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.

never mind @Fronkophone! i thought i’d update you since i found out. i got my automated UMD rejection at 3am today. standard rejection letter. i applied for fiction across the board. i’m still technically waiting to hear back from Rutgers (Camden) and LSU, but i would turn down an offer from LSU if i got one as it’s a 24 hour drive from my fiancée and her kids and requires a 3-year residency—so i would rather wait a year and apply to closer 2-year programs as i’d be graduating at the same time anyway. i know Rutgers (Camden) is so finished with their acceptances and waitlists that they’ve started accepting candidates from the waitlist, so i’m going to mark this the end of my cycle. i got a total of 1 waitlist from NYU. i’m still looking into funding options in the event i get off the list, but the odds of anything being enough are very low given i would get 50% tuition remission and no stipend. i’m already making my list for next year and have put two “safety schools” (one low-residency with the possibility of a merit-based assistantship and one lesser-known program with full funding and a very small stipend) on it just in case things pan out this way again. for reference, the schools i applied to ranged between 0.5% and 5.7% in their CWMFA acceptance rates. i applied with science fiction, and i did so more underprepared than i’d thought i was despite starting the process early. i learned a lot from this year’s cycle. of course i have that awful sinking feeling that i might just not be “good” enough, and that’s why this didn’t work out for me this year. but i know i’ll be in a different place next year—i already am in a different place than i was when i applied in December. for those of you who didn’t get into a program or didn’t get funding this year or are holding onto hope that a waitlist will work out, i feel you and i hope you don’t give up ❤️

thank you for your words! congratulations on your success—and i admire your realism. it takes a lot of courage for we who are uncertain to take a leap when we’re worried things may be just barely manageable at times. and your wife is an outstanding one for supporting you in this. i know can’t thank my fiancée enough for holding my hand through the insanity of this cycle. and i know she’s willing to do it for the next one, if that’s what it takes for me. best of luck!

i feel this; i turned 24 literally just this week and i don’t know what people my age are doing on Facebook at all. i’m generally skeptical of social media. but, then again, i have gotten on here 😂 thanks so much for the update!

hi, there! you obviously don’t owe anyone who’s not on Draft the updates because i’m the one who refuses to get Facebook, but would you mind sharing which schools this happened with? thanks so much!

as someone who lives paycheck-to-paycheck, i think the lack of funding’s going to be what shoots me in the foot this year. which is especially ironic because, knowing my circumstances, i only applied to funded schools. but i’m already making a list for next year just in case and i feel so much better informed for having gone through all this. plus, our art is always growing, even if slowly. i hope this cycle’s been okay for you. it sounds like we’re both in limbo.

some people already know where they want to go, got into their first choice school, and will probably decline other offers in a timely manner accordingly. so it’s certainly possible for waitlists to move in our favor before April. but i believe we’ll see the heaviest movement in late April/early May! especially given some people (like myself) may have to turn down offers from a waitlist (if we get them) due to insufficient funding. some waitlists are open up until the first day of classes at a program as well, so a few of us may even be contacted in the summertime.

if you find out before me, would you be willing to let me know what the outcome is? i was hoping we’d find out today, but business hours went wooosh and i’ve seen UMD’s Grad School take 14+ days in some cases…i’m guessing this cycle of decisions might come out as late as the end of March. UMD is my last real chance to get out of waitlist limbo considering i’m only otherwise waiting on Rutgers (Camden) and they seem to have already done everything but rejections. so i acknowledge i’m being a weeny bit neurotic about the affair

hi, there! yeah, this is a little informative! i’d infer that your application went back to the “Under Program Review” stage because the program has to recommend that you come off the waitlist and onto admit status to the school, in which case that decision would result in a brief “Under Grad School Review” again. i could be misunderstanding, but maybe *all* the applications go through that process? i’m wondering what’s going on for sure

anyone else who applied at U of Maryland get an “Under Grad School Review” update after an “Under Program Review” for the rest of the duration of your waiting? i gathered from their site that this means that the Creative Writing program has made a decision on my application for their Fall 2024 fiction cohort—that the decision just has to go through UMD’s Graduate Dean because that’s just how they do it there. but do *all* UMD applications work this way? the update is kind of driving me insane and i’d love more info from anyone who is applying/has applied to UMD lol

if my application to a program goes from saying “under program review” to “under grad school review,” what might that mean? anyone know why that would happen? also, anyone know where Rutgers (Camden) is with their applicants? the general consensus i’ve heard is “soft rejection; don’t get your hopes up.”