't be bursting their bubbles), so you've got a great support network/group to complain with, and they themselves are working hard to create more of a cohesive MA community. NYU's faculty has also become aware, if only slightly, that their MA program leaves many disgruntled students, and I do think they're trying to fix its problems. My MA has helped me tremendously, and I know the training I got while at NYU is the reason I got into grad school. That isn't to say my undergrad work did nothing; however, I learned much more about graduate school as a business, and how to be successful at that business, while at NYU. I like to think of it this way: undergrad gave me a BA in theoretical foundation and intellectual courage; NYU gave me an MBA in Being A Successful Scholar and Critic. I lean towards the "it's bullshit" side of things when it comes to the argument that if you have an MA, you're less competitive. I'm an obvious example, but that's horribly biased of me -- a lot of friends of mine took the same route, specifically to an English PhD: apply to PhDs, get rejected from everywhere but get offered an MA; take MA program and get MA; get into good PhD programs. It all depends on what kind of applicant and how prepared for graduate study you are. Some of us come straight outta the BA farm a tasty top grade filet mignon, some of us (me!) come out pretty good sirloins that need a little more seasoning. If you use the MA program you attend well, get your seasoning, buff up your literary and theoretical knowledge, and really hone in on your critical interests, your statement of purpose will reflect that and the PhD programs you apply to will notice. If you wasted your MA and didn't work as hard as you could, your statement of purpose will also reflect that and be a big red flag to adcoms: you already tried grad school, and maybe it's just not right for you. My Dad once broke it down for me (he's a lit PhD in the "Business"): Once you get an MA, it's a foot in the door; but don't stand around idly waiting for someone to open the door the rest of the way, you've got to take the initiative or your foot's gonna get cut off. Okay, so maybe I'm taking a few creative liberties with his words (then again, we're both born and bred Jersey kids, so the diction could be right...), but the idea is this: MA programs are like a test. If you do well -- and I mean *exceptionally* well -- you'll pass the test and get another shot at the next level. And, slightly off topic: NYU's English Department at least never offers funding to their MA students. MA students' money literally pays for the PhDs. Like I said, it's a business.

I certainly am! I'm going down next weekend for the English Department's grad conference on Saturday, and visiting an extra day during the week before that to talk to profs I could work with, etc. Also beginning apartment hunt. Uch (but a happy uch ).

I'm in a similar position -- I got into my top choice program and one other school that was around the bottom of the pile -- and to be honest, I'm glad it worked out this way. I knew I was a good fit for the school I'm going to, and really, really wanted to go there. The other schools -- screw em. Things happen for a reason (I'm a huge believer in karma and partial paths etc etc), so if I'm meant to go to BC, all the better! And if any profs ask me to list schools or something to that extent, I think replying something along the times of "this is the program I'm most excited about" is the best choice. That and I told Robert Stanton I was going to attend *when he called.* So much for subtlety. He seemed to enjoy it.

Maybe I can cue into my Irish ancestry while I'm up there! NYU does have some Enlightenment and 18th century people, but the classes offered and available profs in that area are severely lacking. I have a friend in the MA program whose focus is 18th century/Enlightenment/Romanticism, and she's been disappointed with the options available to her. They're a little heavier on the Romanticism side of things, but for some reason even those professors seem absent from the community. It could be that, since being an MA at NYU can be a very fragmentary and disheartening experience, she just doesn't have the same access to the people working in that area that the PhDs have, but she's excited to leave for elsewhere for her PhD in order to be somewhere that more strongly supports her interests. That being said, applying there as an 18th century person may help your application, since the last few years have seen a surge of Early Modern/Medieval/Renaissance acceptances! I think the cohort last year had 4 or 5 in that area of 11 total acceptances, and the year before was comparable. Let me ask around a bit more about the 18th century thing and post again about it if I discover anything new; I think putting out feelers should give me a more complete idea of how we stand with that area.

Done and done! Today, I am not a complete failure. And yeah, NYU does have a strong Irish group -- thanks for pointing that out Yellow, I forgot to mention it.

Friday night, and I'm stuck at home with lung issues (blech) and somehow missed this the first time around! I love reading what everyone is into -- and I'm trying to waste time before I really, officially have to work on my MA thesis, so I'll bite. I study 20th century American (and some British) and proudly call most of it postmodern. I also try to cast myself as a modernist (in order to be more marketable), but after talking to me for 5 seconds you know it's a secondary interest (though I happily cite Faulkner, Joyce, and Hemingway as favorites to read and work with). According to my statement of purpose, I like to "explore the aesthetics of memory, identifying the novel as an artistic landscape that invites the public reexamination and romanticizing of private nostalgia." Basically, I like to believe that postmodernism (and the postmodern memory/memorial), as it's both ahistorical and historically saturated, offers an opportunity to reconsider and challenge public archive as a primary vehicle of recorded history. I also like looking into how this all intersects with identity, narratology, postmodern/post-structuralist theory, etc etc. And I'm starting to develop a very soft spot for poetry. I was accepted to BC and Northeastern and rejected from a hell of a lot more schools. And I love MLA. I'm proposing tomorrow.

Yay! I'm so glad this page is starting to answer it's own question. Although, as Books pointed out, the most important thing is researching the school directly, I think something like this is a great way to get started. It's impossible (and incredibly daunting) to research every school under the sun, especially when you haven't heard of many of them, just to find the ones outside the most well known programs that are strong in your area. And of course we can include info about faculty as well -- anything that can help prospective appliers! Yellow, I'd love to change the title of this to "Fit" -- how do I do that? I'm an idiot when it comes to that sort of thing... :oops: And my two cents on a program: WashU has greats strengths in 19th/20th/21st century, women/gender studies, and African-American Literature. For those interested in Spenser, they also have Joe Loewenstein who is said to be serving on the editorial board of Spenser Studies. What you may not know? There's been a lot of moving towards encouraging more interdisciplinary strengths with roots in English. They have classes funded by the Mellon Foundation, offer summer fellowships which students design and build humanity projects, and you could obtain a dual PHD degree in English and Comparative Literature.

Awesome. I'm glad so many people seem on board with this idea; I think we can at least begin the steps to brainstorming and figuring out the steps to integrating some kind of "wiki" page onto the board (who came up with that idea -- unspeakable, right? fantastic, I love it). Does anyone know any of the moderators here, or how to get their attention? HEY MODERATORS! WE HAVE AN IDEA!!!! I think Yellow's point about labeling being something that makes things more confusing is well taken; what other ways can we organize this "wiki." Obviously, there's by school, but I don't know how much that would help the process. I think everything can be filed under school, but we need to be able to tag things with labels (ha, labels, can't seem to escape) to somewhat organize them. Maybe types/tiers of labels? For instance, first tier would be by school; second tier would be by historical period; third tier by topic/focus (discourse, historiography, aesthetics); fourth tier by critical/theoretical strengths (structuralism, post-colonialism, marxism). I know to some extent this requires some reductive logic ("well, you can't really say this school has just a strong structuralist focus, it really is just an intersection of blah blah blah"), but as long as schools can have multiple labels I think we can protect against "labeling" a school one thing or another. Basically, it would enable someone to browse all the schools that have a strong faculty in, say, post-colonial theory, and cross search with schools that also have an aesthetic focus. As I'm writing this, I realize it would take a lot of time and work to put together, but nothing worth doing was ever easy. And this'll make us all pull out our Norton's and figure out what the hell to call what we're talking about anyway. And of course, more important than the labels, would be the "user description" (or what have you) of the schools: people who go there talking about what that school "feels" like (ah, feel and fit, ever important and ever elusive). We'd need some people to oversee/edit the labeling and descriptions, to make sure everything stays neutral or what have you (excuse me, it's ten pm, I'm prepped to have an exterminator come Thursday -- ew... -- and my vocabulary has gone out the window), and make sure that no one "user" is writing a million words on a school. So, anyone with any web know how/connections to the higher aboves have an idea of what we should do to proceed? I think this would be a really good use for this board, and while it strikes a particular intellectual moral chord with me ("You can't label what I'm doing! It's too... interesting?"), I'm willing to put aside the "ethical concerns of academia" in the interest of getting more info about grad programs to more people.

So I got extremely lucky this year. Of the 12 schools I applied to, I had two absolute favorites. One rejected me at 8:00 one morning, the other accepted me at 11:39 that same morning. But that's not why I got lucky -- finding that second school at all is where my luck comes in. I didn't even know they had a PhD program; a friend of mine mentioned it to me one afternoon last winter/spring and I decided to check it out (needless to say, they weren't even on my radar during my first go-round with applications two years ago). And BANG, suddenly I'm faced with a program where there's a ton of classes not only in my field, but dealing with my particular critical interests (memory, aesthetics, postmodern theory, art versus fact, etc), a program that's almost identical to the program I imagined as perfect in my head (lots of input from PhDs as to field exams, tailorable language requirements, the chance to design your own seminars to teach as experience, etc), professors who emulate the kind of intellectual I want to be, etc etc etc. And I didn't even know this program existed until about a year ago. What really got me was when I spoke to the DGS when he called to let me know that I was accepted, he was excited to have me in the program because I was such a good fit. I was stunned. So here's my thought: as I've been on this board, I've noticed that we all seem to apply to the same 20-25 schools with little deviation. But there's no way all of us have the same 20-25 sets of interests, needs, desires, etc etc. I found my school on a fluke, but there's got to be a better way. Prospective students must have some way of finding the programs that fit (or come close to fitting) their interests, intellectual and personal needs, campus feel, etc. We've all been hearing so much about the elusive "fit" being a key factor in the decision process, so there must be a way we can better hone in on this "fit" and be better informed applicants. I've been giving this a lot of thought because I want other people to enjoy the kind of satisfaction I've been lucky enough to experience this year. This board is overpopulated with bright minds and people who are actually enrolled in more than just those 20-25 departments: is there a way to gather and share our collective knowledge so prospectives can learn more about what schools seem to "fit" them and make better and more informed decisions about applying?

NYU and Columbia have pretty late MA application due dates. And they normally get WAY LESS applications than do the PhD programs. And both (I think) give you some kind of leg up applying for PhDs down the line. Good luck!

Talked to a friend today who applied and is in contact with the DGS/some of the adcom: they got over 700 (holy crap) applications and are not finished going through them as of last night. Probably be until the middle of March, from what I understand. Hang in there!!!

In! Just got a call from Robert Stanton. With funding, tuition, etc... Still shaking. They're my first choice, I cannot wait. Who else is in?? I've seen some other acceptances posted and I'd love to chat!