carly rae jepsenn

Yes, they hosted a welcome weekend, so the admits had a chance to visit Ann Arbor, speak with faculty and current students, look into housing, and much more. Obviously one of the biggest perks is the funding: besides the stipend, there are a lot of opportunities through the graduate school to apply for awards, travel grants, etc. Besides that, though, the faculty members and students that I met were incredibly generous with their time and energy. That in turn created a very communal atmosphere and environment. One of the current students took us on a housing tour to three other students' apartments, and they all offered to tour apartments for us if we weren't able to be in Ann Arbor to look into places ourselves. The cohort size (9 per genre) is also appealing; several students referred to it as a "social program," which for me is a plus — the overall program seems big enough to accommodate a lot of different types of personalities, but not so large as to render anyone anonymous. These are all just first impressions, of course, so we'll see what happens come fall. But overall I'm very grateful and very excited!

I've committed to Michigan!

just popping on here to say that I turned down fiction offers at the University of Wyoming and Virginia Tech, so there should be waitlist movement for those schools soon!

Not intrusive, happy to answer questions. I only had 2 stories I could submit; I'd been working on them both for about 2 years. Both of them were fairly long – one of them was 4K words and the other 5K words, so depending on the page limit per program I submitted one or the other. (I kind of just gauged which one to submit based on the "vibe" of the program, which is very much an imperfect science.) Michigan's page limit was much longer than most other programs' limits, so I was able to submit both stories, and one of my friends who had previously gotten accepted to Michigan helped me decide which story to lead with (I learned from her that order matters!).

THANK YOU I LITERALLY CANT BELIEVE IT lol