papillon

Hi everyone! I'm trying to finalize my CV for English PhD applications, and I would appreciate your opinions on something. When I started undergrad, I thought I wanted to major in the sciences and go to medical school, so my first 3 semesters were mostly biology, chemistry, and math courses. During the summer after my freshman year, I did chemistry research at the National Institutes of Health, and I was very fortunate to have that research develop into a publication, on which I am listed as a co-author. However, I realized during my sophomore year that I did not want to become a doctor, and that, although I do like the sciences very much, I wanted to pursue the humanities more, and I switched to an English major--a decision I have been very happy with ever since. My question is this: should I include that publication on my CV for English PhD applications even though it is not an English paper? I was not planning on it, but now I am concerned that I might be leaving off something useful. I do not have any English publications, and my only significant research experience is my honors thesis. Do you think that a publication in an unrelated field will hurt my chances by making me look unfocused in my interests, or could it potentially help my chances by making me look dedicated to scholarly inquiry in general? Or maybe it just depends on the adcomm. I would appreciate any input. Thanks!

I only remember one Old English translation question, and then a whole bunch of Middle English...but I skipped some questions, so maybe I skipped those and then forgot that they existed. I was most surprised by the number of very difficult reading comprehension questions. I was mostly nervous about identifying obscure passages, but I ended up having more trouble with tricky reading comp questions, particularly the grammar-based ones. I teach English, and I still had trouble figuring out whether a word was being used as a dative, vocative, etc. Maybe if I knew Latin... For those of you who are taking it again though, I found a somewhat effective way to study. I have a long commute to work, so I went to the library and got a literature lecture series on CD to listen to in the car. I listened to one on great American novels (Grapes of Wrath, Native Son, so forth), two on great novels of all time (Ulysses, War and Peace, so forth), one of Walt Whitman, and one on British Romantic poets. It actually turned out to be pretty helpful. I wasn't counting very carefully, but I think that I was able to answer about 10 more questions because of the tapes. It's not a whole lot, out of 230, but every little bit helps. Of course, that strategy would only work for people with long commutes like me (45 minutes to an hour each way--ugh). But it's not very easy to study for this test without reading all literature ever, so I thought I would share my method. Good luck to everyone! I hate waiting for scores...I will definitely be spending the 12 dollars to get my scores early, much as I hate to give any more money to ETS.

Thank you to everyone for your advice, I really appreciate it. I was leaning toward not contacting professors, partly because I felt like it was giving them extra and unnecessary work and partly because I just wasn't sure what to say and didn't want to say something dumb. I think that, since I don't have any specific questions, I'm going to stick to that plan. Hopefully my SOP will speak for itself. I appreciate all the different perspectives; the variety of opinions makes me think that contacting professors can be a good thing or a bad thing, so I'm just going to do what I'm most comfortable with personally. Which is not contacting professors. Thanks again!

I took the test today as well! Very happy to be done with that ordeal, and trying not to think about my score until it's available. I did think there was quite a bit of theory! I only have the most tenuous grasp of theory, so I took some bold guesses. We'll see how that worked out in November. For now, I'm just glad it's over!

Hi everyone. Thank you in advance for your help. I am applying to English PhD programs, to begin in Fall 2011, and I have not contacted any professors at the schools I am applying to and was not planning on it. Having read several posts by people who have contacted specific potential advisors, I'm now feeling nervous that I will be at a disadvantage. I was under the impression that contacting professors was only necessary in the sciences, and since I did not have one very specific person I wanted to work with at each school, I just thought I would leave that for the "fit" paragraph of my SOP. Any opinions on this? Have I seriously hurt my chances of being accepted to a program? And if so, is it too late at this point to contact anyone? I'm assuming that would have been done over the summer. Thanks very much for your input.