trenchywrench

for those of you refusing to go into debt, I turned down both the offers i wound up getting. one was for 50% tuition remission and no living stipend. super expensive area, super expensive tuition, and mandatory summers that i would have to pay for as well. the other was 100% tuition remission with a competitive teaching assistantship in a medium-priced area; however, that one also came with no stipend and i am unwilling to sacrifice the time i would be spending with my stepchildren to work 32-hour weekends and return to my program stressed and unfocused. i decided to defer my 100% offer in case my circumstances change for next year. but i will also be working this year as i apply for the 2025 cycle and i already have a first-choice school in mind. good luck, everyone! i hope we all make it.

Southern in Connecticut. They take 6 poets and 6 fiction writers a year and their program is pretty new, having been around since 2009, so they weren’t on my radar at all initially. I’m really considering going this year.

I just got accepted by a program, but they told me more information about the teaching assistantship is forthcoming (by the end of April) and are allowing me to decide whether or not I want to attend on May 1st. I’m still on the NYU waitlist as well. Looks like I may be going somewhere this year after all!

i got the same letter despite also exceeding LSU’s GPA requirements. was hanging without my fiancée and told her how weird it was—my theory is that undergraduate GPA is probably a very common disqualifier for prospective LSU graduate students and maybe that’s why it’s in the generic letter. because i fully agree that it’s fucking strange to imply your applicant, who put loads of time and effort into maintaining their undergrad GPA and later filling out the comprehensive application to your school (and, thirdly, in many cases, paying an amount of money to submit said application that could instead buy them one month of unlimited phone data) didn’t have acceptable grades to get into your program when the opposite is true. most generic rejections are still polite…this one was just odd.

i'm a fellow NYU prospect with the same problem, albeit to a different degree. i'm from the waitlist. so my odds of getting sufficient funding to attend are substantially lower than yours, as what'll happen is that some accepted NYU applicants with the larger scholarship/stipend packages will probably decline their offers and then those packages will go to people with lower offers who asked for more funding. but it'll move in a linear fashion, as a trickle-down. you got the 50% scholarship out of the gate, which means you're lower on their list of accepted students, but 1. you still got in, and 2. there's no way of finding out exactly where you are on NYU's priority list of half-scholarship acceptances, or who they might choose to fund better to balance out the cohort when someone they wanted a lot declines their offer to go to Brown or Iowa or something. so, you could very well be at the top of them. in which case getting a better package around that April 15th deadline is actually rather likely. you could also be in the middle, or at the very very bottom of that section of the potential cohort, or anywhere in between. which is sort of a crappy answer, i know. just know your odds are much higher than zero. they are also better than mine. i already think it's pretty likely i may be going to a different program this year. but i'll still apply for transfer next year, just in case. i'm unwilling to put myself into debt for the amount of half the NYU M.F.A., no matter how prestigious it is.

i’m still waiting on LSU as well. got my official Rutgers (Camden) rejection today. they said they “read my application with great interest,” but that seems like part of the generic letter. i honestly didn’t expect them to get back to me this soon. LSU should notify before the end of March, according to their site.

do you have a website/place i can look into this summer class, and is it online? even if i go where i think i may be going this year, i’ll still want to apply for transfer in the 2025 cycle and i would love to look into your seminar.

What kind of notification did you get, and for what genre? Fiancée got her NYU Paris low-residency rejection yesterday, but i don’t know about the full-residency or Columbia sending out any notifications.

Emerson is a private institution. i’m not sure how exactly the M.F.A. is funded or how thoroughly, but my younger sister’s there for her undergrad with a 60% scholarship. she started as a Sophomore because she had enough credits from community college to waive her Freshman year, and she’s living on campus. let’s just say i’m one of her loan guarantors—because i love her—but i was skeptical about doing that because i would NEVER, EVER put myself into the amount of debt she’s going into, nor did i recommend she do the same. be wise. if your only option is to take out more debt than you’re comfortable with, consider applying next year. i’m in a similar boat with one waitlist to NYU right now and having not heard back from a lesser-known, newer program as for some reason they choose to notify just before the April 15 deadline.

i also applied—nothing yet for me! also, @camwithquestions, fiancée got her NYU Paris low-residency rejection for fiction today. not sure if that information helps you as i don’t know to which program, or for which genre(s), you applied. but data is data and i thought of you.

even though we're calling their choices based on the data they're giving us, there's no way the program officials don't know how bad these very late rejections make them look. i hope they get it together in years to come.

on the note of Rutgers (Camden)...i applied for fiction and haven't heard anything, the latter of which seems to apply to a lot of us. is it true that R (C) has notified people of rejections in the past beyond the April 15 "D-day" deadline? also, a question about Sarah Lawrence College, because this one wasn't on my radar for the 2024 cycle but i want to apply for their speculative track in 2025. what are their tuition remission/stipend packages like? is full funding common? i see info about student jobs on their site but i do sort of seek a balance between particular financial and opportunistic elements when looking at these schools. especially for those of you whose packages included teaching assistantships, which is what i'm gunning for...what were they like, if you don't mind sharing?

i was notified of my full-residency NYU waitlist for fiction on March 7th. like someone else said, i know they had their accepted students’ visit already. fiancée is still waiting to hear back from the Paris low-residency program. i don’t know what their status is with the waitlist but i would infer they’re done with their initial list of accepted candidates.

fiancée got into the fiction low-residency last week with a $7k scholarship—she’s declining that offer in favor of one closer to us. i don’t believe they’re done accepting yet.

i don’t have Facebook but my fiancée does and she was also a part of the 2024 cycle. her circumstances are extremely different from mine as she’s entitled money from a legal resolution to attend whatever MFA program she wants, regardless of the cost, so she will be starting at a low-residency of her choice this summer. i told her about Draft and hadn’t realized she joined it until she started showing me some of the comments people replied with on her posts. i was astonished by the arrogance—one individual essentially admitted to thinking they were entitled to admission to one of the top programs in the country just because one of their recommenders worked at that same school and in that same department. fucking wild.