Two Espressos

Methinks your department chair gave you shitty advice. Thirty programs? No way. I think 10-12 is a reasonable amount. Then again, I'm only applying to 7-8 programs, but that's strictly for financial reasons.

Probably Villanova and Georgetown. I'm sticking to M.A. programs in the Northeast because I don't want to travel far for a 2-year program. Most of my Ph.D. selections are in the Northeast as well.

I see no harm in including some or all of them. My CV (I feel weird saying that. I don't think I'm yet allowed to speak of "my CV" as an undergraduate ) has very short section listing my association with Sigma Tau Delta, both as a member and chapter president. I have my writing tutoring experience listed as well under a "teaching experience" section. None of that means shit for graduate school, of course, except perhaps for M.A. programs in which T.A. funding is scarce--that's the sole reason why I have the tutoring job listed on mine.

I'm really happy you just posted a clip from The Room.

I'm hoping I'll have a beating-the-odds story to tell of my own next spring, seeing as everything's really against me: I attend a sub-par university and have average grades, decent but not exceptional GRE scores, and an area of interest that I feel will be difficult to accommodate. I don't feel as if I stand out as an applicant in any significant way; I'm just a kid with big conceptual questions that I wish to explore.

This is solid advice. My semi-finished application list still has a couple "ooh, it's [x university]!" places on it for which I need to find replacements...

I'll go further than Stately Plump and assert that you should definitely avoid applying with a paper that is irrelevant to your area of interest.

This. Oh and political/social issues threads like this are always interesting; I'm thinking of the guns on campuses thread from like a year ago in particular. /inb4 arguing

My short answer: don't pay for a Ph.D. in English, so either defer or decline the offer. Paying for a Ph.D. is almost always a bad idea. Obviously, there are other circumstances you must weigh, but I'm of the opinion that in this job market, no one should pay for a graduate degree in the humanities.

I'm probably going to apply for two funded M.A.'s as well as Ph.D. programs.

This is great advice, of course. I'm going to stick to the concise and professional approach. I'd add some unique anecdote that fits with my overall trajectory, but I doubt I have such an anecdote. My life's pretty boring.

I don't see why one would need a hook? Trying to be too creative--witticisms, attempts at humor, etc.--could fail miserably. I've been working on my SOP all summer, and in its current form, there is no hook, no fluffy introduction, no witty remarks, no bullshit. Tread softly.

This is emphatically off-topic, but reading claptrap's post led me to google Heise, which in turn led me to her CV. Her native tongue is German; she is quasi-fluent in English, Spanish, and French; she has intermediate speaking, reading, and writing ability in Japanese; and she has a good reading ability in Portuguese, Italian, and Latin. Fuck! I feel so much less intelligent now.

I'll be blunt: that verbal score is way too low for any kind of literature program. Looking at ETS's conversion chart: (http://www.ets.org/s/gre/pdf/concordance_information.pdf) your score should be somewhere around the 44th percentile. I wouldn't apply to any solid Ph.D. program in literature, let alone Berkeley, without a score above the 90th percentile. And that's a low figure. There are always exceptions, of course.

I find these kinds of posts endlessly curious and equally annoying. Your stats blow most everyone else on these boards out of the water, myself included. It's funny when people post astronomical stats such as these and say, in effect, "oh, little old me with my near-perfect GPA, GRE scores, and foreign language proficiency--how will I fare?" The above was bitchy. I realize this. To answer your question: I'd say any school--at any tier--that is a good fit for you is fair game. You seem to fit the bill for basically any comp lit program, not to mention English programs. If you want a reality check, though, it's this: at every school to which you'll be applying, at least for the top 20 or so, there will be dozens of other applicants with similar stats, and not every one of you will make it.

Exactly.

I agree completely, of course, which is why this year's election is so critical! By the way, I wouldn't worry too much about politicizing things: literature departments aren't exactly the most politically diverse segments of academe, and I imagine that most everyone on here holds contempt for a certain well-known politician who has advocated the elimination of the NEH...

Haha! Remember also that comp/rhet Ph.D.'s have a much better job market than the literature people do, although we don't like talking about that. But to address the overall concern of this thread: no, the job market probably isn't going to get much better, if at all, and will likely just get worse. Personally, I think the bottom 50% or so of Ph.D. programs would need to disappear before we could even begin to address the overabundance-of-Ph.D.-holders problem.

Exactly. No one has room to complain about where they're placed anymore; the market is just too bad. When Ivy league-bred scholars get jobs at "meh" schools, you know times are tough. Adjunctification is to blame, alongside administrative excess and the application of the business model to academia.

I'm skeptical that this actually occurs for Ph.D. programs.

I agree with some of what the above posters have said, but allow me to add the following: with the overabundance of B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees these days, pedigree matters more than we'd all like to admit--at every stage of one's education. An experiment: explore the website of a strong or elite English Ph.D. program that provides background information on its current students. You'll find that most, if not all, of their students came from good to great schools. Making a jump from a no-name institution to a renowned one is possible, I suppose, but such students are a minority. I say this as someone who is currently studying at podunk university, USA. I originally came to the university to study pre-pharmacy, something that would require me to transfer to a better university to finish, but I became disillusioned with both my ability and interest in that field. I switched to English, really enjoyed it, and questioned whether I should now transfer to a better school. I didn't. I rationalized this decision by appealing to reduced costs--I can live at home-- and the purported "big fish in a small pond" phenomenon. We'll see if I made the wrong decision when my application results come in, I guess.

Haha I wish I could say that I had a Ph.D. acceptance somewhere! As Stately Plump stated above, I'm an undergrad still, graduating next spring. I'll be joining you alongside all the other 2013 applicants in the rat race this fall!

Haha no one really cares about quantitative scores, except perhaps for GRE cut-offs for funding, which is more likely to happen at state schools. You did a hell of a lot better on the math portion than I did! I scored in the 56%, pretty satisfactory for me, considering that I'm an English major and haven't taken a math course in three years.

Those outfits are ubiquitous...and bad. I saw this on facebook awhile back: