prufrock_

Grats! flagstaff is very nice. It's near sedona, which is one of my favorite places in america.

GRATS!

rat enthusiast from the draft sheet is like thanos with the full gauntlet. holy cow!

I'm with ya, he's one of my favorites. To make it sting less, I keep reminding myself he lives in CA and probably wouldn't teach anything at Syracuse if I did get in... (plus, with his story club presence online, i can learn from him anyway)

i wrote a python script that monitors the draft spreadsheet for me. It writes out each new row to a pretty ascii table; it also moos when it does this, so i know to look. it moos because a cow moo was the first mp3 i found. it also tells me the other schools the applicant has applied to. It color codes those results with green for admit, yellow for wait, red for rejection. it's basically my emotional support cow.

The cow was going crazy so I told the cow to only look at the sheet every 10 minutes now, and only moo once if it changed (it was anxiously mooing at every line!). Maybe I can tell it to moo louder/quieter based on how many new lines appear in that 10 minute chunk. 1 line only gets a tiny meow of a moo 20 new lines gets a MOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

We wanted a big week, and we got a big week! (another rejection; good bye Syracuse Dreamin)

I saw one poetry acceptance posted last week, but nothing for fiction. I'm waiting for my rejection today from them now

vanderbilt dream is dead, rip. i wanted to live off of hot chicken sandwiches

My michener portal updated to declined finally! fun to hope while it lasted. it's my official 2nd decline, but 5th counting soft rejections. we still have hope for the 11 pending!!!!

Michener is making my cow moo like crazy.

no clue how their system works. i like to think that yeah they mark waitlists/acceptances and then rejections are automated, but who knows. UT austin seems to use a proprietary software. The Michener Center application is labeled “Writing.” (mines still in review) edit: looking at last year, rejections did come in waves, two days apart. double edit: not just two days, but weeks! rejections will be coming in for a while, it seems.

ditto, but i'm near the bottom of the alphabet. with 900 apps, i'm assuming it'll just be a bit until it changes. not to be a doomer, but without a call or email otherwise, i don't particularly imagine this is anything but a decline for myself.

gang, we ddos'd ut austin to the ground. (Michener results are in portal... which is now down) edit: it's back! (mine has no results so far.... hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm)

warning: wild speculation. i don't have exact numbers, but last year i went to round 2 then ended up on the waitlist. Looking at draft results from last year, everyone who reported that they got into round 2 also reported an acceptance or waitlist (except 1 person who didn't follow up). I don't wanna get anyones hopes up incorrectly, but I'd suspect that you'd only get declined at this point if there was something keeping you from general acceptance (gpa too low for the grad school, no degree, etc).

I predict i'm going to run out of likes today; big day coming up! Grats already yall!

It's possible they are coming in waves, but it looks like last year all reported rejections came on the same day, which was a day or two after acceptances went out. Did your UCSD portal update?

they're the one i find myself day dreaming about the most! Everything about their program seems so wonderful. I especially like that they offer a minor in environmental studies or Native American & Indigenius studies. i'll check out "laramie time" by lydia conklin -- been meaning to read something by them. Who is your favorite writer who went there, if you want to share?

My UVA also says Awaiting Decision. I wouldn't read too much into it. Portal updates aren't the best source of information imo (like, my lone waitlist so far still says Awaiting Decision in the portal). Until it says accepted or declined, it could mean anything.

I wouldn't call it a poor choice, since people do get in with novel excerpts all the time. That said, I think the majority are short stories. It's important to show you can end as strong as you start, which doesn't happen in a novel excerpt. I hope you get in somewhere, but it's not a bad idea to start a short just in case.

a few things: the most important: I kept writing, reading, and workshopping. I wrote a new story that got the strongest reactions i've seen, so that now leads my portfolio this year. I reworked the strongest story I submitted last year and that's also in my portfolio. I checked all my schools this round to make sure the funding they offer covers cost of living in the area. Last year I got into a fully funded program that I turned down cause it didn't cover CoL, which stung. This year if I get an acceptance to anywhere, i know i'm going 100%. The downside of this is that my school list is mostly prestigious long shots. I increased the schools I applied to from 11 to 17. I started earlier on the apps and gave more individual attention to each school (though the SOP reads mostly boiler plate, except for a couple sentences). I wrote a new SOP that was less autobiographical and more about my present and future work/plans. I mildly workshopped it with peers and removed the bits that didn't work; the year before my sop felt more like a blog post than a graduate level 'paper'. I saved as much money as I could; i only want to focus on the MFA for the years i'm in it.

acceptances are a phone call first (then physical mail to confirm? not sure) -- rejections are only physical mail though. i wouldn't expect Iowa results until next week, but maybe they're going out earlier this year.

I wrote this last year but think it's still true: I imagine 10%-20% of all applications from any slush have good enough writing to get into the program, and what turns you from that 10% to 'admitted' is less subjective than we may think --- prestigious awards & an ivy undergrad, LOR's from a Pulitzer winner, an sop that's two pages yet reads like a novel synopsis because your life is like Forest Gump. But it's also possible [those admitted to multiple places] just wrote a really killer short story and have an sop that shows they'd be fun to work with for a few years, which is all it takes to get in anywhere.

Why are we thinking UWY might come out soon? They had a very late deadline (1/20!)

I'm counting Minnesota as a soft reject at this point, yes, because i've heard nothing, yet acceptance/waitlists have gone out. Most programs operate like this with the lag between waves. Most don't have massive distances between the three stages, but some do. I'd guess programs wait because that's just what works best for them for whatever reason. Applicants shouldn't even know about the waves; we only do because we have an underground network of crowd sourced data.