GoldenTree

OMG.
OMG.
I’M WAITLISTED AT NC STATE!!!!!!!!!!!!

Congrats to everyone who's gotten acceptances lately! I haven't been on as much (currently in Nashville for a conference so a bit distracted). 
After  7 firm rejections though, I got my first waitlist at the University of South Carolina for poetry today! Makes me really happy tbh even if nothing comes of it. 

Congrats to everyone who's gotten acceptances lately! I haven't been on as much (currently in Nashville for a conference so a bit distracted). 
After  7 firm rejections though, I got my first waitlist at the University of South Carolina for poetry today! Makes me really happy tbh even if nothing comes of it. 

Congrats to everyone who's gotten acceptances lately! I haven't been on as much (currently in Nashville for a conference so a bit distracted). 
After  7 firm rejections though, I got my first waitlist at the University of South Carolina for poetry today! Makes me really happy tbh even if nothing comes of it. 

Congrats to everyone who's gotten acceptances lately! I haven't been on as much (currently in Nashville for a conference so a bit distracted). 
After  7 firm rejections though, I got my first waitlist at the University of South Carolina for poetry today! Makes me really happy tbh even if nothing comes of it. 

Congrats to everyone who's gotten acceptances lately! I haven't been on as much (currently in Nashville for a conference so a bit distracted). 
After  7 firm rejections though, I got my first waitlist at the University of South Carolina for poetry today! Makes me really happy tbh even if nothing comes of it. 

I was waitlisted at South Carolina last year (and seemingly not this year...) and didn't make it off. Hope it works out for you! I'm a fan of their faculty and it seems like a great, underrated program.

Congrats to everyone who's gotten acceptances lately! I haven't been on as much (currently in Nashville for a conference so a bit distracted). 
After  7 firm rejections though, I got my first waitlist at the University of South Carolina for poetry today! Makes me really happy tbh even if nothing comes of it. 

Crying in front of two hundred construction workers and I can’t tell them why because they wouldn’t understand. But you people will. 
Irvine!

WOOOOO congratulations!!!!! 

OMGGGGGGG! I am crying right now. Claire Watkins from UCI just called me. I'm in for Fiction!  Still shaking. There are 5 in the fiction cohort this year. 

Congrats to everyone's acceptances!!
I just got an acceptance from Manhattanville myself! No funding offers yet-- they said those will come mid-March. The decision DID however have cute graphics with the school's mascot floating down with confetti! Their portal is probably the best-looking and most organized of the schools I applied to.

I think some more of the University of Iowa results are going out. I just got a phone call and I'm in for NF! Now excuse me while I go try and calm my lungs with a mild amount of alcohol 😭

I know it’s been so quiet this year compared to previous cycles! Best of luck to you too! Where did you apply? 

I have another q about Iowa ~ if one lives outside of the U.S., will Iowa allow them to (slightly) keep (one little piece of) their dignity and NOT send a rejection via snail mail? I.e. just reject via email/portal? 
If so, that would comfort me greatly. 
(I'd rather not dread going to my mailbox for the month of March lolz.) 
----
Also I want to share a quote by Federico Fellini that feels relevant (!):
"One of the greatest handicaps is to fear a mistake. You have stopped yourself. You have to move freely into the arena, not just to wait for the perfect situation, the perfect moment... If you have to make a mistake, it's better to make a mistake of action than one of inaction."
Applying to MFA programs is taking a risk on yourself and your art. If you don't get into any programs this year, you should still be proud of yourself for stepping into the arena and making a mistake of action. Some people stay on the sidelines and never step in. ❤️ PLUS this is only one risk of hundreds/thousands (millionz?) that we will take as writers. ~ Keep taking risks love u all 
 
 

I hope that most of you go into these programs with an attempt to speak to the truth of our current context, for so often, what ends up happening is the folks that get the degree end up becoming petit-bourgeoisie adjunct professors somewhere. We all know the academy does not produce material change for those in the mud in the States and throughout the diaspora. I humbly ask that when you enter these institutions, the liberation struggles being fought right now are at the forefront of your mind as you write. We need more writers engaging in our current context, not just sitting around waxing about form that does nothing to improve the material conditions of those who feel the most weight from the state.
Free Sudan, Palestine, and all political prisoners.

exactly this. 
I've been a ditchdigger for almost 25 years. i went to school at night and on weekends so I'd have a degree when i retire this summer. i was a laborer and a college student. what will i be now? i was going to be a grad student. 

What I should have said was “schools that are likely to offer full funding”. I was under the impression that if a school wasn’t on the list, it would be next to impossible to go. At a pretty late stage I had one Professor tell me to apply the NYU because they have a lot of money and often give it away. Another told me Columbia wouldn’t offer full funding but a free ride was quite possible. On my own I discovered that hunter’s a free ride with a likely possibility of a ta or ra spot. then I watched people here or on draft get offers from schools that weren’t on my radar.
maybe someone should make a list. 

My recommenders got an email from them asking for letters for Round 2 but I personally haven't received any direct communication from the school. Don't know if anyone else heard directly from them! 

Remember when OSU decisions started rolling out over a month ago? I can’t decide if that feels like a year ago or what. It’s been a long month. 

@saramsarang I'm always down to talk as well. I understand the impact this process can have on someone's mental health. Regardless of whether both of us are applying next year or not I would love to keep in contact with you guys and workshop writing!

@TheGreatLoudini and @GoldenTreeThank you both so much for your concern and support, it moved me that you guys checked up on me! I'm doing mostly okay now, definitely better than before anyhow, and I will definitely reach out to you guys if I feel like talking. But otherwise, I'm cheering both of you on for this cycle! 

Ditto. And @saramsarang you have all the right to be sad about this. That's something my boyfriend told me last night as I was so upset about all this MFA stuff, but it's true. It hurts for the hopes to die and for us to want and fight for something, not yet receiving it. There's always still hope though and I know as writers we so crave external validation sometimes. For someone to say, "yes, I want the work. I love it." We don't always receive that though and then there are these periods where we have to believe in ourselves or else I think we'd all give up. I'm glad you got the sign. Because I believe in you and I've had my own experiences with signs that have greatly helped me. If you ever want a friend I know @TheGreatLoudini offered, but I'd be open too. Whether you'd wanna talk about MFAs, writing, sadness, signs, or whatever, it'd be good with me. If not anything that's alright too. Regardless, I still hope you get in one of those remaining three even though I know you seem to have given up a lot of hope. Keep on believing and I hope you try again eventually or just starting publishing if this current cycle doesn't work out. Either way you wrote an inspiring post that uplifted others and have been a wonderful person to have on this forum. 

This is SO helpful and good to know, thank you!!! 

Hello everyone, looks like a slow day indeed, so I just wanted to share some hope/positivity?
I haven't been doing so well mentally for the last one month. The rejections were a lot more hurtful than I thought it would be despite me expecting them and I haven't written a single word since I submitted applications in December. All in all I sort of gave up on writing altogether. I don't know how to explain it except that it died in me. I began to think I was meant to be a writer or write in this lifetime anyways. It might sound dramatic to a lot of you, but it didn't have much to do with the mfa itself. I've endured a lot in the past seven years just to keep writing in my life. Writing for me is as necessary as breathing, and it's hard to explain that to anyone without sounding crazy. It's been incredibly exhausting with no reward or relief and this was all the love I had for the art, so I was going to let it go after this cycle, because there was no light at the end of the tunnel that I could see. 
Yesterday I went to church for the first time in a very long time. I'm not religious, but I am agnostic. (This is not a God is great and you should go pray post, please bear with me). Honestly, I only went to ask a higher power whether they knew what they were doing and why they were doing this to me. I didn't go to ask for anything, not to ask for an acceptance or anything of that sort because I didn't think it worked like that. Also because I've just been very numb and distant from life, so I couldn't even bring myself to ask for it because I genuinely believed I was just destined to fail at writing. 
I ended up crying a lot, a full blown sob session haha. In the end I asked only for one thing, for God to show me a sign if they believed I should continue writing. Any sign, could have even just been a friend texting me to say they loved my writing etc. I would have taken anything just to feel like I hadn't wasted my whole life away. An hour later on the way home I received an acceptance from Binghamton for their English and Creative Writing program. 
Ultimately, I don't think I'll be going there because there's no funding and the director of the program understood my financial difficulties as an international student especially. But she wrote this: "In accepting your application, we wanted to communicate that the creative writing faculty who read your file and your work found it excellent." and encouraged me to keep writing and wished me success. I feel like that was the sign.
The point of this wasn't to ask you guys to believe in a God or a religion or anything, but to say that I didn't have any hope for after the cycle. I was struggling to even imagine a life, but I'm a lot more calmer now. This is the first morning in the last month that I have woken up without crying. I figured if I've survived seven years and that got me the chance to apply for the MFA, another year of fighting for writing won't hurt. Someone out there did like my writing even if it wasn't the mfa. That's pretty good to me. So I'm going to try harder now.
So if anyone else is feeling lost, angry, sad, like you wasted all that money for the applications, just hang in there a bit longer. Writing loves you as much as you love it, it's not unrequited. It's all about the timing, a matter of 'when' and not 'if'. If it's not this cycle and you feel like you won't be able to apply again, that's okay. It's the same for me, I don't think I have the money to apply again next cycle. But we'll never know what will actually happen in a year, in two years, in three. It may seem like there are no possibilities but we're living in a chaotic world where anything can happen. So many people have pointed out how much they've grown through the application cycle and even the short few months after it. Life is like that, you have to keep walking and then suddenly you'll look back and realise how far you've come. Everyone's pace is different, life isn't about speed but rather direction. So grieve, process, but don't give up on writing. It's just not your time yet, but it will come. If not for anyone, you owe it to yourself.
Until then, watch the sunset, meet new people, buy yourself something nice and breathe in the small things. If you've been waiting for a sign, take this as the one. You are enough and there is a life, it may not look okay now but you'll figure it out, you have before, so you will again. It's not the end of the world, it may in fact be the beginning of a new one. 
(That said, I will still cry when I get my rejections from Iowa, Brown and NYU but it's really not the end of the world. I don't regret applying to the mfa even though all I got were rejections. I needed to see through the seven year period until the end, so I'm going to take this as the closure to that really long and hard period. Most of all though, I got to meet all of you guys and I got to see a whole community of writers, it's been very heartwarming. You guys are amazing people and I really hope for nothing but the best for everyone. I hope you keep dreaming, and your life blooms.)
That was a really long message, sorry everyone!