DisneyLeith

I'm 20th century American, looking to work in particular with Thomas Schaub on Cold War studies there. Edit: And I have only a BA.

To those accepted: firstly, congrats! A question though: were you all Ph.D. admits? Or M.A. admits intending to go on to the Ph.D. there?

I applied as an external applicant for the MA, and I'm also planning to go through to the Ph.D. No change in my status as of yet; it still says "In Review."

I called a couple schools to ensure that they had received a recommendation from one of my writers who wanted to send it to them directly rather than using the online uploading route. The response was overwhelmingly positive and warm. By status do you mean admit/deny status? Or status as in complete/incomplete?

Sorry to hear about the Women's Studies, but congrats on UCLA! What program were you accepted to there? I applied to their English Ph.D. program.

Anyone apply to Minnesota's American Studies Ph.D. program? It appears that last year some of their acceptances went out around this time, so I'm curious to see whether anyone around here is an applicant.

Indeed--congrats! I'm waiting to hear back from Minnesota's American Studies department. Last year a bunch of acceptances went out this week. Anyone else apply to that program?

I got that same email from UW-M, but I didn't get from it that my application wouldn't be complete until I had done one of those two things. Are you sure this is the case? It doesn't forthrightly say that in the email. It seems to indicate that Financial Aid and Admissions are entirely independent processes.

So, do some graduate programs REQUIRE that I fill out a FAFSA, even before I've been formally admitted? The information on school websites is somewhat difficult to decipher, particularly because most of it seems to be targeted toward undergraduate students.

My internet searches on this issue have heretofore yielded mixed and muddled results. As someone who has applied to English Ph.D. programs and cannot attend without full funding from the school, do I need to file a FAFSA? On a couple of applications I checked off that "Yes," I would be filing for Federal Aid, because I figured, "Why not?" But now I wonder whether it's worth it at all. The whole financial aspect of university applications always gets me. What to do, oh vast and knowledgeable community?

I have also been receiving these emails. Not exactly sure what the deal is with them, but after this many I've begun to just ignore them. Glad I'm not the only one getting them.

Yeah, this whole thing ran me somewhere over $2,000 dollars. I can't even conceive of calculating the exact figures. I went for broke, in every possible sense of the phrase. I feel you on having to sell the motorcycle; I was considering the very same thing, but luckily didn't wind up having to go through with it. Living at home has its (very minimal) perks, I guess. If I don't get accepted with sufficient funding to one of my schools, I really have little idea what I'm going to do at this point. Officer Candidate School for one of the Armed Services branches seems to be my primary alternative. I can't justify going into the kind of debt a M.A. in English would carry with it, especially with the possibility that that money spent might not lead me to gain acceptance to a Ph.D. program afterwards. As regards stress, I did spend a year and a half on this whole process (albeit while working full-time), but the last few months were still a whirlwind of stress and anxiety. It doesn't appear that much of that stress and anxiety will be subsiding in the coming months, but rather merely metamorphosing into a slightly different form. What kind of bike you looking into/what was your old one? My bike was the great stress reliever during the late summer/fall when the pressure began to accumulate.

I went all out and applied to 20 schools this fall. 20th Century American, focus on Cold War studies, cultural studies, postmodernism and the novel. Rutgers NYU CUNY Graduate Center Columbia Brown Boston College UPenn Duke Wisconsin-Madison Minnesota UC-Davis UC-Berkeley Rochester Miami of Ohio Harvard Yale WashU UCLA University of Chicago Iowa ...whew Good luck to everyone!