rinneron

Post-application-submission time is the worst! This is my second time around, this time with an MA (thank god I had something to keep me busy and sane after a frightening number of rejections two years ago), but I feel just as nervous as I did the first time around! Hopefully by the time I have to start working on my MA thesis (weird school means we do it in one semester!) I'll have forgotten the anxiety (yeah right...). I tried to vary the types of programs I applied to this time, and not make the mistake of going brand crazy again. I think one of my undergrad profs summed it up best when he said: "If Columbia's going to accept you, chances are UPenn and Cornell and Brown will too, so why apply to all of them?" UCLA (This is my top, top, top choice -- I love their program and their theoretical slant/profs seem like they would be a really good fit! Keepin' my fingers crossed...) UC Berkeley Brown WUSTL UMich Northwestern BC UDel CUNY Rutgers Hang in there everyone...

Pick up a Norton. Seriously. They become your best friend as an undergrad and will follow you all the way through (I'm a second semester MA lit student, and I pray to them every night). For the more canonical stuff, the English Lit anthology is awesome. And the Theory and Crit anthology is awesome for theory and crit. Once you get into less canonical, more "weird-area-specific" stuff, they're good as backup for textual lineage (thanks Jauss -- courtesy of Norton). And the intros they give are priceless -- really informative and (I think) interesting to read. Yeah, they may be expensive, but can you really put a price on education? (Laaaaaame I know... but true!!)

(Disclaimer: This is yet another plea -- as I see there are many already on this board! -- to those who know better than I whether or not I even have a chance at getting into grad school. I apologize very, very much for this, but I figure since we're all in the same field, you guys must understand how terribly stressful and anxiety-provoking this whole process is. And there's no harm in trying, right?) Like many people on this site, I just went through my second round of PhD applications for English programs. I felt much better prepared this time around, but I got my GRE English test scores back about a week ago, and somehow managed an abysmal 560. Better than my first performance (520), but still... So here's my situation: I went to a prestigious small college for undergrad and walked out with a 3.74 overall (.01 away from summa cum laude! sigh), 3.85 in my English major, a high honors thesis, and a few departmental awards. I went to (technically am still at) an equally prestigious university for my MA in English, and am walking out with a 3.91 GPA, a theoretically good thesis (my school is a little odd in that it's only a semester long project, so I technically haven't begun it yet), and a couple of conference presentations/papers. I can read and translate French very well, and Latin to a fair extent. My recommendations are very good (and from pretty to very well known profs in my field), my statement of purpose is very specific as to what I have studied/what I want to study/theoretical questions I want to ask (basically, I used my SoP to outline my previous work, how it's informed my theoretical slant, present the theories/ideas I've come up with, and present an outline of where I would like my work to go/what interests I want to study/how I would like to frame my future research), I have teaching experience as an adjunct at a local community college (they took me on before I finished my MA cause I interviewed pretty well), as well as TA/writing center tutor experience there and at my undergrad, and my writing sample is awesome (if I can pat my back for suffering over that thing for the last four months). I did well on my GRE general -- 690V, 700Q, 6.0W -- but this GRE Subject is killing me. (Specifically, for those who are interested/to whom it matters, my focus is 20th century American and British lit/postmodern -- isn't everyone's -- with my theoretical interests lying in the aesthetics of postmodern thought, minority/marginal nostalgia in literature, how memory is aestheticized through lit and used to usurp history as a primary vehicle of past recollection, post-structuralist theory as it applies to those ideas, and regional literature inhabiting memory -- ie Southern lit, expat American modern lit, post-genocidal Armenian lit.) I don't just love lit/have a passion for lit, I genuinely want to research and teach. So, how fucked am I? I'm applying to 11 schools : (Brown, Berkeley, UCLA -- absolute top choice!, -- Rutgers, BC, WashU, CUNY, Indiana, U of Michigan, U of Delaware, Northwestern), all of which I researched and figured out fit my academic slants/had profs I'd want to study with (who I mentioned in my SoP). But this GRE lit score, combined with the fact that EVERYONE is 20th century these days, is making me panic. So, from you experienced on this site, should I start looking for garbage man (or woman, as my case would make it) jobs, or hold out for potential acceptances?