cyriac

I love everyone's literary and sophisticated handles too. Mine refers to my favorite YA lit book series. Yes, that's how mature and awesome I am I haven't heard anything from UW either. There's a rejection posted today (sorry!), and I just got an email that an article I submitted was accepted for publication, so I'm taking this as a portent of good things . . . Dear portent, please bring good things! Sincerely, anxious applicant/supplicant begging at the feet of the grad gods.

See, now, illiberal apologies for the humanities are, I think, ultimately deleterious. If literary practice is about utility--about teaching people how to write--then we ought to scrap novels and poems and just teach people how to avoid comma-splices.

Maybe this is just the bitterness in me, but it seems unfair that you would post how traumatic it is that you're still waiting on schools when you have been accepted to three already. Some people are waiting to hear back from a lot more, some people have only been wait-listed, while others have only been rejected. Count your blessings that you have some acceptances. It could be a LOT worse.

I'm not trying to be judgy. I don't care what personal decisions people make because it's not really my business. I just can't imagine paying 100K for a Columbia MA in English (or MFA, for that matter), and when I try to put myself in those shoes, I do literally feel a little queasy. Debt is terrifying, and I am legitimately curious what situations would make that amount of debt worth it. I think it's interesting that someone dinged me a red mark just for asking the question--why? Why do people feel this is the best decision for them? I'm not trying to be a jerk, really.

I have no stake in this debate, but those statistics prove absolutely nothing about the quality of the literary scholarship being produced by students and alums. Many mathematicians received verbal scores above 695 and received As in both science and humanities courses, too. Instead, you might want to direct people to, say, published papers by Columbia MA students and grads.



This left me dumbstruck. I simply do not understand why you made the decision you did. The thought of it kind of makes me nauseous, actually. Why in the world?

I don't have money to throw around. I take class seriously and if I am mistaken for one of the "wealthy older ladies" I hope that I thoroughly spoiled your classes you pompous ageist ass. It is true that some older learners are perhaps too enthusiastic, but the youth-worshipping slackers who refuse to speak in class causing long silences are a waste of time and space too.
The only thing I regret about my time at the college was the odd sense of evil directed towards me.
MA students are all first years ..no duh...it is likely that they might struggle. It is also extremely hard to get past the kind of prejudice that is palpable from people like you.
This addresses the agism, shall we begin with the sexism? Or shall we pretend that you didn't embarrass yourself on a public forum.
I'm sorry but with 100.000 dollars of debt under my belt I resent the conflation of old, lady, and rich as a priori.

In one year it is harder to make a strong connection with the professors, who tend to give attention to students that they will invest more time in of the course of years. This is true whether one attends a private or public institution.

No mean accomplishment having been wait-listed or, even, in contention for the wait-list, given a 97% chance of rejection.

Still no word from Durham. Increased use of tobacco products, though.

Kansas is a seriously good program, and Lawrence is a knee-bucklingly cool--I drove my little sister there for a college visit--town!

They admitted me! Pumped in the extreme!

Whoops! Did not see this thread. Yes, got a call from the DGS. Tuition waived. Health & Dental. Stipend is $14,951 for five years! Five funded offers.

Thanks for the ego boost Nice to know I got better GRE scores than a Yale admit . . . (Editied out something that sounded meaner than I meant it to.)

SAY HI TO JAMES FRANCO FOR ME. OXOX

Fair warning--This is not a "chin up, I got rejected by 5 programs before getting a funded offer" story.

We are officially halfway through February. There are those of us (like myself) who have received rejections but no admits. There are those of us who have heard nothing from any program at all. It's easy to stress out. It's easy to picture across the board rejection. We start to picture spending a year waiting tables. In horror, we see ourselves getting forced out of academia and onto the bottom rung of the economic world of "real life." We start to question our intelligence, our worth and our futures. I know. I've been doing it. Today I stop. Today, I recognize that going to work for a year is not a bad thing. Today, I realize that even if I never get a funded offer for a PhD, my life will have meaning because I will have a life. Before I started my MA degree, I spent four years as a high school teacher. I received an e-mail this afternoon, letting me know that two of my former students were in a car accident last night. Both of them graduated last year. Both are 19. One, Mark, is a United States Marine, and he is currently fighting for his life in a shock-trauma center. The other, Ashley, is dead. At 19 years of age. After receiving this news, my perspective on this whole process was forcibly altered. I still hope for a funded offer to continue my work on Shakespeare. I will still get a little goofy every time I hear the beep of a new e-mail arriving in my inbox. I will still check Gradcafe often enough to qualify as an addiction. I will no longer dread the notion of going 0-11. I will no longer get all dramatic at the concept of a year outside of PhD work. Whatever I do over the next 12 months, whether it's starting a PhD program, applying again, working a job I love or working a job I hate, I will be alive to experience the highs and lows of that year. Whatever happens, I will remember that. Our "worst-case scenarios" would look very enticing to Mark and Ashley right now. I intend to remember that over the coming weeks and months. I apologize for the depressing tone of the post. It doesn't make any sense to me when kids die. It makes even less sense when they're my kids.

Still no word from Durham. Increased use of tobacco products, though.

As a proper Haraway fan, you should consider any available calculators to be part of your brain.
Anyway, once you get past the notation, the concepts behind everything here are pretty simple. Here's what The Internet has to say about your schools:

Duke: 394 applicants, 5% (20) accepted, 12 enrolled.
Harvard: 405 applicants, 4% accepted.
Columbia: 627 applicants, 12% accepted.
UVA: 463 applicants, 15% (67) accepted, 33 enrolled.
Georgetown: (no data, so let's just arbitrarily assume it's 20%)
Wake Forest: 19 applicants, 79% (15) accepted, 7 enrolled.

First, let's take a look at what our expectations would be before you were rejected from Duke.

We're assuming, in our prior, that the admission rates reflect your actual chance of getting in. (As Bayesians, when we say "chance," we mean "justified expectation." Adcoms aren't rolling dice, they're looking at your GREs and SOP and so on and such forth. There may be no random elements to the process whatsoever. But since I don't know anything about you other than the schools you applied to, this seems like a good ground for at least my own expectations. If you believe you've got an edge that gives your application better odds than that, you might want to adjust your expectations above the base admission rates - assuming you have a good basis to believe that you have more of an edge than the randomly chosen student, who probably also believes she has an edge.) A nice fact that flows from this is that the average expected number of admissions - what we'll refer to as μa, μ just being the greek letter for m, which stands for "mean" - can be found by adding the admission rates together: 5+4+12+15+20+79=135, so you expect to get into 1.35 programs on average. You don't, of course, expect to literally get into 1.35 programs, but whatever else, it is the case that if you add together the chance you get into exactly one program, plus twice the chance you get into exactly two programs, and so on until six, you'll end up with 1.35 - at least as long as those independent probabilities (that is, for each individual school) hold. (I could prove this, if you like, or you could just accept it.) But this doesn't tell you whether you have a small chance of getting into lots of them or a very very good chance of getting into at least one.

For this, we look at at the enrollment rates. We could of course look at further comparable schools, but since I have no idea what the rankings of lit departments are and am far too lazy to look it up, let's go with what we have, which is that it seems that each department seems to send out twice as many acceptances as it actually enrolls. Since the only people that enroll are those who received at least one admission, and we're assuming no one would go through this horrid process unless they really wanted to head off to gradville, this means that those applicants in your field you received at least one admission offer received about two on average. (Maybe they all got two, maybe 10% get 11 and the rest get one, who knows?)

Now, if you're typical in the number of applications sent out, this means that you should expect that, if you got in anywhere, you got in to two programs on average. Since the alternative to getting in anywhere is getting in nowhere, we say that

μa = 0*p(a=0) + b*[1 - p(a=0)]
1.35 = 2*[1 - p(a=0)]
p(a=0) = 1 - 1.35/2 = 32.5%
("p(X)" just means "the odds that X")

This is actually a really terrible estimate because it's actually larger than your chance of not being admitted to Wake Forest alone. Let's relax the assumption that n=n̄ (that you're applying to a typical number of programs) and thus that b=B (that if you get in, you can expect to get into the same number of programs as other graduate students, on average.) Ex recto, applicants as competitive as you actually apply (on average) to eight programs, not six: n̄=12. We still, of course, assume that they get into two programs on average when they get into anything - that's what the data says, after all. Since the competitiveness of the schools they're applying to remains the same, we just multiply their expected total number of admissions expected by the increase in number:

(number of admissions per applicant in your field) = (your expected number of admissions)(the number of times more the typical competitor applied than you)
μā = μan̄/n
μā = 1.35(8/6) = 1.8

So they expect to get into 1.8 schools on average, and to get into 2 schools on average when they get in anywhere, meaning that they get in nowhere 10% of the time. Now if this person had applied to less schools - say, six - then they would expect to get into none

p(ā)^(n/n̄) = p(a=0)
0.16/8 = .1778

17.8% of the time, which is what you can expect, since this is your situation precisely. (I had to choose wonky numbers in order for everything to come out consistently- some combinations of selections imply that someone really is over- or under-reaching, all else being equal - but why we raise these chances to exponents of the number-of-applications ratio might be easier with a better example. Suppose that the applicant who applies to the sorts of schools that you do only applied to half of them on average, and had a 50% chance of not getting into any of them. If he applied to twice as many, he'd have a 50% chance of getting into somewhere in the first batch, and an independent 50% chance of getting into the second, meaning a 25% chance of getting rejected overall. ("Why are we treating them as independent when we know that they probably correlate?" you may be asking. The answer is that we're dealing with a toy person and keeping his level of competitiveness, whatever that might be, constant. Causally, if you applied to twice as many programs as you did (and it didn't cause you to skimp on your SOP or whatever), your chances of total rejection would go down in this simple geometric way, as none of the programs would affect whether you got into any of the other ones. However, when you learn that you have gotten into programs, that serves as evidence that you're one of the people that programs happen to like.)

Since you get in somewhere 82.2% of the time, and expect to get into 1.35 programs on average, you should expect to get into 1.64 programs when you get in somewhere.

However, we also know that you got rejected from Duke. How should that revise your expectations? Bayes' Theorem says that

p(H|D) = p(D|H) * p(H) / p(D)
("p(A|B )" is just statistics for "the odds that A, given that B")

H stands for hypothesis, or our prior expectation, D for the new data we've just encountered. (Not everyone thinks visually, but if you do, it may help to associate Bayes' Theorem with a sort of two-by-two graph, with one axis divided between H and non-H and one between D and not-D, each cell expressing a number, and the numbers in the four cells adding up to 100. Interpret p(H) as the sum of the H row, p(D) as the sum of the D column, p(H|D) as the portion of the D column's numbers lying in the H-and-D cell, and p(D|H) as the portion of the H row lying in the H-and-D cell. Play around with squares like these on some loose leaf paper, seeing what information you can extract from other information. You should eventually grok it.)

In this case, since we want to know the chances that you got into nowhere, given that you didn't get into Duke,

H: you didn't get in anywhere
D: you didn't get into Duke

Fortunately all of the relevant terms are pretty easy:

p(D|H) is the chance that you didn't get into Duke, given that you didn't get in anywhere. This is equal to 1, obviously.
p(H) we already calculated, it's 17.8%. Note that it's our prior estimation that matters for calculating this term, before you knew Duke rejected you.
And p(D) is just the prior chance that you were going to be rejected from Duke, which we already knew was 95%.

So the new chance that you're screwed is

p(a=0|blue devils noooo) = 1 * .1778 / .95 = .1872

Meaning that your chances of making it to graduate school plummeted from a soaring 82.2% to a miserable 81.3% - literally not even a percentage point, which is the biggest increment that our base data measures anyway (leaving aside the fact that we just made a couple figures up.) In other words, you're still at very significant risk of getting an English degree.

(I hope you don't think that I'm picking on you; if it bothers you that I used you as an example, I'll genericize everything, and hope you accept my apologies - I've just found that many students find it more concrete to substitute their own situations into a model, is all. I'm also never completely sure, on the internet, where to draw the line between overcomplicated and patronizing - if you (the generic you, not just cyborg) find I err too much in the former direction, I can try to explain from a different angle; if too much on the latter, just assume that I'm dumbing things down for all those other people.)

FUUUUCKKKKKK

I Skyped with a professor at one of the schools a few months ago. So obviously he saw a very pretty picture of me from a cousin's bar mitzvah.

The Adcoms: "Well, she does seem like a good fit for our department. But her GPA is... kind of low for a MA student. It's like 3.2, isn't it?"

Potential Advisor: "Um.... what? I talked with her a few months ago and she seems really bright! I want to give her a try."

The Adcoms: "But, dude, we've got stronger applicants who are just as bright... with a HIGHER GPA."

Potential Advisor: "So? She's really excited to come! Please, I really want her. She may not exactly be in my field but she's got great ideas that I'd like to explore with her."

The Adcoms: "Dude, you already have...what? 4 grad students? What do you need another one for? Even if her project idea does sound... compelling."

Potential Advisor: "Don't make me do this." *cringes in his seat*

The Adcoms: "Do what? You win or lose. There is no middle ground."

Potential Advisor: *flashes a picture of me* "Please? We need some beautiful women in the program!"

The Adcoms: "Whoa... she is beautiful..." *stammers* "I guess you get this one, Dude. She's accepted. I guess you can e-mail her."

(Potential Advisor walks out of the room)

Adcom #1: (calls after the Potential Advisor) "Yeah, don't forget to tell her that her advisor's going to f*ck her!"

Adcom #2: "Did we just pull a Legally Blonde moment here?"

Adcom #3: "He's a lucky dog. Let me look at her SOP again so I can figure out my chances of being on her committee!"

Adcom #4: (to Adcom #5) "I'm suspicious. We, historians, aren't that shallow, aren't we?"

Adcom #5: "No we aren't that shallow. Her SOP is a killer, really. I just felt like being a Simon Cowell to Dude."


(thanks for thread, I'm seriously laughing now! )